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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
That’s seriously impressive; it’s not often a class exercise in IF goes well enough to submit to a festival like this 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.
I know my co-author already responded, but I’d like to belatedly thank you for the review as well! I’ve just submitted an updated version that fixes all the bugs you pointed out – well, okay, I didn’t fix the possibility of receiving 15/13 points on Day 1, because as @Encorm said, it’s funnier not to, but I did add some text acknowledging it to the conversation with Gwen. (Despite her dedication to puncturing Thalia’s ego, she will give credit where it’s due!)
I played the Weight of a Soul in two sessions – it’s a longer game than I’m used to seeing these days. After the first one, I was already working on this review and planning to lead off by saying “the only thing wrong with Weight of a Soul is that it slowed down the previously-torrid pace of my review thread”. Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I have a few more caveats, but this is still a really impressive and enjoyable piece of parser IF, with strong characters and a lovely world in which to get lost.
So I’ve tipped my hand that I think WoaS ends weaker than it begins, but it begins REALLY strong. The opening is in medias res, and showcases the paciness and quality prose on display through the rest of the game. Here’s the first full paragraph, as the player-character – a doctor-in-training named Marid – grounds herself to deal with an emergency:
As Marid works with her mentor to try to save the patient (a goblin), details establishing the world and characters are skillfully woven with escalating tension and prompts for the player to assist in the treatment. Then after the crisis is past, there’s a breather for Marid to clean up, return to her home, and unwind with a drink. It’s a bravura, well-paced sequence that draws the player in, establishing the themes and narrative stakes of the story. It also fills in just enough about how the world works – we’re in a steampunk type setting where alchemy is the dominant science – to allow the player to get their bearings, without overburdening the introduction with dry exposition.
Indeed, the light-touch worldbuilding is a major strength of Weight of a Soul. It reminded me of a dozen different settings – the Dishonored immersive sims and the Zachlike Opus Magnum probably most directly – but it’s got its own spin on things, and the game has answers for all sorts of questions about how society, infrastructure, science, and politics work in Furopolis (admittedly the Greek-and-Latin linguistic slurry behind the terminology might not be its strongest suit). Critically, none of these details are rammed down the player’s throat – throughout, descriptions are short and suggestive, conveying what the player needs to know to act and a little bit more to excite interest, without getting flabby. My notes are scattered with delightful coos over things like the paired cold-closet and stove, how the char-golems work (and are named), the dignity of the bemasked mutant bartender, and the individual descriptions of the statues making up the Chorus Metallis, a personified pantheon of alchemical substances. The card-reading – which I think is a completely optional sequence – was also a major highlight. I will say that my suspension of disbelief was a bit shaken by the line of dialogue suggesting that the underclass goblins toiling away in a hellish foundry have access to bereavement leave – probably that’s just due to overfamiliarity with how awful U.S. labor law is though…
Another immediately-noticeable strength is how well Weight of a Soul manages being a big game. To help the player deal with the scope, there are plentiful supports, including a dynamically-updated journal and list of characters, and a beyond-gorgeous map. But I actually barely touched these, because the design itself is careful never to be overwhelming. There are a lot of places to go, but they’re laid out in a big loop, and you can’t stray too far from the beaten path without reaching a dead end and going back to the central artery. Locations have a good amount of scenery, but not too much that it feels exhausting, and the number of characters and objects who can be interacted with is actually relatively modest. It’s generally quite clear why you should be talking to a particular person – and even if you’re a bit fuzzy, either Marid or her interlocuter will make it plain soon enough. And since the game is based over multiple days, the plot mostly progresses not by opening up massive new areas – though it does this a few times – but by changing the existing geography and providing new motivations or roles for characters you’ve already met. This meant that on my first trip out into the Channelworks District I behaved much like a tourist, gawking at every new sight, but quickly grew familiar with it and was able to pick out what was different on subsequent visits. I usually prefer a game go deeper in a relatively smaller set of elements, than sprawl out with more, shallower ones, and that’s especially important in a larger game – Weight of a Soul nails this.
I haven’t talked much yet about what you actually do in the game. This is good too! You’re tasked with investigating the mysterious plague that afflicted the goblin you treat in the opening. So you beat feet to explore his haunts, talk to his associates – and then, as the disease inevitably spreads, the scope of Marid’s investigation expands as well, taking in physical evidence-collection and some light puzzling. Really, though, most of what you do in Weight of a Soul is talk. The author has a good ear for dialogue, and these menu-driven chats unsurprisingly do a good job of establishing the characterization and voice of the supporting cast, while striking a balance between offering up a list of topics to be lawnmowered through one by one, and actual choices that allow the player to proffer their own interpretation of Marid (she is very much a fully-drawn character herself, though, so this is more about putting a bit of spin on her already-established traits).
The reliance on dialogue also opens into how well-done the technical implementation is here. Because there’s a lot of talking in this game, it adopts a visual-novel style approach where after each line or two, the player needs to push a button to advance. I typically find this interface slightly annoying, but here it’s well-chosen, because otherwise the player would be forever scrolling up and trying to find purchase in massive walls of text. This same care’s been taken when it comes to other potentially-tricky bits of the implementation. In one sequence around the mid-game, for example, you need to examine four different cadavers, including looking at different parts of their bodies and their clothing. Once I realized what was in store I had visions of the disambiguation hell to come, but instead it was seamless, with commands like X EYES automatically cueing off of the last person examined.
