For the record, I find both puns un-cormulent.
5 Likes
The Counsel in the Cave
I was excited to see a magical realist game show up in the Comp as it’s something I like but don’t see often, especially in video gaming. One of my favorite video games is in fact Kentucky Route Zero (which is also the only magical-realist game I know of, go figure). It’s clearly a favorite of this author as well, since I could clearly see the inspiration here. KRZ and The Counsel in the Cave are both games set in rural areas (at least at first), and are technically choice-based but don’t have much in the way of traditional puzzles. Instead, the player is given the option to shape how the story plays out – the choice picked is always correct and becomes the new truth of the world, as if it’s always been there. The overall framework of the plot stays the same, but no two playthroughs will ever be alike unless you do it on purpose.
Luckily for me, The Counsel in the Cave ends up being a worthy game on its own as well as distinguishing itself well from its progenitor. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s very well written and creates a world that is both stylistically and thematically distinct from KRZ and has no trouble standing on its own. It also tells a story that is nicely sized, and will feel familiar to anyone over a certain age - who will you become after high school?
A spoilery thematic deep dive
The Counsel in the Cave ends up pulling off a neat trick integrating its gameplay with its story, which I didn’t realize until I was in the shower three hours after finishing. The central conflict driving the two protagonists forward is the question of what to do after high school, how their choices will shape who they become, and how to deal with the responsibility of it all. At the end of their arcs they both conclude that it’s going to be scary, but no matter what they’ll solve the problem by moving forward and seeing where life takes them. The only wrong choice is not to choose and thereby end up stuck.
This is, incidentally, what the player is doing the entire way through The Counsel in the Cave. The only way to get stuck is by indecision alone, and while the player can’t be sure of the outcome of any choice they know it’ll move their story along. Yes, it’s a game and people are expected to click the links, but I really enjoyed this piece of thematic resonance.
What I Liked
For those of you who don’t want to read the spoiler (and I encourage you to play the game first before reading my thoughts!) I liked quite a lot of it. The side character Moondog was a standout, though.
What I Didn’t
I think a little too much happens offscreen between acts, in particular between 1 and 2. I can tell the author wanted most of the journey to happen off-screen, but that requires walking a tightrope between telling the player too little about what happened (and confusing them) and infodumping. This definitely erred more on the side of confusing, which wasn’t a huge problem but it did throw me out of the narrative for a hot second.
Bug Report Corner
Not a bug, strictly speaking, but I did catch one instance of the author tripped up by a homophone (“reigns” used when they meant “reins”). It’s otherwise very well written so I thought I’d give a heads up.
3 Likes
I like this from the “Guidelines for Authors” on the IFComp site:
In a text game, spelling and grammar mistakes are bugs.
( IFComp - Best practices for authors)
Thanks for this review. The Counsel in the Cave hadn’t shown up on my radar when I first went over the blurbs. I like magical realism too so I’ll be sure to read this one.
1 Like
Well, I can’t argue with that logic!
Glad to have put this on your radar, by the way. For a variety of reasons I’m focusing on games lagging in public reviews, but getting the word out about hidden gems is certainly one of them. Good to know it’s working!
1 Like
Cannelé & Nomnom - Defective Agency
Cannelé & Nomnom - Defective Agency is a game you can get a very accurate read on from just the title and summary. You’re an amnesiac who has hired the world’s most dysfunctional detectives to help you regain your memory. (They hate each other and are constantly wrestling for control of their single shared brain cell.) Your task is to keep them on track long enough to work on your case, and not get themselves into too much trouble – a tough task, given that neither of them have any morals and the fantasy world they’re in gives them far too many opportunities to wreak havoc.
This summary doesn’t even come close to doing C&N justice. First of all, this is the most polished Twine game I’ve ever seen! I am in fact COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY by how much effort and polish went into this. There’s (timed!) sound effects, music, art, extremely good use of text effects, and even multiple custom minigames! (One where you connect the post-its on your evidence board with red string and one fully implemented graphical card game, so far). If the authors added more images this could be a full-blown visual novel. The writing is equally good, and the mystery is as compelling as the characters are wacky. The farcical antics of our defective detectives are balanced extremely well with the increasing hints that there is something very rotten in the state of Falaisant.
What I Liked
I already spent a while gushing about this game but this is my review thread, so I can gush more if I want! I already vaguely mentioned that this is set in a fantasy-ish universe, so I want to throw a spotlight on the worldbuilding. The game takes a little time to explain how magic works at the beginning, but from then on does an extremely good job showing and not telling. I never felt confused, but I also enjoyed the bits and glimpses of what Falaisant is like and never felt like I was being beaten over the head with lore.
Also, for anyone who watched Pokemon just for Jessie and James’s antics – you’re going to like this game. Cannele and Nomnom are basically those two with the player character having to act as their Meowth.
