Rovarsson plays IFComp 2022

Competitions IFComp
21

The Last Christmas Present

A computer implementation of an actual real-life treasure hunt, if I understand correctly.

I could easily go back in time and picture myself as an excited thirteen-year-old roaming through the house piecing together clues and directions from a Dad-drawn map. The joy and fun of the real-life experience shine through in the writing, especially in the small asides (TWIRL). I think there are many inside jokes and shared memories connected to this piece, not in the least that it is set in the girl’s own house.

Sadly, the real thing doesn’t translate very well into IF. At least, it doesn’t in this instance. The father and daughter (and presumably other family members) have their shared memories of the hunt and the familiar layout of their house to fill in mental images and evoke feelings of wonder and joy.

We, more distanced players/readers, do not have this inside touch. To bring about the same (or at least similar) emotional connectedness, the game would have to be much more rich in its descriptions and deeper in its implementation.

Someone unwrapped a beautiful present in the room and I caught a glimpse of it. I liked what I saw, but I remained a remote bystander.

3 Likes
22

Under the Bridge

A thoughtful piece.

Interesting to see the world through this protagonist’s eyes, especially as hints of their personal history trickle through. It invited me to set aside temporarily my human moral compass, and the different endings did not seem to push notions of “good” or “bad” upon me after playing. (Except when I died. That was bad. And sad.)

The main theme that pressed itself on me was the tension between the need for interaction, connection on the one side, and the safety in lonely but familiar detachment and self-sufficiency on the other.

Emotionally touching, very well written.

It was often hard to predict the outcomes of my choices, and more than once I thought of an intuitive third choice that was not presented. Actually, this fit rather well with the overall feeling of the piece. My agency was turned into helplessness and lack of control. No matter my choice, there were unforeseen or unwanted consequences. On the other hand, it also meant that steering the narrative toward a particular outcome quickly turned into random guessing and avoiding certain choices upon replay, just to get a different ending.

I liked Under the Bridge a lot.

Author Samantha Khan, I did encounter a bunch of typos:

-“THERE blood of the last human is long gone…” → “The”
-“…to the outsiders that cross through the THAT forest.”
-“That won’t DUE at all.” → “do”
-“THERE approach is ever growing in sound.” → “Their”
-“The knights AND many…” → “are”

1 Like
23

The Alchemist

I am so glad I had most of the day off today. I played my alloted two hours of this game in three hours with short breaks every half hour. I’m not finished. I wouldn’t want to be either. I want to stay in the mansion and figure more stuff out! I’ll be playing this until the end.

Sometimes the perfectly right thing comes along at just the right time, without you even realizing beforehand it was what you yearned for. Starting up The Alchemist, with its full-screen white-on-black theme and familiar font was like being handed a warm cup of soup. Comforting and welcoming.

Old school all the way, in a manner I have learned to trust in Jim MacBrayne’s games.
A strong homebrew parser that easily supports big and winding text-adventures. (Remember: The F1-key is your friend…)
Varied clues and puzzles: riddles, common sense, devices, magic (?),…

The writing is of very high quality. The mood is set with a stylish introduction, reminiscent of late 1800s Gothic Mystery horror stories.
In the game proper, the writing is sparse and stark, efficient and clean, but never loses sight of the desolate-mansion atmosphere.

Very good stuff. Solid adventuring.
I’ll spend the evening wrapped in a sinister blanket of unearthliness.

EDIT: I finished! Very satisfying. Homey in a gloomy mansion sort of way.
I spent around 5 hours on it, sporadically peeking at the in-game hints.
Full review: The Alchemist - Details (ifdb.org)

5 Likes
24

Thanks Rovarsson for the review! Yes, this was me trying to recreate this real-life treasure hunt (that took place ten years ago!) and I was indeed concerned if anyone would be at all interested in it. As you say, it is much more puzzle oriented and not really story focused at all. This is indeed my first attempt at interactive fiction and I have really valued the reviews as well as reading the transcripts of all the folk who have tried out the story. I am very glad you “caught a glimpse of it” and will continue editing the game after the contest!

2 Likes
25

Esther’s

What can I say? I was grinning ear to ear the whole time.

I went through a goal-oriented first playthrough, making choices that I felt confident would bring me closer to the mice’s objective. Meanwhile I marveled at the pretty pictures and the smooth writing. (Writing in little-children-sentences is not an easy feat.)

