[spoiler]Has anyone been able to reenter the town after helping all the animals and talking to the Owl? I thought I was able to do this when I played through last week, but my memory might be playing tricks. I just played it again, and it won’t let me go back in afterwards (I wondered whether there was a way into the estate at the end). By the way, the Owl’s final gift seems to be randomized.
Edit: I suspect this is a false memory.[/spoiler]
Answering jrb’s question:
You can’t get back into the town and, according to email from the author, you can’t get into the estate.
Thanks for clearing that up.
The response to KISS WATSON in the main part of Sherlock Indomitable is hilarious.
I’m stuck about 40 points into Illuminismo Iniziato, with the following issue:
I am trying to get into the airship. I have done everything I need to do, I think, except get a working license with my picture on it: I have the captain’s uniform and boots, I’ve got his license, and I’ve freed the anchor from the townhouse. I’ve also watched four cheese visions. My remaining problem: when I put the captain’s license in the tray in the lumen booth, the booth makes my photograph and puts it on the license, but it immediately slides off and gets recycled by the nymph. I assume I need some adhesive or glue of some kind, but if there’s an obvious source somewhere in Blumph, I seem to have missed it. Crystal’s advice is just that I need the license to look more like me… and I’m aware of that.
Mild hint: One of the earliest game items is helpful here.
Explicit solution: use the shipping label.
Thank you!
Added these reviews this week:
Venience World: emshort.blog/2018/04/24/venienc … hing-2018/
Zeppelin Adventure: emshort.blog/2018/04/26/zeppeli … hing-2018/
Illuminismo Iniziato: emshort.blog/2018/04/28/illumin … hing-2018/
Confessions of an NPC
I agree with Hanon that this sort of oscillates between tongue-in-cheek fantasy satire and serious trope deconstruction. It’s interviews with 5 fantasy trope characters, and they’re generally cynics about it all, poking holes in their whole structurally imbalanced society of heroes and princesses and monsters. But they go further than that, into deeper topics as well which draw clear parallels with some of our own societal structural issues. It isn’t quite a straight fantasy world either, with references to some tech and presenting a different role for princesses (they’re not really royalty?), which makes the world more interesting at the trade-off of lessening the send-up nature. Basically though, I’m not entirely sure the two sides manage to quite sum together into a greater whole, but I appreciate the experimental nature and there are some ideas here.
The character voices come through quite well during each interview. Felt like some stuff could’ve been trimmed, and the interview format itself doesn’t really enliven matters; they’re mostly just sprouting their backstories, and you intermittently prod them for more. “What realizations?”, you may ask after they mention realizations; it feels sort of like being a therapist, or at least the pop culture version of one. (You’re not a very exciting interviewer, really). Other times they might ask you what you would’ve done in their stead. At the end of each interview, they ask you a question (made me think of De Baron by Victor Gijsbers), the reasoning which you provide, which is a cool idea (although I had trouble coming up with meaningful answers). There isn’t really story tension with these interviews; it’s more like some short personal essays, basically, with several of them interesting avenues to explore, and with some interplay between their respective roles in the fantasy world as well.
(Also like Liza said, text effects made it a bit hard to read)
Zeppelin Adventure
Detectiveland was a good game, but I don’t seem to love it quite as much as other people, and I think it was mostly because of a mismatch in genre expectations. Everything about its setup, and UI, and music indicated a noir mystery homage to me. Mysteries seem to work well for parser IF (or parser-like IF, like this was); small contained scenes-of-crimes, picking up items, clear goals. I went in thinking, something like Make it Good, Color the Truth, Death off the Cuff. I wasn’t thinking Monkey Island, which is what Detectiveland actually is, puzzle logic-wise at least. I used the spaghetti in the restaurant, because that was the only thing available to do, and was confused by the illogic of the result. I never fired the gun, until I looked at the hints. The Sam and Max games are zany too even in a noir-ish setting, but they also establish the tone early and throughout. I had trouble getting on board, because to me, the narrative genre didn’t match with the genre of play; they felt, just… not related, and I couldn’t align the two through much of my playthrough.
Zeppelin Adventure (from the same author) doesn’t have that issue. It’s a straight-up, old-school, super-light-hearted text adventure, from the font and background choices to the exclamation-heavy text. There’s a bunch of cheerfully unexplained macguffin items to hunt down. The puzzles all made more sense to me (I especially liked the ones with animals), and there’s even some bit of backstory that you get later on, which is parceled out well. The interface still sometimes pulls attention across several areas, but unlike in Detectiveland I never missed any important items (there was was a key in a letter that falls out, something like that, there?), and I vaguely felt the puzzles make better use of the interface this time around. I needed hints on two puzzles (I missed the sign for the tortoise, and I didn’t think about the dark area up top), and there’s still one ending I didn’t get (this has multiple). But overall, I was able to jibe with this more.
(I read Emily Short’s review only after writing most of this; I did play this on mobile, and I thought it worked fine. Bit of scrolling needed to see the responses to actions, and you do have to scan different areas, but considering the amount of text needed to be displayed? Worked pretty well)