Hello, everyone! Would you like some more reviews of comp games? That’s a silly question, of course you would. While tons of more eloquent and knowledgeable people have already written reviews of this game, I am sure you cannot rest until you know what I think about them.
These are first impressions, often written in part while I was actually playing the game, and as such are a bit rough around the edges. Later, when I’m not in comp-judging Must Play All Games As Fast As Possible! mode and have been able to spend a bit more time with the games, I may tidy at least some of these reviews up and post them to IFDB.
Eurydice
One-sentence summary: After the suicide of a friend, the protagonist descends into a hospital-like Underworld in the hopes of getting her back.
My thoughts:
Some evocative descriptions, great atmosphere. Sometimes a little too self-consciously poetic,and overwrought, but that may be intentional, since the PC seems to have artistic pretensions. All four of the endings felt like appropriate conclusions to the story, although of course some are more hopeful than others. Somewhat shoddy proofreading (lots of missing punctuation, some misspellings) occasionally disrupts the mood. All things considered, though, a nicely poignant take on the old myth.
Andromeda Apocalypse
One-sentence summary: You are the Sole Survivor of the catastrophe that wiped out your planet, and now you’re stuck on an ancient, crumbling spaceship as your galaxy collapses around you.
My thoughts:
This sprawling and cinematic sci-fi piece feels like it wants to be a graphical game. There are the achievements, of course, but more than that, its whole design philosophy seems to belong to that medium, with the sparse implementation (most rooms contain nothing you can interact with, or only one or two big things) and prevalence of “cutscenes”. The plot is intriguing, though in parts confusing for me as I haven’t played the first game. Contains space whales.
In A Manor of Speaking
One-sentence summary: In A World where everything is a silly pun, you are a guy trying to deliver a bag to some other guy.
My thoughts:
I like a good wordplay game, but this one didn’t work for me. The puzzles were for the most part too simple to give any real sense of accomplishment, and the puns were groan-worthy in the bad way. It also felt a little directionless–I had no real idea what I was trying to accomplish at any given time or why, besides “well, I haven’t solved this puzzle yet, I guess I should do that?” It’s smooth, not buggy, and devoid of SPAG errors, and it might appeal to someone else’s sense of humor, but I didn’t find it much fun. As a caveat, though, I did play this before the 10/18 update and have not looked at the new and improved version.
Shuffling Around
One-sentence summary: At a boring professional conference, you duck down a side hallway and find yourself in a magical kingdom which you must save with the power of anagrams.
My thoughts:
This is a good wordplay game. It’s clever and challenging, and while the plot is more of a thin pretext for the puzzles, it was generally clear where I needed to go and what I needed to do in what order. While occasionally a little too in love with its gimmick (sometimes I had to read the room descriptions a few times over to properly understand them), it was thoroughly entertaining and the puzzles were well-constructed. I enjoyed it very much.
The Sealed Room
One-sentence summary: For nebulous reasons, a wizard has trapped you in a room with a dragon and a unicorn.
My thoughts:
[spoiler]Given the traditional escape-the-room setup, The Sealed Room seems very much like it wants to be a puzzle game, but the only real “puzzle” can be solved by exhausting the entire list of conversation topics with both the dragon and the unicorn and then taking a couple of other actions that the game pretty much flat-out tells you to do. I don’t mind puzzlelessness or trivially easy puzzles in a game that’s more story-focused or character-focused, but The Sealed Room didn’t appear to be either one. There’s not much plot here, and while the dragon and the unicorn are distinct characters and are funny at times, they’re not exactly deep.
Then there’s the conversation issue. Conversation in IF is hard to do well–I’ve struggled with it myself on the programming end of things–but from a conversation-based game in 2012, I expect more than a linear list of topics that you can just plow straight through, with almost none of them opening up further conversation paths and none, as far as I can tell, affecting responses to asking about other topics in any way. Not every conversation game can be, say, Galatea or Alabaster, but this wasn’t even Shadows on the Mirror.
I do think the idea of being stuck in a small space with a pompous unicorn and a short-tempered dragon who don’t especially like each other has some promise. I could see an interesting game coming out of that (maybe you have to mediate between them? Get them to work together so you can all get out of there?), but this one just didn’t go much of anywhere.[/spoiler]
Signos
One-sentence summary: Apparently you’re in the afterlife and trying to figure out the Meaning Of It All by imitating wise men of various religious persuasions. Or something like that.
