I am appalled that you somehow composed an entire review without invoking the hallowed name of Glumpus? Truly the most underrated blob diva of them all.
6 Likes
my baby needs blood, by crotovane
I’ve been to a lot of communications trainings over the years – I work in policy advocacy, so the topic of how to use words to persuade people is kind of important – and there’s one hangup that pretty much always throws somebody in the group. See, comms professionals will often distinguish the message – what you are trying to get across – from the story – what you actually say. But for some people, there’s a disconnect because they don’t get why you wouldn’t just say the thing that you’re trying to get across? Like, if the message on health care reform is that if we rein in insurance company greed sick people won’t go bankrupt, isn’t that what we should trumpet from the rooftops? But of course that’s not how human beings work. Sure, some people will nod along, but those are mostly the folks already on your side. Tell a story about a specific, actually-existing sick person who actually experienced these things, talk about how it felt, what exactly they did, drawing out the message like the moral from a fable – that’s what will actually move people.
my baby needs blood has an interesting message, but I wish its author had sat through one of those trainings and made it more of a story. The setup here is definitely novel; the protagonist is an Ainu (I think, from googling some of the proper nouns) woman living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Her partner is deeply unwell, and depends on her to bring him food, and especially the wineskins full of blood that he’s sure will bring him back to health. At the same time, he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want a family the way he does; if nothing else, surely extra hands will help lighten her burden, once the children are grown? As she goes back into the woods and reflects, she encounters, or thinks she encounters, a creature that maybe be the goddess of hunting and motherhood – or may be her demonic doppelganger, who impersonates the goddess, pretending even to have a child, only to lure hunters to her and drink their blood.
The dramatic questions are clear, and have an appealing mythic resonance: the woman is sure she doesn’t want to be a mother, so while her partner sees her as the fecund, all-providing goddess, she’s worried she’s actually the demon. Meanwhile, he also says he needs blood, but the game’s text emphasizes that he’s relying on tradition – and a specifically paternal tradition – rather than direct knowledge, so perhaps this violently-slaked thirst isn’t a real need, just something imposed by the patriarchy much as the expectation of childbearing is?
When I type it all out like that, it sounds pretty cool! But while the game doesn’t state matters quite so baldly, it doesn’t do much to dress these dilemmas up into a story, either. The plot doesn’t really progress, for one thing, ending well before any of these conflicts begin to resolve themselves, and there’s no interactivity to foster player engagement. For another, detail that would help make the characters feel more human remain frustratingly undeveloped, including the all-important question of why the narrator feels the way she does about having a child. The prose is also frequently a bit awkward and unconvincing. For example, there’s a reference to the protagonist’s mother having read her stories when she was a child, which seems implausible for a hunter-gatherer culture (a quick google indicates that the Ainu language doesn’t actually have a written form, just being transliterated into other scripts once other cultures came into contact with them). And this excerpt contains the nugget of a compelling idea, but conveys it awkwardly, at least to my ear:
We can only adapt to [winter]; weapons serving for where we lack strength, wardrobe for where we lack fur. But no matter the arrowheads I carry or the layers I dress, I still feel these shivers.
The counterpoint to these complaints is that the story of my baby needs blood isn’t in the text – it’s in everything else. Because this is a multimedia production, with monochrome-blue, downsampled videos of a frosty landscape lending substantial ambience to proceedings, and character portraits in the same vein theoretically providing additional emotional heft to the dialogue. While I didn’t play the game with sound on, intermittent black screens that persisted for a few seconds made me think that there’s an audio layer too. It’s all admittedly very well done, but there’s also a price to be paid for all those bells and whistles, which is that there’s a delay on every word the game displays, which quickly began to feel excruciating.
For some players, of course, that will feel like a quite modest admission-cost given the cool vibes on display, finding the audio-visual tapestry provides a richly evocative context for the words. But I like text games because I like text; I want the theme to be dressed up in words, not pictures or sounds, no matter how artfully produced they are.
