Lucian's IFComp 2025 reviews (latest: whoami)

Competitions IFComp
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43

Escape the Pale
Pninuška

Well, I… escaped the pale? I managed it in like four trips.

This game is weirdly similar to ‘The Olive Tree’ in that it seems to be attempting to tell a sad story on one hand while having you run a sim in another. (This time, the sad story is about the Jews, from the time when they were the targets instead of the oppressors. The story of generational trauma inherent in the contrast between the two games is almost sadder than either game on its own.) Unfortunately, the writing was too spare and basic to really sell the point home, and the game was over entirely too quickly, to boot. You buy stuff in one city, then travel to another to sell it, hoping that your cousin’s info about prices is good. And, uh, it always is? I think? I kept expecting there to be a twist, and there never was. The final city I went to (of four, IIRC) had rumors of a progrom in the near future, so I sold my stuff, and immediately bought a ticket out of Russia. And, uh, won the game. So it wasn’t really a sad story as it was a small wooden signpost saying ‘sad story this way’.

Did the author have anything to say? Yes, but they didn’t actually manage to convey it effectively.
Did I have anything to do? Yes, but nothing unexpected ever happened, so I just did the thing the intro told me to do, and then I was done.

4 Likes
44

The Tempest of Baraqiel
Nathan Leigh

First, a public service announcement: you can turn on undo in this game. Go to ‘options’ and then turn on ‘show back button’. Don’t turn it on if the presence of undo spoils your enjoyment of games, I guess? But I used it to great effect in my own playthrough.

So. I find myself having a hard time putting together my thoughts about this game. On the face of it, I enjoyed it! The world building was interesting, the character of the PC was nuanced, the other characters were distinct, and the central mystery of the story felt both relevant and somewhat realistic. The style was a genre I’ve often enjoyed: classic hard sci-fi with an interesting core premise. I enjoyed having discussions with my team where we were trying to solve a hard problem, and a discussion point I chose to bring up helped us edge closer to a solution.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. There’s a point where a reference to an unknown-to-you but clearly significant-to-the-PC is intriguing, and helps establish the world as bigger than just the things happening directly in the line of this particular story (“Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars.”) But here, I kept being dogged by the suspicion that there were things in this story that I was missing. It felt like, perhaps, the best way to play the game was to literally see all the text in it first, and only then choose your ‘optimal path’ story through it.

And while that sort of game is often interesting to me, the problem here was that I kept feeling like the story I personally was getting was incomplete and therefore unsatisfying. That was mitigated a bit by the undo (‘go back’) command! It meant I could see at least a bit more of the breadth of the story: it made more sense that my PC would back off of asking too many prying questions of her superior officer when I discovered that I could literally be sent to the brig if I kept it up. That seemed like a bit of worldbuilding that the PC would know that I didn’t, that using ‘undo’ helped me discover.

But as long as my choices kept propelling me forward, I was loathe to lean on ‘undo’ too much for my first playthrough, even though on reflection it might have been the best way to experience this game for me.

I was also just left confused when being thrown into the aforementioned brig didn’t end the game, but instead seemed to push me down a completely different path; one where none of my previous choices nor efforts meant anything, and where I seemed to be essentially starting over from scratch. I eventually decided the story I was now experiencing was too discordant from the character I had previously established, and backed up so as to not get thrown in the brig after all, and from there played a much more coherent storyline. And I found (through a little bit of trail and error) a reasonably satisfying ending. But I was left vaguely dissatisfied, and I think a lot of that was just that the game seems to have been meant to be played ‘wide’ and not ‘through’: that the full impact of the story only makes sense when you know all the ins and outs of all the different stories you could have played.

That is, of course, only a guess! But I can at least say that despite there being a lot in the story that I really liked, my own playthrough felt less than the sum of its parts.

Did the author have anything to say? I think so! And they certainly had a lot of worldbuilding that I did find and appreciated.
Did I have anything to do? Yes, and this seemed fairly reasonable: I was well satisfied with the immediate results of my choices probably 85% of the time.

6 Likes
45

Dead Sea
Binggang Zhuo

Reader, I almost gave up on this game. Fortunately, I persevered, and my experience dramatically increased for the last half of the game.

