Rabbit's IFComp 2022 reviews

Nice review! I also really enjoyed Lucid, but didn’t pick up on some of the things you highlight, like the choices getting shorter as you climb, so thanks for pointing those out. On the cereal boxes, I read that passage as slightly making fun of itself – the description of like a leering, horrible Tony the Tiger and the awful freight contained in the folds of his loathsome packaging is pretty over the top – but yeah it doesn’t really work played 100% straight, though I definitely agree the writing overall is great!

As to the spoilery stuff: I went through a similar thought process and found the pieces didn’t fit together sufficiently neatly to feel like the game worked as a consistent allegory for one particular experience, vs. exploration of a broader theme of resistance vs. acceptance of trauma. It could be there’s a way to square the various circles that you raise but I was OK with feeling like the game was a slightly wooly way of looking at a cluster of related ideas and not necessarily cohering more tightly, though I can see it being more satisfying if it did!

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Thankyou for your review Rabbit that was very cool.

Im really gratified you picked up on rhe central theme- Mike is right to say its slso a more ‘wooly’ discussion of traumatic experiences more generally (such as my real world car accident which im genuinely delighted you enjoyed) but the issue you point to is the organising theme- which is why its also the basis on the puzzle.

The writing is most definitely as wrought as it could be, which is a personal foible. I like to wrought it but good- but to some extent I do try to let this intentionally bleed into self parody. The whole thing is, as with all dreams, absurd.

Thanlyou again so much for you review and for giving me a chance to blab about my game on your thread.

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You’re welcome, glad you were cool with my review. What you and Mike say about treating it as more woolly is fair - I think, after interpreting and reviewing You May Not Escape before this, my mind was in the mode of trying to “solve” the allegory rather than taking it on its own terms.

Hah. Sorry to hear about this, but you got some art out of it.

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Oh no youre fully right- the central allegory is cancer. Do you have game in this year btw? Would love to play it if so.

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Thanks for the offer, but I didn’t manage to get my game done in time for IFComp. Maybe next year!

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Witchfinders (Tania Dreams)

Played on: 8th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 50 minutes for 6 runs (including a perfect ending and a failure)

Witchfinders is a short puzzlebox Twine game which will probably take 10-20 minutes for your first run. You are a witch in Edinburgh in 1827, trying to help and heal your friends and neighbours without drawing the suspicions of the populace.

I enjoyed my time with Witchfinders – I’m saying that now because I’m about to front-load some complaints. Witchfinders makes a lot of work for itself early on with a bad first impression. The spelling and grammar of the opening paragraphs are awkward, but since the author tells us in the post-game About page that English isn’t their first language, that’s forgivable. (And actually, the standard of English is very good once you’re past the intro.)

More problematic is the text styling. The white Impact font on a black background becomes hard to read when the text is bolded, making the letters bleed into each other, and close to illegible when it changes colour to blue-on-black. I’ve checked this in a couple of browsers in case it’s an Opera issue, but Chrome and Edge look about the same. Also, given the association with terrible early-2010s Reddit memes, I think Impact is kind of an odd choice for a realist-fantasy historical fiction game. I’m trying not to harp on styling much this year, but it’s an immediate problem with Witchfinders.

Once the game starts properly, though, it’s very pleasing and playable. I like the way Witchfinders lays out what it calls its “house rules” – that is, what certain colours of text mean. This makes Witchfinders approachable as a puzzle game, and it builds trust that you won’t be whisked away to a game over because you clicked a link that looked like it would just expand some text. I know I just said the colours can be too hard to read, and they are, but associating the colours with mechanical effects is a good idea.

The core gameplay loop of Witchfinders is to explore a section of Edinburgh, talking to people and using magical means to help them with their problems. Say the wrong thing, or act too obviously witch-y, and someone will become suspicious of you (flagged up in grey text, in a way that’s reminiscent of the old Telltale “So-And-So will remember that” pop-ups) and you’ll gain a Witch Point; gain four Witch Points, and it’s game over, as you skip town before the Witchfinders can catch up with you. This adds some tension to navigating the puzzles, but it’s not so troublesome – it’s usually pretty obvious what the wrong thing to say is, and having four chances gives you plenty of room for error.

