Lava Ghost's IF Comp Reviews

Competitions IFComp
31

The Libonotus Cup by Nils Fagerburg

Spoilery Review

Shortly into my playthrough of The Libonotus Cup, I started to ask myself: wait, is this a custom system? I wasn’t having any trouble with the parser, which I’d been assuming was Vorple’d Inform 7. But I hadn’t actually seen the standard Inform 7 header, and when I typed CREDITS, Graham Nelson was nowhere to be seen. Nor were there any other system credits. I checked the directory and found a file simply titled game.js. It was a custom system!

This is the most polished custom parser system I have ever seen! Full support for indirect objects, undo, pronouns, ALL… even some cute side-along footnotes. If I had made a parser system this good, I would distribute it. Not that Nils Fagerburg has to distribute it, I’m just trying to describe how shipworthy, if you’ll pardon the term, this system is. It can even switch seamlessly to a choice-based mode, which it does for the actual race.

The titular Libonotus Cup is a multi-day race held among pirates. The goals are open ended; you can try to prioritise winning the race or getting the most treasure. There’s room for multiple strategies, and you can do well without getting 100% completion. I tried to win (because, after all, I’d made a bet i couldn’t afford.) I didn’t win, but I did come in ahead of the person I placed the bet with.

The world doesn’t take itself that seriously: your pirate ship has a glovebox with a registration in it. The prose is terse; most of the game’s humor comes from dry implications about how the world around you works, like the big box store called “Cutlass, Cannon, et Cetera”. The early part of the game is weakest: you have to get your ship fixed to even start, and doing so involves a tenuously clued maze (I probably wouldn’t have got it if Off-Season at the Dream Factory hadn’t done something similar) and a “voodoo priestess” who avoids being stereotypical by not being characterized at all. (Actually, she owes more to Shakespeare’s weird sisters.)

After that the game opens up. Strategic decisions begin even before the choice-based race segment starts. I became determined to get my sails replaced, knowing that I was going to need to prioritise speed. To do this required careful examination of the environment, leading me to an item I might have missed had I not been trying to achieve this particular goal. It also required me to get my angry ex(?) a voodoo doll of myself, like an idiot. Oh well! These are the tradeoffs. I’m sure there’s more stuff I could have done but didn’t see. This is clearly a game that will reward exploration.

It’s in the choice-based segment that the game really starts to sing, with you having to deal with a series of crises and opportunities, knowing that all your decisions will have a knock-on effect. The crises include an insult mutiny as well as a navigating fish which alternates between truth and lies, who can easily be dealt with by simply asking a question about observable facts. It’s all great fun. This is a game I’d like to revisit and play with more sometime.

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
The Libonotus Cup
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

8 Likes
32

The Last Doctor by Quirky Bones

Spoilery review

The Last Doctor is a short Ink game. You are a doctor with limited supplies in a dystopian enclave mostly controlled by the mob. You have to choose how to use your supplies: how much to do for whom. I found 6 endings and I’m pretty sure that’s all there is. None of the endings are happy, although I stand by my original choices.

The first thing I noticed was the prose, which conveys exactly the right tone of weariness for this project. It’s evocative without being overwrought. I liked the short and expressive paragraphs, and lines like “The building… bears the weight of five silent storeys. Sometimes, when you shine your tools with antiseptic, you hear them talk.” I don’t want to oversell this prose, but I liked that it felt thoughtful, to reflect pehaps a thoughtful character.

With regards to the actual story, there’s not much to say, but what there is to say is good. The medical descriptions are credible and effective, and the dilemmas were compelling enough. I felt decisive about all of them, but they touched on real questions of values. I healed the syndicate boss because his actions towards me could only be explained by altruism, which meant he might be better than his replacement. I think this was borne out. The endings are always framed to emphasize the more problematic consequences of your choice, so the syndicate keeps terrorising people. But I’ve seen all the endings, and the first ending I reached was the only one to say that the syndicate got more merciful. I was never going to be able to fix the world I was in, not myself. I was just a doctor. I did the best I could.

Wait, I just realized that mirrors the approach to the first choice that I had to make to be able to save the boss at all. Was this on purpose? That feels really smart. And if you play The Doctor Who Doesn’t Do Anything, that’s how you lose your practice altogether. I’m beginning to see how different versions of this story foreground different themes. Yes, this is good.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Last Doctor
The Song of the Mockingbird
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
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

5 Likes
33

Kidney Kwest by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta

There’s also an artist credit, but she doesn’t deserve to get dragged into this.

