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. However, to become the truly masterful IF-piece it carries the kernel of, more polishing and shaving is needed.
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.
Stuffed peppers! Garlic broccoli! Balsamic roasted veggies!
The main objective of this game felt like a nice hot plate of comfort food to me. Cooking. Fussing over recipe-books, matching entrée to main course to side dish. Going to the market on a tight budget and somehow finding everything I need for that one course I had in mind but wasn’t sure I’d be able to buy all the ingredients for.
The frame-story and the mildly fantastic setting add lots of flavour and variety, with good-natured acquantances to make, fragments of the setting’s history to discover, spontaneous acts of good will to help villagers in need to fill out the world and your protagonist’s place in it.
I found that Eikas kept a good balance between allowing the player time to explore the village and the valley, and dropping enough reminders to add a little pressure to shop for groceries, plan your menu with care, and prepare the Great Hall for the evening of the feast.
My main naggle is that I couldn’t switch or add ingredients to the predetermined recipes. Adding a handfull of lemon basil to a deluxe kedgeree will bring out a freshness and aromatic quality that parsley alone would not, for example…
Very fun exploration/resource-management hybrid. As above, I’ll be coming back to this one regularly during the Comp.
Thank you so much for the lovely review! Really glad you enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for sharing your (very kind and eloquent) thoughts, and for your in-game contributions! Good vibes were at the core of all my plans and hopes for this concept, so reading that really made my day. 
----<nagging voice>“This game is way too big for IFComp. How can I be expected to play even half of the list if people dump these kinds of behemoths in there?!”</nagging voice>----
I’m very grateful some authors make these big games and enter them in the Comp. It’s a brave gamble, because we are obliged to determine our scores after an alloted maximum of two hours, and big games often take their time to draw the players deeper and deeper into focused engagement with the world of the game, the style of puzzles, the mood of the map.
I haven’t finished Hildy in the two hours of sessions I’ve spent in it so far. I don’t expect to finish it in another two or even four hours. I will play it until the end, even if this means nibbling some time away from other entries. Because playing IF is ultimately about enjoying the game in front of you, and I can hardly imagine a game further down the list will be so right up my alley as this one.
Many of you will already know what this means: a big parser with a sprawling map to explore and draw, a variety of not-too-hard but slightly twisted puzzles, moody and evocative images in the descriptions, solid writing with a generous sprinkling of humour.
Since I haven’t solved the entire game yet, I will look back to the very start of my experience and show you my reaction after a mere 45 minutes of play. This is the (lightly edited) PM I sent to the author to share how impressed I was after playing the intro and getting to know the protagonist:
A protagonist with a name (“Hildegund”) that sounds like a character from Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen, but who acts more like 'Lil Ragamuffin from @bitterkarella’s Guttersnipe series of games. Fantastic!
I’ve played the intro (bathing and getting dressed after exploding a troll), and I already know I’m going to love every bit of this game.
In that short opening sequence of tasks, Hildy has earned my complete and utter trust. I’ll go wherever this game takes me, die a hundred times and still happily restore to do it all over again.
Funny and compelling writing, captivating PC-personality. And pruning all the boring bits out of the magic system while giving perfectly appropriate in-game justifications to succeed in maintaining the direct link to the Enchanter-universe: brilliant!
Rovarsson
After 75 more minutes of playtime, I stand with everything I wrote in this first enthusiastic impression. If anything, it’s getting even better.
Hildy is classic text-adventure material, happy to stand on the shoulders of giants, but not so intimidated by the Imps that it shies away from stretching the mould and putting its own stamp of creative ownership down.
Great game.
Edit:
A HOLLOW VOICE BOOMS OUT: “I just finished it. The endgame’s fantastic!”
An artist’s spirit is present in their work, be it a sparkling glow or a faint after-image. When offered the chance to gather seven paintings to remember your loved one by, you must choose thoughtfully, tenderly, attentive of those moods and feelings you want to keep closest to your heart.
Thoughtful and tender is also how I would characterise the delicate writing in this piece. This being a text-game, each painting is a carefully crafted paragraph evoking colours and shapes, images and sensations, helped along by suggestive sounds and contemplative background music.
The memories associated with your chosen paintings, just as empathically written, come together in a somewhat coherent but necessarily fragmented picture of the beloved artist’s personality and history.