This is a pretty clunky game, and I’m kind of amused at my own sense of entitlement when a different game entered in this very comp (‘The Promises of Mars’) had an innovation (the clickable map) that I immediately wanted in this game. Despite the fact that the author would, of course, have not had access to the game to even begin to imagine the possibility of doing things that way. That said: it was awkward to click directions to go places, especially when the main mechanic of the puzzles (as in ‘Promises’) was ‘get X from room Y, use in room Z’.

The writing was very, very spare, and reminded me of the writing in ‘A Dark Room’, the very popular text-based idle game that came out several years ago. That kind of writing implies more than it states, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the gaps. Which is great, until I’m awkwardly clicking around the map trying to find the exit I missed, while the game wants me to trade a fish for a watermelon. There’s only so much gap I can fill in for a fish-watermelon trade, man.

Fortunately, from there we start trending more serious, and you get some nice background reveals and reasonable puzzles, and the spare writing started to sound less bored and more mysterious the further I got. I’m not entirely sure I understood the entirety of why I did what I did to get to the ‘True End’ of the story, but it felt emotionally resonant. Mostly.

Did the author have anything to say? They had bits of interesting backstory and worldbuilding to share, and a bit of a plot to share, along with some goofy bits.
Did I have anything to do? Fill in the rest of the backstory and worldbuilding myself (which kind of worked!), solve some basic puzzles, and blunder around the map.

4 Likes
46

The Wise-Woman’s Dog
Daniel M. Stelzer

Aha! This was a fabulous game. Just lovely. I wrote the following in my transcript as I scoped out the beginning area: “This whole game is great; I would not be at all surprised if it wins. Wholesome, interesting, believable, cute. LOTS of attention to detail, and being helpful.”

There are two core mechanical premises: 1) you are a dog, and 2) you can move blessings and curses (spells) from one thing to another via yourself. That’s, like, almost a perfect premise for an IF game. You don’t have to have any conversations, because you can’t talk, and you give the player a fun and novel tool to manipulate the world with.

Then there’s the core setting premise: you are in the Absurdly Well Researched Anatolia, in 1280 BCE, in the late Hittite empire. There’s footnotes for days, each a bite-sized window into the author’s research into the time and region, with discussions about why they chose this bit instead of this other bit, or what was going on with the other thing.

Together, it all worked! At least it worked for me. I noodled around the opening area just thoroughly enjoying myself, finding new problems, finding new spells to solve those problems, watching recognizable people go about their normal lives in a very different world from my own that was nonetheless so grounded that I understood everything immediately.

The beginning is also super invested in making sure the player knows what to do and how to do it. But instead of getting an info-dump of ‘this is how IF works’, it’s parceled out over the first several moves, in a slightly over-enthusiastic way (for someone who already knows how IF works) but sincere and short enough that it wasn’t annoying.

The other nice thing was the gating: each ‘stage’ of the game had a common currency to collect, and once you got enough, you could go on to the next stage. But there was more currency available than you needed, so if any given puzzle was too hard for you, you could move on to the next stage anyway, then circle back if you just wanted the satisfaction of solving All The Puzzles. So in the end, you could accomplish the main goal of the game (‘save your human’) without having to be a completist.

Of course, I am a completist, so I had to solve all the puzzles. And while most of them were great, some of them I bounced off of, because, you know, they’re IF puzzles and this is a parser game and That’s What Happens. There was one puzzle in particular that was kind of frustrating to me (involving some, uh, hot oil) where I knew what I needed to do, but didn’t have the slightest idea of how to accomplish it. That one puzzle also kind of broke mimesis for me, because I was the only being that seemed to notice the problem? That seemed kind of major? And try as I might, I couldn’t manage to recruit anyone else to help. It also seemed like there was some sort of plot point in the setup to that disaster that was never resolved, although now that I type that out, I’m realizing there was probably a connection between the disaster trap and the robbery plot. But was there anything about the people behind those plots? Did I miss something? Anyway; it’s a minor point overall.

