Reviews by JJ McC
View this member's profile1-10 of 186 | Next | Show All
Mr. Fudd Goes to Washington, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/8/24
Playtime: 25min, Master of Politics, 4/7 deaths
If there is a more fraught topic to mine for slapstick comedy at the moment than US politics, I’d like to know what it is. Biting Satire? Caricature? Anarchic Absurdism? Absolutely. Anything with a point of view and an edge, the sharper the better. But slapstick requires a much lighter devil-may-care tone, especially if you’re going to have the player engage in cartoon violence with actual fatalities. Due to an accident of birth coinciding with narrative cues, I can only interpret this work through the lens of US politics. I apologize to anyone looking for different.
The work seems to understand its comedic challenge, and opens by positioning itself atop three super-exaggerated supports. 1) Ossified Bureaucracy cynicism. 2) Both-sides-equivalence-ism. 3) Narrative Simplification to the point of abstraction. The latter, I think, is the one that gives this piece its fighting chance of working. The unsung hero of support #3 is the illustration style. There is no better clue that nuance and accuracy are not welcome here than its visual palette and artwork style. I do not intend it backhanded when I say it is reminiscent of childlike doodlings. In fact, it is quite crucial that it is. The visual/artistic shorthand gives permission in a sense for the other two legs to stand unashamedly.
Absent the graphical cues, legs one and two seem hopelessly misguided against the last decade. We are not pretending to distort and mock actual politics here, we are exaggerating inadequate cliches about politics as a backdrop for madcap antics. The player intro drives this home superbly - our goal is to pass the most hilariously inoffensive law imaginable. Just the one. These low-seeming stakes in this alternate-reality West Wing divorces us from having to parse real-world parallels, or suss out layered meanings. So when bizarre character turns, hidden labs, Looney Tunes violence happen, we are not bound to decode them, we can just roll and play in the space. Even the ending that provided the most hope was a funny bit of cynicism that would be actively appalling played against a more real backdrop.
I was game to do my best to go along for the ride. I committed to and suffered cartoon violence. I found all the non-death endings. I freely sampled the actual death endings. I don’t think I ever fully escaped the spectre of its inadequacies in reflecting its purported subject matter but I got pretty close. There was a detail that troubled me about this more than any other - that the unnamed opposing parties were colored red and blue. For me, I needed to be pulled OUT of that space, and those colors were a counter-productive reminder. Literally any other colors, I dunno, pink and teal?
Ultimately, it didn’t quite succeed for me in replacing our dire reality with its own. But there were sequences that absolutely did pull me into its mad orbit for a few moments of subversive glee. At its best, it kind of made me long for ITS version of toxic politics over what we are actually living with.
Mystery, Inc: Scooby
Vibe: Slapstick
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : For sure I would change those colors, if this were my project. I would also try to infuse other touches to further distance from current reality, and sell the Bizzarro Congress. The zanier the better.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Oldschool (Implementation) Horror, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/8/24
Playtime: 2hrs, unwinnable at 1.5. Restarted, 1.25hrs later ANOTHER unwinnable state? score 260/300, Read spoilers, done
An old school lightly-horror-themed parser? Seems like this entry would be talking my love language. Thing is, my intro to the hobby decades ago is definitely seen through rose colored glasses. There are aspects to parsers that I enjoyed when we didn’t know any better but DEFINITELY don’t want to revisit forty years on.
Let’s start with the good callbacks. I have referred to something I call the “Implementation Horizon” in parsers - the level of implemented detail that acts as a soft signal to the player where to stop poking. Zomburbia integrates this horizon deftly into its gameplay by leaning to VERY SHALLOW. This is not a problem, in fact it is very much a strength. Because the implementation is shallow, area descriptions are terse, punchy, and signal interesting items clearly and crisply. There is no futzing about with smothering detail, hunting out the one interesting noun in a sea of them. You don’t need to be TOLD you need the brooch. Its simple presence indicates that quite clearly. This should not be underestimated as a creative choice, it really smooths out player frictions and drag in a seemingly broad space.
The shallow implementation also dovetails nicely with old-school brevity. Descriptions are not flowery and dense, they convey their imagery and importance economically and crisply. The net effect is to make this mid-sized game kind of zippy. Couple that with a good-natured, quirky setup and cast, light humor (especially in death scenes) and it enables a very amiable old school experience. One of my favorite touches was (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist slowly turning into a zombie. A great little goose to the proceedings. Kevin was also just delightful.
