Amanda Reviews IFComp: New Authors

Playing past 2 hours would color my vote for sure. I am not principled like that, which is why rules are good for me.

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A Long Way to the Nearest Star , by SV Linwood-- Twine

This game is a great example of why writing a zippy blurb matters. It’s sci-fi, so it was automatically going to be of interest to me (I’m on a major sci-fi kick these days), but the blurb is great and grabbed my attention right away. The cover art was eye-catching, too. Unless you’re a person of outstanding principles who plays the Comp using the randomizer (which I am most definitely not), these things matter a lot in getting people to play your game.

According to @svlin’s introduction in the “New Authors” thread, this is their first public game, and that’s impressive, because it’s fantastic. It starts off with a well-worn trope: hardboiled intergalactic thief on the run, engine trouble, convenient nearby spaceship as a port in which to fix the problem, helpful yet screwball AI. I will play/read/watch anything in this genre, but you’d better bring some pizzazz to it to keep me happy once I’m there. And this game has pizzazz. The mysteries start to pile up in an empty spaceship, and the zany AI starts to feel more than a little off. The zingy, fluid writing immediately makes it feel fresh, and it’s got great characterization and a puzzly atmosphere that feels parser-ish (this is a compliment). The conversations with Solis, the AI that runs the ship you find, are the star of the show. Solis is part Hal, part Computerfriend, part Rosie the Jetsons’ maid, and the banter between Solis and the PC sets a funny yet informative tone that grows gradually more disturbing.

Gating a game believably is a tricky thing— too often there’s a locked door with no explanation, or a thin explanation, for why it’s locked. It just is, and you have to unlock it. ALWNS uses gating effectively, not just as a way to pace the action, but as a way to explore Solis’s personality tics: Solis is happy to tell you where to find your needed replacement part for your ship, and that you are welcome to take it, but no, it can’t open the door for you so you can go get it. Why? Because them’s the rules. And Solis and “the rules” turn out to have a complicated relationship.

I didn’t finish this one in 2 hours, either, for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to keep talking about everything I could with Solis, because the writing there is great. So that sucked up a lot of time. Secondly, I really struggled with the interface. I am a veteran parser player who only recently started playing choice-based games, and so the format is not as intuitive to me as parser games are. So @svlin and everyone else should take the following with a grain of salt: I found the layers of clicking to reach information in my inventory/notes to be immersion-breaking and attention-scattering. If I want to review info on my datapad, I have to click Inventory, scroll to the datapad, click “read datapad”, then click an entry. I sometimes have the attention span of a gnat, and this slowed me down considerably. For me, it would have been a boon to have a sidebar with inventory available to see and click (the wonderful Bones of Rosalinda did this very well, with minimal clicking away from the main screen, if the author wants an example). Since this may be a personal foible, perhaps others who played the game could reply here and let the author know if this is in fact a reasonable criticism, or just one finicky player’s need for hand-holding. I also found a few of the puzzles a little opaque, but hard puzzle games are some people’s joy, and this one has what looks like a complete walkthrough, a convenience that many players really appreciate.

All in all, those criticisms are, again, petty ones in light of how good the game is. The trend toward choice games with a parser feel is a most welcome one, and this is a great addition to that area. I’m delighted to see such great work coming from someone new to publishing IF, and I hope to see more from this author. I will absolutely return to this game once my judging is complete.

Next up: Graveyard Strolls, by Adina Brodkin

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Yeah…that’s the easy way to do it with Twine: there are probably templates out there somewhere for an inventory sidebar if you know where to dig for them, but creating one yourself from scratch requires a significant amount of figuring-out-web-coding-stuff, unfortunately.

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Thank you for the lovely review! I’m glad you enjoyed the game despite the issues with the interface, (which, yeah, I admit can be a little unwieldy). I hope you enjoy the ending when you get to it!

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Graveyard Stroll by Adina Brodkin- Texture

Sometimes content warnings also act as advertisements. So it was with Graveyard Stroll, which told me to expect death, murder, blood, supernatural freaky occurrences, light body horror, mentions of abuse and child abuse. Right on! As someone who wrote a whole game about the murder of an abused child, this game is clearly for me. The cover art is nicely spooky, and the promise of becoming a “ghost therapist” was fun.

There’s some great stuff in this game: good imagery and characterization of the ghosts—exactly the kinds of people that might hang around with unresolved issues from their lives. It takes a strange turn toward the end toward the personal, but not the predictable denouement I had expected. I found the transition to the end jarring—it definitely could have taken a little more time to build toward the reveal. But that reveal is heartbreaking and terrifying indeed, and worth sticking around for. All good supernatural horror stories mirror real fears, and this one certainly does: the fear of forgetting who you are, where you came from, who you loved, what is true. And fear that the traumas of the past live on.

