It’s on the rusted-out car on the dirt road as you’re going toward the highway.
Or at least it used to be. (I beta-tested this so the version I played isn’t necessarily the version you played.)
3 Likes
I just reopened the game out of curiosity since it’s quick enough to check and yeah, that’s it. My guess is I must have just happened to have a dim/dark flashlight each time I went through here (it wasn’t a place I went back to much since there was “nothing” interactable there), making the abandoned car prompt not show up.
3 Likes
17 | UNREAL PEOPLE
17 | UNREAL PEOPLE
by: Viwoo
Progress:
- I played this game for 55 minutes. I arrived at a game state that appears to be the end, but I am honestly not 100% sure is the true ending. (The screen I ended up on says “You have become”).
Things I Appreciated:
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The game had some funny moments to it. Despite being set in “early mediaeval India,” many of the jokes and language used were decidedly modern, creating a sense of wacky humor. Examples of lines like this: “Shaming them for yielding to feudal dominion in a post-barter economy is hardly bullying,” and “As usual, we accept donations in cash only.” This is a narrative that half-invites you to find immersion but thwarts attempts to take it too seriously, which I think is an interesting tone to strike.
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I appreciated moments where the game uses click-replace links to control the pace of the narrative intentionally for effect. Those were some of my favorite pages, because I felt a more active sense of curation of what I was experiencing, which made me more invested.
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At first, due to the nature of the vessel jumping, I had no attachment to any one character or anything that was happening. But as it went, I did start to gradually build familiarity with the social world of the game, and I was at least engaged with the question of whether Mazboot really was the king’s heir, or if it was an elaborate red herring after all.
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I enjoyed the description of perceiving as non-human vessels. A vivid example that I liked was the tactile feeling of breathing as a banana leaf. That was an exciting moment and made me curious to see what it would be like to perceive as all sorts of non-human entities.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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If I can be a bit blunt here, this game is unfinished. I don’t mean the ambiguous ending either. I can live with that, in fact I find that interesting. What I mean is, there are many technical glitches and formatting errors. For instance, there are many notes encased in double exclamation points that seem like coding comments that should’ve been taken out (e.g., “!!EXPLAIN U CAN MAKE DIALOGUE CHOICES!!”). I also encountered a Twine error that said “The (click-replace:) changer should be stored in a variable or attached to a hook.” There is pre-formatted leftover text, links to click that result in a blank page, and so on. My point is not to exhaustively document each and every error, as I find that mean-spirited. Rather, I want to illustrate that it is impossible to play this version of the game without encountering a lot of immersion-breaking moments like that.
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A system that I think could be added to this game would be to have the secrets be revealed with a special formatting (e.g., gold font or something that makes them really stand out on the page) and a sidebar where you can revisit them. As I played, I ended up taking a significant amount of notes about the secrets I collected to avoid forgetting them, in case they were important in solving a puzzle at some point. I don’t mind taking notes too much, but having now seen other games that have done this sort of thing automatically, I think it’s worth considering implementing something like that.
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I didn’t appreciate the use of generative AI for the cover art. Before playing, I wondered if having AI-generated art specifically would be relevant in some way to the narrative, perhaps offering some kind of attempt to rationalize weathering the ethical concerns that players would raise about AI-generated art, but I left feeling like the narrative did not do that.
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Ending spoilers: The ambiguous ending is interesting in its own right, but it is also a bit anticlimactic to feel like as a player, you are collecting all these secrets to piece together some great mosaic (aided by the mandala imagery on the way) to solve the core mysteries of the game. So the fact that the game ended how it did made me feel like I was missing something. Perhaps the game is intended as a critique of the the player’s desire to see the full tapestry, as it points out how boring it would be to know everything and attain full control of the narrative. In that case, I think that message did successfully come through for me.
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I would encourage even more use of text-reveal timing to control the reading pace, as I saw it being used well in some places and thought it added to the experience. For instance of an obvious one that stuck out to me: “Drop. Drop. Drop. Seconds. Pass.” Each “drop” could be a link, forcing the player into the pace of the dripping. I’m sure going through this again, one could find other ways to enhance the interactive elements along similar lines.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I liked the premise of a bait-and-switch where the player thinks they are doing one thing (building an index of secret knowledge to solve a grand social puzzle) only to encounter a “gotcha” at the end. However, because of technical errors and unfinished sections, when I reached the end, I wasn’t sure if it was the actual end or if I had encountered an unfinished branch of the narrative that I needed to backtrack to escape. So the lesson I take from this is that if I want to pull off an ambitious meta twist, the technical aspects of the writing need to be secure to ensure that the impact of the twist can be strongly felt.
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In terms of the dialogue options, many of the dialogue options felt unnecessary as they were two variants of a very similar answer. I wondered about the effects it has on the player when presented with many choices that appear inconsequential. I found that after a while, I became careless when picking dialogue choices instead of weighing them each time, because so many of them felt like it didn’t make a lot of difference. The lesson is I guess to be judicious about not adding options for the sake of adding options, and making sure that there is a reason to be giving a player less impactful choices if you’re going to do that.
Quote:
- “The last man saw of god was man unseen by god.” (This really makes you think, doesn’t it?)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When at the end, I was suddenly empowered to write dialogue for a scene. That was a super interesting meta moment in the narrative that will stick with me for sure.
5 Likes
Editor’s Note: Not an official response.
18 | THE MASTER’S LAIR
by: Stefan Hoffmann
I tried to download the Windows version from the Microsoft website with the goal of using Wine to run it on my computer, similarly to how I ran the .exe for The Curse, but the Microsoft site itself prevented me from downloading an app that I did not meet the minimum system requirements for. In face of this corporate intervention (for my own good, surely), I am skipping the game for the moment.
Since the front matter indicates that a Mac version may be forthcoming, I’ll check back later to play this when that becomes available. Alternatively, if an .exe becomes downloadable on computers that do not meet the minimum system requirements, I would proceed with Wine emulation at that point. (I mean really, Microsoft, let me decide for myself if I want to “recklessly” try running it against your mandate to the contrary.)
3 Likes
19 | FORSAKEN DENIZEN
19 | FORSAKEN DENIZEN
by: C.E.J. Pacian
Progress:
- I timed out after 2 hours of gameplay, having not yet completed the game. It’s a bit difficult to describe my progress due to there being a lot of nonlinear tasks (I’ve attached my transcript in case that’s useful to anyone, I don’t know that it’s particularly juicy but enjoy my typos due to my finnicky x key not always working I guess). At the time I stopped, I was in the midst of trying to wait in a room to allow a space elevator to arrive. I have no real sense of what percentage of the game I had completed.
Things I Appreciated:
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My favorite puzzle that I encountered was the battery puzzle. I intuitively knew how to solve it based on the note and that made me feel good. Other puzzles were less intuitive to me (like inducing shadow people to grab the viscountess and then walk all the way around to the other side), but I didn’t feel too bad about asking Cathabel for help since it was reasonable in-universe for Dor to ask Cathabel what to do. What I’m getting at is, the game signaled to me that this was a hint system, but also gave me permission to feel like it wasn’t such a failure on my part to have wanted the assistance.
