Kastel's IFComp 2023 Reviews [All Reviews Done]

Competitions IFComp
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Thanks for the review! The map layout definitely suffers from not having intermediate directions available (e.g. the aisles in the cargo hold would make more sense being northeast and southeast)—and it’s been pointed out to me that, since the normal compass directions are still recognized by the parser, I could just have NE and SE work there as well. So the post-comp version will definitely improve that aspect!

My interpretation was that the puzzles can be solved by a rational human but not by a feral beast, so the inspector could lock himself up until the full moon passed, then unlock himself afterward and go back to business as usual. He needed to keep the keys around to get himself free afterward. (Note: really don’t read this spoiler without playing the game. It’s a mystery that loses a lot of its fun if you know the ending going in.)

The criticism makes sense, but honestly I loved that gem—the one I found too annoying was TAG, since there’s no way of knowing what it will do without spamming it in every single room. Getting PULL and CATALOGUE made it a lot better, for me, because now there was actual logic involved in using it.

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CODENAME OBSCURA: While I wasn’t a fan of this game, it’s an authentic graphic adventure parser game that was initially made for the ZX Spectrum 48K in 1987. It’s a time capsule with few modern features and design decisions – locations connect to each other in very strange ways, which is so unlike today’s IF – and that’s pretty cool.

Shanidar, Safe Return: The game lacks exposition and clarity, but its magic comes from how it could tell an epic prehistoric story of migration and journeys. If the game was more self-contained, I think it could’ve been great.

The Whisperers: I found the diegetic “socialist” play format difficult to read, though I’m probably just allergic to long paragraphs on a screen. And I also wish the play reflected more of the historiography of the USSR because it’s a far more complicated and interesting site of politics than the play suggests. The idea of the game is novel at least.

All Hands Abandon Ship: I found the simple premise of getting out the spaceship refreshing. The puzzle isn’t complicated at all, but there are many red herring objects with fun implementation to distract you along the way. But like other nautical games in this IFComp, I found it difficult to move around the ship. That said, it’s a game full of love toward its setting, so I recommend it.

tricks of light in the forest: A stylish Ink game where you play as a young kid going into the forest to get some samples for classes, the title ends up being a post-apocalyptic tale about humanity after climate change. The writing works for what it is, but I find the reading experience a bit underwhelming. We don’t see much of the overall setting because of the story structure. Instead of evoking a larger world, the game ends up focusing on the naive innocence of the player character and how it’s breaking apart. While I get that’s what the story wants, I guess I’m just not that interested.

Escape your psychosis: I’m not sure if I could ever jive with a lighthearted comedy on something as serious as psychosis and getting institutionalized. The endings are also coming from a right place, but it feels off to me.

Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head: I want to give this game another shot because the reviews show there’s something interesting going on in the story. But when I first played it, the gameplay put me off. While the monsters are clearly patrolling on a set path, I couldn’t get into their rhythm. I also relied too heavily on undos, making the game unfun. And the fact that you can only hold two puppets and their flavor text is hidden when you’re near a monster doesn’t really work for me. It’s an interesting Metroidvania at least.

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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.

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Thanks for the review of Hand Me Down, and your impressive efforts reviewing so many games.

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I did play past the prologue meant for IFComp and I was shocked by how large the game became.

It’s been a while since my last time so it might very well be that this rule had been relaxed since then, but wasn’t it the case that IFComp didn’t accept entries already published, even in part? If memory serves, this was even in the IntroComp FAQs.

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This is the first time PQ’s been published :slight_smile:

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Oops, my bad, John. I somehow managed to read Kastel’s remark as meaning that the prologue of PQ had already been submitted to IntroComp. I might be needing a nap :upside_down_face:

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Thank you so much for your kind words about Honk!

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Thank you so much for spending time and effort reviewing my game. I am choosing not to make any specific comments about reviews until after the comp, but I assure you that I am grateful for any and all comments, which are so useful in improving my game and future games.

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Detective Osiris: While the story is too much of a straight adaptation of the Osiris myth to be a noteworthy mystery, I love how traveling works in this game: it’s magical to go from the sky to the ground and travel between great distances. I just wish the writing was more serious and go beyond superficially comedic characterizations (the Sphinx in particular irks me out).

Creative Cooking: While rooms lack interactive objects and the game doesn’t attempt to tell a larger story with its setting, I thought it was a fun game that embraced its eclecticism: we can read a few tomes about the world, check out the Shit Pit, and meet our “senpai” and “kouhai” in a small village. I’m also fond of how the opening credits was implemented.

