Lava Ghost's IF Comp Reviews

Thank you very much for spending some time to check Ghosts Within. Any criticism is always welcome and contributes to my personal development as a writer, in general. After all, this was just my first attempt!

— Kyriakos

3 Likes

No problem!

I wonder if you have played Blighted Isle? It has a similiar scope to your game (large map including a town, many NPCs, multiple paths… only one ending, though.) If you haven’t I recommend it.

4 Likes

Skipping or postponing Andrew Schultz’s Fourbyfourian Quarryin’, as I played Fivebyfivia Delenda Est to prepare for it and upon completion thought “Right, that’s enough of that sort of puzzle for a minute.” No shade! Just not in the right headspace.

That takes us to Fine Felines, by Felicity Banks.

Spoilery Review

The Choice of Games house style (which Felicity Banks mostly embraces in her ChoiceScript work, even work which isn’t hosted by Choice of Games) is well-known for embracing player-defined PCs. One can have any gender, all love interests are presumptively pansexual so the player can have any romantic experience they want, and most games give you a list of names to choose from of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. This fits with the general CoG approach of emphasizing the player’s freedom to decide what sort of story they’re playing.

This approach breaks down, however, when it comes to disability, because it is impossible - not merely inadvisable, but impossible - to erase the ways a disability will affect a PC’s relationship to the world. Most CoG games are genre excercises and thus assume the player will be involved in a fair amount of physical activity. Providing options for a PC with a disability would require a lot of extra writing, so it usually isn’t done. You can try to emulate a disability by dumping a stat hard, I guess, but that lacks specificity. Choice of Games, by default, assumes that all protagonists are fully able-bodied. This is probably bad!

Fine Felines is very welcome, then, as a Choicescript game that sits down and says, “The PC has fibromyalgia. Whatever else is true about the avatar you’re making for yourself, they have fibromyalgia. Whatever else this story is about, it is also about living with fibromyalgia.” That is, it takes the straightforward approach of simply writing a disabled main character, and allowing that to affect the plot as much as it needs to.

Representation aside, this isn’t only a game about living with fibromyalgia. First it’s a game about KITTIES!

This is a game about starting a cat breeding business, and Banks has illustrated it with photographs of beautiful cats (all cats are beautiful). Banks takes care to note that “This is NOT a guide to becoming a cat breeder”, but the depictions of cat-breeding logistics and challenges feel credible. The cats have distinct personalities, all lovable, and are very convincingly drawn as cats: often moody, neurotic, and demanding, but also capable of intense affection.

The prose itself is okay. I like details such as:

“Bukit Hill used to be a one-Starbucks town but no one went to Starbucks because they knew it’d put the local coffee shop out of business. So now it’s a no-Starbucks town, and people seem to like it.”

which not only establishes the setting effectively but also establishes the tone of ‘people will generally be nice to one another.’

I liked keeping my cats and my kittens, but I have to call out a bug. I had only three kittens, but I was given the opportunity (at least in the text) to sell more than that! This was confusing, and especially destabilising because I had been trained to take my kittens very seriously as individuals. The game’s apparent lack of attention to how many kittens I actually have undermined both its logistical and emotional focii.

Oh well! All the cats were lovely, and the decisions were engaging. I liked it.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
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

4 Likes

Finding Light by Abigail Jazwiec

Spoilery Review

I had no expectations whatsoever going into Finding Light, and I found myself liking it a lot. I had a good time with it. It was an enjoyable way to spend an evening and I felt satisfied when I got to the end.

In fact I felt quite forgiving of it. You see, Finding Light has no credits and no listed beta testers (that I could find). If it truly has no beta testers, it is probably as smooth as a game without testers could possibly be. I found no glaring bugs. But there are minor failures of polish on every level. An action I needed to take to complete the game was underclued. (Also, this is the third time in this Comp I’ve encountered a maze that works on the principle this game’s maze does.) The puzzle design also includes several fetch quests, of the straighforward ‘give an item to get an item’ variety (all of them for keys, what’s more). I’ve been critical of fetch quests in other games I’ve played recently. Why am I more forgiving here?

Partly it may be because of the writing. The writing in this game is straightforwardly better than in the other games I’m thinking of. It’s more confident, more controlled, and (in the case of descriptive text) better at actually painting setting. I’ve realised, as I’ve been doing these reviews, that prose which feels crafted is important to my experience, but I often don’t know how to talk about it well.

