I don’t think I used the feedback feature, but let me just say I initially chose the optimistic ending. But when the next screen showed me the corporate logo on the submarine, I hit the back button like I was scalded and promptly dumped all that stuff overboard. Screw those guys!
4 Likes
Your Post-Apocalyptic To-Do List, by Geoffrey Golden
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Cower.
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Die.
That’s mine, at any rate.
Fortunately, the “you” of the title here has a broader set of skills than I do, encompassing foraging, light construction, animal husbandry, and the kind of indefatigable cheeriness that makes one completely insufferable in day-to-day interactions but becomes essential to pressing on after the bombs fall and all is woe. Well, maybe not all is woe, since amidst the general destruction, one specific death has been that of your Uncle Crackpot (to all appearances his given name?), and as a result you’ve inherited his mutant hog farm (the pigs are mutants, I should specify, not the farm – though now I’m curious about what that game would be like).
Seeing this questionable legacy as your ticket to realizing your dreams, you buckle down to make the most of the opportunity. Beyond the quotidian tasks of keeping the hogs fed, clearing away radioactive waste (as in, their poop), and keeping the farm safe from spike-bedecked raiders, each day you can also choose to invest time in more proactive pursuits, like exploring how to persuade the pigs to breed, wrestling with them as practice for a career in entertainment pugilism, or building a really really big gun.
This is where the gameplay comes in – this is a time management game, meaning you don’t have nearly enough energy to do everything you’d like to do each day. Thus the eponymous to-do lists: every morning, you’re presented with a neat list of the half-dozen or so tasks you might want to take on, along with a star rating representing how many hours they might require. Clicking on one will cross it off and tick down the number of hours remaining; once you’re finished, you move on to a wrap-up screen that describes the positive effects of anything you accomplished, as well as the negative effects of anything you left undone.
This is a sturdy structure in service to a wacky premise, with a bunch of different endings (I was very pleased to discover what might count as a “secret” one – slacking off a bunch to get a self-care and meditation focused ending) and a short enough playing time that it’s simple enough to go back and try for another one. Combined with the winning enthusiasm of the narration, this high degree of craft makes for an enjoyable game, though it’s one that I wound up liking a little less than it probably deserves. The first reason is a matter of style; YPATDL’s prose is fairly over the top and wallows (sic) in its own filthiness, which can make for some really funny writing, but here I found the punch lines were somewhat lacking. This is a dream you have early on, which opens up a new possibly career path:
You had a dream last night. You were in a death jalopy, mowing down bikers, and shooting the ones that tried to get away. It was the most wonderful, beautiful dream. But could you ever gather enough scrap and tools to make your own car, gun, or gun-car?
And here’s a bit from the pro-wrestling track of the game:
After successfully defeating the Hog Farm World Champion, you enter your first human deathmatch competition… and you WIN, slicing off your opponent’s head with Axey McHandle! Way to go, Axey! You become a championship deathmatch contender, feared and admired across Arizoona. With the prize money, you build a private, scrap-of-the-art exercise training facility for you and the hogs. Your boil-covered mutant hog has never looked more fit.
It’s well written so far as it goes, but to me stuff like this feels like it conveys a jokey vibe without actually being that funny. This could just be a personal reaction – and from the author’s entry in last year’s IF Comp, Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s, I know he can really make me laugh, so it could be that this was an intentional choice. Still, I would have liked the game better if it made me laugh.
My other hesitation has to do with how the difficulty is tuned. As is always the case in this sort of game, you don’t have nearly enough time to accomplish everything you’d like to. When it’s a matter of having to prioritize among different goals, that can make for compelling gameplay; here, though, a lot of your initial choices are reactive rather than proactive. In order to maintain the status quo, you need to keep your hogs fed, their sties clean, and the fence-line secure from raiders – but you don’t have time to actually do all of that every day, much less try to get ahead of the game by looking for scrap or encouraging the hogs to breed. This made my initial playthrough quite stressful, in a way that didn’t feel like it fit the generally low-stakes, pleasant atmosphere conveyed by the writing. Making this worse, I sometimes didn’t quite understand how the game was communicating: after seeing a “hey you better take care of X thing tomorrow” warning, I thought if I didn’t see that alert I could safely let that task slide for one more day, and I also thought building a fence would automatically keep me safe from raiders. Both of those assumptions were wrong, meaning that my first playthrough ended in failure.