I played through this in under half an hour, so it’s a bite-sized game with a lot going on in it. I think it could have benefitted from more: more buildup, more exploration of the themes, more work on transition, more frame for the story. Particularly, I’d like more beginning—the one-sentence story about a Youtuber wasn’t enough to justify this adventure. And maybe something about the PC: are they interested in therapy? Helping others? I do wish this had been explored in more depth. The author should be encouraged by my wishing for more—I often wish I’d had less of a game.

I was unfamiliar with the mode of gameplay: dragging text boxes to highlighted words in the text, and because I am an old fart, I hated it at first. But I came around to it after a time, seeing it as more deliberately active than simply clicking a text box. It seemed to give more weight to any choices I made, and now I’m curious to play other games using this engine (Texture? Is that new? Or have I just missed recent games using it?).

I did struggle a little with some of the screens—if you don’t notice every highlighted word (and you have to drag your box around to see what’s highlighted), you can get stuck picking obviously bad actions, which at least led me to experience several richly deserved deaths due to being a jerk to the dead. Happily, the game doesn’t make you replay from the beginning (I never do that, even if I like the game), but takes you back to the critical choice. I think my biggest disappointment was that the “good” and “bad” choices were so obvious. Helping emotionally traumatized ghosts seems a field rife with the possibility of accidentally saying the wrong thing, and often the choices were just glaringly polar—“Make fun of” a ghost versus “Help him.”. I’d rather see more depth, more exploring viable possibilities to help someone.

According to their introduction in the “New Authors” thread, this is the author’s first time participating in a Comp, and it’s a really successful outing. Overall I greatly enjoyed my time with this game, and I hope @abrodkin brings us many more.

Next up: The Thirty Nine Steps by Graham Walmsley

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Thanks so much Amanda! I’m glad you enjoyed it! All of the authors who used Texture in this comp were working on a four week time limit due to a workshop we all took part in - which is why it was a bit shorter (and that seems to be the common critique for Graveyard Strolls). My plan is to make this into a full-length game where you can talk to 20+ ghosts, with more nuance to the choices like you mentioned and better explanations.

Texture isn’t a new engine but it was new to me and the workshop we took part in was teaching us how to use it. All of these things are really helpful and useful to keep in mind for future usage of the engine.

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I think there was a flush of games using Texture after it first came out in 2016, but it never got really popular and has kind of languished since then? It’s a neat little tool, though. Here’s Jim Munro’s blog post about the release.

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Aha! How cool. I’m looking forward to playing the others, and I certainly enjoyed yours-- the workshop seems to have been worth your time. I’ll be eager to see where you take this in a longer game. Congrats for getting such such good work into the comp!

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The Thirty-Nine Steps by Graham Walmsley- Twine

I love a thriller, and this game bills itself as one. It also says it’s an adaptation of a John Buchan novel by the same name. I haven’t read the book (or any of Buchan’s books), but I’m interested in games adapting literature. I adapted a whole bunch of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and I’m adapting something else for my Ectocomp game. So I like to see how other authors go about this. And this, it turns out, is more of a choose-your-own-adventure interactive novel than a game.

The game has little backstory for the PC (I learned one thing about my work background halfway through), which is a narrative decision I feel torn about. On one hand, this better allows the player to be the PC, since there isn’t any characterization in the way of seeing yourself in those shoes. On the other hand, it’s a little jarring to step into a thriller with no idea of who you are and what your capabilities are. I myself have gone in both directions, with strongly realized PCs and a PC you know nothing about, and I still feel some ambivalence about my own choices.

The story is fast-paced, tense, and preposterous (which is not necessarily a bad thing—nothing is more preposterous than James Bond stories), with some solid writing. I can’t know what’s taken directly from the book, and what is the author’s invention, but I’m curious how much of it is directly from the original story. It’s a tricky thing to adapt text very faithfully, as it often doesn’t work as well in adaptation, I’ve found. Graham, if you read this, could you comment on your process with that a little in a reply? In any case, the narrative is frenetic, with many of the choices you make being final. If you choose one thing over another, you may never get a chance to do the other thing (which might be critical to understanding the plotline) again. This is a sensible design decision from the perspective of an on-the-run thriller-- after all, you just don’t have time to do very much when everybody’s out to get you. But it also forces another narrative decision: making the player replay in order to see what they missed, a fairly standard CYOA design choice, except that in this case, the missed opportunity might be pivotal. So this game apparently is made to be played more than once if you want to grok the whole story. I confess, this is not my thing. I have never replayed a game to see more of it, and I likely never will. I don’t know how standard an attitude this is among players, but especially in a Comp where there’s a buffet of new games singing their siren songs to me, I’m ready to move on once I’ve played through something once. Your mileage will definitely vary here based on how likely you are to replay. It’s certain that an impressive amount of work went into the branching choices here, so I definitely missed a great deal in my one play through.