8 Likes
WWII Elevator Escape, by Kenneth Pedersen
Titles are one of the many things I struggle with when writing my own IF, so I always perk up when I come across one that seems to scoff at the idea that naming stuff is hard. What could the game about escaping from an elevator during World War II possibly be called other than WWII Elevator Escape? Admittedly the “WWII” part is a bit superficial. Per the opening story, you’re a member of the German Resistance who’s just gathered a key bit of intelligence by attending a meeting with Hitler while undercover – now your cover’s been blown and you need to get to the roof and parachute off it to make it to the rendezvous point. But as for the elevator escaping, yeah, you’ll be spending most of your time on that.
This is a short parser puzzle game that runs on a tight timer, with Nazi guards gunning you down unless you do everything right. And friend, you are not going to do everything right. There’s zero margin of error: if the elevator dallies too long on one floor, the bad guys are likely to tromp up the stairwell and gun you down. If you just try to ride the elevator straight up to the roof, unknowing passengers are likely to stymie your efforts (and tell the guards which way you were going when they last saw you). You do start with a couple of potentially-helpful items in your inventory, and some relatively straightforward puzzles will allow you to manipulate some of the elevator’s features in your favor. But sussing out how you can evade the Nazis, and then coming up with the step-by-step implementation of that plan, is intentionally difficult.
I do sometimes like these kinds of trial-and-error optimization puzzles, and I did get some enjoyment from figuring out how the well-implemented elevator’s different mechanisms worked. The prose is also clean and focused, providing detailed feedback on exactly what’s happening in each turn. But I couldn’t for the life of me get a handle on what I should be trying to do – no matter what I tried, the Nazis always got to the roof just ahead of me (the fact that many parser errors make time advance made this extra frustrating). Fortunately, there’s a hint system, because I’ll admit that while the solution makes sense in retrospect, it relies on a couple of leaps of logic, as well as a nonstandard command I don’t think most parser systems accept by default, so I doubt I ever would have gotten it.
Luckily for my self-esteem, actually parachuting off the roof once you arrive requires solving a second, smaller puzzle, that likewise relies on timing and idiosyncratic commands, but here I had a much easier time understanding the assignment and the obstacles, and the use of the nonstandard verb was more directly prompted. It still took a fair bit of trial and error to complete, but nothing a bit of UNDOing didn’t solve. The challenge of a game as focused as this one is that if the player isn’t sufficiently motivated by what’s on offer, they won’t commit to the many, many deaths required to make progress. But if that’s the case, you can’t say the title isn’t fair warning – this is a game that does exactly what it says on the tin.
elevator mr.txt (52.9 KB)
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My read is that the protagonist is trans (although lacking that language of course); they have a strong negative reaction to gendered terminology and the idea of being in a wife/mother role, while having an affinity with the demon who uses a female identity as a disguise but is not actually a woman.
3 Likes
Yeah, that’s one of the interpretations that occurred to me, as it fits some aspects of the game quite well, as you point out – on the other hand, it’s in some tension with the way the partner blithely talks about having children, unless he’s either unaware of that aspect of her identity, or aware and just being cruel, maybe? Though it’s kind of odd that he seems to suggest that kids could help with their desperate situation, when of course to go from newborn to helpful-around-the-house takes many many years, so maybe he’s talking about adoption, rather than childbearing, which could reinforce that reading while raising other questions about how exactly the protagonist does understand herself and her role, and what, if anything, she’d change about about them.
All that stuff could make for a good story, I think 
3 Likes
Lilac Song, by Autumn Chen
I’m hoping that by the end of the Review-a-Thon, someone will write up Lilac Song without having played Social Democracy; it’s impossible for me to view it as anything other than a coda to that earlier game, but I’m intensely curious what someone unaware of the save-the-Weimar-Republic strategy hit of 2024 would make of it. Unlike that Brobdingnagian triumph, Lilac Song is relatively slight; it’s a short choice-based work where you play a servant puttering around in the household of Otto Braun, the chief executive of the German state of Prussia. The main thing to do is consider making some tweaks to a board game you’re developing to explore the highly dynamic political situation, but before you can spend much time on that hobby the newspaper arrives, announcing a right-wing power play of the kind you’ve spent so much time anticipating via your game.
