Lucian's IF Comp 2022 Reviews (Latest: One Final Pitbull Song)

Headlights

So, there’s two things to review here: the game itself, and the game system that was used to create it. For the system itself, it’s an attempt at being a natural language parser, which is a great goal, but of course it ends up being much worse than your standard Infocom/TADS/Inform parser: doesn’t understand ‘it’, crappy error messages, no scripting, annoying “I understood you to say ‘x the y’” messages every time you type ‘x y’, an inventory limit of two. I mean, come on. It’s impossible for me to know where the system ends and the game begins, and it’s certainly possible that some very different game exists or could exist that would actually make use of its purported ability to parse things like ‘what color is the rock I am holding’, but it’s hard to see how this ability actually would translate into a better game, when I can just say ‘x rock’ or maybe ‘x held rock’ and get the same information.

The game itself is, sadly, terrible. It’s not well implemented, the prose is short, stark, and aggressively unevocative, the puzzles are trivial, and the story is also trivial. Well, the puzzles were trivial until I found one I couldn’t solve. I could wash a bloody deer, leaving it ‘very shiny’, though, so there’s that. I assume it’s yet another ‘a bad thing happened and the protagonist retreats into a realm of fantasy and metaphor to deal with it’ story? I think? I didn’t quite get to that part, though. And the ‘box text’ didn’t really match the game text nor the gameplay, either.

Did the author have something to say? : No, the author had a not-very-great thing to show off.
Did I have something to do? : Technically? But it was awkward, and either simplistic or opaque. It would have been 20% better just using the Inform world model, but only 20%.

6 Likes

U.S. Route 160

The tags didn’t fill me with joy, but at least it’s the sort of game that should know what it’s about, so that’s promising. Not totally proof-read, with phrases like “So you made you like it too” which I think was supposed to be “So you made yourself like it too”? Or “Frusteration”. “You let the ultraviolence soothe your sunbitten skin.” Can I make Yet Another Plea to the gods of Twine that they implement the ability to create a transcript from a playthrough? You can’t properly test something you can’t record and peruse.

Anyway.

The game turned into Yet Another ‘protagonist retreats into land of fantasy and metaphor to deal with sadness’ game. Again, if angst is your jam, go you, but if you want to angst to be my jam, you’re going to have to do some work to pull me in, instead of just having Displayed Angst. That goes even more so for choice games, since my interaction with the game is limited, and even more so with choice games where the ‘choice’ is ‘click the single link’. At that point, you’re just writing a short story, and you have to make it compelling; there’s nothing else for me to engage with.

That said, I did get a reasonable sense of who the protagonist was in the end, and the struggles she was going through. And that’s really all the game tried to do, so it accomplished that!

Did the author have something to say? : Yes, though it was more a snapshot than a story or character portrait.
Did I have something to do? : No. There were somewhere around three actual-choice points in the whole thing, and I got something called ‘ending 3’, but was left with zero desire to find any other endings.

7 Likes

Under the Bridge

OK, here we go. This game is short, but it contains almost exactly what I want out of a choice-based game. A strongly-characterized protagonist, a new setting/world to explore a bit, choices to make that create a meaningful conversation between myself and the author. “I think the world is like this, so I’ll act this way.” “If you act like that, this is what happens.” “Ah! OK.”

Honestly, I don’t have anything much more to say! The text was spare but evocative. The art was similarly simple and evocative, with slight animation that added to the spirit of the world without detracting or distracting. I found a pleasant ending my first time through, and decided to not try to find another, because for me, my questions were answered. I don’t care what happens if I’m a jerk; that’s not a question I have for this world or any other. I appreciated that those paths were available if I wanted to, because it made my own choices more meaningful, even though I didn’t know what, specifically, they might contain. Contrast this to other games where alternate endings seem like they’ll just be more of the same; more conversations I don’t care about.

Did the author have something to say? : Yes! And more to the point, the author had something to say to me, which is even better.
Did I have something to do? : Yes! I made a difference in the world as a direct result of clear choices.

11 Likes

Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey
The only thing I can say about this game is ‘what’. I don’t get it in the slightest. There’s something about rhymes, but the rhymes make no sense, and which rhymes are the ‘correct answer’ make no sense, either. I think I’m going to have to skip this one, and classify it as ‘experiment that failed for me’. I hope this game finds its audience!

