I also got lines and numbers mismatched. First all the numbers and below the check list.
2 Likes
New Year’s Eve, 2019
This is an intricate Dendry game where you spend New Year’s Eve at a party with your parents, friends and acquaintances. You’ve burned a lot of bridges in the past, and it’s all coming back to get you know.
I was surprised at the end to see that Depression Quest was not on the list of inspirations, as it has a lot of similarity with this game. Options that are selected are denied due to your bad feelings, or greyed out in the first place. Things you’d like to say can’t be said, etc.
The New Year’s Eve setting provides a good backdrop for the time limit, which is until 12:00. Just like a real party, it first feels like there’s too much to do and then too little. This game directly reminded me of all the reasons I don’t enjoy big parties with people outside my own family, especially parties where romance is possible but unlikely.
Romance is a theme in the game, but not in a positive way; there are numerous former crushes running around.
The game has excellent attention to detail, especially in Chinese-heritage culture. Characters are provided, usually with translation, and the game describes food, drinks, Mah Jong, etc., together with westernized/globalized additions like Marvel movies and pumpkin pie.
Overall, this is a strong game. I appreciated its meta-commentary at one point about how it feels like interaction with human beings is an optimization puzzle, and I’ve felt like that before. The only thing for me that I didn’t click with was the waiting around aimlessly that happened a little more than I would have preferred. Perhaps it was due to my own actions, though.
I played this as part of the Seattle IF meetup, and then played on my own later.
10 Likes
Let’s Talk Alex
Whew! This game brought back a lot of memories.
It’s a game that doesn’t take too long to play. You are a person with an abusive significant other, Alex (I read the protagonist as coded female and the antagonist as coded male, but the game is purposely ambiguous and uses they/them pronouns for Alex).
Alex does things that are expressed as being for your best interest, but really they are for their own selfish interest. Keeping your away from your friends and family on social media , moving to be closer to their family but away from your friends and family, constantly worried that you will cheat (yep), shaming you for interests they’re not into. All of which I’ve experienced in real life.
Actually, contemplating this game made me zone out for about an hour, thinking about things, and I wrote a big personal essay about it and realized I never finished this review. I guess I’ll have to give this game points for emotional impact, that’s sure. I found the choice structure not as compelling, but I can’t think of any recommendations for it. It has real interactivity and limited options, but I feel it could be somehow pushed a little more. Overall, a game that has unsettled me to my core.
9 Likes
Thank you for the review! I’ve actually never played Depression Quest, although perhaps I’ve been subconsciously influenced by games that were downstream of it. The graying-out of choices existed previously; I’m pretty sure Bee (the Varytale version) had disabled choices and denied options, and that was a year before Depression Quest. I feel like there were other games which used a similar technique before DQ; maybe howling dogs or other Porpentine games?
Also, I wouldn’t say that romance is always shown non-positively in this game…
4 Likes
I believe Varytale (and Dendry) is a QBN system, and choices might gray out if the player doesn’t meet the qualifications for the choice, similar to Fallen London. In Depression Quest I think this was a stylistic choice and hard-coded and there was no actual way to make those choices, but I think I remember Varytale could show a choice the player didn’t qualify for. I’m not sure if Autumn’s game would allow these choices under different situations though - if it’s possible to attain qualities to enable them.
3 Likes
Hmm, I’m guess I’m like that meme:
Guy who’s only played Depression Quest: I’m getting a lot of Depression Quest vibes here.
I’ll edit my review (on IFDB) about the romance to indicate that that was just the result I got in my playthrough! There were some nice moments with Emily, but for my playthrough even those were bittersweet, so I probably missed a path
7 Likes
The Hole Man
This is a very large Twine game. I think of all structures Sam Kabo Ashwell mentioned in his ‘Standard patterns in choice-based games’, it most resembles the sorting hat, as there are ten or so different paths that, once you pick, is generally linear to an ending.