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One design choice that I found brilliant is that in your inventory, objects with obvious uses have the exact command listed next to them, such as “crowbar (< PRY BARRICADE >).” The reason this is so brilliant to me is that, given the time-sensitive turns where after wandering around trying to get junkers to be in the different locations from the one you’re in so you can get one turn to do something, as a player you cannot afford to be wasting that single turn on parser errors like “use crowbar on barricade” (apparently I need to fight my urge to say “use”, parser games seem to really hate that one. I assume it’s because “use” is too all-purpose and vague). Because of this design feature, I had the confidence to know that when my window of opportunity opened, I would be allowed to “pry barricade” and know for sure that it would work. I also don’t think that this detracts in any way from the puzzles. It’s not that interesting to guess what exact language a game expects for you in using a crowbar to do basic crowbar things, so just telling me the verb it expects streamlines the process. In the context of this type of game, where the parsing is in competition with the survival horror timing management, I really think it was an inspired design decision.
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Oh, similarly: I love how at the start of each location page, it just has a very clear description of the available directions at the top so I can focus on other things. Example: “N: Custodian’s Closet S: [CHAINED] W: Audit Department.” When you are flitting between rooms at low health, the efficiency of not having to sift through sentence-long descriptions to recall which directions were available was appreciated to ease some of the cognitive burden of managing the game’s systems.
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Maybe it’s because I have just been playing Elden Ring (or at least I was, until I started playing Interactive Fiction all week… RIP muscle memory I guess), but the image of a giant golden tree leeching the life from a gray and crumbling environment was especially vivid and inspiring. I thought that description was breathtaking, and it has an interesting thematic element where something so bright and beautiful is also deadly and parasitic. The atmosphere of this game follows one of my favorite aesthetic environments: foreboding and grim but still eerily beautiful.
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This game plays with point of view in a really engaging way. Consider this narration, from Cathabel: “Just as Dor arrives, Junker Brutus leaves to the west - his elegant, dangerous and inhuman figure disappearing from view.” Would Dor see Junker Brutus as “elegant”? Or have we learned something important about Cath’s class perspective, that even when deposed, she’s still invested in the beauty of the terrible things (most of which are named after titles of nobility) that have ruined this world? I did not reach far enough the game to see this play out, but I wonder if Cathabel would really be willing to accept the destruction of the golden tree when (if?) it finally comes to that. She makes some wry comments about feeling inadequate when Dor is now wealthier than her. Would she be tempted to reinstate her own power despite the noxious ethical implications of doing so, instead of allowing the system to be shattered?
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Similarly, some really interesting moments happened where the relationship between the narrator (Cathabel), the player character (Dor), and the player (me) becomes entangled. In the first dialogue tree of the game, I picked one of three options, and then Dor overruled me to say something else, which was an exciting storytelling moment because of its implications for this power triangle. I also liked moments where there were dialogue “trees” with just a singular option, activating a similar sense of player agency revocation when it comes to Dor asserting her perspective.
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I was really invested in Cathabel and Dor as characters, and their relationship. I liked how when I got to Dor’s apartment, I automatically knew that I would find the ring on the bed, and sure enough, I did. I wish I had gotten to see more of this arc before my time ran out.
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This game was deeply engaging. Given the ominous “more than two hours” play time, I was expecting that it might be another overwhelming parser game and I’d need to take some breaks. Instead, I ended up getting so drawn into the game that the two hours really flew by. I think the best compliment that I can give to this work is that even after playing nonstop for two hours, I was still reluctant to stop.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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The biggest stall point (though honestly not a huge one) that I had was a result of a reading error I made. So, just first, I will take accountability that I was at fault here. But, it still comes with a recommendation at the end. (Significant puzzle spoilers) After finding a silver bullet from Lis for the first time, I was on my way to finally unlock the DNA lock. I was having trouble getting to do that because of all the junkers swarming the area, so eventually I shot the viscount. I didn’t realize that I had used a silver bullet to do that, since I had never actively equipped a silver bullet. Incidentally, I had never attempted to shoot the viscount so didn’t recognize that he required a silver bullet in the first place. Later, when I learned that the archduke needed to be shot with a special bullet, I was like oh great! I have that silver bullet! Well, I didn’t. I kept trying to examine it or figure out where it was, and Dor would respond as I was using terms that the game didn’t recognize. I went back to talk to Lis in case I had accidentally lost the bullet due to a save/load, but that wasn’t it. I finally searched for “silver bullet” in my transcript to figure out where I had accidentally used it. The game did tell me, I just had directed my attention to the viscount dying and being out of the way rather than noticing the message about the automatic bullet swap. So while the game didn’t make the mistake, I did, I still have a really minor recommendation that I think would’ve helped in my case. I think after finding a silver bullet for the first time, if you use them up, your ammo counter should say “+0 Silver” instead of just disappearing the silver count as if you never had them. Similarly, after you’ve found one but used them up, if you try to “x silver bullets,” the game should say something to the effect of, “Dor is out of silver bullets.” That would’ve helped me get out of this stall faster. At that point, I thought I had softlocked by accidentally using a silver bullet on the viscount, so I called up the walkthrough and was reassured that there were multiple silver bullets in the game, so I was able to continue.
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There was a UI choice that took some getting used to, which was that when talking to Cathabel’s hologram, I would often try to leave to do something but get stuck having to press “4” multiple times to exit the dialogue tree. I learned to (I guess) be less rude to the NPCs in the game by properly saying goodbye to them instead of running off, but I didn’t like situations like that where my mind and fingers are that far ahead of what I’m trying to do that I get interrupted from that to exit menu.
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Over time, the threat of the junkers faded as I got used to them. However, instead, they became very irritating when I just wanted to do literally anything at a location and was constantly forced to leave. It felt random whether or not they would follow me into a new location, allowing me to backtrack into a possibly empty room. You might see areas in my transcripts where I’m just moving back and forth between rooms every turn waiting for an opportunity to have a free turn to do something. Eventually, I would just have to waste bullets to get past those areas. The fact that I sometimes was able to (apparently) get good RNG made it feel a bit frustrating when I couldn’t find the right combination of room navigations to get them to leave me alone for a single turn. Perhaps the intent was to make the player use bullets more liberally, but I was worried about the meta-knowledge I had that survival horror games can punish you intensely if you’re not extremely stingy with ammo. (I do not generally play survival horror games but that’s just like… an impression that has filtered to me through cultural zeitgeist about them). Even after being advised by Cathabel that I should use them, I still was pretty worried about it.
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While I enjoyed the different descriptions of each junker, they felt very mechanically similar to me. Regardless of how they’re described, my experience was that each one behaved the same way and had the same impact on the player (a reduction in health status by one level if you attempted a second turn in that location after they’ve “wound up” an attack).
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I found the dialogue trees at minor NPCs to be repetitive, where I was often asking the exact same questions to different people. I think even some subtle variation in the dialogue choices would help with immersion. I noticed that I was thinking about the conversations in a more transactional way to extract what I needed, rather than taking seriously the opportunity to learn about someone new. Maybe this could be read as intentional, revealing something about Dor’s character?
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I want to emphasize again, the brilliance of the inventory verb labeling. This is a lesson to be
very demure andvery mindful of the context of parsing. If the game is more relaxed and not time sensitive, it makes sense for there to not be verb labels and to let the player organically learn to develop the syntax the game wants. In this game, with an environment with harsh time penalties, smoothing out the parsing as much as possible allows for a balance to be achieved where the player is able to focus less on the basic parser and more on higher-order puzzles. -
In terms of dialogue tree systems, the note I take away from this game is that while these trees narrow down the possibilities so that the player doesn’t have to waste time guessing what to ask about, it can also show the seams a bit by restricting options so much, especially if there isn’t sufficient variety in those options to sustain immersion across multiple NPC encounters. It makes me wonder if these NPC encounters would’ve felt more satisfying if delivered in-scene as a singular pre-written conversation, with dialogue trees only after that if you need clarification or a reminder of something, rather than using the dialogue trees to lead the initial conversation.
