Oh god. I got the ending one step up from the standard/bad ending and it was already a lot. I’ll definitely proceed slowly through the others. It’s hitting close to home in some ways though, so other people might not have quite the same experience!
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Swerving on point to the topic of the thread: I played Structural Integrity and was very, very sad. The sadness has kind of lingered, which I think is a strong testimony to the author’s writing. Power imbalance in relationships can be a tricky thing to handle, but I think it was done very well. I wound up walking away with a lot of sympathy for both characters- often a hard sell with this sort of dynamic. While it does invite replay, I think I’ll stick with the ending I got first as my ‘canon’ ending- wish I could have met the kitty on that route!
Also, my friend Jinx was mentioned in the credits, which is pretty cool. While searching it up to play, I also stumbled across a novella that it’s apparently an interactive adaption of(?). (There also appears to be a sequel, by the name of Structural Strain.)
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Since @sophia gave me cover from looking like I was brusquely grabbing the mike: I just finished my first draft write up of RTE and yeah holy crap so many thoughts. Can’t wait to share revision maybe 47 with you all.
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Oh man. Good times, good times. I wish I remembered more than I do.
But I’m pretty sure every Andromeda game published since then includes the word “cyanotic” as part of a sort of inside joke.
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Could we perhaps start a new thread for the discussion of how and whether grammatical issues should be addressed in reviews? It accounts for the majority of the comments in this thread right now and the fact that it keeps being brought back up makes it hard to use the thread for its intended purpose of discussing Spring Thing games.
[Split ESL Creation/Translation/Review to its own thread]
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Yes! Spring Thing games. Do people keep up with the review sheet? I never really thought about it before, but data tends to invite interpretation.
With several weeks to go, though, things may balance out eventually. I have no idea!
Despite a few reported browser problems, it seems that The Kuolema has been well-received critically. The consensus is that it is compelling and well-written. Tangent: could game development with Google Forms have wheels? Or is this a lighting-in-a-bottle situation?
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I feel like it’s a very daring and amazing lightning in a bottle, similar to getting Doom running on a smart fridge.
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My hot take is that Kuolema is successful in spite of Google Forms. The superb graphics and steady rise in dramatic stakes should translate to any authoring platform.
That said, the coder side of me kept thinking while I was playing it, “Maybe there’s room for a hybrid choice-based game engine, one that combines menu selections with other user inputs like text entry, multiple-choice fields, and so on.” That, and managing game state in a more natural way, could be a winner.
(But what do I know? I’m not familiar with all the choice-based solutions out there.)
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possibly my favourite review so far 
This is clearly an interesting topic for me. I might write a post-mortem at some point and raise this topic as I do feel that Google Forms actually has a lot going for it - especially in terms of ease of use.
I think where The Kuolema potentially succeeds and fails is that I’ve deliberately tried to be over-ambitious and really tried to push what it’s capable of. Google Forms is probably better suited to shorter and slightly more linear stories, and I think there is room for those (especially as a ‘gateway’ tool for people perhaps testing the waters?).
Ultimately though - exactly as Jim says, it’s an interesting tool that’s hamstrung by a few, but very key, missing features. There is definitely space out there for someone to create something new that could offer an easy to use (code-free and more image friendly?) “Google Forms + Twine” like mashup. And this could open the door to more people who might be interested to try their hand at interactive fiction, but who are put off by complicated tools and coding requirements. Maybe one already exists (but I haven’t stumbled across it either)?
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Yeah, my overwhelming reaction was “this is worse in every way than if it had been done in Twine or Ink or Inklewriter or whatever.” Honestly I liked it in spite of a bunch of things. I’m not a fan of graphics in IF: one of the cool things to me is that it’s accessible to blind people (often) and I feel like that’s getting worse as of late. So having a game that was completely dependent on images with no alt text bugged me quite a bit. And I’d prefer not to support LLMs in any way, so the computer generated art ditto.
As a programmer and someone who’s followed IF for quite a while (and occasionally followed things like paper gamebooks which have less state-tracking), I wasn’t impressed with it as a technical thing: it was immediately obvious to me both that this was technically possible and that it’s about the limit of what Google Forms is capable of. There’s nothing new here: these are well-explored design challenges.
And it was a little bit “just check off whether you’ve done the thing in this location.” But on the other hand, that’s good: once you figure that out, it’s either clear where you need to go next, or it’s clear that you’ve been lazy about note-taking. And it had, as you say, a nice steady rise in stakes and the writing had some tension without being too over the top and obtrusive.
