Reviews by MathBrush
2-10 hours
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A long fantasy parser game about elves and a witch with some bugs, November 23, 2023I played this game because it was a ‘longer than two hours’ parser adventure, so one that I would consider might be difficult to complete.
You play as an elf in a village that has suddenly been kidnapped en masse by a witch. You have to look through all the elves’ abandoned houses and workplaces and get the tools and items you need!
This game can be pretty tricky. I made two attempts in playing. In the first, I carefully explored, and discovered some locations where timing was essential. For instance, there is a mine with a lamp, and the lamp has a limited battery. I had to save and undo several times to get that right. Then there were a few other ways for objects to get lost forever.
Increasing the difficulty was a carrying limit, so I had to drop things at different times. There were a lot of containers I could throw things in, but those too had a carrying capacity. Sometimes containers got weird (I had a jug of mead and at one point I was carrying the mead outside of the jug). I’ve had my own issues implementing liquids in containers though so I know how it is!
Unfortunately, after I had escaped and got a bit stuck and turned to the walkthrough, I couldn’t find something mentioned in it while I was wandering up and down the river and, to my sadness, I hit the turn limit and died at about 50 points.
The turn limit seems like a fixed limit, around 600 moves, and so there was no way to undo far enough to keep going. I had to start over, and, fearing similar problems, followed the walkthrough precisely this time.
Before using the walkthrough, I encountered a maze that was actually pretty neat. It’s a ‘twisty little passages’ maze (i.e. a maze where all rooms are identical, or almost so, and going back the way you came doesn’t always take you forward), but the only directions are UP and DOWN, so you have to navigate your way through. I reminded me of the cramped/claustrophobic area in Andrew Plotkin’s So Far a bit.
Some of the puzzles after turning to the walkthrough seemed really hard to solve, especially the finale; I wonder if there are hints you can find elsewhere that can help you with them.
I’ve attached a transcript. It has some bugs in it I’ve marked here and there. Overall, I was glad to beat the witch!
Lengthy and wordy Choicescript game about modern take on King Arthur, November 22, 2023This is the first chapter of a large Choicescript game. I played past two hours on my phone, saving occasionally, but I lost about 30 minutes of progress near the end by forgetting to save (I got to the point where you can pack your suitcase). I think I got pretty close to the end, from what other reviews have said.
The scope of this game is large. The current largest Choice of Games title is 1.2 million words (while some Hosted games are larger), so one chapter of 400K is quite big. Production seems to have taken a long time, as there is a lot of reference to face masks and social distancing.
The overall concept of this game is that King Arthur and his court were real and still exist in a certain way (revealed later on) in the modern world. Simultaneously, demonic forces are trying to start the apocalypse, and you can help stop it.
There were two main romantic options I saw, a man and a woman. There are tons of different chance to declare your affection, so many so that I felt I had to constantly be turning down the people I wasn’t interested in.
The game has lots of action scenes which I thought were full of descriptive language and feeling like stakes were real. I died in one! (to see what would happen). A lot of times it was over the top (lots of Zalgo text for horror and tons of quip/pun options for humor).
The game is so large, I feel, because all the normal Choicescript stuff is amplified. Usually you can pick a few features of your appearance; here you can pick if you have hair, what length is your hair, what color is your hair, what shade is your hair. Instead of five to ten options, there are 15 to 20. Instead of choosing conversation topics from a repeating list that gets narrowed down, you pick from a list of conversation topics that each open up to their own list of conversation topics and so on.
This provides for a lot of customization but it can kind of interrupt game flow sometimes. I felt a bit of decision paralysis from time to time. It’s kind of the opposite of the problem a lot of games have, where all of the cool branching and decision making is hidden and players think the game is small/short because they don’t realize the choices they could have made.
In contrast, here everything is put on display constantly, revealing the massive amount of possible choices. And some don’t even seem implemented yet, like the fencing club (unless there is a way to get into there!).
I liked the Merlin character, and saw them as a fun RO/mysterious person. The overall magic system seems thought out and coherent, and the worldbuilding feels like it’s on an epic and grand scale. While I did find the large amount of choices overwhelming at time, it seems reasonable given the overall scope. I could definitely see it being popular when it comes out.
Long old-school game with hard maze and complex puzzles, November 22, 2023This is I think the 5th Jim MacBrayne game I’ve played, and I think it’s definitely the most fair and well scoped of them that I’ve played; either that or I’m simply getting used to their internal logic.
These games are all written in a custom engine that is remarkably smooth, as least here. For those new to Jim MacBrayne games, the most unusual feature is that if an object is in a container or on a supporter, you can’t take it; trying to will say ‘You don’t see any…’. I believe this is due to the fact that tracing through the contents of all the supporters and containers is too hard for the engine to handle. Instead, you have to say TAKE ALL FROM ____. There is a shortcut specifically for that (F1).
Anyway, the main idea of the game is that you are hunting through a cottage and adjoining area for a mysterious orb, with clues left behind by a circle of elders.
Most of the puzzles revolve around enigmatic devices that you have to figure out, interspersed with riddles and codes that explain how to use them.
I was able to get pretty far on my own; although I only got 70 points by the two hour mark, when I checked the walkthrough I was about 40% through the game. The puzzles are tough but fair; the place where I got stuck was due to not remember a clue from earlier.
The setting is very abstract, and much like Zork in its mix of fantasy and modern aesthetics.
I was glad to play this game, and hope Jim MacBrayne is able to enjoy coding up games for a while to come.
Long wordplay rhyming game with helpful NPCs, November 22, 2023This is definitely one of the heftier IFComp games; I took a whole evening to look at it, spending two hours playing it and then speeding through with the walkthrough and thinking about it for a while after.
This is the 6th in a series of games that are all based on the same concept: rhyming pairs of words. Progress in the game consists of walking around/exploring and taking the names of rooms or objects and finding another pair of words that rhymes with them (like the name of the game itself).
Andrew Schultz has written many wordplay games over time (more than 40!) but I think this concept has proven the most productive, given the number of games that have been produced with the rhyming pairs.
I’d like to describe what this game has in common with the earlier games and what’s unique to it.
First, in common: This game is set in a kind of abstract land, reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth, where abstract concepts are taken literally. By removing the need for all items to be concrete or to fit into a unified setting (like a fantasy world or spaceship), it opens up the opportunity to include a ton more of the rhyming pairs.
Another thing in common is that the game is centered on an emotional journey of sorts. with a lot of focus on emotions and experiences. I said earlier that the game doesn’t have a unified setting, and while that’s true physically, each game has a unique emotional setting, a journey of self actualization that changes from game to game. Most games have an enemy that represent negative social traits such as bullying, peer pressure, cruelty, lying, pandering, or other bad traits, which the protagonist can only defeat after a great deal of personal growth. Not every game has these exact ingredients, because there is a lot of variety.
So that brings us to the unique parts of this game. First, its personal journey is quite a bit different from the others; rather than the hero alone reading books or psyching themself up, they help others. You can grab a whole lot of friends to walk around with you, each of which can help you in different ways. You can also find some people who have been wronged that you can bolster and lift up. Your friends’ journey becomes your journey, in a way. Overall, I liked the positive atmosphere.
You’re also provided with a list of items to get, which I found helpful as a way to track my progress in game.
It’s also pretty hard; while you can just go through the alphabet plus some letter combinations, it can be tricky to come up with solutions. I’d recommend one of two different play styles:
1-Taking a long time on the game, with breaks between sessions, to let yourself find everything.
2-Explore for a while to get as many answers as you can before getting stumped, then using the walkthrough to get to a new area and repeating.
This is definitely one of those games that you can figure out early on if you like it or not. The puzzle types and themes are very consistent, so you can try out the first few rooms to see if you feel like playing more or not. I’m glad I saw the end, even if I needed some help to get there.
An old-school RPG with combat and some neat UI, November 22, 2023This one was a bit of a wild ride.
It’s a long game written for windows. At first I wondered if it was another secret BJ Best game (in the past he’s entered a retro game under a fake name). After all, it has a cool animated loading screen and a neat pixel art inventory picture.
But the author has introduced himself elsewhere and it seems to be just a neat-looking original game by a new author.
So, this game is a mix of combat RPG and Scott Adams-style gameplay. The Scott Adams style is a fun one, but it had two features that I wasn’t used to: the location description is always at the top of the screen (unless you swap to inventory view), and if steps or a door are in the location you type GO STEPS or GO DOOR instead of any specific direction. These tripped me up a bit; especially not needing to LOOK, since LOOK gives a pretty unusual response in this game.
The idea is that a ferry you were on crashed and you need to explore. There is some combat, but most of it is with small and/or goofy things. Beyond that, you have to find a way to enter the city of Hawkstone and discover the secrets beneath it.
I played around without the walkthrough for a while, but had to peek at it to find the right command for dealing with the gate early on. After that, I found a lot more interesting things, and found a way to die.
After a while, I started getting pretty confused. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on, due to procedurally generated text. For instance, one action resulted in this (blocking out some names for spoilers, [REDACTED] is by me):
You attempt to unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED].
object is unlockable. You have a key.
You unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED]
You roll the dice on your stats and get.. +1 stamina.
Your Stats have increased!
You did a thing!
Something happened somewhere.
Argh!
A kerfuffle!
You are knocked over as a monkee jumps at you.
The monkee screeches as he runs away through the crevice..
You did a thing!
You did something!
Something happened somewhere.
After events like this, objects will be added to your inventory or appear in the room description.
The puzzles were fairly difficult, so I ended up using the walkthrough for a while. Even with the walkthrough, I took about two hours.
There are lots of compelling and interesting elements in the game, like a world you can substantially affect in various ways. There are a lot of silly and goofy things in the game, like buying things on the ‘net’. I’m not sure there’s a major resolution to the game; I followed the walkthrough and it seems to just peter out near the end, with there being some nice resolution to some plot points, but I think the game is intended to either have an open, exploration ending (or there’s more that isn’t in the walkthrough).
A lot of items have a generic description; looking at a woman hanging upside down by a rope says ‘That looks like a normal woman hanging upside down by a rope’. A lot of puzzles get repeated over and over (I’m looking at the bananas here). And, finally, there are several commands in the walkthrough that aren’t really described elsewhere in the game (like Q for Quests).
The overall user interface is great. The animations at the beginning are really neat, and the layout looks nice overall. I also liked the saga of the monkee character the most.
A long crafting and exploration-based idle game/roguelike, September 17, 2023I played this game because it was one of 2 on the Interactive Fiction Top 50 poll of 2023 and I had never played it before.
There are a lot of things that can be spoiled in the game, so I'm going to just describe the beginning here and some accessibility stuff, then put some mid-game stuff in spoilers, and leave out the endgame stuff.
The game starts like an idle game like Universal paperclips. You have a 'stoke the fire' button and, on another tab, a 'gather wood' button. A stranger wanders in, freezing in the cold.
Gameplay expands significantly as you go on, adding crafting mechanics and mild city-building. Eventually you do need movement keys and there are some parts I don't think would be accessible to screen readers.
For mid-game spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)Once you are able to craft a compass, you are able to explore a world map. This map contains a variety of outposts, and includes real-time combat that involves clicking, with some battles requiring intense clicking.
As you explore the map, you can make the world a safer place, eliminating threats as you go and establishing outposts. As you do so, you learn about the lore of the world.
Overall, the game is very polished, and while minimalistic it is descriptive. The interactivity worked well for me, although I found some endgame timed events very difficult. I found the game emotionally satisfying and could see myself revisiting it.
A character-driven story about a high-stakes job, July 28, 2023Some background: I wrote a game for Choice of Games a few years ago, but it did really poorly. I ended up playing and reviewing all the 100+ available COG titles at the time to figure out where I went wrong and ended up seeing a lot of different patterns in their titles and in what sells well.
At the same time, I kept seeing hints of a game by Emily Short coming out, who is one of the most respected IF authors with some of the most well-known games in her repertoire (Counterfeit Monkey, Galatea, etc.) But it was always delayed, and disappeared for years.
So I was excited to hear that it had been finished (with a little boost from Hannah Powell-Smith, another very popular author), I was excited to hear about it.
So for the game itself. My first go-to with a choicescript game is to look at its stats page. The best-selling games tend to have clearly defined and cleary differentiated stats, while the less popular ones often have confusing or overlapping stats. Here the stats are a bit overlapping: discretion vs self promotion, practicality vs daring, loyalty vs idealism, populism vs elitism. If you speak out to a billionaire and say you hate the wealthy (not an actual in game example), is that populism, idealism, or daring?
So in games where the stats are confusing, it can be hard to min/max, so I tend to just imagine a very specific persona and pick only what I think that person would do. This game responded to that very well, and I got a good story out of it, which is a good sign.
You play as a concierge to the rich. Billionaires ask the company you work for to arrange parties, trips, housekeeping, etc. Kind of like a fancy butler. I felt some connection with this theme as I work at a private school, and helped supervise a trip to Spain this summer, something I could not have afforded on my own. I don't work with billionaires, but sometimes with millionaires.
In the game, you encounter a series of challenging or intriguing clients. That's another aspect of this game compared to other CoG games: this is much more character focused than plot focused. I've heard some say it ends early; with a 500K wordcount, that's not really true. I did finish it in 3 hours or so, while I've had some CoG games take 10, but there are ones like Choice of Dragon that are finished in 30 minutes but don't feel like they end early. I think it's because the plot arc is fairly flat; there's not really a sense of continually rising drama with a dramatic climax; instead, there's a rolling succession of parallel character-focused subplots that each have their own rise and fall.
Going into more detail, rather than having dramatic overall events, we have things like examining in great detail the life of a trans billionaire who is uncomfortable with wealth; the life of a rich woman with a troublesome child; the life of fellow coworkers, bosses, etc. Much of the game is about reflecting on your views on them and life in general and on yourself and your feelings for them.
And reflecting is a key concept here in terms of other CoG games. The real big bestsellers tend to have actions have direct and dramatic consequences. Do you spare the life of the prisoner, or execute them? Do you take the evil crystal or smash it? On the other hand, a lot of the lower-selling games are reflective. Here's what you do: why do you do it? It's much more passive. This game is in between. You do get some pretty big choices, but a lot of things just happen to you and you reflect on how you feel about it.
This makes this game not really fit with the power fantasy that most Choice of Games fans look for. You're not stomping around destroying things. You're not constantly winning despite the odds. There are failures and takebacks (like a long sequence about a helicopter near the beginning) where you lose ground, something a lot of fans distinctly dislike.
But the games that do these things often win awards for writing, like Rent-a-Vice. Having the reflection, the failures, the character drama all are associated with games that have won awards. So if I had to predict anything about this game in the long run I'd wager that it will likely have middle-of-the-pack sales (definitely better than mine!) but be nominated for at least one writing award.
My particular narrative arc worked out well. I played a people pleaser who is mildly uncomfortable with the status quo but not enough to do anything about it. I ended up (Spoiler - click to show)becoming the CEO and marrying my coworker. I was interested enough to try another playthrough. I clicked through the first four chapters quickly trying to do bad. A lot of the early storyline was similar in the major plot points, although wildly different in the details (I somehow picked up an aunt I didn't have the first time). Later chapters were completely new material; in my first game I had several chapters about blackmail, while in my second I had a kind of international investigation storyline, which was very cool. Overall though I don't think it sells its branching very well; my first playthrough looked like I had hit up most major content, while the second was quite different. Signposting that more content exists is hard (more greyed out choices than we have here, chapter numbers with subletters, etc.).
I liked customization; I was able to refuse a drink and say it was because I was a latter-day saint, which I've never been able to do before.
Overall, this feels like a story about real people in real life situations. It feels like a biography more than a fantasy novel. I like to think of IF writers as opera composers and I've often thought of Emily Short as like Verdi, finding some similarities in their tones and settings. This is more like Beethoven though, with a clear aesthetic free of unnecessary clutter.
I don't think this will be a bestseller. But after having played more than 100 of these games, I think it's unique and high quality, and worth playing. I got really burnt out after playing them all and have started a few I never finished, but I played this all the way through in one setting, taking it to the library and reading it on my phone there, and even replayed it. I'm glad it was published; it would have been a terrible shame to leave this work incomplete and in storage.
A classic-style fantasy adventure with swords and sorcery, July 4, 2023This game was pretty fun; it honestly felt like an old AD&D campaign module. You have a magic user and a warrior with an enchanted blade, you have to buy equipment like rations, there's a miniquest in the middle with a mysterious city, then a couple of dungeons and a big scaly boss.
The idea is that you are on a quest to exterminate some rampaging lizard men. You have to travel through a long desert to do that. Also, along the way, you have to play both characters. This has a few slight drawbacks (mostly making it harder to save) but feels very dynamic, especially when infiltrating the city, and makes the game more enjoyable.
There is some randomized combat in places (so saving often is very useful).
In general the game seemed pretty fair; there were places where I had to reload a save to grab an item but each 'area' seemed mostly self-contained.
I did struggle with the parser from time to time; for me the hardest parts were the gate doors (Spoiler - click to show)I tried LOOK IN PORT, OPEN PORT, SEARCH PORT, PEEK IN PORT, etc. before the game suggested LOOK THROUGH PORT. Occasionally the game would say I hadn't done stuff that I actually had done; in those cases I reloaded the beginning of the area and ran through it again.
Overall, it was a big game, and one I can only recommend to someone with patience and the time to try and retry. But it was fun, and I would recommend it to such a person.
A long, complex parser-based visual novel about solving girl's murder, July 3, 2023This game uses a parser that seems to be keyword based rather than grammar-based. It doesn't use a trained AI model, instead using the author's own custom engine that doesn't scrape internet data. I thought that was a lie since when I typed Overwatch it mentioned it was a Blizzard game, but I checked the github code and the author hand coded quite a few video games with their studio because it's the answer to a question in one of his games.
So this is a pretty unique thing. The author previously used this system in his game Thanatophobia.
This game has various background images and a 3d model of a girl wearing a dress. Later on, a young girl in a swimsuit pops up, although you can tell her to go away. The characters generally just perform random animations, usually not connected to the game.
The plot and puzzles are structured a lot like Blue Lacuna. Both games have a core element of key plot details, but they drag them out by making them timed in a sense; Blue Lacuna makes you wait until night, while this game will say 'I'll tell you more about that later', and you have to ask again later. Both games also include a lot of ambient nature stuff you can interact with while waiting for the core plot. Blue Lacuna has the island, while this game has random spots you can visit like monuments or national parks or even the sky. These usually don't contribute to the story, although sometimes they have interesting details. Both games last very long due to these mechanisms, while they could be far shorter without them (which could be a pro or con).
This game includes puzzles in two forms. First, there are random trivia questions. These aren't essential to the game, it's just something that pops up in the 'touristy' areas of the game.
Second, there are clues in the form of cryptograms. You click on a letter then type something to replace it with. It's actually a really nice system for cryptograms, lots more fun than doing it with paper because it allows for quick exploration. I usually deeply dislike cryptograms in games but this was fun.
Overall, I had fun for the first few hours typing 'in character', but for the last hour or so I just typed random junk to get through, like 'yes', 'i see', or even just every letter of the alphabet, although sometimes I commented more.
I didn't really enjoy the child-looking girls in skimpy outfits; especially when a romance option was available. The game even discusses the three forms of love (philos/eros/agape) but kind of picks one for you (I think? I refused at first but then relented later to see if it was story critical, which it seemed like it was).
The actual storyline is pretty good, about a young girl in the late 1800s who had the abilities of a medium, able to consult spirits. I actually really liked this main storyline.
There is a darker reveal later, and it contains some things I'm really uncomfortable with it, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)directly telling the player to kill themself. I know enough people that have (Spoiler - click to show)attempted suicide that I really don't want to see this kind of stuff in games; I think it can be handled in a sensitive way, but this isn't it (from my point of view).
Overall I was very impressed with this game, and thought about giving 4 stars. But I think the interactivity could use some tuning in regards to main plot vs side action. The types of characters I didn't care for but are normal for some types of VN games. And the content in the dark area was a little too dark for me. Technically, this game is very impressive, and I had fun with much of it.
Technically brilliant game with unsympathetic PC, June 21, 2023Savoir-Faire is a longish game set in an alternate-world version of France. The game prominently features a magic system involving linking items together so that they share certain properties.
The puzzles are brilliant and the game is well-implemented. You can experiment to your hearts content, and most reasonable solutions to problems work. The writing is excellent, and the storyline well-thought out.
I finished the game years ago. Every time I try to replay it though, I lose interest. Why would anyone lose interest in such a technical marvel? Because I really don't care about the PC's situation. He's a wishy-washy wimp; he can't decide if he's investigating his adoptive family's disappearance or looting their house; he can't decide if he's a rake with a million love interests or a romantic with one woman at heart; he can't decide if he's a member of the royalty-hating lower class or a priviliged upper-class man; and he can't decide if he's starving or picky.
Short hasn't written him poorly; she's just very accurately portrayed a disagreeable man. I wish I could have him slap himself, remove his silly white feather, and tell him to just eat the andouilletes plain or stop whining. I don't care about finishing the game because I don't want to go through all that trouble just so his aristocratic palate won't have to endure stale bread and unseasoned lentils. The ending helps a bit, but it is too little, too late. If he really cared about his family, why is he stealing everything?
Others may not have the same reaction.
Edit: I recently replayed it during a long fight, after having replayed a lot of other highly rated games in a row. It really stood out with its craftmanship, so I'm revising its rating to 5 stars instead of the 4 I had before.
A sprawling lab, dystopian murder government, and you, May 8, 2023This game is a hefty Inform 7 parser game set in a bunker city in the planet of Venus, with a horribly dystopian government where the greatest good is turning in others to the government.
The game involves numerous factions and parties (with different endings depending on which of two you support) and crossing and doublecrossing.
There's a lot of death, too. This PC's bodycount is one of the highest in games in recent years.
The game is very open in nature, with many actions being able to happen in any order. This leads to a lot of freedom, but makes the early part of the game fairly overwhelming. The hint system is also all available at once, due to the non-linear nature, and it can be difficult to find what you're looking for.
Overall, the game simply needs more polishing, but it is a good game at core, and is one worth having made.
One thing I struggled with quite a bit was the directions, which are INWARD, OUTWARD, LEFT, and RIGHT. It was hard to abbreviate these, as L means 'look' and IN and OUT map to inform's Inside and Outside directions. To be honest, I would have preferred the author just used the standard Inside and Outside directions and made Inward and Outward synonyms for them.
Giving 3 stars for now but would be happy to bump up if an update is made in the future.
A fictional game-within-a-game with fictional metacommentary, May 6, 2023This is a large, ponderous game with many attachments. The image I had when starting was of a gigantic hamburger, one that you'd get at an artisanal place that is far too large to fit in your mouth. You pick it up; it looks good. You eye it, go to bite, hesitate, turn it. A piece of lettuce drops out. You grab it, but an onion is slipping out the other side. So you just start eating, bits dropping here and there, no longer able or willing to manage it all, just enjoying the burger.
The concept of this game is that there was a (fictional) game released in 1996 that was like Photopia ahead of its time, less focus on puzzles and more on story. But it's intentionally made to be like other games of that period, so I guess less like Photopia and more like In The End, which is referenced several times.
Seven years later, someone releases a transcript of the game, which becomes well-known, so a new round of criticism is generated.
This game, in the fictional history, was buggy and received poor reviews. Then, in 2021, the author was approached by some critics/fans who want to do a critical version of it, which he agrees to while they update it (kind of like the Anchorhead update and the Cragne Manor tribute, I suppose).
This game consists of the 'revised version', with an accompanying booklet with the transcript and some art. The revised version has art as well. An in-game guide consisting of critical materials is available in-game, slowly increasing in scope as you proceed.
The art is one of the highlights; the style is unique and well-executed, and the game may be worth playing for the art alone.
The game concept is that you have the ability to remove entropy from some sources and imbue it into others, having been gifted that power by an orange-eyed demon woman in your youth.
It serves as a metaphor for involuntary inaction, similar to ADHD or depression, where you can only use some external impulse to compel yourself to complete some task.
Your mother is dying in the hospital, and you need to go see her. There are several obstacles in the way, though.
Besides the main goal of the ending, there are many mini-deaths along the way. The more you get before the end, the better ending you get!
Except...even if you only get a few, you can see what the ending would have been for the other options. I only got 6 points, but I wasn't super motivated to see the other 27.
And let's talk about why.
This game is very polished. It had numerous testers, and it feels like it. There were only a few times I felt like there were 'bugs', like trying to (Spoiler - click to show)OPEN DOOR while on the roof and having it say that that's not something you can open. Overall, though, I'd say it has a high level of polish for a game in general, especially one of its size.
Where I found some difficulty was in knowing what to do a lot of times. I felt like the game swung between no details and overfull details for clues sometimes. Like finding deaths; I really couldn't figure out the mechanics behind finding deaths at all. There were no exposed electrical lines or broken glass that could obviously hurt me. And things that were dangerous (like a heavy tree branch) didn't respond to what I thought were death-inducing things (like pushing them). The hint menu has dozens of hints, but none of them at all are for the deaths except for an explicit listing of the exact actions you need. In the main storyline, too, I often found that the things I got most stuck on weren't in the hints at all. I suppose I was just on a different brainwave.
It might have helped to highlight relevant features in some way. For instance, the (Spoiler - click to show)AC unit is mentioned early on in the first line of the paragraph, in the middle of a list of a bunch of non-useful material. Given its significance in the story, it might have merited more prominent place, nearer the end of the paragraph.
Fortunately, the game is implemented well enough that even while struggling there are generally good responses to obtain while looking for something to interact with.
The three layers of Drew Cook (the real one, the author one, the PC one) all blend in interesting ways, positive ones, I feel.
It's hard to evaluate the quality of the in-game writing. I think I would like it, had I found it in the wild; however, all of the in-universe reviews, mostly written by the (real-world) author, praise the quality of the writing. They'll say (paraphrase) 'the writing was excellent, but the bugs were terrible'; it came up more than 4 or 5 times. It's kind of like trying to judge the natural light of the moon when someone has set up a dozen spotlights aiming up at it in an attempt to brighten it. Does this artificial praise really affect my perception of the prose? It's hard to say, and it would have been interesting to see how I felt about the writing quality without simultaneously reading a great deal of manufactured praise for it. However, I do see the reasoning for it, for otherwise why would this game have been preserved?
Overall, I think of lot of people when looking for parser games to play are looking for something that's not super buggy, that responds to most inputs in a helpful manner, and that has a nice outer shell of story, setting and/or (in this case) art. So I think most people will be pleased with this. It made me think quite a bit, and I could see myself revisiting it.
A combat RPG through multiple worlds, April 26, 2023This game is set in the Little Match Girl universe, which is very different than what it sounds like (to me it sounds like a drab and depressing slice of life series based on Victorian London, whereas in actuality its about a time-travelling assassin).
In this one, you have to take down the Snow Queen and her army of henchmen spread out over many worlds. In the meantime, you can add members to your party (up to 5), gain powerful abilities and engage in turn based combat (none of which were features of the previous Little Match girl games).