Spoilery Review

I was born eight years after Infocom folded and sixteen years after Personal Software first released Zork. As a preteen, I discovered the old genre of the text adventure on a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Intrigued, I found a web-interpreted version of Zork I and dived in. But I immediately hit a problem: I couldn’t get in the house. I tried breaking the door, pulling up the boards, climbing the house: nothing worked. Finally, I gave up and went to a walkthrough. I hadn’t realised I could use directional commands to go around the house.

The point of this anecdote is that working with parser games is a learned skill. I myself had to play a number of games from walkthroughs before I was able to engage with the format on its own terms, and, in fact, that’s probably the best way to learn to play parser games in the modern day. The text adventure made most sense, honestly, in the early '80s, when typing commands was how you got anything done on a computer. The verb-noun structure was nicely analogous to the command-argument structure. That’s not how most people interact with computers today.

Enter Kidney Kwest, a game aimed at children with kidney disease which advertises itself as understanding full English sentences. In fact, the game specifically discourages using abbreviated commands, and has a system whereby I can ask full questions to get state data. So, taking the game’s self-presentation seriously, I geared up, forgot everything I knew about how parser works, and typed:

?:go over to the white door
I didn’t understand ‘over’. Try one of these to get going: ‘Where are you?’ and ‘look around’

Well, there you go. The game doesn’t understand full English sentences. “Go over to the white door”, a perfectly standard English sentence, is too much for it. Clearly, it only understands some tight subset of English sentences, just like every other parser game out there, and I will have to work out what the rules actually are. In fact, it doesn’t even understand all the sentences a game made in Inform or TADS would understand. Most parser systems would be able to handle TAKE THE PAIL AND PUT IT IN THE GIFT BOX, but it’s just too complicated for Kidney Kwest.

The response to HELP gives more guidance, but still insists that “I work best when you interact with me like you’re interacting with a human.” This is simply asinine. It is in fact a computer program and it should just get on with saying the rules for interacting with the program (which, to be fair, it does) instead of trying to pretend it’s something it isn’t. Also asinine is the way it’s so attached to its “full sentence” model it complains every time I drop an article. There is no place in the game where article-dropping could lead to ambiguity! Why do the programmers hate convenience?

I don’t know if kids would do well with this game. It doesn’t seem to escape the standard difficulties with parser, and it doesn’t have a strong tutorial voice - and, as we’ve seen, some of the tutorial advice given is actively misleading. It also depends on a rather tight hunger daemon; a player may be at immanent risk of being kicked out before even finding the healthy foods they’re supposed to eat, especially if they spent time fighting the parser. (Time still seems to progress while you’re fighting the parser.) As food is a limited resource, the whole game is on a time limit. There’s also no implicit action support, adding to the frustration. Really, if the goal is to educate kids in a fun way, I don’t see why you’d use a format which is so unfamiliar to modern kids. Should’ve just done it in Twine.

I fantasize sometimes about a game with a truly natural language parser that can understand any command, which allows the player to deal with abstractions as easily as it does solid objects. But how would one learn to play such a game, or design it; what would it even be about? In any event, Kidney Kwest isn’t it. It’s a misconceived game that’s probably not fit for purpose.

Rankings

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

2 Likes
34

Noting for the record that I’ve played some of Infinite Adventure, which apparently is designed for play alongside And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One. Reserving judgement until I play that game.

1 Like
35

I Contain Multitudes by Wonaglot

Spoilery Review

Noting that the initial release of the game was apparently glitchy, I played the updated version with the time limit removed (although there are still some real-time elements).

This isn’t really a mystery game. An actual mystery game, in which you have to gather clues and find a culprit, would have to either be smaller in scope or not fit within the time limits of the comp, I think. The climax of the game has little to do with the murder that initiates it, and it’s possible to complete the game without ever finding out the actual murderer.

Its actual structure is… well, it’s basically a series of fetch quests. That’s a little disappointing. There are some puzzles where you have to wear the right mask to succeed. These masks are simply present on your bed without explanation. Actually, a lot of the backstory to the game is in the blurb, which the game itself simply assumes you’ve read. But the business with the masks isn’t there. The game’s failure to explain its own central mechanic properly was a barrier to engagement for me. (There was a book that provided some more information, but it still wasn’t enough and also the book was not portable.)

There were also many small ease-of-use issues which wouldn’t be worth mentioning individually but together added to my disinclination to engage closely. Important NPCs are relegated to a single line. There is a lack of both implicit action support and smart disambiguation. SEARCH doesn’t include LOOK UNDER Cutting out the priest’s tongue, an action which is required for the ‘best’ ending, does not use the syntax given in the walkthrough. Also, I’m not sure I can tell why the ‘best’ ending is better than the other endings.

