I am incredibly grateful to all reviewers but I believe it’s unwise to comment on specifics during the judging period. So here is a blanket THANK YOU for making the effort to review my game, no matter what you thought of it. You make the IF Comp so much more interesting by being a part of it.
I’m particularly glad to hear I didn’t ruin the Netherlands section!
The Curse by Rob
This bills itself as an 80’s style text adventure, but we don’t seem to be talking Infocom-style text adventures here. Many of those are quite difficult, but at least you have a general idea of what the puzzles are, and the descriptions of the environment and items are helpful in understanding what is going on. The Curse is… not that. It’s not that at all.
When I started out, I was very entertained by the bizarre pop-up windows, crazy questions, absurd backstory, and weird and endearingly annoying sound effects. The game reminded me of ALICE BLUE, a 2019 competition game that as far as I know only I thought was good. I still fondly remember typing ‘sing’, and getting a pop-up window that actually audibly sang at me.
Unfortunately, The Curse quickly turned into an extremely minimalist and also extremely underclued puzzle game. The world is as bare as it could be, and it makes no sense at all. You land in the middle of the desert, but on one side of the first location there’s a wall, the presence of which is left simply unexplained. A few exits further, you’re in a bizarre magical limbo. And the puzzles… well, at one point I managed to progress by opening a cage containing a cloud (??) in the magical limbo location, just because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and it ‘worked’ and brought me to a completely new location. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know how it happened, and I don’t know why I should have expected the action that I took to have this effect.
A little while later, I’m in a house with a mirror, and there’s a picture of a god on the wall, I think Anubis, and everything seems to suggest that I have to maybe spell his name backwards in the mirror interface… but that doesn’t work. So I’m stuck. Okay, you say. Why don’t you use the hints? See, I have used the hints. (I have used them a lot.) But this passage from the game’s blurb is unfortunately untrue:
Using HELP the second time does not give you the complete spoiler. It just gives you another vague hint. In the case of the room with the mirror, it says something like ‘focus on the Egyptian god’. You can’t actually type that in as a command – the game doesn’t know the word ‘focus’. But what else am I supposed to do? How is this going to help me solve the puzzle? I have no idea. Being completely stuck and having very little confidence that any further puzzles in this game are going to make sense or will be solvable by the player, I quit.
Thanks for your precious time.
Your considerations, almost all of which I agree with, will be very useful to me in improving the game in the future.
In fact The Curse is a crazy adventure almost without sense and obviously it can’t please everyone.
Thanks especially for the report regarding the mirror.
Anubis was the only word that shouldn’t have been inserted backwards.
I didn’t expect that someone wouldn’t try both solutions.
It’s a nostalgic game.
The cage for example refers to an object used by Crowther in Adventure, in addition to the iconic phrase xyzzy… (the jump)
The Curse is full of quotes from things of the past. (Syd etc.)
The game itself, with its implementation, has had its day.
If I remember correctly The Curse is the only Windows executable of the competition. 
Best regards and thanks again.
The Killings in Wasacona by Steve Kollmansberger
It is a truth universally acknowledged that designing Murder mystery games are hard. Here’s just one devilish design decision that you have to make. At the end of the game, when the accusing happens, do you:
Kollmansberger chooses the third, and I found it a mixed blessing. On my first playthrough of the game, I was allowed to accuse someone even though I had nothing like enough evidence against him. It was probably better than not being allowed to accuse him – and it gave me the positive message that I had solved three of the murders – but it did feel very unrealistic. I had vague suspicions, but really not much more.
On my second playthrough, I had a great case and basically achieved everything that was good except saving the fourth victim. (I wonder how one can even do that. Keep patrolling in the night even though you have to sleep? I don’t think there’s enough time to find and arrest the killer on the first day.) So that was nice. But it would have been nicer if I had just played better, possibly by using knowledge from the first game. That was not the case, however. I had just succeeded at more rolls. And the reason I succeeded at more rolls is that during the first game, I learned that not all skill are created equal. There are like, only two or three physical checks in the entire game, while there seem to be dozens of Academics and Percpetion checks. I put +6 in Academics and +3 in Perception, -6 in Physical and -3 in Intimidation, and suddenly I was finding evidence all over the place. Nice! Well, I mean, kind of. But not really. It was just luck and gaming the system.
