I wanted to give you a last minute warning about that. But then I decided not to…
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There Those Dare Doze
This is a wordplay-based puzzle game, in the tradition of Nord and Bert and Ad Verbum—the sort of thing that really depends on the parser format to work. The world of the game is truly made of words and sentences, not just described by them. I know Andrew Schultz was writing these when I first went on hiatus from the forum, and I’m glad to see he hasn’t stopped.
This one is based on alliterative pairs of words, which have to rhyme with the thing you want to affect. For example (made up, not from this game), you could defend yourself from horrible monsters in a SHIP SHACK by hitting them with the command WHIP WHACK. (Others may be more familiar with this series than I am, because it does seem to be a series, but I’ve never seen it before this ECTOCOMP, so it’s all new to me!)
The puzzles here are fun, and there were some very nice “aha!” moments: getting the ammunition felt great. The big issue with this game is one that might not be avoidable in a Petite Mort—the unrecognized commands.
There are just so many possible alliterative rhymes. And with only four hours to implement, the majority of them aren’t recognized. This means the pacing frequently gets ruined by a long span of perfectly good commands that the game doesn’t understand. There’s no in-game reason why SHARE SHOWS and TEAR TOES aren’t valid rhymes for RARE ROWS, except that there wasn’t time to implement them all. (I’m especially disappointed about FAVE FOUND and SPAM SPEAK. Those felt like they should even fit the puzzles!)
Like I said, I’m not sure this is something that can really be fixed in a Petite Mort. The number of puzzles is very good. I just wish I didn’t keep losing my momentum.
3 Likes
Side note on this one: I want to see if the ending changes if I get all the points, but the pride prong doesn’t seem to work: I have 25/28 points, so surely one of the areas should be truly complete, but the prong tells me to keep searching in all of them. Hints or spoilers appreciated!
You Are A Zombie Yelp Reviewer
This is a very short (less-than-five-minute) choice-based game that’s exactly what it says on the tin. You’re a zombie who just ate someone’s brain, and you’re reviewing the experience on Yelp.
The frame narrative is neat. You’re choosing the course of the story as you narrate it to your online audience, explaining-and-deciding how exactly you caught this person and ate his brains.
Unfortunately, the overall experience just felt lacking. It was a nice short game, but it didn’t feel complete the way the similarly-short Zombie Eye did—I was left feeling like I hadn’t really done anything, and the game hadn’t really said anything to me. This is quite reasonable for a Petite Mort, though, and the writing of the review works; if I had more experience with Yelp, the parody might have hit harder.
2 Likes
Restitution
As the author explains on the main page:
This is a study in stateful media with an emphasis on narration-based agency. To avoid breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief, this work eschews story-based agency.
What’s this mean for you? An interactive fiction experience that is more “literary” and less “game” made by combining quintessential elements of parser-based, choice-based, chat-based, and templated-based works under a new theory of agency in stateful media.
In other words, this is an experiment, intended to explore a new style of interactive fiction. Rather than giving the player any influence over the story (which risks “breaking a reader’s suspension of disbelief”), they’re allowed to choose which word is used for certain descriptions—changing the way the story is described to the audience.
It’s an interesting idea, and indeed the same basic story told from different perspectives could give an entirely different result. But after that grand, artistic description, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the work itself.
As best I can tell, it’s a short story published by Charles Henkle in 1916. One noun has been deleted from this story, and the player is encouraged to fill in the blank. The following paragraph changes depending if a positive or negative word is used.
The problem is, this one noun—and the following paragraph—doesn’t really have much impact on the narrative. It shows us what one character thinks of another character for a brief moment, and that’s it. It was a good, well-written short story, but it certainly didn’t seem like I had much agency over the narrative at all. My personal thoughts on the character aren’t any different than if I had just read this short story in a paper-and-ink anthology, and the narration’s viewpoint on him isn’t really either: would the experience have been much different if the author had just omitted that character’s thoughts completely, letting the reader fill in the blanks in their mind?
While I liked Henkle’s writing, and I’m glad to see people pushing the bounds of the medium and testing new types of “agency”, the interactive parts of this work just didn’t really work for me. To put it bluntly, it just didn’t feel different from reading a non-interactive short story, any more than a “click to turn the page” prompt would change the fundamental experience of a book. I do look forward to seeing further experiments in this vein, and what “narrative agency” will look like once the concept has been further developed.
