Thank you so much for taking the time to play Beat Witch and give it such a thoughtful review! It made my day.
6 Likes
Thanks for this, Mike!
And yeah, it’s definitely a lot.
I think if we’d had more time we would have put more plot-and-character-stuff in–as another reviewer has mentioned, it’s pretty light on that aspect. I wonder if that’s where the sense that it’s too much jokes comes from, although admittedly it may well also be too much jokes. (We wrote this after another, much longer choicescript game which also uses the bake-off formula, but while that one’s also stuffed full of ridiculous stuff I think we kind of forgot that it’s got a lot more in it in terms of character development and “big picture” plots you can work at. In such a short space as One Does Not Simply Fry, yeah, it kind of overwhelms!
Wikipedia informed me that Eowyn’s name is derived from an OE word for “war-horse.”
So our stunt double is named for the Barb (or Berber) horse.
I will readily admit that nobody would ever be able to figure that out. 
4 Likes
Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head, by E.Z. Poschman
Everyone remembers the first time they truly understood death, I suspect – the moment when it toggled from a frightening but abstract notion, one of a million things about being grown-up that kids have to accept but don’t really get, to the viscera; and frankly terrifying revelation that anyone, anytime can be taken, with no exceptions or escapes or ways back. I was a sheltered kid, so for me that didn’t happen until just after I turned nine, when one morning on the way to school the radio said that Jim Henson had died. Of course I knew who he was: the Muppets and Sesame Street loomed large in my childhood. I tried to hold myself together, but then they played Kermit the Frog singing Rainbow Connection, and I lost it, blubbering as my harried mom dropped me off.
As a result, while it took me a while to figure out what Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head was doing, once I twigged to it I immediately was on board. It’s a Twine game built around a recently-deceased puppeteer who’s clearly modeled on Henson, albeit with significant differences in biography (Malcolm Newsome is a Black millennial from Lancaster, CA); there’s a Disney-style megacorporation threatening to buy out and bulldoze his studio and a tabloid narrative saying that Newsome died of a drug overdose threatening to undermine his reputation. The player character is a former member of Newsome’s troupe who’s snuck back into the studio to try to figure out what really happened, fight back against his enemies, and reclaim his legacy.
It’s a great premise, and like I said, one that resonates with me. But the reason it took me a while to realize that was what was going on is that the game initially presents itself as a heist – actually, you’ve been hired to try to steal back as many of Nesome’s puppets as you can before the compound is demolished. And once you enter the first of four buildings on the lot, the set-up is quickly complicated by a pair of twists that come in quick succession: 1) once you grab the first puppet you find, you’re compelled to put it on your hand and it starts talking to you, and 2) there are monsters, bastardized puppets who now patrol the compound on behalf of the company that’s coming to bulldoze everything. Despite the game’s blurb claiming that its genre is horror (well, “mascot horror”, whatever that is) this isn’t played for as many scares as it could be – in particular, while it’s weird that the puppets appear to be sapient, they’re friendly, and actually quite helpful, as the most important ones each have a special power that can help you navigate through the maze-like interiors of the studio’s buildings, find your way around the various locks and obstacles, and evade or defeat the monsters.
Gameplay-wise, then, we’ve got a sort of Muppetvania, as you gather keys and new puppet powers enabling you to traverse more of the game’s world and in turn obtain yet more keys and puppets. It’s a pretty big game, and while you don’t need to recover all 14 puppets to get the best ending, I found the gameplay loop compelling enough to find all but one (and my failure to go the distance might have been due to a bug rather than a lack of commitment: the puppet-detecting puppet kept telling me there was another to be found in the sink of the dishwashing area, but when I searched there I couldn’t find anything). Each dive into a building makes for a tense game of push-your-luck, as you attempt to explore and search every room, identify obstacles and hidden exits, try to work out the pattern of the monsters’ movements (there’s a different one in each building, and they all have bespoke movement strategies), and then flee so you can come back with the puppet or puppets you need to make progress. It’s fun stuff, even if I defaulted to undo-scumming more often than I like to admit.
I’m not sure it fits well with the broader ambitions of the game, though. For one thing, you’re limited to carrying at most two puppets at a time (and if you’re full up on puppets, you won’t have a hand free to pick up keys), so to speed up the process of recovering puppets from the buildings, I tended to eschew the ones with utility powers in favor of the ones that were strictly necessary to solve puzzles. Because the author’s coded in a bunch of neat interactions where puppets give commentary on the workshops and soundstages you encounter, as well as putting in unique dialogue between each pair of puppets if you wear two at the same time – but I know I missed out on a lot of that. This is a shame because I really did like the cast; all the characters seem like plausible members of a Muppet-like ensemble, and had winning personalities in their own right. And missing out on their commentary in the studio areas meant that they felt more like monster mazes than opportunities for environmental storytelling that enriched the game’s overall themes.
The other disconnect is that it turns out that the real villain of the piece isn’t Disney-branded monsters, it’s systemic racism. I’m going to spoiler-block the rest of this discussion because this is a big late-game revelation, but I can’t help discussing it in some depth. Turns out there’s one particular puppet who has a camera built into her, and she recorded Newsome’s death, which is different from the vague “maybe it was a drug overdose” story you hear hinted at in the early game. Actually, he was pulled over by some LAPD cops who got angry that he wasn’t sufficiently deferential, so they murdered him and planted drugs on his body to cover up their crime. I’m deeply conflicted about this plot point; on the one hand, I liked the way the game foregrounds Newsome’s experience as a Black man in the entertainment industry, and God knows we’ve all seen enough examples of police violence and even killings of Black folks in recent years. But at the same time, this is an exaggerated, if not cartoonish, take on how these incidents play out. I’m maybe especially sensitive to this because I work for an LA-based civil rights organization and know some of the groups and people who helped reform the LAPD post-Rodney King; they still do a bunch of racially-biased stuff and much of my day job involves working to shift funding from policing to community-based alternatives, but for all that the story as conveyed by the game didn’t feel plausible. And again, the struggle against the monsters and the company that made them turns out not to be all that on point with what actually killed Newsome.
Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head does end strong, with a lovely epilogue where you explore a museum exhibit that’s been built around the puppets you recovered, encountering Newsome’s family and colleagues to explore the impact he had, and, at least in my ending, seeing his legacy vindicated. It’s really well done, and gives the player a strong sense of accomplishment as they end their time with the game. But again, its elegiac tone and more grounded themes (race is again a major factor) are at odds with the maze-y horror bits that make up the innards of the game. Again, I think those innards are good, but I’m left with the feeling that this is a game whose components are all quite strong, but which don’t necessarily reinforce each other all that well – it’d take a master puppeteer like Mal Newsome to stitch these disparate parts together into a unified whole.
