Oh yeah, SugarCube has a lot of built-in structure for it so I forget sometimes that Harlowe is less amenable to it. I get by fine with Stylebot in most cases anyway, so it’s not that big of a deal!
2 Likes
A Triangle for Two
A Triangle for Two is a short hypertext piece about two personalities, Jan and Maria, sharing a body and their experience of revealing this to an old friend, Anna. The revelation is nominally tied to Jan (and/or maybe Maria? I found this a little unclear) having a crush on Anna, but despite the focus this gets in the title and blurb, I felt like the romance angle was almost beside the point; the focus really seemed to be more on how Jan and Maria navigate trying to share a life and their conflicting feelings on revealing their situation to others. Maria seems to be a personality that manifested to protect Jan, and because that’s her raison d’etre, she is incredibly cautious, wary of anything that might cause him problems, whereas Jan wants acceptance for himself as he truly is.
Interaction was a little confusing at times; there isn’t always a clear distinction between links that lead to asides and links that move you on to the next passage with no way to return, so my habit of clicking links that are part of the body text as soon as I get to them led me to miss some things on an initial reading. Other than that, this is a well-written and emotionally compelling vignette.
8 Likes
See You Around
Anyone who has hung around me long enough has probably heard my semi-joking rant about the artificiality of genre categories and how they’re not always the best or most relevant way to categorize a work of fiction (I know I’ve done it on this forum), but they do have an important role to play in setting audience expectations. I mention this because I feel like the “literary fiction” label on See You Around set expectations that were mismatched with what the piece actually is. Of course, the definition of literary fiction as a (quasi-)genre is somewhat fuzzier than most, but I do expect artful prose along with an attempt to grapple with some big themes and/or paint a detailed picture of the psyche of at least one character. I don’t reserve the “literary” label for works I think do these things successfully, but in terms of what See You Around was visibly trying to do, it has at best one out of three, and feels perhaps more aligned with the kind of book generally shelved as contemporary fiction.
See You Around is a hypertext piece about a sex worker, Jasmira, who briefly dated an aspiring musician, Alim, and broke up with him when he found out she was sleeping with other men rather than explain that it was her job. One night she’s at a bar looking for customers, only to find Alim there performing a song that excoriates her for her infidelity. Giving up her opportunity to make rent for the month, she takes him home and they hook up; she finally explains what her deal is, he accepts it, and they are reconciled. Periodically the reader can click links to see flashbacks to Jasmira’s backstory and initial relationship with Alim.
The prose is simple and transparent and the focus is very narrow, so the piece’s literary aspirations are presumably focused on providing a complex psychological portrait of Jasmira (who is mostly the POV character, though once Alim shows up the narration dips into his thoughts occasionally without fully committing to a dual-POV conceit). Her motivations for getting into sex work and the way she relates to her job and the men it brings her into contact with are convincingly portrayed and have a level of complexity beyond the easy stereotypical options, but I found it less clear why she felt she couldn’t tell Alim about it initially, what changed her mind about that in the intervening months, and what made Alim so special to her in the first place.
I’m also not sure the choice to include full lyrics for songs written by Alim and, occasionally, Jasmira was a good one; while there are some songwriters out there creating lyrics that are enjoyable to read on their own, a lot of the time songs depend on the music and performance for some of their impact and feel a little pedestrian when divorced from that, and I did have that problem here.
11 Likes
Dreamteller
Dreamteller is a short mystery work in Twine about a detective chasing a serial killer that is leaving him cryptic messages, with a magical-realist twist.
This is another one of those dreamy works whose meanings and themes I found a bit elusive. There’s something about isolation and connection—the unsought loneliness of the victims versus the detective actively trying to hold himself aloof from others. There’s possibly something about police corruption, or maybe just the protagonist specifically railroading innocent people into convictions; this is touched on in one relatively brief passage but the passive framing of the descriptions made it unclear to me whether he was supposed to be observing an institutional problem or trying to distance himself from responsibility for something he was doing. Most clearly, there’s a narrative arc involving the detective’s sense of superiority to criminals, which is eventually challenged in a dramatic fashion.
For about the first 2/3, the piece is pure hypertext, with the asides done as in-line replacements rather than separate passages. I appreciated that the text-replacement links were italicized, so the difference between those and links that move you forward was always clear. When branching choices appeared towards the end, I also found that change reasonably clear, and I could see the thematic reasoning for it (connected to the aforementioned character arc). The only bit of interactivity I wasn’t crazy about was the part where the detective is given a puzzle to solve and solves it but the work makes you, the reader, type in the answer (that was just stated in the text), but admittedly I would have minded that less if it weren’t so finicky about how you enter it.
So as games of this type go, I felt like this was more focused than most and had an interaction style that was better aligned with what it was doing overall, but I still felt like it was a little too vague about what was going on with the protagonist, which made it hard to be invested enough in his fate for the set of endgame choices to have much weight.