The NPCs are a subtle strength of Witchfinders. Their mixed reactions to you help the game to suggest the politics and traumas of witch-hunting. These NPCs are not always suspicious or hostile. Alexina seems to avoid asking any questions about how exactly you’ll help her husband’s cattle, and another NPC, approached in the right way, will prove to be fully on your side. The politics of witch-hunting are not delved into as they might be in a different kind of game, but they add a little intrigue to the setting. The author also gives themselves some leeway with a deliberately ahistorical setting – as they point out in the About page, the 19th century is well past the peak of witchcraft accusations in Scotland. This allows the game to be a little playful with the history and geography of Edinburgh. Again, it’s not a big thing, but it’s there and it’s appreciated.

The puzzles are generally reasonable and straightforward. They’re all of the format “get item A, do something witchy to it, give it to Person B”. The challenge is to put the puzzle solutions together while avoiding Witch Points in order to get a perfect score at the end of the game. I managed this and I just about enjoyed doing it. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of friction to it that I’m not sure is supposed to be there. For example, it’s not clear how to end the game until you’ve done it by accident. It seems to happen when you’ve helped the sick child after offering to help Alexina’s cattle, even if you haven’t helped the cattle yet. If you haven’t, the game’s ending suggests you were unable to figure out how to help the cattle. If you were planning to help the cattle after the child, the game cutting you off like this is surprising and a little galling.

There’s a bigger issue which I think is a design oversight – if it’s deliberate, it’s not a very kind design choice. You know how I said you can offer to help the cattle? You can also choose to end the conversation and miss that choice for the rest of the game, as you can with a couple of other NPCs. Problem is, if you do that you don’t trip the flag that the game’s ending needs, so you can’t end the game. You can lock off other puzzles like this, too, and get yourself completely stuck. My first run ended in a reset because I’d locked myself out in this way.

If this is accidental, there needs to be a little more attention paid to how the player can get stuck; if it’s deliberate, I think there should be more warning that this is part of the puzzle, because it’s not fun to be stuck on a puzzle and not be sure if there’s a solution you’re not seeing or if it’s just unsolvable now. The walkthrough also needs to be better – pretty much all it does is reiterate your objectives, making it frankly useless for getting yourself unstuck. Luckily Witchfinders is small enough that it’s quick to replay if you think you’ve broken something and you can pretty much brute-force the whole thing, but I might not have bothered if this had been a bigger game.

Despite this, I did work out Witchfinders, and I did get a perfect score at the end of the day, and I did enjoy putting together the whole solution. It was very pleasing to string everything together properly to get the perfect run, and not so frustrating to do once I worked out how I kept breaking the game. I think the idea for Witchfinders is fantastic, and the setting and structure are great, but this could be a much smoother game with some work on its presentation and with fewer one-shot chances for the player to progress.

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I look forward to it mate, thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

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Trouble in Sector 471 (Arthur DiBianca)

Played on: 8th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 50mins to beat the game with 5/8 optional objectives

Trouble in Sector 471 is a two-hour puzzle-exploration game controlled by parser. The blurb offers few hints, but the opening minutes reveal that you are a robot dispatched to the Sector 471 space station(?) to exterminate the bugs wreaking havoc all over the place.

As much as I’ve enjoyed IFComp so far, it was very pleasing to see the randomiser serve up DiBianca’s yearly entry near the top of my list. DiBianca has a formula, which may sound like a backhanded thing to say, but it’s a good formula: a puzzlefest with a limited parser (that is, a lot of the verbs which come as standard in Inform games have been stripped out and the game is very specific about how you can interact with the world), a surprisingly-deep gameplay gimmick, an ending that can be reached in two hours, and maybe a little more for players who dig a little deeper.

This time, the limited parser itself is the gameplay gimmick. As a robot, you need to be upgraded to do your job. Several of the early puzzles are based around solving some problem in order to get some upgrade, which will add a new verb to your repertoire. Then you can roam around the map, testing your new verb and its effects and working out the implications of it. I’m saying “map” because a very helpful in-game map shows you where you need to explore, and it’s inherently satisfying to fill it in as you go. Trouble in Sector 471 sort of plays out like a Metroidvania; the world is constantly reconfigured and opened up as you realise “oh, now I can go back here and do this…” It’s a little like if Inside the Facility, one of DiBianca’s previous works, was a lot more condensed. The gameplay loop of getting a new verb and testing it on the old puzzles to make breakthroughs is really really fun.