Slightly more concerning was the fact that by the late game, you have access to an absurd number of spells, which could feel a bit daunting at times. The biggest problem was probably just that there were enough that I could at times come up with a plausible-to-me use for a spell that the author wouldn’t have considered, meaning I would spend a lot of time transporting things all over the map, only to be met with a generic failure message at the end. I can’t overstress the importance of ‘working non-solutions’ to puzzles: you really owe it to your players to respond to things they try by acknowledging that they Tried A Thing, and ideally you’ll use that as an opportunity to push them the right way. That happened a reasonable amount of time for me in this game! But the combinatorial nature of spells and problems was so large that by the end, there was no way the author was going to be able to anticipate every last thing I did.

So being stymied and having to go to the hints was frustrating, but at least usually, the early hints would push me in the right direction, so I could end up feeling clever when I took the solution the rest of the way. And most of the puzzles were solvable for me in-game, which was even nicer. And, of course, I didn’t actually have to solve all the puzzles! If they were frustrating to me, I should have left them alone! But I liked the game too much to leave any stone unturned (or un-lifted or un-frozen, or un-locked, or…)

Did the author have anything to say? Absolutely! Just a ton. A vibrant world, a great premise, some fun characters, and some clever puzzles to solve.
Did I have anything to do? So much! I did so much stuff! I was the bestest dog, and when my human wakes up again, she is going to pet me a lot.

12 Likes
47

Thank you so much for the review, and I’m so glad you enjoyed the game!

1 Like
48

Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus
Charles M Ball

Well, hmm. This was pretty competent, but somehow not very compelling? Like, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the craft here, given the genre: this is a ‘go on an adventure where your character fights bad guys and levels up’ game, and the premise is reasonable; the world is reasonable, the puzzles are… well. The fights are reasonable (if easy? I think?) but the puzzles seem to be ‘find the bit that triggers the next info dump’. These info dumps are several paragraphs long, in which the character you play is kind of a self-important jerk. Playing a jerk isn’t super interesting, as it doesn’t really go anywhere with it, nor does anyone call them out on it, or treat them better or worse because of it, or… or anything, really. They’re just jerky for no reason. And the triggers are kind of hidden, and often rely on doing a thing (usually ‘talking to someone’) only after some trigger has been hit. It’s a little jarring when the first time you >TALK TO DUDE the game says, “You don’t have anything to say to the dude,” and the next time you >TALK TO DUDE the game says, “Oh, right, now you have something to say, here’s three paragraphs of text.”

There’s also a bit of the ridiculous thrown in for good measure: this world’s version of casting attack spells at people is ‘rhyming’, so when you get attacked by Joe Thief, you intone, with great self-import: “Eeny meeny miny moe…” That… didn’t even get to the rhyme! It’s clearly supposed to be ridiculous/funny, but it hit a little weird for me, because it was the only bit of the whole game that had that brand of frivolity.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think part of the issue is that this is a parser game. In a Clicky, you’re always doing something followed by three paragraphs of text; that’s just the genre. In a parser game, I expect the text to be doled out more evenly with all the other messages you get, which are mostly short parser defaults and room descriptions. I dunno; maybe it’s just that the game didn’t grab me, and I’m grasping at straws to explain why, when the real reason is just a basic ‘this game wasn’t quite my speed’.

Did the author have anything to say? Some! There was an interesting world, and the protagonist was characterized, even if I didn’t like them much.
Did I have anything to do? Make tactical decisions when fighting (and when buying stuff), and otherwise stumble around looking for the next trigger.

7 Likes
49

Fired
Olaf Nowacki

This is a short game in that genre of games I have long supported: a game that knows exactly what it is, and sets about doing that. You’ve been fired, your boss is terrible, you are getting revenge before leaving the office. Done!

I feel like the ‘slightly off-kilter workplace revenge fantasy’ is a milieu I haven’t seen for a while, but it’s very possible those games are still going strong just off my own radar; I certainly remember (if vaguely) the setting from the 90’s/2000’s. The examples I’m remembering were slightly more surreal, but on balance, this game is itself pretty surreal as well, though that surreality is very slightly more plausible than my vague memories tell me were in the other games.

I guess overall I had three reactions: It was satisfying to indulge in a little work-revenge fantasy, it was funny to read the over-the-top descriptions of how horrible the boss was (the onlyfans line made me howl with laughter), and it was disturbing to see some of the setup in the boss’s lair. Though the disturbing bits were made slightly less so by me having to go to the hints near the end, particularly for getting the key(!)

