I think “the copper asshole” should take off in the US-- anyone who has lived through a Texas summer should really dig this idiom.
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5 posts were split to a new topic: Do you read other reviews before writing your own?
Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain by jkj yuio
I’m not sure what this game is trying to do, both in terms of tone and in terms of gameplay. Let’s start with the first. On the one hand, everything seems to indicate that this is a light-hearted sci-fi romp. The evil opponents are robots that look as if they were designed by the antagonist of Day of the Tentacle. One of the first things you say to your companion is: “You are from the '80s?” after which she smiles happily and starts naming her favourite bands. And you win the game by tricking a smart computer into thinking about time travel paradoxes. But, on the other hand, said companion is brutally tortured and murdered within five minutes of starting the game, and the only other human NPC is probably going to die from radiation poisoning after being forced to work with radioactive materials. I’m all for the juxtaposition of very different tonal registers; it’s exactly what I did in my two previous IFComp games. But it requires careful thought and attention to make it work, and it seems to me that Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain just throws them together and doesn’t do anything to turn it into a coherent whole.
Moving on to gameplay, I’m unclear what the player is supposed to be doing. There’s some exploration, but there’s not much to find – the Dalek ship is basically empty, and the mine planet is extremely limited and linear. There’s a puzzle, but as far as I can see there’s no way to find out from the description of the technological objects which one is the right one, and so you’re reduced to just trying everything until you hit on the solution. And the final, climactic puzzle… is solved by the player character without any input from the player. A massive anti-climax.
The story also doesn’t make much sense. There’s some evil robots who want to time travel, and they steal this knowledge from me, but first their super computer needs to turn the ‘formula’ into… something, I have no idea, and then the evil robots let me loose right next to this supercomputer so I can go and sabotage it. But I think they still have the formula, right? So what’s going to stop them from working out time travel anyway? Given that I have time travel, they probably don’t even need a supercomputer to make it work. It doesn’t make any sense.
I have never seen any Dr. Who, so perhaps everything is much better if you go into this with the right background knowledge. But playing this game has certainly not made me more eager to watch the series.
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The Den by Ben Jackson
The Den is not trying to be subtle about its play with words and symbols. The very last screen shows ‘THE DEN’ and then below that ‘THE END’. Okay, they’re anagrams, thanks for making sure I couldn’t possibly miss it. Also, ‘The Den’ contains the phrase ‘Eden’, the male main character is called ‘Aiden’ (Eden/Aiden, get it?), and the female main character is called ‘Vee’, an anagram of, you guessed it, ‘Eve’. Did I already mention that the God figure is called ‘Father,’ always with a capital letter, and that Adam and Eve, I mean Aiden and Vee, have to eat a literal apple that will give them forbidden knowledge? That’s right before they leave Eden, I mean The Den, in order to become the mother and father of mankind in a world where all humans have died due to a virus that made people infertile.
It’s not subtle! But we don’t always need subtlety. The symbolism does the job, and you’re so busy solving the elegant puzzles that you’re not too involved in critically examining it anyway. What’s more, the game starts out leaving you fairly uncertain where it will go. Early on, I had strong Dogtooth vibes, and I thought that this was about an overprotective father who wanted to shield his kids from reality. Then I increasingly got Josef Fritzl vibes, and I had a suspicion that the medical tests on Vee had to do with an incestuous pregnancy. It was something of a relief to find out that the game is far less dark than that. Even Father isn’t that bad; He’s quite a benevolent figure actually. The overarching story about a virus that makes people infertile doesn’t make that much sense – it’s never explained why this was only realised after eighteen years, since, presumably, infected prospective parents would have run into trouble immediately – and it’s also very strange that the entire Den is set up as a sequence of puzzles (who makes a system where you have to walk to different physical computers for different household maintenance tasks?); but it all works, because none of that is really what we care about.
We care about the characters. About their ultra-compressed phase of growing up and finding independence from their parent. About their ability to work together. And, of course, about the puzzles. And The Den really delivers when it comes to the things we care about. The character development is good. It’s not subtle, it’s definitely more in-your-face young adult novel than psychological novel, but it’s good. The working together stuff is extremely well done; I’m not sure I’ve seen a more elegant implementation in IF. And the puzzles are near-perfect: varied, logical, systematic, intuitive, and at the right level of difficulty to keep the story going. Also, there’s real tension! First about Father, then about Father recharging, and finally about the power-down time limit.
If you’re in need of help, there’s also a good and thematically appropriate diegetic hint system: you just talk to your supposed sibling. I saw one or two reviewers complain that they got hints when they didn’t want to, but I don’t think you need to have these conversations if you’re not looking for hints.
I really enjoyed my time with The Den. The denouement could have been shorter – after all, this is not a game about emerging from Vault 13 and going into the new world, it’s a game about the difficult process of leaving behind your childhood – but that’s a small comment. Playing The Den is fun, and it also has something to say… even if it’s not subtle.
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A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric by Ole Hansson
This one didn’t work for me at all, but other reviewers seem to have enjoyed it. So my complaints may be idiosyncratic. One thing I notice is that reviewers who post play times seem to have finished this game in a little over fifteen minutes, whereas I got stuck again and again, and was only able to proceed by using the walkthrough for almost every step along the way.
Twice it was the interface that tripped me up. At one point, you have to click on the picture to proceed; but at no point was I cued into the idea that I might have to click on a picture. At another point, you have to notice that something is happening in a picture on the left of the screen while you’re reading text at the right of the screen. This totally didn’t catch my attention. In general, in a game that shows both pictures and text, I’m not really seeing the pictures unless I make a deliberate effort of will to check them out. I also noticed this when playing the Dr. Who game – I can’t recall most of the visuals of that game because I was focused on the text and hardly ever looked at them. No doubt this is one of the idiosyncracies that kept me from really enjoying A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric.
But what is surely a more objective problem with the game is the total lack of context. We’re thrown into the middle of a situation where everything is weird and everything is unexplained. The main NPC is a bizarre character only interested in himself, who is nevertheless taking a cake to his uncle (this seems very out of character), and there seems to be a starter gun as part of the present, which is an ominous discovery… but a starter gun is a perfectly legal object to own, and yet the PC is some kind of cop who is intent on finding out about this not-illegal object, and who then, instead of doing a cop thing, writes an invitation to a duel in the front of a book? I have literally no idea what any of this is supposed to mean.
The problem is, I am supposed to understand enough of it to intuit my character’s goals and the puzzle solutions. Why would I think that the NPC will write his own phone number on the wall when I scratch out the name in a heart? It makes no sense. I had at some point understood that I probably needed his phone, but I couldn’t search his bag, so I gave up on that line of thought. Turned out that I needed to somehow know that he has forgotten his phone, and then also somehow know that he will write his phone number on the wall if he sees a heart with someone else’s name in it, and then also somehow know that if I call this number at one exact moment in the game he’ll return to pick it up, and then also somehow know that writing his name on the wall is an activity so absorbing to him that it will allow me to steal his phone. It’s like I have to read the author’s mind four times to solve a single puzzle. And on top of that the solution is diegetically absurd, because it brazenly requires the player character to have knowledge he can’t possibly have.
I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And then, once you’ve jumped through the hoops, you get this story that again seems to require context you don’t have. Who am I? Who is my enemy? What’s so important about a starter gun? I have no idea, and A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is not going to tell me.
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Yes, the picture-click moment probably comes across as unfair. It was something I added at the last minute. Initially, the player would use a text option to examine the item in question, but then I thought it would be fun to, just once, try out a traditional point-and-click mechanic. It may, howver, not have worked as well as I had hoped. I did include a flickering effect on the clickable area to make it more noticeable, but it’s easy to miss if you’re focused elsewhere. I should probably have included a more direct hint in the text, or maybe just kept it as a text choice.
I won’t dive into the story and characters, but I do want to clarify that while they might seem illogical on the surface, there is an internal logic to them once you grasp the intended tone and context. But tone and context are what I have clearly failed to communicate! It’s ironic as I actually spent more time on the story and characters than on any other part of the game. The disconnect between my intentions and how it’s been received here is something I’ll need to reflect on for future IF projects. Thanks for reminding me!
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Bad Beer by Vivienne Dunstant
You order a Stinky Ferret beer, and then you’re surprised when it tastes bad? I call that truth in advertising! Also, I can totally see a small British craft brewery choosing this very name. You’re not really in the business if there isn’t some loathsome goblin or hag on your cans! Let me add that I love it.
Bad Beer is a charming little parser game from Scottish author Vivienne Dunstan. The beer in the local brewery has gone bad. Early signs are that the pub is being haunted. We never learn why the haunting has gotten worse recently, but it has, and it’s up to us to deal with the restless spirit. What follows is a benign time loop in the past where we actually ensure that the accident never happens. Nice.
This game wants us to have a good time, smile a bit, and then move on with our life. In that respect it’s just like a good pint of beer. Not one of those really hoppy ones, I think; more a blonde. Served well chilled. Nothing bad about it.
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I have bad news about British beer, Victor.
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I think they’ve learned, Mike. Well, either that, or I just mainly remember all the beers that I got from my own or my friend’s fridge! (I lived in Cambridge for a few months, and a friend of mine lived in Edinburgh for years.)
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This conversation has inspired me to open the most adventurous beer in my fridge, ‘Grutte Pier Houtgerookte Dubbelbock’, a Frisian wood-smoked double bock. It’s definitely… something. It’s like someone has taken a barrel of dubbel and put a chunk of bacon in it for a few months.
I’m not saying it’s good, mind you. I’m definitely not saying that.
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Many thanks for the review!
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I prefer beer chilled too.
Tonight’s offerings were Peroni from Italy and Estrella from Spain 
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Crikey! That name! To be fair my Dutch is almost non existent 
My husband likes weiss beers. I’ve a stronger taste. Though I won’t go anywhere near anything like Guinness.
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The other night the name “Bunny Hops” jumped into my head from nowhere sensible. And I am rather regretting that I didn’t think of it earlier to include in the game! My husband gets the credit for Stinky Ferret though.
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My favourite beer is Orval. I also like IPA’s and triples, so I guess I’m coming down on the stronger side of the chart!
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I think it’s either “big Peter” or “big rock”, either of which seem like they would potentially fit!
(I also like darker beers, porters and stouts primarily though an amber ale can be nice too if not too hoppy; smoked beers often sound better to me than they wind up tasting, alas)
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Big Fish by Binggang Zhuo
In a game full of what-the-fuck moments, for me the most what-the-fuck moment was this:
You checked whether he had the full collection of men’s pornographic magazines, but, you know, turned out that there were just a few that were missing. In particular, the rare Massive MILFs of June 2004 wasn’t there!
Okay, so this game starts out as a ‘your shitty apartment’ game, and the player fears the worst. Very shaky writing doesn’t improve this. Then, we’re sent to investigate a crime. At least we’re going somewhere. And then… I don’t even know where to start. There’s a crazy crocodile cult. The protagonist has a secret identity that is not revealed to the player. The sheriff wants to kill us out of religious zeal. We find some regular men’s pornographic magazines. And a 16 year old girl who has never met us, decides to live with us, because we’re obviously a good guy, having just proved that her father has murder her sister who wasn’t her real sister.
It’s completely crazy, but I was enjoying myself, so no grudges.
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So ‘Grutte Pier’ is a Frisian folk hero… No, rewind. Frisia, ‘Friesland’, is nowadays a province of the Netherlands, although it used to be much bigger, stretching further along the Dutch and the German coastline. In current Friesland, the Frisian language is still spoken – by some, certainly not by all – and in fact it has acquired recognition as an official language. There’s a fairly strong regional identity. But back when, in the time of Grutte Pier, ‘Big Pier’ (‘Grutte’ is Frisian, not Dutch), who lived from 1480 to 1520, Frisia still had a fairly independent political identity. And Grutte Pier led bands of armed Frisian against the people of Holland (another part of what is now The Netherlands), who were probably trying to dominate the backwards, rural Frisians. According to legend, Grutte Pier was extremely tall and had a giant sword that could decapitate multiple foes at once. Useful, obviously.
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Sounds like Grutte Pier is getting revenge on the Hollanders via the medium of indigestible beer, then!
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I wanted to object that I’m an Utrechter, not a Hollander, but then I realised that I was born in Holland, so never mind.
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