Slicker City
Played around Nov 13/14/15
[spoiler]Parser, fairly short. A sequel to the Problems Compound. Light, puzzles focused.
All the places and a lot of the objects are pun or wordplay based. The puzzles also generally work towards that motif. Story’s not that important; you go, you meet some people, but it’s a bunch of rooms and objects and puzzles. The game’s pretty straightforward about characters or objects telling you what you need to do in order to proceed, and it’s just a matter of figuring out the how. I honestly didn’t have any real idea why, story wise, I was doing anything after awhile, but I did still know what my goals were, generally.
Tone is informal, plainspoken. Example: when you check inventory, you get “You are carrying nothing. Well, nothing that’d help in an adventure. You didn’t, like, lose your keys or anything.”
There are some minor bugs here and there, but that’s because this game is trying to do quite a bit. This feels like it’s been playtested and revised quite a bit, with hints and alternate solutions and player guidance scattered throughout.
Also there’s some sentence structures that I needed to read more than once to figure out; here’s one that really threw me off, for example: “Knowing pop culture more than clueless bums and yet–and yet–realizing you deserve better than just pop culture, is always impressive.” (My brain wanted to read bums as a verb, and the comma feels out of place)
Lots of helpful meta commands and instructions are implemented, which is appreciated. There’s a meta explain command to get an explanation for the names of all the objects which a lot of work was put into, and I really liked reading some of them.
Although the first half asks you to do fairly conventional parser inventory puzzles, later on it suddenly switches to wordplay-based guess-the-verb puzzles, so the earlier puzzles don’t really set up my expectations for later ones. This happens once you enter the City, and I could see there being different rules there, but if there’s any specific signal for the switch, I didn’t see it.
But the game is fairly quick, and breezy. I never finished Problems Compound or Threediopolis from the same author, only getting far enough in where I thought I felt like I’d gotten the point of them, because these types of puzzles can grind you down; I knew the final puzzle in this from playing Battleship, but if you don’t immediately know it, then… I dunno, you just have to mentally go through the alphabet letter by letter in your head? I got tired of that in those earlier games, but I finished this, and could appreciate it more.
Best thing: helpful/explanatory meta commands, and some useful hints to wrong solutions to things.[/spoiler]
Stone Harbor
Played around Nov 15/16/17
[spoiler]Browser link-based, about a psychic who makes his living off of bilking tourists that gets embroiled in a mysterious murder. If you really require interactivity and player agency in your IF then this isn’t for you, but otherwise this is a marvellously written short story; actually it’s quite long, so it might, be by word count standards, more of a novella even (or… checks Google a novelette?).
As you might imagine from a sort-of murder mystery, you got a nice cast of characters here, with accompanying varied types and figures. If the story’s about anything, I’d say it’s about family, about the weights and balances that those shared histories burden, attach, and pull one with. The protagonist is a close-to-burnt-out cynic, sort of a standard type of detective novel main character, except his psychic showbiz background gives him flourishes that say, booze addiction and a disgraced badge don’t.
The interactivity generally comes at you like this: at various points, at the end of passages, you’ll be presented with objects that you can click on, and clicking on them will reveal the next passage, and might also do the Twine replace thing to change the description or tack on a comma and add more information. What comes across is that your protagonist is picking up on more details about these things, which fits in pretty well with his fake psychic background, where he’d have to take quick stock of his customers and their clothes, say, in order to pick up on contextual things he can “read” about them. It works quite well, and fits into his role in the story: as you might imagine this type of skill comes in handy in a murder mystery.
Around chapter three, I was feeling like the structure was getting repetitive: length of story, a plot object presented, flashback. But the author manages to change things up around then.
And chapter five? Chapter five is one of the more difficult structural chapters in the story, I think; not the most important plot-wise, but it’s a breather and ramp-up, and I think the author really nails it. The intro is cute and world-builds well, the follow-up is appropriately tension-filled, and even the mechanics are played with in fun surprising ways. Chapter seven is sort of having to do something similar but more expository, and that beat wasn’t placed as well I thought (and the chapter before just sort of felt anti-climatic).
The characters aren’t just discrete entities: what’s important isn’t just who they are, but the way they’re entangled with each other and what they do as a result, and the mystery is all about following all those knotted threads to their conclusions. The paragraphs are constructed very well, and the writing overall is just extremely polished and accomplished.
