NS Willoughby’s IFComp26 reviews

Competitions IFComp
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It may be a bit late to get started, but here I am! I thought I would join in the fun and review the (very few) games I’ve played from the comp this year. I’m pretty impressed with every author who manages to get a workable game completed and entered on time, I’ve attempted to write a few games but I never seem to get past the first day of writing before I get too mixed up to continue. Making something that is fun to experience and makes sense to play is no small feat and I really applaud everyone who has the courage to put their work out there. (And yes I mean everyone, including the author of this first game). With that out of the way, let’s begin.

When You Were Shot By Elephants by Ellie G.

If you’ve played this entry you may suddenly understand my strange emphasis on admiring every author. When You Were Shot By Elephants is almost definitely some kind of troll game. The map is nonsensical, success is practically random, and there’s so little flavor text that the experience of playing the games feels very similar to the experience of viewing the cover art (which is a simple MS paint drawing of an elephant holding a gun in its trunk). The game presents itself as a “tribute to no m3rcy’s when i was shot by elephants”, which I have since learned is a troll game from the 2010s of some low notoriety. So if someone were to ask “what is the point of this game?” the easiest answer would be that it is a troll homage to an earlier model. That’s about as far as most of the other reviews have gone on the subject, but I want to go more in-depth with my experience of this game. I think there is something here to really dig your teeth into.

The first strange thing I noticed was that the map was not coherent. Going west and then immediately back east would not take you to the location you started from. The elephant will blame this failure on its lack of a sense of direction. Despite this, it is still possible to move across the map in a predictable way. The point A to point B connections remain consistent, so moving west from the location “Five miles west” will always lead you to the location “North East I think”. I spent some time wandering in every possible direction and marking my results until I had a “map”, so to speak, of all the pathways. The most interesting things I found for my troubles were North-Eastern Eelephants and a location called “Godforsaken Place” which was full of spikes. This piqued my interest enough to stick around, as finding the Godforsaken Place was almost like solving a puzzle. I was sure there was something more here.

I tried following the player around, to see if they did anything interesting. They mostly seemed to follow the path towards the Godforsaken Place but never seemed to make it past there or really do anything if they got there. Then I tried looking at the posted walkthrough, which was only the words “test me”. Running the test me code lead me to discover that “lick” is a recognized verb in the game, and by licking the player I struck gold. If you lick the player you are greeted with a screen full of flavor text about the elephant’s relationship to the player, about the son they supposedly have together, and an actual location to investigate. This, I think, is the true joke/point of the game, and the puzzle is finding it for yourself. So I guess I just ruined the puzzle for all of you.

For what its worth, the joke still didn’t really land for me. If there had been one or two rooms off of the first one to explore, or some conclusion at that point that didn’t take me back to hunting a player for sport, I think I might have actually good things to say about the game. As is, I can only call it intriguing. Please, anyone, tell me I’m not the only one to have found the secret room. I really want to discuss this game, but my conscience will not allow me to ask anyone to play it!

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New Captain by Joshua Kaden

As a huge Star Trek fan (and a moderate Firefly fan, and a general enjoyer of all space-faring crews in fiction) this entry felt like the first correct Star Trek game I’ve ever played. The commercial options on the market all revolve around ship-to-ship space battles, when the real meat and bones of the Trek franchise is science missions and babysitting diplomatic envoys. For once, I actually felt like I was doing the duties of a Captain! I especially loved the mission planning briefing, it was very immersive. (What’s especially notable is that I don’t usually like twine games; I prefer the experience of playing a computer game without touching my mouse, and yet I still sunk my whole two hours judging time into this entry!)

I do have a few disappointments though. I’m going to list them here in the spirit of total honesty, but I wan to reiterate that this is a well polished and fun experience that really did make me feel like I was the captain of a starship!

When you I first started to play I felt almost bombarded with information about the crew. I read over every dossier and agonized over the reshuffling of my senior staff. I was of the impression that the way that I interacted with these people would matter in a big way, and that I would get the chance to have many conversations with the people on my crew. It turns out that this is barely the case. If the player has no in game reason to talk to the crewmates then the interaction immediately cuts off. I found it disappointing that the personalities from the beginning summaries never shone really shone through in the further interactions. (The NSA-type officer became my favorite character, purely because I had the opportunity to interact with her more than once)

I made all of what I thought were the correct decisions, catching sabotage attempts and assigning my best people to the jobs they were best suited towards, and thus there were no issues during my mission. This made me a little sad. I thought that I would have had something to do other than just monitoring my people. And then the game ended without so much as a “good job” from the admiral who assigned me my mission.