I think more important than that is the presence of a meaningful emotional hook for the PC. In other games I’ll wake up with amnesia or be ordered to solve a mystery I have no connection to. But in this game… in this game I’m sort of a familiar spirit, a shapeshifter that a certain clan summons to guide and guard individual members throughout their lives. My charge has been captured, and I need to rescue him. This is a little odd, as I’m apparently a sapient being yet my entre life is defined in relation to someone else’s. But I can accept it as a sort of mythic or folktale idea that isn’t necessarily meant to reflect an actual relationship between people.

But freed from taking it as a literal relationship that should exist, I’m freed to see in it similarities to a variety of strictly incompatible bonds: a pet owner, a sibling, a lover. This gives the PC an emotional motivation that is comprehensible and strong, which goes a long way towards building my investment. Note that this has nothing to do with characterisation per se. We don’t actually know much about these two. But we can recognize them.

Also, knowing this sort of folktale logic is going on (which is confirmed as I can talk to any animal) provides a context in which even the fetch quests make sense. I ultimately exist as a helper, so having to find things for other creatures makes sense. Furthermore: it’s always food or drink, it’s always for a key, and it happens three times. At that point it stops being laziness and becomes a deliberate pattern, which strengthens the tone. And this sort of thing is why I had a good time with this game.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Finding Light
Silicon and Cells
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
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

Also, it won’t come up for a week, but I think I should just state now that I’ll never play The Belinsky Conundrum. Not for the comp, and not ever. And the reason for that is that I will never make an account on any platform run by Facebook, or, as I guess I have to call it now, Meta. Not even once. Thank you for understanding!

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Oh my gosh, thank you for leaving such a nice review! Apologies on the lack of credits, I wasn’t aware of them, but you are correct in that I did not have many testers. (Many never actually followed through…) I had 1 with IF experience, and 2 who were family/friends that had never played before, so a lot of the testing was done by me as I only went to each of them once.

I’m really glad you enjoyed the writing! I like to write in my spare time, so this was a lot of fun. I’m usually a lot more descriptive, but adding more description meant having to plan for possible player interactions and this is only my second parser attempt lol.

Fun fact, Ezra actually means “helper” :grinning: (which was a happy accident). With the exception of Aurel’s name, I chose all the character names with their meaning in mind. You’re the second or third person who has brought up the nature of the familiar/person bond being a bit strange, which I thought was interesting as it was not my intent. It’s closer to what you mentioned with family/lovers etc. I would love to explore more aspects of the lore in a sequel though-- out of curiosity, would you mind telling me which ending you got? (There is one that kind of gives more information on the pairing in my opinion.)

Thanks again!!

3 Likes

I got the ending where I stab a guy to death with my nice sharp knife! (I suspect most players got that ending. The import of the whetstone is pretty obvious.)

And you’re welcome! I wasn’t necessarily bothered by the literal implications of the familiar/human bond, for reasons I hope I explained well in the review :slightly_smiling_face:. And yes, there’s a convention in modern parser IF of crediting testers, in the response to either an ABOUT or CREDITS command.

I hope you do make more games!

2 Likes

Yes I suspect most people did get that ending too, but you never know. And I absolutely understand what you meant, and can understand how others may interpret it.

Thank you! I’d love to make an indirect sequel to this game honestly, but I think it would be lot denser in terms of creation.

1 Like

As the author of TBC, my reaction is: no problem :+1:

I actually loathe Facebook myself and only use it rarely for work stuff, but six years ago, I promised myself I’d do my first “real” game on Messenger because of [long and boring story redacted].

Anyway, that’s how it came to be that I published on FB Messenger. Furthermore, I just couldn’t stomach debugging some more g–d---- code in ChoiceScript or DialogFlow in the timeframe that I had, plus I just thought hey, nobody ever does an IFComp entry in FB (or any of the other chat messengers), so I said f— it, let’s do it.

Even shorter: I needed to publish a game on FB, so I did. Now that’s it’s done, let’s forget about it forever :coffin:

6 Likes

Skipped Enveloping Darkness.

Dr Horror’s House of Terror by Ade

Spoilery Review

Dr Horror’s House of Terror has a great premise. Turns out, the producer of the terrible horror movie you were performing terribly in is the leader of a demon cult and has selected you to be the sacrifice that will usher in Armageddon. However, he’s also captured a bunch of real monsters and forced them to act in his movies, and if you free them all you can lead them against him. That’s all the setup you need for a great campy send-up of old horror movies!

