I like the aesthetics. The writing is crisp. The graphics and design are fitting. The atmosphere of being in a bipolar of schizophrenic episode with heavy paranoia is well-created. I don’t think the game wants to ask the question ‘is it real or are you paranoid?’ You’re paranoid. Things are not well with you. Worst party I’ve been to in an IF game since Blue Chairs, except that this one is far worse! Worst IF party ever, then.
Unfortunately, there is timed text. I found it a bit on the slow side, but manageable. Just skirting the abyss, so to speak. And then it turned out that the game has a loop construction and you have to replay a large part of it several times. I couldn’t stand the boredom of waiting for the text I had already seen to slowly appear on screen again, and quit the third time around. A sad end to what is otherwise a promising little game!
Perhaps the Guidelines for IF Comp Authors should have a more prominent place during the submission process? Here are two of its section titles:
Playtest your game and credit your testers
Submit only finished work
Since Gambler’s Quest doesn’t follow these guidelines (it is very unfinished and very untested) it is a rule-legal, but not an appropriate entry into the competition. I’ll leave it at that.
As part of a huge game I don’t spent a lot of time working on, I’ve made a re-implementation of Hunt the Wumpus with some design changes that turn it, I think, into a nice little tactical game. Perhaps I release it as a stand-alone piece? Perhaps a submission for IF Comp 2027? Who knows. What really blew my mind, as I was re-implementing the original map, is that the dodecahedron is topologically identical to a far more easily imagined space of three concentric rings! It’s logical once you see it, but suddenly I had a way to make navigation much more intuitive.
I don’t think Escape the Wumpus uses the dodecahedral map. It does have numbered rooms, but not all of them have three exits, and the loops that exist don’t seem to be of the right size. There is a hint of bats, there are pits, and I suppose there is a wumpus (although I didn’t get to it). The overall atmosphere of the game is more whimsical and forgiving, with a recycling theme: several of the puzzles involve sorting through trash and taking out the stuff that can be recycled.
Play mostly consists of mapping the dungeon, which is chaotic but not too big. There are a few simple puzzles of the ‘pick something up here, then use it there’ variety. One trigger was a bit strange: I visited a location with the trolley, nothing happened, and then when I entered that very same location from another direction I was suddenly grabbing new items and putting them into the trolley. No idea what was going on there.
The most difficult puzzle I found involved the coloured potions. Reading a book gave me the hint I needed; I brewed the indicated potion; drank it; was able to go through an exit that was so far inaccessble… and then:
Ending a game with no save feature with a sudden death that requires restarting, and then claiming that you ‘tried to stop me’ – a lie, since I literally just unlocked this exit by drinking the potion then clicked on it once – that’s not very sympathetic game design. It feels mean and undeserved. At the moment, I’m not intrigued enough to restart, but perhaps this will change in the future, once my grumpiness has worn off.
Tales of Nivea – my mind is racing immediately. Could it be about a guy suffering from slightly irritated dry skin between his fingers, who notices significant relief after applying Nivea™ lotion for a week? Or is it about a woman complaining that the house brand sunscreen she’s been using makes her skin feel a bit oily, and then her friend suggests using the premium brand? I’m joking, but also a little baffled. I think that ‘Nivea’ is never mentioned in the game; if it is supposed to be the name of a fictional country, or something like that, I would respectfully suggest choosing a new name that is not also an international brand of skincare products!
The game itself. We’re living in an proto-fascist Earth kingdom where people who have affinity with other elements, or whose powers are too great, have always been looked on with suspicion. The anonymous and mostly faceless bureaucrats have started a new programme, GRIP, that finds out about these people at an early age and then… sends them to the right place. In practice, it means that your job as an aspiring bureaucrat (you’re in it because you need to earn money somehow, no matter how) is to interview children aged between 6 and 14, read their files, then determine to either give them a symbol of social ostracism, hand them over for military training, or terminate them.