If you don’t choose certain options (like solving a coded message) right away, the game moves you forward anyway, seemingly as if you had solved them, giving you choices that seem to come out of the blue (how did I know which house to go to in the end?). So quite a few of the pieces of the narrative seemed unconnected. I wonder if this was intentional, with the author hoping that I‘d replay to fill in the gaps? By the end I was hopelessly lost, with no idea of who the bad guys were, why they’d done what they’d done, or how any of the pieces linked to each other. Each piece (espionage, murder, code-breaking, a cool hidden mechanism, etc) was interesting, but without connection between them, it didn’t feel like a cohesive story.

Ultimately, although there were some great things here, it didn’t pull together for me, and that may simply be because I was the wrong player for this type of game. Since so much of a game’s experience is dependent on the personality quirks of the player, I encourage others to play it and form their own impressions.

Next up: Arborea by Richard Develyn

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Hi Amanda! Thanks for this.

To answer your question: I didn’t take any of the text from the book, but I tried to closely follow the way the text was written. When I was writing, I would read sections of the original book, then try to write the game using the same voice.

I borrowed lots of episodes from the book, but I’ve expanded them a lot and added different choices. So, for example, there’s a monoplane in the book, but I’ve made it into a much more dangerous episode, with lots of different choices.

I think your comparison with James Bond is a good one! To be honest, when I read the book, I also had no idea who the bad guys were or how any of the pieces linked to each other. There’s an episodic, disconnected feel to the book: at one point, you end up addressing a political meeting (I left that episode out!). I tried to choose the more exciting episodes, plus the beautiful moments in the Scottish highlands.

Thanks again.

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Arborea by Richard Develyn– parser

I picked this game largely for the gorgeous cover art and the promised ecological theme. Sometimes, folks, a really good piece of art can sway people to your game.

You’re in a simulation of a forest. You’re carrying a gourd. I didn’t find the first puzzle (getting out of the forest) taxing, and oh joy, there were now many areas to wander around in. Each direction takes you to a different place—and perhaps a different time— all based on the type of tree that might be found there. Some of those locations do have heavy ecological themes which can be very horrifying indeed. Others don’t seem to have any ecological themes at all, instead focussing on Buddhism, or on a particularly nasty time in American history, or simply a fun historical era. The writing is very good, immediately setting your mood for each area: horror, mystery, humor, religious experience. This is where Arborea really shines—wandering around the locations and experiencing these mood swings is really quite jarring and effective.

I didn’t finish this in 2 hours, though I probably will go back to it. I say probably because I had some trouble figuring out what there was to do. There are a few signposted puzzles, but not many, and I found myself at the walkthrough pretty quick, just for an idea of what I should be focussing on in all that territory. I ran into trouble with the commands once (I’ll blur this spoiler): I had used the command “up” in the first location, and that worked great to climb a tree. In the other locations, “up” didn’t work for any of the trees, and almost all of the trees could not be climbed, either— in fact CLIMB MANGROVE gives you a reply about the hut. So by the time I got to a very important tree, I had fizzled on trying to climb trees in the locations. I did try UP at the fig tree, too, but there’s another location up from there. So I never would have climbed the fig tree without the walkthrough.

In fact, I used the walkthrough a great deal for the rest of my time with Arborea, because it often wasn’t at all clear who to give things to, or which area to go to use an item-- it felt a bit read-the-author’s-mind-ish. The disjointed feel of the map in this game is both its great strength and its weakness, and I wish my sense of purpose had been clearer. I don’t know if ecological messages would have eventually occurred in every area, but I did find it odd that some locations were so effectively used for a message, while others seemed to have no message at all.

I also may have run into a bug (or maybe I am just really not getting this puzzle): in the realm above the fig tree, dividing the whispered number by a door number works until it doesn’t. I worked on it for quite a while, but kept finding myself with a very low number in an area where there was no exit with a number that could be divided into the whispered number, and I’d have to start over. So either I should have tried way more variations (I did fool with this for quite some time, though) or this is a bug.