Both paintings and memories are gathered in two separate windows where you can revisit them together to more easily discern the common themes or the hooked barbs that stand out.
Despite being emotionally drawn to this piece, there were a few aspects that grated and disrupted the smoothness of my engagement.
-The order in which the paintings are presented to you is randomised to such an extent that it happened multiple times that I saw the same one twice in a row, which significantly diminished the impact of the described images.
-The memories attached to the paintings are sometimes proffered as the direct inspiration for that specific work. I don’t claim to understand how a painter’s inspiration works, but the link between a specific memory of an event and the painting that supposedly flowed from that event felt strained to me at times.
In the concluding sequence, you are given the chance to finish a work that your loved one lightly sketched on the canvas. This is done by adjusting several features of a actual visual image of a painting. I was excited by this opportunity to try my hand at giving creative input and steering the artwork with the impression of my chosen loved one’s spirit still fresh in my mind as guidance.
However, the flat and bland computer-rendering of what should be a heartfelt handcrafted painting made me wish deeply that the author of Imprimatura had opted to just describe this final painting in the same sensitive and eloquent manner as the previous works of art in the game. The words of the writer struck much more closely to my heart, elicited much more honestly felt emotions in me, than the dull and texture-less picture my choices produced on the computer screen.
What should have been a cathartic and freeing experience of closure turned out to be an emotionally drained excercise in Paint™-for-beginners.
Very impressive, deeply felt, visually evocative and imaginative writing. Seriously flawed and disillusioning in the design and execution of its conclusion.
I honestly don’t know what to say. Other than to thank you so much for playing Hildy and for writing this review. I am very, very pleased to know that you’ve enjoyed the game so much. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. The interaction between author and player is one of the things that makes IFComp so great and I’m so glad that I had the chance to participate again this year.
All the best,
J. Michael aka Frotzing
This work starts, interestingly, with a morally significant choice being made for you: you desert. You flee the battleground mid-combat, leaving your fellow soldiers, scampering to cover in the safety of a nearby canyon.
We don’t know the protagonist’s motivations yet, but this is a defining moment. The game itself involves dealing with the immediate consequences of this abandonment of duty, the shaping of the PC’s mentality through the choices you encounter, and the discovery of the reasons for the desertion.
This setup, from a distanced analytic point of view, lends itself well to an ethical exploration of degrees of loyalty, different senses of “duty”, justifications of hierarchic levels of priorities.
The Deserter doesn’t pose these questions in-game, merely nudges the so-inclined reader to think more deeply about them. While I was playing, I experienced it more as an action movie then as a thought-provoking thriller. Nonetheless, I’m pleased that these associations did their work behind the scenes and surfaced as I was evaluating the game afterwards.
The protagonist on the run encounters situations where the player each time has to assess and shape the priorities of the PC. In the text, there’s a noticeable sense of pressure to deal with these choices quickly and efficiently, while the turn-based choice format still allows for careful decisions and forethought.
Unfortunately, my concentration was repeatedly shaken by small but jarring typos and punctuation errors (among which at least one instance of the dreaded feral apostrophe: it’s ↔ its)
Overall, I found The Deserter to be an engaging piece, an exciting run-to-escape with nicely placed pauses for meaningful choices. Maybe a bit too short to really draw me into the tension of the situation or to develop a true connection to the protagonist, but certainly an engaging and well-spent hour or so. There are promising seeds here that could use just a bit more care.
Rarely have I read such a succinct yet powerful announcement of setting and tome combined as the first sentence-and-a-half of A Warm Reception.
You are a reporter for Feudalism Monthly. The princess of the land is being married today,…
It’s all there: a short characterisation of the PC, a clue towards the setting and time-period, an unexpected wording that elicits curiosity.
Excited and curious, I was eager to explore this game in all its nooks and crannies.
Unfortunately, when I entered the castle, there were hardly any nooks, and even less crannies. Well,… A darkened corridor might pass as slightly nooky, and I do admit that I did not count the corners of the maze as crannies.
Nor was there much of any tangibility or depth to the surroundings. Aside from the game-critical objects and a precious few scenery items, the majority of things I tried to examine … (cue spooky theremin)…*were not there*…
I love maps. I enjoy walking around in a game and drawing little labeled squares on a piece of paper. I like how a structured top-down image of an imaginary place emerges. A Warm Reception's map has a nice balance of vertical and horizontal connections. A lean tower rises above the castle, exits branch out in many directions from the central ground-floor room, the underground locations have a slightly more chaotic feel. A good map to draw.
