Last year, I had the pleasure of entering IFComp for the first time. It was tons of fun, and I can’t wait to enter again; just not this year, since I’m working on something else that I’d like to finish first. That said: I always felt bad that I got so much fantastic feedback from the community, yet I didn’t review, judge or play any of the other entries. So this year, I’m finally going to rectify this, and hopefully be able to give something back, by playing and reviewing as many games as I can get my hands and time on.
16 Likes
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
So I’m leisurely scrolling through the comp entries for the first time, waiting for something to jump out at me… In situations like this, a title like LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST certainly helps. Especially when it comes with the added promise of “perversions” and “degeneracy”. See, that’s the great thing about IFComp: it has a little something for everyone.
It didn’t take me long to notice that I was in for a trans coming-of-age story – almost an IF staple by now. Anyway, I was immediately pulled in. For once, there is the pitch-perfect presentation. Font, layout, timing, colors, transitions, social media elements – spotless. And it’s not just style, it actually supports the story to great effect.
But if you come for the sleek looks, you’ll stay for the writing. I did. Even though this easily more than 2-hour-long game comes without a flipping save or bookmark feature. I had to structure my whole flipping day around it, lugging my flipping laptop around, hoping the flipping battery would–
Look, the bottom line is that I really wanted to finish it once I started. Maybe it’s a me-thing, but I found L and his inner monologue extremely relatable. I don’t know how much of the writing is autobiographical, but it feels very real. It’s also funny. It can even be unfunny, if it wants to be. There is a scene at a hairdresser, and it’s so good, bringing out the best in all the aforementioned qualities. “Social horror”, a comment on the game’s itch.io page called it.
I would have liked a bit more interactivity, although there seems to be some branching going on that leads to two different endings. I only got one, but it felt perfect.
5 Likes
Your review is appreciated. A lack of save/continue is an unfortunate limitation of inkrunner (unless this is a feature that does exist, which we are trying to clarify with the creator of the tool). The solution would be to not use inkrunner, but that’s doing the heavy lifting of styling and images, which you (very generously!) mentioned as supporting the game to the point it even works as art. We decided to just bite the bullet in this case.
Hopefully saves will be found in future builds. I can offer solace that one person I watched play through had to run across the house to grab their laptop charger midway through act 1.
Also, I would consider this game as semi-autobiographical. Parts of this game contain real experiences that happened to myself and people I know, but I would like that line to be kept blurred for various reasons.
Cheers,
– THE BLOOD
3 Likes
First Contact by dott. Piergiorgio
Just one review ago, I said that IFComp has a little something for everyone.
Call me dense, but I surely didn’t expect where this one was going. I was simply curious, because I know that the author has been building this big, elaborate world or a while now, and I wanted to see what it’s all about. I think going in blind into this first contact is worth something, so I’m going to say that I enjoyed it, and spoiler-tag the rest of the review.
THE REST OF THE REVIEW
First Contact is an erotic fantasy romance that certainly won’t be everybody’s cup of milk.
First and foremost, it’s in dire need of an elite squad of native-speaking proof-readers, as in its current form it’s difficult to read and riddled with errors (some of them obvious italianisms, like missing pronouns in front of verbs, “having” years, etc.). It doesn’t help that the story consistently relies on large dumps of exposition. While the amount of effort put into the lore and worldbuilding certainly is impressive, it would benefit from being less explicit and frontloaded, and more naturally integrated into the story flow. There is just too much of it crammed into what I understand is supposed to be a short prologue.
Another thing that doesn’t help is that there’s almost zero interactivity. This is an almost linear “click to continue” kind of story, so there’s no opportunity to explore the setting at your own pace. The centerpiece is literally a series of historical lectures, even though, ultimately, it’s not as dry as it sounds. Wink wink.
In general, the writing is all over the place. I kind of dig the larger-than-life sense of pathos and reverence, veering into strange digressions at every opportunity. Even in the story’s most incomprehensible moments, it feels genuine and heartfelt and delightfully overexcited in a kid-in-a-candy-store sort of way. The sprinkles of comic relief clash awkwardly with the rest of the tone, but at this point we’re so deep into camp territory, we might as well embrace it as part of the charm.
