Thanks for your review.
1 Like
Familiar Problems
I had a few different revelations while playing this game. First thoughts: interesting mix of hyperlinks and parser. Second: is this vorple? No, Dialog. Third: a joke about Peano arithmetic? This is someone who’s really familiar with parser games and math, I have to know this person. But I didn’t recognize the itch name until I went to their page and saw it was Draconis!
This game is very polished. I had no idea it was meant for Petite Morte, as it would fit in just fine in IFComp. I’d say I had a 10/10 experience in the beginning, 7/10 in the middle, and 8/10 in the end.
It’s a limited-verb game where you, a kind of homonculus or familiar, gain new verbs by absorbing other homunculi or familiars. These can give powers ranging from eyesight to motion to strange alchemical powers.
The game is educational as well as fun, with references to chemistry, tuning, literature, math, etc.
I was proud of not needing hints until I got stuck on a certain puzzle. I eventually realized I wasn’t closely reading the results of all my actions, but only after hints. “Nudge” was useful, but for a large chunk of the game my nudge was ‘gong’, so I kept assuming I had to do something to it. That lost period was my 7/10 section.
Two things that could have been clued a bit more were what can be ‘cached’ and the rules surrounding the security familiar in all its uses.
Overall, very good, exactly the kind of stuff I hope for when I play interactive fiction.
5 Likes
Thank you for your review, and I’m very glad the Peano arithmetic jokes seem to have found their target audience!
2 Likes
Un Treno Come Tanti
For a few years I’ve maintained an IFDB list for surreal games set on trains, which has turned out to be a surprisingly common genre:
I was glad to add this game to that list.
This is an Italian game. Unfortunately, my Italian is not good enough to understand everything (especially given the spooky vocabulary employed) so I enjoyed this game through the medium of Google translate, which I’m sure botched much of the feeling.
Yet I enjoyed several parts of this game. It’s a Twine game about a ride on a frightening train. The train itself is organized linearly, where you can either go forward or backward, and each train car has its own surreal or horrifying elements.
While you play, background actions occur, at least one of which referenced another IF horror game.
I found some parts pretty creepy, like some of the sleeper cars.
Overall, there didn’t feel like there was much direction, just ambient atmosphere, so a focus on characterization of the train more than plot. That characterization was pleasant, and there was some choices that made a difference here and there. Overall, I think I would have liked more chances to influence the world around me (although part of horror is being unable to do so!)
5 Likes
Thank you for you review! (And for the list - we didn’t know of its existence 
)
1 Like
I’d say it is! One of the funniest German IF games I know!
3 Likes
I like this kind of game so I made the list to remember all of them. Thanks
3 Likes
Like a Sky Full of Locusts
This game is set in the world of Castle Balderstone, but is a standalone entry as opposed to the large anthologies usually found with Castle Balderstone.
It’s a western, a genre of IF I enjoy as it traditionally wasn’t very common (although more have popped up recently!) (although now that I think of it it’s set on a military base, so it doesn’t have to be a western, but it has western themes kind of, like a solo hero with a gun, musical elements, a jail with a single cell, etc.)
The idea is that literal hell on earth has appeared at a military base, and monsters roam around. You have a pistol and can acquire more weapons.
Most of the gameplay for me was finding demons and then shooting them a lot. There’s a little bit more (like puzzles) but I found that the main appeal of this game was the overall aesthetic, with the mechanics mostly serving as a way to flavor your experience of the aesthetic. In that way, it resembles Winter Storm Draco and The Ascent of the Gothic Tower out of Ryan Veeder’s other works.
I enjoyed the writing and its demons, and the excruciating moral quandary that our hero encounters in the final verse.
3 Likes
La Dama Blanca Del Hotel Arizon
This is a well-made Bitsy game about a creepy hotel.
Bitsy is a minimalist text and pixel art animation game engine. Here, the author has modelled a hotel with quite a number of items scattered around, and multiple rooms.
The ambient messages you find around are effectively chilling. At one point, I was checking something out the second time and the game changed drastically. I made a choice, and got a very interesting ending.
I don’t know if there are multiple endings. If the one I found is the only one, that’s neat; if not, I appreciate the branching. Overall, a very strong bitsy game.
6 Likes
There are at least two endings!
3 Likes
Lucifugus
I liked the way the ending of this game was handled.
You play as someone in the basement of an old house who must do everything they can to escape. This is a twine game written with an inventory-based system, and so puzzles revolve around taking and using objects.
I found it challenging a bit, probably due to my non-native speakerness of Spanish, but also partially due to the fact that you have to be pretty creative for some of the puzzles.
The atmosphere is described at a distance, objectively, dispassionately, but the objects seen show that a lot of destruction and wild events have occured.
The story that gradually evolves worked well for me, especially contrasted with the more austere opening. I loved the very last actions you have to perform, which felt very fitting.
I enjoyed this game; it reminds me of the games that first got me into Twine (like You Are Standing At A Crossroads).
7 Likes
Hotel Halloween
This is by the same group that has done the Seneca Thing for the last two Spring Things.
