Hmm. I’ve been pretty scattered: played (or at least started) a bunch of games but nothing has really grabbed me. I think… these are all decent games, but they’re just making me want to go off on vaguely related design hypotheticals… So have a long grumbly post.
I feel like The Roads not Taken is recognizably Manon’s work. Interesting technical experiment; enthusiastic use of adjectives; fancy UI. I’d be interested to see further development in using a parser like this: no “get lamp; go north” but more (at least in my playthrough) just invoking single words to see more about the object or advance the story. Which was both an unusual feel that I liked, and a nagging uncertainty: “what else could I type that I’m missing? I have no idea.”
As with Thick Table Tavern (IFComp) and The Rye in the Dark City (SeedComp), I didn’t quite click with this one. It feels a little like a technical solution in search of a story problem to solve rather than one that grew out of a story wanting to be told in this particular way. Compare Bez’s work: I like to think my chat interface adds something to Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets, but the feeling of online conversation shines through just as strongly in the writing of The Dead Account: you don’t need a high-fidelity rendering; your brain will fill in the gaps just fine.
Similarly the UI is undeniably pretty, but is every element there for a reason, to enhance a theme, or just because “why not? It looks cool.” A number of words were helpfully highlighted to indicate that you could type them for more description, but then some were highlighted because…I have no idea. Some beginnings of sentences were highlighted, but not all? So I’m sitting there thinking, “It doesn’t seem like there’s any meaning to derive from this very ordinary-seeming phrase, but what if I’m missing some really cool secret?” and it’s a little distracting. And maybe it was my browser, but it wasn’t scrolling down when it added new text to the end of the transcript. And I would have liked it to clear out the input field when you entered a command so I didn’t have to delete it before entering another.
And the prose makes me think of the part in Emily Short’s The Annals of the Parrigues on the amount of potentially surprising variation you should allow in your procedural text (page 95):
A goatherd named Leofrick the Seditious hears the voice of a flaming mare who was
defecating while standing in shaft of moonlight on a hilltop—and that was Too Much.
[…]
Therefore I hypothesize that the number of [surprising] elements that should exist in any given sentence is maximally two, and in a longer conceptually-continuous passage, maximally three or four.
The prose in The Roads not Taken is a little too much for my personal taste, and feels like some of it is there because why not put it in, it sounds cool, rather than because it’s necessary to the vibe or the theme. But that’s my “growing up reading Zinsser and Strunk & White” preference for prose that packs more punch into fewer words, and the Blaise Pascal Lettres Provinciales bit about “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter”–I like it when people take the time to make it shorter. I’m sure other people will have more fun with the abundance of imagery.
Anyway. Random tangents aside, The Roads not Taken wasn’t quite my thing but I thought it was a reasonably solid piece. The structure of the story worked for me, and the extra descriptions that I found added to the mood. And even with the unconventional command structure there was only one guess-the-verb bit (I somehow managed to miss all the synonyms for what to say at the very end). An interesting piece, and worth checking out.
I usually don’t play Andrew Schultz’s games because they’re never my thing, but I was curious about Write or Reflect? so…
I don’t know what it is, but while I never mind the thin frame stories in, say, Arthur DiBianca’s work (The Wand, or Sage Sanctum Scramble, or whatever), Andrew Schultz’s pieces tend to feel like two very separate parts and I find myself going “Why are these two things together?” This one especially so. Decent writing? I think. Interesting musings on writing process, interesting mathematical puzzle, but I’m still completely unconvinced that they belong together.
I didn’t pick up on the initial cuing that this was a mathematical puzzle, and I thought the part of the prompt that shows the previous part of your sequence was offering me a third command to type instead of offering status information. Those things didn’t help. But…I don’t know. I’m left going huh? Sure…? I guess?
I like both parts. I’m not sure it does either of them any favors to put them together like this.
I think Andrew and Manon’s stuff tends to not quite work for me because I’m pretty sure if I tried writing IF I’d be like: here, have a cool tech/UI thing! And a neat math/physics/farming/whatever concept! And…uhhh… I guess I have to wrap a story around it somehow? So I’m probably projecting “things I’d want to avoid but don’t know how to do better” onto their work…
I started Nothing Could be Further From the Truth. I don’t know. It’s very clear up front what kind of game it is, so you’ll know if it’s your thing or not. Judging by the beginning, if it were a choice game it would be a gauntlet structure: a main throughline with short dead-end spurs everywhere. You turned left rather than right? Here, have an amusing death and try again. But also…initial info-dump, walls of text, custom directions instead of the usual compass points (thankfully “left/right” are fixed and not relative to the player’s facing, but still), a bit uneven with some things being over-cued and some you have to look in just the right place to see it. Dunno. It’s a very particular kind of parser game: some people are going to thoroughly enjoy this one.
I’m guessing that Secret of the Black Walrus is in the Back Garden as a matter of author choice rather than being especially experimental or unpolished: I only played the beginning but it seems pretty smooth. But there are a number of things that jolted me out of it, so I took a break. Viv Dunstan described the writing as “strong” but to me it reads as cheesy B-movie Victorian and my reaction so far is “please step away from the thesaurus.”
“As a tall, pale, gaunt Englishman, he possessed superior skill in looking dour.”
or
“Ha, ha.” Gould was hardly pleased. “One day I shall be most glad to ascertain how you have come to be aware of my whist habits, or my associates, as Underwood is a private gentleman’s club.”
“You’re at a loss, as I have never entered the club myself, for I am no gentleman.”
I found the transitions painfully long and slow, and the adaptive UI layout meant that zooming the text and resizing the window didn’t do what I expected and I couldn’t get it to display in a way that I liked.
It did seem like an interesting premise, and I suspect it’s going to be a well-constructed mystery.
it should work as intended) and the going back to the last passage choice too!
I’m really glad you liked it!
Most of the stuff I plan to release will lean really heavily into a sort of boardgame-esque, game-y experience! Perfect description!