SPLORT ?
Best regards from Italy,
by a perplexed Dott. Piergiorgio.
2 Likes
SPLORT is the spell (and sound?) of you splatting someone in the game of paintball you’re playing.
4 Likes
A Thing of Wretchedness
This one is billed as an hour, but I think it’s much shorter: I know I read fairly quickly but in half an hour I got to two endings myself and then looked up the walkthrough and tried the other two.
I tend to find horror very boring so I’m not the right one to review this, but I felt like it did a decent job of what it was trying to do. The atmosphere seemed well-done. But I’m not sure if the randomness and mysterious “not explaining the backstory” really works well here: does the uncertainty make it feel more scary or just empty? It also felt like it made you work very hard to put yourself in actual danger so it was more about the ick factor of the situation.
I’ll be curious to see what the horror fans make of this one. I feel like Akheon has made some well-regarded horror things before and also some not-so-well-regarded things? Oh, yeah, Ascension of Limbs but also Fat Fair and Smart Theory.
Edit: Yeah, it just feels a little shallow to me. The game is obviously pushing you to do a bad thing based on nothing more than it keeping hammering you with how the player character feels, which feels like “haha, did you think that maybe you were the monster?” Or you can double down (quadruple down) on the action that’s procrastinating and avoiding doing the bad thing, and the game just… ends. You can (eventually) do the obviously reckless thing and get yourself killed. Or… you can ignore the whole situation and sell off an eldritch object to some possibly-imaginary antiquities dealer? Not sure what’s up with that. And then there are hints that maybe the whole thing was just a dream/vision anyway. Eh.
9 Likes
Last Vestiges
My time: 41 minutes.
One-room forensics game. I think probably half my time was spent fighting with the parser. But when you finish the game, it says:
Inspired by a real case.
Created as a potential teaching tool for forensic science or medical education.
That makes a lot of sense. Say and talk to don’t work, it turns out you have to use ask <person> about <topic> and it’s picky about topics. It drops you into the room with no real guidance, so it feels like if this was a test for people who are supposed to know the correct jargon and questions to ask in a potential crime scene, that would fit.
It’s also a weird mix in a couple of ways. You got called in by the police to investigate but it was very unclear to me what your exact role is. The landlord refers to you as Detective but are you on the police force, or are you a private detective? The inspector calls you on the phone, but then when you come in he doesn’t say anything or brief you or… nothing. Ask Knapp about murder gets no response, nor does asking about the crime. So… you’d think if you’re his subordinate he’d be telling you what to do. And if you’re a private detective… you’d also think he’d bring you up to speed? Dunno. That was weird. But if it’s a game to test your knowledge of what to do in these situations, then that makes more sense.
And then you find various objects and asking about them also gets no response or very snarky responses, so I assumed talking to the Inspector wasn’t a big part of the game, but then it turns out it’s a lot of solving the incident. Maybe half of the things you need to know come from talking to the Inspector.
It’s also strange that some parts are trying to be very naturalistic: oh, how do you unlock the phone, hey, you found some pills, what’s this dude’s medical history? while others are straight up adventure-game nonsense or hey, here’s a nonogram, go draw it on paper and solve it.
Plus it’s kinda under-implemented and overly-stocked with objects, in common new-author ways. There are some objects that feel like they only exist because they would be there in the real scene; some that feel like they exist because this is a thing you check at a crime scene (open the window and see if the murderer could have escaped that way?); some that are weirdly fastened down (or not fastened down when they maybe should have been); the descriptions are super terse.
But there’s the germ of a cool idea under there. I think this highlights just how tricky and finicky it is to make good parser IF…
I will say that, while there are hints in the game, they stop well short of giving you the whole solution, so note that there’s a full walkthrough linked from the IFComp ballot that isn’t included in the ballot. If you get really stuck (I did, and it sounds like @mathbrush did too) the walkthrough is probably necessary…
10 Likes
One King to Loot Them All
My time: 53 minutes.
