Lava Ghost's IF Comp Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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:

2 Likes

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.

1 Like

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

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.

2 Likes

HyperCard was a multimedia/hypertext program, famously used for games like Myst.

7 Likes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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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).

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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.

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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.)

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