Lava Ghost's IF Comp Reviews

Competitions IFComp
10

Thanks so much for the review – I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts, and thanks for the kind words on what worked for you! A quick response under spoiler-block on the thing you mentioned feeling awkward to include in the review:

It’s totally fine to have whatever response to the game as you have, of course, since as you say the judgment is just on how (and how well) I wrote the thing, not anything personal – and I tried my best to preemptively keep folks from feeling bad about stuff like this in the afterward! But on the specific thing you mention – not feeling as much of a strong, positive, emotional connection to the character of Liz as presented, either for you directly or between her and the Mike character – that’s actually a response I expected and maybe even intended? I wanted to steer clear of having the thing come off too sentimental, downbeat, and woe-is-me-ish, and frankly I’m not sure I’d have had the mental or emotional wherewithal to actually write the thing if I’d tried to communicate what we meant to each other, vs. trying to stick rather strictly to exactly what happened, and was felt, in each of those memories. Probably this makes the piece weaker than it could be, so I think it’s absolutely a fair critique, and definitely not anything to feel awkward about pointing out (you should feel perceptive :slight_smile: )

Cheers and thanks again!

2 Likes
11

Thanks for responding to my review! I agree that it likely wouldn’t benefit the story to be extremely sentimental, so maybe it is for the better that it’s just, “Here are specific events where she was present.”

I appreciated this window into your/her lives, either way!

1 Like
12

Thank you for the review Lava Ghost!

If you are worried about Shingon Buddhists being offended by Avalokiteśvara and Kannon having different shrines, just know that before Wabewalker was text-based, it was a point-and-click prototype using graphics from Google Street View. The two real-life shrines had signs beside them, which my friend from Japan translated as “Avalokiteśvara” and “Kannon”. So while they represent the same thing, people do not always name their shrines the same way. As for cryptograms, symbols don’t usually “mean” the things they encrypt. Rest assured, we aren’t chanting body parts, haha.

I hope that relieves some of your worry about possible offense to Shingon Buddhists. I appreciate your feedback!

2 Likes
13

The Spirit Within Us by Alessandro Ielo

Spoilery Review

The Spirit Within Us is a strange mixture of the old-school and the new-school. The old-school, in that it’s a custom parser with an inventory limit and health daemons, even randomized combat; and the new-school, in that it invokes weighty themes, has a PC with a rich interior life, and asks the player to make moral decisions on the PC’s behalf. The game advertises four endings - I found three, unless the fourth ending is ‘drive away and end the program prematurely’, in which case I found all four.

This old-school aspects of the game don’t really turn out that satisfying. You start the game wounded and in pain, in someone else’s bedroom with no memory of the past few hours, and unless you regularly consume food and medication you will eventually die. I see the appeal of a survival game with harsh mechanics. But I never really felt at imminent risk of bleeding out, so the impression was more of wandering some guy’s property snacking on his victuals to keep a number high. (I would have liked the opportunity to bandage my wound, by the way, perhaps using the sheets in the starting room. That’s the sort of thing I’d actually try to do if I was at risk of bleeding out slowly.)

The inventory limit was an annoyance in a game where you often have to pick up an item to interact with it in any other way at all. In fact, the lack of implicit action support in the custom system hurts in general. The implementation in general could have been worse (and I am always mindful of the amount of work it must take to establish even a basic text adventure parser and world model from scratch.) But I must note the presence of a loop of rooms which were clearly written to be experienced counterclockwise even though it is perfectly possible to take them clockwise. It’s also possible to be trapped in that area if you don’t bring the right item. And one important piece of story information can only be found by typing LOOK NORTH - which is nowhere suggested as something that it might be useful to try.

The story - once reconstructed by exploration and flashes of memory - turns out to be as follows. The PC is a CSA survivor who also has dissociative identity disorder. After discovering child pornography left by the janitor at their school (they seem to be employed there, rather than a student), they went to confront the janitor at his home. (From the environmental evidence, the janitor has put a fair amount of intellectual effort into justifying his actions, which is a nice point of characterization.) A violent identity surfaced and tried to murder the janitor, but a different, protector, identity took control and merely locked him in a shed. The PC has the option to try to ‘become whole’ by either embracing their violent side and killing the janitor, or resisting it by facing the janitor but leaving him to his own devices.