That said, the setting was well-drawn, both in terms of the worldbuilding detail and in terms of the setting of an early cruise ship which sharply epitomizes class distinctions. La Societa felt like they had more going on with them; I still didn’t feel like I had a strong sense of why they wre doing what they were doing after all that, but I wonder if that was on me. The world felt lived-in and I’m well-aware there’s stuff I didn’t experience. I didn’t feel engaged by the game, though, so I don’t feel much inclined to poke further.

Rankings

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

3 Likes
36

How it was then and how it is now by Pseudavid

Spoilery Review

How it was then and how it is now is, by design, surreal on every level. You and your ex are trying to reach the center of a phenomenon which is transforming the world into abstract geometry. Think Annihilation with less focus on biological horror and more abstraction. As the protagonist advances towards the Source, they dwell on memories both old and recent…

The game reads like it was written by a neural network trained on Google Translate output and Tommy Wiseau scripts. This is fitting enough, for a game with a first-person protagonist in a state of mental decline! The phrasing is wrong in a way that, in fact, is quite right. (And it occasionally throws out unironically good phrases such as ‘the effect of vibrating guitar strings without any string at all’.)

That said, apparently all Pseudavid’s stuff is written like this (I haven’t looked at their work before), and I don’t have a good read on whether it’s a stylistic choice or an honest attempt at composing in a second language. Even if it’s the latter, I don’t criticize it at all: they own the style and make its rather abstracted nature work for them.

Indeed, the game is a pretty convincing account of the loss of connection to the concrete. The memories grow increasingly implausible and contradictory. A geometrized corpse encountered shortly before the beginning of the game, which is described neutrally at first, increasingly becomes a source of fixation. Clara disappears more than once during the trip, and it seems clear the ‘Clara’ at the end of the game is not the same woman who started out… perhaps only the idea of Clara, a name without a person, a dream… in the same way you’ve been to each other for the past five years. But, after all, perhaps the same thing is happening to you. Are you losing your identity because space is breaking down, or are you losing it because you invested an awful lot of in it Clara and its hard to reconstruct without her?

Given the above, it’s stunning when the game drops the line “As we leave the geometrized corpse behind, Clara says: ‘Let’s play.’” The Clara at the start of the game wouldn’t have said that sort of thing, which could imply a number of worrying things: that the protagonist has completely lost the distinction between the past and the present, that the body really is coming with them, that Clara has been replaced as early as finding the body… is Clara the body? Something significant happened when we met the body, it’s implied. At this point, the import of the choices themselves has become unclear; problematic in another game, fine here.

We’ve already seen that there’a a certain allegory going on between the literal abstraction of the characters and their feelings about each other and their split. The ending I reached was open-ended, but seemed to reinforce this: I and Clara must solve the problems of our identities at the same time as solving the problem of the Source, which is both something that could reshape the world and something that I find myself familiar with. I don’t know if there are any other endings, but I find this satisfying.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Last Doctor
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

1 Like
37

Here’s the deal: I’m not going to play or review The House on Highfield Lane. Here’s the reason: I don’t want to.

The House on Highfield Lane is a game set in an abandoned house, in a custom system. Not actually a custom system, just an unproven one: it’s apparently the newest version of Quest. This isn’t reassuring; Quest is bad. (Even though this new Quest is apparently a clean break from the past.) The blurb is breathless and desperate.

I feel like I played this game in 2019. I feel like this game gets entered every Comp. I feel like I already know what my review would be, and I feel like there’s no value in me giving it. There’s a possibility that I’m wrong, but I feel like the odds are not high enough to risk it. I feel like I want to get to At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast before the Comp ends.

Also, I feel like I have been spending a lot of time critizing custom systems for various ease-of-use failures, and I feel like that’s not necessarily very helpful when what creators of custom systems (especially parsers) often want to do is prove they can make a custom system at all. They’re not even trying to compete with Inform or TADS. But at the same time, I can’t just ignore systemic inferiority… unless I ignore the games themselves and accept that they aren’t for me. Similar reasoning may apply to some other systems with their own seperate communities: they’re just doing their own thing.

I’ve already excluded Twine games from my reviews, and I’m seriously considering limiting future Comp reviewing further, to a specific list of systems. (Yes, this list would include some choice-based systems.) This wouldn’t affect the rest of this year’s reviews much: I’ve already got to most of the custom systems. It wouldn’t have protected me from Plane Walker or Unfortunate, and it would have led to me missing Libonotus Cup and Dream Factory (Adventuron won’t make the cut). But in future Comps I need a way to ease the load of producing review after review saying “Implicit action support is poor.” (Implicit actions are really important.)

