Reviews by MathBrush
About 2 hours
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Rescue muppet-like puppets, each with their own personality, November 22, 2023This is a complex and rich puzzle game written in Twine.
In it, you are tasked with recovering 14 different puppets from a studio that is about to shut down. It seems like a mix of Muppets and Disney, with a studio next to a giant theme park and all the old history about to be demolished.
You, a former puppeteer, are tasked with stealing the puppets with the help of an anonymous accomplice. The twist is (revealed very early on), when you find a puppet, they come to life! Each puppet has different features that can help you in different situations.
Opposing you are evil puppets that stalk through the halls or vents. They can steal puppets from you. I always used ‘undo’, so I don’t know if you can get them back. If you don’t have a puppet, they just kick you out, which can actually be a nice shortcut!
There are four main areas. I finished 3 on my own, getting all puppets, but needed to poke around the code to figure out how to get in and beat the 4th one. However, you can get a good ending even if you miss out on the final building.
While the premise is inherently amusing, the game is more about the march of time and the loss of childhood memories. There is a subplot that you only encounter in the very end parts of the game about the Black experience in America.
I found the ending to be a bit long, with page after page of fullscreen text. That part seemed like it was meant to be a tribute for Jim Henson (like the game mentions in the credits) or maybe an exercise in worldbuilding, but it was a little bit long for my liking. I may be a bit sensitive to that because I have something similar in my current game (a museum at the end describing everything you did or saw) and I’ve been trying to figure out what a good length of time to spend there is.
The ‘true ending’ I got with all 14 puppets worked out well, I think.
I found the random movement of the enemies a bit difficult to avoid at times, but with UNDO it wasn’t too bad. It provided a bit of flavor. The only place I found really rough was the final building, where there were usually only 2 exits at a time, so moving in and out was pretty risky.
I think fans of big parser-like twine adventures (like Agat’s games) will like this a lot. I enjoyed it!
Run a bed and breakfast for your grandparents in Bali, November 22, 2023I spent more time and attention on this game than just about any other game in this comp so far, using the full 2 hours and thinking a lot.
This game is about a person who is part Australian and part Indonesian going back to Bali to visit family. To their surprise, they discover they’re running a bed and breakfast for a week!
Like most Choicescript games, there’s a lot of customization here, but not too much. There are stats here, but they don’t seem to be used for pass/fail as much as just keeping track of your choices and giving you a consistent story.
I started out playing a boy, but over time and with the events of the game I started thinking of my character of a woman more, and ended up in a romance with the guy RO.
I think the game had a satisfying narrative arc for me. I read some other reviews before playing, which had expressed disappointment with a certain major arc not being fulfilled, but knowing that helped me be more satisfied with what I did see. The rewards and trials both build up over time in the game, with a satisfying action conclusion.
I enjoyed the cats, as others have mentioned. But most of all I enjoyed seeing a blend of cultures of which I have not previously been aware much of. The intersection of ‘what Australians are like on holiday’ with the intersection of Indonesian and Chinese people and the effects of local religions, as well as the kinds of food available and the transportation…there’s a lot going on here and it’s described lovingly. I don’t know how autobiographical it is, but it either seems that Felicity Banks is describing things from her own experience, and is part Indonesian, or that this was simply just written with a deep love for and interest in the region. It’s possible that, not being from the region, I may be mistaken as to authenticity or tone, but from an outside perspective it seems very nice. I enjoyed this overall.
Comedic pirate game about tossing some trash, November 22, 2023I approached this game with a combination of excitement and hesitancy. To Hell in a Hamper, the previous game in the series, is one of my top 10 IF games of all time, out of around 2900 reviews. That puts To Hell in a Hamper in the top 0.4% of all games ever for me. So on the one hand, I’m sure I’d like more, while on the other the chance of any new game also being in my top 0.4% of all time would be pretty low.
Overall I liked it a lot, I can just say that. I found it more challenging than the first game and with more of a focus on adventure than comedy, though there is definitely a strong comedic slant. It was genuinely engaging and funny and, in my opinion, well written.
The idea is that the captain of your pirate vessel has fled his ship with his greatest treasures as well as you, a young cabin boy. Unfortunately, your row boat is sinking! You have to toss all of the captain’s treasures out to succeed. He’s not willing to help, though, and a dangerous Yateveo tree is out to get you, too!
I mentioned this game being harder than the other, and that’s true. I got kind of stuck 4 times.
I liked the ending puzzle, a nice contrast to the rest of the puzzle style. And the final scene had some quit nice poetry in it.
So overall, I’d rate this as pretty difficult, but at no point in the four scenarios above was I unhappy. It’s hard, but a fun hard. That’s good, and gives the game high points in my mind on the puzzle side.