Quote:
- “These are the old streets of the original city: grey brick buildings with peaked roofs crisscrossed with sagging, tangled cables. Behind the familiar skyline, obscuring the stormy face of Forsaken Edge, looming over even the incongruous silhouette of my Night Palace: a great golden tree spreads its branches across the sky.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- There’s one line in my transcript where I wrote in all caps, and it was “SHOOT BRUTUS” because I was so excited to finally have a way of stopping this thing from camping out at the bridge controls. It was a great moment in player agency that came after training me to use evasive tactics first, but still giving me a gun after that lesson so I had the option to get rid of something if it’s really annoying me that much.
DemonApologist_ForsakenDenizen.txt (231.6 KB)
5 Likes
Hello DemonApologist,
sorry for the late response, I wasn’t available over the last week.
Daniel Stelzer tested a non-packaged Windows-Version under Wine, and so far it didn’t start. We had no idea why. I can provide that to you too, but I’m not very hopeful that it will starts.
Mac version is still in the making. I try to finish it as fast as I can. I give you an update once I succeed. 
3 Likes
I’m really impressed by how many games you’ve managed to review in a short time! I know when I was an IFComp author it was always really hard waiting for your first review, so I’m sure you’re being a big relief to a lot of them. Hope you enjoy the rest of the competition!
12 Likes
20 | A DEATH IN HYPERSPACE
20 | A DEATH IN HYPERSPACE
by: Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Nacarat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
Progress:
- I played through this game once in 40 minutes and reached an ending called “A Hyperactive Imagination”. After taking a break to process that experience and consider whether I should play again, I decided to play for another 40 minutes, reaching the ending “O Captain! My Captain!”
Things I Appreciate:
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The timer. Both its presence, and the ability to turn it off. When reading the instructions at the start of the timed sequence I hadn’t scrolled down far enough to see the timer yet, so when the text said 30 minutes in relative time, I thought it was going to be a turn-based system (perhaps each click counts for 10 seconds or something), and was legitimately shocked when I finally reached the bottom of the page and learned that 2 of my 30 minutes had already been used up. I immediately panicked and considered turning off the timer, because the amount of time seemed completely insufficient to solve a complicated puzzle, but I decided that the timer was chosen for a reason and I should trust the process. The resulting experience was unique, a kind of nightmare of sensory overstimulation as I desperately clicked through options, gaining more impressions of scenes rather than truly reading them. Every few minutes, the people switch rooms, causing disorientation as you struggle to track them down again. There are characters like VKB who seem like you could potentially talk to but are apparently unreachable, adding to the surreal atmosphere. There are even similar names, like Petro, Primus, and Pax, which I’m convinced was a malevolent design choice on part of the authors to instigate this overall atmosphere of frenzy/chaos that I’m describing. The time pressure caused me to be less deliberate in my dialogue choices, unable to gather my wits enough to adapt responses to a situation and just instinctively picking what stood out to me. In the second playthrough, I turned off the timer and explored the game much more calmly to actively decide what I wanted to do. It also allowed me to recontextualize the first ending I received now that my emotions had settled. So I appreciate that I played it this way: timed first, untimed second.
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Thematically, I think what this game is getting at is the rush of dissociative emotion that can happen as a result of a shocking death/grief. The game starts off with a more serious tone, (I mean this game has epigraphs, how formal!), which Pearl then diverts, completely shifting the tone with the phrase “murder most foul.” This gave me pause in my first playthrough, as I was trying to get hold of what this game was trying to be. I thought, how campy and cartoonish to transform this extremely serious moment into a murder mystery pastiche. This thought dogged me as I rushed through the brutally swift 30 minutes. The game tells you to be careful what you say to people, but most of the dialogue options are written in this similar cartoonish way, with you approaching random people and accusing them of murder or trying to intimidate them, rather than using any kind of rational or tactical approach. For me, that became the point of game: in the desperation of grief your character has dissociated from the reality of the situation to try and find answers. In a sense, given its delusive nature, “hyperspace” itself functions as a metaphor for the state of grief. The process of adjusting suspicion levels feels like a mechanization of confirmation bias. Each time I would raise someone’s suspicion level, Pearl would react enthusiastically, but I felt unsure. My impression of almost every character I met is that they had their own issues and challenges in life and that hardly justifies the accusations I was making. I think the ending I received was fitting: with only a minute left, I happened to ask Lament if I was a child, and I read her response as confirming that to be true. Unlike when I made other suspicion changes, when I unlocked the Ceri explanation and switched it to “high,” the UI changed and it made me think I had finally found the real answer. It made sense to me: the ridiculously phrased dialogue options, the failure to take the situation seriously in an authentic-feeling way. Playing a second time with the timer off felt like I was simulating the experience of coming down from the initial chaos of grief, to finally accept what had happened. Re-visiting Lament’s comment, I realized in context with a clearer mind that she wasn’t literally saying I was a child, just annoyed with me. I was being child-like by pantomiming the detective while Lament was actually seriously trying to solve the grim situation. (And other context clues indicate that the Hyperactive Imagination ending is an escapist hyperspace delusion, to be clear). So I really appreciate how, in my view, the game uses the cartoonish aesthetic of an overzealous detective fiction fan as a mask for something deeper.
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I want to add that the music that played during the investigation phase added significantly to the disorienting experience. I found myself distracted by whether the music—which plays overlapping rhythms at slightly different tempos, causing the notes to line up and then fall out of sync with each other over before lining up again—was glitching out or if it was intended to be doing that. (To be clear, at this point I feel certain that it was an intentional choice on the part of the composer rather than actual glitched audio. I think I’m just not accustomed to listening to polyrhythms much more extensive than something like a hemiola).
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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There are some minor coding errors in this game. For example, sometimes when I would click through to a new page, a ghostly line of code would appear for a second or two at the bottom of the page before vanishing. I suspect this has something to do with the 5-minute timer where characters switch locations, but I’m not sure. Similarly, there were times when the plain text left behind from underlined click links after you click them retained the underline (example: “dim and depressing” stayed underlined). I don’t view these as significantly harming the experience, but I figured I would mention them since I noticed it.
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More significantly, I encountered a moderately disruptive situation in my first playthrough. Since I was playing with the 30-minute timer enabled, I went down to the wire, picking an accusation and proceeding to the end with only 40 seconds to spare. However, while in the midst of reading that ending, the timer went off, causing me to be ejected from that ending into a screen that ultimately re-started the ending that I had already been reading. My recommendation is that if the player has reached a “point of no return” like being in the middle of an ending narration, the timer should stop or pause automatically to avoid this type of disruption.