15 Likes
Bali B&B, by Felicity Banks
For all that Bali B&B lives up to its billing as a cozy domestic simulator, this ChoiceScript game inspired more stomach-churning dread than any other game in the Comp so far – just as I was settling into my week-long stint of temporarily managing my grandparents’ eponymous business, I was terrified to learn that the proprietor of a B&B is expected to play host over breakfast, talking to all the different guests at once, making sure the conversation doesn’t lag, and generally engaging in an extended personal interaction with people who are involved in a purely economic transaction with you. I can see how people with less social anxiety than me would enjoy this as an opportunity to get to know new people and learn more about the world, but ye gods – this is one career I can definitely cross off the list when I need to figure out what to do post-retirement.
Other than that one shocking moment, though, this really is a warm duvet of a game. As a quarter-Indonesian Australian, you’ve grown used to coming back to Bali for vacations and spending time with your grandparents, so when they surprise you on your latest trip by telling you that they’re off to Paris and you’re in charge, at least you know many of the locals and most of what needs to be done. The week progresses in an agreeable series of vignettes; you’re always jumping from one crisis to another, but buoyed by a charming supporting cast, nothing ever feels insurmountable. A litter of cats in the oven when the health inspector comes calling? Guests who don’t speak any language you know? Another who insists on eating bacon over the religious objections of the cook? I dealt with some of these better than others (I charmed the health inspector and tamed the cats; I gave the Chinese guests some mild food poisoning but they overall seemed to have an OK time; and I’m a vegetarian so I told bacon-guy to fuck right off) but the game was happy to keep things moving without excoriating me for my mistakes.
The problems and confusions that arise as you attempt to keep the B&B running are the main focus of gameplay, but the true star is the setting. I’ve never been to Bali – though since there was an Indonesian restaurant a couple blocks from my college dorm, I can confirm the food is absolutely delicious – but this game is a great advertisement for a stay there. The scenery is described in lush detail, there’s an attention to the cultural and religious diversity that feels authentic and respectful, and overall there’s a lovely, laid-back vibe to the proceedings. A game with this premise could easily fall into the trap of demonizing the guests or stereotyping the staff, but even when someone’s being a jerk, the author manages to convey their humanity (and even the ones who behave badly have an opportunity to at least partially redeem themselves). There’s also an adorable yet mischievous monkey, what’s not to like.
If anything, my only complaint is that I felt like the game went too easy on me. It has the usual overwhelming flurry of ChoiceScript stats, which I promptly ignored, but regardless, almost everything I tried seemed to succeed. Late in the game, there was a moment where it said that because I took good care of my health, I was able to accomplish a challenging task, but I had no memory of ever prioritizing health or even having the option of doing so. And the health inspector felt like a Chekhov’s gun that didn’t go off – after an initial encounter where she finds some violations, she says she’s going to come back, but since she returns after your grandparents do, you don’t get to see whether the consequences of your decisions have saved the B&B from a shutdown. Given the general gentle vibe of the game, this isn’t a real threat, of course – and again, this is comfort gaming, I didn’t need it to be overly punishing – but at the end of the week, I did feel like there were some times that I’d made mistakes, and it maybe felt a little patronizing that the game didn’t call me on them.
That’s mostly me finding something to criticize, though. I had a lot of fun with this one, from the well-drawn characters to the intelligent approach to choice-based gameplay (there are times when you’re asked big-picture questions, for example, but if you feel like you don’t have enough information you can sensibly just punt on them with no penalty). And I didn’t even talk much about the kittens! It almost was enough to make me think that B&B life could be worth the awkward breakfast table chit-chat. Almost.
13 Likes
You were there, you remember. I relived that day over and over as the game came together. A lot of this game is me trying to tell the broken-hearted ten-year-old me that still lives somewhere inside, that it’s going to be OK. I’m so glad you get it too.
6 Likes
Lonehouse, by Ayu Sekarlangit Mokoginta
My wife has a sweatshirt that used to belong to my sister. We live in California, and she lived in Maryland, so one September when we were visiting and it got cold, she noticed that my wife was shivering in her SoCal-appropriate outfit, and lent her a hoody. I forgot to give it back before we left, and a month later we found out Liz’s cancer had come back, so returning a sweatshirt wasn’t ever a priority in the time we had left. And now that sweatshirt isn’t just a sweatshirt.
There can be an unbearable poignancy to the artifacts our loved ones leave behind when they die; the books they read and wrote in, the glasses that let them see, the tchotchkes they’d look at and smile. Trivial, everyday objects that were barely worth a second of thought are transmuted to relics, bearing the last impress of someone’s now-finished time in the world.
Lonehouse engages with that poignancy, in ways that were occasionally quite arresting for me to encounter – the protagonist is visiting the apartment of her recently-deceased sister, named Liv, to help clean it out and take away some keepsakes. As you explore using Texture’s drag-verbs-to-nouns interface, you get snatches of the history between them – it’s not fully explained, but it seems like the sisters hadn’t been in touch, and perhaps there’d been a falling out – and identify the things that seem to have the most Liv-ness to them: a jacket, a favored plushie, a photo.
Despite the strong personal resonance of the premise, though, I didn’t wind up feeling like Lonehouse was truly compelling. Partially this is because the writing is often awkward. The style is generally unadorned and matter-of-fact, which I think is appropriate to communicating grief, but some of the author’s word choices undermine the simple power of this approach. Partially though it’s because the writing never gets especially specific. The general experience of death is one we’ve all had or will have, of course, but it’s unique details that turn this from a vague sense of loss to heart-rending tragedy, and Lonehouse doesn’t usually try to work in this register. Upon seeing that Liv saved an old Christmas gift that the protagonist made her, for example, we’re told that “[a] complicated feeling stirs in you” – but what feeling is that? Again, we aren’t given much detail of the prior relationship between the two, so it’s hard to place this in context.
The Texture engine also makes experiencing the story less engaging than I would have liked. I ran into what appears to be a bug with the system, since I came across it in another game too, where the buttons holding each scene’s verbs displayed their text in a tiny font – that’s not the author’s fault, but it did mean that I was often taken out of the story as I tried to decode my options. The interface also made it challenging to figure out which actions would allow me to explore or get more detail, and which would progress to the next sequence; several times in this short game, I wound up accidentally speeding through rooms I’m not sure I was finished with.