So we have the idea that mentally ill people and trauma survivors are predisposed to violence; not great. The edges here are somewhat sanded off by the fact that the game doesn’t actually judge you for choosing violence. Both options seem to be a valid therapeutic foundation; arguably the game prefers violence, as in the pacifist ending it takes care to remind you that the janitor may continue to claim more victims.

Is this really the choice, though? In real life, we recognize options in between passivity and extrajudicial murder for dealing with evil. I tried taking the box of photos with me on a pacifist ending, to see if I could report him to the authorities, but no luck. Of course state violence is still violence, so it’s possible the game is trying to transfer its ethical point into a more convenient package. But if this was the idea, it should not have conflated its ethical question with a very individual therapeutic question.

In The Spirit Within Us, there is no role for society in containing evil; there is only you, versus demons within and without. There is also no role for society in helping the abused or traumatized to recover or empower themselves. The path to healing begins not with getting into therapy or reaching out to the people around the PC, but with looking at a pedophile and deciding whether to kill him or not. The impression given is that you, the individual, are completely alone. And for all the apparant optimism in the ending messages, that’s a really bleak vision.

Rankings

Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me

2 Likes
14

The Song of the Mockingbird by Mike Carletta

Spoilery Review

The Song of the Mockingbird is lovely. I haven’t played Mike Carletta’s earlier game, but this one is a good example of genre-appropriate puzzle design. It’s a nonlinear puzzler, but everything the PC does feels like something the protagonist of an actual Western serial might do. A good hero uses his wits, after all. For most of the game the protagonist is sneaking around, trying to avoid being shot, but it’s clear that in game terms he’s never actually in danger, and this is also fine: we know the hero in a pulp genre isn’t actually going to die.

One thing that is notable about the game (I don’t know enough about serial film tropes to know if the game diverges from its inspiration here) is its willingness to treat violence as horrific. To recover his love from the Black Blade, Boots must kill four men - actually, many men, but in four discrete acts - and the results are described, not graphically, but sufficiently to make it clear that they’re ugly and upsetting. And it affects Boots, too: He always stops to mourn the wasted life.

Indeed, Boots often seems like too good, or perhaps too naive, a man to be in this sort of adventure. It’s clear early on that he’s missing some fundamental information about what’s going on; I was actually anticipating a more radical twist than we got. The ending was possibly the weakest part. Rosa was working for a Confederate holdout, but is still sympathetic: a fraught choice given today’s politics. And I don’t know that I bought Boots’s continued devotion to her. Then again, I didn’t see the first eleven episodes.

The ending does, however, manage to be effectively heartbreaking: not because of the character of Rosa, but because it drives home the sense of waste. Boots never needed to come to the Crossed Keys Ranch and burden his soul with those lives. There was no way to save Rosa, and the Black Blade was going to deal with herself and her men anyway. The whole affair was simply a tragedy. It’s always a risk telling players what they did didn’t matter, but in this case it came off beautifully and painfully.

I encountered guess-the-verb problems setting the loft on fire, but no other implementation issues. The setting was also well-researched, and Carletta showed his work in the endnotes. A strong game.

Rankings

The Song of the Mockingbird
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me

7 Likes
15

Smart Theory by AKheon

Spoilery Review

So, Smart Theory turns out to be an extended gripe about the Quality of the Discourse, in the form of an Ink piece describing a cultic group setting up in a university. I share the author’s concerns about some phenomena, but overall I suspect their values are very different from my own. In fact, this piece shows that, despite their claims to critical thinking, it is actually the author who is pro-censorship and wants to stifle knowledge.