On the writing and story side, well, like I said, this is different than the last game. That game’s humor depended heavily on the increasing absurdity of the objects you found. In this one, though, almost everything I found was reasonable. Instead, there was a lot more emphasis on the adventure of it all, like the helpful octopus, the dangerous tree, and above all the changing relationship of you and the captain. It was almost more like Violet than Lost Pig; each of your actions affects your relationship with the captain. So it was not as funny to me as To Hell in a Hamper, but I think it has a deeper story and a bit more substance.
Polish-wise, it was great. I found only a couple of bugs.
In conclusion, this game isn’t in my top 0.4% of all time, but it’s solidly in my top 4.0% of all time. Great work, and something I could recommend to people looking for humor, pirates, one-room games or great NPCs (maybe a nomination for Best NPC xyzzy?)
This was my favorite game of the competition!
Metafictional narrative about revisiting the past, using AGT, November 22, 2023I’m going to put on my ‘extra-critical’ goggles for this game, because it’s by a previous IFComp winner (who presumably can stand up to sterner scrutiny), and is in a genre (autobiographical emotional retrospective in game form) that has had several recent start-studded entries (Sting, Repeat the Ending, A Rope of Chalk, and of course the author’s own game two years ago). It also intentionally uses an older format and is mimicking ‘my crappy apartment/house’ games, which has to thread the needle between not being as bad as the source material and being accurate to source material.
So how does it succeed? Overall, the polish is evident. I rarely struggled with the parser, which (combined with the other AGT/AGX/MAGX game this year makes me respect the engine a lot). Teleportation and combat are handled well. Death and being reborn could theoretically have really messed up game state, but it doesn’t seem to have done so, which is really impressive to me.
The game itself relies heavily on the commentary to make it ‘good’, which makes sense, because it was built that way. At first I was critical of the base game as being too basic, given the rich and full games I’ve seen built by children and teens recently (for comparison, look at Milliways in this IFComp!). But then I remembered games like Coming Home 1 which are actually very similar in layout and descriptiveness level to this game (although not in polish), so I guess it is pretty authentic.
Exploration was fun. Sometimes commands and interaction felt just a bit ‘off’ from games I usually play, and this was good; it felt like seeing interactive fiction written by someone who had a different set of experiences than me.
I’m not sure whether the game is autobiographical or not; I suspect not, but I’m not sure that should factor into the overall evaluation of the game. The background story is emotional, and hearing only one side of the conversation really helps here as you can imagine the other side for yourself, with version painting the narrator in a deeply sympathetic light or as a barely-tolerated person stretching others’ patience. One thing though for me is that it was always very clear that I was interacting with a fictional narrative, one held at a distance, and that I wasn’t drawn into. This is a personal reaction and not necessarily one all would hold. That’s actually what made me wonder if this was autobiographical, as real life scenarios are often less believable than fictional (like the fact that Tiffany is a medieval name).
The map is nice, and I wish I had read it first. I solved one puzzle it solves on accident due to my normal direction-flailing I typically do when playing games. It has some messages like ‘Don’t Cheat’ and ‘Listnouns’ that make me wonder if there is some hidden content in the game.
Overall, it was clear from the beginning that this has high production values and includes a lot of elements I like. So the debate wasn’t whether to score high or low, but which high score to shoot for. I’m still thinking about it; in a way this game is more relatable to me than Best’s last game, but on the other hand it’s a slighter thing. The ending, for instance, felt anticlimactic, more of an opportunity to sit and ponder than a neat wrapping up.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for other reviews on this; I feel like there are still some unresolved thoughts in my mind and maybe a fresh perspective can help. But I did enjoy this, and it was easy to play this on Gargoyle.
Excellent comedy circus puzzle game, November 22, 2023I deeply enjoyed this game. It’s a well-scoped, polished parser game with a lot of humor.
The idea is that you are a circus clown at a circus that is being sabotaged by a villainous Phantom! You have three friends whose acts get sabotaged and you have to find a way to defeat the enemy.
Most of the puzzles revolve around finding creative uses of items, although there are also some other puzzle types like math.
The characters are pretty distinct and memorable, like the grumpy animal trainer or your ‘dense’ muscle bound girlfriend. There are a lot of hidden details in the game, like a character being trans.
Most of the puzzles made perfect sense, and hit the sweet spot between being non-obvious but not being too hard to figure out. I did get stuck on the rabbit puzzle, but once I got hints for it I realized that I just hadn’t experimented enough earlier. I enjoyed the payoff of the game name.
I like a circus setting for a parser game (Ballyhoo is one of my favorite Infocom works) and the pacing worked great here. Excellent work, deeply enjoyed it.
