Victor's IF Comp 2025 reviews

Competitions IFComp
21

Escape the Pale

For about 120 years, the Pale of Settlement was the part of Russia were Jews were allowed to settle; outside the Pale, Jewish residence was mostly forbidden. The protagonist of Escape the Pale is a Jewish merchant operating in this extremely antisemitic environment, trying to make a living by buying cheap goods in one place and selling them for more in another place. This is a well-known genre of game; and there is even a precedent for using it to do something different in IF Comp: 2018’s Let’s Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise which was… weird.

As a commodities trading game, Escape the Pale would leave a lot to be desired. The interface is both ugly and clunky. You can’t buy multiple goods with one command; your trading information disappears from view when you choose a destination, which is the very moment at which you need it; your trading information is extremely unreliable; and most bizarre of all, you cannot see at which price you’ll sell a good when making the decision to sell it. You’re always in the dark about the deals you are making, a strange fact which not even fictional antisemitism can explain. And while there are serious consequences to leaving the Pale, the game doesn’t so much as mention which cities are within it and which cities are outside. And of course you cannot save and restore. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone will play until they can buy a ticket to New York!

But Escape the Pale is not really a commodities trading game; it is merely using the trappings of a commodities trading game to instil a sense of dread, of unfairness, and of having the deck stacked very heavily against you. Trading is hit-or-miss. There is no feeling that you can shape your own destiny. Tickets to freedom are absurdly expensive. Antisemitic border guards can shoot you or your friends at any point. There’s a scene where you are given charge of your niece, Leah, and now you have a real goal: get her to safety. Having her around increases your expenses, and also makes it even more impossibly expensive to buy a ticket to freedom. And then, at random, she can be taken away from you by border guards to a fate that is probably worse than death.

When that last thing happened to me, I looked at the screen for about a minute and decided that, no, I did not want to play on. Who wants to buy ‘cases’ and ‘vodka’ and keep their fingers crossed that these might turn a profit in Kiev when their niece has just been abducted in a non-interactive scene that strongly suggests that no course of action will bring her back? So I quit. This is not a failure of the game. I’m quite sure that it is a success. This is the experience that Escape the Pale wants me to have; the experience of being a persecuted minority that the law will not help.

In many ways the game isn’t very deep or detailed. You don’t get a sense of Jewish life in the Pale; with only minor changes it could have been a game about an illegal immigrant trying to get by in the US, or a Palestinian merchant travelling the West Bank and trying to get through Israeli checkpoints. Perhaps that is also part of the point – in its abstraction, the game has something of the universal about it.

At the end, ‘Novy Pnin’ speaks to us directly. He tells us a story about being a professor who never dared to speak out about political and personal topics, and whose friends all warned him against publishing this particular game because it would draw unwanted attention to himself. Now he has emigrated from an unnamed country to another unnamed country, and he finally feels free enough to publish Escape the Pale, though still anonymously. (Novy Pnin, ‘new Pnin’, is no doubt a reference to the Nabokov novel Pnin about a Russian emigré professor.) This story rings fairly hollow. It lacks all the details that would make it believable, especially because I find it hard to imagine that anyone would expect Escape the Pale to be controversial.

I also don’t think that this fiction author’s autobiographical unburdening strengthens the game. Escape the Pale works well enough on its own, without a coda that tries to impress us with its seriousness.

5 Likes
22

If you’re a participant, your IF Comp doesn’t really feel started until your game has been reviewed at least once – or at least, that’s how it felt to me. We’re almost to the point where all games have been reviewed, and to hasten it further along, here is a review of

Let Me Play!

I’m an extremely mediocre piano player, and even that might be praising myself too highly. Let’s just say that although I’d love to play Mozart piano sonatas, I can’t. Except for one – the Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major K. 545, which Mozart wrote for beginners. Lovely of him to do that. It lets me play. It also happens to be the opening music of Let Me Play!, which I found appropriate in a personal and idiosyncratic way.

Let Me Play! is a game made by a team that included writers, programmers and illustrators, and it shows. The production values are very high. The game takes place in a virtual theatre where actors get on and off the stage. There’s not a lot of action or movement, but the visual choices certainly set a mood; and there are nice touches, such as the bodies of the actors visually disintegrating as we move deeper into the game.

When it comes to content, this is a strange duck. The entire game is about a fight between the player and the game; or, perhaps we should say, between the player and the characters, the player and the game, the player and the writers – the player and whoever it is that seems to be in charge of the experience of playing the game. Because it is our player (our fictional player, of course) who wants to be in charge. The player wants to play, and repeatedly whines: Let Me Play! They’re not here for non-interactive experiences, nor for choices that turn out to be ignored. What they want is control.

Let Me Play! does everything it can to push the problems inherent in this stance. The player gets into a fight with the characters because they want to control their own lives; the player gets into a fight with the game because it can’t give them the freedom the player desires; and then, brought to the authors to complain, it turns out that the authors within the game are also unable to give real freedom and control to the player, because their dialogue has already been written two years ago and can no longer be changed. We’re all trapped in the work of someone else! Oh no!