Did the author have anything to say? ‘Enjoy getting revenge on this terrible person.’
Did I have anything to do? Enjoy getting revenge on this terrible person.

3 Likes
50

Penthesileia
Sophia Zhao

This was a fun little short story. The vast majority of it is non-interactive, and I was about to write that it all was, before suddenly remembering that, no, there were actually some choices to make here and there. Which feels like an odd thing to forget? Thinking back on it, I did feel like I was indeed making choices when they were presented, but they all felt kind of obvious, like there was no other ‘real’ choice I could make. Or maybe it was the huge ‘click to continue’:‘click on an option’ ratio, which was… probably not 100:1, but it felt like it. There was a lot of clicking in this game. Like, almost every sentence was click-gated. You could click as fast as you wanted, which was nice! No ‘slow text’ anywhere. But I read in someone else’s reviews this year that authors tend to click-gate text if they feel they need to add extra weight to the prose; that they’re worried that the text by itself wouldn’t have enough impact. If that’s true, it would make poor Sophia Zhao the most insecure Twine author on the planet. I don’t think that’s a super fair characterization; it was clearly a stylistic choice here; one that might work for some and not work as well for others. For me, it made the whole game feel non-interactive. And now I’m spending too much time talking about design; overall it wasn’t a huge deal.

So! The game does this thing where everyone in the story gets a name from Greek mythology/legends, so your name is ‘Penny’ which is short for the titular ‘Penthesileia’, and your husband is ‘Achilles’. Which made things a little weird in the beginning as you-the-player is trying to find out the setting: is this a re-telling of some Greek myth? It eventually transpires that no, the names are there to lend added weight to the story; to establish characterization without having to do too much heavy lifting. Achilles is complaining about Theseus being promoted instead of him; we recognize their statuses from the myth. Or, you know, not so much: I had no idea who Penthesileia was until I looked her up on Wikipedia after playing this game; ditto ‘Antiope’. But while I still don’t know the significance of Antiope in the game, looking up Penthesileia did indeed give me new insight into her character! And I suppose the other effect was that it made the whole game feel more Epic in scope, like world-shaking events were happening, notwithstanding that they were happening in a late-2000’s dystopia instead of Times Of Yore.

I see I’ve gotten sidetracked again. Neither of the above paragraphs were my primary reaction to the game. My primary reaction was to the core story, irrespective of the number of times I had to click my mouse and irrespective of the naming conventions. At its core, the game is about a shackled woman finally finding her voice. And it had, at that core, real power. The story writ large has been told before, but this was this retelling, with a personal take on it. And it’s a story that still needs to be told, probably in as many forms as it takes.

Did the author have anything to say? Absolutely: a distinctly voiced story of a woman learning to throw off her chains.
Did I have anything to do? Kind of, but there were so many ‘click to continue’ points that I literally forgot I had made any ‘real’ choices at all.

3 Likes
51

Thank you very much for this lovely review! I’m so glad you had fun! :blush:

1 Like
52

INPUT PROCESS
HY

I really appreciated the premise of this short story. And I got to the end, and it said, “(Ending B)”. “Ending B?” I said to myself. “How on earth can there be multiple endings to this game? I never made any choices!”

Reader, I did indeed make choices in the game. This is now the second game in a row where I reached the end and literally had forgotten every single one of them. I… I don’t know what’s going on. Send help.

I think some of it must have been, again, the preponderance of ‘click to continue’ moments in the game. It wasn’t quite the same as ‘click to read every individual sentence’ of Penthesileia, but this time, there was a preponderance of slow text. And if you were getting slow text and clicked anyway, the next line would show up, even though the first line hadn’t finished slowly revealing itself! So sometimes I could click furiously and end up with three lines of slowly-emerging text on my screen and I could finally read the whole thing 3x faster than I would have, had I waited after each line to click. Thus slightly rewarded, I spent the entire game just clicking furiously, even when nothing was changing.

