What have you been doing with your life?!
The statement about the plot being cliché is actually tongue-in-cheek, but it would be a spoiler to say more. 
1 Like
My creation
(Slight update from original review.)
My creation is a very small parser game that contains more implementation issues than many a large parser game. The five to ten minutes it will take you play it, will be spent almost entirely on fighting with the clearly untested world model and parser. Please people, get your game tested!
If you set all of these issues aside, what remains of My creation is actually quite interesting. It plays with one’s preconceptions about being a dad, since it turns out that this dad (in the sense of gender, not sex) is also a mother (in the sense of sex, not gender). Once that clicks into place, it becomes more clear why the bed is a three-room area. Let me tell you that the first days with a baby if there are two parents around are already a kind of HELL, and if you’re the only parent and without a support network, I frankly can’t even imagine it. It’s amazing if you still have the cognitive capacities to realise that Frankenstein is about parents and children, and the duty to love.
But do please get your next game tested?
(It hit me, later, that the implementation issues could be read in a meta way, as reflecting the mental state of the protagonist. But such a design decisions seems either unwise or positively trolling. So I’m sticking with the first, more innocent interpretation, namely that this game was made by an Inform novice and was just in dire need of one or two sympathetic beta testers.)
7 Likes
Willy’s Manor
Willy’s Manor is a parser game in which we have to solve puzzles in the house of weird rich guy Willy. Wade Clark suggests that the titular Willy is based on Willy Wonka, ‘without the dark parts’. I wonder. Willy Wonka is still a child, but in the sense that he is a creative genius unfettered by what adults have learned about reality. Since the reality principle has no hold on him, he can create his own reality. He’s also a fierce moralist, again, in the way that children can be – with a scary and uncompromising sense of justice. If a kid is greedy and therefore gets sucked into some dangerous machine, that’s fine with Wonka; after all, you shouldn’t be greedy! Willy’s Manor’s Willy is the opposite of this. His idea of humour is a whoopie cushion. He’s a sad man-child who has simply failed to achieve emotional maturity, though that very failure ensures that he himself does not feel the sadness.
This is already to overanalyse Willy’s Manor, though, which brings in the whole idea of an eccentric rich guy only as an excuse to serve us up some riddles and adventure game puzzles, and to set up an interesting, if slightly awkward, joke-puzzle at the end. That’s probably for the best. A game that really delves into the psychology of someone like Willy might be very heavy.
So, we’re here to solve some puzzles! The riddle mechanic works well. You are served nine clues, and for each clue you’ve got to find an object that fits it. The riddles are mostly very easy, and solving them is made yet easier by the fact that the game is fairly linear: every time you solve a riddle, you’ll get a key or a hint that will take you to a new area where you find at least one thing you need to solve the current riddle. There is some non-linearity, though: you can, for instance, find the library at the start of the game (I did) and you can get into the workshop early through an alternate puzzle solution. But through the game’s efficient gate keeping, the map never becomes overwhelming.
The adventure puzzles were a little more hit or miss for me, in part because the answers can be very unintuitive. It is unclear to me how you can put termites into a slingshot and than expect them to eat a tree they land on. The physics of the infinity pool made no sense to me; it seems to work almost by magic, but we’ve been given no reason to assume that we are in a magical world. And I never noticed that the seasons change in the garden, because I didn’t think of revisiting the rooms – this had not been necessary in any of the earlier stages of the game. I think it might have helped if, when moving from room A to room B, there had been a message like ‘Autumn turns into winter.’ or something like that.
But these are minor gripes. The game’s ambitions are limited, and it surely fulfils them to the satisfaction of anyone looking for a light puzzler. The end sequence actually tries something more ambitious: a puzzle that is at the same time an Oh no!-type realisation dawning on you. I was possibly not in enough of a Donald Duck mood to have that realisation – and the insects are all very docile in the earlier parts of the game! – but it still felt like an appropriate finishing touch.
