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?
1 Like
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.
8 Likes
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.
5 Likes
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.
6 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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!
1 Like
Many thanks for the very comprehensive and encouraging review of ‘The Alchemist’.
2 Likes
The Archivist and the Revolution (Autumn Chen)
Played on: 22nd October
How I played it: Played online with Firefox (16th October update played)
How long I spent: 1hr 15mins for one ending, plus 15 minutes looking at 5 other endings
Content warning: Transphobia is a major theme in this game and in this review. Also, this one’s going to be a little spoilery; it gives away details which I think you’re supposed to figure out yourself from context and exploration.
The Archivist and the Revolution is a game about surviving in a post-acopalyptic dystopia, balancing work with social needs while trying to scrape together money for rent, food and medication. It takes a little over an hour to run through, and it was written in Dendry, an engine which I know nothing about, but this game in particular behaves a little like a Choicescript game.
This is the third game I’ve played this year which explored transgender experiences in a post-acopalyptic setting, after Spring Thing’s The Light in the Forest and this comp’s One Final Pitbull Song (a game which I’ve since learned is not necessarily a horror game about being lowered into a big pit, so I’ve gotta get back to that game and see how wildly it branches – but anyway). There seems to be something about modern times that makes people want to write games about the trans community and love and finding each other in a crumbling and uncertain world which is systematically opposed to your very existence. I wonder why? Not worth reflecting on, I’m sure.
The Archivist and the Revolution is by far the bleakest of these three games. This is a world where the culture war has been lost. And it was a war – there are worldbuilding references to a transhumanist war in the past, plus a recent revolution by a faction of “laverneans,” a term which seems to be this world’s term for trans-feminine people (there’s also a reference to “ellioteans” which I think means trans-masculine people?). Now, the laverneans are in hiding, with dark references to “anti-nonbinary purges” being made every so often. The player character Emmeline is a lavernean. The Archivist is a game of social and mental survival as well as financial.
The Archivist gives us a dystopia which intends to reflect and explore modern social ills, especially transphobia. There are other social critiques of modern society and capitalist culture embedded throughout the game. One thing I loved about the last Autumn Chen game I played, A Paradox Between Worlds, was its brilliant spoofing of the weird behaviours and tribalisms of social media; this work continues in much blunter and more dramatic fashion here. There are a few passing references to inter-factional conflicts such as “shameful behaviour from the other non-binaries” which suggests that we’re still arguing the correct way to perform gender hundreds of years in the future. An in-game social media forum supplies a stream of upsetting news stories about police brutality and murders of sex workers, each with user comments praising the oppressors. There’s a running gag of “fake news” being the first comment on every news story, which I think is too on-the-nose to be effective – it feels a little Banksy-ish – but perhaps I’ve just been soured by years of unfunny satirists thinking that saying “fake news” is an automatic slam-dunk on Donald Trump. Having said this, I got a bitter chuckle over the social media option in the menu eventually being renamed “a form of self-harm”.
The setting has had a lot of care put into it and the social critique is pretty clear, but I think there are times when the worldbuilding and the analogy are at odds, and the waters get muddied. It took a while for me to figure out what “lavernean” actually meant in context – the game does a good job of integrating its neologisms into its dialogue seamlessly, but there’s a lot to be said for just having a character say “as you know…” as a way of explaining something more obviously to the reader. A lot of this setting information is mentioned in passing and only laid out in the Notes subsection of the Entertainment menu option, which I don’t think is the most intuitive place to find it. This should be more readily available to the player, especially since the notes also explain the relationships between certain characters, which I’d consider to be quite important for the player to know if they want to make choices that make sense for the player character!
This has been a lot of nitpicking so far over the way that worldbuilding and meaning is delivered, but the fundamental game itself works very well. The core game loop has you making a couple of choices for what to do each day, one day at a time. You’re trying to raise money for a large weekly rent payment, while also being able to soak up the unpredictable costs of food and medication (Emmeline appears to have chronic fatigue syndrome or something like it, which also explains why you can do so little each day). Your main source of income is an archival job, in which you can decode texts from the past and file them as scientific papers, government documents, or other categories. It’s worth doing a few of these just for the writing, as Emmeline compares artefacts from our present with her present. Some of the decoded messages are quietly heartbreaking diaries hoping for a better future that hasn’t arrived, some elucidate the backstory in interesting ways, and some offer interesting dimensions to conversations you can have in the rest of the game. This isn’t really a puzzle game but there’s also a nice “aha” moment in getting your head around how to file the archives correctly (explained in the walkthrough if you’re not in this for puzzle-solving).