This actually isn’t as bad as it seems, both because replaying is quick, and also it turns out not owning any mutant hogs isn’t the worst thing in the world (and in the game!) And on my second and subsequent tries, I was able to figure out the game’s mechanics such that the opening sections became significantly less stressful (if anything, when you know what you’re doing they’re slightly tedious). So this is no big deal in the final analysis, but it does mean the game’s first impression isn’t quite as friendly as it could be – in fact, YPATDL is a reasonably pleasant way to spend the end of the world, far more so than what I’ve got planned, anyway!
11 Likes
This is such a fantastic opener to a review- it startled me so much I laughed out loud. Mine is quite similar- though perhaps more bombastically, given my hemophilia. Might as well go out like a slasher flick, eh?
(Loving your reviews as always, Mike. Definitely a highlight of any competition.)
6 Likes
Elftor and the Quest of the Screaming King
Paging Sam Kabo Ashwell – while Elftor and the Quest of the Screaming King looks like yer bog-standard DnD parody, which choice-based gameplay largely turning on which of the innumerable insignificant side-quests you take on before eventually getting on with your time-sensitive mission to avert a war between generic fantasy kingdoms, it actually innovates with a clever structure I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before.
More on that later, though, and under spoiler-tags (I may have already said too much). Your appetite for Elftor probably hinges on how much of a groan you let out when you read the phrase “DnD parody” above; this is, of course, a hoary old genre, and an often dismal one at that, so I think the prospective player could be forgiven for wanting to pass the game by. This would be a mistake, though, because even the stalest premise can crack when the writing is sufficiently sharp – and friends, the gags here are good, or at least their smart-stupid vibe is very much to my taste. Like, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have nothing on the bickering between you and your manservant:
“Isn’t Elftor a little on the nose as a name for an elf?"
“I don’t know. Isn’t Manny a little on the nose as a name for a manservant?”
Similarly, meta humor can feel lazy, but here it’s incorporated into the more character-focused banter:
You leave the kindly old lady sobbing in the street, because you’re a total garbage hero. You absolute slimeball.
“I’m confused as to whether I’m still the one narrating this,” you announce. “These don’t seem like things I, Elftor, would say.”
“Never mind that,” puts in Manny. “Is it really eating up an entire hour every time you turn down one of those sidequests?”
You glance down at the “Hours Remaining” stat.
Yeah, there are stats here – gold, HP, XP, classes – though of course none of it matters beyond setting up more gags. There’s a bit of light gameplay, largely tied to whether you successfully obtain any of your promised reward up front and thus can leverage a magic hat or cute puppy to surmount the various challenges put in your way. But mostly what you do is progress along a linear path, being entreated by various NPC types to fetch some produce or rescue some orphans or what have you every ten feet, and try to either shake them off or accept the hit to your timetable (while the danger besetting the kingdom doesn’t appear that dire – everyone’s magically compelled to shout at the top of their lungs, which isn’t great but seems manageable with enough earmuffs and cough drops – the king’s decided projecting strong leadership requires picking a scapegoat and declaring war on a neighboring witch-queen if you’re not able to end the curse in time).
It’s a fun journey, and despite the basically linear approach, there’s room for a lot of branching – besides the aforementioned prep phase, there are maybe half a dozen potential sidequests, as well as a final, consequential choice point, and while some of the errands eat up so much time that you’ll automatically fail if you take them on, others can be successfully navigated, or involves subsidiary choices that avoid the whole thing turning into just an exercise of lawnmowering through a binary tree.
