It’s Comp-time again!
Ah that jolly, bleary-eyed and fingerjoint-aching period of the year where we all gather around the glowing light of our screens and gorge ourselves on the brainchildren of those brave individuals who dared offer theirs on the altar of public scrutiny.
Congratulations authors, and thank you for the 67 pieces of interactive fiction we are about to consume.
(I’ll keep my reviews gathered here and add crosslinks to discussion pages as necessary.)
Your local publican Jack is desperate. The beer tastes awful, but there’s no sign of contamination or pipe problems. And the bar-ladies say they’ve noticed other strange things also. Up to you to get to the bottom of this foul beer situation.
Viv Dunstan’s previous games Border Reivers and Napier’s Cache (which I both loved) had a strong historical angle. Bad Beer gently softens this influence, it plays more with a sense of awareness of past times. The setting, a centuries-old English pub, reminded me of the feeling I get in castle ruins or old churches, or other places with a lot of historical background. It seems as if time itself is thin, echoing with past events. Very effective mood-building.
There is one central problem to be solved (calling it a puzzle would not be accurate). More than as a challenge to the player, it serves as a nudge for the reader to engage with the focal point of the game (as I experienced it) that with past, present and future so intimately connected, little confluences of events can lead to large and unfortunate consequences, and reverberate through time.
Bad Beer is a small, touching story that had me musing on time and ripples for a good while.
A murder-investigation within the confines of a polar research station. Which provides one of the most convincing in-game reasons as to why the investigator is just a regular guy I’ve read so far. The complete opposite of the strained Miss Marple situation.
Searching the crime scene (or the rest of the station) for physical evidence is but a minor aspect of the investigation, and when it does happen it seems more triggered by the game-state than by the player’s systematic exploration. The most important tool in your investigation by far is the questioning of your cohabitants in the research center.
Despite being centered on interrogation and conversation, Winter-Over did not succeed in convincing me of the “reality” of the characters. I kept having the image that they were actors dutifully reciting their scripted lines, but without passion for or connection to the part or to the other characters.
Finding out when to go where to find a specific person to talk to or ask help from requires a lot of walking around the station, in the hope of bumping into someone you haven’t met yet. Each such meeting is added to your (very handy!) notebook so you gradually compile a schedule for each NPC. I found this tedious at times, and I kept wishing one of the crew would have stuck a note on the fridge with a complete roster for me to find.
The notebook is a great feature, serving not only to compile a table of when to find who where, but also as a checklist of characters and their alibis and statements. It provides a simple way to compare their words against other clues you’ve already gathered, and it helps to keep track of your immediate subgoals.
Tempo picks up as events are triggered in the station out of the player’s control, heightening the tension. It’s through these events that the claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing feeling of being locked in a small container with a killer on the loose is really emphasised.
The mental state/condition the game takes its name from, the “winter-over”, is similar to cabin fever, or perhaps “winter-over” is the specific term for exactly this condition as experienced on an isolated polar station. In the game, it’s a possible explanation for the killer’s violent behaviour. It’s also set up as a narrative device for casting doubts on the sanity of the player character, raising suspicions in the player’s mind that the PC may be a wholly unreliable narrator. This didn’t work too well for me; apart from some descriptions where the protagonist explicitly questions his (I pictured the PC as male) own mind, I found no reason to distrust the protagonist’s account of events.
I enjoyed working through the mystery, but my experience was more that of a distanced observer than a fully engaged participant.
That’s really interesting! I assumed the character was female. I guess there was nowhere that implies either, but I got it nevertheless. It’s weird - for example, in Curses and Jigsaw (Graham Nelson) I assumed the PC (and Black) were all male. And many others, I lean one way or another.
Thanks for your review! And thanks for taking the time to play our game so early in the comp, we really appreciate it.
It is interesting to see that you and @SomeOne2 had different reads on the player character – the goal was to make them more of a blank slate than our usual fare, so a diversity of opinion here is a good sign in that regard!
Disorienting.
Discomforting.
Strange…
198BREW drops the player in a nearly incomprehensible setting. Just familiar enough to wander around and explore. Hints of backstory, glimpses of history, fragments of memories,… paint an icy, fractured picture of a World, a Church, a Queen, and of some of the unfortunate people inhabiting the city.
The writing is splendid. Descriptions feel alien while still evoking detailed-yet-disturbed images, the sequence of events and actions draws the player along with urgency, without ever gaining clear motive. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the large-scale prologue with the practicality of the apparent game-objective in the opening scene, especially since that down-to-earth practical objective is twisted and spun and distorted during the game that follows.
