Dgtziea's IFComp 2023 Reviews (Please Sign Here)

Competitions IFComp
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Thank you so much for your thoughtful and detailed review of Dysfluent! I really enjoyed reading your analysis of the game and I was fascinated by the stories you shared.
(I’ve always been curious about This American Life, and I think this is my sign to finally go check it out!)

You make many great points and observations about various aspects of the game; most of them I had pondered myself, and ended up choosing one way or the other based on tester feedback and/or my own gut feeling. I think you’re totally right that many of these choices ended up having drawbacks which unfortunately detract from the experience! But I’m very happy to hear that you still liked it, overall. :blush:

Thanks again for your very valuable and heartening feedback – I’m really looking forward to exploring the weight and impact of all these design choices in the postmortem!

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I’m looking forward to your post-mortem! And ones for any of the other games I played! I always love reading them, always interested to see how design decisions were made.

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Milliways: The End of the Universe

(I know there’s a post-comp release planned, so some of this will probably be obsolete very soon. A lot of this is just talking about timed “X turns until death” sequences, really)

I’ll admit I was slightly apprehensive about delving into this one after playing the Witch. Which isn’t a knock against either game, but: this is listed as 2 hours+, and also explicitly tells me that it’s got a Zarfian scale of “cruel.” Warning labels are always appreciated, and why shouldn’t I heed them? I didn’t get too far into that one, I’m just not in the mood to delve into harder games right now.

But I thought I’d poke my head in. Perhaps I won’t judge either since I haven’t really played enough.

The game is a sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the classic IF game. I’ve read every Hitchhiker’s series book, and loved all of them! But I don’t remember a lot of specifics. I also didn’t get too far into the game (when that movie came out, they put the game on the film website, I played it then). I remember getting on board the ship at least, getting just a bit further past that (and I quite liked the opening part). Regardless…

I know timed text gets a bad rep from some players, but what about sections where you die in a certain number of turns if you don’t solve them fast enough? I’ve played a surprising amount of games which feature them so far this year. Beat Witch is actually fairly low on my Annoyotron meter for this sort of thing: you got a handful of turns to perform an action before you die, but it’s often only one action, and even if it didn’t telegraph the right move all the time, it’s still just one UNDO to try something else. What Milliways and Barcarolle in Yellow before this both do is give you a short timing window to perform MULTIPLE actions before you die. And that’s a bit more aggravating, needing either multiple undos or constant saving. I got briefly stuck in Barcarolle, I’m pretty sure, because I didn’t UNDO quite far enough. A stray, early LOOK command got me killed over and over, one single errant action! Milliways has that in the second puzzle (the first one is solved with a single action and I did manage to make it unsolvable since I dropped the radio on the ledge, so still required a lot of undoing, but slightly better). For the aliens, if you trigger and then miss another timing window, I’m pretty sure you don’t get another chance. You’ll have to wait around a while before you get killed.

It did have a neat overall atmosphere; there’s some good description writing and imagination on display. Perhaps not to the level of actual Douglas Adams, but absolutely fine. But a bit further in, the game starts to feel more underdeveloped. We start to see more default descriptions (Even for other Hitchhiker’s Guide characters? Ford, Trillian?).

And some bugs. The cupboard seemed buggy; sometimes it wouldn’t open and close when I was in the kitchen, then eventually it would open and display two separate items (so it looked like it was firing twice). And then eventually it crashed Lectrote.

I stopped there. I did look at hints for the radio (that puzzle’s probably fair enough really) the aliens (that one is on me not examining everything, though again, I just got punished for this in Barcarelle), and the cupboard. There’s effort here certainly; charm, the puzzles are interesting, the writing is interesting. I see the thought that went into all the puzzles I saw. I think the author wrote somewhere that this was their first game, in which case, GREAT for a first effort. Incredible ambition. But needs more testing, needs more time in the oven. Possibility that some of these bugs are ZIL related, maybe modern interpreters don’t play well with it. But wow, this is written in ZIL! That’s cool! The difficulty I suppose is more subjective, but I feel like there needs to at least be a FEW turns of leniency for the player to look around and examine everything, before oblivion comes for them. I get it, OG Hitchhiker’s Guide also had timed deaths. But the beginning of that gives you a lot of turns, and some advance notice before you die. So that sequence works. Very possible the rest of that game also gets more unfair (I do remember hearing it’s very hard) in which case, hey, maybe it’s just nailing the spirit it was going for. Can’t fault it for that.