This is a short game that takes on some compelling issues; I’m not sure whether it’s the author’s debut, but if so I think it’s a more than respectable start. My key feedback for next time (and hopefully there’ll be a next time!) is to lean into the concrete, grounded style displayed here, but not to sacrifice the particular in the vain hope of making a piece of writing universal: otherwise, a sweatshirt will remain just a sweatshirt.
14 Likes
Thank you so much for spending time and effort reviewing my game. I am choosing not to make any specific comments about reviews until after the comp, but I assure you that I am grateful for any and all comments, which are so useful in improving my game and future games.
7 Likes
The Sculptor, by Yakoub Mousli
The randomizer, ever playful, gave me two short Texture games in a row. Like Lonehouse, this one’s also a deeply interior portrait of a person in the throes of powerful feelings, and also boasts a fair bit of awkward writing. It does have a clarity of purpose, though, and some arresting images, as it tells a story of one old man’s obsession with completing his sculptural masterpiece, while it manages to use the sometimes-awkward drag-verbs-onto-nouns Texture interface fairly intuitively; for all that it does have real merits, though, it seems to endorse a rather narrow understanding of the role of art, which limited the effectiveness of its climax.
While The Sculptor doesn’t offer a lot of biographical details about the main character, it does give you enough to understand his situation. His aspirations towards artistry have been frustrated for decades, first by an unsupportive father and then his lack of money. After a lifetime of menial labor, though, he’s finally been able to save up enough money to purchase a block of marble, so that he can have one last chance to create a magnum opus. Complicating matters, he’s also deep in medical debt due to a hernia surgery – the collections agency representative, though, seems intrigued by your work, and might accept your masterpiece to discharge the debt, and their display of such a remarkable piece might even help make your name famous…
This is a straightforward plot, but it’s enough to support the game’s short runtime. And there are a few places where the game offers some optional social engagement with your old boss, or lets you contemplate what you’re trying to achieve, which enriches the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Mechanically, you’re usually given one or two more passive or reflective verbs, and one that’s more active, so it was typically clear which options would deepen the current scene and which would move on to the next bit of the story. On the flip side, the prose is often wonky, but does mix in some moments of real power. Here’s a bit where you consider the sacrifices you made for art that shows off both these aspects of the writing:
The days you scavenged your intact pockets, counting what to spend so you could put the rest away. The nights you slept in hunger’s bed, the winters of wet socks and tattered shoes you wore with pride, and the dear family you loved — children and wife you chose not to have lest they too would choose to put the rest away.
There are also a few images that just land, with no caveats needed, like this description of the marble block you’ve paid for with your life’s wages:
That is your whole life, you explain. Where every little coin you saved went. You struggle to admit that every chip you break from it is a year thrown away.
I did find the game tottered a bit at the finish line, though. After you complete the masterpiece, the collections agency people return, and you’re confronted with a climactic choice, which are literally labeled as either “Sullied and Impure” – you let them have the sculpture, clearing your debt and bringing you worldly fame – or “Refined and Preserved”, where you take a hammer and smash the sculpture to bits before their disbelieving eyes. This is not an especially nuanced look at how artists are cross-pressured between commerce and integrity!
This could work, I suppose, as an allegory of various artistic dilemmas, but the rest of the game has too many specific details – like the whole hernia surgery/medical debt plotline that sets up the choice – for it to easily function as a pure philosophical statement. At the same time, it isn’t sufficiently grounded to really engage with the questions of artistic production under capitalism; like, if he has the medical debt because he was uninsured pre-Obamacare, that lands differently than if he lives in a state that’s stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid for obscure reasons of political fealty. Similarly, the game seems to posit collections agencies as well-funded, classy operations akin to Fortune 500 corporations or law firms, able to shell out big bucks for art and promote it in such a way as to ensure your reputation.
This matters because throughout human history, artistic production has been embedded in webs of economic exchange and patronage – especially capital-intensive forms like marble sculpture – so the simple art-for-art’s-sake philosophy the game endorses seems about as substantive as someone yelling “no sellouts” at a Jawbreaker show. Like, creating a great work of art is rewarding in and of itself, sure, but quarrying rock is not an especially fun job, and the people who cut it into regular blocks often die of silicosis. The myth of the lone, tortured artist creating at the margins of society is largely an invention of the Romantic era, but it’s telling that the people actually doing the creating back then were primarily white male aristocrats or members of the haute-bourgeoisie. The Sculptor seems to interrogate that myth by seeing how it applies to someone with dramatically less economic privilege – but it can’t quite bring itself to reject this inherited narrative.
13 Likes
The Vambrance of Destiny, by Arthur DiBianca
It’s probably the dream of most IF authors to be a prolific writer of high-quality games, but contemplating the oeuvre of Arthur DiBianca, who’s perhaps comes as close to that ideal as anybody currently working, I wonder whether there’s a downside to such consistency. Does there ever come a point where the audience starts to take you for granted, and greet each new work with a simple “ho hum, here’s yet another really fun Arthur DiBianca game”? I hope that’s not the case, but I have to say, I was not the slightest bit surprised to find that Vambrance of Destiny is pretty great.
Like pretty much all of his work, this is a limited parser game, one that specifically feels like an iteration on last year’s IFComp entry, Trouble in Sector 471. Like in that game, here we’ve got a nicely-realized minimap, a metroidvania explore-to-upgrade-to-explore-more structure, and a main objective that’s largely advanced by using your abilities to beat baddies. Here, though, the robot-topia of Section 471 is swapped for the aesthetics of dungeon-crawling fantasy; plotwise, you’ve got to delve into an ancient ruin to beat up a rogue wizard and reclaim his stolen staff of power, and ability-wise, you’ve got the eponymous arm-armor, which evinces various spell-like abilities as you fill its various receptacles with magical gems. There’s also a cool tech upgrade this time out, which is that the game is played with single keypresses – no need to type out full commands or even hit enter – which is a nice convenience (the tilde key allows access to SAVE, LOAD, and other systems commands, though).
The story and writing are relatively minimal – the Foozle shows up a couple times to taunt you, but otherwise this is a simple get-to-the-end-to-beat-the-boss affair, while the absence of an EXAMINE action helps keep the location descriptions tight and focused. They work well for what they are, don’t get me wrong, but like most of DiBianca’s games, VoD lives and dies by its puzzles. And unsurprisingly, they’re really quite well done.