The game, of course, is an analog version of Social Democracy, a tool the protagonist is using to try to understand the threat Weimar’s enemies pose, and how, if at all, they can be stopped. But while SD’s pleasures are all about exploring a confidently-presented simulation, these segments in Lilac Song are all about anxiety – you fret about your assumptions, consider making changes to the numbers and then second-guess yourself, growing increasingly worried that these simplified mechanics mask the way you’ve piled one uncertainty atop another…
There’s a reading of Lilac Song where it’s simply about the anxiety of authority, an attempt to draw back the curtain on a game that broke containment and surely had some of its players feeling sure they could have beaten the Nazis after playing it a couple of times. And sure, that’s part of what’s going on, but I don’t think that exhausts what the LS has to offer, slight as it is.
For one thing, it humanizes the grand sweep of history dramatized by SD. In addition to futzing with the game, you can listen to music or look at some art, which provides some texture to the cultural blossoming wiped away by the Nazi’s reactionary aesthetics. So, a fortiori, does the identity of the protagonist – though the century-old words and concepts she uses are of course different, she’s a trans woman who’s managed to achieve a life with some dignity, due to the liberalization of Weimar’s science and politics. But beyond clarifying the stakes, this zooming-in to the personal level is also a reminder that history is not a bloodless game. The climactic scene sees the protagonist begging Braun – whose ability to leverage Prussia as an independent power base makes him a very impactful presence in games of SD – to take action to oppose this right-wing overreach. But Braun is old and tired, and much as the protagonist dithers over the stats on her game-pieces, he lacks the courage of his convictions:
Otto shakes his head. “The police will obey the constitutional authorities. We do not have the legitimacy to order the police against the Reich government.”
“Then what were all the Republican purges and hires for?”
“To defend the constitution against those who would overthrow it, as you are suggesting now.”
It’s not hard to detect here the voice of certain accommodationists quick to reconcile themselves to Trump’s second electoral victory, or just those too worn out by a decade of resistance to haul themselves off the mat to do it all over again. As Yeats wrote of the apocalypse, “the best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity” – analysis, intelligence, empathy can all feel feeble against the brute action of the fascist.
One could swerve to find completely different resonances with the modern world, though: the warning that even a sophisticated simulation is at best a series of guesses, weighting uncertainties towards an outcome that seems plausible given all that’s come before but might not be able to adapt to fundamentally changed circumstances is also resonant in an age where an increasing number of people view LLMs as oracles (I was in a meeting last week where a colleague said that many of her friends asked ChatGPT how they should vote in our recent primary election).
Lilac Song provokes a lot of reflections, it’s fair to say – and it’s a mirror rather than an oracle, providing no answers to the myriad questions to provokes. But that’s very much the province of art, which is more valuable when creating ambiguities than creating certainties, and always insisting on the human.
7 Likes
Saintsridge Angels, by Atreyu Celestine
The greatest gift God ever bestowed on writers was editors (I could certainly use one). And while I’m not one to venerate the old days, this is one area where I think the 80s have us beat: the peer-review and testing regimen of Infocom (and its competitors, to a lesser degree), combined with the discipline imposed by brutal memory limits, means that at least some games of that era had a critical eye cast upon every single word they offered up to a player’s delectation. Now, however, the profligacy of functionally-unlimited storage and bandwidth, combined with an IF-scene development culture that sees the role of early players more as testers for errors than partners in sharpening a work, mean that most authors are mostly flying solo on the key questions of what they’re trying to do with a game, and whether they’ve written the right words, and the right number of words, to accomplish it.
This intro is (now that I think about it, somewhat ironically) my attempt to soften my critique of Saintsridge Angels by identifying its primary fault as something structural rather than idiosyncratic – but while it’s certainly not alone in this, rarely have I played a game where I’ve spent so much time wishing there was less of it. There are definitely some high points here, as well as some other flaws, but all of them are drowned under a torrent of text, with the narrative loath to skip over any but the most quotidian event, and unsure why you’d write just one sentence when you could add two or three more on top of them. Like, here’s an excerpt from the game’s opening, the moment when it should be working hardest to hook the player:
After washing up, I walk downstairs and go to the kitchen, swinging open the pantry and untwisting the half-empty loaf of bread inside. I take out a slice, and put it in the toaster, pushing it down with a struggling click.
I twist the loaf’s wrapper back up and toss it on the counter, then I kneel down and open my mini-fridge. Damn it, I’m out of butter. Okay, I guess this works.
