3 Likes
Assembly by Ben Kirwin
Brief thoughts on this one: My smoothest parser experience of the comp so far! I didn’t need to use the hints at all, which was gratifying after my difficulties with the two other comp parsers I’ve played. I found this a very player-friendly game; with the main mechanic being furniture assembly/disassembly, it could very easily have been tedious and/or frustrating, but it neatly avoids that by not insisting that you manually perform every individual action. For example:
> put screws in tracks
(first setting down the POUL flat-pack furniture box)
(first taking the wall screws)
I loved the eldritch IKEA setting and found the puzzles clever and fun, especially the wardrobe and lamp one. Kudos to the author!
Assembly_TO script.txt (91.6 KB)
10 Likes
Thank you for taking the time to play my game, and for the transcript! Much appreciated.
1 Like
A Thing of Wretchedness by AKheon
Another brief one for this game. On the whole I enjoyed it—it has a very “mundane horror” feel, where the eponymous wretched thing is wandering around the PC’s house but not posing any active threat. The gameplay, then, is mostly exploring the house and piecing together what might have happened to get you to this point. Of course, you can also poison the wretched thing and see how that plays out, and in fact that is necessary in order to get the ending that reveals the most information. Unfortunately, this additional backstory still doesn’t shed much light on the situation, and really only contributes a new mystery—what is this black box, and why would anyone want it?
I got two different endings myself (killed by the wretched thing and the wretched thing escapes) and then looked at the walkthrough to get the other two. Transcript attached!
Thing_TO script.txt (134.5 KB)
10 Likes
Thanks for posting your transcript! I was curious about some of the other endings after my playthrough, and this helped. I still don’t feel like I really understand what happened in that house, but I guess that’s how it goes!
1 Like
One King to Loot Them All by Onno Brouwer
I was looking forward to this one, and it did not disappoint! I knew it included a clever use of the “undo” command, so I thought that aspect wouldn’t be a surprise when it arrived—but it actually still was, and it was delightful. I love time shenanigans in games, so I found it very fun to rewind to the beginning and play out a different version of events.
Given the Single-Choice-Jam origins, the game is rather on rails, guiding you the whole time to the single correct command for that turn (as such, it isn’t possible to die or otherwise hit a game-over). You won’t get much out of examining things (typically the description from the main text is just repeated) or trying to explore; rather, it presents a kind of “guess the verb” puzzle of figuring out which of the custom commands is needed at which time. I found this aspect fun, and one of the game’s charms; while it took me a bit to hit on the idea of looting the wine bottle in order to drink the wine, it was very satisfying when I did make that connection. I also liked having to smite corpses, plural, in order to win that battle; the game really does reward thinking like a barbarian! So I think adjusting your expectations is key to enjoying this game—don’t look for typical parser conventions, but instead appreciate the clever new things this game does with the format.
One final note: The custom undo did sidetrack me at one point, when I thought I had to use it to avoid falling into the infamous pit. I wonder if it should be disabled until it’s actually needed?
One King_TO script.txt (212.4 KB)
5 Likes
The Vambrace of Destiny by Arthur DiBianca
Another parser game I tried for a bit but didn’t finish (or play for two hours—in these cases, I’m not planning to submit a rating for the comp since I didn’t fully engage with the game). In brief, it really just wasn’t for me. The super-limited parser (e.g., type “i” to “investigrab”, which provides more detail on and/or takes anything that’s important in the current room) removed the aspect of parser games I most enjoy, which is the sense of agency and exploration. Here, I knew there were no secrets to uncover by closely examining my surroundings; it was just a rote matter of hunting down gems to increase my powers to hunt more gems. It’s definitely a well-done game, just very much not my style!
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Hi Tabitha,
Thank you for playing my game and writing such a nice review!
As with Victor’s suggestion it was one of the options I considered. Pretend to have a “standard behavior” (nothing to see here, moving on…) until I pull the proverbial “rug” and release the magic upon the unsuspecting player. But I really liked the “narrated” feature as one tester called it, and could not resist the temptation to give players an early impression that Things Are Not Quite As They Seem To Be just in case they used it before the Big Reveal. So I kept it as it is. Another option might have been to completely disable it up to that point (since my game is a story forward game, the feature is not really needed, so I gambled that most people would not even consider using it until the very last step).
3 Likes
Last Valentine's Day by Daniel Gao
As soon as I saw the blurb, I knew I’d be playing this game:
You find yourself in an inexplicable time loop, reliving the same day over and over again. Can you find a way to stop your lover from leaving you?
I’ve written a game (is it in poor taste to link to my own game in a review) with almost this exact premise, viz., trying to prevent a breakup using a time loop, so I was looking forward to seeing what this game would do with the idea.