EDIT A YEAR LATER: It has been pointed out to me that saying the puzzles ‘made no sense’ is written as if this is an objective fact. This is on me: I forgot that in these cases, one needs to be explicit instead of implicit. So: the puzzles made no sense to me. I obviously have a blind spot for this sort of thing.
Clearly, they made perfect sense to others, and I did indeed sincerely hope that the game would find its audience (which I think it did!)

5 Likes

Prism

Holy crap, this game is amazing.

It starts off really densely and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to keep up, but fortunately there was enough to hold on to as I worked out more about the world, who I was, and who I wanted to be. I also appreciated the way the author took my disparate choices and wove them into a coherent story—I truly felt like the protagonist of a forgotten Brandon Sanderson story, and significant events kept happening at a reasonable clip that all felt surprising, but recognizable. Like, I wouldn’t have predicted any of them, but in retrospect, they all seemed appropriate for the world and story in which they lived.

I decided to replay it and make different choices, since I liked but wasn’t 100% committed to the ending I found first, and I’m still trying to decide if that was a mistake or not. Replaying revealed some of the inner workings of the structure, and I could see that what I had thought was a completely branching tree was actually a bit more sparse than it seemed at first. But while I did miss the sense of ‘I could do anything and the author has a unique story for me laid on on just that path’, I still did find a lot more content along my new path, which informed the world in an interesting way and shed new details on my relationship with the game’s major NPC.

Overall, there was just so much I loved about this game. I loved the worldbuilding, which new crazy revelations coming thick and fast at me almost every time I clicked on a new option. I loved the protagonist, and his place in the world. I loved how the disparate plots came together and overlapped in surprising ways. I loved the overall theme of hope in the midst of trial, of people finding ways to make things better even when the world they were in conspired against them.

Did the author have something to say? : Yes! SO MANY THINGS. And like ‘Under the Bridge’, I felt the author had things to say to me, too.
Did I have something to do? : Yes! I felt like a protagonist making protagonist-level choices the whole time. Some of this was a bit of an illusion, as revealed my re-play, but that’s just good craft.

9 Likes

Inside

This game was…fine? The author had some things to say, and I had some stuff to do. Neither seemed terribly important, but not everything has to be earthshattering.

One thing that I kind of rebelled against was being given choices that changed the background of the story. And I’m not entirely sure why I disliked that so much. I guess the first reason is just that it seemed wrong; that there are defined roles for world-building in a computer game, and while I can take the role of bringing the protagonist to life, and perhaps adding characterization to them, that’s a role that should be formed in response to the world in which the protagonist finds themselves in, and not a role that is supplemented by building the world as well. Which doesn’t really explain why I think that, but at least to say it was a strong visceral reaction on my part. Pondering my own reaction further, I think it might have something to do with what I want out of an IF game: I want the author to have opinions about stuff, and to show me those opinions in response to my actions. Once I get involved in the worldbuilding side of things, I’m afraid I’m going to have to do the heavy lifting for the ‘having opinions’ side of things, too. I already know what my own opinions are! The whole point of art, for me, is to discover how someone else sees the world, and in an interactive piece, how that view meshes with my own view. So when I’m asked to pick a name for the main NPC, that gave me pause, but OK, text search-and-replace is a thing. But when I’m asked whether that NPC and I have done good or evil together, that makes me worry that the game author won’t be providing any commentary on that, and it seems like kind of a huge plot point to avoid entirely.

I didn’t replay the game to see what would have happened had I chosen ‘evil’, but I feel like my worries were, basically, justified. I went with a fairly light-hearted and jovial tone throughout (and even figured out how to feed a stray cat, so points for that), but then the ending showed up and the tone completely shifted in a way that seemed out of sync (sync, get it?) with the game I had been playing so far. Like the author had given me too much freedom of expression, and then didn’t have any response queued up for it, so just punted instead.

As for the interactivity, I remained engaged and clicking throughout, but in the end it seemed a little empty, like things were too easy or too slight or too inconsequential; that, again, I was being allowed to play around but also then ignored.

Did the author have something to say? : Sort of? But it was watered down too much to say anything truly meaningful or interesting.
Did I have something to do? : A bit. It was fine.