The game flips adroitly between the mundane and the macabre. There’s humor in the way everybody’s performing a little, on or off stage, and in the obliviousness of the PC to all the murder that’s already gone on. There’s an interesting new experimental approach to perilious situations (in which the verbset gets modified). Games of all sorts, and especially horror games, have the issue that if they pitch the difficulty wrong tension can quickly turn into frustration. I’m not sure how well the new system works to overcome that, but it was a decent idea.

I was very surprised, and a little dismayed, when the game made me violently murder a security guard, whose level of involvement with the bad stuff was not at all clear, to continue. And I do mean it was me who murdered the fictional security guard; it’s presented as a mistake on the PC’s part. This turned out not to be a one-off: all the studios have a guard you have to do terrible things to to progress.

This first guard, the one in studio 5, in particular didn’t seem to be a cultist because he didn’t turn me in to the cultists. But there was another thing; when he turned me out, he completely ignored the cultist I’d already killed (in self-defense) who was lying right outside the doorway. This was remarkable; what sort of callousness are we dealing with here? This turns out to be deliberate. it’s eventally established that the guards have some idea of what is going on but are turning a blind eye in the absence of anything else to do. The same is true for the human actors in other studios. This ties together with the PC’s disavowal of their own actions to make a commentary on complicity.

Isn’t the execution a little cynical, though? It’s not like the player’s new allies are heroic. This is in no way a game in which ‘monsters’ are used as stand-ins for marginalised groups or anything like that, and in fact it mocks the very idea. The monsters in this game are truly monstrous; willing to commit heinous deeds, and a threat to humanity in their own right. The Countess will blithely talk about how she just couldn’t stop herself from drinking all your blood.

As for the player character… the game hates the player character, actually, in a way that goes beyond the normal ‘lol you’re a schlub’ tone of some comedy games. It’s not just that he’s overwhemingly incompetent at his job, or incredibly slow on the uptake. There are a couple of PCs in this comp who can be described as ‘too naive for the world around them’: Hercules! and Boots Taylor from Song of the Mockingbird. But both these PCs were allowed to own their own successes (which in Boots’s case also involved killing a few guys.) The PC in this case, however, is marked by a sort of just-fumbling-through-it quality. This, of course, is wilful on the part of the PC, who is too cowardly to face up to what he is actually doing.

So, I get it, but at the same time, the game’s ambition doesn’t really seem to extend beyond ‘Look at all these bad people. Doesn’t everybody here just suck?’ I want to be clear that I don’t expect a story or game to give me likeable or admirable characters, or to deliver any sort of uplifting message. I do think, though, that the game’s examination of complicity is shallow and cynical, subsumed into the need for yuks and lacking in the sort of fire that would make it really compelling.

Note that I obviously did not complete the game within the time limit, but I did throw the game at glulx-strings within the time limit to make sure my take wasn’t missing anything, and found out all the late developments. They didn’t change my opinion of the game as a whole.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Finding Light
Silicon and Cells
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
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

The daughter by GioBorrows

Spoilery Review

This appears to be exactly what everybody was hoping wouldn’t happen when updates were first allowed during the comp: someone using the comp as a development lab, submitting blatantly unfinished work for the October 1 release and then pushing out a version with more material during the Comp. This is against the spirit of the Comp. I played the October 1 release.

The blurb says “In the far future everybody is queer, immortal, childless and looks like hot 30 years old.” I thought the laconic “looks like hot 30 years old” might be a sign that the author is trying to take the piss out of this sort of utopianism, but the game itself seems earnest. I do have questions about this premise! Many humans feel a strong urge to create and rear more humans. This is true even of some humans who do not want to have heterosexual sex. I’m not sure how the species would collectively get rid of that impulse, considering how far it’s brought us.

Another thing about the immortal childless society which is barely touched on in the October 1 release is the fact that, in principle, everybody should remember a time before the immortal childless society was instituted. But everyone appears to be strangely innocent about childhood and death. When a new child is born, it’s archaeologists who are responsible for working out care - not, say, people who were childcare professionals 25 centuries ago. Also, where’s the sense of age? These characters don’t feel like they’re all over 2494 years old. Arguably Bahgiratha would be more interesting alive: a young soul among nothing but old souls, trying to understand each other, trying to remember what it’s like.

