[Donald Duck voice]: Sora, we have to delete the smut before it corrupts our hearts or whatever! (Idk, I haven’t played the games.)
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All That Shimmers…, by Andrew Apted
Maybe it’s because I played All That Shimmers… hot (er) on the heels of Lewd Mod: No Buts, but the thing my brain keeps coming back to is that the witch is a babe. The game makes no bones about the fact that this woman who’s recently arrived in your town is up to no good – in fact she’s casting a spell to obtain world domination, so the business of the game is thwarting her – but even from the first time she’s mentioned, it’s emphasized that she’s a young witch, not one of those shriveled-up hags. When you finally track her down in her lair, all the cauldron-stirring has left her “quite hot and bothered”, and sure enough, tempting fate by hanging around long enough to tempt fate by examining her confirms that “you find her surprisingly attractive.” Heck, if you do manage to annoy her she zaps you with a spell, and the game-over text laments “this witch really was evil”, the protagonist seemingly as sad to not get a date as at the prospect of spending the rest of his life shapechanged into a duck.
The mystical femme fatale is of course an ancient archetype – paging Morgan Le Fay – but what’s distinctive about this whole setup is that (spoiler) the witch isn’t just a buxom co-ed trying on the dark arts for a lark: turns out she’s really a frog who was shapeshifted into her human form by a fellow witch. This is quite the twist, and raises questions like 1) wait, did the other witch cast a spell specifically to turn the frog into a hottie?; 2) have we been cheated of a prequel telling how these cross-species lesbian enchantresses tracked down the spell of doom that acts as a MacGuffin in this game; and 3) how dire is the protagonist’s dating life that, upon finding out that the lady he’s been lusting after is an amphibian, he doesn’t have the slightest reaction?
The other reason I’m hung up on this detail is that All That Shimmers… is the kind of debut any first-time author should be proud of: it’s of a manageable scope, with a straightforward plot well-suited to parser IF, with puzzles that don’t strain the basic action affordances of PunyInform but are well-implemented with a Goldilocks level of clueing, and plentiful dad jokes that mostly land. That means my review notes are basically just a list of things I enjoyed – groaning at the Garfield and Father Brown references, admiring the restraint in not spelling out the punch-line to the gag about the dog’s name, or pointing out the coincidence that there’s a puzzle here that’s exactly the same as one in ALYAS OF STARHALLOW. It’s like listening to a jazz band play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – you know exactly where the melody is going, so it’s all about the grace notes and the vamping, the way they put their own spin on an old, old formula.
And yeah, one part of that spin is the sexy frog lady, but there’s also the fact that you get the call to adventure twice, once in passive form when you read a newspaper article about the witch being up to no good, then again when the ghost of your grandmother shows up to order you to do something about this (if the witch has something to do with the dead rising, the game doesn’t feel bothered to explain the connection). While some of the puzzles are as straightforward as giving an old coin to the lady who’s reading a coin-collecting magazine, there are a couple that rely on logical but non-obvious actions, which makes for a pleasantly-paced set of challenges. And the jokes really did make me smile, like this one poking fun at the awkwardness inherent in some parser conventions:
To the west you see the enticing foliage of the local park, and opposite the park is the local shop. To the north is the local church, and following the street south will lead to even more local stuff belonging to this locality.
All That Shimmers… is emphatically not a game that breaks the mold or does something ground-breaking or unique with its format; it’s not going to generate heated debate or in-depth craft discussions. But it’s a very solid and entertaining example of its genre, and a heck of a debut. If the author does decide to try something more adventurous for a sophomore outing, I’d definitely be excited to play it – but more of the same sure seems like it would be perfectly enjoyable, too.
shimmers mr.txt (63.2 KB)
13 Likes
The Warren, by Emery Joyce
I’m a big book person, so go figure, some of my earliest memories involve my mom reading to me at bedtime. It’s mostly the favorites that stand out – I was small even as a toddler, so I couldn’t get enough of The Little Engine That Could – but there was one that I didn’t really like, but my mom insisted on reading it to me anyway. It’s called The Runaway Bunny, by the same author and illustrator who did Goodnight Moon (another banger), and the story is incredibly simple: a baby bunny tells his mommy bunny that he wants to run away, naming the different things he’s going to magically transform into to escape – a sailboat on the waves, a flower in a garden – but every time she tells him that she’ll follow, turning herself into the wind or a gardener, until finally he gives up and goes to sleep. I liked the pictures, which whimsically depict the rabbits’ transformations, but the plot offended my child’s sense of logic: why would the baby want to run away from the snug burrow where he lives with his mommy?
Let me be clear: The Warren isn’t an adaptation of The Runaway Bunny – in fact it was an entry in this year’s Shufflecomp, based on two songs I’ve never heard of. You’re not a baby bunny here, but one who seems on the cusp of young adulthood, and you’ve got a rationale for wanting to leave your overprotective mother, who locks you in your tunnel every night behind a grating made from a lattice of hunters’ discarded arrows: you want to explore, to experience life outside the tunnels, to meet someone who might be unlike any other bunny you’ve ever known before – or just to be seen as an adult, an individual worthy of respect in the eyes of others.
The game presents itself in two short quartets of links, each of which reveals a possible consequence of slipping out one night in search of freedom – a warren of forking paths. And the rewards for your boldness are sweet:
You’ve never been able to take time to appreciate the trees in full blossom, to savor ripe berries warmed by the sun, to simply exist and breathe the fresh air.
Or at least, they can be – for down another path:
You know that a rabbit can never let their guard down, that you always have to have one ear fixed on any hint of possible danger. But you forget this just long enough for a cat’s jaws to clamp down on your leg.
For every positive future, there’s at least one other where your brashness brings you to ruin, all narrated in compact, evocative prose. You have no control about any of this, there are no clues in any of the links to prompt you about which lead to happiness and which to disaster, you just need to take your chances until you reach the final choice, wiser now about why your mother does what she does, but facing the same dilemma: play it safe, or take a risk? Stay home, or run away?
When my son was born, The Runaway Bunny was one of the first books we bought. It’s not one of his favorites, either, but I inflict it on him anyway. I think about my mom, who lives almost 3,000 miles away from me now, on the opposite side of the country; I wonder what she was hoping for when she read me that book, and I wonder what I’m hoping for, too.
