Kozelek reviews the IF Comp

Competitions IFComp
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First of all, I think I should make a disclaimer: I’m not a great reviewer. But I’ll write my reviews here anyway, because I know that, good or bad, any feedback is welcome.

Without further ado, here are my first reviews:

1.- High On Grief

Summary

Regardless of its quality, autobiographical stories move me, and this one seems to be just that.
It’s certainly not high literature, and there are many elements that take me out of the story (such as the actors’ voices, for example, or some of the expressions).
There’s not much originality either (the story of a queer person recounting the difficulties of their childhood and their oppressive relationship with their family), and I find the structure repetitive (ten conversations with different people where the protagonist reflects on their dead mother), but I do believe there is sincerity in what the author writes.
Even so, I can’t give it a high rating. Score: 5

2.- The Witch Girls

Summary

Well written, interesting, and replayable. A story with supernatural elements, like a small metaphor about the end of adolescence.
Some paths have elements of “body horror” and others more psychological horror, but I don’t think they clash with each other. I would say that each path is a different expression of a young person’s anxieties about losing their virginity and entering sexual maturity.
Score: 7

3.- Violent Delight

Summary

This is a game that tests your patience. From the very beginning, when it makes you wait almost an hour to start playing. In a contest with 80 entries, this act of rebellion and challenge to the player’s tolerance seems almost admirable to me.
And then there’s the game itself. I believe there’s a lot I’m missing. I can’t say I understood it (and I think there may be cultural reasons or references that I’m missing), but even so… I kinda did like it? I was interested in discovering the secrets, of which there are many.
But it’s still a game I didn’t understand. Because of everything I’m undoubtedly missing, I can’t give it more than a 6.

4.- Cart

Summary

On a first reading, I liked the story. It’s a well-set and competently written period piece, perhaps a little Manichean with some of its characters, but interesting and well told. However, when I tried other story paths, I was disappointed: it’s a very linear story, with a slight patina of interaction. At least in the ones I tried, almost no decision point leads to a significant variation in the plot.
In any case, the story is still interesting and well written. Score: 6.

15 Likes
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5.- A Conversation in a Dark Room

Summary

The first thing that came to mind when I read this story was how much it reminded me of the plot of “Interview with a Vampire.”
I think it’s a game that tells the story it wants to tell, and it does so relatively well. The problem is that this type of plot lends itself to delving deeper into the characters, to reflecting on mortality, on the human condition perhaps… But instead, this story seems more focused on developing the lore of its fictional world than on humanizing its characters. For me, it’s a wasted opportunity. Even choosing the “empathy” route, I couldn’t empathize with any of the characters. Score: 5.

6.- Slated For Demolition

Summary

When I first started reading it, the first thing that came to mind was “Porpentine.” The same cryptic, telegraphic yet poetic texts, the same American downtown surrealism. Even the colors and CSS effects seem similar to me.
But as I read on, the similarities ceased to matter. It reminded me of everything I like about Porpentine: the exploration of a complex, multi-layered mental world. The images laden with both violence and vulgarity. And the scenes that suggest a very dark event in the author’s mind. When I previously discussed “High On Grief,” I explained how autobiographical works move me, even if they are not high literature. When it is well-constructed fiction, as it is here, the effect is much more powerful.
I really enjoyed “Slated For Demolition.” And I’m saving it to play again, because I sense that there are many more aspects to it that I have overlooked. Rating: 8

7 Likes
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7.- Mooncrash!

Summary

This is the first parser-based interactive fiction game I’ve played in this IF Comp. When I first started playing and realized that many of the objects mentioned in the descriptions didn’t allow for any interaction, I began to lose faith in my ability to enjoy it. But then I discovered that what the game expects from you as a player are not elaborate actions or puzzles, but speed and allowing yourself to be swept away by the game’s absolutely crazy fantasy world.
To try to sum it up in a few references: it reminds me of the old Dungeons and Dragons “Manual of the Planes,” with all its bizarre locations and cosmic deities, but it also reminds me of the old Godzilla movies from the 1960s, with their cardboard sets and foam rubber monsters. In short: it’s pulp, very entertaining pulp, but not particularly deep. If you don’t expect anything more than simple puzzles and a story that takes you through increasingly bizarre settings, you can have a good time with Mooncrash! But don’t expect high literature. Score: 6

