Thanks for the review!
I’m not sure what you entirely mean here. As in, that I’m trying to make there be a right or wrong ending to the experience?
2 Likes
Yeah, this one challenged my ability to discuss a bit! If by ‘experience’ you mean the message behind summation of all endings… maybe indirectly. More directly, because of phrasing, I got the impression that some individual sentences were being characterized as more correct than others, more tacitly author-approved. Where I thought a more powerful experience might be to NOT allow that differentiation.
I don’t presume to know your mind and intentions! But if the intention was not to do that, some phrasing felt more sympathetic than others. Does that make sense?
2 Likes
I sort of just meant ‘game’ but then was like, “this isn’t much of a game…” And yeah.
Ah, yeah, I get that. I really was just trying to imagine all types of messages people might send, and didn’t want it all on the argumentative side because that’s not entirely what it’s about. No purposeful sympathy though.
I also wanted it to be pretty ambiguous so all context was removed. That way, it could be interpreted in pretty much any way. Other than that…
I get what you mean though!
2 Likes
Romance the Backrooms by Naomi Norbez (Bez)
Style: Graphical Novel
Played: 7/24/24
Playtime: 30min
This is an opening chapter demo of a more ambitious project that includes music, voice, graphics and gameplay. Its title/logo was the first clue that I HAD to play it. The logo is insanely well conceived and executed, and an immediate draw to the work. The graphics in the game itself, on the other hand, take some adjustment. They are noticeably cruder than the game’s logo. They are rendered in primitive-powerpoint style, with lots of overt geometric shapes, bright, limited palette colors and almost crude artistic short hands. The opening scene, in a ‘real world’ day care center was a bit jarring and off-putting. By the time we transition to the strange ‘Backrooms’ though, I found the art to be an increasingly mood-setting asset. I attribute this to NPC character design. While arguably as crudely rendered, NPC images rely on more fluid, freehandy shapes. They are also wildly imaginative, making for some evocative illustrations that hit far above their tooling limitations. The protagonist too is chockablock with low-res details (like the duck pattern on her jacket!) that combine to multiply- rather than sum-of-their-parts.
It helps a lot that the Backrooms are intended to be offputting and weird. My first impulse was ‘I’m in the Black Lodge!’ (from Twin Peaks), which, if there is a quicker way to get me on a game’s side I’m hard pressed to identify it. That knee-jerk is not totally without merit, as the titular ‘Backrooms’ are explicitly sourced from a memetic construct around weird liminal spaces featured in fan chats and copypasta. This take on the meme was engaging. Physics and logic are second thoughts that may or may not apply, moment by moment. I was as much put in the mind of Wizard of Oz as Twin Peaks in the unnaturally comfortable introduction and engagement of the deeply weird. You are introduced to a coterie of allies, then set about trying to return to earth. Complications (and villains) ensue.
Gameplay is pretty limited. There are a few moments of choice, but it is unclear how much this impacts the broad strokes of the story. Mostly you are clicking links that turn ‘pages’ (or advance powerpoint slides?). The focus of this demo chapter is orienting the player on the strange world they will be exploring. Or more like DISorienting, amirite? Thankfully, the narrative is propulsive and off-kilter enough that it speeds forward past some limited (so far) NPC characterizations and occasionally unconvincing dialogue. In particular, the protagonist adjusts to her new situation questionably fast, though frankly this choice helps the story’s mood and forward momentum more than it hurts. I found it to be an engaging read of constant surprise whose shortcomings are blink-and-you-miss-them. (And may be mitigated in a longer narrative anyway.)
All that said, there is one aspect that felt neglected. The game describes itself as an otome, which the internet dutifully informed me is a female-based romance game, often characterized by choice-based romantic/emotional gameplay. The fact that I needed this explained might make me not the best critic here. Notwithstanding my genre ingnorance, the romance aspect of the game was completely missing in this opening chapter. Now, given the plot events careening through this demo devoted to establishing the weird, weird setting, I agree there wasn’t really time for that. It ALSO means though that the demo doesn’t really give a taste of gameplay presumed to follow. Is this going to discourage fans of otome? Dunno, can’t speak to that, but feels like a missed opportunity in a demo.
All in all, the graphical and setting charms of this work far exceed any other quibbles. Apparently, there is voice acting and of course subsequent chapters to follow. Unindoctrinated to the draw of otome as I am, cannot say for sure that it will ultimately be for me or not, but ‘Find Love in the Black Lodge’ is a sly way to get me to try!