8 Likes
Violent Delight
One of the defining characteristics of IFComp is the seriousness and tenacity of the judges. There are people who make a good faith attempt to play every single game in the competition. More importantly, many of the judges really try to take every game seriously. Typos, programming bugs, bad writing, incomprehensible ideas, technical problems, obscure file formats, prodigious length – whatever the game may suffer from, there will always be at least a few judges who are willing to push through in order to do full justice to the game and report on what was good among the badness.
This is the perfect territory for trolling.
Imagine a game where you start by ordering a video game cartridge. Then the game tells you that this video game cartridge will arrive in about an hour. ‘That’s fast!’ you think. Until you realise that the game meant a real time hour. Your real time. So for one hour, you as player have nothing to do but watch a small progress bar fill (or empty). Of course, 99% of player will simply close this game. They’ve got better things to do!
But now imagine that such a game had been entered into IFComp. There our imagined game would find tenacious judges who do not give up, and who are therefore the perfect people to troll. How much fun would it be to imagine them sitting there for an hour, until they can finally play the game… and to then troll them further with more and more waits, interspersed with increasingly frenetic gameplay as the stretches of the game you get to play become shorter and shorter (in real time!) while the waits between them stay the same! Ah, what a delightful act of trolling, infuriating, yes, but also smart and funny; those judges themselves might grudgingly have to appreciate the idea even while they were its intended and actual victims.
Of course, dear reader, this game is not imagined at all. It is Violent Delight, subtitled ‘an experiment in withholding’. And withhold it does. It withholds game time, most obviously. But it also withholds meaning and resolution. We start out in a park. But then we uncover a hidden reality – it’s actually a school! But then we discover a further layer, a prison; and then a further layer, Hell; and perhaps we thought that that was were meaning was to be found (we are really in Hell, that sounds appropriate to the kind of game this is), but no, the layers keep coming. Real meaning is always withheld.
It helps that the game is pretty unique – you keep playing because you’re wondering whether these strange graphics, bizarre locales, and piece of prose (that are evocative and sometimes even really good (I was at one time reminded of The Unnamable by Beckett (which is high praise indeed (and I too am withholding something (as you can see (but I have far less stamina than the author of Violent Delight (so the end of the sentence will come in much less than an hour) although it would be pretty cool to write this review in ultra-slow timed text and send that to the author (pay back time!!!)))), the second part of the Trilogy)) will ever congeal into a coherent experience. They don’t. But that is of course the point exactly.
At the end of the game, you enter a basement, and you’re told to pick up a spade and dig. At that point the game turns into a black screen with a little white bar that looks very much like the timers you saw earlier. I am almost certain that it is indeed another timer, but not set at an hour, but at a much longer time period. Days perhaps. Months. Who knows? (Remember this game where the timer is set to three thousand years?) I did not wait to find out.
But I am one of those tenacious judges. So I tried to use the faketime Linux command to start an instance of Firefox looking at a system timer that ran 100 times faster than normal, but it seems that Violent Delight does not use the system timer. I installed Tampermonkey and tried out some scripts that supposedly speed up certain javascript timers. That didn’t work either. My technical knowledge here is pretty much non-existent, and so I gave up. But perhaps others will come, with 1337er skills, and finish what I left undone.
We’re IFComp judges. When somebody trolls us, we turn the other cheek, and even say thank you.
10 Likes
The Tempest of Baraqiel
This game charmed me with the little joke it plays while loading music assets. There’s a button you can click that says ‘wait patiently’, and clicking it a lot generates funny messages; which takes me back all the way to playing Warcraft 2 where clicking on units repeatedly made them say funny things! Two-headed ogre: ‘[Burp.] He did it! No, he did it!’ Two-headed ogre: ‘[Fart.] Huh huh huh huh huh.’ Okay, anyway…
The Tempest of Baraqiel is a fairly large game, but the story feels small. You are the child of a war hero mother in a sci-fi future. Your mother has died in the war with the nasty alien race, and you more or less left the army to pursue a career in alien linguistics. But now you are suddenly brought onto a large military ship for a top secret mission: you’ve got to decode the language on the buttons of an advanced weapon that has been captured from the aliens. That’s it. You talk to some people on the ship, you try to solve the puzzle, and that’s more or less where things end.