Then I doubled the fun. I began behaving like a tricksy recalcitrant toddler, purposely choosing to stuff everything in my mouth instead of moving toward the goal. And I laughed…

Heartwarming and funny.

5 Likes
26

Thank you for the review!

27

----munching on toast----

Hùmm? Wha…

No problem.

----mjumnamnom----

2 Likes
28

Prism

“We’re too young for nostalgia, sparrow.
Go live a life worth reminiscing about.”

These are the final lines of the introductory paragraphs. An incitement to explore the nooks and crannies of this narrative urban maze.

During the first dialogue, I was immediately drawn to the protagonist and their companion. The little inklings of their hidden personalities dropped by the author made me thirsty to learn more of their personal histories and their place in this world.
The setting their meeting takes place in is equally intruiging. There are precious hints of a sprawling city with simultaneously mystifying yet familiar inner workings. Technomagical engineering seems to take the place of our cogs and gears, but the story remains vague about the ratio of familiar cause-and-effect and magical interference. There is mention of storm-powered “jolt” resembling static electricity but also of a crystal with strange workings.

During the story, the player is presented with several situations which increase the narrative tension. There is ample opportunity to shape the personality of the protagonist through the choices of which action to take, and in doing so, to determine the future, the outcome of the story.

I took a conservative path on my first (only, so far) playthrough, choosing to lay low and let the big problems and mysteries be handled by those perhaps better suited to heroic interference with the powers that be.
I learned a lot about the people of Conduin, the great city, and about the power dynamics that drive their society. I survived to live perhaps not heroic, but content with my role.

No point reminiscing about the time you got killed for poking your nose too far where it doesn’t belong…

Very good speculative fiction. I’m gonna go exploring more now, perhaps indeed poking in some darker corners…

5 Likes
29

A Walk Around the Neighborhood

Oh I had a lot of fun with this.

A seemingly simple objective that leads to all kinds of shenanigans. Who knew getting ready to go out the door could set up so many hoops to jump through.

It’s mostly pretending you’re actually in this situation and turning the living room upside down and inside out to find your stuff, but turned up to eleven.There are a few small puzzles, nothing extraordinary but fun.

The game shines in all the details that bring up distractions, or memories and stray thoughts that provide a little backstory. Somewhat more serious are the reminders that this game was made with COVID measures still firmly in mind. But then you’re searching the sofa and laughing again.

Instead of an impersonal hint-system, you have the exasperated but loving and forgiving voice of your partner answering you from upstairs when you SHOUT.

Finding the winning ending is not hard as long as you look hard enough. However, there are 18 other “losing” endings where you have to think more or less out of the box, some hilarious, some just silly. And then there is one optimal ending for which the game drops some sledgehammer clues, so it’s not that hard to find either. It’s very sweet.

Half an hour of fun, pure and simple.

4 Likes
30

A Matter of Heist Urgency

With the snooping detective work at the start and the hyperactive battles later on, I felt as if I somehow ended up in a Pink Panther/Powerpuff Girls hybrid. The musical introductions to each chapter greatly enhanced this feeling.

Great tempo, fast action. Funny side characters (Sir Ponyheart: “Swift Justice!”)
And I always knew those llamas were up to no good, with their spitting and their deceptively lazy eyes…

The game does a whole lot of stuff on its own, often responding to a simple command with an entire sequence of actions. I like my parsers a bit more fine-grained.

While Anastasia is obviously super in every imaginable way (imagine a pony picking up a coconut!), in a game this short it wouldn’t have hurt to have the possibility of losing. Let the super pony take a beatdown, it’s an opportunity for a funny failure scene.

Fast, straightforward and funny. A quick pick-me-up. I liked it.

3 Likes
31

Into the Sun

This is packed with atmosphere! Dimly lit corridors, smoke-filled rooms. The bulkheads creak and scream under the ever greater gravitational stress. And there’s something slithering around the air vents…

A moody hommage to a certain classic SF-thriller (I assume), the threat is ever-present but rarely there.

Optimization games are not normally my thing, but here the breathtaking atmosphere drew me in enough to go through until the end. And then some…

In the two playthroughs I’ve done so far, I mostly mapped the locations of interesting locked doors and the means to perhaps get through them, and thinking of a turn-saving strategy to get to important objects faster. Even then, I was already mildly successful on my second try. Encouraging.

Maybe on my next try I should use the beautiful map the author has provided… I didn’t look at the feelies until just now.