(One small complaint about the limited parser here, which looks like a big complaint because it takes a paragraph to explain: I did miss having an examine command this time. It’s a fine design decision not to have to write descriptions for all the scenery, but there are some items whose purpose isn’t clear until you’ve looked closer, and that means picking them up and then checking the player character’s status. It adds an extra step, it leads to some awkward juggling since you can only carry one object at a time, and it means it’s not always obvious when certain items change to something more significant.)

The puzzles in the main path are all good and fair. There’s a surprising amount of variety, from timing puzzles to inventory-juggling puzzles to put-the-clues-together puzzles, but none of them are unreasonable. I needed a few hints to make sure I got to the end in two hours, and most of the time I looked at a hint I kicked myself for not putting the clues together. Perhaps the difficulty is a touch uneven in the main game – there’s one bug you need to exterminate which is much more elaborate and intricate to get than the others, whereas some endgame bugs turn out to be very simple – but on the whole it’s very smooth without being trivial.

There are a bunch of optional objectives too. I didn’t solve all of these (which means, judging by previous DiBianca games, that I definitely haven’t seen every secret Trouble in Sector 471 has), but I don’t mind that – I think purely optional stuff has free reign to be more difficult than the rest of the game. But I wish it was more obvious which puzzles are mandatory to earn necessary upgrades and which puzzles are sidequests. This won’t matter if you’re not playing under a judging time limit for IFComp, but as I was racing a clock to see the ending, it was annoying to spend time on a tricky puzzle and find out it didn’t get me closer to the end.

The story is pretty thin – it’s just an excuse to get you solving puzzles and blasting bugs, really. There’s usually something more substantial hidden in DiBianca’s games for people who can dig deep enough, and I know that there are mysteries I did not solve here. Still, there’s not much going on plotwise in the core game. But the NPCs are very charming, and manage to suggest that they have a life outside of the game with just a descritpion and a few lines of dialogue each. I’m fond of the robot who only exists to mimic other robots mockingly. I wouldn’t say this is an out-and-out comedy game, but it’s pretty funny – it’s mastered the art of disguising a puzzle contrivance as a goofy character or a silly bit of worldbuilding.

Trouble in Sector 471 is a very high-quality, very satisfying puzzle game. I love games like this. I can’t wait until the judging period is over so I can go back to this and spend more than 2 hours solving the extra puzzles and trying to figure out how to arrange those bloody pipes.

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The Last Christmas Present (JG Heithcock)

Played on: 9th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 20min to beat the game and look at the feelies

This game is a short little scavenger hunt based on an event from the author’s personal life. You play as a twelve-year-old girl using a Marauder’s Map (i.e. the magic map from Harry Potter) of her house to hunt for her final Christmas present. It’s a parser game which can be completed in a little over an hour.

This is a short and sweet slice-of-life puzzle game with a map-reading gimmick. Much of the game is spent cross-referencing the map with the layout of the house in order to find secrets. The map is integrated well into the game as a central puzzle object. It feels as tactile as it can in a text-only game, giving you pages to flip and a couple of flaps to open. It’s a little like an interactive fiction version of those MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles which give the teams some papercraft to do. There’s also a thoughtful game feature which triggers when you read each page of the map: the Harry Potter-y names it gives to the rooms of the house appear in the game descriptions to help you cross-reference. There are a couple of extra in-game hints in the map which will mean more to players who know their Harry Potter books, but they’re not necessary to beat the game and I solved a lot of the puzzles before realising they were there.

(A sidebar here, because it’s something I can’t leave unsaid in good conscience. I am non-binary, and after JK Rowling’s cruelty to the trans community (in addition to the rest of her political weirdness), my distaste for Harry Potter stuff is now limitless. I don’t begrudge the author this and I’m not docking any points for it, because this is a scavenger hunt for a preteen girl who loves the biggest children’s media franchise of the 21st century. I don’t expect young Morgan or her papa to be plugged into the discourse of online transphobia, and I’m not asking that the game stop dead to say something Important about trans rights, because it’s not (and shouldn’t have to be) that kind of game. Still, though, it’s something that’s going to colour my perception in a way that the author can’t control. Sorry, I won’t mention it again.)