I sit on the counter, and stare at the wall while I wait for the toast to cook.
…
…
…Did I forget to lock the door last night?
In partial defense of this passage, it’s at least establishing that the protagonist is kind of careless – but by this point the game’s already noted that he forgot to do his laundry, and upon realizing he was running late for class, he shrugged and decided to have a leisurely breakfast instead of booking it. And this molasses-slow intro is hardly the worst offender: there’s a sequence where the protagonist and his new roommates are playing a board game that goes into exhausting detail, down to loving descriptions of individual pieces, then another where they’re attending a dance recital where the writeups of the five warmup dances go on so long that they completely undercut the impact of what should the climactic, final one – I was just desperate for the sequence to end by the time it arrived. Oh, and the protagonist takes like five pages struggling to solve the chicken-grain-fox brainteaser. If the text were tighter and more inventive, this IF-equivalent of slow cinema could be a risky but rewarding choice, I suppose, but the writing here is generally workmanlike; the author does a reasonable job investing the six main NPCs with their own voices, and there are a few memorable images scattered here and there as the plot gets into more overtly supernatural territory, but I confess it wasn’t enough to keep me from skim-reading my way through many of the longer sequences (this is maybe a relevant point to note that I played the “demo” version of the game – based on the plot progression, I’m guessing that the final version will be at least twice as long).
I’m now almost 700 words into the review and haven’t actually gotten into the aforesaid plot (now you know how it feels!) About the only thing I know about harem anime is the basic setup – one dude who’s living with several attractive ladies with color-coded hair and personalities – but that’s still enough to identify the tropes being leveraged here. You’re a college guy who bumps into an old friend he hasn’t seen in a couple of months one day on campus, at which point she says her sorority sisters are looking for a guy to live with them, and lucky you, you’ve got the nod. While there’s at least one reasonably-explicit sex scene, this isn’t a pornographic game by any means – you’d need to work your way through a looooot of other stuff to get your rocks off – but there’s an unreality to the premise that I found I struggled to shake off, made harder by the fact that there are a lot of details that don’t ring true. There’s an early mention of “California’s notoriously erratic weather patterns”, for example, and the protagonist makes a point of emphasizing that this highly-selective school, one of the best in the state, has professors who are repetitive and “incredible noise machines. I guess I can’t blame them, there’s only so much you can say when you’re no more passionate about your syllabus than your students are.”
Well, you might reasonably object, maybe these aren’t so much inconstancies as intentional signs that the protagonist is an inattentive asshole. Maybe! He’s certainly got a lot of unappealing qualities, like a tendency to call his new roommates “bitch” at the drop of a hat, or one of his first conversation options with one of them being literally either “flirt” or “talk down to her” (the “flirt” options ends with you saying “fuck you” to her). He also flat-out asks another “is your family poor”. In fairness, most of the NPCs are pretty bad on this score too – it’s established early-on that one of them hates the nickname “Peppermint”, but almost all the rest of them use it, on top of using the b-word for each other and smacking each other pretty much continually.
The game does eventually provide a rationale for some of this bad behavior, though. The protagonist is anemic, and spent much of his childhood subject to attacks of weakness that left him depending on the aforementioned old friend. In addition to creating some dependency and sublimated resentment, my take is that it also left him feeling like he has to preemptively push others away before his disability makes them feel pity or revulsion. That’s not an especially novel dynamic – the first Thomas Covenant book came out like fifty years ago – but it’s a reasonable one, and if it’s not explored much in what I played, well, maybe that’s part of what the yet-unreleased back half of the game will get into, but at least the latter stages of the current installment started to see the protagonist lower his off-putting defense mechanisms a bit.
Those sections of the game also brought the supernatural elements to the fore. So as it turns out, each of your roommates is haunted by a demon, and the main action of the game involves saving them from these personifications of grief or addiction or guilt. Much like the rest of the game, these sequences go on far too long while simultaneously jumping around without much logic, but they do provide some much-needed action as well as offering a bit of depth to flesh out the initially-caricatured NPCs. There’s also a bit of gameplay inasmuch as some of your choices will lead you to a bad ending, though there’s always an undo button to take you back before you doomed yourself (there are some choices in the “regular” parts of the game, too, but they largely just allow you to pick which of the girls you want to hang out and strengthen your “bond” with).