I quickly learned that the blurb is rather misleading. The PC’s partner never appears in the story; by the time we’ve gone through picking up flowers, walking through the park, and reaching home, the partner has already left, and this doesn’t change in the subsequent loops. This isn’t a game about trying to prevent the inevitable, then; it’s about trying to process it.
Unlike a typical time-loop story, details of the day are different every time, from the weather to what’s happening at the dog park, and these shifts help build momentum as the PC progresses linearly through each loop, always carrying out the same string of actions. Choices are present, but fairly few, and I don’t think they really matter (although on second thought, I wonder if some of those toward the end actually do…). I didn’t mind this, as it still felt like an experience I could only get through interactive fiction. The repetition with minor changes created an interesting atmosphere—rather than fighting against the constraints of a static world, the PC has to journey through one that reflects their own shifting emotional state back at them.
The dialogue was written a bit awkwardly, and in the end, the handling of the themes was a little too on-the-nose for my taste. The PC and their partner were never particularly defined as characters, and I think if they had been the emotions would have hit harder. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the experience, always ending each loop curious to see what would be different next time, and anticipating when and how I would break free.
7 Likes
Last Vestiges by thesleuthacademy
This was fun! I’m a sucker for single-room parser games, and I enjoyed working my way through this one.
Some notes:
- It’s quite small; while the time listed on the comp site is 1.5 hours, I finished in under half an hour.
- Writing could use a little more polish; there were some past/present tense mixups.
- The realism mixed with typical adventure game puzzles (e.g., solve a nonograms puzzle to unlock the victim’s phone) made for a bit of an odd vibe.
- I discovered the mystery solution very early on, so the rest of the game felt rather anti-climactic.
Last Vestiges_TO script.txt (23.3 KB)
5 Likes
Thank your for your kind review and feedback, Tabitha! Hmm will re-look the tenses again. Thanks for picking those out. 
4 Likes
LAKE Adventure by B.J. Best (major spoilers throughout)
(FYI: way more of a ramble than a review.)
My main thought coming away from this one is… this game was deeply sad. Eddie (i.e., child Ed)'s pain comes through so clearly in the game he created, with the idyllic lake serving as a security blanket, so precious that it even comes up in his imagined futures of winning the lottery and being president of the moon. Otherwise, his life is steeped in bleakness: the bullying, the sister dying/dead of leukemia, the bad/absent father, the best-friend-of-convenience… There are moments of joy, like the lake and the cat, and overall the game doesn’t feel too bleak because it’s so mitigated by the childish excitement—you can feel how happy this kid is to have created a game, how clever he feels, and it’s very cute. But now, as adult Ed looking back on it, it mostly just brings him pain.
The ending felt like a gut punch. Ed’s daughter, named Erica after his sister, comes into the room needing to use the computer. She’s kind of rude and dismissive, preoccupied with school, stressed by the shift to online learning due to the COVID lockdown. So her attitude is understandable; she has no idea what her dad’s just been through (and in fact it seems likely that she has little or no knowledge of this part of his past at all). But oof, did it feel like a knife twist.
This game reminded me of the type of literary fiction that essentially reads as a portrait of a deeply unhappy person. I’ve never liked this kind of story because it leaves me wondering what the point is. Here, Ed basically asks that question for us at the end. “Does ancient history matter?” He says he doesn’t think so, but isn’t 100% committed to that answer. And I mean… my thought is, of course it matters. It matters because those events made Ed who he is today, just as ancient Rome played a part in shaping the way our world is today. Even if Ed doesn’t want it to, how can it not matter?
But then, maybe the reason he’s asking is because he does want it to. Maybe he wants to know that this experience of reliving his traumatic past wasn’t pointless after all.
On the whole: too sad for my taste. But definitely a well done game.
lake_TO script.txt (155.5 KB)
8 Likes
Regarding the ending of LAKE ADVENTURE, I think this is how I interpreted it. While it’s true that all these events (the good and bad) have led him to where he is now, he is struck by how meaningless and brutish this journey of development is. As you said, “ancient history” matters. But it’s also painful that unresolved traumas will creep up to him in unexpected ways. It’s tempting to ask if there’s any order to this character development, but I think the answer might be no.
3 Likes
Honk! by Alex Harby
This was fun! I completed it without using the walkthrough or any hints, which always makes me feel accomplished; the puzzles weren’t too easy, either, but were lightly challenging in an enjoyable way. (My favorite was the goose one, and I loved the callback to it at the end.) The circus setting was well-detailed; I especially liked the variety of useful props I acquired. The writing was funny (“The Ringmaster began his career as a tightrope walker, and to this day he’s still high-strung”), the NPCs were all distinctive, and I’ll always love an anti-greedy-developer plotline. I also really appreciated the casual queerness, e.g.:
You’ve watched her pull off many incredible feats over the years, among them pulling a rabbit out of a hat, sawing herself in half, transitioning her gender, and pulling a rabbit out of a different hat.