I loved this, but precisely because I can see the potential, I also grew frustrated. While the descriptions are very impressive on the surface, it takes but a minor scratching to see that the implementation is sorely lacking in depth. Many nouns are not recognised. characters who seem interesting turn out to be cardboard figures with only one conversation-trigger, commands that flow naturally from the setting are dismissed by a default rejection-response, plausible alternate courses of action (f.e.: following Jacob to the crows) are not accounted for,…
This game excels as a mood-piece, it has provided images that I will probably see in my dreams, it suffused me with an undefinable feeling of strangeness. To become the truly masterful IF-piece it carries the kernel of though, more polishing and shaving is needed.
(Does DWaM go under another pseudonym here? I’d like to send my transcript in a PM.)
Thank you for your lovely review!
You’re in your grandfather’s library, looking to bring his studies into the arcane to an end, and carry out the implied task that reveals itself through the research.
When entering the library, I had expected it to be the starting point of an oldschool quest to the Illuvian Empire. It soon became clear that, aside from a few short magic-teleportations, the bulk of the game is the library.
Instead of grand halls, twisty little passages and ever-winding corridors to navigate, you must make your way through the shelves and heaps and stacks of books and tomes. Instead of using a compass-rose to traverse a map, you must sift through layers of implementation during your search for the necessary bits of information and, to prepare you for what may come, for sources of magic to enhance your powers and protection.
This design makes Forbidden Lore a bit of a textual hidden-object game. Most libraries in IF-games have a few books mentioned by title, signalling that those are the important ones. Here, the books named in the first layer of description, upon X BOOKS, comprise but a small fragment of the total of books you need. You’ll need to examine separate sections of shelves, individual thematic categories in the bookcases, parts of parts of parts of the library.
There’s at least one game-critical non-book object in the room that is hidden in a similar manner. I only stumbled across it buried in an object-description while fastidiously examining all the nouns. (The armchair is standing on a rug.)
Now, I enjoyed this. Digging through layers of description and finding new books to read, and then trying to infer what to do with the information I learned was fun for me. However, I would have liked it if the nouns were a bit more distinguishable: in place of expecting the player to X BOOKS ON DESK, it would have been easier to find the right command if, instead of another pile of books, there had been only rolls of parchment on the desk, enabling X ROLLS.
The few trips outside the library are welcome intermezzos, they open up the space of the game and cut through the catacomb-like feel of that single book-filled room. The final such outside trip leads to the endgame, and it was there that I felt let down.
The player’s expected to enter a bunch of commands that were not foreshadowed enough or introduced in some sort of training-wheel circumstances. After checking the walkthrough, I did think : “Oh, yes, that was mentioned in one of those tomes I ploughed through in the beginning.” The amount of references and information in the books makes it difficult for that one particular piece of knowledge to stick though, especially without a chance to practice beforehand.
I also noticed more disambiguation failures (“Did you mean the shrine or the druidic shrine?”) in the endgame, which makes me suspect this game was finished while Mr D.E. Adline was looking over the author’s shoulder.
I really liked the detailed library search, the hints and glimpses of ancient history, exotic cultures, powerful spells in the myriad of tomes. Player-friendliness could be improved by clearing up unintuitive commands and more obviously distinguishable nouns.
Good game.
(Edit: TADS ! )
Because of its real-time episodic structure, I cannot possibly say that I have experienced enough of this game to write a comprehensive review. During my aproximately 60 minutes worth of play-sessions until now, I did see a narrative unfolding that oozes good vibes.
At the end of each snippet, I had witnessed a small but enticing event or conversation that added its details to the mysterious setting of the game. I got to know the kind and peculiar main NPC, Aïssatou, a bit better through a choice of topics presented after and separate from the events of the daily shift. I broke my brain bit by bit by trying to solve a series of crypic crossword clues (at which I am bad), and I had an inordinate rush of pride each time I managed to solve one.
In a gentle manner, The Apothecary’s Assistant invited me to contemplate beauty, harmony, hope. It gave me the opportunity to feel more and more connected to the friendly mentor-like figure Aïssatou. It allowed me to feel triumphant at solving a kind of problem I’m not comfortable with, and then kindly laugh at myself for being so disproportionately pleased with myself.
Like I said: good vibes.
I’ll be playing this 'til the end of the Comp.