Mike Russo's Spring Thing 2021 Reviews

Miss No-Name, by Bellamy Briks

So this is the second entry from Bellamy Briks, and in a completely different development system (this one’s Twine, while Heroes! was Quest), which shows some impressive versatility. Though the settings are also quite distinct – we’re in a contemporary high school, not fairytale high fantasy – the vibe is once again high-energy and enthusiastic. This extends to the appealing visual presentation, which is all bright color and emphatic text effects (no drawings this time), as well as the prose, which is again appealingly bubbly. Structurally speaking, Miss No-Name isn’t a time cave and is actually fairly linear, though there are a couple of branches depending on your choices, and seven different endings; since it’s a short game, it’s easy to reach all of them, and while there are maybe only really three distinctly different ways the story can wind up, it’s zippy enough that I was glad to be a completionist.

It’s hard to talk too much about the story without spoiling it – the setup is that you’re the coolest kid in school, and you’ve taken a bet to learn the name of the mysterious new girl who just enrolled mid-year. For the most part this plays out about how you’d expect, with your choices either offering different strategies to pursue your goal, or giving you the option of having the main character stick to the bet or start to develop a real friendship with Miss No-Name. While there’s the possibility of a couple of different twists depending on how you play things, the game doesn’t have anything especially surprising in story – but that’s OK. Its strengths are using breezy prose (I loved all the little asides about how cool of a guy the main character is) to create a fun, relaxing mood, rather than in ratcheting up high drama. The mystery of Miss No-Name is mostly an excuse to hang out in this pleasant world, which is no bad thing.

4 Likes

Misty Hills, by Giuliano Roverato Martins Pereira

I feel like there are a lot of chill, hang-out-y games in this year’s Spring Thing. I don’t know if that’s a coincidence, or a result of the past year meaning that spending some low-key time with other people seems especially appealing, but I’m all in favor of it – I’ve beaten a lot of evil overlords in a high-stakes race against time, so sometimes it’s nice to just smell the roses. This is pretty much the setup of Misty Hills, in fact: the main character has just come through an adventurous journey with only a few coins and miscellaneous possessions to their name. There’s one final step left in their quest – since you just missed the funicular to take you up the hill to home, now you’ve got half an hour to kill before the next one arrives.

You can definitely find some dangerous situations in Misty Hills – in fact you can even die, though the choices leading to those ends all but have neon signposts on them so it’s pretty much an opt-in affair. But you can also spend the time just chit-chatting with some locals, browsing a merchant’s wares without buying anything, or playing a dice game with the funicular operator for a few coppers. The time limit means you could even fritter away the thirty minutes taking half-hearted stabs at all of the above and not accomplishing much of anything before it’s time to run to the funicular.

While I usually find timers irritating, this one I didn’t mind it at all, since it’s integral to establishing the proper way to play: Misty Hills isn’t a game where you’re trying to optimize a complex series of tasks or beat the clock, but, as the author’s note says, you’re basically playing someone waiting for the bus. I’ve often been in that situation myself (is it weird that public transit is one of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic?), and it definitely rings true that if you have one positive exchange with someone else, or notice one neat thing in the neighborhood, that’s more than enough to have gotten out of the experience.

This isn’t to say that the different diversions on offer aren’t interesting. I really enjoyed figuring out what was going on with the merchant and experimenting with the various items you can buy, learning a bit more about the funicular operator’s philosophy and backstory, and taking my tea a bunch of different ways, to say nothing of the more game-y exploits of exploring the well and the magic forest – the gambling game I thought was a little too random to be as enjoyable, but oh well, that’s how I feel about most gambling in real life too. There are a number of different interactions to discover, depending on the order you visit the different areas and what, if anything, you’ve gotten in your inventory. There are some typos, and I found a few small bugs (sometimes the game lost track of how much money I had, and one time after I restarted, it seemed to remember my previous interactions with some of the options in the well) but none of it’s especially goal-oriented: my biggest accomplishment was being adopted by a cat, which is actually a pretty big deal!

That was the only thing I did that I noticed changing the ending text – and that only slightly, because of course the story always ends in the same place, with the main character riding the funicular up the hill. But that’s all right – this was just a stop along the way, an opportunity to kill some time and maybe create one or two small memories to bring home.

4 Likes

Some Space, by rittermi

Graham Nelson’s adage about an adventure game being a crossword at war with a narrative doesn’t fully apply to Some Space, but it came to mind when I was playing because while both the puzzles and the story are robustly worked out, it didn’t seem like they interacted with each other all that much. There were some loose thematic links, and some minor fallout for success or failure, but nothing that felt commensurate with the difficulty of the puzzles, which are occasionally quite involved. And then I got to the end and it turned out the game’s concerns were actually quite different than I thought they were, and I felt like the narrative wasn’t just at war with the crossword, but with itself.