The puzzles themselves are simple enough, and structured well. Simple puzzles in individual parts of the house give way to a couple of larger put-it-all-together puzzles in the back half. The Last Christmas Present tries to stop you skipping ahead by setting a few hidden triggers – for example, you can’t find a few things until you’ve read a part of the map that proves it’s there. This stumped me a little in the back half because I knew what to do but I hadn’t proven it in-game yet, but I don’t think I mind that. This is a recreation of a real scavenger hunt, after all, and the player character is a real person, and I think it’s fair enough to ground the game in what she actually did rather than let the player speedrun things.

There has been some good testing on this game, as the credits show, but I think a few more testers could have been useful, because I found a lot of hitches and little frustrations. I fell at the first hurdle because I hadn’t realised you can open the flaps on the map; I had tried “open flap” but in fact the correct syntax is “open flaps”. At a later stage, I failed to put something on something because the correct syntax was “put something IN something” even though the thing you’re putting other things in is not a container. Does that make sense? I’m trying to avoid puzzle spoilers. The point is, I think a lot of reasonable synonyms are missing.

There’s also a trick where a couple of puzzles are obscured by finding the right thing to examine. One important item is hidden in nested descriptions; a couple of important things are revealed by examining the same objects multiple times; one item is hidden in a piece of scenery which isn’t always mentioned to the player because the description of that location has a random element to it. This isn’t that much of a complaint, since a lot of classic text adventures play with examining objects and scenery in similar ways (although the random-description thing is pretty egregious in my opinion; it’s a good thing that the cluing is strong enough that a player is likely to linger there and keep looking). But it is a curiosity in that it changes the nature of the scavenger hunt. Presumably it was immediately obvious to Morgan where to look in the real scavenger hunt, taking place as it did in her own house which she could see. The player of this text adventure has no such familiarity and has to do a lot more work to even be sure what’s in the room with them. I’m reminded of the reviews for Hard Puzzle, many of which focus on how little help that game’s responses deliberately give you, and how untrustworthy it subsequently feels. Scavenger-hunting in the text adventure, by virtue of missing immediate visuality, feels fundamentally different to scavenger-hunting in real life. I don’t know where I’m going with this and I don’t hold it against The Last Christmas Present, but it is something very interesting about text games to me.

Honestly, I think the biggest pleasure of The Last Christmas Present exists outside of the game. In the readme you get when you download the zip file, there are links to two bonus features: an interactive version of the Marauder’s Map, and a gallery of photos from the real scavenger hunt showing the Map in action. This gallery has a few puzzle spoilers, so save it until you’re done playing, but make sure you look through it. The actual physical Map looks gorgeous, and it’s clear how much love and care the author put into this scavenger hunt for his daughter. It’s a reminder that this is a very personal game.

The Last Christmas Present is a little clumsy as a text adventure and you have to be prepared to put up with some guess-the-verb issues. But it’s earnest and sweet and an honest labour of love.

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Wow! Thanks for pointing out the photographs of the real-life map. Amazing.

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Likewise - I actually also completely missed that there were photos! Will need to check those out.

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I too found the text, using the Impact font, nearly unreadable (but I liked the game). However, it turns out that the game doesn’t actually specify Impact, but instead this font list: ‘Fantasy, Luminari, sans-serif’. And Luminari (Luminari™ Font Family | Fonts.com) seems like an appropriate, medieval-style font.

But the first font in the list is Fantasy, which a ‘generic font family’ keyword for a ‘primarily decorative fonts that contain playful representations of characters’. And it’s the first choice, so even if you have the (non-free) Luminari font installed, the browser would always choose its generic ‘fantasy’ font, which for some very odd reason is Impact (Impact™ Font Family | Fonts.com) on your (and on my) system.

So – perhaps unless you happen to have a font actually named Fantasy – you will get the browser’s default ‘fantasy’ font, which might not be very readable or appropriate for the game.

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There are quite a few fonts literally called “Fantasy”. Some of them look very different to others, ranging from highly medieval through psuedo-handwritten to art deco (though some of them are free). So even if someone does indeed have a font called exactly “Fantasy”, there’s still no guarantee the results look as intended.

