EJ's 2023 IFComp Reviews

Competitions IFComp
21

Lunium

In Lunium, you are a detective who awakes to find yourself chained up by the killer you have been pursuing. You must both discover the killer’s identity and escape the room you are locked in before they strike again.

The game has been widely compared to an escape room, and with its plethora of combination-lock puzzles, it’s easy to see why. But Lunium does take advantage of its medium to have a player character with a distinct identity, allowing it to do things that an actual escape room would be unable to do. This gives the game a bit of individuality that I enjoyed, and makes it feel like it has a reason to be a Twine game beyond the fact that most people don’t have the opportunity to make their own actual escape room.

As is typical for this style of game, most of the puzzles that you will have to solve are immediately in front of you once you’ve gotten out of being handcuffed to the wall. A common issue with this structure is that if you have too many puzzles requiring number combinations (or any other single format of answer, but it’s usually number combinations), it can become hard to tell whether you have what you need to solve a given puzzle yet. Lunium does fall into this a little, but luckily it has a “hint mode” that you can enable that will give you this information when you look at a puzzle, which I appreciated. There are also more granular hints available, but I didn’t end up using those.

The puzzles largely walked the line of being challenging enough to be satisfying without being too terribly difficult. The only place I really got hung up was the point early on when I didn’t realize that I needed to search my right pocket again after getting uncuffed, and I eventually got past that just by trying every action that was available to me. I did find it a little annoying to have to repeatedly light matches and I’m not sure the light source management added much in the way of legitimate, interesting challenge, but otherwise the gameplay experience was smooth and I moved through the game at a good clip.

The game has a slick visual design that makes good use of images to create atmosphere; the images also have clear and concise alt text for those that need it. The prose largely stays out of its own way, and the plot does what it needs to do to provide an excuse for the puzzles. (It’s all a little improbable when you get right down to it, but puzzle games tend to be.) One aspect of the final twist became apparent to me fairly quickly, but the other did require a little thought and a careful reading of the in-game documents.

I enjoyed the hour I spent playing Lunium, and if I wanted to introduce my escape room friends to IF, I think this would be an excellent place to start.

13 Likes
22

20 Exchange Place

In 20 Exchange Place, you play as an NYPD officer trying to deal with a hostage situation at a bank. The PC is world-weary and sarcastic; the people around him are mostly incompetent; the stakes are high; the pace is fast.

This has the makings of a solid interactive action movie, if only it had some polish. But as it is, 20 Exchange Place feels like a game made in a great hurry. The dialogue is punctuated correctly only about half the time. The second-person POV keeps slipping into first-person. (Some of this seems to be unmarked reporting of thoughts, but there are places where it’s unambiguously narration.) There are a lot of words that are capitalized for no apparent reason. I try not to get too snotty about writing mechanics, because I know that it’s hard for many people, but the types of mistakes found in 20 Exchange Place seem to speak more of a lack of self-editing than a lack of understanding.

The game is also unforgivingly difficult, and the fact that you can only keep one save at a time makes it harder. I didn’t have it in me to keep replaying from the start to figure out how to successfully rescue the hostages, especially as the game seems to expect you to do this by trial and error.

As a final note, the grey-on-white text of the game’s light mode combined with the very light font weight was pretty hard to read (although dark mode would still have been worse for me).

6 Likes
23

Thanks so much for playing the game and the review - and glad to hear the hint system worked for you (and I’m impressed you didn’t need to use any!). I suspect the game is quite different for those who read everything and those intent on just solving the puzzles. One of the intentions of the game was to try to make objects that you find more than just ‘variables’ you collect – you actually have to examine them. I guess, in many ways, this is less aimed at the traditional IF player, and more at a wider audience, so I’d be fascinated to see how your escape room fans get on with it!

