I got the combination to the back door from the guide by the beverage cart when I flirted with her a bit (4094). I’m talking about the sequence in which to turn the cylinder key in the numbered keyholes on the back of the Aegis display case.
Aaaand I just checked and you’re completely right of course.
Thanks for the nudge. I finished with 92/100.
Brian,
Thank you for the great review! I have been avoiding parsers because I really enjoying coding in twine, so easy, but you may have talked me into it. I see how this game would have benefited.
Thanks again! I always enjoy reading your reviews.
Cheers,
Deborah
Thank you very much for reviewing Dysfluent!
(I noticed your reviews all over IFDB during my first foray into it, and it feels very cool to now have my own game reviewed by the mathbrush, haha.)
I loved reading your reflections on your real-life experiences and how they relate to the game’s themes. You make an excellent observation about the overlap between disabilities!
I was surprised to hear you were able to play it on your phone – it’s unfortunately not optimized at all for mobile, so I had concerns about people trying that.
I’m happy it worked out for you, and that you overall had a nice time!
And hurray for making boring meetings a little less boring!
I actually also played it on my phone (I unfortunately need to save my limited desk time for playing parser games and writing reviews), and while the real estate definitely gets squeezed, it wound up working out OK I thought!
Thanks for the review @mathbrush !
Lunium
I really enjoyed this escape room game.
While you’d think there’d be a big overlap in escape rooms and interactive fiction, the two have very distinct flavors (at least ifcomp-style interactive fiction). I wonder if its because escape rooms often rely heavily on visual clues? (like this game does).
In any case, this has the hallmarks of an escape room: a contrived scenario with codes, color schemes, passwords, chains, etc. where its clear the story (while strong) is in service to the puzzles.
You wake up, chained and forgetful, in a room filled with locks, drawers, safes, keys, etc.
Most of gameplay revolves around trying to figure out correct passphrases to type into boxes. The passphrases represent you having ‘done the work’ of solving.
I knew once I started this that it was pretty hard, probably too hard for me. I also knew that for this type of game, getting hints would probably significantly diminish the experience. So I persevered for quite a while, and finally solved it without hints! That was very satisfying.
There do seem to be several red herrings (for instance, I was obsessed for a while with the idea of prime suspects involving prime numbers, but when one of the numbers turned out to be 57 I realized I was either way off base or the author was making a joke about Alexander Grothendieck.)
I do think this game defies a lot of conventions of IFComp games, with its fairly contrived story and emphasis on visual-only clues and passwords. However, it executed this at a high level of skill, and I really liked it.
And so, with an absentmindedly spoken aside, he sent poor Rovarsson down the dark and twisted rabbit hole.
Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses!
A long time ago I studied IFComp games and noticed games that were marked as unfinished tended to do really poorly in the voting, regardless of their quality. I wonder if that’s changed now? It’ll be interesting to see how this game places, given that it says it will be updated and that several of the endings cut off in the middle of the story.
Your glasses are missing, and you have to find them! There are two key suspects, Minh and Jaime. All of them and you belong to the same book club.
The game branches pretty heavily, with one early ending being peaceful and happy and another ending I had involved organized crime(???)
Overall, it was fun, but just needs some more work. There were some typos (like ‘peak’ for ‘peek’, which is funny because I’ve made that same mistake at least twice this week), but not too many.
It’s interesting to compare this unfinished Choicescript game to One Knight Stand, another unfinished Choicescript game in the comp. This game is pretty minimal with just a few choices, but still manages to branch a lot. The other game has over 400K words with tons of choices for each option. Both manage to be pretty fun.
I liked what I saw of this game, there just wasn’t a lot.
Into the Lion’s Mouth
This is a short branching Twine game with links to other websites and multimedia about a lion.
I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s pretty chaotic; each branch does something really different and then returns. I found a death ending but no other ending.
Parts of it were sweet and parts of it were funny. The writing is a little weird; not in a ‘bad spelling/grammar’ kind of way necessarily, but in a logical flow kind of way. It jumps from idea to idea, kind of like listening to someone spitball ideas about a game.
It had some interesting links about lion diet and a girl hypnotizing a frog, so that was cool. Interesting game.
We All Fall Together
This is a brief Texture game about falling in an infinite void. The setting gives me fond memories of the Magnus Archives, but the tone is very different; rather than using the infinite fall to provoke horror or terror, its used here as a sort of metaphor, although a vague one.