Very immersive setting, strong building tension.

Good game.

6 Likes
32

Hanging by Threads

Picture this: an entire city hanging from a web of ropes and cables over a chasm between two looming mountain peaks. Clouds so close you might catch them. Everything we on solid ground would call a “building” a woven sack with enough room for a bar or a hotel. A bustling marketplace on a floor of threads, gently swaying.

You are a rare outside visitor invited to explore the city.

I love the setting.

The prose is good. Understated, factual descriptions that leave a lot of room for the imagination to fill in. There’s a good rhythm to the writing that pulls the reader along.

Too bad I sprung into English-teacher mode on the very first screen. And I’m not even a native English speaker.
So many linguistic errors… A spelling mistake every third sentence. Random jumping between tenses. English sayings that do not mean what the author is trying to say.

Consciously trying to ignore these and stay focused on the story sapped my energy. When I encountered a screen without a link back to where I came from (an ending? a bug? I wasn’t sure at this point) I quit.

Please let someone fluent in English proofread this story. It has great potential, and I would love to read it in one uninterrupted sitting. However, the language issues were overwhelming to me.

3 Likes
33

Through the Forest with the Beast

You are marked. The villagers found you out. You must flee.

Can you reach the safe haven of Laalfeld through the dangerous woods?

An intruiging setup. Many opportunities to tease the player with hints of backstory. Atmospheric background sounds and image. Stats for health and stamina help guide your choices and give immediate feedback about their results.

But I fear I have stumbled into a similar situation as with my previous game. Through the Forest with the Beast is riddled with language errors.
One of the very first choices has you pick between “Go back” and “Foward”(sic), and there is not a paragraph after that which doesn’t have a spelling error. The author is also overly enthousiastic in their use of “however”.

I did encounter a memorable scene (down the ravine), which demonstrates the author’s strength of imagination and feel for atmosphere.

This could have been so much better if it had been proofread.

2 Likes
34

Who Shot Gum E. Bear ?

A hard-boiled detective investigates the death of a candy-person. I know. Silly, right? Funny too.

And it works… Until you start digging a little deeper.

To me, this kind of game stands or falls with the depth of implementation. I want to be surprised and delighted when I try the most farfetched commands. I want to be constantly thinking “I can’t believe the author thought of this!”.

Gum E. Bear, while certainly pretty well written and quite funny in places, doesn’t meet this standard of more than thorough implementation. (If you’re gonna put a gun in my hand, at least let me SHOOT GUN). The game misses many chances to make itself memorable in this respect.

Good setup, lots of details waiting to be filled in.

4 Likes
35

A Long Way to the Nearest Star

This piece of interactive fiction is an important data-point to be considered in the context of Russovian Merger Theory, which predicts the ongoing growth of overlap between the ür-thesis of parser-based text adventures and its newer antithesis to be found in choice-based clickety games.

A Long Way to the Nearest Star could well be a starting-off point for the in-depth analysis of a hypothetical near-perfect synthesis of the two aforementioned forms.

And now I’ll get down from my jocular ivory tower of theoretical smugness…

In its basic structure, A Long Way to the Nearest Star is an exploration-adventure where the player needs to solve object-based puzzles and unlock gated-off sections of the setting, unraveling the backstory while progressing in the game.
.
The level of granularity is somewhere between that of a parser and a narrative Twine. There is a traversable world without compass-directions. (It’s easy to create a map with random connections between rooms.) The PC has a sizeable inventory without the sometimes cumbersome fiddly freedom of verbs a parser offers.
The agency of the player is firmly focused on the actions to be undertaken, not on higher-level choices of how to navigate branching narrative threads.

The writing is very good, mostly so in its characterization of the NPC.
The AI-computer SOLIS is by far my favourite NPC of the Comp, and it’s up there with the best ones I’ve encountered in my IF-playing years.

Now I’m off to figure out how to get this Janitor Bot talking.

Great game.

EDIT: Very satisfying endgame.
Full review: A Long Way to the Nearest Star - Details (ifdb.org)

6 Likes
36

I appreciate the shout-out to the theory, as well as phrasing it in its proper, dialectical terms!

I’m looking forward to your full review, and heartily agreed as to SOLIS.

2 Likes
37

HOURS

It’s really unhealthy to pull an arrow out of your arm. I know, it looks badass like hell, especially if you do it while nonchalantly conversing with a spectre that just told you you’re going to die, and would you pretty please kill the tyrant before you croak, but really, not healthy.

