Hey all, really excited to play this year’s entries! I’m going to try and get through as many as possible before the start of the new semester.
11 Likes
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST
THE BODY & THE BLOOD
Headline is, I really liked this. The writing is polished and compelling, the experiences portrayed feel raw and challenging and humour cuts through at all the right moments (and cut is the word—it’s very sharp). It does a great job of portraying how it feels to be Very Online without falling into lazy tropes (the Yahoo Answers gregnant bit sent me absolutely west). The dual narrator is great and implemented with a light touch. Really powerful in the places where it needs to be, shades of Alison Rumfitt. And it’s hot! Really hot. Great ending, too. Really interested to know what factors feed into which ending and what the other one is.
It looks fantastic as well, very slick presentation, I liked the colour shift to indicate tone/space and the text was super readable. The Discord/Tumblr bits were fantastic. The Credits and Perversions sections were really difficult to make out, though, might just need a higher contrast text for those.
My main (and really, only) critique is that I would have loved a bit more interactivity. It’s quite a while before the first choice pops up and I was getting concerned that it was just going to be tapping to reveal text the whole way through. The choices when they occur are great and I just would have really liked to see more of them—as it is the experience feels more like reading a great short story, so when the choices appear it almost breaks the flow of the narrative rather than integrating into them.
5 Likes
Birding in Pope Lick Park
Eric Lathrop
I cannot explain how excited I was to see a birding game in this year’s lineup—I’m a keen birder and have actually been thinking a lot recently about what it would look like in IF, so I was really keen to discover how the author had implemented this.
Firstly, I LOVED that there are integrated links to birding tools. I’m often a fan of games where there’s some crossover into the real world, and I think this is a great way to encourage players not only to engage with the game, but to try out birding in real life. I appreciated the accessible approach to identification too—for example, telling the difference between a Downy Woodpecker and a Hairy Woodpecker. I also cracked up at the ‘weird duck time’ comic (this is also true of birding in the UK).
The writing is simple but effective, with some lovely sensory details and descriptive moments. I would have happily lingered on some of the images for longer.
Visually, I found it a little busy—the uncollapsing text and photos often left me having to scroll to find my place, and the image loading times were a little slow and broke the immersion slightly. Great to have alt text/captions for all the images though.
Overall, I thought it did a really lovely job of simulating the experience of birding—the gentle, meandering pace, the surprise and delight of discovering and recording a new bird. Lovely touch to have the full list of everything you saw available at the end. Also, as a birder from outside the US, it was exciting to discover the sort of birds someone in a different part of the world might see in a typical day! Thank you for making this.
3 Likes
Big Fish
Binggang Zhuo
This game is a choice-based mystery where the protagonist investigates a crime that their late uncle was accused of committing in a town called Big Fish.
The prose does a pretty good job of creating a noir-like atmosphere, with a moody ambience and sense of impending dread. There was a little confusion with one of the names—are Fuller and Fleur the same person?
I felt a bit railroaded by the choices in a way that put me off slightly—for example, in Chapter Two, you’re given the option to visit various locations (Church, Tavern, etc.), but the text said to report to the Police Station first, so I did that. I exhausted the police station options, then went to the West Shore to follow up. Unexpectedly, this moved me onto Chapter Two so I was unable to go and visit the other locations in town at that point (even though I was able to return there later). It would have been good to perhaps either not been given such clear directives on where to go first, so the player is encouraged to explore at will, or else not move them on to the next chapter without warning.
I think the game could also have benefited from a bit of work on the visual styling—a few tweaks to the Harlowe default colour scheme and some more line breaks would have made a world of difference.
The plot was interesting—very up my street genre-wise, I love a small-town mystery with supernatural elements!—but I did find the story a little hard to follow sometimes. It might have been useful to have a journal/notebook function where clues we’d found were recorded, as it was challenging sometimes to mentally keep track of all the details. I did work out who the real murderer was, though, so that was satisfying.
4 Likes
Campfire
loreKin
Note: I found one possible bug—in the morning it said I had time for 2 activities, but when I went swimming that went up to 3. When I picked swimming again I couldn’t scroll any further and had to restart. Again, on my second playthrough, doing one activity put the number up from 2 to 3. Then from 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 6, etc. I could pack up at any time so this didn’t prevent me from finishing the game, but this feels unintentional so I thought it was worth flagging.
The prose is lovely. As with Birding in Pope Lick Park, it’s nice to play a game that lets you immerse yourself in a peaceful experience and linger on the details and sensations around you. Very calming.
I found the text quite hard to read—it’s grey with a light font weight against a white or black background, so I was squinting a bit—but the layout is nice. There was some repeating/stacked text in places (for example when adding things to cook).
I really enjoyed the details of shopping and packing for the trip (I always love minutiae like that, makes the experience feel more tangible), but it would have perhaps been good to have a clearer idea of what I was shopping for (even if that was just ‘I need to pick up some things for my camping trip’—I know this is implied from the title and blurb but I’d like to see it in the text too).
I appreciated that the items you picked up at the start of the game could be used once you were camping—it made the experience feel personalised and changed it up each time. I really want to make popcorn on an open fire now!
5 Likes
Turn Right
Dee Cooke
This was so good and clever and funny. When I first started I was like ‘right, okay, I get it, I just type ‘turn right’ every time, this is going to get old quickly’, but that really isn’t the case, for a few reasons.
