Thanks for the wonderful review!
3 Likes
Maze Gallery by a lot of people
This game occupied all of my play time today. It’s really quite large, which is fitting for a game with 34 contributors. Most entries are puzzleless, so it’s not so never-ending as Cragne Manor, but it has a similar variety of experiences.
This game feels like a text version of MeowWolf. MeowWolf is an unusual art exhibit that exists in at least two locations (New Mexico and Texas). I visited one with a group of students and happened to live next to the second one that was built. It’s a kind of art museum that has a central theme (a family’s two-story home, recreated inside of the museum, has been affected by twistings in space and time, leaving clues behind as to the family’s fate) with a variety of unusual and bizarre art rooms connected by creative things like tunnels behind refrigerators or cast iron spiral stairways. Each of the art rooms is just (as I understand it) given to a local artist who decorates it in any way they like, from sculptures of meat robots to videos of beaches to a secret club venue for bands to play in. The whole thing is an elaborate maze.
This game has the same feel. You play as someone stuck in The Maze Gallery, which is a bizarre exhibit. You pass through rooms filled with moving inkblots, eggs painted like clowns, vicious fashion designers, tiny paintings etched on rice, and more.
Some of the ‘exhibits’ are actually encounters spread throughout the game written by single authors, like a series of diary entries or a loving couple that shows up time and time again.
Parts I especially liked include some of the presidents, the four humors, the de(void), the clown alley, the talking paintings, the wing of bad art, and Jo’s cafe.
The only time I really encountered friction was in a maze-like part where you need to pick the right path from three options. I didn’t distinguish that it had a separate ruleset from the rest of the park and couldn’t figure out it’s mechanism, so my experience was mostly a voice getting more and more frustrated and annoyed at me until I got kicked out.
The consistent css and art style and placard images managed to keep the tone remarkably consistent. A game like this usually feels very distinct in voice, but this one could almost conceivably have been written by one very creative author. The poetry segments and Zizi!!! are perhaps the most distinct.
I was hesitant at first that this game would be impossibly large, but it’s in a fairly compact 4 act structure and not all content is visible on first play. I got lost once, but looking at a directory showed me the path forward.
I felt satisfaction at reaching the ending and enjoyed feeling more oriented in life, in a way; like the game presented a wide variety of viewpoints and feelings and gave me more of a sense of where I am mentally in relation to a sea of others. That was even a theme of one of the rooms, where a mirror shatters representing you and you can only grab for some of the pieces, holding onto what is most essential and hoping that you grabbed what was important.
There were several other wonderful parts of the maze that I wasn’t able to fit into this review (like the Hungry room, the Galatea reference and the ladder and so on) so thanks to everyone that participated!
13 Likes
Forsaken Denizen by C.E.J. Pacian
This is a long exploration game involving picking up and using various tools and ammunition in a surreal technomagical future.
Many Pacian games are in such an environment; Gun Mute and Weird City Interloper come to mind. This game, though, seems to be directly set in the same universe as the game he released last year, Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince. Both involve solar royalty (the Third Prince in the previous game and the Second Princess in this one) and many of the other characters and concepts pop up in both games.
In this game specifically, the princess (your girlfriend) has defaulted on a big debt, and the debtors have come to collect. Golden roots have invaded the city and are sucking the life out of all the office workers while Mad Max-style Junkers (I’ve never seen Mad Max, just going off vibes here) roam the city attacking anyone they see. Your goal is to save and/or chastise the princess while rescuing the citizens.
A variety of survivors can be found throughout the city, each unique, with widely varying personalities and amounts of helpfulness. Conversation is menu-based, and can change depending on your progression.
The gameplay features simple randomized combat using rolls for attack and defence, both of which can be modified by equipping special clothing. Your only weapon is a gun which comes unloaded. You have three inventory slots (including the gun) and this is filled over time with items like lockpicks and money.
I had a bad experience at first. Combat is random, you can’t UNDO, and I didn’t find any ammo in the first area. There is an enemy at a bridge right away, and to use the bridge you need several actions, so I was just getting hurt with no way to fight back and the monster wouldn’t go away. It felt frustrating, like the game had set up a complex system and wasn’t letting me interact with any of it. I had to use all my healing items and didn’t find any more for a long time, and I was resigned to not really enjoying the game.
Fortunately, past the ammo-less opening (I hope I’m wrong and someone points out that I missed some really helpful early ammo so others don’t suffer my same fate), the game is a lot more fun. Combat can either take place through violence or through escape and patience, and I chose the latter the most often. It got really intense in one late area with tons of monsters, but I was satisfied when I was able to summon an assassin to kill 3 monsters in one turn.
I was invested in the story, and the exploration was smooth and satisfying. I found no bugs. Like many of C.E.J. Pacian’s games, there is a great romance element between the leads that is much rarer in parser games than in choice-based games. He’s able to turn combat and parser look/take/drop gameplay and make them into acts of love, which is nice.