The ‘Smart Theory’ cult as depicted in the game is deliberately described as low on actual content (at one point it becomes actual gibberish), but aggressive and totalizing. It advocates all sorts of things we are not supposed to approve of, such as:

  • Accusing people on the street of being bigots.
  • Making inflammatory replies on social media.
  • Fixing society by ‘criticism of media and grand narratives through a Smart lens.’
  • Socially ostracising people for ‘questionable’ statements.
  • Rejecting ‘[i]ndividualism, liberal humanism, consistent social values’.
  • Attempting to tear down society without a backup plan.
  • Printing books like “Dumb Fragility.”
  • Removing STEM courses from academia.

The game is Very Online; it stays on the topic of social media for a lot longer than the above list suggests. At the same time, it freely conflates social media discourse with academic discourse.

Now, I share the author’s concerns that social media has caused people to internalize a lot of totalizing beliefs about the way the world works that do not stand up to scrutiny; that it allows misinformation to fester; that it encourages glib ‘dunking’; that it encourages people to make performative statements to gain cred which may not be true or throught-through. But this is not specific to any specific ideology. It’s a function of social media itself.

As for other spheres of discourse: It’s clear that what AKheon is actually opposed to is critical discussions of social justice. If this wasn’t obvious before, it becomes blatant when they bring up “Dumb Fragility”: clearly derived from the term “white fragility”, a term used to describe the defensiveness white people often display in discussions of racism, coined by diversity cosultant Robin DiAngelo and later used as the title of a book by her.

And if they think this is the big threat to open discourse: look. I don’t know the situation in Finland, but in America you have a situation where a journalistic project which points out “Hey, slavery was pretty important to American history” receives major backlash and tenure denial, where conservative activists and legislators are suppressing all discussion of racism in schools because it’s “Critical Race Theory”. So ask yourself what views are really being suppressed.

rubs temples The title ‘Smart Theory’ is obviously intended to be ironic. The writer doesn’t think it’s smart, he’s just trying to paint his opponents as pseudo-intellectual. They see themself as the smart and rational one. So let’s think about smartness. Or actually, they’re right that ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ are totalizing terms. Let’s think about wisdom and foolishness.

What’s wisdom, then? An important part of wisdom is being aware of the limits of one’s own understanding (this has been understood since Socrates.) A wise person embraces the idea that others may know things that they do not. If they are curious, they will pay attention to many perspectives, knowing that knowledge may be found anywhere. They should evaluate claims and may have to reject some, but not without first understanding them. Open-mindedness is an integral part of wisdom.

Has the author of Smart Theory engaged in open-mindedness? Well, they do not seem to have tried to understand the theories they despise. They actively suggest that the theories are circular, non-substantive, and gibberish, and they do so in particularly lazy ways such as presenting the theory as a list of movie quotes. They are preoccupied with “postmodernism”, a term they use with no apparent precision. They make the paranoid suggestion that STEM fields will become marginalized. Nobody with any power is actually coming for STEM fields; and the implication that they are merely reflects a horror that there might be more than one valid source of knowledge.

The whole endeavour is, frankly, exactly the ad hominem that they accuse Smart Theorists of. It’s clear the author does not accept certain academic fields as legitimate and would like to get rid of them - and they’ve also conflated that with a bunch of frustrations about social media. The certainty that they have nothing to learn from those fields is closed-minded and foolish, and reflects the binary thinking they despise in others.

Ranking

The Song of the Mockingbird
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

EDIT: To fix the tic whereby I put the emphatic “Look.” in three consecutive paragraphs.

8 Likes
16

Hm, I don’t read so much into this game. I just don’t know much about the PC based on what’s in the game, or what’s happened in their life prior to the half an hour or so depicted in the game. I take the events depicted pretty literally, what with all the hit points and such.

-Wade

1 Like
17

Thank you, Lava Ghost, for your thorough review! I appreciate it!

1 Like
18

Silicon and Cells by Nic Barkdull and Matthew Borgard

Spoilery Review

Silicon and Cells is a choice-based cyberpunk investigation game implemented in Unity. I didn’t think I was going to complete it in two hours, but then I did, although I only reached one of apparently nine endings. It has all the normal cyberpunk stuff like body implants, a VR cyberspace, and killing God, who is a computer. I do want to say that it advertises as having “a large dose of parody”, but I didn’t get that out of it, although there’s sometimes a dry, referential wit.