Although this is the first I’ve heard of the concept of “generic font family” keywords that aren’t serif/san-serif/monospaced/proportional , so I can easily imagine how the problem occurred.

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Oh, well spotted! So it’s just an unfortunate styling glitch rather than a design choice. (Though I’m still very puzzled that someone thinks Impact is not just a fantasy font, but the fantasy font.) Do you mind if I link your post in the review?

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The Alchemist (Older Timer)

Played on: 14th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran the Windows executable
How long I spent: 2 hours – didn’t finish, got 180/300 points

The Alchemist is a parser puzzle game which bills itself as “old-school”. I didn’t finish it in time, but based on my final score I’d guess it’s 3-4 hours long. The player character is tasked with finishing an important experiment by the titular Alchemist, Ezekiel Throgmeister (great name) – unfortunately, Ezekiel is far too busy to explain what the experiment is, so the player must explore his mansion to gather clues and materials.

Let’s talk about that parser, first of all. IFComp gets one or two custom text parser engine games a year – that is, the author has built their own parser rather than use a “standard” engine like Inform or TADS. Doing this allows the author great flexibility with presentation and multimedia which you can’t get in standard parser engines, which need to be agnostic about what interpreter will be running them. The author also gets to make deeper decisions about, say, how save data will be recorded, which might be necessary if you need your game to do something very particular that the standard parsers can’t do.

But the thing about Inform and TADS and the rest is that many of them are the product of literal decades of community work. They carry so many quality-of-life features, and such deep parsing of language (recognising pronouns, accepting multiple instructions in one line, etc.) that a custom parser built by one author cannot hope to match. (Dialog has just about managed it within four-or-so years of public work and who-knows-how-many years of private tinkering by a mostly-solo developer, which is a minor miracle. It can be done, but it’s bloody hard work.) So it’s a dangerous game, building your own parser. You get to do great things with how your game looks and acts, but if it’s even a little more annoying to control than Inform, people will notice.

The Alchemist’s QBasic-based engine is up there with the best custom parsers I’ve played in IFComp. It may help that this isn’t the first game Older Timer’s made with this system, so there have been opportunities to refine it, but it’s the first one that I’ve played, and I was very happy with it. Almost everything I would expect is present and correct – abbreviations for common verbs, pronouns, multiple commands in one line, the works. The big missing feature is an Undo function, as you might learn the hard way, but The Alchemist is pretty generous – it’s mostly impossible to make unwinnable (or so the game claims, and I didn’t find any mistakes), and the one deliberately unwinnable situation that I know of outright tells you to save your game beforehand. There are a couple of other quirks, like a painful save-restore system which has you type the name of the file you want to load (it really is old-school – I’ve been spoiled by GUIs) and an odd insistence on specifying containers when you’re trying to take items from them, but there’s nothing you can’t learn and work around.

In return, you get a good-looking game. Coloured text and simple ASCII art is used well for pull-out quotes and for certain puzzles (though I think such puzzles may not be colourblind-friendly, so watch out for that), and there’s an option to recolour the screen to different themes. Sound files are played at appropriate moments to punctuate puzzle solutions. (Unfortunately, my run of the game stopped playing sounds at some point, but I’ll put that down to a freak glitch.) The really clever idea, though, is that The Alchemist’s engine hooks up certain common commands to the function keys on your keyboard, and lets you reassign them. That’s such a nice quality-of-life feature. I didn’t take the time to play with this much, but I can see where I’d like to use it in The Alchemist.

How about the actual game? It’s a classic puzzle adventure, the kind of thing that’s the bread-and-butter of text adventures: explore a big weird place, solve puzzles everywhere, and open doors to other parts of the big weird place. The story is an excuse to get the player to ransack this mansion, really – which is fine, goodness knows there are a lot of old-school adventures with far thinner premises. There have been suggestions that there is more to the plot – a few odd-looking rooms in the house, an interesting random event or two – but the other shoe doesn’t drop in the first two hours so I can’t guarantee that.

The writing is just a little off, with a bunch of long and flowery run-on sentences and the occasional double-width space. It took me a while to realise why: the text is all justified, but the font is fixed-width, meaning that every description is written so that every line is exactly 75 characters long. This is a lot of effort put into supporting the visual presentation and I wouldn’t have noticed or complained if it hadn’t been there. The writing isn’t bad by any means, but I think it could improve without this artificial constraint.

