Reviews by BitterlyIndifferent
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Vivid and uncomfortable, December 16, 2023This work was phenomenally well-written, which made it a challenge to enjoy.
The Best Man is initially told from the perspective of Aiden. He has been asked to stand in for the best man at Laura’s wedding, and that forces him to confront unresolved feelings about their past relationship. Their story is vivid and uncomfortable.
For the first few chapters, it looked like the author was a “Nice Guy” who had created an autobiography to process events from his own life. I was concerned that I’d spend the entire time watching someone wallowing in destructive behavior.
Then the perspective shifted, and I realized that the author wasn’t a self-pitying doormat — just unnaturally good at creating narrative voices. Laura’s wedding is viewed from several perspectives, and each one them feels distinct and internally consistent.
The Best Man also uses some clever writing and supporting mechanics to handle its character changes. Colored hyperlinks indicate that the reader has assumed a new perspective, while Aiden’s eye-catching white suit allows readers to track him through the scene.
The story is advanced with dialogue choices, and those decisions are referenced in later passages. I couldn’t tell whether it meant that I had any control over the narrative, but I managed to get Aiden to a final state that seemed healthier for him. On the other hand, the ending may have been more dark than it appeared.
It’s possible that Laura’s wedding could have ended quite differently, but I lack the endurance that would necessary to find out.
Well implemented, but there were some player/character disconnects , December 10, 2023Players steer Mandy, the protagonist, into a creepy old house. The rest of the story involves trying to find a way out. I thought that the puzzles were engaging, but the story felt like the triangle of identities was out of alignment.
The player and the protagonist of The House on Highfield Lane are kept separate from each other. This happens through narrative details, like the third-person perspective of the writing, and also through design choices that isolate the player’s knowledge from the character’s knowledge.
I knew that brevity was the soul of wit, but Mandy didn’t know that, so one of the puzzles involved guiding her to a place where she could discover the answer. On the other hand, contraptions in the house were described in ways that made them seem familiar to Mandy and entirely alien to me.
As she explored the House on Highfield Lane, Mandy might have been fascinated by the experiments in reversing death and transferring consciousness. Maybe she was horrified. The narrative distance left me feeling detached and unmotivated. Escaping from the house became her problem, not mine.
Overall, this was a smoothly implemented parser experience. Many aspects of the house were confusing, but they were intentionally confusing and bound by consistent rules. I didn’t need to spend a lot of time guessing obscure verbs, and the parser generally understood what I was trying to do. The technical craftsmanship was solid, and the narrative choices might appeal to the right audience.
"Simple" isn't always easy to deliver., December 10, 2023Brave Bear is a child’s toy with a solemn duty to keep its owner safe. I liked the concept, I enjoyed playing with toys, and I liked the goal of bringing friends together to protect someone that they cared about. I just wish that some of the clues were easier to understand.
As a toy, the bear has a simple view of the world. As people who quote Steve Jobs will tell you, “simple” is difficult to implement. Brave Bear’s narrative voice describes an ordinary family home from a new perspective that felt unnecessarily limiting and confusing in a few places.
Some of this entry’s other design choices were unexpected — two toys have abilities that are hinted at but never used in the game, and a few of the locations have exhaustive lists of exits that are never used. They might have been red herrings, but that seems out of place in a story where the puzzles are so simple.
The experience reminded me of Samurai Lapin, which was an animated flash movie on the internet from (checks notes) more than 20 years ago.
…now I just feel old.
It's like a Medieval Boy Scout Simulator, December 10, 2023This choice-based adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a niche piece — almost a Medieval Boy Scout Simulator — and I love it. To quote one of the story’s options: “I’m all in on this. Let’s do it.”
The original story of Sir Gawain makes no goddamn sense. This work, written with choicescript, offers decisions that put Gawain’s thinking in a more relatable context.
The reader is expected to uphold the virtues of a knight, remaining pious, courteous, magnanimous, and chaste throughout the entire journey while also embodying the spirit of fellowship.
The expectations make Gawain’s predicament more understandable: How can good manners keep you safe from an immortal giant?
I appreciated how much extra writing was necessary to humanize Gawain’s adventure. And the story notes many of the reader’s choices, referencing them in future passages.
However, King Arthur's Christmas Feast doesn’t have a lot of branches, which means that people who stray from the correct path might find it less entertaining. I had fun pretending to be a rule-abiding poindexter, but I can see how that might not appeal to everyone.
A courtroom drama with many shades of gray, December 10, 2023The thing about The Corsham Witch Trial is that it contains no actual witches — and that’s fine, there weren’t any at the Salem Witch Trials, either. However, the blurb’s mention of a “worryingly urgent and irritatingly cryptic” request gets a bit confusing alongside other interactive fiction stories of magic and supernatural horror.
This work is a cleverly written courtroom drama. The author describes it as “a transparent attempt to enliven a disjointed and gimmick-laden manuscript with a few distracting interactive elements,” but I really enjoyed how its story was framed. Court transcripts and other documents are presented as .PDF files, and a workplace colleague asks questions about the evidence after it has been reviewed.
Every step of the Corsham Witch Trial works very hard to maintain an atmosphere of uncertainty. When the player analyzes the evidence to support a specific interpretation, their colleague explains how it can also support a different outcome.
Unfortunately, after a skillful buildup of tension and ambivalence, the entire exercise proves to be futile: It doesn’t really matter what the player thinks. The case is closed, the truth is discovered, and newspapers report the results.