Aside: for the puzzle involving the darkness, that one seemed extremely familiar. Where you’re listed all your senses, and have to notice the missing one. Which other game is that from? (Is it just from Hitchhiker’s? that… would make sense)

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Thanks for the review! Many of the things you mentioned (cupboard bugs, some default responses) are already fixed (as far as I can tell). I understand the whole timed death thing (by timed I assume you mean by turn, not by seconds), it’s pretty cruel. The radio you do get many warnings, just the timer never decreases (in my head it permanently damages your brain), and if you want some help it’s that I noticed some testers trying CHANGE CHANNEL, so when not using the radio you can do so to slow the timer.
And yes, the senses puzzle in the Dark is a main reference to the original Hitchhiker’s!

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How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title

TADS game. It reminds me in a way of early/mid 90s fare, when games were still large and ambitious in scope but had maybe backed off a bit on the cruelty scale. This has 300 potential points! This has a points system! I finally stopped at… 22 points.

Medieval fantasy setting, not overly serious. Very much an adventure. The king in unimpressed with his son, potential heir to the throne and the titular feckless prince. You are a mighty knight and renowned hero, and the king asks you to take on the boy as a squire, and you also take it upon yourself to prep the prince for his regal duties. Also the king has a rival you might have to deal with… and oh by the way, the king wants you to deliver his prized rutabagas to be entered at a festival.

So this has been lovingly worked on and pored over. I’m reminded of another parser game which had fairly long dialogue scenes which objectively could’ve been cut down. But it was evident that author really enjoyed writing them, and my thinking for that was, hey, these are almost all free, hobbyist passion projects anyways; how much could I really hate on that? If the author enjoys it, wants to put it in anyways, I can look past it a little bit, as long as the author knows and makes that choice, right? This game has evidently made similar verbosity choices.

The introduction has two versions the player can choose to read, a like 10-minute odyssey, and an abridged one. This has almost certainly gone through a ton of testing, and the author made the choice to keep the longer one as an option anyways but added the abridged one afterwards. I read through both; is the longer one superfluous? Um, yes. Ideally, the abridged version plus maybe two of the little side stories would’ve been good I think. But can I tell the author enjoyed writing the long version? Also, yes. In fact the longer intro has a more free-wheeling farcical tone that isn’t found quite as much in the game proper.

The in-game writing also shares the same verbosity. Paragraphs–at least one, perhaps more–for every single person place and thing within eyesight. I legitimately don’t recall examining ANYTHING that didn’t have a description for it. The favor that the king asks you to do at the start, in a “by the way” off-hand manner, is to pick up some rutabagas to bring to the festival you’re going to. So you head off with the prince in tow. And this seemingly breezy sidequest took me, I think, more than an hour, not because the puzzles were hard–they were quite standard ones: get past a dog, find a light source, find a key, etc–but because there’s so much text to process. The text is fine, well written; it’s more focused on either world-building or visually describing how things are laid out, though I’m not a very visual person so maybe not quite as effective for me.

Throughout this little quest, the prince is active: every single turn, the prince is examining something, singing something, doing something. Another one of the strengths of this game is how dynamic it feels, how things are always happening the background. What the prince doesn’t do, is… have anything to do on this sidequest. You order him to move some stuff around, that’s about it. Maybe if these were puzzles that blocked me off from the festival directly? Maybe if the prince had been tasked with bringing the rutabagas, and I was helping him instead of the other way around? But it’s a story about a prince where I’m doing stuff he isn’t really a part of.