17 Likes
Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl, by improvmonster (Charles Moore, Jr.)
For decades, one of the standard critiques of adventure game puzzles is that they can operate on cartoon logic. It’s a brave move by Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl, then, to steer into the skid: one the one hand, having a game that’s literally in a Looney-Toons style cartoon means that slapstick doesn’t create tonal clashes with the rest of the game, but on the other hand, there’s a very real risk of frustration if players aren’t thinking outside the box in exactly the right way. Fortunately, the game nails its premise, offering up clever twists on classic scenarios that prompt you towards solutions while maintaining a healthy level of difficulty, and make plenty of room for funny gags along the way.
The precise setup here is one of the oldest in video-game-dom – someone nefarious has kidnapped your girlfriend for underspecified reasons – but what you’re really doing is wandering around looking for anything shaped like a puzzle, in the confidence that that will eventually get you where you’re going. The early stages are more directed, as you’re confined to a small area of the map until you figure out how to reach the city where your paramour disappeared, but once things open up there are pretty long puzzle chains to be traversed before you pick up the thread of the plot again. And that works fine, since in a cartoon short the mayhem in the middle is the point.
Again, it helps that the scenarios are nicely chosen to prompt the player to act – if you see a safe dangling in the middle of the street, hanging by only a fraying rope, or a parasol next to a near-bottomless pit, you don’t need to have mainlined cartoons to guess what you should be doing. While there are maybe one or two that could fit in just about any parser game (I don’t remember Bugs Bunny doing anything so straightforward as prying up a grate with a crowbar), they’re very much the exceptions from the inspired set of challenges on offer. You can die – though nothing a couple UNDOs won’t solve – and I think there’s at least one way to get yourself into an unwinnable situation, albeit it’s near the start and you need to do something that’s fairly obviously unwise. But I didn’t mind this flirtation with cruelty, because it’s part of how the game balances approachability with challenge: there are some tricky puzzles (I actually needed a hint to figure out exactly how to deal with that cliff, though it was reasonably clued in retrospect) so the game wants to make sure you’re thinking about what you’re doing.
As I also mentioned, Slappy Squirrel actually is funny, too. I really enjoyed the name of one of your neighbors, which is an off-brand riff on Pepe LePew, and the game never misses a chance to indulge in a cartoon trope, like emphasizing how background scenery keeps getting reused or how the world disappears as you get near the horizon past which the artists haven’t drawn anything. It’s also well implemented, with the only tiny bug I ran into setting up the biggest laugh of the game. Here was how the ending text was displayed:
Congratulations, you have saved the girl and joined the ranks of the greatest romantic couples in toon history.
(first dropping the vacuum cleaner hose)
That kind of intrusion of chaos into narrative is characteristic of both cartoons and IF – and Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl what good things can happen when that convergence isn’t run from, but embraced.
squirrel mr.txt (142.5 KB)
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oxblood, by Naarel
My old gaming group was very into the old World of Darkness tabletop RPGs, but we never played much Vampire – our tastes tended more towards the heroic and optimistic, and we were mostly on the “nerd” side of the nerd vs. goth side of the WoD fandom spectrum. So when I finally had an idea for a one-shot and the rest of the group bit on the pitch, I came up with a house rule to try to prod folks into the right headspace to play one of the damned, which was simply that creating a new vampire wasn’t deterministic: even if you follow all the steps that would lead to someone joining the ranks of the undead, it wouldn’t work for everyone. The ones who did survive the process were the ones who, when faced with the choice between oblivion and life, even a harshly limited form of life centered on predation, in their heart of hearts – or heck, we’re talking about vampire fiction, we can say “soul” here – decided to take the deal. It was a simple tweak, but I thought a fairly idiosyncratic one, given that it was aimed at the specific foibles of my players. So I was completely flummoxed when, upon playing oxblood, I saw this discussion of the kinds of individuals who can become vampires:
There are people who are… predisposed. They’ve got that sense of perpetual unfulfillment. They float by. They don’t remember much. Essentially, their lives seem to be nothing and they feel themselves as being nothing. They’re a time bomb but they don’t know it yet. One day, something will happen to them — something that will make them feel for the first time. It’s always either profoundly beautiful or profoundly destructive. The outcome is always the same: the thirst for life.
That’s not the game’s other departure from the standard Dracula line: these vamps can walk around in the sunlight, can easily get enough blood without killing anybody, and don’t mind running water so long as it comes from plumbing. Sure, they avoid looking in the mirror, but that’s not because they can’t see their reflections, it’s because they don’t like what they’ll see, due to the tendency of their bodies to seem a bit corpse-like and identity-dissociation most tend to develop over the centuries.
I’m often wary when vampire fiction messes with the traditional formula, not due to a slavish adherence to dogma but just because it tends to undercut the drama – I get it, vampires are fun and they’re a more comfortable vector for exploring difference (especially queerness) if they’re not all mass murderers. But those changes can also mean a story is borrowing the trappings of angst without the actual danger; the human prejudice against vampires is often portrayed as irrational in these kinds of stories, a thoughtless hatred directed at a harmless minority. That’s a fine approach, but as I said, personally, I like my vampires to have more bite.
Fortunately for me, this is another place where oxblood is on my wavelength, because the point of these changes isn’t to let vampires off the hook: just the opposite. Again and again, it’s made clear that vampires don’t have to be monsters who are a threat to anyone who gets close to them. So when they are – and Ethel, the game’s protagonist, definitely is – that’s a choice they’re making, not something they can blame on an impersonal undead condition.
One part of what makes Ethel so compelling is that she goes through incredible mental and moral gymnastics to do exactly that, though. Here’s her Catholic-inflected thought process after she’s accidentally (“accidentally”) harmed her human lover, Erin:
Of course, she thought she didn’t deserve forgiveness from Erin but it was the only thing she wanted in that moment. It would feel so good to have all of her sins absolved; she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, after all, and biting is just her nature, so how could it be held against her?
