Reviews by Pseudavid
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Design, mechanics and interactions bring life to a deeply felt text, November 29, 2023Not in a thousand years I would have thought a mechanism to let this story, or essay, be told as interactive fiction. The exhibition concept is a brilliant way of allowing significant interaction with an static text. Nothing like “choices matter”, it’s not that kind of game; but your interactions matter, in the sense that they shape the way you receive this narration.
The exhibition format has another good effect: as in a real exhibition, it kind of gives you permission to overlook items that don’t catch your fancy. I’d always be hesitant to do that in a more standard game, afraid of losing information; but this being an exhibition, I behave as I do in exhibitions: I look and read at what I find interesting and ignore the rest. (In reality, I read more than 90% of Bez’s exhibition, but the freedom makes the whole thing more relaxed).
The stuff Bez tells is relevant, and deeply felt, and should be known. Bez's talent to use design, mechanics and interactions to enliven the text is proven (play Lore Distance Relationship if you didn’t do it yet).
Straight to my list of favourite parser games, November 29, 2023To sea in a sieve is brilliant! It’s yet another parser game I’ve been able to solve with little help, and the help I needed was due to obvious parser-challenged mistakes on my part, rather than bad design of the game. It’s a perfect example of the classic absurd puzzlefest + comic narrative style, perfect because none of the two elements interfere with the other. The situation, the characters’ language and the colour provided by the descriptions make the puzzling meaningful, and the puzzles are perfectly embedded in the narration. And the puzzling is narratively interesting, at least comically interesting with the unexpected results of your actions.
Extraordinary and unique, March 14, 2021Swigian has a limited vocabulary, a limited range of expression, at every level: the text level, the story level, the gameplay level. This doesn't sound promising, but in the end it's the key to making this game extraordinary and unique.
Descriptions could not be shorter. Things are named with simple words, but there are almost no adjectives, and no details besides the things that there are. "It is what it is". The character doesn't like to describe things, so he gives them unambiguous names. But, despite this sparse and precise language, there is an amazing degree of ambiguity, because of the lack of details. A name may be enough to understand how to use a thing, but not enough to understand what it is.
The story is also full of fog and ambiguity. The narrator knows what they are and what they need, but they never explain it to the player. Fantastic worlds are generally over-explained, particulary in games, where you need to manipulate them; but in Swigian, the world is wonderfully under-explained. Players don't know what they face, or why they have to do the things they do. The puzzles are simple, but intuitive instead of logical. This heightens the myth-like feeling.
And the limited vocabulary of the text also fits perfectly with a limited parser with very few available options. That is of great help to players not very good at parser, like me.
My only complaint is that I wish it was longer, with more puzzles. I wish I could play a longer game like this.
The thing I appreciate the most about Heretic’s Hope is the same I appreciated about Devotionalia: it sets out to tell a story whose subject matter, structure, rhythm, style, etc. are very much at odds with most things at IFcomp, and even more at odds with most things in videogames, and even most things in popular culture.
“What is it to be holy?”, the game asks. What kind of question is that in a videogame? The game doesn’t compromise to make the subject more player-friendly. Hats off to anyone willing to do all this in such a coherent way.
The story is fine, the aesthetics stunning, the interactions well thought. I have problems with them sll, but minor. It’s memorably written and illustrated. Both the story and the design follow the same principle: horror vacui. It’s a very dangerous thing to try, and you need to have it under pretty good control. The game keeps piling characters, locations, plotlines, pictures, colored words, decorated frames, but amazingly, it mostly pulls it off. Perhaps it's the sheer imagination of it all, even when it's way too much.
There’s more than one game inside Turandot. Two at the very minimum. Putting two very different things together is risky: the contrast may illuminate both parts and create a satisfactory emotional evolution; or both elements can fight each other and turn out too frustrating.