I think the addition of a luck factor is a net positive for the game. Just giving out all the clues would take away the feeling that you’re working with a non-predetermined partial set of evidence; and making it deterministic which clues you’ll get would take away some of the tension. But I think there’s a fairly obvious way to make the system more interactive and give the player more agency, more of a reward for their detective sense. It is this: give the player a limited number of ‘automatic success’ tokens, to be used before a roll. Maybe three tokens. Then at every roll you will have to decide whether this one is so important that you want to use one of your tokens. I think that would work marvellously. Are you gonna blow it on a stupid racist search for drugs in the clearly-not-a-drug-user’s apartment? Or will you use it to find the murder weapon where you probably intuit that it must be hidden?
Let me say, though, that overall The Killings in Wasacona was a very positive surprise. It’s the right size, there’s the right amount of people and locations, the right amount of information per location, enough connection between them, just enough opening up of new options, a time limit that isn’t too tight, and – most importantly – the right clues to make the case solvable but not too obvious. Murder mysteries are hard, but this one was done very well. It’s not the kind of mystery where we really delve into the psychology of the characters, or unearth the hidden social dynamics of the town; it’s more a straightforward police procedural than a grumpy-British-detective-who-is-in-an-existential-crisis-and-the-current-case-will-force-him-to-reflect-on-his-own-troubles type thing. In that sense its aims are not too high. But they don’t need to be, because a game like this is perfectly enjoyable, and enjoy it I very much did.
There could be a further round of proofreading. One of the first screens told me: “you’re excited and relived to have graduated from the FBI Academy.” I also ran into an early “You recall back to” (should be “You recall”), a “per-say” (should be “per se”), and the phrase “She contested she charges”. Nothing too troublesome, but it could be polished away.
Civil Service by Helen L Liston
I’m tempted to give a very brief and very misleading joke review. Something like:
One star. This game did not work.
One star. This was not a game.
One star. Would not recommend.
And then I’ll add:
“But who cares for reviews?!!?!!!”
Look, I’m not a native speaker of English, but I do wonder whether that last phrase is idiomatic. To care for something is to give it the care that it needs; surely, the current context requires the word ‘about’? Or not? I’m not sure. And then again, it would not be beyond the capabilities of Helen L. Liston to actually ask who is caring for reviews; those sad, lonely reviews, left to die in a cold ravine on the internet, abandoned and forgotten… Who cares for them? Maybe you? Maybe a soul sent down from limbo, morally corrupt, but in a low key way, and eager to regain being and a semblance of life by learning to care not just about but also for something. Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again, and yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel… I mean, no, I’ll give him the paper clips he needs to organise his angry letters to Agamemnon.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Victor, this is one of the most chaotic and least coherent reviews you’ve ever written. But look. Civil Service starts out as one of the most chaotic and least coherent pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever played. In fact, I was mightily annoyed by it. There was just fragments, making little sense. The choices were opaque: you have no idea what it even means to click one thing rather than another. And the frequent changes of background were disorienting and annoying, even without the moving texts and weird font colour changes. I was not enjoying myself.
And then things started to click. I mean, they didn’t fully click. I still have a hard time imagining three people who abandon their co-worker in a ravine and don’t even notice her absence. But this is to some extent a metaphor. Let me quote Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, the chapter “Nabokov on Cruelty”:
Helen L. Liston is our Nabokov. She (I’ll assume that that’s the right pronoun, but correct me if I’m wrong) worries most about the particular form of cruelty that is incuriosity. That is people just walking past each other. That is people looking at each other, but not seeing. That is people talking to each other, but not hearing. That is people never getting the name of their colleague right. That is, in the ultimate and bizarre case, people forgetting about their team mate while they’re in a ravine, and then forgetting to wonder about her when she doesn’t show up for work day after day after day.
So here we are, a ghost, ourselves assigned to limbo because of a egotism that killed, trying with all our might to manipulate physical reality just enough to make these people remember. To save a woman by giving others the thought: “What happened to her?” We have to stop seeing everything only in terms of how we experience it. We have to stop rating everything, as if our experience of an object is what is most real about it. Instead, we must accept our own irrelevance, FOCUS, and do the job – the job of compassion. We have to live up to the words that Falstaff never said: “I am not only compassionate in myself, but the cause that compassion is in other men.”
