Reviews by Sobol
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Minimalist humor, February 2, 2018You know those moments - when, say, in Lost Pig there's absolutely no reason to type BURN PANTS, and the sensible course of action is quite obvious, but you type BURN PANTS - and are totally happy with the results?
Well, this whole game is one of those moments in the purest form.
It's extremely brief. You can see all possible endings in a couple of minutes.
Magical, January 5, 2018Besides being amusing, absorbing, excellently written, cozy and generally making you warm inside, the games by S. Woodson also demonstrate an interesting approach to branching in an interactive story.
There's a sort of contradiction in choice-based puzzleless IF. On one hand, linearity is usually considered a drawback; most players want to feel that their choices really matter and substantially affect what happens, want the game to be truly interactive. On the other hand, in a significantly branching story the player will only see a small part of what's written by the author, can easily miss the best bits; the ratio of the player's enjoyment to the author's labor is low.
It would be great to make the players restart the game and explore all the various plot paths; but motivating them to replay many times and read different variations of the same story requires some serious stimulation.
In the games by S. Woodson - this one, ♥Magical Makover♥ and Beautiful Dreamer - different story branches entwine and interact with each other to form a kind of higher unity; some paths throw light on enigmatic elements of the other paths, make you see your previous game sessions in a new way - and even revisit them because, as it turns out, you didn't pay proper attention to something curious. They are all different elements of the same picture, and you want to see the picture whole.
(Narcolepsy by Adam Cadre utilized the same idea, though less effectively: the crazy guy in the university plaza always gives you hints referring to other storylines.)
In both ♥Magical Makover♥ and Beautiful Dreamer, there's one "main" branch - the one which is central to the picture and which the player is most likely to find first.
In ♥Magical Makover♥, it's the one featured on the cover art - the only one where the protagonist's initial goal is reached. If, say, the player tries three different random products on their first playthrough, they get this branch with the probability of 60%.
In Beautiful Dreamer, it's talking to Cephiros about the moth - which has the highest priority among all the topics the protagonist may discover.
Get Lost!, which is much smaller than the former two games, lacks the "main" branch: all the paths are of equal importance.
Mysterious, November 4, 2017Crocodracula supposedly recreates the feel of American TV shows for kids from the '90s; having little familiarity with those, I was instead reminded of the recent hit series, Gravity Falls. There are similarities: two young protagonists in a small town full of various supernatural stuff, a creepy swamp, a climbable water tower, a helpful book about magic and dark secrets, a cryptogram... There was a cute plot and some good kid-friendly spooky moments.
Games by Ryan Veeder generally feature lots of optional details, glimpses of a backstory, digressions (like, for example, the tale of Homeschooled Gwen in Robin & Orchid) which add to the atmosphere and give you the feeling of inhabiting a rich world. In a game like this, which encourages you to look everywhere, search for hidden content and don't do what the NPCs tell you to do, these many optional details turn into red herrings. After helping the sheriff and playing through three different endings I'm still not sure I've seen it all. Is there a way to open that door with a Latin inscription? What is the significance of the Old Tree? Or the verb "ululate"?.. Perhaps some mysteries of Opasassa are never to be unveiled.
The Dragon Won't Tell You Anything, October 3, 2017You were going to meet a dragon, but you're stuck at a door which won't open. I looked through the code - seems like there's no way to get in. So, it's either unfinished or an unwinnable joke game (having one among the entries feels now like a good old IFComp tradition). Probably the latter. There were a couple of mildly amusing moments, though.
Cool in a grotesque way, October 3, 2017A fruitful idea: taking one common action verb and building a whole game around it. We already had SMELL: The Game by the same author, KILL: The Game, GO NORTH: The Game together with GO WEST: The Game, last year's TAKE: The Game, and even USE - I mean, UNDERTAKE TO INTERACT WITH: The Game. Now it's EAT: The Game.