It definitely has gaps though. It is one thing to have a shallow implementation horizon, it is another to not fully plumb that horizon. There are a LOT of unimplemented synonyms, inadequate disambiguation prompts, and bugs (in one instance, dropped items were not listed in room location, and needed me to reread my transcript to figure out what needed picking up.) Some papers were coldly listed as ‘not flammable’ as I sparred with a particular puzzle. It did not fully recognize game state, in one instance telling me "You can’t find anything wrong with the broken hedge trimmers." Those broken ones you mean? Nothing notable comes to mind?
All of that could definitely have been forgiven had the game not also leaned into my two LEAST favorite old school tropes: inventory management and unwinnable states. The former was never really entertaining as a puzzle, it was a misguided attempt at ‘realism’ in works that didn’t need or want it. Its effect is book-keeping drudgery of the least entertaining kind. And this from a guy that plays with spreadsheets. Unfun wastes of my time grate here, particularly when the overall vibe is otherwise so fleet.
Which brings me to the unforgivable sin (according to Monsignor McC) of this game: quietly unwinnable states. My first playthrough, after two hours I stumbled into two of them. One of them was at least clued by in-game warnings, another… just happened? I was on the edge here: was the game enjoyable enough for a replay, two hours in? Its attitude was so friendly, I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, so I plowed back in. Took me ~40 minutes to retrace my steps which was longer than I wanted at skim-speed, but then got back in the flow. Thirty-five minutes later I had racked up 260 points and was firmly into endgame… when I think I hit another one. I say ‘think’ because I had a flash of something I should have done, but at that point was beyond my UNDO window to revisit. It is possible that the game could have provided NPC business to reopen that window, but nothing in my experience so far indicated that was likely.
Ok, yes, not having a savepoint is on me. I knew what I was in for at this point, I’m an adult with some level of object permanence and cause-effect understanding. What can I say, I let the breezy environment lull me. So here I am, maybe two steps from end, do I go back AGAIN, maybe another hour’s worth of replay? I do not. Old school parsers didn’t have a wealth of alternatives vying for our time. They were what they were, was up to us to meet them on their own flawed terms. Today? I got choices, man. I chose to read the Hint sheet to see what I missed and yeah, I was on the right path. Yay? *sigh* I woulda really liked that, had I not needed to rewind so far.
Mystery, Inc: “Z-z-z-ZOMBIES?!?!” Shaggy
Vibe: weirdly enough, Scooby-Doo Horror
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would eliminate any and all possibility of unwinnable states. Just kill them with fire. If that doesn’t sate my blinding rage, then nuke the inventory management too.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Eight Legs, One Hat, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/8/24
Playtime: 45min
How smart are Octopi? One list had them #8 in ranked sub-human IQ, below Orangutan/Chimps, Dolphins, Elephants, Crows (wow, you go crows!), Pigs and Dogs. Other fun facts: Chimps and pigs have played video games. Smarter dogs have learned basic Parser vocabulary and Verb-Noun syntax. I mean, none of my dogs for sure, but some.
What drove me into that divergence was concern that I might not be as smart as an Octopus.
This is a one-room parser game. As a pet octopus (probably a thing, right? Some folks keep tigers and alligators, so sure), your goal is to change the view from your aquarium, and not get in trouble doing it. It is a wry, tight little game - maybe a three step puzzle with some red herrings to sort past. The nature of the puzzles were clever enough, yet because I declined to (Spoiler - click to show)>X ME still required a hint. Followed by a headslap.
The humor here is gentle, mostly of the baffled-Octopus-take-on-weird-humans variety (I particularly liked the ‘For Neptune’s Sake’ expletive). If nothing else, the image of a baseball-cap wearing mischievous Octopus is a gift to all of us. If you imagine a balance-scale, with gameplay frictions on one side and puzzle challenge/raw entertainment on the other, a great IF experience would tilt noticeably to the latter. The greater the goods, the more frictions can be shrugged off. Here, the challenge/humor was lighter, and correspondingly, minor frictions suddenly became impactful to the balance.
There were quite a few: vocabulary was notably lacking in synonyms. Pillows but no pillow. Cap but no hat. Bathtub but no bath, and on. You were able to put items on the dresser before knowing how to retrieve them. Missing verb/nouns previously referenced in the prompt text. A continual need to resubmerge, but no shortcuts (that I found) to long form >GET IN AQUARIUM. (Spoiler - click to show)Inability to >JUMP past an open drawer. None of these are fatal, but do accumulate against its lighter charms.