I had two experiences with this game, one 'okay' and one great.
In my first experience, I just plopped in and started exploring. I got confused by the large number of exits, especially diagonal ones, and I had forgotten the key feature of Little Match girl games (remember below for anyone in a similar position). Once I figured out how to go to other worlds, I met people but no one would join me. I kept gaining more abilities on my own and I was worried I'd get through most of the game without ever finding someone to help me.
So I asked for help from the author, and restarted. My second experience was much better. The three things that helped me were:
1. Keeping an actual map (I could have gotten a fairly early companion if I hadn't missed a room)
2. Remembering the key feature of Little Match Girl games (very light spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)examining fire takes you to new places
3. Realizing the key to getting companions (moderate spoiler, got from author): (Spoiler - click to show)each companion requires one object from another world, and there's no companion in the first world.
With these in mind, I had a great time. There were some fun puzzles, and a variety of combat.
I'm actually interested in this a lot, because as an author I like to learn from these games, and they cover so many topics that at least something is always relevant to my current interests. The last little match girl game had an escape room that I liked, and I read it right when I was working on an escape room.
I play this game as I'm working on a combat mini-game. I had learned from someone else that having multiple antagonists made combat more interesting, and I was working on a system where you had a couple of robots with you you could program to fight.
So seeing how Ryan Veeder approached his combat was really interesting. Most randomized combat doesn't work well in IF, with Kerkerkruip being a major exception, but I think this one works well, especially with using HP to fuel attacks, even using HP to heal other's HP (but only one person being capable of it), as it can become a kind of resource management puzzle.
Overall, Vorple is working well here, with some surprises with sounds and colors. A couple of times when restarting or right after saving (maybe a coincidence?) the game automatically skipped through some cutscenes (like the very ending one), maybe because I had hit a lot of keys and there was a delay? Not sure, but I had to UNDO multiple times to see the ending correctly as it was just zooming past me. I'm almost sure it's something on my end but I'm putting it in the review in case it's useful for the author or happened to someone else.
I liked the plot threads about Ebenezabeth's overall growth and the ambiguity of her relationship with her father (is he possibly malicious?). I didn't really understand the overall storyline but I felt like it was supposed to have a lot of implied secrets (or maybe I accidentally skipped the opening?).
One of the areas (spoilered discussion about non-game stuff related to one area) (Spoiler - click to show)is a pink hotel in Hawaii, which is fun because I drove by that hotel a lot when I lived in Laie. It really stands out and for me was a big landmark in Hawaii, so I enjoyed seeing that).
Maddening puzzles personified, March 31, 2023This game really hit me in a weird spot because it coincided with an idea of mine in an amusing way.
In my own game, I wanted to come up with something to 'scare' the player, a horrible device so terrible that every player would run in fear, only for it to turn out to be a joke that can be solved in one move.
My device was called 'hideous contraption' and had random dice, twenty six levers, 8 strings corresponding to elements, Towers of hanoi, goat and cabbage, etc.
But it was all a joke.
This game is just like that. But not a joke. The most horrifying thing I could think of a game having, that's what this game is.
After a brief intro, you find yourself in a room with two switches, fives lamps, rope, a ladder that is movable, an exit, a chandelier, a button, a fitting, a track with fire on it, moveable scales, an egg timer, etc.
You have to manipulate all of these devices, plus far more. Oh, and your verbs are extremely limited to 2 or 3 at a time. Oh, and there's a turn limit. Multiple ones, in fact.
I just refused to play it. Hints wouldn't give the full experience for this game, and I just frankly didn't want to play this type of game. I like games where you don't need to take notes, just learning over time.
I said as much to Mike Russo, a tester of this game, and he said it wasn't that bad.
I drew a very extensive diagram of this game, took careful notes, and got 4 or 5 points by being careful and a sixth point by dumb luck. At that point I looked at the hints.
I don't like this game style and don't want to see games like this in the future, but that's my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the general populace, and should not be an impediment to future games in this genre. However, I do recognize the craft and polish that went into the game, and the storytelling is exquisitely good given the circumstances.
An unusual epic-length retelling of King Arthur with longterm choices, February 6, 2023I played version zeta-3 of this story.
This review is a bit odd to write, as I'm approaching it from two points of view. On one side, this game is a definite artistic statement. The author writes in the overview:
"It's not a game. It's not interactive fiction. It's not a puzzle. It's not action-packed. It's not fun. If you're a gamer, you'll hate it and should not play it. It's not interactive fiction. If you like interactive fiction, you probably won't like it. The reason such people should not play Le Morte D'Arthur is that it violates all the norms of these firmly established genres."
And so as someone who does like interactive fiction and puzzles and action, I have to take that into account. It's essentially like a vegan reviewing a steakhouse, and so as someone not from the target audience, I wouldn't take my feedback to indicate necessary changes.
On the other hand, I also have to see how I feel about the game just as a game, as if I had found it out in the wild, even though it's impossible for me to be completely subjective.
In this game, you play as King Arthur. Most fantastic details have been removed; though I haven't seen it or read it, I'm reminded of the showrunners of Game of Thrones who reportedly stated that they tried to strip as many fantasy elements out of the show as possible, as 'We didn't want to just appeal to that type of fan'. Here, too, it seems like the author has strived to appeal to a broad audience. There is no magic, and the traditional systems of chivalry or witchcraft or even tragic noble love are generally missing here. Instead, the focus is on a life of poverty, sickness, animals, and decay after the exit of Rome.
Play is based on little storylets that happen one right after the other, with a few choices per page of text. The game is very large and mostly cyclical, with Arthur dealing with local disputes, having family discussions or issues, spending time with his dog or nature, fighting the Saxons, and discussing with Merlin in turn. Each of these elements progresses as time goes on.
The discussions with Merlin are a focal point for the author, and seem to be the central thread of the game. They are posed as Socratic dialogues, with Merlin asking you questions, generally correcting you for your mistakes.
Now I'll take about my five criteria for rating IF (which as the intro says, this game isn't designed for standard criteria, but I find it useful as a way to organize my thoughts):
Polish
The game is polished. While it is still being updated and there are some unfinished artwork, it is a very large game and has few issues for its size, and no bugs that I could see. The ending (Spoiler - click to show)has a surprise use of video, which was well done.
Descriptiveness
The game is very descriptive. It depicts a squalid and lawless world, with crude but humble people. It paints a picture of decay and loss, loss of culture from Rome and loss of life and land from the Saxons.
There were a lot of features I wasn't sure whether were historical or not, so I looked it up. For instance, battles tend to have very high casualties, so I looked up how common that was at the time. There is a great deal of rape and sexual interactions with young teenage girls in the first half of the game, so I looked up how common that was. There is a casual disregard for life and a system of slavery, so I looked up about that. Sometimes what I found agreed with the game, and sometime not, but there is a lot up in the air.
The text uses few archaisms but throws in some celtic curses. The language is brusque and casual, with references to farts and diarrhea but also tender family language. There were a few incongruities (one noble uses modern slurs to insult another as a (Spoiler - click to show)pu**y fa**ot).
Interactivity
The storylets are disconnected. Choices from one are generally not brought up later on. Instead (behind the scenes) incremental changes to overall stats are made, like Choice of Games. You need not worry if you make the wrong choice about who should lead a clan or who should be put to death, as it doesn't affect anything later down the road. That's only at first, though; the last 25% of the game has many important choices to make.
The interactivity does feel better as you go along. At first I felt like I could pick anything and it really didn't matter, while near the end it did matter more.
I had a very satisfying ending right until the last screen, where I was more or less informed I had been defeated (the code for my ending was (Spoiler - click to show)defeatresolution. I support being able to 'lose' in long games, but I think it can be done in a more satisfying way. In fact, the ending was pretty great; I think one or two lines might make it more satisfying. It's rough after playing a 6 hour game that takes quite a while to replay to hear 'you played wrong as a player' rather than 'your character made wrong choices', which are two different sentiments, and I'm getting more of the first sentiment.
As an accessibility note on the ending, (Spoiler - click to show)I had difficulty hearing the voice as I was in a public space on a quiet computer without headphones. Having a text transcription or subtitles of both sides of the conversation could be useful, even if it only appears after.
Emotional Impact
I started this game with a bad attitude, and felt justified as the game was often repetitive at the beginning with low stakes in most choices.
But, due to the slow buildup and epic length of the game, I began to know the characters a lot better, from the local doctor/healer to Mordred and others. It made the ending actually quite satisfying emotionally (outside of the very last few lines), and felt like there were real stakes in dealing with betrayals and friendships and loss.
Would I play again?
I might, although it is difficult to say. The game is very long, and the mechanics are more or less intentionally obfuscated. There is no real way to look at options and think, 'What is my strategy here?' Sometimes being bold pays off, sometimes it hurts you. I think that's a great way to introduce real-life ambiguity into a game, which was why I was so surprised to have 'you played right' and 'you played wrong' as endings. With all the micro choices over the course of the game and no indications as to what their effects are, I think there's room for endings that are equally valuable for the player, just varied in the actual results.
Overall, if I had found this game on its own, I would have thought it was a marvelous game. There are parts of it I don't agree with in terms of treatment of women and some language, but I am often an outlier in feelings of that sort and wouldn't base any decisions off of that. Due to that, and to my feelings about the combination of unclear consequences and strongly delineated endings, I'm giving 4 stars out of 5. I think most players who stick it out through the lengthy game will enjoy it, and I would consider it a success and one I can recommend to others in the future as an excellent historical fiction and military story.
A bunker escape game with nice UI, February 3, 2023This game was real surprise for me. I was looking for something short to play in the French Comp, but this ended up begin quite large.
You are in a bunker during a world problem (something like Covid but bigger, forcing many people underground in bunkers).
The game is split into two sections. The first is a complex computer system with areas like digital libraries, an encyclopedia, archived footage, etc. The second is the bunker itself, which you can explore, including lockers, a library, etc.
The system used is Moiki, and it looks great, with satisfying fonts, click effects, images, and music.
Overall, the story was quite complex. I had to use hints eventually (I didn't realize at first that you can't access later hints without accessing earlier hints). I feel like the ending I received didn't resolve all the narrative threads, but I liked it overall.
Very big, expansive game designed to be played a long time, January 24, 2023This game is a classic in the style of the period between Infocom and Inform. Those few years in the 90s saw the rise of several gigantic indie games, often with obtuse puzzles and nonsensical, Zork-like landscapes. The Unnkulia games were the most popular I know from then, with lots of silly Acme products.
This game seems influenced by the same era, with a lot of ACME products.
You are getting a shopping list for your aunt when you fall down a big hole. There you find a complex web of locations and buildings and teleporters that take you all around a house, a village, and the world.
This is the kind of game that's designed to be played on and off for months, possibly working together with others online and not necessarily designed to actually be solved. Often times the solution to a puzzle is something found far away in a different room.
There are many teleportation devices in the game, including one powered by geometric objects, another with different button presses, and another in the form of a wand. A lot of puzzles are coded messages, as well.
I played this game to clear it off my wishlist as one of the longest-running games on that list, but was surprised to see that this author is the same Jim MacBrayne that has recently released games in IFComp and Parsercomp. Those games are written with a Basic engine (and I think there is a version of this game that does that too), and they have very similar features to this game, including giant maps with many rooms called 'corridor' or 'path', and puzzles involving color-coded combinations and obtuse messages that must be interpreted correctly to pass.
I know several people have greatly enjoyed these recent games from Jim MacBrayne; if you're one of them, this older game has a lot of the same flavor, just longer and more difficult.
A long and rich mystery game with wide variety of locations, January 21, 2023I don't know why I forgot to review this one when it came out.
This is one of the best Adventuron games I've played and also one of the most complex and rich mystery parser games in the last few years. You play as a young high school student whose aunt has gone mysteriously missing, and you have to check out her house.
The first half or so of the game is a mystery/drama as you investigate both your aunt's disappearance and a deadly party held at a farm, which is being investigated by your high school friend. Your sister is acting bizarre, as well.
Later on, as others have noted in their reviews, the game takes some decided twists, and becomes both more deadly and more surreal.
I found the overall plot to be the strongest point of the game, as well as the satisfying classic-style parser gameplay. I got frustrated a few times trying to figure out the right action, but overall I'd say this is a very successful and fun game.
Fight, upgrade, explore, recover memories, and negotiate between three factions, December 14, 2022Inspired by Kinetic Mouse Car's review, I tried this very long Twine game.
It is at its core a cycle of procedurally generated combat, with upgrades that can be bought by the player. Upgrades are earned by fighting, and the more you explore and fight the more areas you unlock, which have stronger enemies with stronger rewards.
You play as a Corrector, a figure with unknown properties and goals, and you have the ability to come back from death due to an AI that has access to a cloning mechanism. Both you and the AI are missing large chunks of memories that you have to recover.
This is done by finding microchips to plug into the computer to increase its capacity and give you upgrades. Small upgrades cost just a dozen or so chips, while the biggest upgrades can cost over 500,000 chips.
The storyline is complex, and reminiscent of shows like Avatar (James Cameron one). You interact with three factions: human, robot, and alien.
There are 15 endings, corresponding roughly to which factions you support. There are some romantic figures, lots of literary references, and some psychologically intense scenes.
Overall, I found it very satisfying, and it took me at least 4 hours to complete, much of which was through fairly repetitive combat. But it was enjoyable combat, due to the constant upgrades and escalations.
Like KMC commented, there are noticeable typos, which can be distracting, and I believe the armor plating doesn't actually work (one version of it does). But these are pretty slight faults in a large game.
Big, puzzly hybrid parser game about possession and archdemons, November 10, 2022This is a complex, rich game written using a custom parser-choice hybrid system similar to Robin Johnson's Gruescript, in which you have traditional parser actions like NESW movement, taking, and dropping, but all through a choice interface.
You've been trapped in hell too long, and want to get out. Fortunately, you are capable of transferring your consciousness between others, able to possess all but the lowest beings (gross!) and the highest beings (that's what got you into trouble in the first place).
The map is laid out visually on the screen in a perfect grid, and has several affordances to allow you to travel around the map.
This is primarily a puzzle-fest. For those who like parser puzzles (including me!) the ones here are excellent, with timing puzzles, pattern recognition, and required leaps of intuition. I got through most of the game but needed a major hint for finding the last 4 or 5 squares of the map.
Some of the best parts of the game involve finding a way to defeat all 7 arch demons, each representing a different sin. This part was very clever.
There is some sexual content in the game but very non-explicit, more just hinted at or left to the imagination.
The only drawback I found was the sparseness of the text. Minimalism in games isn't a bad thing; there are many minimalist games I've played that can evoke great effect. And some areas of this game were very well-developed. But I feel like some more parts or people in the game could have used a little more shine, especially since I've seen lots of bits of excellent description from this author both in parts of this game and in past games; I may not even have noticed the sparseness in, for instance, the statue rooms, if I didn't know what he's capable of.
Still, I think the broad majority of parser fans will like this one, it's very clever and fun.
Complex and rich historical tragedy with multiple perspectives, November 6, 2022This game is a fine game, one of the most complex and deep I've seen during Ectocomp. I may be making this up but I swear I heard the author say she was planning on entering this in IFcomp but decided to enter it into Ectocomp to allow for more polish time. This might not be true, but it would make sense, as this game has the kind of structure and polish that high-ranking IFComp parser games tend to have.
The idea is that you play as multiple player characters, each with their own chapter, but sharing a large map: a duke's castle, where the young duchess, only 15 years old, is struggling to please her older lord, and his anger has found its expression in unpleasant ways. The various chapters provide a solid narrative arc, from introduction to rising action to climax and denouement.
The story is based off a poem (whose name I'll omit, as the authors has), and has the feel of a richly researched game. Period-appropriate clothing, art, jewelry, architecture, horticulture, etc. are described in detail.
The game has a high ratio of words-to-action; new scenes will often have page-long introductions, and single actions will often set off large chunks of story. This is often paired with a short game, but this game is quite large, with a big map and many things to see and do. Instead, the game strikes balance by providing significant guidance for most events, a style that is more of a guided tour than a puzzlebox. (I've adopted similar a similar playstyle in some of my own games, including a Sherlock Holmes adaptation; it fits adaptations well, as it keeps players on the main narrative path).
This is an earthy game in a grim world, though happiness exists for some. Players encounter domestic abuse, rape, sexual abuse, degradation, intimidation, underage marriage, and psychological manipulation. Most characters are on the bottom tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, concerned about physical safety, food, and sexual desires, while a couple reach for love or even esteem, but none are situated well enough to reach for self-actualization.
The map is a large castle, hard to navigate at first but slowly becoming more familiar. By the end I could make my way well-enough, but I found out after finishing that there is a map available for download. I don't feel it was completely necessary, as the oppressively large castle and getting lost adds to the sense of fear or awe in the game. And getting lost is the main source of in-game hints, outside of talking to people.
Speaking of conversation, it's a topic-based system that works pretty well, especially since you're primed on how to speak early on. I think adding 'A' as a synonym for 'T' would be useful, because ASK/TELL is a fairly common IF trope and it's usual to implement both (just now, going back in the game, I see that T stands for TALK [Noun], not TELL [noun], which makes sense. It might be worth making A/ASK/TELL synonyms for TALK/T).
It's interesting to see the connections between this game and the authors' other games. The use of poetry, either author-written or as inspiration for the whole game is a strong pattern (at least 6 other poems have inspired games by this author, including 4 in a single game). The darker historical setting is also common in these games, although the exact time period varies. This game is unusual in that there are less puzzles and more roleplaying as a renaissance character.
Overall, a strong game and one that I think everyone should check out.
A very large puzzler parser game themed around trees, October 15, 2022This is a very large IFComp parser game where you in a sort of simulation trying to find a 'kernel' of some sorts.
The main area is a giant tree, from which you can eventually find 8 sub-areas. Each sub-area is a simulation of a different part of the world, including the Amazon rainforest, Missouri, Elizabethean England, etc.
Gameplay consists of finding objects in one world and generally using them in another. It can be fun to try and think where one can be used.
Content-wise, everyone has things they like and don't like; while I enjoyed the mini worlds idea quite a bit and some of the sections like the Viking ones, I felt uncomfortable with some of the others. There's some sexual wish-fulfillment in play (like a dominatrix pirate and a harem of succubi), though nothing explicit seems to occur, and there are some cultural moments where I thought it wasn't an entirely respectful depiction or relied on surface-level depictions. At times I feel it reaches too hard (at one point, an extreme not repeated, it even says "they wander off[...]together to figure out what to do with the rest of the wreckage of their miserable lives (this is called "pathos", by the way)."
Overall, the level of polish is high; there were a few sticky situations (like how (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER BAOBAB works but (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER CRACK doesn't in the first room of the Savannah).
I messed around for about an hour on my own, accruing 11 points, then followed the walkthrough. Some of the later puzzles seem to require a great deal of mind-reading, but I suppose there may be more in-game hints if I had reached those points naturally.
Overall, it has a lot of satisfying parser elements. While the tone and characters didn't always reach me emotionally, there is a lot of craftmanship evident. I don't plan on revisiting it, but it is polished, descriptive, and has much good interactivity.
A big surreal game about a train and a strange city, October 12, 2022This is a large, custom-engine choice-based game that takes place in a surreal world like the Phantom Tollbooth or a Roald Dahl book.
The player is on a train that mysteriously stops in a giant field of corn. You get out and explore a town full of odd people.
It uses a custom javascript engine that relies on a map to get around; however, you can't click just anywhere on the map; you must click on an adjacent tile first.
Gameplay revolves around having a big notebook full of thoughts or ideas as well as a bag of items. Each location has some intro text, following which you can use the map or click on one of these ideas.
This is essentially quadratic in nature, then, with interactions of each item with each location. This was manageable at first but grew a bit out of hand for me. I also found the movement in the game extremely tedious as I had to click a location on the map, navigate its initial text for the dozenth time, then click on the next location, etc. especially when running back and forth to check for missed things.
After about 2 hours of gameplay I found trouble following the walkthrough, as a woman I had talked to earlier was supposed to appear in the Center-West Tram Station but never showed up.
Overall, I would be interested in seeing the rest of the game at some point, but the interactivity was pretty frustrating.
A large adventure across procedurally generated seas, October 11, 2022This author's game Skybreak! is one of the most popular games from 2019, even getting nominated for a Best Game XYZZY Award. I really enjoyed the game myself; it was procedurally generated, bouncing from planet to planet trying to complete various success criteria.
This game is a fantasy version of that (kind of like how Agnieszka Trzaska first made 4x4 Galaxy then 4x4 Archipelago). You are a dreamer exploring a vast ocean of procedurally generated towns and cities. You generally pick choices by typing capitalized words or selecting from a menu by typing a number. Some choices are always available to type, like STATUS.
What this game does well is replayability and freshness. Procedural generation here has dramatic effects on the story, and includes nice chunks of unique content. The setting is compelling, and there are many approaches to the game and customization of the character.
Where it's worse for me is in difficulty and polish. The game has you start with goods and food, and it's really hard to consistently replenish these. Very few locations sell both or either, and usually you can only do one action at a port. You can do pretty well without either, though, at least for a while. Getting injured in some way is very common.
Polish-wise there are occasional typos, once there was a popup error when starting a new character (something like (Spoiler - click to show)first dreamer has been removed), and there was a reoccurring bug where exits were listed that didn't actually exist (possibly if you try a wrong direction the game includes it in the list of exits? I'm not sure).
I ended with a score of 150, mostly made from Recording my secrets (as mentioned in the manual). I died (or won?) by repeatedly ignoring directions in a cool Fallen London style (specifically by (Spoiler - click to show)returning to a tower every night when told not to). This was a satisfying ending.
I'm sure there's tons more content, but for now I've seen enough for a (positive) review.
Explore odd friend's big mansion filled with portals, magic and machines, October 10, 2022There are a ton of ways to author IF. One way I've seen is to experiment with different styles in an attempt to find what players like, and respond to feedback by making big changes in future games. Another style is to keep making exactly what you like, making games that are all alike, consistent with each other. There are other ways, too, of course.
The games by this author seem to fall in the latter category. Each of these games is written in qBasic by the same system and features a large building that contains different areas containing diverse historical or other themes, often accessed through portals, minimal descriptions of areas, potions or elixirs, riddles and codes, and multicolored devices. The idiosyncrasies remain the same as well, such as objects in containers not being 'in scope', so you can't examine or take things in an open container directly, instead requiring the command TAKE ALL FROM ____. The author has a type of game he enjoys making, and I appreciate the consistency.
I played around for 10 minutes or so then went to the walkthrough, as I knew from experience that this game would be hard to finish in two hours without doing so.
I ran into some trouble with the parser. For instance, 'STAND ON LADDER' or 'STEP ON LADDER' didn't work, but 'CLIMB LADDER' did. In a room described as having many books, X BOOKS said it didn't understand, while X BOOK said 'you don't see the small book', an object I had yet to encounter.
This game is best enjoyed by enthusiasts of text adventures that prefer the pixel art/command line look, like puzzles over story, and want something long and tricky but fair to digest. An author with a similar feel is Garry Francis, for those looking for even more.
A choicescript space trading game with custom UI and some bugs, October 9, 2022I played this game for a couple of hours, but didn't find the ending. I ended up poking around in the code, though.
This is a choicescript game with some neat css styling. In it, your sibling has been abducted and you have to find them.
Gameplay consists of moving around quadrants. There are 100 quadrants, and it costs fuel to move between them, a small amount for adjacent quadrants and a large amount for distant quadrants. Each quadrant has 4 sectors, which costs battery power to move around.
The game is procedurally generated in a minimal sense; each planet has a randomly selected 'level', which determines how many shops and things there are. Then text in each shop is pre-determined with blank slots that have words chosen from a random list.
I quickly realized that almost everything on a planet was pointless except for the trading and refueling. You can buy info, but it's rarely helpful, usually talking about planets so far away that fuel costs eat into your rewards. Travel guides don't seem to do much.
So I just bought and sold and moved around. I found an asteroid and claimed it, and started improving it.
But there were significant bugs: for instance, mining never has anything in it. Peeking in the code, it's hard coded, line by line, for 350 lines, for there to be nothing in the mines.
More severely, there are separate variables for available cargo spaces and total cargo, and only one is updated when upgrading your asteroid, so every time you upgrade your asteroid you permanently lower your cargo capacity.
I saw in the code that you can find a cheeky companion (didn't see how), possibly get married, and that there is an ending coded, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find it.
Dialogue-wise, in the main story bit, the game has character, but it likes to play tricks on the player in the sense that the guy you're talking to will treat almost anything you say as something wrong. I wasn't used to that, but it worked overall.
I think this game needed a lot more playtesting, including by the author; it doesn't 'feel' like the author played through a complete game by himself, and I'd heartily recommend doing that a couple of times, tweaking the game to make it easier or harder as needed. I would definitely raise my star rating if that polishing happened!
An internally-consistent and pretty big Basic time-travel adventure, September 22, 2022This game placed well in the 2022 Parsercomp competition. It's in Basic, with a custom parser; most games written in Basic with a custom parser are pretty bad, but this one is good. It's only as I write this review that I realize I've played another game by this author, from last year, so it seems this parser has had plenty of time for polishing.
This is a time-travel adventure. Descriptions are sparse and leave a lot up to the imagination. Puzzles are often riddle-based or combination-based; individually, they are often obscure, but as a whole they have consistent internal logic.
The parser generally works well; it has a few oddities that I noted in my review of Somewhere, Somewhen, and which others have noted as well; since the author has been aware of them for some time, I doubt they will change, so won't note them here.
I found it all generally pleasing. I almost never played text adventures as a kid, but there were two I played a lot in 5th grade in the 90s. I remember one of them being a Wonderland-like game that had gardens and interesting areas, and most puzzles were riddles. This game has very similar vibes to that era of game, and I found it charming.
Overall, this is a big game (I played about 4 hours and used a walkthrough about 11 times), and fun. I'm glad it was entered.
An epic-sized space adventure with a complex path to victory, August 16, 2022This is the 14th game by Larry Horsfield, counting all the ones listed in the credits, and is so think the fourth or so I’ve played. For years IFdB’s old recommendation algorithm would suggest Die Feuerfaust to me as the next game to play but I never got around to it.
One thing I’ve learned about his games s that they are written almost like movies. It’s like he sits down and thinks “what would be an awesome scene here? What would be a cool move?” and then fleshes the game around that and adds obfuscation. Not necessarily classical puzzles, in the sense that you use logic to figure out what to do, but obfuscation in the sense that things are hidden behind some layer of searching. For instance, this game has right almost identical rooms called Living Quarters, half of which the game has you leave automatically and the other half of which contain an important item hidden behind some combination of “search”+preposition+room object. I had fun trying this part without the walkthrough and felt proud that I found tons of stuff in the base after an hour or so.
But I had missed several key items and actions (like loosening the straps on the rucksack) and was only 10% of the way through the game. So I typed in the walkthrough and enjoyed the movie, which was actually entertaining.
I think it would be possible to eat this game without hints. For me, playing an hour or so a day, it would probably take a month and need the help of people online who were playing with me. However, I found ore satisfaction in this way of playing. Thanks for the game!