Those who know my games by reputation may be surprised to hear that I almost stopped playing when I realised that part of the game was to sign the death sentences of children. (Those who have actually played my games are perhaps less surprised.) I’m glad to report, though, that termination is never insisted on by the game. In fact, the only episode where it makes sense to choose it, is one where the powers that be do not want you to choose it. I did choose it, and the game handled it with more grace than I counted on. I wonder what happens if you play as a zealous killer.
Overall, the build-up and the atmosphere are good. The writing is pretty good too, although I’ll have something more critical to say about that at the end that I’d like to keep out of the main body of the review. The strict rules of bureaucracy, its faceless nature, are presented in a very convincing way; and then the inevitable injustice, senselessness, and even sheer hypocrisy are exposed through a series of cases that never get boring. What happens is not, I think, surprising – and I think the game may owe more than a little to Papers, Please, although that’s only an informed guess since I never played it – but it is thematically effective. There’s real tension too, helped by the colours and graphics. (I believe there is music too, but I played without sound.)
The games structure is on the opaque side. I got taken from my job, perhaps terminated, because I stayed the same – I kept wondering, rather than committing to the system. That made some sense, but wasn’t easy to map onto the actual decisions I made. I understand from the IFDB review of @mathbrush that you get doubt points when you question the children. But just like him, I had assumed that you were supposed to always question the children – there was no indication that the interviews were optional. While not feeling in charge of my destiny is okay for a game with this theme, I don’t think it wants to descend into Kafkaesque realms where the relation between action and punishment is unfathomable. A clearer connection of the end with my deeds would have been better.
Overall, though, GRIP is a good game that does justice to its ambitious theme. End of main body of the review.
Now that we’re outside of the main body of the review, let me tell you that I’ve been doing some fiction generation with locally run LLMs (that is: models that run on my own computer, no disastrous data centers involved). I’m not creating texts for other people’s consumption, but experimenting with using LLMs as a tool for solo roleplaying – with mixed success, to be honest. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Contemporary LLMs write narrative prose that is quite fine, sometimes bordering on the good, but the models have distinctive mannerisms. It’s a bit like how certain writers have their own style, and you immediately recognise that style. Five sentences and you know it’s them. What happened to me when I was playing GRIP was that there were passages that felt 100% like they were written by the models I know. They felt so much like it, that it was like recognising the face of someone you know well – it’s hard to put into words exactly what it is that you recognise, except that it is them. Here’s a passage that does that for me:
It’s the phrase ‘squared off with more precision than any job should require’ and not just the construction of the phrase, but also its not quite making sense. (Can you rank jobs along a scale of how much precision they require in squaring off stacks of files?) It’s the fact that we re-use an environment detail that shouldn’t appear here: the white job offer notice, framed, makes no sense as an office decoration. It’s especially the entire last sentence, its grammatical and semantic construction, the words used, the way how it sounds very accomplished but once again subtly fails to make sense (if someone thinks they already accounted for all your needs, they might still offer you what they think you need). I cannot read this paragraph without thinking: I know who wrote this! Or, rather, what wrote this.
But that’s a big claim to make, because it would mean that GRIP breaks the competition rules and would face disqualification. I’m neither willing to nor interested in basing an accusation on my mere subjective feeling. (And perhaps there is counterevidence too: ‘stair’ should be ‘stairs’, and is that a mistake LLMs make? Maybe not.) What’s more, I have the nagging suspicion that as people use more and more LLMs, their very own writing might start to copy the mannerisms of LLMs. That a text sounds like an LLM is, conceivably, no longer a solid sign that it was written by an LLM. It could just be a sign that it was written in an LLM-infused world.
One thing that LLMs have done to all of us is that they’ve made us suspicious and paranoid. If a student sends me something good, a doubt is generated in my mind. If an IF Comp entry phrases things a certain way, a doubt is generated by my mind. I don’t like being suspicious. This state of mind – this justified paranoia – is itself already a form of harm we have suffered. And that’s an insight into the power of systems over individuals that fits GRIP quite neatly.
(Just to be clear: I do not accuse GRIP of breaking competition rules, but I also could not write about its prose style and how it affected me – a crucial component of an IF review – without mentioning these thoughts I had.)