Game set in two worlds, with long, complex graphical puzzles, November 22, 2023This game has a few different twists, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers the best I can.
This is a choice-based game, and it is quite extensive. It took me right around the two hour mark to complete. It’s reminiscent of Gruescript in a sense, with different locations you can click to and an inventory to use. However, the inventory only shows up every now and then in-game.
While it grows more complex, it feels fair to say that gameplay revolves around a ship captain walking around the ship, trying to understand a mysterious poem given by ancestors and talking to others on the ship.
Storywise, it’s all about navigation and pushing to the unknown. There are different books that give you lore about the world. The pirates in the game all curse, presumably for verisimilitude, but for some reason the swearing was written exactly the way the 14 yr old boys in my school swear so I kept picturing very young pirates.
Many of the characters have tragic backstories. There are several opportunities to show mercy or justice and to change your relationship with others.
The writing overall was adventurous and dramatic. Near the end, there were a few different narrative threads that came together, but I’m not sure how I felt about the resolution. I was left with more questions than answers.
There were graphical puzzles in the game as well. At first, they fit well into the flow of the story, providing simple distractions along the main journey. Near the end, though, there were so many puzzles of such quantity that by the time I returned to the story I had forgotten much of what had happened. While I do enjoy graphical puzzles from time to time, they lack many of the features I’ve come to enjoy in text based fiction and thus weren’t quite as enjoyable to me.
The level of craftsmanship in the UI and puzzles was very high; the author clearly has a good grasp of visual design and event-based programming.
War/romance/thriller game where all choices are seen through a scope, November 22, 2023I think the best descriptors for this game might be ‘incestbait’ and '‘unusual UI’.
Let’s talk about UI first. The idea is that you are ‘aiming’ at the screen, with a literal scope in the title page and elsewhere just dragging your aim around. While moving around the page you find text you can click on. So it’s choice based, but with work to discover the choices.
The controls are opposite from what I expected. It all clicked when I realized that instead of panning around the page I was moving the camera.
This is a very long game, and took me longer than 2 hours to complete. Parts of it were difficult; a couple of times I could have sworn the text needed to progress just wasn’t there, so I exited out completely and ‘Resume’ and it worked. But looking back, I likely just had trouble finding the right link. I got very stuck at one point looking for my father, due to the many places possible to look.
The story is one of was and love. You play as two siblings who have had a love/hate/LOVE relationship their whole life. While there is no history of romantic intimacy between you two, everything in the game drips with its possibility, so much that the entire theme of the game seems to be ‘what if two siblings were almost-lovers and sublimated that tension into hate’.
The backdrop is like a modern Gone With the Wind or War and Peace, where a violent war is raging and you are part of a privileged family, the children of an admiral. The countries involved seem to be fictional, but evoke modern tropes: an aggressor country feeding misinformation to others to justify invading a smaller country; corruption at the highest levels, etc.
The game opens with a violent conflict between the two protagonists, and I never really understood the justification for that. Even seeing the messages that spurred the conflict, I don’t understand why the fight happened.
In any case, this really does have the overall feel of the grand war novels I mentioned before, with similar musings on changes in life. The UI was an interesting concept but by the end it started to wear thin. It may be because I was using a trackpad and playing on desktop; I had to click and drag a lot.
There definitely is strong craftmanship in evidence; this is the kind of game where I personally didn’t love it but I’d definitely hire the creator for game work if I ran a studio. So the pros of this game are mostly in the areas of the author’s skill, and the cons are mostly in my personal taste.
Spy adventure set in Italy with good nostalgic vibes, November 22, 2023There’s a tendency in interactive fiction for people to talk about ‘old fashioned adventures’ or ‘old school’ games , but it means different things to different people, usually ‘similar to games I played as a kid’.
I didn’t really get heavily into IF until I was in my thirties, so I don’t have a ton of feelings for older games. But I do have a couple experiences as a kid; one was trying Zork in my teens and failing to do much of anything (quit at the dam), and the other was playing some obscure text adventures with graphics in 6th grade (one called Hacker and another about rhymes in an Alice in Wonderland type world).
This game really evoked for me the nostalgia of those games, like Hacker. I know other Adventuron games are similar in appearance, but this also really got the feel of games of those time down well. It even reminded me of the feel of games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
Anyway, you’re a spy for a secret organization called TURTLE and you’re called in to rescue another spy who is in trouble. Your goal is to infiltrate the enemy’s secret villa and steal back his diamond while stopping his evil plan.
There are a lot of tropes here similar to the 80s and 90s and early bond movies. Some are a bit outdated, but it has a nice overall action vibe. It’s also very Italian (for me the most Italian moment was finding a monastery where the monks wouldn’t let you in without a crucifix). There’s a lot of Italian text in the game. While I’m not fluent, I could understand most of the Italian pretty easily, but it may be useful having google translate nearby (although you can’t copy and paste from Adventuron, last time I checked).