And so, in the end, I started enjoying and appreciating Civil Service. It is a little rough, it takes some time to click, but it has something to say. Something that is worth saying.
So let’s not give it a rating. Let’s not say how many stars it is worth. Let’s just say:
Five star potential.
A Dream of Silence: Act 3 by Abigail Corfman
Next up in my random competition playlist is a game labelled as Act 3 of a trilogy. I have not played the first two acts, so that, I thought, might be a problem. It’s not. The game allows you play through a quick summary of the first two acts, which apparently consist of… escaping from a one-room tomb? Doesn’t sound like I missed much, but maybe I’m wrong.
There’s also a long, long list of content warnings in the blurb:
Wow, I thought, this game is going to be dark. But, again, appearances are deceiving. Yes, there’s an evil vampire overlord involved, and we’re being told that there’s a character chained to the ground who has all the bones in her hand deliberately broken, and ouch it hurts so much, but we’re not really experiencing any of it. It’s more that some ‘evil vampire’ tropes are being mentioned on auto-pilot, with no attempt made to make them real or visceral to the player. Which is fine – I’m not here for the torture porn or the vicarious victim blaming euphoria – but it does point towards a certain weakness of the game. More about that later.
One thing that rather inexplicably is not mentioned in the blurb, is that this is a Baldur’s Gate 3 fan game. This puts me in a somewhat weird position as a player and a reviewer. I have not played Baldur’s Gate 3. I have played Baldur’s Gate 2. I’ve played it many times. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that I was at a friend’s in Geldrop the day it hit the Dutch stores and we biked into Eindhoven to buy it, because we couldn’t bear the thought of having to wait for it an hour longer than was strictly necessary. But, you know, things changed; I’ve got kids; I don’t have as much time for gaming as I used to; and so I don’t know anything about Baldur’s Gate 3 except for what you might now from playing the first two games. I don’t even know how much continuity there is from the second to the third game. And this meant that I started playing A Dream of Silence: Act 3 with some trepidation. I was a little bit worried that I wouldn’t understand this game. I was more worried that it might contain big spoilers, because, you know, one day I might find the time to return to the Sword Coast. But I’m willing to trust the author and dive in.
One of the first things that then happened in the game is that I’m asked how my character views Astarion. I chose something non-committal. And the game told me:
I stared at my screen for minutes trying to process this. It made no sense to me, and still makes no sense to me. If the game presupposes that my character cares about what happens to Astarion, then surely it is the job of the author to write the game in such a way that it is clear that my character cares for Astarion, and to not give me any choices that suggest that my character doesn’t. If, on the other hand, the game presupposes that I care about what happens to Astarion, well, the game should not presuppose that; rather, it should do its job and make me care about what happens to Astarion. I find this remark absolutely flabbergasting.
After some soul searching, I decided to play on anyway, despite the earnest warnings. I’m glad I did, because the game is interesting, at least from a mechanical perspective. You’re a ghost; well, not really a ghost, more a dream insert, but it comes down to much the same thing. You have limited energy to interact with the world, and also three numerical skills that determine what kinds of interaction you are best at (social, exploration, physical manipulation). The other main character, Astarion, is the main doer of things, and you are there trying to help out in small ways. Maybe you can give him an idea; or point him at a useful item; or find out something that he doesn’t know about. I like this minimalist approach to player agency, which makes you think hard about what to spend your energy on. I suppose that mechanically it works a bit like all those management type games where you can take only a certain number of actions per day; but here it’s done to put you in the role of a support character who has limited influence on any particular scene. That’s deft and interesting. Early on I worried about the extremely limited amount of energy I had, but I quickly found that there’s a reset in every scene. All in all, even though I played on normal difficulty, I found that I had enough agency to steer the narrative towards a positive conclusion.
So I liked the basic idea and mechanics. The fiction, on the other hand, fell flat. I’m assuming that Abigail Corfman chose to write about this character Astarion because he’s really interesting. But that didn’t come out in the game at all. He’s just some bog-standard vampire in a bog-standard vampire setting. All of this could have been a Vampire: The Masquerade fan fiction and I would not have noticed the difference. (I would have commended the author for not having fetishistically mentioned the character’s clans, I suppose. I can certainly live a good and productive life without ever reading a sentence like: “He was clearly a Brujah.”) Okay, maybe there are no gnomes and half-elves in Vampire: The Masquerade, but a pair of half-pointy ears does not an original setting make.