Yeah, that’s a dialect thing, I’m almost certain. I don’t think it’s British vs. American, but I’ve definitely seen flavors of English that use “stair” to mean “staircase.” And I ran a regex search on the source code and it’s completely consistent about it, so it’s not just a typo here.
The use of “stair” in this clever verse may have been chosen for poetic purposes, and already archaic at the time. According to what I can find, the distinction between “stair” and “stairs” was already established by the 1500s
In some ways Quackpond is the perfect time capsule for the amateur internet. An ‘amateur’ is somebody who does an activity for pleasure, rather than for money. It’s the literal word for lover.
The amateur internet was built on and with love; in the case of Quackpond, by a wife-veterinarian and their non-binary spouse, presumably showcasing their love of ducks and of each other at the same time. (I feel that the admins listing pronouns is the only thing that doesn’t fit the 90s vibe of the game; I don’t remember anyone doing that back then. But maybe I was hanging out in the wrong places.)
Unfortunately, love is hard. People who act out of love can end up acting less like amateurs, and more like, you know, amateurs. People who don’t have a clue. People who think that it matters what random strangers on the internet think about you. People who think that one can talk through real and personal problems in an internet forum while the world is reading along. People who mistake the strength of their emotions for the righteousness of their cause.
So Quackpond marries a nice little time capsule with a sad little tale. The tale is over very quickly; things might have hit harder if we had had an opportunity to actually come to know these people before the duck shit hit the fan. But Quackpond is perhaps not interested in that. It wants to remind us of something we already know, not explain something of which we were ignorant. It’s a quick dip in the pond, not a voyage across the lake.
It leaves me wondering about the use of text input. It’s nice that you could type your own posts, but it was also very apparent that they didn’t actually do anything. (I told people that my favourite type of duck was Peking duck, but nobody took the bait!) Would it have added something, would it even have been possible, if there was some kind of interaction/persistence with other players? Again, more a lake approach than a pond approach. But I noticed I quickly stopped really thinking about what to write, since it wouldn’t be read anyway. Unless I had been as smart as @amesyflo, who posted a screenshot in their review thread!
Among the less well-known Athenian schools of philosophy are the Cyrenaics, who believed that the point of life is present pleasure. Their founder, Aristippus of Cyrene, is supposed to have said, upon entering a brothel: “The danger lies not in entering, but in being unable to come back out!” While this has somehow not become one of the famous wisdom sayings of the ancients, it is nevertheless quite apposite to Pegasus Crew: Pleasure Planet. The danger lies not in entering, but in being unable to come back out.
I was mildly apprehensive of this entry, because a story that is set on a ‘pleasure planet’ has a certain probability of being someone’s excuse to write immature brothel scenes. I need not have worried. This game is class act. As much of a class act as any game can be that involves an intrusive full-body medical check-up involving mechanical tentacles. Which Pegasus Crew proves to be ‘more than you might have expected.’
We follow Astrid, an escaped brainwashed space marine, and her companions Locke and Chicken as they enter the pleasure planet. Our choices have an influence on how Locke, Chicken and the people of the planet see us; and I think certain scenes play out differently depending on the current values. For example, if you let Locke decide what to do in the probability building, he will make a more mature choice if his relationship with you is high enough. (There is, unfortunately, no way to check the current relationship values, and also, more unfortunately, no way to save the game.)
These characters are quite delightful, and the situations they get involved in are short, crisply written, amusing, and sometimes slightly touching. The worldbuilding is inventive. The music is fitting. What’s not to like? If I had to be critical, I could point out that everything fits a little too neatly: the end of the game hands us a lot of puzzle pieces to these characters and their backstories in quick succession, which lacks verisimilitude and doesn’t allow them to have the narrative weight they could have had. This is mostly a matter of timing, and I do not resent the rush – a longer game might have had more room to breathe, but would also have been, well, longer. The final message, at least the one I arrived at, is hardly novel, and could have been predicted from the beginning. You must find your own purpose. But that’s what I get from following Nietzsche rather than Aristippus. Pleasure was offered me on a golden plate, and instead I chose to walk out of the brothel.