I do think it would have been a stronger game with a bit more polish. Some examples:
- Unimplemented nouns providing the classic “You see no [thing mentioned in room description] here.”
- Conversation options for each of the NPCs still showing up long after they don’t make sense anymore.
- While I liked each of the three acts being its own self-contained puzzle, being able to repeat them (endlessly?) after failing felt like it broke the narrative a bit, especially since you couldn’t discuss your failure with the involved performer at all.
- Not being able to use unique verbs like “accelerate” or “brake” during the car chase sequence (I’m not sure if there was anything useful to do there besides waiting?).
-
The water tank puzzle didn’t entirely make sense to me. I had trouble picturing the tank contraption, the position of the rope, and how the rabbit chewing the rope would free Adagio. I did find the solution very fun, though!
My transcript will illustrate these things better than my attempted explanations ever will, so it is attached!
Honk!_TOscript.txt (228.6 KB)
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Thanks very much for your kind review! I’ve got your examples and your transcript saved to work on for future releases, thanks for providing those.
3 Likes
Hand Me Down by Brett Witty
This was an unusual one, starting with a short Twine piece that leads into a parser game. While the “a father made this for his daughter and wants her to play it right now in the hospital” conceit led me to expect a fairly small, simple parser game, it was actually quite large, with many rooms, hidden objects, and multiple NPCs. I started out exploring all the places and collecting all the things; the notes especially were an intriguing layer, and I felt motivated to hunt them down (I wish I could have talked about them to the dad in the “after” segment). So I was settling deep into the parser, when… I realized that my two hours of IFComp playtime were almost up.
Since I wanted to get to the second Twine part before my judging window ran out, I went ahead and skipped to that one without having reached the end of the parser game. Which made the experience of playing out that portion fall somewhat flat, because the PC had finished the game, whereas I hadn’t. It didn’t help that I had already felt at a distance from the PC in the first segment; for example, when I got the choice of whether or not to lie to my mom, I had no idea why the PC might want to. I couldn’t get a read on her relationship with James, either.
The parser game also suffered from some typos, lack of implementation, and disambiguation issues; at first I wasn’t sure if this was intentional, painting the dad character as an imperfect programmer, but nothing in the game supported that reading, so I think it just needed a bit more polish.
As a whole, I didn’t emotionally connect with this game, and I think the large-parser-between-two-Twines format wasn’t ideally suited to a comp with a two-hour judging window. But I did enjoy my time in the parser game, and might just go back and explore more…
HandMeDown_TOscript.txt (238.2 KB)
6 Likes
Thanks for the review and transcript! I tried to give players many options to complete the parser bit to make it easier (and thus not a huge obstacle to getting through the whole game), but it often just encouraged more exploration. While maybe not a bad thing overall, maybe not helpful for a time-boxed comp.
Thanks again.
4 Likes
Tricks of Light in the Forest by Pseudavid
I liked this game a lot! It’s very aesthetically pleasing, with soft, shifting-color backgrounds, a map that expands as you go deeper, and lovely art (although I notice the latter is unattributed, which is always going to make me wonder if it’s AI… EDIT: the author has clarified that the art is public domain images that they edited!). The engine worked well and made for a smooth choice-parser hybrid experience. After a bit of a slow start, I became invested in the PC’s forest exploration, partially due to her strong voice—her youthful enthusiasm and joy are captured so well. Discovering new things to photograph, interact with, and collect for my sample box was delightful, especially since trying each action on each item has its own unique flavor text. For instance, photos of certain things may come out blurry or not live up to what they’re trying to capture, which was an excellent detail. All in all, this really captured the experience of going on a rambling forest hike.
A layer of intrigue was added once the worldbuilding started trickling in, creating a sense of potential danger in the forest and of precarity about life in general in this world. The small-scale stakes of potentially getting lost, getting in trouble for sneaking out, or even getting attacked by a creature played out against an off-screen backdrop of warring ideologies and a forever-damaged planet. The way that glimpses of this larger geopolitical situation were meted out throughout the story was very effective, providing one puzzle piece at a time that never formed the whole picture, but were enough to convey a strong impression.
I love exploration in games, and this was a thoroughly satisfying experience on that front, with a few small puzzles along the way and an enjoyable PC to spend the time with, along with a compelling world to do it in. I plan to replay in order to hunt down anything I missed.
Tricks_TOscript.txt (110.3 KB)
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Thanks for the review!
One clarification: I see now that I forgot to mention the art in the credits. It’s public domain art edited by myself with simple image editing tools, nothing AI about it. I’ll fix the credits after the comp.
5 Likes
Ah, gotcha! Thanks for clarifying that; I’ll update my review.
1 Like