Sure. But who exactly is the target of this argument? I’m sure there are some people out there who believe that great games put them ‘in control of the story’, without recognising that the real experience of control over a story would be that of sitting in front of a blank sheet with the freedom to write any word that you want. (And that’s not the freedom that these people crave!) But this is a fairly naive stance towards games and interactive narrative, and I don’t think it is at all prevalent in the interactive fiction community. Most of us are more than willing to abandon ourselves to the authors – the real authors – and see where that will lead. Interactivity does not equal control. Choice does not equal authorship. And the protagonist is certainly not ourselves.

So I agree with the argument of Let Me Play!, but it is a bit too easy to agree with it. The delivery is on the slow side, with timed text and, especially near the end, much repetition. I had a memorable playing experience, especially because of the great production values (graphics, music, interface), but the message of the game did little to challenge me.

6 Likes
23

It was the second game I played in this IFComp. The first one was Uninteractive Fiction 2. Not a great start. But with the first one, I’ve been prepared what to expect.

Among many disappointing things in The Island of Rhynin the one which struck me most was this. I don’t mind playing an evil character. If the PC had to kill their companion for something like immortality or love or bags of money – I’d accept it and see what the game is trying to make of it. But when the choice is either to die or to become a (probably life-long) king of this extremely uninspiring island with extremely uninspiring «tribal people» – it’s practically Uninteractive Fiction 1.

2 Likes
24

Rain Check-In

This is a great premise for a puzzle game: self check-in in some Airbnb type apartment. When I went to Lisbon for a conference this summer, the instructions told me to first open the main door with a code (and you’re always praying that it will work!), then get the key from the electricity cupboard, then pull hard on the door while trying to open it. I had to pull really hard; without that part of the instructions, I’m not sure I would ever have been able to enter! Now it’s easy to imagine a situation where the way to get into the apartment is a bit harder and the instructions are bit worse, and suddenly you are in core IF puzzle territory.

That’s what Rain Check-In is. A thunderstorm might start any minute, the check-in instructions have been mangled by horrible translation software, it is dark, and your phone is almost dead. Can you get into the house?

The game is small but mostly well-made. I had little trouble getting into the house, and in fact the mangled instructions were fairly easy to follow. On my first attempt I got a mediocre ending, because I had used the spade to open the lockbox, even though I had already found the dial. On the second attempt I used the dial and got the best ending.

My only real criticism is the dial puzzle. It doesn’t make much sense to me; as I understand this kind of combination lock, if you take out the entire part which allows you to set a combination, the lock will no longer keep the box shut. But perhaps it’s a type of lock I’m not familiar with. More importantly, the interface was rather obnoxious, especially when the game is played on a phone, with just too many commands required after you already know the solution to the puzzle. On the positive side, I’m happy that you could find the spade based on the photo alone, without having to turn on your lamp. That allowed me to feel smart.

The game achieved what it set out to do: a nice little puzzle game with a relatable premise.

3 Likes
25

I agree that the temptation was mostly not there! :smiley:

26

That passage and the title of Pippi’s father have been changed in later swedish editions by the Astrid Lindgren estate.

4 Likes
27

High on Grief

Herodotus wrote, in The Histories 3.38, about how funerary customs differ from place to place:

The point that Herodotus is making is that everyone has their own customs, everyone believes their own customs to be the best, and that the wise man understands that there is no universal goodness of customs. Anyway, I was reminded of this passage by High on Grief, which starts from the amusing premise that Yancy the protagonist has baked brownies containing (a) weed, and (b) the ashes of their dead mother. Whom they hated with a passion. Eating the mother is an attempt at healing, an act of absurd vengeance, and the keeping of a promise made in youth to a friend while high on drugs. (Proving Bill Hicks right: “I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do.”)

It’s good that the game has such a funny premise, since without it, it would have been unremittingly grim. From all that we hear, Yancy’s mother was an absolutely horrible parent, subjecting her child to years of psychological abuse. She seems to have had no redeeming features when it comes to the parent-child relationship (although she had great relationships with other people, but the how and why of this is never explored in the game).

All we see of Yancy, meanwhile, is a struggle with negative thoughts that come from the mother. The main gameplay loop is this: eat a brownie, think a negative thought, call a friend, be talked out of the negative thought to some extent. We repeat this until all pieces of the brownie have been eaten. It’s a dismal affair. The protagonist doesn’t truly unburden themselves to their friends, and we often only learn from diary-like notes that the conversations have not been as helpful as hoped. At no point do we feel that Yancy arrives at real self-understanding; there is no healing going on here. Or maybe there is, and the game is just making the point that such healing takes a very long time, so that the short time period of the game’s fiction cannot show a measurable amount change. That’s fair. But of course also a downer.

