A game about a vampire infiltrating into a company owned by a fellow (rival) vampire. You have a bone to pick with this other fellow, and so you need access to the company to sabotage their current project. The tone is humorous, and the game doesn’t take itself too seriously. The gameplay is very smooth - everything is clued so well that you almost don’t need the included hint system at all. The puzzles were just the right difficulty for me, so I enjoyed playing this quite a bit. Playing through the game took about the estimated one hour. The story was on the short side and there were a few puzzles only along the way, and there was maybe nothing that groundbreaking or overwhelming, but what there was was competently implemented and worked. 8
THE WAYWARD STORY
“Thank you playing through The Wayward Story. I hope you find some meaning in it.”, the author mentions. Does this mean that the author isn’t sure what the meaning of the story is, and hopes that the player might squeeze something meaningful out of it? To be honest, I didn’t quite get the meaning behind the story, if there was one. This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy playing … Ok, let’s see: You start in your room, at 2 a.m., excited about the season finale of your favorite TV series which you have decided to watch on your laptop before going to bed. After a while, having finished it, you are annoyed that it ends in a cliffhanger. You fall asleep (presumably?) and go through various fragmentary scenes; you manage to do some actions in them, but they all end “prematurely”, before any meaningful conclusion or solution is reached. You also play as different characters in the course of play, which I didn’t quite get. The names (playing as Jack, Nolon, etc.) were not explained or put into any context or framework. The “puzzles” are not that hard, mainly you do something obvious throughout. At the end, you manage to reach some kind of satisfactory ending, but the game starts over from the beginning right afterwards. This might mean that there are some variations as to the gameplay and that every game you play is a bit different. I didn’t play through another time, however, as I already had played close to two hours. There were some minor rough spots here and there (words that should have been capitalized weren’t, etc), but otherwise playing through was smooth enough. It was a neat trick that when you for example went in a red door, the text turned red, and so on. As I mentioned, playing through the various scenes was enjoyable enough in itself, but as there was no explanation of what had happened or what I had accomplished at the end, the flavor that I was left with after playing was rather vague. 7
I have now played through all the parser games in this year’s comp (I didn’t review or grade Under They Thunder, as I was a beta-tester, and if I understood the rules correctly, I should refrain from grading it). I will now play through some of the choice-based entries.
YOU WILL THANK ME AS FAST AS YOU THANK A WEREWOLF
The output in the game is as nonsensical as the title. This might be due to the fact, mentioned in the about section, that “this work is a collaboration with GPT-2, a neural network model designed to predict the next word in a block of given text based on its study of eight million web pages. In this application, I input a text file of my own prose from the past twenty years into GPT-2. It then generated new writing in a similar style. I selected, arranged, and lightly edited the resulting output.” Consequently, we get text passages like “There were billboards for breaking into cars and throwing them crashing into mountains. There were vultures that drove all around the yard, searching for thunderclap.” followed by clickable choices such as “Like teaching young people how to love their mothers” and “Hell, even the garbage trucks look beautiful.” Sometimes there is only one choice to click, sometimes two, and it isn’t clear why. The blurb mentions that this is an experimental story about a lifelong romantic relationship, and that theme does surface in the text regularly. However, mostly this feels too incoherent to follow in a concentrated manner. You could of course let yourself get intoxicated by the poesy, and the various metaphors, but I could not keep at it for long. There is an indicator at the bottom of the page showing your progress in %, and it was helpful, but I felt I had lost interest long before the 100%. Props to the author for making the experiment, though. 6
A short and rather linear story about a scene at a store where the protagonist is working for the first day. The whole incident depicted in the narrative is brief and doesn’t appear very exciting. Very often there was only one option to click to move the story forward, and even when there were several options, they resulted in the same outcome. Even to start with, the options didn’t often differ essentially from each other (you can pick between “Hi” and “Hello”, or between “Nod.” and “Say ‘cool’.”). So, this was basically a linear story camouflaged with some false options. Sometimes a choice led to the reaction “You couldn’t have done that.” (from which the title of the story also is taken), parallel to “You can’t do that.” in parser games, and the other option, the one that the player didn’t choose, played out instead. In short, rather unremarkable, linear. 3
The interface looks good and this seems to be professionally implemented. There is also background music included. The story starts promisingly, too. The game world, with its animal characters that behave like humans (wage wars, drive cars etc.) is intriguing. During gameplay, you have to be clicking at links in two different windows, and that can be a bit distracting - you have to follow the changes in two windows to keep track of the story. Moreover, if you examine an object for example, this text appears in a third window of its own that you have to close to return back to the default view. It took me sometime to learn how to scroll down the text; the sidebar could not be used for that purpose. It was also rather cumbersome to take inventory; you had to click two or three times to access the inventory listing.
I played until the end of chapter 2 at which I point I died as a result of a fight over a gun. The story seemed to progress rather slowly - two chapters, and I had encountered one person that I got into a fight with. I didn’t feel like playing another time after reaching this (early?) ending. The interface, as I mentioned, is stylish, and a lot of care and work has probably gone into the implementation. The story, however, wasn’t that engaging, partly due to the slowish pace, partly to the aforementioned difficulty in dealing with the various application windows, even if I did find the setting (with the human-like animal characters) successful and a good idea in itself. For the effort, anyway, I am willing to grant this game a 7.