The process of getting new capabilities via gem upgrades is always fun, of course, and you get to master a fun set of spells over the course of the game, from elemental attacks to teleports to summoning spells. Having spent a bunch of time recently assessing the design of limited-parser games, I’m increasingly of the mind that the key challenge is to avoid the lawnmowering problem – that is, making it too tempting for the player to make progress simply by running through all the different options at their disposal whenever they hit an obstacle, rather than engaging with the puzzle and trying to solve it. Vambrance avoids this pitfall handily; the challenges progress nicely as you go, with straightforward one-spell-required obstacles soon giving way to more complex ones that require an extended sequence of different spells, or have timing elements that require you to wait or otherwise pay attention before spamming different actions. This variety of strategies keeps things fresh, and means that spamming all the spells in turn eventually becomes tedious and unproductive.
Of course, there’s also a risk of making challenges too complex – which is just that a game becomes too hard. VoD generally stays on the right side of this line, too. I struggled a bit with some of the multi-step solutions in Sector 471, but generally had an easier time here, I think because the game does a great job providing feedback for when you’re on the right track or have come up with a partial solution. As with most of DiBianca’s games, the most esoteric puzzles are mostly saved for optional side-objectives (here, there are a dozen bonus treasures to collect along the way to the big boss, in keeping with the dungeon crawl theme). That said, while I did complete all the puzzles, both the critical path and the optional ones, I did wind up going to the hints more than a few times towards the end – ultimately, you wind up accumulating over a dozen different ability-gems, some of which are fairly involved to use (like the one that enables you to temporarily teleport in one of a half-dozen different objects), which feels like it starts to strain at the borders of how limited a limited-parser game can be.
Still, even the puzzles I got hints on were well-clued in retrospect, and fun to solve. The climactic fight with the rogue wizard is also a really good time. It maybe doesn’t play completely fair, I have to admit (you need to beat him in a spell duel, and after a warm-up round where he throws things with obvious counters at you, and then starts mixing in ones that require extrapolation from puzzles you’ve previously solved, to a final set that actively mislead you, telegraphing one vulnerability only to reveal a different, hidden one after you fail to stop it. This means that victory will almost certainly require an initial loss or two so you can memorize how to respond to these tricky ones, but since trying again just takes half a dozen turns, and the whole sequence is an enjoyable set piece, this notional violation of good game design principles is eminently forgivable).
All of which is to say: ho hum, here’s another really fun Arthur DiBianca game. Yawn. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next year!
vambrance mr.txt (394.5 KB)
10 Likes
Shanidar, Safe Return, by Cecilia Dougherty
Shanidar, Safe Return, has a compelling setting that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a work of IF before – Clan of the Cave Bear style prehistory. Jumping back 40,000 years ago, this choice-based game tasks you with guiding a small band of Neanderthals who’ve suffered an attack from some aggressive Cro-Magnons first to immediate safety, and then to a far-off sanctuary where they can hopefully flourish. It’s enriched with compelling details that appear to be the fruit of quite a lot of research – I really felt the texture of these people’s way of life. While the author made a few choices that I found worked somewhat at cross purposes and lessened the impact of the work overall, I was still glad to experience this story.
The game admittedly doesn’t make the best first impression – instead of a play online link or a game file available for download, instead you need to open up a pdf that contains a link to the actual website where Shanidar, Safe Return is hosted. For something that appears to be a conventional Twine game in format, this feels needlessly convoluted. The landing page includes a quick summary of the setup, but then lists links without providing any context – I wasn’t sure at first whether these were ways of jumping to different sections of the story, but as it turned out the game gives you an option of which of three story vignettes to start out with.
There’s a cast of characters page there too, but I found it hard to digest. The names aren’t drawn from any language I’m familiar with, a lot of characters have names that begin with the same letter, and you can’t refer back to the cast list once the game starts, which really wished I could do once I’d clicked through: immediately, there are a lot of different people to keep track of, and their basic information and relationships with each other aren’t always communicated. I was deep into the game’s second act before I realized that Uda, one of the major recurring characters, was actually the father of the main character’s son, but I think I was supposed to know that from the beginning.
Admittedly, some of this confusion may be due to the fact that the game is a sequel to an earlier instalment – those who’ve played that one might find this introduction smoother. Still, since I don’t believe the prequel was an IF Comp game, I think the author could have probably been more mindful of the likelihood that there’d be a lot of new players who were coming to the series fresh.
It didn’t take me too long to get into the groove of things, though, since the initial setup of fleeing from danger was clear and compelling. The game’s written in a very simple prose style that feels like a good fit for the subject matter, too; the characters are never dehumanized by forcing them to adopt stereotypical “cave man” speech, but it does make sense to keep the language from getting too flowery. Here’s an early passage:
Oihana carries Eneko in a soft leather sling on his back. Eneko is never a burden. Eneko falls asleep in the safety of Oihana’s sling. He drops the doll, Pala, along the way. The forest canopy protects the band of refugees from the rain. They leave a trail of wet prints in the mud, most of which are washed away by morning. Dawn approaches. The rain stops.
There’s a kind of mythic, elemental resonance to this kind of writing, and when it combined with those well-observed details about how the characters found and prepared food, or gathered supplies for travel, or engaged in group decision-making, Shanidar, Safe Return works very well in a unique, anthropological vein.
Unfortunately, pretty soon after the initial act came to a close, I once again started feeling disoriented. The game started introducing more and more characters, and I realized that its idiosyncratic approach to choices – each passage ends with two or three links summarizing something different people are doing, and clicking on one will skip you over to that part of the plot, without any interstitial narration to make the transition less jarring – was actually skipping me over important information or plot developments; for example, in the first act, I found it most compelling to follow the thread involving an orphaned toddler and watchdog finding their way back to the larger group, but as a result I didn’t wind up clicking on any of Uda’s links, and as mentioned above, didn’t understand who he was or why he was playing such an important role in Act 2.
This sense of the game skipping around was exacerbated in the final act, where, their preparations complete, the group embarks on an epic journey of thousands of kilometers. I was deeply curious about how they were going to cross mountains, pass over the Bosporous, and explore unfamiliar lands – but since Act 3 also introduced a whole new set of characters, who appeared to be ancestors of Aboriginal Australians, I was curious about them, and by the time I’d gotten a handle on who they were and switched back to the original group, they were already just about at their destination! This isn’t a modernist story, where fractured timelines and incomplete information are thematically important – again, I feel like the game is most effective when it’s working in National Geographic mode – so I feel like a more linear approach to the material would have worked better.
The other authorial choice that didn’t resonate especially strongly for me is the use of some narrative elements that felt YA-inspired; there are some tropey romances, and the Neanderthal-Cro Magnon conflict is characterized in a fairly Manichean, diversity vs. intolerance sort of way. I’ve got no objections to any of that, but I felt like they didn’t mesh well with the dry prose style, and injected some notes of anachronism into what was otherwise an engaging window into a long-forgotten past.