You have a companion in this falling, a mysterious person dressed as a rockstar whom you can learn more about.
There were a lot of real choices in the game, as most options disappeared after choosing one. I didn’t choose to replay because I found my one playthrough satisfying.
20 Exchange Place
This is a pretty tricky ink game. I had to play it around 10 to 13 times to win, even using saves. I didn’t realize that one of the keys to winning was steadying your nerves with a cigarette. At least I think that’s what happened. But it would make sense, since it’s in the cover art.
This a hardboiled NYC cop thriller, kind of like NYPD Blue (although I don’t remember much of that show as I wasn’t allowed to watch it. One of the first network shows with nudity!). You are a hostage negotiator at a bank robbery and have to find the best strategy for capturing the thieves and freeing the hostages.
After many, many attempts, I was able to free all the hostages, although the criminals went free.
On the one hand, I felt like it was too hard to strategize in this game, as there weren’t many clues as to what path is best. On the other hand, it was short enough that I could try multiple things on multiple attempts.
Lonehouse
This is a brief Texture game, one where you drag actions over verbs. It looks like several of the Texture games in this comp were written by authors who supported each other, as they retweet each other on twitter, use similar verbs in their games (like THINK and INSPECT) and one mentioned a writing circle. If it’s true, then that’s cool, because having people to bounce ideas off of can make for much stronger games.
This is a compelling game about someone receiving a text about a sister who died. You must go to your sister’s apartment and inspect her things, deciding what to do with them.
While they are unrelated, I kind of saw this as a counterpoint to My Brother, the Parasite. That was a dark and unpleasant game about a brother who was very close to the protagonist but also very violent. This is a bittersweet game about a sister who is distant from the protagonist yet left behind a lot of sweet memories. While you can’t see everything on one playthrough, I most enjoyed the moments about the big red jacket, as it was a striking visual and a sweet way to remember someone.
Thanks for the review and well done for getting through it without any hints - glad you found solving the puzzles satisfying in the end - they’re definitely intended to seem tricky at first, but entirely solvable without the need for extra hints. I should say that the hints are intended to spoil as little as possible (at least the first one or two) - so no one should feel they can’t turn that option on if they’re feeling stuck.
I’m impressed you got the Alexander Grothendieck reference. Ahem. Yep, that was totally intentional.
Why would someone who wrote Elements of Algebraic Geometry appear in an escape room game?
That sounds like a convoluted maths joke.
Grothendieck was one of the most brilliant mathematicians during his active period, specifically in the area of schemes and theoretical stuff involving prime numbers.
But when asked to give an example of a prime number, he is rumored to have said “57”, which is not prime. (And there’s a really easy way to tell it’s not prime using the sum of its digits).
It’s an urban legend that’s meant to show how theoretical math can be completely disconnected from practical math.
So having someone with the number 57 be called a ‘prime suspect’ could theoretically be a Grothendieck joke.
Antony & Cleopatra: Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando
This game is not archived, but I’m only reviewing it by request. (although technically it’s open on github so I guess that’s the same thing!)
There have been several multiplayer IF games in recent years, many of them by this author. Approaches to multiplayer IF have varied; there are parser games where codes must be passed back and forth and collaboration is key; twine games where codes are passed back and forth but no other communication is meant to be made; and games like this that utilize a server.
This is a very well written and technically proficient game. I think I’m going to divide my thoughts on this game into three areas: the story/writing, the mechanics, and the multiplayer aspect. Because this game works well and the author is proficient, I’m going to be a bit more critical than I would with a newer author, since I think this author values thoughtful criticism (and I hope I’m thoughtful!)
Story and writing
The main storyline is that you are Antony and Cleopatra, with Antony being the Vice President (I assume of the US) and Cleopatra being the Queen of Egypt (I wonder what it would be like if the vice president in real life was married to a monarch of another state. That’d be pretty interesting!). The two of you have been asked to solve the murder of Marlon Brando. You have around two weeks to gather clues, conduct interviews and investigations, and to make an accusation.
The story has varied suspects with differing motivations and interests. I’ve played a lot of other detective games where everyone just kind of blends together, a lot of rich white british people who have no distinguishing characteristics. But in this game, each character is very different. Interviewing Rasputin was memorable, and Vitruvius was very different from James Dean, who was very different from the General.