If the arrowhead is barbed, you’ll tear apart the muscle and skin while forcing it out. Imagine ripping a fishing hook out of a fish’s throat. Chances are you’ll turn the poor thing inside out, its guts hanging in the wind to dry. I saw this happen once when I went fishing with a mate. Anglers have a nifty little piece of equipment to push-and-pull the hook without damaging the fish’s throat and jaw too much.

You could try pushing it all the way through to the other side, but that would mean more tearing of muscle and skin inside your already wounded arm, and then you’d have to slide the entire length (or half, if you remembered to break it) of the dirty, blood-and mudstained arrowshaft through the wound. Not healthy. Well, getting shot with an arrow is not healthy, but hey, no need to make it worse now, right. Not just to look badass.

Granted, barbed arrowheads are mostly used for hunting big game, to cause massive bloodloss and hinder the animal by hanging there while it tries to run away, getting tangled in its legs and tripping it over. Arrowheads used for war are mostly bodkins, heavy, roughly bullet-shaped points of metal made to better pierce armour. Even then, while it may be a smoother pull to get it out, it may well be plugging an artery so that if you remove it, you could bleed to death in minutes.

Best get yourself to the field hospital, have a little morphine and let the nice doctors and nurses cut it out cleanly in a more hygienic environment.

Speaking of hygiene, ripping off a strip of cloth off a nearby corpse’s uniform to bandage the wound, while very badass, is a sure way to introduce an invisible swarming army of bacteria into your bloodstream, all but ensuring your death by gangreen a few days later, your arm rotting into a blackened mess.

Again, ask the nice nurses and doctors at the field hospital for some antiseptic and clean bandages.

But hey, if you insist on just pulling the arrowhead out, you might as well storm the castle and singlehandedly take on the guards, am I right? Just be careful with that arm. It hasn’t fully healed yet.

8 Likes
38

Many thanks, Rovarsson, for that very kind review. I’m really glad you liked it.

I’ve just finished re-writing a game, The Black Tower, which I wrote for the Commodore PET 40 years ago and will release this once it’s had some beta testing. It’s REALLY ‘old school’ (it even has a maze) and is quite unforgiving. I hope you’ll play that also :slight_smile:.

1 Like
39

Huh… I must’ve taken a right there when I shoulda gone left. Well, while I’m here again…

Witchfinders

I feel like I’ve just got a small but delicious appetizer for a feast gastronomique extraordinaire. And then I was denied the main course.

Also, delicious as it was, there were a few dog hairs in my appetizer.

I love Witchfinders’ premise. Your wish to help people must be balanced against the risk of being caught, which gives the game great leverage for suspense and tension. There are different NPCs with different dispositions towards witches, opening up opportunities for conversations where you must feel out the NPC to see how lightly you should tread. It all takes place in an underdescribed town, a fertile field for worldbuilding.

Oh, the dog hairs? Typos.

Witchfinders feels like the preparatory notes to a game I really want to play. It needs to be expanded and built upon in all directions.

Lots and lots of unfulfilled potential. I’m still hungry.

2 Likes
40

The Princess of Vestria

A nice long introduction allowed me to settle into character and prepare for the quest at hand. Talking to the King’s advisors stirred my imagination and made me eager to set out into the world.

There are some obviously branching choices, and many that seem to simultaneously allow for characterization of the protagonist and steering the story on smaller detours.

This range of options allows for a personalized playthrough. I mostly went for the type of story I fondly remember from my most beloved children’s adventure books. I welcomed company, was kind to strangers and helped people in need. (This came back to bite me in the rear once, but this is to be expected in a grand adventure tale, is it not? I was saved by my earlier magnanimous spirit toward a stranger however, so that evened out nicely.) I wonder what will happen next time when I’ll adopt a more cynical, secretive and suspicious attitude.

Sometimes, especially in shorter paragraphs, the 2nd person writing seemed to be more distancing than engaging. In places I felt as if I was reading a set of strict theatre-directions instead of an account of my protagonist’s voluntary actions. This made me think that maybe this story would benefit from a 3rd person perspective, like in a book where I was guiding the main character.

Overall though, I was happy to be swept along on this adventure. I liked it a lot.

(Oh, I don’t know if we’re keeping score about these puzzles, but I freed the monkey and failed to open the music box.)

2 Likes