The main reason that High on Grief did not resonate with me much emotionally is that things are left very unspecific. Almost everything is described in abstract terms. There are ten conversations with friends, but they all remain at the level of general platitudes. We also do not have any memories of the mother, and never learn more about her than that she was a children’s nurse and active in her church. The protagonist, whose mind we are occupying, doesn’t become much of a fleshed-out character either. This feels like a missed opportunity. One wonders whether, say, a conversation between the protagonist and the mother’s best friend – who seems a genuinely nice person – played out over the length of this game would not have had a greater chance of generating real insight into abuse, humanity, and the possibility of healing.

Of course that would have been a different game, and possibly one that Bez had no desire to write. But compared to the glorious if very difficult detail of eir My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition, the abstract musings of High on Grief fall a bit flat.

3 Likes
28

Fable

There’s a lot to unpack here. Fable is the story of a young man whose best friend was prophesied to kill a dragon, set at the moment when the best friend returns and is lauded as a hero. This is an interesting premise. Usually, we are the hero. It is far less often that we are made to dwell on the life of the hero after returning from the heroism – the most obvious example being, I suppose, the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings. And even less prevalent are the stories where we are the old friends of the hero, now forever relegated to non-hero status.

Okay, but Fable is also the story of a love triangle, for the hero is supposed to marry the sister of the protagonist, but the protagonist himself is also in love with the hero. Is the hero really in love with the sister, as his past behaviour seems to indicate, or is there some chance for a queer relation with the protagonist? And if the latter, how will the sister react?

But that’s not all, because Fable is also a story about a body snatcher. It turns out that the hero, Ronan, has not in fact defeated the dragon, and also that the Ronan who appears in the game is in some sense not Ronan. See, Ronan’s body has been snatched by a wandering soul, some guy called Jamie, who is using it for his own purposes. Prime among those purposes is… well, Jamie has been experiencing Ronan’s memories, and has fallen in love with you, with the protagonist, Kel. So Jamie directs Ronan’s body back home to strike up a romance with you. You can’t believe your luck, until you find out that Ronan is not the real Ronan; and also, that the real Ronan is still inside the body too, waiting to take back control. Meanwhile, your sister also understands what’s going on, and obviously she wants Ronan to get his body back.

That’s… a lot, as I said. It’s all original and inventive, and that’s a big positive in my book. But I also feel that all these different layers of the fiction are a bit too much for what the game then proceeds to do with them. See, after all this complicated set-up, it turns out that there is a solution to the central problem that makes everyone happy: Jamie occupies another body, of somebody who was dying anyway; Ronan and your sister get married; and you get into what seems to be a secret relationship with Jamie-in-his-new-body. That’s a bit too neat. And it leaves me wondering what the point of the whole body snatcher scenario was if we don’t end up exploring questions like: Do you fall in love with the body, or the soul, or the interplay of the soul and the body? What happens when you find out that the person you’re in love with is in fact a ruthless abuser? Could a polyamorous relationship in which two people share a body work out? Is it possible to fall in love with someone that person X is in love with when you literally look through the eyes of X? And so on and so forth; there’s a lot of stuff you could do with a body snatcher scenario, but Fable rushes to a happy ending without really asking any of those questions.

To my taste, the game also lacked interactivity, relying heavily on big texts with ‘continue’-style links underneath. There were some points with multiple links, but few and far between. This is no doubt very subjective, but I prefer a rhythm where my interactions have less text between them.

To add some important points to the positive side of the balance, the game is well-written and well-paced.

(I noticed two place where the author used an unfortunate turn of phrase, which can perhaps be edited. The first: “Stone erodes slowly. Sometimes, it takes centuries.” This is unintentionally comical in its underestimation of how long it takes for stone to erode. The second is where a character says that until now they saw life in black and white, and now they suddenly see it in colour. This simile is based on the history of photography, and does not belong in a pre-industrial fantasy world.)

2 Likes
29

Hi Victor, I’m happy you liked it, and also that you find it relatable! :sun_with_face:
Your review reflects the kind of experience I tried to design!

For the lock, yes, it is exaggerated, but it is inspired by a true half-broken lock I had to deal with. It had number wheels but, it was like missing a part of the structure next to one number, so the last wheel was not properly fixed in place and could slide on the axis that kept them. To spin the wheels I had to keep pushing the last wheel next to others, otherwise none of them would move.

Hope the dial interaction didn’t ruined your experience, I liked a bit of hardness in commands (like recreating the feeling of setting the code on a stiff dial with scarce lightning), but I get the point, and I’ll keep it in mind for the future!

Did you have the same issue I have on mobile that requires to re-open the keyboard after every prompt?
This bothers me every time I try to play a parser online instead of using Frotz.

Last but not least, if you still have time, and you haven’t already tried, there is an alternative ending that begins going north to the bar! :wink:

1 Like
30

:rofl:

1 Like