Great game, lots of fun!
7 Likes
Yes. Survival Horror is a strange discipline, and it sounds like you got the hang of it. One of the cruxes is to pick your battles, at least on your first run(s). The same strategies that work in console survival horror games work in this game. The same as they do in Leadlight, too, where some judicious fleeing is called for.
-Wade
3 Likes
The Bat by Chandler Groover
Playing this game was a whirlwind of associations, expectations, references, and laughs.
You play as the valet to Bruce Wyatt, billionaire playboy, who is undergoing a crisis of sorts at the worst possible time. He’s acting, well, like a bat, fleeing bright light sources, screeching, and crawling around. All this is happening right when a fudnraiser party/gala is about to start!
The story is divided into an act/scene structure. And my expectations swirled around. Spoiler-heavy discussion:
Spoilers
At first, I thought the game would be a Verdeterre-style optimization game as we struggle to make enough money, a game that would be heavily replayable but relatively brief. I thought the story was a reference to Der Fledermaus, a comic opera I’ve seen a few times but have mixed up with Der Rosenkavalier at times.
Then I started thinking that the money changes weren’t related to optimization, but rather a way to inject additional humor into a scenario. Having someone get injured or annoyed or amused can be mildly funny in and of itself but attaching a specific dollar amount to it is especially amusing.
Similarly, I realized that this was a Batman parody when I saw the names of Bryce Wyatt’s parents, Thomas and Martha (or something similar). Soon guests arrived, and I saw versions of Two-face, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman.
But others eluded me. Then the game itself mentioned Der Fledermaus, and I looked up the wiki description to refresh my mind, and saw that it included other characters that were in this game! So it was referencing two bat stories at once (and I saw later, in the credits, another one referenced).
Pacing was shockingly smooth. On several occasions I began thinking that I would run out of things to do, when subtle nudges pushed me in the right direction or major events (like the doorbell ringing) took place. Conversely, at times I’d have so many tasks piling up I thought I’d have to miss some and replay the game to see them. I kept thinking, “Surely this can’t hold up, the pacing’s going to go all wrong at some point and I’ll be stuck twiddling my thumbs or getting too frustrated,” but it never happens.
Compass directions have an in-game explanation, which I found fun given that Chandler Groover has expressed his own struggles with the compass in other parser games and his decision to keep it out of most of his own games; so having its presence so carefully justified here makes sense both outside of the game as well as in the game as a kind of tutorial for new players. Perhaps the later parts of the game where the compass serves as a tool for control and destruction serves as an unconscious metaphor for the community’s over-emphasis and use of the compass and the pressure it puts on authors to do the same.
Overall, this game was well-made and enjoyable. It includes some sensual material and some puerile material with bodily fluids, but both are framed in such a way that they are not really objectionable and leave more to the imagination.
Given that a few characters resemble people from different sources, I wonder about those I couldn’t place, like the twins. Are they from another source, or new creations?
I think this game will join Eat Me and Toby’s Nose among Chandler Groover’s best-regarded games, and serve as both a good introduction to new players and a fun treat for the experienced. Great work!
7 Likes
An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There by Mandy Benanav
This was a cute game, written in Twine with lots of exploration and some puzzles.
You are given an invitation to a beautiful and magical house filled with enchanted objects and creatures. Almost everything has positive and wholesome undertones, although there are some disruptive or angry behaviors.
The house is full of animated things, like skulls or piles of clothes. Everything you meet has requests, from helping deal with a friend to basic needs like food. The puzzles have variety; even though the map is compact (with only 4 big locations and 2 smaller connecting rooms) the number of different tasks you can do and secrets you can find is surprising. New links pop up in one area based on actions in others, and there is some searching (like a big library bookshelf).
I think I liked the bedroom the best, because it had a combination of creepy and fun, or negative and positive emotions.
At times I wished for a little higher stakes, but the ending resonated with me emotionally. Similarly a few too many of the puzzles involved mechanical searching through a list of things, but at least the writing was interesting in each item and the other puzzles had more variety.
Overall, definitely a fun game to play. The reason I like playing IFComp games more than a lot of other IF is that you can tell the IFComp games have a lot of work put into them and were carefully nurtured and worked on until they’re a real gem. The love put into this game is reflected in its quality.
4 Likes
When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves by Michael Baltes
This game was quite different from most IF games I’ve played.
It’s a slice of life game about a man and his girlfriend/wife who live in a cheap flat. He works nights, she works days, and today, on the eve of a new millenium, he is sick.
I was surprised when at the end of the day, I found my wife dead at work. I was even more surprised when there was a bright flash and I woke up at what I thought was the next day, only to see my wife still alive. That’s when I realized this game was a time loop. (all these spoilers are for things that happen in the first day only).