A swashbuckling, cinematic, self-aware sword-and-sorcery adventure. Limited parser: movement plus six verbs. Good stuff.
This was a lot of fun, and it does a great job with the storytelling and the thoroughness of rewriting all the possible responses in the voice of the game. It started (I’m pretty sure?) as a potential entry for the Single Choice Jam (where you were only allowed to have a single actual choice in the whole game: everywhere else there had to be one way to move forward).
And I think that restriction is responsible for the fast-paced drama of this story. But I think a slavish adherence to that restriction is also responsible for the things that aren’t quite as ideal about this. I’m fine with the story being linear: many many parser games have a single through-line. But, well, let me digress and talk about a non-IF game for a…
Minit is a 2018 action adventure game. Similar to the original Zelda games: you run around with a sword whacking at things and solving puzzles. Its gimmick is that each life (day?) lasts only 60 seconds and then you are respawned at your current sleeping spot. And I love this as a design constraint. It means that none of the game’s puzzles can be big long tedious affairs where you can see the solution but it takes forever to slog through performing it.
But as a gameplay restriction it’s mostly just an annoyance. If you’re exploring and you find a new puzzle with 20 seconds remaining, and you see the solution immediately but can also tell that you don’t have time to do the whole thing, then you’re just stuck waiting. And on launch it didn’t have any way to end the day early. So you’re sitting there waiting 20 seconds for the timer to run out, and then spending 15 seconds walking back to where the puzzle is, and then solving it, where if you just had 5 more seconds you wouldn’t have had to wait at all.
It does do some fun things with it. There are several places where they make it a race, though you could do that without having a global day timer. But to me it mostly it felt like an internal restriction that shouldn’t have been in the final game.
And One King is a little like that, though not as badly: here it’s subtle things. But it felt like the point of this game was to have a smoothly-flowing story, and forcing you to do several things in a single location in an arbitrary order worked against that for me; it felt a little stilted.
For instance, near the beginning, you need to travel in a ferryman’s boat. So you have to find something to use as payment, ring the bell to summon the ferryman, and find something to take as a sacrifice. In that order. And Onno makes a heroic effort to justify that, but it still makes no sense in story terms.
More often it’s just that one of the actions seems trivial and skippable: in the latter half of the game, there’s this exchange where you talk to your companion: she says to ignore the markers. So you do, then she stops you saying, no, you have to read the marker. Then you get sucked in by the magical runes and she’s like, no, no, what are you doing, ignore the markers!
transcript snippet
>t lydia
"My lord," Lydia says, "please follow your instincts and get us
out of here. I do not like these markers calling out to us."
>s
"My lord," Lydia says, "I feel uncomfortable looking at this
marker, but there appears to be some kind of runic script on it.
It may tell us which way to go."
>x marker
You lean in closer, studying the runes intently. It is almost as
if the runes are speaking directly to you; you hear whispering
voices, encouraging you to listen to them, to hear their stories,
to learn what they have seen and heard.
"My lord!" Lydia says urgently and pulls you away. You realize you
were gripping the marker with both hands, afraid to let go and
lose the soothing sound of the voices.
"I do not like these runes. They feel ... tainted. I think it's
best to ignore them for now and rely on your instincts to guide us
through this darkness."
>* well, that's what I was TRYING to do. Jerk.
(Noted.)
>e
You proceed to march eastward, following your instincts. The
pitted black stone pathway seems to stretch endlessly into the
darkness, but you remain resolute in your advance.
Or right at the beginning of the game’s second half, the action you have to take before being allowed to leave the room is to look at yourself in the mirror. And this was immediately after the game had told me “You are no exhibitionist, seeking to catch a glimpse of yourself in all your glory.” so I assumed it wasn’t something I should be doing. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on: even reading back through the transcript I’m not 100% positive, but I don’t see what else it could be.