5 Likes

Traveller’s Log

This game cracked me up in its sheer audacity. It’s a python script that vaguely simulates a dungeon crawl. There is no picture. The ‘content warning’ is “please do not use file upload or cheats”. Cheats. Right. Over half of the source code is dedicated to describing different irrelevant backstories for your character. There are multiple misspelled words, in a game with very very little text. Answering “y” to a yes/no question is interpreted as ‘no’; you have to type “yes”. I met a locked box, hit it with my sword, and it joined me.

The Hitchhiker’s quote “Ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking” haunts me. This is, of course, a terrible game. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t do what it set out to do well, and whether it should have set out to do it in the first place is an open question. But I can’t help admiring the chutzpah of ‘Isaac’ for entering this in the comp. They obviously have a long journey ahead of them in the design and coding departments. But I can just imagine the coder, relentlessly typing up yet another backstory that nobody will see. There’s a compelling story here, and it’s not the game you play.

Did the author have something to say? : No. The author had someone to be, and was that person.
Did I have something to do? : Honestly, typing ‘walk’ endlessly into this thing was still more interactivity than ‘click the link to continue’ in some other games in this comp. And you sometimes had to decide when to type something other than ‘walk’! A branching storyline!

9 Likes

Arborea

This game’s opening puzzle locked almost the entire game out of reach for me. I futzed with what I could for a while, and things seemed competent, but I couldn’t seem to do anything in the bit of the game I had unlocked.

Specifically: the game starts off in a ‘simulation’, where you’re in a forest. You have to search the forest for a particular type of tree, and each type you find unlocks a game area in each compass direction. There is no list of trees to search for. From the available corpus of tree types, you have to guess the eight trees that the author was thinking of. I got two right away, then my next two weren’t recognized. I mucked about in the two areas that unlocked. I came back to the forest, and tried a couple more. No luck. I looked up ‘list of trees’ on Wikipedia. Six more types, and got one. I tried thirteen more, with no hits. So for 23 different tree types, three of them worked, and I still had five more to go.

Finally, I had about given up, went to write this review… and finally thought to try something new. And, of course, there were the hints after all: the game didn’t expect me to guess eight types of trees ex nihilo; there was an in-game way to find them.

I feel like this is partly my own fault and partly the fault of the puzzle: if I hadn’t tried two tree types successfully initially, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to just guess them, and I wouldn’t have been stuck so long.

Once I actually could access the rest of the game, I made reasonable progress. It turned out to be no surprise that I couldn’t do much before: many if not most of the puzzles involve using an item from one area in a different area. I never reached the end, but I’m stopping for now: I’ve played a good amount of the game, have probably invested the requisite two hours or so, and more importantly, it’s the sort of game that feels to me like you need to take breaks when playing it; one of those games where you mull the puzzles in the back of your mind a while, and finally think of something new to try.

However, while the game was quite functional and competently coded, something about the writing felt a bit off, for me. The box text promised more than was delivered, for one, and in general, it seemed like there was a lot of cursory dealing with issues that I felt deserved more care or attention. I wasn’t super keen on the ‘it’s a simulation’ framing story, either; it kind of felt like a cop-out. (Though I can’t think of a better one for the game design on display here.)

The game also stymied me for a long time—I’m trying to play these comp games in fits and starts when I have time, and I kept bouncing off of this one, which stopped me (perhaps unwisely) from playing something else instead. Anyway: competent game, some reasonable puzzles and one big on that stopped me cold for unfortunate reasons, but also a little off-putting for hard-to-define reasons.

Did the author have something to say? : I felt like the author wanted to say some things about trees, but this didn’t come through very well, and that they could have said things about some of the other elements in the game, but didn’t, or only dealt with them very superficially (i.e. as puzzle pieces, not as anything real).

Did I have something to do? : Yes; it was a honest-to-goodness puzzle fest. A somewhat lifeless puzzle fest, but there were some satisfying solutions in there that I appreciated.

7 Likes

Thank you very much for the review.

It’s a funny thing about puzzles and that first one in particular. You’re the second person who concluded that they were expected to google lists of trees and guess one after the other. To me, that wouldn’t have seemed like a very fair puzzle, but then obviously you don’t know me so you don’t know what to expect.

My aim for the puzzzles in Arborea was to follow the Infocom “guideline”. I mean, what I set out to produce was something Infocom-like, and having played a number of them myself I tried to gauge the puzzles on what might I expect to see in an Infocom game of standard difficulty.

