I’ve played a few of the games now. I’ll try and drop some reviews here as time allows!
7 Likes
Big Fish - Binggang Zhuo
A shaky start to the competition for me, this. Any game that switches between second and third person and past and present tense seemingly at random and often in the same paragraph (sometimes in the same sentence) has got to be approached with caution. This is not a well written game.
The game itself is a short murder mystery. The protagonist’s uncle has been convicted of a murder and fed to a crocodile. It is up to the player to unmask the real killer (or maybe it was your uncle!).
What follows is a journey around a small town looking for evidence and uncovering clues. There’s a strong reveal in the middle of the game that puts it more in the mold of an occult mystery and makes the ending entertaining. The game is gated quite well - with three ‘chapters’. We get a lot of information, and it all hangs together more or less. There’s also a nice use of color to show new and interesting stuff when you go places.
Unfortunately, the writing just isn’t strong enough and it takes me out of the game. There’s the aforementioned tense and pov problems. The text is flat and basic. There’s a lot of grammatical oddities and structural problems.
I will say this, though. The clues scattered through the text for that final choice are clever and take some thinking about. There is an ah-ha moment when the information you’ve seen marries up with the reveal. It makes sense. This is well done. And that’s important.
This game shows promise. If the author can take their obvious skills at building a clued mystery and marry them up with more focus on the quality of text then I’d love to see another game from them.
10 Likes
King of Xanadu - MACHINES UNDERNEATH
I’ve had to have a bit of a think about this game. On the one hand, some of the writing is very nice indeed. It manages the tricky job of being both evocative and descriptive without straying into purple prose.
On the other, I’m left a little frustrated. Ultimately, I think I understand what the game is reaching for. As the titular king, we think we have ultimate power. In fact, to the point that we believe the sun is showing disloyalty, but “at least the moon remains obedient”. The narrative does a neat job of showing us that this is not, in fact, the case. As plague descends on the kingdom and the king falls into madness, the kingdom fails, power dies - ultimately leading to a moment of revelation and self-discovery. I see from Mike’s review that the comparison with Shelley’s Ozymandias has already been drawn, so I’ll not type more on that.
So why am I a little frustrated? There’s a tension here between choice, consequence and revelation that’s not, I feel, fully explored. Mainly in that there is no consequence. However thoughtful, capricious, wilful or cruel the King’s commands, the land is beset by plague. As the reader, we are shown the nature of power in the very opening of the game. Ultimately our choices don’t alter the nature of this catastrophe - we’re just watching it unfold. Which is absolutely what the game is going for - applause. But, there’s something there around the impact of choice on how the plague unfolds, on how this leads to a revelation. The end of the game is the choice of revelation. It leaves it up to the reader to interpret the narrative experience as a moment of self-discovery. I wonder.
In general, a narrative will build toward a revelation. In IF, we have the opportunity to enable the reader to dictate the actions of the protagonist and ultimately, affect the outcome and to provide a conclusion that reflects the choices the player has made. Giving them the ‘option’ of which revelation to take away feels like a bit of a cop-out.
I’m tying myself in knots. Would the game have worked with this? Is this in any way representative of what the author is going for? I don’t know - it’s niggling at me, though.
Given that this game has got me thinking about all this (pretty incoherently, I admit) - that’s got to be a good thing, right? This review is obviously outrageously subjective. Others will probably entirely disagree with me. I very much enjoyed this game. As I said at the start, the writing is excellent, the narrative effective. It’s a very good game.
Also. The final line of this piece is absolutely perfect.
7 Likes
Deliquescence - Not-Only But-Also Riley
We get to interact with our friend for the last time as she deliquesces. It’s a builder, this game. We can replay and replay and each time our emotional connection with our friend grows. Each play through, we have limited time with her. As I play again and again, I am hoping that there is a combination of interactions that will save her.