And with some of these actions being undercued (or occasionally not cued at all? dead end in the dungeon, I’m looking at you) it feels like it’s falling into the choice-based trap of “oh, there are only a few things to do here, so go ahead and try them all until one works.” I found myself just lawnmowering through the options a lot.
Anyway. These are minor niggles: it’s just that (as I keep saying) I think the game is trying to be (and mostly succeeding very well at) being a fast-paced, dramatic, campy sword-and-sorcery story, and some of its mechanics throw up unnecessary roadblocks and act to make it subtly more stilted.
one-king-transcript.txt (150.9 KB)
10 Likes
Hi Josh,
Thank you very much for your kind review! I will study your playthrough and see where I can improve things.
I am aware that the strict ordering is not helping, and will cause players to get stuck. I think I have a way to fix that, but that will be for a post comp release. Same as with the pit where the action to get out is not very obvious.
2 Likes
The pit was funny once it happened, but if you look at the transcript you’ll see me just embarrassingly banging my head against the wall for way too long and I eventually resorted to story mode for one move…
3 Likes
You are in good company, ClubFloyd was also banging for a while… until they figured it out. With a limited verb set, one needs to be creative 
.
1 Like
Paintball Wizard Content Note
Hoo boy, I guess I really successfully went “let’s pretend that wasn’t creepily and completely unnecessarily written in a non-consensual way,” huh? Because I completely forgot this when I was writing about the game the other day, but the way you learn more spells and advance is by rummaging around in your frat brothers’ heads and reliving their traumatic first childhood experiences with learning magic. And of course they’re all fine with it afterwards, but you don’t ask before.
4 Likes
To Sea in a Sieve
My time: 46 minutes (35 to play, another 11 to try some amusing things I missed.)
You are Peter Petibon, 14-year-old cabin boy, writing a letter to Captain Charles Johnson (nudge nudge wink wink), detailing the “strange, wild tale” of pirate Captain Rupert Booby (ditto).
Hmm, and at one point he gets doused from head to toe in blue dye powder: does that make him a blue-footed booby? And, y’know, if he had been Robert instead of Rupert that would have made him Captain Bobby Booby…
Ahem. Anyway.
This is a one-room escape game: your pirate ship has been sunk, Captain Booby has escaped in the heavily leaking jolly boat and brought you along to row and bail, since he’s above doing such work himself. The boat is also heavily overloaded with pirate treasure, and you must throw it all overboard to lighten the boat before you can row to safety.
This was a fun, ridiculous game, as you’d expect from J.J. Guest. After disarming the Captain at the very beginning, I was stuck for a bit and had to check the walkthrough. The big problem for me was that you’re incongruously strong and slippery and capable for a 14-year-old former thief, so I just assumed that I wouldn’t be able to simply steal or flat-out wrestle things away from a full-grown pirate captain, no matter how ineffectual, or simply struggle free when "no one escapes the clutches o’ the dreaded Yateveo tree, and especially with the latter when you have three turns of the game telling you you’re helplessly trapped in its tendrils and none of your commands work before the Captain gives you the clue to the one (custom) command that does work.
But once I got the idea, I was able to solve most things myself. Great fun.
8 Likes
The Gift of What You Notice More
My Time: 36 minutes.
A Twine-based “surreal escape room” about finding your way forward after a break-up.
This one’s a funny mix. Because on the one hand a bunch of the writing is sad and sweet, and your character is stumbling around in this dreamlike daze, but… there’s always a distance from the character (I didn’t pay attention enough to notice exactly what about the writing encourages that, but I was never attached to the character at all) and you’re solving bizarre adventure-game puzzles (dip a rock in garlick spread, why? You’ll see. Or finding a turtle somehow trapped underneath a full-room carpet and then feeding it a banana to get a banana peel which you can later make someone slip on).
Plus it’s intentionally confusing. You get more items as you progress through the game, and at the beginning you think you should be able to solve puzzles but it turns out that you simply can’t yet. And there are three dream areas where you solve puzzles, and each of them has several rooms, and there are items that you keep the whole time and items that only exist in a particular area, and again, it took a while for it to become clear which items were which (the items you get from inside the grandfather clock are permanent, the others are area-specific). This is made more unclear because several objects seem tailor-made to other puzzles that you know about but that object isn’t available where you think you need it.