The game’s primary means of gating progress involves ablities which you can ‘power on’ (potentially taking energy from other abilities) to gain new options. One can take most powers in either bionic (body modification) or psionic form. At first it seemed like the dichotomy between transcending the body with external augments or enhancing one’s internal powers was going to be a major theme of the game (especially because of the name). It wasn’t, really, which was probably a good thing as it wouldn’t have been a very interesting theme. It does, however, leave the point of the options unclear: they’re different flavors of the same effects!

There’s a lot going on in Silicon and Cells. There are some casually innovative ideas like a person who ascended into the digital realm and became an encyclopedia. The creators have put in work to ensure that every significant character represents a different philosophy of how to deal with the world they find themselves in. The depiction of cyberspace is informed by the right parts of real-life internet culture: a somewhat older vision of the internet, less an arena for the world to screech at itself across and more an agglomeration of cosy habitats in which one may embed oneself. There’s even a MUD implemented within the game! And once the true nature of Jartekan is revealed, it really is immensely clarifying, and gives the quest to kill God (or, perhaps, do otherwise, but I went and killed God) a greater weight.

Besides quibbles like some places where information can be revealed in slightly the wrong order or a few character beats that don’t feel true, my big misgiving is the odd cramped-ness of the game. Even though the world had some good ideas in it, every part of the world felt like it was there specifically for me to find it. (This was especially obvious with the Elders: every Elder mentioned turned out to be important.) It’s not that I didn’t get a sense of the setting, so much that it felt like I was privileged to see were the only really important things going on in the setting… and I was led to them in some rather determined ways, following the signposted choices to get another infodump (but they’re well-presented and relevant infodumps) to guide me further along.

This could be seen as a part of the point: the world is claustrophobic, it’s a remnant of humanity kept shut away by an overbearing AI, and it can’t be truly expansive while the AI suppresses it. (I say, “AI”: the final twist about God feels wholly unnecessary.) In fact, it’s one of the reasons the reveal feels clarifying.

Even so, this feels like a game that wants to be even longer than it is, so some of its themes have more room to breathe and so it can spread out the investigative/plot structure more. (I stress that I’m reviewing on the basis of only one playthrough.) Even as it is it was impressive and satisfying - I just think it could have used more space.

Ranking

The Song of the Mockingbird
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

1 Like
19

shrugs When given a limited choice, I’m going to spend some time thinking about the implications of what I am and am not allowed to do.

20

Second Wind by Matthew Warner

Spoilery Review

This is one of two Adventuron games released during the comp. During ParserComp I had a bit of a snit on these forums about Adventuron’s lack of scrollback function. In the light of day, this seems more tolerable. (Most choice systems don’t have easy scrollback, including Silicon and Cells, which I had to review from memory. Really the problem during Parsercomp was made worse by the fact that The Faeries of Haelstowne was apparently the most complex story ever attempted in the system.)

Adventuron is kind of an interesting development in the IF sphere: a parser system, but one outside the Infocom tradition. In some ways, this places it as a sister to the choice renaissance; in other ways it feels startlingly regressive. But that’s a bias I should put aside. Interesting things were happening in parser outside Infocom in the 80s, for all that Infocom’s games were second to none in terms of actual ease of play. I’ve recently felt someone should take a proper second shot at the sorts of things Synapse and Telarium were trying. Will Adventuron bring that? Probably not. It’s optimized for the Scott Adams style.

What this means, however, is that starting this game I felt the same sense of anticipation I feel when starting up homebrew parser games: To what extent will this be in conversation with the modern style of interactive fiction? Second Wind turns out to have a clearly defined protagonist and a sort of arc. It also has a bittersweet ending in which the PC can only save his wife at the cost of his humanity. (The game was more like a zombie movie than I expected.) These are both modern-feeling features. On the other hand, there’s a time limit, and even small actions advanced the clock.