3 Likes
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Yes, that definitely comes through! Then, too, the way you have to engage with them is different from a typical escape room, where documents might have flavor to them beyond whatever you need for the puzzles, but you’re rarely expected to make inferences about the plot (such as it is) in order to progress. I think that’s why the twist didn’t hit me sooner—in a more traditional IF game it might have, but I was in “escape room mode,” skimming the documents for stuff that was relevant to puzzle solutions. Then the final question really made me sit down with all the materials I’d collected and read them properly.

If any of my escape room friends takes me up on this recommendation, I will report back!

2 Likes
25

The Gift of What You Notice More

I love Dar Williams, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a game whose title references her music. I assumed at first that the connection ended there, but no; in fact, The Gift of What You Notice More is substantially based on Williams’s song “The Blessings”—it would have fit right into ShuffleComp back when that was a thing. (Of course, this is largely inconsequential to a review, unless you also happen to be a Dar Williams fan who wanted to know exactly how Dar Williams this game is, but I wanted the writers to know that the whole concept of it made me smile.)

The PC of The Gift of What You Notice More is in the process of separating from their husband, and is going back through dreamlike, surreal versions of key moments in their relationship to figure out where it all went wrong. You go through three rounds of this, at intervals getting items that unlock new areas within each memory (the game calls itself an escape room, but structurally it’s more of a Metroidvania—as funny as either of those descriptors sounds when applied to an introspective game about relationship failures). This is all in the service of digging progressively deeper in the hopes of unearthing the most fundamental problems with the relationship and figuring out what you need to take away from this experience. The problems are all very plausible, and the game struck a nice balance between being relatable and making the characters specific people with a specific relationship that isn’t meant to be a vague stand-in for every soured relationship ever.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the author’s first major foray into choice-based IF after releasing a number of well-received parser games. The Gift brings a parser sensibility to Twine in a way that I thought worked very smoothly. You have an inventory of items always displayed on the right side of the screen; if you think you can use a particular item in a particular location, you click on it, and if you’re right, the relevant link appears. This provides a taste of the parser-style puzzle-solving satisfaction that you don’t get in games where the link appears automatically once you’ve got the right thing in your inventory, but only having to worry about the noun makes it less clunky than the attempts I’ve seen to incorporate verb selection into choice-based gameplay. (It’s a little too late to take inspiration from this for the inventory-heavy choice-based game I’m currently working on, but I’m taking notes for the future.)

But although I liked the mechanics of the puzzle-solving, the design of the puzzles themselves didn’t always work quite as well, largely owing to the dream logic that the game operates on. When the internal logic of it works, it works (of course I have to drop a banana peel so that the jester who keeps popping out to put my armor back on whenever I take it off will slip and fall!). But there were puzzles where I could figure out each individual step based on the tools I had available but had no idea what my end goal was (e.g. all the elephant business—yes, I get the “elephant in the room” metaphor, but it wasn’t really clear to me what I was trying to do with the elephant), and others where I had no idea where to start (e.g. the moving van scene with the sticks). This is fairly subjective and I suspect that if you polled players you wouldn’t get very strong consensus on what clicked and what didn’t, but there must be some way to give the player a bit more of a nudge in the right direction now and then.

Another minor complaint is that each round involves coming up with three possible sources for the relationship’s issues and then picking one as the issue; this is clearly a reflective choice meant to encourage the player to engage with the story, with no gameplay implications. The thing is, the options didn’t seem mutually exclusive, and there was at least one round in which two of the options felt like facets of the same underlying problem. So it didn’t feel like there was strong in-universe motivation to be choosing just one thing to focus on, and I didn’t feel like I was guiding the character down a significantly different path into their future based on which thing I chose. It felt like the PC realizing where the problems were and what they could do differently in the future was what was really important for their growth, and picking one was a formality that ultimately fell a little flat.

But these complaints aside, I did enjoy The Gift. I like when introspective, issue-focused games have a little bit of whimsy and/or a fantastical edge to them, and this was a lovely example of that, with some smart ideas about gameplay design on top.