I think most of my disappointment comes from the same place as my excitement: I am a little too pretentious in my love for Star Trek. Trek captains almost always make the smart decisions and over prepare for every interaction, and yet they still come across bumps in the road and thus have to make hard decisions. I would have loved the chance to actually deal with a crisis not of my own making, then I really would feel like I was a Trek captain. But then again, I think I’m asking for too much here.

To end on a more positive note, this entry opened my eyes to the possibilities of making a trek-like game in this medium. I’m excited to see if this game inspires more like it.

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Agreed, I love a good Star Trek game and New Captain scratches a very particular itch! If this is a genre you like, I’d recommend Voyage of the Marigold, too - it doesn’t have the TNG-style planning, but does have a lot of TOS-style action to make up for it:

In more mainstream fare, the 25th Anniversary adventure game has some dogfighting bits but generally sticks to puzzles and dialogue, as does its sequel, Judgment Rites - there are versions that play well on modern computers on GOG.

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Thank you for the recommendation! Voyage of the Marigold seems like a game that’s right up my alley. I’m hoping to find a game that’s good enough for me to force on my ‘gamer’ friends who are also trek fans, there has to be some way for me to convince them to leave the video game world and experience the textual wonders of IF. I might just send New Captain their way.

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Thank you for recommending my game, Voyage of the Marigold. You are clearly a person of taste and distinction.

I intended VotM to be the most StarTreky game possible but I think New Captain might have it beat for pure, undiluted trekiness.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed New Captain. I think the two games compliment each other quite well, covering slightly different angles of the ST experience.

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Demonstration by Marion Zhuravlev

This is a hard one for me to review, mostly because I didn’t like it all that much. I don’t think this game was meant for me. I think the idea was to jump through different scenes in the player character’s life and thus better understand them and their relationship to their (former) partner, but the descriptions of the rooms didn’t draw me in enough to care about this plot. I spent some time pushing my way through different scenes until I got stuck, and then I stopped playing. I’ve been brought up to say nothing if I have nothing nice to say, clearly I’ve already said too much, so I’ll just leave it there.

Tableaux Vivants by Lamp Post Projects

Now this entry is the opposite of the last, I really enjoyed Tableaux Vivants. There was no moment in my play through where I was unhappy with my experience. I would say that it is exactly what I’m looking for when I want to play a new IF game. The room descriptions were compelling, the puzzles were clearly defined, and by the end of my time I found I had some level of fondness for the main character and her charming home. If I had to pick one word to describe Tableaux, that’s what it would be: charming.

A big part of the charm here is in the colorful descriptions, and I mean that both figuratively and literally. Every room in the house has a specific, colorful wallpaper for the player to examine and I really loved how that complemented the wallpaper background of the game itself. On the more figurative side, all the NPC’s practically jumped off the screen for me (which is almost a pun if you’ve played the game all the way through). I especially loved the description of the chimera. I really felt like I was in a real place as I navigated through the house and its grounds, a place with history and little touches of personalization, and that’s what I come to this genre looking to find.

Now I want to talk about the main mechanic that sets this entry apart from others in its category: the library and the greenhouse plants. I really liked it! I had a great time learning more about the main character through what books she choose to keep in her library, and I was pleased to find that there were responses that were meant to add to the world building beyond just as a solution to a puzzle. I used all but two of the garden plants to solve puzzles and I can’t help but wonder if there was any use for them at all or if they were just set dressing.

I really have nothing bad to say about this entry. I even loved the hint system, which was just leading enough to get me past my point of confusion without just telling me the answer outright. That, I believe, is the perfect level of hints.

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Thanks so much for this review!

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Thank you for the game! It was a real highlight for me.

Where did you get the idea for the wallpaper motif?

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I’m so happy to hear that!

I’ve been an admirer of William Morris’s designs (and the Arts & Crafts movement in general) for as long as I can remember, so those were natural references to draw on in setting the scene of a home in late Victorian Britain. But wallpaper became a real focal point for the game once I realized that describing areas of faded wallpaper was how I could clue the player that paintings were missing from the wall in the study!

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