A complex UI for a complex German game about a Trump-ruled island, June 5, 2022I played this game for quite a long time. This is a German Grand Prix competition game from 2022.
It's a downloadable executable that requires an up-to-date version of .NET. It's written in German, and is a custom parser game that contains 6 different windows, each with clickable links (one is the main story, one is constant links and directions, another is all objects in the room, another is inventory, another is a static room description).
The idea is that the whole game can be done either through typing or through link choices. Each object has its own set of links. Overall, it made play simpler, but frequently this led to an overabundance of links. For instance, most rooms had 7 or more furniture objects that did not matter in the gameplay. And many links were redundant. For instance, 'climb on top of' and 'get down' and 'go to' links were always there but never seemed to be used.
The story is that you are hunting Phoney, a 'hamberder' loving man who leaves behind bankruptcy claims and red hats to go through a portal where he rules an island through 'Phoneyvision'. Phoneyvision makes everything seem better than it really is. For instance, his wife is reality is a sticky blow-up doll, but in Phoneyvision she's a model.
Unfortunately, Phoneyvision only seems to work in two locations for most of the game. I had to restart once because I used phoneyvision in the wrong place and entered a void containing nothing but a rotten hamburger. I feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity.
Gameplay mostly revolves around surviving a grim and darkly humorous world populated by parodies of Trump's associates, such as the cannibal ghoul that is also Trump's lawyer, or the poisoner/tax-collector named Middlefinger (not sure who this one's a reference to). Rotten food, mean-spirited pranks, and general filth and decay abound.
The UI has a replay option to allow you to go back to any time in your story, but every time I used it it got stuck in the first room of the replay. I tried saving, but when I closed the program and re-opened it my save wasn't there.
Overall, I think the engine is impressive but could be improved. This is part 1 of a four part story. I don't really enjoy mean-spirited humor, and felt frustrated with both my bad German and trying to understand the game's puzzles, but this game stuck in my brain so I played it for several days, getting help from the author. I'm rating it as '2-10 hours long' in my classification system, but a native speaker might finish it sooner.
An epic fantasy feverdream, May 1, 2022There is a genre of game in Twine which is massive, sprawling, and focuses on stream-of-consciousness style text. Furkle's early games were the trendsetter, especially SPY INTRIGUE, and other games like Charlie the Robot and Dr Sourpuss have branched the genre out into many areas.
This game is unusual in that it employs the fever-dream word-flood format but is also an epic fantasy story.
It is difficult to piece together storyline in this genre of writing. In this specific story, sentences can sound like this:
"Azalea ersatz lunars crackled glowing over semitranslucent ambient films this headache brutally pounds out in stechschritt to a buzzing id blockage"
One sentence I measured was almost 600 words long.
Attempted plot summary:
(Spoiler - click to show)Other sentences have more coherence. As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the storyline (told over 27 chapters, some much shorter than others) is that you are a person in a water world who has made a theft or bad business deal, and ends up killing someone over it. You enlist at sea on a quest to visit the submergence. On the way, you fight a sea monster. Then you must ascend a type of tower, which wasn't an original stop. As you do so, you seek out the Vedas, who are either Gods or nobles or something else. You request to become a Veda, or something else more than you are, which comes with a name change. Your mother was a Veda. As part of the transformation you cut off your finger? Then you visit the submergence, and someone activates a world-breaking device.
At times it seems you are someone else, or maybe it just focuses on two members of the crew, but there are two people or gods or something with very similar names (like imimnemo and emimnemo), but this is also confusing because the main character of the main story has two names (like Leinur Emimnu) and different characters use different names.
Overall, there is an emphasis on pain or emptiness of life or the quest to escape existence. It ties into Eastern traditions with statements like:
"There is one question to which I do know the answer: who we are when they wish we were not:"
but also Western ideas like sin.
Overall, it's wearying to get through; the game says so itself and describes itself like a migraine. I had to rest several times while reading it, even though I was speedreading after the first 4-5 chapters. But I'm trying to build up tolerance for Finnegan's Wake some day (I made it through 30 pages once before giving up), so I felt like this was a good practice run.
Edit: At some point, characters are making up monsters and fights like a D&D game, narrating them to each other. It's possible this is the entire story, and it's possible it was just a side diversion among the crew.
An exuberant and amusing dog-team-up Adventuron game, April 13, 2022This game reminds me of what you'd get if you mixed the 'buddies' movies (like Space Buddies) with Secret Life of Pets and Sherlock Holmes but both characters are Watson.
You are a dog on a leash. You like you're owner, but don't want to be on a leash. You escape, and eventually find another dog.
Then the game opens up into a huge map, with I swear 30+ locations. Many farcical situations arise, including things like kick-flips, ollies, pretending to be a dog mannequin, wearing a dog bow-tie, and an enormous chunk at the end where you (Spoiler - click to show)stop a burglary of a museum.
It's a very long Adventuron game, one of the most complex I've seen. It's charming and funny.
My biggest sticking point was just not knowing what to do. Different IF communities have different conventions on what's considered 'fair play'. Most games I spend a lot of time around with (like old IFComp games) tend to only use standard verbs or verbs directly mentioned in the text. In this game, I had to fiddle around for a while, especially with an embarrassingly long 20 minute session I had trying to solve the first puzzle. I didn't want to resort to hints, but after that, I used them copiously.
I especially used hints later on because the game often sets up and plays out hilariously funny scenes but with little motivation. As a hypothetical example (not in the game), it'd be like hearing an alien is attacking the city, and then you see a line of dominos leading into an alleyway. Pushing the dominoes would tumble them down, and then you'd discover there's a giant cannon in the alleyway which the dominos trigger, shooting and defeating the alien. This is an absurd example not in the game, but illustrates the kind of logic: it makes sense in hindsight, but otherwise it's kind of hard to guess that you need to do it.
This is a common issue with humor games, where you have to balance player participation with setting up good punchlines. For my part, I enjoyed the humor and am willing to sacrifice a little agency for it.
I did experience one difficult bug, near the end. When I had succeeded in the biggest task of the game, (Spoiler - click to show)foiling the robbery, I dragged the robber out of the water and tried to lead the police to the museum. I got lost though and accidentally re-triggered the water scene in an infinite loop. I got out of the infinite loop by reloading my browser window, which took me back to my previous turn, and going a different direction.
Overall, a fun romp, one of the most enjoyable long Adventuron games, and highly recommended.
Lengthy Lovecraftian horror game in the vein of Anchorhead, February 4, 2022There is a long tradition of big Lovecraftian games in IF (Theatre, Anchorhead, The King of Shreds and Patches, Lydia's Heart, Ecdysis, etc.) This is one of the most recent such entries, and one I beta tested.
The setting is that you are moving to a new city for a scholarship at a foreign university. You move into an old, isolated house and all sorts of strange occurrences start to happen.
This is a sprawling game, including big locations (including a town and a village), and includes complicated set-piece puzzles like big machines and run-ins with cultists.
Overall, there's a rich background and detailed writing. To me, the thing I struggled with the most was the pacing. Some major events take place as almost-instantaneous cutscenes, especially early on, while more mundane things get dragged out unnecessarily at times. Still, this is a solid and enjoyable game, and I can recommend it to people looking for more good Lovecraftian games.
A grab bag of innovative parser/choice hybrid games, November 7, 2021It's become increasingly hard to review Ryan Veeder's games because they're generally all the same: 'This game does something very creative that I hadn't really seen before and is polished and funny. One of the best games I've seen in a while yada yada yada. If this game was by a new author, I'd think they're one of the best new authors out there.'
And that's all true here, too. This game does something I had once considered the 'holy grail' of modern IF, which is to combine parser choice in a logical way. In this game you use Twine in an overworld with a map, which leads to Inform 7/Vorple mini-games that seamlessly transition back into Twine. Its all hosted on the authors website using the autosave feature first used in his Fly Fishing game. My only concern is for preservation; is there a way to ensure the game could be saved for posterity?
Storywise, the framing story is the same as last year, a funny take on literary culture and the way we handle celebrity writers. It contains 5 (or so) mini stories:
Letavermilia: This is a linear (story-wise), puzzle-based space game. You play as a bounty hunter chasing after a criminal who is also named after a horrible plague. You chase them from world to world, with each world having a puzzle you must solve to find the 5-digit autopilot code needed to move on. Solutions range from exploration and mapping to a straight-up cryptogram (the latter being my least favorite activity of the whole game, but easily solved online and solvable by copious in-game hints). This game features some genuinely chilling moments and some funny ones as well, and demonstrates Veeder's predilection for deeply implementing unnecessary side systems. This one takes an hour or so to play.
Nyvo the Dolphin: This is a Metroidvania-style game where you as a dolphin explore a wreck filled with scientific equipment, which grants you increasing capabilities. This was horror in the sense of Beetlejuice or Addam's family, where our cheerful protagonist blithely navigates the remains of past human devastation and death. This one took about 30-45 minutes. I had a little trouble navigating, so mapping might have been good, but I enjoyed the power curve and the finale.
Singing for Me: this is a Lovecraftian (or maybe, more Blackwoodian or fae) small town living simulator, in many ways reminiscent of AKheon's recent Ascension of Limbs or titles like Stardew Valley. You play as a recent move-in in a cabin, and typing LOOK gives a list of places or people you can visit. Each visit takes the entire day. You can also buy stuff, where buying one thing takes the whole day, or sell many things at once. As you explore, you discover more locations and people. Like Stardew Valley, there are significant holidays that you can experience on a set schedule. Through these, the main story is developed in a classic 'creepy small town' style like Midsommar or The Village. I enjoyed this one; I was worried I wouldn't be able to see everything, but the game gives you plenty of time to focus on one or two goals that matter to you. I spent a couple of hours on this.
Visit Skuga Lake: This game had the most traditional gameplay but used a mechanic with quadratic complexity. Basically, you start locked in a closet, but soon break out with the help of (Spoiler - click to show)an amulet with an empowering eyestone. You then wander a large map, gaining two new classes of powerful items that interact with each other in an enormous amount of ways. I'll admit that I ended up 'lanwmowering' many options to find what worked, but it was also fun to experiment so it didn't really feel tedious. I played this for about an hour and a half.
Finale (called (Spoiler - click to show)Hunted): (Spoiler - click to show)This story was a bit confusing, but felt fast-paced and appropriate as an ending. It was Christmas-themed and felt like an action movie. Scenes focused on movement and basic take/use gameplay. It wasn't as compelling mechanically as the earlier pieces but story-wise and emotionally was satisfying. This took less than an hour.
Additional comments: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a secret fifth game. I was able in this one to read many books, see a family tree and look up people in it, make coffee, and find a nook, as well as talk to Allison Chase. I wasn't able to find any use of the nook or book or tree, so either I missed out on the point or this was just a 'chill and vibes' section like the end of Rope of Chalk. If the latter, I think it worked well.(Spoiler - click to show)
Fighting, politics, romance, mystery solving as a vampire, November 7, 2021I've enjoyed all of the Vampire the Masquerade titles from Choice of Games.
The first game in the (loosely-connected) series, Night Road, won an XYZZY Best Game award and a had a very out-of-this-world style with cray labs, magicians, ancient vampires, and a CRPG-style quest structure you could pursue in multiple orders.
The next game, Out for Blood, featured a human protagonist in a small town and focused on running a shop, developing abilities like intuition or gaining weapons, and handling a small-town vampire clash. It was lower-powered and a smaller focus.
This game sits nicely between the two. You play as a powerful but out-of-shape vampire in Ottawa whose Prince has gone missing at the same time that Anarchs are raiding the city. You have to rediscover your old strength while solving multiple mysteries.
The number of stats is heavily decreased in this game compared to the other VtM games (and Choice of the Vampire). Now there are only 9 or so main stats. Disciplines can be used, which is my favorite part of VtM games, but you either have access to a discipline or not, no growing it. The disciplines basically operate like a 'be awesome' button that is later penalized by high hunger, which can take away your freedom to choose as your are forced to feed. I played as Toreador, and enjoyed using Auspex and Celerity the most.
Focusing on a big mystery is a bit of a gamble in a big Choicescript game, since the player always knows the truth after one playthrough. This game deals with the issue by having many endings depending on what you do with that information and how you resolve the issue. In the end, there are several factions you can unite with. Also, there are many sub-mysteries to solve.
There are two romances for now, but each is fairly well-developed. The one I went with seemed much better integrated into the game than most romances, probably because the author was able to focus more deeply on each romance rather than fitting in a ton of different ones.
On an individual line-by-line basis, the writing is entertaining and flows well, and the pacing in scenes is well-done, with few slow spots, making this a page-turner.
I've written for CoG before and previously received a lot of review copies of CoG games for free, but this is one I bought myself for fun.
A polished Western parser puzzler about surviving a long shootout, October 12, 2021This game is a nice entry in a very under-represented niche of parser games: Westerns. While there have been some entries in this genre before (a Scott Adams Game, the puzzle game Hoosegow, etc.), it hasn't really attracted a lot of attention.
In this game, you play as a sort of singing cowboy, but your gun has been taken. You're on a quest to save a woman named Rosa from a band of bandits. All you have is your wits and your trusty guitar.
Along the way, you'll solve a lot of tricky puzzles. This game had some of the harder puzzles in the comp (from my point of view). There are complex mechanisms whose purpose you have to unravel as well as many physics-based puzzles involving (mild spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)heat, leverage, etc.
The story was pretty good. Like others have noted, it lacks the sense of urgency a drawn-out gun standoff tends to have in films once you start tooling around for the hundredth time. I'd prefer that over a turn limit, though! Second, there are some reasonable solutions that weren't implemented, particular when facing Whitey (I particularly would have appreciated responses saying I was on the right track for (Spoiler - click to show)putting hay in the barn and setting it on fire.).
The game has a lot of ties to real-life history with detailed notes at the end. The songs in-game include a lot of old classics that remind me of my grandfather who recently passed, and who loved singing cowboy songs. I think the game in general reminded me of him.
While the game did have minor flaws in the puzzles and story, I was overall impressed with it. Definitely would rank it at a higher difficulty rating than most games in the comp. I ended up using hints on only one of the puzzles, but the other two took me several days of on-and-off playing.
A big, polished, funny horror parser game with a lot of complex puzzles, October 11, 2021This long game is set on a movie set for a company that makes cheap horror films. After a harrowing experience with your boss, you have to explore five different studios to assemble a team to save your life...and the world!
Each studio generally represents one 'big' puzzle, and most have at least one mini-puzzle as well. The big puzzles range from using animals to complex timing puzzles to story-based puzzles and more. The grand finale is a puzzle with many strategies, many solutions and three distinct outcomes leading to three endings.
The writing is humorous. It is pretty gory (lots of blood and body parts) and violent (with the player initiating much of the violence). There was one instance of mild profanity. Conversation uses a simple menu system which seems to be custom (no Inform extensions are listed). There are quite a few characters to talk to, more than ten.
The game contains several linear action sequences that are predetermined, with only one sensible action available at a time (although that might be just an illusion). When I encountered two such sections (one at the beginning, the other at the end), I felt a bit railroaded, but each one opened up into a large puzzle, so it balanced out and felt great.
Some personal thoughts I had in relation to something I recently worked on (not really relevant): (Spoiler - click to show)I was especially interested in this game as I had just released a game with striking similarities, one I had intended to enter into IFComp. The two games are completely unrelated (this game has clearly been in production for a long time), but I too released a horror game where you wander an entertainment facility, solving big set-piece puzzles (including a lot of animals) and befriending the supernatural inhabitants of the park while it slowly transforms, culminating in an epic battle between two factions. I'm glad I didn't release my game in this comp, as Ade's game is better in every way. I love how he slathered plenty of story, conversation and characterization over everything, leaving very little 'filler' text, which is something I struggled with.
I had a great time playing it! I also enjoyed seeing tie-ins to Ade's other games, both mechanically (the puzzle involving (Spoiler - click to show)ghosts reminded me quite a bit of Map) and story-wise (the animals and their behavior is very reminiscent of Hard Puzzle 2, and other references are even stronger).
Edit: I should say that I worked really hard to solve this without hints. I almost never do that, and only tried because the work was engaging. My biggest mistake (that, once I fixed, solved most of my problems in the midgame) was thinking that (Spoiler - click to show)each studio puzzle could be solved by itself, but that's not always true.
A long, complete Twine RPG with multiple classes and quests, October 10, 2021Last year, the author released a game called 4x4 Galaxy, where you played a star fighter visiting 16 planets (arrranged on a grid), battling, gaining weapons, having different skills and different quests.
I really enjoyed it, but it got a bit tedious near the end of each playthrough.
This game is better than that one, though. This is a fantasy version and has more variety and more descriptive writing. Not only was I not burnt out by tediousness at the end, I was trying to find ways to extend my gameplay.
My character was a swashbuckler, and I focused a lot on combat. You start out with very few hitpoints and a couple of basic attacks, but enough to have some strategy (for instance, using a sword gives you the option to stun, while with a bow you can ignore damage reduction). By the end of the game, I had several legendary weapons, and could switch between sending out a half-dozen arrows from a giant's bow and using a finishing strike with 'the really really big sword'.
There are a ton of sidequests and they have excellent rewards. The main goal changes from game to game; mine was to assemble four pieces of a pirate's treasure map, and that involved things like becoming famous and defeating a pirate's ghost.
I did get really frustrated near the end of my several-hours playthrough when exploring the optional area (Spoiler - click to show)Coral Cove, which is a (Spoiler - click to show)maze with a kraken that attack randomly while walking around. I got very lost, and I gave up on it. In a future playthrough, I'd probably just map it out.
I don't think this game is for everyone; the opening is kind of overwhelming in terms of sheer number of options to try, and there is a lot of grinding, but I always enjoyed grinding fantasy RPGs as a kid.
There were a small number of errors. At one point </span> was used instead of <span>, leaving some raw code; a pirate threatened to conquer the land of [undefined], and a lot of dungeons that had events in their first room ended up overlapping the text compass. But these were minor in comparison to the very large amount of material in the game that worked great.
As a final note, the core gameplay here is similar to Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, so if you like one such game you might like the others.
A sprawling city and mystery with multiple opening and endings, October 9, 2021This is a TADS game entered into IFComp 2021. It is a very large game, with dozens of locations and requiring many hours to play through.
There are three different opening scenarios, each giving you a slightly different backstory. In all 3, you're an injured and forgetful young man exploring a small town called Foghelm.
There are numerous NPCs to talk to and a big mystery to solve. There are at least 3 endings, some of which are bad endings which you can't undo out of, so make sure to save.
Gameplay requires the use of ASK, TELL, SHOW, and ASK FOR. Searching all around is also helpful, as is keeping a map, even if you usually don't.
I manage to beat the game with 32 points out of 50, meaning there are many optional things I didn't see. I also replayed with a different opening, and some areas were unlocked that I couldn't see the first time and others were blocked off.
Overall, this is a compelling and excellent game.
It's negative features, such as they are, are typos (a frequent typo is having both a period and a comma after speech), topics for conversation appearing before you'd really know about them, and the big world map making it hard to know what to do at times.
Very fun game, one of the most fun I've played in a long time.
Detective game on a boat with great concepts but some execution issues, October 3, 2021This is Wonaglot's third IFComp game, the other two being the well-received Dungeon Detective games, both placing in the top 15 and both receiving XYZZY award nominations.
Mystery is one of my favorite genres, so I was excited to see a new mystery game by Wonaglot. Surprisingly, this one is a Quest-based mystery. Quest is a parser system that, like similar systems such as ADRIFT, provides a simple and intuitive system for making parser games with less overhead than Inform but a little less robustness.
The storyline is that you are an engineer with a set of special masks, asked to investigate a murder on a large private ship. This is a long game, the longest I've played so far in the comp.
This game has great concepts and could be described as ambitious. It has many NPCs spread out over dozens of rooms. The PCs respond to conversational topics and items shown and can move from room to room. There are multiple mysteries to solve, multiple subquests, and magic involved. There is even some animation involved. Perhaps most ambitious, there are 4 masks you can wear that affect how others see you and treat you, changing conversations.
While I completed the game and found it overall satisfying, the implementation wore thin in several places. The mask system was not intuitive; it was hard to figure out what effect each mask would have, and the first NPC I saw didn't react to it at all. In the end, the masks systems ends up pretty inconsistent; sometimes it changes what actions you can take; sometimes it changes a couple of lines of text in dialogue; sometimes it adds flavor text to room descriptions. It was difficult to make plans and execute them with the masks.
Similarly, the NPCs had so many different ways to interact with them (showing them things, asking about topics, and TALKing to) that most interactions ended up being not coded in at all, leading to a lot of 'I don't know anything about that,' a problem common to many parser mysteries.
And in the endings I got, it lists what happened to everyone, with a few saying 'you should have interacted with so and so more' when I had gotten to what seemed like the end of their quest, while people I didn't interact much with got a bigger ending.
I'm not sure that all of this could be or should be changed, though. In a recent game I wrote, I spent months writing out every possible response for every object, but all feedback I received about that was that the text seemed generic and bland (since writing 100s of lines gets repetitive). So leaving the player to only find the few key lines of text isn't a bad alternative. But in the end, I wished for more smoothness and understandability, especially for the mask system.
Overall:
-Polish
+Descriptiveness
-Interactivity
+Emotional impact
+I would play again
A sprawling town mystery in the Vampire: The Masquerade setting, August 20, 2021This game is the second in Choice of Games's deluxe series of Vampire the Masquerade games. It is long (the 12th longest CoG game), has at least a dozen high-quality character portraits, and uses the White Wolf system of attributes.
Inevitably, this game will draw comparisons with its (unrelated, story-wise) predecessor, Vampire: The Masquerade—Night Road. That game featured you as a solo vampire making their way up the ranks of the city's undead through elaborate and high-powered missions. This game, in contrast, focuses on a human protagonist inheriting an old shop in a small Illinois town that has a dark presence lingering. I can't think of a more apt comparison than Jojo's Bizarre Adventures. Night Road is more like seasons 1-3 of that story, big battles and crazy powers, while Out for Blood is more like season 4, a smaller story where we meet locals with different interests and abilities and the main enemy is a sort of lurking, hidden figure.
Mechanically, there are a lot of statistics to sink points into. This is an RPG, so we get a lot of experience points over 12 chapters. I sank most of my points into Intuition and the Occult. I found this satisfying, as I was able to get flashes of insight at different points (although I'm not sure if this was from my ability or built into the story), and I was able to use magic extensively to curse people, place wards, and to scry. Given the different achievements and options I saw, I'm sure I would have had a very different experience with a different stat build.
Mechanically, the game has a few distinct threads.
-You have ownership of your late grandfather's shop, and you can decide who to hire to work there, what to invest in, how to pay for it all, etc. It starts you off seeming like it will have numerous recurring options, like Metahuman Inc., but it never really circles back to it, so you only get one real shot at setting up the shot and then many sub-choices after to affect minor details.
-There are numerous romantic options, including the sultry vampire villain, a goth/punk human friend, a handsome disabled attorney friend, a friendly vampire hunter, etc. I had numerous romantic encounters with my chosen relationship and it seemed fleshed out better than many CoG games. Occasionally there were scenarios with my love that may have seemed out of place given our current history, but they were few and far between and none spring to mind immediately.
-(Early spoilers)(Spoiler - click to show)A wealthy and powerful vampire seems to have set up in town and is manipulating affairs. This thread forms the main plot.
-(Middle spoiler but not giving a lot away)(Spoiler - click to show)A group of weaker vampires is also in town.They form the second-biggest thread.
-A lot of complicated town history is also floating around.
The game definitely was affected by my choices, and I re-evaluated my viewpoint multiple times as I realized a group I trusted was pretty bad, etc. Near the end, I felt like the whole weight of complex machinery the game is built on began to break down, as I double-crossed a lot of people without too much punishment. But while it pushed up against disbelief, it never really crossed the line. I think a lot of things depend on the relationship statistic alone, and I had had a lot of built-up trust before the betrayals.
Overall, the game is very long, but many people have said it feels short. This is likely because the game has so many options and avenues mid-game that it doesn't really get a sense of building to something. The other VtM game, Night Road, had the regular structure of missions and payments and handled increasing tension well, but here it's hard to feel much progress until near the end. I don't think this game is short or small or linear, but I think it could be paced or structured a bit better to indicate its length. Someone in the CoG forums said it has 12 chapters and 12 endings, and that really helped me set appropriate expectations.
Overall, I would rank this as one of the better Choice of Games titles. I think it is worth its purchase price, and that fans of Vampire the Masquerade or White Wolf in general will be pleased, as well as fans of small-town stories. It's a story that I wish I had written, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I received a review copy of this game.
A lengthy QBASIC traditional adventure with magic and codes, August 1, 2021This game is a large treasure hunt that, like very early parser games, is a mishmash of fantasy and modern concepts put together for a treasure hunt.
There is a central hub with different 'mini-worlds' you can access. They are interconnected, in that the solution for one world is often found in another.
I played straight through with the walkthrough, as:
-the game is in QBasic, and no scrollback seems to be available, making it harder to keep track of things
-the author stated it may take weeks to accomplish
-I wasn't sure if the game was 'cruel' or not in the Zarfian sense (i.e. can you lock yourself out of victory without knowing it?)
After I won, I went back and tried to explore on my own and look for different paths. I found it 'parcelled out' fairly well.
The parser is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the author describes it (in a forum post) as being the product of 40 years of work, and that it is a 'very powerful parser'. It can understand pronouns and complex commands like 'drop everything except blah and blih and..'
However, it has some issues. Sometimes you can refer to a noun by its first name (like EYE for EYE of NEWT) but not its second (like NEWT); sometimes, it's the opposite (so SCRAP doesn't work for SCRAP of PAPER but PAPER does). Perhaps most oddly, it, as many people have pointed out, can't take items out of container without using the phrase TAKE X FROM Y. Given the 40 years of development and the otherwise complexity of the parser, I can only imagine this is a conscious stylistic choice.
The world is sprawling, with many rooms having multiple exits and the ordinal directions like NW, SW etc. being used extensively. Rooms are almost ideally generic, with most rooms being empty and having names like 'MIDDLE OF CORRIDOR', with most descriptions being 'The room is vaguely lit and hard to make out. There are bare walls and floor and ceiling and several exits, including one going down.'
There is at least one NPC, who is fairly responsive. Puzzles include codes, riddles, leaps of intuition, musical puzzles, etc. with many hint sources in-game as well as built-in hints and a walkthrough.
Every game is written for a purpose. Some purposes are to share your feelings with others, to emulate something you find worthy, to try to become famous, to make money, to fufill a request for others, etc.
Due to the author's desire to keep in the oddities of the parser, the general vagueness of the game and its Zork-like setting, the QBAsic64 environment, etc. my guess is that the game's purposes are to evoke nostalgia and to demonstrate the author's system. Evaluated for those purposes, I'd have to call it a success.
For my own liking, the game is very polished and has some clever puzzles, but I didn't enjoy the interactivity as much as I could have and felt emotionally distanced from the game.