This just goes to show that the plot idea isn’t important; what you do with it is important. The Tempest of Baraqiel does a lot with this small segment of story, and it was throughout engaging. There’s a real sense of tension about both the internal politics on the ship, and the morale of the little group of experts that you’re in charge of. You’ve got to make some seemingly innocuous but in fact crucial decisions about how to spend your time and who to talk to about what. One thing I did was use the ship’s communication system to talk about a sensitive topic, and to my horror several communications officers who were not supposed to hear what I said were executed for security reasons! From other reviews, I’ve learned that there are even weirder paths you can take in the game.
The story moves towards a climactic investigation of the weapon, where some of the linguistic facts start to make sense. I enjoyed this – rarely did linguistics feel so tense. There’s even a do-or-die choice about which message you send to the captain of the ship, where you had to pick up on some fairly subtle clues in order to succeed and survive…
… which brings me to some areas where The Tempest of Baraqiel is less than stellar. One weird design decision, easily remedied, is that the game by default (a) does not show a back button, and (b) saves in the single save slot every turn automatically. Unless you’ve seen these options on the options menu, which I had not, you’ll be under the impression that the game works like a roguelike: no saving, no undoing. In fact, Save/Load simply seemed broken and non-functional to me. It was only by sheer coincidence that, after dying, I went to the options menu and saw that I could actually go back to before I made the wrong choice! It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to change at least one of these two settings – I’d probably stop the auto-save, because it makes the prominent ‘Save’ and ‘Load’ buttons do nothing. And I think ‘Back’ is best implemented, not as a dialogue choice, but as a button in the interface?
More important is the fact that The Tempest of Baraqiel, for all its size, sometimes moves too fast and too sudden. The weirdest moment was where, near the end, I suddenly had no choice but to mutiny against my commanding officer. Why? I have no idea; this was a totally unmotivated plot twist that felt bizarre and utterly out of character for the protagonist. I also failed to understand the end sequence. If you don’t send a message to the captain, the entire ship gets blown up by the aliens and you die. If you do send a message, the captain turns back… but why would the aliens then not blow up the ship? Seems like they have even better reasons to do so in that scenario.
These are the clearest examples, but also at other points in the game I felt that I as a player just didn’t grasp the situation well enough to make an informed choice. Surely my character, who knows this organisation well, should understand the dangers of the intercom system, or the subtleties of the hierarchy, and so on – but the prose doesn’t convey them, and therefore you make choices with no idea of what the consequences will be. There’s room for improvement here.
That said, I enjoyed playing the game. The music was nice too; I was too focussed on the game and the writing to really think about its procedurally generated nature, but certainly it never went wrong for me.
8 Likes
By All Reasonable Knowledge
A game like By All Reasonable Knowledge makes me feel sad. The author has spent more than a little time with Inform 7 to create this game. And they put some thought and heart into it. The puzzles that I’ve seen work. And this is not just a ‘your dingy apartment’ game either, as flashes of backstory reveal that there is more going on and that what is going on is quite serious. I’m actually interested and would like to know where the story is going.
But it seems the author did not take the step of getting some testers to help out. That step is not optional; it is necessary. And it is even more necessary if you are just dipping your toes into Inform and parser games, and you do not yet know that (and why) it is a terrible idea to put the room description of the starting room in the opening text of the game rather than in the room description. Any tester would immediately have sounded the alarm when the ‘look’ command didn’t repeat the absolutely crucial information about what there is in the room. No testers, no alarm.
Testers might also have pointed out some of the many typos, or the fact that the hint system is completely broken – I have not been able to get a single hint out of it, and the same happened to B. J. Best. Since there is also no walkthrough, I was unable to proceed once I got stuck. It didn’t help that I ended up with no confidence that the game had been designed in a fair and winnable way. For all I know, one has to interact with objects that are not described anywhere. I’m not saying that you have to, but I’m saying that the state of the game makes this seem a distinct possibility, and this drains me of the willpower to proceed.
So, I end up a bit sad, and mostly I just want to say: look really well at these early reviews, perhaps enlist some testers now during the comp, and get a new version out as soon as possible!