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There’s another moment that I encountered that I’m not sure was intentional or not. In a conversation with Pax, the text proceeded as if I had picked a dialogue option accusing him, and led through a conversation with only singular dialogue options along those lines. It made me wonder if the dialogue tree had been mismapped somehow. Unfortunately I couldn’t go back to 100% confirm what I had clicked, so it could’ve been my mistake.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This game most obviously raises the question of real-time events, and whether or not players should have the ability to turn off the timer. The alternative I’d consider here is having the timer be mandatory for the first playthrough, and then enable the option to turn off the timer after that. (In other words, deciding that the way I have played it is the “correct” one. How reckless and misguided of me!). But upon reflecting more, I think having the option to turn the timer off even the first time through is essential. I think as a player, even though I chose to keep the timer on, I would’ve resented the inability to turn it off. By having the option, it gave me the opportunity to consent to the timer, essentially. I actively chose to take the invitation to experience the fever dream that results from trying to legitimately solve this without outside help in 30 minutes of real time. And I look forward to reading, I hope, from players that managed the timer differently and might have wildly different interpretations/endings as a result of playing it differently. That wouldn’t be as likely to happen without giving players the control here.
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Another lesson this game teaches me is one of voice. I had trouble connecting with the voice of the character, most of whose dialogue options I did not want to click on because I wanted to extract information in a more tactical manner that was seemingly impossible with the clumsy and aggressive way that Pearl confronted people. In the end, I have come to a better understanding of why it was like that. Moments of disjuncture between the player and the “2nd person narrator” (Is that what I’m meant to be calling it? The version of “you” that is in-universe, as opposed to the out-of-universe person playing the game? I’ve never had to reach so much 2nd person prose in my life as I have this week, I’m not really used to trying to discuss it in a technical way.) are an interesting tool. They necessarily hinder immersion by making the player conscious of the voice feeling wrong. Yet that can pay off later and better help the player empathize with Pearl’s character with a more rounded/informed perspective of their grief. So the note here is: consider how a character’s voice might appear to “ring false” first before “ringing true,” and what types of narrative contexts in which that could be thematically enriching, such as this one.
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The choice of the underline styling to distinguish between links that will reveal more/new text from links that will send you to the next page was interesting. Making this kind of distinction helps reduce the cognitive burden about whether or not to click an interactable element in the middle of a page. So the lesson would be: in situations where I want players to avoid that type of decision fatigue, having a distinct style for that type of link is a strategy that can work.
Quote:
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“Are you sure you want to find out the truth, Pearl? I mean, if you do, then this game you’re playing will be over.”
Lasting Memorable Moment
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When with under a minute left on the clock, believing Ceri’s story resulted in a sudden change of the UI, letting me recklessly believe that I had finally found the “right” answer with moments to spare. It was emotionally and thematically engaging, while also being a great illustration of confirmation bias at my expense.
8 Likes
This community will talk about “player,” “protagonist,” and “narrator” as a triangle of identities that may have different relationships in different games…
6 Likes
Thanks for these great, insightful comments!
Especially appreciate those notes on glitches and bugs–I’ll take a look at those, although I probably won’t have time to tweak things until after the judging deadline.
3 Likes
21 | MISS GOSLING’S LAST CASE
21 | MISS GOSLING’S LAST CASE
by: Daniel M. Stelzer
Progress:
- I timed out after two hours, having scored only 6 out of 18 possible points in 609 turns. I believe that I fully solved one of the game’s puzzles, and may have softlocked the one that I had been working on for many, many, many turns at the point that I timed out.
Things I Appreciated:
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Something I found to be a therapeutic game design element is that since the player avatar is a dog, when I was frustrated by my parsing errors, seeing the dog do something cute and dog-like would help alleviate some of the tension I was feeling as a result of not understanding the puzzle. Like Watson, sweetie, I am SO sorry that I am putting you through my incompetence like this, you deserve better. That put me in a more constructive mood at times when I needed to refocus on the puzzles to make any more progress before the two hours ran out.
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I really enjoyed the puzzle that I solved involving placing certain objects in the dumbwaiter. That was one of the first things I wanted to interact with, and I felt like this was a very challenging puzzle that nonetheless has an elegant solution.
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The game has a very polished UI. The way that things are set apart to interact with, and the option to type a command or press one of the suggested commands, is all very streamlined to me.
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The writing sets a very consistent atmosphere appropriate to the “cozy mystery” genre. While it’s not a genre that I like that much, I absolutely bought into what the game was doing and I had fun despite not liking the genre.
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I thought the game had great worldbuilding. I believed while playing that Miss Gosling could be an ongoing series that this was (I guess) the final entry in. I’m not sure if that’s true. If it’s not true, the way that the game mentions snippets of past mysteries that she solved gives the impression that you are picking up a book late in a mystery series and reading it, with an entire context of the rest of Miss Gosling’s life out there to influence her thinking in this puzzle.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Softlock (?). For some context (to make it easier to make sense of the transcript), one of the first things I did upon gaining access to most of the house was start a fire so I could eat Constable Davis’s sandwich and one of her biscuits (this was before I knew what my goal with this puzzle was, I was still testing the game’s mechanics and how the character would respond to Watson’s actions as he maliciously ruined her day). Unable to make progress after I had solved the carrot puzzle, I looked at the walkthrough for instructions as to how to progress into the gardens. Because the walkthrough takes the form of hints, rather than an explicit list of moves to carry out, I spent the rest of my time in a loop trying to figure out how to “Take her sandwich and run to the Reception Room.” No matter what I did, I could not get her to move from the kitchen into the reception room. I tried running there with the biscuit, and she did not follow me. I tried showing her the biscuit while in the kitchen, but she just takes the biscuit and throws it away. I tried barking at her while in the kitchen, but you can’t bark while holding the biscuit. You also can’t put the biscuit down to bark either, Watson refuses to do that. I tried other ways of getting her attention while holding the biscuit in the kitchen, but she ignores you. I tried barking at her like 8 times in a row to see if I could be annoying enough to force her to pay attention (no, apparently she’d rather just turn off the stove every two minutes without ever wondering why this malevolent dog is constantly trying to burn the house down). I tried waiting with the biscuit in the reception room, but the biscuit in Watson’s mouth dematerialized (the game doesn’t explicitly say this, I assume in-universe Watson just eats it without being prompted). What I think is happening mechanically, is that the game cannot allow two interactable biscuits to exist simultaneously, so the moment that Watson re-enters the dining room having turned off the stove, the existing biscuit is dematerialized and replaced with the newly materializing biscuit that is in the tin. Even with the walkthrough, and after searching through other reviews, I could not progress this puzzle. For me, this biscuit puzzle is the Dark Souls of IF Comp. At one point, I considered whether I should fully restart the game to see if I could solve the game with the long-since-digested sandwich instead of the biscuits, but since the walkthrough explicitly says “Or, if the sandwich has been destroyed, she’ll be eating a biscuit. Same idea,” implying that the biscuits will work if the sandwich is gone, I thought, no, I’m the one who’s wrong, the biscuit should work if I just guess the right set of commands. So I still don’t know what the heck happened here. Was it an actual softlock, or is there some perfect sequence of events that will allow a player to get Constable Davis to care enough about the biscuit to follow Watson into the reception room that I somehow just never quite guessed in all those turns trying?
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This might be an odd recommendation, but since we learn that “you’ve never been any better than Watson at distinguishing reds from yellows from greens,” the UI should be colored accordingly, to improve immersion. The fact that green, red, and yellow are all used to color different elements that can pop up takes me out of the illusion that this character cannot easily distinguish between green/red (though I guess if the player actually does have red/green colorblindness, this is resolved for those players in particular).