2 Likes
38

This is all fair enough, and I definitely agree At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast is worth checking out. But if you’re passing on Highfield Lane purely because it’s written in Quest, rather than because the blurb doesn’t appeal or whatever, you might want to at least briefly check it out to see whether you feel you’re able to evaluate it fairly - I’ve also always struggled with Quest games, but I found the new version night-and-day better, nearly indistinguishable from Inform or TADS (and I don’t think that’s just my weird opinion - Mathbrush’s review says he thought it was Dialog at first).

2 Likes
39

I don’t want anyone to think I’m judging the new Quest on the basis of the old Quest, to be clear, but the game seems to fall into an extremely tired subgenre of IF and just nothing about it appeals? (I was dreading it long before I realised the Quest connection.)

I’m glad to hear the new Quest is so much improved.

1 Like
40

Sounds like an excellent reason for not doing something and is more or less the same one I give for not e.g. reading Stephen King novels, or eating polenta. It’s just not for me.

(For the record, though, Highfield is pretty good and worth a look for players who don’t really care about the niceties of implicit actions and suchlike.)

2 Likes
41

What are implicit actions? Do you mean something like automatically unlocking locked doors when opening them? Object scopes? Daemons?

Personally speaking, giving criticism is fine as long as its constructive and that you differentiate between critiquing engine and story. That being said, not everyone agrees with me on that, or even are capable of differentiating at all.

42

No one should play a game they don’t want to play or feel defensive about not playing it.

But as a tester of The House on Highfield Lane, my Mama Bear instincts kick in a little here, so I’m going to link @rovarsson 's review to it here so people can read about it.

9 Likes
43

Implicit actions are when the player says they want to do something and, if there’s only one possible way to do it, it’s right there in the room and not actually meant to be part of a puzzle, the program will do the intermediate step.

For example, if you typed “look under doormat” and found the key to the front door there, then typed “unlock door”, the game will automatically take the key you’ve discovered and unlock the door with it. It might even open the door for you in the same action, since that’s the logical next step - unless it’s the sort of game where there may be a reason to not open a door immediately after unlocking it, in which case it won’t.

It shouldn’t allow you to do anything (implicit or explicit) with the key if you didn’t look under the mat and thus haven’t seen it yet. Also, it should prompt for the door if there are two locked doors in that location, and if it’s possible to have brought a second method of unlocking the door to that place, the game should still ask which method you want if you weren’t specific. Implicit actions are about cutting out busywork, not making anyone think less.

Automatically unlocking doors on opening are another possible implicit action, depending on the unlock structure involved. Certainly, if you’ve already opened it once, you still have the means to open it again and nothing about the game world would reasonably result in the door becoming impassable by that method, implicit actions are good for cutting out unnecessary repetition.

5 Likes
44

This is a great explanation – I just wanted to hop in to mention the way Hadean Lands make some quite complex actions into de facto implicit actions, where late in the game typing a simple “w” can solve a half-dozen subsidiary puzzles and take hundreds of actions instantly and automatically. It’s magic stuff! Er, I guess literally since the game is about alchemy, but it’s also an awesome piece of Inform-wrangling.

4 Likes
45

That would be a function of story, instead of engine. If you allow the engine to take over such implicit actions, then …

And I’m not sure I like that. I suppose it depends on puzzle structures, but like I said, that’s not the function of engine.

46

Oh, it’s integrally tied to the design and the puzzle structure, since it only automatically solves ones you’ve already figured out. There are regular state resets, and the implicit-action thing removes some of the busywork, while introducing new complications because there are multiple solutions to most puzzles and the automatic actions just go with however you solved them last. A lot of the game winds up being developing and tweaking an algorithm to solve its biggest puzzles - it’s incredibly elegant.

Ok, I will stop threadjacking now, but I feel like Hadean Lands gets much less attention than it deserves!

3 Likes
47

The engine can handle common instances where implicit actions make sense. The first example I gave, where a hidden key being found and subsequently used in a door in the same location happens in enough games that engines can and sometimes do code that automatically. This is how Lava Ghost knows that Quest 5 doesn’t do implicit actions - relatively routine situations like what I just described do not have implicit actions.

Story-specific implicit actions are needed for elements that are rarer. If the door was unlocked through an object-facilitated puzzle rather than a key, most if not all engines don’t assume what constitutes proof that puzzle was done and still could be done because that’s game-specific. That’s when you’d need to code the additional implicit actions game-by-game. My guess is that Hadean Lands will have had at least some story-specific implicit actions coded, to get that “well that proves I solved everything I was meant to solve here” implicit action sequence.