Anyway! The story I got (Ending B, apparently!) was cool! I felt like it took a by-now-somewhat-standard concept and took it in a new direction. And from here I’m going to dive into spoilers…

The basic story here is that you have recreated (before the game begins) the girl that broke up with you as an AI, complete with an illicit brain scan that you just kind of dumped into the mix, hoping something good would come out of it. And this is a pretty old story; there’s an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series with this premise. But most times the story has been told in the past, it’s all 'oh, horror! You have Intruded On God’s Domain! For a dumb reason! She just left you; you don’t have to be so weird about it!" And then this game takes that basic idea, strips the hysteria from it, and just kind of explores, “Well, what might this premise actually look like, if you had reasonable people in the mix?” And I played this would-be God as pretty open and kind of regretful of the whole thing, and the AI girlfriend figures out who she is, and is all, “What the hell, you creep?” and I was “Yeah, sorry, I dunno,” and she’s, “But why do I know I’m a program?” and I was, “you seemed more realistic this way?” and she’s “Sigh, OK, let’s see what we can do about this,” and you both leave the house together (I think?) and then there’s a weird scene with a crow? And then I was told I had reached ending B.

And it was pretty grounded! Like, I believed that a fairly-human AI that managed to discover who she was might actually act that way. I believed that someone trying to recreate their girlfriend might eventually kind of lose heart, and just make a self-aware program that kind of resembled her instead, for opaque-to-them reasons, but just as part of the process of kind of stumbling forward and trying to deal with that pain. And there was no histrionics or over-the-top gasps of horror. It was nice! And interesting! And perhaps most helpfully, it was nice to be able to wrestle with the basic premise in a realistic way, and think about it from a fresh perspective.

Did the author have anything to say? A modern take on an old story, minus the hysteria.
Did I have anything to do? Not that I noticed, apparently! But yes, I suppose so.

4 Likes
53

This is the second review I’ve gotten for this game that says something along the lines of not knowing where all the choices even were, so you’re not the only one lol. While I regret the confusion I will try to explain myself a little and say it was because I went into it not wanting each choice to feel like a huge deal; I imagined especially in emotional situations you might not know the significance of what you say.

I’m glad you ended up getting Ending B though, it’s admittedly the most substantial one.

Just for clarity’s sake, the protagonist left by herself, and the crow was my attempt to have parallel ending lines across all endings :skull:

Thank you for playing and for the review!!

1 Like
54

Fable
Sophia Zhao

The story I got from my playthrough of this game was, by far, the most affecting to me personally of all the games I’ve played so far. I put this down to the writing on two levels: one, the simple expressions of longing from our protagonist were heartfelt, sincere, and deep. And two, the plot of the game was perfectly structured and timed to hit me right in the feels. And here I’m going to have to diverge into extensive spoiler territory, so blurs up…

One thing I’ve realized I appreciate as I have gotten older is a story with a ‘necessary tragedy’: one where nobody is doing anything nefarious or evil, per se, but the structure of the world and the reality of life is so tuned to cause tragedy anyway. I think it might be, to some extent, because this is the situation I fear most in my life. I want to believe with all my heart that if reasonable people talk to each other reasonably, a positive outcome can always be found. But a ‘necessary tragedy’ story hits me right in that very sensitive spot in my world view. “But what if everyone was reasonable but tragedy happened anyway?” it asks. And my heart is rent because there’s nothing in my worldview that can help. So many stories manufacture conflict by having someone behave badly, or communicate badly, or not care enough. I know what to do in those situations! But if acting nobly, communicating well, and caring for others isn’t enough? I’m… I’m lost. I have no answer.

So in this story, we open with a very simple setup: unrequited love. And the extra layer of a gay man pining for a straight man means that no matter how much the straight man might care for and about the gay man, there’s just not going to be the possibility of a romantic relationship. And this is where the well-written depth of longing has to come in and sell it, because normally I’d be like, “Dude, move on; find someone else.” But I believed, with Sophia’s writing, that this just was not going to happen. The depth of the longing and the passion was just never going to let up.

Then the hook is baited: the object of your affection has returned ‘changed’. They love apricots, when they used to hate them. Other things seem… shifted. Could their attraction have shifted, or at least expanded, as well? It’s not unheard of. Maybe?

Hope, you precious bastard.

Because the shift was indeed real, but it wasn’t truly the person we loved that had changed: a foreign entity had taken over his mind. Happily/tragically for us: a gay foreign entity. And because we loved the original man, who had risked so much on their journey away, and who loved our sister (!) so deeply, we have to save him. And he comes back, still straight, and marries our sister, and lives happily ever after. While we remain, bereft.