The final puzzle solution itself is probably the funniest part of it, and even that is a LITTLE weird because I-the-player landed on it super fast, but I-an-OCTOPUS would never have any idea to do that, nevermind what the outcome of my actions would be. There was a bit of a subversive charge to that dissonance that made for a high note ending. So, maybe I am smarter? Maybe it’s not a competition though, maybe the real competition is who is less delicious? Which I win HANDS DOWN! Hopefully unverifiably so.
Mystery, Inc: Scooby
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : Ironing out the vocabulary frictions for sure would be my priority if this were my project. This is a clever, wry little game. Getting the parser out the way would let it land without caveat.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
The Wrath of C'mon, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 4 plays, 4 fails
Have we culturally saturated ourselves on Star Trek riffs? I won’t leave that hang: No. No we have not. VoM leverages a deeper-cut aspect of its inspiration to tremendous advantage: reductive two-fisted approaches to complicated problems.
Let me start by acknowledging ALL narrative is reductive. Figuring out what to reduce to tell a compelling story is a core challenge of storytelling. What details are important to the tenor of the piece? What details destroy the piece with abject ‘realism’? Adventure fiction in particular uses two-fisted action either as metaphoric shorthand or as a mechanism to deliver morally-unambiguous thrills. In our post-COVID world, the idea of sending an under-fueled, under-gunned boat of cure through enemy territory with insufficient resources to get there… ridiculous! This is a diplomatic/large military operation of infinite complexity and nuance!
In Star Trek world though? THIS IS EXACTLY THE CORRECT APPROACH. Evoking that vibe bypasses any quibbles we might have and puts us smack into the right frame of mind. The piece does not provide thinly veiled caricatures of familiar characters. Why would it? There’s plenty of that out there already. Instead, it crafts a series of Trekky scenarios in just the perfect combination of unique and familiar. We are essentially watching a season-long arc (presuming Trek trucked in that) on fast forward. Our familiarity plays off these scenarios in exactly the right way to maximize our enjoyment and minimize drag. We don’t need the details, we get it. It is a terrific choice, implemented confidently, and lands like gangbusters.
We are blindly exploring a sensor-defying nebula, searching for the route to a plague-ridden planet. Encountering all manner of alien species, strange phenomenon and ancient artifacts, not to mention meddling Glingons. And solving them all via WWKD. (What Would Kirk Do?) Each mini-encounter is an abbreviated television episode where we are trying to wring out fuel, weapon upgrades or information and not lose TOO many redshirts. These encounters are satisfyingly broad, varied and dangerous. If we seize initiative and power through, with a little luck we might save the day.
First time, I didn’t . Ran out of gas. Barely skimmed the endscreen before cycling back in for more. On repeat play, some gameplay artifacts started showing. For one, encounters started repeating. Obviously I was more successful second time. For another, the path through the nebula randomized, meaning every game would feature blind exploration, with many possible deadends and backtracks. I failed again, this time as a result of an encounter decision I had no way of deducing. Just guessed wrong. Then out of fuel again on a third run.
Then a playthrough that broke me. Applying what I had learned to by-now-familiar scenarios, and focusing maniacally on refuel opportunities I explored to within four jumps of the end, with three doses of fuel. It was in sight! I was presented with a wormhole that promised to shoot me… somewhere. No way to predict, just guess. I guessed… wrong. It shot me so far from the goal, and provided no opportunity to refuel. I conclude: 1) the randomizer is not adequately constrained for balanced gameplay and 2) waaay too much weight is placed on blind guessing problem solving. The latter is bad, but at least manageable through repeat gameplay. Coupled with blind exploration, the former is death. To know that I can exhaust fuel through no fault of my own, or be placed in unwinnable state by random luck… these are deeply unsatisfying experiences.
Even with all that though, the charm of the setup and encounters still shines through. Yes, maybe they get a little tiresome once ‘solved’ but they haven’t yet chafed. Yes, it was a fun, immersive experience for the first few runs. No, it is not compelling enough to fight the randomizer until you win. But honestly, you still get plenty of grins without that.
I realize, due to my stream of consciousness ramblings, I have neglected to praise the MacIntosh-1bit graphics which are just delightful and resonate with the retro-narrative vibe in a terrific way. For whatever reason, Ink continues to showcase superior graphic design, and Marigold is a proud member of that fraternity.