WHAT THE BUS
A fun game that uses successfully the multiple choice gimmick. The main character needs to get to his/her workplace and the usual way of getting there doesn’t seem to work today. They can choose between alternative local bus/train routes, and after some time end up somewhere that can be anything from hell to a dog park to their actual workplace. There are altogether 10 different endings and the fun thing about the game is to explore the different outcomes. I managed to find 8 different endings and it was entertaining enough. However, there didn’t seem to be a lot more to the game than wandering through the different routes and seeing where you would end up. You could reach one ending relatively fast, through taking two or three means of transport and then seeing where you might end up. If that’s all you require from a game, then of course this one fulfills its purpose. And it did have a certain charm of its own. 7
I must confess this one didn’t engage me at all. How long will you survive van life when you have to take into account electricity consumption and things like that? With sentences like “trying to run a 12V 960A premium kettle for 3 minutes caused a problem, when I tried to use 576 watts from a battery bank that had 0 watts it didn’t go well.” I think this one is trying to teach some fundamentals of electricity to 6th graders (6th graders are mentioned at the beginning of the story), but I wonder if they, either, will be that excited. Or maybe I’ve just missed the whole point. However, this one was utterly uninteresting to play, sorry. 3
Taking place on a space station inhabited by not only humans but also other species, this story doesn’t, however, manage to engage me very much. There are a lot of terms to memorize, terms for the various races and the various devices found on the station. They are highlighted and when you hover over them, a definition pops up, which is helpful, and the various terms keep being highlighted and clickable even further into the story, even if they have appeared before, so you can click again and check if you don’t remember what a particular term means. The story is rather linear - mostly. after every page of text, you can just click on three dots to forward the story. About 25% of the time, or a bit less seldom. there are alternatives you can choose between. Thus, the whole thing is rather linear, and mostly it feels like you can just read the story and click automatically to make it move forward. Not a lot happens anyway, so the player/reader loses interest after some way into the story - well, at least this one did. The interface is slick and has a nice sci-fi feel, but for some reason the online version was very slow, so I switched rather soon to the downloadable version which worked better. I played for an hour but couldn’t be bothered beyond that. The alternatives to choose from don’t present any challenge in themselves; clicking whatever doesn’t seem to make much difference; you are proceeding along the same main path in any case. In short, the interactivity here felt lacking. Anyway, there was a lot of thought and planning put into creating the game world itself. All in all, the impression I got from this game amounts to a score of 5.
A very brief interactive adaptation of the author’s short story which he wrote some years ago. It’s unfortunately rather linear, and you can examine some things, but ultimately only one link brings the story forward on each page. The author does acknowledge this in the about section. I didn’t find the ending that special, unfortunately, and this being a very short experience, it is hard to grade it very high. 4.
The idea, a superhero and a villain discussing their moves over a cup of coffee, is cute.
After playing this for a while, however, I noticed that it is practically just a story that you click to read forward, with no multiple choices except very few and far between, and then mainly cosmetic at that - at least throughout the passage I played. Clicking on some text just to go automatically to the next page is about as interactive as turning the pages of a conventional book. There are also various short story competitions to consider. I know this is not the only game in this competition to suffer from this design, but I take it up here. I do notice that the game advertises itself as “web-based”, not “choice-based”, so maybe I am being a bit harsh, but I think there should be something interactive about the entries anyway? If this was a parser game, it would be mainly a single body of text with a “more” prompt that you’d have to click to read on… and on… 2
Hey Anssi, I wanted to give you thanks for your many excellent reviews. You helped me discover some gems that I would have missed because they were buried deep in my personal shuffle. I appreciate that you include your numerical rating, which most reviewers don’t share I think.
Great, thanks for your feedback! I’m glad if my reviews have been helpful. Some of the scores I presented above changed a bit in my final cast of votes, for example Dr Ego, and The Eleusinian Miseries both got 9 (despite being rather different games, for example as to wordiness), even if I have graded them slightly lower above. There have been many excellent games this year. Thanks to all who read my reviews.
Ok, let’s see: You start in your room, at 2 a.m., excited about the season finale of your favorite TV series which you have decided to watch on your laptop before going to bed. After a while, having finished it, you are annoyed that it ends in a cliffhanger. You fall asleep (presumably?) and go through various fragmentary scenes; you manage to do some actions in them, but they all end “prematurely”, before any meaningful conclusion or solution is reached. You also play as different characters in the course of play, which I didn’t quite get. The names (playing as Jack, Nolon, etc.) were not explained or put into any context or framework. The “puzzles” are not that hard, mainly you do something obvious throughout. At the end, you manage to reach some kind of satisfactory ending, but the game starts over from the beginning right afterwards. This might mean that there are some variations as to the gameplay and that every game you play is a bit different. I didn’t play through another time, however, as I already had played close to two hours. There were some minor rough spots here and there (words that should have been capitalized weren’t, etc), but otherwise playing through was smooth enough. It was a neat trick that when you for example went in a red door, the text turned red, and so on. As I mentioned, playing through the various scenes was enjoyable enough in itself, but as there was no explanation of what had happened or what I had accomplished at the end, the flavor that I was left with after playing was rather vague. 7
