(Mostly very brief, because the games are too, and because I should really be finishing off IF Comp reviews instead.)
BlacknessThe problem with this is that no cheesy hospital horror can compare to Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, so I just spent all my time reading the lines in Garth’s voice. Otherwise, this is about what I’d expect of an Ectocomp entry: it’s functional, the writing’s fine, there’s one trivial puzzle, the horror is pretty much A RANDOM SPOOKY THING ATTACKS.
You Are A Blob![spoiler]More satire on Twine! Roughly, ‘because Twine doesn’t feature a world-model or consistent actions, and because Twine games are often fragmentary and surreal, you don’t get an adequate idea of what the story’s about and player agency is often effectively arbitrary.’
Or, to put it another way, ‘you couldn’t do The Gostak as a CYOA’. To be fair, it’s not as though we make games like The Gostak very often. But it does point to a general underlying principle of IF: that interaction should give you a grasp on the world, that this is crucial to understanding and inhabiting it. This isn’t really a parser/CYOA distinction: lots of CYOA games arrange their choices to reflect some consistent mechanic by which their game works. (In Katawa Shoujo, you consider every choice in terms of which girls will find which actions attractive. In most Choicescript games, you weigh your choices in terms of the stats you’ve already developed and which ones you want to develop further.) Rather, it’s a distinction between games with more consistent structure (which typically means substantial state-tracking) and games with less.[/spoiler]
BoogleThis is a dating-site parody about how Big Data is insidious and ‘personalisation’ is, in practice, really just a matter of trying to force you into a tidy demographic. It doesn’t work awfully well as persuasive satire, because when people aren’t troubled by big data, it’s not generally because they’re unaware that the data-gathering stuff exists, it’s that they don’t think it’s likely that it might be used against them. The answer here is ‘Google will try to date you and then make you dress up in a creepy dress and then stab you’, which isn’t very convincing.
Chemistry & Physics[spoiler]Seems like a winner. Plausible attackers are more scary than bugaboos or random-ass serial killers, and there’s some good, detail-oriented setting work here.
It seems as though it’s transposing a standard kind of trad adventure-gamey puzzle into a CYOA format; but the problems with this puzzle don’t have much to do with interaction method. The CYOA format doesn’t deal with the problem of not being sure about one important detail of a puzzle; I knew I had to set up an explosion to catch Murdery Ex, but I didn’t get that this was simultaneously meant to get the door open, so I only found the right spot by process of elimination. For a while I was wondering whether fire was a dead-end and I should try to explore a pressure trigger, since the text mentions that as another way that explosive can be set off.[/spoiler]
Crater Creek, 2113
Hill of Souls[spoiler]Two games by the same author. I wasn’t able to finish either. They’re both strong on atmosphere, but part of that atmospheric effect is a surreal, indefinite sense of who you are, how the world is put together, and what your goals are. This is not an inherently bad effect to try to accomplish, but making it work is kind of an advanced challenge. Because in order for the player to take part in a game to any meaningful extent, they have to have an idea of what they should be doing. I figured out one thing that I could do in Crater Creek, but other than that I was pretty much entirely stumped. So there’s some lovely imagery here, but more work’s needed on making the interaction work as interaction.
Also, naming choices pedantry! Aiden is a really generational name, one that was very rare until twenty years or so ago, but since then has absolutely exploded. My basic assumption is that anybody named Aiden/Aidan is young - probably born after 1994 or so. So, to my ear, this makes it an odd choice for a name from an otherworldly setting: it’s a bit like going into a high-fantasy kingdom and finding that the women there are all named Jessica, Jennifer or Heather.[/spoiler]
Dead Pavane for a PrincessThere’s a hell of a tone-shift between calling your game Dead Pavane for a Princess and mentioning zombies in the first sentence. Zombies are not classy! Zombies are the cheeseburger-and-Tang of horror. And that’s pretty much the entirety of the game’s schtick: you are Maurice Ravel fleeing from zombie Claude Debussy. Apart from this, it’s a pretty straightforward exercise, but points for being weirder than I expected.
Ice House of HorrorsThis is a game about being a fish that has been caught by a fisherman and is trying to escape; given that, it’s about what you’d expect. (My main response to it was wishing that I still lived in a place where I could catch rockfish. Seriously, game, I am hungry now.) The moral is that you should gill your fish properly, because otherwise they will flap around in a disturbing manner and then spoil more quickly once they’re dead.
JackYou are a pumpkin-headed scarecrow on a rampage. It’s no worse than any number of first-time speed-IFs, but running around and killing dudes for no reason is not as entertaining in IF as it is in other game forms.