I liked the writing; there are nice lines like “The corridor has as much personality as the interior of a pipe.” But this game is irreparably damaged by two features. One is that the puzzle design is largely based around looking for utterly tedious codes, which are often gated behind word/number/general knowledge questions set up by NPCs for arbitrary reasons. Apparently the post-apocalyptic future will involve doing a lot of gematric math. Obviously this completely kills the fiction (you can’t even remember the code to your own door, or ask Wendy for hers). These aren’t even challenging problems that are satisfying to work out: They’re just a case of following the instructions, or looking up the right fact.

The second problem is guess-the-verb. The author seems to recognize this is a problem, because he often tells you what to do in a tutorial-like voice. It’s not enough. I was constantly having to go to the walkthrough to work out what input the game would accept. A safe must be DIALed, even though we previously used INPUT for the same sort of thing; the only way to drive the hoverbike is START HOVERBIKE (also a case of insufficient synonyms). At one point the game just told me a wrench could solve a problem without telling me what the problem was (I had to USE WRENCH). It would seem that, in this case, the old-school system came with old-school problems. And they are problems.

Rankings

The Song of the Mockingbird
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

3 Likes
21

Plane Walker by Jack Comfort

Spoilery Review

The opening text to this one was something to behold. I was going to copy and paste the whole thing, but it seemed too mean. Instead, I’ll describe it: a long single paragraph which meanders from belated realization to belated realization. The second sentence is, for some reason, about the PC’s entire life, even though the rest of the paragraph established me as amnesiac. Meanwhile the realization that the PC is alone on the airplane is buried after a comment on the bathroom smell. What it really needed was to be broken up into paragraphs, and focused on specific beats. As it was, the paragraph created distance from the situation rather than driving it home. It turned all these realizations, which should each have specific impact, into a mishmash of information.

It may seem harsh to spend to much time on one oversized paragraph, but it’s not crazy: an intro sets te tone for the rest of the game. And it’s not as if the rest of the game’s writing style is a model of immersion. The ending is weird (the protagonist just lets themself be unmade for no clear reason) ad a deeper sense of the PC as a character might have helped that land better.

What the game actually is is a surreal puzzler about trying to stop some sort of planar incursion. There are puzzles involving abstract mathematical concepts like imaginary numbers and 2-dimensional geometry. A lot of this is nicely implemented. However, there was a lack of clear motivation on both the general and specific level. Whether it was examining the same thing twice with no indication it might have changed, examining every single button on a keypad, entering a chalkboard, or sawing a limb off a dead tree, I often ended up doing things for no real reason. There’s also a lack of synonym support, most painfully in the lack of abilty to refer to a textbook as a ‘book’. And I really didn’t want to be doing inventory management in the middle of a plane crash.

The author clearly wants players to be able to follow the game easily, as he gives clear signposting some of the time. I don’t see any listed beta testers, and so - even though the game wasn’t very buggy - I would really recommend the author seek beta testing for games in the future, so he can find out how people will actually engage with the thing.

Rankings

The Song of the Mockingbird
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

3 Likes
22

A Paradox Between Worlds by Autumn Chen

Despite great fudging, I was unable to complete this within the two-hour deadline. I’ve decided I want to hold off on reviewing it until I can play it to completion. I can rank it, though.

Astrapella 4eva!!! (Rankings)

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Song of the Mockingbird
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

2 Likes
23

Off-Season at the Dream Factory by Carroll Lewis

Spoilery Review (CW: Discussion of Racist Violence)

Off-Season at the Dream Factory is top-tier in all the standard categories. It has good puzzles, including puzzly combat progression that’s very satisfying. The cluing in particular is ingenious: I especially love the way “gauntlets = mitts” was seeded. The level of polish was high, aided no doubt by the long list of credited beta testers: we’re far from Second Wind here. The menu-based conversation is nicely written; the antagonist convincingly nasty.