8 Likes
The Burger Meme Personality Test
Since Cerfeuil writes that the effectiveness of this game ‘will hinge entirely on how much experience the player has with the “bullshit personality quizzes” this game is based on’, it is perhaps important to start by saying that I have never made a personality test for a job in my life. In fact, all I’ve ever done in terms of personality quizzes is make some Meyers-Briggs tests online; those are fun, and can be helpful, though not for job assessment. I’ve also read Jung’s Psychological Types, the inspiration for Meyers-Briggs, and a very good book. It shows you what psychology might have become if it had decided to be close to the humanities rather than close to the natural sciences. But Jung’s book is not a test, nor does it at any point suggest that filling out a questionnaire could replace the hard work of self-interpretation. I think Jung would have been horrified by that idea.
Anyway, I wonder if there’s something very USA about The Burger Meme Personality Test? Many years ago I was in Boston at the IF Meetup that had been organised as an official side event of PAX East. I then took a bus from Boston to New York to visit a friend. At the bus station, there were large posters in front of the bus meant to inspire the bus driver with a message about how important their job was and how proud everyone should feel of the company. I had never seen anything like that, nor have I since seen anything like it. But if you dial such posters up to 11, you get some of the things that happen in The Burger Meme Personality Test, where you have to explain that you are very proud of the company and that you would let 250 people die in a trolley problem just to save the CEO. It does not feel like Dutch company culture to me, but perhaps it works as a satire of USA company culture?
Even with what might be a bit of a cultural disconnect, I could still appreciate The Burger Meme Personality Test. On a ‘normal’ playthrough, it is just very wacky, but amusing enough. Things get better – and I have to thank @dfabulich for pointing this out – when you resist the AI as much as possible, and actually make a human connection. That the entire test is not administered by a stupid AI but by somebody who wants to make an AI as stupid as possible so they can keep their job, that’s pretty funny. Civil disobedience. Worker resistance. Let’s go.
Also, this potential romantic partner has the great bon mot of the game: ‘Talking to you is like making out with Existentialism.’ As MC Frontalot, whose show I missed at PAX East that year, sings:
6 Likes
In another review, you write about how seriously judges in IFComp take their work here (and how it’s therefore exploitable by nefarious game designers, mwa ha ha). Your reviews, imo, epitomize why someone would want to submit a game to this competition. I don’t think Burger Meme ended up being a favorite for you, but I am deeply appreciative of the probity and thoroughness of your discussion of it.
If it’s okay, might I ask you to blur out the part where you reveal one of the endings? Dan, in his post, doesn’t spoil it, and I think maybe you meant to cover it but forgot to?
Again, many thanks for the deep read you gave my little game!
5 Likes
Thanks for your reply, Carlos! My time spent with Burger Meme is better than Burger Meme’s burgers, I’ll warrant. I had fun! You may be right when you claim that it may not end being ‘a favourite’ of mine, but that’s just because my favourites will probably be bigger, more ambitious games – not because I didn’t enjoy your game.
My entire review should be hidden beneath a details tag, actually? All my reviews tend to be super spoilery, and I don’t then blur out specific spoilers within the big text. I think my readers know that by clicking the review open, they’ll wade into spoilers territory. 
4 Likes
Murderworld
This game was so much better than I had expected! More importantly, it is also really good – there are some issues, of course, and I’ll talk about them later, but Murderworld is a big, varied, and ambitious parser game that ends up being highly enjoyable. That is a serious achievement. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
But I think it’s relevant to get back to my expectations. See, Murderworld is an X-Men fan fiction. I told @mathbrush over in his thread that I knew nothing about X-Men going into this game, but that’s not quite true. I did in fact once watch an X-Men movie, X2. I hated it. I remember sitting through it in total boredom; otherwise, the only thing I remember is some totally ridiculous scene where someone battles fighter jets with their bare hands (or something like that). I can’t for the life of me remember what the story was about, but here’s the first 10% of Wikipedia’s summary:
That’s certainly a bunch of sentences one behind the other. I have no idea how they fit together to form anything recognisable as a story, and I suspect I didn’t have that idea when I was watching the movie either, and that that is why I remember nothing. Maybe I should have watched the first film first? But, look, I really do not want to watch some hero fighting jets with superpowers.