Backing up, said narrative is one of space-immigration, as the main character is a human who’s decided to take a new job on an alien planet. The overall setting is lightly sketched – it appears to be somewhat Star Trek-y, with multiple species all more or less getting along in a single interconnected society, albeit the economy is clearly still capitalist and the different species still strongly retain their native culture. That sketchiness works because this isn’t a space opera with deep politics or galaxy-shaking revelations: the main character’s new job is in marketing, and the story is about being far from where you come from, trying to make new friends and fit into a new home that plays by very different rules.

Some Space starts in medias res, as the main character is chatting with a fellow human expat also on his way to that same alien planet. We never get much of the main character’s backstory, but this expat – named Amar – plays a significant role in the plot, as he’s one of those gregarious types who makes friends everywhere, and as it turns out is soon the only other human the main character knows on the whole planet. The story’s structure alternates between three kinds of scenes: the main character starting the new job; exploring the city and running errands on their own; and hanging out with Amar and, eventually, his friends. Transitions between the scenes are usually punctuated by the main character checking their phone for news and messages, usually getting one from Amar or another friend – which will typically lead into another scene – and almost always having one from the main character’s mom – which they invariably ignore and leave unread.

Speaking of messages, that’s also where the puzzles come in, because your new hosts, the Koilians, communicate via “puzzlespeak,” which means that you can’t read an orientation memo without looking for hidden meaning. There are a number of puzzle types, mostly different kinds of ciphers, and you need to demonstrate you’ve solved them by choosing the right option for where and when a meeting is being held, or occasionally by typing the answer into a text box. I’m not a cryptographic maven, so I found the puzzles rather challenging, or at least I did until I decided to bend the rules and use various online solvers to expedite matters – I figured the main character has a smartphone and access to a forum for expats swapping tips about how to understand puzzlespeak, so it’s not implausible that they’d be doing the same thing!

For the most part the puzzles don’t gate progress – rather, you can solve them and behave appropriately, or fail to solve them and irritate the Koilians by your inability to follow simple directions. As far as I could make it, there aren’t significant consequences, though, with a missed message meaning that you might be in for some minor embarrassment but no real plot impact. Puzzles that lack much narrative impact are fine, I think, so long as they’re simple – which these aren’t – or if they’re thematically connected to the narrative. Here, the puzzles are all cryptographic, and as an immigrant, the main character faces lots of difficulties communicating, so there’s some general linkage – or at least I thought there was, until I got to the last fifth or so of the game.

Despite appearances, Some Space isn’t primarily about the immigrant experience. I’ll put the rest of this discussion behind spoilers, but to summarize, a different theme becomes very prominent towards the end, and I thought it didn’t fit well with what came before as well as not having any resonance with the codebreaking puzzles.

What Some Space actually wants to talk about is domestic violence. This is part of the main character’s backstory – a primary reason we’ve left earth and are ignoring our mom, it appears, is that our brother hit his kids, and our mom is defending him. And it’s also part of the main action, as the final sequence hinges on Amar being beaten up by his Koilian boyfriend, and then arrested by racist (Koilian) cops who blame him while letting the abusive boyfriend go free. I didn’t feel like this twist worked. First, it undermined the rest of the story for me – I was enjoying the experience of learning about another culture and trying to fit in with it, so seeing that society and one of its main representatives suddenly portrayed in this way made it feel like the main character’s efforts to get along with the Koilians were misguided. Second, it didn’t feel like it rang true with Amar’s characterization, as he’s portrayed as a kind, outgoing, talkative person, while his boyfriend comes off as a monosyllabic grump even before he’s revealed as an abuser; it was very hard to understand what we were supposed to understand Amar saw in him. I get that it’s hard to write this stuff in a way that doesn’t come off as melodramatic Lifetime-movie-of-the-week material, but all the more reason not to cram such a plot into a small part of the story. And finally, the swerve into melodrama made all the time spent on letter-substitution ciphers seem even more incongruous and unrelated to the story Some Space is telling.

It didn’t help matters that I sometimes found the game a bit clunky. There’s timed text, and I thought the custom font the author used wasn’t easy on the eyes. I did run into a few technical issues, with the game once hanging and forcing a restart after I failed to type in the correct answer to a puzzle. And while the writing is generally good, beyond the characterization issues mentioned above sometimes I found the worldbuilding didn’t fully hold together. For example, even though the Koilians are portrayed as hard for humans to understand, the main character often decodes their emotions with no difficulty, noting that one looks aghast, or perks up when you enter, which is at odds with the sense of displacement that the main character should be feeling.

