Some short reviews and a round up …
How time flies! Already the Comp is over, and I have hardly managed to scratch the surface (in my defence, there has been … stuff). For the most part, I’ve played and reviewed games in the order in which they have appeared in my personal shuffle. But with the Comp coming to an end, I thought I would post some very brief (half-cooked) reviews of a few games I have played but haven’t had time to write a full review of, and a brief comment on the comp generally. I’m really sorry that I didn’t get round to all of them (and because I didn’t, I’m not going to do what I sometimes do, and say “these were my favourites” – because there’s a very good chance that I haven’t played my favourite yet).
So to the short reviews. I loved Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover) for the writing, but above all for the wonderfully dark playfulness of it. Not one for the children, to be sure. I’m not quite convinced that it’s slightly “penny-in-the-slot” endings quite work. Rather than having many (does the walkthrough say 25?) fairly quick routes to different endings, I think I’d rather have one or two more complicated ones, with the others being clearly sub-optimal side-paths. But I want to spend more time playing it, in case I’ve missed some depth on my first few playthroughs. Still, a really lovely little game.
I got on rather less well with Brain Guzzlers (Steph Cherrywell). I can completely see why it’s such a crowd pleaser: the writing is spot on, and with the drawings and general atmosphere everything coheres well. Lots of people have praised the writing in particular, and it absolutely deserves it all, because it’s the sort of thing that seems so easy to do, until you read (again, and again, and again) the vast number of off-key versions of it that are endlessly being produced. I got less out of it as a game, because the puzzles seemed to be less the sort you solve by careful thought and more the sort that you quite often solve by accident while trying everything you can think of however silly it seems: they make sense (and sometimes they are funny) in retrospect, but they are not deeply satisfying (with, for me, one particular exception, involving the RPS cannon).
Arcane Intern (Unpaid) (Astrid Dalmady) surprised me in a good way. I started off with low expectations, and for the first few minutes the game seemed to be living down to them. But it gradually became more interesting, and I liked the way it built up towards a choice which – they the time I came to make it – seemed significant (and clear). I remain unconvinced about the wisdom of combining two very well-trodden and rather insipid genres (HP muggle-ishness with cubicle-slavery), but I was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked, all thanks (as far as I was concerned) to the framing story. All that said, I thought the game lacked focus: it kept getting distracted by a desire to follow through one of its two notional themes in a way that got in the way of cleanly focussed narrative. So it could do with some tightening up in design terms, and perhaps with some pruning.
I played Pit of the Condemned (Matthew Holland) with others, and I think that added to it. Obviously it’s not trying to be ground-breaking in any way, except in so far as a sort of text based escape-the-room roguelike is innovative, which I suppose it is. The main question-marks for me were really over polish and range of possibilities: it didn’t always feel as rock solid as I think it needed to, and once you realise how it options seem rather limited, with little scope for strategy. I’d rather like to see this extended in a post Comp release, with a greater range of options and more scope for strategic planning.
I also had issues with the implementation of Pilgrimage (Víctor Ojuel). It has three things, in particular, going for it: the wide geographical canvas it uses (where directions are truly geographical directions – a device that I found worked well), its similarly wide temporal canvas (one never imagined or supposes that this was happening in hours or minutes, without needing any devices such as cut-scenes to make the point), and its writing, which manages to be both tight and original. The main difficulty, I thought, was that it had rather shallow implementation, which while it wasn’t quite buggy in the technical sense, tended sometimes to mislead the player. I think I’m more inclined to regard it as an interesting experiment than a true success; but it has some ideas which deserve further and better exploration.
Another interesting experiment was Hanon Ondricek’s Baker of Shireton. I really didn’t play this for long enough to have a proper opinion on it. So I looked very quickly at the walkthrough. I think the idea is intriguing, but I found the interface difficult to work with. To quite a large degree I think this was just a matter of interface design: so many bits and pieces of information coming at one seemingly randomly became overwhelming. I suspect that the author and the testers stopped noticing it, because they would have become used to the order in which information was presented and have known what they were looking for. But, fiendish as it would have been to write, I longed for something which would have given me either simultaneous information about different things (i.e. different windows to tell me about the state of my dough, my oven, my customers, and so on), or somehow have organised the information in a way that made it easier to absorb. But as I say, that really can’t be counted as a review as such, because I really haven’t played it yet for long enough. It’s one I plan to return to later.
I couldn’t make much of Much Love, BJP which seemed to be some sort of fictionalised biography. It’s not often that I say that I think a game really needs to be longer, but this is such a time, because it didn’t seem to me to have enough time to deliver any impression of a rounded character by showing rather than telling.
Finally, from this pile of the reviews-that-never-were, SPY INTRIGUE by furkle. This was a very curatorial egg. It was obvious that a huge amount of work had gone into the interface, which is as clever as anything I’ve ever seen in Twine – and it’s a long story, which I didn’t complete. But it seemed inconsistent, both in tone and in delivery. FOR INSTANCE IF YOU ARE GOING TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON THE INTERFACE INCLUDING KINDLY OFFERING TO TURN OFF THE MIGRAINE-INDUCING DEFAULT BACKGROUND EFFECTS (WHICH ARE LIKELY TO ANNOY EVEN THOSE WHO CAN AVOID ACTUAL PHYSICAL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL INJURY FROM THEM) WHY IN HEAVEN’S NAME CAN’T YOU REALISE THAT READING LONG PASSAGES IN CAPITALS IS INCREDIBLY SLOW AND ANNOYING? I had similarly mixed views about how the story developed: sometimes it seemed economical and well-designed, but sometimes there were long lulls in any sort of action. In other words, it seemed like a game written by someone with some very good ideas and considerable writing and programming skills, but in need of a sort of artistic sub-editorial conscience – a dull fellow who would sit on their shoulder and ask annoying questions.
The Comp in General Early in the Comp, someone started a thread where they said that this was a really high quality group of games. And I smiled, and thought to myself “let’s wait and see”. But I have to say, I think that it is true. It’s not just the number – but the relatively high number of really interesting things. By that I don’t just mean “not terrible” games (though that is obviously true) – I mean that the average quality is very high: there were very few games that didn’t manage to have at least some really pleasing quality, whether that was the writing, or the virtuosity of the implementation, or the originality of the story, or something else pleasurable. And many games had lots of these. It really has been a quite exceptional vintage.