For all that not all the strands here come together seamlessly, though, many of them do. I liked getting to follow Eneko’s coming of age, and learning about how the people’s foraging practices changed as they came to the Middle East from their original home in Europe. I’d gladly play a third game in this series – but would hope that it would be a bit more accessible to newcomers, and not lose sight of the primary threads of its story.
8 Likes
Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses, by Lacey Green
My freshman year of high school, somebody stole my glasses. I wasn’t as nearsighted then as I am now (and I wasn’t farsighted at all – ah, to be young again!), so I was able to struggle through the day, but it was still a disorienting experience; I remember squinting at blackboards, at faces, at the TV, hesitant and having to constantly guess at what I was seeing, who I was talking to. It was an object lesson in how fragile one’s sense of stability in the world can be – and also an object lesson about the cluelessness of teenaged boys, because turns out the culprit was a dormmate who’d drawn my name for Secret Santa and decided it’d be funny to give me back a bunch of my own stuff.
So I think the inciting incident in Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses has legs; waking up after a nap at your school’s Literature Club room to find them missing, of course you’d drop everything, and even grill your close friends, to get them back. Unusually for a ChoiceScript game, there aren’t any stats governing your travails (or at least if there are, they’re hidden), though you do get to customize your gender and romantic preferences (relevant because you can get flirty with at least one of the two prime suspects) – success is all down to the perspicacity of your investigation.
Or is it, though? After two playthroughs, my sense is that the game isn’t really structured as a mystery. Sure, you can go interrogate your two friends – one the anarchic class clown, the other a mysterious and cool new kid who’s a multiclassed jock/nerd – and take a variety of conversational tacks, but these choices mostly seem to have an impact on you relationships rather than your ability to solve the mystery. And as is perhaps evident in the lopsided detail with which I characterized the pair of friends, while questioning one of them is an involved process with the potential for myriad different outcomes, the other friend is dispensed with in a conclusory two or three choices. I explored pretty thoroughly in my first playthrough, but I didn’t find my glasses, and though I did in my second, success didn’t feel especially satisfying (I decided to take a nap and the glasses had come back while I slept). I consulted the walkthrough, and it seems like the results of your investigation might depend primarily not on what you say when you encounter your friends, but your skill at finding them: the initial sequence of the game involves you trying to track them down via a variety of means, which feels a bit like an exercise in forcing the player to find the plot.
The writing is charming enough to somewhat carry this disappointing gameplay, though – it’s got a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and though the prose has more than its share of grammar errors and typos, it’s still occasionally charming. I got a laugh out of this description of one of your friends:
She’s the typical class clown, always with her antics, never taking anything seriously. One time she ordered milk tea for the whole class, even when your school specifically bans outside food.
What a mischievous imp! I do wish the writing had done more to foreground how challenging it is to exist in the world without being able to see well, though; while it gets mentioned from time to time, I’d often forget my predicament since many descriptions don’t seem to be impacted by the main character’s presumably-intense myopia.
Actually, there’s an indication that H!ICFMG may be unfinished; the Comp blurb starts off with “(To be updated)”, and the author’s already uploaded two new versions as of this writing. If that’s the case, a more robust final release may help the game more fully live into its fun premise, but for now it’s more of a teaser.
8 Likes
In the Details, by M.A. Shannon
I swear, the Comp randomizer has a sense of humor: immediately after having me play a possibly-unfinished game about not being able to see, it serves up a Texture game that features the engine’s signature miniscule-text-on-action-buttons bug and which explicitly presents itself as a teaser. In the Details has a solid premise, updating Robert Johnson’s legendary deal for the social-media age, but the implementation’s a little wonky and it ends just as things are getting interesting. I’d certainly play more of this story, but what’s been entered into the Comp isn’t especially satisfying on its own.
The opening sequence sees your rock-star-on-the-rise rolling into your upcoming gig in style, then blowing off your manager; it helps establish the main character as a conceited, thoughtless brat, but then, I already said they’re a rock star so I’m repeating myself. The elements of a strong beginning are here, but the scene could use another layer of polish: the manager says you’re too drunk to perform, but that level of inebriation hadn’t been conveyed through the earlier text, for example, and the prose throughout conveys some bold, if not garish, imagery, but has more than a few awkward moments. Here’s the description of entering the venue:
A gold-speckled red carpet yawns at your feet, all the way down the procession and into a set of double doors whose windows glow with a heavenly facade.
Or a sequence where you wow some backstage listeners with your virtuosity:
To their gaped jaw and compulsory applause, you close your eyes and take a deep bow. You live for this, and maybe [your idiot manager] will appreciate what you do just like the others.
I found the Texture drag-verbs-to-nouns interface worked okay, but not great, throughout this sequence. In particular, sometimes the distinctions between the available actions felt too fine to easily parse: in one of the first passages, you get to choose between “inspecting” and “considering” various nouns, with no clear indication of which might move the narrative ahead. Later on the options do become more straightforward choices, which were simpler to navigate – but here the stakes are quite high, with one wrong move leading to a premature, and quite violent bad end.
(Complete plot spoilers follow; it’s nothing you can’t guess by reading the blurb and looking at the cover art, but still figure it’s good manners not to completely ruin the twist).
Because yeah, 3/4 of the way through, the devil shows up; you sold your skill for guitar skills, and now the bill has come due. The writing gets much more engaging at this point, as the author clearly starts having more fun – we’re told that in a bit to intimidate you, the devil “rolls his neck slowly. Purposefully. Vaingloriously.” And you do have that high-stakes choice. But if you guess wrong, he simply murders you (albeit in lovingly metal prose); if you guess right, you get shunted into a series of noninteractive passages that work as an ending cutscene setting up the final “To Be Continued.”
Based on this finale, the game rallies sufficiently to make me interested to see what comes next; there’s promise here, but also some rough bits, so hopefully the author refines the existing prelude even as they work on the next chapters.
10 Likes
This is my favorite so far, though I’m only 3 games in! It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. But you are right that you always seemed to succeed, at least partially, at whatever you tried. And you are also right about Chekhov’s health inspector, I thought most of the game was going to be about getting ready for the next inspection, but the ending did make me chuckle.
I checked the stats occasionally, mostly out of curiosity, but didn’t find that they mattered much (which is the case with most CS games I’ve played). I guess it is like Who’s Line Is It Anyway, the story’s made up and the stats don’t matter!