10 Likes
26

Last Valentine’s Day

(Yes, my personal shuffle gave me the two surreal choice-based games about getting over a breakup back-to-back—there wasn’t even a game I was planning to skip between them or anything. It’s also funny that both of them feature a PC who used to play the violin but doesn’t anymore.)

Last Valentine’s Day represents the experience and aftermath of a breakup as a time loop in which the PC relives the last day of the relationship over and over, passing from shock and disbelief through despair before finally reaching the point where he’s able to move on with his life. The world around him reflects his mental state—the weather, the condition of the park he passes through, and the lives of the people around him go from pleasant to miserable, then gradually improve again.

This externalization of the PC’s feelings serves as somewhat of a substitute for actual interiority—the specificity that I appreciated in The Gift of What You Notice More is missing here, and I don’t have a strong grasp of who the PC is, who his partner was, or why their relationship fell apart. But the evocative descriptions of the environment and the predicaments of the somewhat more distinctively drawn side characters help to ensure that the game sounds the emotional notes that it means to.

The game effectively captures the post-breakup emotional arc of a person who has been dumped unexpectedly; choosing to represent this as a Groundhog Day experience emphasizes the difficulty of moving past something like this, and the fact that choices don’t matter much makes sense inasmuch as this kind of post-relationship grief is, to a degree, something you have to just wait out. But I think the writing would have been just that much stronger if there had been a bit more distinctive characterization for the central (ex-)couple.

7 Likes
27

The Finders Commission

In The Finders Commission, you play as one of the members of the eponymous group, a euphemistically named band of thieves-for-hire. You’ve been hired by the goddess Bastet (or maybe just a regular talking cat) to steal an artifact belonging to her out of a museum. You navigate the museum exhibits, in the process avoiding police officers, creating distractions, entering various codes, flirting with a guard for information, and so on, all in preparation for the moment when you finally take Bastet’s aegis from its case. There seems to be no way to fail at this, but you receive a score at the end grading how well you pulled it off.

As this description might suggest, in a case of convergent evolution, the gameplay here is rather similar to the heist sections of Lady Thalia, which makes it a bit awkward to comment on due to the bias involved. That is to say, I think it’s a very solid foundation for a heist game, but of course I would think so. In any case, barring a few bugs and one puzzle that seemed somewhat opaque (which I’ll detail below), I think the structure was largely implemented well here. Nothing is really that difficult to figure out, but there’s some challenge involved in fully exploring the museum and finding all the things that you can do.

That said, the writing was a little spare for my tastes. The prose consists of terse sentences with minimal variation in structure; many rooms lack sensory detail, and not much characterization comes through either. It’s very much a straightforward recitation of a list of facts. If the gameplay were more complex, that might have been enough to carry the game, but as it is I think it could stand to be punched up a little.

Also—I don’t want to be told that the detective “could be a friend or maybe even a lover” if the two of you were on the same side of the law. I want to see that tension between them; I want to feel the star-crossed chemistry for myself. (I mean, again, of course I would, but.) Even though they don’t interact, this could still be demonstrated through how the PC thinks about the detective and what they notice about him. Obviously this is a trope I enjoy, but I’d like to think this isn’t just about me wanting to see more of it in general; if you’re not going to make the player feel the gulf between the two characters and genuinely regret that it’s impassable, why even bring it up?

You can choose to play any one of a number of different Finders, who apparently have different strengths and interests, but as far as I can tell, the only difference this made in the game was to the three-sentence description of what you do with your morning before heading to the museum. This seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for greater variation in both narration and gameplay actions available.

I could see an expanded version of this game, or a sequel, becoming something I would very much enjoy, but as it is there’s not quite enough there for me to become fully invested.