What’s also interesting is that all these sequences involve you suffering horrific violence, and in at least two out of the three included in the demo, end with you martyring yourself on behalf of the girl you’re trying to save, exposing yourself to stabbings, dismemberments, and even shooting yourself under dream-logic rules that allow you to eventually recover. Adding in the dependent dynamic he had with his childhood friend made me sit up and take more notice, and the there’s a telling detail in the sex scene – which involves the sorority’s queen bee taking control, shoving you on the bed, and grinding on your lap – that gave the game away:
As I revel in her plush, maternal figure…
(This lady is like 22, and per the art about the waifiest anime waifu you’ve ever seen, for the record).
So yeah, our hero is a masochistic sub who’s super into dommy mommies, which to be honest is kind of a cool, unique concept for a protagonist who gets to save the day and be in these big action scenes, though it does somewhat reinforce the impression that Saintsridge Angels is a porn game without the porn.
I’ve banged on for more than long enough here, but having spent two days bingeing the game, would I sign up for more once it’s finished? Actually, the cast did wind up growing on me, I am curious where the protagonist’s arc is eventually going, and since it is the case that the last couple of chapters were noticeably leaner (though not actually lean by any objective measure), so despite all the critiques I’ve levied above, yeah, I think I might. But I sure wish the author could find an editor in the meantime.
7 Likes
A Train to Piccadilly, by Marco Innocenti
I would like to say that it is my decades of IF experience that allowed me to suss out the subtle gradations of influence that gave rise to A Train to Piccadilly. But after you get through the linear prologue, you’re given a choice of three objects that will whisk you to different times and places, one of which plays host to a conspicuously-placed jigsaw puzzle. And if that’s somehow too recondite a reference, the third of those objects is straight-up just a copy of Trinity.
So what we’ve got here is an entry in the canonical-but-rarely-attempted genre of romp-through-puzzle-filled-historical-and-allegorical-vignettes. Despite the idyllic title, the story starts in a post-apocalyptic past, with the triumph first of Hitler and then of Stalin has cast all of Europe under a totalitarian pall far worse than the historical Iron Curtain (…don’t even ask about the U.S.). You play a member of a resistance movement, whose mission is to collect far-flung artifacts in hopes of somehow correcting the moment when the timeline got out of joint.
This isn’t laid out in po-faced infodumps, thankfully – the game throws you into a deadly situation from the get-go (there are a lot of action sequences, many of them quite tricky, but UNDO will get you through them), and then dispenses worldbuilding sparingly, relying on the player to put the pieces together from isolated documents, strange encounters with people who know more than they’re saying, and the odd cutscene. Sure, there is one bit where a superior provides something resembling a briefing, but it’s got more in common with a Dostoevsky novel than a traditional pre-mission psych-up:
Confused, I ask: “…and where are we?” In the Berlin underground doesn’t seem to be the right answer.
“Nowhere, and at no time. Or, perhaps, in all places and at all times. A question of splitting hairs.”
The writing is really good throughout, actually, not encumbering the puzzles with excessive ornamentation but providing plenty of evocative details. Here’s a bit of scenery for the opening scene, which underlined the physical misery of living in this world:
Tents and curtains stretched between buildings, forming a series of overlapping levels—I imagine they were once used to dampen the rain. Unfortunately, now, while good for hiding, they are useless for the purpose for which they were erected. Water cascades in torrents from one tent to the next, amplifying the downpours on the ground.
It quickly becomes clear that this is a puzzle-forward game, however. Each of the three main branches has a distinctly different area of focus: one is a single multi-step puzzle-hunt style conundrum involving exotic methods of decoding and recoding information, one is a set of musical variations on a theme, and the last requires traversing a series of environmental puzzles to make progress through a hostile area. I don’t want to go into too many details because they’re almost all very good, with the puzzle-hunt one especially impressing me with its elegance. I did find it the toughest, however, and was glad for the existence of invisiclues linked off the game’s IFDB page.