And then after the sidequest is finally done, and there’s an author’s note thanking me as a judge, there’s another choice of either a long or abridged scene at the festival, and then the game map suddenly opens up. And you can just go ANYWHERE. There’s a fantastic illustrated map feelie that I had pulled up in another window to consult. There’s another quest, this one actually prince-centered. You’re told that your destination is somewhere north. and you start moving. There’s small towns, crossroads, fields, forests and mills along the way. It’s not just a straight shot north. Sometimes when you enter the village it’ll just tell you you spend some time there. Sometimes you’ll enter an inn and get another scene before it spits you back out. The prince keeps doing stuff in the background. Every once in a while, after travelling a while you’ll get a scene where you set up camp for the night. This is all structurally wildly different from the prologue (the ABOUT section tells me that the prologue puzzles are different from the rest of the game), and it’s more fascinating to me then the fairly normal puzzles + loads of reading that the prologue offered me. But then I got to my destination, a frozen lake is blocking my way, and I’m just told to keep exploring the countryside. I loaded up the game the next day, kept exploring. I think I have a few potential puzzle pieces at the end of that, but I did find all the description reading to be a bit exhausting after a while. Because I don’t know what I’m looking for, I really needed to concentrate on poring over all the words: room descs, everything mentioned IN the room descs, things happening in the background… I’m examining everything, and I’m also having to genuinely navigate with the map, in locations that will actually just splinter off in seven other potential directions (so I have to mentally remember which directions I’ve already gone)… So I did feel a bit tired by the end of that session and had to stop; I mostly explored without actually solving anything, and without necessarily knowing what else I would do next other than to KEEP exploring. I’m well over 2 hours at this point. The large map was very cool to explore, but I personally would’ve liked a slight bit more direction. The initial trip north was great. Purposefully planning where to go next would been cool considering the map. But I just trekked across half the countryside, and boy are my eyes tired!

Aside here about the passage of time in parser IF. I think in a lot of games time sort of just stand still, right, while you’re solving puzzles? Nothing actually proceeds, except maybe after solving a puzzle. This and Barcarolle in Yellow both acknowledge the passage of time (You’re told you’re late in Barcarolle at one point; you’re constantly automatically stopping and resting here so days are passing). But they also take place in large scale maps: respectively walking around Venice, and just walking around a whole kingdom. It… breaks the idea of the world for me a bit, because I’m imagining time passing when I’m inefficiently wandering around and criss-crossing the map.

I think what it comes down to is that this has a story, a detailed world, and puzzles that are all separately extremely solid and spit-shine polished. What I’m not sure is if they’re all working to fully complement each other as a whole. I like the potential story about the prince who is easy to like (but the puzzles I’ve seen don’t have much to do with the prince). I like the world descriptions (but they don’t aren’t necessarily contributing to the story or part of the puzzles). Because all the parts are good, the game is also still pretty good! Polish actually counts for a lot; the effort and love that’s gone into this shows.This is also extremely, thoughtfully implemented, and caught most every action I tried; I doubt this is ever going to have a guess-the-verb problem later on. The amount of unique things the prince does is incredible. It’s a fun world to be in, and it makes you feel the scale of it’s expansive and detailed world.

transcripts:
pq.log.txt (226.1 KB)
pq2.log.txt (86.0 KB)

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Thanks for reviewing Prince Quisborne!
Sorry that you felt stressed by the days and nights… there’s not really any time deadline in play, and we’re told that being out for at least a year is practically expected.
You almost had finished covering the “countryside” that PQ nudged you to explore! Ironically, three of the last areas you didn’t see were ones that contained other characters to interact with and spice things up a bit.
I know that I could have made this game with fewer words, but per your observations, the worldbuilding was, for me, an end in itself. Of course I hope it serves the story and the puzzles as needed, but I hoped it would be a place that could be charming and interesting to explore for its own sake. But I think you’re right that the game is, perhaps more than ordinarily, characterized by a story, a puzzle set, and a worldbuilding that each offer to be an end in themselves.
This comp’s been a little hard for me (oh I know, I asked for it), knowing that most reviews and perceptions of the game are based on such a small percentage of it, and arguably a percentage that doesn’t have the best parts of the story or the adventure or puzzles or humor or whatever else. I know that the over-simplified prologue followed by the potentially bewildering dump into the post-Festival exploration is probably going to create some dubious impressions if folks don’t know where things are heading! Alas… IFComp is the “big” IF competition so I chose it.
Thanks again for playing!