This complexity, however, does mean that if you do want to lawnmower to find all of the game’s nine endings, you’re in for a bit of tedium. While you can skip the intro on replays, the ability to ask for different rewards from the king means you can’t fast-forward too much, and oddly, while I saw an undo arrow when playing the game on my phone, it didn’t show up on my laptop’s browser, meaning that fully retracing my path after a misstep could require a lot of clicking. Still, even though my discipline petered out after getting only 5 out of the 9 possible endings, I laughed sufficiently hard along the way to make the journey very worthwhile.
Right, the spoiler: I found it surprisingly hard to get to a good ending on my playthrough. I quickly twigged to the fact that taking on sidequests ate away at the timer, but even when I rushed and ignored every needy citizen’s complaints to focus just on the main mission, at best I still only reached the ambassador about to deliver the declaration of war with an hour on the clock – forcing an ethical dilemma with no satisfying outcomes. The trick is that one of the things that looks like a sidequest actually conceals the solution to the main plot – it’s just that you have no way of knowing that at the outset, and it’s cunningly hidden sufficiently late in the game that I was conditioned to see each of the subquests as a shaggy dog story. I guess that means this is a simple gauntlet structure – but the final series of winning nodes are presented as a side-branch, while the notional main thread runs into a cul-de-sac. It’s a clever bit of legerdemain with the narrative structure, and not one I’d seen before.
10 Likes
OK your bit here made me laugh in return! I think there’s something to be said for a realistic appraisal for our likely fates if the world goes to pot – it’s a little extra motivation to do our best to keep things more or less trundling along, I think.
(Thanks for the kind words!)
7 Likes
Galaxy Jones, by Phil Riley
I’m not usually one to harp on graphics in my text games, much less out of game artwork – but holy heck, the cover art for Galaxy Jones makes an impression: the eponymous heroine, wearing a sleek jumpsuit and a fierce expression, and backlit by copious lens flare, promises one heck of an adventure. And the game’s opening backs up this swashbuckling style, kicking off a sci-fi pulp rescue mission with the perfect mix of cheesiness and panache. With third person narration, colored text for dialogue, and location names integrated into the text rather than above the description, it stands out from the crowd – and a sweet ascii art logo swoops down every time you score a point. Like, here’s the sequence after you solve the first puzzle (small spoiler, but this is an easy one to solve):
Jones fires the disruptor into the sculpture’s main support cable, snapping it. The huge crystal blob starts to sag, straining the other cables. In quick succession they break as well, and the whole installation plummets to the ground, right on top of the hapless guard robots.
_________ __ _____
__/ ____/___ _/ /___ __ ____ __ __/ /___ ____ ___ _____
_/ / __/ __ `/ / __ `/ |/ / / / /____ _/ / __ \/ __ \/ _ \/ ___/
/ /_/ / /_/ / / /_/ /> </ /_/ / _/ /_/ / /_/ / / / / __(__ )
\____/\__,_/_/\__,_/_/|_|\__, / _\____/\____/_/ /_/\___/____/
_____________________________/
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
I mean, you gotta love that!
The plot here is mad-libs nonsense – Galaxy Jones needs to raid an installation on Mars to rescue a celebrity from the clutches of her archnemesis, Admiral Thallium (he’s not really an admiral) – which, to be clear, is a positive in my book; heck, it’s no sillier than a 70s James Bond movie. The puzzles are more MacGuyver than 007, though, since the Admiral’s various robot henchmen usually aren’t susceptible to direct blasting, and his defenses include, beyond the de rigueur poison gas, a whole bunch of locked doors. It’s fun to explore the building and kitbash solutions to let you rise from floor to floor, on your way to a rooftop showdown.