Still, none of this slight wonkiness did much to detract from my enjoyment of the game, since for the first 80% of the game I was having fun as a code-breaking fish out of water – but for me, unfortunately the final act left Some Space less than the sum of its parts.

3 Likes

A Strange Dream, by Anais Tn

A Strange Dream doesn’t seem finished. The first sign is that the game’s file name is “test.aslx” and opening it pulls up the Quest editor rather than launching into the game proper. The intro text positions the player character as confused and discombobulated, waking up with a pounding headache in a strange, decrepit mansion, so perhaps this is a fourth-wall-breaking bit of metafictional slyness? But given the slapdash quality of what’s on display, unfortunately it’s more likely a sign of a game entered into the festival before it was ready.

Your goal is to unlock the front door and escape this crumbling manor, but within a few short actions it’s clear that it’s not that the place works according to dream-logic, it’s that it just doesn’t work. Interacting with the game is simple, with a subwindow allowing for compass navigation and another for examining and manipulating nearby objects via a menu. But if you exit and then re-enter the lobby, every time you look around you’ll see the exact same text about confusedly waking up that you get at the beginning of the game. Objects that the text implies should be hidden – like a silver key that’s described as being revealed when you pull out and look behind a book on a library shelf – are clearly listed in the subwindow from the get-go. It appears there’s meant to be a light puzzle, as upon lighting a match the game says “you can now go downstairs”, but you only find the match in the one downstairs room in the house, which you can get to and explore just fine without any extra light.

I found some flat-out bugs – trying to re-open the table after closing it threw off a scripting error – and wonkiness in the taking code meant that while the game cheerfully told me I was picking up keys and trying them in the front door, they never actually showed up in my inventory. After getting stuck, I wound up pulling up the editor to see if I could figure out what was supposed to happen – again, maybe this is what the author intended? – and as far as I could tell, a gold key I’d found in the upstairs office was meant to have allowed me to escape. Entering that office and taking the key appears to be the only actual puzzle, unless some of the other keys were also supposed to have gated other parts of the house?

The premise here would allow for a good bit of puzzle-y fun, and I did enjoy the use of pictures to show the often-beautiful furnishings of the house. I also laughed at the sentence “looks like you are in an old mansion, falling apart” (we’re all getting older, let’s not throw stones). But unless it’s all meant as some kind of ironic commentary and I’m just too thick to get the joke, it sure seems like A Strange Dream just isn’t a complete game at this point.

2 Likes

Picton Murder Whodunnit, by Sia See

I can certainly see the appeal of the randomized murder-mystery. More than most genres of IF, once you know the solution to a mystery there’s not much to hold interest on subsequent replays – and even on the initial play-through, if the author’s telegraphed the true culprit too strongly it might be even less compelling. On the other hand, mysteries tend to be really engaging puzzles for players. If you could write a good mystery that could be randomized, so the player knows the game is playing fair and can be surprised the second, third, fourth, and fifth time they run through it – that’s a game you could enjoy for a long time.

While I think I’ve played maybe half a dozen iterations of the concept, though, they’ve always left me cold. Some of this is I think is down to the fact that I tend to be less interested in randomized narratives – I’ll gladly sink untold hours in a pure, zero-story roguelike, and I’ve 100%’ed every single Assassin’s Creed game save the most recent one. But even in those often-grindy games, if there’s a system for randomly generating quests, my brain just flips a switch and is completely uninterested, even if functionally the random ones are almost exactly the same as the bespoke quests I just put a hundred hours into playing through. But I think my diffidence at the sub-genre isn’t due to personal preference alone: it’s hard enough to write one mystery, much less a mystery that can be reshuffled multiple times and still be satisfying.

Picton Murder Whodunnit – yes, we’re finally getting around to it – is, of course, a randomized murder mystery. It’s built using the Strand system, which I wasn’t previously familiar with, but looks like it was designed to create updated versions of some of the old Magnetic Scrolls games. Anyway I like the engine well enough, offering the option of choice-based or parser-based interaction, though there isn’t the ability to play offline so far as I could tell and the online version was sometimes laggy.

The conceit here is about as traditional as you can get: you play a police inspector called to a country manor to investigate the suspicious death of a peer of the realm, and you’ve got to identify which of a quartet of suspects (the conniving widow, the vicious son, the grasping brother, or of course the supercilious butler) did the deed. The game discloses that the solution is randomized each time, so while e.g. the widow is always portrayed as conniving, only one time out of four does this tip over into a murderous motivation.