Bugs and issues
  • When I looked at my satchel in the arts district, hitting “Continue” took me back to the starting area instead of to the arts district.
  • On my first playthrough, when it finally came time for me to take the aegis, the “Open Case” option (which I had not selected previously) had somehow disappeared. Selecting the cylinder from the satchel still worked, but it was impossible to disable the alarm, and I had to brute-force the code to open the case.
  • I was a little confused by the camera puzzle. In-universe, it should be easily possible to glance at the screen and see whether the camera is pointing at the aegis or not, but I saw no option for that on either playthrough. Also, given that the camera is in the same room as the aegis rather than having line of sight from an adjacent room and is not described as being in a particular cardinal direction from the case, there seems to be no way to logically figure out which direction it needs to be pointing in order to not be aimed at the case. I pointed it in a random direction, and when I got back to the aegis room I no longer got the message about the camera watching me, so I assumed that must have worked, but in the score breakdown at the end I was told I had been caught on camera. I am not sure whether this was a bug where something was not showing up that should have been or whether I just missed something about the puzzle.
9 Likes
28

So I took a bit of a break from IFComp reviews, first to focus on my Ectocomp game and then because of health issues that led to me not finishing the Ectocomp game anyway. I’m still having health issues (in fact, I think while I was dealing with a chronic illness flareup I may have also caught some sort of bug), but I’ve been lying around doing nothing for long enough that I’ve gotten bored, so here I am.

Citizen Makane

When you think about it, text adventure games are a triumph of phallogocentrism (as originally defined by Jacques Derrida and expanded on by feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray). The world of the parser leaves no room for indeterminacy, for ambiguity, for self-contradictory ideas. What matters is concrete objects, represented by words, able to be manipulated in predictable ways and be used in puzzles with a single solution that can be reached (ideally) through logical reasoning. As this worldview is associated with a Western, patriarchal system of values that tends to set up hierarchical oppositions that define men by what they have and women by what they lack, games like the original Stiffy Makane—which is quite literally phallocentric—can be argued to be the ultimate expression of this tendency, having the player engage in this system with the explicit goal of the subjugation of women. Meanwhile, Citizen Makane demonstrates its commitment to complicating the phallogocentric worldview in its first scene, which requires the player character to unequip his penis in order to proceed, thus blurring the boundaries between the body and the environment as well as the traditional definitions of “man” and “woman”…

Okay, okay, that’s enough—Citizen Makane is a porn parody deck-building game, and although it has moments of sincerity and some actual commentary to make about masculinity, most of the game is very, very silly.

It is the story of a man who wakes up after centuries of cryosleep to find himself in a world where men have otherwise died out. He has been revived as an experiment in reintroducing men to society, and is also playing host to an AI, Shamhat, whom he is tasked with providing with training data by having sex with as many women as possible.

The sex is represented by a very simple deck-building card game; once you’ve figured out the basics of how it works, it becomes rote, with little variation between encounters. The acts you perform are described with semi-randomized ridiculous similes clearly parodying bad erotica, which keeps things entertaining for a while, but the fun of that wears thin eventually too. This is unfortunate, as the player does have to grind (no pun intended) to advance the plot. But then, maybe the tedium is intentional; as the game goes on, the PC himself obviously begins to tire of the whole thing and long for some real connection.

This is one of a number of ways that Citizen Makane sets up gender-essentialist and heterosexist elements for the purpose of knocking them down. The player must afford the game a certain amount of goodwill for this to work, as much of the knocking-down comes fairly late in a long (by IFComp standards) game, but—all semi-joking attempts at feminist litcrit aside—the opening sequence did serve its purpose of giving me some confidence that these elements weren’t being replicated uncritically.