But this doesn’t work out for her, because absolution requires sincere contrition, and Ethel is wallowing in bad faith:
It wasn’t and she knew it but admitting what it really was would be an admission of guilt. She couldn’t have that, no, she had to pretend to forget until she thought she forgot, until she led enough new lives to bury all her faults beneath them so she doesn’t have to confront herself.
This is the primary conflict of the game – almost everything Ethel does is aimed at escaping herself and sublimating her past. The title is even a reference to her tic of referring to blood as “(ink)” instead, an evasion one of the humans she feeds on even calls her out over. Much of the plot of the game also concerns itself with the process of her creating these “new lives” – we get flashbacks to a much earlier life, when she went be “Ethedread” and did something that appears to be unforgiveable, but also see her abandon being Ethel as she flees from the fallout with Erin, and adopts “Adele” as her new name.
This narrative business is compelling, especially as a psychomoral menage a trois develops between Adele, the aforementioned willing-blood-source, and another vampire named Virgil, who’s unique among his kind because he has faith that there’s a purpose to life. But ultimately it’s Ethel/Etheldread/Adele’s interior dynamics that make oxblood so successful. Much of the story is told via dialogue between several of her internal voices, with their lines often appearing as links you can click through to get more detail or background (this is where much of the lore is delivered). There’s one voice that’s perennially making excuses or trying to appeal to the audience to sympathize with poor Ethel – but there’s another that doggedly reiterates the rules, refusing to let her off the hook and making clear that at every moment Ethel is making choices. The possibility of accountability is the same thing as the possibility of grace, and it’s always, always present.
oxblood is the kind of choice-based game where I’m happy there’s no branching. It feels quite engaging, don’t get me wrong – if nothing else, there are lots of those optional links to explore – but the story is the story, and the last link on the page will lead you to the next one until you reach the end. That’s the right call, because this is a game about choices: but they’re Ethel’s choices, not yours.
13 Likes
recombinatorial, by 30x30
One of the things I like about my approach to reviewing IF is that it’s a prompt to think about games, to try to develop a take about what it’s doing or the craft by which it’s been put together. It’s fun to think about stuff rather than letting it passively wash over you, which is way too easy to let happen given all the distractions of modern life, and ideally it means I have some insight or analysis to share when I write things up – a couple of the reviews that I’m most proud of are basically just an attempt to construct a reading for a difficult game that some players might have bounced off.
The downside, though, is that sometimes a game just leaves me befuddled, which leaves me even more flummoxed about how to talk about it. Such is the case with recombinatorial, which has been percolating in the back of my head for the couple of days since I played it, as I wait, increasingly in vain, for something to click. Part of this is probably situational, as I’m a bit sick and my son’s preschool has been closed for a week, meaning I’m fuzzier and more distracted than usual. But part of it is that this is an elusive work, a downbeat prose poem about obsession, confusion, and disintegration with gorily compelling scenery. It also has a color scheme that’s surely intentionally off-putting and hard to parse, with links showing up dark brown on a black background.
Those links are very interesting, actually, and one of the key things I haven’t been able to figure out: they go white when you click them but don’t seem to lead to branches or other changes within the story, from the limited set of text comparisons I did, though from some comments on the game’s page perhaps the poem whose disintegration is the climax of the work varies based on which you clicked and which you ignored? I suppose I could experiment with that, but honestly, while it’s an effective ending I’m not sure I remember any of the specifics, it’s thick with portent, an impasto rendering of the dissolution of identity, but it was the vibes more than the particular words that stood out.
Not to say that the words in earlier parts didn’t stand out, though. As I said, there are some engaging images along the way, most involving blood and viscera:
They string up the criminals all Jesus-like here, dangling from long poles sunk in black sands. Soot, holy ashes on flayed martyr-skin.
…
Gore-frothed waves break on men and women marching to drag the butchery inland. They were not from here. Tore themselves apart, raised lances like lightning. Struck and became anew, fin and fang and beak and too-many-too-dark eyes. Images folding on images folding on images in the coiled gut-pattern spilt on the docks, kinked and curled message in their square-and-triangle script.
“Images folding on images folding on images” is a frequent refrain throughout, I think speaking to a sort of kaleidoscopic negation of meaning? And the equation of spilled intestines with language is clear enough, I suppose. But I’m not sure what to make of the other repeated phrase, “go north”. That’s the one link that visible does something, moving you to the next passage and retroactively reconfiguring the previous one (e.g. “North facing beaches, you wonder if they too felt they must. Go north.” Becomes “North facing beaches, you wonder if they too felt they must go north.") On a literal level, this is because the protagonist is traveling to the ends of the earth on their death-pilgrimage (the game specifically cites the way insects suffering from a fungal infection will travel large distances to climates more favorable to the fungus), but beyond that I’m drawing a blank – maybe that’s all there is?
So yeah, more question marks than usual for one of my reviews (did someone swap me for Victor Gijsbers?) It’s hopefully not too flippant to characterize the author’s typical formula as immaculately threatening vibes combined with queer melodrama, and I found without the latter part of the equation the vibes remain very compelling, but there’s a little less to hang onto, and proceedings are a little too enigmatic, for my personal taste.
9 Likes
A Quest in Time, by OlderTimer
Towards the western end of the Forum Romanum, the ancient heart of the Eternal City, tucked below the still-majestic ruins of temples, arches, and courthouses, lies the Lacus Curtius. It’s incredibly unassuming today – a random assortment of paving stones scattered around some divot-filled turf – but it wouldn’t have been much more imposing at the height of the Republic either; for the Lacus Curtius wasn’t a great edifice, but rather a sort of basin or wet pit, one of the last remaining bits of fen when the swamplands below the Capitoline Hill was drained. What makes it special? Even the Romans themselves weren’t quite sure. One story is that the spot was made sacred after it had been hit by lightning. Another, more involved, says that a great sinkhole once appeared at the site, threatening to swallow some of the most important buildings in the city, when an oracle said that the rift could be closed only if Rome’s greatest strength were sacrificed to it; a brave young soldier decided this must mean the bravery of a soldier (perhaps unsurprisingly) and jumped into the abyss, saving the day.
The last story is that some guy named Curtius got his horse stuck in the mud there one time.
