I had no idea there was a status page! I should go back and check that out again…
3 Likes
:o Me neither! I enjoyed it a lot, though
3 Likes
First off… thank you so much for this review!!
You touched on nearly everything I thought about when I was writing Half-Alive.
When I wanted to begin writing, in my mind I had a whole world created with rules that Kenny and Alfie would have to explore. However, I found it hard to get it started without them having some knowledge about how things go on. Wyatt wasn’t even a character in the original script but it felt nearly necessary to have some sort of guide in this confusing world. Writing Chapter 2 which was VERY detail-heavy nearly killed me, the author, because of how many things I wanted to throw at the reader. But, I’m glad you powered through all the exposition lol.
And as for the ax and the fighting. Heavy spoilers ahead → My original thought process was that Kenny’s ax was able to attack the Creature on Earth because Abby had to materialize in the cloak as a more physical being in order to exist outside of the Underworld. So at that time, Kenny could lodge it in either her arm or leg. In the Underworld, it passed through when they were on the Altar because the cloak was described as being ‘wispy’ material and 10-year Abby was comparably very small in a 8-foot demon costume so she wasn’t hit directly when Kenny tried to attack. When Abby removes the cloak, Kenny can then hit her directly with the ax on the kill route. But now writing all that out, I definitely see that I assumed for the reader to guess my thinking process instead of tell them explicitly 
. (same thing with Alfie getting lured where the timeline is even confusing in my head)
On the other note you mentioned about detail, I didn’t want to be too detail-heavy on anything other than descriptions of areas because of the fast-coming deadline and how long the game was already turning out, but I definitely see that Half-Alive would have benefitted from a consistent writing style throughout. Thanks for pointing that out.
And I also enjoy having longer conflicts and harder to read emotions when I read stories. Though, with time issues and length worries I decided to make the characters and plot pretty easy to read so I could tell the story I wanted to tell quickly and concisely. Definitely something I’ll keep in my mind next time.
Overall, thank you so much for playing and I’m glad you enjoyed it!
(Ps: I am devastated that I forgot about the pocket recorder and the time period mismatch 
)
3 Likes
If you haven’t seen the status page, something else that you might not have seen are the background images, which I think are disabled by default on the itch version. If you click “Options” on top, there is a check to enable backgrounds. The backgrounds are not visible on the phone, though.
Thank you for the wonderful review by the way! I don’t think your view on APBW was that off from the general opinion; it won the golden banana after all. I’m glad that this game seemed to worked better, and I really appreciate your detailed thoughts on everything!
About the two endings: I actually tuned the game’s parameters so that the two endings are about equally likely on a random playthrough; many testers got to the Emily route without specifically trying (it’s not necessary to interact in the first scene).
The idea of “relationship game as optimization problem” is an idea I specifically wanted to challenge with this game, which, well…
6 Likes
Orbital Decay, by Kayvan Sarikhani
For all that its plot hinges on a lone astronaut’s attempt to escape a doomed space station before it falls out of the sky, Orbital Decay is a surprisingly low-key affair. This choice-based take on a classic premise is distinguished by steering more into real-world plausibility than is typical (given how grounded the game’s tech is, I was surprised to learn the space station was orbiting an alien planet), but also by simple puzzles and a willingness to back-burner the imminent threat when there’s an opportunity to poke around its well-realized setting. This winds up playing to the game’s strong research chops – it’s fun to explore the station and read the various infodumps on how it should be working – but means the stakes and challenge felt reasonably low throughout.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of the game’s accurate rendition of NASA bureaucratese. After some early hiccups – the writing in the opening starts out a bit too wide-eyed (“The celestial heaven - an immense sea of black and stars, almost as if the uncounted fiery eyes of the Gods themselves were peering through the darkness”) and then overcorrects towards an overly-abrupt style when laying out the inciting incident:
As an astronaut assigned to the COL (Crewed Orbital Laboratory) Bowman, you’re currently conducting a spacewalk to repair a failing AE-35 unit.
Swiftly and without warning, the Bowman is struck by space debris. You survive, but the impact sends you spiraling into the vastness. Suddenly, you feel a violent recoil and realize your tether has miraculously remained intact!