A huge, complex story/puzzle game about dangerous Faeries, August 1, 2021This game is very, very long, certainly the longest adventuron game I've seen. It's split up into 6 or so parts, and the first part alone is already one of the longest games in Parsercomp.
I'm going to go over my 5 point scale with it.
+Descriptiveness: The author does an excellent job of painting a rich and vibrant world. Everyone knows each other, and events in one location affect events far away. Rather than a Zork-like grab-bag of random magic and sci fi (like a lot of big puzzlers), everything is tightly inter-connected, like Anchorhead.
+Emotional impact: Unlike Anchorhead, and most horror IF games, this is based on Faerie magic. While you may or may not classify this game is horror, it certainly presents scenarios which would be strongly horrifying to those in them. I enjoyed the story, which is the main reason I persisted.
+-Interactivity and Polish: These two categories go hand in hand, and I kind of want to give half a star in each. More details below.
+-Polish: The author intentionally chose Adventuron as an engine to show what it could do in a long-form game. Through a great deal of effort, I think he was completely successful in what he wanted to achieve. However, one difficulty is with not always having useful parser responses when having the correct verb and wrong noun or correct noun and wrong verb. One frequent occurrence for me was using the right verb and the wrong noun (like saying 'mirror' instead of 'fragment') and having the game imply it knew what I was doing but that it wasn't helpful. I didn't even know the game couldn't recognize the noun until I looked at the hints or other people's discussion. This happened multiple times. Outside of that, the game is remarkably well-constructed for such a long game.
+-Interactivity: The puzzles are a mixed bag. Some are mundane (find and light candle), some are complex (operate a camera and develop the photos), some are very obscure (the game is filled with many details in every room, and four or five puzzles depend on examining such a detail, while all the others are red herrings). I enjoyed the complex procedures, the gathering ensembles. Perhaps the most fun was just grabbing everything along the way, wondering what it would all lead to. Also related to interactivity, there were numerous timed events to add flavor. These were well-written and interesting, but when repeated multiple times and in various settings with the same text, became surreal and blurred.
The game is ponderous, which a huge number of locations. To preserve realism, the game frequently has you 'wake up' with a few key items removed from your inventory and placed around you. This contributed to mimesis but also contributed to me wondering where on earth I set things.
+Would I play it again? Yes. This is a marvelous achievement of a game. I'd like to one day write something like it.
An extended sci-fi space puzzler on many platforms, June 21, 2021In this game, you play as someone awoken from cryosleep near the end of a long journey when your spaceship encounters an alien vessel. You'll have to explore the vessel with your helpful artificial intelligence unit Io, discovering its origin and purpose and encountering some bizarre alien technology on the way.
I'm not sure where to rate this, so I'll use my 5 point scale:
+Polish: I've read reviews of the earlier versions, and it seems like the Inform version dealt with most of the issues. I definitely would consider this more polished and bug-free than most games I play. Most standard responses have been replaced, most error messages are helpful, and command suggestions are frequently handed out. The game includes complicated containers, text typing into various interfaces, talkative NPCs, etc.
+Descriptiveness: A lot of the text is vivid. The author is clearly enthusiastic about space and I think it pays off. I was able to get a clear visual idea of each room.
+Interactivity: I admit I liked the puzzles. Many recent old-school games I've tried haven't appealed to me, but this is more of a light Infocom style than the more difficult British games. There's a bit more hand holding than Infocom but I appreciate that as someone who prefers lighter puzzles. I did get stuck a couple of times and had to request help.
+Emotional impact: The storyline itself didn't grab me but my natural curiosity and interest in the setting and exploration was satisfied. I felt like there was always something to work on and overall found it similar to a crossword puzzle in satisfaction.
?Would I play it again? I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't think this will become a long-term favorite. On the other hand, it has a pleasant compactness and unity that I could see myself coming back to in the future, especially if there were a sequel (which the name suggests). So I'll award a point here.
To me this game compares most directly with Hugo Labrande's Tristam Island and Marco Innocenti's Andromeda games. They all have a fairly similar style of 'retro aesthetic with modern affordances', a playtime of several hours, and availability on multiple platforms.
I think this game succeeds in its apparent goal, which is to create a product that people who played adventure games in the 80's will recognize and enjoy. The availability on multiple retro platforms definitely helps with that feel. (I'm making guesses here since I didn't play IF until 2010).
There are two types of authors when it comes to feedback: growth-minded authors and marketing authors. Growth-minded authors are looking for ways to improve and eager to find flaws in their products, while marketing authors are hoping to make more sales/move more product and don't want anything negative.
Competition authors are usually growth-minded, but since this is a commercial game I don't know which type this author is, so I'll put the 'growth' comments in spoilers which can be ignored if not desired:
(Spoiler - click to show)Jon Ingold, a two-time XYZZY winning author and head of the Inkle company said recently that the PC should never take action that isn't somehow the direct result of a player's choice, and I think that's true. Too often our character here does something without input, like the data hub; we're told 'it's not powered on, so you decide not to put anything on it'. It just feels weird. I can think of more examples if you like.
(Spoiler - click to show)Also, IO provides very useful information but talking again just says you can't think of anything to talk about. Again it's
kind of making the decision for you, but more importantly it's hard to get the information again. It'd be nice if IO would summarize for you or if there was another way to repeat that information.
Excellent multi-act game in gothic urban fantasy environment, April 6, 2021This is the kind of game that comes along only once every few years, especially recently: a polished parser game that lasts far longer than 2 hours.
The author is inspired by Anchorhead, Blue Lacuna, and City of Secrets. Of those 3, I find this game to be closest to City of Secrets in both play style and prose style.
You are a medical student trying to solve a mystery: a mysterious black plague is destroying people in your city, and you have to help them.
To solve this, you need to go through 4 acts (plus a beginning and interlude) to reach the depths of the mystery.
The map for this game is quite large, and it comes with an in-game graphical map that looks great.
Like Anchorhead and Blue Lacuna, gameplay is divided into days. Unlike those games, gameplay is narrowly funneled. This game reads more like a movie than a novel, with an emphasis on scripted conversations and scripted action scenes. Only rarely are there simultaneous puzzles, and the most difficult puzzle is generally learning to navigate the impressively large and responsive city environment, which has both randomized events and time-based changes.
This is a love story, too, with multiple love interests and multiple endings. Romance plays a key role in numerous scenes. It uses other movie-like techniques, including a lot of foreshadowing and an emphasis on visual and aural descriptions (okay, that's not just in movies, but it just feels like a movie).
There have been two really negative reviews of Anchorhead in recent years, criticizing that game for not being 'funneled' enough, for having too open of a world, too subtle of story, not enough romance, etc. This game directly addresses all of those issues, with its constrained gameplay and copious allowances (such as a GO TO feature, in-game map and journal with a list of goals). On the other hand, for fans of the open world, exploration, and difficult puzzles of Anchorhead, it may pose too slight of a challenge. Blue Lacuna was in a similar spot, and offered two versions: a story version and a puzzle version.
For me, though, I enjoyed playing through this game, and truly consider it a rare game. I think it will do well in the XYZZY awards for 2021, and makes me want to try my hand at something like this, although I expect it would take as many years as the author's original did.
The polish on this game is impeccable, the setting and prose is descriptive, I'd definitely play again, the interactivity is a bit narrow but has several fun puzzles (including [mild spoilers](Spoiler - click to show)a nice math one), and emotionally was satisfying. Recommended for fans of story-focused parser games. I spent around 5 hours on this game.
Review for 2017 Spring Thing preview:
This game is advertised as being incomplete, but a very large chunk of it is done. Playing it is like playing 'episode 1' of a large series.
The setting is unusual: you are in a large and decaying city where magic and science are blended together. Scalpels and anesthesia blend with goblins and soul magic.
I found the opening to be a bit constraining (which is something I do in my own games, too), but that after that the game was rich and rewarding. Locations have several interactible details, conversations feel natural, and I felt like a real detective.
I enjoyed the large feeling of the city, something difficult to do right in an interactive fiction game. I did get a bit lost from time to time. Locations were unique and vividly described.
I would love to see this finished.
A fan wiki for a 'lost show', April 3, 2021When I had heard that JJ and Grim had been working on a huge Twine project, this isn't what I expected, but I enjoyed this nonetheless.
This is a fake wiki, a sprawling website with links to tons of different actors, directors, characters, episodes, and even fan theories. It reminds me of the wiki game Neurocracy, although I believe they're gated differently. In this game, the wiki is being updated as you go, with new links appearing after you explore others.
The beginning was, as another reviewer mentioned, a bit difficult; with so much information at once, I just sort of lawnmowered through it, saving the fun stuff for last. So I ended up reading the 'people' page, then 'characters', then 'planets' and then the episodes.
It was slow going, with no real plot beats in those first segments because they were order independent.
But it was fun for different reasons. This project seems to have several different goals: to be a sort of 'lost episode' creepypasta-type story, to be funny, to provide a window into 70's culture, to honor and parody Dr. Who and original Star Trek (among others), and to impersonate and parody fan wiki culture.
That's a lot to deal with. One interview snippet from the wiki is an apt description of the wiki itself (mild spoilers):
(Spoiler - click to show)"In the end, I think we were all just pulling in different directions. Carson and I wanted this quite serious Space Opera, if you like, edgy, with political undercurrents and elements of folklore. Jerry (Newbaum) wanted a children's show to compete with Doctor Who, and Derek Farland, well, he really should have been writing kitchen sink dramas. In the end, the show just sort of tore itself apart."
One issue with writing 'creepy' or 'weird' TV shows is that a lot of TV shows are both intentionally and unintentionally weird, and you run into Poe's Law.
There were three threads in the wiki about its own origins, of which I found two pretty compelling (heavy spoilers from here on out):
(Spoiler - click to show)I enjoyed the 'curse' aspect, where the crew enacted an unholy Crowley-based ritual in Glastonbury Tor, invoking the 'thelema' of the producer to enact his will, and thereby dooming the entire show to obscurity.
I also enjoyed the 'Tulpa' idea whereby the whole show (and possibly all of human existence, according to 'Hantises') is a form of haunting or mass delusion or collaborative psychic projection which, once disrupted, fades away forever. If you're a fan of this idea, I recommend this game itself (of course) and also SCP-3930 (http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-3930), a similarly masterful telling of this idea.
The least compelling to me was the idea that it was just a lie.
There's a lot of humor in the game. My favorite line was "It was later found that a fried lentil from a packet of Bombay Mix (Newell's favourite snack) had become lodged in the cavity left by the write-protect tab."
Like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of insights about the 70's. I liked this line about that (spoilers for ending)(Spoiler - click to show)Strikes, shortages, sexism, and the Black and White Minstrel Show. Yet the way people talk now, anyone would think they were Britain's glorious heyday. And that's the point, you see. You can't go back to the way things were, because they never were like that in the first place. We create our own past, we invent it. We make it whatever we want it to be. But the reality of it is, there is only now. The eternal now.
The final theme of the wiki seems to be around (Spoiler - click to show)loss and the past, as that last quote describes. For me, the real 'ending' was when I read (Spoiler - click to show)about how the documentary-writer's friend had had an 'incident' and pulled away, in conjunction with the final episode summary about saving the world but no one remembering you. The actual ending itself was less satisfying, but I see its purpose as (Spoiler - click to show)you need an anchor point for people to say 'okay', I've seen the whole game. Perhaps I just didn't understand it. In any case, I enjoyed my own gradual realizations of the themes shortly before the true ending.
I initially was going to give this 4 stars, with a point taken off for the overly spread out info at the beginning, then 5 stars as I approached the end, then 4 again for the mild letdown I had with the actual ending. So I'll just go with my formula:
+Polished: Immensely polished. It doesn't really get better than this. Also appreciated the art, which I hadn't mentioned before.
+Descriptiveness: Incredibly detailed. More detailed than some real wikis I've tried to use to look up shows before.
+Interactivity: At first, not so much, but as it went on I enjoyed it more. A real wiki dive.
+Emotional impact: Left me quite thoughtful at the end.
+Would I play again? It doesn't really lend itself to replay. I was planning on making this a '-', but I love the story of Excalibur, and maybe one day I might (with the author's permission' do some fan fiction in the world, as it's truly delightful. But that would be far in the future.
Finnegan's Wake meets Antony and Cleopatra, April 3, 2021This game is a 22-chapter work relating the story of Cleopatra in Egypt told with a dense, symbolic word style.
I am a fan of the play Antony and Cleopatra and interested in the history around that time period, and I also have at times enjoyed dense symbolic text.
That enjoyment didn't crystallize this time. The game describes its own writing very well:
"Pour pen terrene this dysnomia volta syschronicity to formendulate paragraphs smashed into spare fragments of evocative semiimagery, mimetic shards that don't quite cohere to any generative idea."
They really don't cohere to any generative idea.
When the portmanteaus include French and Latin it gets even less 'generative':
"drunken nothings fuzzed up to retend in the mode prior to resolution beatified immolution densigravitas of the decolor demolition, wickedness we entrenched cheri in jouissanceunteurre catapulted in the cancers cant,"
(I prefer when the game's language is simpler, such as 'Slurp you up a jello mistake.').
I think there are times when this writing style works wonders: when it is used to tell an brilliant and exciting story, hiding the details behind a wall of words; or when it is used in a very short game, like B Minus does, allowing the player to have time to digest and process.
But this story seems largely hung on the traditional story of Caesar, Octavian, Antony, and Cleopatra, almost as if the author wished to write as much as possible, and used the old story as a framework to drape their own words around. The end result is a like a wedding cake made of a wooden frame with heavy fondant draped over, no cake inside.
I found specific moments fun: (Spoiler - click to show)Octavian hiding, the birth of the twins, the deathloop. There are hints of a larger trans narrative, but only in the middle and later parts and even then just vaguely alluded to.
The book itself is well aware of these faults, the author offering to be attacked for the content. In the end, the best description of the book is the one given by the characters in the primer:
"Unfortunately, the finished work appears to have become a bizarre mess of unreadable nonsense. The author appears to have been far more interested in playing obscure word games than telling our story in a way that people could actually understand."
An ornate and sprawling blend of the supernatural and history, April 1, 2021This game is like a text version of the Winchester mystery house. That house was built upon continually for over 30 years, with constant extensions added, some leading nowhere, others connecting with each other in strange patterns.
This game was one of the earliest Choicescript games, and with that has some of that early-choicescript strangeness (now manifested primarily in its large number of stats and the occasional habit of the narrator addressing the reader directly). Since then, though, it has been expanded on considerably. This game contains 4 sub-games, two of them free and two not. So it's simultaneously one of the oldest and one of the newest choicescript games.
Its overall structure is very different from other titles from CoG. It has a periodic narrative arc. Instead of tension rising to a peak and falling in one grand swoop, it features a single vampire moving about America throughout the 1800s, experiencing a variety of historical events in addition to dealing with vampire society and the curse of immortality.
This episodic structure gives a sense of deja vu and ennui to the main character, as you see so many historical fads and people come and go.
Just like the Winchester house, there are a lot of dead alleys and lost construction. I tried beta testing the game before, but died in the second sub-book. Playing it for this review, I died twice at the end of the fourth book. Similarly, there are huge chunks of the story that can be skipped out on, such as romances, and the opening is completely different depending on your chosen background.
In another departure from Choicescript games, this game addresses race in a very direct way. This game is largely a history of black people in America, with each chapter containing large segments in relation to black history: the liberation of Haiti, the Exodusters, Cuba, lynchings, vodou, the treatment of former slaves after the civil war, etc. Black characters speak in heavily accented text, and for most of the game they are the only ones to do so, with Germans, quakers, and Jews receiving some accents later on.
A game that deals so intimately with black history and black stories risks embracing stereotypes or profiting on stories that don't belong to the author. However, I've seen in the forums mention of several sensitivity readers, although I don't see them listed in the credits the way that Fox Spirit has done (might be worth considering). From what I've seen from PoC authors on Twitter, many consider sensitivity readers a way to make sure that PoC voices are heard, considered, and paid.
The history in this game is detailed and heavily researched, especially in the fourth chapter. If you're interested in silver arbitrage resulting from the Coinage Act of 1873 or the invention of the modern celebrity via Oscar Wilde, the 4th act should appeal to you heavily. The third act deals with a lot of letter-writing and numerous social engagements with other vampires leading to political maneuvering. The 2nd act deals with the Civil War and deprivation, while the first has the most material dealing with you, yourself, as a vampire, and your feelings about that decision.
This game will appeal to a certain type of reader, those who consider themselves interested in philosophy and history or fans of vampires in general.
The game is not yet complete, but due to its plot structure you can pick up and stop off just about anywhere in the journey. A unique choicescript game, huge and detailed.
A hidden gem of a game for people into books and fae, February 13, 2021I've noticed that most Choicescript games' quality matches up pretty well with the total and number of ratings on the omnibus app, with most of the lower-scored ones ending up being confusing or dissappointing.
This game proved the exception for me. While it had problems, especially near the start, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit especially the ending.
In this game, you play as a monk/scholar in 1000 AD who is entrusted with a book of marvelous prophecy called the Chronicon Apocalypticon. At the same time, you discover a disembodied hand running around. You embark on a quest to save (or destroy) England, meeting many weird characters and discovering the magical side of the world (with undead, elves, dragons, etc.)
The NPCs all are very different from each other and creative. They include a beekeeper and his special bee helper, a Joan-of-Arc type woman, a conflicted nun, a bard, and others.
I enjoyed the fact that 'being good at reading' is a superpower in this game. At least, it's a skill that can be used to save the world.
Overall, the main characteristics it has with other less popular CoG titles is its weaker/confusing stats and it's lack of flexibility when it comes to romances (there are romances, but gender of ROs is fixed and many will only specific types of romance or none at all).
By 'weak stats' I mean that I ended the game with almost all skills at 50%, one in the 60's and two in the 50's. This can cause a lot of problems, such as trying to figure out if you just screwed up your stats royally, or figuring out what's enough to pass challenges. My personal analogy for stat growth is that it's like walking speed in a 3d game: really low stat boosts are like having a character move at 1/10 of normal speed.
By 'confusing' stats, I mean that it can be really hard to figure out which stats are which; for instance, the game frequently asked me if I would do things myself or work as a team, but I cannot identify any skill that that corresponds to. On the other hand, there are many tracked stats that I can't for the life of me tell how they apply in the game.
Many people in reviews for this game mention difficulty with stat checks, which I think is a result of the above issues.
So that's a lot of time spent on the weaknesses. The good thing is that the game is at its worst at the beginning and only gets better with time. The final chapter was great, on par (in my opinion) with Heroes of Myth, another excellent Choicescript game. The actual last page was one of the best I've seen (in my playthrough).
As the game progresses, you can figure out the author's signposts for the stats. It's usually the simplest possible: he mentions the name of the stat in the choice.
As the game goes on, there are many factions you can choose between and many ways to influence the world. The choices are great. The whole game story was really compelling for me, better than most of the games I've played in the last few weeks.
I think this game most appealed to me because of my love for reading and my enjoyment of monastical, historical, and/or fae-based narratives with a bizarre cast of characters, as well as my patience for puzzling stats. If that sounds like you, you'll probably enjoy this game.
Great author and great concept with some problems in the execution, February 11, 2021Jim Dattilo is a good interactive fiction author. He's great at creating a variety of characters.
The power to affect time is a fun subject in IF, and has a lot of potential.
However, I think this game misses at its aims a bit.
You play as an insurance salesman who one days realizes they can stop time. You can use this to enrich yourself or help others, and you can attract the attention of many might people or romantic interests.
I think where the trouble is is that Jim's strengths are a vibrant cast of NPCs and a superhero game's strength is the hero's growth, and they don't mesh well.
Your character in this game has almost no development; all the interesting personal plotlines are pushed on to other people. There is an enemy, but they enter pretty late in the story.
The problem is the NPCs with the interesting plotlines don't have powers, so the game basically alternates between two chunks: interesting, non-supernatural segments with NPC's personal lives, and exciting but aimless explorations of your powers. So, for instance, you might go to a party with someone and learn about their childhood, then go out to a park and decide to steal a bike or help a kid not scrape their knee. And that's the bulk of the game.
The writing is good, though, and over time I found the characters interesting. The workplace subplot is fascinating. I definitely feel like playing this game was not a waste of my time.
The other main problem I had was a 'sudden death' ending in Chapter 12. I don't mind sudden deaths in Choicescript games, but these are essentially 'hardmode' games where a death wipes your whole file and you have to restart. If there was some kind of denouement to your death (like in Mask of the Plague Doctor) or options to restart a given chapter (like Choice of Rebels or Cakes and Ale), it would be a lot less painful.
So I can't strongly recommend this game, but I can recommend it to fans of Dattilo's other work and fans of slice-of-life style superhero works (or corporate drama; honestly, if you're into that, that subplot alone is a pretty good game in and of itself).
Like a tapestry of beautiful threads that was never completed, February 6, 2021This game is a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of being a game about, say, Norse gods or Zeus, it's something more like Avatar or similar shows. You are a constructed being in a race that has control over wind and water naturally, and fire and earth through technology.
The weather is out of control, so you have to stop it, along with a kind of sentient bio-organic robot servant and some human friends. You meet a human city controlled by 5 warring, corrupt houses and you also meet others of your kind (and their enemies).
The game opens strongly, with cool scenarios like jumping off a cliff to test your flight abilities.
The issue that I had with the game is that so many things are set up without being followed up on or resolved. Part of that, I believe, is that the author put some very important story beats into only a few of the possible playthroughs, making multiple playthroughs almost a necessity to really understand the game. That's not bad in itself, but it makes each playthrough a little weaker.
I didn't watch Game of Thrones, but I remember a lot of people talking about how the winter badguy had been built up for the whole show then was over in a surprisingly easy way that was disappointing. That happens here in many ways. In fact, your 'climactic battle' between whichever final opponent you choose is almost indistinguishable from every other battle in the game, and if anything seems less momentous and intense than the others (like fighting off an army of hundreds of robots).
Like other reviewers on other platforms have said, the individual writing is good. The worldbuilding was creative, to me, and the types of characters were varied. Like other parts of the stories, each character's arc felt unfinished in ways, but had enjoyable parts. I particularly enjoyed Humil's story arc.
Despite my mixed feelings, I overall enjoyed this game and definitely believe I'll play it again in the future.
Hard sci fi that grows more complex over time. , February 4, 2021I was prepared not to like this game at first. It's title seemed vague, and in the first chapter it almost felt like neutral sci-fi, like The Fleet without managing, or Choice of the Star Captain without weird humor and aliens, or I, Cyborg without all the crime.
But over time it actually really came together. Little hints about characters that would just be slight traits in other people became full-fledged storylines. Macguffins become actually plot-relevant. The people I found least interesting at first all had really well-put-together storylines.
The choices worked well for me later on, too. At first, there were a few annoying choices (like one where the game decides you must answer a distress call, and you pick the reason why, instead of whether you do it). But as you go on, the game becomes a lot more about managing who you spend time with and which of the many factions you support. One of the best things the game does with stats is tying the stats to storylines and people. So instead of 'pick which of these four options is the stat you maxed out at the beginning of the game', it's more like 'spend time with the doctor using your medical training or use your engineering training to make weapons'. Maybe it's just the same as other games under the hood, but I felt like I was making real choices.
I also appreciated the science aspect. Out of all the space games, I felt like this one dealt with realism the most. There are some handwavey aspects (like artificial gravity and the main Macguffin), but a trip across the solar system takes you months, and you have to use magnetic boots in a derelict spacecraft. I thought that was neat.
Overall, I'd say it's a great scifi game with a slow start but a great finish.
Play as a cyborg copy of a smuggler in the wild west of space, February 2, 2021This game is one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars to, but some of the interactivity dragged it down a bit for me.
This is a large game, at 330K words. In it, you play as (what felt to me) a cyborg version of Han Solo: you're a smuggler, you can charm, lie, shoot, and fly, you can choose how morally ambiguous you are, etc.
In gameplay, it almost feels like a wild west 'slice of life'. You spend a long time on a space station on the edges of civilization, dealing with 3 criminal syndicates (or 4, if you count the corrupt police), as well as an old flame who represents the more civilized side of life.
The man you were a copy of, though, has left a trail of spurned lovers and slighted enemies behind, causing you a lot of trouble. In addition, your sensory implant (which handles all of your input) is dying and replacements are scarce.
I think this game handles overall coherence pretty well. It's not too hard to get a feel for what the world is like and what you need to do. It can be hard to keep track of all the characters, but you get tons of opportunities to interact with everyone.
Choicewise and statwise, there's some good and some bad, at least the way I see it. What's good is that there are some areas where you get very significant choices, contributing to the game's large wordcount. For instance, there are different jobs you can take, factions you can join, etc.
What's a little rougher is that the main use of stats is pass/fail checks, but made pretty difficult. One chapter in particular involves a long impersonation attempt where you have to keep 4 or 5 factors in mind, and failing even one can get you busted.
In other places, events that could have been written in as outside circumstances are instead made to be player choices that are forced on you. For instance, I didn't like the Sphinx character much, but the game assumed I'd be their buddy at least a little.
Perhaps most distressing is that there are quite a few choices you make where the game immediately says, 'but actually, instead of what you just chose, this happens instead'.
Overall, I'm glad I played it. I can recommend it conditionally for sci-fi fans, especially for those interested in ai questions. If you ever liked a Data-centric or Doctor Hologram-centric episode of Star Trek, you'll probably love this.
A long, complex fantasy game with massive worldbuilding, January 31, 2021Having played (almost) all of Kyle Marquis's games, I can say that there are some definite trends. They tend to be very long, with complicated skill checks and intricate worldbuilding.
In particular, the worlds he constructs have certain similarities, almost like half-remembered versions of the same fever dream. The worlds tend to be man-made by ancient, superior versions of humans, who are now gone, and have bio-mechanical or magic-scifi hybrid.
I like all of his games, but I think this one works particularly well (although his Vampire the Masquerade game is, I think, his best). Years ago, a group of heroes saved the world, and two of them had you as a child. When news of a foreign army comes, you have to travel across a huge continent and a variety of locales to warn others of what is to come. In the end, you have to travel to the Great Southern Labyrinth to get aid.
I can only describe the structure of this game as 'baroque', in the sense of being almost excessively elaborate. You have statistics for personal skills, as well as statistics for things you are trained in. There are many subplots running through the game (such as the fear of the gods, a lengthy murder mystery, political intrigue, your character's backstory, control over temple worship, an artifact that possesses creatures, etc.) and 4-5 villains, each of which would work fine as a main villain. It's over the top, maybe even overwhelming at times, especially given the size of the game. The great labyrinth itself is huge, but it's only in one or two chapters.
There are a lot of ways to fail in this game, both due to bad stat checks and due to built-in-failure.
I found your two main travelling companions (who also serve as ROs) interesting and varied.
Overall, a game I'd recommend if you've liked the author's other work or if you try out the free demo and enjoy.
I received a review copy of this game.
Excellent, long slow-burn horror/medical drama, January 28, 2021This game is pretty much exactly what you would imagine a 400K-word game about being a masked plague doctor would be like.