5 Likes
Eat the Eldritch, by Olaf Nowacki
Well, it’s finally happened. Even a casual perusal of this year’s Comp roster reveals that games with boats are way, way overrepresented, and I for one couldn’t be happier – big boats, little boats, sail boats, paddle-wheelers, motorboats, house boats, inflatable boats; yawls, yachts, ketches, clippers, men o’ war, brigantines, sloops, catamarans, schooners, container ships, dinghies, triremes, hovercraft, barges, scows; even airships, zeppelins, sauce boats – I love ‘em all, and I’m excited to finally be able to embark (eh? Eh?) on the nautical portion of my Comp explorations.
Eat the Eldritch is a great way to inaugurate the trend, too, because it’s both very boat-y (the whole thing takes place on board a giant fishing boat) and very good, leavening an effective Lovecraftian vibe with good-natured gross-out humor and some satisfying parser puzzling – call it The Terrible Old Man and the Sea. You play the captain, who’s had a bad run of luck that means he hasn’t managed to catch any fish to feed into the floating fish-stick-making plant belowdecks; you’ll get right on that, as soon as you get the suspicious “Rudolf Carter” fellow you just hired on as cook to fix you some lunch… As that potted summary as well as the title suggest, Eat the Eldritch presents a horror of consumption, where everything exists to eat and be eaten, with the latter stages of the game containing revolting, stomach-churning images by the score.
This would be a little much for my poor vegetarian self, but fortunately, the game’s also wickedly funny, and the occasional chortle really helps the offal go down. Here’s a bit of the description of the aforementioned cook, focusing on his fingers:
They are thick and swollen and their skin looks like brittle scabs. The comparison may be disgusting, but they actually look like fried fish sticks and when he uses them, you’re afraid they’ll crumble.
It’s a ridiculous image, but very gross, and works very well. The game does swerve into more straightforward horror territory from time to time – the description of the inevitable Cthulhoid monstrosity is a uniquely messed-up phantasmagoria, and there’s a lovely disorienting bit where you see some ceiling-lamps swaying with the waves, and you imagine yourself upside-down and underwater, looking down at colossal sea-grasses. But there are also some extended jaunts of wackiness, maintaining the overall balance and keeping proceedings from getting too grim.
Eat the Eldritch is also impressively balanced when it comes to gameplay. It uses shipboard directions for verisimilitude, for example, but smartly keeps the size of each individual deck small, and provides handy ASCII-art maps for each, so these aren’t as disorienting as they can sometimes be. There are also regular prods towards your immediate goal to keep you on track, and a handy THINK verb in case you need a reminder (though attempting to THINK in a particular extra-dimensional space threw off a run-time error). And the downloadable version of the game comes with a nicely put-together Infocom-style manual that should make this easy for folks newer to parser games to get into. Oh, and while there is definitely peril of both the physical and existential varieties, Eat the Eldritch will politely rewind if you reach a bad end, taking the sting out of failure (you’ll also often get an optional achievement for your trouble – I though I was pretty thorough, but I only got about a dozen of the 27 on offer!)
The puzzles are similarly player friendly; there’s nothing too head-scratching here, but they’re satisfying to solve, especially the climactic set piece, which had me giggling and gaggling in equal measure. But beyond its visceral appeal, it’s a clever bit of design – it’s got multiple steps and requires some clever leaps of logic, but it’s all quite well clued and I was able to put all the pieces together without any hints. There is one potentially misleading reference that could lead folks less-familiar with maritime matters astray – protip, if you’re ever in a major storm, you emphatically do not want to go perpendicular to the waves, you want to steer your bow directly into them – but other than that, they’re uniformly well-clued.
It’s a real pleasure to come upon something as horribly lovely as Eat the Eldritch; as I said, I may be slightly partial to maritime tales, but this one floats on its own ballast, and sets a high-water mark for the other games in the Comp.
…there are like a dozen more games with boats in them still to go, y’all are in for a lot more nautical puns FYI.
Eat Eldritch mr.txt (148.7 KB)
15 Likes
I’m flattered to the point of speechlessness (almost 
).
Thank you so much for playing EtE and your very kind review!
5 Likes
The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls, by Ryan Veeder
As discussed in my Eat the Eldritch review, boats are clearly the central theme of this year’s Comp. Little Match Girl 4 does OK on this score – there are some shipwrecked pirates, plus an extended sequence on a spaceship – but my experience with the game was largely defined by its membership in two other incipient trends of the Comp, being a sequel (I’ve already reviewed Shanidar, Safe Return, and looking ahead on my list there are a bunch more) and a Metroidvania (joining Vambrance of Destiny and Put Your Hand Into the Puppet’s Head).
Let’s take the sequel part first. I haven’t played any of the three prior Little Match Girl Games, and while I’m dimly familiar with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, any connection to that moralizing fable has long since fallen by the wayside; per a handy recap function, the eponymous protagonist has developed the power to travel through time and space by looking into fires, been adopted by a post-reform Ebenezer Scrooge, and currently works as a freelance sniper-cum-troubleshooter for Queen Victoria (England’s gain is Denmark’s loss; I guess she wasn’t very patriotic?).
The game seemingly isn’t especially fussed about any of this backstory, though, and in fact opens in medias res, with the introductory text not explaining anything about your immediate mission or situation. This kind of beginning can work well, but here I feel like it was misdeployed. It’s not used to skip boring exposition and get the player into the action from the get go, since the opening sequence just involves quiet exploration of a deserted beach. Nor does it do much to heighten player interest in what’s going on, since the actual plot is straightforward – you need to find half a dozen magic pearls as a combined peace offering/christening present to a baby fairy; i.e., it’s a fetch quest – and it’s effectively dropped in your lap ten minutes in without any deeper engagement or piecing together of clues required; you wander into Faerie and come across the infant prince and his caretakers, and everybody acts as though you already know the deal. As a result, the decision to forego a conventional introduction struck me as an odd one: I don’t think the game gains anything by it, but it loses the opportunity to establish stakes and engage the player in the world and the characters.
The Metroidvania aspects of the game also start slow. This is a genre convention, of course – the accretion of powers allowing you to overcome previously-encountered obstacles is a major part of the appeal – but I also found that the absence of minimap like that provided in Vambrance of Destiny, combined with the additional navigation challenge posed by the fire-portals leading to other settings meant it took me a while to wrap my head around the available space for exploration. It doesn’t help that the first few areas are rather straightforward – a ghost town, the age of the dinosaurs, a coast – with the few other people not especially engaging to interact with (LMG4 uses a TALK TO system without any dialogue options, which is probably my least-favorite way to implement character interaction in a parser game).