And nobody could have acted better to avoid it. It’s just simple, common, understandable, unchangeable, unrequited love. It’s the best possible outcome. And it sucks.

(And hey, it’s the third game by Sophia Zhao! And all three have been both different from each other and solid. Congratulations, Sophia!)

Did the author have anything to say? Yeah, punch me in the gut.
Did I have anything to do? Choose the options that punch me in the gut, because it’s the best ending! I was complicit in my own gut-punching! The nerve!

5 Likes
55

The Litchfield Mystery
thesleuthacademy

This game was competent, but I found it a little… dry, I guess? All the trappings of a mystery were there. You investigate the house; you interview the suspects, you make deductions and discover new clues and new things to ask the suspects about. It’s pretty solid? The only issue I had with the mystery and the clue-gathering is that as I discovered clues, I really wanted to ask people about them, and only rarely was I able to: I feel like the author had a certain pathway in mind for how things would be discovered and what conclusions you could draw from them, and didn’t think of things from a player’s perspective: when you find evidence that implicates person X, maybe the player will want to talk to person X about that? I think the author believed the evidence would be much more conclusive that I found them to be: I found things and thought “That seems kind of fishy” but I was intended to think “Well, that clears that up.” I got to one point in the investigation, couldn’t figure out what to do next, turned to the hints… and discovered that literally all the hints pointed at things I had already found. I was done! The only thing left was the ‘accuse’ button.

The whole process seemed pretty dry, though, and a large part of that can be attributed to the utter cypher of a main character: they methodically search every room for clues, and once in a great while a random spike of personality will show up that seems to come out of left field and have zero context. At one point, you notice the person you’re talking to has red fingernails, and it reminds you of the blood of the victim that calls out for justice! Which… I mean, I guess? You’re a detective, so that’s kind of your job? But every question you ask everyone is clinical and precise (though you manage to develop a slight personality when interviewing the child, so you don’t scare them to death). You don’t have a style; you don’t have a method; you don’t muse to yourself about the case; you don’t commiserate with the perpetrator to put them at ease; you don’t… become a person. You are a detective. You solve the case, and then you’re done.

Add to that, the cast of characters are relatively straightforward, too. The murderer has a single secret, which motivated them to murder the victim, that’s not at all surprising or odd. One other person has a motivation, too, which again is utterly pedestrian. A single suspect has ‘the makings of a blackmailer’ in your opinion, but then nothing happens with this. The suspects hang out in the sitting room the entire time; nobody wanders around trying to cover up their crime or otherwise just do stuff (though the cook wants to make lunch for people! She’s a cook! That’s her personality!)

This review has turned into a nonstop litany of complaints, and I do want to say that the basic structure was great, the ultimate story made sense, and I did feel clever eventually figuring things out. I just didn’t feel satisfied eventually figuring things out.

Did the author have anything to say? Present a kind-of-standard murder mystery in a competent format.
Did I have anything to do? Find clues and interview people, though unfortunately kind of perfunctorily.

3 Likes
56

One Step Ahead
ZＵＯ ＬＩＦＡＮ

This game takes very real and reasonable concerns about over-reliance on AI, extrapolates them a bit to illustrate the dangers slightly more, and then for some reason resorts to a ‘BUT WHAT IF AI GAINS SENTIENCE’ trope. Like… why? AI gaining sentience is not an actual problem, while over-reliance on LLMs is. I had hoped for some small insight into the issue, but no, it’s just a ‘hey, AIs are bad, amirght?’ Sure, probably, but I was hoping for something more.

Did the author have anything to say? AIS ARE BAD
Did I have anything to do? Sigh as the story fell apart.

3 Likes
57

The Semantagician’s Assistant
Lance Nathan

It took me ENTIRELY TOO LONG to figure out what on earth was going on with this game, and I think on balance I’m going to have to kind of blame the design on this, though I’m not entirely blameless, as we shall see in a moment. The main problem is that the initial ‘intro’ puzzle has nothing whatsoever to do with the puzzles in the remainder of the game–it’s a different category altogether. And the next problem is that after the initial puzzle, you’re presented with six different devices, and a handful of portable items, and almost none of the combinations of stuff to mess with does anything. However, this problem was compounded for me when I chanced upon one of the very few legitimate combinations… and the ‘it did something’ message was about as long as all of the ‘you can’t’ messages, and I scanned past it without even realizing it was different:

[Major spoiler for the first puzzle of the game!]