It's a fairly grim tale. You are a travelling doctor forced by the crown to enter a city in quarantine due to the Waking Death, a plague which makes its bearers sleep-deprived until they die.
You work with two others, a man wearing a boar mask and a woman wearing a fox mask. The town is surrounded by starving soldiers who want to sack it, is run by a despot mayor, and has at least two insurgent groups inside and multiple religious sects.
Although many exciting things happen in this game, the writing is slow-paced and dense. Here is a description of stars, for instance:
"The stonework of the courtyard fountain feels cold and uncomfortable against your back, as you gaze up at the sky. A persistent wind, the same one that caused you to bundle up your robes and seek shelter behind the stone structure, has left cracks in the relentless march of clouds, allowing occasional points of light to blink through. You ignore the creeping ache as the winter night assails your bones, focusing instead on those distant glimmers. Are they miniature suns? The faraway eyes of watching deities? Or simply another act of nature, like the snow, or the rain?"
I enjoy this style of writing. Given the large wordcount of the game and the dense prose, it took me several evenings to finish this game. And it branches quite a bit. My playthrough went against the grain, so to speak, as I supported the despot mayor at every opportunity and sought after (and found, to my detriment) the forbidden knowledge at the heart of the town.
Despite my 'losing' ending, it was written very well, with a lengthy epilogue that made the game very satisfying. It's always a huge bummer to get to the very end of a choicescript game only to have an abrupt 'you lost' ending, so having this 'you lost and here's what happened to the shattered wreck of your mind and body, and all those you loved' is definitely refreshing.
Also, I found it fun to roleplay as SCP-049 in this game.
Comparing this to Heart of the House, another long, slow-burn horror game, I'd say that Mask of the Plague Doctor is more like The Haunting of Hill House or The Turn of the Screw (more philosophical with more implied/ambiguous horror) and that The Heart of the House is more like a Stephen King novel or Dracula (events that are clearly supernatural and terrifying). Fans of both games may also like Blood Money, which has you playing a more cutthroat character.
I received a review copy of this game.
Byzantium-punk heroes travel to alternate prehistoric times, December 29, 2020This is a great game. I've played 4 Kyle Marquis games now and have noticed a pattern. They tend to be very large games with intricate worldbuilding, have high stakes (usually involving the creation or destruction of the world), have a large cast of characters and feature some kind of alternate tech timeline.
In this game, you are in an alternate world where the Byzantium Empire is dominant during what would be Victoria's reign instead of the British Empire. The world features more domes than spires and more bronze and gold than iron and steel.
This world is very different than ours, with explicit Gods and a history numbered in the thousands of years. But an experiment changes everything, plunging you into prehistory.
There, you enter a village where you can play a sort of 'city simulator', deciding to focus on arts or defenses or trading. In the meantime, you have to deal with rival civilizations, some of them non-human, and with the threat of an enormous silver mountain in the sky coming to destroy the world.
The game did feel a bit bogged down in the middle and the climactic battle at my village was over just an action or two faster than I thought it would be, but it was fun. I also had fun investing a lot of relationship time with Vecla when I though she was an old worm before discovering that wasn't the case.
Finally, this is a very long game. Took me well over 2 hours to finish, reading fast, and it is definitely replayable.
Extreme TTRPG-style power fantasy--ascend to the gods, December 28, 2020When I was a kid, I read tons of Dragonlance books. My brother and I owned over 100, read them, laminated them.
I always liked them better than Forgotten Realms because the Dragonlance characters were more human. At the beginning of the Dragons of Autumn Twilight, everyone is pretty low level. Raistlin doesn't even know fireball.
But the Forgotten Realms books were always super over-powered. A character murders gods and becomes a god. Elminster goes to a fireball competition and explodes a fireball the size of the sun. Stuff like that.
This game is more like Forgotten realms. You play as an incredibly powerful archmage (much more powerful than a level 20 D&D character) who is ready to ascend to Godhood, but someone is sabotaging your plans. You have to find a way to keep yourself alive and in power long enough to ascend (or to take over the world, or many other goals).
There is intense worldbuilding, with dozens of characters, creatures, spells, artifacts, etc. in a traditional RPG style setting (dragons, plane shifting, wizards, bards, knights, etc.)
I'm usually all over this kind of thing, but as I said earlier, there a couple of flaws for me.
-The narrative arc is flat. There's no real growth; you start out as super-powerful, then become more super-powerful, then even more super-powerful. By the later chapters, it makes more sense, and feels better, but the first few chapters made me feel like I had nowhere to go and no real stakes since I started out having already 'won'.
-The character is pretty much evil or close to it, but I didn't really get a motivation for it. I can compare this game to Endmaster's Eternal in some ways, a game I recently played that also has a notably villainous PC (although Eternal is much darker overall), and even though Eternal had an even more evil protagonist, it's motivated more because you're a servant sworn to work for a master. In this game, you answer to no one and nothing. Many of your choices are just evil for evil's sake. I guess it's the difference between being an anti-hero (like in Eternal or Champion of the Gods or Metahuman, Inc. or even Megamind) vs being a straight-up villain.
But these are minor quibbles. The writing is clearly good. The game is very large, one of the longest (in playtime) that I've played for Choice of Games, and most of the problems I mention go away after the first few chapters.
So if you play the demo and enjoy it, it only gets better from there and is worth the price.
As a final note, the game does a brilliant job with changing the stats screen to reflect your situation, and I wish there was some 'best stats screen' or 'coolest Choicescript trick' award I could give the game for that.
An extremely hard ChooseYourStory puzzle game with inventory system, December 24, 2020I've been exploring the ChooseYourStory catalogue a bit and taking the advice of previous commenters to check the content warnings so I don't complain about things I should have known about ahead of time.
This game was really interesting and really hard. I don't usually review games without finishing them, but I think it might be a long time before I beat this one (unless I just use the walkthrough).
You play as someone who wanders into a Walmart right when it's taken over by terrorists. You have to explore the various departments and collect items to help you and others escape.
I've probably only reached 1/3-1/2 of the game after a few hours and checking the beginning of the walkthrough. There are tons of items that you can pick up and manipulate, and the game is defiitely 'cruel' on the Zarfian scale, meaning you can irrevocably mess yourself up without knowing.
It reminds me of some of the Infocom games like Deadline or the one where you're a scuba diver, where you have to hit things in just the right sequence or you'll miss out on something important.
There's some grammatical and writing inconsistencies, which is why I'm doing 4 stars instead of 5, but I would definitely recommend this to fans of games that require careful note taking, experimentation, logic, and a lot of replay.
Epic fantasy in Choicescript w/ army simulator and tons of characters, December 22, 2020This game reminds me of nothing more than picking up some epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time or Thomas Covenant, one of those books that has a huge scope, intricate backstory, and tons of characters. It's a different feel than standalone fiction, and I haven't found a new series like that in a while.
Seeing it in Choicescript is great. This is a very large game. I remember thinking "Wow, this game is gigantic, took me a long time to play," and then realizing that I was just near the end of Chapter 2 (out of 4).
It's split into four chapters:
In Chapter 1, you establish your backstory and much of the worldbuilding and start your rebellion.
Chapter 2 is a long chapter spread out over weeks where you try to survive over a difficult winter. I had a very hard time with this, as I wanted to not steal, but it meant letting people die. Really good tradeoff in goals here, love to see this kind of interactivity.
Chapter 3 involves meeting a diverse group of people and discovering problems in your midst.
And Chapter 4 is the climactic battle, from planning to execution to aftermath.
This game has many ways to fail, but mercifully has a 'redo this chapter button', which I was glad for when I died on my first run through Chapter 4.
Playing the first chapter will let you know right away if this is your kind of game or not. What I love about this game is how the stats are completely just there to show the game remembers you, and passing or failing stat checks is less about solving a puzzle or getting rewarded/punished and more about building a story based on your choices.
Relationships occupy a lot of the game. There are characters with great depth who can never be seen if you just kill them off bat. All of the main characters show up enough that they get meaningful development and you know exactly what kind of things might offend them or please them, and they frequently are in conflict so you can't get everything you want but still feel good about your choices.
I liked this game, but fair warning it does take a long time to play. The author intends on writing 4 more books but it stands well on its own, especially when compared with other good Choicescript games that are essentially '1-shot' TTRPG adventures. I liked those too, but this is more like a whole campaign with solid backstory.
Regarded by some as the best Exceptional Story. Play Cricket for the college., December 10, 2020I've long heard rumours about the quality of this Exceptional Story, and that made me hesitant to play it, as I didn't want to be disappointed.
I shouldn't have worried. This exceptional story is of high enough quality that I thought at one point 'this is the first time I've seen a real story in a Fallen London game'.
Now, that's not quite true, as there are great stories throughout Fallen London and Sunless Skies. But the format usually favors a series of vague allusions that come together in the end to give you an overall impression, although very little is said in each bit.
Cricket, Anyone? is different. It's very large, for one thing. I swear I spent over 80 actions on it, and anxiously waited to refresh my actions throughout the day.
The structure is intriguing as well. Once you get through a couple brief opening storylets, you enter a long cricket match where you make strategic options and, in between inning, investigating the bizarre machinations of the different teams and the trainer.
The story unfolded beautifully; the structure and writing rival a lot of the great sci-fi, fantasy, or modern lit short stories I've read before. There are a series of reveals that individually feel small until you realize what it's building up to and you see that it should have been clear all along. This happens several ways, with the stakes being upped over and over until it's some of the weightiest lore material in the Fallen London canon.
I came in with everybody saying this is the best Exceptional Story ever and was both skeptical and nervous about being disappointed, and I can only say that they were right.
A game that is a treat for retro enthusiasts. Explore a large, mysterious island, December 2, 2020This is an unusual parser game in that a lot of its development went into making it accessible on a variety of platforms, including Apple II, Atari, Gameboy, TI-84 and Dreamcast.
This puts some pretty extreme constraints on a game, which explains a bit why this is in a .z3 format. It would also suggest that this game would have to be under-implemented or small.
But Labrande has fit quite a lot of game into this small package, and that's what took this from a 4-star game for me to a 5-star game.
You land on an island after a plane crash and have to both survive and investigate the mystery of the island.
Gameplay takes place in several portions, each of which involves increasingly sophisticated objects and devices.
The first, survival-focused, portion was fairly linear, which was odd to me, and then once it opened up more I realized that this was just a very large game so its opening, linear segment was larger than most.
This game is at its best when it presents mysteries. When the game first mentioned Tristam Island by name I was instantly intrigued. That was my driving force in playing.
The feel is more like Infocom in that you have large maps with a few useful items in each area. This map reminded me a bit of Planetfall, which had several empty rooms to serve for realism's sake.
The biggest divergences from Infocom are in NPCs and in 'pizazz'. There are few opportunities to interact with others in this game, lending it a quiter feel. And Infocom games tended to be over-the-top, with wild circuses or exciting spy thrillers or time travel. This game is completely grounded in reality, and in fact seems to have entailed a great deal of research.
There are some troubles here and there in terms of responses or synonyms, which is why I would have given 4 stars. But much or all of that is explained by the oppressive constraints one has to deal with to fit a game this complex into a small package.
If you are a fan of retro gaming, I can't think of anything better than to play this on your platform of choice. For fans of parser games in general, I can give this a positive recommendation as something longer than any game in this year's IFComp, and polished.
(Note: I used the provided hints, messaging the author and even decompiling to complete this game. With all those aids, it still took me several hours).
A clever wordplay game with a huge world, October 18, 2020I’m always happy to see another Andrew Schultz game in the comp. His games have ranged from large open worlds with large amount of traditional puzzles (like The Problems Compound) and compact, laser-focused games like Threediopolis or The Cube in the Cavern.
This one has open-world elements mixed with a lot of wordplay. There is a specific gimmick/rule for items and things in this game that has surprisingly large amounts of play.
I beta tested this game, and was pretty overwhelmed while testing. The state of all possible solutions is so large (especially when using slang words or words I’d never heard pronounced). Fortunately, since then, Andrew Schultz has both increased the number of available help systems (including a very useful passage to a ‘cheater’ helper) and turned on most of the older hint systems by default.
My most recent playthrough was a lot easier due to these helps, but still difficult. I especially enjoyed the boat-based sequence. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the game is when you get on a good string of guesses in a row. One possible weakness is the lack of uniformity in puzzle solutions; each puzzle might be solved by a song you’re thinking of, a book you’ve read, typing in the solution to a wordplay puzzle, or USE-ing an item. While this theoretically increases freedom, the state space becomes a little too large for me to handle successfully. Available hint items definitely aid this though!
One thing I’d love to see in a future Andrew Schultz game is one where you have to find nouns hidden inside other words (like a ‘shovel’ that produces a ‘hovel’ you can enter).
+Polish: Given the enormous state space, I think this is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: There's a lot of creative uses of the main wordplay mechanic here.
+Interactivity: Despite my frustrations, I had fun. I like wordplay.
-Emotional impact: I didn't get absorbed into the story.
+Would I play again? Yeah, it feels like there's more to discover.
An intricate horror antique shop management sim, October 15, 2020Man, I stayed up a couple of hours later than I ought to have because I wanted the best ending to this game.
I beta tested this game, but I didn’t see it all at the time. This is a very unusual parser game with limited actions. Instead of moving around and manipulating things, you have a fixed set of verbs and a fixed set of nouns, and they interact with each other in weird ways.
The verbs have normal things like EXAMINE and TALK but also things like WRECK and PROMOTE. The nouns include SELF, people, STORE, MIND, etc. Yes, you can WRECK mind to make yourself go a little less sane and in fact that’s a great way to find more endings.
You have a set amount of cash and it goes down each week. This is a hard game, unless you hit some random luck. Once you get going, things build up: promoting rare objects brings in customers who become regular customers who give you cash. I also recommend TALK CATALOGUE early on to get a free item.
Because this is a horror game, things go wrong. Your employees may be possessed. Once, to satisfy an ancient relic’s thirst for blood, I murdered a customer. But another customer came in before I could discard the body, so I had to murder her, too, and then more customers came in. Fortunately, no one escaped and I cleaned everything up before the police became involved. But it was touch and go.
I decided to try to reach all endings. I’ll say right now that the final ending, Ascension, is different from the others and may not satisfy you (although if you played this far it very well may; I felt content with it). As for the second to last one, it can get a little weird depending on your choices (Spoiler - click to show)(for instance, mine involved ritualistic bathing in chocolate).
But overall, I think this game is great. It’s heavily RNG based, so it will be either too hard or too easy on most playthroughs, but the depth of the interactivity is what I love here.
+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? This is exactly the kind of thing I like to see.
A complex custom parser web game with a deep detective story, October 14, 2020I beta tested this game.
This is another custom parser game, but this one is web-enabled, and features a complex realtime murder investigation in the vein of Deadline (which is cited as a direct inspiration).
Just like in Deadline, you have a large building full of independently moving people, time events that change everything, and the ability to analyse (although here we carry our own fingerprinting machine and chemical analyzer).
The parser is not bad for a custom parser; in fact, people's custom parser writing skills in general seem to be improving a lot from year to year. There are some niceties that need some improvement, though. For instance, the game tells you to sample things in the format 'SAMPLE __________', but if you try to sample the wrong things (like SAMPLE PANEL) it throws an error message as if SAMPLE wasn't recognized. Of course, I beta tested it so I should have found and reported that myself.
Deadline was the hardest of all the Infocom games for me to play, and I ran to the hints quickly. This game is also hard, but plays by the same rules as Deadline. Without any hints, I expect this game to take several hours. The mystery is quite elaborate; I only ever found the most obvious suspect, but I'm interested in still looking for the truth.
If you liked Infocom's mysteries, you'll definitely like this, and it's a worthy successor to them.
-Polish: As indicated above, the custom parser could use a little tuning up.
-Descriptivenss: The descriptions are generally small and bare.
+Interactivity: The mechanics are ingenious and the puzzle is clever.
+Emotional impact: I found this game intriguing.
+Would I play again? One day I plan on revisiting this game.
Very fun wordplay game with dozens of hard puzzles, October 13, 2020I beta tested this game.
What can I say? I love this game. DiBianca is well known for making themed games with constrained commands and one type of puzzle.
This is the first one not to include movement (at least since Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box), and instead we have a series of dozens of word puzzles.
This is a big game, and, as many many reviewers have found, it sucks up hours of your life if you’re into wordplay puzzles. I spent easily more than 4 hours as well as thinking about the puzzles quite a bit, and this is with emailing the author for hints.
I haven’t played all the way through the newest version (just the first few puzzles again, and I already see some improvements). I’d love to wait a few years to forget most of this and do it over again, maybe with my son when he’s older.
There is an overall story that, for me, became more coherent as the game went on, but it’s still very abstract. But I definitely think this game ranks up there with Counterfeit Monkey, Ad Verbum and the Andrew Schultz canon as one of the great wordplay games out there.
+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? This is exactly the kind of think I like. Love it!
The latest in a long series of big, adventuresome Adrift games, October 2, 2020Larry Horsfield has a long-running and fairly successful series of ADRIFT games with the hero Alaric Blackmoon.
I always have a bit of trouble finishing the games. These games are definitely in the older school fashion, which Adrift is suited for. Adrift only encodes specific verb-noun combinations, although you can set up a few synonyms. So in particular, if an action works in one room, it might provoke an error message in another. To climb down a rope, you must type ‘CLIMB DOWN ROPE’ but not ‘DOWN’. This isn’t necessarily a drawback…it ends requiring careful analysis. These games are the perfect games to slowly pick at over a month or so.
During the comp, though, I rushed with the walkthrough, until I messed up a part with a bucket and got stuck. In the part I saw (about 2/3 of the game), I found some really fun dynamics (like growing and shrinking), intervened in a goblin war and navigated through some crazy caverns. Definitely one to come back to later!
+Polish: It has a lot of effort put into nice color changes and complex mechanics.
+Descriptiveness: I could imagine a lot of the scenarios vividly.
-Interactivity: I frequently had trouble doing what I'd like to with things, and commands frequently had to be very specific.
+Would I play again? I plan on looking at this again.
+Emotional impact: A lot of parts of it were just fun, like crossing the ravine and changing shape.
A faux-MMORPG with increasingly cooler scenarios, October 2, 2020So, Hanon Ondricek has a long history of making very unusual and experimental games. I first came into contact with his work in the 2015 IFComp, which we both entered. He had a game called the Baker of Shireton, an unusual game which was a baking simulator with some MMORPG-style elements. One especially odd feature was that it modeled abstract objects as inventory items, like your name, job, and quest. It later turned out (spoilers for this game) (Spoiler - click to show)that you were an NPC in an MMORPG and could hack the game to get out and go on a short quest.
I found that idea fascinating, and I ended up using it in several of my games. So that made the Baker of Shireton get stuck in my brain.
This game is a successor to that one. In this game, you get to play an upgraded version of the fake MMO that the first game was set in. This is a choice-based system instead of parser, and it has great art by Marco Innocenti and music from a variety of sources. The music was catchy; I left it on for much of the day as I played, and my son liked it too.
The bulk of this game is getting and fulfilling quests from different NPCs. There is a complex combat system (I especially enjoyed the 'magic' mechanics which require you to quickly spell some words during combat. There is also an option to slow down combat significantly for people who have trouble with quick time events). While rich and actually pretty fun, combat isn't completely necessary. In a way, it reminds me quite a bit of Porpentine's various comabt systems, and various bee-related events in the game also bear some resemblance to her.
Speaking of bearing resemblance, there are references to a lot of games in here, including many of Hanon's older games as well as Cragne Manor, the SCP foundation and others.
Solving this game was challenging. I frequently had to think outside of the box. Hanon is one of the pioneers (along with people like Agniezska Trzaska) in choice-based puzzle mechanics and boy does this game have a lot of them. I definitely wouldn't feel bad asking for hints (and, in fact, I didn't feel bad; I asked for quite a few).
This is also a very large game. I spent around 5-6 hours beating it.
My overall evaluation:
+Polish: Absolutely polished. About the most polished a game can get. I don't mean bug-free, I mean that every aspect of the user experience has been accounted for and acted on.
+Interactivity: Loved the RPG events, the weird shortcuts you get later on, and the ease of use of the AXMA system.
+Descriptiveness: I especially appreciated the details in Luneybin.
+Emotional impact: The horror-lite sections near the end worked well for me.
+Would I play again?: Definitely plan to revisit this just for fun in the future.
A masterfully written Shakespearen-style game with fiddly stats, September 30, 2020I'm actually very torn on this review. I think I'm going to end up recommending this on Steam but not giving it 5 stars here, because the two sets of reviews serve different purposes.
Fool! has brilliant writing. I've read all of Shakespeare's plays multiple times (I got on a real kick in college where I'd read one of his plays after every other book I read), and there are some parts of this game I'd easily believe came from one of his books. It has a lot of poetry and jokes.
The overall backstory seems to be based on Henry IV parts 1 and 2 but in a different setting. There are battles between England and France, a somewhat rebellious Prinxe Hail and a rebellious northerner nicknamed Hotfoot.
In the midst of this, you are an aspiring fool who starts out with an audience of three wide-eyed kids and a stage marked by horse manure and drunks' vomit. Throughout the game, you build up your reputation and make friends (and enemies) along the way until you can end up as high as the King's Court or being one of the most famous players in the land.
It's a large game, maybe 4-6 hours long if playing intently.
With all these good things going forward it, it's hard not to recommend it. But I had to battle quite a bit with the stats. I frequently could not for the life of me guess when a choice was sanguine, bilious, phlegmatic or melancholic.
"Let's see," I'd think to myself. "This option is about cheering up my friends. That's sanguine, right?" Nope. It's phlegmatic, because you're trying to balance your various responsibilites.
Okay, trying to be famous is usually bilious right? No, this time trying to be famous is melancholic, because you're being cynical or cautious about it.
I was trying to roleplay as a confident and brilliant braggart (high blood/bile), and made it to act 3 with almost maxed-out sanguine (after restarting, something I almost never do, and battling back and forth for a while with the stats), and then a series of encounters somehow flipped it so I had extremely low blood and bile. I literally pounded my fist and shouted 'no!' in frustration a couple of times.
My reaction to the stats seems isolated. Fool! is fairly high on the bestseller list on the Choice of Games omnibus app and has very positive reviews on Steam and on the Choice of Games forum. The funny writing, the excellent quality of humor and even silly stuff like the ape companion make me feel confident that I can recommend this game to others and they'll feel like they got their money's worth, and I intend to do so on steam. If you're into Shakesperean comedy or want to max your Bawdiness or Wit then this game is absolutely for you. I don't regret playing it, and intend to return to it in the future.
I received a review copy of this game.
An enormous stat-driven Vampire game with great art, September 27, 2020This game helps fulfill a childhood dream of mine. When I was younger, I always had access to and eventually bought a lot of guidebooks for RPGs. I focused on Dungeons and Dragons (I had over 20 AD&D 2E books as kid) but enjoyed White Wolf a lot. Sadly, although I really wanted it, I never found a group to run a campaign with and never tried playing Vampire: the Masquerade.
This game is exactly what I hoped for if I had played such a campaign. A clever story cooked up by a master DM (or the VtM equivalent), a large number of encounters with chances to grow my powers, and fun dives into lore and characters.
This game is designed to keep you on your toes. In an interview, the author said that his favorite concept in VtM is that just surviving is incredibly hard, and just dumping characters in a big city and seeing if they can live for a week. This is exactly the kind of scenario you have in the game.
You play as a vampire who is coming into Tucson after a long absence. The Prince there brings you into His service and asks you to complete several tasks. These tasks are each there own chapter, and there are 2 sets of 3.
You have many stats (over 30), with your initial stats determined by your clan (together with a clan weakness; mine was zoning out due to beauty). All stats are useful throughout the game, though mental stats are more useful early on.
Between mission you can spend your money (on housing, which is very useful, or cars, which the writer seems really really excited by and describes in incredible detail, with over a dozen options including exotic sports cars), upgrade your stats, or buy new equipment. You can turn NPCs into 'ghouls' who help you with everything. I got a ghoul early on and she factored into literally every mission from then on in an integral way.
True to the source, the game is heavily focused on stats and strategizing. The most important stat is hunger; high hunger makes you bad at everything, including finding more food to eat, so getting high hunger can cause a terrible spiral until you get back home and buy some cheap food. Moreover, using your coolest powers (i.e. 'disciplines') raises your hunger. You can use this to your advantage by using powers to hunt food, immediately wiping away your hunger boost.
I would describe this as a 'deluxe' Choice of Games title, if that descriptor existed. It has incredible graphics when you meet people, it has a great IP connection, and it is LONG.
I play a lot of IF games, and I can finish even very long material in an hour or two. But it took me an entire Saturday and much of the evening before to play this. It's like several shorter Choicescript games bundled together. To get a better idea of its length, I was thinking 'this game is huge' as I was getting close to its end. I was a little disappointed I had been able to raise my stats as high as I wanted, but it was okay. Then I realized that I was only halfway through the game.
There is some strong profanity in the game. I didn't run into any explicit sexual content. I received a review copy of this game. The violence level is about what you might expect from a game about superpowered vampires engaged in a war.
Sprawling, creepy, non-linear game with great pacing, September 21, 2020"Theatre" was developed after "Curses" and before "Anchorhead", and has many elements in common with both of these games, including some shared puzzles. It is a large, sprawling game, with many puzzles in the find-an-object-use-an-object category.
I found it slightly easier and slightly smaller than the other two games, but it may have just felt smaller because I always felt drawn forward to complete the game. A series of lost journal pages for collection provide a fascinating backstory.
As others have said, the writing feels a little off at times; however, the game gave me quite a few genuinely creepy moments during exploration, similar to the famous (Spoiler - click to show) "you forgot to close the front door" moment in Anchorhead. The game was strangely compelling despite the weaker writing.
As I said, the puzzles are slightly easier than many similar games. I also noticed that the author favored certain puzzles; for instance, there were at least five puzzles where the solution involved (Spoiler - click to show)pushing or moving a large object around.
A couple of times in the game, I thought I had put myself in an unwinnable situation by entering an area without some object I needed to get out. However, I found I was wrong. I don't think there is really any way to lock yourself out of winning, except by using one-use items when you shouldn't (when you have used a one-use item correctly, it will be obvious).
A couple of things, I wasn't quite sure what they did: (Spoiler - click to show)turning the switch in the electrical panel, and wearing the amulet. Also, as other reviewers noted, there were quite a few plot points never resolved.
However, I didn't feel cheated.
The one star off is for the lack of polish and the plotholes. Overall, though this is one of the most enjoyable games I have every played (for reference, the other games I've most enjoyed are Curses, Anchorhead, and Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina). I anticipate playing through it again several times in the future.
(I added the star back later)
A great reality-show sequel to the first Heroes Rise, September 17, 2020(Edit: I originally put this review on the wrong page)
I honestly enjoyed this game quite a bit. It kept all the things I liked from the first game and fixed some of the drawbacks.
This is a reality show-format game, like Slammed!, so a lot of the game is choosing what kind of image you want to project and going along with it. There are several romance choices, and I felt like I had more agency.
