Yes, I wait until I’ve played before reading others’ reviews too!
I think it’s really helpful for a designer when reviewers disagree about specific points. I’ll often read a review and think “I quite liked that thing that you didn’t like”.
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It was very refreshing! I haven’t seen many games like that.
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Belated thanks for the kind review, and also for your help via PM with getting some features added and general confusion straightened out!
I only just now got around to updating things, and I actually hadn’t even clicked on this topic … yes, I do like to make stuff that can’t be categorized, which has its ups and downs for sure.
The writing – well, it was done a bit last-minute, with a lot of speech-to-text, which is one reason I put WoR in the back garden. I’ll say more in my postmortem, but the TLDR is, WoR was a lot more cathartic for me than I expected once I started it, and publishing it set me about doing other things.
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REPEAT THE ENDING
My overall feeling with this game is that I don’t have the background knowledge of parser games I needed to understand it. This is how I feel with a lot of parser games, honestly.
I like the writing. It describes a difficult life situation, but the descriptions always seem realistic and human. The trailer park feels real. The text feels well-edited: it paints a picture but it’s not overwritten. This is really great.
For most of the game, I didn’t really understand what to do. I walked around trying to diagnose every single object, then I eventually looked at the Guide for the solution. I don’t think I managed to solve anything without the Guide.
Because I was so lost, the text often criticised me, which was frustrating: “Your bungled request”, “Come on, use your words”, “Where do you get these ideas?”. At one point, I really didn’t know what to do, and examined the grass outside the trailer, to which the text responded “Are you really pestering me [for a description of the grasses]?”. Well, I thought, yes I am, I don’t know what else to do.
I think the game wanted me to explore different endings. (I didn’t quite understand this: was I meant find all the endings, get a full score, explore what could have happened?). I did this a little, but what usually happened was that, once I’d solved a puzzle, I was so desperate to proceed that I didn’t want to go back.
Overall, I really liked the idea of this game and wanted to get the most out of it, but I didn’t feel I got there. It is startlingly ambitious, which I really appreciate. It is a game that I will keep thinking about.
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Graham, thanks for spending time with Repeat the Ending. I think parser games can be hard to access, so your difficulties will be relatable to many people, I am sure.
As part of my post-festival release of RTE, I will make a detailed play transcript available for players who would prefer reading the story. I will also release the source code, which can be another way of viewing the text.
Thanks again for playing my game, and for supporting Spring Thing with all of your reviews.
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This is actually a thing reviewers often understandably criticize: That the game mocks the player when doing something wrong. For some reason, reviewers haven’t criticized Repeat the Ending for this. Perhaps because the player character doesn’t like themselves so it fits with the game?
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Honestly, I think it’s because the usual player/PC relationship isn’t present in Repeat the Ending. There’s so much else going on to emphasize that the player is not the PC (especially the footnotes and commentary), so I never felt personally criticized. It might depend on how much one is engaging with the metatextual parts of the game, though.
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The game is largely about criticism in all its forms, so this fits. And I think you’re right about the connection to the PC-- he’s drawn as a loser and I think this puts you into his shoes remarkably well. You can’t do much right as this PC.
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For me, the game-internal berating felt of a piece to the “earlier,” pessimistic version of the game. It augmented the feeling of depression and helplessness and underlined to the ‘don’t bother trying to fight it’ feeling. Which I felt the “later revision” actively tried to combat. I even felt some of the fail states subverted that by being funny, like the penalty was not nearly as bad as the game wanted you to believe.
Fwiw, I thought some of the opacity of early gameplay was ALSO on purpose? Artistically, a reflection of the immaturity/inexperience of the young artist. Practically, as a low-key way to encourage the player to engage the hints, which definitely seem integrated into the overall narrative. That’s how it operated on me anyway, and worked like gangbusters.
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WRITE OR REFLECT? (AGAIN)
I find I’m still thinking about Write or Reflect?, so I thought I’d write about it again. If you haven’t played, it’s a Python game that’s ostensibly about writing but ends up being a mathematical puzzle that needs a spreadsheet to solve.
First, I found this game satisfied me in a way that other games didn’t. I really like a mathematical puzzle. It actually took some detailed thought, in a way that I don’t often experience in games.
Second, I’ve been a professional writer, and it honestly felt a bit like this. You can’t write all the time, so you need to take breaks, which leads to you planning your time: if I write tomorrow, I need a break tonight. I remember getting into routines, in which I’d take a walk one night to think about what I’d write the next day. And then you plan your week around that.
My first reaction to this game was that it had grafted a mathematical puzzle on to an unrelated activity. I think I’ve seen other reviews say something similar.
But, the more I think about it, the more I realise it’s not entirely unrelated. And, certainly, it’s no more unrelated than (say) telling a story about adolescence in a text adventure, and putting some simple puzzles in to add interest.
Anyway, these are half-formed thoughts, but I wanted to jot them down.
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