Which I think fits the theme of being lost and blocked, but it can be frustrating, especially with the moon-logic puzzles where you’re often just lawnmowering through the options. And it’s exacerbated by this being in Twine and (perhaps even more than most hypertext map-and-inventory-puzzle games) it has me wanting to “stop that incessant clicking!” And huh, it feels like there are a lot of these this yeare.
Hmm. I think it also increases the player/character distance that the poets ask you to choose one of the three answers you find in each segment, and then I don’t think that has any mechanical effect. So it feels important to the character but irrelevant to the player. I don’t think it even really changes the flavor text anywhere?
But I had fun with it: it just felt like it couldn’t quite decide whether to be silly or serious and the pieces didn’t quite mesh into a coherent whole, though it did hang together for me better than I might have expected given how outlandish some parts are.
12 Likes
Magor Investigates
I haven’t played any of Larry Horsfield’s games before. But seeing some stuff about them, and it being in ADRIFT, and an hour and a half… but this one doesn’t have any public reviews yet so I thought I’d take a stab at it and… 22 minutes later it tells me I’m done!? Of course, probably 8 of those minutes were spent fighting with the parser: this is even worse than usual for an ADRIFT game.
oy vey
> x sink
A quite ordinary ceramic sink, it has a plughole and a wooden plug attached to a chain. In one side there is an overflow opening. You can put the plug into it to stop the water running away through the plughole.
> put plug in sink
You put the wooden plug inside the ceramic sink.
> get water
There's no water in the sink.
> turn sink on
That cannot be turned on
> fill sink
FILL THE CERAMIC SINK WITH what, e.g. FILL SINK WITH WATER, etc.
> fill sink with water
The ceramic sink is already full of water.
> get water from sink
Try pouring the water into something or you could empty it.
> pour water in kettle
Pouring cold water into the copper kettle won't help you in this game.
> fill kettle
Ok, you fill the kettle with water from the faucet.
> n
...
> hang kettle
I don't understand what you want to do with the copper kettle.
> x arm
It enables you to hang a kettle or cooking pot over the fire to boil some water or cook some food. It is swung away from the fire at the moment.
> put kettle on hook
I did not understand the word "hook".
> hang kettle
I don't understand what you want to do with the copper kettle.
> hang kettle on arm
Ok, you hang the kettle on the swinging arm and swing it so that the kettle is over the fire.
You must now wait until the kettle boils.
Other than that… it was a nice enough little puzzle game, heavy on the lore, not all of which is explained (this is what, number 4 in a series?). You have a command tasks (or t) that tells you what things you need to do. I assumed the ten tasks were just one section of the game and then I’d get another task list when I finished this one but nope, that’s it. Dunno. Can’t decide if it wants to infodump at you or be serious or tell jokes. But it was short enough I was pretty fine with it.
- Finding the Archway
- Watering the Aspidistra
- Meeting the Archivist
- Reading the Herbal
- Picking the Herbs
- Brewing the Infusion
- Giving Infusion to Archivist
- Finding Kelson’s Lineage
- Reporting to Archivist
- Reporting to Kelson
8 Likes
Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest
My Time: 98 minutes.
Ribald seems like a good word for this game. Or protagonist is a vampire/succubus sort of lady? Drinks blood, gains energy through sex, so we’re going to use that as an exuse to sprinkle the piece with a bunch of corny descriptions of sex? I don’t know who this is for: it didn’t feel particularly erotic or particularly funny to me, just… ok, whatever you enjoy writing, I guess.