Mystery, Inc: “We’ve got a Mystery on our Hands, Gang” Fred
Vibe: Boldly Going…
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would pay attention to the route randomizer, and ensure refueling opportunities are presented frequently enough to avoid dead runs. I would ALSO double, maybe triple the encounter mix, so that replays have a decent chance of showing some new ones in with the old. Reward replays with new challenges and opportunities to bellow loudly at the sky. GGGLLEEEEEEXXX!!
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
The Broad Wore Fangs, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1.75hrs, (Spoiler - click to show)Stayed in city, joined a faction
For as big a horror fan as I am, vampire-fetishism has never been my bag. To the extent that I have any tabletop RPG history it would be more Call of Chtulhu than V: Masquerade. Despite leading with its inspiration (the latter), I was very pleased with the smoothness Loose Ends got me up to speed on the deep background of factions, norms and abilities. Trickle feeding lore as it was needed was so much more engaging than a massive infodump would have been.
I was positively delighted that gameplay and story owed a lot more to Noir Detective than RPG sourcebook. Like a lot of great Noir, it uses a very specific political and social backdrop to inform a more-than-appears mystery, with a hard-boiled, out-of-their-depth outsider player-detective. It also seems to be a pretty deep implementation, supporting a variety of play styles. A handful of selectable skills and abilities seem to permute the player space in a nicely customized way.
It is a choice select mystery. This is a challenging paradigm for mysteries, as without careful curation, even simple absence/presence of options can provide unearned or mimesis threatening cluing. Loose Ends is not perfect here, but it is pretty darn good at it. Its biggest compromise on this front is marking options that may hold information with icons. It acts as a stealth hint system, that often wasn’t needed due to well-connected chains of clues. In one case though it did generate a repeat visit I might not have otherwise bothered with. I think on balance its value as a soft ‘director’ outweighs its downsides.
In addition to enabling a variety of player capabilities, the work also seems to enable a variety of player motivations and story paths. With diligence you can solve the (pretty cool) mystery, but what you DO with that solution seems to be up to you! That’s just nifty. It leverages Telltales’ ‘X WILL REMEMBER THAT’ mechanism to great effect, rewarding player choices with faction alignment that potentially changes the levers of power in the city. (Sidebar: Is there a more important narrative-game innovation in our lifetime than that pregnant phrase? I guess barring folks old enough to have seen the genre invented in the first place.)
My biggest quibble with the game is its lack of state awareness. Many times throughout the game, stock location descriptions include objects that have been removed, refer to dialogue that is no longer relevant, or concatenate game state text in jarring ways. In its most egregious artifact, it allows recovery of clues that have been destroyed. Below is an intrusive example:
(Spoiler - click to show)"[...] Lucille freezes—then a spasm runs through her body as her control of her own nerves is severed, muscles and tendons moving as Varkonyi directs. With another gesture he shuts down a bundle of nerves, sending her sprawling to the floor. For a moment she can do nothing but twitch, but with effort she staggers back to her feet.
"Lucille stays close to your side, watching and waiting for the right moment to strike—and then she finds it. In a split second she’s right in the middle of everything, laughing wildly as she whirls around in a flurry of steel. Another split second and she’s thirty feet back, covering your advance."
I have some forgiveness for these kinds of artifacts and even so, the work had enough to push itself past my ‘just ignore it’ threshold.
The only other off note for me was the denouement. As these things do, it kind of summarized the net effect of your choices on the ultimate outcome. I was unpleasantly surprised to see my choices showed me aligning with a faction I had no intent of aligning with. In fact, I had deliberately attempted to preserve faction-free independence throughout the game. I suppose some combination of my final actions and who I chose to ally with swung the algorithm on me, but I was not expecting it.
So yeah, slightly sour ending but engaging through its runtime for sure. Here's the big twist though: the authors have since updated the game, seemingly addressing many of these issues! I can only report my own experience, but assuming they did as good a job on the updates as the base game, they likely turned a 4-star experience to a 5-star one!
Mystery, Inc: Shaggy, though a strong argument for Velma too
Vibe: Vampy Noir
Polish: Textured -> Smooth?
Gimme the Wheel! : Absolutely my version of this project would try to polish its state awareness as a first priority. I think I would also try to soft hint faction alignment implications to give a little more player information and influence on the outcome. To the extent this was done... backseat driving works ya'll!
