Your experience with Retrograding is almost beat-for-beat the same as mine was, if that counts for anything! At least I’m encouraged that I wasn’t alone in thinking that initial choice was who to track down to capture or kill, rather than to work alongside - that really felt like a weird twist to me.
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I mean, maybe we were? And we were pretending all along to ‘work with’ her, but in fact, once we got back, it was supposed to be implied that we toss her into the recycling flame with everything else? It would make no sense, but it would at least fit with the opening. I guess.
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FWIW, Raven’s route is substantially more fleshed out and less confusing than Zinnia’s. I don’t say this to try to argue anyone out of their opinion or convince anyone to try again, but I do think it’s essentially two games in a trenchcoat, one of which is substantially better than the other, and it’s unfortunate that most people seem to be playing the less good one.
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The Little Four
Captain Arthur Hastings, O.B.E.
This was utterly charming. It’s a little slice of life Poirot fanfic, imagining a day in the life of Poirot, Hastings, and Hastings’ four children in their double flat in London. It is, comprehensively, another game that knows exactly what it is, and sets about doing exactly that. It wants you to do simple activities and examine every item, so that you’ll see the little bits of item-based backstory that the author has meticulously and delightfully left waiting for you at every turn. (My favorite: the revelation that because Poirot enjoys a breakfast of exactly two identically-sized eggs, the grocer has taken to putting together a special box containing paired eggs, just for him.) All of Poirot’s items’ descriptions are great, but I particularly liked the descriptions of the kids’ items: they had an earnest description to everything that painted a picture of a single father (along with ‘uncle Poirot’) trying his best to raise children in a society that had not really given him great tools to do so, but remembering his wife’s injunctions, and appreciating each child for what they were.
For what it tried to do, I would say it could not have done it better: the tasks you are given are clear and straightforward, and provide just enough contrast to ‘>X THING1. X THING2’ to break up the latter enough to not be boring. Unexamined items are conveniently bolded, and italiced post-examination. Then there’s a final ‘mystery’ at the end, with zero stakes, and instead a fun way to pass the time with your restless son.
I am reminded that while in traditional Western storytelling, you would need the addition of conflict to make this ‘a story’, but that there are other traditions that revel in simple observation. It seems that the ‘exploration’ mechanic that IF does so well is a perfect fit for this kind of storytelling. Excellent job.
Did the author have anything to say? Present a slice of life of some well-known literary figures, and the life they led between adventures.
Did I have anything to do? This is kind of an interesting question. Because I’ve answered ‘no’ here for other games with arguably the same amount of stuff to ‘do’. But here, since exploration is the whole point, it felt more like I was ‘doing something’ in the game than other games where I had more influence, but felt more like I was just watching things unfold.
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Just Two Wishes
Kozelek
A little bit of wish-fulfilment fantasy. And I think I’m just going to spoiler-shroud my whole review, so here we go.
Wouldn’t it be nice, this game asks, if the smallest and worst affected by this world’s tragedies could play a part in, if not fixing things, at least getting some small bit of revenge? And, you know, yes. Yes, it would.
This is, though, the final reveal of the game, and up until Act III, we merely see the effects: Netanyahu and Trump getting turned into anthropomorphic bears, the first from the perspective of a random Tel Aviv citizen, and the second from the perspective of Trump himself. Which was, I have to say, not what I was expecting. The game had Trump behave exactly as I imagine Trump behaving, and that was probably the most satisfying part of the game for me, just to watch a terrible person have to deal with having surrounded himself with more terrible people, so that when something bad actually happens, there’s nobody to turn to. I kind of feel like that part, at least, might actually eventually happen, though of course well after the damage has been done. Sigh.
There were some bugs, mostly unimplemented objects, which felt… kind of apropos? Like, if I made a game in haste and anger, I’m sure I’d have unimplemented objects, too.
Weirdly, this game disabled ‘script’ (???) and ‘undo’, and come on. Don’t do that. I had to get my script from the interpreter instead:
Did the author have anything to say? Yup: be angry at people who make the world a terrible place.
Did I have anything to do? Kind of not, but like other similar games, there was some exploration to be had.
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Thanks for the really kind review! I’m out of spoons for a big response, but thanks for giving my entry a chance despite your initial reservations. I’m glad that it seems like you enjoyed it in the end! I’ve been watching the reviews carefully for things to improve next time (synonyms! I need to add more synonyms!), so hopefully my next try will go even better.
Also, you’ll have to forgive the fourth-wall breaking and meta BS. That’s just part of the experience of dealing with most fiction I write. My D&D group feels your pain.
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And thank you for pouring your heart and your creativity into your game! Games that go big always have a special place in my heart. Even if they’re so big they break the fourth wall.