Now, it's interesting what different groups find appealing and don't. I saw some people on the Choicescript forums get mad at this game because it's possible to make wrong decisions and 'lose'. In fact, you can actually buy (with in-game cash or real money) hints on how to win.
At the same time, I saw a well-thought-out and clear review on this site talking about One Eye Open, and saying that, while it was well-written, it was not that interesting because it didn't have difficult puzzles.
So on the one hand, there is a group of people who want games to mold to their desires and be winnable no matter what. And there are others who want games to frustrate and challenge them. I started in the second camp but now enjoy both types, and I think most people have some overlap between the two.
In any case, this game has some difficult challenges. The characters and plot are written with broad strokes, and that's because, like many early Choicescript games, it was written by boiling down an entire genre.
At 180,000 words, it's not the biggest game, but playthrough length felt substantial. I played steadily and it still took a few hours. I think this one's worth playing, even if you haven't tried the first one.
I received a review copy of this game.
A large, graphical commercial game about American storytelling, September 14, 2020It's more or less impossible for me to review this game objectively, because (although almost certainly unknown to the authors) this game is tied up in the story of my life.
Enormous backstory behind spoilers for space:(Spoiler - click to show)
In 2015 I was desperately in search for validation in life. I had graduated with my math PhD with the hopes of being one of the best and brightest young researchers out there. However, I found my papers rejected again and again, and realized that I was in over my head.
Feeling like a failure and stung by the reviewer's comments that my exposition and overall writing were poor, and recently interested in playing interactive fiction, I decided to throw myself into writing interactive fiction and become a great writer.
When I began, I had a chip on my shoulder and viewed well-known and commercial authors as distant, vague entities, to be envied and imitated. My first game was well-received in general, but was noted, again, by reviewers as being somewhat lacking in the writing department. I vowed to do better.
Around that time, I joined the euphoria IF community, a discord-like website (that is now, I believe, defunct), where many of the great authors and up-and-coming ones congregated. I wanted to fit in, and here were the people I wanted to be like.
A lot of good came from that. I made my first transgender friends, which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had from my youth and almost complete lack of experience with anything outside of the gender norm. I found out that a lot of famous people, like Emily Short, were just normal, kind individuals who happened to be very talented at writing.
But a lot of the community had different standards and ideals than I did, and I began changing in subtle ways to fit in, and eventually I realized I didn't like it and cut it out. At the same time, a lot of those same people joined the writing team of this game. As one of those not invited, it deepened my envy and pride. I thought negatively about the game, and felt a kind of smug assurance when I heard it had done poorly.
Since then, I've re-evaluated a lot of things in life; got divorced, changed careers, went back to my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've found self-value in my church and in my high school teaching, interacting with students. I got a book deal and published a novel, and realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do. And that commercial writing isn't what I want to do. I find joy in writing the games I like, helping others write them.
But some old habits are hard to change, and probably will be forever. When I heard this game was free, I felt my old demons stirring up inside of me. I downloaded it and wrote pages of notes on why I disliked it or it was bad.
I finally realized, though, that my own personal hangups weren't a basis for a good review. And pushing through to the end revealed many good facets.
So what is this game about? Like Sunless Seas/Skies and 80 Days, its closest competitors, it's a narrative game with little storylets spread around a world map, coupled with some stat management in the background.
[Note: I had a lot of trouble finding info online about this game and was frustrated many times, so I'm going into tons of detail here. Spoilered for space]
(Spoiler - click to show)
You walk across America, and have 3 main activities:
-Collecting stories, which can occasionally deplete one of 3 stats. Later on, collecting turns into 'upgrading' where a story is retold to you by a stranger and becomes higher quality
-Replenishing those stats by finding work or buying food
-'Feeding' stories to one of 16 different wanderers on the map.
The feeding part is the bulk of the mid and late game. The strangers have detailed art, and they ask you for stories in one of 5 categories: sad, funny, inspiring, scary, and exciting. The stories don't come labeled, and it can vary from playthrough to playthrough, so you can either guess and check what the type is or try to remember from the first time.
Each character has 3-4 chapters, with 3 being the most common. In each chapter, you have 5 opportunities to find stories that fit their requests. As the nights progress, higher quality stories are needed. When you complete a chapter successfully, the character moves across the map and you gain their story or upgrade it. If you are unsuccessful, they still move but your progress is saved.
The character's stories, as I found out through experimentation, count as wildcards, level 3 stories that can satisfy any request. It can be amusing at time to tell the story of a character haunted by the phantoms of war and have the listener laugh and say how good a joke it was. I beat about 10/16 characters' hardest levels by saving up these wildcards for the final chapter.
My overall impression of elements of the game:
(Spoiler - click to show)
The 2d art and sound in this game are wonderful, with a very Americana atmosphere and some startling changes in the characters.
The 3d art is obviously the result of a lot of good effort, but it felt fairly repetitive after traversing the land over and over.
The writing is very good on a small, prose level, but weak on overall structure. The stories you collect are short little nuggets, and leveling up doesn't give you a new story to read, it just says essentially the title of the new version.
Everything in the game is allusions, allusions, allusions. You're supposed to know tarot cards and their meaning and names, as the font is too small to read if you don't know them. Most of the conversations with the characters goes like this:
-The player: Tell me about love.
-The character: Love? I've loved before. It's a strange thing, love. One day you can love, and what day you can be out of love. Me, I've been both.
There's a reason for that. One is that the writing is necessarily modular in nature. The authors didn't know what order the responses would be given in in-chapter or even if they'd be given at all, so none of them contains any essential information and they don't form a cohesive in-chapter narrative.
The other reason is that it seems to just be the direction they were given. The weakest part in the game is its overall direction/combining the various elements. I frequently thought as I played that I'd love to have all the elements separately: the stories in a book, the music on a CD, the art on a webpage. It's very disconcerting to see a beautiful transformation in the artwork at the same time that the story ends with one of several variations of 'Well, goodbye, I won't see you again.'
The game's controls and the style of play are very cryptic at the beginning. It helps to hit h and look at tips or escape to find controls. If you can push past the first part, it will start making sense.
Overall, my experience only improved as I played. As for my personal story above, (spoilers for uninterested):
(Spoiler - click to show)I came to realize as I played that I didn't need to hold onto the old envy, although I don't know if I'll ever be able to get rid of that feeling for good. I wouldn't have enjoyed writing for this game and I wasn't suited for it. I like on-the-nose fantasy and sci-fi, and I'm unskilled at literary-style text because I haven't valued it or practiced it. The game's direction leans against my values, with casual nudity included in art, strong profanity, and frequent diatribes against God, including by preachers. Getting my wish would have been a disaster for both me and the game, leaving everyone dissatisfied.
I received a free copy of this game, but only because it was on sale.
Gothic horror at its best. Explore the mysteries of a cursed manor, September 7, 2020This quite large Gothic horror game reminded me of quite a few games and stories over time.
In its early phases, it has much of the feel of Dracula or the Mysteries of Udolpho (one of the stories inspiring Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey). You are in a small town where a beautiful and sensual Lord or Lady (depending on your choices) presides and where strange disappearances happen, like that of your uncle.
The bulk of the game (15 or 16 chapters, each substantial) reminded me of Anchorhead, or of Udolpho again, or of Curses!, my favorite IF game of all time. A giant mansion filled with odd and horrifying characters and objects (like a mysteriously strong 90 year old butler, or a door wrapped in wrought iron vines that seem to prick your finger no matter how careful you are).
The game overall tends towards 'weird fiction' in the latter half, a genre commonly identified with Lovecraft but which here seems to align itself more with other works such as Algernon Blackwood. There are no cults here, no bizarre combinations of consonants and very little of madness. Ghostly horror is more of a theme.
There are several rewarding romantic opportunities. Like all of Choice of Games' titles, there is a lot of diversity and inclusion, but unlike some games that reviewers have complained of, all of the diversity here is very well-explained and genre-sensitive. After all, a strange manor in a strange town where the owner is known for startling and forward-thinking views is the perfect place for a non-binary character or for same-gender romances, much like the early vampire novel Carmilla, which is even referenced in-story.
Gameplay revolves around choices to be trusting or distrustful, to be physical or charming or spiritual, to investigate more or to help others, etc. There are several layers of mystery, and the game seems very replayable. I'd especially like to replay as a completely skeptical investigator.
There are some questions that I still have, and hope to explore more (especially about a figure you see in the very first chapter).
Overall, I'd say that this game in the Choice of Games canon occupies the same place as Anchorhead in the parser game canon: a long, replayable, evil house horror game that is very popular and basically great for everyone to play.
I received a review copy of this game.
A great (and oddly prescient) end to the Heroes Rise trilogy, August 28, 2020If you told me there was a game whose villain was catapulted by reality tv into the presidency, who had had several spouses and relationships, who ran on a platform of locking up his enemies and keeping 'others' out of America, who employed his children in government positions, I would have told you that it was a heavy-handed ham-fisted commentary on modern life.
Well, this game came out in 2014, a year before Trump started his first campaign. So it's interesting to play a game that directly speaks to current issues without being affected by them.
This is my favorite game of the series, probably because I'm emotionally invested by now. You have the chance to work with former enTheYour first game let you save a city, the second let you be known to America, the third lets you shape the future of the nation.
This is a hard game, and it's definitely possible to lose. You can buy an in-game hint system for $.99 (or use in-game money if you got rich in the other games), but I followed a playthrough I found online (although they made different choices than me, so I had to adapt).
You can play this game separately from the others, although I'd recommend starting at the beginning. You could always play the first chapter of this game to get a feel for it, though.
I received a review copy of this game
Huge horror game with tons of gore, August 26, 2020One eye open was an IFComp game much longer than two hours. In it, you play someone being tested for psychics powers.
Without giving away too much, this is a search-the-lab game similar to Babel, but with gruesome gore in the vein of the SCP foundation (like SCP-610, for instance). The horror has also been compared to the Poltergeist.
Somehow Vespers and Varicella disturbed me more than this game. In a way, the horror are not as scary because of the way that they are described, but they provide a coherent atmosphere. There are many endings, many Easter eggs.
There was no profanity, no sexual material. Not recommended for most people, due to the gore. I probably won't play it again because of it.
A long and tense drama in a Venice-like mob setting with ghosts, August 19, 2020This game is firmly in the drama camp. It had a lot of action and intrigue and less, if any, humor.
The setting is detailed and vivid, and is the best thing about the game in my mind. Its set in a Borgia-era Venice, albeit with different names, and you are part of the crime family. Your parent has died, and there is a power play between you and two siblings. You are the only one, however, who is a blood mage, an illegal type of necromancer who can see and influence spirits.
This is in the category of Choicescript games like The Martian Job or Rent-a-Vice where there are a lot of ways to go wrong and it doesn't feel like you have complete power, as opposed to pure power-fantasies like Creme de la Creme (by the same author) or Choice of Robots.
This game has more options to violent or dark than most Choice of Games titles. Murder is a possible solution to many problems. And there is no way to please everyone. One of your siblings is an ineffectual pacifist and the other is a violent war hawk. At least twice in the game you get urgent messages from multiple people and have to let someone down.
I had a satisfying romantic arc in my game. Some reviewers have complained that romance is less of a focus, but the game was updated this June to have additional romance.
This is a long game. While having a lower wordcount than Tally Ho or Creme de la Creme, the playthrough length feels comparable. I felt like I was playing a quality game. I am glad, though, that the tone is lighter in Creme de la Creme.
I received a review copy of this game.
Three games put into one: cat life, politics and music, August 12, 2020My rating for this game went back and forth quite a few times while I was playing it.
This is a very long game. I played this over two days. Its wordcount is 610,000. There are only 2 other published Choice of Games titles bigger than it.
Tally Ho, one of the games that is slightly larger than it, has a shorter play length, due to having more branches. This game has 9 very long chapters.
It's really three games in one, each of which could be separated into its own, shorter game.
The first is cat life. You are with a family and there is a kid and a dog and a wild neighbor cat you can interact with. Over and over again, you choose where to sleep, how to get the best scraps of food, and how to treat the humans and other pets. This is fairly entertaining at first, but gets pretty repetitive by the end.
The second is Claire (the mother) and her political career. She is an MP trying to win power in a party that centers on ecological concerns. You can influence this by affecting her mood during talks, distracting her during important moments, or trying to 'show her a sign'.
Similarly, the husband, Andre, is working on a musical career. He's pretty bad at it, and the grouchy neighbor behind you is a musical producer. You can influence him like Claire.
Of all the plots, I found the beginning cat bits and the political segments the most interesting.
One frustrating aspect was the large number of overlapping stats that were constantly being both tested and changed. For instance, is looking sweet to get food a test of being manipulative v demanding, of being audacious vs cautious, of being feral vs domesticated, or of contempt vs affection? Or is it a way to change one of those stats?
I became invested in the storylines eventually. I know one of the paths can lead to divorce, so I managed to avoid that. I imagine there are many branches possible, so I may have to replay.
I received a review copy of this game.
One of the best of Choice of Games. Huge, exciting, and strategic, July 23, 2020This game has been at the top of the bestseller charts for Choice of Games since it came out last November. I've been interested in it for quite some time, and it exceeds my expectations.
The best Choice of Games stories are those which allow your decisions to matter with meaningful branches (like Choice of Robots), which have a strong narrative arc (like Slammed!), have a lot of customization (like Hollywood Visionary) or which invite strategy (like Choice of Robots again).
This game excels at all of these features. Set in a fictional, more open version of Europe some decades past, this game features you as the scion of a disgraced family, sent to a finishing school to redeem their failures. At school, you can attend to any number of activities, including academic studies, meddling with teacher romances, witchcraft, leadership, and quite a bit of romance (with 9 possible romances and 10 possibles marriages, including marriage of convenience and a royal).
The last few chapters can really throw some gears into your plans. I planned on restoring my family's honor and marrying the headmistress's child, and achieved both of my goals.
It really captures the essence of the boarding school story, like Jane Eyre's early chapters or an ethically-sourced version of Harry Potter. This game allows quite a bit of customization with regards to genders of romanceable characters, and your own appearance and personality.
It's also very long. While it has a smaller wordcount than the enormous Tally Ho, my playthrough length was longer than any Choicescript game I have played, lasting several hours (although I read everything carefully).
In a way, it was a lot like epic fantasy. Not the Hero's Journey (it's not rigidly in any tradition like that). Instead of a hero from a destroyed village, you're a student from a destroyed family. Instead of gaining experience through battles and sages, you engage with rivals and teachers. And instead of facing Mt. Doom, you face the truth behind the school, which is just as destructive.
I was provided a review copy of this game.
A fitting end to the Sorcery series, July 22, 2020I'm a big fan of the Sorcery series, with part 3 being my favorite.
This one is an appropriate ending for the series. It's huge, absolutely huge compared especially to part 1, and the magic you can gain here is powerful and mysterious.
The ending sequences can be nervewracking and difficult. The art is great, and the music good.
While I like this episode, I still prefer part 3, as part 4 is a bit one-note with its feel of a final confrontation.
An educational dinosaur game for kids with graphics, July 21, 2020I played this game on this Apple II emulator: https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/
It's a parser game with one or more custom images per location. The parser isn't super responsive by modern standards but is reasonably understandable.
Beyond normal puzzles (like capturing a lizard or shooting an allosaurus with an improvised slingshot), each time you meet a dinosaur you have to type in its name. If you get it wrong, it zooms in and gives you a hint. Getting it wrong again makes it tell you to look at the Dinosaur Handbook which, unfortunately, does not seem to be archived along with this game. I got stuck on a horny-beaked dinosaur I could not identify.
The game was interesting but didn't move me emotionally, and I wasn't invested in completing it.
An excellent optimization-based treasure hunt with good humor, November 19, 2019I beta tested this game, and I love it.
You play as a contestant on a reality show that apparently involves finding antiques while wearing a chicken suit (?).
You run around a mansion gathering items while a timer ticks down each turn. Some items are easy to find, while others require a great deal of ingenuity.
Knowledge is the key in this game, player knowledge and not character knowledge. You can learn secret codes that help you succeed. There are secret bonuses. On top of all of this, all of the items have an 'optimal placement location' that gives you even more money.
This game has more narrative than most shameless treasure hunts, and a lot of funny lines, but the focus here is on getting the best prize. Your host comments on your score each time, and you are able to replay as much as you want in-game, with it being interpreted as re-takes of the show.
Love it, think it's great, and I think people will be playing this one for years. I play IF for many reasons: love of stories, love of characters. This game satisfies my itch of 'take/drop/N/E/S/W', which is the same reason I love the original IF game Adventure.
This game takes about 30 minutes to finish the first time but hours to get a good score.
If you want to fly higher you gotta train harder!, November 19, 2019I beta tested this game, and was delighted to do so.
This is a big game, DiBianca's largest (except perhaps for The Wand). I played it for well over 2 hours (maybe 4 or 5) while beta testing, although I was trying to be exceptionally thorough.
Basically, the game is full of little minigames which give you better and better rewards as you understand them better and as they synergize. Your airship captain gives you goals to hit and you do them. There's an economy that grows in scope over time, and a lot of little lovely surprises.
There are puzzles here, but not in the traditional sense. It's technically possible to win just by doing the simplest of tasks over and over and over. The real joy here is in optimization, similar to Sugarlawn from this year's comp.
Strongly recommended, and lots of fun!
Pure puzzle with a moving interface. Programming local movement, November 19, 2019I beta-tested this game, but only got to the first part/tutorial.
Now that I've seen the rest, I'm really amazed. I love it!
I don't know if I can recommend it to the general IF populace. In this game, you have a very restricted programming language that moves a block one tile at a time based on conditions that only detect the block near it. This is very similar to my PhD research in almost convex groups and subdivision rules (which were also determined locally by rules), so I have a soft spot for this kind of thing anyway.
The framing story is very light. There might be a big reveal at the end for all I know, but everything else is just sort of fluff to introduce the puzzles. The puzzles are quite hard, and require a great deal of trial and error and a little bit of praying for success or cursing at failure.
The "Hard Puzzle" anti-game aesthetic adapted to IFComp, October 19, 2019The Hard Puzzle games have always been odd-balls. They tend to be extremely fussy sandboxes with mechanics you can use over and over and whose solutions require enormous leaps of intuition, endless experimentation with absolutely everything, or just dumb luck.
This game honors that legacy by having many, many sandbox commands and requiring some outrageous leaps of intuition. I had solved some of the previous Hard Puzzles by decompiling them, and this game has some good-natured nods to people who 'cheat' at games like that.
This differs from the other Hard Puzzles, though, in that it can be solved piece by piece, instead of an all-at-once lightning bolt thought like the former ones.
I won by cheating in three different ways (including (Spoiler - click to show)'decompiling', the intfiction forums, and decompiling).
A polished and massive recreation of Hogwarts in Inform., October 18, 2019This game lovingly recreates Hogwarts, with dozens or possibly hundreds of rooms, down to sub-corridors.
In this huge world, everything Hogwarts has in the holidays is implemented: Hagrid's hut, the owlery, Dumbledore's office, all of the classrooms, the dungeon, Filch's office, Hogsmeade, etc.
In this vast and sometimes overwhelming maze (for which lavishly illustrated maps are available), there is a mystery afoot. After a longish introduction where you explore and look for your wand, you discover a missing student and a professor with a cloud over his head.
This works, but its exceptionally long, and this makes the usual adventuring process diluted. The lack of regular gameplay can be ameliorated by the wonder of exploring a Potter world, but this will vary a lot from player to player.
I played for 2 hours and decompiled to read the ending. It seems exciting in parts, but the great spread-out-ness and the difficulty in finding clues made me bounce off emotionally.
Vast space game, with resources, combat, and many goals, October 13, 2019I would have been happy to pay for this game. I intend to play through this game many times in the future.
This is a menu-based Adrift game (I strongly recommend downloadable play). Basically, you are in space, and you visit worlds. At each world, you can do exactly one thing before you leave.
However, you may randomly visit the same place again in the future. So if you missed out on something, or started something you couldn't finish, you get another chance.
The game has many stats, almost 20, but it becomes more natural over time. The game is right when it says it's better to have a lot of 1's than a few 3's or 4's.
You can pick abilities, talents (which increase abilities and give you special powers or the ability to unlock a new kind of story), and two backgrounds. The backgrounds drive the game, and decide what your win conditions are. For instance, my character had the goal of collecting 30 stories (from the storyteller background) and also the goal of exploring 10 or so new planets (which is how I won).
For the regular backgrounds, achieving your objective ends the game with no fanfare. There are 3 'special' backgrounds that apparently give a more coherent story (I didn't choose them in my first playthrough, as they seemed more difficult).
Progress is slow in this game, and there is a lot of grinding. Probably half of the links are systems where you can scan with Astronomy or mine with Mining.
But this game uses a lot of the principles that make things like gambling addictive. It has infrequent, random rewards that are pretty awesome, so it kept me chugging through the grind.
Loved it overall, and plan on playing it more. There are a few small bugs (like an option the says "Explore Explore [Planetname]" and a choice I clicked on that didn't have any follow-up text). But these were very slight. Love it!
A very long epic space Twine game with ingenious puzzles and combat , October 11, 2019This game has some of the most devilish puzzles I've seen in quite some time-and it's in Twine! Twine puzzlers have been getting far better in recent years, and this author has already been one to push the envelope with last year's game Lux.
In this game, you play as an intrepid (but tiny) alien, who must fight against 3 opponents. I thought this would just sort of be a combat game, but very little of the game is actual combat. Almost all of the game is exploring and using inventory objects.
Most of the early puzzles can be solved by changing your color. This strategy is used in man interesting ways throughout the game (although it would have been cool to have a call-back to it at the very end!). Later on, you gather a good deal of inventory items, each of which can be used on any scenery object and on each other, for a quadratic set of possibilities similar to Robin Johnson's games.
This game isn't perfect. I thought the opening was really long and non-interactive, but then once I realized the true scope of the game it made sense. Conversation is just lawn-mowering, which can get tedious. Guessing the exactly correct combination can be hard at times.
But I think this will do very well overall.
A very long pirate-themed parser game that could use some clean-up, October 8, 2019This game is quite large, definitely longer than 2 hours. I got as far as the first walkthrough went.
This game is confused. The simplest problem is language: the author has asked for help in the description from people willing to work on the English.
But even with perfect English, the plot would be bizarre. You're getting wristbands for doing pirate activities, and one of them involves (Spoiler - click to show)Using a durian fruit to bait a hook to catch a man in a manatee suit made of a giant pile of meat that another man sews for you, and somehow this gives you the 'barbecue' badge.
Conversation was simple due to the nice extensions used, but actions were difficult to guess.
The plot, writing and action issues made me not feel emotionally invested in this game.
Too many spare moving parts for my like, August 24, 2019This game reminds me of reviews I read for Infocom's Suspended, which suggested that the only people who would play that game were would-be air traffic controllers.
This game has much of the problems of Suspended with few of its benefits. You are in a large monastery (with few items implemented) with many, many monks (each with very little implemented) carrying out independent actions, and you have to solve a murder (which occurs after several days (where time moves constantly and always ends up pulling you to the same room (from whence everyone you might want to talk to leaves immediately after))).
This was modeled on a board game, and I think that it would indeed benefit from the visual aspect a board game would bring. I've tried playing this game on and off for over two years, but can never really get anywhere.
A fun but buggy space cat sci-fi adventure, July 26, 2019This game is big and complex, with 6 chapters (albeit some very short), real-time sequences, and a special helper robot.
But in all of its complicatedness, the game frequently falls short. Too many interacting states go unchecked. I couldn't progress past the challenge to the champion, and others have reported many other bugs (although several have played to completion).
You are the last human, a mouse-like man named Irvine. You have to help the cat-aliens (who have a system that reminds me of Star Trek), and prove yourself to them.
A divided fantasy world where all magic has a price, July 25, 2019Choice of Magics is a wonderful Choicescript game. I’ve probably played through 3-4 times and intend to play even more.
You live in a world where magic is banned after an ancient war. There are five kinds of magic, but each takes its toll. Glamor can charm people, but it rots your body. Negation blows stuff up, but it creates permanent death clouds.
There is a church you can work with or destroy, a neighboring land to explore or conquer, and many romantic options with customizable levels of content. And there’s a stuffed monkey puppet.
Even though it has more content, I didn’t quite like this as much as Choice of Robots, which had an undefinable quality to it. But that’s like saying a Da Vinci painting isn’t as good as the Mona Lisa. This is a solid game and one of the best of Choice of Games’ offerings.
One of the best text adventures of all time, even better in Steam version., July 6, 2019Review for Steam Edition:
Anchorhead is a masterpiece of interactive fiction. In this well-illustrated Lovecraftian game, you have to piece together the history of your husband's family as you move to a new town with a dark history.
This edition fixes a lot of the worst puzzles from the first edition, especially the very difficult mill section. It adds some new puzzles, too, some of which I found quite difficult (such as the dinghy), and others less so (the new opening sequence).
The illustrations are very well done, and go a long way to making this worth the purchase price. I love this game, and I'm glad to see it in such good form. I also appreciated the change in the orderly's magazine, which made me laugh. Some of the older texts in the game contain echoes of Lovecraft's racism, and they seem to be written new for the game, not old texts quoted, so I thought I'd mention that.
Earlier Review:
Anchorhead can completely draw you into its world. The writing and atmosphere are classic Lovecraftian horror, beginning as merely dismal and developing slowly into madness. Early scenes take on far different meanings on a second playthrough.
That said, this is a very hard game. I'm not sure how anyone could solve the (Spoiler - click to show)telescope lens puzzle on their own.
However, the depth of the game and the quality of the writing is such that it is still enjoyable even if you have to resort to hints from time to time. Many of the best moments are also the easiest puzzles.
A game about WWI with complex but flawed mechanics, June 26, 2019Mike Gerwat has made several games, and they all share some features. They tend to be enormous, with instant deaths all over the place and complicated walkthroughs that are often slightly incorrect.
This particular game is set in WWI, in the trenches, with a grim and seemingly accurate portrayal of trench warfare. The game is worth trying out, seeing the horrors of war and the sad extremes that soldiers are pushed to.
A fun parody of Homestar Runner's parody of IF games, June 26, 2019This game takes Homestar Eunner's 'get ye flask' joke and dials it up to 11. The entire game is in ridiculous fake old-time speak. It would be incredibly annoying, but it provides an amusing secondary game where you mentally translate the phrases you see and realize how stupid those phrases are.
The game is very long. I only played to the halfway point or so, as it didn't seem like there was any overarching storyline. It was amusing to found so many 'ye magic [thing]'. And the series of rooms called the bakery, the cakery, the makery, the snakery, etc. was pretty funny.
One of the best Adrift games I've found.
A big mishmash of rooms, time travel, cosmic horror and space, June 26, 2019This game is technically finishable, but I don't have a huge desire to finish the game. It's huge, with rooms that frequently are filled with items of uncertain purpose. There are bookcases that are always closed, and when opened are filled with the author's favorite books which he enthusiastically recommends. SPAG errors are everywhere, especially with quoted text.