You play as a person whose identity is stolen, leaving you as a gaping hole in an alternate world.
That world is one where anything can happen. A shop that has a closet can take you to another world, and so can biting a sucker.
Each path allows you the choice to become a ‘man’, like the Drake Man or the Darin’ Man, giving you an awesome and alternate life.
I found the prose to be overall well done, and there were interesting ideas. But after 3 or so paths, I began to feel like there were, if it’s even possible, too many good ideas!
Brandon Sanderson has said before that good magic systems are more interesting the more restrictions they have. This isn’t a high fantasy novel about complex magic, but I think something similar applies here: if anything is possible, it’s almost the same as if nothing is possible. After a while, it all kind of blended together.
I opened up the game in Twinery to see how much I missed, and realized that after an hour or so I had only seen about 20-30% of the game. I used the code to read the ‘ultimate’ ending, which I thought was roughly as fulfilling as the other endings, but had some cool descriptions of things.
Taste is subjective, but for me personally, I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were more structure in terms of themes or some other kind of rhythm to the game. Outside of that, the game is coded in a smooth and complex fashion and the writing is vivid and descriptive.
7 Likes
Thanks so much for your kind review!
I’m honestly surprised that so many players remark on the length of this game. The Spring Thing homepage didn’t suggest a word count (or did it? Did I miss it?), so I just tried to make a game that you wouldn’t feel ripped off by if you’d paid money for it! Since my initial model was The Manhole, I tried to make a game you could really get lost in and not find your way back to somewhere familiar for a long time.
What you said about the Sorting Hat is turning out to be more literal than I expected; everyone who plays this game seems to come to a different conclusion on what it’s about. The real theme as far as I myself see it is language, wordplay and puns. Things are taken literally to an illogical extreme on a regular basis, and even the Men themselves are anthropomorphic puns; mandrake, mandarin, manhole, give us the Drake Man, the Darin’ Man, and of course the Hole Man. One of my friends called this a Norton Juster style story, which is some of the highest praise I could ask for!
I’m glad you got to see the end (and presumably the Cheater’s Corner!); it’s especially gratifying to hear kind words about my coding, since this is my first game and I really felt like I had to let the prose carry the code rather than the other way around. The bonus content can actually be viewed as part of the twelfth ending, if you’ve gotten the other eleven endings first, so at least you don’t have to play thirteen times!
10 Likes
Hinterlands:Marooned
This is a short, one-move game from the author of the iterative Locked Door series.
You are alone with a hideous monster on a planet, alone and marooned. Most actions end the game immediately, with some kind of effect, while others give you more info.
A lot of work went into this. Decompiling this, there are a ton of verbs being implemented here.
Many of the results are similar to each other, but at least they’re coherent. I got a Sisyphan vibe from the game (maybe projecting; I like Sisyphan things).
I can say I found it pretty funny when I realized what the general theme was. Worth trying out due to its short, easy-to-try length.
6 Likes
You aren’t projecting, Sisyphus is there (seated next to Roberta Williams)!
I have been toying with three different ideas of what my next project might be, and one of the ideas involves stone-rolling, so I may revisit that theme more explicitly at some point.
6 Likes
The Legend of Horse Girl
Bitter Karella has been making games for many years now, but I think this is the best one I’ve played so far, for my tastes.
You play as a cowgirl whose beloved horse has been stolen by a lying, murderous judge, and you have to get it back.
It’s set in a wide town with quite a few locations, and even more that get unlocked over time. I say the humor is ‘grotesque’, but by that I mean that a lot of solutions are amusingly gross.
The characters are vivid and based on tropes and stereotypes, like a snake-oil salesman, a crazy miner/inventor, a brothel owner, etc. A few of them lean heavily into racial and cultural tropes, like an opium-smoking asian man named Lucky Strike or a hispanic saloon owner named La Muerte with a face painted like a sugar skull. I’m not really fond of relying on racial stereotypes, but all those characters are portrayed in a positive light as independent business people respected in their community.