While they’re uniformly well-designed, though, they’re not always integrated into the story. The hostile-environment branch I think does the best job of grounding its challenges in diegetic reality (and perhaps as a result, I managed to get through it without any hints, even a tricky-in-retrospect password-guessing bit). The music one is more equivocal, with some implausible elements like a song-generating staircase running through a castle being used as a torture prison, though this branch does have some neat thematic elements, like the way your reuse of apples in multiple solutions echoes the theme-and-variation mode of musical composition. And for all that I admire the elegant way the strands of the puzzle hunt come together, I have not the foggiest idea how any of it can be justified in narrative terms – it feels like a really well-done crossword crashing into the narrative and daring the player to say boo.
As for that narrative, while I found it ran decidedly second-place to the puzzles, it’s pretty fun in its own right. The nonlinear, mystery-box storytelling and effectively dystopian picture of a triumphant Soviet empire make each plot point feel urgent and compelling when it comes. I confess that I didn’t find the last revelation especially plausible – come on, Churchill is cool and all but there’s no way assassinating him before he became PM would let Hitler win – but I suppose it’s the nature of the genre to focus on key, personalized turning points in history. Even if it’s a more correct take, “Allied victory in WWII was guaranteed given the inability of the Axis to target the U.S.’s overwhelmingly large industrial base” doesn’t really lend itself to dramatic scenarios where one person can suddenly shunt the future into an entirely different track. That’s only one of the many reasons why this subgenre is so tricky to get right, and, I suspect, why we’ve seen so few authors make a run at it in recent decades. Kudos, then, to Train to Piccadilly for calling its shot, and for nailing so much of the follow-through.
train mr.txt (275.4 KB)
7 Likes
Bael’s Rock, by Alex Halver
After I finished Bael’s Rock, I turned to the walkthrough – a document with which I’d become well-acquainted – to see if I could solve a multi-step Easter Egg that requires finding a series of clues across the game’s eight chapters. The walkthrough didn’t spell out the answers, only providing a series of hints, and the one for clue number 4 says it is “the most obscure one, requiring a code that is commonly used.” Ah, the contemporary IF player says, just gotta type XYZZY, doesn’t get much clearer than that, right? But it isn’t, because the full hint is actually “…commonly used in immersive-sim games.” I was able to solve the puzzle nonetheless – Thief and System Shock are some of my all-time favorites, so I knew exactly what it was getting it – but it’s symptomatic of a game that’s full of enthusiasm, but to its detriment feels cut off from the past several decades of parser-game development.
I don’t mean to overstate the case, here – heck, the completed Easter Egg is an Infocom reference (you get some grue repellant). And I hate to come off parochial or a gatekeeper, I can think of numerous instances of authors who, because they were largely unburdened by expectations and preconceptions, have brought new, exciting ideas to the scene. And there are definitely glimmers of that in Bael’s Rock; there’s an extended riddle-duel that puts a clever spin on a hoary scenario, for example. But for the most part this is a collection of fantasy-themed medium dry goods puzzles of the sort seasoned players will have seen many times before, and the author’s seeming lack of familiarity with the state of the art makes proceedings feel significantly rougher than they needed to.
The most obvious place I felt this friction was the parser. This is a custom-built game, and it’s cool to see such things out there in the wild, especially released on Steam! But in a world where the major parser systems offer incredibly robust, well-tested gameplay, custom parsers are inevitably held to a high bar. In terms of features, Bael’s Rock generally does OK – most common abbreviations work, the up arrow key retrieves previous commands, you can get a history of the last couple of turns of output, and it seems to be able to handle sentences of comparable complexity to Inform, TADS, and Dialog.
But there are some notable omissions, like nonexistent handling of adjectives – I got very bored with having to type PUSH RED LEVER over and over instead of just PUSH RED. And the error messages are very frequently misleading, failing to clearly tell the player whether what they’re doing won’t work, or if the parser just wasn’t able to translate typed input into action: “you can’t examine that” and “you can’t take that” are very unhelpful responses when the player’s typo means the “that” just wasn’t recognized, and the fact that ILLUMINATE ITEM WITH TORCH spits out “you can’t use this item to do that” unless you’ve picked the exact right ITEM is actively misleading. Similarly, I had to go to the walkthrough for almost the first real puzzle of the game because PUT AMULET IN LION STATUE says “you can’t put it there”, rather than prompting you to be more specific about where exactly you want to place it.