You’ll notice all the names are taken from famous characters in history. That’s part of the conceit here; kind of like Clone High or Fate Grand Order (neither of which I’ve watched or played), all of the characters are characters from history, modified to fit into a single scenario. For instance, Marlon Brando and James Dean both work at Raytheon.
This is clever, but to me the influence of the character’s historical figure is like La Croix; it’s not really there, just a hint of it. For most of the characters you could have swapped them with some other historical figure and there would be little difference. If it has been Queen Victoria instead of Queen Cleopatra, much of the game could have remained the same, outside of the Blood Diamonds bit. James Dean could have been Timothy Chalamet, etc. The only character that seemed heavily influenced by their historical counterpart is Rasputin. For the others, it mostly seemed like the name was just tacked on with a reference or two (Napoleon’s coat) with the mental associations meant to be developed by the reader.
But that’s not to say the characters aren’t developed; they’re very well developed! Just not in ways that strongly justify the unusual character choices.
The storyline itself was really interesting, and I liked seeing how things developed out and new storylines emerged.
Mechanics
You’re given a calendar with several blank days, each day with two appointments to make. You can schedule interviews or visiting locations (I thought you had to do one of each at first, but later I doubled up on appointments once I realized you can do so). Once in a meeting, you can mostly just click every link, although there are occasional choices you can make that make a difference. So the real strategy lies not in each individual interview, but in which interviews to schedule.
I found that satisfying in the long run, as time began running out and I had to guess which meetings were most important to schedule.
I’ve mentioned before my informal classification of mystery IF:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.
This is a type 3 murder mystery. At the end you have to pick who did it and why.
I got it wrong, mostly because I psyched myself out about a character I hadn’t had a chance to interview. But the solution was logical!
Multiplayer aspect
I played this game twice, first as part of the Seatlle IF Meetup and then again on my own.
In the meetup, we only got through the first day after 30 minutes of playing. On my own, it took me over an hour to finish.
Overall, I usually play IF around other events in my life like meals, childcare, work, tutoring, etc. and so it’s pretty hard to find time to meet up with others to play IF. That’s why I tend to prefer multiplayer IF that has small amounts of text and short gameplay (like Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by the same author).
This game has a lot of text and long gameplay! There was also one time while (when playing with two browsers on the same computer) it said I was losing connection and might have everything reset without saving.
That says to me that this type of game may be more appropriate for a ‘multiple people in one room’ setting, like a TTRPG or boardgame, but digitally.
This feeling was strengthened once I realized that there’s not really special abilities for each of the two protagonists or information only one receives. There are certainly little details here and there and there are some witnessses where you get substantially different options, but by and large most of the multiplayer aspect is ‘do the two of you agree on this course of action’, which again to me sounds better for a cooperative game played by people in the same room.
Overall
This was a strong game, well made, and I enjoyed it. The multiplayer aspect and the historical figures weren’t compelling to me, and I believe the game could have retained much of its enjoyability without either one. But I’m glad it encouraged me to work with others and I’m glad I spent time with this.
I think I’ve now played all the games in the comp I’m planning on playing.
I beta tested several games, and I plan on posting reviews for these games, but I’ll do it nearer the end of the comp, in November. Those games are:
Barcarolle in Yellow
Hand Me Down
How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title
Magor Investigates
Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Paintball Wizard
The Vambrace of Destiny
A few games are explicitly sexual. I don’t derive enjoyment from games with sexual gameplay, as I don’t associate sex in games with happiness. Those games are:
Citizen Makane
Dick McButts Gets Kicked in the Nuts
Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest
Xanthippes Last Night with Socrates
Finally, there’s been a recent trend to self-host IFComp games. A lot of self-hosted games have disappeared over time (like Sun and Moon), and some authors have been deleting their self-hosted games after receiving criticism. I mostly write reviews as part of an archival process (like labelling books in a catelogue), so I’m skipping these games unless the authors want me to review them. Those games are:
The Enigma of Solaris
Meritocracy
One Does Not Simply Fry
Paper Magician
Shanidar, Safe Return
Virtue
Other than that, I’ve played all the games and really enjoyed them. Thanks to all the authors for making excellent works!
Re To Sea in a Sieve:
In one part of the game I typed something like the former 50 times, not realising I needed to do the latter. It’s rather encouraging to see someone else with sort of similar issues in this area! Though strictly speaking your point is re LIGHT vs SUN, whereas I was having issues with the verbs and action options.