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It’s not so much any worry about time running out so much as… if I’m thinking about this world as one where time DOES pass, then I feel slightly more reluctant to do things that obviously take a lot of time without reason. I don’t care about moving back and forth in small rooms in Zork. I feel slightly more resistant to aimlessly wander here. Because moving between villages would take time and effort. I guess this is slightly about role-playing the character within the reality of the world you’ve created. I’d get over it while playing, don’t worry, it’s more an idle thought about what introducing time and large scale maps does to the game environment.

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Quicker reviews here, more an acknowledgement that I played them.

I have two more things left to review after this. Spoiler alert, they’re One Knight Stand and Please Sign Here.

Assembly

A puzzle parser game based around… IKEA. What a concept!

Great fun, really good length for IFComp, with good story surprises and some very well designed puzzles. Good iteration on the basic mechanic of assembling IKEA furniture. Yes you read that right.

The disambiguation wizardry this must have used!

Also in further innovation following The Vambrace of Destiny’s INVESTIGRAB, whenever you pick up an object here it also automatically gets EXAMINED so you get the description as well. That’s what I always do anyways, so great! Just look at the time I saved!

You might think just following and typing in a set of instructions (“ATTACH side panels to base”) might get monotonous, but it really didn’t. The whole screwdriver sequence (realizing what I needed, the recognition of where it was, the further recognition of how to get there, the brief additional obstacle(wrong lamp), the final solving) was fantastic. The whole showroom maze section? Fantastic.

I did get stuck a while in the cafeteria; I didn’t realize that it was the same wardrobe between both locations, I thought it was two separate ones, and I didn’t see that the top panel had been removed from the cafeteria side after I’d removed in in the closet and went back through. So I did look at the hints for that.

transcript: assembly.txt (149.2 KB)

The Finder’s Commission

Played it, neat little heist game. It does actually extremely remind me of the type of puzzles I’d expect to see in a parser game, just implemented in Twine: finding codes, finding disguises, etc etc. But they were enjoyable to work through.

Very no-nonsense start (oh, I’m a finder, here’s a client, here’s the job? Okay let’s go I guess!). You get to choose your character, I chose the first one (Aspen?). Apparently talking cats are an unremarkable occurrence in the world of Finders, as your client is a cat. And also possibly an ancient Egyptian god.

The museum space is quite large (I do wonder if there’s a better way to fill the museum so it doesn’t feel quite as mechanical). Look around, find all the various things you can do, I liked that there seemed to be more than one solution to some problems. My first attempt, I got 30/100 (something like that) and got caught. After turning off the alarm and putting on gloves first (I had all the stuff I needed, just didn’t use it at the right time) I got 97/100. I did wish I could go out the back door but not sure exactly how I could’ve done it; in my end sequence, the detective was always N so I was always forced W or S for a few turns until I either escaped or got caught. I wanted to meet the tour guide!

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Thank you for the kind review!

I didn’t realize how gnarly this was going to be until my first round of playtesting… quite happy to hear it worked out well in the release. (Probably my favourite little trick is that the game tracks the instruction booklet you most recently read or used, and uses it to help figure out which part you might be trying to attach or detach.)

Credit for this idea goes to Anchorhead, actually! I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t do it… nice for the player, and for me-the-author it was handy to know that the player’s taken at least a cursory look at the stuff they’re carrying around.

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I’m surprised in hindsight the idea never occurred to me. I should add that to things.

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I put this in details, since this may be getting off-topic for the review thread. But I don’t know where else to put it. TLDR: suggested features, plus, an up and coming author could make an extension of this (Unless Daniel’s “add that to things” encompasses that… in which case, ignore the below.)

examining post-take

It seems like there could be several levels of this. For instance, for a to-do list, you might not want to dump everything on the player at once.

So maybe you could have “after examining a examine-when-taken thing” … and of course you the author might want the option not to have the player re-examine something they already examined. Or they player might even want to turn this option off.