As you can tell from the characters straight out of central casting (the butler’s even named Jeeves), the milieu is spot on, and the writing is full of cheerfully over the top Britishisms that I quite enjoyed – the brother is described as wearing a “pompous cravat and tweedy, shoulder-patched green shooting jacket,” which definitely conjures the character. This is where the randomized nature of the game starts to pose problems, though, as every character is described in dark, unpleasant terms, even if that seems to make little sense. Here’s the ten-year-old son, Jimmy: “piercing, piggy blue eyes stare back at you fiercely. You get the impression he totally despises the police and you in particular. He’s probably guilty as Hell!” I mean, steady on there, matey, he’s not even a tween. But in order for the randomization to work, everyone has an equally-plausible motive, and everyone has a key to the gun cupboard (yes, even little Jimmy) which I thought felt artificial – at least give us one character who doesn’t seem to have a reason to off the Major!

The investigation is also less fun than I wanted it to be, though here the randomization is only partly to blame. There isn’t any physical evidence to examine, nor are there any clues to uncover or forensic details to analyze. Solving the mystery reduces to asking every character about their alibi, then doing another round to ask about everyone else’s alibi to see who’s the odd one out. This is made slightly more difficult by the fact that the murderer, of course, is happy to lie, and by the fact that I found some of the clues ambiguous, though possibly that’s down to me not fully understanding the manor’s layout rather than fuzzy writing. The alibis are also functionally the same in repeat playthroughs (like, maybe the brother will be writing a novel instead of smoking a pipe, but he’s always in the drawing room and always relies on Jimmy for corroboration), making the investigation feel repetitive even though the ultimate culprit may be different. This is especially the case because after the first run-through, which took maybe ten minutes, I managed subsequent replays in maybe two minutes apiece since there are so few things that need doing.

All of which is to say that while Picton Murder Mystery works fine and supports at least one or two fun go-rounds, the nut of the tightly-plotted but randomized mystery remains uncracked, and I’d personally trade it for a non-replayable but deeper investigation with the same setting and characters in a heartbeat.

4 Likes

Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires, by E. Joyce and N. Cormier

Thalia is the Greek muse of comedy, and she’s an apt namesake for what’s the most purely fun game I’ve yet hit in the festival. It felt like LTSS was grown in a lab to plaster a grin to my face – I’m a sucker for anything involving British twits, heists, libraries, and museums, and here we’ve got the eponymous burglar planning not one but three heists (at a library, a museum, and a British manor), all to tweak the nose of a supercilious society doyenne. Oh, and there’s an extended game of cat and mouse played against a sexy art-theft consultant to Scotland Yard. Still, even if these particular tropes aren’t your specific cup of tea, the breezy, clever LTSS is a rewarding gem of a game.

Admittedly, I went into this one expecting to like it – one half of the authoring duo, E. Joyce, previously wrote What the Bus? for the 2020 Comp and Social Lycanthropy Disorder for last year’s EctoComp, both of which I’d played and really enjoyed. And the gauntlet thrown down by the ABOUT text got me even more excited:

Happily, LTSS lives up to this initial promise. The opening does a great job of establishing the milieu, the antagonist, and the player character, who’s a social climber with a masked alter-ego and a fondness for relieving snobs of their possessions. Hearing her stuck-up hostess brag about the gems she’s about to parade at a fancy party, our heroine takes it upon herself to lift not just the jewels, but also a rare book and valuable painting in the lady’s possession.

The game thus plays out as a trio of heists, each proceeding according to a well-paced structure: there’s an initial planning meeting with your sidekick Gwen, who’s a seamstress and gadgeteer of no mean skill, then a sequence of casing the joint incognito, before the final nocturnal visitation to put the scheme into action. Of course, the best laid plans of mice and muses gang aft agley, so even the most meticulous preparation doesn’t save you from occasionally having to improvise. And then after each heist is done, you get to read about your exploits and get debriefed – and rated – by Gwen.

These sequences are all really well done – none wear out their welcome, and each builds momentum into the next as you’re eager to see how the groundwork you’re laying will pay off. Each works differently, too, which helps keep interest high. The briefing scenes are pure dialogue, primarily giving you a chance to add some shades to Lady Thalia’s characterization as the outlines of the plan get established. When you hit the streets, you usually get a choice of three or four leads to pursue to gather information, hide your tools of the trade in a useful spot, or recruit confederates, before time is up and it’s time for the heist. It’s possible to succeed or fail at each of these subtasks, which could make the actual burglary sections faster and easier, or more time-consuming and challenging – these bits are set up as linear gauntlets, and can be appropriately nerve-wracking, though generally you’re more in danger of making a mess of things and having to endure Gwen’s mockery than of losing life and limb.

