Bruno Dias reviews IFComp

Competitions IFComp
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Yes, yes, I said I wasn’t going to do it. I might still not submit a ballot, but I’ve changed my mind after talking to people. You can view a more detailed explanation of why, as well as the overall approach to reviewing, in the first post of the series about it.

Current ‘best in show’: The Witch Girls

Blog posts (and games reviewed within):

  • September 21st: The Olive Tree, valley of glass, Anne of Green Cables, the Witch Girls
  • September 22nd: The Wise-Woman’s Dog, 3XXX, the Semantagician’s Assistant
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I’ll only be excerpting one review from each batch on the forums. This is from the most recent post which also includes reviews for The Wise Woman’s Dog and The Semantagician’s Assistant.

3XXX: Naked Human Bombs

So this is explicitly an extremely personal piece, and writing a review of those is always inherently very fraught as it can amount to, basically, poking and prodding at someone’s spilled guts on the floor. But I’m going to take this mostly as it is, which is to say: a really interesting mess.

This is a fairly linear story with a few choices interspersed set in a comically grim dystopia ruled by extreme prudes. In this society, showing any skin below the neck is illegal, people aren’t considered adults until the age of 43, and sexual repression is so thorough and so complete that becoming even a little horny causes people to violently explode.

This is obviously a loose allegory for all of the overlapping fronts of social conservatism: the increasing impossibility of posting porn or even discussing sexuality online and the increasingly insane and censorious age-verification laws in various jurisdictions are obviously at the forefront. But this seems just as inspired by fandom ‘anti’ discourse and extremely-online ‘puriteens’ who might disemvowel words like ‘k*nks’ and ‘f*tishes’. It’s also alludes, of course, to the wave of transphobic fascism that seems intensely deranged about what people do in bathrooms.

By far the best writing here is the prologue, which is set firmly in this insane dystopia and proceeds more or less as a pastiche of a police procedural – you play as a cop who investigates people who’ve exploded due to unresolved sexual tension. But the story very quickly pivots away tonally to a very different thing, which is more of an exploration of intimacy, gender, and specifically trying to enact your intimacy in a world where everyone around you has had their ability to be intimate curtailed in some way by society.

From a pure writing craft standpoint: I think it struggles to maintain its energy throughout. I think it pivots tonally too hard between the absurd hyper-puritan dystopia and the much more earnest material later on in the piece. The prose is definitely clumsy in places, unsure of how to move the story forward or convey information and thus resorting to some fairly flat exposition.

But taken as a whole, it’s also this really brash piece of gonzo queer storytelling. I think other games I’ve reviewed so far are certainly more mature or technically competent, but I found this to be one of the more interesting and fun pieces so far. It has zero interest in being subtle, in a good way.

This is one of those pieces that I think more people should try out and play even if they might ultimately not like it or if the ratings it ultimately garners (by the typical rubric people judge IFComp with) are likely to not be so high.

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Thank you very much for the review!

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Thank you for checking out my really interesting mess.

I’ll be sure to quote some of the criticisms here in my eventual postmortem since my critic side of the brain agrees with them entirely and has been telling the author side of brain to cut it out.

But the author part won out in the end because “isn’t gonzo queer storytelling fun?” This pulp fiction approach is not something I tend to do, but it was a fun experiment.

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Another day, another post. I’m excerpting my review of Penthesilea here:

Review of Penthesilea

This is a short sci-fi thriller set in your standard off-the-shelf totalitarian future.

Interaction-wise this is a fairly straightforward Twine piece. On the writing side, I think this struggles with finding specificity. The strongest aspect of the story is the relationship between the point of view character – I won’t spoil the details – and her husband, a ‘very important man’ with the regime. It is genuinely creepy in places, but most of all it achieves a good sense of alignment.

The player character’s relationships and circumstances are portrayed in a way that really does enable the player to inhabit that viewpoint, with a good possibility space of choices that makes that alignment feel meaningful as the player enacts their character’s story.

Where I do think this piece is weaker is in the writing surrounding that relationship, both in the overall conclusion of the plot (which I felt was weak, but I can’t discuss without spoilers) and especially in the rendering of the setting. This really doesn’t have an image or a central idea that gives its world some direction. It’s not completely devoid of unique detail, but it does feel largely like what you expect; it’s every near-future totalitarian dystopia you care to name.