Best thing: Storytelling, pacing. Chapter five (I’m setting up expectations awfully high for this, aren’t I?).[/spoiler]
Manlandia
Played on Nov 15
[spoiler]Twine. Pulpy adventure story about a trio of explorers who venture into the deep jungles to find a secluded Amazonian tribe. But… the explorers are women and the tribe is all-male! Gasp!
I was hesitant to review this originally: I’d seen the discussion in StephC’s review thread (while looking for reviews of games I’d already played), and I’d also read the Manlandia poll thread, and then just felt that that knowledge would completely taint my experience with this entry. But that really doesn’t seem fair. So I’ll do my best.
I think the surface level commentary (what I think I would’ve gotten out of it without the foreknowledge) is straightforward, as an illustration of gendered language and norms: one character is described as a “woman’s woman,” the tribe is overly bubbly and mostly comes off as a sort of single amorphous blob, and just the “exotic” otherly feel that I think an all-female tribe is supposed to evoke takes an odd turn when it’s gender swapped. A tribe of men? So what?
The choices are basically arbitrary: sometimes you might get two at a time, but honestly you’re generally not going to have any idea what clicking on anything will actually product as a result. Or at least I didn’t.
The writing is good, decently engaging; it’s a throwback, with a pulpy adventurous tone, and the three explorers are decently characterised and sympathetic. But…
So the paragraph below won’t make sense without knowledge of what the game is about ([url]https://intfiction.org/t/steph-cs-reviews/10480/1]).
[rant]I’m willing to consider that the author was withholding the text source for a specific artistic purpose, and that lack of information is supposed to be a part of the experience. But I also don’t think I can really erase my brain to figure out how successful it was at that. I don’t know whether, presented with those two links at the end, I would’ve pieced together what this was about myself (or how much I’m even supposed to), although I found the minotaur piece to make a bit more sense as a target for this type of subversion than Manlandia’s, even if that text was also dryer and harder to make it through. The knowledge of roughly what this text was doing made me try to divine the original source text’s meaning while playing through it, to figure out if this was trying to be a commentary on the source text, at which point I’m trying to play chess three moves ahead, on a three turn delay. If you took Manlandia’s text and reverted it, I honestly don’t think I would’ve been able to tell it was written by a feminist, but I also didn’t remotely get any the themes listed on the Wikipedia page, even in retrospect, so those parts seems to have been cut out of this adaptation. Hmm.[/rant]
As an entry in a writing-based competition, in a competition for “authors”, it’d be pretty difficult to judge this. If the criteria’s that an entry should be text-based and interactive (okay, it falls down there) and fictional (?) though, sidestepping issues of implementation or disclosure, I at least like the thought experiment of how to approach text-based artistic statements like this, as a piece of IF. This doesn’t really seem like it hits its mark, but what if it had? Also I’ve read Reality Hunger by David Shields, and that also had something to say about sourcing, which is skewing my reaction.
Best thing: questions this raises about IF authorship/IF as art?[/spoiler]
Black Rock City
Played on Nov 20
[spoiler]Written in Texture. You’re someone making their way to the Burning Man Festival, and along the way you meet various people that you can decide to stop and talk to or help, and there’s an approaching dust storm as well.
The game comes off as a CYOA, just with click-and-drag mechanics instead of click-to-choose. I did like how examine verbs were used; say there might be a passage with two locations to go to. You could drag that examine action onto either location, and those would work like how replace links tend to be used in twine, giving you a bit more detail on each, and then you can use the other action to choose which one to head towards. That seemed like a novel type of interaction that’s different from other IF engines.
Outside of those examine actions though, I basically picked choices based on whichever one sounded most interesting; I can’t really say I got a grasp for my character, nor did a story ever arise. You’re on drugs, maybe, probably? I kept clicking choices, talking or not talking to people, and then eventually, abruptly, I’d get an ending, generally involving the dust storm arriving. And I could restart, and go down a different path.
Writing wise, things are described well, and sometimes surprisingly, and the dialogue there is is natural. You get sentences like “The wind whips by in a very realistic way, but when you put your arms out you realize you can glide towards the Man, arms held out to catch you, or towards the Temple, radiating soft welcome.” I like the phrasing, especially “radiating soft welcome.”
Across your various could-be journeys, there’s a texture of diverse characters you can meet, that creates a sense of communal nothingness. There’s almost no sense of concrete place, just an off-kilter hazy/pseudo-dreamy tone before the dust storm finally hits.
Best thing: dream-like unreality, odd cast of people you meet.[/spoiler]