There’s nothing especially special about the Lacus Curtius, all of this is to say, except for the fact that some people who lived a very long time ago thought it was special too. So in some ways, A Quest in Time, which is a game made almost entirely out of Lacus Curtiuses (I know that’s bad Latin, Daniel, sorry!), should be right up my alley (you will be unsurprised to learn that when I visited Rome on my honeymoon, I befuddled my wife by making a beeline for the aforementioned sump). This time-traveling adventure takes you to Rome in the last decades of the Republic, but also Athens as it catches its breath between flare-ups of the Peloponnesian War, London during the Plague Year, and more eras besides. But you’ll find no lovingly-described Acropolis or a version of the pre-Great Fire St. Paul’s conjured up with historical fidelity; there are temples and churches and marketplaces and all that, but the spaces are general rather than specific, workaday spaces that provide a bit of color to the puzzles, most of which involve decoding ciphers left behind for you by a rogue time-agent in order to figure out the spatio-temporal coordinates for your next destination.
Rather than offering a view of regular life in the past, a sort of quotidian temporal tourism, though, the effect is often just vague. Here’s a lawyer’s office in Restoration England, for example:
The room is arranged with a careful sense of order, its atmosphere one of a quiet formality. Everything appears to be kept in its proper place, just as if governed by rules not immediately visible. There’s a stillness here that suggests deliberation rather than neglect, and you get the impression that matters of consequence are conducted within these walls.
A certain degree of vibes-focused description can be a virtue in parser games, inasmuch as it conveys mood without creating a whole bunch of distracting scenery that takes a long time to implement and risks sending the player down blind alleys. And there are other locations that have a bit more concrete detail to them. But it’s not just the location descriptions, a similar sort of fogginess infects NPCs and their dialogue, and actually interactable objects and scenery. Too many parts of the game, especially in the latter half, fall prey to fuzziness, which dramatically undercuts the fun of hopping through history.
But back to the puzzles, which are the main focus of the game – though there is a reasonably robustly-written opening, it pretty much just boils down to “you’re a rookie time agent, someone’s gone missing and could be playing out their own agenda, so it’s up to you to track him down.” They’re a pretty classic lot, with a fair number of swap-item-X-to-NPC-Y-to-get-item-Z chains there mostly for pacing, and the aforementioned encoded-coordinates puzzles being the set-pieces. I found those to be a mixed bag; several work well enough, providing just enough resistance before you can figure out how to turn a bit of ASCII art or a scrawled message that appears to be about something entirely different into a six-digit number. But I had to go to the walkthrough to solve the first of them, and even seeing the steps required to solve it I still don’t understand what was going on. The sometimes-finicky parser also made a couple puzzles harder than they were probably intended to be – there are a lot of clues written in dead languages, which is fun, but the availability of the TRANSLATE verb really should have been better signposted, and getting the time machine to work took me way too long, largely because the keypad can’t be TYPEd on, nor can its buttons be PUSHED – only PRESSED.
While the environmental storytelling gets weaker as the game progresses, however, the puzzles get easier, and the throwaway plot from the intro starts to come back into play, leading to a late-game twist that recalls a major work in the IF canon for its climax. It’s a bold move, though not one I’m wholly convinced by (inviting comparisons with Trinity is probably a fool’s errand in general, and the specific method of sabotage contemplated here – stopping the Trinity test by blowing up a particular piece of equipment with a hand grenade – doesn’t seem like it would actually accomplish much, though in fairness there are indications that there’s some other timey-wimey stuff in play and it’s that, rather than the secrets of nuclear fission, that you’re trying to keep bottled up). There’s fun to be had with A Quest in Time, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help wishing it had committed to being the clearest, most compelling version of itself, rather than the decidedly thinner and more spread-out iteration we got.
Quest in Time MR.txt (204.5 KB)
9 Likes
The Woodcutter’s Quest, by Garry Francis
It sounds like the very definition of damning with faint praise to say that my favorite thing about The Woodcutter’s Quest is the wood. But actually I quite enjoyed my time with the game! It’s just that it’s intentionally rather straightforward, an implementation of a pedagogical example used in a how-to-design-adventure-games book – a book entitled, in fact, How to Design Adventure Games (by Shaun McClure) just to be clear how straightforward we’re being here. It’s charmingly simple to my taste, boasting Classic Text Adventure Premise #17: a wizard has kidnapped the rest of your village, so it’s up to you to journey through the forest to his castle and save them. There are several puzzles that involve giving food to animals, the descriptions are terse but communicative, and provide solid clues about to overcome obstacles, and the implementation is of the high standard I’ve come to expect from the author. And per the ABOUT text, there are even some bonus puzzles and extra bells and whistles belted onto McClure’s chassis.
All that makes for a solid game but one with few surprises, so like I said, the wood-forward nature of the adventure really stood out. I mean, sure, it’s right there on the tin, but I figured the whole “you’re a woodcutter” thing was just an excuse for having you be out in the forest when the wizard comes calling, and maybe start you off with an axe already in your inventory. But actually said axe can be used to chop a surprisingly large number of objects into kindling – sometimes usefully, sometimes just for stress-relief – there are plentiful opportunities to search around in wooden objects or furniture, a key early puzzle revolves around making a fire from wood… heck, the background of the game’s itch.io page is even a tessellated mosaic of sawn-through logs! It’s commitment to the bit, and also makes the game feel more simulationist without making any of its puzzles too complex, since one bit of wood can generally be substituted for another. So yeah, I was a fan of the wood.
As for things I wasn’t as much a fan of, well, that’s a shorter list. I was sad not to have found an alternate way past the goblin, though there might well be one and I was jut too thick to notice. Beyond that, I had to look up the full answer to the puzzle I mentioned above involving fire, because it relies on some pyrodynamic assumptions that I think aren’t right (surely in most cases throwing a jugfull of water on a moderately-sized fire will just produce some steam and maybe put out the fire, rather than producing smoke? For smoke you need wet wood, but burning the rotten wood didn’t get me smoke, and despite wrestling with the parser for quite a while I couldn’t convince it that I wanted to put any of my large pile of wood into the easily-accessible river to get it damp).