Anyway. This is… an unevenly implemented puzzle parser with flashes of cleverness. The assassin chase at the end was a nice bit of design: use different senses to catch traces of your quarry who’s always just ahead of you, and manipulate the environment to trap them in a dead end. And it feels somewhat urgent, but it doesn’t punish you for losing the thread (or, y’know, going off and doing something else for a while instead): the last clue will still be where you left it if you need to backtrack to a place where you know you found a clue.
But then the descriptions are pretty uneven: some things lovingly described, some things unimplemented or with default descriptions. Consider the top of the temple (minor spoilers for the late-game but by this time you’ll have a handle on how the game works and breeze through this part even without hints, I think?).
Temple, third floor
Temple, third floor
Huge stone pillars ringed an altar of alabaster, the place open to the cool night air. This was a place of solitude and contemplation, where one could cast their eyes to the heavens. Above the altar, an ornate reliquary twinkled under the moon and stars.
>x altar
An elegantly simple block of stone, the altar seemed to have been untouched for some time.
>x pillars
Tall and mighty, they cast long shadows over the altar.
>x heavens
Moon and stars shone down amidst rolling, ghostly clouds.
>x stars
A vast field of tiny lights, they twinkled and shone.
>x moon
Lighting the path through the night, the moon was our heroine's constant travelling companion.
>x reliquary
The reliquary, decorated with a motif of drooping purple bittersweet, was closed.
>open reliquary
She opened the reliquary, revealing an inscrutable rod.
>x rod
She saw nothing special about the inscrutable rod.
[... then you find a phylactery hidden in the rod...]
>x phylactery
She saw nothing special about the phylactery.
If you didn’t want to be spoiled, the relevant thing is that the “heavens” and the “moon” and the “stars” all have their own descriptions when they could easily have been synonyms for the same thing, but then the plot-significant objects have “She saw nothing special about the X.”
It has a bunch of unnecessary map gating based on progress: there’ll be a perfectly good exit but you’ll get told you don’t have any need to go that way until you actually do need to go that way. That backfired for me: especially since the game starts with at least one dead-end exit; I assumed they were just a gentler edge of the map and then when I did need to go somewhere new I couldn’t think where there might be unexplored places. But it presumably took a bunch of work to implement that.
But on the other hand there are a bunch of descriptions that don’t change once you act on the item: an encyclopedia that is on a desk says “It was concealed beneath a handkerchief” whether it’s on the desk or if you’ve been carrying it around for a dozen turns.
I felt like most of the puzzles were underclued and you were more likely to stumble across the solutions by trying everything in every location rather than getting to feel clever because you figured out the puzzle and knew what to do. And the professor’s ritual was a cool puzzle but the others were pretty simple object puzzles so it felt out of place to be like, “On the too-small desk were a concealed yip encyclopedia, a satin stain and a heroic soaping iconographies.” You need a replacement ritual object for the encyclopedia: quick; what are you looking for?
And there were a bunch of map connections that change direction (so you go north, but then you have to go east to return). And things (I think)? that don’t fit neatly into the grid. And I think those were all buildings so it sort of makes sense to have the inside be a separate map but some of them were in/out connections and some of them were just cardinal directions, so it wasn’t clear which were supposed to be inside spaces. I don’t know. I can see the temptation to make the map more “interesting” but for me these kind of shenanigans just make it more confusing and more annoying to try and draw it out. Just make your maps fit neatly into a square grid, please?
And some red herrings (maybe? or maybe they’re optional treasures that I completely missed). A bunch of locations that seemed like in-between places where nothing happened. An apothecary’s shop that for sure felt like it was hinting that you could do something there but I have no idea what. Ditto the cat. You can name the cat and take it with you but… well, OK, I didn’t try to find out what the cat is for. But nothing immediately obvious: in my playthrough it was just there.
Anyway. I thought most of the puzzles and most of the through-line were good ideas but in practice I was more often left scratching my head over how I was supposed to figure it out rather than feeling clever. And the sex just felt kinda pointless to me: not my personal taste, I guess.
10 Likes
Don’t you just need to loot the bed to get your loincloth? If not, then it’s indeed strange.