Which finally brings us to the horny elephant in the room: To say that the story leans into a lactation kink would be the understatement of the century. Believe me, you are not ready for the sheer scale, epicness and gravity the author manages to squeeze from the concept of erupting mammary milk. Even if you’re not into this particular kink, you have to admire the level of glorious artistic indulgence.
So while First Contact certainly isn’t “good” in a traditional sense, its relentlessly escalating sense of genuine weirdness nevertheless brought me much joy. You tell me we may get to play a full-sized, parser-based isekai set in this world? Count me in.
6 Likes
Thank you for your review (and more so for the feedback implicit in the review)
For the elite squad of proofreaders, don’t worry for the “main dish”: having watched the handling and proceedings of the final public beta of Never gives up her dead I have a precise idea of how to handle the 0.99RCx version of Isekai, during the fall of '26… 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
2 Likes
Focal Shift by Fred Snyder
From the moment I saw Focal Shift on the ballot, I knew it was going to be up my alley. The blurb alone: perfect. Because, you know, sometimes you just want to pretend to be a hoodie-clad mercenary hacker on an infiltration mission, preferably gone wrong. I took the dive and wasn’t disappointed.
From the intro paragraphs on, I got what I came for. Focal Shift is a cyberpunk short story that hits the expected genre beats with laser-focused precision. There aren’t any big surprises here; it’s all about indulging in the fantasy. The writing is sparse and effective; it knows how much it needs to say and keeps it there. Characters, the PC included, have exactly the amount of personality needed for their role in the story. Terms like gadget names or in-universe slang are dropped without much explanation, but put into context and named in such a way that you can pretty much understand what they are if you’ve ever read a cyberpunk story before. I had to double-check whether “grid jockey”, for example, was taken from somewhere else, because it sounds like it’s been around forever. (Unless I’m wrong, it’s something the author came up with. There have been grid runners, there have been desk jockeys; but no grid jockeys.)
The basic gameplay is similarly straightforward. Strictly speaking, you need nothing more than directions, “look”, “take”, “talk”, and the game’s special commands, “identify” and “hack”. (Considering that the parser is servicable, but not outstanding, the game may even have benefitted from a limited verb set.) The environment you are set loose in is reasonably confined, but leaves enough room to explore and experiment.
Now, pardon me while I have a strange interlude go off on a paragraph-long tangent about hacking mechanics in games.
When you make a game about a hacker, one of the big questions is, obviously, how to gamify the actual hacking part. And because no one on Earth knows what real hacking actually looks like, the possibilities are literally endless. Pseudo coding? Check. Floating through cyberspace shooting at geometric shapes? Check. Playing a game of Frogger? Hell, why not. You don’t even have to do a “minigame”. Just roll the dice. Or don’t. In the best cyberpunk game of all-time, Deus Ex, hacking is completely passive and succeeds automatically. You just sit there and wait. The challenge is not getting caught, because there is a simulated world going on around you. The later sequels had a minigame, and it was pretty good, with small optional challenges and rewards. Anyway, my point is, it doesn’t matter. It has to get the feel across – a sense of mischievous satisfaction; like you just got away with something.
So how does Focal Shift fare then? It goes for two kinds of minigames that manage the “feel” part pretty well. For the most part, I enjoyed them. I won’t spoil how they work, since figuring out their actual rules is part of the puzzle, but that’s exactly where I had some problems. Unless I missed something, the first minigame seems very underexplained in-game. Without the walkthrough, it would have taken a much smarter man than me to figure out what I was supposed to do. I think it would be worth it to convey the mechanics a little more explicitly, because once I understood, the actual mingame was enjoyable enough. The second one was easier to figure out for me, but I still had to abuse the “undo” command at its “final boss” instance.
I don’t want to end on a negative note though, since Focal Shift is a solid little game that I had fun with. So here’s a joke. What do you call it when I’m rummaging through my backpack, going “Where’s my damn phone?” A vocal sift.
4 Likes
Another one for the list of entries I definitely have to play!
2 Likes
Thanks a lot for the thorough review! I agree that it would have benefited from some in-game explanation of how the word hacking minigames worked. I wanted it to be an interesting puzzle, but a simple explanation of the clues would have been helpful without wrecking the challenge.
I look forward to dropping a post-comp version of the game that takes this kind of stuff into consideration.
2 Likes