The fact that I just spent so much time quibbling about one small aspect of a puzzle is an indication of just how tight the game is overall – it’s a textbook example of the small-fantasy-text-adventure genre, and if along with praise for the effectiveness of the execution, that also suggests a cap on how exciting it can be, well, so it goes. I was more than happy to enjoy Woodcutter’s Quest for what it is – but also because if I squint at it, I can see the outline of a much weirder game that really goes whole hog on the woodworking angle. Maybe some newcomer turned onto IF by this game, or the book it’s riffing on, will take up the gauntlet? Stranger things have happened.
woodcutter mr.txt (91.1 KB)
10 Likes
Hey, you’re writing in English, not Latin; no need to be beholden to Latin’s rules! 
2 Likes
Dead Man’s Chest, by Garry Francis
In every event where I use a randomizer, I feel like there are at least one or two coincidences that prove that God does in fact play dice with the universe, and this time out the cosmic joke is that out of the combined list of 40 ParserComp and Review-a-Thon games, I wound up playing Garry Francis’s pair of ParserComp entries one after the other. What are the odds of that? Well, like 3 or 4 percent, I think, depending on the math I’m too lazy to attempt for the edge case where one of them is first or last on the list so it’s only got a single neighbor, rather than one on each side – which explains why when you’re randomizing 30-70 games stuff like this is bound to happen, I suppose.
But if Dead Man’s Chest and Woodcutter’s Quest were going to wind up back to back, I’m happy this is the order they landed in, rather than putting Woodcutter’s Quest second. Per my review, I enjoyed playing the earlier game, but it’s by design a simpler game, and adapted from another author’s initial plot and puzzle framework. So I was glad to get to chase it with a shot of the uncut stuff. Oh, the premise is still a classic one – it’s a treasure hunt through the abandoned manor of an old pirate captain (in fact the same captain from one of the author’s earlier games, in a nice bit of mythos-building) with all the secret passages, shipwrecks, and sandy coves that implied. But everything here is just a bit more robust and fleshed out – it’s specified that the mansion is empty because the captain’s last descendent died intestate, which for some obscure reason is a word I always love to hear deployed. For one example, careful attention has been paid to the geography and interconnections of what’s a reasonably large map, with a few optional puzzles providing a sense of how the pieces all fit together. For another, even small incidental descriptions are written to highlight what your character, a treasure-hunter on the make, would notice and do. Like, here’s the response to X PANELLING in an early room:
The panels are chipped and faded with age. You tap on them to check for any hollows where treasure could be hidden, but everything sounds solid.
For a game like this, though, all that stuff is secondary to the puzzles, and they’re a solid lot. There’s nothing that stands out especially, as the kind of thing you get up to is exactly the kind of thing you get up to in a pirate-themed text adventure: you push and prod the furniture to reveal the aforementioned secret passages, there’s business with ropes and locked roll-top desks, and even a (appropriately easy) riddle at the end. For all that they’re workmanlike, they reward careful observation, which made them often satisfying to solve.
That “often” covers up the one thing I’d critique about the game, which is the few occasions when I think Dead Man’s Chest prioritizes challenge over narrative coherence. The primary offender is the puzzle that opens up the secret passage I’ve mentioned a couple of times – I knew it was there, having noticed tell-tale grooves on the floor, but thought it opened from the other side as attempting to PUSH or PULL the relevant piece of furniture was an exercise in futility. After consulting a hint, though, I discovered that actually I was on the right track, but I’d needed to use the verb SLIDE instead of the more familiar alternatives I chose. This is arguably overly precious as a matter of general implementation, but also faintly ridiculous as applied to the actual situation – having seen the grooves the protagonist knew exactly which direction the wall was supposed to swing open, so what, they were just pushing perpendicular to that without deigning to mention that’s what they were doing? I ran into a similar issue with one of those optional puzzles mentioned above, where neither opening a curtain, re-checking the room description once it was open, or even explicitly typing LOOK BEHIND CURTAIN revealed that there was in a fact a new piece of scenery available (I was supposed to examine the wall instead). There’s a thin line between “puzzles that reward careful observation” and “mimesis-breaking pixelbitching,” I suppose, but these are a couple of places where Dead Man’s Chest runs afoul of it.
Still, I mention these issues largely just to flag them for potential tweaks in future releases, and to acknowledge them as exceptions to the rule. This is one of the best-designed and best-implemented iterations of one of the comfort-food IT setups, and even when I struggled with problems both of my own making and not, the helpful contextual hints quickly got me back on track. If you’re at all interested in old-school puzzlefests, this one’s a treat.
chest mr.txt (108.2 KB)
(By the way, @Warrigal, as I was posting this I noticed that I’d accidentally uploaded the walkthrough for Woodcutter’s Quest rather than my transcript – wanted to flagged that I’ve now corrected that in my earlier post)
12 Likes
Something in our heart, by Naaral and Coral Nulla
The paradox of linear games (by which I guess I mean non-branching, puzzleless ones) is that the best ones often give the player a lot to do. Games are all about player engagement, which can come in a lot of different forms, from trying to optimize your path through a narrative to fiddling around with complicated machinery, but most of the easy options are off-limits for a linear game. Clicking “next” to see what’s going to happen in a pre-baked story can certainly be interesting, don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of these things called “books” – but in an interactive medium, authors are often best served by seeing what else they can leverage.
Something in our heart is a good example of the benefits of thinking outside the click-to-continue box. As far as I can tell it’s completely linear (there are one or two passages where there are things you can click on or type in, but these are very much exceptions to the rule, and messing around with the optional bits and bobs doesn’t appear to change anything). But my brain, eyes, and hand were all kept quite busy, frankly more busy than they’ve sometimes been in an uninspired parser game with easy puzzles or a branching choice-based one with a trope-filled narrative.