With this in mind, what unwritten rule which seemed to apply in all but the infamous baseball puzzle in zork 2 was that the answers to all the puzzles in an adventure should appear within the adventure. Ie you shouldn’t rely on external knowledge.

I hope you enjoyed it in the end.

All the best.

Richard

6 Likes

Exactly! It would have been a terribly unfair puzzle, but, as you say, since the author-player relationship was only just getting established, I truly believed it was designed that way on purpose. Amusingly, I also thought of the Zork II baseball puzzle in this regard, and Graham Nelson’s ‘no outside knowledge’ rule that went with it.

I feel like this sort of problem would only come up in beta testing, and if you didn’t happen to catch it there, you weren’t going to be able to catch it anywhere else. Here’s a few of the ideas I had to make it work a bit better:

  • Make all the trees obscure. I tried ‘pine’ and ‘oak’ right away, and the fact that they both worked set me on the ‘just guess’ path. If I had to enter more specific types of pine and oak, perhaps I would have gone looking for an in-game clue sooner.
  • More personalized error messages: Instead of the ‘I dunno if that’s a tree’ message, perhaps have some sort of ‘just guessing isn’t going to work’ message. “You scan the forest for [maples] but can’t seem to find any. The trees you do see are very particular, but seem to fuzz in and out of existence when you look closely. If you knew what you were looking for, that would probably help.” (This could be the place where you look up tree types on Google to steer people in the right direction.)
  • Have the puzzle appear later in the game. Obviously this wouldn’t work with the design you have here, but in general, you can get away with seemingly-unfair-but-actually-fair puzzles dropped later in the game, after author-player trust is more established.

At any rate, thanks for the reply, and for the game! I’ve set it aside for now so I can rate the other games, but it seems worth coming back to.

4 Likes

Good suggestions. I shall revisit Arborea once the competition is finished with all of the feedback I get.

And I’m glad you enjoyed it. If you do go back to it, let me know how you get on with it and any other feedback you want to give.

All the best

Richard

1 Like

A Chinese Room

This was a solid, solid game. I only played through once; it claims to have multiple other options for how to play, and you can even play through other stories. But the story I played (the suggested story for first-time players) was very well put together.

Strongly-characterized protagonists are, I feel, always tricky for IF games. The stronger the characterization, the less leeway the player has to insert their own characterization. The best games (and I include this game in the list), encourages the player to participate as an actor with a script, where they’re there to bring nuance and humanity to the role. You might have a certain amount of flexibility in your portrayal, and specific decisions may (as they do here) lead to different branching plot points. But the character you play should feel real, and the decisions you make should feel like choices you are making as an actor, bringing the protagonist to life.

After debating with myself for some time as to how much of our protagonist’s story (and how I played her) to share, and finally decided on a minimalist approach: not nothing at all, but not many details, either. Our Hero is a very very careful and precise housewife, with two just-grown children and a husband in politics. The game itself never mentions that you’re in Russia, but the extra-game materials do, and in retrospect it seemed obvious, though as I played my hypotheses wandered from thinking we were supposed to be in Asia, to some fictional country, and finally to Turkey. Over the course of the game, you meet a foreign dignitary, and work with him as a guide. The game, then, lets you interact with your husband, your kids, the foreigner, and (a bit) with an odd character from the government. I felt keen empathy with the woman’s family situation, with two kids of my own about to make my own wife and I empty nesters ourselves, and keen sympathy with the woman’s constrained place in the world, taking freedom where possible, but never overstepping any bounds she found important.

There is a central plot point (not truly revealed until the very end of the game) that deals with the eponymous ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment. As a story beat, I didn’t really buy it, which is an odd accusation to make of a piece I generally thought was excellent. “Great story; pity about the plot” “Back to the Future was great, but the time travel element was silly.” I suppose I felt the premise was indeed silly, but that it felt embedded in a real, vibrant world. Knowing (after the fact) that it was supposed to be set in Russia also felt slightly off to me—from what I myself know of Russian history and character, I didn’t quite buy that this story was really set there. But that doesn’t change my opinion of the strong characterization of the unnamed nation in the story, just that it doesn’t quite line up with my own instincts of What It’s Like to live there.

This review feels disjointed, and I apologize. Consider this a definite vote of confidence in the game. Excellent at conveying both the character and the story of a sharply-defined protagonist.