It's almost like Harmonic Time Bind Ritual Symphony with worse programming. I quit when I went back in time and couldn't come forward in time.
An immensely cruel but otherwise great game about overthrowing robots, June 23, 2019This is that rare game that is very cruel on the Zarfian scale but otherwise fair. Expect to restart, undo, or restore this game dozens of times. I gave up around 5 or 6 points and after decompiling, but I know at least a few people succeeded.
You play a japanese girl who wants to destroy robots, so you explore a city to undertake various actions (that must be done in a very precise order) to obtain various items, in order to stop the robots.
I'd love to see someone do a full walkthrough of this!
A spotty Infocom game with great highlights, June 17, 2019This is an interesting game. With wordplay games, the question is, how can you make a game about wordplay that lasts long? One answer is to follow Emily Short's example and just put tons of content into a game (Counterfeit Monkey).
This game achieves its length through unfairness. Parts of this game (it's basically several mini-games put together) are wonderful: Buy the Farm was particularly good, as was the Shopping Bizarre. Those two would make a wonderful game pulled out on their own, one relying on American English sayings and the other on homonyms.
Some parts of this game don't make any sense. I didn't understand In a Manor of Speaking (which btw is also the name of a great Hulk Handsome game) at all, and looking it up, I still haven't found a good explanation at all. I believe having the Doldrums was a mistake, because it made you think everything else had a gimmick (like Gary Larson's infamous Cow Tools cartoon).
But if the game wasn't unfair, it wouldn't last very long. The only way I've seen fair wordplay games achieve length is through tons of content, like I said. Andrew Schultz does this with exhaustive code-enhanced wordspace searches. Shuffling Around is a good example of this.
I also like the Act your Part session. It was nonsensical, but I was able to get a lot of points just doing dumb stuff.
I played the version released by Zarf who was re-releasing Jason Scott's releasing of previously unreleased Infocom releases.
Explore a mid-size map over 5 decades. Well-crafted, great puzzles, May 9, 2019First Things First was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Game, and won Best Puzzles, among others.
In this game that starts out very slowly, you quickly progress to an interesting situation similar to A Mind Forever Voyaging or Lost New York, where you can investigate a mid-size map over 50 years using a time machine. Your actions in certain time periods strongly affect the future in interesting ways.
This is definitely the best long-form time travel I have played, as I felt Lost New York (which explores New York over a century or two) and Time: All Things Come to an End (which explores many epochs in a linear fashion) had relatively unfair puzzles.
IFDB has version 3.0, but the walkthrough is for 1.1, so it didn't work in places. I am a walkthrough junkie, so it was hard for me to beat it, but I was able to guess from the walkthrough what I should try next, and eventually worked my way through it.
The game has good characters, beautiful settings, and a bit of a confused plot, which is natural given the main gameplay mechanic.
For simulation fans, it has an interesting money/bank account/investment system.
Strongly recommended for everyone. (Note: the first area seems incredibly boring, but it gets better and better. I started to like the game as soon as I made it into (Spoiler - click to show)the garage.)
A hard puzzlefest that improves upon its predecessor, April 15, 2019I beta tested this game, but didn't finish it at the time due to personal events.
This game is similar to Bullhockey 1, but it improves on it. Implementation is smoother, inventory is cut down a bit, and atmosphere is distinctly improved.
Playing through the entire game, the highlights to me were an old house containing a series of dramatic historical vignettes and a self-referential finale scene that breaks the fourth wall.
However, this game is opposed to my personal play style. I play light and breezy, skimming text and rushing through. This game is designed for careful and studious play, with dense and obscure puzzles and the need for careful notes .
Overall, each of these games is getting better.
(Note: game contains some mild BDSM imagery)
A long sci-fi Twine game with rich world model and puzzles, March 5, 2019This game is one of the most complex Twine games I've seen.
Rather than focusing on conversation and emotional choices as many Twine games do, this game focuses on inventory management and movement around an extensive map, similar to typical parser gameplay.
This allows for some truly clever puzzles, including a major twist that only occurs in some playthroughs.
Strongly recommended for people looking for old-school puzzles and fans of sci-fi stories about artificial intelligence.
A longish game that wavers between genius and frustration, January 30, 2019StupidRPG is a long game, split up into several acts in multiple genres. It has a custom parser with hyperlink shortcuts, and uses quite a few tricks and techniques to spice up the visual presentation.
The biggest drawback to me is that the interface is clunky, which detracted from both my emotional investment and sense of interactivity. The game has a dungeon master that types slowly, leaving large spaces of time where you have to sit and wait for it to type out. You could leave, make a small sandwich, and come back before it finishes, sometimes. Also, the custom parser isn't up to the standards of, say, TADS or Inform 7, which caused some frustration.
The writing is amusing and the settings, especially later on, are imaginative, with puzzle mechanics involving multiple worlds. I just wish I didn't get so frustrated with the interface.
A time travel pirate game in Adrift, December 21, 2018Anno 1700 is an ambitious and sprawled-out pirate game involving two timelines, multiple NPCs, and a large map.
As is often the case with Adrift games, the game works well with the walkthrough but has trouble for someone without it. Very specific actions need to be guessed, and actions that seem like they would be easy (such as communicating with your base) cause trouble.
Playing this with the walkthrough, though, was enjoyable.
Edit: Several people pointed out to me that this was written in Adrift, not Quest, and I apologize for the mistake!
A complex spy game with some interaction difficulties, November 22, 2018This is a game that was hard to play during the competition, for a few reasons, and those same reasons make it much better to play now.
-It is a large Adrift game, and Adrift is an engine where a lot of commands don't work. This game gives you hints about the commands in the text, but this requires careful reading of the text.
-This game is randomized, so you can't just repeat commands from memory. The map is the same, however.
-This game is big. It has a few dozen locations, runs on a timer, and has many NPCs with many interaction options. There are little encounters too that happen frequently.
-This game is hard. Really hard. I played it 5 or 6 times before completing one of the biggest mission objectives. You have to keep track of tons of things: where stuff is located, where people are, what times things happen.
So this is definitely a game to be savored. But it is rewarding.
A big, densely described puzzle game about a girlfriend's revenge, November 17, 2018This IFComp 2018 parser game is big and pretty tough.
I beta tested this game. You play as a person whose girlfriend has supposedly left them, trashing the house and hiding your clothes all over the town.
This is, I think, the author's first publicly released game, and a big one. It's clear while playing it that the author got better and better at programming and writing as it goes along. Thus, the first area is the sketchiest/most obtuse, while the later areas are an improvement. I recommend perhaps consulting the walkthrough until you leave the house, to get a feel for the game, then going wild.
An amazing Stephen King-like twisted self-referential tale, November 17, 2018I played this game early on in the competition. It was late at night, and I was listening to sad music on my phone.
This was the perfect game. A strange tale about a writer trying to get past writer's block (self-referential art has always impressed me), taking place both in the real world and in the author's book (I love dual world games), with both text entry and choice, this game absolutely impressed me.
I have to warn that the game is extremely explicit, and I played almost entirely on the least explicit level.
The game constantly pulled out surprises, and is big enough to feel like a real, living world. Just like in the real writing process, scenes and characters are written and rewritten, in and out of the game. Decisions are reversible. There's even an inventory and an economy!
I think some people might have bounced off of this because of length, but now that the competition is over, this is one I strongly recommend. This is going on my all-time top 10 list, was my favorite IFComp game, and is definitely getting my vote for XYZZY Best Game!
A time capsule from the 80's. A sprawling, difficult fantasy game., November 9, 2018This game was created over a period of 30 years, using a variety of design systems.
You play a natural philosopher in medieval times, nicknamed Phil. There are a ton of puzzles and a magic system.
However, this game could use some thorough beta testing by six or more people familiar with modern IF conventions. Directions are omitted from room descriptions, puzzles are undervalued, and there's an inventory limit which doesn't really seem to do much in-game.
For people who enjoy struggling with the parser in old school games (I'm in that group, and intend to play this one again!)
A bizarre, long, unfair but fun parody wordplay game, September 24, 2018I do everything I can to complete games before I review them. I read walkthroughs, I look up old message boards, and, at last resort, I decompile to get the text.
This game is one of those rare ones (such as Hard Puzzle 2) where decompiling is worthless. In this case, the text of the game is literally split into two interleaving fragments, so that no whole words remain.
You have a huge anagram machine which makes anagrammed words out of anything you put in it. The results can be used, eaten, modified, entered, etc.
There are a lot of rough edges in the implementation, which is part of the overall effect. I don't know of anyone whose solved it. I got very far this time, but I forget how to do all the puzzles I had solved when I tried this last year. I'd love to see a team of people on a forum solve this one.
A clever puzzle game with lots of character and some bugs in the ointment, May 8, 2018I've enjoyed the full Guttersnipe sequence of games; they generally feature well-thought out puzzles involving an urchin doing ridiculous things and eating junk.
This game puts a spin on things by placing your long-standing help system and narrative device Percy the Rat in confinement.
It features stereotypical Italians as the antagonists, with names like Tony Macaroni. It would be somewhat uncomfortable, except that it's less of a parody of Italians themselves and more of a parody of gangster movies's and novels' parodies of Italians.
There were several bugs in the version that I played, but it made the game more interesting, as I had to type exactly the right command, and it became just another puzzle. But polish and interactivity correspond to two of my stars, which is why I'm giving 3/5.
Edit:
Since my original review, the game has been revised to fix many bugs, so I'm increasing my score to 4/5.
A lengthy TADS sci-fi novella with sketchy implementation, April 25, 2018This is one of the longest and most plot-intensive games entered into IFComp.
The story is a sort of self-insert fantasy. A college student who is bullied and shy is courted by beautiful women and powerful men due to his latent universe-changing powers. It unfolds over several days, over a week.
Unfortunately, there are two flaws in the implementation and design. First, the author has decided to implement in great detail the most tedious parts of the game. Ordering food takes several steps, repeated daily. Campus contains many non-essential locations, which seem possibly to be based on the author's actual campus. Most of the game consists of opening your backpack, selecting the right book, putting it in your backpack, closing it, marching across campus, sitting in class, waiting, going to the cafeteria, ordering food, swiping your id, sitting, going to your dorm, swiping your id, and entering your room. This is repeated at least five or six times in the game.
The second flaw is that only this path is implemented, and only with the exact walkthrough commands. Attempting to order food without the walkthrough is extremely difficult.
Overall, I was glad I played.
A big, polished sequel to a big, polished game, April 21, 2018This sequel to the 15-year-earlier Risorgimento Represso is a fairly large glulx game that uses advanced features such as graphical windows.
In classic parser game style, you are an eccentric wizard's apprentice in a blended fantasy/modern setting where you push the boundaries of the law to get what you want.
I enjoyed the variety of puzzles, such as timing puzzles and transportation puzzles.
This game reminds me a lot in style and quality to Bob Bates' game Thaumistry. Both games were charming, and reached a level of quality that is quite difficult to reach, but failed to grip my imagination. In both games, I felt like some solutions were unnecessarily restricted.
I believe this game is most likely to win Spring Thing (this review was written before the competition ended).
A 'get the band back together' game in Quest, April 13, 2018This is a complex Quest game with a life-like map and NPCs that are responsive and numerous.
For my personal taste, the NPCs were too lifelike, with your main companion having a foul mouth, using profanity as a form of verbal seasoning rather than a means of emotional signalling. It made me uncomfortable the whole game. For some players, though, this is a selling point.
The game itself is fun; you try to convince all the members of your band to get back together. Each one is vividly defined, and you're asked to perform various fetch quests, intuition-based puzzles, and logic or experimentation puzzles to get to your goal.
Quest has its usual limitations, but this game was better programmed than many quest games. Great for puzzle fans and fans of real-life slice of life games that don't mind strong profanity.
An engaging sci-fi tale using a parser-choice hybrid, April 9, 2018I enjoyed this game, which took me a few hours to complete (and one big part I missed out on because I didn't notice a certain room exit).
This game uses the same hybrid system as in Detectiveland and Draculaland, where you choose a noun to hold and various options become available.
The breadth of the puzzles is impressive, and the humor is great. A few times I was frustrated by not knowing what to do, but when I realized what was needed, I felt like the puzzles were fair.
The endings were nice, I think. It's good to have satisfying endings for a game.
A sprawling multi-platform tale about crime and love in North Dakota, April 8, 2018This is a very large game/story, comprising 3 Twine stories, 1 inklewriter story, 1 Instagram album, and three wordpress blog entries.
Reading quickly, even skimming from time to time, it took around 3 hours to finish.
The story is compelling: an unemployed woman gets a business opportunity from her brother that's too good to be true.
It's gritty and dark. It's full of profanity, which I filtered on my computer. It's also completely believable.
I'm giving it 4 stars because the fifth star is for "would I play it again?" and while it was very compelling, I felt mildly traumatized by the time I was done.
A bizarre game with great depth and replay value and tricky UI, April 6, 2018This was one of the few IFComp 2015 games that I never reviewed. On my old laptop, it wouldn't even run; every page of text would be immediately erased.
It works on my new laptop, though. And what an unusual game it is.
It runs in a command-prompt type window, and uses single-letter commands with occasional typing of names and numbers.
It is a surreal game, with huge standing waves surrounding a 25-location town and people getting murdered left and right, each murder announced by red lightning.
A hallucinogenic bunny hops around guiding you.
I've never come close to finding the murderer, but I've discovered many of the game's secrets over my 4 playthroughs. The best involved a tightly-timed sequence at a bar leading to a length CYOA sequence.
This is a game with several flaws, such as the fact that you can't scroll back through text due to it disappearing, and it's incredibly easy to hit a button and miss a whole page of text. There is no save command.
But these flaws enhance it; it makes you approach the game more cautiously. This game is a masterpiece in a way. But it requires length play.
A just-off-reality alternate timeline game where Napoleon survived, April 4, 2018Disclaimer: I write for Choice of Games and received this copy for free.
This game is set in an alternate reality where Robert Fulton had more freedom to work with steam and Napoleon survived long enough for succession to be a question. The game is meticulously researched to be as close to baseline reality as possible.
You play the personal bodyguard and childhood friend of Alexandre Walewski, the illegitimate but favored heir of Napoleon. You deal with court intrigue and assassination attempts as you mold the future of France.
I didn't like the beginning of this game, so much that I set it aside for months. I just didn't find it compelling.
But one of the biggest strengths that Choice of Games has is the length of their games. Once I played a few more chapters, I had spent so much time with these characters that I became emotionally invested. I was very satisfied with my outcomes.
I also enjoyed the chance you had to make major changes in the outcomes of different chapters, and to take charge.
I don't give 5 stars to all choice of games games; this one was, in my mind, special.
A 5-Episode virtual reality mecha game in ADRIFT, April 4, 2018ADRIFT usually has the weakest of the popular parsers (Inform, TADS, Quest, etc.), and this game is no exception.
The concept is interesting: you play as a human playing a virtual reality video game after the main game has ended. There are several layers of reality, similar to Wreck-it-Ralph. You play in a single layer, though.
The video game is about giant mechas fighting aliens. The after-the-game playthrough that occupies most of Mishmash is a stealth game using a 'ghost cap'.
I enjoyed the opening scenario, but the game quickly devolved into walkthrough-only territory.
A bland but complex fantasy game , April 1, 2018This game hits up almost all of the classic overused parser game tropes: you are a wizard's apprentice in a fantasy town on a quest to get scrolls of spells by completing complicated fetch quests. The parser is another 'let's insult the PC' parser, and the game has hunger and sleep timers.
This style of game was popular for a time in the 90's (with Unnkulia and Westfront PC), but otherwise has continued to be produced since then on a regular basis.
Why do people still make it (even in 2018, years after this game)? Because it can still be fun, and sometimes overused tropes are overused because they're so good.
But in this case, I mostly felt frustrated. I stopped playing the first time I tried it a year or two ago because it was so frustrating getting killed over and over again in the windmill. This time, I completed the game (by (Spoiler - click to show)Taking several breaks to return the broom early).
I finally completed it now. If you're just hankering for some unforgiving old-school games, try this out. But I prefer some other more recent old-school games, like A Beauty Cold and Austere, or Speculative Fiction, or Scroll Thief, all of which had clever innovations.
A slick commercial game by a former Infocom author, March 31, 2018This game was funded by kickstarter, like Hadean Lands before it. It casts you as a novice magic user who is trying to save magic folk from discovery.
The magic system is a bit unusual; it seems to rely mostly on moon-logic. In fact, a lot of the game does. There's really no connection between things; it seems like the puzzles are mostly solvable by trying everything everywhere.
Many players enjoy this style of careful play, and the game has very positive steam reviews and ratings on here, and people I've talked to liked it quite a bit.
But I like puzzle games where you can plan ahead more, like Hadean Lands. I felt like Thaumistry kept saying 'I'll notice that you tried a reasonable solution, but it's not the one I want. Just wait and be patient, kid.' I ended up stopping playing halfway and through, and left it that way for months.
So it's not my style. But it is incredibly high-quality in terms of polish. It was beta tested over and over, and looks good.
A kid's story with 10 different color coded islands, March 30, 2018This game is really interesting. By the author of Little Blue Men and Anchorhead, it is intended for children and comes with a great set of supplementary materials.
There is a sort of tedious opening with a ton of hand-holding before it opens up to a wide world. I enjoyed the islands, especially the junk and dark islands.
I felt like the author was holding back a bit on some descriptions that could have been made biting and/or sad. But the sparseness was fun.
One of the last islands seemed like a big buildup to an anticlimax.
Overall, I have to say I enjoyed it, because I couldn't put it down, and couldn't wait all the next day to play more. So that's a good sign!
One thing that can seemingly lock you out of victory:
(Spoiler - click to show)The icefruit seed doesn't respawn correctly.
So I suggest that, to be safe, you save (Spoiler - click to show)before using it.
You'll know you did it right if (Spoiler - click to show)Something dramatic happens.
A difficult and sprawling dark fantasy/comedy circus game, March 28, 2018I played this Guttersnipe game after I played the IFComp 2017 one.
This is a big Quest game. You play as a ragamuffin urchin who is trying to be the number one urchin of all time. The game uses a variety of humorous dialects to show character, including yours.
You enter a dark circus, and have to discover its secrets. This is a big game with a big map, with 1-2 puzzles per room. Generally, an item found in one room will solve one puzzle somewhere else.
I liked this game, and would have given it 4 stars, but I found it a bit difficult to complete, and I abandoned it partway through. If it had a complete walkthrough, I would probably give it 4 stars.
This author has a number of other games that are big and well-received, including Night House and the other Guttersnipe game.
Edit: I finished playing, and the parts I hadn't been able to reach were actually great! I wish this were ported to Inform or TADS.
More combat innovation from Corax. A long battle game, January 17, 2018After seeing several gritty fantasy choice RPGs this last IFComp that were just okay, it's great to see a complicated and balanced combat system where you have to make real choices.
In this game, you take the role of Hansel and Gretel, in a more modern setting, as they track down and kill sorceresses one at a time. Over several chapters, you have to solve difficult puzzles in an exploration segment (which also unlocks 'fragments' or powers you can activate in later chapters), followed by one or more combat segments.
Combat has a relative positioning system where enemies are different steps in front or behind you. You can turn around, advance, use weapons of different ranges and effectiveness, make use of cover, focus and dodge, etc.
It's of similar complexity to Kerkerkruip. It's written using Vorple, so that helps the complexity, but it prohibits saving. The author has found a clever way past this using a password system, which transported me to the 90's and my time playing Willow and Punch-Out! on the NES.
It was very long; the challenge of the puzzles, complex combat, and playing in a non-native language made me take 2 hours for the first 5 chapters, and I don't have time to finish it right now, but a look through the walkthrough shows that it has a complex plot. This is a high-quality game.
A massive game with a modern setting, battling monsters and humor, December 3, 2017Cryptozookeeper is an XYZZY Award winner, and is one of the biggest games out there in terms of content, especially in terms of NPC content.
You play as a character who is sucked into a world where you can blend together DNA and create new monsters, who then fight each other in a pokemon-like system.
The system takes center stage story-wise, but not mechanically. The game is structured in a series of 'episodes', each of which results in new DNA for your devices.
The game has a ton of characters, many of whom constantly follow you around and talk and joke.
The implementation is selective; some parts are extremely detailed, while many synonyms and scenery descriptions are omitted.
This game is truly monumental. It also has a great deal of profanity and suggestive language.
An incredibly hard puzzle twine game with complicated inventory and riddles, November 20, 2017Some people really enjoy difficult puzzle games, like Fish! or Praser 5 or System's Twilight.
This is the first time I've seen such a game done well in Twine. It is very hard; it has been given a 'nasty' forgiveness rating by the author, and that is completely appropriate.
There are frequent deaths and ways to lock yourself out of victory, but there is a multi-save feature which helps.
The first part of the game is an escape the room puzzle. I thought it itself was one of the hardest twine puzzle I had seen, and I thought it was the whole game, and a longish one at that. Once I escaped, I realized the main game was much, much, much bigger. In fact, the next area was huge, and I thought that was the whole game, and then it opened up into the real game! And there's an epilogue about as long as the first complex.
I couldn't finish, even looking at the source code. This is unfair, difficult, and crazy, so if you're in the mood for something like that, you've found it.
A fun big RPG with nice styling but some bugs, November 17, 2017This RPG in Quest is just gorgeous. I loved the font and coloring.
You can choose a class, then do a preliminary quest, then a bigger quest, then maybe another one, then the final quest.
It held up better than just about any of the web RPGs in this comp. I couldn't finish it because it was really, really long.
I'd give it more stars, but there were some typos and some minor bugs. If they were fixed up, it would be great.
A large mathematical journey of a puzzlefest, November 17, 2017I beta tested this game several times, and work with the author.
This is one of the best big games released in recent years. It's a mathematical puzzlefest, and it's huge; I'm a math professor, and I used the walkthrough, and it still took me 4 hours.
You travel through the history of mathematics, or more over a mind-map of theoretical concepts: the number line, arithmetic, algebra, all the way up to fractals.
The game is completable by non-math majors, according to several reviewers.
This is an old-school game; puzzles are unabashedly complex, each room is its own set-piece, NPCs don't engage in deep puzzle trees. I liked it, and I especially like that people are still making 'big games'.
An intense minimalist puzzlefest with magical color combinatorics, November 16, 2017This is one of the large puzzle fest games out there in recent years.
You play an adventurer entering a strange castle where all actions are performed by a wand: you set the wand to a color combination, then you go on.
It has a fun feel similar to Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, by the same author. Slowly, more and more combinations are revealed to you, often allowing you to go back and do things that you've been wanting to do for a while, but were unable to do.
HIghly recommended.
An enormous scifi game with severe implementation problems, November 16, 2017Escape from Terra is huge, with 3 or 4 or 5 acts, each act as large and complicated as an IFComp game.
You can pick from two different characters, including one who is deaf. You have to use weapons to battle your way to a safe space, before being take to outer space.
In outer space, you have to interact romantically with aliens, change bodies, use strange plants, etc. with many NPCs and companions.
It's also impossibly buggy. The walkthrough frequently doesn't work, and anything off the walkthrough doesn't work at all.
Strength through length; a compelling and long Victorian pastiche, August 25, 2017I played a Study in Steampunk after I had spent several months rereading the original Sherlock Holmes stories. I had discovered that Sherlock was very different from modern versions: no "elementary, dear Watson", a lot of strength and physical activity, minimal pipe use, etc.
So when I started this game as John Watson and my friend said 'the game's afoot', I rolled my eyes. I couldn't get into the storyline about dueling empires with mechs and soul-draining powers.
But I tried again two more times, and on the third time, it stuck. I think the first chapter just wasn't as strong as the later ones; the game began offering really intriguing role-playing choices, and ended up setting up several compelling life-and-death situations that were effective.
The decisions were effective, I believe, because the game is just so long. It has a lot of minor faults I would usually take off points for (like obvious choices between being good/being evil or by-the-numbers genre scenes), but the author clearly has a deep understanding of long-form game design that just makes it fun.
I enjoyed it more once I realized that it wasn't really a Sherlock Holmes knock-off; it was really the author's own vision, with some Sherlock-related elements. The author cites Dracula and Jack the Ripper as inspirations, too, and these are almost stronger; supernatural life-draining is one of the main game topics. It also suggests Jekyll and Hyde as an influence, but I saw nothing of this in my playthrough.
This game is effective because of how long it is, and is definitely worth its price.
A very well-developed RPG with shops, battles, and a huge tower, August 6, 2017This is a big game. You have a long, opening sequence (very long!) that is entirely linear, then you begin the actual game, which is one of the best RPGs I've seen in text (Kerkerkruip is the other, and they're roughly equal in quality).
You are on a sort of elevator-like platform, and you ascend from level to level. To ascend requires 3 keys; each level has 8 doors with a variety of challenges. These challenges include trap-filled pathways, combat, mini-games of cards/fantasy chess, and occasionally some bizarre extra paths.
Everything is hyperlinks, making combat much more enjoyable than usual. Magic is simple. There is a complex money system, and most levels let you pick between seeing an armorer or an apothecary.
More than anything, it reminded me of Final Fantasy VII and Conan the Barbarian. The enemies start out as zombies and humanoid fungus, but you eventually find Guards of the Tower, Captains of the Tower, and Swordsmen of the Tower, much like Shinra Tower in FFVII.
I got to the 7th stage, but was unable to defeat the end guardian.
The story and writing is exactly the sort of thing TSR was putting out in the 90's. You're in a sort of dreamworld that is stable, and are hired out as an assassin, with the king as your target. The monsters are generally right out of a D&D handbook. There seems to be some mild racy parts, but my French vocabulary doesn't include that sort of thing, so it's easy to self-censor.
A big, ambitious but buggy game about a magic house, August 1, 2017Like all other John Evans games, this is a really big game that promises some cool stuff (being able to cast all sorts of spells and having a portable house), but is not able to deliver on its promises.
The walkthrough is interesting, though, and worth checking out.
A massive adrift game with text dumps and pop culture references, August 1, 2017This was David Whyld's first IFcomp game.
This game is just really, really big, with tons of conversations and features.
It's just too big; page after page of text dumps make it difficult to pay attention to what you're trying to do.
It involves a fantasy land where everyone references american pop culture and you learn DnD spells.
A frustrating and hard graphical adventure about dreams, July 16, 2017This is a point and click adventure. I couldn't get past an ogre, and from reading reviews, I don't know anyone (except maybe one person) who actually beat it; there's an ogre that's hard to get past.
You wander around a girl's boarding school at night before discovering an unsavory conspiracy involving scientific experiments on dreams.
An overly ambitious, under-implemented fantasy fest, July 16, 2017This game had just too big of a scope and not enough polish to work out. It is a sprawling fantasy game, with a village and a town and a tower and an underground dungeon and an island and so on and so on. It has a homebrew parser. Contrast this with The Land Beyond The Picket Fence from the same year; its homebrew parser is much more polished, the map is tiny (7 or 9 or so locations), and its slick and smooth. Both games probably had roughly similar amounts of work put into them, but Eldor is just spread too thin.