Fortunately, I found the game picked up by about the halfway point. Gaining a few additional abilities and a clearer sense of the map made the puzzle-solving feel more rewarding, and the environments became more interesting – the dinosaur era actually involves a modern, oddly-bougie civilization; the English coast is home to the actual Pirates of Penzance; and there’s a vampire-haunted Alpine chateau that’s the best of the bunch. The number of sly jokes and clever Easter Eggs also ramps up quickly from the comparatively-straight beginning: it took me a minute to realize that your first two upgrades mirror the ones Samus gets at the beginning of each Metroid game (the fire-bullet is like a missile, and the mouse-transformation is like the morph ball); there’s an extended conference among the vampires that gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes – and it goes a long time; and there’s a disguise bit that I’m pretty sure is directly tweaking the Gabriel Knight 3 puzzle that’s long been decried as having killed graphic adventures all by itself.
Even in this running-downhill part of my experience with the game, though, I still found there were underexplained elements that I think must have been part of earlier games in the series – you seem to have some history with a couple of the specific vampires, you’ve encountered that prehistoric civilization before, and I’d guess that the climax is calling back to the very first game. So while I did eventually very much enjoy my time with LMG4, I can’t help but think that I would have liked it even more if I’d played the earlier games in the series, or even better, if it had done a bit more work to get new players up to speed. I can see how entering a late-series game in the Comp can help draw attention to earlier works, which is all to the good, but it’d be nice for us newbies to be met halfway.
match girl mr.txt (238.4 KB)
10 Likes
DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, by Hubert Janus
There are some stories that, when you encounter them, worm their way into your brain and take up permanent occupancy. Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is on that list for me; the piece concerns an eccentric Frenchman who so fashions his life so that he can write, from scratch and without reference to the original, simply from his own mind and direct experiences, a brand-new version of Don Quixote that is exactly the same, textually speaking, as what Cervantes wrote. But even though every character precisely matches, the story’s narrator tells us that the two books are not the same: there are some passages where Menard writes so movingly, and with such fiery, personal inspiration that the corresponding bits of Cervantes pale in comparison.
We have something slightly different here: instead of two identical works with the same title but different authors, DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS has one title and one author but two entirely separate texts. I was spoiled on this feature by some of the forum discussion surrounding what’s clearly an entry that wants to be noticed, learning that there’s a random die roll at the beginning that determines which of the two versions a given player will get. I also knew going in that one is linear, full of typos and egregiously offensive, while the other has some actual gameplay and is legit funny.
On the one hand, this is clearly just a play for the Golden Banana of Discord. On the other, that’s a good meta joke, and the combination of title, authorial pseudonym (my money is that this is Graham Nelson’s triumphant return to IF), and blurb was sufficiently funny that I decided I’d play along: I resolved to take whichever version the RNG offered up, and not game things to replay the other one, in order to obtain the intended experience.
Reader, you probably know me well enough by now to know that I was secretly hoping to be stuck with the terrible one, and my hopes were not disappointed. The five-minute vignette I played was entirely linear, moving sentence-by-sentence through a zero-context extravaganza of genital trauma and bodily excreta with cameos by Adolf Hitler (as promised), various 80s movie villains, and a troupe of cancan dancers. There’s only one dramatic element – it’s the one in the title – that plays out in a variety of scenarios, the content set off by a nauseously-oscillating green-and-pink background, rakishly-angled text, and typos that couldn’t be more aggressively awful if they tried.
But there’s the rub, of course they tried; the whole thing is entirely calculated to be bad, rather than naively bad. And I found that knowledge colored my entire experience, and meant that I actually kind of enjoyed something that’s objectively terrible. We’re back in Borges territory here, but legitimately so: like, when I read that Darth Vader shrunk himself down into two mini clones, and one of them kicked DICK MCBUTTS’ right ballsack and the other kicked his right ballsack, I didn’t roll my eyes at the slapdash mistake, but chortled at the skillful trolling. Similarly, the rising-and-falling action – no, not of the kicking, but of the game’s pacing, which hits several fake-out climaxes in its short running time – seemed balletic to me, cruelly playing on the naïve player’s hope that this thing is finally ending. There’ve been troll games in the Comp before, so it’s really not hard to imagine the Cervantes DICK MCBUTTS, which would make me angry about how it wasted my time and how cavalierly it deployed Hitler for cheap laughs; but this is the Menard DICK MCBUTTS, and it is sublime.
I’m still rating it a 1, of course. Anything more would be disrespectful to Mr. Janus.
16 Likes
One Knight Stand Part 1: The Beginning of the End, by A. Hazard
One Knight Stand reminds me of a peacock. This hefty ChoiceScript game is impressive but also absurd, hyperspecialized after taking evolutionary logic way past its logical endpoint. I know, for example, that the Choice of Games audience tends to really like player-customization options, but when it took me four separate choices to establish the length, texture, and color of my character’s hair, I thought something had gone awry; when, five minutes later, I picked out the color of my favorite mug and laid out my habits when shopping for a cell phone, I half suspected this thing was actually a parody or maybe a marketing survey in disguise. Similarly, CoG games tend to use length as a selling point, but having slogged through what I’m pretty sure was a short novel’s worth of prose to get through just four simple scenes and introduce only two significant characters, I can only imagine the fortitude needed to persist through the Middle of the End and the End of the End. There are some promising modern fantasy flourishes here, and I can’t fault the author’s work ethic, but sadly this is one of those games that I suspect will elate its intended audience while leaving those outside that group bewildered.
In its outlines, the story here is pretty solid. The main character lives in an alternate future where COVID gave way to a series of other plagues and pandemics, though as the game opens they’re more focused on practice with their surprisingly-intense polo club. But the city’s been threatened by a series of gruesome murders, and after seeing some strange things around your apartment, you get swept up in a supernatural world that involves demons, reformed incubi, the reincarnations of the Arthurian Knights, and a best friend who’s harboring some kind of secret…
It’s all fun enough – I could see the setting being a lost World of Darkness RPG from the late 90s – and the bits involving the polo team have some zip to them (I wouldn’t be surprised if the author has a bunch of real-life experience with horses), but the game’s glacial pacing does it no favors. I had to get through half a dozen see-something-weird-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye-but-there’s-nothing-there-when-you-check “scares” before the first sequence was over, so that the creepiness had long since worn off, and the game’s written in an incredibly granular style that completely undermines any sense of pacing; I was similarly bored of most the action scenes by the time I was two-thirds done with them because they just took too long. And the transitional sequences are just as bad, as you’re forced to play through the dull bits between the set pieces at a similarly high level of detail; it’s like reading the first draft of someone’s first novel, before they’ve figured out how to move characters around in time and space.