Note to author, two typos detected:
"]I interrupt him by charging at him in a run. " (stray bracket)
“f you want to unlock Adiel’s True Route” (no I)
4 Likes
Museum Heist by Kenneth Pedersen
Style: Parser
Played: 7/21/24
Playtime: 30min, 8-10 runs lost track, 634/752 (should be more)
A clever little jam entry asking you to optimize your thieving in a ten minute guards-are-coming window. This time, I went straight to the web implementation and had no issues with ADRIFT (in linux). Well, no platform-based issues. Per the rules of the JAM, it was implemented in a two week window which, ok, that buys it some forgiveness. Because for parsers, that is insane.
You are tasked to steal as much as you can carry and get out before you are caught, in a museum with a limited number of objects worth stealing. (Beyond the painting you secured that started the alarm timer.) That’s it! As an optimization game, on repeat plays you will divine the value of each object and figure out how to make away with the most value in your short window, until you decide you are done. It’s an interesting, if shallow logic problem, requiring some classic parser object manipulation.
And some classic parser fighting. Probably as an artifact of the short development time, you will often burn precious time guessing verbs or struggling with incomplete synonyms. Sometimes you quietly drop things you think you are carrying, other times objects are mysteriously not reported. Most vexing, in at least one scenario your final haul is not tallied correctly, where items in your inventory are not present in the final scoring.
Look, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who need to fill in every last cell in Sudoku, and those that are satisfied knowing it is solved once it tips past critical and don’t need to mechanically complete it. I know what you’re thinking. “Given every word you’ve written you are CERTAINLY the former, Reviewer! Just no room for doubt.” Seems likely doesn’t it? But NO! I CAN leave blocks unfilled once solution is certain! I AM FULL OF MYSTERIES AND CONTRADICTIONS, MARVEL AT MY UNKNOWABILITY!!!
So yeah, it ended up being an engaging enough puzzle for its tight scope. I figured out how to get high payoff items, but decided the mechanics of closing the score (including bug and syntax fighting) wouldn’t improve my experience further. Because I am ALSO composed of unimpeachable integrity (as well as so much bacon), I am only reporting a score the game alotted to me, above. As a two-week Jam game, its sins are easily forgiven and the its achievements against that time frame admirable. Also, not for nothing, quite fun.
5 Likes
Vespertine by Sophia de Augustine
Style: Short Story
Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 15min
My second played work from the Goncharov Jam, and hoo boy quite different. This is a tragic love story, where interactivity is used to provide different insights and flashbacks into the central relationship, between a gangster and a killer seemingly hired to kill him. An early charge I got from this work was this super loaded phrase in the Content Warning: - Brief cannibalism. LolWUT???
The cover art was actually the FIRST charge I got from this work. It is evocative, compelling, and very much of a piece with the 70’s movie conceit of the jam. So much is packed into that illustration, its dramatic layout, its swirling brush strokes, the dynamic lettering, the details in those swirls, I could stare at it for minutes. I could mount it next to my Vertigo poster as a full partner.
Another aspect of the work that landed precisely for me was its use of inline links. There are three types of them: 1) third person flashbacks; 2) first person internal monologue/observations; 3) advance the story. Each of these has its own interactive paradigm and color cues, very effectively segregating three intertwined narrative threads. If I had a quibble, it is with the default color scheme, which seems at odds both with the purported inspiration and the narrative itself. If it was intended as ironic frisson, it didn’t quite land that way for me. Small quibble, but there it is.
The story itself is a relationship study of two flawed men. The prose used here is quite magnetic, employed in both first and third person to simultaneously flesh out the deep attraction and the tragic destiny of their relationship. The language flows from character-focused descriptions of physical and emotional attraction to horrific acts of violence, and does so in a shockingly consistent voice - the juxtaposition enhanced by the language thread that unites them.
It was a compelling read, no doubt, but like another recently reviewed work it engaged the ‘romancing the villain’ trope. It’s a work of fiction, I get that, but real or not there is some level of atrocity where I just stop caring about perpetrator heartache. I don’t want to make too much of it. It’s my own hangup. If you find that trope compelling, it is hard to see how this work would disappoint.