But once you’re back aboard the station, things settle down, and as you work through the puzzles, you’re treated to stuff like this:
You’ve opted for the CEVIS pre-breathing protocol; before you can begin suit preparation, you need to perform exercise on a stationary bike while pre-breathing pure oxygen and then slightly depressurize the airlock to 10.2psi.
Maybe I’m a strange person, but I really like this! It gives a nice, grainy texture that lends novelty to a fairly played-out scenario, and if it sometimes undercuts the gravity of the protagonist’s predicament, I think that’s an OK tradeoff. The downside of this highly-technical style is that it risks bewildering the player by expecting them to have the same facility with jargon as the protagonist, but Orbital Decay avoids this by keeping the puzzles and obstacles quite simple to work through. There’s a pleasingly complex protocol required to move through an airlock, for example, but all the player has to do is click a series of links in order and enjoy the technobabble the game spits out. Similarly, there are a lot of different gadgets and items to find, but they’re pretty much all floating around in corridors, and with no inventory limit it’s easy to just grab all of them and then choose the usually-obvious options to use them appropriately.
I sometimes got the sense that the author realized that they’d streamlined things quite a lot and tried to re-add some complexity. For example, at one point you need to do an EVA to enter a damaged portion of the station from the outside, and have to make it across the gap. You have a large number of options to try, from using a tether to anchor you as you jump to using a fire extinguisher as an improvised propellant, but since you’ll have almost certainly picked up a jetpack that’s specifically designed for these kinds of situations as you went through the airlock, you’ll obviously want to just use that. Similarly, one of the options you’re given as soon as the game starts, when you’re still floating out in space, is to remove your helmet. It fleshes out the list of choices, sure, but having a “shoot self in face” button doesn’t really improve interactivity or add difficulty.
Also on the negative side of the ledger, I did run into some technical niggles, including a soft state-reset where after pressurizing an airlock, my choice to look around before heading onward somehow depressurized the airlock and put me back in my suit. Some text that probably should only fire once – like the protagonist musing “where is everyone” upon seeing the empty crew hub – repeats whenever you backtrack. And played on a phone, there are some misalignment issues that meant that some lists wound up mismatched, making the last “puzzle” (you need to pick a landing point from a list that includes an assessment of how well-suited they’re likely to be) harder than it was intended – though again, it was probably intended to be too easy.
Would Orbital Decay be a stronger game if it was harder? I think in some sense yes, the version that has timers, inventory limits, and more challenging puzzles probably does a better job of realizing the premise. And the low-key vibe extends to the ending, which I found pretty anticlimactic. At the same time, I feel like I’ve played a million games milking drama and challenge out of escaping a crashing spaceship, so playing one that leans hard into nerdy technical detail, where it’s no big deal if I want to ride an exercise bike or rehydrate a burger mid-crisis, made for a nice change of pace.
10 Likes
The Bright Blue Ball, by Clary C
(I played this on my phone so no transcript, sorry!)
Most of the Spring Thing games I’ve played so far have been relatively intense, so it was kind of nice to get another low-key entry after finished Orbital Decay. The Bright Blue Ball is a short, cute parser game pitched at IF beginners, and while its slightness, and slight wonkiness, means that it’s probably less suited for that purpose than other, more robust efforts to create a parser-IF gateway drug, nonetheless it’s a pleasant way to spend 15 minutes, with a few darker notes around the edges reinforcing how nice it can be to spend time in a safe place like this one.
Those darker notes are primarily about the situation that kicks off the action: this is the second Spring Thing game I’ve come across where you play a dog (the other of course being Custard and Mustard’s Big Adventure), and as the story opens you’re with your human “parents” as you flee your home due to a bombing alert – the resonance with the war in Ukraine seems entirely intentional. Thankfully, you quickly reach safety, but along the way you wind up losing your favorite toy, the eponymous ball, and the game consists of solving three or four small puzzles to retrieve it.