It could be more fun, though. This goes for the environments, which despite the occasional highlight (a historical Mars lander!) are fairly meat and potatoes, with a whole lot of offices, desks, and cabinets to sort through. And many of the puzzles seem more plain-vanilla than a hero of Jones’s panache should be facing. You’ve got to pick a lock, fix a deactivated elevator, sneak past guard robots…
They’re all in-theme, and to be fair, there’s the occasional death trap and the climactic showdown pops, but some of those are in turn let down by some slightly over-fiddly implementation and an instance or two of underclueing. While in general the game’s technical chops are strong, modulo a few small bugs like missing responses when trying to go in an invalid direction, there are a couple of places where I had the right idea but had to spend a bunch of time groping for the correct command. This includes the sneaking puzzle, where the narration points out that you’re close enough to see under a robot’s armor and presumably can find a weak spot, but X ARMOR, X ROBOT, and LOOK UNDER ARMOR aren’t productive approaches – turns out the answer is the straightforward SHOOT ROBOT, which is fair enough in retrospect but I think could have been prompted more directly. The ending sequence suffered from this too, where a few misleading responses made me unsure how to implement the idea that wound up working.
On the underclueing side, there’s another tangle with a robot that felt like it required a few leaps of logic beyond what one would reasonably expect, like intuiting a use for a somewhat obscure inventory item that I didn’t think was clear from the description. And there’s one climbing puzzle that I’ll single out for being actively misleading: there’s a sequence where you need to climb up the outside of the building, and all you can see from the ledge is a metal cable. I spent a lot of time trying to shimmy up the cable – efforts made frustrating by the constant disambiguation issues caused by another cable I had in my inventory – before, frustrated, I tried to go UP (no luck) and DOWN, which led to the response that I “don’t even want to look down.” Except this is exactly the solution – you need to LOOK DOWN, only to find there’s a window-washing scaffolding down there. This feels like dirty pool to me; beyond the fact that the location description doesn’t call attention to the area below the ledge (in fact, now that I look at it again, the description also says you’re “trying not to look down”), violating the understanding that it will usually provide you with a sense of all the obviously visible stuff in the vicinity, straightforwardly telling the player “you don’t want to do X” when X is the only way to progress seems to penalize you for trying to act the way the game is suggesting.
I don’t want to end on a negative note, because the writing, setup, and characters are just delightful, and I enjoyed my time with the game as a result, from the opening crawl to the cliffhanger ending. But I did feel like there was a bit of a mismatch between the energetic style and the more plodding substance. In the promised sequel, I hope there’s a little more action, more exotic locales, and slightly smoother puzzles; I’d very much look forward to inhabiting Galaxy Jones’ shoes again sometime soon, but ideally wouldn’t have to consult the hints so many times in a follow-up outing.
jones mr.txt (166.0 KB)
10 Likes
Your analysis on Galaxy Jones really reminded me of my own time playing Emily Short and Dan Shiovitz’s Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning[…]. I loved the action comic style and how self-aware it was, and the jokes were hilarious. But the game was let down by a lack of synonyms and reasonable verbs, so it was hard to type in a solution even when I knew what it was. It made for a pretty frustrating experience, but I pushed through because I wanted to see the story through. History repeats itself.
6 Likes
omg I was mentioned in the same thread as Emily Short!
4 Likes
Similarly to how you solved that other puzzle effortlessly where I struggled on and on, the one you call out for being “actively misleading” felt like a pleasant two-step diversion to me.
“trying not to look down” is exactly what prompted me to LOOK DOWN. Great minds sometimes think differently, apparently.
4 Likes
I’m wandering around aimlessly at the end of The Lost Shovel of Athenia. My catometer is in the blue. The cat has been petted, provided with food and bed in the shed, and is altogether contently waving her tail above her arsehole as contented cats tend to do. I still have this squeaky mouse which attracts the cat’s attention when I squeeze it, but that’s all I can do with it. DROP MOUSE, THROW MOUSE, GIVE MOUSE, SHOW MOUSE give either no response or a mildly interested one. Nothing that impacts my catometer though.
I reluctantly looked at the hints. The rest of the game had a few neat misdirections, but nothing devious, so I expected to have missed something obvious. But the hints stop where I am, presumably because the meter should be green by now?
Any nudges? (@AndyG ? or anyone else?)