But when I’m exploring a game’s setting, the walking around while drawing squares on a piece of paper is not my main source of joy. I’m not entering compass-commands (just) for the fun of it. My main motivation for pressing NESW-buttons is so I can unleash my awesome X-ing powers on a new set of furniture.
Alas! A Warm Reception's implementation is so slight that it feels like wandering through a mirage. No matter how pretty and convincing at first sight, one small poke or focused glance shows that the majority of the castle consists of freefloating words, with no substance or reality behind them. (Feel free to point out the nature of text-games and start an ontological debate about the reality of parser-game objects.)
The quality of writing fluctuates a bit. Never less than serviceable, very funny at times, a few striking images (especially the Moth Hatchery. That room gave me the shivers!) , and a few more shiny nuggets, like the description of the Kitchen:
The kitchen seems like it was left in a hurry. Various ovens and stoves are off, but the food is still sitting on them, as if waiting to be completed. Your ineptitude at cooking prevents you from rectifying this situation. Best not to dwell on the waste.
I had fun while playing, fun of the fleeting kind perhaps, but fun nonetheless.
Ooh, matron!
-Wade
You have me laughing every time I open my own thread now. I can just imagine the high-pitched voice, the batted-down eyelashes, the pouted lips hidden behind fingertips, the rosy blush.
Read that title.
Not “magically gifted” or the more neutral “with magic abilities”. Not “magic-afflicted” or “magic-infected”, which might be appropriate if the children were in some way endangered by their powers, as is often the case with the newly-magical.
No.
“Magic-infested”. Like pestilence-spreading vermin.
Indeed, in the world of Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People, those who show any signs of supernatural powers are to be eradicated, or in those more lenient countries who have subscribed to the MagiCore Accords, picked up at gunpoint and isolated in a special school.
This setting, introduced in a mere handful of screens during the prologue, is impressive and wide enough to accomodate a whole series of games and stories, and I hope the author delves deeper in its history and culture in future works.
This particular game plays out in the school from the title where magic children and young people are isolated, yes, but also allowed to develop their talents. That means magic lessons, yeah!
And yes, there’s a bit of that, partly depending on the choices of the player. At the heart of the game, however, are dangerous intrigue and a high-stakes power-struggle.
I really liked the personal development of the protagonist. In the character-creation screens, I coblled together my main girl Jacky, a purple-haired Canadian car thief who is “gay as a bucket of rainbow glitter”. That made me laugh really loud. She quickly made a few friends, and the conversations and banter between them flowed very naturally. There was one low-key opportunity for romance, which I bypassed it at the time thinking it was a bit too soon. It never came up again, but I was just as happy being just friends.
There is ample room for the player to steer the direction of the narrative and, with the choices taken, the sort of person their protagonist is. The further the story progressed, the more I felt the weight of the responsibilty and danger in my choices. Not only was I genuinely concerned about Jacky, I also felt I had to protect her friends. This made me weigh my options carefully, trying to judge if the “heroic” choice that I was sure Jacky could handle, would inadvertently harm her friends. Very engaging.
The introduction felt a bit rushed to me, like I was plunged in without having a chance to dip my pinky toe in to test the waters. One second I’m joyriding with my buddy, the next I’m jumping off a bridge and I’m a troll. Just like that. No glowing aura of transformation, nor a bonecrunching metamorphosis. No vague premonition or sense of apprehension that Jacky might be on the verge of changing, and that this stressful action might push her over the edge.
It could of course be that in my specific sequence of choices, I missed a bit of exposition.
The writing’s very good. Good and clear descriptions of the school and its wildly differing levels. Intuitive and natural conversations. Shocking and/or exciting action scenes (which is hard when the player is allowed choices while the action plays out.)
And most importantly: an beautifully sketched main character, an organic blend of the outlines provided by the author and the colour added by my choices. I felt intimately connected to Jacky, like I could grasp her anxiety or joy or anger all through the game.
I enjoyed this very much, and I’ll probably replay with a different protagonist (I saw in a dimmed-out choice that there’s a cat somewhere…).
If Jacky will let me, that is…