It’s always fun to play as an animal, and BBB does a good job of providing smell-centric descriptions and a robust SMELL command to allow for olfactory exploration. The protagonist’s canine nature also makes some traditional parser limitations more reasonable, like a one-item inventory limit that’s fair enough given that you have to carry things in your mouth. At the same time, I felt like the game sometimes didn’t go far enough to commit to its conceit: the first puzzle, for example, requires you to find a key and unlock a door, which is a good introduction to a common IF situation but makes for a bizarre mental image.
Speaking of the puzzles, they’re pretty much all of the medium-dry-goods variety, with one guess-the-action challenge thrown in on top. They’re all very heavily signposted, which is appropriate for the target audience, and feel satisfying to resolve. I did struggle for a bit with the first one, possibly due to some small bugs: I could smell something metallic in a table drawer, but after opening it the smell seemed to go away. I guessed that there was a key somewhere, which proved correct after I tried to TAKE KEY, but it hadn’t to that point showed up in the description of either the room, the table, or the drawer. Similarly, I was briefly stymied once I started wandering the city’s streets because one location had an unmentioned exit (for anyone else who hits a similar barrier: try going north). I also worried I’d made the game unwinnable when I solved the puzzles related to the little girl outside of the intended order, but despite the text seeming a little off-kilter it all eventually came right. As a final small niggle, X TABLE in the newsstand didn’t result in any output, indicating a missing description.
None of these bugs did much to impact my enjoyment – I usually wouldn’t list them all in a review, but since I don’t have a transcript I’m doing so in case it’s useful for the author. BBB is a fun, small game with a positive vibe that acknowledges that even when big scary things are happening in the world, small bits of kindness are important – maybe more important than ever (would that this message didn’t feel especially timely, given the state of the world). I enjoyed my time with the game, and would happily play (and test, if that’d be useful!) another game by the author.
7 Likes
Thanks so much for playing and for the critique! In the same way as what others have pointed out, I’d say you’re spot on. The writing definitely comes across disjointed; I did various bits at various times, struggling throughout to find the right “tone.” It shows. Some things like removing the helmet or ignoring time critical moments were kind of a nod to the unforgiving comedic nature of the old Sierra On-Line games, while in other ways I tried to drive home the realistic bits…for example, even in the future while orbiting an alien world, we’re still subject to the same physical laws (denitrogenation unless pure O2, threat of decompression sickness, radiation exposure, preparing for EVA) and so on.
In hindsight, it might have been better to set the story in near-present day and focus less on the whimsical bits and more on the story. Funny you mention timers and inventory limits…I actually did have some timers in the game (helmet leaking, rate of orbital decay, etc.) at one point and also planned to limit what one could bring with them, but the threat of feature creep while meeting the deadline got the better of me. Oh well - perhaps next time.
Thank you though, much appreciated!
5 Likes
(I’ve gotten a bit behind on the thread so I’m doing an omnibus reply – sorry!)
Glad the review was helpful! I have to say, there was a fair bit of exposition but I definitely thought you handled it well. It helps that the ideas you came up with are interesting – it rests on a framework that’s mostly familiar from other underworld stories, but the specifics of the rules and the way they play out are distinct and lead to fun drama. Adding Wyatt was also a really good idea – he’s a great character, and having a third person in the sibling dynamic means the “downtime” between obstacles is often as dynamic as the more direct challenges Kenny faces.
(Oh, and that explanation re the ax makes sense! I admit I might not have picked up on the cues of what was going on since I was playing on my phone and fairly tired, since my son’s just getting over a cold and nobody’s been sleeping well lately).
Moving on to @cchennnn’s reply:
Now that I zero more into this piece of the game, I think you did a really good job with it – there’s an elegant marriage of the diegetic pieces (Quiyi is self-consciously thinking about relationships in mechanical terms) with the gameplay elements (it’s clear that the player’s decisions are having a mechanical effect on how the game measures relationships – all the more so if you’re aware of the status screen!) I think I was just enjoying the writing and the characters sufficiently that I was happy to just go with the flow, without my brain immediately pivoting to the meta critique.
And thanks for the tip on the backgrounds – they’re really nice and help add to the mood!