As you go into The Archivist, understanding that it is a dystopia and a reflection of modern economic and cultural woes, you will probably instinctively guess that the money isn’t going to be enough to keep up with the rent. And so it proves. The rent keeps going up, and random(?) events such as Emmeline’s illness flaring up will scupper your plans and budget. In this way, The Archivist nudges you towards engaging with two NPCs who Emmeline can try to ask for monetary help. These NPCs are quite well scripted and their conversations seemed very flexible – although Emmeline will sometimes make her own choices, you’re usually given valid and reasonable yes/no options to branches in the conversations. The conversations do try to steer you towards romance, which usually irritates me in a game but I think it’s justified here – the two potential love interests are both ex-partners of Emmeline who would like to pick up where they left off, so it’s not coming out of nowhere in-universe.
Eventually, the game will come to an end, probably once your luck with the rent runs out. (I think it’s possible to hang on for a long time with perfect play, but something in the walkthrough implies to me that an endpoint comes whether you like it or not.) There are nine possible endings, six of which I’ve seen – the other three will need me to replay the game with a strategy in mind, and I don’t think I’ll have the time to do that. The endings are all a little abrupt, which I think is because they have to stem from one or two pivotal scenes which will come at a time that the author can’t predict, based on how long you managed to beat the rent payments. But you’ll get different possible endings based on your choices throughout the game and what you made time to do, so your choices definitely matter throughout the game.
The first ending I got was Ending 1, which I think was a bad first ending to get. I’m still working through how I feel about it. On the one hand, I can see how it fits alongside the themes of the game. The most hopeful endings (of the ones I saw) are the ones where another person acts as a benefactor in some way, and the least hopeful have the player character alone at the end of the game, suggesting that there’s no bootstrapping your way out of a spiralling cost-of-living situation and that you need to be lucky enough that someone who is already lucky will help you. Ending 1 is the ultimate expression of that – it’s very much a Deus ex machina, or perhaps wish fulfilment. It also pays off something mildly risky the player can pursue throughout the game, as a gameplay reward for spending time doing that instead of something more obviously useful. On the other hand, the way it happens feels very sudden, it introduces new backstory information that I would expect to have been aware of earlier, and it seems to introduce a technology that has not been hinted at anywhere else in the game (unless I missed something? It’s a big game with a lot of optional content, so it’s quite likely I did). The ending feels like something of a swerve which cuts off a lot of other narrative threads, making it feel unsatisfying to me. I assumed it was a dream sequence until I saw the credits and the list of endings.
There seems to be some mild bugginess remaining in this release, but nothing game-breaking. I got one daily routine description which was just “0” but this is a useless bug report because I forgot to write down what day it was and what I did to cause it. Also, in an event where the character S- visited Emmeline’s flat, the game called it “the first time someone besides [Emmeline] has visited in over a year,” the game having forgotten about a visit from A- the previous day. But this is a complex game, and if those are the only two bugs I spotted, then it’s a pretty well put-together game.
Sorry, sorry, I know the review is too long, but I forgot to mention the styling. It’s good. The game looks really good. I love the background pictures. I’ve just been admiring the full pictures in the download folder. The muted colours and dithering get the spirit of each picture across without being so loud and detailed that the background fights for attention with the game text. Very cleverly done.
I feel like I did a lot of griping in this review. That’s not going to reflect the score I give it. The Archivist and the Revolution is very good – it gets its mood right, it’s written devastatingly well where it counts, and its setting and gameplay loop click with each other better than in most games. This is not the kind of game I tend to play outside of IFComp, to be honest – I need a little more optimism in my games – but there’s a lot of excellent work being done here.