So all in all I found Arborea to be a really mixed bag: a big, terrific map; and good writing evoking real sense of place in many different times and places. But when I can’t figure out what to do with all that, I start to lose interest. Possibly the game could benefit from some gating so there’s less space to roam while you figure out what to do, but that would hurt its central asset, which is the thrill of going to all these vastly different places from one hub. I think perhaps a subtle in-game hint system would probably help enormously—perhaps the gourd could somehow be a hint system (it kinda sorta already does that a bit)? If you love hard parser puzzlers, this is the game for you. And it’s definitely worth wandering around in for the writing, even if you do need to keep the walkthrough handy.

Next up: INK by Sangita V Nuli

** Edit: I just had a glass of wine, so I’ll share this with you: if I ever were to write a romance novel, the hero would be named Richard Develyn, or d’Evelyn. I mean, what a cool name. Some of us have names that bring to mind things like: Amanda Walker, county clerk in a mustard-stained uniform. Others get to go through life with names that conjure up different images, like: Richard Develyn, swashbuckling rake in tight pants and a poet’s shirt.
Life is not fair.

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Or “Jim Nelson,” which is a good name to use when you’re passing bad checks around town.

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Nah, that’s an odd one, I figured it out by mistake: if you look again you’ll get a different set of exits. So just repeat until you get the number you’re looking for.


Edit: now that’s interesting, because for me it’s always conjured an image more like an older Judi Dench character. Elegant, maybe a little severe, brooks no nonsense.

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Yeah, I feel like “Mandy Walker” might be a whole different kettle of fish but “Amanda” classes up the joint.

“Michael” is apparently Hebrew for “who is like God?”, which is pretty cool. “Russo” is Italian for “I snore”, though, so it balances out.

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“Nelson” and false identities reminds me here of a high school friend who got his picture in the school yearbook twice. He didn’t intend to do anything silly, but they asked his name and he said “Joe Nelson.”

He then decided, what the heck, I’ll do the same thing the next 3 years too. And he indeed did!

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I am a little drunk, my pants are covered with old paint (like, stiff with old paint), I just had my husband shave the back of my head because I was tired of all the fluffy little hairs sticking to my neck, and even though I am 51 years old and should be way past indignities of this nature, I have a big zit on my chin. Like, the kind of zit that you can see people trying not to look at. But I am very pleased that my name conjures up severe elegance for you, as that is better than the reality.

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OK, back to business.

INK, by Sangita V. Nuli

This game also had content warnings that said, “This is a horror game,” so I’ve had my eye on it. And I liked the inky cover art. Also, this was another Texture game, which has piqued my interest now that I’m over my initial “This is new and I don’t like it” phase with it.

I don’t want to say too much about it, as it’s only about 15 minutes of play, so I’ll just list the salient points:

This was not really a game. There were very few choices, and so I’d call it an interactive short story. I assume this was made in the same workshop as Graveyard Strolls? If so, I think that explains the lack of choices, as it seems that the authors learning Texture had only a short amount of time in which to make a game. In that case, sacrificing interactivity for a solid story is a good choice.

I really, really liked it. The story was heartbreaking, scary, breathless, and unpredictable. It’s about the paralyzing grief of loss as the world moves on around you, and the vampiric nature of denial. It’s in verse form and it’s very dramatic, and that can be a problem in IF, but here it works. The way the text boxes you drag play with the main text is great, and they actually add to the story instead of just being pauses to move things along at a certain pace.

It could have used an extra tester/proofreader, as it had some spelling and format issues, but these were pretty minor.

A very promising start from Sangita— I was fully immersed in this truly creepy and thoughtful piece of work. I’ll definitely play your other game in the Comp (that’s US Route 160, everyone).

Next up: One Final Pitbull Song (at the End of the World), by Paige Morgan

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It’s randomized, sometimes there are no good options and you have to return to 108 and start over.

I thought this too and found it a bit confusing. The game’s actually more about all the ways in which humans interact with trees. Reverent, practical, destructive,…

I enjoyed this game a whole lot, at least partly because it indeed shines in the free exploration department. My enjoyment also went up a whole notch when I tricked the blind monk into giving me sugar in no tea… Muahahaa!

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Yes, but as I said above, the numbers change every time you look, so you just re-roll them until you find a good one. You never actually have to start over.

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Yes, I did not mean “start over” as in start the game anew or even the entire puzzle. I meant start over the puzzle sequence from any new beginning point which is 108. You are right that the PC never actually leaves the puzzle to come back to it and start over. The puzzle itself just continues on and on.