The puzzles were pretty hard, and I had to get help on a couple, especially on finding a bezoar. I played the game over about a week on and off. Most puzzles are ‘find an item in one area and use it in a creative way in another’. A lot of the humor is in finding out what item actually solves to problem.
The implementation of the game is a big improvement over all past Karella games, but still has a couple of rough edges here and there. I had trouble finding the right words to use the dynamite, or to use a rope. Fortunately, the game itself will also include the right wording to use as a hint, and has other features designed to help with implementation.
We played part of this in the Seattle IF Meetup, where it seemed well-received, and I finished it on my own later.
10 Likes
Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel
This game is an interesting experiment in involving real-time in text games.
Basically, there are several storylines going one in different motel rooms as well as outside. You have peepholes into 5 motel rooms. Every minute or so of real time, a counter updates the in-game time and you see new things in the different rooms. Occasionally, you can affect things by being in the right place at the right time (the vast majority of these being deaths).
It’s an interesting concept, but it was hard to puzzle out in-game, and I only heard it from others and saw it in the code. Without knowing how it works, the game seems oddly repetitive as you see the same scenes over and over, since they don’t change until the next ‘tick’.
The writing and plot is similar to B-movies, with some strong profanity, a voyeuristic but not explicit sex scene, and violence. Plots are mostly tributes to classic horror movies, although at least one seems non-magical.
Overall, I’m not sure this timed method worked for me, but I’m glad someone did it so I could see how it works. A couple of the stories were effectively creepy for me.
6 Likes
Good Grub
This game’s tone reads like a game parody of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ‘well, actually’ twitter posts (like when he pointed out that leap day isn’t the earth actually leaping). The tone is very heavy-handed and smug, with the game literally telling you ‘you made a wrong choice, make better choices in the future’.
I’m sure it’s a parody, but a well-made simulation of an annoying thing is still an annoying thing.
Otherwise the writing is sharp and word choices and images are clever.
Message-wise, I think the concept of humanity eating bugs is just fine; I love shrimp, and shrimp is more revolting-looking than other insects. But it helps that I was fed shrimp at an early age; I got used to it, and I’m not used to bugs.
Overall interesting, but, to me, too successful at imitating an annoying person.
7 Likes
George and the Dragon
This game requires you to create an account with an email and name and to accept cookies, which felt like a lot. I used a burner email and fake other things.
The idea is that you are a young man named George who is the son of a blacksmith and knows the royal family. Every year, a young maiden gets sacrificed to a dragon, but this year, you hope to help stop that.
Here’s my overall rating:
+Polish: The images look a bit strange, like the princess wearing some kind of autumnal leaf pajamas. Otherwise, I didn’t run into errors.
-Descriptiveness: A lot of details are just skimmed over or assumed. Plot twists happen in quick succession without a lot of forewarning or explanation.
-Interactivity: It was a bit confusing figuring out what to do, or what did what. At one point you’re given a ton of gold, but then it doesn’t really come up again. I grabbed a fire crystal, but it said I needed a sword; later I was given a sword, but it never came up whether I used the crystal. Exploring a royal camp ended up showing me part of a villain’s base, but it just seemed out of nowhere.
-Emotional impact: I had difficulty becoming emotionally invested in the story.
+Would I play again? I’d probably like to see other endings.
To be fair to the author, a significant amount of work went into this game. I may have been prejudiced from the start, as I enjoy the quick, anonymous, pick-up-and-put-down nature of more text IF, so having a full-screen graphics-based game with mandatory account creation likely put me off from the actual content.
6 Likes
Fix it
This is a compact twine game where you attempt to go about your day despite a minor annoyance.
The bulk of the game is a long loop about dealing with the annoyance.
Quite a bit of it reminds me of my friends with sensory processing disorders including certain forms of autism, where they have to go to other rooms to avoid noise or where head-cancelling headphones.