48

I’ve already excluded Twine games from my reviews

Do you mind if I ask why you don’t like Twine?

49

That’s a fair question, so I’ll copy-and-paste what I said in an earlier, private discussion:

The first thing I should say is that I don’t get the same things out of parser and choice-based games in general. What I get out of parser games is the joy of exploration, of interacting with a simulated world and having it poke back, often in unexpected ways. What I get out of the choice games I like is having a sense of co-authorship and co-ownership over the narrative. (This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge amount of control over the narrative; I like Turandot .)

I tend to bounce off Twine games because:

  1. They often don’t provide the things that make choice-based games work for me : Sometimes they’re short, and not that satisfying to direct. Sometimes they don’t provide choices frequently enough. Sometimes they try to build a simulated world to explore in hypertext. But these aren’t as satisfying to explore as simulated worlds rendered in parser, because their limits are so obvious.
  2. The use of hypertext is offputting : Sometimes hyperlinks will get put directly in the descriptive text, and it’s often not even clear what clicking those will do (so in what sense are they really ‘choices’?). I find this blending of output and input really unmooring, as a practice. But (this is a minor thing) even if it’s just a pair of choices at the end, I don’t really like “just make the choices themselves links” as an interface. Parser games make you think and type, classic gamebooks say “to x, go to y”… removing the distance between the choice and the execution of the choice is off-putting to me.
  3. I don’t really like browser-based play in general : I like to try to maintain a separation between recreation and the many other things I use the Internet for. Of course, Twine is far from the only system which uses HTML files for games these days, but it’s a factor.
  4. Twine games often look cheap : This isn’t a universal; it depends on the authors’ CSS skills. But the default look with oversized serifed text and gratuitously bolded links is unappealing to me.

None of these things are true of every Twine game (except 3), and none of them are exclusive to Twine games. But the patterns are strong enough that “cut every Twine game and review the rest” seemed like a pretty valid way to make the Comp manageable for me.

So, basically, a bunch of idiosyncratic things that don’t make Twine a bad system, but do leave it the first to go. I’ll add, now that I’ve thought about it more, that its very versatility makes it hard to establish ‘best practice’ for it, and a feeling that the author has in some way committed to a set of best practices is helpful as a reviewer (which is what I was getting at above.)

7 Likes
50

Hercules! by Leo Weinreb

Spoilery Review

A Hercules parser game is a surprisingly good idea. For all that Heracles gets painted as the prototypical brawns-over-brains type, many of his successes in the myths involve cleverness, even use of dry goods. They’re puzzle solutions. So why not take advantage of that with a puzzly take on the Twelve Labors?

Of course, when all twelve labors need to fit in the confines of a two-hour Comp deadline, the game was never going to be able to take itself that seriously. The map and puzzle structure are by necessity compressed. With the epic unavailable to the game, it turns to comedy, and first off it makes the decision that becomes its primary hook… instead of just de-emphasizing Hercules’s status as a strongman, it erases it altogether. Its Hercules is a nerd and a wimp who needs to use his brain to complete the Labors because it’s all he has.

I was pleased to find that Hercules was characterised as good-natured and optimistic. He’s not jealous or self-loathing although he’s candidly aware of his frailties, and he doesn’t go around sneering at what’s around him. The narrative also doesn’t hate him: his successes are real. The tone of the game is pleasant, and that goes a long way. Yes, it’s just the typical nerdy power fantasy of getting some respect already, but it’s the most benign version of that fantasy.

The puzzles move along briskly if linearly. I do have some issues with the simulation; for example, I had trouble buying that a flag which fit in a trick gun could be used as a hammock. And having established that Hercules has no sort of supernatural strength, it’s a bit much to declare that a chunk of ice he carried all the way down a mountain contains enough water to wash out an entire stables. The need for a constrained structure in general leads to some forced solutions, and I want to call out the business with the ‘monstrous’ receipt as being absolutely awful, at least in the version I played (it’s possible the update fixes things.)

Also, since we’ve been talking in this thread about implicit actions, here’s a good object lesson: If the game wants me to PUT a pendant on each of four individual action figures in turn so I can TAKE them, the least it could do is to assume I’m taking the pendant from the figure it’s already on before putting it elsewhere.

But in spite of these flaws Hercules! is an easy game to like. I’m glad I played it, and I’m glad it’s in the comp.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Sting
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

5 Likes