Is there? I don’t know. I am playing almost religiously now, determined to experience as much as I can of my friend’s dying moments. The writing is tight and spare. These tiny snippets from each interaction build my friend into a person. She is quietly accepting of her fate, though. Ultimately, the most satisfying experience, to me, are the set of interactions that make my friend’s last moments the happiest.
An emotional connection to a narrative is such a personal thing.
4 Likes
Campfire - loreKin
My random shuffle has thrown four relatively short choice experiences at me straight away. I don’t mind. Next up, though, after Campfire is something a bit beefier.
We go away and camp for the weekend. That’s everything. We can do some shopping first, we can choose whether to camp in a tent or a yurt. We experience nature and do some activities and eat. While what we shop for affects the choices we have, it doesn’t seem to matter much. Whether we buy bug spray or not doesn’t alter the text.
Honestly? I quite enjoyed this, in a way. It’s pretty meditative and gentle. I do have some beefs with some of the choices though. No beer in the grocery store? I hike and camp out a lot. Can’t remember the last time I went without taking a few beers with me. Also, fireworks? At a campsite? That’ll please your fellow campers.
There’s a couple of implementation niggles here. Occasionally, during the shopping expedition, I get to a point where I can’t do anything - I have no choices and have to restart the game. When I cook some popcorn, the game just stops, and I have to restart. There’s a few typos. For a game as short as this, I have to say, this isn’t a great experience.
It’s a bit light to be honest. There’s a promising setup here. We buy stuff which should impact how the game plays out. Then we take it on a camping trip. What I was expecting from this point was a ‘camping optimization’ game - i.e. the stuff we’ve bought affects our experience. We don’t have sun screen? We should get frazzled. Don’t have a chair? Have to sit on the damp ground…etc…ultimately how do we have the best camping experience we can?
Also. I, personally, would have cooked and eaten the fish.
I think the author has the basis of something good here. I’d really love to see them take this premise and flesh it out into a more rounded experience.
10 Likes
Hebe - Marina Diagourta
I’m not sure how I feel about this: “Generative artificial intelligence was used to make game text”. On the one hand, as someone who agonizes over every line of text in a game I’m writing- often to the point of paralysis, it feels like cheating. On the other, text is only one aspect of a game, and if there’s a tool that helps a developer with something they may struggle with for many possible reasons, isn’t that a good thing? Making the production of games a bit more inclusive? However, this is probably not the space to debate this.
It’s a game about the Greek gods. I’ve just watched the new netflix series ‘Kaos’ - also, I recently read ‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller (both of which were very very good) - so I’m more conversant than usual with the complicated mythology of ancient greece,
We are playing Hebe - the goddess of youth. It falls to her to rescue the gods and take Olympus back from the Titans.
I’m going to get the problematic stuff out of the way.
First of all, and I don’t know whether this is an artifact of the AI used to produce this text, or what, there’s a confusion between past and present tense (I’m only 5 games in and this is the second game with this problem now). “Mount Olympus’s grand hall glittered with marble and gold”…“In the hall you can see Heracles, Zeus, …”. For me, it’s teeth-grindingly distracting. Pick a tense. Please. I think it’s a tension between Inform standard constructs and the way the text is generated.
>get club
You picked up the Club of Heracles.
>give club to heracles
He smiles at you. "Thank you, my dearest.
The implementation is also not great. Stuff is undescribed, character show little to no life. Basic commands are unrecognised or result in stock responses.
You can see a backdrop named agora here.
>x agora
You see nothing special about the backdrop named agora.
I try and be positive in my reviewing. I want to compliment some of the writing. But I’m struggling to do even that as it’s written by an AI. I will say this. The scope of this work is impressive. The author has tried to represent, as a playing area, pretty much the whole of ancient Greece.
I wander around for a while, find a couple of puzzles. I’ve been given quests by various characters. I do like the way that the directions in the world are presented and how I can navigate around them.