7 Likes
Admiration Point (Rachel Helps)
Played on: 25th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 1 hour to find 3/5 endings
Admiration Point is a choice-based described on the ballot as an “anti-romance”. The player character Maria, who works as a digital museum curator developing experiences for VR, develops an attraction to her co-worker Sean. The player decides how Maria explores her desire in relation to her career and family. The stated run-time of 90 minutes seems to be based on finding all five endings; each ending will take 10-30 minutes to find.
The idea of an anti-dating sim is an immediate winner. This isn’t a romance, and you’re primed by the blurb and the author’s comments not to expect an ending where you get the guy. This is a story about feeding a guilty obsession and about being pulled apart by lust, family and religion. But it keeps its stakes, its characters and its setting mundane – not mundane as in boring, but as in everyday. (Well, apart from being set 100 years in the future – more on that later.)
Admiration Point plays on the expectations of a dating sim with its visual design. At first the styling is fairly straightforward (I wasn’t sure about the lime green accent colouring at first, but after playing for a while, I’ve been won over), but after a certain point, status indicators appear in the sidebar to track your relationship with Sean. An ever-tightening spiral represents Maria’s obsession with Sean, which I think is a clever bit of visual design. There are also icons for Sean’s attitude to you and his awareness of your crush.
Interestingly, although I saw that spiral tightening, I never noticed the Sean-related indicators changing. It’s possible that these could change if you make choices that I didn’t make, but it occurs to me that the game still works if they don’t change. Part of Maria’s agony is that she’s not sure how Sean feels about her, and she’s not sure how to feel him out without coming on too strong. Keeping Sean’s feelings as opaque as possible really emphasises the intentional dissatisfaction of the anti-romance angle.
The writing is pretty decent throughout. It can be dry and a little dull when it’s just describing events that get you to the next scene, but it’s at its best when Maria monologues to herself about her obsession – it does a great job of characterising the self-loathing that comes with thinking thoughts you don’t want to think. Maria’s crush is written carefully, tempered by little bursts of silent outrage against Sean and other characters helping to temper her obsession and making her feel real. Helps also has a real talent for working the setting into the writing. I always felt like I had enough details to go on when making choices, without feeling like the game had stopped dead to exposit.
There are five main endings, and a lot of little variations between those endings based on certain choices throughout the game. I’ve seen three of them: two you can get relatively early, and one which concludes the dalliance with Sean. The remaining two endings will require me to replay the whole game going for specific playstyles. I’m not sure I know what choices to make to get those endings, and I’m not sure I have the patience to work it out. I’m not sure what the intended way to experience this game is, if there is one. The multiple numbered endings, the hints at the end and the status bar suggest you’re supposed to be figuring out how to see all the content and planning your approach to Sean, but the deliberately dissatisfying limits of your romance with Sean and the obtuseness of the status bar (allowing for the possibility that I didn’t make the right choices to see the status bar change) make me think it’s better experienced as a one-shot game.
There seem to be three thematic strands to Admiration Point. One is, obviously, the exploration of a dangerous and probably unrequited crush. Another is the intersection of feminism and Mormon culture. The game’s two lead characters are Mormons and the game is embedded in a semi-speculative Mormon culture which had me doing a lot of research. (I’m pretty sure “Deseret State University” is fictional, but I’ve now learned that the LDS Church does sponsor universities.) The worldbuilding seems to imply that the Church grows its sphere of influence in the future (I will get around to that “100 years in the future” thing, I promise). This is presented pretty neutrally in the game – I don’t think Admiration Point is interested in swaying you in a religious debate. Instead, I think the setting is being used to immerse you in the religion so you can see things from the player character’s perspective (and the author’s, presumably - the FAQ at the end of the game heavily implies that Maria is based on Rachel Helps).
The intersection between feminism and religion surfaces in many interesting and unexpected ways. I noticed and appreciated a moment where God is pointedly referred to as “They” rather than the traditional “He”, for instance. The personal politics of motherhood are especially underlined, as one of the stresses underpinning Maria’s family life is that her husband wants to try for another child even though her first pregnancy took a huge toll on her; Maria, in turn, expresses a desire to resist the cultural expectations of motherhood when she designs exhibitions which feature mothers as key historical figures. To an extent, the game isn’t really about Sean; it feels like Admiration Point wants to explore how feminism is negotiated against a traditional conservative American background (i.e. the Christian nuclear family), and Sean’s presence is just the spark that lights the gunpowder.