One problem is this: we’re meeting a lot of characters that mean something to Astarion, but they mean nothing to us. And nothing interesting happens to them. We just meet them, deal with them, then move on; and we don’t even experience much of the dealing, because our character is off exploring the room. The entire story can be summarised as: “we walk through the mansion, meet each of its inhabitants in turn, then walk on, until we reach the end”. In the process we learn nothing about Astarion; we learn nothing about ourselves (surely the first-person introspective nature of the game would have lent itself well to at least showing us the personality and background of the player character, but they remain something of a blank); we learn very little about the Big Bad and his cronies; and we learn very little about the larger setting. The game didn’t give me anything in that respect. It just chugged along and then reached an ending.
Did I enjoy myself? Yeah, I did. I like the mechanics, and the exploration of the scenes is well done. I resented building a four-part sword and then still doing only 2 damage, but okay, I guess that’s what I got for choosing to be bad at physical manipulation. But it never moved beyond that rather basic level of enjoyment; the game never took a step beyond that.
The Apothecary’s Assistant by Allyson Gray
The most curious aspect of The Apothecary’s Assistant is that you’re supposed to play it in small doses, one per real life day. The idea is this. You find yourself in a magical forest apothecary, where you are asked to perform small chores as part of your ‘shift’. Performing these chores gives you a reward in magical acorns. But you can only perform one per day. For your next chore, you need to return tomorrow. Once you have amassed enough acorns, you can assign them to real world charities, and Allyson Gray will use her Colossal Prize money to make this happen.
(This is a great idea, by the way. I don’t know which country Allyson is in, but here in the Netherlands it’s not so easy to do tax deductible donations – you have to give a lot of money to charity before tax deductions start kicking in. And of course the charities have to be registered in The Netherlands, which most international ones are not. Last year I was about to get some money from IF Comp for Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates, and I had the Competition organisers send it not to me but to the Nigerian charity Give Girls a Chance, which is also registered as a charity in the US. It’s the only way I’ve ever been able to do a tax deductible charity donation! I don’t know whether something like this is Allyson’s reason for tying donations to her IF Comp entry, but I’m putting it out here because it could be relevant for other authors, current or future. Anyway, although the set-up in the game does not actually increase the donations for any charities, it does draw the players’ attention to the six chosen charities, and perhaps some of us who can afford it are inspired to give more than just magical acorns.)
I played the game as intended for about a week. By that time, I must admit I was getting rather impatient. All the scenes I had experienced were extremely low-stakes and low-difficulty. To give you an example, I would be asked to identify a certain animal. You’re given a description of the animal and two pictures, one of which evidently fits the description while the other evidently does not. Then you must click the right one. After this, you will be profusely praised by the apothecary – totally unearned acclaim. This was typical for all the days I experienced. Everyone is utterly happy with you, delighted in your performance, of good cheer, and honestly the only thing that separates them from the Care Bears is that they don’t have hearts on their bellies.
When, I was wondering, would something happen? There had been some hints about a Hunt, and about the full moon, so I was fully expecting some horrible calamity that was going to break through the cloying sweetness of the game. But it was a long time coming. So I decided to ‘cheat’, and started to increase the date on my computer. This way I played up to early October, hopefully far enough to get a good impression of the game as a whole.
To my surprise, nothing changed. It just remains a series of ultra low-stakes low-difficulty challenges that bring you standing ovations when you successfully complete them. No narrative starts to unfold. Characters do not develop. No note of longing, bitterness, passion, anger, or grief is allowed to penetrate the all-too-sweet harmonies of The Apothecary’s Assistant’s fantasy world.
Is this cottagecore interactive fiction? Are we here to just bask in the cosy? A brief search for ‘cosy literature’ gave me this:
and that sounds about right for The Apothecary’s Assistant. Perhaps there are those to whom this has some appeal. But I can’t help but feel that if something makes no demands on me, it is bound to be boring. And that is, alas, exactly how I experienced this game.
Thank you for your honest feedback and for giving the game a chance! I’m very sorry to hear that it didn’t hit the mark for you, but I really appreciate that you still took the time to write a review. It was especially interesting to see your interpretation the genre, which does seem apt!
I’d just like to respectfully clarify a couple of points to avoid potential confusion. Hopefully I’m not misinterpreting your initial comments — sincere apologies if so!
– The game is set up in such a way that donations are directly increased by each vote. We’ve got 55 votes so far, which means 55 extra dollars on top of the base donations I was going to make from the Colossal Fund 2023 money (distributed according to player votes)
– The characters generally do have some progression within their series of shifts (with Aïssatou also having a separate trigger for her development). However, these are set up in such a way that the average player will probably only encounter one or two of the major developing moments at most, so that impression of stagnation is a completely fair criticism! I hope to improve this aspect of the game in the post-comp version.
Once again, thank you for your time and for kindly purchasing a bead! I hope you have a great rest of the comp and I’m looking forward to reading your other reviews. 
Thanks for the reply! No need to be sorry, of course – there’s luckily no rule of game design that tells us that games should fit the taste of Victor Gijsbers. 
I think I correctly understood the donations scheme. I wrote about it the way I did because the collection of acorns does not, like, actually raise money. If I buy a bead in the game, you will donate a dollar more. But in a sense my action of buying the bead is completely inessential; it doesn’t make it in any way easier for you to donate the money. So in that sense the real benefit, it seems to me, is raising awareness about the causes.
(I actually also tried to buy a second bead, and lost the acorns for doing so… but I couldn’t fill in the form because I had set my clock a dozen days into the future and security certificates started failing when I tried to browse the web. 
But I got those acorns by cheating anyway, so maybe it was for the best.)
Hebe by Marina Diagourta
This is not a review. I’ve played for a bit, and what I’m seeing is a game that has been made with a lot of love for ancient Greece and its mythology; but I’m also seeing a game that is very much undercooked. Basic interactions with the world are often problematic, in locations that are not important, but even with central puzzle items. So I’m going to stop playing. I won’t rate the game. And I’m going to hope that a post-comp version will come out – perhaps after Marina has chartered some extra testers on this forum – which will allow me to enjoy Marina’s vision.
I’ll just give some examples of problematic interactions to show what I mean.
With that last one, it’s relevant to note that there absolutely is something under the carpet and the message totally misinterprets the puzzle situation to you.
As I said, this is just to give an indication of the kind of thing that’s going wrong. I’m totally here for a puzzle game about rescuing the Greek gods, but I’m going to wait until some further polish has been applied.
There’s also The Master’s Lair. I think that’s the only other.
It certainly wasn’t obvious to me, but I love this idea. That seems like a great way to structure a mystery game, and I may have to borrow it for the future!
It’s kind of archaic, but “care for” can also mean “like” or “enjoy”. It’s almost exclusively used negatively nowadays, as in “I don’t particularly care for tea”.
(I wish I had something more useful to say about the reviews themselves, but all I have is—I’m enjoying them immensely. I would never have made that Nabokov connection.)
I guess it’s only obvious if you’ve played a bunch of tabletop RPGs with reroll or automatic success mechanics. For instance, I’ve played a lot of Trollbabe over the past years. Each session, you get a limited number of rerolls in case you didn’t like the outcome of your original roll. What’s more, rerolls are the only way you can get injured. So every time you fail there’s the questions: Do you want to spend a reroll on this? Is it important enough to risk getting injured, or worse?
It’s a pretty idiosyncratic connection, I suppose, but I happen to be a big Richard Rorty nerd! (I don’t think I quite rise to the level of being a Richard Rorty scholar.) I made a series of videos on this particular book:
Focal Shift by Fred Snyder
At first, Focal Shift seemed rather foreboding to me. The map felt cramped, yet all avenues of exploration were quickly shut down. There’s nothing to do in the garage. The bureaucrat won’t help me. I can’t hack the drone because I don’t know the password. And so on. But this perception soon changed. I realised that I didn’t need to know a password, but only needed to guess one and then the solve the resulting puzzle. And all the puzzles in the game turned out to be carefully gated. Solving A clarifies that you now have to go to person X to solve B. Solving B clarifies that you now have to go to location Y to solve C. And so on. It’s very streamlined. It’s quite easy too. The game doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to the two hacking games – those you have to learn to solve through trial and error – but otherwise it make it very clear what you’re supposed to do at each point. I breezed through it.
The story is fairly cliché for a cyberpunk hacking game, although the ending is mildly surprising. I liked the ability to hack the owl and do something smart with it. Overall, a nice game, fun, not groundbreaking, but very competent.
Ha, as is often the case we were thinking along similar lines for Killings in Wasacona – I had the Trail of Cthulhu evidence-gathering system in mind, rather than Trollbabe, but it’s not too dissimilar.
The Bat by Chandler Groover
I sometimes listen to the Dutch punk band Hang Youth, whose song titles have a tendency to leave little mystery about the point of the song. There is, for instance, SHELL IS EEN PRIMA BEDRIJF (ALS IK DE WEBSITE MAG GELOVEN), which translates to SHELL IS A FINE COMPANY (IF I CAN BELIEVE THEIR WEBSITE). “Gratis geld / in de grond / geen gezeik / lekker boren” – “free money / in the ground / don’t complain / have fun drilling.”
I’m bringing this up because my 8-year old son has a favourite Hang Youth song, which is called BATMAN IS EEN FASCIST. It’s only the ‘nanananana nananana Batman!’ sound bite, except that they then also say the words ‘is een fascist’, which I don’t think requires translation. The Bat has a guy in it who looks suspiciously like Batman, and even has a suspiciously similar name, but I don’t think he’s a fascist. He’s spending 99% of his in-game time being a cross between a traumatised bat and an especially irritating 2-year old, and there’s the strong suggestion that in more normal circumstances, he is merely an egotistical plutocrat rather than a far-right authoritarian. Though it can be hard to tell the difference, I suppose. Indeed, if we need a Hang Youth song to accompany this game, I think we need to take their favourite song of my 6-year old daughter, the very sing-along-able ditty JE HAAT GEEN MAANDAG, JE HAAT KAPITALISME, translating to YOU DON’T HATE MONDAY, YOU HATE CAPITALISM. That’s the spirit of the game. You don’t hate organising a party. You just hate the ultra-rich dudes and dudesses whose every whim you have to cater for because they belong to a different class, and whose elevated positions in the ranks of the capitalist pantheon make them literally unable to see you as a fellow human being.
There’s one person who treats you as a person, and tells you that they were happy to know and meet you. Turns out they are stealing everyone’s valuables and are just cynically manipulating you to dull your suspicions. Your own heroic tasks will culminate in stopping this thief from absconding with the valuables, so that your ultra rich employers and their friends won’t be losing what I suppose is 0,000001% of their net worth. Such ironies are not lost on Groover or his game, although they are hardly spelled out explicitly.
I said that the main character hates the ultra rich, but this is not apparent throughout the main part of the game. You’re thrown into the role of the extremely competent valet who will make a success out of the very worst situation; and the situation is pretty bad indeed at the beginning of the game, and only gets worse thereafter. The Prologue is a masterclass is generating real player competence to match fictional character competence: the player must visit all the rooms (for a plausible in-game reason), must learn about some of the central puzzle solving mechanisms (using the crank, using the newspaper, using the broom), and will thereby also learn about the game’s central command ‘attend to’. Groover can, of course, be trusted to choose the verb that the game focuses on carefully. ‘Attend to’ is pleasingly vague – slightly too vague, perhaps, since I kept accidentally dropping things until quite late in the game – but works very well in reinforcing the main theme of servitude.
The game felt very stressful to me early on, and since I was tired and had little energy, it actually took me a few days to work up the courage to return to it. The stress is generated by an escalating list of tasks: things go wrong at a faster rate than you can fix them, and it’s strongly implied that there are time limits and you have to optimise your performance. That’s all smoke and mirrors. There are no real time limits. The money you get and lose is completely irrelevant – this becomes clear fairly soon, when the amounts go up and down in fairly ridiculous ways that often have nothing to do with your own performance – and you cannot put the game in an unwinnable, or really even in a suboptimal, state. The tasks also start getting more and more zany. You have to give Master Bryce three different tools that can be used to mutilate the baron’s beard. You have to find five completely stupid ‘clues’ connected to cats and give them to a detective. And you have to, ah, lubricate a social encounter between three women and a moose head. (I have been told by the author that there is no connection between this scene and the infamous antler job from Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country, but of course it is hard not to see this coincidence as evidence of a wise and benevolent universal consciousness.)