I didn’t find the puzzles too difficult, for the most part. They’re not trivial, but I clicked pretty well with them and made good progress: I made it to 180/300 points in my two hours, and I never needed to use a hint. The one puzzle I got stuck on was crossing the fissure, but I worked it out myself, and I thought the solution was clear and fair. It’s a good thing, too, because the puzzle arrangement is very linear. There’s usually only one thing to work on at a time, and if you’re paying attention, whenever you find a new item it should be pretty clear where and how you use it. If the puzzles were hard, this could be annoying, getting you stuck on a puzzle with nothing else to work on. But because The Alchemist is relatively gentle, instead it’s very satisfying to knock down puzzle after puzzle like a chain of dominoes. And although the arrangement of puzzles is linear, your actual movement through the game world is not; the puzzle chain folds back on itself nicely, with constant re-usage of old concepts and locations.

The Alchemist is old-school in presentation and setting, but this puzzle design is much kinder and gentler than the sprawling entangled cruel puzzlefests of a Zork or a Curses. The puzzles actually reminded me a lot of escape room games. Not the escape rooms in real life that cost too much money and you have to do as team-building exercises; I mean the casual little Flash puzzle games that you used to find on JayIsGames. The Alchemist has a lot of similar puzzles, like simple key-door combinations and finding codes to apply somewhere else, and it’s pitched at about the same difficulty. If you’ve been yearning for Happy Coin Escape, you’ll probably get on well with The Alchemist.

I’m very fond of this game. It has its quirks, but they’re manageable, and the actual puzzling is a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to finishing it off after the competition.

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4 Edith + 2 Niki (fishandbeer)

Played on: 15th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 20 minutes of poking around, all endings seen

4 Edith + 2 Niki is a bitesize dating sim made in Twine, which can be played to an ending in two minutes. You poke around in a building at the back of a psych ward meeting four people called Edit (not Edith, note – I’ll get back to that) and two people called Niki, and you choose one of them to date at the end. This is an expanded rerelease of another game, The 4 Edith, originally made in 2015 for Twiny Jam, a game jam which stipulated that each entry must be less than 300 words. (I played that one as well out of curiosity, but I won’t comment on the original The 4 Edith in this review except to contextualise 4 Edith + 2 Niki, since it’s not the game I’m supposed to be reviewing here.)

This is a very, very small game. Your interaction with each Edit and Niki is one paragraph of text and one date, which is the ending of the game. Not even that, in fact – the two Nikis, added in this update of the game, are not dateable, as explained to you by the sentence “The Niki are not yet/no longer available…” when it’s time for your date. (I’ve been through a bunch of different combinations of hypertext links, and I couldn’t change this, so the Niki dates are either unimplemented, blocked off by a bug, or very well hidden.) The paragraphs only give you the briefest rundown of physical features and interests for each dateable NPC. I’m not a dating sim guy at all, but I thought the joy of these games was getting to know the object(s) of your affections so you can treat them right, and 4 Edith + 2 Niki cannot offer that. I’d call it more of a hook-up sim, except that the outcome of most of the dates is a description of a long-term relationship, so I guess it’s not supposed to be a one-night stand. The game is just too small for its own good, really. As an entry into a minimalist game jam, that’s fair enough, but as an expanded IFComp game, I expected something more – more room to breathe, or more craft in the words that are there (two of my favourite previous IFComp entries, Out and My Gender is a Fish, are tiny but perfectly formed).

But the big problem is that 4 Edith + 2 Niki is just not well written, from a technical standpoint. Odd syntax and grammar abound in sentences like “A horrible young man appears and names him a coffee-mouthed boy.” It’s hard to tell what’s going on, and the game sometimes fails to give you enough context to work it out. The Edits are hard to tell apart – of course they are, they’re all named Edit – and you don’t get much help to work it out. The dates you can go on are listed by location, but not all the Edits actually tell you where they want to take you. More than half of that 20 minute playtime I listed above was me making a table of the Edits and the dates to figure out which was which, like a little logic puzzle. I don’t actually think “bitesize dating sim” is a bad idea for a game, but if you’re going to try it, you’ve just got to write more carefully than this, if only so the player knows what’s actually happening and who they’re trying to date.

