Mathbrush's 2024 IFComp Review Thread

Competitions IFComp
101

King of Xanadu by MACHINES UNDERNEATH

This Twine game depicts the fall of a great empire. We play as the emperor, a being with complete control over the the people. Excess and corruption are rife.

But then, a famine strikes the land, and the old way of life begins to disappear.

The writing is descriptive and evocative, and the story is good in itself and can be applied to almost anything in life where a group has grown powerful and complacent.

It reminded me of something I saw in China earlier this year. At the Summer Palace, there were some older buildings that had been destroyed, and I heard the story about how it had been burned down by Europeans. Our tour guide said that her mother used to bring her there in her youth, tell her the story of the burning, and say, 'That’s why you have to study for school, that’s why you have to work hard, because if China isn’t strong it will be burned down again."

Obviously this game is different as there is no invading force, just nature itself, but the two tied together in my mind.

2 Likes
102

Turn Right by Dee Cooke

I think this is the only Adventuron game in the competition. I always like Dee Cooke’s games, but seeing how short it was made me wonder if it would be able to tell a complete or engaging story.

It ended up being funny, relatable, exasperating, and had quite a good chunk of writing in it.

It’s pretty simple. You are trying to pull out of a supermarket by turning right (which for me in the US would be the equivalent of turning left). I saw a complicated map and thought I’d have to navigate complex commands, but it didn’t turn out that way…

I won’t say how the game ends but I was amused and honestly impressed by how many different scenarios the author could think of to cause problems with turning right. It reminds me of living in Philadelphia, where I felt like I had this kind of experience a lot. I’m glad I’m in Dallas now, where things are thankfully a lot better.

Very amusing, and I found no errors.

Side note: I find it very amusing that this game is almost the polar opposite of the recent Spring Thing game, ’ You Can Only Turn Left’

8 Likes
103

Uninteractive Fiction

Uninteractive Review
37 Likes
104

Where Nothing Is Ever Named by Viktor Sobol

I don’t really worry about spoilers very much, as I find most games and movies are just as fun if you go into them knowing what happens as they are when you come in blind.

But this is one game that I accidentally got spoiled on, which is a bummer, as that’s a lot of the fun. Fortunately, only half of it was spoiled, and the rest was still a mystery.

In this game, the names of everything have disappeared. All you see around you is ‘something’ and an ‘other thing’.

The whole game is about experimenting and trying to figure out what those things are. Once you have an idea, the game is pretty short.

Overall, fun and well-done.

7 Likes
105

You Can’t Save Her by Sarah Mak

I had a moment in the middle of this game where I thought, 'This reminds me a lot of Porpentine, especially their angelical understanding. But I thought, ‘No, come on, there are a lot of other twine authors and not every game is a Porpentine reference’.

But at the end it included a list of references to Porpentine, including lines borrowed wholesale (and credited). So that makes sense, it really does have a similar feel!

This is a love story of sorts between two women, raised in a monastery, trained in swords, devoted (or not) to gods. One woman was rebellious and was cast out; the other, a coward, stayed behind.

Gameplay focuses a lot on time: one second, two seconds, etcs. There are prophecies and visions, so that events happen and will happen and have happened, making time confusing. I think I saw an Adventure Time reference, too?

Overall, the writing hit a lot of what made Porpentine good, references to bones and gods and change and colors that are left unexplained but all can be seen as symbols of change or transition or other metaphors.

The game has consistent imagery and theming, even when restarting, which I appreciated.

Pretty neat game!

4 Likes
106

Final Call by doq and Emily S

This game is graphics-and-sound heavy, with a lot of images of casinos and creepy houses. You play as a thief in a casino who suddenly finds himself tasked with escaping a house of horrors.

Gameplay involves exploration and collecting clues, as well as emotional reaction options in the past.

There are some inconsistencies, like some links being capitalized and others not. But the puzzles all seemed to work out all right, with everything becoming useful at some point and the game solvable by clicking every option.

Overall, I think it would have been fun to have more challenges after the first set, as the game felt like it was setting up for some really heavy-duty stuff, and that could have made the ending more powerful. But there are many good things here.

6 Likes
107

A Dream of Silence by Abigail Corfman

I’m going to review all 3 acts here.

This a Baldur’s Gate game. It is possible to play and generally understand it without having played the game (I’m in that scenario) but it generally builds off the associations, motivations, and understood characteristics of that game, which I’ve only partially absorbed through meme osmosis.

