Hey, thanks for the review! Good looking out mentioning that bug—no one had found it before.
1 Like
Of course, I respect the artistry and craft that goes into these labors of love, and if my feedback can help I want it to! Also, if “OverThinking” was a commentary on my review, I wholly accept it :]
1 Like
Traveller’s Log by Isaac
I don’t know what to make of this entry. It presents as a super light, highly randomized FRPG kind of thing. You get an apparently randomized starting character with a name, race, some traits and background. None of those come into play again, except maybe magic use. Then you walk, trade and warp until you either win, decide you’ve had enough, or a bug ends the game. I achieved two of those in 45 minutes of pretty repetitive playtime.
You have a short list of items, effectively a status screen, that tells you what you have or don’t (helpfully pointing out you can GET them). Walking and warping lets you navigate the world, such as it is, but there is no map per se, just an endless series of terse, repeating random encounters that kill you, give you money, or neither. When I say no map, I mean your location has no discernable effect on your encounters, or even your relationship to other areas. You can still find Inns and Houses inside a Labrinth for example.
And you can die. Either because you randomly encounter foes you are not yet equipped to beat, or you just open a box. It’s not really that big a deal, as you immediately respawn with most of your stuff, but is that fun?
In practice, gameplay is just as repetitive as the encounters. You walk (dieing as often as you need to) until you have enough money to get stuff (some of which has game effect, others do not as far as I can tell). Or you warp to some area you’ve been before, but if locations don’t matter not sure why you would. Repeat many many times. I don’t think I’ve ever typed the word ‘walk’ that many times in 45 minutes before.
I did hit a small bug - I would lose money if I couldn’t afford an expensive item but already had a sword and tried to trade. I hit a big bug — an ‘out of range’ crash on something called TT. But the game asked so little of me, neither elicited a reaction. Ultimately, I stopped playing when I jerked awake to see that I had typed ‘wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww’ on the command line.
So yeah, what is this? Is it art, a wry commentary on FRPG gameplay? A zen mindfulness excercise? An impressionistic IF that you bring the story to from your head? I don’t think any of those things are for me.
Author: Isaac
Played: 10/10
Playtime: 45min, 1 crash, 1 quit, so many respawned deaths
Score: 2 (Bouncy, Notably Buggy)
Would Play After Comp?: No, not my cuppa
3 Likes
The Princess of Vestria by KPO
Action Princess! This was a fun story divided into 7 chapters, that played out in three phases for me.
The first phase was “the setup”, and I found it to be deftly and confidently executed. The stakes were established efficiently and effectively in very few screens. There was a lot of political, magic/religious and historical context to establish, as well as family background. There were three terrific choices right out of the gate: 1) the political/historical complexity was just right for this size game - specific and intriguing with enough breadth to feel lived in but not so much to drown in details. 2) the information was conveyed using multiple different scenes and interactions rather than a single massive textdump. 3) integrating it with player choices that also established the protagonist’s character. It doesn’t seem like the early choices have far reaching implications (maybe barring one), but they do give a chance to establish the Princess’ voice in the choices the player is making. All in all a very strong start.
The second phase was “the escape and journey”. This was a series of moral and physical peril scenarios (ie series of player choices) that would either establish character or set up potential future stakes or both. By and large I also enjoyed these. The fact that I paused to agonize over options a few times is a good indication that I’m sucked into the stakes of what’s going on. Most of them gave you a chance to flex different dimensions of the Princess’ character and skills. One of them though, involving an abusive street performer, added a new twist that I wasn’t crazy about it.
Prior to this encounter, the choices could result in death, or “luck” loss, but you had a few of those to give and if you didn’t hit a death scene, you got info or character established. With the street performer encounter, the game explicitly warns you if you want “success” you need to navigate a magic sequence of actions. On the one hand, appreciated the warning, make sure to save. On the other it changed the tenor of the game. No longer were you collaborating with the author to establish the princess character and story, or even how much backstory you were exposed to. Instead, you were guessing a puzzle sequence. Further, there were no discernable clues in the choices to inform your guesses. It devolved to trial and error where the focus was on ‘beating’ the scenario, divorced from any prior character or goal choices.
Unfortunately, the last “destination/resolution” phase was more in line with this previous encounter than the first 2/3. There are timed puzzles that lock out interesting story information. More guess-the-magic sequence encounters. But most disappointingly to me, a final boss fight that had little narrative surprise, nuance or complexity. Through the course of the game, the lore was a key underpinning of the quest, gaining more knowledge of the true vs reported history of the realm. While yes, arguably this lore informed the motivations of the final boss, that final battle didn’t build on or modify or subvert anything that came before. Given how strong the world building had been throughout the game, it felt like a let down.