My thoughts:
I feel bad for criticizing the grammar, since English is clearly not the author’s first language, but it really is distractingly bad. Comprehensible, for the most part, but it’s hard to get immersed in the story when you keep coming across oddly structured sentences and poorly conjugated verbs. That said, that isn’t really the game’s only problem: the puzzles are repetitive, the philosophical element is ham-fisted, and the implementation is a little too sparing–there are things mentioned in the room description that aren’t implemented or that return a “you see nothing special about the _____” response. When there are descriptions of objects, they’re often rather bland or redundant–when I examine a “big tree”, getting the response “Its like a giant tree [sic]” is amusing, but unhelpful. (Though to be fair, that description does go on to say “Its branches extend to the sky. You can’t see the top from here”). Also, you can’t “talk to” any of the numerous NPCs or “ask… about” anything (you get the response “it says nothing”), although examining the NPC in question might give you a bit of dialogue with them. All in all, it’s… well, it’s a would-be philosophical first effort from someone whose grasp on the English language is shaky, with about the level of polish that one would expect under those circumstances. Again, however, I have not played the most recent updated version.
Living Will
One-sentence summary: The player takes the role of one of four beneficiaries of the interactive will of a man who made his fortune mining tantalum in the Congo.
My thoughts:
This choice-based tale of will-wrangling, colonialism, and conflict minerals is darkly funny (well, sometimes just dark) and has slick presentation and a lot of personality, but having played through it multiple times with each character, I still feel like I’m missing something. I couldn’t figure out how any of the choices affected the numbers in the sidebar or the percentages bequeathed at the end. Was I not supposed to care? What was I even trying to accomplish? I’m not really sure.
Spiral
One-sentence summary: Two characters, trapped on a train and unable to recall how they got there, navigate separate but interconnected dreamworlds to regain their memories.
My thoughts:
[spoiler]Story-heavy, but with an interesting puzzle element involving collaboration between the two POV characters between whom the player can switch at any time. Both the PCs were well-developed and likeable, though flawed, characters, with crumbs of backstory meted out at intervals in a way that kept me interested throughout. Though both characters’ stories deal with some heavy issues, the game never came across as heavy-handed, judgmental, or lecturing. The writing was solid and evocative, and the dream worlds especially had some striking imagery, as well as contributing to an understanding of the characters, what they fear, and what’s important to them. Once I figured out the rules of the dream-logic, puzzle solutions were logical, except possibly for the one at the very end, which I had to check the walkthrough for. Implementation was good (I am terrible with names, so was very pleased in the beginning to find that it would accept commands like “be the other guy”, “be the person opposite”, “be the woman”, etc.) and I didn’t encounter any major bugs.
All that being said, however, my opinion on the game was soured slightly by the ending(s), which made no sense whatsoever to me. I’m all for surreal imagery and leaving things a bit open-ended, but this ending just felt weird and impenetrable for the sake of being weird and impenetrable and I couldn’t begin to get a handle on it, even on a symbolic level. It was a very unsatisfying conclusion to an otherwise interesting and enjoyable story.[/spoiler]
A Killer Headache
One-sentence summary: The zombie apocalypse has occurred, and you are a zombie, in search of brains to eat as your body slowly falls apart.
My thoughts:
This game has many good points, including a very thoroughly modelled world and some real pathos leavened by bits of humor, but it is really, frustratingly difficult and in some parts even resorting to the walkthrough didn’t seem to help. Maybe it’s just me being Bad At Things, but I found juggling all the things that wanted to kill me next to impossible, and I quickly got sick of being eaten by zombie schoolchildren. It’s not a bad game by any means; like I said, the world modelling is pretty impressive, the writing is good, and I didn’t find any bugs. But I didn’t find it fun to play, and I was not able to finish it in two hours, because I kept getting eaten by zombie schoolchildren.
Escape from Summerland
One-sentence summary: So, a ghost, a monkey, and a killer robot walk into an abandoned circus…
My thoughts:
[spoiler]The game begins with a weird bit of mood whiplash: the tone of the intro seems very serious in its description of the air raid, but then we go straight into the ghost character saying things like “oh my giddy aunt!” and Jacquotte the monkey’s silly animal-speak with emoticons (which seemed a little unnecessary). The rest of the game settles into a sort of balance between twee presentation and a sense of melancholy lurking beneath the surface, which works a bit better.
As in Spiral, the puzzles in this game mostly revolve around switching between PCs so they can help each other do things, but it feels less smooth here, largely, I think, because the characters usually have to all be in the same place at the same time, and as they don’t automatically follow one another, you end up doing a lot of “c ghost. w. c robot. w. c monkey. w,” which is kind of a pain. There’s a certain charm to the different narrative viewpoints, emoticons aside, and while not amazingly complicated, some of the puzzles are interesting. But in the end my feelings towards it are more lukewarm than enthusiastically positive, mostly because of all the irritating maneuvering of the three PCs.[/spoiler]
More to come at some unspecified point in the future.