>put won through rings
You reach out towards the rings with the won. But as you get close, the air seems to thicken, until you feel like you’re moving your hand through molasses. You’re not going to be able to put the won through the rings.

>put cartoon through rings
You reach out towards the rings with the cartoon. There’s a faint shimmering, and the cartoon blurs as it passes through, until it comes out the other side as a carton, which you take with your other hand.

>put note through rings
You reach out towards the rings with the sticky note. But as you get close, the air seems to thicken, until you feel like you’re moving your hand through molasses. You’re not going to be able to put the sticky note through the rings.

>put photo through rings
You reach out towards the rings with the photo. But as you get close, the air seems to thicken, until you feel like you’re moving your hand through molasses. You’re not going to be able to put the photo through the rings.

…yeah, that one might be on me. I read the first sentence, thought, “Yup, another thing that doesn’t work,” and stopped reading. In my defense, I will say that I had already kind of disengaged with the game at that point, and had looked up some unhelpful hints, and felt about ready to give up altogether.

A few moves later, I read through the hints long enough to where it said I was supposed to <do the second thing I had typed in the above snippet>, went to go look for that item, and it was missing, and suddenly in a flash I finally twigged to the premise of the game.

At that point, it was great! My relationship with the game did a dramatic 180, and I did all the puzzle-y things you want to do in a puzzle-y game: think about the situation, figure out a general plan, find things to experiment with, formulate a more specific plan, mess with things some more, consult the hints a little but not too much, and emerge triumphant on the other side.

The story, such as it was, was kind of disappointing? I’m not sure if it actually promised something I didn’t feel it delivered, or if I just wanted it to promise something it didn’t deliver. And the sardonic rabbit character, who seemed pretty fun at his introduction, kind of lost his personality for me once the game actually started. Neither was the point of the game, of course, but improvements on either front would have been appreciated by this reviewer, at least.

Did the author have anything to say? ‘Here is a platform for some puzzles, and I’m not going to tell you what genre they are.’
Did I have anything to do? Rage against not knowing the genre, and then finally enjoy myself after figuring it out(/being told).

(Also, here’s my full transcript of the game, which may be helpful to the author if they were wondering 'how did it take this guy SO LONG to figure out what was going on?)

4 Likes
58

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration
Jesse

Argh.

The existence of the system that this game illuminates is infuriating. And at the first screen, I could tell what the game was going to be, and was all “argh”. And then it indeed Was That Thing, and I was all “Argh!”

And then there was a twist of sorts at the end, which was really interesting! And, like, even though it was complaining about Yet Another Thing, somehow it made the game a little lighter; a little more hopeful. Because indeed, the lens through which we viewed the bulk of the game was “Hey, look at the crappy things humans do to each other.” And the pushback at the end said, in a way, “We don’t have to do this! It’s not just Human Nature that puts these systems in place; it’s something more complicated.” And with a bit of a spoiler (of sorts)…

The alien is clearly powerful (they can freeze time!) and they’re using that power to take notes. And it’s not too much of a stretch to point out that this a very easy trap to fall into: to take notes about a broken system, and publish findings about the broken system and receive accolades about how insightful you are about broken systems, all the while failing to fix the broken system. And it’s not just elites with this power; most of us have at least some. Are we taking notes? Or are we doing something? I kind of think Jesse is doing something.

Did the author have anything to say? Yes! Shine a spotlight on a broken system, and then also pose a question about the nature of spotlights themselves.
Did I have anything to do? No, not really. Most clicks are ‘click to continue’, and a few are ‘which thing do you want to see’ and of course the answer is ‘thank goodness there’s an undo button’.

5 Likes
59

Frankenfingers
Charles Moore

This game had a charming premise, a ton of effort put into making all major descriptions rhyme, was filled with logical puzzles, and mostly failed to work for me.