But all this theortical discussion about the premise is avoiding the real point: this is the most incoherent thing I’ve seen in a while. Characters are thrown into scenes with no introduction, and none of them feel well-defined as individuals. Scenes themselves change with no signposting. There’s no real player character; instead we just head-hop wildly. At one point I was shocked to realise that I was not following the character I thought I was following but had been following a completely new character instead. The choices I am given are often inane (“Her father is unknown.” “Who is the father?”)

I try to be gentle with ESL prose, but this text is absolutely riddled with typos and other errors. There’s also no command of tone. Consider this sentence: “You would call him a hipster if they hadn’t stopped being a thing 2412 years, 3 months and 6 days ago, in the great hipster purge.” First off, who is ‘you’? There’s no PC. Second off, where did this sort of referential humor come from? Third, are you telling me that at a point after the immortal childfree utopia was established, there was a genocide… against hipsters? Clearly there’s a joke here but it’s hard to tell what it is.

Actually, what even is this society, which apparently is able to check in on everybody on the planet with testicles to see whether they’re someone’s father or not? Is it actually a draconian dystopia, as the hipster genocide joke suggests, or is it just really small (which would also have interesting historical implications)?

But the biggest inconsistency involves the very core of the plot. It’s made very clear that this world does not know permanent death. If anybody dies, they have super-tech that can fix that right up, and the only time anybody can die permanently is if they’re isolated when they die and no one can get to them within a couple of days and resuscitate them, and that hardly ever happens, which is why no-one knows how to handle it when a death does occur. This is extremely important to the story. So what happened to the mother of our unique murder victim?

“Her mother died in childbirth, she has been leaving [sic] happily in Modane for the past 16 years, educated by the entire community.”

There you go. Incredible. Absolutely incredible.

And, of course, the October 1 release is unfinished and simply stops in the middle of a scene.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Finding Light
Silicon and Cells
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

2 Likes

D’ARKUN by Michael Baltes

Spoilery Review

When I saw that the game was clled D’ARKUN and opened with Tool lyrics, I was expecting something edgelordy. In fact the game turned out to be a relatively sedate Lovecraftian with strong influences from Anchorhead. How strong? It copies the “you need to lock the front door before you go to bed” thing.

As a game, D’ARKUN is… perfectly fine. It suffers a bit from comparison to Anchorhead. They’re both exploration games, which is fine, but the pacing and the motivation are somewhat weaker in D’ARKUN. I’m particularly thinking of how at one point there’s no way to advance the game beyond cycling out into town, despite there being no particular motivation for the player to do that. There’s a vicar there who’ll only respond to one question. (Probably should have either given him more to say, to encourage interaction, or had him respond to any interaction with the gate.)

Above I described the game as ‘a relatively sedate Lovecraftian.’ That’s an odd combination of words. What I mean by that is that the game often takes its reveals as given. The PC is shocked by some occurences, like the man in her bedroom. But a door made of bone is described neutrally. Near the end of my playthrough, my player went to a village inhabited by Deep Ones (for eighty years? Without anyone noticing?) and witnessed a dark ritual. Described neutrally (using the word ‘unfathomable’ once doesn’t count.) In addition to being humorously un-Lovecraftian, the prose is also often just weak. For example, "“The rest of the room is quite bare, as if there are some things missing, that once might have been here.” The lack of interiority and specific detail makes the game feel generic.

I do have something positive to say about D’ARKUN, which is that I really liked the characterization of the old Morpheus Putgarten and his pals as just sort of overeager scientists who didn’t mean to awaken ancient terrors and were mostly just after knowledge. Of course, in a Lovecraftian world, learning the secrets of the universe isn’t a safe thing to do.

I’m glad somebody else (besides its creator) is working in Dialog, which is one of the more exciting developments in the parser space in the past few years. Even if I found the game itself underwhelming, I think some strategic revision could solve most of the real issues with it.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Finding Light
Silicon and Cells
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

6 Likes

Thank you very much for your review! If you have any transcripts then feel free to send them to me. Nice to read that you also did a full playthrough.
Best regards,
–Michael

2 Likes

Hi Michael, you may have misread my post: I only played for two hours as has been my policy for Comp reviews.

I can send you a transcript, though.

