Reviews by forgepoet
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Interesting, Creepy, March 1, 2014I enjoyed this. It's effective and fun.
It reminded me of an old school CYOA, with branches that depict different realities, rather than different aspects of the same reality. You're building a story here, and your choices will affect it, but you won't have much idea what's going to happen based on what you've picked. This actually works pretty well with the genre --you're supposed to feel helpless and uncertain, even a little foolish at times. And there are a number of subtle variations along each path that make the story seem coherent and put together even on repeated plays.
(Spoiler - click to show)The author somehow managed to create a CYOA with the feel and effect of watching a handful of different horror movies. Your job, as the player, is to watch and occasionally flip the channel to see what other movies are playing. And it really does work in this context.
Overall, I really felt more as if I were assembling a story than playing a game, but it was an enjoyable process.
Visually NSFW, Not Much Else, March 1, 2014Wow. A "NSFW" label on a work of interactive fiction REALLY does not do enough to warn folks that an explicit (Spoiler - click to show)(foot-long erect penis) photo will be displayed. Seemed especially out of place given that none of the other branches (as far I could find) had anything visually explicit in them even though the text says you're sending adult photos. I guess I should be grateful the author didn't put a hardcore porn clip in the middle.
No characterization, no descriptions, no real plot, no structure. No actual sex, just bored guys sending pictures to each other. Just one long, dumb excuse to show us a "shocking" picture. Maybe it's trying to say something, but what, I don't know.
Cute Idea Horribly Obscured By Poor Implementation, February 28, 2014It's a cute idea with cute art that would be perfect to share with kids if it weren't written in near gibberish. It's obvious the author enjoyed writing it and knew what he was trying to say, and plot events happen in a logical way, which actually makes the butchering of the English language far more frustrating that it would be otherwise.
Mistakes like "unfortionatly" and sentences like "You went in and saw the creature with some kind of sharp thing making a hole in the glass, then put some beautiful jewelries in the sack! but you sack the sack has a cat picture on it, and you thought, it must be for me!" show the author wasn't even trying.
Technical implementation is equally terrible but at least it's simple -- directions are used for all but a few objects ("go down to push the button", for example). This should have been written as a CYOA.
To the author; please, please find a more suitable system (have you looked at Twine?), proofread it, get someone else to proofread it (twice), and make this the game it should be.
Difficult, Brilliant, February 28, 2014Fair warning, I've tried to use the spoiler tag but I may have inadvertently left something in. You should go play this first before reading a single review anyway!
I enjoyed this immensely. In a lot of ways, this reminded me of an Ursula Le Guin novel (The Left Hand of Darkness in particular), with the focus shifted from gender divisions to -- well, it's complicated, but brilliantly put together. (Spoiler - click to show)The Colonists are asked what price they will pay, in terms of which faction of their people (and thus which facet of their culture) they will sacrifice, for the survival of their entire race. The humans are asked the opposite question; what part of their culture will they pay to save a single suffering segment of their population.
(Spoiler - click to show)Add to this that each race has already faced the choice to destroy one group of their people to save the rest, and made very different decisions that shaped their cultures, and that the historical decision that most people would want to be the correct one was most likely (but may not have been) disastrous, and that everyone involved except the hero is aware of these ramifications, and you have a lot to think about.
We don't get to see much, if any, of the emotions of any of the characters, including the protagonist. (Spoiler - click to show)He isn't a blank slate; he has been personally affected by the Plague, and the choices made that led to it. And his life has been changed, maybe even saved, by choices others have made for him. But, despite glimpses of his history, we are never told overtly how he feels about anything of importance. This is a case where detachment from the main character is an effective technique; the distance allowed me to see the facets of the situation without undue emotional weight.
That is part of what made it so difficult to decide what to do; if the protagonist's sympathies were clear and aligned, we could simply choose to "do what our character would do" and thus feel no responsibility for the choice (as we are urged by the protagonist's superior, who goes so far as to absolve us of any guilt if we do "follow orders"). Instead, we are forced to decide on our own, using the information we've gleaned from our exploration of the world and the NPCs (and the more thorough the exploration, the more meaningful the choice will be, though never clear cut). We can certainly choose to make the decision we think the hero would make, based on what we know of him, but it will not be handed to us.
There's a fine line between "make the best choice you can with the limited information you have" and "eh, it's impossible to say what'll happen, just pick something". I think this came down on the side of the former, but it could easily swing to the other side if you missed important information or didn't explore enough or didn't catch on right away that these NPCs were not going to stand around feeding you information on demand all day.
