I’ve played three so far:
The Goldilocks Principle - what a range. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed this delightedly at a game about an eating disorder. The level of effort put into urging you to reconsider your choice of how triggering you ant this experience to be, that it comments differently on the one that you choose first… excellent. And then of course the multiple tellings of the “same” story. The narrator voice actually reminded me a bit of Chandler Groover’s Eat Me.
There were some good text effects in the level 5 story, but mostly the timed text was just obnoxious, of course. Don’t use timed text, people!
As the Fire Dies - this was charming. I liked a lot about this - a dreamscape is a perfect place for the light adventure-game logic. The surrealism felt like a nice amount to me - it’s strange and you don’t quite know what’s going on but it’s not so strange that you can’t figure out what you might be supposed to do.
The writing and mechanics were consistently just a little rough - some redundant adjectives and word choices that are technically grammatical but don’t quite fit where they were used. And while there are indications that the fire is getting low, they’re worked into the prose in ways that aren’t obvious unless you’ve visited that location before and happened to notice that the description has changed - and the descriptions are just long enough that you’re likely to skim/skip them on a second visit, and the puzzles are straightforward enough that you may not revisit the locations much… I didn’t figure out that there was any indication about the fire getting low until the last scene where it becomes crucial to the mechanics.
But those are minor things: tricky problems in game writing/design. This was fun!
Echoes - more escape-room-eque fun from Ben Jackson. This trio of lightly-connected games (pedantic: a group of works by the same author is a “collection” while “anthology” implies multiple authors) do interestingly different things: The Labyrinth is a four-character game which could be played by up to four separate people sharing info “who has the code for the blue key?” (and is probably most fun that way), Sticks & Stones is a charming dungeon crawl that can be played by clicking the links or by using the four arrow keys for the at-most-four options at each location (and slightly-real-time combat events: choose which action to take before the turn timer runs out), and Treasure of the Deep is… I think just a thing that you click through for the origin story?
Fun! Very smooth. Almost too smooth?
I would have liked to see a little more variety in The Labyrinth between the four characters: I still enjoyed it but playing by myself it did get a little tedious at some points doing exactly the same thing with all four characters and then collating the results. I could have done without the departures from a strict grid-based map in Sticks & Stones because I couldn’t find the final item with the fighter, and I eventually had to stop and draw a map to see what I’d missed, largely because of that. But that was a limitation of the control scheme, mostly.
options the game gives you to not have an adventure at the beginning and then the passages got way longer and more enthusiastic and could have used more checking. Oh. So this is a Gauntlet structure (see previous link): find your way past all the dead ends to the story the author is trying to tell. And a bunch of the dead-ends were fun enough to make it well-worth searching for the way through.