I just don’t get the attraction of superheroes. The fantasy of someone who has powers beyond those of normal humans is simply not interesting to me, unless this power somehow ties into meaningful themes. But such tying in is the domain of fantasy, not of superheroes. Ged, in A Wizard of Earthsea, has magical powers that other have not; but he uses them to violate the natural order of life and death, and the entire book is about what that means and how to deal with the consequences. The ring in The Lord of the Rings gives the power of invisibility to Frodo, but that’s just so we can delve into temptation and corruption. Batman being super strong and super rich and then using that to beat up some criminals in an alley – give me a break. Of course it then turns out that you can only justify superheroes narratively by also having supervillains, and then we are deeply into cackling evil laugh territory and all I want is to go home. (When I was a kid I watched a Batman movie and if I recall correctly the villain was a bizarre penguin man living inside a sewer or something? I mean, who writes this stuff?)
Unsurprisingly, I usually avoid anything having to with superheroes, and tend to regret it when I don’t. I watched Thor because it was directed by Kenneth Branagh, and his Hamlet is one of my favourite films… but I thought the movie was really boring. I bought and read Batman: The Killing Joke because it was written by Alan Moore, who also wrote Watchmen, which I deeply love (and which is not itself a superheroes comic, I would argue)… but I thought it was really uninteresting. It did not at all make me care about Batman or The Joker, and so why would I care about what they do to each other?
Anyway, I’m writing all of that to explain that I went into Murderworld believing I would not like it at all. Superheroes. X-Men. This was going to be bad… but perhaps there would be a few nice puzzles. And then, dear reader, something unexpected happened. The game totally charmed me! My first task was not beat up some cartoon villain, but to get a cup of coffee for a friend. Nice. Then, I landed at the mansion. Playing as Cyclops, my task was to get through on the phone to the construction firm so that they could schedule repairs as soon as possible. I loved this! I’m a guy who can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and I’m battling a phone menu! And worrying about interior design! And trying not to get puked on! And giving a student advice about her CV! The implementation was smooth, even though there were many moving characters; the difficulty was really comfortable; the writing was fine; there was understated comedy. I loved it. In fact, I was already planning to play through again with the other characters just to see more of this welcoming, nice game. Superhero powers are far less annoying when they are just little puzzle devices, rather than that which sets the exceptional individuals apart from humanity at large, which means that they should be allowed to engage in random acts of violence. I mean, there is no humanity at large present in this game, and nobody to battle. Except phone menus, which are impervious to laser eyes.
It was a rude shock to me when it turned out that the major part of the game was very different. Suddenly, we are abducted by a cackling super villain who has constructed elaborate death traps that we need to escape. I played Cyclops and then Colossus, and I was quickly fed up by the recherché scenarios that I had to escape from while listening to the ranting of the Big Bad. The time limits also felt annoying and stressful (and I think the game would simple be better without them). I almost quit. But I’m glad I played on, because these two death traps turned out to be by far the least interesting. The others start exploring what is possible in parser puzzle design. What can you do with a teleportation power? That’s a great question, and the Nightcrawler sequence does good work with it.
I do think these six sequences are fairly uneven. Some, like those of Cyclops and Colossus, just don’t have a lot of room for exploration and turn into ‘get stuck’ situations fairly easily if you fail to intuit some of the actions. I thought the Storm scenario was weak, with many useless locations and a lot of reading the author’s mind and making utterly illogical leaps (from clothing colour to weather types). On the other hand, Dazzler’s interactions with the robot were very nice; Nightcrawler’s teleportation antics, while often hard to visualise and keep track of, are a good exploration of puzzle space; and Wolverine’s sequence, ah! I needed the walkthrough to understand, among other things, how to proceed in the office – I thinking the hinting is not as clear as the author might believe – but the idea here is so good. You solve a mystery, yes, but as far as I know you can never even explain it to anyone. It’s just you who knows what happened. And what happened is sweet, and such a nice touch in what is supposed to be a murderworld.