After such rigorously enforced neutrality, I was expecting a twist that could suggest alternative sequences of events. Instead, I got moralizing about doing the right thing even when it’s pointless.
The Corsham Witch Trial is well-executed fiction, but doesn't end up being very interactive.
A tense decision, but a tedious setup., November 27, 2023The conflict at the heart of this entry is gripping: You are the only person on board the International Space Station, and you must determine which of the two newest arrivals is human. Will you make the correct decision and save the human race, or will you be tricked by robotic agents of destruction?
It’s a delightfully tense sequence, but the problem is that you have to wade through a few thousand words of apocalypse fan fiction — my least favorite variety of fan fiction — before you get there.
I would have preferred to see fewer passages concluding with a single link. This author is clearly capable of creating meaningful story branches, but most of the time, they didn't.
In Twine, the story diagram looks like an enormous vertical column.
Many of the scenes in The TURING Test should be familiar for people who enjoyed With Folded Hands, Colossus: The Forbin Project, the Terminator franchise, and even The Mitchells vs. The Machines. If there was a larger message about intelligence, morality, or the ethics of interacting with sentient beings, I missed it.
Ultimately, your choice to determine who can access the space station will decide whether the story is disaster fiction or apocalypse fiction. It turns out that they’re separate genres.
Worth checking out if you're into Lovecraftian horror., November 27, 2023Beneath Fenwick is the Lovecraft-adjacent story of a remote New England town full of sinister, malformed humans lurking just out of sight. The author's goal was to create an experience that is “primarily choice-based but plays like a parser game.”
On the one hand, I didn’t encounter the branching storylines that are seen in a choice-based game. There is only one “correct” sequence of links that brings an audience through to the end of the story. Readers are free to explore detours on their journey, and they're also encouraged to save often, because the wrong links will end things early.
On the other hand, I didn’t receive the clues that a parser might provide when players struggle with specific puzzles. Beneath Fenwick has a “combine” command that feels a bit vague — sometimes it involves using one object on another, and at other times it merges objects together, but the error message is always “That combination does not work!”
I respect the amount of effort that went into implementing and polishing Beneath Fenwick. It’s a smooth experience! I didn’t encounter any broken links or inescapable dead ends, and things functioned consistently.
My main issue was that the interface overshadowed the story, encouraging me to ignore the text and hunt for links. This problem has been discussed in Interactive Fiction communities before.
The writing in Beneath Fenwick is consistent, and fans of this genre might enjoy themselves. I recommend experiencing it for yourself to draw your own conclusions.
Kidney Kwest might be trying to do too much at once., November 27, 2023I enjoyed the writing in Kidney Kwest. It has the unavoidable “after-school special” tone that you would expect from the subject matter involved, but there’s a clear challenge with some basic puzzles and multiple outcomes. I was also entertained by the Kidney Fairy's sense of humor.
I don’t normally quote the bible, but Kidney Kwest makes me think of the one about trying to serve two masters. This work is trying to do a bit more than that when you consider that it’s:
-reinforcing key messages about taking medications and avoiding specific foods,
-giving people something to do during their weekly dialysis treatments,
-engaging an audience that is 8–18 years old,
-showcasing the “Perplexity” Natural Language Prototype that was designed by Eric Zinda, and
-being judged in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Clearly, some tradeoffs have been made.
The overall experience reminded me of AI dungeon — specifically, the part where I endured a noticeable lag between submitting a command and receiving a report from that command. This added extra stress to my personal Kidney Kwest, because a substantial part of the gameplay involves finding food and taking medication before bad things happen.
(I knew that the delay in sending and receiving responses wouldn’t really affect my character’s health, but it was rough having to wait through a sequence of commands before I could take care of immediate needs. And then it was only a matter of time before hunger became an issue again.)
I’d call this entry a functional proof of concept, but the real question is how Kidney Kwest is received by its target audience. If it encourages people to lead healthier lives, then my opinions (and its final score in IFcomp) are irrelevant.
An adventure that could use more detail, November 3, 2023This fantasy adventure is light on details -- the protagonist's brother feels like less of a family member and more of a placeholder to provide motivation for the journey.
I did appreciate the number of choices that Enveloping Darkness offers. The passages are short, and the reader is presented with something to do at the end of each one.
However, it would have been helpful if choices hinted at possible outcomes. I got killed early while trying to rescue an innocent victim, and at one point I spent two inexplicable months in a boat on the lake. It was a complete surprise when the story ended and I was praised for saving the realm.
Enveloping Darkness also includes several fantasy creatures that don’t feel connected to the narrative. Like the orcs used as generic outsiders: some are helpful, some are violent, and some are infested with parasitic brain worms. You could replace them with Canadians, and the narrative would be completely unchanged.
Overall, it could have used some developmental edits.
A lot of minigames with little in the way of a connecting story., November 3, 2023The blurb for this title encapsulates its entire story: the player is at a retro gaming convention in Las Vegas. Although the convention lasts for 2 “days,” you have as much time as you want to explore everything.
The author has pulled off some feats of programming that are far beyond my own Twine capabilities. You can play 3 different games at the convention and gamble on 4 different activities in the casino. Each of the 7 options presents a mini-game in its own right, including one that is a functional parser experience.
But just because you can do something, that doesn't mean doing it is a good idea.
RetroCon 2021 works as a proof of concept, but I would have enjoyed a narrative arc that offered more than arriving at a location and leaving when I got bored.
(To be fair, engaging narratives are difficult to implement! Especially when you’re making a game about playing other games. It took a lot of work to build RetroCon2021, and that deserves to be recognized.)
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