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
I'm not High, You're High!, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 15min, two passes
I know I just said two passes, but this is a one playthrough game. It pretty crisply tells you exactly what it is up front - an exploration/simulation of the grey area between sleep and wake. The presentation is terrific - swirling backgrounds of symbolic dream images or sleepiness-contorted real world fragments. I think the plunging, swirling staircase was my favorite. It also plays with font and layout in intriguing and evocative ways very much adhering to its mission statement.
The story it tells is drowning in specificity, to its great benefit. It’s not trying to be a general dream state, with shadowy details that might or might not resonate with you the reader. It presents a protagonist of specific experiences, well and tightly described, then sleepily distorts those vignettes. That is its true power. Those specific details are our entry into this halfway-state. Only by understanding what clear looks like to we appreciate the depths of murky. I was swept along in its thrall, and happily report it delivers its intent with panache and confidence.
My first playthrough left me in a happy fog, kind of like an hour into an evening of edibles. Uh, so I’m told. Always leave them wanting more, right? Well, when I want more, I want MORE. In this case, that meant revisiting this short work.
Peppered throughout the proceedings are occasions where you get to select sleep v wakefulness. I decided to poke a bit, see what those choices amounted to. This was a mistake. During first playthrough, my selections had everything to do with the ebb and flow of the dreamstate. Where did it FEEL like I was going. That was cool.
Second time, deliberately playing with it, it looked to me like those choices had no effect on the narrative. Worse, the way I determined that was making a choice, then going back and making the other choice. Sometimes this was not possible, but when it was I detected no difference in the subsequent text. It didn’t seem to matter which choice you made. Except it did, because making a choice and rolling with it kept you in the flow of the piece. Stutter-stepping back and forth shattered that calm and effectively destroyed the mood of the piece. Which was really its whole point!
Learn from my mistakes, team. This is a really cool one-off experience. Like my oft-cited butterfly, examining it closely wrecks it.
Mystery, Inc: Shaggy. You know why.
Vibe: Pre-Munchies Fog
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : What would I do if it were my project? Good question, it is very accomplished at going after its goals. I think I would expand the use of music. Ambient sounds often try to reflect the current scene, but their transitions to new scenes are usually abrupt. Rather than disrupt the flow, I think I would commit to an unbroken, dreamy soundtrack. Music could powerfully underline the mood it is going for. Even better if you could engineer smooth thematic changes as the game progresses and avoid those jarring cuts.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Teenage Horny Space Marine... Somethings, May 10, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 30 min
Up front, the game told me this was part of an ongoing series to which I had no prior exposure. These disclaimers immediately prompt the question, ‘Am I too background disadvantaged to appreciate this?’ My success rate with these kinds of things is pretty high - Series like Little Match Girl and Lady Thalia notably ease new players in without friction and quickly get us in the swim.
Beseech didn’t quite achieve those heights. Interestingly though, for a while, it used that opacity to its advantage, creating an interesting frisson between a world that of course knew who our Power Throuple was, and me who was desperately trying to catch up. If I’m honest though, that frisson was kind of an artificial boost. There were some narrative choices and gameplay choices that didn’t play for me, and absent that ‘gotta figure out what’s going on here!’ charge, would have tired of it much sooner than I did.
The first narrative sin, for me, was the Power Throuple themselves. Cast as uber-Space-Marines who were so valuable that military structure bent over backwards to accommodate their flagrant insubordination. You know what that kind of double standard does to unit discipline? No, the work does not know. And worse, the Throuple were so, so, so smug about it. About the only time I can tolerate this kind of archetype is either when they subvert their competence somehow, or when we fast forward into outlandish pulp adventure. Beseech did neither.
The second narrative sin, though perhaps specific to new readers, was that their identity was revealed so offhandedly, so late in the story, that it was very much a ‘burying the lead’ moment. They are (Spoiler - click to show)Horny Space Demons! Maybe I could have learned that a lot earlier, certainly before they go on a mission? The reveal was so vastly underplayed as to effectively be anti-climax.
The last narrative sin was lack of interesting conflict. They were presented at the jump as final-resort weapons of irresistible effectiveness. They were employed as such. Sure enough, they lived up to that reputation. There were no reversals, no intricate plans, not even any portrayal of HOW irresistible they were. Hell, there wasn’t even any conflict - (Spoiler - click to show)the antagonist surrendered without protest, and in fact went out of his way to say how awesome they were. Uncharitably, the arc of the piece was ‘We are awesome. The enemy agrees. Now reward us!’
