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.
I do actually clue this though, I know, with my prose style these clues sometimes hide 
Hi Amanda,
Thank you very much for your review.
I take your point about “up”; got into a bit of a pickle with it when I placed the fig tree in the junction with a mountain path going up and down. Since the up and down is figurative as well as actual, and I needed that tree there too, and I didn’t want to remove up for going up trees and bulldozers and so on, I am a bit stuck with this.
Thank you for playing and I’m glad you enjoyed it (I think, overall, you did, didn’t you?
)
As for my name, it’s unique. Trying to explain that would be a mini adventure in itself. If you google my name you’ll learn all about me and my hobbies, though I am now retired which isn’t on the internet yet. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether you think I look like the swashbuckling adventurer type 
All the best
Richard
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Hmm. I’m still not sure if we’re saying the same thing… You never have to go back to 108: you never have to lose any progress on the puzzle at all.
example snippet of transcript
Three Wholesome Roots
You are in the three wholesome roots. Below you lies the mundane
world.
To the north you see the five expedient methods, to the south are
the five guides for propagating buddhism of nichiren, to the east
the five bikkhus and to the west the twelve sense media.
A voice in your head whispers "9".
Note that there are no usable exits. So now we look:
>l
You blink your eyes and look again as the doors of your perception
sway and change.
Three Wholesome Roots
You are in the three wholesome roots. Below you lies the mundane
world.
To the north you see the five periods of hui-kuan, to the south
are the twenty-eight indian patriarchs of zen, to the east the
three gates to nirvana and to the west the five watches of the
night.
A voice in your head whispers "9".
I still have 9, I’m still in the Three Wholesome Roots, but now east is a good exit.
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Oh wow! I never noticed that. I just took one of the “wrong” doors and it reset to 108. Hah…
Thanks!
The traps we write ourselves into. I am always struggling out of a programming trap of my own making, so I feel you here. My suggestion would be to give the player an option in any area where UP could mean up a tree or up to another location-- like, “Do you want to go up the fig tree or up the stairs/bulldozer/etc?”. That would keep the commands consistent for players like me, whose first command in the game (after Xing myself and the gourd images) was U.
And yes, I did enjoy my time with the game very much. There’s little as good in the world as being in an IF hub that has interesting and varied locations in every single direction-- it makes me feel rich.
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One Final Pitbull Song (at the End of the World), by Paige Morgan—Choice-based
This was on my must-play list for the kickass title and the content warnings: extreme violence, gore, and sexual themes. It doesn’t have a blurb at all, but rather a playlist, which is a really bold choice. But the title is so strong and the game so unique that any blurb might have undersold it.
This is an ambitious piece of writing. It’s an uncompromising slapstick potpourri of sharp commentary on prisons, gender norms, the coming apocalypse(s), and state-sponsored religion, with our heroine—TeeJay-- aided by the supernatural powers bestowed by music and dance. The game consists almost entirely of dialogue, lots and lots (and lots) of it. Some of it is exceedingly funny and well-written, and some of it is extraneous and stilted, but mostly it hits its mark: to turn the satire dial up to 11, grind on it, splash blood and vomit on it, and keep cranking it.
TeeJay lives in a nightmarish future America with a lot of parallels to our nightmarish current America, in which the rediscovered media of this time reigns supreme—particularly the music of Pitbull. I had to look this up, as I’d never heard of Pitbull, and (oldster alert) I genuinely thought before playing that we’d have a howling dog here (which now makes me wonder if this is intentional homage to howling dogs). Although things have improved for transfolk in the future, there’s still an awful lot of the current conversation about trans issues and identifying language going on (I hoped that so far into the future, society would have just accepted everybody unconditionally, but no such luck). We spend most of our time in a Thunderdome-type prison, talking to a cast of well-realized, quirky NPCs, learning about our set of Very Special Skills, and forging deep bonds while dancing like our lives depend on it (this mostly makes sense in the game).
I didn’t finish this in 2 hours, and I might return to it. I enjoyed my time with it and was impressed by the scope of the vision, but was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of zany narrative curveballs being thrown at me. Also, I do draw a distinction between reading and playing, and this was a reading experience, not a playing experience. There are vanishingly few choices to make, although it did tell me that making a choice between one food and another sounded Very Important and I’d better save my game. Was it Very Important? I don’t know. Perhaps there’s a whole different branch to the story and another reviewer will fill me in on it.
A good editor would have been golden here—sometimes dead horses are beaten, and there are occasional grammar, formatting, and spelling problems, along with some blips in conversation where the back and forth seems disjointed. Also, there was just so much conversation. With this game, more is always more, but good editing can underscore that by trimming the fat.