EDIT: By the way, I systematically kept transcripts where possible, in case any other authors want them.

1 Like

If you have a transcript of my game I’d look to have a peek. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Codex Sadistica by grave snail games

Spoilery Review

You’re the frontperson of a metal band of uncertain subgenre. There’s a band playing before you that you do not like at all. (It’s referred to as ‘glam’ in the text, but also seems to contain elements of power and prog metal.) You have to get your band together and seize the stage. Oh, also, the narrator is a demon, the glam band frontman is also a demon, and the narrator’s given you the power to generate magical effects with your music playing.

I definitely do not care about the aesthetic divide between glam metal and other genres of metal, but one senses that the game doesn’t really care either - it’s just a cheeky hook, and something to let the PC be exuberant about. (After all, both sides are headed by demons.) The author demonstrates their familiarity with actual metal - mostly through the character of Mae - but it’s not quite the point.

The puzzle to get to the sidebar is pretty great - a satisfying connection to make. Also great is the tabletop RPG which the narrator-devil hijacks to give you the titular Codex Sadistica, a fun mixing of narrative levels which is the sort of thing it would be impossible to sell outside text. By comparison the game’s actual core mechanic feels more like a proof of concept, where solving puzzles is just trying various combos to see what will happen. But even so, the game shows a strong understanding of what you can do in a narrative game, and also a playfulness that serves it well.

Having said that, when I noticed that the game was produced with the most recent build of Inform 7 and compiled to Z-Code, I was filled with trepidation. An hour-long Z-Machine game made with Inform 7? In this economy?

(In case any readers don’t know: Inform 7 produces large, bloated game files and the extent of the bloat has increased over time. As the Z-Machine has a hard file size limit, Inform 7 games of significant length usually have to go for Glulx these days.)

I suspected the game would be under-implemented, and I was right. Things mentioned in object descriptions often aren’t implemented, even just as synonyms for the main object. The game would often print more text than my screen could handle at a time, forcing me to check the scrollback. Two of my bandmates have no description. No attention has been given to item listing; lists like the following are commonplace:

You can also see Creepy Stalker, a sound booth (on which is a stage manager), an Infurnal Stage (on which is Faramir Spidermoon) and a Maintenance Closet (closed) here.

In addition to the grammatical issues, this does a bad job of presenting these things as an actual part of the room. Some verbs give no response some of the time (especially SCREAM). Also, this can happen:

>knock
(on the Gore Jesus shirt)

I think I have reason to suspect the Z-Machine was deliberately targeted here, and I’ll just say: the colored text is nice, especially as it reinforces the energetic tone of the game, but the game wouldn’t be terrible if it was disposed of. I could be way off-base here, though.

In any event: good game, good writing, questionable implementation. The writer has good ludonarrative instincts and I’m interested to see what they do next.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Finding Light
Codex Sadistica
Silicon and Cells
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

2 Likes

Closure by Sarah Willson

Spoilery Review

It’s my last year of high school. I’m about to help my friend make some really bad decisions.

I love breakup stories. While other people will be out there talking about how cute their ship is, I’m secretly crafting the series of events that would lead them to abandon each other forever. Sometimes I get together with someone in a CoG game just to break up with them later. I’m fascinated by the different forms of human incompatibility, and enjoy the potential for angst/emotional catharsis.

Closure is a short and exploratory look at a relationship that’s already ended. The most striking thing about it is the format: you, the player, are a friend of Kira, the protagonist, guiding her by text message to, well, burglarize her ex’s dorm room looking for clues as to why they broke up. In the html version, Kira’s messages to you are formatted to resemble real text messages. This format was well-implemented; aside from the normal parser limitations, nothing in the output broke the illusion, and the author has anticipated actions which would logically arise from the format, such as PHOTOGRAPH.

Besides that, the game is, as I said, brief. Kira’s growing recognition of the precise ways in which she was stifling TJ is well-done. Her failure to understand or respect things that are important to him, and her willingness to project her own ideals onto him, are seeded carefully through the text, and are evident on a re-read. The ending walks a awkward line, trying to present the incident as a learning experience for Kira, and my willingness to be her accomplice as a sign of my support for her, without appearing to actually condone breaking into people’s bedrooms.