The PC, Zildud Henderson, is an orc whose job is to provide a bit challenge for adventurers. In this setting, RPG-style adventures are provided in the form of dreams, but dreams which involve real monsters fighting adventurers’ dream selves somewhere in the physical world (the exact mechanics are fuzzy, but the game doesn’t feel confusing in practice.) Real-world locations exist within the setting, and books that would be called “literary realism” in our world are considered to be fantasy in this world. So this fantasy world is very deliberately a reflection of our own. (Remember that.) Zildud is terrible at his job, in part because of a real distate for violence. But a surprising change in his dreams shows him a less aggressive way to fight adventurers…

There’s a lot going on in this game. I haven’t even mentioned yet the inclusion of an orcish Lewis Carroll who is also the PC’s uncle and talks in incorrect ‘Jabberwocky’ references. (I don’t have much comment on that decision, actually; it’s kind of baffling.) There’s a recurring theme of ‘dreaming the world differently’; it’s by exploiting unexpected items from his dreams that Zildud learns magic, with which he himself can change the tenor of the dreams he has a part in creating. I can always get behind a game which encourages one to imagine what change would look like.

I reckon there’s also a connection to discourse in tabletop gaming. Lewis Carroll says “What kind of buffoon only dreams of killing other beings?” The best ending involves taking control of the Dream Factory and shifting its focus. Thus the game is subtextually against the Gygaxian model of tabletop gaming, which assumes violence is at the core of gameplay, and promotes more diverse and expansive forms of roleplay. If you’re not convinced, note the presence of a racist book on Orc history which appears to consist entirely of quotes from Monster Manuals ancient and modern.

That brings us to the other big topic in this game: Racism. As the world of Dream Factory is a reflection of our own, the depiction of anti-Orc bigotry by the PC’s boss and elsewhere quickly starts to feel reminiscient of real-world behaviors. Which is especially striking, because the in-universe bigotry isn’t limited to harmful attitudes and cruel comments. The Boss tries to commit a hate crime against the PC! She had his father lynched! This is really dark!

So the flipside of “Allegorical Criticism of D&D” is “Racist Violence As A Plot Point”. The issue here is: I’m white. I’ve never experienced anti-Blackness or any form of racism, so I probably won’t have as helpful a lens on this as someone who does. However, I’ll risk a few provisional takes:

  • The depiction of Zildud’s grind to fulfil the demands of a system that will not celebrate his success and will in fact see it as a threat seemed effective, to me.

  • The whole ‘dreaming a better world’ thing, which I liked for what it was, seems rather inadequate in the face of vicious, murderous oppression.

  • The good ending’s certainty that exposing an evil racist will lead to their downfall feels very 2015.

I have other thoughts, but I think I’ll leave off here. I hope this game gets more reviews, it’s underdiscussed at present.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Song of the Mockingbird
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

6 Likes
24

Mermaids of Ganymede by Paxton

Spoilery Review

Mermaids of Ganymede is an Ink piece in five chapters. The first chapter was strong, introducing me as the captain of a research vessel trapped on the floor of the Ganymede ocean. My choices were mostly about social interaction, both with my crew (who are obviously struggling with their situation) and with the titular mermaids (surprise, there’s a whole society down here.) I was enjoying characterizing my two-fisted man of action who also feels a deep loyalty to his crew and has a deep curiosity about other forms of life. (I don’t always go for the clean-cut hero when roleplaying a choice game, but it seemed like the appropriate course here.) If the rest of the game had continued along the lines of the first chapter, I would have given it a higher ranking.

The drop in quality between chapters 1 and 2 is alarming. Even the basic polish drops: comma splices start popping up, the dialogue becomes phoned-in, and the choices begin referring to characters and things that have not been described. On a narrative level the shift is also dismaying. The game decided for me, without any input, that my top priority was getting out of the mermaid city. (What if I want to stay for a bit and try to learn more about this entirely new civilisation?) Said city is suddenly taken for granted; the idea of ‘first contact with an alien species’ is practically abandoned, as mermaid society turns out to be very similar to our own (except for the part where it’s a monarchy.)

I had to explore the city and select one of several paths to break out of it. If I proceed by helping a mermaid scientist do research on me, I am placed on “the path on Individualism.” (Why? How is that individualism? And what if helping advance mermaid science was what I actually wanted to do?) Even the fact that the city is in a giant air bubble feels like taking the easy way out. Even if the mermaids can breathe air, they’re most mobile in water; why would they design air-filled cities?

