Hrmph. The problem with an index post is that then you can forget to update it…
If you’ve played Plasmorphosis, you know what you’re getting into here (or either of the Rosalinda games, but Plasmorphosis is sci-fi like Universal Robot).
A short, silly (or not so silly) sci-fi romp where your boss has ordered you to assemble and train a robot so he can fire you (out the airlock). Find items, combine items, use items to solve puzzles.
I had a lot of fun with this one. It has a little bit of a split personality; it’s listed as “short” but while I immediately got the “give up” ending and the “do the expected thing” ending in about 20 minutes… it then tells you that there are TWELVE endings total, and finding those probably turns this into a two hour game.
Which is my only real quibble with this game: that’s too much time to spend with it for how much story is here. And even if you’re keeping a bunch of save states, it still gets tedious to try possibilities and it really starts highlighting how clicky the interface is. And I kinda wish the game had left me to my own devices to think up clever things to try and decide when I’m done exploring rather than triggering my completionist “Well of course I want to see all the endings!”
But also the game deserves more time than only the obvious two endings, so… it needs something to suggest that there are other possibilities. I’m not sure what.
I gave up on this game three times before I got past the initial tutorial puzzle. Fortunately, that was (for me) by far the most inscrutable puzzle-hunt-style “I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m supposed to be doing here” of the puzzles that I solved. Once I got past that gate I had fun. I was able to solve every puzzle that I tried, and after maybe 15 or 18 of the 26 puzzles I turned to the solution sheet to zip through and see where the story was going to end.
I did find that the frame story (“The most important thing is the milk. Just get in and get out.”) was directly in opposition to the game play (solve every puzzle for lots of other items) and made me care less about both the characters and the puzzles (because I’m not supposed to be solving these puzzles, I just need the milk, how do I get milk?). If it hadn’t been very clear that this was where the story was going I would have been pretty annoyed to be told at the end that oh no, you forgot the milk because no I didn’t, not for a minute.
But that was minor. The writing was fun and the story did what it needed to do.
But getting to that point… I completely missed the ONE word that’s supposed to give you a clue about what type of puzzle this was. I sat staring at the first puzzle (which locks off your entry into the rest of the game; after this you can solve puzzles in whatever order you want) for a long time and couldn’t come up with anything. Mice might never fit {something} your shrew zoo {something} {something}?? (I still want to see the puzzle that that answer goes to; it sounds far more interesting than the actual answer).
So I pulled up the source text (I don’t know why this is the first thing I thought of; maybe because View Source is just a Control+U away?) and the answer didn’t tell me anything either. And then there’s a hint in the answer checker that another word is close, but you want the transformed version of that word and that didn’t help either.
OK, there’s probably a walkthrough in the extras/ folder. Well, there is, but it’s just a list of the solutions, and I already know that; it didn’t help.
OK, I’m being stupid, it said something in the “about this game” section about enabling hints. So I clicked that, and it just refreshed the page and all the text (that I could see without scrolling) was exactly the same so… I guess it didn’t do anything? Oh well, maybe it turned the hints on and they’ll show up in the game.
So I start the game again and… no hint. Well, it said there are hints “for puzzles that are difficult for any reason” there are hints, so maybe this one is supposed to be so easy that no one should need a hint? Maybe this game is just way too hard for me and I should just give up?
I set the game down for about two hours, but then decided to try again. This time I noticed that the About this game page does change, just… below the bottom of my screen so I had to scroll down to see it. For […] the hint system, click on the space after “Puzzles solved” at the bottom of any puzzle page.. So I went to the puzzle and tried clicking all the blank space at the bottom of the page …nothing. OK, let me stare at this puzzle a little longer. And then I was using keyboard navigation to tab through the links and… oh. When you say “the space after” you mean “the single space character” and not “the blank space generally to the right of”.
So then I got it. But I suspect that if I hadn’t already seen the extra hint from the source code, even the hint wouldn’t have been enough for me. So…for that first puzzle:
There’s a word in the preceding text that is a further hint.
Let the countdown to savings begin!
