Recently I discovered that some games listed on IFDB have extra reviews on Backloggd, a popular videogame review site similar to Goodreads but for games. A lot of popular IFDB games are on Backloggd, though most of them have no reviews, but the few with reviews have some interesting ones. With quotes:
- 31st March, Midnight on Backloggd - IFDB page
- “struck a very personal [chord], as someone who went [to] university for game design, losing passion for the medium I thought I loved, as the years passed, and I ended my time at uni as the largest mass layoffs the industry ever seen was going on. How do you not get disillusioned? How do you not lose all the passion you have as it gets churned and spit out the other end, with nothing more than a degree worth less than shit, a industry that hates you and a newfound hatred for the craft you studied? / Vision and love don’t get rewarded, passion is a resource to exploit and leave at the wayside once gone.”
- " Original and honest, 31st March, Midnight. went down like a bitter pill and hit me where it hurts. Research gamedev for a second, and you’ll know how difficult and taxing it is to the soul. This VN slides all of those feelings of resentment and betrayal under the microscope, placing the reader in the hot seat of an unenviable but revelatory position. I must commend the level of detail presented here, with the layered narrative reminiscing on the golden days of browser gaming contrasted to the stark realities of gamedev today. No party is safe from critique: cynical companies, performative marketing, Western Parody VNs… the list goes on."
- Type Help on Backloggd - IFDB page
- “Hooooly moly. My brothers and sisters in gaming, we have ourselves something special here. This game is a ride. If I can attempt a genre description: it’s a text-based, who-dun-it, static deduction game heavily inspired by the likes of Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story with a story that feels like Agatha Christies style of horror-mystery. This kind of deductive reasoning puzzle solving just scratches my brain in a way that nothing else can.”
- “A mystery as gripping and thrilling as any I’ve experienced in a game that kept my interested for the entire duration of my playthrough. It firmly earns its place alongside games such as Return of the Obra Dinn, No Case Should Remain Unsolved and Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box in the top class of “Puzzle Mystery” games. As well as being firmly in the top class for puzzle games overall.”
- Howling Dogs on Backloggd - IFDB page
- “surroundings deteriorate, the reality of the person wearing the headset, the player, and the story’s characters all meld, everyone’s goals collapse into one - organic like the tendrils of its dream cities, if you click the right links. compelling. reality vs fiction vs virtual spaces are v much an obvious theme from the moment you see the VR headset, yet it’s pulled off so elegantly that i can feel my mind reaching to draw connections between its abstract stories even when i’m otherwise busy. it explores many other things too, including misogyny and what it means to resist it.”
- Counterfeit Monkey on Backloggd - IFDB page
- “serves as probably one of the best social commentaries in a game I’ve ever played—up there with Disco Elysium and Katamari Damacy (yeah I said it).”
- “great conceit for a bunch of clever and silly wordplay puzzles, mostly oriented around the full-alphabet letter remover you start the game with, but what I really love about Counterfeit Monkey is that it also tries to seriously answer the question “What if language literally shaped reality?”. The dystopian government cracks down on foreign languages and nonstandard spellings and punishes offenders by transforming them into inanimate objects (in some cases until they lose the ability to turn back); ambitious idealists try encouraging mass adoption of new terminology that could help depollute the planet or develop entire conlangs to solve world hunger; a growing protest movement co-opts a patriotic symbol and in doing so changes how instantiations of its name manifest. And that’s not even getting into the circumstances of the player character, a student named Alex and a smuggler named Andra fused together into one person named Alexandra, the resulting feminine body causing Alex (who serves as the narrator) some pretty obvious gender dysphoria.”
- Neurocracy on Backloggd - IFDB page
- “Neurocracy was a ten-week collaborative adventure, during which participants could discuss the latest pages added or edited, to propose their theories on the assassination and all the other events surrounding it. A visit to the Neurocracy Discord gives a glimpse of an exceptional collaborative effort, which is difficult to replicate. Some projects, such as Cicada 3301 (2012), may be similar, with its mysterious conspiracy aesthetic. On the French-language Internet, a legendary website was Ouverture Facile (2005), now unavailable, which offered puzzles of increasing difficulty, combining mathematics, steganography, computer science and many other puzzles. Without being as difficult as Cicada 3301, the project generated a very particular craze and many discussions on numerous forums of that time. To experience Neurocracy without this social dimension – something that cannot be replicated today – damages the game’s design. Whereas Excalibur (2021) shines with its fake time capsule nature, Neurocracy thrives primarily on the interaction that players have beyond the game. Such an experience suffers from the passage of time. / For the player of 2023, all that remains is the universe and the mystery to be solved, but with no real solution to be reached or verified.”
There are more, but I got tired of looking for them. Many other games I found had only 1 short-to-medium review, like Cadre’s Shrapnel. <Edit to add: The OG Zork games and their many spinoffs also have entries on Backloggd.>
It could be useful to go add the Backloggd links for games with reviews to their IFDB pages, although I’m not sure if it would go in the Reviews or External Links section.