What I Didn’t
The writing is fantastic but could have used one last editing pass by a native English speaker (I assume, given the large amounts of French, that the authors don’t speak it as a first language. My apologies if that’s incorrect). There’s a few spelling issues and weird turns of phrase that could have stood to be ironed out. Also, The Contre Morte* section was a lot of fun to play, but the delay in seeing the options pop up made it frustrating to go through multiple times (which I had to because I’m dumb). Still, these are minor things that in my opinion don’t distract from a very well-done game.
Other Thoughts
The lesbian cheese stand couple are (so far) my favorite side characters of the Comp. I would also play an entire game based around, well, I forget the in universe name but it’s basically Scrabble Poker.
Bug Report Corner
At one point my game called up the wrong name for the player character and called them "Yassie” even though I picked “Muffin”. Also, I read fast and I still have no idea how close I am to the end, so expect to spend well more than two hours on this unless you’re truly phenomenal.
I’ll probably loop back and do another review of this one once I’ve played it in full (unless I’m actually two pages from the end and just didn’t notice). Tearing myself away from this one is hard!
*Sorry if I got the name of this part wrong, my memory is a sieve.
Also, @DeusIrae, you just got your Encormian encomium. Let’s see if I can pull off a second one for @AmandaB’s encore. 
10 Likes
Thank you so much for your detailed review of our game 
It was our duo’s first shot at making an IF at this scale (it’s even @yazaleea first game, ever) so your kind words about C&N mean the world to us.
We’re especially happy as we were not sure if several things we tried to do in this game would land correctly, and your review helped us confirm that a good portion of it did, which is more than we hoped for.
We’re taking good notes on your feedback, and we’ll use your —and the other player’s— comments into account when we’ll work on the next versions of the game, especially when we’ll use your conspiracy board to write the final chapter!
3 Likes
Woo hoo! Someone should whip up a little badge icon that the lucky winners could slap onto their game’s cover art on IFDB
2 Likes
Hmmm I seem to remember a small festival thingy in the spring that lets players design their own ribbons…
The “Encormian Encomium” could be one of those…
3 Likes
A Matter of Heist Urgency
A Matter of Heist Urgency bills itself as “An Anastasia the Power Pony Story”, although as best I can tell this is the only “Anastasia the Power Pony” story in existence right now. The game certainly doesn’t seem to acknowledge this, as it throws you right into the action, but it’s not hard to piece together what’s going on – you’re Anastasia, a pony superhero fighting crime in a world of ungulates. In true Saturday morning cartoon style, you have to investigate a crime (without blowing your secret identity, of course), and then jet off and use your powers to fight the culprits with (or more accurately, despite) the help of the gallantly useless detective Sir Ponyheart.
What I Liked
The story and staging here have a lot of heart. The pony characters are memorable, and overall it really feels like a 90s superhero cartoon. I would have absolutely loved an Anastasia action figure as a kid.
What I Didn’t
This game is full of great ideas that aren’t translated well to a game. Yes, it’s a shorter parser game, but there’s really no puzzles to be found. You examine some things in the first scene, then it’s off to find the llamas and make your way through some fight scenes as Anastasia. At least one potential puzzle is solved by Anastasia doing a number of actions when commanded to SNEAK that could have been several separate commands. The fight scenes were similarly unchallenging and while there’s some depth to them, I also managed to win them all by spamming KICK LLAMA over and over. Maybe the hint command will give more insight, but I’m not generally a fan of using it to convey required gameplay knowledge. This is a place where I really could have used a basic list of available commands, since otherwise I feel like the game expects the player to be familiar with Anastasia’s power set – but there’s still no other Power Pony games to be found, so guess the verb it is. Overall this felt like watching a cartoon, with watching being the key word.
On that note, there’s some interesting discussion to be had about the game design choices. I’m a fan of games (usually choice-based) that don’t have a failure state and will allow the player to proceed no matter what, possibly at the cost of some score or another. That was clearly the intent of this game, but in this case I didn’t feel it worked. I’m not entirely sure why (lack of stakes? Lack of rewards?) but I’d be interested to hear if anyone else had an opinion.
Other Thoughts
I have to admit, I spent a lot of time wondering exactly how a horse could climb a ladder. It’s a striking mental image.
7 Likes
The Grown-Up Detective Agency
I’m breaking with my attempt to play things with 0 public reviews for this one, so I figure I should explain why. The why also involves some personal stuff, which I’m generally bad at sharing (I am overly paranoid about talking about myself for no real reason besides having grown up in the era of Internet Stranger Danger). But hey, these reviews are supposed to be a learning experience for me more than anything else, so here goes!