Gameplay consists primarily of interacting with others through menu-based conversation, collecting items (all of which persist through the time loop) and trying to think of ways to help your wife.
There are a couple of small bugs and typos, which I’ve notified the author about and which should be easy to fix, although I had an issue where after I restarted the game I couldn’t load any saves, which might have been an HTML TADS issue. Fortunately, the game is the kind where if you know what you’re doing you can get from the beginning to end in very few moves.
I loved some of the characters in this, like Vincent, and enjoyed the multiple endings. A few times I really couldn’t figure out what to do; I used hints once, I think. But overall this game was a good time and really a clever idea that was executed well.
5 Likes
I also want to thank you for your comment about not noticing some exits. A minor bug popped up that I wanted to fix in an update, so I took the opportunity to clarify that room description as well. You weren’t the only one to have that issue. I noticed in the transcripts that one of the players thought Mabellabeth was in your side of the dorm room and kept trying to talk to her when she wasn’t there. Of course, I suppose that might have been you! Regardless, you were right and I’m glad you pointed it out. It should be clearer that the room extends to the north now.
2 Likes
Thank you very much for your review! I was really curious about how the approach would work for a first time player and you gave me a very good impression about how things worked out for you.
2 Likes
Miss Gosling’s Last Case by Daniel Stelzer
This was a long game! It took me around 3 to 4 hours to finish, possibly because clicking links wasn’t quite as fast as typing, but it went well.
Two of the most enjoyable murder mysteries of the last ten years are Erstwhile, a twine game where a ghost has to try to solve his own murder, and Toby’s Nose, a parser game where a dog has to aid Sherlock Holmes.
This game combines the two! It’s a parser-choice hybrid where you are a ghost that has to influence your dog to solve your own crime.
The setup is a classic murder mystery: you have died in the middle of the night, and four people stand to inherit from you. Each suspect has to be cleared or convicted before the day is through.
The game relies heavily on physics and on the five senses, as well as interactions with the neighboring humans.
Overall I found it very fun. I’d like to describe some nitpicks with the puzzles but those should come with the caveat that I had a good time!
The thing with some of the puzzles is that I could conceive of many possible solutions to problems but couldn’t tell what the game was looking for or what effect things would have. How much do lights illuminate things? How far does sound travel? How does a dog communicate with a human?
I grew a bit frustrated, but a light bulb went off when I realized how few red herrings the game has (although they’re there!). I changed from deductive reasoning to inductive reasoning. Instead of making a plan and trying to figure out how to achieve it, I looked at the items, actions and locations I hadn’t used yet and thought, ‘How can I do something with this?’
Occasionally there were plotlines that stretched my disbelief (especially the amount of things the dog got away with) but not so much more so than a normal mystery book.
Overall, I enjoyed the high level of polish. I realized later on that the ‘find ____’ options were actually really good at zipping you through the map quickly; if you remember where something is, you can just type it in and click on the ‘find such and such’ link and go there immediately. I also liked the characters of Watson and Davis.
The hint system works very well. The game has some automatic hints at the beginning which were a bit too spoilery for me, but fortunately the author has added a way to turn those off; the normal hints, on the other hand, can be accessed at any time.
7 Likes
Thank you so much for the review! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
3 Likes
String Theory W Pzinski
This game was interesting; I’m not sure if it’s actually complete or not, as the story ended a little abruptly for me. It did give me an ending screen, and I downloaded it and checked and found a few side stories I missed, but overall, it felt like a plot arc was building up to something but just kind of stopped right before the apex.
This game is about a tense Thanksgiving with family that doesn’t really get you and a variety of unusual occurrences. Plot threads include a bigoted uncle, hiding your sexuality, learning family secrets, and experiencing weird visions.
Also, everyone treats you like you’re vegan but it seems like you’re not really heavily vegan? That part wasn’t clarified, but most of the plot points aren’t. This seems more like a character-focused mood piece. You can talk to your uncle a bit, and you can decide how much to interact with your boyfriend on the phone, but the visions you see don’t really seem to have a resolution that I could find.
So I’m not sure how I feel about this story. The writing was good; I was invested in the characters and the overall feel. I just felt something missing in the end. But at least it’s good that I wanted more of the game and not less!
5 Likes
re: BOSH
Interesting, looking forward to getting there!
1 Like
This bit was weird. It seemed to me like he told everyone he was vegan so he wouldn’t have to eat the food, because he was actually on a diet. Then the meringue pie came up , which he did didn’t seem as fussed about trying - but the pecan pie he did…
1 Like
Yeah, that’s a good description of what happened. I don’t know how to interpret it, but maybe you don’t have to interpret it? Maybe it’s just someone who’s having trouble in life and doesn’t know himself what he wants? IDK
1 Like
When you click on “vegan”, the text changes to “trying to look like the guys in LA”, so I think the implication is that the veganism is an effort to diet, and while he tries to stick with it, he is still willing to eat the pecan pie.