Now, as part of an ongoing series of games, maybe this isn’t so terrible? Maybe this is just a low-stakes interlude (as suggested by introduction) between high stakes adventures. It’s not unreasonable to see it that way. For me though, as a standalone story without background literacy, it did not work.
The narrative was not my only friction with this piece. The Twine link-select UI also chafed at me. Visually, it was attractive. A futuristic font with unique highlighting on choice links. The problem was, there were two types of links. The first was an aside - some comment on things going on. These were actually the best part of the piece. The wry aside observations from the protagonist were funny in their often blatant horniness. The second kind of link was the ‘proceed with story’ link. I did not detect any links of the ‘affect the narrative’ variety. The problem was that the words chosen as links gave no clue which type they were- not in phrasing or position. An example (choices bolded):
"There was no hail of gunfire, no clouds of smoke and war. Instead we were greeted with something shocking. Something none of us thought we would ever see in our life times."
You might expect from that construct that the first link would provide some additional detail, while the second would naturally push the scene forward. No, it was the opposite. The work did this ALL THE TIME. This example is somewhat atypical anyway, in that more often, the highlighted words seemed arbitrary. Like if they were ‘There was no’ and ‘thought we would’ in the above sentence. Even worse, many times there were multiple paragraphs, where the natural thing to do would be select links as you read them, except the first link might move the story forward and expect you to have read the whole page! Independent of any narrative quibbles, this link confusion drove me to distraction.
Between the character, plot and UI choices, this was not for me. I could certainly see this playing better in context of a larger series, and hope longtime fans appreciate this more.
Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Horny Space Demons
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, the UI is where I would put my energy. It is a linear novel of sorts. I would give a lot more thought to the link architecture and its impact on how the piece is read. I would especially make sure those nifty asides are consumed in a natural way.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Always Be Fighting Facism, May 9, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/4/24
Playtime: 1 hr, long civil war ending, but hey, no Hitler!
There’s a lot of folks ready to draw parallels between the rise of Nazism and current US politics. I’m not historically literate enough to contribute to that dialogue, but boy am I intrigued by (and sympathetic to) that analysis. My antennae twitch whenever the topic comes up. I ALSO happen to dig modern board games, particularly card-driven political games. So this entry could not have been more engineered to my fascinations unless maybe it included 80’s slasher icons. Boy would I play the HELL out of a Jason v Hitler game.
It wasn’t immediately clear what I was in for. Given the intimidating plurality of German political parties, each with their own permuted relationships and alliances, and public sentiment percentages that suggested a fine grained-navigation of cold algorithms, I feared my historical illiteracy would be a prohibitive handicap. Thankfully, and also dauntingly, there is a library of background reading to set the player up for what follows. The game had prerequisite reading! I don’t think I was at ease until I saw the Deck/Hand paradigm. Turns out the transition from apprehensive to ecstatic is super easy.
What followed was gameplay that echoed any number of cardboard experiences, requiring juggling party and government decks (each presenting a series of unattractive choices), a limited resources pool, and unstable political alliances to hopefully keep the country steady enough not to give the Nazis an opening. History has kind of foreshadowed how hard THAT was going to be. I was smitten after the first two cards played and just totally immersed from there, nevermind that my choices had uncertain impacts. Nevermind that some special powers were more opaque than others. Nevermind that most of the historical cast were unknown to me. I was fighting Nazis fer cryin’ out loud - no time to bemoan fog of war, just start swinging!
I cannot speak to the historical accuracy of the thing. It certainly presented as well researched. I cannot speak to the compromises, algorithmic or otherwise, made to facilitate gameplay. I can say my hour was a white knuckle series of challenges, moral quandries, and frustration with my fellow Germans. Holy Crap was it compelling. Behind it all danced the tantalizing ‘well this does/doesn’t have a modern US parallel’ dialogue.
This is clearly the gamiest entry in SpringThing24. The narrative is emergent, as most well-designed, themed board games are. Is it Interactive Fiction? Technically, yes, but maybe in a way that unnecessarily muddies what we mean by IF when there are crisper ways to summarize this experience. Is that a lick on it? Oh, hell no. My playthrough ended in civil war, because I was unwilling to cede to the Nazis. I got chills as I let the modern US parallels sink in.
This thing is bookmarked. ABFF. Always Be Fighting Facism.