The interface also provides more of that friction. Layout-wise, outside of cutscenes most locations have two main text boxes – the first being a largely-static description of the room, the second responding to player input, plus a command line below. It’s a reasonable enough approach, but many actions lead to output that won’t fit in that second box, meaning I very frequently had to hit enter to advance through two or three pages of text responding to a seemingly-innocuous command. I also experienced a slight delay when new text was displayed, either in response to actions or moving to a new room, which made certain sequences, like the maze – spoiler alert, there’s a maze, and you map it by dropping superfluous inventory items to track where you’ve been – feel molasses-slow. That’s a shame, especially because of the way it undermined a made a couple of puzzles that I enjoyed, but required a bit of trial and error by design, like the climactic sequence of the game.
Speaking of design, the puzzles here are very traditional, with every chapter requiring you to progress past a set-piece barrier of some kind. While there are a few exceptions, most of these involve simple object manipulation, fiddling with the occasional complex device, decoding abstruse hints, and the odd bit of magic. This is a classic formula, and again, in the abstract there are some solid brain-teasers here. But unfortunately in addition to the weak parser, there are some guess-the-verb issues that quickly taught me to run to the walkthrough rather than waste time trying to figure out what I’d missed – the most egregious offender here is an early hurdle where after you’ve collected three pieces of a cube-shaped key, I was nonplussed about how to actually use them. COMBINE KEY is, I suppose, a reasonable approach, but abstract, goal-driven verbs like that aren’t typically a part of the modern IF vocabulary, and there’s nothing in the game’s help text that indicated it’d be a reasonable thing to try, nor were comparably reasonable attempts like PUT FRAGMENT ON FRAGMENT successful.
The last place where the game could have benefitted from familiarity with post-80s IF design philosophies is the story. There is one, but it’s pretty thin: you’re abducted and abandoned in the middle of the desert, forced to find shelter in a mountain crammed stem to stern with a-wizard-did-it obstacles. There is a reasonably well-done, only somewhat telegraphed, twist at the end, but there are plenty of satisfying works of IF that have similar story structures. However, where most modern players would expect that a game like this would do some environmental storytelling, weaving some backstory into passing descriptions and otherwise creating a cohesive world that rewards exploration, Bael’s Rock mostly sticks to just the puzzles, ma’am – late in the day, you do find the journal of a previous adventurer, which I was hoping would provide an opportunity for just this kind of exposition, but it mostly just lampshaded the arbitrariness and implausibility of everything that had come before.
I am being hard on Bael’s Rock here, I recognize, perhaps out of proportion to its faults – there’s nothing wrong with its bones, even if it isn’t the kind of thing that sets my world on fire. But it’s really a shame to see what’s so clearly a passion project stumble repeatedly on problems that have been solved for decades (including the lack of a transcript feature, which is one reason I’ve been more specific about stuff like parser errors than usual). The good news is that the changelog indicates that the author’s been making upgrades, and the game ends with a blatant sequel tease. So even though I got as much frustration as enjoyment out of this game, by taking feedback on board, and hopefully building experience with contemporary IF approaches, I’ve no doubt the author could make something really special in the future.
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Thank you for the fair review and transcript. As this was a themed mini comp, there was no time for beta-testing which would undoubtedly have caught the most unfair situations. I guess solving the elevator puzzle can be crammed into:
SPOILER!!!
Delaying the elevator as much as possible by pushing as many buttons as possible starting from the highest number and moving down. If you don’t manage to hide in time in the elevator, you should have pushed one or more buttons less to get enough turns to hide. I think there is some room for pushing one or two buttons “too much” if you carefully avoid loosing turns.
You definitely got a point regarding error messages taking up time - not sure if I can fix that but hope to look into it at some point - thanks again
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A Garden of Impossible Objects, by SkyShard
Sometimes I worry that, for all that I try to have recourse to some consistent albeit subjective standards as I write these reviews, actually that’s all just post-hoc justification and the reasons why I like something or don’t click with it are just ineffable and inexpressible. This worry is especially sharp when I play a game soon after another that’s superficially similar, but which lands entirely differently despite all that. So it is with A Garden of Impossible Objects, a short kinetic novel that boasts atmospheric visuals and a compelling premise, but doesn’t provide a ton of in-depth exploration or plot development. So far so my baby needs blood, but while I thought that game really could have been stronger if it had elaborated upon its setup, I’m perfectly content with the glimpses Impossible Objects offers.