You both probably thought of parts of this already–but I think it would make a neat extension, for someone who wanted to contribute to the I7 repo and just make an impact but wasn’t really deep into the guts of I7.

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The sequence X THING, TAKE THING is so deep in my muscle memory by now that having the game describe the thing when I take it would be redundant. In a normal parser game I would probably turn it off, if only for my fear of picking up a poisoned coin and dying.
For straightforward text-adventures, that is. Authors can and will and do come up with all kinds of brilliant settings and circumstances where combining the two commands fits perfectly.

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I sure hope you were not thinking of doing the reverse… make examine pick up things…

>x saw
The circular saw is spinning madly.
As you attempt to grab the saw, your fingers are cleanly sawn off.

I can see the benefit of making a GET automatically do an EXAMINE. But still allow for a separate EXAMINE to take care of the poisoned/sharp/etc thingie scenario. Was that not what they had originally in mind? Ensuring anything in inventory has been examined? Might even go as far as not automatically examining something already examined.

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Yep! This is exactly how it works in both Anchorhead and Assembly… examining only unexamined things when taking them. And you don’t automatically take the things you examine or anything like that.

(One exception… in Assembly you do automatically pick up booklets when examining them. But I think of that as a special case and not a generally good idea.)

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This reminds me of a moment in Stuff of Legend. I remember OPENing a chest, I’m told there’s a baseball inside (or something, I don’t remember the object) but then the game AUTOMATICALLY picked up the baseball for me! Wait, that’s my job! I wanted to pick up the shiny, obviously takeable object myself!

On the other hand, I think after I search a container and that find something, some games automatically pick up the object for me with the SEARCH and some don’t, and I sometimes feel confused if I don’t have the object afterwards. Is that contradictory? Hmm… I think my brain sometimes interprets a “you find a object” statement as also picking it up.

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Why were booklets a special case?

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Two reasons:

  • It’s a bit more ‘realistic’. Weird to find a booklet in eg. a container and read the whole thing without it ever leaving the container.
  • It makes the game flow better. As you assemble something, the narration describes you eg. flipping to the next instruction, so the booklet needs to be present. But it’s annoying to try and attach A to B and discover that you can’t because you never picked the booklet up. OTOH, there’s no real reason to want to get rid of a booklet… so moving it to inventory often helps and rarely hurts.

(I don’t claim this was totally successful! But that’s the rationale.)

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One Knight Stand

ChoiceScript, skewing somewhat close to the Choice of Games house style, by which I mean lots of create-your-own-character/backstory driven choices and consequences. The innuendo part of the title isn’t indicating anything in the game by the way. It’s just knightly. And I suppose you CAN make a stand or two. Also, heed the content warnings, this gets briefly quite graphic (and NOT in a fun way).

Sort of urban fantasy tying into Arthurian lore, about YA level. Modern day-ish setting. At the start you have an elaborate dream about King Arthur. Or maybe, more accurately, a nightmare? Or maybe, more accurately, a heeding! You wake up, head out (…eventually, but we’ll get to that), you meet up with your friend/love interest/stalker (like I said, lots of This is YOUR story type choices, so you define that relationship), and well, this branches too much to describe the conversation you have. But there’s general foreboding, light horror vibes. Actually, this specifically reads–well, it skips across a couple different tones, but this reads… Very Online? The author has definitely read a bunch of online Creepypasta forum stories for some of the jumpscare elements, maybe some fanfic, tumblr-y (maybe tumblr is too old actually). Maybe it’s more specifically the sense of humor and the choices you’re given that give off the Online sort of vibe; the prose is generally more restrained than the choices, which occasionally get very wacky: in response to your friend telling you at length about the legend of King Arthur, one choice of response is: “I’m greatly aggrieved at the lack of coconuts, ducks, and killer rabbits in your lecture.” That’s not a response that any person I can think of would say out loud, but I could see like a… tween typing it out to their friend? What’s the upper limit for tweens? Googling it… Okay, possibly slightly older than that, maybe… early to mid teens. Sorry maybe this is all overly presumptive, but the protagonist is supposed to be mid-20s (I think I was told this at one point), and I dunno, some of the dialogue choices sound significantly younger than that.