There were several pain points, and while none of them were particularly egregious, collectively they served to mostly push me out of fully engaging with the game. You start off with an inventory limit of one, because (duh) you’re just an animated hand. So far, so good. Later you need to carry multiple items and get a sack… but the game doesn’t do inventory management for you, and if you use something from the sack, you’re very likely to drop the thing you were holding without realizing it. It was a little extra knowing that all the author had to do was designate the sack as a ‘holdall’ in Inform, and it all just would have Worked Out. This meant that for the entire game, a puzzle I had already solved (‘how to carry multiple items’) had been solved, but I still had to deal with it, over and over and over again. At one point I lost an item and literally had to pull up my transcript to find out where I had dropped it.

The second thing that didn’t work for me, sadly, was the rhymes. I was impressed at the work that went into it, but few of the rhymes scanned very well, and more importantly, it was tremendously difficult for me to pick out the important information when revisiting the room (items and exits). And, well, this feels like me being ridiculously picky, but who exactly is doing the rhyming? I tend to think of the room descriptions as the internal monologue of the player, but our protagonist in this game didn’t particularly seem the rhyming type? We’re just a common villager, right? I think if I had liked the rhymes more I wouldn’t have cared, though, so I dunno, ignore me.

The third thing that didn’t work for me was the spacing of the puzzles; it just seemed like there were a lot of ‘padding’ rooms that only served to draw things out and make me forget where on the map I was. This was mitigated by the fact that much of the map was labyrinthine instead of maze-like, making it harder to get lost… until there was an actual fork in the path, and I’d miss it. This was made more finicky and frustrating once we got to the ‘horse’ part of the game, where the horse acted like a slowly-moving roomba that you had to explicitly turn in 45-degree increments. That in and of itself would have been fine, the first time you encountered it, but there’s a few puzzles that will very probably make you re-traverse a very long path several times with the horse, and having to read the rhyme room descriptions to try to find the exits, then remember which direction you’re coming from, then working out which way to turn the horse, time after time after time was just kind of exhausting.

And again, the whole thing felt very unfortunate, because I liked the spirit of the game, and I wanted to enjoy it more. No one thing would have been that big a deal. And I enjoyed solving the puzzles that I figured out! And I do have to say that the ending scene did pull me back in a bit, and make me go ‘aww’.

Did the author have anything to say? They had a lovely premise to share, though not much more of a message other than ‘mad science bad’.
Did I have anything to do? Solve some fun puzzles, but also get bogged down.

6 Likes
60

The Island Of Rhynin
Ilias Seferiadis

Ergh, I dunno, man. This was a competent game, and I didn’t like any of the choices it made. Or the choices it gave me to make, either. It’s a stats game, where your choices make number go up or number go down, and for your first choice, you’re given three options, then berated when you pick the wrong one by the people in the game who gave you the choice in the first place. Why give me a choice if there’s only one good option? Then there’s a similar gauntlet of making the right choice amongst seemingly-reasonable options, and either being rewarded for thinking the way the author thinks, or penalized for trying something different.

Then… well, OK, spoilers, I guess:

Then you find a hidden native tribe on this island you’re exploring, and you talk to the king who tells you “Please ignore the weird storytelling here, just accept it at face value. Now you can become king for reasons, but only you or your companion.” And the only vaguely reasonable option is ‘let your companion become king’, so he kills you and that’s the end of the game. And if there had been ‘undo’ I would have sighed and tried one of the dumb options, but there was no ‘undo’, and I was not going to replay the whole thing just to try a dumb option, so I quit there. Will, I hope you bring some sense to the island by abdicating the crown, because wtf.

Did the author have anything to say? Some sort of English Explorer wish-fulfillment fantasy?
Did I have anything to do? Make ‘wrong’ choices and die.

5 Likes
61

Uninteractive Fiction 2
Leah Thargic

Well, OK then.

Did the author have anything to say? No.
Did I have anything to do? No.

4 Likes
62

In the game’s defense, Dialog doesn’t have this feature by default—it assumes no inventory limit, so no need for a holdall.

I think I vaguely assumed the rhymes came from some kind of external narrator, like the prologue of a Shakespeare play. The characters in the world know what’s going on, but the narrator is explaining it for the benefit of the player, and they’re doing it in rhyming verse for entertainment purposes.

3 Likes