7 Likes
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8.- BackPackWard

Summary

Very entertaining. From the outset, I find the protagonist and the characters I encounter extremely relatable. The tone is parodic, but a parody with heart, well written and funny, which pokes fun at the little insecurities of a decidedly “geeky” protagonist and, in passing, takes a few jabs at the miseries of modern life with its crappy jobs and inequalities. It’s like reading an adaptation of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” starring Simon Pegg.
In terms of mechanics, there is one that is central to the story (to the point of giving it its name) that I really liked: at different points in the plot, we have to choose which objects to carry in our backpack, which requires playing a little “Tetris” by rotating the objects and fitting them together to fit as many as possible. On the other hand, the protagonist’s inability to control his anger is another mechanic: at various points, we have to choose whether to let our fury escape or contain it.
Overall, it’s a fun and well-constructed story. Score: 7

9.- Saltwrack

Summary

Saltwrack is a science fiction story: after a not entirely described apocalyptic event, only a few city-states remain in the middle of a plain covered with toxic ice. In the game, we play the role of a scientist who organizes an expedition to an abandoned city in the north to find answers about what happened.
What a journey. When I write a review of any fiction, I tend to think of references, and here a number of them come to mind: The descriptions of strange and hostile ecologies in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” the search for a goal in the middle of dangerous terrain in ‘Stalker’ or “Annihilation,” even the idea of an expedition through increasingly alien landscapes in “Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City.” But I wouldn’t be doing full justice to a work that clearly took years of care and development (six years and nearly 78,000 words, according to the author).
I have entered the world of Saltwrack twice, and each time has been distinct. My companions have behaved differently. I have encountered differing obstacles along the way. There have been deaths in some cases and not in others, betrayals that do not occur on other journeys. The surprising thing is that none of these events seem random when you read them; everything unfolds logically, and all subsequent events follow naturally from the previous ones. The amount of work required to construct a fiction like this exceeds what I feel capable of doing (although it inspires me to try, which is another sign of a good work).
This Saltwrack is a little marvel. Score: 9

4 Likes
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10.- Errand Run

Summary

Every now and then, it’s nice to have a short, straightforward story among other longer reads. This is a story with a “surprise ending,” although I’m afraid that surprise is telegraphed too clearly from the outset (That almost empty supermarket? The protagonist’s brief moments of rage?) Or maybe I’ve just seen too many stories of this type. In any case, it’s entertaining and competently written for what it is. Score: 5

11.- Horse Whisperer

Summary

The author warns at the beginning of the game that it is incomplete (although they also warn that it should be finished by September 1, and we are now on the 6th). What I did not expect was that it would be so incomplete: it is not possible to get to the end, and there are many sections with placeholder text warning that they are still to be finished.
The game loop has potential, and despite the multiple grammatical errors and the almost telegraphic style, it did manage to make me smile a few times. But a game that cannot be finished does not deserve a good score. Score: 3

5 Likes
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12.- Crescent Sea Story

Summary

Each chapter of this story begins with a quote, and the first one points to its greatest influence: “A Wizard of Earthsea.” As in that novel, the central theme revolves around a desire for knowledge and power through magic, although unlike it, the motivation is not knowledge itself, but revenge. Another theme in this novel and the rest of the series that the game also incorporates is the risk of facing forces greater than one can defeat.
It is not the only influence, of course. It also reminds me of “Worlds Apart” by Suzanne Britton, with the trope of the amnesiac protagonist who unlocks their memories through successive flashbacks. Although here the protagonist may have greater moral ambiguity, which makes them more interesting.
The story, which may not be the most original (as I have indicated, it hints at a strong influence from Ursula K. Le Guin and her Earthsea cycle), is well written and competently narrates its successive chapters, revealing enough information about the world and the protagonist for the player to fill in the missing gaps. Although the puzzles are not complex, they serve their purpose well in describing the world and its inhabitants. It is exactly the kind of story I wanted to read on a day like today, and as such, it has fulfilled its objective. Score: 7