LOTS of character/backstory choices. Staggeringly so. Eye color, hair color, body type, job satisfaction, tragic backstory, vices, weaknesses, fears, hobbies… And there are callbacks, references, and later choices that are blocked off depending on earlier choices, so it’s not all superfluous, and some of it definitely comes into play. Is it too much? YES. Just leaving the apartment takes a long time because instead of telling a story, you’re going over your favorite color. And your favorite drink. And–

It also sometimes uses different fonts for emphasis of certain phrases, which definitely feels like someone very used to writing online, as opposed to a book prose orthodoxy type of mindset. Actually Twine authors sometimes do some of this (bolding, different fonts, etc), I just don’t see it very often in Choicescript. But very playful.

Also? Lots of sound effects. I did mute them after a while because they did get distracting (I got jumpscared a few times from how abrupt and loud they were!) But the amount of work inserting all the sound effects this uses is also impressive.

The overall sheer amount of effort put into this is in fact impressive! The amount of choices this has? The amount of tracking? The sound effects? That first conversation with your friend has TWELVE topics to choose from! You can spend an inordinate amount of time just talking to them. For no real reason, a lot of words in passages will link to Wikipedia or wiktionary (Things like JFK, SSDs, etc); just adding those seems like an additional few hours worth of work. The author seem to have done a whole lot of research into horses (as well as other stuff) for this, and so there are a bunch of links to all the terms they looked up. And the horses were only because I ended up in polo club; it seemed like I could’ve gotten a whole different favorite activity, in which case did each of THOSE also get as much attention as polo club did? My mind reels at this possibility. I picked a ringtone (I SAID there was a lot of choices…) and it actually played the ringtone sound effect for me, and there were at least a dozen others to choose from! How? WHY?

Princes Quisborne seemed like a behemoth of a game, but this, this? I can wrap my head around a humongous parser game, I’ve encountered those before. But this is staggeringly large in a more alien way to me. I’m thinking Prince Quisborne must still have taken more overall work than this (all the testing and fine-tuning probably puts that way ahead), but this is still substantial work.

But the story is just way too glacial, and at some point it just wasn’t engaging enough to keep on going. I played this across the last couple days before the comp judging deadline, and finally gave up. All this effort could be focused much better–just brutally cutting out like… 70% of the text here would probably turn this into an okay experience–but if the author is willing to put this much work here, then they’re hopefully willing to put work into continuing to hone their craft as well for future works, because the sheer seeming productivity on display here and ability to just put pen to paper (you know what I mean: finger to keyboard) seems like perhaps an undervalued and uncommon talent for this line of creative work. I don’t know where the story goes, I can’t really judge the story as a whole. It does need a better and stronger focus on the actual storytelling part of the equation, as well as a few other things that could be tweaked: the over-reliance on fake-out jumpscares, meandering scenes even disregarding all the choices, the lack of pacing, the tonal inconsistencies… But I see some promise for the author for the future.

There’s also a wild twist right before I stopped playing which seemed BOLD but also probably a BAD idea for this specific type of choice story because it completely re-frames the protagonist. Okay, spoilers here for this specific thing: You’re given a choice of a secret you’ve been keeping from everyone else… And I got to choose to become a serial killer. And it went through and told me about how my character has a backstory where they apparently stalk and kill people! (I think I got to choose a motivation and a few other things). Problem is there wasn’t enough story by that point to really make me particularly invested. But also, doesn’t it somewhat go against the Choicescript conventions that the rest of the game is following, where I’m constantly being allowed to mold the protagonist into whatever image of them I want? That’s such a major re-framing of the character I’d been asked to shape so far! It seems like the wrong sort of twist for this type of choice game.

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Please Sign Here

I played this on the last day of judging. Alas, I forgot to submit a score for it :frowning:

Twine. Very visual novel style, with illustrations, so more dialogue focused.

There’s been a series of murders and you’re currently the main suspect! You’ve just survived a car accident, and you’re being interrogated by the cops about what happened. Flashback: you work at a coffee shop, and it’s a particularly rainy and busy time. Over several days, a couple characters cycle through your shop and talk to you. But also some mysterious happenings start occurring: back doors left open, shadowy figures at night.