Turandot starts like a wild comedy, oscillating between wacky videogame humour (with reflective choices of different insults) and some black, brutal jokes. It ends like a philosophical conversation about moral choices. It transitions from lightness to seriousness on a very tight rope: the first serious long conversation happens (Spoiler - click to show)with the player hanging over a crocodile pit, in a joke that reminded me of Monkey Island. Then it gets more serious. At some times it feels more like a statement than a story to me. It certainly feels like a different game, one that provokes contradictory thoughts and impressions.
But it's one of he best-written and best-designed games I remember from any recent comp! It does interesting things with the choices, like the false choices with only different wording but identical result. It manages to make the game feel less linear. The jokes land effortlessly, dialogues flow, the characters are vivid.
The first part was my favourite game in IFcomp 19. The second part will require more effort to wrap my head around it, and I will certainly play again.
I love classic surrealist painting. Women surrealist painters (other than Kahlo) don’t get the credit they deserve: introductory books, or articles, or classes seldom mention artists like Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage. I love them, more than most of their male peers (certainly more than damn Avida Dollars).
Describing paintings of that kind in text is quite difficult. The intensity of the images’ presence is impossible to transmit. Sometimes, however, a hint of the picture’s imagination can be suggested. I would surely like to take a look at most of the paintings in Night guard/Morning Star.
Let this detail be a significant example of how well this game is written.
The other vital thing that the game does very well is something that was very well done in Cactus Blue Motel: giving the player a lot of freedom through movement and exploration, and at the same time make it dramatically relevant. Exploration that is not about reading room descriptions but about choosing nightmares.
I have only one problem with this story. I’ve tried getting different endings and, while they are quite different, I’m not really sure where the forking points are, or the connection between the decision taken and the ending itself.
The game, finally, is very well designed, readable and beautiful.
An excellent story!
> Sunlight filters through the window, while a cool breeze brings the scent of wildflowers and stirs particles of dust into the air where they shimmer as if made of magic. But that's not all, the wind also carries the approaching sound of hooves as they strike the cobblestone road that runs close by your window.
This is the first paragraph of the game. Consider the ambiental detail transitioning to a more specific event preceding the beginning of the action. Some reviewers have pointed that the the writing is verbose and could be trimmed, but I disagree. This choice of details, told in this order, has a rhythm that a lot of interactive fiction never really gets. This is good writing.
The story is a simple folk horror tale, and perhaps stakes are not too high, but they don't need to. It totally gets the necessary tone.
Some of the interactions and choices could be better thought, but the game offers a sense that choices matter, and clearly points at the ghost paths that you didn't choose.
This is a promising game from a new author.
This is a fun game that requires some serious and enjoyable mental work. Perhaps it doesn't meet all expectations, but there's a lot of things it does very well.
Some players considered it a difficult game. I'm terrible at parser games (because I simply can't get into the 'try different verbs' mindset), and I didn't find it hard at all. The mechanic breaks standard parser expectations, which is very clever, but if you read the description text with attention, everything you need to uncover the mechanics (Spoiler - click to show)(that looking is cueing, that it has to be done one bar before the instruments enter, and that the whole sequence is quite cleanly described if you examine the score) should be quite evident after some time. Then, the puzzle is essentially solved and it's only a problem of executing the solution, which has the perfect length and is nicely described.
So this game is solid and has a lot of excellent points:
- A cool mechanic
- An unusual setting and subject
- Enjoyable writing, well tailored to the information we need
- Really good presentation, and this is very important, this game looks good and is very very readable
This is obviously an immensely fun game, and it’s clear that it’s been a great success as this. English being my second language, I’m not the best to fully appreciate all the wordplay, but I had lots of fun nonetheless.
I really liked the game’s structure, and that was unexpected. If I had read an explanation of the structure before, I would have expected it to fail. The idea of (Spoiler - click to show)taking the wrong decision > losing instantly > going back one turn and choosing something else looks quite wrong to me on paper. But it works beautifully in practice.
Perhaps it works because of the humour. (Spoiler - click to show)Losing means getting some hilarious verses, so of course everyone wants to lose and try again.
This is an excellent game and its great position in IFcomp was both expected and deserved!
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