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Since I used the stove to start a fire 13 times in my playthrough, I thought it would be immersive if the environment changed to reflect that. For instance, when spending time in the kitchen, you should be able to see a fine grime of soot/ash, or a lingering smell of char, each time you enter this space, to reflect the actions that have taken place there. There were other times where these kinds of details were present (for instance, showing the carrots to Constable Davis has her take note of Watson dripping water onto the rug, showing that the game remembers that you’ve been wading around in the cellar). Maybe my playthrough was especially aberrant and it isn’t worth programming a detail like this in, but if you expect it’s likely for players to be burning a lot of stuff on the stove trying to solve the puzzle, it would be good to add.
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I got stuck in the introductory puzzle, even with the red hints. (This was ominous foreshadowing for Biscuitgate.) I spent a lot of time trying to knock over the binocular stand as the larger object to turn over the chair with. The language “The rubber ball proves too small to foul the wheels” made me think that I needed to take the police tape to “foul” the wheels that way, but the tape was untakable. This was especially confusing when I was prompted “Watson looks at the shredded police tape in confusion. Did you want him to take it?” I was like, yes, I do want to take it! But I kept getting the action description for “biting tape” when I was trying to “take tape.” Eventually I had to use the walkthrough to understand that the books really were the solution to the puzzle, and that was enough information to get me through this bottleneck. I don’t find using books to mess up wheels to be a very intuitive solution, but I seem to be in the minority with that opinion based on the other reviews that I glanced at. So, take what you will from my experience.
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The other puzzle I was stuck on involved getting into the attic. The only thing I found that I thought might be involved was a mattress. Without commenting on the solution to that puzzle, since I don’t even know what it is having timed out before attempting more with it, I found that it strained belief that I could, as a dog, push an entire mattress from room to room, and neatly lean it back against the wall. I get that the game requires some suspension of disbelief, but perhaps some detail could be added to the description to describe how difficult it was to move, or that the mattress was lighter than expected.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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My experience playing this game is a (hopefully) fascinating case study into the creative decision to include a hint system instead of a true walkthrough. Had there been neither a hint system nor a walkthrough, I expect I would’ve been less frustrated, knowing that I had to get it together and find a solution myself. Had there been a true walkthrough, I could have had resolution on whether or not I was softlocked by entering an exact sequence of commands and seeing if it behaved as expected. But the fact that a hint system existed, and I had fully read the steps I needed, and things I expected to work according to the hint did not, it was especially embarrassing to not be able to proceed. In that case, I would’ve appreciated a more direct walkthrough even though that is less elegant. Comparatively, there was a perfectly balanced hint for the carrot puzzle that gave me an “aha” moment (“Smelling got you in; another sense will get you out.”) So the lesson I take from this is: if the goal of hints is to make a challenging game more approachable without just giving an exact solution, you run the risk of players still struggling if the exact sequence of commands required is especially precise.
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I think the use of an animal as the actor in a parsing game is an inspired game design choice. When a player makes errors as a human in a parsing game, it can break immersion in the sense that an actual human would just be able to do some version of that thing that you tried. But by relocating the locus of action to an animal who is trying his best but won’t always understand, it very cleverly eases that aspect of parsing instruction that even a well-intentioned dog is not necessarily going to do exactly what you think he is going to do. So the lesson is: to think creatively about how the actor in a parsing game can be used to soften the edges off of parsing errors. It’s very beautifully done here.
Quote:
- “Really, you suppose, that’s the best you can expect from a dog’s cooking.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When, after already solving the dumbwaiter puzzle to put the flashlight in to light the cellar, I had to use a variation of that same action to bring the bundle of carrots out of the depths of the root cellar. It was a legitimately clever puzzle in how it first trains the player to use the dumbwaiter, misdirects with the pump (can you restore electricity to de-flood the basement, thereby allowing the light to turn on and the door to stay open?), and forces the player to realize that they must re-use the object they already used.
DemonApologist_MissGosling.txt (207.0 KB)
4 Likes
Thank you very much for the review! I’m glad you enjoyed what you did of it! And I’ll see about updating the hints on that puzzle—I’m afraid I may have misled you there. You need to take the sandwich/biscuit while Davis is working on her paperwork, which will make her follow you. If something is on fire at the same time, that takes all her attention, and she won’t notice you messing with her lunch. Burning things is the solution to an entirely separate puzzle.
1 Like
Oh my god. 
LMAO.
Thank you though, that does make sense. My early interactions with the sandwich made me think that the fire was essential as a distraction for her so you could take her food. So it never once occurred to me that multiple types of distraction were at work here. I could not escape my tunnelvision that the fire needed to be involved to open the door, especially because the fire is on the way to that door, right in between the puzzle start and puzzle destination.
1 Like
22 | LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
22 | LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
by: THE BODY & THE BLOOD
Progress:
- Unfortunately, I timed out at the two-hour mark. The last screen I saw was Act III, Lipstick. (I was having some trouble telling whether the screens were appearing at the end of the act or at the beginning of that act, so I’m unsure if I completed 2 or 3 of the acts.) The piece is deeply engrossing, so I definitely would’ve continued reading if not for the competition judging time limit.
Things I Appreciated:
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The writing voice is so, so good. It’s hard to overstate that. I bought into the voice instantly, and found so much of this deeply relatable despite many of my life experience/social positioning not necessarily being applicable here. The most vivid aspect of the writing is the interior monologue, which is written in a gripping stream of consciousness way that feels almost impossibly authentic. And the specificity of certain moments really convey the trueness of the writing. For instance, the line: “There was a quiet, but unmistakable, squelch of lube sliding under latex as we shake.” I have no way of knowing whether the author(s) have had this specific experience of shaking hands while wearing latex gloves, but it’s so visceral that I fully believe only someone who has specifically done that would be able to narrate that experience in that way. This is one of many such moments. And the depiction of obtrusive inner thoughts? The constant self analysis? I feel seen, in an almost disconcerting way. Even in my IF Comp responses on this forum, that I have inexplicably taken upon myself to post in public even though no one really needs to know what I in particular think, they are littered with parenthetical comments and digressions and self-deprecations because I cannot help but contort my own voice in that way, so seeing a version of that playing out in front of me as I read is something else.
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The visual presentation is impressive. The backgrounds use a kind of dithering effect. There’s a night-time style that uses a hellish black/red/gray palette, and a daytime style that uses a “heavenly” blue/white palette, and also an inset Discord palette. The backgrounds are unobtrusive and melt away from the main screen, creating a sensation that you are being pulled inward into L’s mind. This lines up with the narrative style that is intensely self-analyzing/self-doubting/self-affirming, where the inward takes precedence over the outward. The scene shift effects are very satisfying and change the mood with them.