And then we get to the kids. This sequence felt easier, more light-hearted, and just plain fun. Exactly befitting the fact that we are playing kids. Excellent design all around (my only problem was that healing the dog didn’t work in one location and than somehow did in the other, for reasons that were unclear to me). Lots of good characterisation. I liked the kids more than the original superheroes! And the final fight has been designed extremely well. Dynamic, intuitive, fluid. In parser, this is much harder than it may look, and Austin Auclair has to be commended for making a scene where it feels like you’re playing six people so smooth.
So, yeah. I’ve picked some nits. Parts of the actual murderworlds where not that great. The verbs command should really only show the special verbs, and not fill my screen with the standard list every time. A bit more hinting here and there would be useful. But in a game of this size and complexity, this is all small beer. Murderworld is an impressive game that just gives a lot of the one thing it wants to give: fun. Even to me, to someone who does not like superheroes. In fact, this might be the most fun I’ve ever had with superheroes!
Perhaps Austin Auclair has a superpower of their own…
8 Likes
The Litchfield Mystery
Originally a genre that was seen as extremely hard to do well in IF, mystery has grown to be a popular and successful part of the contemporary IF scene. The Litchfield Mystery gives us the most classic of all setups: a British mansion, a dead rich guy, a limited number of suspects, and a brilliant detective who will solve the case.
Gameplay mainly takes the form of lawn mowering one’s way through all the options. Go to every location, click every object, talk to every person, click every question. This is not inherently very engaging, so the game will have to keep you interested by sharing titbits of information that make you think. For the most part, The Litchfield Mystery does a fair job of that. We slowly start building a mental picture of the situation; we see a few connections; it kept me engaged throughout the process of walking around the house and interviewing the suspects.
(Take note: all my reviews are spoilery, but hereafter I will be spoiling more or less everything about this mystery!)
But after the initial stage, the game didn’t quite work for me. There were, I think, three main things involved in that. First, I found the central puzzle extremely obscure. You are given a riddle that you should solve to open the safe. But this riddle is not specific enough; it could have been ‘tree’ or ‘house’ or a hundred other things. I would never have guessed ‘sailing boat’, not does it seem obvious once you know it is the intended answer. What’s more, it makes no sense at all that Litchfield would use this method for giving his safe code to his wife, because it’s clearly ineffective!
The second thing that hampered my enjoyment of the game is the inability to confront the suspects with the evidence. I find evidence of financial malfeasance, but I can’t ask anyone about that. I find that an African snake’s poison has been used, but I cannot ask the African snake expert about that. (It is, by the way, absurdly stupid that Hansel uses the one method of killing that immediately indicates that she is the killer.) I find out that the business partner entered the study after Litchfield died but did not raise an alarm… and I also can’t ask him about that! It’s really weird that I can confront some of the suspects with very minor evidence and questions, but that when I start making real discoveries, my powers of investigation disappear.
My third complaint is that there are several strange inconsistencies that you cannot investigate. Hansel’s passport indicates that she made a trip to South Africa that lasted six days. But a trip to South Africa in the 1930s will take more like a month, so she clearly did not really go to South Africa. Why not? What is going on? Why can’t I find out? The cook tells me that she imports her snake meat from Asia; but it’s fresh snake meat in the fridge, not dried snake meat, so this is a fairly unbelievable story. While refrigerated meat ships were had been in use for decades at this time, as far as I can see they were not going from Asia to the UK, and would also not have carried individual customer packages. I might be wrong, but it seems suspicious, and I thought it was strange I could not investigate this further. And how could she get pufferfish from Japan?
Anyway, with copious use of the hints that are hidden in the About text (spoiling especially the riddle) I managed to get to the accuse sequence, and I made the right guesses. But they were guesses. Informed guesses, to be sure, but the evidence I had was extremely limited and surely not enough to convict Hansel. I felt like an amateur desperate to make it good, rather than the crack detective I’m supposed to be. Although one may wonder why I’m supposed to get Hansel behind bars. Tabitha’s review very perceptively points out the dubious moral situation here. The game does at one point give me a motive, but unfortunately it is in the single most purple passage of prose I have so far seen in the competition:
That’s hard to take seriously.