There is, however, one area in which the game doesn’t try to question the assumptions that undergird the genre that it’s parodying, which is the treatment of sex and gender as strict binaries. Granted, I’m not sure quite what I would have liked to see the game do here, given the “all men have died out” premise; it’s inherently difficult to handle the idea of sex and gender as spectra in that context. I don’t think any recent take on the premise has handled this in a way that I was entirely satisfied with, or that didn’t cause a certain amount of controversy; even the best-regarded example that I’m aware of, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, came in for a decent amount of criticism within the trans community (of which the author is also a part). So I can’t entirely fault Citizen Makane for simply avoiding the issue, but I was still a bit uncomfortable with the lack of acknowledgement that trans, nonbinary, and intersex people exist. Though I did appreciate that the game made a point of showing that some of the women still prefer relationships with each other, even with a man available.

Ultimately, despite these flaws, I did find Citizen Makane a largely effective deconstruction of the toxic machismo of the genre that Stiffy Makane, in its particularly egregious awfulness, has become emblematic of. The opening and ending scenes are particularly strong, and there are plenty of humorous moments to be found along the way. But I’m always a bit on the fence about whether intentionally boring the player is worth it, and while I recognize its thematic import here, it still made the long middle section of the game a bit of a slog.

12 Likes
29

Antony and Cleopatra Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando

The Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective gamebooks have spawned a whole genre of multiplayer games where the players take the role of detectives provided with a number of leads; limited to a certain number of actions per day, they must decide what to follow up on and hope they manage to get enough information to solve the case. These games generally end with a quiz asking not just about who the culprit is, but about a number of other particulars surrounding the case, to see how much the players have discovered or deduced. Antony and Cleopatra is an attempt to bring this genre into the realm of multiplayer IF; it’s an ambitious and interesting attempt, but not, I think, an entirely successful one.

Rather than emulating Sherlock Holmes, Antony and Cleopatra take their cues from Nick and Nora Charles, but the chemistry and charm that have made the Thin Man movies enduring classics are largely absent; the influence is obvious mainly in the staggering amount of drinking on the job that the characters can do. Characterizations for the protagonists are fairly thin and their interactions with each other are minimal. This seems like a missed opportunity—Antony and Cleopatra are colorful figures with well-established pop-cultural personas that seem ripe for some engaging repartee in the interstitial scenes between investigative activities. But the only moment in the game where this comes through is the bit in which Antony has to explain to Cleopatra why a jewelry store being named “Blood Diamonds” might be off-putting, as Cleopatra thinks it’s only natural that diamonds should be paid for in blood. I would have liked to see more moments like this one—more character interaction, more dry humor wrung from the absurdity of these two larger-than-life figures investigating a murder.

Antony and Cleopatra’s innovation with regards to the genre’s traditional gameplay is to add investigation sequences where both players are offered dialogue options to question people connected to the case, but the lack of distinction between the two characters here is disappointing—sometimes you can get the same question worded slightly differently, but only slightly. In combination with the lack of focus on developing the characters and their relationship, the lack of any game-mechanical difference makes the two-protagonist conceit feel somewhat pointless. In fact, since you always have time to ask all possible questions and it makes no difference who asks them, the interactivity isn’t doing much for the investigation scenes in general.

There are a number of different approaches one could take here, any of which I think could have been effective:

  1. Dispense with the two-PC conceit entirely and make the whole experience more like playing Consulting Detective with your friends, where you’re not really controlling multiple distinct characters, just trying to hash out among yourselves where you should focus your investigative energies. As in SHCD, make the investigation scenes static passages; have the planning sessions be the bulk of the actual gameplay and rely on discussion between players to keep them engaged otherwise.
  2. Conversely, take inspiration from some of Consulting Detective’s successors that were actually designed as multiplayer games (unlike the original) and make the characters mechanically distinct. Give them unique investigative abilities (with limitations on when and how often they can use them); give them actually distinct conversation options; have them notice different things. In IF, this is an opportunity to work in characterization in a way a board game can’t, but honestly, in my experience, if you give players the mechanical distinctions, their imaginations will often fill in the rest.
  3. Go the IF sleight-of-hand route and keep the two characters mechanically identical, but give them very distinct personalities. The player may always get the exact same information in the end, but the initial formulation of the questions is so different that it seems like it matters which PC is asking what. The illusion would fall apart on replay, of course, but SHCD-likes (if you will) usually aren’t replayable anyway.