Ultimately, it leaves me with Sparks of Joy where the first 2/3 of the game were that spark. Its always a shame when the ending is a let down, because that final flavor can overshadow everything that came before. In this case I want to refocus on the first 2/3 that were a true accomplishment of character and word building. Here’s the metaphor I am committing to: its like you get so much pleasure from the sound of two lego blocks clicking together, then you suddenly look up and realize you built a scale model of the Parthenon. Regardless of what you do with the Parthenon after that, that is pretty cool.
Author: KPO
Played: 10/10
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished w/ final battle walkthrough
Score: 6(Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Don’t think so, experience is complete
5 Likes
No One Else Is Doing This by Lauren O’Donoghue
There is no real graphical flourish to this work, little interactivity, and the few puzzles you need to solve there are no clues to decode to succeed, making it effectively random. I think I complained about all of these things in other reviews. But here, my reaction was exactly opposed – I unreservedly loved it. The intro text probably is the key to this. It sets the stage with the fruitless grind of the work, the dieing optimism, the modest yet still out of reach goals, and does so unsentimentally and resignedly. Before you know it, you are knocking on doors, really just clicking house numbers, one after another until the time runs out.
And oh my god the neighbors. Many are just not home, and sometimes the text makes it clear that’s a good thing. When they are home, each is uniquely and specifically unhappy to see you, but you still have to engage. Sometimes you inadvertantly say the right thing, sometimes you say exactly the wrong thing and they slam the door. Its not that you don’t have control (it seems), its that you have no way of knowing what motivates or sets people off so you take your best shot. And its thrilling when it works, and self-recriminations and if-onlys when it doesn’t. But, still gotta get to the next door and do it all over again.
I am kind of in awe at how finely calibrated the game is. Its individual interactions are either disappointingly abrupt, or whirwind verbal fencing matches, but every encounter is exactly the length it needs to be. Neither victory nor defeat is dwelled on, because on to the next. A quick click washes the previous encounter away and is charged with promise of the next one. A pee break if you’re lucky, then your shift ends at what feels like the narratively perfect point, leaving you with regret over the houses you didn’t get to. Text and screen organization within and between encounters pace every step of this experience just so. Until its uncermonious ending, you simultaneously feel “this shift just keeps going” and “I need more time.”
“A Community Organizing Simulator” is its subtitle. Before you start, you would probably be thinking ‘its funny because its too small a game to be a simulator.’ After you’ve played, including that chef’s kiss of a denoument, you’re definitely thinking, ‘OMG IT IS THE MOST ACCURATE SIMULATOR EVER MADE.’ I am saying that this work marries IF interactivity to its subject matter so thoroughly and precisely it is what most aspire to when they talk about form-function synergy.
Frankly, I am only resisting calling this Transcendent due to my suspicion that my recent grass-roots volunteer experiences may be coloring my reaction. Thanks Lauren?
Author: Lauren O’Donoghue
Played: 10/10
Playtime: 15min, finished
Score: 8 (Engaged, Seamless, Sad)
Would Play After Comp?: Sadly, I will be living it
6 Likes
The Grown Up Detective Agency by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
Everything about the pre-game hit my brain pleasure ceters and put me in this thing’s corner. Grown Up Detective Agency is just a fantastic title. Time jumps? Mystery solving? The phrase “follow the trail of a missing heterosexual”?? It’s like a pinpoint targeted glee generator.
The work itself did not disappoint. The 2-in-1 protagonist was incredibly well realized. Their dialogue crackled with wit and personality and was simultaneously recognizably same and different. The time gap shenanigans were not overplayed, just tossed in like precise seasoning. (I laughed out loud at “why are people getting more deliveries?”) I simultaneously felt bad for Kid and understood Adult perfectly. There were a few times I chafed when remembering this world-weary gumshoe was all of 21, but the text was strong enough to get me past that.
Secondary characters didn’t fare as well, but with one exception it was actually fine. Most of the non-protagonist cast was pretty one-dimensional, but in an amusing and winning way. We don’t NEED them to be fully fleshed out, they just need to be fun in their respective roles and most of them very much are. The bros, the bartender, the club owner, the furry… unique and consistent and funny. Even the client filled her role, though I suspect if I’d had more exposure to the other games in the series she would be more fleshed out. We’ll get to the love interest in a minute.
The mystery itself was extremely clever, in the sense of everyone’s motivations making perfect, hilarious sense, however surprising their reveal is. But the mystery-solving gameplay? Less clever. It relies a bit too heavily on NPCs withholding information more for plot than character reasons. It also appeared that player choice in following clues and interrogation tacks ultimately didn’t make a difference. You were always going to be able to visit every clue site, and get relevant info regardless of dialogue choices. I don’t know this is true, I could just be an Ace Detective, but it felt that way. Which led to a thought mid-game that popped in my head unbidden. “Would I be enjoying this pretty much exactly the same if it were traditional fiction? Yeah, I think I would.” As soon as that thought popped in, I realized I was not engaged because of the interactivity, it was the story and characters. My clicks were less about participating in progress and more like turning pages. Is this a problem? Didn’t feel like it, I was still Engaged in the narrative and enjoying myself immensely.
Really the only narrative shakiness for me was the love interest sub-plot. Characters made assertions about them that I didn’t see corroborated in the narration or the character’s own dialogue. If I can be forgiven the pronouns for a moment, my reaction was basically straight out of Arrested Development. “Her?” Maybe this was a ‘play the previous episodes’ thing too.
As I roll up the score, I am again confronted with the inadequacy of my judging criteria. I was Engaged, no doubt about it. But I feel like the interactivity of IF was inessential to the experience, and I think I want to count that as ‘technical intrusiveness.’
Author: Brendan Patrick Hennessy
Played: 10/11
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Score: 7 (Engaged, Seamless but Inessential Interactivity)
Would Play After Comp?: Probably Not, but the rest of the series, likely
4 Likes
Witchfinders by Tania Dreams
Very short work, giving you the role of witch in 1800’s Scotland trying to do good while evading close-minded witch finders.
Overall a pretty Spartan experience. The interface is functional, but not very evocative of its setting. Use of color is actually well done - different colors highlight three different game functions. The text has some offputting grammatical issues, like maybe a non-native English speaker or young author, but certainly forgivable. The text is functional enough, though contains few descriptive or character flourishes to establish the setting or players. Unfortunately, the relative sparsity of the text made the errors that much more prominent and memorable. Ultimately, without any textual immersion we are left with sequencing puzzles - how to fix certain problems without tipping off the Witchfinders that you are sus.
The NPC interactions are limited to problem identification and/or solving. Some action choices are contextual - options become available after you’ve heard of things – others appear to be available at time 0, even though you don’t know what they might be good for. People can be asked only one or two things, with only one or two actions available. It creates a claustrophobic world of limited possibilities that isn’t that compelling to explore.
Some responses and actions are obviously witchy, and these provide some tradeoff tensions, but others are ambushy - what seemed like a safe move still turned on you. Not outright unfair, just sour gameplay. There are really only 3 good deeds to do (that I found), one easy, one medium with tradeoffs, and one I didn’t solve after three tries. Was not really motivated for more attempts than that.
Definitely a Mechanical experience. The text and/or presentation could have elevated by setting a stronger sense of environment and characters. Expanded, more interesting choices and destinations would have created a more interesting playground.
Author: Tania Dreams
Played: 10/11
Playtime: 15 min, 3 playthroughs best score 60
Score: 4 (Mechanical, Notably Buggy more in language than coding)
Would Play After Comp?: Doubtful
5 Likes
Tower of Plargh by caranmegil
I sometimes forget about pure puzzle IFs. I do a range of paper puzzles, but tend to be biased to think of IF as narrative, and so scratch different itches. Which is kind of wild, because ‘classic’ IF are so much more puzzle than narrative. Is the narrative framework, however rich or thin, really that important to the experience? Intellectually, shouldn’t have to be, but emotionally I guess it is for me. We are a species of storytellers and some of our most popular media suggests the stories don’t need to be that sophisticated or even novel. Sick burn, culture!
Now, I do like logic puzzles, but the ones that engage me are ones that jump straight to application of deduction and/or knowledge. It is a fair point that no-rules puzzles do in fact require this, they just require the additional prerequisite step of discovering the rules as you go. Puzzles don’t need frameworks of wordplay, trivia knowledge, spatial cues. Nor do they demand hint systems, either buried in clues and prompts or to the side as a reference for the stuck. Cure for cancer is famously a puzzle with no clues, prompts or hint system.
So what does this have to do with Tower? The game is a no clues/no rules/no hints puzzle. You need to divine the rules from literally nothing but experimentation. Like cancer research! It also seems to change its rules with every level (of the tower, presumedly?) It seems to deliberately provide no fail feedback other than the fact of the fail, meaning it becomes a guess-the-verb, guess-the-rules exercise. Your enjoyment will depend directly on 1) how energizing you find that sort of thing and 2) how mentally nimble you are to not drive into a mental cul-de-sac of ‘no idea what’s left to try.’
I can’t tell if the game is buggy or just obstinate in that it doesn’t always give you immediate feedback even with success. For review purposes, I am treating both those cases as Bug - either coding or psychological. In an early notable instance I left a room where I tried something to no apparant success, only to return later and see, “Wow, I guess it did work after all.” Objects have names you recognize, but don’t really behave like their real world counterparts. Autonomous objects disappear from your sight, rather than move through observable space. Reasonably expected functions of everyday objects don’t work. To the point where their names are just familiar sequences of letters whose behavior is its own puzzle. Continued failure is frustrating, and achieving brute force solutions to seemingly arbitrary puzzles provides more “sure, I guess” than cathartic rush.
If opaque, experimentation-type puzzles are your jam I would recommend you join the fight against cancer! If your schedule doesn’t allow that, Tower is for you. For me, a narrative justification would be one way to increase engagement. Medical research isn’t motivated by the super-opaque trial-and-error puzzle solving. Its getting the cure! Narratively, maybe it could be getting the treasure. Or freedom! Love Interest! Magical Rune that apocalyptically eliminates selfishness from the range of human behavior! Another way would be to craft clues/hints/experiment feedback to learn more than simple fact of success-or-fail with each experiment. Without either of those, its too Mechanical an exercise for me.
Author: caranmegil
Played: 10/11
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 3 “floors” complete
Score: 3 (Mechanical, Notably Buggy)
Would Play After Comp?: Doubtful, not my kind of puzzle
4 Likes
Arborea by richard develyn
Mostly polished parser adventure, squarely in my wheelhouse. There is some opening business about a holodeck type setting, but it feels like a bare bones justification to allow you a walking tour of 8 wildly different arboreal climates. That’s a great design choice, actually. It hand waves at the background and quickly ushers you to the main exploring event.
I really liked the ambition of it. 8 different ecosystems, 8 different sets of locations and puzzles, many of which interact with some of the other 7. There is some classic puzzle gameplay in evidence, as well as some nicely novel ones (thinking of an enlightenment puzzle). Its probably not a spoiler to say you bounce back and forth between them to resolve many puzzles. The puzzle text was mostly descriptive. NPCs are minimally rendered which on the one hand feels shallow, but on the other does nicely skirt the “ok this NPC is slowly transforming into a parrot” problem. I liked the “on the right track” hint messages. Still not sure where I land on the parenthetical “you still have the X” messages. Points for clarity, but jarring compared to surrounding text. I was either 1/5 or 1/8 complete at the 2 hr mark depending on how you score it. Right at the 2hr mark, there was what I’m going to call a bug in deceptive text. It involves an object landing at your feet at a joust, but the nouns in the text prompt are unrecognized by the game, and per walkthrough the noun you need to use was never mentioned.
Other than that glitch, the puzzles seem capably rendered and satisfying. It feels like the variety and choices of settings are the true showpiece here though. The narration is well up to the challenge of immersively depicting very different ecosystems and geographies. First entry also provides a header quote of scientific or cultural interest, in a way that effectively conveys global scope. The variety of settings chosen plays deftly into that as well, creating a really epic feel.
If I scratch a little closer at it though, I’m not sure the 8 chosen settings click together smoothly. Half the settings use the unique trees/ecosystems as background for light puzzle play. The trees themselves little more than scenic/puzzle elements. Hoo boy the other half though. Fully half of them engage deeply dire ecological and/or sociological issues. On first impression I kind of dug it. Since I encountered a few lighter settings first (just by random chance), the heavier settings came as a gut punch. “Look at all the pretty trees… holy crap WHAT!!!” I do wonder how someone who chose differently would react - experiencing a dramatic REDUCTION in stakes. In any case two hours in, the contrast is dramatically jarring in a narratively intriguing way that totally sucked me in.
But but but. I am now petrified. I am petrified that the 4 different very fraught issues are not well served by the puzzle solving mechanic so far on display. That they could be reduced to background setting like the other 4, and effectively trivialized in a way that could be glib and deeply offensive. So far the text has nimbly avoided this to its credit. It has given me no reason to fear I am in incapable hands. But the risk is so large I can’t help but feel trepidation. In particular, confidently invoking ‘strange fruit’ (google if you need to) feels like stomping your foot on thin ice and boldly declaring “I got this.”
I am Engaged, and also extremely nervous about what lies ahead. Bad time for 2hr timer to expire!
Author: richard develyn
Played: 10/12
Playtime: 2hrs, did not finish, 21/100 score with one walkthrough lookup
Score: 7 (Engaged but leery, Notable bug)
Would Play After Comp?: Almost certainly, as I chew fingernails to nubs
6 Likes
Hi there,
Thank you very much for the review.
I guess the only thing I can say with regards to your nervousness is that others have trodden the path before you and none have ever complained. Well, I think one review expressed a little bit of nervousness like yourself. I do understand where you’re coming from. I don’t suppose I’ll have dealt with these matters to everybody’s satisfaction, which probably isn’t possible, but I just hope I’ve done well enough to allow the creation of something which is generally light hearted whilst at the same time touching on some serious and even quite dark moments.
Richard
3 Likes
I enjoyed reading your review, which is perhaps longer than the game being reviewed. Part of the magic of IF is that even deeply flawed games can trigger so much reflection and thought.
When I played this game, my first instinct was “The author is a neophyte who doesn’t know what they are doing.” But the more reviews I read of this, the more I begin to suspect the author knew exactly what they were doing. There was a game several years ago in which the object of the quest was an artifact named with a symbol that was untypable. Sorry I don’t remember the name of that entry, and it wasn’t something I would like to promote. Even if you found the artifact within the game (a challenge, because the game was buggy) you couldn’t take it or win the game, because the object had no name. It was a deliberate defiance of the “rules” of IF, to name something with a symbol that could not be typed.
There is something similar in Tower of Plargh, with the “Golden Seven”. Inform interprets the word “seven” as a number, not a thing, and objects to the command “take seven”. This author has allowed us to “take golden”, but I think they were someone who was already familiar with Inform error messages to even give an object this peculiar name.
2 Likes
I enjoyed reading your review, which is perhaps longer than the game being reviewed.
Lol, thanks for the note, and that does feel true for a lot of the shorter games I’m writing up. But you’re right, depending on the work it triggers a lot of tangential thoughts that I can’t help but chase in front of everyone. I do deliberately try to avoid making assumptions around the author, though I’m not perfect at it. I hope it is more helpful to engage the work as clearly and directly as I can, then the author can decide how valuable my feedback is or if I’m just in the weeds.
All that said, I do suspect you are right that this seems more deliberate.
1 Like
Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey by Andrew Shultz
Wordplay games are so cool. They marry the math and lateral logic of abstract puzzles with the messiness and context of human language. But they also have a slightly uphill climb, in that they explicitly ask the player to break the mimesis of language and consider problem solving at more of a remove. LKLJJ crucially engages this problem the best way possible, playfully and winkingly. The setup is absurdist beat poetry in the best possible way that just catapults you into an extended, lightly-geographic wordplay puzzle.
From there it is all about rhyming placenames with mostly clever cause and effect phrases. The Sparks of Joy were flying so fast and furious it was like a metal grinder, or a daycare class dancing with sparklers. The game is quite generous with problem solving helpers, from a codebreaker feedback item, a limited use “auto solve” item you can earn, a log of useful-just-not-now solutions, options to close off branches when exhausted, and hints. Most of them tunable to personal challenge/handholding preferences. Its a quite impressive array of tools that shows an understanding of the possible sticking points in its loose tale.
The absurdist milieu is a two edged sword. On the one hand it would be almost impossible to facilitate this kind of rhyming wordplay without it. Conversely, it sets up a universe where words and actions may not behave the way you expect them to, or even think of. The tools above crucially help close that potential gap. As does the author’s completely winning use of language. I can’t even imagine the claustrophobic development garret, overrun with yellow-sticky rhymes, linked with yarn like a Qanon war room. The effort to create puzzles, solutions, and locations that all alliteratively rhyme, AND to accommodate snarky responses to guesses that don’t solve the puzzle. Respect.
Its not completely seamless. The game sets a very high standard on good rhymes so you are trained to ignore imperfect rhymes and when they show up, it jars. There are also one or two prompts that don’t adhere to the two-word descriptions standardized everywhere else. Its not unfair, in that you can deduce the two-word pair from context. The problem is, its not obvious you need to do that, given the standard set throughout the game. Yeah, I’m reporting a puzzle that flummoxed me. Those all feel like quibbles though, especially as the helper tools readily power you past them.
LKLJJ is a winning, extended puzzle set in a hilariously Dada world of clever wordplay. So many Sparks I might ignite. Why not engaging? I think the arbitrariness that is part of its joy has a side effect: there is no continuity thread that pulls you back for “oh I gotta know what happens next.” It kinda doesn’t matter what happens next. Its going to be fun and amusing, no doubt, but I could pick it up tomorrow or next month, whenever I want my next fix. This is not a lick on the game - it does exactly what it wants really, really well. It’s like a book of crossword puzzles - not a page turner you can’t put down, but ready to pick up anytime you want a dose of joy in your life. Assuming you can support a metaphor where crossword puzzles are joyful.
Author: Andrew Shultz
Played: 10/13
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete, score 29
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy, mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: Will be unable not to
4 Likes
Hours by aidanvoidout
This work feels more incomplete than the ones I’ve reveiwed to date. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but it feels like the work of somone at the front end of their authorship. There are gaps kind of across the board: in concept, narrative, use of interactivity and coding. Everyone that writes has been here, where ideas are clamoring to get out, but the tools are still blunt and clumsy. Using them is the only way to hone!
Conceptually, the setting is an interesting (fuedal?) Japanese, military magic/mutant exploitation jam. Depending on choices, you get more or less of the background and all of it is loosely scketched. The looseness is not a problem per se. Sometimes you accomplish more with detailed hints that allow the reader to do some mental lifting to fill in the gaps. The danger is that if the reader lifts TOO much, and you subsequently contradict their mental image it is jarring. The trick is knowing where to proscribe and where to sketch. For me, the use of swords and historical Japanese vocabulary crashed in my head once guns were mentioned (but never employed?) Or when a prominent character’s name was revealed as “Charlie.”
Narratively, the protagonist is initially presented as resisting the call, only to then acquiesce. Of course, this Campbellian Construct is deeply ingrained in popular storytelling. But it isn’t free. In particular, the Refusal is the least interesting part of the Journey and really requires some selling by the author. I mean, we WANT the adventure. The longer and less convincingly the protagonist resists, the more the reader rejects them. Conversely, if their acceptance does not organically refute this refusal, the character comes across as petulant which is not endearing either. There are other unsatisfying narrative choices, like the protagonist having exactly the tools needed in the moment, without foreshadowing or establishing shots. Again, tone could help sell this, but not here.
Interactivity is all but missing. I think there is exactly one narratively important choice the player can make, and one of the alternatives is unattractive and unsatisfying. Instead there are a series of choices presented that at best provide more backstory and at worst have no impact on the narrative at all. Now there are a lot of ways to use interactivity: to align the reader with protagonist, to give the player agency in the narrative, to provide mental and emotional puzzles to grapple with. None of these are at play here. It devolves to page turning, which effectively shines a brighter light on the Concept and Narrative.
Technically, there is a bug where one potentially impactful decision puts the game is a stuck state without resolution. If you attempt to buy a slave (to save their life presumedly), you get stuck on a page with a “markup contains mistake, need usable code right of =” error. Elsewhere, a potential choice seems unimplemented and stalls until you make a different choice. With a game this small and linear, it is hard to understand how playtesting the entire decision tree was not done before release.
I honor the ambition of the effort. As a player, this is not engaging, but as a first step there is plenty to learn from and build on.
Author: aidanvoidout
Played: 10/13
Playtime: 15 minutes, multiple playthroughs, 2 endings, 1 game ending bug
Score: 3 (Mechanical, Intrusively Buggy)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
1 Like
Glimmer by Katie Benson
Of course I’m not the first to observe that interactivity doesn’t have to mean story branching. Interactivity in linear stories can accomplish at least two things: 1) it can invest the player in the protagonist more deeply than raw text and 2) it can carefully manage the pacing of the text to enhance emotional effect. I am saying this to the population that least needs this explained.
Glimmer is very much a short, linear study of depression and to varying degrees attempts both of the above. Because the subject matter lends itself to spiraling introspection and lethargy, there was a particularly nice fit with form here. The player can dive into tangential mental rabbit holes. Scene changes are paced slowly, with small blocks of text where the act of interacting slows down the proceedings. The formula is subtly shifted as the narration proceeds towards the end. All of this displays a nicely deliberate marriage of form and function.
As far as protagonist investment, Glimmer didn’t quite get me there. Early game events were fairly dispassionate, showing the protagonist with flattened response to increasingly important events in their life. I understand the intention here, that the protagonist is increasingly withdrawn such that events do not register like they should. It seems that because we are introduced to this mental state before we have built empathy, there is an unecessary hurdle to our investment. For me, I didn’t get over it until way later and was playing catchup to the narrative all the way to the end. Meaning when the protagonist had a subsequent shift I was also behind.
Stephen King (or was it Alan Moore?) famously said something to the effect of “Horror is seeing your neighbor dismembered through your bedroom window. Terror is when the killer notices you.” There’s gotta be an empathy/sympathy analog to that idea that seems relevant here. While I admire the pacing effect of the work, the killer did not see me, leaving me at a remove. While mostly Mechanical, I am upgrading to 5 in intellectual acknowledgement of the pacing accomplishment. Not Joy per se, but worth giving a bonus point for.
Author: Katie Benson
Played: 10/13
Playtime: 15 min, finished
Score: 5 (Mechanical + form/function bonus, mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
6 Likes
Chase the Sun by Frankie Kavakich
I really dig the Texture “drag and drop” interface, that is what I’ve learned. It feels like you are connecting ideas more organically than a cold click-one-or-other selection (looking at you, Twine). It also seems to open more authorial possibilities by contrasting the connecting ideas, or conveying information about what ideas should be connected (or can’t!) for story purposes.
This story is well-served by the user paradigm. Its an intriguingly imprecise apocalypse tale, focusing on one woman’s reactions in face of impending doom. As she makes her way through a nicely-specific Western Pennsylvania, the interactivity gives us personal and global background and character beats whose ordering and selection (or not) allow the player to collaborate in fleshing out. The whole thing is packed with specific details that really bring the setting and characters to life. It is a short game, but allows multiple endings directly impacted by player choices, and those choices have everything to do with how the player wants to define the character. This is Sparky.
The only unfortunate note, and for me it was an impactful one, was that one ending was arbitrary and unsatisfying and it was the first one I got. It lowered expectations so much for me, that subsequent playthroughs carried a shadow over them. That particular ending was ALSO noteworthy in that the background setting work it did (and was unavailable on other paths) was captivating. I could envision a version where the leadup perhaps leaned thematically more into the ending provided, but I didn’t detect that.
That is unfortunate, because the endings I achieved after that were so much more satisfying and complete. A key attraction to Apocalypse stories is the “what would I do?” question. Here, by providing just the right amount of specifics and back story, the better endings were exploring variations of “what do I want the protagonist to do”? That there were multiple choices leading to different conclusions, and that they still felt consistent with both player choices and the overarching narrative felt really cool. It feels ungenerous to drag down the score due to one possible path. Is a work as good as its best moment? Or as bad as its worst? Or some work-specific function of them all? I dunno man, I’m just winging it.
Author: Frankie Kavakich
Played: 10/13
Playtime: 20min, multiple runs, 3 endings
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy, One ending Notably Narratively Buggy)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
5 Likes
Zero Chance of Recovery by Andrew Shultz
I kind of thought this was going to be different than what it was. That’s not the author’s fault, I think I misread the cover art? This is another pure puzzle IF, specifically an implementation of an apparently well know chess problem. There is some anthropomorphising skin applied and references to mercenaries of some kind. It was very quickly presented, and to be honest I kind of got lost in it. I think the text might have assumed I knew I would be tackling a chess problem so the skin didn’t set any location staging. I…didn’t and that’s not a great testament to my sharpness but there it is.
It became clear pretty quickly when the grid showed up on my screen. After that, it was trial and error chess moves. It took a bit to vibe with this sort of problem, as chess is SO not my jam. I’m just not that into anal beads. (Look it up! “Chess anal beads cheating.” Well, carefully. You could really fall into a hole on this one. Oh god, I heard it as soon as I typed it.) Part of the problem was that I didn’t immediately orient on the baselines, but one playthrough showed me that. Part of the problem was that I didn’t have a grounding in some important concepts like “two queens will inevitably be a draw.” I’m pretty sure I could still manage to lose that.
So yeah, I eventually busted out the walkthrough. It was a nicely demonstrative teaching lesson, but in something I really wasn’t all that interested to learn. If I’m honest, the subject matter is Bouncy to me. That feels like an unfair ranking on this one though. The intro text was a bit confusing and could probably be cleaned up some. Otherwise it is a rock solid implementation of what it is. It’s one thing to pretend personal resonance with subject matter is only a small part of these rankings when narratives are so personal. When there’s no narrative? ‘Artistic Response’ kind of becomes a ‘does puzzle appeal to me’ thing. In this case I think I will not log my vote so as not to penalize the author for my own blind spots. I’ll include it below for completeness. You are fully in your rights not to even look at it. Even that doesn’t feel very generous. I mean, the author put in so much more work on this thing than I did saying “ehh not for me,” and really, who cares about my biases? This is about the work, not my eccentricities.
