Thank you for giving me a chance.
As you may have noticed, Latinorum is a completely different project, entirely independent from my previous works.
you can elaborate more on this ?
best regards from ITALY,
dott. Piergiorgio.
1 Like
Social Democracy: Popular Front
by Autumn Chen
I never feel like I’m educated enough to play these games: I grew up largely disconnected from current events. I dove into learning about our political systems when I was 16, but somewhat haphazardly and I still feel like I’m never going to catch up. (and also a little Miss-Marple-ish people-are-largely-the-same-in-small-groups-as-large-ones and look, if you’re not going to at least hire a few D&D playing teenagers to point out the OBVIOUS ways that your legislation is going to backfire spectacularly, should you even be designing laws? but mostly oof there’s so much that I don’t know that I don’t know).
So the Social Democracy games are particularly overwhelming with their “here are eight different parties and their potted histories and their current polling among six different demographics.” But this one I bashed through about four playthroughs in the last three-ish weeks and I finally managed to survive at least up to the war and I’m not quite flailing around entirely blindly and ugh, I didn’t write enough notes to know who this was going to alienate… Another couple and I might start to have a handle on the game mechanics.
And it has a good bibliography…
7 Likes
Our Lady of Thorns
by Joel Burton
This was maybe the third or fourth game of the festival that I opened, but the following kinda sapped my will to play and I set it down…
Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6 (both from Anthropic) were used to:
- check for anachronisms and American-isms in text
- suggest debugging steps for misbehaving code
- help create non-game scripts, like my testing/build system
I finally picked it up again, played enough to identify the poison and get into a couple places that I wasn’t supposed to (the cellar under the kitchen was easy, and then I arbitrarily found a secret passage behind an altar in the one chapel). But then I got caught with something I wasn’t supposed to have (I know I had hidden it but I guess I took it out again by accident, oops) and the LLM thing was still poisoning my attitude towards it so I just read the walkthrough transcript on the web site.
Dunno. It seems fairly polished; a decent mix of letting you explore and nudging you toward what you might do next. Most of the things in the walkthrough were vaguely on my mental list of things to try or places to check out. The scheduling was fun (though I felt like it mattered less than I expected, except that at particular times most people were going to be at services?), and finding when people would and wouldn’t talk to you. A lot of standing on things, which felt very improper for a novice, but nobody caught me at it, so eh.
7 Likes
Join the Swarm by various
OK. 10 more little things to go. I played these a while back but they didn’t immediately grab me like they sometimes do so I left them to come back to later…
I think my top recs are:
- The underground dungeon, by A.S.M.
- WHAT A MESS, by T.H.K.
- It’s Here, by Chaos
- Yellow Swarm, by HOT
- John the Swan, by Vitalii Blinov
Huh. That’s half of them. Well, none of them are bad, and they’re all short, so just go play them.
The 13/14-year-olds:
A Swarm of Spiders, by DiBa
This is a long gauntlet of “do you want a story, or do you want to go back to sleep?” but I thought it worked pretty well with the tone here, waking up in the middle of the night to something unusual, and maybe some amount of are you really awake or are you still dreaming? The final ending was where I thought it might be going all along, so the grandma was actually my favorite, where she probably doesn’t believe you no matter what you say, but whatever, time to go back to bed now.
The underground dungeon, by A.S.M.
Oh, right, this one. This one was great. Who wouldn’t want to play a game where “The maid enters the room. The king bites her but she doesn’t find it weird since the king throws a lot of tantrums.” I mean, horrifying working conditions aside, you were probably expecting the king to be dead, not bitey. This is one of those games where it’s short and super branchy and you’re never sure quite where any link is going to go, so it’s fun to speculate before clicking. Yay!
WHAT A MESS, by T.H.K.
Yesss. Terrifying killer rabbits, and fart jokes, this is what I want from the Senica Thing. 
Like the previous one, you never know where this is going to go. It’s an unusual choice to have player choices be bare nouns, but it adds another layer of “what is going to happen with this cave/footprints/rabbits? Who knows?” And it’s fun that the choices aren’t good/middle/bad or some other simple scale, they’re “bats” vs. “a party.”
The 18-year-olds:
Dystopia, by Creator
I’m not really into books about writers, or songs about musicians, or games about gamedev, so the choices here fell a little flat for me, but a bunch of the formatting was fun, and it was satisfyingly over the top, and yay, we get to punch the bad guy at the end.
It’s Here, by Chaos
This was one of my favorites of this anthology; staying abstract and focusing on the motion of being caught up in a collective consciousness, which then… just learns from you and moves on, leaving you with an experience to reflect on? That was a charming twist. Also I just… often like loopy hypertext poetry-ish that sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t link back on itself like this.
Join the swarm, by SAT
Another loopy one, more of a grounded story or scenario contrasting nicely with the abstractness of It’s Here. Looping is used to good (and threatening) effect: have we been here before? Is this new? The voices are in your head; an interesting variety of endings.
Jouin le Swarm, by Neural
A threatening cult of the neural link. I liked the four endings and their distribution, that mostly you get “Freedom” or “The Union” but you can also find your way through the cracks into “Forced Assimilation” and “Infiltration.” And they’re mostly threatening, yeah, but you can also often… just walk run away? Nice.
Yellow Swarm, by HOT
Right. You are Agent Yellow, tasked with taking out a queen bee who has taken over a lab dedicated to deriving “a neural synchronization compound from insect pheromones.” I thought this was really well-done: enough choices to feel interesting, but a narrow enough shape to keep pushing the player forward and keep the pace and tension up.
The writing felt pretty polished: for instance in this final paragraph of the intro, four sentences is maybe ONE too many with the same structure and length but I liked most of the individual sentences, especially the copper and wax one.
The facility is smaller than you expected. The lobby smells like wax and copper. The emergency lighting pulses red. Something moves at the far end of the corridor.
Excellent work.
The adults:
Swarm of Thieves, by SKIT
The stories were a little heavy-handed for my taste. Some nice styling, although I’m not sure if the juxtaposition of the archer statue with the “TRUTH throws snowballs at the police who approach to catch her” was intentionally or accidentally funny. Also it’s unclear to me if there’s intentionality to the irregular mix of he/she that are used for TRUTH? They feel kind of pointed sometimes but didn’t quite cohere into anything I could be sure of.
John the Swan, by Vitalii Blinov
This is someone who has made a stand-alone entry in IFComp (IIRC?) in the past. The timed text (as always) was a little painful but otherwise it was pretty fun. Short somewhat goofy poems, each with one or two links to go forward to another poem.
Memories lie:
Rolling the die
Wearing tie
No one can die.Was he a swan?
Was he the John?
Memories gone.
He stays alone.
It was fun that the poems played with words that are spelled the same but don’t actually rhyme, but they were also a little random; I liked the absurdity but a little more of a story throughline might have been nice?
6 Likes
Big thanks, Josh. I have been afk for acouple of days on SlavCon and a bit sailing just finding out you have been so budy playing and commenting on our entries. Am turning now into a busy bee myself to pass it on. Seems easier to teach basics of game design than making students enter a new social platform. 
6 Likes