Firstly, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. If this was a longer game the conceit might get tired, but it’s short and snappy enough that it works. The writing is also really funny and sharp—I don’t even drive but I know EXACTLY the purgatory-like experience of being at a junction like this—so it was an amusing experience rather that a frustrating one (I mean, it is frustrating, but it’s intended to simulate frustration so it worked—I was frustrated with the other drivers, not the game).
I also LOVED how organically I felt pushed to taking other desperate actions (scream, cry, reverse, etc.) and that they had responses assigned to them even when you’re unable to carry them out (I’d love to know what else you can attempt to do). Weirdly the tone sort of reminded me of the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game? Had that sort of tongue-in-cheek tone to it.
It’s a very neat, well-executed little thing. I really enjoyed it.
5 Likes
You Can’t Save Her
Sarah Mak
This was so, so excellent. Beautifully written, elegantly crafted. The narrative is clear without being expository, and the use of styling to indicate alternating sections (narrators/time) is really well-executed.
Choices run throughout the text, and feel meaningful whether they impact the ending or not (I’m not sure if they do—I’ll play again at some point and find out!). The use of timed and cycling text is effective, feeding seamlessly into the game’s themes of hopelessness and free will. It’s such a great example of integrating interactivity as an a crucial part of the experience, rather than supplementing it.
The soundtrack is also absolutely stunning, so atmospheric. I think there’s moments where it would have been more effective if it faded out rather than cutting off, but that’s a very minor nitpick.
Also—I spent the entire game going ‘this reminds me so much of Porpentine’s stuff’, so I was delighted to see the note at the end.
5 Likes
Your review is appreciated. Can you clarify/send any screenshots of the credits and content warnings being difficult to make out? It should use the same styling and fonts as the rest of the game and be as easy to read.
Cheers,
– THE BLOOD
2 Likes
The Garbage of the Future
AM Ruf
I feel like I should preface this review with the caveat that I am not very good at puzzles and don’t have a vast amount of experience with this format—some of my struggles can probably be put down to missing cues etc. that more experienced players might pick up on!
This game has a great set-up—a truck driver alone in a darkened landscape, something menacing lurking in the shadows. I’m a big horror fan so this was always going to appeal to me. The styling is nice, readable, and adds to the ambience of the game.
My first run was a bust—I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and just sort of wandered around in the dark until I was eaten. That’s on me. The second time I realised you could turn the flashlight on and that improved my experience considerably. I managed to get the hose to start pumping into the lake but was again, sadly, eaten.
I think the structure here is solid and the writing is good, but personally I would have liked to see a little more variety in the text to keep building that eerie feeling. The sense of threat was present but I found myself noticing it less in the second run because I was focused on keeping the flashlight on, pumping the waste, etc. I’m really interested to know what happens if you succeed in emptying the tank so I’ll have to have another run at it soon!
7 Likes
Thank you so much for your lovely review, Lauren!
3 Likes
The Shyler Project
Naomi Norbez (call me Bez, e/he)
For starters, it was cool to hear voice acting in a piece of IF! I think both actors did a really great job and it added an additional level of depth to the game. The story was interesting, and the writing is pretty polished. I liked the UI and the music too. Some of the choices where they appeared felt quite surface level—often just variants on the same response, or so it appeared. I would have liked to have seen some more choices that felt like they could have a more significant impact on the course of the narrative, such as the one where Jaiden decides how to respond to Shyler’s issues.
In terms of the central relationship, obviously this is a dynamic we’ve seen before—an AI tool gaining sentience, or at least the capacity for self-reflection, and a human communicating with them. Maybe it’s my expectations of the convention that are to blame here, but I was really surprised when almost immediately Shyler began talking about their own opinions on God, faith, etc. before offering much in the way of support to Jaiden (especially when Jaiden has just explicitly disclosed that they’ve recently had a manic episode). I don’t know if this is meant to imply a continuation of long-standing relationship between the two, but it did jar with me slightly. I might have liked to see Shyler’s personality, opinions and perspectives reveal gradually over the course of the narrative rather than being front-ended—or, at least, for that earlier relationship to have been shown a bit more. From my understanding Shyler’s approach is meant to have shifted away from their creators’ intended programming, and I would have liked to have seen that shift happen rather than being told about it after the fact.
The relationship between Jaiden and Shyler felt a little forced rather than developing organically, which is a shame because I think it could be really compelling if built upon more. I also think the idea of an AI being able to be programmed to be ‘better’ left some interesting questions unexplored—is facilitating this bittersweet for Jaiden, a human being whose own mental health issues can’t be ‘fixed’ in that way? How this change affect Shyler’s ability to support their users? I think there’s a longer game in here, one which takes more time to explore these ideas more fully.
In conclusion, a snappy little game which raises some compelling questions about AI and mental health, which could benefit from more time and space to linger on them.
3 Likes
Thank you very much for the review.
My SO pointed out that bug and I had made a note to go back and fix it… Which apparently got missed it that batch of edits. Thanks for the heads up.
I’m really glad you enjoyed the prose. I know it’s a little rough around the edges, but I was worried about the overall quality of my writing. From the feedback I’ve gotten it seems I needn’t be too worried on that front.
Hope you enjoy the Comp!
4 Likes