Thank you for the lovely & thoughtful reviews of my games! <3
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Fine Felines, by Felicity Banks
Have you ever wished you could breed cats for a living?
I’d be curious how many players can actually answer yes to that question, right off the bat? Admittedly, such a thought had never crossed my mind before playing the game. But after being bombarded with a massive quantity of gorgeous, professionally-photographed cat pics over the course of this game, I’m starting to see the appeal.
In this business/life sim, you’ll juggle the sometimes competing demands of being a cat breeder; maintaining your relationships; and looking after your own mental and physical wellbeing.
The life of a cat breeder is surprisingly dramatic, and Fine Felines takes a bold, go-big-or-go-home approach to it. Everything begins with investments in cats and equipment, and even the most frugal player will end up spending a big chunk of their life savings just to get started. The potential rewards are great: the promise of seeing happy, healthy kittens enter the world and helping them find the perfect owners… which is extremely remunerative if you have enough kittens to sell. But because the rewards are so precious, the stakes of your decisions are high. If your cats’ needs go unmet, they’re less likely to produce a lot of kittens, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to recoup your initial investment.
I enjoyed the fact that the player character can develop a set of attributes (creativity, respectfulness, etc.) depending on how they navigate social interactions and adapt to their fibromyalgia diagnosis. Especially in the late game, having the right attributes is important for being successful in certain decisions.
I think that Fine Felines is very successful at what it attempts. My only criticisms worth mentioning would be that it would be more convenient if the money/attributes could be displayed on every page rather than being relegated to their own page; and that I’d rather it was four or five times longer, though this concern is somewhat mitigated by the replayability factor.
3 Likes
Kidney Kwest, by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta with art by Kristina Ness
With a custom parser engine and a stated mission to make itself accessible to kids with no parser experience by accommodating natural language input, Kidney Kwest is an enormously ambitious project.
So how is it, really? Uh…
?:how are you this fine day?
I didn’t understand ‘fine’, ‘day’, and ‘how’. Maybe try: ‘what do you see in there?’?
?:what do you see in there?
a white door, an opening, and you
?:examine me
You are a person that looks like they need a costume for the audition. It also has a hand, a hand, a body.
Your stomach starts to rumble.
Pretty rough. The idea of this game understanding full English sentences is more-or-less a façade; it understands a specific set of commands, like any parser does, with the only difference being that these commands happen to be formatted like (a narrow range of) sentences. There’s still a learning process by which a player will have to determine what is and is not suitable as an input. As for whether contemporary kids can more easily learn the quirks of this engine than those of a more established standby like Inform or Quest, I can only speculate, and my speculation is no. But fortunately the writing buttresses the engine by suggesting working commands during many failure responses; for that reason alone, and not for its insistence on full-sentence inputs, I do think this would be a relatively easy game for a beginner to approach.
As you can see from the above example, the game’s responses could use some polish, and it especially has a tendency to print lists and auto-generated descriptions that are grammatically wonky.
Ostensibly, the main goal is to collect items to make a costume, and I think this element of the game is well-designed. You can pick up different stuff to mix and match into one of several possible costumes. It’s easy, straightforward, and allows the player to personalize their result - all good features for a game targeted toward kids.
But alongside this simple and fun main activity, there are other puzzles that are much more brutal. Starvation is a constant threat, and no matter how much you eat, you will always hunger for more; you cannot explore the world at a natural pace because of the frequent interruption of needing to find food. I accidentally made a fairy very sad because I took too many turns trying to figure out the command to open a box of phosphate binders (the problem was that I was holding two boxes). Every time you eat, you have to venture into your digestive system to collect phosphates manually, which might be somewhat interesting the first time but quickly becomes tedious after having to do the same thing over and over again.
With some proofreading and rebalancing, I think this could become suitable for its intended audience. But in its current state, I’d worry that it might come off as just a frustrating reminder of the difficulties of dealing with kidney disease.
2 Likes
The Last Night of Alexisgrad, by Milo van Mesdag
This one appealed to me greatly in concept. A dramatic political/military thriller set during a single, pivotal night, for two players? Oh yeah! I would have been all over this on the first day of the comp, were it not for the fact that it took a while to wrangle a partner.
My expectations were high, and I am pleased to say that the writing did not disappoint. The author succeeds in many things at once: evoking the chaotic and desperate flavor of an already-battered city on the verge of collapse; showing the brutal calculus of conflict in each of the protagonists’ minds as they consider how to give themselves the greatest advantage; and contextualizing it all with just enough worldbuilding to intrigue but not distract from the action.
The game design/choice structure didn’t scratch my itch quite as much, because there’s not a whole lot of room for players to maneuver.
More spoilery musings for the initiated:
In the asymmetrical conflict between the General and the Dictator, it is immediately obvious that the former is at a great advantage. Naturally I picked the Dictator for my first playthrough, because I love a good underdog story. When I died an especially ignoble death, I assumed it was because I had made poor choices, or my buddy had made very good ones. I was eager to try again.
We enjoyed the game enough to replay it many times, switching roles regularly. As we did, the initial thrill of competition wore off and an unfortunate realization emerged. Each character has very few choices that affect their fates. All of the maneuvering prior to the final confrontation has no real consequence beyond affecting the flavor of what happens along the way. What it all comes down to, in determining what happens to our protagonists, is: will the General give the Dictator an opportunity to negotiate? What will the Dictator ask for in return for capitulation? And will the General accept it or just kill her instead?
I feel that the game design is at cross-purposes with the way in which my buddy and I approached the game. We wanted and expected to compete against each other, to test our strategies in the hope of gaining an upper hand. In fact, there’s not much room for that when the Dictator’s fate always comes down to whether or not the General decides to be generous.
There’s a limit to how much I can criticize the game on this point, of course. The blurb does clearly warn:
Both have little doubt that the city of Alexisgrad will fall tonight. The question that both must ask is how it will fall.
We probably should have paid more attention to this, rather than latching so hard onto the idea that the two-player structure encourages competition. To get the most out of The Last Night of Alexisgrad, one must be less concerned with winning than with roleplaying the journey.
I do think, though, that the payoff would have been greater if there had been an epilogue to show non-immediate results of some of the players’ decisions. It’s mentioned a few times that the General has to think not only about taking Alexisgrad, but about holding it and ensuring that it becomes a stable and productive part of the Kingdom. If we could get some final confirmation of how well this comes to pass depending on the players’ choices, it would provide a stronger sense of agency to the players and a stronger through line for the story.
6 Likes