Some of it, though, seems more directly tied to OCD, like repetitive hand-washing behaviors.
Its overall message about how to deal with these things isn’t something I can personally vouch for; however, the techniques described do seem related to those I’ve used to manage depression, so I could see them being valid in this situation.
Overall, I think the structure is interesting, but I feel like it could have been developed a bit more, hit home more.
5 Likes
Filthy Aunt Mildred
This is a Twine game with few options, more of a kinetic fiction than a game per se. It’s also one of the most effective uses of such a structure I’ve read (another effective one I could recommend is Polish the Glass).
The story is about the Bladesmith family, a twister group of individuals that read like villains from An Unfortunate Series of Events if it was aimed at a slightly older demographic. Abuse, fraud, deceit and murder follow the family and everyone in it.
It includes amusingly absurd elements (like the multitude of Mildreds) and provocatively vulgar elements (like the opening scene of a man smearing faeces on the glass).
Overall, here’s my assessment:
+Polish: The game feels quite smooth overall. There were at least two typos (squeeking vs squeaking and some other typo near the end), but they were minor in the grand scheme of things.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid and detailed writing.
+Interactivity: While mostly linear, the story does allow little sidebars and choice of navigation that lent interest to the story.
+Emotional impact: I found it both amusing and morbid.
-Would I play again? While I found it very well-done, it has a edge to it that’s not my personal preference. I only enjoy darkness in media if it sets off an inner light.
5 Likes
The Fall of Asemia
This is an interesting experiment, reminicscent of Heaven’s Vault or Short’s First Draft of the Revolution, but I think it falls a bit short from both.
You plays as a translator, given glyphs in the ancient language of Asemia. Clicking on glyphs gives you other glyphs. After you go to the next page or two, a translation appears.
Asemia was a place of hard things, where people died and soldiers destroyed. The music and the extra-translatory dialogue also deals with this.
To me, the biggest difficulty I had was in the obfuscatory interactivity. What does clicking do? The same glyphs and stories came up multiple times, sometimes with different translations, and sometimes with the same. Do my actions, cycling through glyphs, change the output, or do you automatically get different results each time?
And it just doesn’t make sense from a translation viewpoint. The glyphs you cycle through are very distinct from each other, so it’s not like you are trying to guess what different words are in the language. It would make more sense to cycle through the translation of a fixed glyph, like Heaven’s Vault does.
I’m sure there could be a deeper meaning to everything, but I didn’t find it. Lovely visuals and graphics, though, and the writing is solid.
5 Likes
externoon
This is a game written in Squiffy, which is based on the engine that Quest uses but is choice-based.
You play as someone who walked away from a relationship and is going cross country on late-night/early-morning busses.
It does a good feel of evoking that wistful travel feeling when you’ve left something behind and are passing by other people’s lives, people you’ll never see again but feel important in the moment.
Unfortunately, there is one passage that contains no links to any other passages (in a section on a movie), and this makes the game no longer possible to play. It’s possible to fix this by opening the game up in a text editor and adding a link to the next passage. I didn’t do so, but read ahead.
Overall, thoughtful and musing. I wish there were a way to tell which links were exploratory and which links moved the story forward.
6 Likes
Skipping Digit as the author has helpfully labelled it as ‘erotic’ and ‘AIF’ and probably doesn’t want a review from me saying ‘oh I don’t like this kind of stuff’. Appreciate the labeling!
5 Likes
Crow Quest
This is a visually very nice game, and funny, too.
It’s a short twine game where you play as a crow with an attitude and intentionally bad spelling (basically ‘no u’ times 100). Your attitude, is, in fact, measured, and you ‘win’ by getting the highest attitude.
We played this in the Seattle If Meetup and I played it after, as well.
It’s fairly brief, and amusing. It seems to have some kind of randomization or procedural generation, as you can get different events on different playthroughs.
There’s some mild profanity. Overall, it’s not too long so if the above sounds appealing, try it out.
5 Likes