Fortunately all the other puzzles I tried were much less opaque and I mostly had a pretty good guess of what to try for all the ones that I attempted. Definitely recommend if you like puzzles (mostly word puzzles) with a slightly-dystopian grocery-store story wrapped around them.
Hey look, a game that’s NOT mostly about a corporate dystopia. I guess this is this year’s mystery-at-a-carnival game - this time with 100% fewer murders.
Maybe I’m just bad at puzzles today; I am kinda under the weather. I pretty much just followed the walkthrough for this one. I’m not sure I would have gotten most of the deductions by myself. (also the solution/walkthrough is slightly wrong about the first accusation: it’s a costume, not a uniform).
Actually, maybe I would have gotten some of them. But it feels pretty overwhelming when your first accusation is: You are lying about where/why/how/when you/Edwina/Diffany/Cornie/Barnaby went/took/ate/got/stole the rainbow frosting/blanket/dough/coffee cake/oversized baking pan/uniform/garbage truck/dark circles/phone/home/competition/pretty dress/car/photograph/stomachache/snow/paper baking cups/shift schedule/costume. And then to make it stick you have to pick What you ate and Why and three pieces of How I know evidence each from that list of nouns (and for some reason it seems like the order of the nouns is randomized in each dropdown? They’re not alphabetical, and they’re not the same as each other). And it looks like you need to get all five of those correct to continue. And most of them were mentioned only once in the 6K word story you’ve read so far.
So this is one to approach when you’re ready to dig into mountains of interviews to find which piece goes where. Wish I’d set it aside to come back to when I was in more of a deductive mood.
I do think the pacing could have been better: that initial huge infodump and then you keep having to scroll back and pull pieces out of it and fit them into the new bits you get every time you successfully accuse someone. And it was a little odd that it started with the very silly very over-the-top pompous Georgian-era origin of the detective’s society and pops to “the present day” and a cozy mystery and does nothing with the secret society until sending you a judgy letter after you’ve wrapped up the case. It was fine, just an odd contrast that I don’t think it really needed.
And it was maybe a little bit too much “we’re going to use every piece of evidence exactly once and involve every suspect in some way that they don’t want to admit” for my taste, but that was appropriate enough for this kind of game, so eh.
Dunno. It seemed fun! I just wasn’t quite up to attempting the deductions properly given how intimidating they seemed at first glance. I’ll be curious to hear how other people get on with it. It may just be more of an “oh, you need two pieces of evidence for this one, what’s the thing I’m missing?” deal and it’s obvious that they’re correct once you sort them out of the story.
Looks like it’s using a custom engine written in OCaml and it worked pretty well for me. I did wish that it would have left the choices at the bottom so I could see more of the scrollback, instead of scrolling them to be roughly vertically centered, but otherwise…
Edit: Oh, and apparently you can restart the game without using browser dev tools to delete the game data - according to the itch page you tap/click the (completely unmarked) first mention of Quibblebottom 5 times. Uh. That could have just been a “Restart” button, but sure, why not?
Like the previous Warden: a (bug)folk horror this is short and charming.
After many adventures, you stand before the legendary Spring Stage; tonight, you
plan to play the music that will call the last full moon of spring out of the sky. She’s
already rising, a day moon. It’s time to string your bugdolin and find the four
master musicians before nightfall.
I’m not sure what to say about this; it was fun. Unlike the previous game, it’s not horror, although you’re a bugfolk, you can get eaten gruesomely by a variety of creatures.
There are 12 achievements of which I’ve only found five or six (I got taterbug friend once but now I’m not sure how). You will want to type commands at the beginning because as a bugfolk bard you do have some unconventional core commands.
It has a bunch of nice little touches – the time of day changes as you convince more musicians to join you. Your bugdolin gets dirty and most of the people you talk to will call you on it if you’re not taking proper care of it.
Good stuff; go play it?
At a new opera house, all the performers are having dreams which, while not necessarily nightmares, are intense enough to interrupt their sleep and impair their ability to work; you’ve been hired to investigate the situation.
While this is fully standalone, Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade was the only one of Nell’s three (!) IFComp games that I played, so it was fun to be able to compare directly to its predecessor. This felt like a step up in every way.