Okay, that 100 years thing. A few dates given in this game imply it takes place at about the turn of the 22nd century, but you can’t really call this a sci-fi game. The furthest it goes with hard sci-fi is depicting VR headsets and gloves as having improved haptic feedback. But Admiration Point does spend time establishing what happens to web technology politically and economically in the next 100 years. Gripes from co-workers suggest that anonymity on the internet is long gone, and an in-game book you can read describes a gamification of crowdsourced data harvesting which feels very plausible. The VR museum of Admiration Point presents a digital world that is contemporary (if threatened) to us but historical to the characters, who only know the internet after it seems to have wholly succumbed to corporatisation.
So the third theme of Admiration Point is digital culture: how we might archive and exhibit our current digital culture, and what the interests of capital and surveillance might do to future digital culture. At first blush this theme feels a little divorced from the other themes, like it doesn’t really belong alongside the interplay of feminism and religion and lust. And yeah, I’m not sure it intertwines with the themes of desire and family life as tightly as they intertwine with each other, although it is used as an effective tool to provoke interactions between those other themes (for example, during a lot of the game Maria works on an exhibition of mommy-blogging artefacts, which leads to reflections on her own pregnancy).
However, if I’m honest, this stuff about digital culture was the most fascinating part of the game to me. I used to work with archives, so I was really interested to read how the author has worked through the implications of digital archives. In fact, quite a lot of my notes are copy-pasted excerpts from the game when Maria reads a book about digital culture. Helps is sensitive to the politics of the archive and fictionalises the debates effectively; I enjoyed the little scene where Maria is asked to create the display for a Handmaid’s Tale-themed game which seems to have missed the point of the franchise, weighing up her feminist values with the responsibility of her job to present artefacts and exhibits as they are. I know that I in turn have missed the point of Admiration Point, focusing on scenes like this instead of the core anti-romance, but I could quite happily play a game all about this kind of thing.
I appreciated Admiration Point a lot, and it achieves what I think it sets out to do: it uses the dating sim as a springboard for much more nuanced conversations about feminism and sexual desire. As with The Archivist and the Revolution, this isn’t really the kind of game I play for pleasure, so I don’t feel a strong desire to go see the other endings. But this feels like a very personal and empathetic game and it was well worth playing.
6 Likes
Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey (Andrew Schultz)
Played on: 29th October (2nd October update played)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 2 hours to almost-but-not-quite finish the game (scoring 70/75-84)
(Full disclosure: I tested Andrew Schultz’s other IFComp entry, Zero Chance of Recovery, and he’s tested my current project. But I’ve had nothing to do with this entry.)
Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey, hereafter referred to as LLJJ for my own sake, is a wordplay puzzle game controlled by text parser. It’s a continuation of the puzzle types used in the author’s previous games Very Vile Fairy File and Quite Queer Night Near, though I haven’t played those and can’t compare this game to them. The ballot says it’s 90 minutes long, but I don’t think that’s enough – I couldn’t quite finish it in the 2-hour IFComp judging limit even using as many hints as I dared.
The puzzle gimmick is all about alliterative rhymes, as demonstrated in the game titles. You’ll be confronted with a person or object or concept with an alliterative name; your job is to come up with new phrases that change the initial phoneme but keep the rest of the sounds of each word, in order to create another object or change of state that solves the problem. For example (and I think I’m inventing a puzzle here, but my apologies if I’m accidentally spoiling a puzzle in VVFF or QQNN), you might meet a character in a car experiencing road rage, so you might try trying things like “code cage” or “goad gauge” to see if something like a cage or an instrument can address the problem. (Usually only one or two phrases will be the expected solution, but something in the game’s descriptions will clue the right phrase.) The experience of this game is sitting in front of your computer saying out loud things like “blowed blage? Mowed mage? Throwed frage?” trying to work out what actually sounds like words.