3 Likes
I just futzed around until it worked, but from another thread I think the trigger is dropping the mouse in front of the cat, then looking.
2 Likes
Yeah, I’ve noticed the trigger being awkwardly placed with another object too. (can’t remember which now)
Anyway, thanks!
2 Likes
Thanks for replying @DeusIrae : I did mention this in another thread as you state 
The mechanics for the mouse could have been done better from the outset 
- I have updated this to make that work better in a later release - but I have just noticed that my last release (Release 14) has broken the end game! (I am beginning to realise a number of lessons in my first foray into a comp) - I have fixed this in Release 15 which @mathbrush should hopefully update the ‘play online’ and downloadable versions soon. Can’t thank everyone enough for their comments and help - AG
4 Likes
Thanks for giving YPATDL multiple playthroughs and a thoughtful review, Mike!
5 Likes
Just an update that @mathbrush has kindly updated the version for this to V15 which fixes the ‘end game’ bug I introduced in the last build! - Thanks AG
7 Likes
Structural Integrity, by Tabitha O’Connell
I worry sometimes that in my reviews I sometimes present myself as cooler than I actually am – look, I’m a Gen-X-identifying Millennial, we focus on weird stuff sometimes – so it’s perhaps a welcome corrective to report that I was actually super excited to see that Yaan, one of the protagonists of Structural Integrity, runs the department overseeing the use and sale of city property in a municipal government. It’s not as cool as being in charge of zoning, sure, but still, this kind of granular, bureaucratic milieu is so my jam. Disappointingly for me but I’m guessing fortunately for others, the game doesn’t go into much of the nitty-gritty of the job, instead focusing on his relationship with his romantic partner (and deuteragonist), Kel, but this atypical choice for the main character’s career is of a piece with the generally grounded, thoughtful approach the game takes. While I had some quibbles about some elements of how this two-hander is framed, I appreciated that the game is refreshingly content to focus exclusively on the occasionally-minor emotional dynamics of an only medium dramatic relationship.
So, a quick plot summary: you play the aforementioned municipal functionary in what seems to be an alternate history or low-magic fantasy setting (the details aren’t fleshed out, nor are they especially important; I leaned towards the latter interpretation just based on my sense of the names), who’s a person of some importance but plagued by a host of anxieties and self-doubts. Your partner is a younger man – how much younger isn’t specified, but it seems like the age gap is fairly significant given the difference in temperament and economic status on display – who’s recently moved in with you, and quit his job as a messenger because his earnings are relatively paltry compared to you. Yaan is deliriously happy to have Kel in his life, but from the first scene, it’s clear that there are some challenges to how they relate to each other, some issues in how they communicate. When a seemingly-mundane decision facing you at work turns out to have a significant impact on Kel, the player’s choices – alternating between both of the characters, though to my eye Yaan is the primary protagonist throughout – determine whether they ignore the issue or face it head on, and if they do, whether they’re able to navigate through these stormy waters.
Gameplay-wise, this is a traditional (albeit attractively presented) Twine game – there are two different colors of links, denoting those which just provide a little bit of extra explanatory text and those that represent choices moving the story forward. Most of the latter are dialogue options, because most of the game is dialogue; there are usually a few short intro and outro passages where one character or the other will interact with other (unnamed) characters or otherwise go about their quotidian business, but the heart of the game is really the three or four conversations the two have with each other, and here it feels like the player’s given a fair bit of agency; while you might only have a couple of choices at each juncture, they tend to feel distinct, with the overall dynamic centering on the extent to which you want each character to escalate the conflict – which risks a fight, but also opens up the opportunity to actually communicate – or instead to go along to get along – avoiding fireworks but increasing the distance and disengagement in the relationship.