The challenges are varied, too. Most of the social challenges use a system where you choose an approach from a menu of direct, friendly, or leading (this last meaning you’re asking leading questions aimed at getting more voluble types to share more than they ought). This is a nice framework, since it creates some structure around what could otherwise be very fuzzy social challenges, and it also prods the player to think about the personalities and desires of the other characters rather than as mechanical obstacles to circumvent (admittedly, sometimes using the direct route with servants and employees can feel a bit like bullying, though Thalia typically stays on the right side of that line). One heist largely hinges on a word puzzle; another’s all about planning ahead; and a third involves Burke’s Peerage, because of course this is that kind of game.

The writing is just as good as the puzzle design, in particular when it comes to the protagonist. Thalia herself is a joy to inhabit, and has some of the best lines. Here’s her reflecting on how her status has risen after many successful jobs:

And here she’s sizing up a potential mark:

(Yes, Thalia is unashamedly randy).

There are a few flies in the ointment: I ran into a couple of small bugs (when faking a swoon in front of one of the museum guards, I got a “cannot execute macro” error, and when chatting with Lady Satterthwaite’s maid, one of the friendly dialogue options appeared to redirect back to the same passage, so I had to choose a different approach to progress). There was one sequence that I found hard to parse –the duel of wits with Mel in the museum – where I understood what Thalia was planning but wasn’t clear on how to implement it given the options available (this was the one place where I save-scummed). Gwen also scored my performance on the first heist as a 15 out of 13, which could be an error or just an indication of how awesome Lady Thalia is, I suppose. But these minor flaws do nothing to detract from the zippy, cannily-designed pleasures on offer – LTSS is a must-play, and here’s hoping this isn’t the last we see of its dashing heroine.

6 Likes

An Amical Bet, by Eve Cabanié

Much like Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires, An Amical Bet is about a dashing lesbian thief committing crimes in a lavish setting, but unfortunately this one doesn’t rise to nearly the same heights. The premise bodes well – unwinding after a big score, the protagonist and her lover relax by seeing who can be the first to steal something shiny, something useful, and something unexpected while at a party in Rome. Unfortunately, the implementation doesn’t live up to the hook.

Partially this is because of the writing. There are a host of typos and strangely-written passages, including the title which I think is supposed to be “Amicable”, and some of these phrases are so tortured I can’t even tell what the mistake was – like the corridor that’s described as “fastuous” (that could be a typo for “fatuous”, but that still wouldn’t make any sense?) With that said, occasionally some humor gets through the tangled prose – this response to TAKE STATUE made me snort:

The major issue is that the scavenger hunt, such it is, doesn’t hold any interest. Unlike the locked-door puzzle in fellow Quest game A Strange Dream, it is possible to complete this one. But there aren’t actually any puzzles to solve – you just go from room to room looking for portable objects, and if you take something that satisfies one of the conditions, the game will tell you in bolded text that you’ve got one of the three necessary items. None of the objects are hidden or gated in any way – it’s just a matter of hoovering your way through the dozen-odd locations – and for the “unexpected” and “useful” objects, I have to confess I didn’t fully understand the logic behind their selection.

There is a small, fun twist at the ending, and the game definitely wouldn’t have been better if it took longer to get where it’s going. Still, An Amical Bet is a very small, very slight thing that serves to pass five minutes of time but not much else.

4 Likes

Hi :smiley: thank you for your review, I’m french so i surely made some mistakes and i’m sorry about that ! :sweat_smile:
It was an exercise we had to do at my school and my teacher told me to submit my Quest here, so i promise that next time i’ll submit a better story :relaxed:

2 Likes

Thanks for the great review! And double thanks for the bug reports - I’ll get to work breaking into our code vault to fix them. (I might leave the 15/13 bug in there though, that’s almost too funny not to).

The goal of the showdown in the museum is to goad Mel into dropping her guard, but not to anger her so much that she just rushes you. You can always take the slow or messy ways out, but getting the best finesse score requires carefully winding her up and then going for the window at the right moment. (Flirting is a great way to wind her up quickly, of course). I think if we did a better job signposting exactly HOW mad Mel is at any given point in time it might make it easier for the player, so thanks for the feedback!

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Hi Eve – that’s really cool! I studied French in school and if I tried to write a game in it it’d be nowhere near as good as yours :slight_smile: Hope it was a fun exercise!

2 Likes

Of course! In case it’s helpful for tracking them down, here’s a little more detail on the bugs:

Museum bug

For this one, here’s the error message that came up: Error: cannot execute macro <>: unable to parse macro argument “[[’“I doubt it. Isn’t there a closer door?” (L)’|escaperoute3>><<set $convVar = 3>><>
<<link [[’“How can you even ask me that, you brute?” (D)’|escaperoute4]]”: unterminated link markup.