Anybody who has every talked to anybody from a different town will spot a problem here: everybody has an accent and everybody thinks their accent is the right one. One person’s homophone is another person’s who-in-their-right-mind-would-ever-think-these-words-sound-the-same. And, well, yes. This is one of the big stumbling blocks to solving the puzzles in LLJJ. Schultz leans into it with a liberal interpretation of sounds, meaning you have to be very flexible here. To take an example from one of those game titles, you may find that the “er” in “very” is considered a match for the “air” in “fairy”. Some people won’t have a problem with this, but others might say them slightly differently (I know I do – I draw the “air” out more than I do with the “er”) so they might miss rhymes like this when trying to solve puzzles. I’ll bet there’s a puzzle in here to stymie every English speaker on the globe.
Because of this, LLJJ has the potential to be a really nasty wordplay game with lots of reading the author’s mind (as well as guessing their accent). But it’s not. LLJJ is a remarkably kind game. There’s a saying in cryptic crosswords which I can’t find an attribution for, but which I’d say applies to puzzles in general: the role of the setter is to lose gracefully. You want the solver to beat you, even if you want it to be a challenge. If you fancy yourself the Riddler and make the most obtuse puzzle you can, the prospective solvers will mostly get fed up and leave and you’ll rob yourself of the satisfaction of seeing people admire your brilliant solution.
LLJJ wants you to solve it. It’s one of the best-hinted games I’ve played. All the puzzles have clues embedded in their descriptions. A close-but-wrong guess may give you an extra clue. If you get a phrase which will solve a future puzzle but not this one, LLJJ kindly stores it in a list for you to check later, removing the possibility of guessing a solution too early and then never trying it again. There’s even a SOUNDS verb that lists common phonemes, for those of us who need to stare at our keyboards going “soad sage? Doad dage? Foad fage?..” The puzzles themselves are consistent and fair, and deviations from the norm are usually indicated clearly. The only puzzles which upset me were the ones where I’d never heard of the necessary word, but that’s just one of the perils of a wordplay game. I tried a cryptic crossword the other day which threw up the word “enfilade”. This kind of thing just happens sometimes.
In-game objects also provide excellent hinting, although it takes a bit of work to figure them out. The leet learner object provides a lot of settings for nudges if you get close to the right answer – you can switch those off, but I think they’re best left on to overcome any accent/spelling trouble. It can also provide numbers after each guess – what those numbers mean is left as an exercise to the solver, but I think this concept is introduced in a bad and intimidating way, encouraging you to climb to a particular place and then bombarding you with obscure edge-case numbers you’re not going to be able to make head-or-tail of yet.
As well as the leet learner, you can also obtain an object which solves critical-path puzzles for you, but which only holds a limited set of charges. In a clever bit of design, it’s recharged by finding good-but-wrong solutions. Even if “code cage” isn’t useful, if it’s recognised by the game, it contributes a little something to your progress. This encourages you to keep trying puzzles honestly without resorting to skipping them too early, since if you struggle for long enough making valid guesses, you’ll earn the right to skip them. (LLJJ also counts the number of valid rhymes you’ve found for each puzzle; if you’re motivated by seeing numbers go up, LLJJ’s got you covered.)
I spent a lot of time talking about the puzzles because that’s the draw here. It’s one of those games where the story and setting is just there to spice up the puzzles. In LLJJ’s case, as with a lot of Schultz’s other wordplay games, it seems like the puzzles came first and were arranged roughly thematically, and then the locations and storyline were bent around them. This is not a complaint, of course – it’s very clear from the outset that LLJJ is not trying to be a heavily story-based game. The inciting incident is that the player character has nothing better to do and just decides to go along with the wordplay adventure. Having said this, the puzzle-first writing does happen to lead to some little scenes which are a lot of fun to build up. My favourite of these was the sequence where an arena concert is built up from scratch. These word puzzles are surprisingly flexible!
One last thing to note is that LLJJ is kind of a buggy game, but not in a game-breaking way as far as I know. The bugs are mostly in the way it displays text. There’s a hub area whose list of locations is wrong, running two locations together on one line; since the list is initially presented as a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle, this makes those blanks unintentionally tricky to fill in. There are one or two spots where the response to the solution I found felt disjointed, as if I had missed a step (e.g. (puzzle solution spoiler here) the Mad-Most-Cad Coast, which suddenly mentioned a voice when I correctly guessed Bad Boast, even though one wasn’t mentioned in that room when I entered). There are also a couple of valid (in my opinion – it could be an accent thing again) rhymes which aren’t recognised, but that’s okay, most have been caught and the ones that haven’t might be hoovered up in a post-comp release.