One Knight Stand: This game aims for a specific audience and doesn’t seem to care if other people get it. What reads corny and boring to me is suspenseful and relatable to its readers; it’s speaking a different language than something I’m unaccustomed to. I ended up being more interested in the community than the game because it’s a success there. I believe that “art” is not some “universal” that everyone will happen to like – there’s no way we can force people to look into parser fiction for example – and subcultures and people can have very different aesthetic sensibilities that will never meet. Competitions and jams like this are perfect places to encounter this diversity and while I don’t think the game is any good, I feel content from learning a thing or two. In a way, this game reminds me why I like exploring subcultures because it’s always a humbling experience to learn there are people who aren’t like me at all and I want to respect that humanly beautiful thing called difference.

Hawkstone: While I was initially interested in a homage to the games of Scott Adams, I found the implementation confusing. The RPG elements especially don’t feel connected to the puzzles. It’s also difficult to follow the long walkthrough and I never ended up finishing the game.

All the Troubles Come My Way: I feel like I’m missing something in this game and I can’t tell what. Cute stats, though – reminds me of Disco Elysium.

Magor Investigates…: The parser is finicky and I’m not sure if Comic Sans is a great font to read in, but I thought the worldbuilding and writing were engaging. Since it’s a standalone game in a bigger series, I thought it did well in evoking something bigger in the unseen world.

Out of Scope: While this game can be criticized for reinventing the wheel, I think it’s an interesting way to visualize objects and scenery as text in a 360 degree space. But as someone prone to motion sickness, I found the game’s controls and zooming in and out kinda exhausting. I entered chapter three feeling quite sick. After struggling to find the flags that advance the game state, I ended up reading the walkthrough; it didn’t write out steps but rather a summary of what happened in each chapter. I read the whole walkthrough, including the themes section, instead and was quite surprised at what the game is trying to do. I’m not sure if some of the ideas the author intended came through in the session I had (I understood the family was a hideout for military commanders and generals, but the larger picture was lost on me). It’s commendable the game is trying to do something different and succeeds in evoking the time of passage in the house, but it’s a buggy Unity game (the web version crashed on me when I tried to go to chapter 3) and it’s difficult for me to understand the chronology of events.

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Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts on Detective Osiris! I appreciate your feedback.

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I got too invested in my research for an upcoming article for Rosebush (someday I’ll be free) and forgot to update the thread, so here’s three reviews:

Library of Knowledge: Although this game has been withdrawn from IFComp, I decided – with the encouragement from other IF people – that I should write something about this for historical/archival reasons. The game isn’t great because the narrative framing device slams the audience with a cliched and somehow confusing infodump about the fantastical Chinese setting; we encounter real provinces of mainland China with zero changes to spice things up. Instead, we read a short story that feels like a synopsis of a better story that doesn’t exist. It’s a strange title where the actually imaginative aspects clash with formulaic writing; its interactivity doesn’t extend its narration to greater heights and it just feels like I’m reading a story on a website.

Kaboom!: The game is poorly implemented and the writing is rough, but the ending is a perfect fairy tale finale.

Antony & Cleopatra: Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando: This multiplayer Twine game is impressive and underwhelming at the same time. Its adaptation of a detective boardgame is nothing short of incredible and part of it might have to do with the fact I just enjoyed talking to @Nitori about what we should do. However, our inexperience got in the way and we investigated some dead-ends instead. It’s hard to evaluate the game on my usual rubric because it was more interesting as a social game experience than something mechanically satisfying as an interactive fiction title. I can take a step back and say, “Well, the bombastic multiverse setting of historical figures in the past in a cyberpunk future isn’t fully explored and the characters are sorta Wikipedia-ish descriptions of the real thing.” But that wasn’t really how I interacted with the game; I saw it as me talking to Nitori about how that Rasputin guy is pretty sus. I think the novelty of this game is less about it being an online multiplayer game and more suggestive of the unique interactions that could emerge from cooperative gameplay. There’s something very interesting going on when the two of us are talking about how we should talk to people and who to interview next; it just seems this adherence to the board game mechanic makes it quite funky. I would like to see more exploration on this cooperative aspect at least.