Lady S's maid

This was the offending dialogue option: ““Goodness, no, I wouldn’t do her a favour like that.” (F)”

As for the bit with Mel, yeah, I understood that my goal was to manage her anger to get it high but not too high. I think some of the feedback could have been a little sharper in communicating where she was at, but the bigger issue I ran into was not realizing that I should be proactive about going for the window rather than waiting for Thalia to do that automatically when I succeeded at the social challenge. I think partly this is because most of the other challenges to this point had worked that way, and also because I was enjoying the banter so didn’t want to end it prematurely, if that makes sense. It might make the puzzle too easy if there was a more direct prompt that it’s time to go once you get Mel wound up an optimal amount, but I think that’s what I felt myself missing.

Congrats again on the game!

1 Like

Thank you Mike :relaxed: (french is really hard btw so it’s okay haha)
Have a nice day :smile:

1 Like

Excalibur, by J.J. Guest, G.C. Baccaris and Duncan Bowsman

Excalibur is somewhere between odd duck and rara avis. Created by a murder’s row of talent, it’s a Twine game built as a fan-wiki for a low-budget BBC space opera from the 70s. There’s some dynamism to it, with a few additional links and comments opening up as you read through the entries, and a sequence that’s more or less an ending. But there’s no puzzle-solving beyond what’s happening in the player’s own head, as they browse through the wiki and mentally assemble each individual jigsaw piece into a mental model of what was going on with the show.

Excalibur’s success, then, is all down to how enjoyable it is to read each of its pages and engage with the questions it raises. Happily, it is a success. There’s an enormous amount of craft on display in how the authors’ have conjured up this two-season wonder, spanning not just plot summaries and character bios, but also backstage drama like writer/director clashes, special-effects mishaps, and more. My upbringing was about 15 years too late and 3,500 miles too occidental to fully appreciate all the references, but I know enough about Windrush and the coal miner’s strike to tell that the story is cannily situated in its time and isn’t just a classic Dr. Who send-up (though I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of that here too).

Of course, just methodically clicking through cast and crew listings for a nonexistent show could get a little dull, no matter how many finely-crafted details and in-jokes there are to find (the Russian-language poster for Terrovator – or “Death Lift” – made me laugh). In a well-considered move, there’s an element of creepypasta to proceedings too, which provides some of the most immediately engaging stuff. As you browse the entries, you come across hints that there could be something odd about the fact that no recordings of the show still exist, or that some of the accidents that plagued the cast and crew had to do with the incorporation of a ritual in the series one finale.

I’ll say that little of this struck me as super original – perhaps I’m biased because I live about three miles from Jack Parson’s old house – and I thought the way the “trivia” and “fan theory” pages spelled out many of the mysteries was less effective than it would have been to just let the player notice this stuff and come up with their own ideas. But overall, this element definitely does the job of providing the sugar-coating that entices the reader to do a comprehensive dive through the wiki (I especially enjoyed figuring out what was up with the crossing-guard and tracking down his comments).

What’s ultimately more compelling is that in amongst all the speculation about whether the show is a tulpa and what exactly happened to Old Alfie, Excalibur engages intelligently with the role nostalgia plays in our culture and interrogates the impulses that give rise to these kinds of massive fan-projects. One key perspective comes from the writings of a French existentialist who consulted and wrote a few of the show’s scripts, including one where the character’s experiences seem to presage future developments and even mirror those of their off-screen counterparts (Bleak Planet):

He ultimately espouses a radical ethic of forgetting, and in the cast interviews that are some of the last pieces to open up, you can see some of them coming round to this approach too (there’s some in-show mirroring of these ideas too in how the Lethe Ray is used in the final episodes). And the game doesn’t shy away from portraying the negative side of obsessive fandom, largely through the gatekeeping, nerd-raging character of Ian Newell. At the same time, this pro-oblivion theme doesn’t exhaust what’s in Excalibur, not just because of the obvious love and dedication that went into making it, but also in the experiences of the less-crazy fans and the positive connections they’ve developed out of their devotion to this deeply weird (and possibly made up) show. The urge to reify our memories through a shared cataloguing has taken on the very specific form of the fan-wiki at this particular moment in late-stage capitalism – and yes, there’s politics in Excalibur too – but it’s also recognizably the same urge as leads to story-telling at a funeral. The game cues up the difficulty of finding the balance between remembrance and forgetting, a very human dilemma, even as it comes down more strongly on one side than the other.