The Profile[spoiler]This has a sort of Spider & Web-type premise, with perhaps a little bit of Make It Good thrown in - if considerably less crunchy than either. You’re a police profiler, trying to recreate the circumstances of a murder. It’s not a bad idea, but I think it needed more time than was available to do it justice. For this sort of story to be interesting, more details about the crime need to emerge over the course of play - and this didn’t really happen, since the police chief tells you all the evidence you’ll ever get on the first pass. The muddy-shoes puzzle was also a bit confusing; some solutions that should have worked, like leaving the shoes on the front porch to retrieve while leaving the building, weren’t recognised, and it wasn’t fully clear why not. I think it could have taken a lot more advantage of its frame-story; at least after the first pass, it might have been more interesting to have your audience comment on your actions as you did them, rather than summarising at the end.
Anyway. This is a pretty impressive effort for a three-hour game, but it’s also got the most unrealised potential.[/spoiler]
A Slight Problem With ZombiesMy slight problem with zombies is that people keep making games about them. It’s only a slight problem, because I don’t actually have to play these games. Also, this is a CYOA of the sort where all the choices but one will kill you. For that to be entertaining, you need to write some awesome death scenes, and these are mostly ‘then the zombie eats you.’
The Cenric Family CurseThis suffered a great deal from guess-the-verb: I had some holy water, and there was an undead skeleton, and obviously the next step involved dealing with the latter with use of the former, but I couldn’t figure out how to go about it.
The Voodoo You Do[spoiler]I tend to be a bit wary of voodoo in fiction, because pop depictions are generally about as accurate as the idea that Christians worship a death-god and believe that all sins can be forgiven through ritual cannibalism. (Actually, I’d be a lot more cool with that.) This has done a modicum of research, but it’s still very much in the ‘voodoo = evil magic’ vein.
Anyway. This is going for a pretty serious, dark tone, which is challenging to pull off even when you don’t have such tough time constraints. In the event I think it needed either more richly evocative language or a bit more space for characterisation - its basic premise is ‘you want to do something horrible to your ex because she dumped you’, my basic response to that is ‘no I fucking well don’t’, and it takes some pretty sturdy motivation to overcome that. But, yeah, that’s a big-ass job for three hours.
Also, I felt it might have been stronger if it hadn’t felt the need to stick quite so explicitly to the Hendrix song.[/spoiler]
The Horrible PyramidThis is one of those games where you do something that is obviously going to turn out really badly, because it’s the only thing you can actually do. As you wear the queen’s stuff, you become more and more subsumed in a creepy mind-control thing where she thinks she’s the dead pharoah’s queen and everything is wonderful. This is less creepy than it might be, because there’s not much time to establish the protagonist before she gets creepily possessed, but and also because metagame-wise it’s super-obvious that wearing the regalia will lead to identity shenanigans. It’s all rendered in pleasantly perky and over-the-top Veedery writing - the diamond abs particularly amused me. I got a little stuck towards the end, I think because the bracelets on the skeleton weren’t mentioned in every description.
The Nessa Springs SlasherA slasher-horror thing: somewhat like Snatches, you play a series of characters, switching to a new one whenever the current one gets killed. I’m not sure whether this is meant to be winnable, either as individual scenes or as a sequence; there are some small obvious self-defence things you can do, but they don’t seem to have any effect.
Trick Or TreatThis was written by an eight-year-old, so it has a sort of Axe Cop quality where people’s motivations are all weird. I giggled a good deal at “After an hour of kissing the ground,” which is worth a bonus point or two.
WispThis looks to be one of those figure-out-the-navigation-trick not-actually-a-maze things. I didn’t figure out what the trick was.
Zombie Dating.zomThis consists of essentially one extended joke, and it didn’t really click for me. (Also, I need a very strong incentive if I’m going to put up with zombie games. I’m not sure that can be accomplished within the scope of an Ectocomp entry.)
Personality RightsThis is a very brief visual novel kind of thing, making prominent use of graphics and music from Creative Commons sources. It’s aiming to be a meditation upon death or something along those lines. It’s tough to tackle serious themes at the best of times, and attempting it in a tight time limit is pretty brave. But I think that the game bites off a lot more than it can chew; a lot of the writing seems mad-libbed from the images, interaction is kind of disconnected from content, and it seemed as if the story was relying upon characters that it didn’t have the space to really establish.
Headless, HaplessI think this would have been a lot better if the final twist hadn’t required such specific phrasing. I guessed the correct answer pretty early on - that I was absent-mindedly carrying the head around the whole time - but the command to check that was so narrowly phrased that, even once I figured out that I had arms, I needed to be given the explicit wording to LOOK UNDER them. Moral: if your puzzle relies on an action that doesn’t fit in smoothly with the patterns of conventional interaction, you had better give it a really robust set of synonyms. Otherwise, I liked this fairly well.