Mystery, Inc: A construct this intricate? Fred
Vibe: Boardgamegeek Top 10
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project, I would Kickstart this thing as a prestige-format board game. Wooden pieces, thick cards, the whole nine yards. Yeah, I’d need to lose the opacity of algorithms, and streamline mechanisms to adjust public sentiment, but small price to pay. Maybe as a backer bonus thresshold, provide US 2024 alternate decks.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Storytime Slowdown, May 9, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 20min, finished
I kinda love that there is a “children’s story” sub-genre of IF. We’re dealing with the breadth of human imagination, IF should have ALL THE THINGS, and our chronally challenged progeny deserve the magic as much as anyone. That said, there is no getting around the fact that I am not a child. Historically, I mentally conjure a childish avatar in my head when engaging these works, to assess how these things are landing. We just have a grand old time goofing together, this mental construct and I, like the brain-damaged maniac I am.
I found it harder to do with this work, and I think I know why. It wasn’t the presentation, at least not the graphical presentation. The excellent ‘painted’ backgrounds and animated-cell characters are Bambi-esque, immediately setting a friendly and welcoming tone. The setup is classic misunderstood-protagonist-winning-through-kindness. Revolutionary? No, though maybe in modern times we can use a lot more of it.
The UI paradigm though is punishing, and its primary sin is a common one: injudicious use of timed text. Text plays out sloooowly, not unlike someone narrating a book aloud to a pre-reading audience. Ok, thematic, except absent the verbal intonations and performance that make that tolerable it is just sloooow. Even if you try to speed it up by space-barring, subsequent text blocks remain delayed even after the current words are flashed up. Both choices are jarring. According to my mental avatar, kids are LESS patient than adults, not more so, so this choice is doubly defeating.
The UI has other issues too - the text box requires scrolling, but it is invisible so it is not immediately obvious WHEN it needs scrolling. This makes for some early delays in an already snail paced progression. Even a tinted, transparent box would have clued that better. (There are also a noticeable amount of typos in the text it bears observing.)
Then there is the narrative. There is almost no meaningful interactivity. Yes, you can decline to be helpful, but in a work titled Do Good Deeds … what level of sociopathy are we talking about here? ‘Click to continue’ is useful in IF for sure, but when ‘continue’ means more timed text, its welcome develops some back pressure. More to the point, there are a LOT of interactions. Story telling tradition recognizes the power of threes - Establish, Reinforce, Conclude/Twist. This is an especially powerful technique in kid’s lit. Deeds is embracing the power of… tens? Ten vignettes different in detail, but samey in result? Another dimension of drag.
All that said, the core presentation has a lot going for it. The individual interactions are varied enough to express a breadth of generous problem solving, with a large cast of woodland friends. The UI issues seem addressable to tighten down the experience. I could see this pushed into shape for my youthful avatar.
Mystery, Inc: Talking animals? It’s Scooby
Vibe: Kids’ Lit
Polish: Rough
Gimme the Wheel! : We talked about the UI and typos above. If my project certainly my first stop. On its heels though, I think clubbing the encounters into three groups of three, where the results of kindness escalate the protagonist’s acceptance in the larger loops would better leverage classic storytelling BKMs (Best Known Methods).
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Emotional Support Ghost, May 9, 2024Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review
WARNING: Review is from an early, incomplete version of the game
Played: 4/3/24
Playtime: 2.25 hrs >7 fails until win?
I made a good-faith attempt to spoiler-protect this thing, but my responses are so specific… caveat emptor.
New as I am to the modern hobby, I am occasionally blindsided by obvious-in-retrospect conceits that are likely not surprising to others. I am familiar with the fanfic phenomenon - enthusiastic amateurs writing about copyrighted properties simply because they love it so much. It should not be a surprise that fanIF also exists in the world. Presumably less porn-focused, but hey I’m not judging either way.
This is a fanIF riffing on Balder’s Gate 3, a D&D-based AAA console RPG. I have no relationship with that property (Alan Wake/Remedy Games is more my speed), but c’mon I grew up in the modern world, I know what D&D is. Dream ably catches me up on what I need to know to provide a much tighter bottle scenario: escape a one room mental tomb with a vampire compatriot. It also lets you pick your D&D Class which, hey, if you invite me into the party you’re getting a Rogue. You just are. If you didn’t want a Rogue you shouldn’t’a invited me. That’s on you.