As it goes along, I found the game getting more and more enjoyable. The puzzles are just varied enough, although there’s perhaps a tad too much hinting. But that’s a very personal balance.
The final fight scene reminded me of the climactic encounter at the end of… Earth and Sky? One of the Earth and Sky’s, at least, and surely Chandler is not going to come out and tell me that he a resemblance to the most famous series of super heroes IF is also a coincidence. And after that, there’s the denouement. It’s fairly dark. Thematically, I think it fits, but it might have hit harder and felt more true if there had been more interiority for the PC earlier on. We never really get to understand why the PC has not left Master Bryce when all the other servants did. So why is this the final straw? I did like how it was mechanically and command-wise tied up to the one mechanism whereby we could actually make the Master do what we wanted; that’s a very nice touch.
I highly recommend this game, and it has given me much food for thought.
Spoilery comparison of The Bat and Forsaken Denizen: These games are both about our relation to the ultra-wealthy. It’s amazing that the violent dystopian horror game is, thematically at least, much less dark than the zany comedy of errors! (Though it is not unexpected that a Pacian game is less dark than a Groover game.)
House of Wolves by Shruti Deo
I always read all the other reviews of a game before writing my own. And we’re now at a stage of the competition where sometimes, this means that I feel everything has been said and I do not really have a new perspective to add. That’s certainly the case here.
House of Wolves is a short horror game about a study-at-home student (who isn’t really studying as much as just dragging themselves through their days). The student has to eat dinner every day with their abusive family group, who want the protagonist to be ‘presentable’ at dinner; to eat slabs of raw meat, cause they’re wolves; and to be thankful, because everything that is done to them is for their own good. Classic abuse. The meat and the wolves are not doubt a metaphor, but as Mike Russo and others have pointed out… it’s not clear what it’s a metaphor for. It kind of just becomes another metaphor for abuse.
The writing is good, and so is the lay-out and structure. In terms of atmosphere, I was vaguely reminded of Bogeyman. But that was a substantial work that could really hit you. House of Wolves is extremely short; a coffee break horror; perhaps an appetiser for something bigger that Shruti Deo will give us in the future.
Forsaken Denizen by C.E.J. Pacian
The evolution of parser games towards friendliness and better play experiences has led to many changes, but in particular there are two strategies that authors use to avoid ‘guess the verb’ issues. One is the meticulous implementation of everything that a player could reasonably try. The other is the clear limitation of the space of possibilities, so that players will try fewer things. These two strategies are almost always used in conjunction – every game needs to provide responses to actions that are not strictly necessary, and every game needs to teach the player how it is to be played – but some games lean more on one strategy than another. Pacian is well known as a pioneer and adept of the second strategy. By limiting the kinds of actions that the player can take, play becomes more constrained, but also more streamlined. While not being in a strict sense a ‘limited parser’ game, Forsaken Denizen uses such heavy hinting about the actions one can take that there is never any doubt about what one might conceivably try. As a result, one is thinking about what one can achieve with one’s limited expressive resources in an environment with limited affordances.
‘Affordances’ is a technical term meaning ‘the characteristics or properties of an object that suggest how it can be used.’ I don’t think we’ve talked about it a lot in IF criticism and theory, but we clearly should! A chair has the affordance of being sat on. A gun has the affordance of being picked up, dropped, shot, perhaps loaded or reloaded. Games do not only teach verbs and strategies, but also affordances. In Forsaken Denizen, for instance, one quickly learns to recognise that the various kinds of ‘locks’ have only one affordance: being opened by an easily recognisable key. There are other games where a barrier might have affordances like being set on fire, being talked through, allowing a robot mouse to move through its gaps, and so on. In Forsaken Denizen, it is clearly there to remain in place until the right key has been obtained – and so one doesn’t even try to interact with it.