Did the author have something to say? : Absolutely. What the author had to say about Chinese Rooms was, I felt, a bit hackneyed, but what the author had to say about a particular woman living in a particular time and place was very strong, and very well conveyed.

Did I have something to do? : Yes. Somehow, this game made even the click-the-single-link-to-continue bits feel engaging, interspersed with genuine branching elements where I felt like the actual protagonist, making what constrained decisions I could.

7 Likes

Thank you so, so much for such a generous and thought through review. It really means a lot, thank you.

2 Likes

A Walk Around the Neighborhood

A light-hearted, fun little one-room game. It’s goofy; it’s charming; it knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be, and sets out to be exactly that. The edges of the simulation are well crafted, with plenty of give for player mistakes or misconceptions, with clear guides to get you back on track.

One of the things it did very well was accept more general verbs to do things that didn’t require performing all the steps by hand, and did that in way that I naturally tried out the verb anyway (despite that sort of glossing-over stuff not often working in parser IF), and it was always pleasant when it happened. It meant that I could focus on figuring out the correct approach to solving a puzzle, without getting bogged down in the details. (This stymied me in the post-game extra puzzle scene, where a simple ‘make’ verb suddenly didn’t work for the extra thing I wanted to do, and I couldn’t figure out the syntax to do it the step-by-step way! But I’ll forgive it that, because it’s a bonus puzzle anyway; I didn’t feel too bad about not being able to solve it.)

If I’m going to nitpick anything, it’s that there’s an in-game hint system, of sorts, where you can talk to your spouse about the puzzles you haven’t solved yet, and they’ll give you clues. However, they also will talk to you about other things, and talking to them is actually required to solve one of the puzzles! At least as far as I could tell. This meant that when I was treating ‘chatting with your spouse’ as a hint system, I would avoid it until I was stuck, at which point I’m already mildly frustrated. And then I discovered that talking to them was the actual solution! It was a weird code-switching thing—if I had known that ‘using the hint system’ wasn’t actually always ‘using the hint system’, I might have thought to use it to solve the puzzle. And who knows; maybe there was another non-spouse method of solving that puzzle. But it was weird.

At any rate, a very solid game that was a delight to play.

Did the author have something to say? : Not particularly, but there were also no pretentions of wanting to do so and failing: it was very clear from the opening text what sort of game this was, and ‘the author has something profound to convey’ was never going to be part of that.

Did I have something to do? : Yes! And the game made it particularly easy for me to do it, which was even nicer.

7 Likes

Witchfinders

This was a pretty slight choice game, but was reasonable enough. Some fairly glaring spelling errors, revealed in the post-game ‘about’ to be because English isn’t the author’s first language. Fair enough, but beta testers? Also, Twine needs a spellcheck.

The author also revealed in the ‘about’ that they had done some research into what life was like in 19th century Edinburgh, which is nice, but somehow it didn’t feel very real–the place descriptions were sparse and functional, but not terribly evocative. The premise itself was oddly teased in the intro: it tells you about witchfinders, whose job it is to, well, find witches, and then tells you, “I bet you thought you’d be a witchfinder, didn’t you? But no, you’re a witch!” And… the exact reverse is true: I assumed I’d play a witch, because come on. Playing a witch is interesting, while playing a witchfinder would be deeply uncomfortable.

I played through once and got a score of 60/100, replayed and happened to solve a puzzle I didn’t know existed by accident (I bought something on a whim which turned out to be critical), and ended up with a score of 110/100, so yay me. (I think I got the extra 10 points from buying something twice, he said vaguely.) The puzzles weren’t difficult at all, but it was kind of nice going through and solving them, so hey.

Did the author have something to say? : Not much! Not everything has to be profound, but even the slice-of-life-with-vague-danger scene the author tried to set up left me a little cold.

Did I have something to do? : A few things. The accidentally-solved puzzle was not good design, but everything else was competent.

6 Likes

Thanks for taking the time to write up your feedback!

On the engine side: I’ve been working on beefing up the “classic IF” commands that Perplexity understands and it has come a long way since the last IFComp, but you’ve given a good summary of what I’ve got left there. I’m curious what you felt like it was missing for getting a transcript? The upper section allows copy and paste, is there something more you wanted?