The mystery itself also didn’t work quite as well for me; maybe there was something I didn’t find, but as far as I can tell, you’re meant to solve it by noticing a single discrepancy that you can’t in any way follow up on and extrapolating the whole situation from there, and that didn’t quite come together for me. I understand SHCD cases usually did require some leaps of logic (which I presume is part of the reason that it turned into a multiplayer event when it wasn’t designed as one—more likely that someone in your group will make the right connection), and my preferences here are probably shaped by having spent much more time with recent games like Detective: Modern Crime than with the original. But I would argue that what’s fitting for a game based on the controversial deductive style of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t feel so natural elsewhere, and in an interactive mystery I do prefer having firmer grounds for my conclusions.

I will admit that part of the problem here may be that I played this game with @Encorm—we tend to be pretty much on the same page, so we didn’t spend a lot of time debating what to do, which is clearly meant to be a significant aspect of the gameplay experience. But she and I have enjoyed working through games like Detective together, and I think it could be fun to have that kind of experience in IF form, especially if, again, it managed to lean into some of the things IF can do that board games can’t. Antony and Cleopatra, meanwhile, feels to me like it makes just enough changes to the formula to introduce new problems without fully committing to the strengths of the new medium.

11 Likes
30

One Does Not Simply Fry

One Does Not Simply Fry is a short ChoiceScript game laden with Lord of the Rings puns and jokes about cooking competitions. Possibly also jokes about ChoiceScript games—I’m not sure whether the bit where the PC is exasperated at having to fill out endless forms about their identity, preferences, and motivation before they can start the cooking competition is a friendly dig at the usual Choice of Games style, but if it is, it amused me.

Rather than actually filling out those forms, you select a premade character—essentially either Legolas, Eowyn, or Frodo—and then get frying. In effect, you’re skipping the part of the CoG game where you decide how to build your various skills and going straight to the part where you figure out how to apply them to your best advantage. I’m a bit impatient, at least when it comes to this style of gameplay, so I appreciated this.

I was easily able to win the fry-off with every character except poor Leggy Ass (his high stat of “breadcraft magic” simply doesn’t seem to have as many potential applications within the competition as some of the other skills). The game encourages you to play multiple times for the full experience, but I was a bit disappointed at how little changed between playthroughs—the differences are mostly at the beginning and end. This seemed especially glaring with Froyo, who is accompanied by an assistant (Samfool, in a slightly lazy joke) when none of the other characters are; this seemed like it should at least have an impact on flavor text, but Sam apparently didn’t have much to say during the competition. Even the special unlockable character of the Which King (he can’t remember which king he’s supposed to be, you see) mostly gets the same text as the other possible PCs during the competition, although the divergence at the end is more significant.

This is a little unfortunate mostly because the game trades primarily on its humor, and seeing the same jokes over and over again tends to take the shine off them. (Although I was unreasonably amused by “mistainless mithril” every time.) If the style of humor seems like a good time to you, it’s worth a play, but I think the optimal way to go about it might be to do one normal playthrough (probably not as Leggy Ass), then play as the Which King, then call it quits.

10 Likes
31

Hello,

Thank you for the kind review. I will be making updates post-comp and did plan on making other episodes. You hit on almost everything I wanted to include but ran out of time. I probably should have kept working on it and released it in 2024. Lesson learned.

Cheers!
Deborah

3 Likes
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It’s a very understandable mistake! I’ve made it too, in the past—just getting tunnel vision about “well, I said I was going to release this game for this comp and I will do it, no matter what!”

I really do look forward to the post-comp release and any future installments! I always want more heist games.

4 Likes
33

@#$%^@#$^ Worst heart I ever gave. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

4 Likes
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I’m sorry for tormenting you with my use of hyperlinks. :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes