You ask too much of poor roasting.
I get it, roasting is what saved brussel sprouts from the dustbin of history. But roasting isn’t transubstantiation! At the end of the day you still have… warm broccoli. 
3 Likes
Broccoli soup is good. I also make a dish of orzo/risoni with cauliflower, broccoli, onion, garlic, vegetable stock(?) and Parmesan cheese. Pretty good.
5 Likes
I Wish You Were Dead by Sofia Abarca
This one crawled into my head a bit.
IWYWD is similar to some previous games, in the sense that it is a linear character study, where the character in question is a relationship in intensive care. I nearly got bounced off the first page, for what I think was an unintended artifact? The intro screen starts with a dedication to the heartbroken, then flashes the title. Yes. (paraphrase) “to those recovering from heartbreak: I wish you were dead.” Wow, author, just wow. 
I say with some confidence that this was unintended.
The entire game is a dialogue between the player/protagonist and their lover. The player is trying to break up. There is so much I feel I want to say about this entry I can’t even get two sentences in without plummeting into the spoiler pool.
The dialogue is overflowing with very sincere emotion, and hurt, and history. It’s achingly cringy how unprotected the two characters are and I mean that in the most lauditory way. I found the dialogue very naturalistic, which is really the only way this could work. As a modern man, I have been relentlessly taught to flee screaming from this level of emotional honesty. Even the slightest crack in believabilty would have been an excuse to bolt for the exit. No such luck. I think it was this naked honesty that drew me in so quickly where other linear studies were less successful. In the end, it is a tribute to the writing, pure and simple. Both the character voices, and the specific and compelling shared history that emerges as the game progresses.
It is a linear narrative, though it appears you can make impactful dialogue choices. The act of making those choices felt like a torturous tradeoff of honoring the truth and honestly wanting to minimize pain. I cannot recall a single instance of inelegant post-choice dialogue - even when, as is definitely true in life, what you try to say has nowhere near the effect you intend. God this game is so smart about fraught emotional conversations.
The author makes another important choice, that I’m only mostly aligned with. The dialogue plays on a timer. Meaning the dialogue, hurt and emotional and unsteady, comes completely on its own pace, impervious to the wants of the player. This is such a smart choice. It forces the player to ‘listen’ rather than mash buttons to get to their next choice. When it works, it paradoxically rejects player input, and the effect is MORE INTERACTIVITY. My head is exploding here. It also allows the author to pace the dialogue precisely for effect. There was one sequence burned into my head in response to a yes or no question:
I don’t –
No.
I don’t know.
Reading my non-paced recreation of it you may be unimpressed (you heartless bastard). But how it was revealed on the screen in fits and starts conveyed the pain of the speaker like a bullet to the heart.
Now, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the pacing doesn’t quite ring true, or is perhaps clumsy in a way that doesn’t reinforce the dialogue. Also, when there is more than a screen’s worth of dialogue, the page does not autoscroll, ultimately forcing the player to interact in a way that defeats the effect a bit. An auto-scroll functionality would have been so much better here. There is a bit of backstory rationing too - two specific plot points get kind of headfaked in one direction (a not very satisfying one) only to be revealed as something much more real, nuanced and uncomfortable. One of those reveals felt at odds with the carefully crafted player/protagonist alignment. The protagonist clearly knows the history, a sudden reveal to the player disconnects them temporarily. I should also mention that while I found the dialogue crackling, there were some narrative descriptions that suffer word choice. A teardrop ‘exploded’, something else was ‘infected’, a second pass editing could have buffed those burrs out.
Not perfect, but between the dialogue and the story choices those quibbles kind of fade away. And that ending. It masterfully recontextualizes the “Play Again?” trope as endlessly revisiting what-I-shoulda-said in our most heart-wrenching, emotional Monday morning quarterbacking. Kidding ourselves that all we needed were better words to have made it go any differently.
For me, the ending cemented it as a Transcendent game. Sofia created and conveyed a real and insanely wracking scenario, then used interactive tools to (near) maximum effect, pacing dialogue for dramatic impact and mimesis and integrating the player directly into the narrative. God do I not want to play it again.
Author: Sofia Abarca
Played: 10/16
Playtime: 30min playtime, more than twice that thinking about it
Score: 9 (Transcendent, mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: I’d have to be made of much sterner stuff. But if I’d just said…
3 Likes
Making pasta with broccoli, bacon strips and cheese as we speak.
Nice warm oven…
Yum!
3 Likes
I see I have kicked over an anthill. A vile, horrific anthill. 
3 Likes
But you don’t! The whole point of roasting is to enable Maillard reactions which transform (dare I say transubstatiate?) yucky broccoli molecules into yummy, umami-laden browned bits of flavorful delight. (Ok maaaybe I’m overselling it just a tad).
I’m sorry for derailing your thread, as a peace offering I’ll add a forest of broccoli to my ECTOCOMP game which is set in hell.
4 Likes
You’re going to have nightmares of us swarming all around you with hot and steaming roasted brocolli florets between our pincers…
2 Likes
Hanging by Threads by Carlos Pamies
A short exploration IF of a tantalizing setting. There are some early nods to a specific protagonist that needs a cane, including one nice bit of business on a bridge. That specificity seems to fade into the background pretty quickly, and doesn’t seem to inform the experience beyond that. Personality-wise the protagonist is a blank slate, which is not uncommon in IF that wants the player to step in.
There are choices to make, both in wandering direction and equipment. In all cases that I hit, there was little to no indication of what effect your choices could have, so they all ended up being arbitrary. None of them seemed character based. That’s not so terrible in the wandering around part. It does convey the exploring-a-new-city feeling of not even knowing where the interesting stuff might be. In the case of equipment it does rankle a bit, particularly when depending on your arbitrary choice some areas of the city might be closed off later.
The setting is really the star here and in concept its a pretty cool one: a city suspended on ropes and chains between two mountains. The narration that describes it varies from scene to scene. Some scenes are wonderfully painted with vertiginous heights, colorful skies, physically hefty and sagging environs. But there are just as many scenes where details jar to the point of ‘I don’t think that’s how that’d work.’ If your city is suspended by ropes, then torches and holy crap bonfires seem like a REALLY bad idea. Kids play with rocks which, where are they getting those exactly? Most eggregiously, the ropes are repeatedly desribed as fraying and worn. I would think rope maintenance would have to be top priority for the city council. I mean they don’t need to worry about sewer or trash collection right? (Though dear lord the land dwellers beneath them) At first I was thinking maybe it was the poorer sections that suffered neglect, which would have been a nice detail. But no, that was me me adding things.
There is definitely something to be said that nit-picking details in stories is garbage criticism. When you start complaining about the realism of fantasy, what is even the point? (see also incel criticism of Rings of Power race in fantasy races. Actually, that’s a little different. I’m not talking about racism masquerading as ‘realism’ Forget I brought it up.) While I think the prescription to embrace fantasy on its own terms is a strong idea, that doesn’t change that effective use of tangible details helps immersion. Tone matters here. If presented as whimsical fairy tale, reader expectations are different than gritty urban fantasy. Despite the prodding of the angels on our shoulder, tonally inconsistent half-baked details can jar us.
Yes, Sparks of Joy wandering around, but as many ‘I don’t think…’ moments. Maybe more disconcertingly, your ability to wander is limited. In some cases you can’t go back to explore untaken paths. In others, sections are shut off because you took the wrong equipment. And then it ends - practically out of nowhere. In two playthroughs, I went down completely different paths but ended at the same abrupt and narratively unsatisfying end screen. There was no arc to what I’d seen and the end text did not wrap up my experience in any meaningful way. It just ended. I think there is a really powerful nugget of setting here, but for a truly satisfying experience, it should be polished a bit, and some sort of narrative arc applied to it.
Author: Carlos Pamies
Played: 10/16
Playtime: 20min, two playthroughs, same ending
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy, Narrative clunk bugs)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
3 Likes
Lucid by Caliban’s Revenge
This one feels like an IF poem more than anything else. Mechanically, it is mostly an exploration through a dream/nightmare slice of a world with dream logic attached. The language is doing most of the lifting here in setting this tone. And boy do you get a lot of it.
As a narrative it is, I think the word I want is belligerently, overwritten. Metaphors and similes fly fast and furious on nearly every page of text. More often than not, word choice is doing way more than it should, in an intrusive way. For example: “your mouth is eating your heartbeat.” There is a germ of poetry here, that puts the heartbeat squarely in the throat. But “eating” is more than physically centered, it is also an act, and that additional nuance does not play in a resonant way, it jars. I don’t want to just list text here, but this excessive use of doing-too-much descriptions both adds to the dreamlike quality of the place and as quickly pushes the reader away with ‘wait, is that the right word here?’ I cannot overemphasize how pervasive and consistent this use of language is, it is the defining characteristic of this work.
There are bright spots of language in here. Among the bright spots, I really enjoyed the phrase “Maybe every other sunrise was dumb luck” and especially “Sommeliers are liars. Fight me.” The latter was a delightfully unexpected infusion of humor in an otherwise moody game. In other places, there were wild swings in the same sentence. Where my response was “no I don’t think… oh but yeah that works.” What I’m saying is your response to this game will have everything to do with your response to its language rhythm.
There is an underlying reality to the narrative, I think, however deeply buried under language. There is a vague sense that this is all going on in the protagonsts’ mind as he suffers some unnamed physical debilitation in the ‘real world.’ It is only ever a hint, which is fine, but at least my playthrough never developed into anything thematically or narratively resonant. Primarily, this was due to a maddening gameplay choice. There are multiple ways to end the scenario, some blindingly, arbitrarily abrupt and fast, others after lengthy exploration. The end of which auto-restarts at the same entry point. Now this could plausibly be a ‘cycle until you find a different ending’ thing, but there was nothing in the text to hint that this was possible. Instead, the vibe was very much, ‘you are infinitely trapped here.’ Which, if there were thematic resonances could have worked just fine. Instead it just felt trapped to no clear end, where my escape was to stop playing.
Technically, I only found one possible bug - In the flat I attempted to go lets say right, and the game took me left instead. It kind of didn’t matter, and it is completely possible that this was not a bug but intended. Only because the effect was not signposted with florid description do I suspect bug.
Scoring wise, I’m in a bit of a conundrum. The overall surreal tone was effective, and there were blocks of text I really dug. There were a lot more that pushed me away, and the looping ending really bounced me out. So I end up averaging Bouncy and Sparks of Joy.
Author: Caliban’s Revenge
Played: 10/17
Playtime: 30min, 1 or 5 playthroughs depending on how you count
Score: 4 (Averaging Bouncy and Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, think I’m topped off with the experience
5 Likes
Thanks for taking the time to give such a carefully considered review. I’m really interested in your feeling about the line “your mouth eating your heartbeat” but I don’t quite understand what you’re saying about it. If youre inclined, do you think you could break down what you mean by “eating” being “more than physically centered”?
2 Likes
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that it is. I thought it was reasonably clearly signposted, with pretty direct hints on the necessary steps – did you talk to the guy in the park, and try giving him a drink like he hints at? No worries if you’re done, of course, but the ending does shed some light on what the game’s doing and saying, if you’re feeling unsatisfied with where you wound up with it.
4 Likes
The Hidden King’s Tomb by Joshua Fratis
Extremely short and small parser-based exploration game. Escape the Tomb you’ve been pushed into! The opening is very efficient, immediately setting stakes and goals, then turning you loose. You are piloting a blank slate protagonist, which is fine as this is definitely not a character driven game.
This one feels like a learning exercise more than anything. It is a very small 6 room tomb (not counting connecting hallways). It does have more than its share of objects to collect and to lesser extent manipulate, but almost none of those objects do anything useful even for scoring purposes. You can move them around, admire them in your inventory, and mostly be told “you don’t need to” when trying to apply them to the environment.
The text is serviceable enough, mostly descriptive, although insufficient for mapping. For example you are told there is a crack in the wall through which you can see something interesting, but nowhere are you told WHICH wall, should you want to explore that direction. In the end the map is small enough not to matter, but it does interfere with your ability to hold it in your head. More distressingly, where the room descriptions are more fleshed out, the nouns are not implemented. So you can be told “there is a river here” but when you try to examine it “there is no such thing here.” That feels like a pretty quick and easy rule of thumb: if you mention a noun, have a response when the player examines the noun. It doesn’t impact the gameplay, but definitely adds polish to the product.
There’s really only one puzzle to solve, and its reasonably straightforward, befitting the scope of the piece. The geometry of the tomb doesn’t immediately suggest the answer, but is imprecise enough that it doesn’t contradict it either. As you progress in solving the puzzle, the descriptive text could be more state aware. When water runs through the tomb, only some of the rooms acknowledge the presence, and depending on the room, the volume of water is inconsistent..
As a coding excercise, I would call it functionally complete. No major bugs, no unwinnable states I could observe, consistent object behavior. Would definitely recommend fleshing out the noun space. The most bang to buck would come from polishing the descriptive text to make the thing internally consistent and clear. As is, a Mechanical excercise.
Author: Joshua Fratis
Played: 10/17
Playtime: 20min, finished
Score: 4 (Mechanical, mostly seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience is complete
2 Likes
Lost at the Market by Nynym
Dreams are certainly useful settings in IF. When used effectively, it can explain and justify any of the inherent limitations of the medium or even lean into the limitations as features. The role dreams play in human experience also immediately gives entree to a deluge of symbology, psychology, metaphor and abstraction.
LatM starts in a dream, invoking the other kind of dream, y’know aspiration. It also highlights to you the double entendre of Market - to promote and a target customer base. It notably does NOT mention ‘place to buy stuff’ which is the easiest of the three to get lost at. So much wordplay in so little time! It won me over instantly.
And then I crashed into the user interface. Now, first impressions are not awful, its an uncommon but pleasant color pallette. Any hopes of the pallette being part of the story quickly vanished and that’s fine. It briefly got me hoping for more, but whatever. But not ‘whatever.’ The interface refused to be dismissed and instead stepped to me like I had insulted its mother. It was a 4-bar implementation which I’ll call ‘current command’ ‘inventory’ ‘game control’ and ‘log.’ My biggest gripe was that the log and current command bars frequently repeated the same text. Adjacently on different color backgrounds. This is where the color pallette first became a problem.
The inventory bar was also problematic, in that it took a lot of real estate between item lists and interaction options, and ended up crowding the display. I think there’s an esthetic reason inventory is classically a command and not just a list printed on the screen after every turn. A quick fix here would have been a standard dropdown - let the player engage the list when they want, not have it thrust on them. Same for game controls which similarly never left your peripheral vision.
The command bar had another issue in what it offered as a next action. Too many times once you look at an object, the command bar gives you no option NOT to interact with it. This was frustrating early when the only way to make progress was a mindless act of destruction I was disinclined but forced to do. It was really bad when I encountered an object that felt game endy, but I had no option but to manipulate it once clicked on. I could (and did) use UNDO, but that is a big hammer. There is a significant narrative difference between “you drop the X and continue on your way” and “REWIND REALITY.”
“Well reviewer, you’ve certainly bellyached about this UI long enough. You can’t possibly have more to say about it,” you might reasonably say right now. I would have to condescendingly shake my head and reply “Oh no, dear reader, no no no.” Most distractingly, the colored bars constantly resize themselves based on input, output and new options. So not only are the bars distinctively and contrastingly colored. Not only is significant real estate taken by infrequently needed information. Not only is text distractingly repeated and options limited. The bars themselves jump around like hyperactive frogs with every click of the mouse. This constant motion demands you unceasingly monitor the entire cockpit. This was so distracting I can’t even, and I never got over it the entire game. I am a shallow, petty person and I don’t love myself right now, but you see what its done to me??? I can’t be free even after four paragraphs!
You might have detected, this user interface ultimately prevented me engaging the story in any meaningful way. For its part, the story is a relatively sparse journey (perhaps a dream?) with a few object-fetch puzzles, capped off with a story-ending choice. I took three paths to two endings and none of it allowed me to shake off the user interface. The theme of musician struggling with the collision between reality and aspirations is one I could engage. The wordplay on display out of the gate was fun. To my shame if it was present elsewhere in gameplay I was too distracted to appreciate it. In the end Technical Intrusiveness of the UI is what dominated my experience.
I do want to know more about Betty the Drummer though.
Author: Nynym
Played: 10/17
Playtime: 20min, 2 different endings, another duplicate ending
Score: 3 (Mechanical, Intrusive UI)
Would Play After Comp?: I can’t do that to myself
3 Likes
US Route 160 by Sangita V Nuli
Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer (also known as “randomness”) this one hit my queue uncomfortably close to Chase the Sun. I say uncomfortable because there are enough common superficial details it bends my brain to try and compare them, and I really don’t want to. Two Runaway brides fleeing a union their communities endorse but their own heart denies. Two solo roadtrips through unpopulated stretches of road. Strong supernatural elements. Strong religious influence on the narrative. A looping ending, allowing you to explore different paths, but strongly linear outside a few key choices. A common abrupt car crash ending. Um, wedding dress still on.
That’s reductive isn’t it? It feels super reductive. Especially because notwithstanding my manipulative list above, the two are different in the ways that matter most: themes, tone and impact. I hope I got it out of my system above, US Route 160 deserves its stand-alone focus.
This is a very dark work. The mood is overwhelming oppressive and hopeless, even before the story starts unfolding. I am put in the mind of a writing excercise from decades ago, where the class was asked to convey someone’s mood only through scene description. 160 would have aced that assignment. Words are used like blunt weapons to convey the desperation of the protagonist. It is often effective but… ends up being a bit one-note. That note is really strong and crescendic (c’mon that’s totally a word, no need to look it up), but without variation around it, it starts losing its punch. It is not helped by some unfortunate grammar or spelling which breaks the spell. One that stood out was (paraphrase) “ultraviolence soothed her skin” Now I’m pretty sure from context, that was supposed to be Ultraviolet. If not it was jarring for different, wordchoice reasons. And yet elsewhere I was gifted with the phrase “corset of lies” which I unreservedly love in and out of context.
Besides the rhythm of the text itself, the main weapon in its mostly linear runtime is dramatic text pacing. 160 doubles down by using both interactivity and more traditional sentence/paragraph structure to regulate its cadence. Like the above, I think this is done so pervasively that the effect becomes muted by the end. It too would benefit from some variation in intensity and application.
The story being told is Tragic in the colloquial (not Greek Drama) sense. The protagonist’s life as told through flashback is heartbreaking. Their western journey is fraught with the rubble of those ancient battlescars. It is pleasantly surprising to me then, given the relative homogeneity of tone, that the three endings I found were so wildly different from each other and the rest of the piece. One managed to find a whole new level of tragic, one was melancholy and slightly …hopeful seems too strong but that’s all I’ve got, and one was delightfully ambiguous. But only one of them felt like a legitimate result of player choice, the others were kind of arbitrary given the choices that brought you there.
It feels …bad… to talk about “Sparks of Joy” for this piece, how about “Sparks of Appreciation?” When the tone worked it really worked, and there were some excellent turns of phrase. And that one ambiguous ending had me smiling in its audacity. But those were counterbalanced by the unremitting ambience, occaisional format or word choice clunks, and some arbitrary-feeling endings.
So, to compare to Chase the Sun… godDAMNit brain!
Author: Sangita V Nuli
Played: 10/18
Playtime: 40min, 3 endings
Score: 5 (Sparks of Joy, Intrusive… lack of variation?)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
5 Likes
According to Cain by Jim Nelson
I was really drawn to the conceit of this thing - a merging of historical murder mystery (the FIRST murder!) and alchemical deduction. All wrapped in a classic parser IF milieu. There were a few minor technical and text glitches 2 hrs in: a firepit is not recognized for some actions, while the stones that compose it are; the memory mechanism which I’ll touch on later sometimes lags the player’s knowledge; word choice is occasionally intrusive like a beam that “dissects” the opening of a well when “bisect” was right there… there’s moments like that throughout.
Those are so minor though I really only included them to show how even handed I am as a judge. I really dug this entry. The setup is economical and efficient. In particular, it felt very modern-video-gamey in that it dealt out key alchemical concepts and equipment slowly and interactively, effectively training the player in their use which is crucial to the gameplay. I mean this as a compliment, it was smoothly and effectively done. Too, the map unfolds rather deliberately. Comfortingly linear at first while you are busy learning alchemy, then opening up as you have more confidence in the world and environs.
The mystery solving is also very satisfying. Mystery games have an uneasy tension to resolve: if the player is insufficiently clever, the mystery could go unsolved and that is the opposite of fun. Conversely, if the clues are presented under bright spotlights the mystery solving is unsatisfying as the player feels no agency in the solution. The alchemy mechanism is kind of brilliant in that it integrates ‘find the ingredients’ classic IF puzzles with ‘if A, then not B, and C lives in a red house’ deduction problems. This very much puts the player in the driver’s seat of crimebusting while nicely avoiding “if only I’d thought to ask the maid about the missing dog collar” endings.
The setting itself is also a treat - fleshing out 4 cipheric biblical figures into more lived-in humans. Their characters are well thought out, extrapolated from the relatively little established about them in a satisfying way (so far). The puzzles have so far been tractable and engaging. In general, great time and energy has gone into rendering nearly the entire world as examinable or look-up-able(?) which really makes the game a complete experience. Even the ‘can’t do that’ text often feels like an extension of the world and not an arbitrary boundary the game has imposed. Notwithstanding my obligatory quibbles above it is a nicely polished experience with narrative heft. Dare I say immersive?
And I haven’t yet mentioned the crucial player aids: there is a MEMORIES command which helpfully lists important steps completed, and others not yet complete. As the game opens up it would be easy to lose track of these. This is a welcome and oft-typed command. There is a RECALL command which replays key scenes should you not immediately memorize them, which you won’t. There is the wonderful implementation of your how-big-is-this-book-exactly? encyclopedia the Pharmakon. A stunning array of entries are available, so far avoiding the ‘book is suspiciously narrow as a resource’ artifact. These three mechanisms are deftly woven into the mystery and gameplay such that they become as second nature as the alchemy itself. A central gameplay function, the alchemy mechanism feels to me like the exact sweet spot of complexity between too-trivial-to-justify-the-typing and unnecessarily-baroque. Collectively, these mechanisms put enough spin on the traditional IF formula that it feels fresh. You’re doing chemistry and solving mystery!
You know where this is going. I was Engaged. May not wait until end of November to finish.
Author: Jim Nelson
Played: 10/19
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete
Score: 8 (Engaged, mostly Seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: You can’t stop me.
8 Likes
The Archivist and the Revolution by Autumn Chen
“The world is ending, and you are still paying rent.” Ah game, you had me at tagline.
This piece collects a handful of speculative fiction ideas, each of which was so deeply, deeply cool it could support an entire story on its own I think. Then it mixes them together in a surprising and unique heady brew of world building. World building is a delicate balance of information and reader-filling gaps, and it kind of has to be carefully tuned to the tone, themes and length of the piece. You can’t let the detail overwhelm the narrative, but you need enough so that contextual dramatic moments hit big. TAatR feels like it hits exactly the sweet spot for its narrative, and does so while juggling multiple Big Ideas. By the end screen, I raised a proverbial glass to the accomplishment.
The central mechanism is filing: in order earn money you must file snippets of data from “the past” on behalf of a faceless bureaucracy. You’ve got to do enough of it to make rent. So much good stuff is wrung out of this mechanism. For one, the “snippets of data” are world and personal background, which you navigate based on your interest. You will start to recognize narrative threads based on data “encodings.” As you assemble more background, you realize the protagonist was more than an impartial observer to some of these events, and then get to decide how much you actually want to give the government. This in turn can create a money problem that the game offers character-defining ways to solve. This mechanism melds grind, data dump, and character moments in a very compelling and Sparky way.
You’re already like 4 layers deep in your IF parfait, and more to come! On top of all this, the protagonist’s uniquely complicated personal life gets folded. Here’s where things pushed at me a little, and I can’t figure out if the text needed to do more, or maybe if I did. There are choices to make about how the protagonist prioritizes and interacts with other cast members. Only (very!) belatedly did I realize I was fully empowered to collaborate on defining those things. Early on, I thought I was trying to pick the ‘right’ choice based on the character so far presented. As such, some choices made no sense to me and felt false. Often the results left me wanting more. If I shift the blame, I think the text could have nudged the narratively collaborative nature of its choices a little better. This is weird feedback to give an INTERACTIVE FICTION piece. I think I am just a dummy. I will say, once I realized (whoever’s) mistake, I appreciated that the choices were actually really interesting and varied and opened up the dramatic space tremendously.
There was another narrative, I don’t want to say ‘problem,’ how about ‘inelegance’? Because you are selecting which historical and personal events to pursue in juggling your day job as data filer, and because you cannot pursue all of them (I guess you live in a world with no coffee?), you will not see the breadth of narrative possibility in one sitting. This is cool! It effectively conveys a world of so much bigger than what you see. However, it also doesn’t guarantee a fully satisfying narrative arc. In my case, the ending ended up leaning directly on less than 10% of my overall gameplay, and maybe indirectly on another 25%. I did dig the ending as a story twist fwiw, just didn’t find it fully satisfied my investment. I can’t help but wonder if I bypassed a key file or two that would have driven it home for me.
This game did so much that is hard to do, and did it so well, I feel a little ashamed that I couldn’t push past (lots of!) Sparks of Joy. The perceived but probably false choice steering, and not-quite-crisp narrative closure just kept me out. That said, this game is probably the first Sparky game I’ll revisit after close of judging.
Author: Autumn Chen
Played: 10/20
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished 1 of 9 endings
Score: 6 (Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless)
Would Play After Comp?: I think I will, once I work off my incomplete backlog
7 Likes
Thank you for this great review!
2 Likes
Thank you for the review! Here are some clarifications:
- There are no right or wrong choices in any of the non-archival scenes (although I think engaging more is generally pushed by the game), and certainly no quiz-style choices. There aren’t really any character personality stats, either.
- The main character can’t do everything because she has something like chronic fatigue syndrome.
I’m guessing you got Ending 1? It’s interesting because I’ve seen like half the reviewers explicitly mention something about a twist ending, whereas it was probably the rarest ending in my random playthroughs, and none of the beta testers got that as their first ending. So I didn’t invest as much into that ending as I probably should have.
3 Likes
That is in fact the ending I got. I am heartened that what I saw is specific to that path, and not as I assumed a more general game system artifact. Certainly I look forward to running at it again, and I’ll be better at 1. next time. Can I still blame my IF incompetence on you though? 
3 Likes
A Matter of Heist Urgency by FLACRabbit
I have a feeling my review of this is going to say more about my age and cultural blind spots than I intend. Will do my best to provide at least some useful feedback along side it. I mean this in the least prejorative way possible: I read this as a serial-numbers-filed-off My Little Pony fanfic.
It is an adventure story in 3 parts, set in an indeterminate Renaissance-feeling time period. Notwithstanding the lack of opposable thumbs in the dominant sentient species, it is recognizably urbane and advanced. Also, there’s a super-hero horse? This thing is overtime on whimsy, and good for it. The story understands that whimsy is often best served by a snappy pace, but here it is somehow too rushed. You are whipped from one encounter/location to another without much pause. The whimsy of its setting is crying to be highlighted by examining surroundings. There are nods of it, like the brief overview of museum exhibits fit for the inhabitants, but they seem limited to the first part and almost completely disappear in parts 2-3. It could really use more. It is all too easy to forget you are a flying super-horse. WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO FORGET THAT???
Part I is an investigation of the Heist in the title. While amusing, there is little to navigate, and barely more to examine before the case is cracked. There are two NPCs you can’t really interact with, which is fine. There is a technical glitch where one of the characters is always talking, and should you engage them, ends up talking both to you and not to you simultaneously. That could probably be fixed. There is some interaction no doubt but it feels very linear. Certainly the mystery is cracked at lightning speed and without much twist.
The next two parts are tracking down and battling the miscreants. Each part has its own setting, but the settings are 3-4 rooms max, with little to do but fight. There is a combat system, such as it is, but its not very interesting. It feels like there could be randomness involved, but I can’t tell for sure. While there were a few fighting options available, there didn’t seem to be any reason to do anything but strike, then up-arrow-enter repeatedly until done. The battle text was kind of amusing, but ultimately repetitive. The foes were Bond-villain thugs - each had their own signature flair, but were otherwise interchangeable. The game was at its most Mechanical here, and kind of washed away what charms part 1 offered.
It felt like a missed opportunity to me. The star was the whimsical setting. I wanted so much more of that, and less fighting. It should never be a surprise to remember I am a super hero horse.
Author: FLACRabbit
Played: 10/20
Playtime: 20min, finished
Score: 4 (Mechanical, Notably Buggy)
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
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