Then, I’m sorry to say, at this point:
On the beach, you notice a nymph weeping and wailing
>talk to nymph
You can't see any such thing.
I give up. I’m sure that there’s a great puzzly game in here struggling to get out, but I think it needs a lot more work on the implementation, better clueing as to what the player is supposed to do, and maybe, just maybe, a re-write that isn’t AI generated.
7 Likes
Forbidden Lore - Alex Crossley
It takes a while to get the hang of this game. One of the reasons is that our goal is obscure till quite late in the game. This review is going to be more spoilery than most as it’s difficult to discuss it without revealing the primary gameplay elements, which are themselves the whole of the puzzle more or less.
Our grandfather’s left us his old library. We need to sort it out. As it turns out though, we eventually discover that in order to save the world from an impending apocalypse, we need to, for some reason…well, we’re not quite sure what we need to do. Get more powerful and probably use that power to do something that’s almost but not quite entirely unrevealed by the text. This isn’t a moan by the way - I quite liked the uncertainty. Certainly made things interesting.
Effectively, in order to do this, whatever this is, we have a pretty extensive library at our disposal. We can learn and perform magic. We can get powerful. We can protect ourselves from unspecified dreadful fates. There are many books here all of which, when their instructions are followed, give us more power, or give us somewhere new to visit. I, actually, really enjoyed this aspect of the game. Poking around the many bookcases and finding all the secrets in the room, working out what to do with the info they revealed was a really cool mechanic.
The game is also nicely written. There’s some good descriptive work and, at points it’s imaginative and almost surreal.
But. There are many frustrations here. I had to turn to the walkthru several times. I would class many of the puzzles as very much of the read the author’s mind variety. There’s a few in particular. Picking out the words ‘moon’ and ‘rug’ in relatively innocuous bits of flavor text. Knowing that the bust can speak. Suddenly developing the ability to shoot fire without actually being told that. And there’s more and these are gateway puzzles.
Toward the end, it all falls apart a bit. The endgame was done completely from the walkthrough.
Probably the most annoying moment of all was, at the end, when I realised that the three things you found in the desk were of no use at all! I didn’t even need to open the desk to complete the game. Author, you have no idea how much time I spent trying fruitlessly to do stuff with those things. All to no avail! Were they total red herrings or did I just miss a cool thing to do with them?
I did really like the core mechanic though.
7 Likes
Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People - Felicity Banks
One of the most impressive aspects of this game, to me, was the start. We have a number of characters to choose from. Depending on who we choose, we are offered several different narratives to begin the game with - of course, they consolidate into a primary narrative later. It’s a clever hook. The game is entirely replayable. I want to replay to see the differences my choice makes.
On my first game, I am in the Australian outback with my friends. They discuss the nature of magic and the grim rumours about the eponymous school. Their relationships develop. But then we, in order to save the day, develop our magical powers and the eponymous school has very long arms.
It’s very well written. The language is simple, uncomplicated YA style, but doesn’t suffer for it. I’ve always enjoyed Felicity’s writing. if I was being hyper critical, very occasionally it does have a few passages of dense exposition. Difficult one for authors this. Info dump in three paragraphs and get it over and done or expand into a four page conversation? It’s only a couple of times though, so the text gets away with it.
The direction the game took surprised me. But in a good way. My expectations were set by the initial forebodings from the group on the camping trip. I was expecting more of a prison/horrible experiments/evil security guards/general nastiness than a lovely tower where people get potato and coriander pancakes cooked to order for breakfast. That the narrative progressed how it did with the primary antagonists and tension in the student body was unexpected (to me). Like I say, a good thing. I like to be surprised.
The other narrative device used that I thought was very clever was the gradual reveal of the nature of this world the reader found themselves in. We have made assumptions about the nature of these people we’re getting to know, but then a sudden reveal, and our assumptions shift. It’s hard to say more without too much of a spoiler.