3 Likes
Reg and the Kidnapped Fairy
I’m really not sure what to make of this one. My first thought was that it was a parody, but now I think it’s deeply, purely sincere. And I mean that in a good way.
This feels like a kid’s first experiment with Inform 7, and it has a certain charm to it. You are Reg, the Good Werewolf, and you need to punch 100-foot-tall undead gorillas and dancing skeletons into space on your way to free the good fairies from the bad fairy. It even has a handful of AI-generated illustrations!
Looking at others’ reviews, Encorm mentions “this was at least partially written by a seven-year-old”, which explains a lot. It definitely reminds me of my first attempts to make an Inform 7 game, and honestly, ECTOCOMP does seem like a good way to get outside eyes on a first experiment like this.
I wouldn’t call this a good game, necessarily, but it has a very distinct charm and soul to it. I hope the authors continue to play around with Inform and look forward to seeing what else they create.
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Thanks for the review! This is actually a prequel to my current ifcomp game, set about 10 years earlier (they’re very different games though). And I do plan on expanding this particular story someday.
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I do want to add a postscript to my Reg and the Kidnapped Fairy review.
When I went back to the game page to rate it, I have one criterion that outweighs everything else. Did I have fun playing this game? And I did indeed.
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Thanks for the review! Yes, there was a certain “I want to see how much I can do and I know I’ll have to cut stuff out.” My Grand Guignol spilled over and the puzzles seemed to be in place, but I was aware it was a lot to pack in.
I had a paper full of notes I write down in early October, and both your guesses were meant to be more prominent, and will be in a post-comp release. The core code was there, and I even have Python code to generate the code, but I had already cut the time limit close just to get things to work.
Shop talk/post-comp plans for the curious
Big spoiler for the post-comp release: FAVE FOUND somehow didn’t make my notes–you’re right it’s an obvious one and maybe I thought “it’s so obvious I won’t bother,” but then a day after I published, I realized it would be a nice wrap-up command. Which means after three of four point-scoring guesses, you can actually determine FAVE FOUND as Dave has enough to like…
Also since this is built on the same code case as Jokey Journey and Drivel Dreaming, there’s a way in the core to get a hint item active. But it never surfaced because I spent a lot of time just compiling.
For instance, TEAR TOES would get you one hint-point, and getting the last bonus point after satisfying Dave would get you 2 hint-points. At 5, you get a hint item that lets you bypass one puzzle. But it was impossible to get to 5, because conditionally optional points were not flagged as optional due to time constraints (e.g. in cram creek, there are 3 of 4 things to guess before the big one. They all start off being labeled necessary, but flipping the right one to optional was tricky coding.)
So I’m glad there was fun to be had and hopefully a post-comp release will streamline that.
2 Likes
origin of love
This one is more interactive poetry than interactive fiction: a sequence of stanzas hyperlinked together, with additional lines that show up when you click particular words. It’s a genre that I haven’t seen much of before, but one that seems very well-suited to Twine’s format.
It’s about gay vampire lovers, which I adore. The writing is quite nice, and the poem overall is short but sweet. It feels like it’s just the length it should be.
I want to comment more on it, but unfortunately I’ve never been great at this type of criticism—I can write a lot about my feelings on different types of gameplay, but that’s not especially relevant here. So I’ll conclude by saying simply that I enjoyed it, and quoting a passage I especially liked:
only you love him the way
a wound bays for the knife
a raw socket misses the tooth
restless tongue probing
cavernous ache.
3 Likes
Buggy
This is a work that I’m not quite sure how to describe. It’s a very short parser game written in Inform 7, and it’s quick to play—usually over in just a couple of turns. You’re riding in a buggy (as in the type of cart), in pursuit of a mysterious foe.
I recommend playing it, because it’s hard to say much more than that without spoiling its central conceit. So go do that first. Or, if you don’t care about spoilers:
The core of this game is puns. The game is buggy, in the sense that it’s got (intentional) typos and also in the sense that that’s what you’re riding. You’re as good-looking as Ever (your brother Everett), and you can jump on the spot fruitfully (catching a branch of crab-apples). You think there’s a Suchthing around, but you can’t quite see it. The fourth wall is thin here, and every message the parser produces is also happening in the world itself.