Kira seemed to ‘realise’ that TJ had another girlfriend well after that had already become clear? (I missed the calendar until late in the game.) However, the final revelation that the guy had gotten married was a strong, confident escalation, almost outrageous, that capped off the game satisfyingly. On the whole, this was an enjoyable twenty minutes.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Closure
Hercules!
Finding Light
Codex Sadistica
Silicon and Cells
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

7 Likes

Brave Bear by John Evans

Spoilery Review

I nearly missed Brave Bear, and, having caught it, I find it hard to know what to make of it. Its simplicity is in some ways its virtue. It’s about a comfort object, and the value of comfort objects isn’t necessarily something that needs to be expanded on at great length. What a small child understands about their comfort object is that it stays close to them and maybe can be brave when they can’t. That’s the core of what this game needed to convey and it did it well.

But it’s also underimplemented, and inconsistently so: if a phrase reads “quilts and blankets” the quilts won’t be implemented but the blankets will. There’s one room in which relative location is implemented - but the descriptions don’t update to reflect movement. Also, I question the way the game mostly revolves around enlisting the help of all your owner’s other toys to defeat your owner’s anxieties and sense of loss. Isn’t there a difference between a toy, as an object of play, and an attachment object? I felt collapsing the two undermined the significance of the Brave Bear itself, and the image of a whole army of toys running to this child’s rescue was goofy.

Although the genre is described as ‘magical realism’, the ending seems to establish that the game is set in a full urban fantasy setting with worldbuilding which explains what is going on. Ending on an explanation felt really unnecessary: it didn’t make the emotional core of the game any more resonant. And the core is real! The sense of loss seeps into the descriptions. The descriptions themselves are competent and suitably dramatic. I don’t hate this game at all! But I had some issues with both the implementation and decisions made.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Closure
Hercules!
Finding Light
Codex Sadistica
Silicon and Cells
Brave Bear
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

4 Likes

At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast by Travis Moy

Spoilery Review

Well, that was rather brilliant.

Moy shifts between a casual, modern style that uses words like ‘ginormous’, an alliterative descriptive style that evokes verse, and at points actual alliterative verse, which is used, in the context of this game, to represent formal speech. But at all times he keeps a clear eye on the specific effect he intends, and makes his choice based on the needs of the scene. (Low-key one of my favorite moments is when Gawain crosses a mountain, slays an actual dragon in the course of crossing the mountain, and it gets reported in terse, fragmentary style because Gawain is too cold and miserable to recognize it as glorious.)

By the way, I haven’t read Gawain and the Green Knight in any translation, but I did know the plot, so I know that some of the verse I saw must have been composed by Moy himself. Likely all of it was (wouldn’t it be a copyright violation if he were including text from a modern translation of the actual poem?). It was good, entertaining verse, as far as I could tell! (I know little about poetry.) Except /t/ and /θ/ get alliterated with each other a couple of times, and I’m not sure whether that’s allowed? Well, it doesn’t matter! The verse is fine!

The seduction attempts around which the plot revolves are suitably fraught, and Gawain’s predicament, having to talk the Lady Bertilak down without actually being impolite to her, was convincingly portrayed and led to some really engaging choices. For what it’s worth, I played Gawain as being in love with the Lord rather than the Lady (although he also wants to maintain a good relationship with the Lady.) Of course, what the Lady Bertilak does would today be described as sexual harassment, and this might cause problems for some players. Also engaging were the choices which required me to make a real value judgement, such as when I was asked about the relationship between love and arranged marriage and had six thematically plausible options to choose from.

Another note: it’s easy to assume some stats-tracking is going on, but if so it’s completely invisible - either that, or many choices which take the form of Choicescript stat-selecting options are merely reflective. I like it either way: make the player focus on what they really mean to say by a given choice, rather than making numbers go up and down.

The tensions in the medieval notion of chivalry may have been a theme present in the original poem, but Moy does a good job of bringing it out here, and does it with humour, style, passion, and beauty. This is a very good game; I’d treated it as a sort of target, while writing all these reviews, which meant I ended up with pretty high expectations for it, and it met those expectations. Recommended (with trigger warning).

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Closure
Hercules!
Finding Light
Codex Sadistica
Silicon and Cells
Brave Bear
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

5 Likes

To answer your question, yes, a modern (< 70 years ago) translation of an ancient work would, indeed, fall under copyright law because it is considered a new piece of authorship. But if the translation was done mechanically (i.e. via Google Translate) then no, it wouldn’t be subject to copyright because it isn’t considered to be something that was “authored” by anyone.