The other element undermining what could be a fun pop-fantasy romp is the tonal whiplash. While the world is generally fairly grounded, and the game’s blurb says its genre is “dark urban fantasy”, a large portion of the game’s choices have some ZaNy options. Like, here are the player’s choices in one of the action scenes:
-Here goes nothing.
-Easier said than done.
-I don’t get paid enough for this.
-Da da da da da… Batmaaaaaaan!
The monster you’re trying to run away from here is actually kind of creepy, but this kind of thing drastically undercuts any sense of realism or fear the game is trying to convey. And I’ve picked a mild example; there are lots of pop culture quotes and bewilderingly over-the-top choices that seem to show up more and more as time goes on (though even the first sequence suffers from a news broadcast where April O’Neil and Peter Parker are highlighted as featured reporters).
One Knight Stand also gets way too dark sometimes given its omnipresent refusal to take itself seriously. You (of course) have a tragic backstory, and without thinking too much about it I went for the one where my family died in a car-crash (the others are comparably bleak). I was not prepared for how this was narrated (CW for violence and just general terrible things):
Incredibly bleak car-crash description
Your father had turned the car at the last moment so that the driver’s seat took the full brunt of the crash. He’d been killed instantly. At the trial that followed, lawyers had argued that the people in the backseats — your brother, your sister, your mother — could have survived if the car’s side airbags had deployed as they were supposed to.
In the end, both your siblings had died before rescuers could prise them out of the wreckage of the car. You know your little sister, at least, had been alive directly after the crash. She had cried, gurgled, and half-screamed for several minutes afterwards. Your mother in the seat directly behind you had lingered the longest. She never regained consciousness in those last few days and finally passed on after a bloody miscarriage.
What the fuck, game.
I’ve said before that to my mind, the one thing that most amateur IF needs to feel professional is an editor, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glaring proof of that. If someone had helped the author smooth out the drastic tonal shifts, cut down 2/3 of the word count to focus on the engaging parts, and highlight places where going deeper really would be helpful (the main romance interest is so bland that even after three and a half hours of gameplay, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about his personality), this could be really promising. As it is, while I suspect the hardcore CoG-heads will lap this up, I didn’t get much enjoyment out of One Knight Stand. Which is a shame: peacock feathers may only turn on peahens, but at least they’re still pretty to the rest of us.
12 Likes
The Whale’s Keeper, by Ben Parzybok
I used to work with some environmental advocates, from whom I learned a mouthful of a Greco-Roman phrase: charismatic marine megafauna, or, in normal-personal language, cool big ocean creatures. All the organisms that live in the sea, as well as general environmental features like pollution, oxygenation, and (gulp) temperature, are critical to keeping oceanic ecosystems stable. But “save the krill!” is a rallying cry for precisely nobody, so in order to persuade people to adopt the kind of laws and regulations that are needed to mitigate the impact we’re having on the marine environment, you’d better trot out a dolphin or sea turtle or something big and sympathetic like that. And of course marine fauna don’t come any more charismatic, or any more mega, than the whale: warm-blooded and communicative like us, but massive and as comfortable at the depths as on the surface, it’s no wonder they’re an object of fascination, back to the story of Jonah and the whale. So it’s perhaps just understandable that the cetologist protagonist of The Whale’s Keeper appears to have purposely arranged to get himself swallowed by one.
This choice-based game’s obviously set out a magic-realist scenario, but it does credit to both sides of that equation. As to the latter, the pressure increases as the whale dives down give rise to a memorable set piece, for example, and there’s some lovely prose describing what it’s like to be inside it as it sings:
You are at ground zero and for a moment you wonder if this vibratory wonder might thrum you into oblivion. It overwhelms you with its grandness. It is the most perfect, all-encompassing thing you’ve ever experienced, every molecule of you sings in response.
The mechanics also reflect the precarity of your situation; you’re given a 10-click “sanity” clock, which decreases as especially frightening things happen; presumably once it hits zero, you get a bad ending, though I never had that happen since the system is fairly forgiving. This is especially the case because there are opportunities for your sanity to go up, primarily as you encounter the elements that fall more on the “magic” side of things. In particular, the game quickly establishes that you’ve got company in this particular gullet; figuring out how to engage with the hermit you quickly nickname “Jonah”, interacting with him and learning how he’s managed to eke out his existence, is a highlight of the first part of the game, even if some of these details strain credulity past the snapping point.
While the game starts out with you (er) in the middle of things, it does eventually sketch out a few elements of your character’s backstory and try to explain why you’d do something as crazy as this, I wasn’t as sold on this piece of the game, both for the specifics (there’s a particular detail about the death of your child that probably could have merited a content warning) and just the general concept of the attempt (look, I don’t care how terrible things have been going for you, there’s no way to logically justify jumping down a whale’s throat). The game really only works when it keeps its focus on the present, and the player of necessity has to run with the off-kilter reality being presented.
The elephant in the room is the format. For all that the game I’ve just described would work just fine in a conventional engine like Twine, The Whale’s Keeper runs on its author’s bespoke chat-based IF platform; you have an option of playing it via Telegram or just, as I did, via the web. So while each passage ends with a series of choices, instead of clicking on the appropriate one, you need to type in the indicated work or two to select your preferred option. While I can see some games taking advantage of the chat-based interface, this one doesn’t gain anything by it – and since I played on my phone, tapping out the required words felt like it added unnecessary friction to the experience. And despite a fair bit of fiddling, I couldn’t adjust the text speed to a comfortable pace; many of the passages are long, but each is delivered in short speech-bubble chunks, so I wound up either tapping my foot waiting for the next one to load, or having the view window prematurely yanked down as one arrived while I was still finishing the previous one.
These quibbles didn’t do much to take me out of the game, though, and the game’s strengths are unique enough that it’s worth putting up with these idiosyncrasies. It communicates a real sense of wonder by immersing the player in a compellingly-imagined environment, and while it dances on an absurd tightrope between reality and fantasy, it’s over quickly enough that it never topples to one side or the other. One of its most impactful sequences, in fact, marries the two: Jonah guides you down to the acid pools that he scavenges for sustenance, and in amidst the potential food you fish up clumps of garbage and plastic bottles, too. For all the power that this leviathan has over you, it’s subject to the same human-made pollution that’s destroying the rest of the oceans; save the whales, save yourself.
11 Likes