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Thematically, this piece is rich. Caveat of course that I have read less than the entirety of the work. But still I feel recklessly drawn to comment. The piece introduces the reader to the concept of three spaces: (1) the IRL social circle where passive and active transphobia is the norm, deeply alienating in the challenges of being a very online queer person struggling to stay afloat in waspishly cishet spaces; (2) the self-consciously affirmative trans Discord server, which is plagued mainly by Discourse™ and despite the positive aspects the space, conversations are often frustrating and exhausting; and (3) the kink scene that Valentine and Artemis bring L into, which is this kind of idealized aspirational capital C “Community” that is both affirming and also about real shit. I find it very intriguing that this piece is nostalgic for a queer space it imagines to be gone: “I wouldn’t know how much of that is fiction or fact from an era before the new wave of puritanism that killed off the good old days of the queer community that I was too young to see or have a hand in ruining myself.” This continues with the Discord server discussion of the history of leather in queer rights/pride, framing the community as “something past.” Yet, by the time I’ve gotten to in the narrative, it seems clear that this community hasn’t truly dissipated into the past, it’s something that L’s kink group is in the midst of doing/becoming. This piece has a broadly anti-assimilationist bent: it notes the friction and tension in all these spaces and reaches toward something liberatory, but something liberatory in a way that is real, and isn’t misdirected into a dead-end kind of enstiflement. (Apparently that’s not a word. Oh well. Fuck the dictionary.) I’m not sure if that is something that can be actually reached, or if the act of reaching for it is itself the destination. (That sounds really obnoxious of me to say, imagine that I phrased it in a way that feels more relatable. Thanks in advance!)
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Having not seen the full arc of Valentine’s character, I’m not sure where this was ultimately headed, but I was engaged with the tension of Valentine as a man who L enviously wants to be (imagining Valentine as a kind of transition ideal and that he is somehow free from the kinds of transition hangups and insecurities that L is constantly embattled by) but also someone L wants to fuck. I would expect that L will eventually be forced to discard or come to terms with the hero image he has has imposed onto Valentine for them to reach whatever status their relationship might end up becoming.
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Finally, another thing I want to say I have a hard time articulating, is this kind of gap between how the front matter presents this work vs. how it actually feels to read this. There’s a kind of grimness to a piece that promises “perversions” and credits “The desacralised blood channelled through the mutilated body fucked by society” for writing this work. Yet, reading this, despite the intensity of some of the imagery, my overriding impression is one of… sweetness, I guess? The wholesomeness of an ethically engaged and affirmative sexuality that hasn’t been stifled by cishet nonsense or by Discourse? I’m not sure if that was the intent of the piece but I enjoyed that aspect of it—that a piece that is so intensely sexually explicit and raw feels warm, comforting, welcoming?
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Just some very very minor typos/cleanup: (1) The “Leather archives and museums” Wikipedia link extends across the right edge of the “Discord UI” screen onto the white background. The very next link (PolitiFact) wraps into the next line properly, so I’d wager it’s just some very minor formatting that could be fixed; (2) I also found one instance of “Valeire” instead of “Valerie,” but honestly she is so awful that I don’t blame you much for misspelling her name.
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This isn’t necessarily criticism, but I felt like I had something to say about this quote: “You are not offered the luxury that cis men are that any kind of hairstyle still leaves you a man, even if a weird alternative one.” I get what this is saying, but this doesn’t resonate with my personal experience appearing in public as a gnc cis guy with very long hair, I get she/her’d semi-frequently, especially if I’ve remembered to shave. (Or at least I used to, now that I barely go out anymore I guess I’ve minimized opportunities for strangers to misread me.) It’s entirely possible that this is a part of L’s voice (to believe that is what cis men actually do experience, akin to the assumptions he makes about how Valentine must feel about his presentation). Gender is a mess, I don’t know what to tell you.
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Good news and bad news. The good news is that I thought so many lines were instantly iconic and quotable that I jotted them down. The bad news is that I had to manually type them all because I was unable to figure out how to copy and paste from the screens, it seems like the clickable aspect overrides the ability to use a cursor to copy-paste here. Ironically, my interest in holding onto so many quotes actively slowed down my reading pace, preventing me from experiencing more of the work in two hours. Even though I knew it was slowing me down, I couldn’t bring myself to lose those quotes.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This is another aspirational work on so many levels. I’d say what comes first to mind here is the formatting of the stream-of-consciousness narration and how it intersects so effectively with the rest of the narration. The way that it is timed and formatted feels natural, yet is still often funny, or surprising. It crackles with energy. I’d recommend anyone trying to access an authentic feeling voice to study this work—not to pick it apart and ruin the magic, but just to be exposed to how it can feel when it’s done this well.
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The use of backgrounds to set the mood. As I went along, my mood would start to shift as I grew familiar with the pitfalls of each setting. I grew to dread the sterile blue and white daytime background, and longed for the escape into the red and black nighttime background. They’re just colors, sure, but building upon those associations and teaching the reader what kinds of things happen when those colors are present develops an emotional backdrop for the narrative.
Quote:
- So many, but how about this: “Do I pretend I’m the eyes of God, wondering how some cocks and holes led to whatever the fuck is going on down there?”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- I had a strong visceral reaction at the introduction of Valerie at the lingerie store, knowing what kinds of horrible things were about to happen, but being (seemingly) powerless to do anything other than watch it unfold.
8 Likes
23 | WHERE NOTHING IS EVER NAMED
23 | WHERE NOTHING IS EVER NAMED
by: Viktor Sobol
Progress:
- I completed the game in around 8 minutes without outside help. I’ve included my transcript for reference in case that’s useful.
Things I Appreciated:
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Honestly, the main thing I appreciated was how straightforward this game was. Earlier today I played/read two very intense games/narratives in a row (one that was well above my skill level to solve, and one that was emotionally demanding) that each timed out after the full two hours, so it was nice to have this as a kind of chaser to those games.
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I appreciated that the game is so minimalist that it holds up a mirror (get it??) to the player to reveal something about them. Upon the game starting, it was extremely open-ended. It feels very strange in hindsight that my first command was “examine moth”. I’m not sure what that says about me. My impression at the time was that given the open-endedness of the prompt, I might be deciding what it was I was seeing, and I decided that maybe it would be interesting to see a moth.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I feel that the cues I received from the game were too direct. For instance, after touching something moments into the game, it purrs, fully solving the puzzle of what it is instantly. Similarly, when the other thing snorts, it led me to the solution very quickly. I’m not sure what intermediate stage I would want from this to space out the clues more, but it felt like I wasn’t asked to work as hard to solve this as I could’ve been. I wish I had more chances to go on red herring conceptual paths as to what I might be seeing.
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While I respect that this is a minimalist game, I feel like this is a puzzle that craves to be elaborated with a few more unknown things at once that perhaps have less to do with each other (a cat and horse are much more similar than different, when compared to the pool of all possible things that they could have been). Perhaps that would take away the charm, but I imagine a lot more could be built on this foundation if the author felt so moved. What other ways might the player be led to perceive something vague into something specific?
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On one of my commands, I attempted to “bark”. I was informed that this was “unintelligible,” but in this case I think it might be intuitive for something to react to that.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This game provides the illusion that it has stripped back everything, while still having a very guided/structured puzzle. I find it interesting that it manages to train the player as to how to solve it so efficiently. The lesson I take from this is how a vague and open-ended presentation can still draw out an interesting response from a player.
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I thought this was an interesting exploration of how to create an emotional resonance with a truly blank protagonist. Just by describing something they are perceiving in a particular way, (e.g.: “All is silent. / Everything is deadly silent.”) it creates an emotional response even when the player character is a shell yet to be filled with an identity.
Quote:
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“Nothing will come of nothing.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When the other thing snorted, triggering that sudden, kinetic flood of recognition as to what it was.
DemonApologist_WhereNothing.txt (2.8 KB)
5 Likes
Your review is appreciated. The typo has been caught for the next update.
