Bali B&B: I have mixed feelings about this game because I’m Chinese Indonesian and I know Bali quite well. It’s quite strange and alienating to see the city in this foreign tourist light. I think it succeeds as a story that fantasizes what it’s like to run a B&B in this country, but it’s at odds with the Indonesia I know.
Virtue: This work doesn’t feel like a satire but a reductive biography of a Tory. It tries to explain why these politicians become the way they are, but it feels too “logical” to be sensible; we learn that (upsetting sexual content warning) the protagonist was molested by a priest, which informs how she looks at morals and decency. And it ends with another politician suggesting her moral crusade was dirty. Ignoring for a moment the game’s stance on sexual purity, I find the explanation too simplistic and certainly not ironic or exaggerated enough to be satirical. I don’t quite understand the message this game is trying to say besides implying survivors can become moral crusaders or opportunistic politicians. It’s possible I’m misreading this game hard, but the whole experience leaves me with a sour aftertaste and I think the game needs more explicit content warnings.
Hand Me Down: I like the idea of playing a Twine game that leads to a parser, but I don’t really care for this kind of sentimental story. The parser element is really neat; however, it feels more a gimmick than something properly integrated into the story (I’m aware that you can find diary entries, but they’re so hard to find). The game’s use of LLM art as portraits also puts me off and makes some dramatic situations quite bizarre.
Honk!: An enjoyable game where you’re trying to up-end the Phantom who’s ruining the circus. The puzzles are interesting, characters all have fun personalities (it feels like the Big Circus from Ace Attorney: Justice for All), and the climax is hilarious. I’m also glad the math puzzle has an alternative solution. The game definitely left me honking for laughter.
How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title: This game is verbose, overwhelming, and very long. All IFComp reviews of this game are impressions at best and mine is more neutral: the bombastic prose makes it hard for me to decipher what’s important in the setting (in retrospect, I should have used BRIEF) and the tutorial interjections got annoying. Even in the cutscenes, I’m just glazing over these large slabs of text explaining the setting. I did play past the prologue meant for IFComp and I was shocked by how large the game became. I closed the game afterwards. It’s a really good-looking game in QTADS and there seems to be some magic in it, so I wonder if I would appreciate this game more if I knew what I was going into.
Barcarolle in Yellow: This game is doing something interesting with metafiction and cinema, but its implementation makes it hard to get into. I do like how the hints are displayed at least.
Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest: The prose doesn’t agree with me: the figurative language feels overextended, the cadence bothers me more than it should, and I’m usually left confused what any of these sentences mean. I just can’t visualize anything in this game. The puzzles seem underclued too and the walkthrough didn’t help me, so I never got far into the game.