PaulS Ifcomp Reviews 2015

Sub Rosa

Joey Jones & Melvin Rangasamy

Inform 7

Sub Rosa is a puzzle game, set in a fairly small area. Your task is to break into a wing of a mansion, deploy a bomb that puts the inhabitants to sleep, and then discover the secrets of a sinister theocrat called Confessor Destine, and then leave – as far as possible without leaving any trace of your visit.

Given such a premise, everything really depends on implementation, and here (for the most part) Sub Rosa is excellent. A lot of the pleasure of the game comes from the sense of a very detailed (and absolutely weird) world, which is then taken for granted so that it is something that one gradually discovers and makes sense of. The game has no difficulty in leaving plenty unsaid and unexplained, which in fact makes it all more interesting and more convincing. When I say “convincing”, I certainly don’t mean to suggest that it is in any sense realistic: it is, on the contrary, surreal, but with just that sense consistency and internal logic that one finds in the best fantastical stories. Confessor Destine in particular is a wonderfully drawn pantomime villain. But there are all sorts of details to enjoy.

The writing is also good, and sometimes excellent. It’s not (and isn’t supposed to be, I don’t imagine) “fine prose” to be enjoyed for its own sake, but it’s sufficiently verbally clever to be enjoyable in its own right.

Which brings one to the puzzles. And here my experience was a bit more mixed. (Full disclosure: I used the walkthrough in parts, and would not have finished in time without it.) The problem wasn’t so much with the way the puzzles were clued (which was generally fair, though they are not meant to be easy puzzles). The problem more often was with working out that something was a puzzle at all. That went, in particular, for discovering the secrets. It’s obvious, for instance, that a secret room is likely to have secrets. But why would anyone think that a pot of slimy mince left in plain sight on a counter was likely to be a “secret” at all? At times I felt I was blundering about, hoping simply to light upon something that would turn out (however unexpectedly) to be a secret.

I also felt that the game relied too much on frequent resort to the library. It’s delightful, in many ways, to have such a deeply implemented library; but there was so much trial and error involved in using it that it became a bit tiresome. One secret, as far as I can see, depended on random investigation of the library, which – if that is right – makes it the worst sort of “needle-in-a-haystack” puzzle (which the others were not).

That said, there are some really excellent puzzles here: the sort that require several stages of lateral lateral thinking to solve.

I particularly enjoyed the ashes and finding the secret of the blue roses. (Getting into the secret dungeon was too hard for me, frankly – but I imagine more puzzle-oriented people might really enjoy it.) And the requirement to avoid leaving traces adds some replay value.

In short: if you are going to produce something that is basically an entertaining puzzle game, this is (mostly) the right way to do it. It’s not flawless in its puzzle design; but it’s well beyond the average, and it sets the whole thing in a world that seems fresh and with writing that is very well done. It’s well polished (almost completely free of typos and bugs).

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.

Apparently the Authors have been writing extensive verse. We normally have a few verse reviews; but none this year. So, out of a sense of tradition:

Taghairm

Chandler Groover

The first time’s tough: far easier to release
The creature: let its blood not stain your hands;
And thus the game relents in its demands,
So that way lies a fairly rapid peace.
Rapid but restless. With a shambling stride
The spirit of inquiry haunts your thought:
“Be not imprisoned by this ‘should’ and ‘ought’!
What might you find,” it pleads, “if you just tried?”
And thus it starts: impale, rotate, and stoke —
One, then one more, sack after sordid sack,
The vile becomes routine; you have the knack
Now, madly clicking in the flesh and smoke.
And to what end? To learn, from this atrocity,
That cats are often killed by … curiosity.

Thanks, PaulS! I’ve really enjoyed reading your reviews, and the poem is perfect. Bravo!

Lol the last line was perfect…