If I did have an issue with this game, it would be the length. It feels like there’s considerable room for this work to expand and breathe. The author has a really nice writing style for a longer work. There’s enough here around this world that this could, quite easily, tell this story through a novel length work. There’s a lot I’d like to understand about the why’s and wherefore’s of Miss Duckworthy’s school. About magic in this world. About the people.
But this is a minor minor thing. As it stands, this narrative works and works very well. I enjoyed experiencing it.
8 Likes
I am incredibly grateful to all reviewers but I believe it’s unwise to comment on specifics during the judging period. So here is a blanket THANK YOU for making the effort to review my game, no matter what you thought of it. You make the IF Comp so much more interesting by being a part of it.
2 Likes
The Garbage of the Future - AM Ruf
This game is compelling enough that I want to complete all the achievements. I’ve got quite a few. Then I get the one that might lead to the ‘good’ ending (if this game does have a good ending - given that the good ending seems to involve me dumping toxic sludge into a lake and getting away with it? Is it good? - dunno - I may never find out - see the rest of this convoluted paragraph), but this involves me doing the same thing over and over for a loooong time, and after that the game needs me to do something else, and I step outside the truck and get almost immediately eaten and I have no intention of repeating all that again. Hopefully this paragraph is vague enough that its not a spoiler.
That’s the premise of the game. As a tanker truck operator, we’ve got to get some awful sludge out of the truck. But there’s something terrible out there in the dark.
It’s presented as a choice game, but a parser-esque one. I have a small, but surprisingly confusing, map I can navigate around. Objects I can manipulate. Commands are contextual. It’s a cool, experimental UI platform. But does it work? In the main, for me, yes. Within a few minutes, and once I get used to it, I’m clicking merrily away without any huge issues. There’s the occasional moment when I’m four clicks deep into nested windows, trying to find the option to do something, but it’s really not too bad.
There is no save, though. That’s a bit of a miss in this game. IMO, of course - given what went down in the first paragraph of this review. I’d be happy to repeat the same thing over and over if I had to do it once.
I mentioned at the start that this game is compelling. It really is. While the language is relatively simple and spare - no lush scenery descriptions here, it’s still evocative enough that it captures my attention straight away and keeps me engaged. The in media res beginning helps. There’s no lengthy introduction. There’s no in-depth analysis of these characters motivations or emotional states. And it works somehow. Things creep around in the dark. Flashlights flicker and go out.
There are a couple of small bugs. I took the hose several times for example. Sometimes when I click on something I get a blank window. But nothing huge.
I did enjoy this game. I wish that the length sequence of empty turns wasn’t there. That there was a save. This is a compliment. I’d like to experience more.
P.S. I have just been informed that there IS, in fact, a save function in this game. However, it is not enabled. To enable it, you have to scroll right to the bottom of the Settings. Author - strongly suggest have this enabled by default!! I totally missed this.
7 Likes
Bad Beer - Vivienne Dunstan
This game subverted my expectations. First of all, unlike the author’s other games, it’s not set in 15th century Scotland. Secondly, what happened about 10 minutes in surprised me.
The remainder of this review is somewhat spoilery.
The beer has gone bad in my local pub (as a dedicated pub-goer, coincidentally whose local pub also has ‘duck’ in the name, I can relate, although usually this is a result of lax line-cleaning). Quite quickly, after a bit of exploration, it becomes apparent that there may be a supernatural element to this souring of the beer.
Then the Vicar turns up, and the game takes an unexpected turn.
We are immediately thrown a couple of hundred years into the past, and, as a spectre, we get to try and avert a tragedy.
There are puzzles here, but they are simple and gentle. It took me about thirty minutes to experience both of the endings. I didn’t get stuck at all. The map is small enough, the problem space is constricted enough, that just the basic process of exploration took me through the first part. In the second part, the solution is telegraphed enough that it is fairly obvious what needs to be done. Also, there seem to be a couple of solutions. The game is more concerned about me experiencing the narrative than getting stuck on puzzles. Which, I think, was the right decision by the author for a game of this type.
It’s also nicely written. While the prose is relatively spare, it does what it needs to do, and, even with the shortness of the game, we do get some emotional payoff at the end, whichever ending is reached. I did enjoy my time with it.
I do have a ‘but’ though. But. There are a couple of areas that struck me as problematic. First of all, the action that throws me into the past - well - it doesn’t hang together that well. There’s no rationale or explanation - it just happens. And, tbh, I would have expected the PC to have a bit more of a reaction to it. Secondly, the nature of the spectre you’ve become and its interaction with Will seems to be more driven by the requirements of game logic than by narrative logic. Finally, it would have been great if the game had come full circle at the end, and ended in the pub. I’d have liked to have seen what the temporal paradox that would inevitably have occurred would have done. I mean, would Jack still even been the landlord? Maybe Will and his descendants would still be running it?
I think my main comment would be that this is a pretty good hook to hang a game on - I would have loved to see it fleshed out a bit more - some of the plot devices smoothed out.
6 Likes
Thank you for the review!
2 Likes
There is, though! Unfortunately it’s hidden: you have to go to the very bottom of the Settings and enable it, grr.
1 Like
Yeesh. I totally missed that. I will amend my review!
1 Like
So did most of the rest of us, I think
3 Likes
Verses - Kit Reimer
I seem to be some sort of molecular/biological analyst who has been sent off to a new research station. But now the game has broken so I can’t proceed.
There were already problems. The in-game (red) action links disappear when I hover over them, becoming the same colour as the background. I don’t know whether this is expected behaviour or not.
The main mechanic is a little bit exhausting. At one point I have at least twenty words highlighted on the screen, all of which I’ve got to click to see the definitions pop up and find a way of advancing the narrative. At another point I have a whole verse of Hungarian on which I’ve got to click every word to slowly reveal the translation. Sorry, but, for me, it’s too much. I’m on the verge of giving up. I get it. Literal translation of poetry is hard and often makes little sense.
Then I reach a page titled ‘Analysis 2’ and nothing I now click on does anything and I can’t progress the narrative. Author, I am using Chrome on Windows v128.0.6613.138 (Official Build) (64-bit) if that’s any help to debug.
I will say the text is beautifully, evocatively written. I would have liked to have seen more.
n.b. I see from the general chat that there is an issue in Chrome, but it may be ok in Firefox. kk. I’ll need to download firefox then - I’ll leave this review here as a placeholder and will come back and revisit later if I have time.
4 Likes
In my opinion, Verses is worth trying to get to the bottom of. It might also be a bit easier to play on a phone rather than a computer. (tapping on the screen is a lot easier than clicking sometimes)
3 Likes
quote of the day; 
Then the Vicar turns up, and the game takes an unexpected turn.
but more seriously, I’m going to make a minor point about, wouldn’t it be nice if…
I make short games and people say they would have liked to see this or that or i didn’t explore such-and-such. Or my characters and dialogue could be developed more. And you know, they’re 100% correct.
One of the biggest problems of game design is to curtail scope and remit. Keeping it contained. Actually, the biggest problem is making it work. Apple used to be the masters of this; the iPhone and the iPad. Only since after the Jobs days are they proliferating now into compatibility problems. But of course, they’ve got vast resources.
But for us mere mortals, the best plan is to always descope as much as possible, but still deliver.
4 Likes
!!! Hahaa !!!
Makes me think of a game title that goes nicely with this:
Birding in Pope Lick Park
(or is it just me?)
1 Like
I discovered (after reaching the end of the game, reading your review, realizing I never found the things in the desk at all, returning to a save point, and acquiring them) that you can give the crystal to the reptilians and the statuette to the priests. Then when you defeat one of them, you get a message saying that the others will be taking power.
1 Like