“Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” by Nadine Rodriguez also appears to be a Texture game.
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“Am I My Brother’s Keeper” by Nadine Rodriguez is yet another Texture game entered in this year’s competition, but not tagged as “Texture” in the competition search engine. Thanks to Steve Evans for pointing this out.
“Am I my Brother’s Keeper” took me about half an hour to play. It is well written, and provides a more fully developed story arc than some of the other games I’ve played recently. The PC is searching for her lost sister, someone who has disappeared several times before. This time, though, her disappearance is not a mere alcoholic bender, but an abduction by supernatural monsters from the dream world.
There is some limited police involvement in the search, and I thought it strained credulity when the chief investigator invited our PC to go into the crime scene alone (an abandoned warehouse by the docks) to “just search around” while the cop waits outside. But it does move the story forward. Inside the warehouse, the protagonist discovers a clue to search another location, and then eventually join her sister in the monstrous dream world.
I’ve seen this trope before, characters entering a dream state to battle some monster within. So common, in fact, that I saw it just last week in a rerun of “South Park” titled “Insheeption” in which Mr Mackey (along with a dozen other denizens of South Park) travel into his dream to do battle against Woodsy Owl, who molested him as a child. “Am I my Brother’s Keeper” puts a new spin on this trope, when the PC realizes that her sister doesn’t actually want her help// a parallel to the problem which families of alcoholics and drug abusers often face when trying to help their loved ones.
As I said, the writing and story design are strong. This would make an awesome screenplay. But as an interactive fiction, the player should have choices. The story itself is entirely linear, and most of the pages have only a single option to move it forward. There is one scene in particular which I thought was a missed opportunity to add choices. The player realizes they can take something with them into the dream world, so they buy a gun. How much more interesting it would have been, as a player, to get to choose what to bring with me into the dream world?
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“Glimmer” is a Twine game by Katie Benson. The story is about one person’s gradual decline into emotional depression and isolation, followed by the fortuitous arrival of a friend and the glimmer of hope for recovery. The writing is competent, but there are no branch points, and hardly any interactivity. Reflecting on this philosophically, I suppose that is the nature of depression. One doesn’t feel they have any agency while they sink into depression. And the arrival of a friend to help one recover from depression isn’t perceived as a choice either, so much as a blessing or an act of God, or whatever you want to call it. Philosophy aside, though, I’d prefer a game design that gave me choices.
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“Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey” is a word game by Andrew Schultz, similar to some of his earlier games where the goal is to come up with alliterative rhyming word pairs, following the pattern that appears in the title. “Mokey mourney”? “Blokey Blurny?”
The puzzles weren’t entirely intuitive to me, which left me working through the alphabet. The process can be pleasant and meditative, much as it is to sing the old camp song “I like to eat, eat, apples and bananas”. (If you’re not familiar with this song, every verse is the same as the previous one, except for replacing all of the vowels sounds with a different set of vowel sounds).
Surprisingly, this wasn’t a very effective way to solve the puzzles. I’d get through the entire alphabet, only to be told I’d discovered exactly two of the sixteen possible rhymes. How many phonemes are there in the English language? Even more surprising were the rare cases where I would discover a rhyme pair that made sense to me but wasn’t recognized by the parser! (Surprising because Andrew has anticipated almost everything you might think to try, and coded appropriate responses.) Fortunately the game also comes loaded with a variety of mechanisms for extracting hints.
So my experience was mixed. I found the game relaxingly silly, but not something I could complete without the hints.
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Thanks, Doug–yes, the possibility of repetition was kind of the elephant in the room while I was writing things, and it may provide many people with a ceiling for enjoyment! I’m glad there was some humor to be found in it, as that was my intent. But it is a bit easier to laugh at one’s own jokes.
I’d be curious what rhyme pairs you found that I missed, if you remember any–I tried to brute force through them all, but I missed a few. And I would like to add them for a final release. A few other people have given me things to put in.
As for the 2 of 16 parallel rhymes, maybe you got 2 of 3 from the room, but LLJJ also considered other objects as having potential rhymes. So that’s a bug, and it’s definitely demoralizing for the player! I should definitely separate the two.
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I played the online version, so I believe you probably can see my transcripts. I hope so, anyway, because I didn’t take good notes while I was playing. Thanks for your entry, and I look forward to trying the chess puzzle later in the week.