Mostly, the world is rendered in general-purpose signifiers that Things are Bad without going much further. This is the kind of comically repressive state where restaurants have to be named things like On Our Knees Before Our Beloved Prefect and pizza is considered a high-status food. There’s precious little material detail to this world; I think I’m supposed to picture a hyper-capital-fascist JG Ballard nightmare more so than Airstrip One. But the whole thing is very ungrounded in any particular place or time – characters are named after figures in the Iliad, like the titular Penthesilea, which gives it a remove from any one cultural context.

It’s hard to know how to take this genre of work these days; you can’t really fault it for portraying a world where the ruling class is comically, absurdly evil. Not going to call that one ‘unrealistic.’ But it does feel pretty flat and pretty confined by its genre. I think the sci-fi thriller half of this and the psychological horror half of this are at odds, or at least the writing doesn’t successfully find a thematic throughline between them.

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Thanks for reviewing “Burger Meme”! I really think you nailed it: I take my shitposting very seriously!

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Reviews for September 24th, including Violent Delight, Crescent Sea Story, and Murderworld (excerpted):

Review of Murderworld

This is, just straight-up, X-Men fanfiction. The title made me assume it had some tedious twist about superheroes actually being bad and violent, or that it’s a 90s-grimdark type story about the X-Men being made to kill each other; but no, turns out that (unbeknownst to me) a murderworld is just a concept in Marvel continuity, which fans familiar with the comics would recognize.

Murderworld is a fairly large and ambitious parser game; I played enough to know it is significantly longer than two hours. Among other things, this game features tons of NPCs, multiple alternate solutions to puzzles, and most notably multiple playable characters. As you’d expect of an X-Men game, you play multiple characters[1], with the expected differing powers and capabilities. Wolverine, for example, has special responses to SMELL in most places, in addition to the signature claws.

The writing here is solid; it doesn’t overburden with unnecessary detail but still has enough flavor to get across the comic-book world being explored. A lot of care is put into the characterization of the various x-persons, both when inhabiting their viewpoint and when interacting with them as another character.

Implementation, too, feels solid. I definitely found some jank or rough edges, but nothing that broke the game. Most of the puzzling I encountered was of the kind liable to be solved by just exploring everywhere and talking to everyone – this game is filled with NPCs, unlike most parser games.

The first sequence of the game, set in Xavier’s mansion, is the one that uses the multiple-characters conceit more effectively; here, you can pick to play as any one of the x-folks and you have an overlapping but not identical set of goals depending on whom you play as. I did find that some of the puzzles are a bit odd because they rely on, essentially, other characters moving about and doing things on their own to progress things in ways that aren’t signaled to the player, so you might not think to revisit an area that has changed since you last saw it.

The later section of the game, where you play through scenarios specific to each character in turn, doesn’t have that flair but remains interesting and shockingly extensive.

I was definitely pleasantly surprised by this; this is a large and complex puzzly parser game, of the kind that you don’t see many in a given IFComp.

  1. Obviously there’s been millions of X-Men but the available lineup here is Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Dazzler, and Nightcrawler. ↩︎

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If anyone’s wondering, Violent Delight is meant to take more-or-less exactly two hours… and playing another game in the meantime is exactly what you’re meant to do! Thanks for giving it a shot though. It was actually pretty sunny today.

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Reviews for September 25th, including ‘the Tempest of Baraqiel’, ‘Moon Logic’ and ‘The Grove of Bones’.

Tempest of Baraqiel Review

This is a fairly long, mostly linear choice-based story built in a bespoke system akin to something like ChoiceScript. It’s billed a homage to 70’s science fiction, which it absolutely is – this is military sci-fi in the vein of something like Robert A Heinlein; humanity is losing the bug war, and you’re a naval officer – and scientist – recruited to a project that might just turn it all around.

I played this through to a ‘bad’ ending; since the game didn’t really signal that this was possible, I didn’t bother saving. As it also doesn’t have an ‘undo’, and is actually fairly long, I didn’t have time to replay it through to a different ending, so I didn’t really get a full impression of the story. This seems structured like a classic SF short story, with the plot hinging around an ‘aha’ moment at the end, but I never got that ‘aha’ moment. Oops!

There are some other technical issues here. I wasn’t able to play this with audio; the game is supposed to feature a procedural music score, but my attempts at playing it with sound resulted in the long load time for all of the audio files stalling. I think IFComp’s own fairly slow servers don’t enjoy me trying to download 200mb of music stems spread across 300 individual files. So I feel like I didn’t get the full experience in this sense either.

Beyond that, the presentation is enriched with illustrations made very much in the style of 90s cd-rom game art – retro 3D renders with hard surfaces and looping animations, presented as pretty crunchy indexed-palette gifs. It’s charming, although I think some more polish to the overall interface (as in, layout, typeface choices, colors) could have elevated that more.