There’s a surfeit of worldbuilding here, to my tastes at least: I prefer clarity about a few good ideas to so many ideas stuffed into such a small space that all of them remain vague and underexplained. The protagonist is some kind of vampire for the cyberpunk age; there’s a crime writer who has an owner; there’s a lot of other stuff going on; and I for one have no idea what the setting is actually like or how any of the elements we’ve been given fits into it. This is a matter of aesthetic preference. Others will enjoy this more than I do.
The basic idea is clean, neat, simple, abstract. A crime author has written about every conceivable way a locked room mystery could play out: now he will be killed, and he will be found in a locked room. It’s the only version of the story he couldn’t get published, namely, the one where the killer is a cyberpunk vampire. It’s hard to get the full picture, though: what attracts you to him, what you will take from him, how he recognises you, why he claims to have lured you here. Here I feel the surfeit becomes more than an aesthetic preference – it actually harms our comprehension of the basic idea.
The game mechanics are simplistic, almost non-existent. You visit rooms. Click on items. The way into the locked room is so clichéd (using the name of someone’s lover as a computer password) that perhaps we are meant to pick up on that and understand the author to have done this on purpose, because he wants to be killed in his locked room. I don’t know. It ends up feeling thin.
After all that, what remains? The voice. But it’s enough, because Residual Income IS its voice. The idea, the game, even the world, they are nothing compared to the sheer fact of inhabiting this mind, hearing this voice. At first, I bounced off hard. Because in a sense it’s not good. It’s not good writing:
Any editor would make you change that in a dozen places at least. But when I clicked through the game a second time, the game clicked too. This doesn’t want to be objectively good writing. This is a voice. An obsessive voice, a voice that constantly overhears itself, that corrects itself, that goes into weird cul-de-sacs and then has to back out of them, that lies to itself, that realises that it lies to itself, that cannot stop lying to itself, that has lied to itself for centuries. This voice is the game. Everything else is a vehicle for its delivery. Everything else is the framework of barely coherent sense inside which this madness can unfold:
It has to keep talking, because silence is a comfortable bed, and then you can’t get up again, and what’s the point of that? What would the point of that be? Better to talk, think, mutter. Better a surfeit of sense than a gap in the stream of consciousness. We cannot sleep. No, not this century. Not that we need it. Not we. We are experienced. We are better than the city. It thinks we are its bad dreams, but no, we are its waking.
And so it ends up being objectively good writing after all.
The first version of the review when I had 50 of 220 points and was stuck; this version is written after having completed the entire game, with a little help from Brian’s transcript.
This is a parser puzzle game. We play a none-too-bright barbarian in a loincloth who has to rescue a princess. This is leaning extremely heavily into genre tropes, so much so that one wonders if they will be subverted at some point. In the part that I’ve seen, the tropes are played straight. Trolls, ogres, guys called Abdul selling camels, dark castles, beggars who need a coin before they give you a crucial puzzle element, pirates on pirate islands, forgotten desert temples, and a protagonist who cannot read and who has as much personality as a wet rag. What was not on my bingo card, though, was being treated to belch and fart mechanics that would certainly delight most seven-year-olds. (The game has self-awareness about this last element, discussing it during one of the final puzzles.)
The implementation is extremely solid. Navigating the world feels effortless in the way of a really well-made parser game: only those who have played badly made parser games, or who have written parser games themselves, know how much work and how much thought go into that. Moore is a skilled craftsman and the game clearly a labour of love.
I must admit, though, that I experienced little pull to persist in solving the puzzles: the setting is genre-tropy, the writing is functional but not inventive, and the puzzles are standard adventure fare. Little about it makes me want to push on, regardless of obstacles.This is the kind of game I’m willing to persist with because of the puzzles when things are going smoothly, but which I quickly give up on when I get stuck. And I originally got stuck, due in part to a bug (that has now been solved), but also because there’s no walkthrough and the ‘help’ command is less than helpful. E.g., if you know you need the thread but don’t know where it is, the ‘help’ command will not help you at all.