Last, @ksarikhani
I did pick up, and enjoy, at least a few of the Sierra in-jokes! I think I focused more on the realistic bits since those feel more novel, whereas there are a ton of comedy space games so those bits feel less distinctive, even though I enjoyed them too. Anyway, I have lots of fond memories of dying in incredibly dumb ways in those games (at least, fond once I realized I had to save very frequently), but I have to say I much preferred your, much more player-friendly, approach.
2 Likes
Wry, by Olaf Nowacki
Well, this is a funny one – funny odd and funny ha-ha. The premise of this one-room-parser game is, uh, slightly novel: as an insurance agent making a sales call at the castle of an eligible Baroness, you’re ushered into a waiting room where you’re encouraged to poke around – a slightly-askew portrait is the clearest jumping-off point, but you’ve got several avenues open to you, most of them leading to escalating farce.
(Oh, I just got why it’s named Wry. Clever!)
Certain actions, some of them non-obvious, will increase your score. Most such actions also serve to increase the protagonist’s libido, again sometimes in non-obvious ways – for example, trying to leave the waiting room to explore the castle will provoke a daydream of wandering into the Baroness’s boudoir, winning you two points. After a decent interval passes, the game ends, and depending on your score you get one of three endings, ranging from a minimally-successful one where you land the insurance deal all the way up to one where the Baroness responds positively to your erotic revenues and you wind up staying for breakfast.
Per the author’s note this is in some way inspired by a sketch or sketches by a German comedian, but without direct experience of any antecedents I have to say this is a pretty bizarre setup. And while things are kept PG-13, it can also veer into slightly uncomfortable territory; part of the joke is that the protagonist is a ridiculous horndog, but it’s still a bit icky to see him drool over nude paparazzi snaps of the Baroness (on a third hand, she’s presumably the one who left these magazines in the waiting room, so I suppose we’re meant to see her as inviting the attention. And in the ending where she’s not into the protagonist, that’s the end of it; sexy-times only commence when she opens the door).
With those caveats, though, I’d say that if you’re able to buy into the premise, Wry is an energetic good time. The writing is enthusiastic and happily goes off the rails before bringing things back to earth – here’s the aforementioned finding-the-Baroness’s bedroom daydream:
You’d love to have a look at the chateau… What if you happen to find the Baroness Valerie’s bedchamber? She may be in the process of changing clothes? Or she is still lying in her bed? Naked?!? And then she says, “Oh Jon, I’ve been waiting for you all this time! Won’t you keep me company?” with a suggestive smile on her lips. Then the fantasy is gone.
There’s also some nicely-choregraphed physical comedy if you take the game’s invitation to fiddle with the out-of-true painting. Things escalate nicely, and every action you take to try to recover the situation is both reasonable, nicely clued, and inevitably makes things even worse. My only complaint is that the game ends just as things are reaching a fever pitch – I wouldn’t have minded a few more turns for further chaos to be unleashed. Pacing is always a challenge in this kind of game, but the author handles it well here, and every time the game ended I was eager to try again until I got the last ending. Blessedly, you also don’t need to wring out every last point to see it; if you complete the main thread and also discover a few bonus interactions, you’re able to see the protagonist make his breakfast date, so it’s up to the player whether they’re inclined to revisit the game to try out more abstruse interactions.
“You’ll like this thing if it’s the sort of thing that you like” is the mealy-mouthiest of critical verdicts, but that’s pretty much where I’m at with Wry – I can understand why some folks might find it hard to get into. If you’re able to get over that hump (er), though, the game can very much be a treat: personally I enjoyed it, and it’s definitely a well-designed and entertainingly-written piece of work, even if it might make me look askance at the next insurance salesman I meet.
(No transcript this time since I forgot to reactivate the command after my first very boring “just X everything” playthrough ended with failure).
8 Likes
Roger’s Day Off, by Sia See and Jkj Yuio
Roger’s Day Off wants to be a lark. A parser-choice hybrid, it has an entertainingly zany premise (use a time machine to do some historical tourism and collect a series of MacGuffins disguised as a tea service – the time machine is also a teapot, with a TARDISy bigger-on-the-inside thing going on) and puzzle-focused gameplay that doesn’t take its characters or situations too seriously. Add a fun authorial voice with some jokes that actually land – there’s a Cloak of Darkness riff that made me chuckle – and competently-done 3d images to liven things up, and you’d think it has all the ingredients it needs to realize its ambitions.