This is a dynamic that feels true to life to me; almost a little too much so, if I’m being honest! There were definitely moments in the game where I was sweating, feeling the stakes of each word. And while neither character is drawn with much nuance – two or three adjectives fully explain their personalities – the unadorned but well-drawn prose portrays them as convincingly different characters who respond differently to different conversational approaches, meaning that mindless selection of choices is unlikely to lead to a satisfying outcome. Indeed, there are four different endings (as well as three achievements for exploring some optional strands of the narrative), determined by the state of the characters’ relationship at the end of the game, and neither of the two I found was wholly reassuring, which I think is a positive statement on the ambiguity of the situation.
On the other hand, it may also function as a negative statement on how in tune I was with some elements of the authorial framing. The game overtly positions the relationship between Yaan and Kel as a positive thing; the ending where they stay together is labeled the happy ending – but I was somewhat unconvinced by this, and actually wound up preferring the ending where they’re headed for a breakup. Partially this is because the good times in their relationship are told, whereas the tense moments are shown: from the very first scene the two share, there’s an awkward tension between them that made me question whether they were right for each other. Rushing into the conflict like this heightened the perceived stakes, but it also reduced my investment.
Similarly, the path to the happy ending revolves around Yaan abjectly apologizing for his behavior and Kel grudgingly accepting him, reinforcing the idea that the fault for the situation is almost entirely one-sided, whereas my sense was that things were substantially more nuanced – again, perhaps this is too much personal bleed-through, but I rebelled at having him grovel for forgiveness when his sins, which largely focused on taking his demanding job seriously while still seemingly prioritizing Kel as best he could, seemed venial at best; similarly, I thought Kel’s discontent was likely as much born of having quit his job and letting himself become utterly reliant on Yaan as it was due to any of Yaan’s specific behavior, so I was disappointed not to see this idea picked up on.
Going back to that first hand, though, it’s the rare piece of IF that engages my personal prejudices and beliefs so effectively; even if some of my value judgments might differ from those offered up by the author, the game still constructs some effective dilemmas that required me to reflect instead of just immediately clicking a link. And for other players who might be coming at the central relationship from a different perspective, I can see Structural Integrity really resonating. It really is a shame there wasn’t more about the paperwork in Yaan’s job, though – come on, everybody loves that kind of stuff!
15 Likes
Thank you so much for this thoughtful, in-depth review! The analysis is spot-on and has given me some things to think about for if I ever do any significant updates…
I’m glad to know that my self-indulgence as far as including my interest in city planning in the story has pleased someone else 
Now I 100% want to make a game about this 
5 Likes
Nothing Could be Further From the Truth, by Adam Wasserman
The review thread’s been uncharacteristically silent for a couple of days, and part of that’s down to quotidian life stuff, but partially it’s down to Nothing Could be Further From the Truth, a long, somewhat abstruse parser game that in a year with more entries competing for attention I probably would have dropped or just hint-scummed my way through to avoid getting too held up. Since the schedule this year means I’ll likely be able to review all the games well before the deadline (…he said hubristically) I decided to power through instead – albeit I did wind up using a lot of hints – so that I could render a more complete verdict on this satirical sci-fi puzzlefest. Having done all that, was it worth it? I respond with a resounding mooostly (when it comes to incisive criticism, you get what you pay for, folks).
What we’ve got here is a dystopic romp heavily reminiscent of the classic tabletop game Paranoia (a debt freely acknowledged in the ABOUT text) – you’re a worker drone in a post-apocalyptic bunker ruled by backstabbing, unregulated scientific experimentation, psychopathic homeland-security enforcers, and fanatical allegiance to a central government only slightly undermined by the fact that practically everyone’s a member of one semi-subversive secret society. NCBFFTT differs from its inspiration largely by dialing down the satire of Cold-War-era right-wingerdom (boo), omitting the failing Friend Computer who’s notionally in charge of things (well, so it seems, though actually it turns out the game hews closer to its inspiration here than it initially lets on), and dropping the six-pack of clones that makes the treason accusations and ultraviolence lower stakes than they’d otherwise be. In place of these missing elements, it adds – not much, actually.