That’s a lot of criticism, in terms of word count, but most of it could be easily fixed. I feel that The Litchfield Mystery is about 80% of the way to a game that I would really like. Iron out the historical inconsistencies (if that is what they are), add some interactivity with the suspects, improve the obscure riddle, and perhaps give us a moral choice at the end – perhaps we tip off Hansel and allow her to flee, if we choose – and this would be great. As it is, it is still enjoyable.
5 Likes
A Murder of Crows
Earlier his year I read John Crowley’s beautiful novel Ka, which has a crow protagonist. The first screen of A Murder of Crows makes it clear that this game has a crow protagonist, and that one of their friends is called Crowley. Could that just be a coincidence? Uh, well, yes, I think it is. At least I didn’t notice any link to the novel, which is also very different in style and tone.
A Murder of Crows is a sympathetic little game that allowed me to first get a fellow crow to safety and then visit a possible aggressive but actually very nice dog. After that, the game suddenly stopped; I wonder whether that was intended or a bug, but I’ll assume it was intended. I wondered because the game had already proven itself to be somewhat buggy, containing a fair number of typos as well as a Twine programming error. Some extra polish would have gone a long way towards making the experience more delightful.
I did like my few minutes with the game, watching out for unfeathereds and playing with woofers. Once you look past the typos and missing indications of direct speech, there’s an enjoyable crow vibe that I didn’t mind to vibe along with.
6 Likes
whoami
First thing I did when playing whoami was start a bash terminal, type ‘man whoami’, and check – yes, what I got was not 100% identical to the game’s blurb, but it was close enough! Look, I’m the intended audience here, a Linux user who is at least somewhat familiar with the terminal. I know that /dev contains hardware devices and that /bin contains binary, that is executable, files; I know that .. takes you up a directory; and perhaps more importantly, I know that a ‘#’ comments out a line, so that you can activate parts of a script by taking out the ‘#’, which is a crucial part of the game’s central puzzle. I can imagine that this super slick Twine implementation of a bash shell could be a bit overwhelming for those who have never used such software… but perhaps trial and error will work too.
The medium very much is the message here. Working through the bash interface is cool. Finding an Inform parser game embedded inside it is also cool, even if the game is horrible. And a web page reminiscent of the 90s! I didn’t even mind the stupid Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Oh yeah, and there’s also a story about surviving nuclear war and uploading your consciousness into a simulation? But to be frank, this fades into the background compared to the coolness of the interface.
I’ll even forgive the game for name checking Nick Bostrom.
9 Likes
Thanks for playing!
The blurb manpage quotes the BSD version of the command, as it does not have arguments and I like the phrasing a bit better.
About the Bostrom name drop, I was reluctant to keep it (back in early 2022 I was not fully aware of how horrible the dude was), but I could not find an alternate figure to embody the simulation hypothesis.
2 Likes
No worries, I even had a BA student who used a bunch of Bostrom papers in his thesis, so I can take it. 
And yes, he’s probably the person to quote on the simulation hypothesis!
2 Likes
The Path of Totality
I’m under the weather. No fever, but a stuffed head, extremely tired, that kind of thing. Not terrible, but it leaves me unable to read any of the work-related stuff I really ought to be readings. (Like an article on how to solve the truth maker problem for presentism using distributional properties. Yeah.) So last evening, while trying to kill just a bit of time before going to bed, I was looking for a game that wouldn’t be too strenuous. I saw The Path of Totality. I tried it. And it perfectly fitted the bill! It’s friendly, simple, forgiving. Just the kind of thing I’m able to play right now.
The Path of Totality is set in a landscape that the author describes as being inspired by Dartmoor. Fun fact: I once got lost in the mists on Dartmoor, just like the protagonist of this game! Okay, that’s not quite true; I didn’t get lost, because we turned back when we saw a thick mist was gathering, and there were enough landmarks to find our way back to Wistman’s Wood, after which it was only a matter of following the path back to the car. But the mist was really thick, came up very quickly, and getting lost would have been a real possibility if we had tried to finish the walk we were originally planning. I could relate to the game’s setting, then.
I had more trouble relating to the game’s time. Of course it’s a fantasy setting, and its history does not have to line up neatly with that of our own world. Still, one expects historical details to fit together. Here we have, on the one hand, a world where people can accurately predict solar eclipses as to both time and location with astonishing accuracy (an 18th century achievement), as well as not-too-rich commoners who explain that they have shelves and shelves of books at home (something that requires, one would say, late 19th or early 20th century mass production capabilities). But on the other hand, the world is ruled by feudal lords who don’t want the peasants to be educated, and there is no sign of post-Scientific Revolution technology. I didn’t know what to make of this!
Of course, the game is mostly interested in the story of five people who travel together. Although it seems to give you a choice about whether to travel together, this is fake: for fun I replayed trying to push my companions away at every point, but you’ll still end up travelling with them! The game then follows a rather rigid patterns, where every evening you can ‘befriend’ one of your companions by asking them some questions about their background. You can sometimes choose between being nice and being nasty, but the nastiness of just that, and it’s hard to find a reason to ever be anything than nice to everyone.
In fact – and although in my current state I did find this kind of fine – I’ve got to say that everything is a bit too nice. These five people traveling together under really stressful circumstances do not, at any point, experience any tension. Nobody wakes up grumpy. There are no disagreements. Everyone is happy to share everything about their lives, and then they say ‘thank’s for sharing such personal information’… which made me feel like I was listening to some kind of support group rather than people in an informal context? You can fall in love with and hook up to someone, but it’s a zero anxiety process – which makes it really unlike falling in love. And it doesn’t even trigger jealousy in the person whose companion you are suddenly taking from their side; not even the smallest, quickly repressed jealousy that a kind and wise person might have under such circumstances. (If you’re on holiday with your best friend and they suddenly start spending their time and nights with someone else, it’s surely natural to take a little while to adjust even if you’re happy for them.) The niceness is so strong, in other words, that the characters become unbelievable and uninteresting. They have varied backstories, but they are totally interchangeable as people. Which again makes it strange to fall in love with one of them, since they are all at bottom identical.
On the other hand, I thought the puzzle sequences rescued the game from being cloying. They add tension and danger (even though I’m fairly sure you can’t fail, though I didn’t try) and made a nice change with the conversation scenes. The pixies, the bog, the mist: all good stuff, and well-paced. I also like that reaching the eclipse taught me about an astronomical effect that I had never heard of before and that seemed well-fitted to the research capacities of the protagonist. (I was half-afraid that I would discover Eddington-style evidence for general relativity, which would have been unbelievable, but the author was much smarter than this!)
I had a nice time. It was pleasant and uplifting. I won’t particularly be remembering this romance, but maybe that wasn’t even the point?
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WOW that was brutal! Not my place to argue, and I appreciate you taking the time to try it out!
It’s an experiment! Maybe a misguided one. But that’s the whole point of experimenting - there’s really only one way to find out.
One thing I’m really proud of is that I’ve already begun receiving emails from people who say it warmed their hearts, and who wanted to share their own words with me (I invite people to write to me at the end of the game, and I wasn’t even sure anyone would do it).
I’m learning its definitely not for everyone, but so long as SOMEONE can connect to it - I’m happy!
Thanks again for giving it a shot Victor!
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FWIW my take on the game was very different from Victor’s! (Not saying his take is invalid, of course, but the things the game makes you click definitely didn’t feel like “boastful lies” to me, so much as an exercise in self-actualization and treating yourself kindly.)
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Thanks for replying, and for being so nice about it! I’ve got a feeling that we’re coming at this from very different directions. I’m very interested in games that are something very different from what they claim to be; and IF and the IFComp have a long tradition of such games. (I’ve made three or four myself!) So already the title of your game, juxtaposing ‘Break-Up’ with ‘Game’, suggested to me that it would fit right in there. And then when I started getting achievements, I felt certain: this game is not what it claims to be!
Apparently, that’s not how you meant it, but to me, coming from my particular background in interactive fiction, that’s what the game looked like. I hope that makes my reaction an interesting data point! It certainly wasn’t meant to be brutal; I experienced the game in a way that was apparently very far from your intention, but I quite enjoyed it. That might even be a positive thing.
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Thank you very much for this! It’s definitely worth a-lot to me!
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