The historical details felt more integrated into the story; there were a few didactic moments but much less than Mischief’s constant “here, let me infodump at you” (yes, thank you, I do know what a cornetto is, get out of my face). The prose still consistently has just a little of the same superficiality though. It does have things to say but says them all out loud, where a novel might leave a lot more of it to subtext. It’s a thing you see a lot in fanfic writers, or in new novelists and short story writers, people who haven’t learned to trust their readers yet. But this is otherwise very competently written so I have to wonder if it’s a deliberate stylistic choice? I don’t know. It’s not blatant, and a lot of video game writing is intentionally up front about things. But personally I don’t love it here.
The investigation felt smoother here too, and I thought the epilogue did a good job of explaining the things that you failed to guess correctly. It was more stuff than I was willing to memorize, so placing the performers correctly was a lot of flipping back and forth between sections, but it was great that all the information was still available in the interface.
I wish the die rolls had been explained a little more, but the extra info felt like bonuses rather than necessities so it wasn’t a big deal. If I’m reading it right, you get to choose two out of three from Architecture, Magic, and Music: one of them you’re good at and have a 50% chance, one you’re OK at and have a 25% chance, and the final one you are locked out of. Similarly you choose Charm vs. Observation, 50% for one and 25% for the other.
The wrap-up choice of “who’s with you? Your partner, or this co-worker or that co-worker?” was a bit jarring since I don’t think any of them were mentioned anywhere else in the game, but otherwise that final section fit much better than_Mischief’s_ “here, have a romance game tacked onto the end of your game.”
What else? I also appreciated that the image filesizes weren’t huge: the whole thing is, what, 8 or 9 MB? It’s always nice when I don’t have to waste download time and storage space on the non-text parts that I don’t care about.
Another lovely investigation; I had a good time.
This fell in a middle ground where it didn’t really grab me, and I wished it had leaned more into something.
I tend to think the Winograd/Flores inspired conversation state diagram that it’s built around is overly-complicated and hard to follow, and the slight surrealism (?) obfuscates it even further. But then the weirdness felt like it was just for the sake of weirdness rather than having much purpose or much to say, so that wasn’t very satisfying either. And the looping around felt like it was just filling out parts of the diagram, rather than an experiment in evoking some sort of… something through loopy Twine poetry.
It felt just a little underbaked in ways that triggered my “the emperor has no clothes” response pretty hard. Like the passage where the dialogue was a stanza from each of our ABC characters, and the first and third were reasonable approximations of what, iambic tetrameter? And the second’s meter seemed to be designed to be as awkward as possible to read aloud. That had to be an intentional bit, right? But I don’t know why it’s interesting or particularly funny.
Dunno. It wasn’t bad; it was fun to loop through several times. But it didn’t feel meaningful enough for me to think it was worth the unnecessarily confusing presentation of a sci-fi (?) vignette that didn’t really go anywhere.
Oof. I am so the wrong audience for this one. Growing up being always involved with babies and kids (oldest of 5 children, all boys; near the beginning of… 24 grandchildren, two-thirds boys), it has always been difficult for me to see “dad games” as more than a depressing commentary on the narrowness of who gets to make games. And then one of Keza MacDonald’s podcasts reinforced that. What was that called? Spawnpoint? Extra Life?
And this is definitely no exception. But let’s try to look at it for itself…
It’s a poem set to a turn-based silent movie. A blurred walk to work in the early morning. No choices: click or press space to reveal the next line. As a reader, I might have preferred revealing stanzas instead of lines, but that wouldn’t have evoked footfalls as well.
The poem is set in three… not columns, since they overlap, but… alignments? Left/center/right. I thought that was used to good effect, both for interleaving competing lines of thought, and just for movement.
I thought it got saggy toward the middle and end. More of a story, less poetry. More overplaying its hand; piling on making excuses for explaining the protagonist rather than being exhausted early-morning thoughts. I think the ending was supposed to be looking up but it just felt like another excuse to me.
Broccoli was an amusing recurring motif:
Wipe the debris from my eyes
crunchy
like the tips
of oven-baked broccoli
Yeah. Dunno. I thought it did a pretty good job of what it was trying to do, but it also made most of its point in the first quarter or third and then kept going.