If it is just elephants all the way down, there’s not much point either to writing or reading these things, so we might as well assume that there’s a reason for that. One reason for the difference might be that Impossible Objects’ palette is reasonably broad – that applies literally, as rather than being uniformly a chilly blue, the visuals here provide a varied feast. The game opens with the arresting image of an annular eclipse, and each chapter is interspersed with hyperdetailed images of constellations, but most of the graphics illustrate the eponymous garden (and attached house), where the protagonist’s recently-deceased aunt carefully nurtured plants of all kinds until they ran riot, blooming and fecund. There are pseudo-3d effects (achieved I think through parallax scrolling) and subtle touches of animation, that make the lush visuals even more engaging.
The writing is also very impressive – and I don’t just mean the prose and dialogue are evocative and ring true (though they are, and they do), but that very careful attention has been paid to match the words to the format. I often find visual novels a little frustrating because you need to do so much clicking to advance through the story a sentence or two at a time, but here, almost every short bit of text provides a compelling detail, a nugget of characterization, or an enticing development of the narrative, or both, rather than depending for their impact on something you might not get to for two or three more clicks.
Like, here’s a relatively simple bit where your mom (she’s the reason you’re there, looking for some stuff of hers your aunt didn’t return before her death) opens up the house:
I remember standing next to Mom as she fiddled with the key to unlock the front door.
Carmen didn’t do locks, but following her death someone had put one there.
I’m not entirely sure who.
For nearly a whole day before leaving, Mom was on the phone.
I don’t know who she was talking to.
I didn’t listen in.
As to the substance here, I didn’t find that those enticing details cohered into a single interpretation of what, exactly, the aunt’s deal was, where, if anywhere, the mom’s stuff had been hidden, and what the heck was going on with that eerie basement. And the game does just kind of end, rather than building to a conventional narrative payoff. Here, again, though, I’m eager to give Impossible Objects a pass. The major theme here is grief, and the truth is that most of the time grief is just about alienating vibes – the death of a loved one means that you’re not going to get answers or resolution to any outstanding questions or business you had with them, it’s all just over, and that feels bad and weird. Also, the grief is really a second-order affair – the protagonist didn’t have a close relationship with the aunt, so they’re mostly observing their mom, trying in vain to understand what she’s feeling and why. This displacement of mediated emotions also resonates with the subject-matter of the story, which sees you looking through the physical detritus of the aunt’s life, using the lens of a few scant memories to try (largely in vain) to understand what these scattered objects have to say about her. Filling in the details or creating a too-neat wrap-up to the story would betray the whole theme.
So yeah, those are my reasons, though I’m not sure how convincingly they distinguish A Garden of Impossible Objects from similarly-elliptical games I’ve bounced off. Maybe it is all irrational, my judgments simply downstream of how much sleep I got the night before I played a game, or whether I was hungry or thirsty or reminded of something else, good or bad. Or maybe it’s that there are no firm, fixed rules in IF: implementation and inspiration will always trump rules of thumb, and even stuff that doesn’t immediately appeal to me can nonetheless grab me by the heart-strings once I get into it. That’s a big part of what I love about IF, and a good note too, I think, on which to close the book on this year’s review-a-thon!
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Congrats (and thank you!) on reviewing them all!
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Congratulations on completing the review-a-thon, and thank you for reviewing Bael’s Rock!
It means a lot to me that you played the game so thoroughly and even went out of your way to collect the “secret” runes for the Easter egg.
Everything you wrote is valuable feedback that I’ll take into account while working on my next game and its parser. In the next update, I’ll also add an option to disable the delay you found annoying - it was originally intended as a failsafe to prevent players from accidentally skipping text.
I’m glad that you were still able to find some positives, despite the aspects of the game that didn’t work for you. Your final words were especially encouraging, and I truly appreciate them.
If anyone would like to give the game a try, I’ve included some Steam keys in the event spreadsheet. Feel free to redeem one and claim the game for free. I hope you enjoy it!
(If you run into any issues with the codes, please feel free to DM me and I’ll be happy to help.)
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