Sadly, though, I did not manage to have a good time with Roger’s Day Off. Some of this is due to awkwardness in the bespoke system, an underdeveloped world, and the way the heretofore-lackadaisical plot comes to the fore in the endgame. But largely it’s because the puzzles feel like they’re trying to check off as many of the crimes itemized in Ron Gilbert’s Why Adventure Games Suck essay as possible. There are instant deaths – including many puzzles that require dying to get the info you need to progress – puzzles that require out of game knowledge, and puzzles that seem to either throw logic out the window, or somehow invert it. Fortunately there are easily-accessible hints, and I can see a player getting some enjoyment out of the stronger parts of the game by using them early and often, but attempting to play the game straight was for me an exercise in frustration.
I’m going to be spoilery with examples of the kinds of puzzle shenanigans the game gets up to, so fair warning if despite everything you do want to try to flail your way through. Here are some of the worst offenders:
- At one point you meet a character – the concierge in a hotel – who asks your name. If you don’t lie and tell her your uncle’s name instead of your own, you’ll hit a game over (see, later on you find out she’s an undercover time police agent, and your time machine is registered under his name).
- Later on in that same 1920s sequence, there’s a drinking game where you need to maintain your faculties as long as possible and the solution is to drink the highest-alcohol stuff first, which is uh not my experience of how this works.
- Once you succeed in the drinking game, you make friends with a time criminal and have to try to get access to some contraband; you do this by suggesting he hide it anywhere except his boots (like, you need to click every other dialogue option and leave that one un-lawnmowered), and then he’ll hide it in his boots.
- Speaking of dialogue, almost the entire pirate ship sequence is a long conversation where just about every node has one good option and the rest instafail you, with no clear signposting on what strategies will work (OK, there’s one inventory puzzle that’s kind of fun).
- In the far future sequence, there’s a puzzle involving finding a FORTRAN bug – though at least the game has the courtesy to provide a link to a forum thread explaining the bug and providing the fix, making this puzzle either forbiddingly hard or completely trivial.
There are a few good puzzles in here – some inventory-based ones require you to do some present-day shopping and share the largesse with folks in history, which is entertaining. But for the most part it feels like progress requires either reading the authors’ minds or being OK with a whole whole lot of trial and error gameplay that’s at odds with the breezy vibe the game seems to be going for.
I found the game’s custom-designed system exacerbated these issues, since it’s fiddly enough to make repetition annoying. In principle I like hybrids between choice and parser approaches, since they can offer convenience and prompting via the choices while providing scope for exploration and surprise via the parser side of things. This one – dubbed “Strand” – mostly managed to do that, but there’s some sand in the gears. For one thing, the parser side of things feels underdeveloped, with very few pieces of scenery or places where poking around is rewarded, or even possible. On the flip side, though, most puzzles require typing commands that aren’t listed as options, so you can’t play just with the mouse. I also ran into some performance issues that slowed things down and made precise clicking harder, and had to manually scroll the game window down after most actions because the automatic scroll-down happened before the images loaded and pushed the last pieces of text off-screen.
All this frustration is a shame, because the range of settings provides some fun variety, and the gentle, idiosyncratically British humor on display in the opening is something I really enjoy (it’s in the same ballpark as Christopher Merriner’s games, which I love). Occasionally the it’s-all-just-a-laugh approach to worldbuilding feels a bit too slapdash – in the section where you travel to Assyria, which is basically ancient Iraq, you’re introduced to Sultana (erm) Nefertiti (double erm) who tasks you with killing a monster (erms again) who goes by Anubis (erm, hopefully not the real one?), and if forced to name a single element the disparate times and places have in common, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with something other than “ladies with pneumatic boobs” – but on the whole it’s pleasant to do some historical tourism and enjoy the jokes. If only the puzzles had been just as low-key!
5 Likes
Tours Roast Torus, by Andrew Schultz
I’ve played and enjoyed a bunch of Andrew Schultz’s recent games riffing on board games, but have to confess that I’ve often found it harder to get into his wordplay ones; something about the pig latin one from a year or two back especially managed to melt my brain, despite recognizing that there was quite a lot of care taken to provide hints, tutorials, and other support to invite the player in. So I turned to this game, which is clearly anagram-focused (it’s a sequel to some older games that apparently have a similar concept), with an eagerness not unalloyed with trepidation.