This game is the latest in a series that includes Bell Park: Youth Detective and Birdland. Birdland in particular is a special game to me - I played it at the recommendation of my first girlfriend*, and it was my first real introduction to interactive fiction. (Well, not including Counterfeit Monkey, which I enjoyed but came away with the conclusion that I was too dumb for parser IF). Appropriately given the summary of The Grown-Up Detective Agency, when I played Birdland I was also experiencing the ennui of my early 20s and all that entailed, with new and exciting challenges like “being out to my parents”, “I think my first real job sucks, actually”, and “baby’s first medical crisis”. The latter of these consisted of a really nasty sinus infection, and Birdland was suggested as a way to keep myself busy and cheer me up while I was stuck at home and struggling to be functional. So Birdland is one of those games that I played at the exact right moment in my life for it to really, really stick with me.
*(As some of you may have guessed, said girlfriend is my frequent coauthor @EJoyce. We’re still together and now we collaborate on IF! It’s pretty rad.)
As such, I’ve been very excited and very nervous to play The Grown-Up Detective Agency, out of the hope that it’ll live up to my expectations and the fear that it won’t (possibly because things just hit different when you’re not taking enough antibiotics to kill a horse). But it turns out that I didn’t need to worry, because this game has everything that made Birdland great and then some.
What I Liked
One of the things I enjoyed most about Birdland was how it seamlessly balanced the silly and irreverent A-plot (psychic bird men are invading the world via summer camp!) with a touching, nuanced, and deeply relatable B-plot (how do I deal with being gay at 14?). The Grown-Up Detective Agency pulls off the same trick flawlessly and is equal parts more ridiculous and just as grounded.
The A-plot has you looking for a woman’s missing boyfriend, and is ripe with ridiculousness as you try to hunt down clues at a chicken wing joint, a cabaret club, and the world’s worst dive bar among other places. Many of these locations give you ample opportunity to hear about the ridiculous shenanigans that go on there, and I ran through every single one because hearing about the bar’s screaming contests is the kind of thing I find funny. (Yes, literal impromptu screaming contests over who can scream louder. It’s that kind of place.) Meanwhile, the B-plot has Bell attempting to solve why her 12-year-old self has suddenly time traveled into 2022 which turns into a subtle exploration of growing up, expectations vs reality, and the sinking feeling that maybe Kid You was more right about certain things than Adult You was. It’s very relatable to how I felt in my early 20s, and frankly still do to a lesser extent in my 30s. Bravo!
What I Didn’t
The mystery in this story can be summed up as “are the straights OK?”, which made for a lot of excellent humor throughout but didn’t give a satisfying conclusion to the A-plot (since in the end Mark G was just off being bafflingly heterosexual). I think that was intentional, since its purpose was mostly to contrast Adult Bell’s boring detective work with Kid Bell’s wide-eyed enthusiasm, and most real life mysteries aren’t nicely wrapped up in a bow. Still, I don’t think it quite worked for me, possibly because after a certain point the mystery gets tied up in a way that felt rushed.
Other Thoughts
Sonny’s sprite doesn’t have any dogs with him. 0/10, worst game ever.
More seriously, I’m also in a field that I’ve been interested in since I was a kid (engineering), and squaring my dreams of killer robots with the reality of endless Excel documents and heated arguments about flatness requirements for a while went only slightly better than Kid Bell’s journey did. Getting out of my awful first job helped though, and I think there’s a message here about keeping your youthful spark alive and not letting the reality of Adulthood (™) grind down your enthusiasm too far.
Aaand here’s the encore! I’ll be here all week, folks.
11 Likes
Encountering an encomiastic encore is so encouraging, Encorm!
3 Likes
You and Mike are going to be the death of me!
3 Likes
Star Tripper
Star Tripper is a game that’s not trying to sell itself very hard. The summary consists of a single sentence, describing itself as inspired by a Palm Pilot game that I’m definitely not familiar with! So I didn’t really know what to expect going into this one.
It turns out that Star Tripper is massively underselling itself, because there is A TON to do. After the intro, which establishes you as the scion of a rich and powerful family looking to rescue their kidnapped sibling, it dumps you out in the great wide universe where you can do just about anything. And I do mean anything! The number of quadrants and planets you can visit must number in the hundreds, with activities on each ranging from religious prayer, drinking, visiting bookstores, ferrying passengers, and of course karaoke and gambling (not available yet in my playthrough, but I’m excited about them anyway). Oh, and the resource trading. How could I forget that?
What I Liked
The goods trading is the meat of the game, and it feels very satisfying. It didn’t take me long to get a feel for how it worked - buy goods cheaply on planets that produce them, and sell them high on planets that don’t. I quickly spun up a burgeoning empire in electrical cables and for a while I was rolling in money. I felt very smug about my early success, and was pushing into deeper and deeper quadrants in the hope of finding a space station to spend my cash on a better ship and start the process all over again.