7 Likes
Alana’s Dungeon
This is a parser game for which eight-year-old Alana came up with the concepts and her grandfather, Clyde Falsoon, implemented them for her. I actually have a similar game in my own catalogue; The Presidential Pizza Plot was made for my sister, who was just a little older than Alana at the time, based largely on ideas she came up with. (If anyone remembers playing that back when it was available, this may explain a lot about it.) I have mixed feelings about my decision to share that game with the world (as may be guessed from the fact that I haven’t reuploaded it), but I do remember it fondly as a sibling bonding activity. I hope Alana and Clyde also had fun.
The writing is clearly mostly Clyde rather than Alana, which is honestly a little disappointing because I love to see how kids describe things. I did get stuck trying to get out of the dungeon, but I’m not going to critique an eight-year-old’s puzzle design. It would have been nice if Clyde had provided a walkthrough, perhaps.
8 Likes
Wild Ride to Earth
Wild Ride to Earth is a ChoiceScript game in which you are a hapless human who has been abducted by an alien and dumped in the far reaches of the galaxy. You must now take odd jobs to earn enough money to book a ride home, keeping an eye on your health and prestige in the process.
As ChoiceScript games go, this is bite-sized and gives you relatively few stats to juggle. The aliens are suitably weird, and the jobs are suitably terrible but never in a way that tips from comic into depressing. It’s an entertaining little humor game, nothing too ambitious, theoretically a very chill way to spend half an hour to an hour.
… Except I was also very bad at it, and I’m not sure the game thinks it’s possible to be as bad at it as I was. I reached a point where there was nothing left to do and I still didn’t have enough money to get back to Earth (I was very inefficient about moving between stations and what order I did the jobs in, plus I kept going “I have thirty credits, time to go back to Earth!” and then of course I had to spend money to get to the station you can leave from so I did not have thirty credits when I got there, and then I had to spend more money to get back to a station that actually had jobs). Eventually, after poking around for a while, I had to conclude that I had soft-locked myself out of any kind of an ending. At that point I restarted and, with a better understanding of what I should be doing, managed to get back to Earth in a pretty timely fashion, so I have done a complete playthrough now, but I have to say that even getting a bad ending feels better than having to go “well, I guess there’s nothing more I can do here?” and restart. So I kind of wish there were a time limit, or a check for whether the job board is empty, or something, but I don’t know how feasible any of that is in ChoiceScript.
All that being said, mostly this was my fault for being unspeakably bad at managing my time and money, and Wild Ride to Earth is still fun more often than not.
10 Likes
I’m at the point where I’m frantically trying to play all the games I want to play before the deadline so I can rate them, which takes time away from reviews, so like last year I might be posting several reviews after voting closes but before results are out. But in the meantime, here’s the review I’ve been chipping away at for the last couple days:
Tableaux Vivants
“You awaken in a mysterious room and find you have amnesia” is perhaps not quite the most classic setup for a parser game, but it features in a lot of the well-regarded games of the early post-commercial era, and when I started following IF in earnest in the early 2010s it was still pretty omnipresent. I played a lot of early-2010s amnesia games with a litany of other amnesia games, both the classics and the variably-successful recent attempts, running through my head. And from the tenor of discussion at the time, I don’t think I was the only one; it came to be seen as an overdone cliche, and while it’s never vanished entirely, it’s definitely a lot less common now.
Technically, Tableaux Vivants is yet another amnesia game. But I gave all that backstory because I want to make sure it’s clear that it means a lot when I say that I was very quickly drawn into the specifics of its situation and barely thought about its predecessors at all while I was playing it. The game immerses you in a melancholy but beautiful environment filled with references to art and literature and sets you to search for a series of objects disguised as other objects in order to help the PC to recapture bits of herself. The mystery here is really about who she is as a person, what drives her, more than about the details of what happened, and the amnesia itself ends up being deeply tied into the work’s themes rather than simply being a useful device to get the PC into a situation where they don’t know more than the player knows.
The process of slowly uncovering facets of the PC’s identity is in fact one of the game’s main pleasures and something I don’t want to detract from, so although it seems slightly silly to treat what I’m about to discuss as a spoiler, I will do so nonetheless. I appreciated that this is a game about a middle-aged woman dealing with regrets about the way her life turned out, which is not a common topic for IF or for fantasy in general. There are other areas of fiction where middle-aged regrets are a common theme, of course, but mostly for men (particularly straight, white, etc.). The main example that comes to mind in IF is Tapestry, but that always struck me as a very young writer’s idea of what being middle-aged and having regrets might be like, and Tableaux Vivants felt more believable to me. Technically I’m not really old enough to know what it’s like either, so maybe in ten years or so I’ll look back at Tableaux Vivants and go “hmm, not quite,” but its buildup of small frustrations and disappointments with few moments of high drama reads as authentic to me right now, at least.