Turns out I needn’t have worried – while I definitely had a few moments of struggle, Tours Roast Torus is an approachable set of puzzles, boasting a well-tuned level of difficulty, a sufficiently fleet play time not to wear out the concept, and some optional tough-as-nails endgame challenges for those who didn’t break a sweat getting to the end (I mean, this wasn’t me but I assume someone out there got through the core puzzles, cracked their knuckles, and settled in to have some real fun). There’s a bit of a plot threaded through which connects to those earlier games, and while I didn’t have much context for all the proper nouns, the setup is clear enough: antsy after your accomplishments in the previous games, you set out to explore a mysterious tower found in the middle of the eponymous torus.
Said exploration consists of finding an anagram from the prompt given in the names of each location along the torus. There’s a clever trick here, which is that each puzzle involves a word that includes exactly two of each word it includes, so it can be decomposed into a pair of smaller anagrams which make up the prompt. So like the prompt could be something like “stake takes”, which you’d read and then come up with – nothing, because I’m much less clever than Schultz is, but let’s pretend “askettakes” is a word.
As is typically the case with anagrams, for about half of these I looked at them and got them near-immediately, and half of them left me completely baffled. This is where Schultz’s trademark player-friendliness comes in; there’ll usually be a gentle nudge somewhere in the location text prompting you towards the answer, and if that’s not enough, the protagonist has a set of tattoos that tell you how many letters you’ve got in the right place, allowing you to trial-and-error your way to success (there’s also an advanced setting for the tattoos that provides even more information, but I couldn’t figure out how they worked). They’re largely reasonable words, too: there was one exception where I thought “hey, is that really a word?” (HAPPENCHANCE), but at the same time I got that one after only two or three guesses so I think it plays fair. And in case your brain is starting to get tired of anagrams, there’s a well-calculated change of pace for the penultimate puzzle since it uses an entirely different mechanic.
With all these supports, it took me about a half hour to play through the main puzzles and solve the first of the bonus challenges (entirely by luck, I have to add), and then I poked around the post-game options for a few more minutes, since those helpfully tell you what you missed and lay out some fun rejected puzzle options. I found a few technical niggles – some of the text for the advanced version of the tattoos came out a little garbled, and they seemed to get confused by the endgame bonus puzzles (details in the transcript). But it’s all solidly put together, and the whole package makes for a nice, concentrated burst of wordplay that just about any player can have some fun with.
torus mr.txt (72.2 KB)
9 Likes
Computerfriend, by Kit Riemer
Computerfriend is hard to describe, but as I was searching for ways to communicate what it’s about, a shorthand popped into my mind and refused to leave: it’s Infinite Jest by way of Eliza. Despite how it sounds, this is not a stone-cold insult! What we’ve got here is a choice-based narrative, told in clever, literary prose, following a protagonist as they navigate their mental health issues in an alternate-history, mid-apocalyptic America (so far so Infinite Jest), which they do largely by engaging with a computerized therapist whose treatment strategies sometimes resemble madlibs (here’s the Eliza bit). It’s off-kilter and unsettling, with arresting images and meta jokes that are funny, but not just funny. Even though the ending I got didn’t quite feel of a piece with the rest of the story, I adored it anyway.
If I love a game it’s usually down at least partially to the writing, and Computerfriend is no exception. Here’s the first sentence:
Six hundred wooden arms rise up on either side of the street black and warbling mirage in the terrible morning heat.
You had me at hello (the wooden arms are tree stumps: Computerfriend uses evocative language to describe the blasted pre-millennial environment of its setting, but it steers clear of surrealism). Here’s one more, from an early list running down some of the sensory input jangling into the protagonist’s overstimulated consciousness:
3: The Constant Humming Of Air Conditioners Crouched Like Thieves On Open Windowsills
Memorable images like this pop off the screen at regular intervals, grounding the reader in the protagonist’s intolerable status quo and providing a more than adequate rationale for them to be seeking refuge in the questionable bosom of a computerized psychiatrist. While the precise mental illness they’re dealing with isn’t spelled out – from a cursory knowledge of the medications you’re prescribed and a few of the therapeutic technics and analyses that get deployed, there’s at least anxiety and suicidal ideation – the protagonist’s experience of their life is assaultative and blanched of meaning all at once.
