I noticed the name, too—The Fields of Asphodel are an area of Hades in Greek mythology, so I took it to imply that the PC had died and this was the afterlife they were trapped in, but I could of course be wrong.
6 Likes
I’m holding off on further explanation until post-comp, but I appreciate the kind review. Thanks for playing!
2 Likes
How To Fly a Kite by @Ruber_Eaglenest
This is a sad, sweet story of finding joy in the middle of tragedy, of building from ruins, of life continuing in the face of death. It’s short, so I don’t want to say too much about it, but its wistful vibe and benevolent ghost are lovely.
I did find it a little difficult to get things to happen-- I was never quite sure what I clicked in order to get things moving along. But despite this minor struggle I really enjoyed the game and its message of hope and rebirth-- something I need right now as things get scarier and scarier in the world. This is a nice game, so if you need a break from all the blood and darkness of so many of the other games in the comp, give this one a try.
4 Likes
Last-Minute Magic by @Afterward
This is a really fun game. Your job is to collect items for a friend who can magic them into salable items at a craft fair. You can do magic too, as long as you have an amulet and an eyestone to fit into the amulet. You find and borrow amulets and eyestones, and you have to figure out what each combination of amulet/eyestone allows you to do. Something I love about puzzle parser games is finding a situation that you need a tool/ability for, and then finally getting that tool/ability and opening up a new section of the game. There’s nothing quite like the little oxytocin burst of that experience. That very feature is what this game is all about. Need to cross water or climb something? You can be sure you’ll find an amulet/eyestone combination that will allow you to do it. There’s a good deal of experimentation with various combinations which requires a lot of note-taking. And the map is sizable, so you have to do another of my favorite tasks: mapping.
The game is timed-- you have a certain amount of moves to find all the things in the game. This I’m not so crazy about because I’m only willing to restart and go through known moves a few times. I also don’t have the completionism bug, which makes me a poor gamer, but I just have never cared about getting every point or every thing. For those of you (and you are legion) who do care, you will be thrilled, as there’s so much to do and find here. I won’t tell you what my score in my first play through was, but it wasn’t great.
This game is in the world of Visit Skuga Lake, which I have not played (I can’t keep up with Ryan’s prolific output!), but I will now since I enjoyed this one so much. But not until I do at least a little better at this game-- I didn’t see the whole map before my time ran out.
Anyway, I highly recommend you play with this lovely toy of a game, and please, please, PLEASE have pen and paper handy for mapping and notes.
5 Likes
This demo of an interactive novel is absolutely gorgeous. The interface, the art, the care and thought put into every aspect of it-- it’s all clearly a labor of love and it’s very polished. The author has built an entire fantasy world here and is deeply invested in it. The story is pretty good, although there are lots of jarring instances of modern slang clashing with medieval syntax. But if you can look past this, the story has you up and running immediately, with abducted monks, scary undead thingees, and mysterious strangers. The PCs (there are a couple of them) are very well characterized with stats pages, memories, and drawings of them. Again, it’s just a staggering amount of work and it all looks amazing.
That said, this is really not for me. I’ve just never been able to enjoy or get into an interactive novel. I like to do things in my IF: solve puzzles or navigate or have some sort of agency that isn’t present in interactive novels. It’s the selling point of IF for me. To be fair, a lot of regular old choice-based IF isn’t great for me either, for the same reasons. But I found myself clicking through this looking for something to do, which isn’t fair because this isn’t that type of project.
If you like interactive novels I definitely recommend you check this out; the author’s hard work deserves an audience that is more suited to the medium than I am.
3 Likes
A fireboat on the Hudson River, a terrorist with a bomb, and only you can stop the madness. A zippy setup! I had a really hard time fighting with the parser, though. The game seems to assume I had conversations with Kenyon, but Kenyon is nowhere to be found and I never had any conversations with her. She appeared for a moment at the beginning of the game and then I never saw her, or any more writing on any windows, ever again. I found the terrorist and the bomb, took a SWAT team and had them defuse the bomb, and finally figured out that BLAST was the correct verb for the water cannon and blasted the truck. But now I can’t blast the terrorist, and the game says Kenyon has left me a note in the galley. But where’s the galley? I can’t find that! I feel like I’ve tried everything.
So I couldn’t finish the game. There were other issues like disappearing room descriptions and repeating actions (I could blast that truck away multiple times), but the biggest problem was the lack of interaction with Kenyon despite the game referring to conversations with her and notes from her many times. This needs some polishing to be playable, but if it gets that polish I’ll try it again. Any game where you are expected to TAKE a SWAT team is a game after my own heart.
6 Likes
Hi Amanda,
Thank you for the review. I thought I had left enough breadcrumbs in the narrative to move the game along. Most of the interaction with Kendra was the notes she left in the galley. The note really fleshed things out. No direct interaction with her. She is an apparition after all.
I’ll try to sort things out better with a post game release and I have more time. The month long writing time frame is very difficult for me. 
Thanks again, Jeff
1 Like