This is another short game, where getting an ending takes only a couple turns but there are plenty of different endings to find, and I think that’s the right structure for it—its brand of surrealness would get old if it were drawn out much further. Though I do wish I could eventually find out what we’re pursuing.
4 Likes
Thanks so much for the review! I’m so glad that you liked it- and that the length felt right, since I had been a bit concerned about the shortness of the poem: though ultimately, decided that where it concluded felt like it just ‘fit’, as ambiguous as a decision as that can sometimes be.
1 Like
THROW. MARIA. OVERBOARD.
This is a ChoiceScript game set in Imperial Constantinople, which I think means it’s somewhere between ~400 and ~1400 CE—my knowledge of history is unfortunately much weaker than my knowledge of historical languages! You’re a sea captain named Peter, a guest at a high-society party thrown by your friend Demetrios, entertaining “merchants draped in cloth and woman with intricate veils, scholars sitting straight, Imperial administrators proudly sporting their badges of office”.
All of them speak exclusively in rhyme, and look down on you for not being able to do the same. Your goal is to tell them a story that will satisfy them. (The rhyming seems to represent some sort of linguistic difference: at one point a friend of yours abandons rhyme and “shift[s] down into the common register”. It’s a neat touch, because it makes the high-prestige register sound both difficult to execute and faintly absurd, which is presumably how Peter sees it.)
The story you tell them is, unfortunately, very short. You get one real choice to make during it—which is an interesting one! And the writing is certainly engaging.
But even after a couple different playthroughs, I was left wanting more. The four-hour deadline puts tight limits on how much writing can be in a Petite Mort game, but I wish a little more of it had been dedicated to the story itself, and a little less to the frame narrative. Both the high society of Constantinople and the strange affairs happening out at sea are fun and engaging, yet the overall impression I’m left with is that I want a proper serving of either one, rather than just a little taste of both.
P.S. I was tempted to write this in rhyme, but decided it’d take too much time. I might have to try again later, when I’m done with my duties as rater.
2 Likes
Ambiguous, perhaps, but I have to agree with you there—I think the length fit. Any shorter and it would have felt lacking, any longer and I might start to lose interest.
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Something Blue
Epistolary IF! I always love it when a piece makes use of the medium in a clever way.
This is a Twine work where the classic “click links to change their text; click other links to move on to the next page” represents the process of editing a letter. The story is told through the general outline of each letter; you can write and rewrite certain passages to your liking, then send it off. The story then advances to the next letter, a week or two later.
The protagonist is Helen Compton, recently married, writing letters home to tell her sister about her marriage. I’m slightly ashamed to admit how long it took me to realize what story was being adapted here, because in hindsight there were so many clear indications—in other words, I was as clueless as Helen about who her new husband was.
There are a few different endings you can get; I found three, and I think the first one I got (before I went back and chose “all the first option”, “all the second option”, and “all the third option”) was the best. The writing was excellent, it used the medium in a clever way, and the length and pacing were top-notch. This might be my new favorite to win the comp.
P.S. This one made me think of Restitution again, and the “narrative agency” Passer was aiming for. It’s an adaptation of a famous work of literature, and the main way you interact with it is by deciding how a character feels about the action happening around her; you/she have/has no real ability to change that action, except insofar as someone might react to reading your/her letters.
If not for the conclusion, where the story changes based on what the player character has written, would this fall under “narrative agency” and “stateful narration”? I would say this work specifically contrasts narrative agency against the “story-based agency” Passer rejects. Helen is trapped in her marriage, unable to change what’s happening to her; the only thing she can change, even as she knows where her path is going to end, is how she describes the horrors around her.
This may not be a brilliant new insight, since this sort of changing text is a classic part of Twine, and for all I know this style might be as common as darkness puzzles in parser games. But I find the parallel interesting.
4 Likes
Trick or Treat or Trick or Treat or Trick
From the description, this one seems to be a parser puzzlefest written in Inform 7. You’re a 12-year-old trick-or-treating on your own for the first time, and perhaps inadvisably decided to knock on Old Man McGuffin’s door. He chose “trick” and left you with a strange device that traps you in a time loop: after seventeen turns, you’re reset to the start of the game.