The contrast between the front-loading of “perversions” and the like on the front page, compared to the content, is quite intentional. It’s intended as a bait and switch where the worst parts to sit through (and/or the most extreme content) will come about from the kink scenes and weird sex, when they are actually found everywhere else. Act 3 (which you were just about to start, the act scenes show the start of an act if you were still wondering) is one of the better examples of this.
Cheers,
– THE BLOOD
2 Likes
That’s a really on-point review that expresses my own thoughts better than I could, especially when it comes to the writing voice, the presentation, and the subversion of expectations.
3 Likes
24 | THE DRAGON OF SILVERTON MINE
24 | THE DRAGON OF SILVERTON MINE
by: Vukašin Davić
Progress:
- I was able to complete this game in about 31 minutes, reaching the end without the use of hints.
Things I Appreciated:
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One of the elements I really appreciated in this game was the intuitive inventory-combining system that allows you to combine items with each other, or use them on environmental elements in the location you currently occupy. While there are few enough options that I suppose one could brute-force solutions by systematically testing every combination, I never felt the need to do that as most of the time, if I thought of a potential solution, the tools came together in a logical way given the situation. This felt pretty intuitive and natural almost all the times I used it.
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I enjoyed the tonal shifts over the course of the game. The front matter sets you up with the expectation that you might be facing a dragon lurking in the depths, which combined with the claustrophobic caved-in space, is ominous. However, the game subverts this in a fun way with what actually happens. I liked that the game had this humorous element.
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The writing does a good job creating an environment that seems lived in/worked in. You can study the evidence of the cave in, and encounter elements that end up foreshadowing what comes up later.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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The main issue I have involves the timed text. (Not in the way you might think.) I didn’t mind the timed text itself too much, though it could’ve certainly moved faster. The issue I had is that the action hyperlink to move on to the next page spoils the content of the timed text that is still in the process of revealing itself. The most notable example of this is when the hyperlink “Deal with Doug” appears long before the narration has officially revealed that Doug is present and causing the issues that you are facing. So I think if you are going to require the reader to read at the pace dictated by the timed text, you should include the hyperlink reveal in that text as well so that it doesn’t preempt the scene it is a reaction to.
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At a few points throughout the game, I found that I had pre-solved puzzles before arriving at them. The biggest example of this was the ring. Because of the order I chose to explore things, I had fully crafted and worn the ring before encountering the place that I needed to use it. This makes the puzzle solving feel a bit backwards: I was just making the ring because these were items to interact with in a signposted way, rather than crafting a ring intentionally to help someone who needed it. Overall, I think the puzzles could’ve been a bit more challenging (but I’ve had a rough last few days of IF Comp gameplay as documented extensively in above posts, so honestly it was nice in some ways to breeze through a game without frustration).
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I think this game is a great example (as discussed above) as a tonal bait and switch. The cover art by Mina Davić is especially evocative, setting a grim/moody tone that set my expectations for the game. The writing unfolds in such a way that you gradually realize the dragon is not exactly the threat it was made out to be, and the text goes out of its way to playfully skewer the self-aggrandizing dead paladin (who is arguably a reflection of who the player thinks they are going to end up being—a dragonslayer—at the start of the game). So this was a good example of how to structure a tonal shift in a natural seeming way.
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I thought this was another good example of how to bridge choice-link-based and parser-like gameplay together. This directs the player’s focus toward the puzzles themselves more than the meta-labor of guessing how to phrase potential solutions. In a parser game, for example, I may have wasted several turns trying to do wacky things with two objects that might go together, as opposed to just instantly learning that those two things don’t combine and to move on to another thread of potential solutions. This approach has its pros and cons, but I thought it was effective here. It illustrates how the format you choose to structure your game directs the player’s attention to different cognitive levels of a puzzle, so it’s important to be conscious of that when deciding on a format.
Quote:
- (Significant spoiler) “A fat eyeless tube with two massive chompers both up and down, waddles into the chamber and squeaks thunderously, then belches a short burst of flame.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- The moment all the pieces came together and I realized the “dragon” was actually a mole rat that got into some tomb and drank enough dragon blood to morph into a hybrid entity. That was what the whole game seemed to be building toward, and was an amusing twist.
6 Likes
25 | THE MAZE GALLERY
25 | THE MAZE GALLERY
by: Cryptic Conservatory, including: Paxton, Rachel Aubertin, Chrys Pine, Ed Lu, Toni Owen-Blue, Christi Kerr, Sean Song, Joshua Campbell, Dawn Sueoka, Randy Hayes, Allyson Gray, Shana E. Hadi, IFcoltransG, Dominique Nelson, Orane Defiolle, An Artist’s Ode, Sisi Peng, Kazu Lupo, divineshadow777, Robin Scott, Sarah Barker, TavernKeep, Alex Parker, Mia Parker, J Isaac Gadient, Charm Cochran and Ghost Clown
co-written by: Charm Cochran, Sisi Peng, Shana E. Hadi, IFcoltransG, Aleshani, and Pine
Progress:
- After approximately 40 minutes of play, I encountered a game-ending glitch at the Gift Shop when I examined a nebula, which froze the screen and didn’t show any clickable links to get out of. After trying a few things, I restarted and did my best to generally recreate the path I took, with a few detours as I tried to engage with some of the other things that I passed. Eventually I was able to exit the art museum at around the 1h25m mark.
Things I Appreciated:
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This game is very atmospheric. It is an intimidating game to approach based on the front matter. The music dynamically changes as you wander these cursed locations, adding another aesthetic layer atop the wraithlike writing that weaves these tapestries of almost-coherence, allow you to pass through rooms without fully grasping the implications of doing so.
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My favorite room in the gallery is one called “Jo’s Café” where you suddenly find yourself re-embodied as a barista. After spiraling through the game feeling bereft of agency, this room was an invitation to “become ungovernable” and expressly disobey the terms of your employment. This helped me let off some steam because it was more concrete than some of the other rooms. Another room I really enjoyed was “Clown Cathedral,” mainly due to the music, which is an entertaining Alfred Schnittke-esque blend of carnival tunes and a funereal requiem.
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I like the meta aspect that a reviewer could metaphorically trap oneself in the maze by choosing to go to the effort of applying some kind of literary analysis to what is happening. Each room has plenty one could comment on, as the gallery is not entirely senseless. It’s interesting to be combing through this conceptual beach where the seaglass of shattered images, symbols, and references clink together, tumbled ashore to be gathered closely or admired from afar. It’s reminiscent of other (in)famously hyperliterary work like… I guess House of Leaves comes to mind? I haven’t read much in this genre because it hasn’t been a priority for me to engage that deeply with works that are that self-consciously resistant to being read. But I think occasional exposure to them can be engaging.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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As discussed above, I (playing on Chrome) encountered a gamebreaking glitch with the nebula. This was prior to receiving the key. I ended up at a screen that said “Not that you’ve seen a nebula up close before, but this looks normal. Except that it’s the size of a wide vehicle instead of billions of light years or whatever, obviously. You can feel a faint tug from all the tiny star systems forming inside it, and probably shouldn’t get too close.” (I guess I did get too close…) This didn’t allow me to proceed in any way so I had to restart. In that second playthrough, I encountered other glitches where my inventory/map/goals became inaccessible, but I managed to cross the finish line based on my prior knowledge from the first playthrough. There was also a broken image link at one point. Since similar things have happened to me on previous resource-intensive games (namely, Yancy At The End of the World), I suspect that it’s Chrome’s fault. Therefore I would highly recommend that players save often if they are trying to play on Chrome, or ideally, try to play the game on a different platform in case that is more functional.