I found many of the puzzles quite smooth and pretty fun. Of course you need to find a needle in the haystack. Of course you need to enter it. Of course once I found the lodestone I knew what to do with it. And so on. There are also a few puzzles, though, that suffered from one or another design weakness. I’ll list a few, though I should add that there are more puzzles that were fine than puzzles that were a problem:
Drinking from the bottle. The problem here is that the game teaches you that you can get into an unwinnable state very easily, and that this happens when an action that consumes an object has no immediate good consequence. Having been taught that lesson, I immediately pressed ‘undo’ after drinking from the bottle. Here the game’s own lessons discourage the exploration needed to solve the puzzle.
Burning the gangplank. The problem here is twofold – one, there’s a 50% chance that you won’t even have seen the torch yet, and be in an unwinnable state without knowing it, wasting a lot of time. But two, other interactions with the gangplank that sound far more plausible just generate fairly generic failure messages. You can take it, push it, attack it with your club. And yet all of these sound more likely to have success than using the torch. (A plank does not catch fire easily or quickly, in general.)
Untie straps. I got into big guess-the-verb trouble here, trying commands like ‘take off bracelets’, which surely should have succeeded. I notice that Brian had trouble at the exact same spot.
The compass. I actually found the solution myself, but it just doesn’t make any sense. A compass works not by you following the needle, but by the needle always pointing north.
But with Brian’s transcript, I finished the game, and had a pretty good time overall. I still would have preferred something with more narrative or personality; but I guess not every game about a stupid barbarian fighter can be Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom!
just in case the blurb wasn’t clear. the help system (admittedly a mess and will be fixed in a post-comp release) is progressive. you can use HELP WITH DOWSING ROD multiple times.
there’s no command. You just take the rod into the desert and it will show you where to dig with the shovel.
i’m not trying to belabor the point. i typically “run silent” and don’t post responses during a competition. i think your critique is spot-on (as have been the other two reviews i’ve seen). i just wanted to clarify how the help system works in case anyone else was having trouble with it.
IIRC, I ran into a minor bug on my playthrough where a certain automatic event didn’t trigger while I was riding the camel, but it did work properly after I had dismounted. I think it might have been the exact spot where Victor is stuck (although I am not absolutely positive about that. I played the game a little while ago!).
(@improvmonster: I played online and recorded my transcript, and I think I left a comment about this during play, so hopefully that bug should be findable whenever you get a chance to review transcripts!)
n
With a rocking gait, the camel plods to the north.
Black Desert (on the camel)
This is a broad sandy desert north of Talonwich forest. Unlike any desert you’ve every seen before, it’s utterly flat and the sand is thick and jet black. The black sand seems to absorb and magnify the sunlight and it’s exceedingly hot here. The desert extends off to the horizon and a path leads south back towards the cooler and darker confines of the woods.
n
There doesn’t seem to be an exit in that direction.
w
There doesn’t seem to be an exit in that direction.
The heat is oppressive and you may not last very long out here.
e
There doesn’t seem to be an exit in that direction.
nw
There doesn’t seem to be an exit in that direction.
You’re sweating profusely and starting to feel a little light-headed.
ne
There doesn’t seem to be an exit in that direction.
x rod
It’s an otherwise unassuming wishbone-shaped piece of wood.
get off camel
You awkwardly dismount from the camel.
You notice that you’re no longer sweating. You’d better find some shelter from the sun soon.
x rod
It’s an otherwise unassuming wishbone-shaped piece of wood.
wave rod
You wave the wishbone-shaped stick in the air, with no apparent consequences.
Overcome by heat stroke, you fall, dead, to the sand. The buzzards soon find you and your end is far from picturesque or heroic.
Turns out that @LampPostProjects suggestion is the solution: you have the enter the desert while not on a camel. So it’s not a guess-the-verb problem after all, but an ordinary and I suppose easily fixable bug.
Everyone’s Invited to a Gambler’s Quest
and take Brad and Janet 