The story is that Astarion (here’s where the pre-existing knowledge deficit kicks in) and you have been sucked into a nightmare world by a creature that feeds off of suffering. Astarion who, in the ‘real world’, has made great progress in escaping from an abusive vampire overlord, has now regressed and in his mind is back where he was at the start, hopeless and alone.

Gameplay in all three acts revolves around a combination of exploration and conversation. All significant actions cost energy, which you only have ten units of at a time. In the first two acts, energy is replenished every night, and you also level 3 skills of manifesting as a dream ghost: Speech, Sight, and Touch. In the third act, energy is replenished by finding secret ‘gleams’, and you can no longer level your attributes.

In all three days, Astarion has a health bar which, if it goes low enough, will cause him to die. Each day has other important meters as well, such as Astarion’s mood, or the attention that can be drawn to you. Basically, this game is an Astarion Tamagachi.

For the first two days, the main goal it to keep him from dying. I discovered after some experimentation that the amount of health he loses or gains each day is based on his mood. I kept dying over and over early on from trying to max my stats first, but in fact there is plenty of time to boost stats with leftover actions. The main goal here is to please this man.

The main difference between the first and second days is that the second day adds more ‘special’ events with objects and intruders, while the first day just sets up the rhythm of the game as a whole.

The third day is very different, as you are pulled from encounter to encounter, where Astarion talks to people while you explore or interact.

This game is brutally hard (for me!). I died many times trying to complete Act I. There’s just almost never enough actions to go around. I found it useful to save every day and reload if I don’t achieve my goals. I made over 50 save files through all three acts.

The third act seemed impossibly hard and frustrating until another reviewer pointed out that you can get new actions by finding ‘gleams’. I’d spoiler that but I think it’s a fundamental part of gameplay and shouldn’t be difficult to find in the first place. Finding that, and realizing the ‘conversations’ often stalled, giving you enough time to explore, helped this section work out better.

Visually and auditorially, the game is beautiful, with nice styling, transitions, fonts, colors, and sound choice.

Conceptually, while this game is symbiotic or even parasitic object, only able to exist in tandem with the resources provided by Baldur’s gate, it still (to me) had a generally satisfying plot arc and some nice power progression.

Many ifcomp games are made for ifcomp. This seems like a passion project that just happened to be good enough to enter into Spring Thing and IFComp. I like it.

8 Likes
108

Many thanks for your great review!

2 Likes
109

Brilliant review!

2 Likes
110

(I am now reviewing games that I helped test in some way. I won’t rate these on the IFComp website but will eventually put scores on IFDB. The only other game I plan on reviewing is the Apothecary one.)

Dust by IkeC

Dust is about a man in the Wild West who comes to town looking for his wife when he comes across trouble. It involves a lot of conversation and the use of a lot of tools.

This game was entered in the German IF Gran Prix earlier this year, where I personally found it the best game of the competition. I enjoyed the characters and the western setting.

I love foreign translations and foreign things in general (maybe I’m a xenophile?) so it’s always hard to know when playing a game in another language if it is the language that attracts me or the game itself.

In this case it’s a little bit of both. One reason I liked it in German was its simplicity, with descriptive but mostly non-figurative language and the use of menus in conversation and some actions. While in German it was brilliant for someone with a weak vocabulary in another language, in English I could have enjoyed some more complexity in writing, and perhaps a slightly expanded map.

But there’s a lot here that I loved in the original and now in the translation. I like how you collect various tools and apply them, giving the game a physical feel. I like the social dynamics, with the non-violent but still substantial threat of the sheriff holding onto your papers while you investigate, and the tavernkeeper urging you to grab a cookie. I also enjoyed the townsfolk popping in and out, from mean grandmas to ball-playing kids.

I helped test this game a little by reading through the English transcript looking for any errors (of which I found very few).

8 Likes
111

Sidekick by Charles Moore

Now, this is another game I tested, but, sad to say, I didn’t finish testing it at the time, because it’s actually pretty hard! I have finished it now, though.

This is a long, difficult Dialog parser game that uses Dialog’s hyperlink system to turn itself into a parser-choice hybrid.

In it, you play as a sidekick to a cowboy hero who is famous for saving people from villains. The secret is, though, that you are the one who is actually saving everyone!

The game is expansive, and largely revolves around getting Buck out of trouble, defeating henchmen, and investigating the outskirts of town.

Gameplay is very hard. You can lock yourself out of victory; to avoid that, you can set ‘winnable on’. If it’s in ‘easy’ mode, you’ll know right away that you messed up. If it’s in ‘hard’ mode, you’ll only find out a few turns later.