The puzzles mostly were satisfying to solve and not too difficult. There was just one that felt like it had too many layers of indirection without an obvious way to get started, which was the puzzle of finding a saddle for the horse. It occurred to me to look for books about saddles or horses, but not to assume that I was looking for a plant. At a guess, the flow of the puzzle-solving in that case might be supposed to be that you see the missing plants in the greenhouse and immediately assume you need to be looking for them in a book, then have all those plants already at your disposal by the time you start thinking about saddling the horse, but as there are a number of plants just lying around the house and unlocked by solving various non-book puzzles, I didn’t make that connection either. The in-game hints got me through this without having to consult the walkthrough, but what I really wanted was some cuing in the main game text to point you towards the bookshelf as a way to find the missing plants and maybe some suggestion of the extra layer of puzzle to solve if you talk to Napoleon before you’ve found the plants. (The other book puzzle felt better to me because you’ve already been pointed to the library by needing to find a normal book first.)
I feel a bit bad that it is, as usual, easier for me to write a lot of words about things that didn’t work for me than things that did; this one puzzle aside, I really loved Tableaux Vivants. Some of this is just that it caters to my tastes almost as if made for me; a melancholy Victorian game about a complicated and not straightforwardly likeable queer woman dealing with thwarted ambition that makes a bunch of art and poetry references and contains multiple descriptions of William Morris wallpaper would have to be pretty bad for me to not enjoy it. But it is also legitimately quite well-constructed, and I think there’s a lot for fans of narrative-forward-but-still-moderately-puzzly IF to enjoy here even if the window-dressing isn’t catnip to you the way it is to me. (Still, though: what beautiful window-dressing!)
11 Likes
El Ruido
El Ruido is a Texture game about a telenovela villainess scheming to stop her rival, Selena, from marrying the object of her affections, Alejandro, while puzzling over a mysterious buzzing sound in her head. It’s short and designed to be replayed several times to unravel the game’s mysteries and find the best conclusion.
It’s a great concept; aspects of the underlying mystery are reminiscent of a certain popular TV show, but hey, nothing’s original, it’s all in the execution. The writing is a little uneven, but it has some nice high points, especially when it really leans into the novela villainess shtick. Really my main issue with the game is, well, it’s Texture. Much digital ink has been spilled over the past however many years of IFComp about the clunkiness of the interface and the problems with the ever-shrinking text and so forth, but with El Ruido I actually discovered a brand-new thing that bothered me about Texture: there’s no undo. There are several different outcomes for the final scene but it’s not quite to the extent of having unique endings for every single action you might take, so if you chose wrong (or spent too much time examining stuff) and got funneled into an ending you’d already seen, too bad, you’re starting again from the beginning! This isn’t the absolute end of the world since the game is so short, but it does get tiresome if you’re trying to see as much as possible. That I was motivated to do so says a lot about how invested I was in the game, but at the same time, I spent a lot of time wishing it had just been Twine or Ink or some more typical choice-based interface.
All of that being said, I have to admit that one of my favorite little details about the game was made possible by the unique affordances of Texture. I’ve always been a big fan of PCs with strong personalities, and I love when those personalities come through in bits of game text that are usually treated as purely functional. El Ruido has a fun example of this where it replaces the default “examine” verb with “glower at”. I know this kind of thing has been done in parser games (One King to Loot Them All, for instance) but for something as basic as EXAMINE, my feeling is that replacing it with GLOWER would be an annoying disruption of muscle memory while adding GLOWER as a synonym would just mean players didn’t use it and it didn’t leave much of an impression. Meanwhile in a standard choice/hypertext setup you’d probably just be clicking on nouns to examine them with no verbs involved at all. So… score one for Texture after all, I suppose.
(Quick note: I know the author isn’t a regular here and I’m not sure if they’re reading reviews, but just in case they do see this, while the title is spelled correctly on the IFComp page, in-game it’s typoed as El Rudio, transposing the I and the D.)
8 Likes
Thank you so much for the review!
1 Like
Another quick review for a short game:
Black Thumb
My track record of keeping plants alive is pretty poor, but I do have a potted echeveria that I’ve managed to keep going for a while. The problem is, now we’re getting into later fall in my northerly latitude, it’s definitely not getting enough sun. My apartment has windows on only one side, so no matter where I put it the sun exposure will be pretty much the same, so I guess now I need to look into getting a special lamp for it or something.
Or, Black Thumb suggests, I could just go outside and grab the sun out of the sky. Easy peasy! Well, not that easy; it’s a short game with only a few steps, but the dream logic of it makes the “get item, use item” puzzles a little harder. I did have to turn to the walkthrough at one point when the dream logic didn’t quite add up for me, but otherwise it was a quick and enjoyable game.
I really enjoyed the writing on a prose level, whether it was describing the mundane details of the PC’s room or the cataclysmic effects of taking the sun from the sky. (Before I cross-post this to IFDB I’ll try to grab quotes, but I didn’t copy any down in my last-minute IFComp haze.) I’m not quite sure what it’s doing thematically, though. Something about anxiety regarding new levels of responsibility, not because you think you’ll mess up and let whoever/whatever you’re supposed to care for down, but because you think you’ll go too far and give them too much? Or maybe the point is mostly just to share some particularly striking imagery, which the game did a great job of.
11 Likes