I agree that for garden variety examining of things, plain old IF commands work fine. And I am definitely exploring what is the best game form to exploit what it can do. You can see some examples of game play that I think exploits it more in the spoiler section of what I wrote here.

On the game side: thanks for writing up your thoughts, always appreciate unvarnished feedback.

3 Likes

I could be wrong, but I thought I remembered times where some command would clear the page, like when you got to a new section. Am I wrong? If I am, then yes, you could just copy the whole page and get the whole transcript. Even this seems a little clunky, though, as I have to remember to do this by hand when I’m done with the game, instead of just typing ‘script’ at the beginning and forgetting about it. (The latter also is good for debugging when there’s the possibility of the game crashing–if you’ve saved things as you go, you have a better record of what caused things to go wrong.)

This is definitely something that most browser-based games do not do, but I complain about those systems for the same reasons, too, because transcripts are useful, darn it! :wink:

Your example of what your engine could potentially do is interesting, though by itself it isn’t quite compelling yet. For one, the particular abilities seem like they could be implemented as an I7 extension, and for another, it’s hard to imagine someone thinking to interact with the game that way, or, if they did, what they would be hoping for. Would you reveal characteristics of items in locations not seen? Would there be adjective synonyms? I feel like it could be pointing to something useful and interesting (and I applaud you forging out in that direction); I just can’t make out where you’re going yet.

Lazy Wizard’s Guide

This was a reasonable puzzle game, marred a bit by missed implementations (‘hit’ not working but ‘break’ working, for example), but mostly marred (for me) by not having anything in particular to say, and not having strong enough puzzles to make up for it. I’d compare this to the first puzzle-fest I played in this comp, Into the Sun. Both have a spartan aesthetic, a bit of atmosphere, and rely on puzzles. But while Into the Sun had a focused, whole-map-one-puzzle play experience, this game had a more standard fetch quest design. Which is fine, but does mean that you need to bring a bit more to the table: particularly clever and/or intricate puzzles, great and/or funny writing, an interesting place to explore, or something.

I did like a lot of the puzzles! There was a lot of excellent item re-use, and even foreshadowing (the paintings scattered around the school; another student revealing what happened in their own exam). I felt clever many times while playing the game, which is exactly the sort of feeling you want your puzzles to inspire. I also only rarely felt like I was performing actions for the sake of performing actions–instead, I usually knew what I wanted to do, and after a bit of wandering, often was able to formulate a plan to do it. All that was great! I guess I just still wanted more.

Part of the problem was that I didn’t quite buy the premise: you’ve been in school for years, but haven’t learned any spells… but to graduate, you only need to learn a handful of them that are easily obtainable by reading the right books. The implications are that literally everyone else going to the school are chumps, and our protagonist is correct to put in two hours’ worth of work at the very end to obtain what everyone else worked on for years. One thing that could have made things more enjoyable for me would have been to imbue the game (in writing and design) with a sense of desperation from Our Hero, being insanely clever/lucky at the end in order to make up for a long series of bad decisions. Or if not that, then some sort of stronger engagement with the premise. Instead, the premise felt a bit tacked-on to a pre-existing set of puzzles, and it wasn’t a great fit, or at least it wasn’t a very interesting fit.

Did the author have something to say? : Not really! Any sort of sparkly writing or characterization would have gone a long way to making the game more enjoyable.

Did I have something to do? : Yes, and the puzzles were competent. As mentioned, a few missing synonyms that unfortunately had me turn to the walkthrough, since the in-game hint system wasn’t very helpful.

5 Likes

The Thirty Nine Steps

This was a rollicking adventure! There were puzzles, but none that bogged down the pace of the story at all, by dint of having every branch reconverge at the beginning of the next section, but with different states, each of which the player could have an opinion about, but none of which impeded further progress entirely (merely cutting off some options in some cases). This design, combined with the option at the end of each chapter to replay it from scratch, puts the player completely in control of the pacing of the story: they can barrel ahead with whatever they’ve achieved so far, or they can try multiple times, tweaking things as they go.

Overall, I’m a huge fan of this design: it gave me full control of the story and the puzzles, and (critically) made all of my possibilities fun to experience! At times, I was directing the protagonist, and at times I was directing the flow of the story itself, and was given just enough leeway to discover interesting nooks and crannies of the story, but not so much that I could ruin the experience for myself.