The writing, unfortunately, disguises something really interesting that 4 Edith + 2 Niki is doing. There’s a thing going on where some of the Edits and Nikis change pronouns mid-paragraph. The problem with the writing being so confusing is that this reads like carelessness at first (not helped by some actual pronoun trouble where the game adopts first-person narration for one paragraph only), but I think it’s intentional. In the original The 4 Edith, all Ediths were referred to as she, and I think this update is going for a much less heteronormative, more genderfluid approach to its bachelors. This would also explain why “Edith” is rendered as “Edit” throughout this update – the author is, I think, switching the characters to a gender-neutral name. I do appreciate this, honestly. This kind of thing is near and dear to my heart. It’s just a shame that the pronoun switches add another quirk that’s hard to figure out at first.

The possible endings are varied, depicting cosy relationships or failing sex lives in brief. The one which says of your relationship with one Edit that you’re “dumbassing together” raises a smile, whereas the one that says of its Edit “she’s a little hysterical, but which woman isn’t” raises an eyebrow. These endings show that the tiny dating sim concept could work. It does work with these endings, really! I like the idea of focusing on the present and glossing over a full future in a few sentences. It’s just not quite earned by the rest of the game. And that thing about hysteria is kind of unpleasant.

I don’t know that there’s much more to say, really. The presentation is default Twine, and the setting is not deeply explored outside of a little bit of descriptive prose. I wondered if the psych ward setting might point to an engagement with mental health and the way that people struggling with mental health find each other, except that the player character goes home at the end of the day, so presumably they’re not a patient. Good thing, too, because some of the Edits seem to be healthcare workers, and I’m sure there must be some kind of ethical guidance about relationships between workers and patients in psych wards.

I’m sorry, I didn’t like this game – there’s far too little meat on these bones, and it’s so difficult to understand what’s going on that any possible connection to the characters is scuppered. But 4 Edith + 2 Niki is small enough that it’s not going to be a waste of time to play the game yourself and see if you get more out of it than I did.

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Into The Sun (Dark Star)

Played on: 15th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 1hr 20mins to score $1590, plus 10 mins noodling around

(Content warning: this game has a little gore in it right from the start, though it’s not discussed in the review.)
(Full disclosure: Dark Star and I tested each other’s games for IFComp 2020. I’ve had nothing to do with this game, though.)

Into the Sun is a Z-Code parser-based game, which is billed as taking an hour to play but which has plenty of replay value beyond that. In this sci-fi horror, you need to salvage as many materials from an abandoned spaceship as possible before it drifts into the sun – but you’re not alone in the ship.

This is an optimisation game in the style of Curse of the Scarab or Sugarlawn or Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder. (Disclaimer: I’ve only played Sugarlawn out of these. Curse of the Scarab is cited as the main influence, but I can’t say how much Into the Sun draws from it.) As in those games, you’re moving through a map picking up as many valuables as efficiently as possible, planning around the need to find keys for locked doors and that kind of thing. But there’s a monster moving around the map unpredictably, and it can outrun you, and you only have so much weaponry to fend it off before you run out of shots. My experience of playing Into the Sun was not the maths-y graph-theory puzzling of Sugarlawn, but rather a tense game of risk-and-reward, trying to balance time and resources and having to gamble on the monster not being nearby as you delve into dead-ends to gather objects. It’s a fantastic idea.

The monster is the big obstacle to your efforts, and worth delving into. But first, let’s give it its proper name. The blurb on the IFComp ballot doesn’t give the game away, but if you read the in-game About text or pick up on a few familiar brand names in the ship, you’ll realise where you are: this is the Nostromo, and you’re up against the xenomorph, aka the alien from Alien. This is another point of ignorance for me because I haven’t watched Alien either, but you don’t need to know about Alien outside of picking up on references. It’s enough to know that the xenomorph is after you, and that you don’t want it to catch you.