The solutions to all puzzles revolve around objects that are far away and that usually aren’t labelled or associated in any way with the area you need them in. Given that this is a big game, that means that the best way to progress is likely carefully mapping out the world and taking every object you can find, looking at what verbs it’s capable of, then trying out obstacles one at a time.

Alas, there is an inventory limit that comes into play fairly often. I think you might be able to carry some things in the knapsack, but I forgot to try that this playthrough.

As a side note, multiple puzzles require you to throw an object into an adjoining room, which isn’t standard in most Inform/Dialog games, so keep an eye out for that!

Overall, I think this game deserves a long, careful playtime that will likely exceed the two hour IFComp limit. So I recommend trying it out, and coming back to it after the comp if you like it!

7 Likes
112

Winter-Over by Emery Joyce (co-written by N. Comier)

I beta tested this game.

This is a murder mystery set on an Antarctic ice station. A murder has been discovered, and you are highly motivated to solve it. Unfortunately, without any real authority, all you can do is gather evidence and hope people find it.

The game is set out on a time-based system. You have a certain number of days until the real authorities are available. Each day is split up into 4 time periods (I think). During each time period you can interview someone, bond with someone, or do a couple special activities. Sometimes timed events come your way.

Conversation can be down just by clicking each link, but sometimes a new piece of evidence can add new topics, which adds complexity to the game.

Some actions require a closer relationship with someone or extended time, which means you may have to replay if you make poor choices early on.

I found the mystery intriguing and the clues logical. It’s in the format where the player amasses enough evidence to satisfy themselves, and then you select a murderer to accuse (like Toby’s Nose, for instance), but the game can prompt you when you have enough evidence.

Overall, I liked this mystery. The time and stress meters add some extra complexity, and the Notes system helped me stay organized and not have to worry I was going to forget something important. I think this will do pretty well in the competition, although there are many good games this year to compete against!

10 Likes
113

Thanks so much for your review! (And for the playtesting, of course – it’s no exaggeration to say this game would be much worse without it!)

7 Likes
114

I got stuck on this too! You can HIT FLASHLIGHT to make it work again. (Though for me it was reading the gauge, not the manual.)

4 Likes
115

Notably, this isn’t something built into Dialog; Miss Gosling’s Last Case and Sidekick added it completely independently. That’s a really funny coincidence.

5 Likes
116

Yancy at the End of the World

I beta tested this game.

I have to say right now that I played this game twice, once in Chrome and once in Firefox, which I downloaded just for this purpose.

It is MUCH better in Firefox, where every character is voice-acted. I would really strongly suggest only playing it that way.

This is a long choice-based game with full voice acting about a character who takes up photography as a ‘bucket list’ item while the apocalypse happens due to a zombie virus.

Your camera purchase serendipitously leads you to find your former childhood friend nekoni online, who you reconnect with, ending up in a discord of former childhood friends.

Playtime is split up into 4 seasons, with an intro, 3 days per the first three seasons, and one day for the final season.

In each day, you’ll hang out with your dog, have the opportunity to go to one of several, then hang out in discord, choosing which friend to chat with, then chatting with your friend Neko in a voice call. Your mom also might call.

If you choose the same place to visit each day, it unlocks someone to help you during a crisis later. If you chat with the same friend each day, you unlock a special ending centered around them.

Playing twice gave me really different experiences; in my first one, I hung out with a snail guy at the park; in my second, I hung out with a heterochromia guy in a coffee shop. In my first, I chatted with Artemis the most; in the second, Rainer.

I’m glad I tried multiple paths. One of them (the Rainer path) unlocks author commentary on the game.

In it, the author mentions that part of the game is about something e visualized for a long time, and this is a chance to experiment with it to see what it would be like.

I think that explains a lot about the plot and setting. Some say dreams are a way of the brain coming up with ‘what if’ scenarios and testing them out. That’s what this game (at least partially) is!

So there is a zombie virus, but much of the game is about the past and discord drama. The virus can be seen as a stand-in for both Covid and for neurodivergence or coming out. The vast majority of characters are LGBTQ+ or allies and respect pronouns. Bad things still happen (at least two really dramatic events occur) but they aren’t the norm. The protagonist can positively affect the lives of others.

Thinking about it, the game can be therapeutic. Both of the worst things that happen to you personally are the kind of scenario you can think of in the shower and stress out about, so writing or playing a game like this can be a nice way to work through it.

I liked the voice acting; on this playthrough, the mother’s voice and neko’s contributed the most. The pictures were great; I especially liked the papercraft.