This is a collection of students that write mini-twine games under the direction of their teacher.
This year, the theme is a horror hotel. Like many young beginners, the games are primarily branching with little state tracking or merging of branches (although there are some fancier games that do this, like the soda bottle game!). There are some typos here and there, which makes sense as each one was written in a 2 hr time limit.
Where the games excel is in the imagination. One game has really funny messages when the player dies; another manages to be genuinely creepy (with the dolls); one with a maze is pretty complex; and so on. They all have creative things that happen, which made it enjoyable to play through them all. I hope the students continue to write engaging and entertaining games.
4 Likes
Thanks for playing and reviewing.
This game evolved from a 2-room world model demo written in response to a Harlowe programming question. Development was a bit rushed, but I hope it has some of the classic text adventure feel I was aiming for.
To avoid scrolling and prevent visual clutter, I also had in mind the kind of text economy found in your game Swigian, when writing this.
4 Likes
El trayecto
paravaariar, the author of this game, is (in my mind) well-known for literary, high-quality spanish Parser games.
This game uses fi.js, an interactive fiction parser platform for web. It uses a small number of verbs (provided in the ‘manual’) which makes gameplay easier than most parser games.
The background image of the game is a beautiful field of stars. The story of the game is that we have woken unexpectedly early from cryogenic storage on a kind of space station. We need to explore to understand what’s going on, but, more importantly, to understand ourselves.
The game is compact, both in design and in story. In the game, a repeated idea is that there is no room for wasted space, and nothing is wasted in this game.
I think the main idea could have supported a longer gameplay, but I think the game as it exists is well-done and very poetic and literary.
7 Likes
That’s really cool! Thanks for thinking of it. I always enjoy your games and Spanish ectocomp games in general (I feel like the community always puts in great effort for this yearly event!)
3 Likes
The Little Match Girl in the Court of Maal Dweb
The Little Match Girl series consists of games where a time-travelling assassin girl adopted by Ebenezer Scrooge enters various worlds through the means of looking at flames.
This game is creepier than most the others, in good ways. I enjoyed the thematic unity of this one.
I originally forgot about the flame thing and so I wandered the opening area for a while before finding anything. Then once I examined a flame, things took off.
I enjoyed the diversity of the worlds this time. The main story here is that an evil werewolf is travelling through time, attacking others, and each time period and place you visit has also been visited by the werewolf. Despite the variety of worlds, the after effects of fear and strange sickness are common. I found it especially creepy that in one world the characters slowly became stricken as I left and visited again later.
Overall, the game is very polished. I ran into the same couple of issues others did (hints assumed I had grabbed something from a room when I hadn’t, since the thing I needed to examine in that room didn’t stick out to me; and ‘percipient’ was spelled as ‘perpicient’, unless that was intentional) but I didn’t have the vorple-breaking bugs some reported.
I think I liked the atmosphere and single-mindedness of this game over some of the more elaborate other Match Girl games. It reminds me of Marvel’s Werewolf By Night, as both are smaller, darker, werewolf-themed entries in a series filled with grand spectacles, and both are uniquely charming in their overall series.
3 Likes
Dark Waters on the Night Shift
This is a puzzle-centered choice-based game about an operative at a water treatment plant who receives a haunting visit on Halloween.
Your goal is to take care of the plant and to deal with your unwanted (or wanted?) guest. At your disposal is the plant itself, which is modelled in surprising detail: multiple spaces to represent one room, multiple levels, machinery that can connect and disconnect, several short sub-games.
Story-wise, I found the overall concept of ‘the legend about an old employee’ neat and well-done. The antagonist felt a bit one-dimensional, so it could have been fun to find out more lore or learn more about them (although maybe I missed some areas).
This was a neat game overall.
4 Likes
Thank you!
1 Like
Thank you for this review! I should give a shout out to Riaz Moola for Metallic Red. While I was initially planning to use the same kind of full-screen navigation layout as I did with wtr, Metallic Red’s final act’s much sleeker and more accessible compass navigation system led me to retool my own approach to it.
3 Likes
This is part of the author’s series Prime Pro-Rhyme Row, all of which are based on looking at the two-word, alliterative name of a room and thinking of a rhyming set of words that are also alliterative.
In this one, you are trick or treating, and encounter various spooky Halloween things on your way to trick or treating.
The games in this series really rise and fall on how responsive they are. Other ones in the series acount for almost all player options; this one, however, is missing a ton of possible rhymes, even ones that make sense (like against the twit twins, I would have thought wit wins would be a clear choice).
While there have been some great entries in the series (like the original
Very Vile Fairy File and the recent Bright Brave Knight Knave), I was glad to see that this might be the last in the series, as the author’s newer mechanics in recent games have been, to me, a bit more fun (I liked Why Pout and Roads of Liches).
In any case, though, I found this entertaining. I did get stuck a few times. I thought it was interesting that the protagonist here is constructed as a flawed individual, for instance as someone who can’t keep track of the different names of his Asian classmates; that’s different than the protagonists of the rest of the series, who tend to be heroic types who grow in self-confidence.
5 Likes