4 Likes
Okay, I actually really like that detail, that adds a lot of character. Thanks for explaining!
3 Likes
Verses by Kit Riemer
This was a hard game to play, but not for the usual reasons. It wasn’t difficult in a puzzly way and it didn’t make me feel bad inside.
This game was hard to play because the text really made me have to think to understand it, to try to piece together everything, to absorb the different layers of meaning going on.
Here’s an example. The links in this game are colored differently, with one mostly representing ‘forward motion’ and the others side details which are placed below the main text. These side details take the form of definitions and can vary from mundane to metaphorical, often one right after the other. Here’s a snippet I clipped:
Snippet
air: the chill makes you shiver.
smoke: something becoming something else.
meat: how would it feel to be cooked?
So I felt like I was wrestling with a hydra, trying to take on this game on multiple narrative levels at once.
I failed, I think. It reminded me of this meme (which I’ve shared recently, so apologies to those who are tired of it):
(alt text copied from tumblr:
[image description: drawing of a large, muscular ogre, crying and holding a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce. text reads: “Everyone call Ogre STUPID and it TRUE! Ogre barely even Literate! Ogre finally finished reading ULYSSES, but Ogre only can identify surface level themes like Religion and Nationalism, and can’t comprehend deeper ideas like the “Remorse of Conscience” that make James Joyce’s novel a Modernist Classic! Ogre so dumb, it make Ogre sad! At this rate, Ogre will never understand Finnegans Wake!”])
I can only identify the surface themes in this story, alas.
Which is why I’ve delayed describing the story so far, because I’m not sure I can.
As far as I can tell, it’s set in a different timeline than ours where biological modification is common and words usually reserved for religion are applied to other mysterious phenomena.
You are an analyst, which seems to be a job involving organic, technological and spiritual components. You are assigned into the middle of nowhere with little company in a rotting building. Every day you’re asked to analyse, partly using the computer and partly using your own intuition. The whole process actually just now reminded me of accounts of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, first using a tool designed by God for the purpose before later relying on it less.
Analysis seems to be all about interpreting the words that come to you, but those words are unclear at first. Simultaneously, the game includes many translations of poems, going into great detail of the difficulties in preserving metaphor, beauty, rhyme scheme and tone between Hungarian, Romanian, and English. It was fun learning a bit of Romanian (I saw a word for claw or hoof that looked like ‘ungulate’). The protagonist takes special pride in translating poems with good meter.
The translation and the analysis seem to go hand in hand, but of the rest of the story, what does it mean? I visit a farm which I’ve already heard rumours about, and find masses of bioflesh with human organs waiting to be harvested. As I translate more, I lose my humanity, my eye, my leg, my ability to speak. I consume the flesh of the unholy and the dead. What does it mean? It feels almost like Kafka’s “In der Strafkolonie”, with its vivid and violent semi-religious imagery with no explicit moral or meaning.
I don’t think this is a game meant to be enjoyed in a brief time to serve as entertainment; it feels like something designed to provoke thought, like someone deliberately crafted something to cause as much pondering as possible.
As a final note, what I think is going on with analysis is that the biscuits you consume are pieces of waste extruded by long-dead aliens that preserve some of their consciousness, which you slowly become attuned to at the price of your own body and mind. They appreciate this as it grants them some freedom, but you yourself lose everything.
In any case, definitely a game worth checking out. I found a small bug where I had to click on some links repeatedly before they worked, but it’s been passed on to the author and a workaround may be available. I wouldn’t let that stop you from playing, though, it worked well for me even with that.
9 Likes
I will be that someone and point out that if you search the crashed car in the same location you initially pick up the gun, you’ll find enough bullets to kill Junker Brutus.
2 Likes
Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain by jkj yuio
I’m surprised this one has no review yet, I think this is the most fun jkj yuio game I’ve played so far.
It’s a direct use of Dr Who characters and lore. You play as the doctor, with companion Bex, who only appeared in an audio drama (unless the name is a coincidence). You’ve accidentally teleported into a Dalek base and need to get out.
The game is a light snack, a thirty minute adventure with few puzzles and mostly exploration. The Daleks here are powerful but not the strongest they’ve ever been, lacking some core skills they’ve had in other adaptations.
The 3d models jkj yuio makes look a lot better in this than before, you can tell his skill is increasing. I think the mechanical nature of much of the scenery in the game helps with that, but also the faces are less uncanny-valley.
Overall, I enjoyed this. Is it because it relies heavily on a media franchise I like or because of the author’s own merits? Maybe both; I feel like the author’s enthusiasm for Dr Who led to a strong effort. In any case, this doesn’t take very long to play, so it’s worth checking out.
7 Likes