I did mention up top that I found Weight of a Soul grabbed me less as it went on, though. Much of this is down to a slight mismatch of expectations on my part, but the butter-smooth implementation of the first two-thirds of the game does start to break down a bit in the last few sequences. It’s still very good, don’t get me wrong, but I did find myself wrestling with the parser when trying to exit through a window, unlock a hidden door, or even trying to shortcut talking to Marid’s mentor by typing TALK TO DOCTOR. I also ran into a run-time error in the code generating background events on Day Three (I flagged these, and a few other small niggles, in the transcript linked below).
I also found the dialogue and writing strayed a notch too far into melodrama for my taste as the stakes got higher. Weight of a Soul is I think operating within YA conventions – you’ve got a teenaged protagonist taking on a problem the grown-ups are powerless to solve, a somewhat trope-y love triangle, and after poking at a bunch of small details I’m pretty sure it’s even set in a post-apocalyptic world. This isn’t my genre of choice, and I think heightened emotion is very much part of what folks who like it enjoy, but things like Doctor Cavala declaring that Marid is the one person who’s made all her work worthwhile sometimes took me out of the story.
In terms of gameplay, I kept waiting for things to get a bit more puzzle-y. Since the first half is focused on world-building and investigation, I didn’t mind that there weren’t any real obstacles in the way. But as the climax neared, the few puzzles that did appear were nothing too special (the two main ones being outwitting Carnicer, whose solution is telegraphed with what I thought was a very heavy hand, and the piston-pressure puzzle, which is just an exercise in trial and error). Many players won’t mind that there are only a few, easy puzzles – but given that they are there, it’s a shame that there’s less creativity on display than in the rest of the game, especially since the alchemypunk world sure seems like it would lend itself to interesting challenges (I was itching to get clever with the Metallic Chorus!)
Finally, for all that I really dug the characters, world, and plot of Weight of a Soul, I didn’t find its themes to resonate that strongly. Marid’s central struggles are definitely legible to the player (letting go of the past, figuring out how to be a healer given the inevitability of death) but they’re very familiar ones, and often felt a bit too abstract, or too tied to the details of the fantasy setting, to land strongly. I’m significantly older than the protagonist, which could be reducing my ability to relate to her journey, but I do think some of the game’s narrative choices wind up short-changing the themes – for example, having the only patient we see Marid treat be the goblin whose awful death kicks off the plot undermines the player’s ability to appreciate her late-game reflections on the grind of serving the same people, day-in and day-out, as they slowly decline. Sure, I intellectually understand that that’s her experience – but my experience as a player is different.
Compounding this slight feeling of abstraction, I was underwhelmed by the final reveal of the mystery, which ideally would have tied Marid’s internal and external conflicts into a unified whole. I’m going to put all of this behind spoiler tags: I only really understood Justinian’s plot (that is, the motivation behind it, not what he was doing and that he’s a baddie since that was pretty clear early on) like the third time he explained it. It seems to depend on the player noticing some pretty subtle bits of world-building, like the fact that this is a post-apocalyptic world with the population squeezed into overcrowded cities, which I think is only alluded to if you examine second-order nouns in an incidental mural. And even with the background granted, I thought there was a really substantial mismatch between Justinian’s stated aims – radically change the world for the better, somehow – and means – culling the population of the poor so they don’t have so suffer so much. I’m happy to accept him as a delusional psychopath, but Marid seems to think what he’s doing has some logic to it, and not I think just because of her puppy-dog crush. And since the major plot felt like it reduced to “eh, dude’s nuts” I didn’t experience much catharsis around Marid’s final choices. Oh, and while I’m being spoiler-y, I also thought Carnicer’s actions didn’t make any sense (she was a hired hitman, paid to knock off Doctor Cavala but not a member of the conspiracy – so what possible reason would she have to freelance on an unpaid gig trying to kill the person her patron specifically told her not to harm?)
Again, though, I think like 75% of my criticisms here are pretty much just down to me wanting a slightly different experience than Weight of a Soul is offering up – if you’re in the market for a YA-style adventure with dialogue-first gameplay, I don’t think there’s anything else remotely as good. And most of that remaining quarter would be pretty easily addressed with a few nips and tucks before the next release. Even in this Brobdingnagian review, I haven’t managed to even name-check everything that delighted me in Weight of a Soul (let me squeeze in a final pair: the undead pigeons, and the way you’re introduced to Horatio standing by a bridge). This is a game that I’m quite sure folks will still be recommending ten years from now, and I’m excited I got to play it when it was brand new.
(I’ve attached my transcript in case it’s of use to the author – I marked some comments with asterisks where I noticed a typo or bug, or made a joke I thought was clever because I am the kind of insufferable person who types their own jokes into parser IF and then draws attention to them, for which I profoundly apologize though of course I won’t be mending my ways anytime soon).
I’m just recording this in case other people get stuck, you have to TURN TIME repeatedly.
Edit: For the next room, I’m a bit stuck. I dealt with the hourglass by REMEMBER followed by BREAK HOURGLASS, but still can’t get through the black door.
Very, very impressive indeed. And nearly invisible to the player who’s not interested in the machinery behind the game. A sure sign of good implementing of hard stuff.
Hah, yeah, I hadn’t ready other reviews until I wrote my own, but I just checked yours out and looks like we had a lot of the same reactions!
(By the by, this is a tangent but I wanted to thank you for your review of Return to Ditch Day a month or two back. I hadn’t known this existed, and since I went to Caltech it was especially fun to poke around in the very faithful recreation of campus and laugh at the in-jokes, on top of the clever puzzles. Though I have to say, reading your review about the map being confusing I thought “hah, I lived there for four years, I won’t have any trouble,” but then of course I did get lost repeatedly in the byzantine layout of the dorm – which happened to me in real life in that dorm, too!)
(french is really hard btw so it’s okay haha)