I'm terrible at timed puzzles and worse at dialogue-based story advancement (I'm the person dialogue menus were invented for). I love that this was accounted for; I still made it to the end by doing logical IF-y things, just with a lot less information than a better player would have had. I could have made a decision blindly at that point, but I decided not to spoil the ending with lack of context. So I restarted with a walkthrough to consult on the trickier bits, mainly a couple of conversations near the beginning before I caught on to the nuances of communication. Hint: (Spoiler - click to show)You often get just one shot at someone; the most productive next step is often clued heavily in their dialogue. Experiment with general responses like "agree" or "disagree".
It took several hours of mulling it over to really grasp the significance of the main story and to appreciate the layers built into it and the frame around it. EVERYONE in this game has an agenda and a past that influences them today, and none of these agendas are petty or foolish, and none are entirely right or entirely wrong -- much like their opinions of each other. (Spoiler - click to show)There are also no absolutes and no guarantees; no ending promises that history will prove this the right choice, a theme mirrored by the human story of the plague. And on this scale, of millions and millions of lives, that ambiguity feels appropriate.
By the end I was greedily lingering over any little thing I could interact with just to learn a tiny bit more, checking just one more time to see if changing any aspect might open up another ending, even reading the Club Floyd Transcript to see what others might have found that I missed. And requiring that my loved ones play too so we can discuss it. Not sure there's higher praise than that.
Surprising, February 27, 2014So. First impression: this is going to be awful. Starts out at a desk in a featureless office, with a hero who has a ridiculously banal quest. Yep. This is going to be awful.
And... it wasn't. Things rapidly become more exciting, in a web comic meets action movie kind of way that plays it pretty straight (if sometimes a bit over the top). The characters are likable (although flattened into easily recognizable roles) and there's a real sense of the emotions between them. It's obvious this is a prologue of sorts to a much larger story, and sometimes backstory is sacrificed for immediate action (which I find preferable to the alternative).
The design is solid, and most choices lead to actual branches, some that loop, some that don't. Choices are meaningful but the "best" path is not always obvious (and sometimes sub-optimal choices work out in surprising ways). I could have done with less author abuse of the characters, but I read that as more of a self-defense mechanism than anything else.
The whole piece needs a proofreader to polish it. The author does a lot of things right, and I wouldn't want to polish until it lost what makes it unique -- just enough to take some of the unintentional rough spots out.
More than worth the time to play, as long as you don't mind profanity and are willing to suspend a little disbelief.
(Small) (Spoiler - click to show)It's not that I don't enjoy thirty-two step convoluted brain-meltingly hard unlock the door because it's there puzzles that require six sub-puzzles to be solved first (without accidentally alerting the NPC who is wandering around), it's just that sometimes you want to beat up a bunch of thugs as a solo one man army after making a single bold choice. While on crutches, no less. It's a credit to the author that I came out of this scene feeling badass and not silly.
Appalling, February 24, 2014If there were zero stars, this would be the time for it.
There's an error message on the first screen. Nothing is implemented except exits. The content is unfunny, unpleasant and repetitive. The dialogue is hard-coded into the room descriptions.
I've already wasted too much time on this, but hopefully it'll save someone else the hassle.
Pretty Surprising Given Its Age, February 24, 2014I spent a large part of the day tinkering with some very old school games, and when I saw this one had an Inform port, I jumped at the chance to see if it would hold up to modern standards with a better engine.
The answer is "sort of"; the world and implementation are solidly three stars, but the unfairness of some of the puzzles makes it hard to appreciate. It's pretty obvious that the game is designed to take a couple of weeks of exhaustive searching to solve, but the plot really wasn't interesting enough for me to want to devote that much energy to it.
It must have been an innovative game by the standards of the time, with NPCs who move around on schedules and a plot that actually drives the exploration and advances as you play. The puzzle of managing your heroine's time isn't overly difficult and adds life to the world, but the NPC dialogues are unfortunately limited and fiddly, and often require very specific phrasing to trigger the required result.
(Spoiler - click to show)And I don't know about you, but after crossing a moor in a rainstorm, climbing down a steep, muddy cliff, crossing a raging river, reaching a safe place, lighting a fire, and heating up some grub, I INSIST on walking all the way back to town because I forgot to order coffee at noon and thus lacked a spoon. Eat with my fingers? What am I, a barbarian? This is even funnier when you find out that the heroine is so frail she collapses from exhaustion if she spends the night without a blanket.
I'm proud of myself for finishing it, even though I had to dig into the source pretty hard to find a few hidden items (I somehow didn't think to search, look at, and examine every single piece of scenery in every single room just in case a plot item might be hidden there. And each action uses up a minute of game time).