Not everything is perfect about the game; it feels really long, and it’s not apparent at first just how much freedom there is. Due to the personal nature of the game, some choices don’t feel authentic to who I imagined myself to be. But it helped when I realized something; I read the Great Gatsby earlier this year. I used to really dislike it, but once I realized that the narrator wasn’t intended to be perfect or for us to always agree with him, I liked it much more. It’s the same here; I don’t think Yancy is meant to be perfect. I think part of the idea is to see what happens to someone who is doing their best but sometimes messes up.

Overall, this game gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me a lot more sympathetic to aroace people, as, while I don’t identify as such in the longterm sense, I realized that I have a lot of those feelings right now in my life. And the game helped me imagine different scenariosin my life as well. So a lot of food for thought!

Edit: Also, I didn’t listen to all voice acting all the way through, I’d just let each person have at least one line so I could get the voice and tone, and for really powerful stuff I’d play it all the way through.

6 Likes
117

The Apothecary’s Assistant by Allyson Gray

This game is very unusual. It changes based on the calendar day.

The idea is that you are helping out at a shop in a fantasy setting and are paid in acorns. Each calendar day you can earn acorns by completing a task (usually selecting between two pictures based on a description), solve some cryptic crossword clues, and talk to the shop owner. Then there is nothing else you are allowed to do, so you can just wait until the next day.

I had struggled before with completing Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing, a game with similar mechanics. Before, I couldn’t put a finger on why.

Now I think I know. The issue is that every day I choose for myself the most important things I need to get done. During IFComp, playing a new game is one of those tasks. Finishing a game I’m in the middle of is important, too. But doing a small amount of work in an ongoing task somehow feels less important than starting or finishing, so I shelve it.

Then, days later, I come back to it, not remembering anything. When I play a game all at once or over several days, I immerse myself in it and focus on it, holding all the plot in my head as well as I can. Then I mentally summarize it to myself and let all the rest leak out of my brain, leaving only the summary, and whenever I think of the game, that’s what I think of.

With this game and Fly Fishing, I never had a chance to digest the whole game. Because I played out of context each day, I didn’t know what was important to remember. So I honestly have no clue how the game started or what the setting exactly is. I think we’re in a magical fairy forest and the shopkeeper is a kind of animal, and there was a page given us at one point. But I couldn’t say more than that.

Of course I could have looked it up for this review, but I wanted the author to get a glimpse into my deranged mind to see what one player’s experience was like.

The cryptic crossword clues were fun, albeit hard (like most such to me). Upon my request, the author made a very helpful visual crossword that made it a bit easier. I also used some online crossword dictionaries, but didn’t look at others’ hints. The thing that got me most stuck early on was that I was convinced that the clue small demon would certainly have a different solution each time, and was shocked as I realized today (after two weeks of thinking about it) that that wasn’t so.

Overall, the game is creative and polished, and provides interactivity that’s engaging. Due to its format, I struggled to hold onto a summary of the plot in my mind.

The game also had a charity donation segment, but I’m not including that in my score, as I wouldn’t want it to become a trend for games to get upvoted based on financial donations the author makes (or to get downvoted for not doing so). I don’t think it’s bad, I just think it should be separate from the scoring system.

11 Likes
118

And that’s it for me! The last three games are all sexually themed in some way, so I’m going to skip those. I really enjoyed the competition this year. In my voting, I gave 10 to three games (and would have given another to one I beta tested) and gave one 1 (which I think the author will be pleased to receive).

13 Likes
119

Thank you very much for the review and I’m really sorry that the game didn’t quite work for you! It was super helpful to get your perspective and impressions, which I’ll be sure to keep in mind going forward.

I think you’ve already seen my comments about this in a different thread, but the “amnesia” factor was something I severely underestimated during the difficult testing process. I hope to do a much better job of handling it in the post-comp version!

To avoid potential confusion for other players reading, I’d just like to mention that it is possible to work more than one shift per day on most days, as shifts are tied to open/closed timeslots. I tried to make this more explicit in updates as it was poorly-explained initially, but if it’s still not clear enough, I’ll definitely consider making further changes.
Technically the “choose between two pictures” shifts are in the minority (making up 30 of the total 72), but they do indeed make up the bulk of the closed timeslots — apologies for the lack of variety in your own play sessions!

Thanks again for the review, for the kind comments about other aspects of the game, and for buying a bead. All the time you spent playing and reviewing so many comp entries is much appreciated as always! :blush:

7 Likes
120

Ah, that all makes sense! And I should also clarify that I did give the game a score above average for the comp. I think it’s well-made!

7 Likes