I noticed a few technical niggles with the game (the “Television Series” category link at the bottom of the “Excalibur (TV Series)” link doesn’t work, nor do any to the character page of Chanticleer) and some typos and inconsistencies (the audio archive page mistakenly lists series two episode 13 as a second episode 11, the Lodestar One page says it should be included in the “Derivative Works” category but it’s not actually listed, and one of the trivia entries for the episode Oneironaut says it was directed by Goulding, when obviously it was really LaGomme). I was also able to sequence-break by accessing the series two episode summaries before they officially unlocked (via the wiki-maintainer’s profile page). Though given that this is meant to be an amateur, fan-driven effort, perhaps all these errors are diegetic! Again, there’s a smart alignment of form and function that means even mistakes help draw the player in rather than drive them away. Excalibur’s great accomplishment is to conjure up a richly realized alternate world in which to get lost, while raising more than enough interesting reflections for when we return to the real one.

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Thank you for playing, and sharing your thoughts on Excalibur, Mike! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

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Sunny’s Summer Vacation, by Lucas C. Wheeler

I really dig the premise of Sunny’s Summer Vacation – you play a Very Good Dog (a corgi) whose person, Emma, is headed to the beach for a weeklong vacation with one of her parents (you get to pick if it’s a mom or a dad). The serious part of the backdrop is that Emma’s folks are in the middle of getting a divorce, so it’s your job to take care of her and cheer her up. This is a relatable set-up that allows for Sunny’s cartoony antics – playing volleyball with a seal or helping Emma build sand-castles – to sit alongside a plot arc with some depth and resonance, as lots of people have been on one side or another of this particular experience.

Structurally, the way this plays out is that each day, you help Sunny have fun with Emma by playing one of a series of minigames, with success rewarded by shells you can use to upgrade her treehouse-cum-shanty. Then each evening, there’s a vignette between Emma and her parent that advances the story of their relationship and the divorce. In the story sections, you often have a few choices about how to interact with Emma, though these usually reduce to either being playful or being really playful. When it comes to the minigames, you’re in the driver’s seat, and that’s where the large majority of the game winds up being spent.

This is where the issues come in, since I found the minigames dull and unrewarding. There are four of them, and they remain the same each day:

• A scavenger hunt where you hover your mouse over some highlighted words to find out whether you found treasure; after doing this about 20 times, the round ends.
• A stone-skipping challenge that plays out like a Twine version of a golf game, as you need to click to stop fast-moving counters the determine the orientation, angle, power, and spin of your shot (either I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing or the coding here is wonky, though, since my best throw came when I released a stone at a 97 degree angle to the water!)
• A sand-castle building game where Emma describes her plan, and then you dig sand and use differently-shaped buckets to build walls, gates, fountains, and castles in a 3x3 grid.
• A volleyball game, played against an easy, medium, or hard opponent, where you click to serve, bump, set, and spike.

These are all good ideas for beach activities, but the problem is that many of them are overly complicated and drag on way too much, while offering zero in the way of interesting choices. The volleyball one is the worst offender – you need to click to serve, click up to three times to see if your opponent manages to bump, set, and spike it back to you, then make up to an additional three clicks to bump, set, and spike yourself, then click again to see if your shot succeeded… you or the opponent can fail at any stage, but against the toughest opponent, a single point can take up a couple of shots back and forth, so it’s a lot of clicking with no strategy or choices to determine whether you win or lose.

Compounding the boredom, the notional goal of the minigames – winning sea shells with which to pay the gopher for upgrades to the shanty – wasn’t very motivating. You get almost the same number of shells for mediocre performance as for a perfect run, and I got more than enough shells to finish the upgrades midway through the vacation. Plus the upgrades didn’t appear to do anything to change the description of the shanty, or open up any new options – all that happened was a number indicating my shanty level ratcheted up.

Besides the minigames, there’s not really much to do during the day – if you explore all the locations you’ll find a few small treasures that wind up getting featured in your shanty’s trophy cabinet and win you an achievement. But you’ll do this on your very first day and after that the environment stays static, despite indications that a fair will be coming to town and a shift in the tides might open up the way to a hidden cove (the about text indicates that a later, commercial release is planned, so possibly these locations are meant to be fleshed out at that point).

Happily, the evening sequences are well-written (though the author’s got maybe a touch of adjectivitis), and I enjoyed seeing the dynamic between Emma and her parent develop. Sunny’s attempts to play with her and cheer her up are heart-warming and satisfying, though I wished there was a way to get a fuller view of how Emma feels about the divorce, or what her relationship with the absent parent is like. Also, indications that the vacationing parent still has feelings for their former partner, and the wistful way they talk about their absence, took me aback – it sometimes feels like the divorce is something that’s happened to the family, rather than a choice being made (I almost think game was originally about the other parent dying, then was quickly rewritten to be about a divorce). But given that you’re playing a Corgi, I suppose this muddiness in understanding the marriage is appropriate.