First, the brain. The basics of the cyberpunk story here aren’t too hard to grok: the protagonist, who goes by the forum handle “Res Delicta” (more or less “offensive thing,” if I have my legal-Latin right [EDIT: no, it’s actually “Derelicta”, closer to “abandoned thing”, I can’t read]), is deeply alienated from their body and as a result does some deeply ill-advised experimenting with a definitely-not-under-warranty third-party consciousness-uploading rig. Once infused into silicon, Res encounters a ghost in the machine, which has some history of its own and is enticing and dangerous in more or less equal measure; they dance around questions of trust, with the ultimate resolutions of those questions having significant repercussions for themselves and others. But within this relatively grounded frame, the game is rich with detail, toggling nicely between deep abstractions and surprisingly grounded conversation (at one point Res, starting to get a hint of what the other mind has experienced, says “looks like you came with LORE” and yeah, I laughed), and doesn’t spell anything out especially cleanly. The narrative is also refracted through multiple viewpoints: the main pair, of course, but the story also gets told through threads on the aforementioned forum, EULAs, and even stranger materials. As a result, there’s a lot to do to fit together the different pieces of the kaleidoscope and assess the twists and turns as they’re presented.
Speaking of presentation, that leads to the eye and (mouse) hand bits, because we’re a far way from basic Twine here. I haven’t played a ton of Decker games, but I’m pretty confident that there are very few that take advantage of the platform’s capabilities to the degree Something in our heart does. There are windows and sub-windows, primitively-rendered computer graphics, and strange effects that distort the text (though not, crucially, past the point of readability, so of course I squinted my way through all of those). Progress usually just depends on clicking a button, but the button changes shape and moves around, and sometimes you need to type a letter instead. Each passage is like a bespoke art piece, requiring you to engage with the plasticity of its surface in order to extract its semiotic meaning and the way to move on. There are some repetitions, sure, like the recurring forum bits, but that’s inevitable for a game of this length (it took me about half an hour to play through) and often the familiar is being deliberately invoked just to set up a deeper rug-pull; the effect really is of a box of chocolates, with surprising new delights in continual supply.
It all adds up to an impressively complete package, a polyvalent cacophony with a clear structure and arc. And for all the trauma and dehumanization of the subject matter (did I mention Res prefers “it/its” pronouns?) I found it ended on an appropriately ambiguous, but still hopeful note, centering trust, connection, and the faith that tomorrow can be different from today – and that while different is definitely different, that can be good. It’s an experience that would only work as a game, and as a game, it works very well indeed.
13 Likes
The Krampus Case, by Kirk Damato and Sarah Willson
I am not at all a betting man, but if I were, I don’t think I’d ever find a safer wager than betting that somewhere, there’s a version of The Krampus Case that was an actual Advent calendar. See, as the title indicates, this is a Christmas mystery – Santa Claus has gone missing, captured by his archnemesis Arius the homoian heretic Krampus, and it’s up to you to find where he’s being imprisoned by interrogating elves, staking out the toy workshops, and maybe taking some time to see the North Pole’s sights in case a clue comes up. And the game’s structure is of a piece with its plot, because the way you do all those things is by picking one lead to run down per game-day, much like a child opens one calendar-door and consumes one chocolate each day of Advent. The about text even suggests you could play this way, starting on December 6 (right after Krampusnacht, which is when the crime goes down) and selecting a single path to play through each day before Christmas, when time of course runs out.
This isn’t to say that the Krampus Case is static. There’s only a limited amount of obvious interactivity – one of the 25 leads has to be unlocked by pursuing a certain other one first – but the game is full of subtle state-tracking, with plenty of nods to information you’ve already gathered or characters you’ve already met. There’s also a case notes feature that records the six clues as you find them, and a Christmas-Carol inspired timer system that sees you visited by increasingly-aggressive spirits bent on resolving your standard-issue Hard-Boiled-PI-backstory-angst before Christmas eve. And one of the leads (I’m not saying which) leads to a delightful minigame of sorts, which similarly appears to have a lot of flexibility in commenting on your performance.
The heart of the game is definitely just reading what’s behind each “door”, though, and with only six clues spready across four times as many options, you’ll be meeting failure more often than not, at least from a mechanical perspective. But for all that I never felt the need to skim; even when it was clear I’d followed a red herring, the good-natured writing and actually-funny jokes typically made me game to see what was in store. It also helps that you’re generally able to learn something, help someone, or otherwise make a difference pretty much anywhere you go, even if it doesn’t lead to a formal clue being added to your tally. Talking to the North Wind sees you politely ask if it’d mind sending its freezing-cold breath in some other direction when it talks, visiting the library reveals some wacky Christmas traditions from around the world – heck, you can even meet the Grinch’s reformed sidekick.
Things get slightly more serious when you resolve the case, which shifts into a short choice-based interactive vignette allowing you to resolve your deep-seated Christmas trauma; the lack of a save or undo feature means the stakes for this are surprisingly high, giving you the ability to push the simple plot rather farther off the rails than I was expecting. But all the endings are cute, and the choices allow you to cut the inevitable sentimentality of the ending with whatever touch of vinegar fits your taste.
While I had quite a good time with Krampus Case, there are some complaints I’d level – in particular, while the 20-days-to-Christmas structure is an integral part of the premise, I felt like the pacing did start to drag in the day 15-20 range. Similarly, while some clues are easier to find if you do some critical thinking about what earlier information you’ve uncovered is suggesting, much of the time I felt like I was making blind guesses, trying to decide whether the spa or the skating rink was a likelier source of clues. The vulnerability of high-concept experiences like this – it’s an Advent calendar that’s also a mystery game! – is always that the novelty runs out, and Krampus Case occasionally flirts with that line. But unlike a real Advent calendar, once you’ve gathered the requisite clues, you can trigger the endgame whenever you’d like, and even when the mystery felt like it was getting increasingly shaggy, I still enjoyed getting to hang with the various denizens of the North Pole.
All told I remain convinced there’s a paper-and-cardboard prototype of this game the authors used to delight their friends some Christmas Past, but the clever implementation and layering on of interactivity mean the game’s living in the Christmas Future, too. Now that’s quite a Christmas Present!
…shoot, that’s only three of the ghosts. Anyone know any puns for “Jacob Marley”?
11 Likes
My understanding is that delictus specifically means “committing an offense” in legal contexts (so in flagrante delicto and our modern word “delinquent”) but Classically it was more often “failing in one’s purpose” or “lacking something essential”. Etymologically it comes from something like “leaving an important piece behind” (dē “down, away, off” + linquō “leave, abandon”).
I dearly hope this IF exists at some point.
