Two games in translation
I enjoy playing the French, Spanish, and German games that crop each year (usually in French IFComp, Ectocomp, and the German Grand Prix respectively). Two games I had played in the past and enjoyed were translated this year.
whoami
I played and reviewed the Spanish version of this game before. When I play a game in another language, it has an air of mystique around it to me. Everything seems cooler when it’s in another language. But it’s harder.
Playing this game in English was an interesting change. It uses a lot of technobabble which was mostly incomprehensible when I played the Spanish version. Here I can understand it more, and turn a more critical eye on it. But the technobabble still holds up pretty well; the ideas used are at least plausible.
This game is about mind uploads. You don’t know that at first; the game simulates a file system like DOS or command line Linux. Navigating the file structure, you discover that a war is wiping out humanity. You are going to die. A brain upload might be what saves you.
The majority of the game is piecing together what is going on through navigating the file system and finding older documents.
Along the way, the game uses interesting mechanics, including a simulated Inform parser (written entirely in Twine) and a cheeky towers of Hanoi (cheeky because it’s a famously bad puzzle to put into an IF game, so much that several games mock the concept, like Wizard Sniffer that has a dumpster with towers of hanoi in it at the start. I don’t mind it too much here).
This game is visually rich and has subtle details that can really throw you for a loop and more explicit text that will help you connect the dots (I’m thinking here of checking the date before and after the upload. It gave me a realization that was later explicitly confirmed.
I liked it in Spanish, and I like it in English.
Fired
Olaf Nowacki is a popular figure in both English and German IF, with games like Schief/Wry and Fischstäbchen/Eat the Eldritch having made a splash in past years.
This game is fairly small and compact but has a strong voice and characterization. I’d describe it as anti-capitalist and just anti-work in general.
You play as a worker being fired from their crummy job and bent on revenge. But the evidence you meticulously collected has been stolen by your boss!
You have to recover it, in the process overcoming a ludicrously anti-worker building and boss’s lair (parts of which definitely reminded me of past jobs! I had a desk in a closet once) to defeat him.
There are multiple endings (with worse endings usually giving hints for better endings) and lots of funny commentary.
There are a couple of rough edges carried over from German; Forklift in German is Gabelstapler, which I thought was just a stapler when I first played, so I picked it up and tried to staple things with it (which makes for a very amusing picture in my mind, now). This version still lets you pick up the forklift, but I don’t think I found any other errors.