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Imperial Throne
Alex Crossley
This game had a very interesting design that I respect, but ultimately didn’t work for me, personally. The basic idea is that it’s an empire-building sim, but also wholly a parser game: you’re hardly told anything about what possible things you can do, and instead just try to figure it out as you go. Partway through playing it, I got frustrated and turned to other reviews to see if I was missing something, and I… kind of was? I mean, there were lots of things I was missing. But I was also missing the way the game could work, when it had felt like a straightforward design failure when I played it. So I’m glad I saw the other reviews, and I returned to the game with a new sense of possibility, but in the end, the central premise still felt like a design failure, at least to my own brain.
I’m just going to spoiler the rest of this so I can talk freely.
So! As you might have guessed if you’ve played this game, I spent a lot of the beginning of the game just being annoyed that none of the stats of the game were stated anywhere: no sense of your treasury, no list of provinces you controlled, no map, and only a partial set of verbs. (I played a late version, which apparently had more help than early versions? Maybe that led me to think I should get even more help than earlier players, who had to figure out every last verb on their own? I dunno.) So when the game told me that the aristocracy was enjoying a new silk fashion trend, and I typed ‘tax the rich’, and it worked, I didn’t get the thrill others got of thinking, “Woo, I figured something out!” but instead felt annoyed that I hadn’t been told what I could tax–a feeling that only got stronger much later when I happened to try ‘tax silk’ much later, which also worked, and I grumbled at having not been told I could do that 30 turns ago. And while we’re on the subject of taxes, at the end, I finally turned to the walkthrough and saw I could tax individual provinces. Come on! Arrgh.
So the whole thing made me think about the function of the parser in a game. There’s really nothing like it when it works: you just type what you want to do into the game, and the game does something! And when it does something you wanted it to, you feel like the most clever person on the planet in that moment.
So the trick of a parser game is to get you to think of the right commands, so you feel clever. And it can’t do it too obviously, or you’ll feel like you’re just being led around by the hand, but it can’t do it too obscurely, or the player will quit in frustration. And everyone is different, so 'what it is that makes people think of typing ‘>X the Y’ is going to be different.
And I think that’s the crux of why this game does an interesting thing in a way that doesn’t quite work. It’s a sim where the levers are completely hidden, with prompts to get you to jump to the idea ‘oh, I bet there’s a lever about this’. But for too many things, there’s only one prompt. You are told, exactly once:
The rich have begun wearing silk garments, something that would have been
condemned as an extravagance in former years.
and from that you have to deduce the commands >TAX RICH and also >TAX SILK. And that’s the only prompt you’ll ever get about it! You either think of them or you don’t. I think in order for this game to have worked for me (and to work more like the better of the parser games in general), it would need to have a variety of ways to get you to those ideas.
It would certainly be easy to overdo things, but I feel like there has to be a middle ground between a single prompt that just mentions the rich and silk, vs. “The rich are flaunting their wealth and ridiculing you in public because they enjoy such low taxes on silk in your empire.” And I certainly don’t know where that line is, and having the line where it is right now seems to have worked for a bunch of people! But it didn’t work that well for me, and I feel like it could have, with some more tweaking.
Because there is indeed something cool about playing a sim where the levers are invisible. It’s more realistic, if nothing else: someone in history had to be the first person to think of taxing individual things, or particular groups of people. Empires don’t arrive at your doorstep with gift-wrapped levers you can toggle. And I read over the walkthrough with a sense of wistful anger: some weird combination of ‘How was I supposed to think of that?’ combined with ‘How cool would it have been to figure that out?’
So overall: a really creative idea with a bold approach. I wish it had worked better for me, but I also think it would be possible for this (or some future game) to make that leap to be more accessible while still retaining the core ‘sim parser game’ aesthetic.
Did the author have anything to say? I saw other reviewers say they wished the author had something to say about empire building, and I agree that there wasn’t really much there; just the parser sim idea. Adding ‘having something to say’ to that would indeed have been cool.
Did I have anything to do? Yes! I failed at it, but I definitely had things to figure out.
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The Breakup Game
Trying Truly
This was a surreal game. The first line of the summary is “If you found this place, you belong here.” Game, I do not.
It told me to think of a ‘lost love’. I… I don’t have any lost loves. The closest I could think of is a girl I dated briefly at the very end of High School, and then I went off to college. She was nice! Nothing was ever going to happen! My freshman year of college I went on, hmm, maybe four dates with three different women? Over the course of the entire year? Then my sophomore year I started dating the woman I am currently married to. That was 34 years ago.