I often have hard time relating to the games by Chandler Groover with their aesthetics of abhorrent, but this one turned to be not as revolting as I initially expected. The puzzles were satisfying, the images vivid; the game is cruel (I think it should be the first one to boast both "child protagonist" and "evil protagonist" tags at IFDB at once), but not particularly repulsive to my taste - mainly because of two reasons:
1. A strong fairy-tale atmosphere that smoothes everything, gives an unreal, dream-like feeling (and excellently fits in with the game mechanics, as many classic children's tales are obsessed with food - Hansel and Gretel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, etc.).
2. Many food descriptions were pleasant and genuinely appetizing (e.g. cheeses in the armory).
All in all, not a "don't play it while eating" kind of game.
A good enough first effort, October 2, 2017The game feels a bit unfair, but it's so short and your options as a grue are so limited that it isn't hard to win; in-game hints are also available. There are several nice atmospheric touches like referring to the human NPC as "it", the description of the starting location, some customized responses, etc. And even many standard responses - e.g. the infamous "hollow voice" - seem completely at home in this setting.
I'd like to see more parser games from the author. Hopefully with some more polish - this one doesn't list beta-testers and is kind of rough.
A surreal meditation, August 14, 2017A Study in Porpentine is a text game about making a text game. I initially expected something like Last Minute, where you make several choices of what your game will feature and then play the result.
As it turned out, the essence is roughly the same, but the game is... very different.
You explore a small multiverse of nested worlds, seek for inspiration in various sources and collect parts of your game - its "skull" (the main idea? your game can have two skulls and more), its "bones" (game structure?), its "flesh" (writing?), its "skin" (appearance?), its "hair" (?) - until the whole organism is complete; even when it's not, you can try to play what you've got (don't fear to use "Entwine" - you won't lose anything).
There's repetition. There's confusion. There's irritation. How many parts do you need? You don't know.
But I liked it.
The ending was beautiful.
Religious yeast, July 6, 2017The PC is a yeast cell.
Who practices a religion.
And saves the Universe.
And the game takes place inside a large bottle.
And UP and DOWN are the only directions.
And the game's title is one of the very last words in English dictionaries.
What's not to like?
A peculiar experience, May 1, 2017So, you have 7 moves to thwart an apocalypse. That's not much time, not enough to leave the building you are in. You explore the building for a very short while, learn something about the game world, then you die, and start anew; it resembles, for example, Rematch.
But, unlike Rematch, which is a parser game, Save the World in 7 Moves is choice-based. Therefore, you don't have to invent some complex and unobvious actions in order to win - all the options are explicitly given to you, and at first it seems that you can solve the puzzle by simple "lawnmowering": just go everywhere and try all the links - sooner or later you'll find the winning one, right?
Wrong. This game experiments with the choice-based format, uses a few rather unusual ways to conceal information from the player and makes you do things you rarely need to do in a Twine game.
Also, it's funny, light-hearted and somewhat absurdist.
I'd recommend (Spoiler - click to show)listening to The Song right after you finish playing.
Why this is a good one-puzzle game, April 27, 20171) The puzzle is neither too easy nor too hard. You can beat the game in several minutes - but it gives you a surprising amount of satisfaction for such a short playtime.
2) The sequence puzzle perfectly fits the choice-based format. When all the options are laid out openly in front of the player and they don't have to guess the right actions - how can you make the player think, create the element of surprise? By making them guess the right sequence of the given actions, of course.
3) The choice-based format perfectly fits the xenobiology puzzle. Imagine if you had to type commands you need here - like DISENGAGE CREMASTRAL HOOK - again and again in a parser game; Twine mercifully lets us just click the links.
4) The game gives you interesting feedback when you do things in a wrong order. There are 7 different ways to kill a pharate; there are 94 losing paths through every game cycle and only one way to win. But when your plan goes south, you always learn something new and put together a new plan in the light of fresh information.
5) The game's horrific nature is not just for the sake of horror. It suits another purpose: the creatures are so monstrous, evil and repulsive that the player isn't likely to feel sympathy and get attached; so they can experiment freely and sacrifice as many pharates as they like while trying to understand the logic of the puzzle.
6) It's well-written. Laconic phrases and preteritions let the player's imagination run wild; that's one of the strengths of interactive fiction, an effect which is hard to achieve in a graphic game.
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