Anyway the result of this mismatch is that by a couple days in, I started skipping the minigames so I could get to the good stuff, except then Emma complained that she was said and feeling like she wasn’t making the most of the vacation. So I forced myself to suffer through at least a couple for each of the remaining days, but I still only got a mediocre ending that didn’t seem to hold much in the way of catharsis or character development for anybody. Part of me wanted to replay again to see if I could get a more satisfying resolution – but the thought of having to go through all that filler to get to the good stuff dissuaded me. With that said, the core of Sunny’s Summertime Vacation is solid, and if the later release retunes the minigames, it’d be well worth another look.

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Perihelion, by Tim White

Perihelion is a well-done game that I admired more than enjoyed. It’s got a compelling, hypercompressed and occasionally poetic prose style that’s really well done, and the aesthetic pleasure is compounded by some neat color-gradient backdrops that do double-duty to indicate time of day. The setting is an elliptically-described alien world with awesome vistas to explore, and there a few gentle puzzles that help give the player some direction in what’s otherwise a fairly abstract story space. Unfortunately, I found my appreciation of it to be held back by the game’s occupying an uncanny valley between the abstract and the literal, and by its overuse of an awful timed-text mechanic.

The opening and closing are the strongest parts of Perihelion. In the beginning, you (some kind of alien – I think a sort of air-elemental?) witness a comet breaking up and ejecting a (different) alien, in a sequence that’s compellingly written and prompts you to come up with adjectives to describe how you perceive the novel form of this interloper into your world. In the ending, the viewpoint shifts to that of the interloper, who describes what they’ve experienced and recontextualizes the events of the game.

In the middle sections, you guide the first alien as you decide to help the second – OK, look, this is getting unwieldy, I’m going to call the first alien “Fred” and the second one “Sam”, OK? – you guide Fred as you decide to help Sam return to the stars. Or at least, you decide to do that if unlike me you head first to the Mausoleum-Museum to chat with Sam, rather than saving it for last – I spent much of the middle section wandering around unsure of what I was supposed to be doing, and in retrospect wish the game had opened up free navigation only after the initial sequence with Sam imparted some direction.

Getting Sam spaceborne again involves going to three different locations on Fred’s planet and accomplishing a series of small tasks. These are barely puzzles – you’ll go to an observatory and be told that it’s cloudy, so you need to wait until it clears up, or try to slip into a guarded location and be told you need to do that on a weekend night. Once you’re past these barriers, there’s only one option to take in the different locations (except with the lava, where you can choose to do a kinda-risky thing or a stupidly-risky thing), so it’s a quick matter to do everything you need to do.

Or at least, it should be a quick matter. The overwhelmingly worst part of Perihelion is that much of the text is timed. When you move from one area to another, there’s about a five second lag. When you sleep, there’s a similar pause before time resumes and you can act again. This is frustrating enough on its own, but when making progress meant waiting around for half a week to be able to access one of the locations, I wound up alt-tabbing to read Twitter to kill time during the delays, which really reduced my enjoyment and immersion in the story. I’m not a blanket no-timed-text person – I think there are times when, if used sparingly, it can emphasize a really critical point in a game – but its use here is just awful.

My other critique is a little harder to pin down, but I wished Perihelion had committed a little harder to either being an abstract art-game, or a more grounded space-adventure instead. It sits in an awkward middle where key pieces of the situation are under- or un-explained, just alluded to through obscure allusions and complex language, but the player’s primary engagement is still a more traditional model of traveling around a map and solving puzzles. The puzzle-solving is undermined by the player’s weak grasp on what they’re trying to accomplish in each location (I still don’t think I could really explain what Fred actually did to help Sam, on a literal level), and my engagement with the rich, dreamlike language was undermined by having to shuffle back and forth trying to circumvent obstacles. As a result, even though I really liked pretty much every individual part of Perihelion other than the timed text, I don’t think it made as much of an impression on me as it deserved to.

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Thanks J.J., and congrats on the game! I loved Alias ‘The Magpie’ too, but I’m sure you get that a lot :slight_smile:

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Thanks so much for checking out Excalibur, Mike! It’s a joy to read such a thoughtful review and to know that our work left an impression. I’m so happy you enjoyed your time with it.

(It’s a big help to know about that lingering sequence break possibility as well, but I’m glad it didn’t detract from the experience for you.)

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Glad you liked the review, and again, just massive kudos on the game!

On the sequence break thing, I seem to recall I found a second way to get to the series two episodes, but I unfortunately didn’t write it down so can’t be more help than that, sorry! But yeah, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all since I’m super anal and never considered reading it until I got through series one :slight_smile:

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That’s seriously impressive; it’s not often a class exercise in IF goes well enough to submit to a festival like this :slight_smile: While I’ve not posted in any reviews for the games I’ve played (due to having an entry of my own in here), I will say I enjoyed playing An Amical Bet. I’m sure your teacher will be pleased with how your game has been received too.

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