Overall, I definitely recommend that you try this. It’s a wild ride crammed to bursting with the author’s exuberant and prodigious creative energy, and I guarantee you’ll laugh, then gag, then think.
Next up: Crash, by Phil Riley
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I would have escaped but for his stuff blaring constantly at my athletic cub. He seemed to be collaborating with everybody. The club wouldn’t play 2 songs in a row but the same artist, but they would
- play a song by “X featuring Pitbull” then one by “Pitbull featuring Y”
- play a Pitbull song then play a commercial for a CD (or whatever) of your favorite tracks, with Pitbull taking top billing
To describe Pitbull without exposing you to his music, I recommend this clip. It doesn’t have to make total sense, but you’ll get the gist of it.
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Thanks for the review!!
There’s another review on this forum that insists this game is about TeeJay going down into a giant hole. I’m sure they’d be surprised to hear about the dancing…
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Hi Amanda,
Thanks for the kind and thoughtful review, I really appreciated it! This is my first foray into interactive fiction and I’m looking forward to gamifying things more as I continue to learn!
Also, you were correct - I did submit INK as part of the Texture workshop so it was a pretty short timeline - on behalf of all of the authors who submitted Texture games as part of the workshop, we appreciate you taking the time to check them out!
I was definitely focusing more on the story for this project, and I’m glad you liked it! Writing in verse has been a bit of a mad science experiment - this project dipped and dived into the surreal and I just let it happen. Thanks for taking the ride!
Finally - thank you for shouting out U.S. Route 160! As my first interactive fiction piece, that project has a special place in my heart - I look forward to hearing what you think!
Enjoy the rest of the comp! - Sangita
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Crash, by Phil Riley
I’ve been itching to play this one, since it’s a parser sci-fi game, and that is squarely in my happy place.
It’s a terrific set-up: you’re a repairman on a spaceship with a to-do list, and things go very south very fast, leaving you alone to figure out how to save the ship, and yourself, with much bigger stakes coming into play later. I particularly liked that I was a grunt-type repairman-- the kind that fixes jammed cabinets-- instead of an engineer or a high-level tech. It always makes me nervous when the PC is smarter than I am, and I’m just the type of person who could fix a broken cabinet, but not a malfunctioning computer. So I felt right at home with the PC. There’s a good map, and I found the nautical directions (aft, forward, port, starboard) to be easy. The puzzles start stacking up: blocked doors, locked cabinets, as well as the things on your to-do list (no matter how dire the bigger crisis is, I’m still a repairman, and by God, I’m going to fix that microwave). So this is an old-fashioned text adventure, which feels like sitting down with a plate of comfort food. It underscores that by having you play a section of Planetfall. I confess I never played Planetfall, but I do appreciate the nod to a classic game.
This is a Inform game (I assume I7), and Phil is a new author, and I gotta tell you from experience, learning Inform is hard. So it’s a pretty major feat to get an Inform game running smoothly. And this mostly does run smoothly. There are some pretty constant disambiguation issues, and some holes in implementation of described scenery/items. Which, by the way, were the exact criticisms I just got from a tester on my WIP. I’m sure that writing choice-based games is rife with difficulties I know nothing about, but choice-based authors don’t have to implement separate descriptions for literally every single object they describe, plus responses for players who try to lick everything. So there were issues, yes, but as a fellow I7 learner, I have to point out how freaking hard it is to deal with all those things. I think the game is worth going back and smoothing those out in a post-comp version, Phil.
I didn’t finish this in 2 hours. I love parser games, but I’m slow at them, so I don’t know if this is finishable in 2 hours by a quicker-witted player. I did get hung up on a red herring-- an in-game hint that said I needed to vacuum something, and having a handy vac suit that I was just positive was the solution-- and I’m not sure whether or not that was an intentional red herring. If so, ack. Messing with that ate up a big chunk of time for me. I struggled to guess the verb occasionally, and had some trouble finding the right keywords to talk to people about (there’s a great section where command bigwigs start contacting the ship, and you have to figure out who to trust).
Overall, a really zippy and fun sci-fi puzzler that I will absolutely return to-- I put it down very reluctantly at the end of my 2 hours. It does have some parser frustrations, but they’re nothing out of the ordinary for experienced parser players, and the game is worth playing despite them.
Next up: Lucid, by Caliban’s Revenge
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LICK socket.
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PUT FORK IN SOCKET
Thanks, Amanda, for that very kind review. I’m going to try to restrain myself from working on my next game until I whip this one into shape. And no, that was not an intentional red herring, just an unfortunate name collision. That’s one thing I’ll definitely avoid in the future.
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I restrained myself from tagging you in the review. I didn’t need to anyway, because we all know who the mad licker in our transcripts is.
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