Puzzles were generally fair and well clued, and had fun features like a computer system and a money system. I had to check the walkthrough near the end about three different times.
Overall, I had a great time. Very fun.
Nautical cosmic horror game, with snacks, November 22, 2023I opened this game and I was poking around and thought, ‘Man, this really feels familiar. Where have I seen this before? Did I test this?’
Then I checked, and I realized that I had played it in the German Grand Prix as Fischstäbchen! I really enjoyed that game, so it was fun to see the translation here (something which has only happened recently since rule changes allowing translations of games).
This is a fairly hefty but manageable parser game about exploring a fishing boat in Point Nemo, the point on earth furthest from land. Things don’t seem quite normal; your crew won’t come out of their rooms and your cook spends a lot of time chanting out of ancient books and being surrounded by freezing mist…
I loved the German version of this game, especially since it had a built-in help menu to list all verbs that you need to finish, something that worked really well for me as a noob. This version seems like slightly different compared to the old one; it has some puzzles I don’t remember, and some features like highlighting of exits, which I like.
On the other hand, seeing it in my native tongue makes it easier to be judgmental. For instance, several times, there were ‘double directions’ like saying something is ‘down’ but you access it to the ‘west’. Even though both ‘down’ and ‘west’ are highlighted, going ‘down’ gives an error. I think it would have worked better to redirect ‘down’ and ‘west’ to work the same way.
The map is pretty intimidating at first. I’d recommend just exploring and mapping the whole thing before anything else as several of the puzzles just involve finding people or things.
I used the hints a couple of times, even for things I did in my last playthrough.
Overall the things I liked last time are still here: the Lovecraftian/dry humour mix and the active and engaging puzzles. I also like the guidance it gives you on some puzzles and the restart method for when you die.
Overall, I think I liked the German version slightly better only because playing in another language presents its own unique challenges and gameplay, but I still enjoyed this one.
Commodore 64 murder mystery game with independent NPCS, November 22, 2023This was one of the better experiences I’ve had with a custom parser game written for a retro format.
This game was written for the Commodore 64 platform and must be played in an emulator. I played with the Vice emulator.
It is a murder mystery. It comes with a great deal of background material. There are feelies with long, in-depth interviews with each of the suspects. There are also guides on what can be typed. I found it necessary to read every single feelie and command guide and manual to complete the game, as there are essential components you will likely not find without help (such as the important ANALYZE command).
The setting and game style is intentionally reminiscent of old Infocom mysteries such as Deadline and Suspect. There is a single house with multiple independent NPCs moving about and various clues.
I’ll talk a bit about things that were frustrating and things that worked well.
Frustrations came mostly from the engine and parser. The Commodore 64 emulator I had imitated its old clunkiness. Each room takes several seconds to load. If you go the wrong way and want to turn around, it’s 20 seconds just to correct your mistake. There was a ‘speed up’ button which I used, however, it caused the space bar to wig out, making only one-word commands possible in fast mode (great for navigation). At one point while messing with speed and trying to type ‘E’ I made the emulator hang up; I don’t believe it was the game’s fault.
Some commands were a bit difficult to phrase. One must type ‘interior garage door’; ‘interior door’ will not suffice. TALK TO someone and OPEN something almost always returned a blank line with no response at all.
The story and motives were lavishly described but stretched the imagination a bit. I’m not sure the motive found in the game would hold up in court, and some of the puzzles felt a bit arbitrary.
Those are the frustrating points. The good points are that outside of the above-mentioned difficulties, the parser was quite robust. I was frequently able to do what I wanted in an easy fashion. Puzzles were well-clued; I only turned to the walkthrough to speed up after I had the game crash. I do recommend playing on your own first without the walkthrough as it can help explain some of the more unusual action choices. I do think I would have had to turn to a walkthrough no matter what, though.
Other good things are the reasonable scope of the entry. With the slow emulation and the minimal parser, a long game could have stretched patience thin. This game seems well designed and compact, and is more fair (in my opinion) than the original infocom games. All interactable items are listed at the end of the paragraph, so you don’t have to worry about whether scenery contains an important clue.
In the past, I’ve had many bad experiences with custom parser and retro platforms. I’d say that this was genuinely refreshing and was, compared to those experiences, satisfying. For someone unaccustomed to such platforms I could imagine there would be much frustration. I also found the feelies to be very high quality (although there is a ‘images go here’ section that I believe will eventually be corrected). If I could change one thing, it’d be allowing ‘X’ as look at. I appreciate the game and was glad to play it!
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