So, I don’t have any breakup angst in my life. None! The scant handful of times in this game it would finally let me say something like, “Nope, I’m good!” and it would tell me “And yet, here we are.” Game, we are here, as you say, because you entered yourself into this competition, not because I am secretly needy. A competition that is not the exclusive domain of the lovelorn. Breaking up is not a Universal Experience. It’s common, sure, but there was no exit ramp for anyone such as myself.
And beyond that, even for the actually-lovelorn, I’m not entirely convinced the game is as universally applicable as it thinks itself to be. It’s rooted in a particular cultural milieu that values self-affirmations above… well, above just about everything, it seems. That probably works for some people! I’m not going to knock it; that’s fine. But I was born with self-affirmations seeping out of my pores; personal growth for me involves realizing I screwed up, which I am otherwise, by nature, likely to blithely ignore. Personally, I don’t need more self-affirmations; they came pre-installed.
Did the author have anything to say? “You’re good enough, you’re strong enough, and gosh darn it, people like you.”
Did I have anything to do? Nope!
(This is my first post-comp-deadline review, but I’m still enjoying plugging through my list. But at this point, I’m also letting myself read reviews before writing them, as well as reading post-mortems, knowing who won, etc. Not that I know who won yet.)
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Yup, pretty much sums it up. I personally did have some serious break-up issues in my early twenties. This game, with its constant reminders that I am making great steps forward by clicking on a button that didn’t really describe how I felt just because there was no more appropriate option, would not have helped.
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Belated thanks for your review of The Little Four and for the very kind words!
I don’t have much to add (and am saving further notes for the post-mortem), but I wanted to express just how lovely and heartening it was to hear that all these elements were able to come through in the way I hoped they would.
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whoami
n-n
OK, this game had a delightful premise and interface. I mean, I suppose the premise was kind of terrible, but… enh, you know what I mean. I liked the idea of setting a game there. The interface being ‘navigating the directories of a UNIX system’ was particularly fun for me, since I have had to navigate directories of UNIX systems a LOT, so just the familiarity of the root directory structure in a post-apocalypse setting was amusing. And, perhaps, slightly heartening? ‘Even in the post-apocalypse, Mr, Smith, we will still need people that understand the UNIX file system.’ ‘But of course!’
Like some others, I too was impressed by the sudden switch to a parser game, implemented entirely in Twine. Impressive! And somehow appropriate? Continuing the theme of a computer designed for one thing performing a very hypercomplicated thing instead? I dunno, maybe I’m reaching.
My one complaint about the game is about the endings, so spoilers…
So, it turns out that there are four different solutions to the parser game, which gives you four different worlds in which to live out the rest of your simulated existence. And if it had been me, I would have HATED this, because I had no idea when playing the parser game that there even were four solutions, let alone what the options meant. I’ve seen this before (with less dire results) in other games: games that give you alternate puzzle solutions, and then claim that the puzzle solution you found means that you are X kind of person. No! For the love of all that’s holy, NO! Puzzle solutions are things you stumble on as you’re trying random stuff; they don’t mean they’re your preferred solution! The ONLY way that works is if you find all the solutions first, and then decide between them! Fortunately I had needed to turn to the walkthrough earlier (I hadn’t realized bits of the ‘Makefile’ were clickable), and noodling back to it, and found out the whole ‘there are four solutions and the one you find defines your world’ premise. I can only imagine my poor protagonist, years later, being vaguely dissatisfied with his capitalist number-go-up world, going back to the original file system and discovering that he could have been living in an egalitarian society the whole time, and just being SO PISSED. And having only long-dead people to blame, making it even worse.
Also, in non-complainy musings: what would it be like to be a fully-compiled mind with real-world memories in a world of complete simulation? And knowing that? That’s kind of mind-boggling. And to then possibly also have a medium-level-compiled mind there with you, who also knows not only that they’re living in a simulation, has all her original memories, but also knows that they’re not a very good copy of the original? The author never explores this, but the premise is really compelling and not a little disturbing.
Did the author have anything to say? Kind of? There wasn’t much beyond the premise, but the premise was indeed fun.
Did I have anything to do? Revel in my UNIX skills being relevant in a post-apocalypse.
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Thanks for the review!
About Mia’s scan, the lower resolution means that it has the main personality features but not the memories, so it’s like a digital clone unaware of her condition. It’s still morally dubious but not so cruel, I think.
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Oh, that’s interesting! I didn’t get the moral dubiousness as much–Mia sent you the scan of her own free will, and all. I could also imagine the world developing in a ‘Free Guy’ sort of way, too–the computer clearly can support at least one consciousness, so maybe it could support more? Depending on storage? Anyway, it’s definitely interesting to think about!
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