It's not the game's fault that gamers expect a lot more today, but it still has to be judged against modern games because those are what it's competing with for a gamer's attention. And I would say this is worthy of your attention, but don't be surprised if you have to sneak a peek at the source eventually.
A Good Puzzler, But Not Exactly As Advertised, February 23, 2014For a game titled "Dracula", this starts off the way you'd expect, as a spooky, incredibly atmospheric piece, with the hero arriving in a small seaside town after dark carrying nothing but a letter from the endangered Lucy Westenra. Terrifying supernatural forces array against you as you seek to understand what's going on and locate your only ally.
And then it goes all sideways. It's still a lot of fun, but it's not Dracula.
(Spoiler - click to show)Essentially, by the second chapter, you've somehow wandered into someone's Ravenloft campaign. It's as if the writer wrote the first chapter, took a few years off, reread it, and decided it was good but needed more pirates. So it becomes a creepy dungeon crawl, with some very dark fantasy creatures to encounter, and a few vignettes tied together by the four mystical whatsits you're trying to recover.
The game took me about three hours and was challenging, but I finished it on my own without a walkthrough, which means it wasn't that hard. A number of puzzles are timed, and you only have one shot (and any interactions, including "look" and "examine", cost you time). Undos were sufficient to handle most issues, but saving when you enter a new area is wise.
Deaths are plentiful and you get used to it. NPCs are marginal and mostly there for shock value or to dispense a few specific bits of advice. The game's design is fantastic, a cleverly laid out series of rooms that require careful exploration and unlocking of further areas with actions, nicely punctuated with clever shocks. The ending was satisfactory, but I would have liked to learn more about the hero's backstory; after some time to think about it, I think I've puzzled out how all the pieces go together to fit with the ending, but I'm not at all certain about it.
There were a few typos (the author had issues with "it's" and "its", especially in the first chapter), and one glaringly misnamed item (Spoiler - click to show)(a dustbin implemented as "bin"; meaning the first time I tried to look into it I got a generic message that sent me looking for something else to interact with). Otherwise, nothing too difficult, as long as you remember to examine each object when you get it for any specialty verbs.
I would say that this is a game worth spending a few hours with, as long as you're aware that what you're getting, while good, is not what necessarily what you might expect. And that you will end the game with more questions than answers.
College Hijinks Ahead, February 22, 2014As much as I enjoyed the first game in the series, this one is better. The author has kept a lot of what made the first game fun and improved on many of the things that needed improving. Unfortunately, he also introduced some new issues, notably a ridiculous number of typos, including one in a room name.
First, the things that are the same. The hero is still ridiculously talented in the erotic arts, still has a one-track mind, and is still surrounded by women who need favors done and are willing to repay in kind. The world still runs on porn logic.
However, there's now a plot goal outside of having sex. The situations are fairly stock fantasy, with a lot of loving nods to the movies that define the college romp genre. Picking a frat name right out of the gate was a nice touch and immediately told me what to expect.
The map is still large, but the areas are better defined and few are wasted. Descriptions of rooms and scenery are functional and do give a sense of the hero's personality, such as it is. The NPCs are just as varied and individual as in the first game, but more mature and assertive.
The puzzles always move the story forward but rely a bit too much on searching and revisiting old locations. No guess the verb problems, but I did find run into what seems like an oversight more than a bug; nobody will answer the door at the Dean's house unless you (Spoiler - click to show)get rid of all your twenties first.
This is definitely a puzzle game; the puzzles aren't a tacked on afterthought but a crucial part of the game. Fortunately, the time spent solving most puzzles (the ones that don't directly involve sex) provides a needed down time in between more intense scenes.
All in all, one of the better adult games I've played, and worthwhile as IF, too.
A Mix Of AIF and Puzzler, February 22, 2014I first played this game a decade ago, and I can safely say it's one of the better AIF titles from that time period even if it doesn't quite hold up to the standards of today. Setting the sex aside, it's a fine puzzler, with puzzles that feel logical and generally intuitive. However, this is definitely a game about sex, with sex as part of some puzzles and as the reward where another game might hand out narrative.
The design is fine, but the implementation is only passable, with that "first-time author" feel (but that's okay, we're not here to look at tables and scenery, are we?). Where the game shines is in the variety of NPCs and the skill the author used when writing them. All have their own personalities (unfortunately too often stereotyped, but a bit less so than you would expect of a school romp), and their responses are varied and unique (and pretty much too eager, but that's the kind of game this is).
The puzzles were generally fair, although there were a couple of actions that really needed more synonyms implemented (Spoiler - click to show)(getting the oregano and climbing through the window).
I definitely recommend this (with a walkthrough handy) as both a look back and as a decent game.
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