However, Stuart Allen released The Unholy Grail the next year, which is a fantastic game, so I strongly recommend it.
A large, sprawling fantasy castle with big bugs, July 16, 2017I was excited to finally play the first John Evans game, as he had become a legend in my mind from his other games.
John Evans is known for entering massive, extremely bold games into the comp that are just not finished. Games where you create the world, or where you can do anything you want, that kind of thing.
Castle Amnos is actually relatively tame and finished compared to the later games. There is a castle with five floors, reachable by an elevator whose buttons seem to work randomly. I was able to learn a variety of spells. It seems the game is mostly unfinishable, but the textdump showed me the ending.
Overall, it was fairly fun.
A big, difficult game about buying beer while underage, July 16, 2017This is a big game with a lot of personality. I haven't heard of anyone who's actually finished it, though.
You play an overweight, nerdy character who wants to be popular with the head cheerleader. You are going to try to get underage beer. It has a Jim Munroe sort of feel.
This game is full of NPCs and things to do and strange subplots, but its somehow hard to achieve anything besides wandering around. This is a game that would strongly benefit from a walkthrough. As it is, the hints are good, but each hint leads to other hints you should do first and the first steps are never really mentioned.
A long fantasy time travel game in an uncles' hotel/museum, July 16, 2017This game seems strongly influenced by the previous year's massive Mulldoon Legacy. You are investigating your uncle's museum/hotel, and you discover a crackling energy portal leading to ancient times.
The game has some tricky puzzles, and the published version is in fact not completable. However, the source code provided does compile correctly.
I found the game to be fun but to have way too many 'guess the author's brain'-type puzzles.
A graphics-heavy, big game with a huge swamp, July 16, 2017This is a big, old-school game with tons of pictures. Expect quicksand, killer mosquitoes, a big maze, a light puzzle, a hunger puzzle, searching many random objects, etc.
I played with the walkthrough, but this would be a big, big game without it.
Story was pretty good, but navigating the swamp was tedious. The puzzles weren't too bad. Randomly has a troll.
A somewhat difficult sci-fi space thriller for Windows, July 16, 2017This is a long and well-polished game, but it has a number of difficult features, like items you have to take at the right time or you'll be closed off forever, a maze, etc.
It felt somewhat tedious to play through. It had a teenage girl that loves swearing; in fact, it's one of her main characteristics.
Interesting, but ultimately not one I'd replay.
A homebrew RPG with random battles and death and losses turned to max, July 16, 2017When I saw this had the same opening as You Were Doomed From the Start, my heart sank.
This is a two-part ms-dos game, but I know of noone who has passed the first few rooms, as every step has you fight a monster called Double J, an in-joke about one of the author's friends, I believe.
By examining the code in Notepad++, I could read a lot of the text; there's a giant shape to the map, and a bomb of some sorts. Apparently there is a cheat, and a new game++. But noone's ever reached it.
A homebrew game with graphics and music but difficult design, July 16, 2017This is one of several different executable games entered into the 2001 IFComp where you wander around a very large area and engage in random RPG combat.
I only played a few minutes of the game. The music and images were interesting, but I just had a hard time getting into the interaction; also, I could see from the walkthrough that this is a very very long game.
A long star-trek/Dr. who Esque space survival game, July 16, 2017This game has you wandering around a space ship with slowly evolving goals. You begin as a tourist and end up as much more.
The game was competently programmed, but dry. I found it difficult to be invested in the game.
One of the biggest sticking points is a maze with randomized directions (so every turn the game spins you around). There is an item that helps, but it's a bit tedious, especially since there are 4 locations leading off of it that you need to get to.
A juvenile riff on the already juvenile Unnkulia games, July 10, 2017The Unnkulia games filled the gap between the end of Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls and the beginning of Inform. They were juvenile, focused on 'bro' type humor, misogyny, and underclued puzzles.
This game manages to ampmlify all of that. It suffers from several problems, including an overly large scope. Every location has several paragraphs of text, frequently a whole page. The puzzles use moon-logic where it's very hard to know what will happen next.
A large and underclued game about rescuing a princess, July 5, 2017There is a dragon in town, and it's your job to rescue the mayor's daughter from them.
This game has more of an open-world feel, with many challenges that can be completed in any order, and a slowly unveiling realization of what's going on.
The problem, though, is that only a small slice of that open world has been implemented, making it very easy to do the wrong thing due to lack of guidance. It also has a really, really big maze that can be hard.
Interesting concept, and fun to play with a walkthrough.
A crude, offensive, homebrewn parser game, July 5, 2017This game manages to be offensive on almost every level without being actually obscene. If you want to play a game based on massive diarrhea, being rude to your mother, offensive racial stereotypes (including Injun Jim and Italian and Mexican characters who add 'o' after every word), sexism, entering giant bodily orifices, senseless murder, and random drug use, this is the game for you.
The parser itself does an okay job of recognizing commands, but it has some actually brilliant innovations, like little popup windows that tell you what's going on elsewhere, and a great implementation of hangman. But why its put in as an implementation of an childish and offensive BIG game whose favorite puzzle form is the obscure riddle is beyond me.
A purposely obnoxious short puzzle about tons of pieces, June 11, 2017Hard Puzzle is obnoxious on purpose. You need to assemble a stool, but everything goes wrong, and you start to find more and more parts.
The author intentionally makes the game underimplemented, with guess-the-verb, standard response, etc. going on. It claims to be a speed-IF that isn't too hard, but it is hard.
I decompiled it to figure it out. I'm giving it 4 stars because it's good at what it sets out to do.
An entertaining but frustrating animal shuttling game, June 11, 2017This game is the sequel to Hard Puzzle, and like the first, it has some purposely underimplemented parts, and lies about its difficulty and even about your goals (or does it?)
I haven't finished it yet, but I've read all the text from decompiling, and I know the last command(s), just not the middle.
In any case, the game has a large number of critters with independent AI and some emergent behavior. It's fun to play around with.
A diabolical finale to the hard puzzle trilogy, June 11, 2017This game take the purposeful obfuscation of the last 2 games and ramps it up even higher. There are numerous independent NPCs, every turn has an ongoing story, the stool and parts from the first two games shows up, etc.
Decompiling again got me the ending, which was a fitting ending for this trilogy of games.
The writing may be interesting to even those who haven't played the first two games.
A fun minimalistic pirate adventure, June 5, 2017This is Scott Adam's second game, and fits into just a few kB of data; it's really miraculous how well it works, and I liked it better than Adventureland.
This game forces you to conjure up your own explanations of things; a hidden passage, a bloody book, black mamba snakes, etc. are described only once. There is no desire for mimesis, just for game.
Having played these games has given me much more respect for Scott Adams' work.
A cool and funny old-school Scott Adams adventure in a funhouse, June 5, 2017In this game, like other Scott Adams games, you have a minimal 2-word parser, with spare rooms with a few objects.
Also like the other games, every inch of the game is used for something good. This game is also really, really funny. An opening joke made me laugh out loud.
This has been one of my favorite scott adam adventures so far.
A minimalistic atmospheric marvel about Dracula, June 5, 2017Scott Adams created many games in a short time, but the Count is one of the most famous.
I played this game only recently, after experiencing more modern games, but I love its charm and open exploration. I feel like in the 70's, when it came out, and people only had a few games, it's unfairness and picky parser would actually be a bonus, adding many hours to gameplay as you try to figure out something to type.
But even for more modern players looking for a quick fix, it's enjoyable. The ultra-minimalism works really well, here, as you are captured and wake up the next day with little explanation beyond your own dark imagination.
A real keeper. Beating it on your own could take quite a while, though.
A hilarious gumshoe detective game in a hybrid parser interface, May 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
Detectiveland is a great game in a unique interface created by Robin Johnson.
The interface is a refinement of the one used in Draculaland. You have a parser-like interface, but instead of typing in commands, you have a menu of visible things and people and an inventory; you click on an object or person, and a menu of verbs comes up. One object at a time can be 'held', and this affects the menus of other nouns.
This is one of the biggest IFComp winners ever, with a minimal walkthrough taking 250 or more moves. It is split into 4 cases, 3 of which can be solved simultaneously.
You play a detective resolving problems in a square grid town. The game has graphics of speakers, and has really good humorous writing.
The game is written Scott Adams style, so many of the locations have very spare writing. This, according to the other, allowed him to spend more time on conversations and scripted events.
**Edit**
I actually hadn't played any Scott Adams games before this one; now I have played three, and this game is a straight send-up of those games, down to the split window and empty room descriptions. It's a perfect homage.
Great opening to a big simulation game, May 12, 2017This game has the same design philosophy as the authors' last games, but with a very different set of mechanics.
The opening sequence is thrilling, with a strong buildup to... something extremely odd.
This game discourses at great length about advanced mathematics and philosophy while you are engaging in something utterly trivial, but it manages to blend the two together.
It was a trippy and surreal experience. I played until the game said I had no more to learn, but I didn't get a high score. If you get lost, shoot the magnet.
A great exploration of how far you can go with a limited parser. In a lab., May 10, 2017This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.
This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.
If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.
Life and death and life through binary choices, September 3, 2016Caveat: I was given a review copy of this game, but ended up playing the free public intro instead.
This game incorporates various multimedia effects including sounds, music, some animation and even apple watch interactivity, but I played it on android with the sound turned off.
So I'm just reviewing the graphics and story, and it's a good one. This is my favorite Fwlicity Banks game yet, perhaps because I just finished mistborn and I enjoyed the metal-themed magic vibe and the wilderness survival aspects.
In the free intro to the game, which by itself is quite long, you play as the unwilling holder of a special talent: "eating" souls. What that entails and its implications for you are slowly unraveled.
Your main nemesis at first is a ghastly creatute, a red eyed albino bear. The confrontations with the bear were exciting, and you get a lot of mileage out of the game before the pay/ad wall.
The visual styling is gorgeous. The choices were all binary, and the story 'felt' like the choices didn't matter at first, but I soon found that options that seemed unimportant led to dramatic results; the author must have spent a great deal of time working on the different threads to allow this level of choice.
As a final note, I've given this game 5 stars based on my judging criteria. I've reviewed several of Banks' games by her request, but I haven't been afraid to give less stars when appropriate. This game is polished, descriptive, gave me a real thrill of emotion, and made me want to play more, which are 4 of my 5 criteria. I didn't like the binary choices at first, but it fell into a rhythm that ended up working for me, which is my 5th star.
A truly epic Choicescript game focusing on people, grudges, and storytelling , July 7, 2016This game is truly epic. I felt like I was reading a novel as I played. It lasted long; longer than any of the other choicescript games I played.
I had trouble putting it down. A game about professional wrestling seemed so silly, but it's cinematic, almost like Rocky. There's a lot about second chances, betrayals, seeing the truth. It's so much better than it seemed from the blurb and art.
Subplots include a variety of romances, long term relationships with a rival, and so on. You can choose to be a face or a heel, and seeing the psychology about being a heel was very interesting.
Strongest recommendation.
An extensive, map-based CYOA game with an enormous amount of polished content, April 6, 2016In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.
This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.
The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.
Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.
The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.
I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.
Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.
As of now, longest Twine game ever. Part crazy, part deep, February 4, 2016Spy Intrigue is not my type of game. But it is an incredible game, which I have played through twice, and is excellently crafted.
It is a game of layers. It literally has two layers of text, interwoven within each other.
It also has two levels of meaning. The top level is just crazy and silly (you very quickly learn that most spies have died of "spy-mumps"). But there is a much deeper subtext in the game, much like another 2015 IFComp entry TOMBS of Reschette. Both games encourage you to look under the standard shoot-kill-loot structure of normal games and see what existence would really be like for protagonist and enemy.
That's probably the deepest contribution of this game: to show the protagonists humanity. The author has succeeded in a very well-crafted game, which I feel should be nominated for several XYZZY awards. She has done an excellent work here.
As I said, this isn't really my type of game; I'm not into profanity or sex, of which the game has it's fair share. But it's certainly never exploitative, and it all makes sense in the context of the game. I will also always fondly remember (early spoiler)(Spoiler - click to show)"OATMEAL TIME."
An utterly remarkable game; solve crazy puzzles and learn about engineering, February 3, 2016I'll be upfront and say that, by modern standards, I wasn't impressed with the original Ditch Day Drifter. This sequel, however blows my mind.
The introduction is especially good. Reminding me of the hidden temple sequence in Lydia's Heart, you have to race another tech firm to pitch a product to a southeast asian company. You have to deal with both fidgety technology and a decaying factory.
The game then makes a huge transition to Caltech, scene of the original Ditch Day Drifter. As then, you must explore the campus, solving stacks, reading memos, going in the tunnels, going to the store and kitchen.
But boy, the world has changed! Crowds of independent NPCs, immersive room descriptions, real conversations, etc.
The game has a fairly unique premise: your character must learn (or relearn) about physics and engineering to crack the code on a high-tech box. Puzzles are drawn from real-life techniques, and you learn a lot; however, the game is adapted for those with no real-life experience. You convert IP addresses to hex form and back; you learn about quantum coherence and decoherence; you learn how to use network analyzers and even cherry pickers.
I enjoyed the beginning more than the rest of the game, but that's because open nonlinear games often intimidate me.
I recommend this game for everyone. Even if you're not great at IT, like me, the game treats it like any other 'magic system', telling you how to use things. It's fun.
Forgotten gem about two realities and facing fear, February 3, 2016Chancellor is a game that got a bit overlooked in the IFcomp for being long, of moderately hard difficulty, and not having a walkthrough. Later, it got more attention, being nominated for Best Game, Best Story, Best Writing, and Best Individual Puzzle in the XYZZY awards.
You play in two different worlds. The first is a fantasy world, where you must leave your father to undertake a quest. The second is (Spoiler - click to show)the real world, where you are a chancellor (like a resident aide) in an abandoned dormitory.
Both have a grim and brooding atmosphere, but also one of wonder at the world around you. The two worlds are interconnected.
The writing is excellent. The game is excellent. The author has a hints guide up somewhere that got me through a few tricky points, although the guide is very very minimal.
Strongly recommended.
A surreal trippy journey to Christian afterlife; mid-length, well-written game, February 3, 2016This game is a typical Eric Eve game:
Good points of Eve games: several NPC's, large map that doesn't really need mapping, optional side quests, great writing, interesting plot.
This game is a bit like Dante's inferno, but with a more 'modern' take. In particular, there are forces that disbelieve the truth of heaven and hell, and the game doesn't say who's right and who is wrong. As a case in point, one of the first things you see is that hell is closed, due to mythologicalization.
The general gameplay was very enjoyable. It felt like Blue Chairs without the drugs and profanity.
Bad points: trophy-ization of women.
Just like Elysium Enigma with the naked Lena and Blighted Isle with Betty the buxom, All Hope Abandon is chauvinistic. The main woman is referred to frequently as just 'the blonde', and there is a green-skinned demon, who makes you uneasy because they 'use sexuality as a weapon, just like many mortal women'.
It's a shame that these games all pigeonhole women, as otherwise I would strongly recommend them to everyone.
An overwhelming mix of wordplay, exploration and story, February 3, 2016Note: This review was written months in advance. A week before this review was published, another review came out saying that counterfeit monkey was overwhelming and was very negative about the author and game in general. While I was overwhelmed, I think this is an incredible game, and that the author is extremely talented.
*********
Counterfeit Monkey is a technical marvel of wordplay and implementation. The game is a large exploration game where you can alter almost any item by adding or removing letters, reversing letters, performing anagrams, etc.
This game has been rated highly by the majority of those who played it, and I must praise its puzzles, writing, implementation, and craftsmanship.
These very qualities led me to feel overwhelmed playing this game. I had a similar experience with Blue Lacuna. In both games, so much is implemented that I had a hard time thinking of what to do next. In both games, you have a certain sense of urgency, so you want to move forward, but both reward experimentation. So I have a feeling of being torn in two directions (much like the protagonist of this game).
I wonder if the reason I feel drawn to interactive fiction in general is its minimalist, constrained atmosphere. Games like Zork or Curses! where you are noone, and exploration is the only goal; games like Glass, where you can only steer a conversation; games like Rogue of The Multiverse that are split into several parts with clear goals. Even games like Ad Verbum, which mirror the puzzle parts of Counterfeit Monkey without the plot.
Most will not feel the same as me, but I love the minimalism and asceticism of classic games, and I don't know if I enjoy those games which have been built up into a rich, huge world.
One of the most well-developed mystery games. A very strong style of writing., February 3, 2016This game has really grown on me. When I first played it, I found the atmosphere a bit depressing and the puzzles underclued. However, after revisiting it, I've realized that this game is a true classic. Especially when compared to other mystery games; this one really stands out.
The writing has a very strong style; for instance, we have the following:
"This room is long and thin, like a jailhouse corridor, from the doorway in the northeast corner to the large bay window opposite which stretches the length of the room, overlooking the street outside. The colours are your eyes on a Sunday; red like blood, red like the leather of the over-stuffed chair, which sits a cheap trophy by the main desk. A bookshelf fills the east wall."
The whole game is filled with a feeling of inevitable loss or failure; not of the game itself, but for life in general.
The puzzles are difficult to figure out. For more casual players like me, I recommend exploring until you feel you've seen everything; trying to solve every puzzle at least once; revisiting it after a day; then using a walkthrough. The ending surprised me twice, and even now, I don't really understand all of its implications. For me, this game only improves more and more with time.
Wow! A hardcore fantasy CYOA with beautiful graphics and dnd module vibe, February 3, 2016I love this game. Travel through the city of Khare using a beautiful 3d map and posable figurine. This city is a den of thieves, traps, liars, sorcerors, the undead, and worse. A stew pot of evil where the weak are mercilessly worn down, you must find a way to leave the city, or to save it.
By far the longest CYOA I have played. Allows unlimited rewinds to undo any number of actions. Innovative combat and gambling systems. Spells that you cast with 3 letter combinations with available letters changing at different locations. God's to serve, people to kill or save.
High fantasy at its best. Very strongly recommended.
Long, highly replayable game. Spend a lifetime working with robots., February 3, 2016Choice of Robots is a game that has received high accolades, such as an XYZZY nomination for Best Game, and very favorable reviews from the general video game community.
I loved it. A very long game, perhaps of novella or screenplay length, and that is just in one playthrough. You can take wildly different paths, from prison to riches to love to all sorts of things. You keep track of 10 relationships, 4 robot stats, personal stats and political stats.
You are a young robot researcher, developing robot technology, and you have the chance to guide the development of robots toward autonomy, acting like humans, giant tank missiles, or advanced surgeons.
The gameplay can either be free-flowing, answering each question as it comes, or you can develop intricate plans to minimax your characters stats.
Well worth the money; this was the first commercial game that I bought since I purchased the complete Infocom collection.
This is just as good as Creatures Such As We and Choice of the Dragon, but longer. The only hiccups I found were inconsistent branches; when someone I married quit my company, the game said I wouldn't see them for a long time, for instance, without mentioning our relationship.
One of the best trippy journey-through the soul games, now forgotten, February 3, 2016Like So Far, All Hope Abandon, and a large number of other games, Losing Your Grip is a trip through the subconscious.
The game is filled with beautiful and crazy imagery. For instance, the opening scene consists of (Spoiler - click to show)you standing in the mud next to someone buried up to their neck who resignedly chides you.
I tried this game without hints, and it was very hard. I explored every room in the first main area, tried everything I could think of, and I only got 2 points out of 100.
The game was previously shareware (i.e. you got a limited version, then pay for more), but now the author has released it for free (well, over a decade ago). It comes with well-written feelies, and ifdb has a walkthrough or two.
I cannot say how much I enjoyed playing through this game.
Clockpunk game of Anchorhead-like length and quality, February 3, 2016What an enjoyable game! My heart was racing in chapter 12. This is a quite long game set in a world dominated by clockwork; the religion, the city, the people's mindset, everything is based on clockwork (a funny moment was seeing that pagans worshipped non-mechanical timekeeping devices like water clocks or sundials).
You play an assistant clock keeper who must investigate a future robbery. The game is a very long example of what I call the linear thriller type of game. You encounter a more or less linear sequence of challenges where you are given a good amount of hints on what to do, there is always a sense of urgency, and everything you do is the right thing in just the nick of time.
This game is what I wish the illustrated book Hugo had been from its cover; you jump and leap and fall all through a giant clock early on, you use an early calculating machine like a computer, etc.
The writing is as good as Anchorhead, in my mind, and the implementation is smooth. The story wasn't as compelling to me at first, but the last few chapters really got me into it.
The game has probably not received very much attention because it was a commercial game for a while. But everyone should try it now.
A long, animated and voice-acted superhero story, February 3, 2016Future Boy! was a commercial game from 2004. A large game (it took me about 4 and a half hours, using hints 27 times), it has illustrations with gif-like animations for every room and character, as well as voice-acting for all dialogue.
The game is split into two parts, one with the parser, and one with little windows with graphics, usually one for the room itself, one for each character present, one for the compass rose, and one for effects like rain.
The game starts out fairly linearly, with a succession of challenges that set up the story. I found some of the early puzzles fairly difficult, which is unusual for commercial IF. I resorted to the hints as early as the second scenario.
After the first few scenes, the game opens up considerably. It ends up being reminiscent of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a cast of crazy characters and a variety of random locations that you can visit.
One of the highlights of the game is an unusually well developed (Spoiler - click to show)computer system. It's like a miniature game within a game, and gave me fond memories of the 90's.
My winning game was ~1500 turns long.
The plot is fairly intricate. Overall, I enjoyed this game. If it were an iPad app, I would price it at around $5-$10.
I came into possession of the game by contacting the creators using the email on the Future Boy! website.
A mid-length sci-if puzzle game with two outstanding ideas, February 3, 2016Spider and Web is one of the most famous interactive fiction games, appearing at or near the top of several lists of Best IF. While I personally have enjoyed some other games more, Spider and Web is still in my top 10. I believe that part of its fame is its ability to draw in every kind of gamer; the story is interesting, the puzzles are hard but get easier with each failure, and those that don't know what to do after the transition mentioned in the game's ABOUT text can still feel great about their accomplishments.
In this science fiction game, you encounter a wide variety of technological devices. You must learn how they work. It' shard to be more specific without giving away plot details.
The game has two brilliant innovations. One is the puzzle it is most famous for, which causes the big transition I mentioned above. Most walkthrough said refuse to give the solution to this puzzle, as a gift to first time players. It took me a day to get over the shock of solving it.
The second innovation is the narrative structure. It frames the game in a way that no one had done as successfully before, and provides an interesting mechanic for hints.
Everyone should play it at least once. I played it the first week I started IF five years ago, and I played it last month, and it was great both times.
Puzzle-heavy surreal game. Like Porpentine before Porpentine, February 3, 2016I played "So far" years ago, made it to the bird-animal farm, and never got any further. It was just overwhelming. I don't like games that are so extremely open-ended that you have no idea if what you are doing is helpful or game ending. That's not to say that I dislike non-linear games; a lot of non-linear games have items that suggest what you need to do, and then you find a way to do it.
In "So Far", you are utterly clueless most of the time. So I just gave in after a few years, grabbed a walkthrough, and checked out the game. The worlds I found were fascinating and alien, like many of Porpentine's games.
I was surprised that many of the worlds were connected with abstraction and metaphor; the first two worlds put me off by making me think they would all be well-established alien worlds without any explanation.
Having gone through with a walkthrough once, I plan on playing again, relying on my memory of the last attempt but not referring to the walkthrough. Hopefully, this will let me explore more, and have fun with some puzzles whose solution I didn't understand or can't remember.
For those who want a taste of the abstract worlds, there is a world where (Spoiler - click to show)everything is dark and everything is sound.
Fun take on the play-die-repeat idea with great hint system, February 3, 2016There are at least three camps in the IF world: those who hate using hints; those who rely strongly on walkthroughs; and (the largest group) those who like to play as long as possible without getting hints, and then use just enough to get them through.
This game appeals to all three groups; on one hand, the game world is fairly open and completely forgiving, allowing explorers to try other areas when they are stuck on a given puzzle.
On the other hand, the hint system is embodied in a large group of NPCs with fun personalities. Even better, some of the hints are wrong, as the NPCs have imperfect knowledge of the world.
The gameplay is most similar to Heroes, with a magic system and a lot of find-item-use-item puzzles.
The one annoying part was having to repeat the same basic commands over and over again. The "record" command is very helpful, although I won without it.
Unlike many similar games, the endgame was very rewarding.
A difficult, highly nonlinear swords and sorcery game with days of content, January 17, 2016It is rare to find a CYOA text game that combines a hundreds of thousands of words, extreme branching, a complex inventory and spell collection, 3d graphics, and orchestral music. The fact that it features a compelling narrative, unique gameplay mechanics, and at least a hundred npcs and monsters just makes it better.
Sorcery! 3 is part 3 in a series, but it is definitely not necessary to play the other games first. In fact, the game is easier if you play it alone.
You are a sorceror, who casts spells by combining lettered stars that differ from location to location. For instance, to command unintelligent creatures, you must stand where the stars allow you to spell L-A-W. Some spells also require certain inventory items, such as a gold-backed mirror.
You also can engage with creatures using a variety of swords and other weapons, as well as gambling with dice. Combat requires strategy, as you want to hit hard when the enemy leaves themselves open without expending your energy.
The game includes both ink illustrations and 3d maps. You move a figurine about a gorgeous 3d map from checkpoint to checkpoint. This could all be handled by hyperlinks, but the movement provides more variety. The game includes special beacons which have a unique mechanic with a gorgeous 3d effect.
You play a sorceror from Analand who must hunt down 7 serpents who seek to expose you to the Archmage, a powerful enemy. The serpents range from the relatively weak to the gut-wrenchig Serpent of Time. Few text game can give you that feeling of total despair that you can have meeting a boss, but this one succeeds.
In your quest, you will meet several sorcerors, magicians, thieves, tribes, and monsters. Conversations are difficult to lawnmower, which is a plus. You can negotiate, threaten, help, and so on.
The game is extremely nonlinear and branches strongly. There is one event at the fissure in the first area that I have tried to recreate over and over again and never succeeded. Whole quests, relationships, even a marriage to an NPC can be skipped or missed. Most serpents can be destroyed in two or more ways.
It took me most of a week playing 2-3 hours a day to beat. I restarted 3 or 4 times once I got a hang of it. There are some basic ideas that if you miss can make the game much more difficult.
I plan on nominating this game for the XYZZY for Best Game of 2015.
Insanely, unfairly difficult; but fun, April 5, 2015By far the hardest interactive fiction I have ever played. It is just a series of puzzles, represented by characters. Puzzles include Euclidean geometry, wordplay (similar to cryptic crosswords), and a maze.
Some of the puzzles are bewilderingly difficult (such as the name of the Mark of Water). I don't think that it was ever intended to be solved without cheating. Using a decompiler gave a few answers that I could not otherwise get.
This is a pure mental-exercise game with no plot. I've brought up some of the puzzles on Stackexchange and Reddit, and it provoked some good discussion, so this is a good game to mine for interesting puzzles.
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