My synopsis above makes the writing here sound really schlocky, but that’s not really the case. It does a pretty good impression of this style of sci-fi, both in prose style and tone, and it takes its characters and world more or less seriously. There’s some good character work here, and some interesting worldbuilding that makes this more interesting than an off-the-shelf retrofuture you could easily imagine this as.

Formally, this is a dialogue-heavy story in which all choices are lines of dialogue. While it has a solid player character protagonist, it also opts to have dialogue choices sometimes belong to other characters, occasionally allowing the player to branch the behavior of various characters in the story. From my single playthrough I couldn’t glean whether there was a lot of hidden state or variability here; I think this story has a strict branch-and-bottleneck structure in which player knowledge is the only thing that can separate distinct paths after they rejoin, but I am not 100% certain.

This gives the entire thing a bit of a light choice puzzle feel – it’s trying to reward you for picking up on certain clues and knowing the right things to say – but this is paired with it being a fairly unforgiving choice story with constant forward momentum.

Not having seen the denouement, I can’t really speak to the overall plot, but I did get the sense that the final act tended to run towards getting a bit lost in the sauce. I found that the dialogue in later sections was not really written to cope with complicated scenes with multiple characters talking and doing different things; it also represents a fairly abrupt and somewhat out of character escalation relative to the story so far (to avoid spoilers).

I also don’t know how much of the sci-fi conceits at the center of the story really land, but again, I didn’t see a proper denouement.

I think this is one case where the author has nailed some aspects of writing (the tone and prose style of the genre he’s operating under) but is missing the mark a bit on others (there’s some clarity and pacing issues). Similarly, I think the narrative design here is a pretty unrefined and seems like a first pass at choice design and building a custom system, although there are some interesting ideas.

This is one where I’d encourage the author to do some exploration of prior art in the medium and get a better sense of what’s possible, and maybe try building some games with off-the-shelf systems (most of which are open-source and freely available).

Also I wish I could edit the top post in this thread but I think I’m not allowed to?

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Editing the top post is perfectly fine! Especially during the comp as new reviews trickle in; it’s pretty standard procedure to keep adding links as you go.

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I think it’s a trust level issue! There’s a limit on the time frame in which a post can be edited, and it’s much lower for users below the “member” level. Though even members can normally only edit a post for 30 days after making it, apparently?

Default requirements for reaching Member
  • Visiting at least 15 days, not sequentially
  • Casting at least 1 like
  • Receiving at least 1 like
  • Replying to at least 3 different topics
  • Entering at least 20 topics
  • Reading at least 100 posts
  • Spend a total of 60 minutes reading posts

(This page has more details about the whole system)

Based on these, I think Bruno would reach Member in about 9 days and be able to edit his post—but since he’s already a trusted figure, maybe the moderators would be able to help!

Edit: I asked the mods just in case but it seems the 15-day visiting requirement is being enforced (specifically visits post-Discourse migration, not counting any prior activity). Sorry about that!

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No need to bother the moderators on my account, if it’s an automated thing that’s fine, I just found it odd given my account is… 15 years old.

Anyway: reviews for September 26, including The Little Four, whoami, Pharaohs’ Heir, and Smorgasbord of Pain (excerpted).

Review for Smorgasbord of Pain

This is a parser game that I would describe as a pastiche of kung fu exploitation movies but everyone is a horse. It is extremely, extremely silly, to the degree that I think a lot of people will find the humor on display here grating. Personally, I did mostly enjoy it; it is genuinely funny in places, and the whole thing is built around several mechanical conceits that are unusual for a parser game, including a pretty extensive (and again, very silly) combat system, with the entire game culminating in a sort of freeform arena designed to use it.

This knows pretty much exactly what it is – a vehicle for cartoon jokes – and delivers on that pretty confidently; either it works for you or doesn’t. I do think that it could have used parser polish purely to help the player acclimate to the game’s various unusual features – a lot of the game takes place in open areas where you can see across multiple rooms and are expected to take action based on what agents are doing in those other rooms, for example. Some of the systems feel a bit shaggy and loose in a way that means there’s not always a clear answer on a given turn.

But those are ultimately nitpicks of a piece that isn’t really about formal exactitude so much as it’s buildup for exactly one very extensive set of jokes.