I ended up on roller coaster with this thing, and I’ll use an early quote to shepherd us through:
"This game does presuppose that your character cares what happens
to Astarion [the vampire party member in question -jj]. If you
don't like him (which is a very legitimate opinion to have, he is
an asshole) you should probably not play this game."
I laughed out loud encountering this the first time, as that could easily have been my knee-jerk had the game not warned me to play along. So I played along. The one room escape is a fiendishly clever Dark Room. Due to reasons, you have to teach yourself how to interact with the world, including seeing, speaking and touching. As you teach yourself, you haltingly explore a pretty spare crypt and have to figure out how to escape. I played in ‘Balanced’ mode, and it is CHALLENGING! Your companion’s health leaches away every day, and if Astarion dies, you die. You can slow the bleeding by talking and comforting him, but every moment you spend doing that you are NOT improving your abilities to facilitate escape. Events happen around you to increase the challenge, and there are few clues what the ‘right’ mix of activities is. He died in a half hour the first time.
But I was metaphorically trapped in this puzzle! The balancing act was interesting and fun. Deducing cause and effect, what is important, where things might go, USING MY ROGUE POWERS, all of this was magnetic in gameplay. I cycled more times, almost maniacally poking into new corners here, engaging the poor sap differently there, leveling up at different rates, always learning. It was Time Looping. I was Time Looping and I loved it more and more except…
…except it became more and more clear that the way to success was to (Spoiler - click to show)emotionally buttress my fellow prisoner, to slow his decay. Thematically I get it, its really clever actually. In PRACTICE it was increasingly irritating, on a geometric progression. Not only because I was spending greater swaths of my day just (Spoiler - click to show)holding his hand, when I could be, y’know, THIEVING SOME ESCAPE TOOLS. But also, with every loop, I got smarter while he didn’t get an iota less Needy. If anything, by keeping him alive longer, I was treated to increasingly unwanted codependent behavior! Yeah, I’m trying to set up a finely calibrated sequence of sensory growth, exploration and guard interaction, but BY ALL MEANS LETS TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS FIRST.
Look, I KNOW it’s thematic. I KNOW it’s plot justified in the most elegant way. I KNOW it was slyly subverting dungeon adventure tropes for emotional narrative and an extremely vital exploration of the trauma of solitary confinement. I don’t even begrudge well-chosen gameplay compromises like after 150 days only NOW does his decay escalate; or famously immortal vampires cracking under pressure of advancing time. My problem is, after looping so many times, I was pot committed to a High Adventure rescue. I was not receptive to a segue to (Spoiler - click to show)slashfic. If that was the piece’s aim, it certainly held its cards close while I built contrary expectations. Additionally, I think there is a missing piece. It is clear what Astarion needs from the PC. It is not clear at all what Astarion provides the PC, emotionally or otherwise, why the PC should care. Maybe the original IP provides this? For a noob like me though, by repeating his neediness over and over via gameplay loops, it curdles to Cling. Have we not established at this point that I am an emotionless husk? This cannot be surprising to you.
Inevitably, I saw the writing on the wall. There was no High Fantasy rescue in my future. I needed to do what I needed to do to get him out of the fox hole. So I hid the pity in my eyes, looped 3 or 4 more times (over two hours total) and nursed him through. Things seemed to be progressing, and then ACT 1 ended.
Ok, that was progress! We didn’t die! (Spoiler - click to show)His clammy hand was clingy and we hadn’t escaped yet, but things were moving in the right direction at least. I had seen in Menu that there were three acts. I had presumed I got to play all three of them. Nossir. It seems the other two are not implemented yet? So after all that, the game ended and I DIDN’T EVEN (Spoiler - click to show)ESCAPE??? WHAT THE HELL AM I HOLDING THIS NEBBISH’ HAND FOR THEN???
There was a noise that came out of me I would not have believed I could make. For a game that needed me to care about Astarion, after I had gamely agreed to do so, it went to great lengths to break me of that then just left me twist. I am so sorry, that is just classic Scrappy.
Mystery, Inc: Classic Scrappy
Vibe: Gothic Escape Room
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, I would perhaps engineer a High Fantasy Escape solution that balanced emotional maintenance with daring-do. If that was really anathema to the purpose of the piece (which it well could be), I would better clue the intent up front, then focus on Astarion - pay attention to how looping affects his character and give the player reason to care, rather than demand it as a prerequisite.
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
In deference to the idea that this is both incomplete and clearly not for me, I am omitting my rating from the average.
1-10 of 186 | Next | Show All