Forsaken Denizen seems, at first, like a survival horror game. The absurd blurb of the game is: “THIS GAME CONTAINS SCENES OF IMPLICIT VIOLENCE AND GORE.” There’s nothing implicit about the violence; it took me all of three minutes to horribly die. For the first ten minutes or so, the horror vibes remained. But then, once past the bridge, I found that all the monsters could be easily avoided. There’s a few places where you work under a time limit and might die – e.g., the first time you try to make one of the guard robots work – but this is rare and easily recognised. You don’t even care about the monsters as you cross the map, since you are invulnerable as long as you keep moving. I liked it; I’m not a big fan of horror. But the PC is pretty bad-ass and this is more a game of heroism than of survival.
Thematically, the game is about our relation to the super-rich. In Forsaken Denizen, these take the form of out-of-time space aristocrats, bizarre alien monsters that were once human but now use humans as literal sources of energy. (The game tells us that these people didn’t become monsters through their wealth; rather, they were always like this.) The game’s narrator is one of these aristocrats, but she’s redeemed through her love for the protagonist, who once tried to kill her. ‘Kind-of-evil princess love interest’ might suggest a connection to Turandot, but really Pacian’s princess and my princess couldn’t be more different. Turandot towers over the game and the PC; Cath, even though she has the powers of being the narrator and immense wealth, is a smaller, more vulnerable being, one who needs her lover in order to have any authentic spirit and personality at all. This is not criticism; it is perfect for this game.
Gameplay is smooth. There’s just enough danger and complexity that you have to keep paying attention, but it’s more or less impossible to get stuck. The prose is lovely, building up a bizarre world without setting you adrift, and without large chunks of exposition. The tight inventory limit is… not so useful, actually, but handled graciously through a save-point system that doubles as a place to hold your inventory.
There’s a lot more to say about how this game talks about wealth and capitalism – the entire scenario is a space horror expression of the truth that failed investments don’t hurt the capitalists but the workers; and it’s more than a little disconcerting that only the unemployed aren’t being eaten – but I might leave that for another occasion.
Forsaken Denizen is a great game, my favourite in the competition so far.
King of Xanadu by Machines Underneath
I was promised a pleasure dome. There is no pleasure dome. There’s a garden, yes, but the grass isn’t equal enough and, worst of all, nothing protects me from the rays of what in Dutch we call ‘de koperen ploert’ – hard to translate, something like ‘the copper asshole’ or ‘the copper scoundrel’ or something, but ‘ploert’ is deliciously old-fashioned yet strong sounding, I’d have to think of a way to render this in English; and in case you’re wondering why the Dutch came up with this phrase even though their country is not really known for being sunny, it originated in the colonies that are now Indonesia --, in other words, that malicious sun who is trying to usurp the divine right of kings that belongs only to me. So, no pleasure dome. I don’t care who Machines Underneath is, but I want them brought into my presence right now so that I can sculpt a new statue from their bones…
Yeah, let’s stop there. I don’t actually want to harm Machines Underneath! But of course they brought this outburst on themselves, having forced me – the word ‘forced’ is chosen advisedly – to inhabit a crazy, megalomaniac king whose most rational response to a crop blight is attacking the sun. (Among the less rational responses are giving a wing of the palace to a dog who has eaten a noble. Yes, we’re squarely into weird Caligula territory here.)
Many reviewers complain about the lack of choice, or the lack of responsiveness to choice, or the way that at the end the illusion of choice is completely stripped away, and then we’re just there to watch a bleak, nihilistic tale unfold. It’s nihilistic, not a morality tale, because the king’s evil is irrelevant to anything that happens. We’re just watching a disaster unfold, and we’re watching the effect that is has on our deluded god-king, who is, alas, no wiser than most deities from the world’s varied but almost always very imperfect pantheons.
It’s not a game. It’s an aesthetic experience. it also signals early on that it’s not a game, by flagrantly disregarding what you mean when choosing a particular option and turning it into something outrageous. You’re only along for the ride. And maybe that’s for the best, because it’s a swift downward ride into delusional hell. Rendered in – at its best, there are also less successful passages – delightfully delusional prose.
It’s actually a bit odd that English doesn’t have a dramatic, poetically archaic word to use for the sun. (Latin’s got a bunch, and Akkadian’s got at least one.) Maybe “Helios” or something?