What I Didn’t
Unfortunately, a game like this is hard to balance, especially with one programmer and one tester (based on the credits). So while I thought the trading was fun, fuel management ended up being a pain. In particular, refueling on a planet is a real drag! Instead of the spaceport having a fuel station (why???), you have to go to a bar, buy a patron a drink (at a price that scales with planet difficulty), buy them ANOTHER drink (with a similar price that isn’t revealed until you’ve bought the first), and then finally unlock the option to pay them even more money to buy fuel. Not only is this tedious, it means that if you land on an expensive planet you can wind up with not enough cash to actually buy fuel, leaving you to do odd jobs until you scrape together the cash to leave. An easy fix for this would be at least to let the player buy as much fuel as they can afford, but when you’re buying it from a shady person outside a bar it’s all ten units or nothing.
There’s a few options of jobs you can do to earn cash - I’ve run into mining ore and making coffee so far, although I suspect there will be more once I get further in. Unfortunately, the mining minigame seems to be designed for players to trade credits for carpal tunnel - you descend a mineshaft for up to 50 meters (requiring one click for each meter), mine until your bag is full (20-30 clicks) and then go back up to the surface (again, one click per meter). Then you do it again. I did this once and then stopped because it gave me wrist strain. The other money-making minigame I’ve encountered (working at a coffee shop) is much more fun, since it’s based around remembering customer’s orders instead of blind clicking. Still, the payout wasn’t enough to justify the 20 or so rounds I’d need to complete in order to get back off the planet, so with that as my only option I decided my run was over. (The minigame rewards don’t seem to scale properly with the planet level either?)
Finally, I had absolutely no idea how to progress the story, and after the first quadrant I didn’t encounter a single space station where I could upgrade my ship. In hindsight I really should have written down the number of that first quadrant! (I really should have written down a lot of things. Definitely bringing a notebook for round 2.)
Bug Report Corner
Reloading a save will start all your achievements over from scratch. This didn’t bother me too much, but it’s definitely unintended behavior.
Other Thoughts
I’m going to give this one another shot once my frustration’s worn off, because despite the other issues I was really enjoying this until I got stuck on Tau Huborkon. I can see myself coming back to this one a lot once I unlock arcade mode. (Also, I played this with a brewing sinus headache so that definitely affected my persistence. Sorry Sam!) With some more polish and maybe a better primer on gameplay I could see this becoming a classic. Also, I’m going to be smart and make better use of multiple saves so if I screw myself over again I won’t have to start from scratch.
5 Likes
Thanks for writing this review. And I’m glad to see you had fun playing my little ditty of a game.
For the record, I actually had several beta testers, and all of them complained about the fuel management 
Myself, I went back and forth a bit with tweaking it a bit, but fuel management being a PITA was part of the original game (from 2002), and I ultimately decided that it was a fundamental element of the gameplay, so that’s why it is the way it is in the IFComp release.
Also definitely glad you enjoyed some of the mini-games! For the record, my wife (an uncredited beta tester) absolutely loves the mining game 
I’ve seen her thumb get bruised from tapping on the screen so frequently, which always makes both of us laugh like loons. And yes, you’re right, there are far easier ways to make money.
Thanks again for playing, and hope you have fun unlocking and discovering all the other content!
2 Likes
It didn’t occur to me to play on a touchscreen! I’ll happily trade my aching wrist for a bruised thumb. Can’t wait to play again once I’ve knocked out some more reviews.
1 Like
Sam, can I ask what “lawnmowering” is?
Sure! 
Imagine that you are cutting the grass using a lawnmower. To make sure you don’t miss any patches or spots, you have to cut the grass in even segments starting from the far corner and working your way across and down.
“Lawnmowering” isn’t a real verb, but it’s become one in IF, and it refers to a player metaphorically doing the same thing to a game - clicking on/examining everything in every space before moving on and repeating the same to make sure they don’t miss a single spot. Think “FOMO” if that’s a more familiar concept for you.
Long, long ago, in the days of Zork, this “lawnmowering” approach to playing games made sense, and a lot of the old-timers here still do it, reflexively.
2 Likes
I think a lot of IF pieces have trained players to feel like this method is necessary. Even many of the parser games being released today seem to penalize you for not examining every location and item thoroughly. Of course, you eventually get a feel for how close most games expect you to pay attention, but I would worry that if I don’t play this way, I’d up getting stuck, because I may overlook the one thing I need to be able to progress further.
3 Likes
For what it’s worth, these days when the term pops up I generally see it used critically. Typically either for poorly clued puzzles (where lawnmowering is the only realistic way to progress) or for choice games that have a lot of superficial options but only one path through the game. Either way, it makes progression a chore.
1 Like
Which is the main reason I am loving the increase in choice based games in this year’s comp!
3 Likes