Also re: smorgasbord of pain:

in the final food fight, I could not think of enough puns. I was able to muddle through but I wish the walkthrough listed a few… I only came up with RAM LLAMA WITH HAMBURGER, SLICE LLAMA WITH SLICE, NAIL LLAMA WITH SNAIL. I’d love to know how extensive it really is.

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I found a good number of other ones, though apparently a since-fixed bug meant some of them didn’t work. I kept a transcript (linked at the end of my review) - sorry, I know it would be more readable to paste them in but I’m on my phone at the moment so that would be pretty laborious!

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I had BEAT with BEETS and POUND with POUND CAKE and CHOKE with ARTICHOKE.

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Thank you very much for reviewing The Little Four! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts.

I’ll save any further blathering for the postmortem but just wanted to explain the espresso machine, whose design was based on this page from Gaggia’s website.

Relevant bits from the page

1936

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1938
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1939
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A very tight timeline, but I thought I could get away with it—since Poirot is rich, well-connected, and has a particular interest in gastronomy, I reasoned he could conceivably have obtained a professional-grade machine with that new technology long before it reached the masses… or maybe not! I’ll be sure to keep this point in mind as I fix and fill out the game further in the post-comp (and will consider downgrading the coffee maker).

In any case, you’re completely right about the Gaggia brand being anachronistic; I’m very grateful for the correction! I didn’t realize that the inventor hadn’t yet formed the company at that point. I’ll change that phrasing as soon as possible.

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Reviews for September 29th, including Saltwrack, Promises of Mars, and A Rock’s Tale. Excerpt:

Review of Saltwrack

This is a medium-length Twine piece. It’s post-post-apocalyptic fiction; the player character, along with two others, travels on an expedition to find the origin of the setting’s specific apocalypse – or die trying.

This owes a lot to Roadside Picnic and its own descendants Stalker and Annihilation; but also to D. Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World, and even its descendants Dream Askew and The Quiet Year. While it’s definitely operating within a genre, it’s very much the product of a unique lens into that genre.

This isn’t a stock apocalypse, which I appreciate; the wasteland is the titular saltwrack, a frozen tundra caked over with an excess of salt.

The writing here is quite good; I did spot a couple of clunky passages and some ideas that I don’t think quite land. But there’s also really effective material here that operates well in the mode of this style of fiction; the saltwrack is a place of austere beauty as well as horror and privation.

I think the writing here is at its best during the expedition itself, and struggles more both when setting up the premise early on, and during the climactical moments encountering the expedition’s objective. In the latter scene, it’s trying to perhaps cram a bit too much concept in that singular moment. Overall I think this is a very good effort, however.

It’s not totally clear to me (from one playthrough) how much the story varies, but I am given to understand that there’s random variation in what you can encounter; this is a bit Oregon Trail, with a status bar that tells you how far you’ve come and meters your constantly-dwindling supplies.

My own playthrough was lucky enough that I did not really encounter nonstandard game overs or even some of the more horrific outcomes the game’s content warning hints at. If I have major criticism of this piece is that it feels like the amount of tension and jeopardy in the story is a little too much at the mercy of randomness or whether the player takes specific choices. I still found the story satisfying, ultimately.

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Reviews for October 1st, including Backpackward, Willy’s Manor, Operative Nine, and Monkeys and Car Keys.

Excerpted review of Monkeys and Car Keys

Another pure parser puzzler. Mostly, I found the puzzles here to require some arbitrary leaps in logic; the way you pick up the thread of solving the first puzzle is something I would not have guessed (and that wasn’t clued at all; you’re sort of expected to just think of it as something to try), so I resorted to the game’s built-in hints pretty quickly.

Solving this first puzzle then requires a lot of back and forth, but is straightforward once you do make that leap. At which point the game presents you with another similarly obscure puzzle.

That second puzzle is one of those cases of something really spatially complicated with a lot of steps; the setup was surely clear in the author’s head but the text does not make at all clear.

Rope is notoriously complicated to implement, but I think puzzles involving this type of thing are even more so difficult to design so that a reader understands what they’re supposed to do and the spatial relations between everything. In this particular case, the setup is so arbitrary, with no real referents to life or fiction, that it’s difficult to really internalize how the elements relate to each other and how they might be manipulated. To me this feels like a case where the puzzle design is overcomplex, and the writing is struggling to convey it to a player.

The writing here is fine, it’s functional for the type of game that this is. It’s not bad, but it also doesn’t really have a personality that enticed me to push through the wonky puzzle design. I think if you’re really going for a cardboard world that’s purely a setup for puzzles, those puzzles need to really be on point, and they’re not here.

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