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A major issue (?) I had with this game was that it trained me to dissociate from what was happening. I didn’t feel like my actions had any tangible consequences. After trying to earnestly engage with the game at the beginning, reading carefully to try to make sense of it, I started to wonder if I should read less, as this was part of the maze gallery’s trap. Because so much of this game is delivered in large blocks of text that is at a high reading level, the urge to skim and just vaguely click through hoping to proceed becomes more and more difficult to resist. There was a certain tunnel puzzle involving a room of timepieces where the game tells you to find the pattern, but I accidentally advanced without figuring out what the solution was, or if there even was a solution other than just allowing yourself to be tortured by the attempt to coalesce a signal from the noise. So the combined effect of these experiences is that I slid through a lot of this game without being called to task for not doing the harder work of digesting each room deeply. At the end of writing this, I’m not sure if this is a criticism or not, it’s more of just a description of what playing the game was like for me, so take from that what you will.
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This might be a weird comment, but I think the gallery map is actually too helpful in that it provides reliable information about which rooms are connected. I didn’t like that I saw a full path to the exit the first time I looked at it. Could the map be revealed in a piecemeal way as you organically wander through rooms instead?
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The power of collaboration. This is a massive project with a ton of text that is well edited (I don’t think I actually noticed a single typo while playing, though I’m sure inevitably some are lurking in the walls). Having a lot of collaborators means that you can build something this polished that is impressive in ambition/scope. I have a preference for working alone but maybe that’s because I haven’t had the right kind of positive collaborative experience. In a community that appears to be as interconnected as this one as (at least from what I’ve seen on the forum), maybe that’s an avenue to explore if the opportunity arises.
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I think this is an interesting case study in making the text extremely complicated but the gameplay very forgiving. This feels like a very intentional choice to put the player on edge with the difficult and abstract writing they are trying to read, while still allowing them to pass through relatively unimpeded. One can imagine a true nightmare version of this game that is basically unplayable because it’s moon logic and unforgiving to solve. The lesson I take from this is that balancing an extreme element of your work with a forgiving/comforting/simple element can make your work more approachable while still retaining the effect the extreme element is aiming for.
Quote:
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“As you reach to cover your ears the noise stops abruptly, the sudden silence as painful as the cacophony that preceded it.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When I looked at the wall of the café and saw that Jo had been declared employee of the month a billion times. I wasn’t expecting the game to have such a “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” moment, but Jo really did… that. I was entertained, and then proceeded to maliciously feed a child a quadruple shot of espresso. This is what art looks like. Try to keep up.
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26 | A VERY STRONG GLAND
26 | A VERY STRONG GLAND
by: Arthur DiBianca
Progress:
- I just barely finished this game within the 2-hour time limit. There was a puzzle early on (unvanishing the vanisher) that I was stuck long enough that I decided to look at other reviews for help. I’m glad that I did, because I don’t think I would’ve made it to the end without that one push in the right direction. (Though I’d definitely recommend to players that aren’t adhering to the 2-hour time limit, it’s well worth taking the extra time to solve the puzzles on your own.)
Things I Appreciate:
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What stands out the most about this game is how deceptive its difficulty is. You start out thinking, really? All I can do is “examine,” “touch,” or “wait”? With such restricted options, and only nine-ish locations to explore, it seems like it would be a quick task to solve. It’s really not. The vagueness of the game (poor translation from an alien language that leaves you to guess at what the hell anyone is even talking about) forces you to pay attention to every cue the game is giving you and deduce what can be done with it. I think there was only one puzzle that I solved “accidentally” (getting the finder to be able to find again) that felt less satisfying as a result. But pretty much everything else makes perfect sense, especially in hindsight when you think, well how silly of me to not have noticed that! So what I’m appreciating here is the puzzle design: giving an extremely limited toolbox that nonetheless must be used very intentionally by the player to get anything done. This game gave me so many moments that provided that satisfying spark of realization/insight from a well-crafted puzzle.
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The game world is dynamic. There are several timing-based puzzles, so the game expects you to pay attention to the world that is moving and shifting while you are taking your own turns. It creates the illusion that you are not the only entity with agency in this space, which helps liven up the constricted space you play in.
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I thought the alien language—that is to say, the way that the aliens talk about the world around them—to be internally consistent. It feels like a plausible cultural gap between the player and the aliens precisely because the language follows a kind of logical grammatical pattern that can be discerned.
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It was very satisfying to solve the final “capture” puzzle, using several of the previous tools/mechanics together at once to accomplish that goal. It was one of those puzzles where I suddenly had an entire plan develop in my head, and went and did it, and it worked exactly how I expected. Those are the kinds of moments that make a puzzle feel good to solve.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I did not enjoy the single letter command entry, and specifically, the way that commands “snap” the moment 1-2 letters are typed. This results in entering a lot of unintentional commands, because you don’t have the opportunity to edit what you are submitting before enter as “enter” is essentially chosen for you by default the moment it is possible. It was hard for me to fight my natural inclination to type full words, resulting in a lot of messy commands. In a way, this kind of ruins the intended efficiency of the system, because of how it slows down processing (“I need to make sure not to type a wrong letter since I can’t delete it”) and how certain timed events can be disrupted if a false command is entered that advances the time counter. Fortunately, at least it’s pretty trivial to set up a timed event for a second try, so that’s not too much harm done. I could imagine that if you played many games with a single-letter-command system like this, it would eventually feel natural. But for me, in 2 hours, it did not.
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As mentioned above, there was one puzzle that I felt like I never grasped the system of (the “finder” alignment). I was actively trying to learn what it meant to touch those objects with a particular timing, but I wasn’t able to figure out how it worked because it unexpectedly reached a solved state while I was fiddling with it. I was thankful for it to be over, but felt a bit cheated compared to the other puzzles that I felt like I was more in control of solving.
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This is very much a puzzle-first game, which is fine, but I felt like I was craving a little more reason to connect to either the protagonist player avatar or the aliens in the ship. Because of how sparse the game is (not to mention the intentionally-distancing language gap), it felt more mechanical to solve rather than feeling like I had emotional investment in the events unfolding.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This is a masterclass in a kind of minimalism: giving the player a severely restricted toolset that nonetheless can be used in a myriad of creative ways. I’m not sure exactly how one can really learn to design puzzles with that mindset, but it’s a jolt of inspiration to think critically about basic tools like a “wait” command and what that can be made to accomplish in the game world. I think one such approach is to ask yourself, when you are considering adding a new element to a puzzle: do I need to add a new piece, or can I think of a way a pre-existing piece can fit differently here?
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In terms of the structure of how the game leads you to solve its puzzles, one of the tools it uses is echoing language across different elements of the game. For instance: “settled”/“unsettled” link together; if an observation is being made about color, think about what tools you have that are color-based and act accordingly. This is a fine line where you don’t want to make it too obvious, while still clearly putting out a signal for the player to notice.
Quote:
- “I do not need an age-stopper, because I am a self-stopper!” (I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around this one but it sure sounds like it’s funny.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When I was empowered enough by the game at the end to wait the exact number of turns I needed to make the final capture. It felt like I had learned what the game was trying to teach me.
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