I have four more games left to play…

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Oh dam, I was scrolling through and I saw this and I immediately thought someone had made a spin-off of my game or something, since all of those objects are parts of my game: there is the Thing (thing your aunt gave you which you don’t know what it is, but sometimes I refer to it as the Thing with a capital T); there is also a very important (and violently buggy and probably the most commented part of my game so far) cupboard puzzle which is very long and… violently cruel; there is a very irrelevant key (it appears only for a tiny puzzle, and it’s only a half chance you get the key); and finally the longest-ish subsection of my game is a Workshop (Viv and John should know about it… most other people I doubt it).

So… yeah. TLDR: A Thing, a cupboard, and a [not-just-ordinary] Workshop are all very important parts of my game (plus an insignificant key which actually appears in said [not-just-ordinary] workshop) and I thought that the game had spun a life of its own.

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This is the final batch of the bite-sized reviews for the thread.

First, I’m going to write about two games I actually finished a while ago but forgot to put in the thread:

The Little Match Girl 4: This is the greatest Metroidvania adaptation of Hans Andersen’s classic tale. What I quite like about this game is how conflict-free the game actually is. You’re not fighting enemies, but you’re just solving different problems that require tools from different timelines. I find the exploration enthralling and I’m very curious about the lore. This is actually my first Ryan Veeder game and I think I jived with the humor quite well, so I should play more of the author’s stuff.

All Hands: This Texture game doesn’t really intrigue me in any way. It’s certainly the most fleshed out game of the bunch, but I found the interactivity quite detached from what the story is trying to tell. It ends up being quite empty.

Here are the last four titles that I played:

Eat the Eldritch!: This is a charming parser game with some cute puzzles. I don’t really have much to say except I just found it quite fun. It’s a fun game.

One Does Not Simply Fry: While I appreciate what the game is trying to do, I just didn’t jive with the humor at all.

The Finders Commission: The idea is neat, but I found the navigation quite irritating and it was quite annoying that I was stuck trying to open the Aegis case when I just never ordered a drink from the beverage area. I also found the description quite terse and it’s honestly hard to situate myself in the game.

Milliways:

I was looking forward to this game when I first heard that it was an unofficial ZIL sequel to Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s. Now that I’ve played it, I’m unsure and I wonder if it’s less to do with the game and more on how I remember Douglas Adams.

I was into everything Douglas Adams back then, including the Dirk Gently books and Last Chance to See…, so I have a very rosy-tinted picture of who Adams was and how he influenced my writing. His dry humor make otherwise dreary subjects like capitalism and the false progress of technological optimism quite fun to read. He’s a good satirist who knows how to write environmentalist science fiction that’s biting and critical about our pride as a humanity.

But that’s my version of Douglas Adams. I’m certainly ignoring his work on Dr. Who and countless other credits on radio and television. People are bound to have different interpretations of Douglas Adams, especially if they haven’t read him in years – that’s how we get rigid depictions of authors because we see them as fixed and static in history.

The Douglas Adams presented in this game is someone I’m not familiar with: terse, a bit mean, and also quite puzzle-y. It’s not an Adams I care for, but it is an Adams – the creator’s version of Douglas Adams, I must add.

So, I find it difficult to evaluate this game (which I haven’t finished). I think it’s like evaluating someone’s take on Douglas Adams and I can’t really detach my view on how I understood Adams. It’s an interesting conundrum: the friction and tedium I encountered are all related to my own interpretation of Adams.

At the end of the day, this is a solid fangame that tries to capture the Infocom tradition and it does reference some details in the books (though it’s been 20 years since I read it…). If you’re an Adams fan, I think it’s worth playing because it may remind you that there are different Adamses in people’s imaginations. The way I wrote about Adams here might not even be the Adams you have. And well, that’s a good lesson to learn from a game.

Alright, I think I’m done writing all the reviews and bites for IFComp 2023. That was fun, though very stressful and exhausting at the very end. It was fun to see my thread rake up so many views, even though I’m just some newbie on interactive fiction. I’m glad I played all the games and I hope I’ll submit something to IFComp next year.

If you’ve been following the thread since its inception, thanks for reading everything. I don’t know if my writing is good, but I hope you got something from it. Thanks again and since the last review is on a Hitchhiker’s fan game, I’ll appropriately end the thread with a so long and thanks for all the fish.

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Congrats on clocking all of them, and in record time! Super-satisfying is it not?

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Considering I went on a research binge, then played a video game, and binged on horror movies for Halloween, I’ll take it.

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Congrats on this amazing feat!~

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Well done for all the reviews.

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Now that you said this, those that reviewed the entries this year and who have yet to participate in any IFComp (including past years’), time to go up one level and get one done for IFComp 2024! (myself included? …)

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Thanks for reviewing Milliways!

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