3 Likes
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13.- A Day in a Hell Corp

Summary

A demon in hell tries to excel at his job torturing his victims in order to win a vacation in paradise. Of course, as is usually the case in this type of story, the tone is parodic and histrionic. At no point do we empathize with any of the characters, but that’s not the point of this type of plot: the characters are masks through which to satirize the capitalist world and the miseries of the working class. Nothing new under the sun, but the plot and humor, while not particularly sharp, are entertaining nonetheless. Score: 6

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Thank you for the attentive and timely review: your critical eye has precisely captured the spirit and intentions of the story. I appreciate the clarity and balance with which you highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the interactive story.
The characters, devoid of true humanity, function as specters of capitalism: entities stripped of their own identity, reduced to cogs in a productive mechanism that never stops, not even in hell. Their existence is an extreme caricature of the alienated working condition, where even eternal damnation becomes a corporate performance

2 Likes
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Kozelek, thank you so much for your very kind review! It made me happy to hear that you experienced the game as I hoped readers would.

1 Like
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Thanks Henry and Hex for answering my reviews. It’s always a pleasure to see that they have been of help to you :slight_smile:

14.- whoami

Summary

Disclaimer: The author of this game is a member of the Spanish Interactive Fiction community. We know each other, so there may be some bias. The reasons I decided to review this game are because I hadn’t played it until now, his work only has one review so far, and I’ve decided to cover games with fewer reviews.
The initial story could be a reflection of the anxieties of our time: the United States has launched a nuclear attack on Europe, and a scientist decides to save the results of his research before dying. One of the most striking things about “whoami” is the variety of interfaces: we will mainly move around a simulated console environment, but we will find web pages, short narrative paragraphs more typical of Twine, an email manager interface, and a text adventure with a parser for the simulation part.
The game uses some of these systems (such as the email manager) as a way to convey its story and how the protagonist got there, even though they are not necessary to reach the end. What is really important is to understand how the simulation program works (how to extract our consciousness, changing the necessary parameters, and compiling the final simulation) and the part of “training” the simulation through the text game. Here we have a dilemma: how to get fruit from a basket. Depending on how we do it (there are four different ways), the final program will simulate a different type of society: “green” capitalism, an egalitarian society, terminal capitalism devastated by war, etc.
I found “whoami” to be an interesting experiment, especially because of the way it conveys its narrative and the way it uses different modes of interaction. If there is one specific place where this experimentation with interfaces “creaks” a little, it is in the Hanoi Towers game that must be solved in order to compile the final simulation. In any case, it’s a good game: 7

15.- Transformations of Dr. Watson

Summary

Continuing with my list of games with few votes, I find this one, which already warns of AI-generated assets. And I understand the reason for the lack of votes. It’s not just that AI images repel me, but that the use of AI for something makes me suspicious of the use of AI for other things, such as text or story design. Hence my reluctance: suddenly I have to evaluate not only the game itself, but also the possibility that machines have been used for these other things (which, obviously, would make me abandon this review altogether).
The story itself is a relatively well-told Sherlock Holmes investigation tale (although here my suspicion about AI rears its head again) that could pass for any Conan Doyle story if it weren’t for the supernatural element: throughout the story, we take on the role of Watson, who transmigrates into the bodies of a cat, a parrot, and a little girl, trying to alert Holmes to the real killer. The story is very linear, and at least as far as I could see, no choices affect the final outcome.
Neither the story nor the game design particularly surprised me, and I consider the presentation with a large number of AI-generated images to be a negative point. It is very likely that this has predisposed me against the work, but I cannot help but evaluate it according to my subjective experience. Score: 5

5 Likes