So yeah. I liked it in spite of Google Forms, because it was well constructed in general.
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FWIW there is an alternative text-only version, though it’s only linked halfway through the FAQs & Info page so I guess it can be easy to miss (I think it would have been better to link it in the introduction).
Overall I agree with the others: it’s very well-made, but despite its platform rather than because of it.
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You can in fact do all those things in Twine! But if you mean an engine with a development frontend that lets you do those things in a coding-light or no-coding-required way, then yeah, I don’t believe there is anything.
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I want this also! I’m currently snooping whether Vorple might be capable of this - and it is, using hyperlinks to trigger text commands. Vorple is quite comprehensive, but it’s a tricky setup, despite being well-documented.
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Must be something in the zeitgeist. This also seems fascinating to me, and there are a few games in the Thing this year that take some steps in that direction! Both The Roads Not Taken and Stygian Dreams took some bold steps that were intriguing. As promising as both those are, I found The Mamertine caught my imagination the most on this front, though its engagement with the hybrid model was quite different. More like what could it unlock.
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This is kind of a white whale of mine, too, having text input sections in a Twine game to hide options and open up the combinatorial space.
The Roads Not Taken is a step in this direction, but it’s all parser. It plays more like “type the hidden links” rather than a regular world model. My idea would be to have some complex state that can be manipulated via text input and choices, so the player cannot simply backtrack their way through the story.
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Not to be that person, but TADS natively offers clickable links, and only requires an HTML TADS interpreter like QTADS to work. It does not require anything a wild as Vorple. The links also appear for screen readers, though I have heard that screen reader users prefer to type in their commands.
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Does TADS offer native multimedia? Music, sound, images?
That’s what I was hoping for Inform 10 - that it’d have hyperlinks built in which when clicked would issue a text command, or just follow a set of normal rules, like
After clicking "Go to the Airport.":
now the player wears traveling clothes;
now the player carries tweed suitcase;
now the player is in Airport Terminal;
reduce stamina by 100;
say "Well, now that was an exhausting three hours... But you're here.".
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Yeah TADS supports images and several tracks of simultaneous sound, for sound effects, voice lines, background music, and ambient music (last time I read the docs)
EDIT: The only reason why I’m not putting the full audio experience in my games is because I’m afraid the audio will obstruct the sound of a screen reader, and images take me too long to make to be worthwhile.
EDIT 2: Also, TADS tells you what the capabilities are available for the current interpreter, so if the terp doesn’t support sound or hyperlinks or images or whatever, then you can check that, and modify how your game works to accommodate.
In I Am Prey, for example, I use alternative outputs, if hyperlinks are not available, and then I use a modified version of @blindHunter’s accessibility module to ask if a screen reader is being used, and then I modify punctuation, layout, and how certain things are worded to better-accommodate screen readers, too. So you don’t have to worry about if the player has the right terps; you can be flexible with it.
If you’re going full-tilt and have no flexibility in your project design (valid), then you can also use these terp stats to alert the player that they should use a specific interpreter, right when the game loads.
EDIT 3: More info on sound, specifically, can be found here. HTML TADS is the kind with hyperlinks and stuff, but—again—if the interpreter doesn’t support HTML TADS, then you can check that when the game is running. I think (85% certainty) that non-HTML TADS supports images? Because one of the interpreter types is “text only”, which implies images do not need HTML TADS, but sound and hyperlinks do.
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I think The Kuelema was both a success as a game and as a demonstration of what can be done with Google Forms, though you can’t please everyone as that would require that everyone has the same taste.
Also, I think it shows that players may accept “minor problems” when it is not caused by the author’s laziness or lack of skills. For instance, it is possible in The Kuelema to see your progress and then reach another room, see that your progress is now further and then return to a place you have been before and suddenly see that your progress has “been set back”. This is not really the case but when I first experienced this I was slightly confused. Thus I learned how to play a Google Forms game and realized that practically no information is stored by the game.
So in a way, playing Google Forms games require a bit of getting used to, just as parser games do. However, if they can be made without any sort of programming that is just great. I hope that other authors will be inspired and make more Google Forms games, assuming the game fits the system so probably no turn-based combat in that system etc.
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Yes, I could have been more explicit about this. Google Forms has a pretty simple point-and-click interface for building pages. It’s fairly remarkable that Kuolema is “code-free,” unless there’s some advanced Google Forms guru-ness going on behind the scenes.
I also appreciate the browser-based, zero-install aspect of gameplay (although I saw that some folks had problems with pop-ups and such).
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