PS - even weirder, copyrights sometimes go to the translator of a modern work even though the (living!) author holds the copyright to the original. It’s a fun, thorny branch of law :man_judge:

Lovely review, btw! Always been a fan of those Arthurian stories.

3 Likes

And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One and Infinite Adventure by B.J. Best

Spoilery Review

I’m almost at the end of this lot of reviews, and perhaps it’s appropriate that I now come to a game about games. I hear, in You Come To A House (but it is just my fancy) echoes of games throughout the comp. Jumping through worlds, as in The Library; magical allies to salve childhood pain, as in Brave Bear; the blurring of metafictional levels as in one scene from Codex Sadistica; a contemnible attempt at a health education game for children (I am not sorry for that review); perhaps the adolescent emotional realism of Sting; and of course the fetch quests of the sort I’ve seen throughout the comp, from as far back as What remains of me. But You Come To A House does all these things better. It is affective and effective in surprising, overgrowing ways.

I shall expand upon the fetch quests. I’ve had cause to say before (see Finding Light) that fetch quests work best when both the concept and the structure of the game feeds into them: “you help these people and that’s how you win.” You Come To A House’s fetch quests start with “Infinite Adventure”, where the dependence on fetch quests is a limitation of the game-within-a-game: and then it carries on outside the game, transforming a series of set pieces into an interlocking structure. Every other game turns into a game about helping people. The result is rather lovely, especially as your virtual trading partners are so winsomely portrayed.

(This review, by the way, uses “quotation marks” to denote the game-within–game “Infinite Adventure” and italics to denote the separate entry Infinite Adventure.)

The game’s approach to its late emotional turns shows immense trust in its players. Nothing about the fight that erupts between you and Riley is spelled out (in general the things which are going on are not spelled out.) “Infinite Adventure” resolves, over the course of several rickety iterations, into being an imitation of Riley’s house, and Riley considers this a betrayal on Emerson’s part. Why? Perhaps because, in its broken form, it represents an intolerable form of denial. (And it’s been obviously broken since early on, and Riley hasn’t wanted to play it since then.) Turning away from the hard conversations about change and how to deal with it, treating one room, on one day, as if it can be an infinite adventure, instead of facing change clear-eyed so one can preserve the things one actually values.

And maybe that’s not diegetically what Riley’s thinking at all. Maybe she just perceived a cruel joke or something. Although the witch is obviously the ghost of Emerson’s mother trying to keep him from screwing up, and she really doesn’t seem to actually want him to play “Infinite Adventure” right now. So I think it’s quite defensible.

But there is surely more than one thing that could be said about You Come To A House. It’s a game that creates the impression of many things happening in peripheral vision, which the player themself is not permitted to see. Even the digital actors feel like they have more complex inner lives than we are entitled to, let alone Riley. Smears on the window. (What could the not-doctor not-psychiatrist not-say?) But if we go out on limbs they are sure to break; the real effect is a challenge to the solipsism that creeps into text adventures by default.

The game itself is what we have. And it’s good. It never feels like it doesn’t know what it’s doing. It makes the tropes it uses absolutely sing. The structure is careful but flexible; I can see how a different player might have a different experience. If I’m going to read this game as a synthesis of this year’s entire Comp, as I suggested I might in the introduction, I would have to say it shows that I was right to be excited at the beginning of the comp. Interactive fiction is alive, and even the games I didn’t enjoy so much show that it’s alive. The wettgeist is displayed right here, in this game, and the game vindicates it.

Something about this game has made me bold, as a writer. I think that is enough. I cannot tell whether this review is brilliant and insightful or pretentious and silly. I promise I will not invent new German words in my AardVarK Versus the Hype review.

As for Infinite Adventure, the DOS game which exists as a seperate entry, there’s not much to say. It’s clearly a bad idea, the author knows it’s a bad idea, and it’s positioned as more of a ‘feelie’, as another reviewer put it, to You Come To A House. (The save file it generates provides a clue to that game.) In the circumstances, I feel comfortable giving it a NOT RATED.

Rankings

A Paradox Between Worlds
And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
At King Arthur’s Christmas Feast
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
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Closure
Hercules!
Finding Light
Codex Sadistica
Silicon and Cells
Brave Bear
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory

8 Likes