5 Likes
Thank you for the nice review! Some of the problems you reported, I wasn’t aware of so that’s very useful. I’m glad you had no problems with the Adrift WebRunner (playing in the browser). Most importantly, it sounds like you had fun 
Playing locally instead of in the browser would give you two Adrift features which no one seems to use anyway for this game: Making a transcript and importing a “macro” (a list of commands so you don’t have to play through the same sequence over and over when restarting). The latter may be useful to avoid frustration 
Regarding your score, should I add it to the high score list? (JJ McC 634)?
4 Likes
I leave that up to you, you are certainly welcome to! If you get me TOO invested in that though, I may need to go back and fill in all those Sudoku cells after all…
3 Likes
Read This When You Turn 15 by Kastel
Style: Short Story
Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 5min
You guys are really throwing down the gauntlet here, aren’t you? Ever shorter lengths, ever tighter conceits, its almost like you’re daring me to spoil! A dual Jam entry this, it is structured as a letter from sibling to sibling. The interactivity is of the page-turning variety, adding more text to a long letter in small chunks until it is done.
The letter itself is just sad, full of regret for a lifetime of neglect and emotional isolation of its addressee. There are depressing details, nicely observed, that sell the specificity of its setting. There are equally depressing omissions on the author’s part that paint a pretty complete picture. A sad, complete picture. I found it effective in its brevity, if a bit of a downer. Which, I expect, is the whole point of it. I mean, writing is exercise in empathy, no? Trying to evoke emotions in others (horror, swooning, catharsis, tragedy, horniness, laughter, whatever) is one of the written word’s most common uses. Until advent of motion pictures, it was the main mass market vehicle for it (not to sell stage productions short). RTWYT15 ably steps into that legacy with its brief, cold shot of empathy. Really nice last line too.
Yah, this is shorter than most of my stuff, but it is scaled to the work, I promise!
6 Likes
Done
I’m sure you can if you want to / bother 
I just need to keep the requirement the same for all on this highly prestigious list ( 
)
3 Likes
DOL-OS by manonamora
Style: Simulated Computer
Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 1.5hrs
At some point, I review enough work from a single artist that my impulse is to turn a current review into a body-of-work overview. I need to resist this impulse, not because Death of the Artist (why would I want that???), but in fairness to the current work. Or perhaps, in fairness to the remaining body of work. To this point, I have admired almost all of this author’s works that I presumed to review, sometimes with qualifiers. Those caveats have given me things to talk about, digest, and clown on a bit.
DOL-OS, for me, was an unqualified, un-caveated success. You’re tying my review hands, work! It presents as an ooooold computer terminal, some archaic dawn-of-windows-like OS. Monochrome (mostly) terminal, visible-pixel fonts, all of it. And the design is just terrifically evocative, down to the messy desktops, the stray game and (working!) internet apps, the trashcan of nearly-deleted files. No clues what to do, just log in (initially as guest) and poke around a bit.
There, you are treated to a wide array of files, images and programs (among a field of ‘corrupted’ ones) that build a mosaic picture of a future dystopia. I cannot stress too highly how well done this is - the graphical presentation is just perfect, from its squiggly ‘corrupted’ files, to its program start screens and tones, to its broken internet. Too, the documents at your disposal are varied, redacted and fragmentary presenting a picture of life under state paranoia and its often dire consequences. And the puzzles this enables! A clever set of puzzles dialed in specifically to this conceit and environment, integrated in a satisfyingly organic way.
Eventually, you can piece together the password to a user account and… learn of the genesis of the dystopia and perhaps the seeds of its fall. Only then is it clear that you are interacting with a distant past, though honestly, the graphical presentation couldn’t clue it more openly. And you engage a final artifact from those times: an AI created to render passionless legal judgements, most often capital. At that point you enter a dialogue (on keyboard) until a final, impactful decision.
This was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. Its verisimilitude was top tier, and sucked me in immediately to its world building. I relished the desktop playground constructed for my spelunking. I devoured all the files I could find, for 2/3 of the runtime hopelessly lost in the loose, seemingly disconnected puzzle pieces it was presenting. Then the game masterfully closed the gaps, fit the pieces in a satisfying pop, and built to a final conversation of great import. These kinds of mosaic narratives are catnip for me, and finding one this well done makes my heart sing.
So here is the part of my review where I would back off and whine about some detail, some gameplay artifact, some prose flourishes that didn’t quite… whatever. NOPE. I got none of that here. This is a winner folks, a straight up winner.