Nope! I did that and tried to walk out the door and got stopped.
transcript
You wake up, untangle the sheet from around your throat, throw it
aside, and get out of bed.
Royal Bedroom
The grandeur of your bedroom exudes an air of opulence and power,
providing a space befitting a monarch. An ornate archway leads
west to the dining room.
Your bed shows the signs of your hasty departure, with the sheets
thrown aside, revealing a chaotic tangle of blankets and pillows.
The mattress retains the imprints of your form, a reminder of the
restless slumber you've just emerged from.
A full-length mirror is attached to the wall, boasting generous
dimensions.
>x mirror
You are no exhibitionist, seeking to catch a glimpse of yourself
in all your glory.
>x me
Your muscles ripple beneath your sun-tanned skin. You are
definitely as good-looking as ever.
>i
Your muscles ripple beneath your sun-tanned skin. You are
definitely as good-looking as ever.
>w
You realize that you have unfinished business here, and you cannot
leave yet.
>x bed
You get the feeling that you forgot something when you left your
bed in a rush. Maybe you should check if you left anything in it?
>regard bed
You get the feeling that you forgot something when you left your
bed in a rush. Maybe you should check if you left anything in it?
>l
Royal Bedroom
The grandeur of your bedroom exudes an air of opulence and power,
providing a space befitting a monarch. An ornate archway leads
west to the dining room.
Your bed shows the signs of your hasty departure, with the sheets
thrown aside, revealing a chaotic tangle of blankets and pillows.
The mattress retains the imprints of your form, a reminder of the
restless slumber you've just emerged from.
A full-length mirror is attached to the wall, boasting generous
dimensions.
>loot bed
You approach your bed and reach down with strong, calloused hands,
fingers deftly sifting through the fabric. You pull your loincloth
free from its concealed spot, and you deftly don it.
>loot bed
You have reclaimed your loincloth from your bed; there are no more
treasures to be found in there.
>w
Your instincts tell you that there's more to be done here before
you can depart.
Then I flailed about for a while before being able to leave, but the only successful action I see in that part of the transcript is looking in the mirror (which gives you a different description than if you’re naked).
2 Likes
That is the limitation of the “engine” I used for my game. You need to loot the bed before you can regard the mirror, and you cannot leave the room before regarding the mirror. I wanted to make that second action optional (thus only requiring the pc to be properly dressed), but due to a late game issue I had to disable optional actions. I could bring in a fix for that but that would break any saved games.
2 Likes
Thing of Wretchedness spoilers
My understanding is that the PC is someone examining the mysterious black box and having a vision of the events the box caused, in which they take the role of the wife trying to deal with the wretched thing. So I think this is supposed to be something that really happened, but we’re seeing a memory of it rather than it actually playing out in the present. I’m not really sure why this is the case, though; it doesn’t feel like it really adds anything to the game…
4 Likes
Thanks for the review, Josh. And as for the spoilers, what Tabitha says is correct. In Ascension of Limbs, there’s a seer character who you can have appraise the mysterious artifacts you find in your store. What happens in A Thing of Wretchedness is one such appraisal from the point of view of the seer - she has a dream-like vision of the past with some fuzzily defined elements, especially in regards to the passing of time.
2 Likes
Thank you for reviewing my game. In case you are curious you can type AXE, XANIX or XIXON within the game to get more information about the world where this game takes place
3 Likes
Thank you for the feedback, Josh! Will take this into consideration for game revisions. It’s meant to be a short escape room + mystery, hence the game mechanics include both puzzles + info-gathering to solve the mystery. Other than the prologue, I’ve intentionally kept the descriptions terse based on personal preference for such genre in IF games to reduce cognitive load (but I’ll take note of that for future games).
As you have noticed, the game was designed with teaching in mind, so the intended audience is expected to know what to do after entering the crime scene. That being said, I’ve tailored the game so that the layperson is able to enjoy the game as well (many thanks to my beta-testers). 
6 Likes