I think I would have appreciated the addition of a few status markers here and there that make a difference in what your choices are, and/or what the results of your choices are: your current outfit, perhaps, or the current status of how much you’ve deciphered a particular code. I also think I might have appreciated being told if I was correct or not after my opportunity to say my piece on what I thought was going on. But those are guesses; I know I felt a little lost when my guesses weren’t commented on, but I don’t know if being told ‘you were [wrong|right]’ would have actually helped that feeling, or if tracking my clothing would have made me feel more confident in my choices, or annoyed at the hand-holding. Or both!

Side note: I really liked the fact that in Chapter 3, what seems like a sub-optimal path on one hand can actually be beneficial in the end, as it gives you time to do a particular action you can’t do otherwise. Replaying that chapter, I figured out how to avoid the ‘bad’ path, only to realize that it meant I couldn’t do the other thing, and it was a fun moment of mental frission :wink:

Oh, and I loved the music. It was wonderful.

Did the author have something to say? : Yes: the author had a story to tell, and was bound and determined to make you a willing participant in it.

Did I have something to do? : Yes, in several different ways: the choices of the protagonist (both material and philosophical (the three ‘approaches’)), the pacing of the story, and the final stage (if desired) of piecing everything together and working out the deeper mysteries of the plot.

7 Likes

The Thick Table Tavern

This game has three basic parts: the framing story, the mixing-drinks minigame, and the main story and storylets. So, I’ll talk about all three!

I didn’t particularly care for the framing story. I found the ultimate (hinted-at) identity of the ‘Watcher’ and of the creator to be a bit cliché, but more importantly, it didn’t feel like anything was done with that premise. The Watcher just showed up and was mysterious. The final choice was a bit weird: normally, I’d be happy to replay a game to explore alternatives, but in this case the offer to replay was given to the protagonist, not the player. And as such, I strongly felt that the protagonist had no business replaying his own life and giving himself a potentially worse outcome and even a different backstory; that would have betrayed, in some way, his whole life. So I just said ‘no thanks’ and quit. And now I feel I can’t replay the game separately, either :wink:

The mixing-drinks minigame was also not particularly my style. There’s a list of things to click and you find and click on them, and then you get a new list. And…that’s it. I did discover that grenadine is a syrup, I guess. I feel like there are aspects of actually mixing drinks that could be interesting to explore in a minigame, but those would be things like mixing things in a particular way, in particular ratios, or making clever substitutions, all based on the patron you’re serving, or based on your knowledge of how drinks mix. But none of that was in the game; it was just ‘click this recipe’. You could set the difficulty level so that instead of just ‘click this recipe’ you could instead ‘click this recipe with added stress’, which did not sound like it would add anything to the experience, so I stuck with Easy mode. There was a time or two when the game didn’t recognize that I had clicked something, which on the harder modes would have made me angrier, so I didn’t get to experience that, I suppose.

But that brings us to the heart of the game; the ‘fiction’ part of the ‘interactive fiction’. And this I liked! Having the setting be ‘a place where interesting people stop by’ was great; it made what was essentially a one-room game feel like a normal full world. Sort of a B5/DS9 experience instead of a TNG game, if you will. The waitress character was fun (if somewhat objectified), and the owner character was also interesting, though I felt that characterization kind of abruptly flipped after his introduction, and I never did really figure out his backstory. And the parade of storylets of people coming through the bar were generally fun and well-written, though the obvious highlight was the older couple. I also liked the ritual of getting everything ready in the morning. Clicking on each of the bottles in turn when restocking the bar made me identify with the protagonist in a way I hadn’t expected: he was an excellent bartender, and always methodical in ensuring he had every tool he needed to do his job.

Did the author have something to say? : Not a ton; mostly simple NPC characterization with a touch of worldbuilding. The obvious place to have something novel to say would have been in the framing story, but I felt that was mostly a missed opportunity.

Did I have something to do? : Yes! Unfortunately, a lot of what I was given to do was the ‘click this list’ minigame, which wasn’t particularly engaging for me, but it was at least simple enough to get through without too much difficulty. The morning ritual was a lot more engaging for me, all told. Interestingly, however, these interactions made me not realize that my choices during the rest of the game were fairly limited. It wasn’t until I had to write this paragraph that I noticed, in fact! So that’s a pretty clever bit of game design; kudos!

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