LLJJ came along at the right time for me. After a couple of games on deep themes and heavy topics, I was happy to just have a ton of word puzzles to work on. This is not an ambitious game, but it is a lot of fun and it’s on the pile of games I’ve got to finish off as soon as I’m done judging.
5 Likes
Esther’s (Brad and Alleson Buchanan)
Played on: 30th October (3rd October version played)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 10 minutes to play twice
Esther’s is a short Twine game built with Snowman and Tweego, aimed at children. This is a simple story about two mice trying to communicate a brunch order to the human owner of a restaurant, who doesn’t speak Mouse. The player makes choices for the mice to try pointing at different things or playing charades. The game only takes five minutes to play, maybe ten if you’re reading out loud to a kid.
This is going to be a short review for a very short game. In one of the other reviews I did this year, I mentioned that two of my favourite recent IFComp entries were Out and My Gender is a Fish. These are both tiny games by IFComp standards, and that’s a good thing – they both do exactly what they want to do, they do it well, and then they end before they overegg it. I think a small project gives authors the chance to really pay attention to detail and get everything polished, tested and proof-read. It’s easier to perfect 1000 words than 10,000.
Esther’s has earned a place on this list. It’s one of the shortest entries I’ve played this year (it’s either this or 4 Edith + 2 Niki), but it’s the most finely-crafted entry I’ve played so far this year. It’s obvious that the authors have put a lot of care and energy into this game. I really like Esther’s, to be clear. The presentation is beautiful (even without the pictures, the colour palette and big font look very good to me) and the writing is tons of fun.
There’s essentially one puzzle to the whole game, that of getting your brunch order correct. It’s not a hard puzzle – it’s easily brute-forced by lawnmowering all the choices you’re given. That’s fine, it’s a kid’s game. I’m not expecting twisty passages and cryptograms. And actually, having played one quick run and one thorough run, I think it’s a lot more fun when you work your way down all the choices and find all the little jokes and character beats.
I guess the big question mark for me is if Esther’s is successful as a work of children’s literature. I don’t have kids and I’ve never tried writing for children so I can’t judge Esther’s very well on that front. I’ve peeked at a few other reviews and I saw Victor Gijsber’s report that his four-year-old loved the game but had trouble keeping track of what objects were in play. And yeah, I can see that being hard to remember for a child, and clearly it is hard. I think you are always funnelled towards the puzzle solution, just by dint of exhausting all the other choices, so I don’t expect it will be a problem for gameplay, but maybe it’s a problem for storytelling.
For my part, like Victor, I was wondering about the choice of mimosas and avocado toast as the main objective. These don’t seem like foodstuffs or words that a young child is likely to come across often. (Although I do like the joke that not even the mice are sure what a mimosa is; they just think it’s some kind of orange juice.) I’m not certain what age group this is aimed at – the setting is very nursery-friendly, but word choices like “satisfaction” and “meticulous” seem demanding for that age group. Not impossible with an adult reading aloud, though, I don’t think.
Quibbles about the target audience aside, I don’t have a problem with Esther’s. It’s charming and it’s cute as buttons. I hope it does well.
4 Likes
I think that’s probably it for my reviews! I’m not a fast writer, and I need to free up a little time to focus on a couple of other projects. I want to squeeze in a few more IFComp games but I doubt I’ll write anything more unless they’re really worth writing about.
I’m still not going to discuss scores for specific games, but I will say that for most of the games I’ve reviewed, I’ve penciled in a good score, 6 or more. I might be a generous scorer, but I also really think that everybody puts their best foot forward for IFComp. It’s always a pleasure.
4 Likes
Thanks for the review!
2 Likes
Very belated thanks for the bug reports about the text and I’m glad they didn’t seem to impact things too much! I’m tracking down the final things to fix for a final release & with the automated testing I do, this can slip.
I’m in the “5 detailed reviews from any reviewer is a good thing” camp and you got 12, so that’s very good indeed. It’s so easy to focus on what one is missing, but given that there are a lot of reviewers that give 5-10 strong reviews, it really does add up.
4 Likes