2 Likes
DEVIL’S LIMINAL, by Studio Interlude
I suppose I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, in an objective sense – each year sees at least a couple entered in the various annual comps and events, so even though I haven’t played any of the big, longform names, I’ve got at least a fair bit of exposure. But it’s definitely an area where I feel myself on unsure footing, and so when I find myself wishing DEVIL’S LIMINAL weren’t quite so slow-paced, I wonder whether I’m critiquing the game or the format. Like, it’s definitely the case that it takes its time to get going: this is a supernatural mystery, but the first hour of the 1.5 hour demo version is content to slowly establish the main character, a teenager spending one last summer at home in small-town Arizona before heading off to college, and her milieu, with only the slightest hints of plot. And while there are a few choices, they’re not especially engaging, largely amount to either picking lines of dialogue that all have to be exhausted to progress, or answering simple “do you want plot or not?” questions when a friend calls to ask you to hang out.
In a book or a traditional piece of IF, where you could read all the dialogue in its short scenes in one or two passages, I think that would work fine, and I actually might admire the commitment to sitting with the characters before the mystical shenanigans started. But in VN format, the need to click through each individual line of dialogue was generally enervating. Fortunately, I’ve played enough VNs to know the RenPy trick where you can just click a bunch to get through the timed text, and then scroll through it much faster the second time using the mouse wheel, which made things more bearable, but I’m still worried that my concerns about pacing are an artifact of my unfamiliarity with VN conventions.
Even leaving that big question aside, there’s both a lot to enjoy and a lot to critique with DEVIL’S LIMINAL, though I come down more on the former side than the latter. Just to get the rest of the VN-specific conversation out of the way first, I’ll note that the visuals are very well done. Just about every character has an expressive, lightly-animated drawing representing them, with the exceptions (largely your mother, who is never directly depicted) pretty clearly intentional. The backgrounds, meanwhile, look to be photos fed through an early-Macintosh filter, evocative in black-and-white dithering. I often find the fact that 2/3 of the screen in a VN is mostly static kind of annoying, but DEVIL’S LIMINAL makes good use of the real estate, frequently shifting locations or bringing character icons on or off screen, with visuals that largely complemented the text.
That’s helpful because sometimes the text withholds a bit more than I think it should. For all that the game takes its time introducing Margo (the main character), her family, her work situation, her friends (including some new ones), and her backstory, it doesn’t provide context for much of what’s happening, allowing interactions to play out without always letting the player know about the dynamics beneath the surface. Sometimes that’s a reasonable choice – there’s clearly some Big Deal with Margo’s dad, and the game seems to be building up to a set of reveals that I suspect will land pretty well – but I was annoyed that it took two long scenes of interacting with Lee, the first of which seemed pretty innocuous, to learn that he was Margo’s dirtbag ex. And there’s a scene about an hour in, right when supernatural stuff starts getting weird, that talks about how she’s always yearned to be special, some kind of chosen one, and live in a world of demons and monsters, which feels like important characterization that’s just nowhere in play before that moment, aside from a couple glancing comments like saying that if she wrote a comic book, she’d want there to be vampires in it.
The characters and the setting are similarly both mostly good, with some less successful elements marring the picture. The cast is generally appealing, especially Bec, a new friend who turns out to actually share some history with Margo, with engaging dialogue that helps keep the slower scenes moving. My only cavil is that there are a couple of characters who are just wearing giant “bad guy” hats, coming off much flatter than the others: the aforementioned Lee is one of them, but the mother is even worse, a vicious, unpleasant caricature of a human being. Melodrama needs stock villains, I suppose, but especially in that more naturalistic first hour, I felt some whiplash between the author’s effort to carefully sketch in Margo’s personality, and the whirling black hole of motiveless malice that is her mom (the fact that it seems like some of her behavior may be driven by OCD, but that’s never directly addressed or interrogated, also doesn’t feel great). It could be that the non-demo portion of the game adds some nuance, of course!
As for the setting, the strip-mall wasteland of a small town in the American Southwest is generally well realized, with attention paid to the flora and fauna. One detail struck me as jarringly ill-chosen, though, which is the blasé way the characters talk about the heat: like, I’ve been in Arizona a couple times when it was 110 degrees, that’s not a mild inconvenience that makes your walk to work slightly uncomfortable, it’s an assault by an angry God that can leave you dead if you stray too far from air conditioning.
But these complaints are getting more minor as I go, so I’ll repeat that but for the pacing, I found a lot to like in DEVIL’S LIMINAL – and even that was starting to pick up as I got to the end of the demo and the plot began to kick in. Honestly, if this were a traditional piece of IF I’d be tempted to try the full game to see where things ultimately go. Since it isn’t, and I’m not really a VN person at the end of the day, I’ll count myself content with the piece of the experience I got, and allow myself to imagine the places it might go – imaginings that show up a full page of text at a time.
10 Likes
Sleepless in the Sapphire City, by Coral Nulla
This is really very good.
I know my schtick is usually to dress things up, do some tapdancing with a barely-related personal anecdote or set up a joke that pays off at the very end, or at minimum lay the groundwork for judgment instead of just announcing it. But here we are – and I’m saying this about a linear Twine game that uses vampirism as a not-even-thinly-veiled avenue to talk about loss, alienation, dysphoria, and the compromises we make to get through what we optimistically call our lives, at the level of concept there’s not much about Sleepless in the Sapphire City that’s very interesting, much less novel, at all.
The secret sauce, unsurprisingly, is the writing. I copied at least half a dozen full passages from the game into my notes, since they stand on their own as tiny poems and I wanted to be able to read them again. Here’s one of the first, and one of my favorites:
We say it’s dark
but look at that:
midnight
and the sky glows.
It’s not a haiku, metrically speaking, but it does everything you want a haiku to do. It’s also a nice bit of exposition, because the sky isn’t just bright at night due to ambient light pollution, but because the game takes place in a world with two moons, reflecting double the sunlight at the unhappy vampires below. That’s not just pointless worldbuilding, though, because that in turn sets off a rumination from the main character, who wonders if somewhere there’s a universe with one moon that’s more peaceful, because people can sleep better at night and the oceans are calmer. It’s got the structure of a joke, but also serves as a thematic reminder that one person’s worst-case status quo is another’s yearned-for escape.