The game is structured around their repeated sessions with the eponymous program; after brief, conventionally choice-y segments laying out their daily life (mostly humdrum stuff around the house), you get a bit of therapy, then unwind by messing around on your computer. While even this last piece is interesting, including fun alternate-history headlines that relieve some of the misery of the rest of the game (“Jeff Bezos’s Grave Desecrated On Sixth Anniversary Of His Execution”; “Disgraced Magnate Donald Trump Attacked, Disfigured By Feral Ungulates At Cottagecore Animal Sanctuary”) and clever semi-interactive magic tricks that reinforce the idea that the computer is always ahead of the game, it’s the counseling where the game’s greatest heft lies.
The Computerfriend’s therapeutic persona makes for engaging play. All of its questions and statements are presented with a bit of an edge, and while it’s notionally trying to help you, it’s hard not to detect a whiff of the demonic in its approach. At first it primarily asks you simple biographical questions – some indicated by choice, others by typing in – and then spits out general platitudes that incorporate your replies in a cursory way (“I bet ‘writing’ is a great way to unwind”, it says, acknowledging your preferred hobby).
At first this is a dark joke, as the crappiness of the algorithm gives the lie to its claims of effectiveness. But the techniques quickly become more sophisticated, and the Computerfriend’s dialogue more naturalistic, sometimes in unsettling ways. Eventually it pushes you towards a breaking point, and possibly a breakthrough, and while writing an authentic catharsis is hard – much less writing psychiatric counseling that seems like it could prompt one – the author sticks the landing here, and I found the last therapy session really affecting, as the Computerfriend took on the protagonist’s anomie and proposed a postmodern, existentialist philosophy that could plausibly allow them to find meaning despite their emptiness, their loneliness, and the ruin of society.
Where the game didn’t stick the landing for me is in the actual ending I got (numbered 4 of 6, so there are others), which saw the protagonist fly away to an untouched wilderness and have a regenerative encounter with nature – this felt a bit too pat to me, and the pristine nature of the environment seemed at odds with everything I’d read about the chemical and biological ruin visited upon the U.S. It could be this is meant as a fantasy sequence, but even still, it didn’t feel all that connected to the choices I’d made through the course of the game (I should say, there are a lot of choices beyond the madlibs-y ones, largely around accepting, resisting, or reinterpreting the Computerfriend’s therapy).
Given the strength of the rest of the game, though, I found this too-pat ending easy enough to ignore, and after I’ve finished my reviews I’ll probably play again and see if I can find a different one that’s more fitting. And in the meantime, Computerfriend’s left me with enough indelible images that I won’t forget its dystopic, failed world – which is to say, our world – before I get back to it.
6 Likes
I feel silly for not realizing that’s how the tattoos worked. I assumed they just told you how many anagrams you had completed and never looked at them a second time (or rather I turned them off after making that assumption).
4 Likes
it didn’t feel all that connected to the choices I’d made through the course of the game (I should say, there are a lot of choices beyond the madlibs-y ones, largely around accepting, resisting, or reinterpreting the Computerfriend’s therapy).
I got two of the endings and thought they were the logical result of my answers.
I got one by being very nihilistic, avoiding cooperating whenever I could… I think I got ending 5/6 where you end up sitting in the bathroom. I got another one by preemptively refusing to give the computer my signature.
I am not sure what triggers the endings. Did you cooperate with the computer a lot?
An impressive game, anyway.
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I cooperated maybe 2/3 or so of the time? I think the things that felt most incongruous were first, since I had gone along with much of the therapy, it seemed weird to go to nature and seemingly reject the computer in a way that it seems like doesn’t happen even if you refuse to play along. And second, it just seemed too upbeat for where I wound up, which felt like maaaaybe holding steady on mental health at best.
