PB Parjeter's IF Comp Reviews

King of Xanadu by Machines Underneath

I felt kind of detached from this game, but it’s decent.

It’s a bit of a Rorscach test. Throughout the game, you’re given a range of choices which seem to range from most active to least active.

The situation is clearly pretty bad early on. But acting passively and risking neglect is conceivably as good a response as a heavy-handed solution that makes things worse, so all of the options are viable at face value.

This made reading other people’s reviews pretty interesting. The apparent differences in reviewers’ preferred choices intrigued me and convinced me to play.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the choices are that interesting on their own right. First of all, the ruler in the game is portrayed as excessive, but was hard to feel that anything he did was particularly shocking. I thought the weird stuff might be par for the course, since the game seems to have a historical setting (or possibly a fantasy-historical setting).

Secondly, I got the feeling that the author was trying to draw a parallel to the modern day in some way that isn’t clear. I suppose the central famine could be highlighting concerns about an ecological disaster or a global food crisis. However, it could be a stand in for any kind of fatalism (or, derogatorily, “doomerism”). But in the end, the specific events in the game don’t seem to add up to any sort of parable.

Since the game presents extremely broad life philosophies at the end, maybe I am totally off base in trying to find social commentary. My apologies to the author in that case.

A Good Foundation

Even though I was presented with choices that didn’t intrigue me. the game did gently nudge my pessimistic tendencies, and the basic scenario was good enough to hold my attention for the 15-20 minute playtime.

I think it might difficult to make a thoroughly compelling story around this structure because the audience is waiting for a collapse that acts as a payoff, which kind of devalues the incidental events that lead up to the ending.

A counterpoint might be The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which relies heavily on side characters and plots to tell its story of impending doom and is highly regarded. However, I haven’t played it for decades and never played it in full, so I don’t know how closely you can really compare it.

A Squiffy Game in the Wild

Finally, this is the first time I’ve come across a game made in Squiffy, or at least, the first time that I’ve consciously noticed one, which is surprising since the engine is apparently about ten years old.

I only see a few games tagged or keyworded with ‘Squiffy’ on IFDB. Can anyone tell me how common this engine is?

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The Lost Artist: Prologue by Alejandro Ruiz del Sol (@GuguTheGadget )

This is an early portion of a game about a detective who has been asked to rescue somebody from the drudgery of office work — though the job seems allow for a little bit of rebellious creativity.

There a few things that the author did well. The written voice is very direct, conversational, and concise, which is refreshing.

And, mechanically, this is Twine at its most straightforward. It has choices that lead to other passages, and those passages usually return to the mainline plot.

Possibly Dada

However, as others have noted, it’s a bit unclear exactly what’s going on. Some people have called it surreal.

I visited the main author’s website and found he’s done some other work in dadaism, which seems to be distinct from much of surrealism.

Here’s an explanation I found by Googling:

As Dada’s artistic heir, Surrealism presented a contrasting idea: instead of wishing to overturn society, the Surrealists sought to re-enchant life by probing the inner-workings of reality by exploring irreality.

That’s just one explanation, but building on it: I’d say that this game isn’t surreal in the same way as Verses is, which seems like a more common type of surrealism.

Verses has tightly interconnected themes and images that don’t necessarily point to anything in real life (especially the core analysis process), but which do point to things in the reader’s internal being.

By contrast, The Lost Artist has a lot of core parts that are pretty grounded individually and draw on real things (like bank heists, private investigations, and corporate jobs) rather than abstract ideas — they just don’t connect in a normal way, and they rely heavily on non-sequitir.

The Lost Artist also has the anti-institutionalist themes that apparently define dadaism. The fact that the characters are trying to apply originality on top of corporate work makes me think of possibly the most well-known example of dadaism: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which turned a signed urinal as an art installation. The Lost Artist’s repurposing of corporate/industrial stuff is less crude, but the idea is similar.

Sometimes Confusing

If dadaism is the author’s intended goal, it’s natural that the game feels disjointed. However, I’m still going to highlight a few jarring things, because I don’t know whether they’re intended or not.

First, the prologue has its own prologue. The story begins in media res with a bank heist, then transitions to an office scene. It seems like the characters become indentured servants as a result of the heist — but maybe not, since it’s a fuzzy transition.

Secondly, the story tells you what’s artistic and what’s drone work in a way that’s hard for the reader to infer for themselves. As @DeusIrae noted in his review, the bit about saving money on logos is confusing. The work that the characters are doing isn’t clear on the whole, and the game is currently very short, meaning that there aren’t really enough examples to make this all gel. (The game is unfinished, so my impression could change as more content as added.)

Third, there’s a co-author, Martina Oyhenard. I have no idea what she contributed. Perhaps she refined the main author’s ideas, or perhaps the idea was to combine two authors’ disjointed contributions exquisite corpse-style. Or maybe the goal was something in between.

It’s impossible to say. It would be interesting to hear the authors comment on the writing process. Maybe they will in a post-mortem, but this strikes me as the kind of game where a magician never reveals their secrets … so who knows?

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The Dragon of Silverton Mine by Vukasin Davic

This is a well-made Twine/Sugarcube game that tries to get as close to the traditional adventure game format as possible.

I’m going to skip right to the game’s main mechanic: the telekinesis spell.

Often in Twine and choice-based adventure games — and even in graphical adventure games — I feel like I’m just doing object association. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing something, because unlike in parser games, I can’t spontaneously try a verb.

Despite those limitations, using the telekinesis spell in The Dragon of Silverton Mine kind of does feel like performing an action. That’s because it has slightly different effects throughout the game: sometimes it just moves a thing where the game needs it to go; sometimes it shifts something to dislodge a buoyant object, and sometimes it doesn’t work and you’re informed that you need to power it up.

(Certain other Twine games also have central mechanics with diverse effects. I got the same feeling from @agat’s The Bones of Rosalinda. Bones has a more complex and more impressive central mechanic, but I also enjoyed the simplicity of Dragon.)

These systems still don’t give total freedom of action, but they do give a sensation that can’t just be reduced to handling or using an object.

Otherwise Prety Traditional

Apart from that, the The Dragon of Silverton Mine is short and sweet.

Not all puzzles involve the telekinesis spell. Many puzzles fall back on object association, and the game gives you a lot of information when you need it. If you try and use two things and you did it wrong, the game pretty much tells you what you need to do.

I only felt misdirected in one puzzle — the one where you need to get oil. You need to find it in the shed, but oil is also mentioned in a few places that you’ll probably have visited more recently.

I think I spotted a few minor bugs, too. The hidden burrow is described in the inventory screen before you actually uncover it. And I think the note about the ring reappeared in its original position after the game took both the ring and the note out of play. These are minor things, and I didn’t see any errors that broke the game. It’s very well-made, especially for what seems to be a first game — though maybe the author has made stuff outside of IF.

The humor is good, and the final twist is fun. However, I would note that the game gradually becomes funnier as you progress — I was expecting a much more serious game when I started.

Decent Design

Finally, I wanted to comment on the design. This game modifies the Sugarcube layout a bit.

I’ve come to kind of dislike Sugarcube’s default sidebar because it takes up a lot of space and is very empty by default. I assume that the reason it’s laid out like so that authors can easily add things line-by-line, like in @agat’s 4x4 Galaxy. However, most games don’t make full use of the sidebar, leaving me to collapse it.

Anyway, The Dragon of Silverton Mine opts to simply move the buttons to the footer, which I like. It would probably be better if they were fixed in place so you don’t need to scroll to see them, just like how the sidebar is fixed. However, The Dragon does something else that’s really important: it keeps each passage reasonably short, even when it appends object text to the end of the page. So I like the layout overall.

Moving onto another topic of design, the game also uses italics to distinguish object links (which append text) from room links (which go to a new passage). Verses also visually distinguished links in a similar way. I don’t know where this started or how widespread it is, but I guess it’s good if it’s becoming more common.

I also wanted a retro feeling when I played this game, so I quickly applied sixtyfour from Google Fonts when I played. This is what it looked like:

7 Likes

IF Comp is over. Congratulations everyone, especially 1st place winner @CMG and 6th place Daniel Stelzer/@Draconis

I’m going to condense all of my interviews down into point form, just for anyone browsing this who doesn’t want to read every single one.

Here’s what I think each game that I reviewed did best:

  • The metaness of Where Nothing Is Ever Named, especially some of the more jarring meta responses
  • The build up of tension and sense of relief at the end of Turn Right
  • The streamlining of interaction, navigation, and puzzles in Miss Gosling’s Last Case
  • The visual design and website-like approach of Birding in Pope Lick Park
  • The wordplay and comradery themes of Why Pout?
  • The role inversion of patient/therapist and AI/human in The Skyler Project
  • The humor and sheer joyful panic of The Bat
  • The Eastern European and Stalker-like aesthetic of Verses
  • The Rorshach test-like options in King of Xanadu
  • The rarely-seen dadaism of The Lost Artist: Prologue
  • The versatile telekenesis spell in The Dragon of Silverton Mine

There were a few other games I wanted to play and review, and it’s possible that I’ll get around to some of those in the future. My workload is going to increase starting next week, though, so it’s unlikely I’ll get around to those other games soon.

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