This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, since there is a lot going on in Paranoia, and it’s not like this particular slice of sci-fi comedy is well-trodden turf (the Fallout games kind of riff on similar ideas with their Vault stuff, but I can’t think of too many other examples). And the perspective here is enjoyably novel: you play a janitor (you’re allergic to dust, natch), who’s single-mindedly focused on winning enough social credit to be promoted to work as a scientist in the labs she cleans, though you appear to be entirely devoid of any aptitude for research. Still, I found myself missing a few of the aspects of Paranoia not carried over; without the send-in-the-clones mechanic, the plot’s casual deployment of death and dismemberment on innocent victims, much of it triggered either negligently or recklessly or knowingly (this game is a law school Torts final unto itself) by the protagonist, can feel a little sour, and without the political context, the satire came off somewhat toothless to me – who exactly is being skewered here? Regardless of these quibbles, though, it’s still an engaging setting, and the exuberant writing did elicit more than a few chuckles from me (the fact that the game’s central hub is named Tucker M. Carlson plaza means it’s perhaps a bit sharper than I’m giving it credit for).
Those chuckles quickly turned to groans due to the persnickety gameplay, though. Beyond the frequent read-the-author’s-mind puzzles – I’ll get back to these – there are a number of mechanics that make NCBFFTT often frustrating to play. Most obvious among these is the directional system. Since you’re underground on a planet with a weak magnetic field, the traditional compass directions aren’t used – fair enough – replaced by a circular-coordinates system of INWARD vs. OUTWARD and LEFT vs. RIGHT. While workable in theory, in practice getting from point A to point B was an exercise in bumbling. For one thing, LEFT and RIGHT are objective, not subjective directions, not varying with which way you’re facing, which makes life easier but is also very confusing because that’s not really how left and right work. Add the fact that going deeper into the lab requires going OUTWARD, while heading out of its entrance means going INWARD, and the further fact that there aren’t easy abbreviations for the new directions (L remains LOOK, while IN and OUT likewise have their usual Inform functions), and it’s not surprising that even after spending about four hours wandering around a modest area of maybe fifteen rooms, I don’t have a functional mental map of the place.
NCBFFTT is also sorta cruel, in the Zarfian sense. It’s not possible to get into a sustained dead man walking state, because bad decisions will typically lead to your death sooner or later – but “later” can be a dozen or so turns, and the difference between a puzzle you haven’t figured out how to solve and an inevitable karmic punishment for having screwed up five minutes ago isn’t always obvious to discern. This is especially annoying the few times when you’ve seemingly solved a puzzle but might not have done it the exact right way, triggering a delayed fail state; the natural inclination upon making progress is to save, but that might lock you into a no-win scenario if it turns out you missed a beat.
(Let me pause here to note that I’m deep into a long-ish review that features a lot of harping, and there’s more harping to come yet. So it’s maybe worth stepping back to reiterate that I mostly enjoyed the game, and to directly say that the author seems talented and obviously put a lot of work in. So I’m writing this long and, okay, somewhat nit-picky of a review first because I hope it’ll help make the author’s next game go down smoother, and second because I hope it’ll orient potential players towards what they’re in store for, so they’re better able to appreciate the high points. Okay, resuming your regularly-scheduled grousing).
I said I’d circle back to the puzzles. Many of these are actually quite fun and well-clued, and, inasmuch as they involve avoiding blame from/currying favor with an incompetent authoritarian regime, there are a bunch that are pretty novel – I liked figuring out how to stash the (first set of) incriminating bodies from an accident that totally wasn’t my fault, for example. But I got stuck regularly and repeatedly, requiring frequent use of the not-as-helpful-as-it-could-be hint function (it’s organized in a bizarre, nonlinear fashion linked to location rather than phase of the game, despite the fact that many late-game puzzles are found in the first few locations, and also has at least one mistake: the hints for resolving the mob that comes after you for firing the harvester say that you need the missing vending machine part to solve this puzzle, but you can only get that missing part once you solve the puzzle!). Sometimes this was my own fault for skim-reading the dense text, like not noticing an in-retrospect obvious clue about the impact my character’s dust allergy was having on my ability to sneak.