You have a grace period at the start of the game until the xenomorph wakes up (or until you stumble on where it’s sleeping). Once it’s on the move, environmental messages alert you to where it is; if it’s just a few rooms away, you’ll be told of noises to your starboard or your aft or wherever (this game uses nautical directions instead of compass directions), and whether it’s moved towards you or away. This gives you just enough information to plan your next couple of moves, but is vague enough to keep you on your toes – you’re only told of one direction at a time, so just because it’s starboard of you doesn’t mean it’s directly starboard of you. Sometimes it stays still, and the environmental messages imply it’s listening out for you. I don’t know how much is actually going on with the xenomorph’s AI – whether it’s moving purely randomly or whether it’s actively seeking you – but the writing is pretty good at suggesting you’re up against something you have to outwit.

You can’t wait for it to move forever, though, because your other enemy is time: a gravity meter in the status bar slowly ticks up move by move, Into the Sun’s answer to the time constraint found in other optimisation games. Deviously, it doesn’t tick up linearly, but instead picks up pace as you drift closer to the sun, meaning that what looked like plenty of time suddenly becomes no time at all to make a mad dash to the airlock. Waiting advances the clock, which led to a couple of tense standoffs in my run as I wasted time waiting for the xenomorph on the other side of the door to mosey on. The gravity also ticks up every time you move or get something, or some other action like that, but lets you examine things for free, as in Sugarlawn. This introduces an unfortunate gameplay exploit, because the xenomorph moves every turn no matter what you do. If you know it’s on the other side of the door and you need it to go away, you can just examine something over and over again until the alien moves on (or enters the room and forces your hand) without wasting any gravity – surely not an intentional gameplay mechanic when waiting is so expensive. (Maybe this is easily fixed by not moving the xenomorph if the gravity meter hasn’t increased?)

You could, of course, also save time by using undo and save/restore liberally until you dodge the xenomorph successfully. Nothing’s stopping you! (I’d hate to lose my precious undo, but maybe this game would benefit from a mode which disables the undo command?) But the xenomorph has one more trick which is much harder to manipulate. It will occasionally destroy another room while searching for you, melting everything in acid. Anything valuable you haven’t picked up will be gone. But this might help you, too – in my run, the alien melted a desk with a locked drawer while I was searching for a key elsewhere, which opened the drawer and let me grab the contents later. There’s some very interesting gameplay design going on in Into the Sun, especially on a second run when you know what you’re looking for – a lot of gameplay systems are about trade-offs like this, whether it’s better to visit a room now, or come back to it later at the risk of the xenomorph getting to it first, or come back and hope the xenomorph gets to it first.

This game defies the ways in which I thought optimisation games worked. All the tropes are there, and you can certainly go for a high score (the game claims you aren’t scored, but the ending definitely changes based on the dollar-value of items you escape with). But the survival-horror twist turns it into a game of risk. I boiled Sugarlawn down to one perfect run, but I don’t think I can do that to Into the Sun, because the monster’s movement and whatever randomisation there is might scupper whatever I have in mind unless I want to save and restore and save and restore endlessly. (I’m not actually sure what’s randomised here – the map must be the same each time, given the maps provided with the zip file, and the keycodes you get probably change, but I don’t know what else does.) There are almost certainly tricks I haven’t found, and ways you can lure the alien which I don’t know about. But for now, this seems much more survival-horror than puzzle to me.

Anyway, it’s a good game. Very tense if you let yourself be immersed in it. I think I’m glad I don’t know exactly how everything works yet – keeps the next run interesting if/when I get back to this.

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Thanks for the indepth review.

I think most people do this at some point. But the game gives you an attaboy if the player wins without UNDO/SAVE/RESTORE. Something Drew Cook came up with.

There is no walkthrough because there’s random movement in the game. Other stuff changes each time too. You are right about the door codes. After the comp, I plan to release a post-mortem explaining the game in more detail. And when the post-comp release drops, I’ll also make the source code available.

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Thanks for playing through the Last Christmas Present and for such a thoughtful review. I have gotten a lot out of all the comments you and others have made. In particular, many folk hit snags on opening and reading the map (which is kind of unforgivable as the rest of the game hinges on this!). I am glad you liked the names of rooms and things getting labels from the map once you read them. This was my attempt to help orient the player to where they were on the map. I also think I really need to rethink how to better indicate the need to look twice sometimes. And I’m glad you liked the bonus features!

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Many thanks for the very comprehensive and encouraging review of ‘The Alchemist’.

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