It really was a seamless implementation, and the walkthrough in particular was an easy read. I’m now even questioning whether I should even post this, it has so little community value.
FTR, I wouldn’t hesitate to rank Bouncy on content that repels me artistically, but something that is fine for others? It’d be like if I chose to rank soap operas, or competitive cornhole. Lots of people love those things, and my opinion is irrelevant to their experience. I will rank broccoli though. Broccoli is just objectively the worst vegetable and there’s nothing more to say about that.
Author: Andrew Shultz
Played: 10/14
Playtime: 30min, needed walkthrough to finish
Score: 2 (Bouncy for chess ignorant, seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, chess doesn’t grab me
3 Likes
@OnlyPossiblePromDress
I guess I missed my window to edit the post. Given that there was an obvious solution to my load problem that I was too inexperienced to know, and now that I have a lot more plays and reviews under my belt, I am changing my score on Prom Dress to 8 (Engaging, Mostly Seamless). My reasons for docking a point do not hold up. I apologize for the confusion!
2 Likes
A Long Way to the Nearest Star by SV Linwood
Ah, the classic ‘adrift in space with a suspect AI.’ In my head, I kept calling it ‘HAL.’ I don’t mean that in a reductive way, it is a welcome setting, skillfully rendered. The game shares a lot of DNA with classic parser based IF. There is a map to navigate, items to find and manipulate, puzzles to solve to unlock rooms or achieve other progress. All if this rendered in wry text that spikes to sarcastic or sentimental without being jarring. All in all, nicely textured narratively speaking.
Graphically, I think I expected more. Early on, the white-on-black presentation is very evocative, when the vastness of black space surrounds you, or when your spaceship is darkened. The glowing blue and green screens pop against this background, and their respective fonts nicely convey different variation of machine interface. I was vaguely disappointed when the lights came on, but the interface didn’t change, making me wonder if I was giving too much credit to the graphical presentation? I still like those terminal screens though.
The protagonist is kind of a minimally rendered space-rogue type that at least so far is an amusing vessel for the player to amble around in. What little opportunity you have for deeper character glimpses are nicely done, really loose sketches that allow you to mentally flesh out your host without derailing the story. Same for the tonal choices in how you interface with your AI partner. Mostly though, its about navigating this puzzle-filled-ship.
I go back and forth on the Twine interface for this game. On the one hand, having highlighted text to navigate and manipulate nicely avoids any hunt-the-noun excercise. It does box you in in a somewhat restrictive framework. Ultimately, I think the writing and design saves it here. While theoretically, highlighted choices could break mimesis by channeling the player in a constricted way, there are enough options anticipated, and enough shiny things to pursue that it never started to chafe. The text is also very clever in sprinkling hints and nudges that your path usually feels organic and not forced, nevermind the limited boxes available to click. Most successful IF must succeed at this (parser or not), and ALWTTNS does.
The object interface was less successful for me, and boy is this a petty complaint. As the game goes on, your inventory expands, but does so one line per item. Meaning if your screen is wider than high (which I presume most are), you have a scrolling list of items with huge black real estate on the right of the screen doing nothing. I don’t know boo about Twine, but if it were possible to put all inventory items in multiple columns - fill the screen and eliminate scrolling I would have much preferred that.
Another petty gripe: the Notes screen captures information it would be tedious to look up separately and acts as a soft hint system. Great idea. Could it have been its own option, and not buried in the scrolling inventory? And also, either quietly drop or separate notes once no longer needed, because you have completed a relevant task? As the notes grew longer, it got more intrusive to skim the list to find what you need, and increasingly jammed with notes I (presumedly) didn’t need any more.
These are petty gripes, I own this. I also never presented myself as above pettiness. Of course in the end this did not block my Engagement. I had a really good time bouncing around the puzzle space with some nicely intuitive and occasionally challenging posers. The central mystery of just how sus is HAL is clicking along at a rewarding pace. Its posed as a 2hr playtime, so maybe I’m getting close to the end? On the one hand I hope not, but on the other I’ve liked the pace of reveleations and plot so far and wouldn’t want it to draw out for its own sake. I have no reason to doubt the author has a firm grasp on the length and pace of the story and I’m here for it.
Author: SV Linwood
Played: 10/16
Playtime: 2hr, incomplete, not stuck
Score: 7 (Engaged, Mostly Seamless, minor interface quibbles)
Would Play After Comp?: Likely, though I am developing a backlog…
3 Likes
Those sound like the words of someone who’s only ever had boiled broccoli (which is admittedly rather meh). Roasting broccoli is the way to go.
3 Likes