8 Likes
Remembrance by Emery Joyce
Style: Short Story
Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 8min, 4 endings
Hitting quite a run of these Short Story IF works. I suspect (and only suspect, not having participated in Jams of my own) Jams encourage this style of IF. Broad puzzly works, with complicated moving parts, player initiative anticipation, and their attendant debug and tweaking are a lot harder to force into a tight development timeline than a controlled linear narrative. Not a dig, linear narratives after all are the PROTO narratives. Should not be a surprise that there is a Jam that acknowledges this directly, the One Choice Jam. Makes the subtext text!
This is a story about mourning and reconciling difficult parent-child relationships. Per the one-choice conceit, you must select one of four artifacts to honor your mother, with mini-sections giving context on each of the choices. Actually, ‘difficult’ isn’t quite the word I want, though it is technically accurate. The story is not more or less difficult than any portrait of two differing lives squashing together, sometimes in harmony, sometimes with frictions, and further burdened by unfair and/or tone deaf expectations on both sides. Y’know, standard interpersonal relationship stuff.
This is a pretty good representation of that dynamic, I found. The artifacts represent samples of different aspects of this relationship. The One Choice offers conflictory impulses. On the one hand, it asks the player to select only one aspect of the relationship to foreground. A relationship that is explicitly NOT one thing, but a synthesis of them all. The very act of selection betrays the reality of the relationship’s complexity and flattens the fullness of it.
On the other hand, the player is deciding which memories to prioritize, in some way acknowledging that the complexity need not be uniform. That some traits might loom larger and more accurately summarize the relationship than others. Or more importantly for the protagonist, maybe the complexity was noise that distracted from the aspects that loomed largest.
There is a subtle on the third hand here, begging the handiness of the metaphor. Because the player is making the choice, the choice becomes what the player/protag WANTS to be true, almost independent of the deceased. It becomes more about the survivor than the deceased, and more revealing of their needs and wants. This feels like a stunningly well-observed insight into how ALL human relationships work, especially ones relegated to memories and not new experiences.
The work then hinges entirely on this one choice. I find it telling that the denouement is not materially affected by the choice - funerals are scripted ritual after all. But the choice itself is what makes all the difference, to the protag and the player’s experience.
Hrm. So while I seem to have successfully avoided narrative spoilers, I have nevertheless completely spoiled the emotional content of the work. Does that count? Is there a mask for that?
5 Likes
(Yay, catching up with other folks’ reviews now that I’ve started mine - nice work on this one JJ!)
I couldn’t quite crowbar it into my review, but I felt the same - the bits of the game where the word’s lexicographic nature comes to the fore, like feeling like it’s spouting serifs when it sweats, are really fun and unique, so I also wanted more of them!
4 Likes
Was getting worried about you! Glad to see you are diving in, though I do have a bit of a LEAD on you… 
4 Likes
Thanks a lot for your review!
(Also I need to check on some of the missteps in coding you pointed at)
3 Likes
Thank you for this!
Fun fact: that was in fact a photo of my boss (at the time)'s dog that I had to take sneakily. It was supposed to be a photo of a friend’s dog, but he couldn’t get it to sit still long enough for a good picture. In the first release of the game, the named breed of the dog very clearly didn’t match the photo because I forgot to update it lol.
4 Likes
MAN, does the universe hate hubris. My laptop died, with about a dozen un-backed-up reviews sitting patiently on its harddrive. Early August is going to be a challenge for me, so I am unclear when I will get access to that data again. sigh. Hopefully I am enabled before the Thon ends. #$(&#$% fragile tech. My apologies to those masochists awaiting their next turn in the Snark Booth.
At least, the good news is I did backup my WIP before Thon started. That would be a devastating loss.
10 Likes
Oh no! That sucks, and not just because I was really enjoying catching up on your reviews. Hope you’re able to recover as much as possible as soon as possible.
6 Likes
Thanks for the review! (And for your earlier reviews of my other games in this event — I haven’t been engaging much because I’ve spent most of this summer in migraine hell, but I would hate for anyone to take that as a lack of appreciation.)
This is spot-on — I feel that that’s just the nature of this kind of choice (which we all make, although usually not in such a straightforward, obviously-important, one-time kind of way).
Edit: Also, I’m sorry about your laptop! I dealt with a sudden hard drive failure myself recently and it was stressful and expensive. I hope you can get your data back soon!
6 Likes
Well, laptop still dead, but I have a sloow way to recover data, so I can at least post the reviews I already have in the can. Playing more is temporarily still a problem, but I’m working it, I promise!!
8 Likes