Here’s another one:
I’m too aware
of where I live
I don’t say
“I live in a body”
I should say
“I live in a box
stacked up with other boxes
in a whole mountain of boxes
all the same
all different
and I’m a letter
in a word
in a sentence
on a page
in a newspaper
on a film reel
in a library
on a street of libraries
and we used
to be a novel”
I should say that
if I could speak to anyone
without leaving bite marks.
Reduced to its semantic content this is trite, but with these words and this meter, it’s a devastating statement of alienation and isolation.
I should say that the game isn’t all vibes and self-contained poems. Actually, there’s a reasonable amount of infodumping about bespoke vampire lore, but mirabile dictu, it’s actually a unique spin that updates the tropes while maintaining close ties to the traditions that birthed them. The cleverest bit here is the take on vampiric weaknesses: it’s not sunlight but the blue light of LCD screens that’s anathema to the undead, leaving them cut off from the screen-mediated society of humans; the symbols of faith that harm vampires are no longer religious ones, but corporate brand logos; and it’s not literal stakes but stakeholders, that is, connection with people who give a damn, who are the deadliest danger. Again, this has the shape of a joke, but is actually a canny way of repositioning the relationship between the vampiric protagonist and the elements of the living world, both good and bad, that will harm them, turning the logistics of managing an undead life into something more broadly resonant, into mythology.
There’s a plot too – it’s simple in its outlines, but effective, taking the protagonist from a childhood idyll through bereavement before ending in a squalid, heartbreaking climax. Or actually, not ending there, because my only complaint about Sleepless in the Sapphire City is that after it builds to a searing turning point, it keeps going for another ten minutes, with those final minutes largely return to the register of the opening, rather than sitting with the enormity of what’s happened. From a certain point of view, that’s thematic – pretending that a just-committed crime is no big deal is a classic coping strategy, after all, as is pretending that sleeping with someone you just slept with was likewise no big deal, and protagonist’s just done something that partakes of both those things – but I still found it a little disappointing.
That ending is a real weakness, but I minor one, I think. I return to where I started this review: Sleepless in the Sapphire City is really very good, exactly the reason why I keep coming back to IF decade after decade.
8 Likes
This is an absolutely interesting angle to take and it’s very fitting when it comes to Res… but Res didn’t call itself Res Delicta, but Res Derelicta, which is, to my best understanding, property voluntarily abandoned by its owner and therefore, nobody’s property. There’s a bit of a text in there (which was purposefully rendered somewhat unreadable/barely readable through the presence of a textbox in a way and static effect) that says:
…and the chair I’m in has been taken from the side of the road, one of those sad sights with a wet pathetic cardboard sign that says FREE, paint flaking off of warped wood. res derelicta, the abandoned thing, the one previous owners didn’t want to have anymore because of how much they didn’t need it
6 Likes
Lol, here I thought us natives were the only ones that might clock this. I like to remind folks that a ‘dry heat’ is what ovens use ALL THE TIME.
1 Like
Thanks for the correction, I’ll make a tweak above! My brain just jumped on what it was expecting to see, I guess (“res” comes up in legal contexts a bunch too)
To the day I die, I will remember getting out of a car in a Waffle House parking lot in Phoenix and realizing “oh this is what they mean by saying you could fry an egg on the pavement, that would definitely work right now.”
5 Likes
So to speak.
*‘it’ being ‘Woodcutter’s Quest’
2 Likes
Blossom, NY, by alyshkalia (Tabitha)
OK, now for the first installment in a series that we’ll occasionally dip into through the remainder of the Review-a-Thon:
Wait, Did I Beta Test This?
See, I have beta tested a fair number of games, and I got no more than a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep at a time when my son was in his baby-to-toddler phase, meaning that my medium-term memories of like 2022-4 come in obscure glimpses rather than a coherent whole. But when I saw the name “Blossom, NY” pop up on my to-play list, suddenly I recollected testing a game by the author set in upstate New York, where you used a Google Maps type interface (maybe it was literally Google Maps?) to follow pointers from one historical building to the next, learning more about the architecture and personalities at each stop.
It was a fun way of exploring local history, so I was excited to come back around to it and give it a go in something more closely resembling my right mind – only to discover that No, I Did Not Beta Test This. I’m pretty sure it’s set in the same town hamlet, with the same general theme, but the presentation is more traditional, as it takes the form of an illustrated travelogue narrated by (a version of) the author, implemented in Twine with links alternately progressing to a new site, or providing footnote-type explanations that go into topics discussed in the main text in more depth.
I’m still a fan, though! Like here’s a tip, if you want maximize your chances of getting a good review from me, you can’t go wrong by including a passage entitled “Municipal Divisions of New York State.” And as I read it I couldn’t help noting that it’s pretty northeast-focused, since the “township” model it discusses doesn’t hold in most of the west, where there are lots of unincorporated communities within counties rather than literally everything being attached to some sub-county level division. But nerding out in this very specific way is a lot of fun to me, especially when it’s paired with cool photos and background on the German sect that occupied the town for a decade before deciding that thing were getting too worldly and moving on. There’s a well-preserved mill, and old bridges, and 19th-century houses incompetently updated to modern standards! And the author’s inconclusive detective work aiming to uncover the origin of the town’s name is so great I’m surprised it was relegated to optional, red-link status.
There’s not much of a narrative here – as I said, it’s pretty much a tour, and a short one given that the town only occupies about two streets. There’s no grand drama revealed in the past, just an accumulation of migrations (some voluntary, some forced: this was Seneca land originally, and then one of their reservations, before being displaced), fires, and renovations. I didn’t mind any of that, my only critique is that I wish the game had been longer, and went even deeper, since I was having such a good time; I dimly remembered other buildings and other anecdotes from the Google Maps version I actually tested, and wanted to hear more about the rivalry between the German Evangelicals and German Lutherans, or what kind of stuff the gift shop that moved into the old lightning-struck church building sells.
Blossom isn’t anyplace special in the scheme of things, I’m sure you could make a game equally compelling about any of five hundred other towns in New York. But that’s the point, to my mind – every place has its stories worth telling, and this is a great formal for telling them.
11 Likes