Small dialogue choices when you talk to people, other small choices of actions (tidying up, whether to help someone, etc) as well. I was extremely amused by the response to one choice I picked literally being “it doesn’t matter”. Points for honesty I guess! Some proofreading issues, noticeable but not too obtrusive, somewhat overly expository dialogue at times. Lots of vocalizing of their inner thoughts by main character Jackie; that’s something that makes sense in a voice acted thing, but probably could’ve stayed actually inner monologue in a text game. She doesn’t actually need to “say” them here!

The illustrations are really nice (there’s… dynamic lighting in one background graphic, somehow. A GIF maybe?). I feel like I would’ve liked the story to ramp up slightly quicker, but then again I think visual novels tend to be a bit like this? I’m not fully sure, I haven’t played all that many. But I think back to a game called VA-11 Hall-A which was… an okay game. It also had visual novel elements and you were working at a bar with a lot of repeat customers across a daily cycle so the setup is similar, but there you also had to mix the drinks for the customers before talking to them, and that helped vary gameplay a lot more. Instead of just a string of conversations like here, with only a gradual sense of foreboding in the background. Not that I’m saying this necessarily needs a whole barista mechanic… But maybe it could’ve used just some greater sense of momentum or progress.

So there’s basically a couple of repeat customers. Generally nice, and you gradually get to know their diverse personalities and backgrounds, and also some slightly suspicious details about each of them. And then at the end of the flashback, you’re suddenly asked to pick one as the lead suspect for the murders. I just… picked one of them semi-randomly (Martha), because I didn’t really have too much to go on. And then the police just went and arrested them! Gotta say I have some concerns about how this police department conducts investigations! And there’s no real confirmation if you’re correct.

(Complete aside: if you only have one customer enter your small coffee shop, do you really need to still write their name on the cup?)

A lot of this seems generally competent enough, but since I didn’t get the central mystery, I can’t say it worked for me. I honestly didn’t realize I was trying to pick up clues to the murder along the way; certainly since it’s a FLASHBACK, that’s not what Jackie is trying to do day to day when deciding what to do. I was mostly just picking choices trying to be nice to people! Within the flashback, there’s no present day framing where Jackie or the detectives are really trying to focus on details while Jackie is thinking back either. It’s all just a couple scenes which proceed normally, until you’re brought back into the present and you’re abruptly asked to put someone else behind bars. I can’t say I feel like justice got carried out here.

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One more.

Dr Ludwig and the Devil

I played through this since it won the comp, not a full review but some quick thoughts:

I’m not sure I fully jibed with the conversation system. The system is ASK/TELL–well, I’m not sure if TELL is used too much, it’s mostly ASK–and the TOPICS command gives you a list of all the things you can ASK about. A is a shortcut command (for ASK person ABOUT) which is super appreciated here. But I did feel like I was doing a lot of lawnmowering at times, going up to everyone and just going down the list of TOPICS whenever I got stuck. The interactions felt, I dunno, maybe a bit mechanical, input->output as opposed to a more naturally flowing conversation. Dialogue itself was good. Maybe I’ve just gotten too used to TALK systems, but are ASK/TELL systems just inherently a bit more rigid? A few of the parts I got stuck on were because I missed asking about something (specifically getting the flyer). Maybe it’s just too many TOPICS? You accumulate quite a few.

The puzzles are pretty fair, I did peek at hints a few times. One alternate solution I tried was maybe grabbing Hans’ beer as a substitute wine which didn’t work. I also spent some time unsuccessfully looking for that elusive bartender. And being confused by the whole “I’ll sell wine to you the next time you find my shop” from the shopkeeper; I thought maybe the shop would disappear and I’d have to find it again.

Really liked the description writing. Lots of good replacements for default responses as well. Both these things are written from the subjective voice of the mad scientist, and they help to inject a bunch of personality to the proceedings.

Obviously it’s the comp winner so it’s a really good, funny puzzle parser game that’s easy to recommend, good writing, good puzzles, etc!

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