But often it’s because the main character’s actions seem like they were scripted in a book, with seemingly-obvious solutions punished with arbitrary death (I’m thinking here of two flagrantly-signposted ways of dealing with the Ward of the State, when the actual solution to the puzzle is arrived at completely by accident), puzzles that require incredibly out-there lateral thinking (the harvester discharge puzzle), and others that just take a punishing amount of trial and error. The finale sequence is a case in point; it’s an interrogation scene where you can respond to a series of questions with YES, NO, MAYBE, or SORRY. This reduces to yes, no, and two different flavors of a squirrely sorta-yes, meaning it winds up being yet another read-the-author’s-mind scenario – except there’s one other option on top of those four, which is nicely deployed in a final puzzle that’s clever and satisfying and not too hard, a really excellent example of what a final puzzle should be (I’m talking about accusing your cleaning-service supervisor, of course). You really take the bitter with the sweet here, is what I’m saying.
The last thing I’ll note before wrapping up this maybe overly-fussy review is that there’s a real need for a final polishing pass to make NCBFFTT a bit more friendly. Regularly, puzzles where either PUT X IN Y or PUT X ON Y would work only with one option; there’s a location with both a TUNNEL and a HOLE, except the HOLE is more like a TUNNEL so I used the wrong noun and didn’t realize I had the right idea for a puzzle and just messed up the input; and one sequence involving POURing something onto something else required like half a dozen tries before I hit on the exact right verbiage. All these completely understandable parser-game woes were exacerbated by the customization of error messages, which redirects a bunch of the standard parser complaints, like when a typo means you’ve gotten the name of a noun wrong, to a generic, unhelpful “can’t do it”.
I’ve spent way more time on the negatives here than the positives, which is often something I’m guilty of, though I think in this case it’s warranted – NCBFFTT is a hard game to enjoy in its present state unless you copiously abuse the hints, and even then I got stuck and deeply annoyed. And yet! Let me go back to that parenthetical interjection I made some 600 words ago. It’s a hard game to enjoy, but enjoy it I did; there are good jokes, an expansive world, and cannily-designed puzzles here, straining under a presentation, and set of hurdles, that make them way less accessible than they deserve. There’s very little like NCBFFTT out there – maybe Varicella, sort of? – so if it seems at all up your alley, I think it’s worth a play. And I really beseech the author to not get too discouraged by this feedback, but take it on board for a hoped-for next time.
truth 3 mr.txt (551.6 KB)
truth 2 mr.txt (205.9 KB)
truth mr.txt (243.6 KB)
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I skimmed your review (thoughtful and well-considered, nuanced; good job), because I’m not quite finished myself. (I fixed the EF)
I have to disagree here though. Maybe it’s because this game seems tailor-made for my brain. Maybe it’s because this type of game pulls me into tester-mode, Xing and investigating more deeply than I would otherwise.
In any case, I’m enjoying it very much without the use of hints. Well, almost. I’ve had two peeks at the hints and I got two nudges from the author.
I do agree with most of your criticisms, but not this one.
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Thanks, Mike, I appreciate the review! You know, back in another review I referenced my friend’s mom and her reaction to one of my books, when her comment was “Well, I finished it.” The reason I brought it up is that, ultimately, the comment is a positive, not a negative. There was enough there for you to actually finish despite the difficulties.
I had three great testers, but I know I needed more. You guys are finishing up the testing for me, and I apologize to you for that. I didn’t realize how rough the game still was. To that end, your transcripts are much appreciated. Hopefully, you will be improving the gameplay of some unknowing person who stumbles on the game in IFDB years from now.
I have observed this tendency several times now. I suppose one consequence of writing “walls of text” is that players will indeed skim over the contents. They might even be skimming shorter sections of text just because they are now conditioned to do so. So having a puzzle turn on a single phrase could be problematic if the player is likely to miss it.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed review - and warning the as yet uninitiated!
7 Likes