The game somewhat recovers after this; chapter 3 is a tense enough negotiation scene, although chapter 4 is dominated by a rather fiddly navigation minigame. But at no point did the game actually regain my trust. It also turns out to have weirdly anti-body-modification themes? Apparently using genetic engineering to give yourself sharklike traits is bad because it turns you into a murderous inhuman monster. This beat feels really shallow, and the possible counterpoints (I think it’s possible to get body-mods yourself, but I didn’t take that route) don’t seem to help.

I was given the option to stay on Ganymede, in the end, but it didn’t feel earned after such a perfunctory presentation of Ganymede society. The moral lesson about leadership also felt unearned; I wish more of the game had been spent making leadership decisions. Honestly, this game just felt rushed, lurching from situation to situation. The game is strongest when it’s about negotiation and leadership, and it may have been better if it had focused on those modes.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Song of the Mockingbird
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Wabewalker
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

4 Likes
25

The Library by Leonardo Boselli

Spoilery Review

The Library is the debut of a whole new system, which the author calls “HyperFable”. I don’t know if I’m feeling it. Its big innovation is to allow clicking-and-dragging of the words in a description. This is mostly used for containment model interactions: most normal interactions are done by clicking a noun and then clicking an verbal obtion that appears. These verbal options are not particularly distinguished from the text around them (just italics and a mild coloring), but nevertheless I often found myself using them even when the click-and-drag options would do.

It occurs to me that graphical games that use drag-and-drop are very… intuitive, in their approach. Dragging an inventory item somewhere is basically like “USE OBJECT” in a system like Quest. I wonder if this approach would feel more satisfying or engaging than just treating it as a gloss on the containment hierarchy. But maybe I’m just biased against “choices in the descriptive text” in general. I will also say that I did not realise those double-carats in book text were clickable.

Anyway, I shouldn’t go on about my interface preferences, because that wasn’t my real problem with the game. My real problem with the game was the unapproachable puzzle structure. I was given one specific goal, and then dumped in a wide-open map without guidance as to how to approach it. The map is made effectively unnavigable by the use of relative directions. This, combined with the lack of indication of which books would be helpful to resolve the problems in other books, left me turning to a walkthrough immediately.

The intended experience was probably for me to explore, to pass through the different literary worlds poking at them until I’d completed my mission as well as a bunch of secondary goals. So is it my problem, for not engaging correctly? I don’t think so. The game felt under-written, with most of the text being bland descriptions of the locations I’m in. I would have appreciated a stronger sense of both the settings I’m entering and the characters I’m becoming. But when all the text has to fit on a postcard… It ultimately creates a game that feels more like a proof of concept than a fleshed-out game.

Except… saving Ulysses, which was my chosen goal, was actually funny. The puzzle solution was witty in concept, and the interaction which followed was also a humorous and well-paced double subversion. Ulysses then making off with Charon’s ferry just feels right: of course he would do that. So there actually is a good storytelling sense here; it’s just that stylistic complaints make it harder to reach. Perhaps I would have seen more funny and witty stuff if I had engaged with the optional content, but I just… don’t feel like it. It just doesn’t seem worth engaging with the stuff around it. I’m sorry.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Song of the Mockingbird
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Second Wind
The Vaults
Unfortunate
What remains of me
Smart Theory

26

Thank you very much for the review! You’ve pointed out some of the problems that force players to drop this game after a few attempts. The poor design choices that I made since the beginning are going to be removed in a possible future version thanks to all the suggestions that I’ve received. I’m happy to read that Ulysses’ plot is appreciated. Thank you again!
The name of my tool is HyperFable… but HyperCard is nice name too :slight_smile:

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27

Oh dear, that’s entirely on me. It is HyperFable. I’m very sorry I misnamed your system. That was a shocking failure of attention on my part.

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28

However HyperCard is more appropriate, in fact the room description is a sort of flipping card :wink:

29

That must be why my brain went “HyperCard”. But I cannot excuse myself for this kind of sloppiness with regards to someone else’s work, especially in the context of a fairly negative review like mine.

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