This is now two games where I’ve complained about getting happy endings (New Years Eve 2019 being the other) so maybe this objection says more about me than Computerfriend, though! Anyway, as you say, a very good game regardless.
(I also realized that after my gimmicky opening, I didn’t mention that the reason the Infinite Jest comparison wasn’t meant as a dig is that I actually enjoyed the book, indefensible as it is. There are far better ways to spend a month of reading, but some worse ways too).
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Haha, I knew you meant the Infinite Jest comparison tone-wise.
I am a bit biased toward David Foster Wallace and I think Computerfriend is on the right side of being influenced by his work. The weird news headlines, psychological thought experiments, and as you said a bit of mid-American apocalypse. It’s not trying too hard with big words and long pages, though.
I was actually surprised to see the author of Computerfriend wrote Universal Hologram…I dismissed that at surface-level new age “woo” during IF Comp but maybe I should revisit it.
Also re: DFW, about six years ago I was considering writing a parser game themed around a fairground and/or country fair. It was loosely based on David Foster Wallace’s essay “Ticket to the Fair” and John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (an influence on one of DFW’s short stories).
The central mechanic was similar to Bigfoot Bluff…it would have been a sandbox game in which you had to accomplish an arbitrary number of tasks to reach and defeat an evil carny at the top of a ferris wheel.
I think there was a puzzle where you had to turn someone’s prize pig into gelatin, then grease yourself with it to squeeze through gaps.
However, there was nothing “metafictiony” to say about parser games, so it eventually turned into Dr. Sourpuss, a commentary on Twine games.
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Yes! Lemme at it!
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Thank you for your review! I struggled the most writing the endings, and it seems like players are pretty split on how they feel about them. The one you got is for sure the happiest, and I’m wondering now how I could’ve made earlier small choices affect the way things play out at the end (which is determined by whether you seem cooperative vs. uncooperative and hopeful vs. hopeless in the final act, as well as by random chance). I am glad you enjoyed it overall, though!
I try to avoid any sort of similarity to DFW but it seems to creep in everywhere. I also like Infinite Jest overall despite everything, and my friend was rereading it and texting me frequently about it while I was writing Computerfriend, so I wonder if it was just haunting my consciousness the whole time… Haven’t played Eliza, but it sounds interesting (another reviewer mentioned an old Windows game called Dr. Sbaitso, which blew my mind when I played it - it’s exactly how I’d initially envisioned Computerfriend).
I lol’d at this; one of the least pleasant reviews Universal Hologram received was in part because of its rude opinion of astral projection, so it seems I kneecapped myself from both angles with the new age thing. But the games are intentionally total opposites- UH is slangy, metaphysical & (hopefully facetiously) woo-ey, with kind of juvenile humor and a plot rather on rails, whereas CF is quite bleak with more carefully chosen language and a greater variety of paths & endings. Which is to say if you liked one, you very well might not like the other.
Anyway, I really enjoyed reading all this. Thanks so much for playing!!
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For anyone interested:
- Assyria was a) a city/state b) a full-fledged kingdom, and c) an empire at various times
- The city-state (Assur) is indeed in today’s Iraq, but the empire included what parts of of what is today Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and Armenia.
- The empire’s capital changed five times, the last being in what is now Turkey, although the others are in today’s Iraq.
- “Sultana” is a female Arabic name, not Assyrian (for a list of Assyrian names still in use today, see here).
- Nefirtiti, of course, was the name of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who lived from 1370 – c. 1330 BC at a time when Assyria was a tiny city-state that was centuries away from becoming notable.
- Anubis is an ancient Egyptian god, not an Assyrian one. The primary god of the Assyrian pantheon was Ashur.
Last but not least, there are still Assyrian people around today, and some of them are members of one of the oldest churches in Christendom. So yah, they’re worthy of a little historical dignity, I should think 
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I lol’d at this; one of the least pleasant reviews Universal Hologram received was in part because of its rude opinion of astral projection, so it seems I kneecapped myself from both angles with the new age thing.
I have to admit I didn’t get far enough into Universal Hologram to see the sarcastic and rude bits, that should have tipped me off in hindsight. 
I do like the core concept of using AI images though.
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