Unfortunately, I think this is the first one I can’t solve. I like the idea a lot, but the implementation just confuses me too deeply. I started making a map, and ended up finding a loop that I can’t reconcile: going north, east, south, west, west from the starting room brings you back to the starting room. I found a way to leave the device behind (put it in the box, close the box, drop the box) but it keeps being described as in my hand. “Fields of rustling corn” are an impassible barrier, while “an impenetrable line of trees” is an exit you can use.
If anyone has hints, I would appreciate them: based on the reviews, I think Amanda and Mathbrush managed to solve it? So far I’ve found a twig and a box, and I’ve got this map. The two weird angled passages connect to each other (east of the Bushes is west of the Lot).
Those issues aside, though, I do like seeing parser games in Petite Mort. Four hours is not a lot of time to make and test an Inform game, and I’m glad the author made it, even if I’m stuck!
EDIT: With hints, I managed to solve it. I like the puzzle, but the implementation gets in the way frustratingly often. Some important actions persist across time loops, like PULL ROPE, and give confusing error messages if you try them after already doing them on a previous loop. McGuffin expects you to say “trick or treat” when you find him later, and prints the same text as at the beginning, but doesn’t reset the loop. Using commands that are slightly off, like SHOW BOX instead of GIVE BOX, does nothing. I like the game, but the implementation issues keep me from really recommending it.
Updated map:
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Have you found a use for the twig yet? I can’t tell from the map, since my memory’s a little bit fuzzy.
There’s probably only one thing you can see that needs solving, and the twig’s what can solve it.
The twig is a disguised version of a classic adventure item.
The twig is the key to the gate.
Once you use the twig, the box is the last thing you can use.
Have found the secret room? The next two hints are for finding it.
The secret room is past the gate, once you unlock it. Have you examined everything?
There’s a rope you can pull. Now the hints are back to the box.
McGuffin doesn’t want the device. You have to trick him.
What’s something he likes?
Have you shown him or given him the empty box?
He loves that candy. Put the device in the box and give him the box.
3 Likes
One More Page
This one appears to be the third in a series I haven’t played, but hopefully it stands on its own. It takes the format of a text conversation, with messages from your contacts appearing one by one, and you choosing how to respond. The visual presentation is quite sleek, though I honestly wish it had been simpler—I spent a long time waiting for text to slowly fade in, even when it’s a choice for me to click rather than a message from someone else, and the messages floating around in different directions and bumping into each other was mildly distracting. Sometimes I could scroll down too far and leave the whole conversation behind; other times the messages were cut off at the bottom and I couldn’t scroll down any further. The background music was atmospheric, though I turned it off after a little bit.
(The flow of this review is different from the rest because I keep tabbing over to work on this while I wait for the messages to appear. It takes a while.)
Interface issues aside, this is a spooky little short story told through online chats. Your mother messages you to say that your friend has arrived, and is waiting in your room. Then your friend messages to say they got delayed on the train. So who, or what, is it that your mother just let into the house??
Sadly I found the climax less compelling than the premise. Your friend’s doppelganger starts messaging you in Zalgo text and sending you uncanny pictures from the internet. I’m not sure if the bathos was intended or not, but it ended up feeling like a bit of a letdown after the spooky premise. I somewhat wish the entity itself had been left in the background, rather than messaging you directly, because only hearing about it secondhand could keep it both scary and vague at the same time.
I enjoyed this one, but I wish the climax had kept up the spooky atmosphere from the beginning.
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Aha! With those hints I managed to beat it. I’ll update my post in a minute. Thanks!
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Untitled Ghost Game
It’s a beautiful day in the mansion, and you are a horrible ghost. A new owner has just purchased your ancestral estate and is about to bring their awful corporeal biological presence into it. You have five hours to make the house as spooky as possible and put a stop to this!
This is a lighthearted choice-based optimization game. As you roam about the mansion you find various spooky tricks you could play on the owner; each increases the “spookiness” of the house by a certain amount, but each also costs a certain amount of time. The goal is to get the maximum spookiness in the five hours allotted.
It’s not an especially difficult optimization problem—you only have one resource to worry about, so you just need to choose all the haunts that have the best spookiness-to-time ratio—but I enjoyed the tone and the writing a lot. I played this with some of my family and they loved the ghost’s analysis of their various little tricks, and the different endings you could get with different levels of optimization. This one is definitely getting a high rating from me.
4 Likes