I know Andrew Schultz is a huge fan of Games magazine and similar which offers puzzles appealing to advanced puzzle fans with tricks and layers and extra rules: you never get just a straightforward crossword puzzle or word-search, it’s done with rebuses or has a theme or an extra logic-layer to figure out a situation (like the cabbage/sheep/wolf river crossing). That’s the type of games he’s most interested making - themed word puzzles that take advantage of the interactivity of a parser.
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Absolutely! Of course, that’s why these games tend to be overwhelming to people like me (and the fact that it’s word puzzles in a language that is not my native tongue is adding another layer of challenge). But as I say in the review, I admire the results.
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The Cave by Neil Aitken
“A Journey of Self-Discovery”. That turns out to be a rather misleading subtitle; I think much more clarity is created by the walkthrough, which tells us the following:
I think it is hard to understand The Cave without this knowledge. It looks a lot like a simple fantasy adventure where you have to escape from a cave and defeat some enemies along the way. But then why create a cave with random connections, where you revisit the same locations over and over? Why have puzzles that are mostly trivial, easy to solve without even meaning to? And why have the game end rather abruptly, not because of some series of achievements, but because we have taken a certain number of otherwise causally inefficacious actions? It’s hardly a satisfying experience compared to what a much more traditional approach might have brought us.
In fact what is happening is that the game purposefully throws situations at us, sometimes repeatedly, giving us different routes to success; all with the aim of allowing us to define a character by choosing to use certain stats. If you cast spells a lot, you end up with a high Intelligence. I suspect that if you fight a lot, you’ll be increasing your Strength.
As a dungeon crawl or a story of self-disovery, The Cave is rather lacking, although there are some nice moments of surprise. (I especially enjoyed the moment when I crawled into a chest in order to feel safe and sound.) But how does is succeed as an alternative way to generate the basic character ability scores for your favourite roleplaying game?
Given the six scores you end up with, the assumption seems to be that the game we are talking about is Dungeons & Dragons. Now character creation in D&D is in some ways very complicated (when it comes to choosing the mechanical bells and whistles of your character), but very simple when it comes to choosing your ability scores. If you want your character to be half-way decent, there is little choice. A wizard simply must have high Intelligence. A fighter needs Strength and Constitution. D&D4 indeed goes so far as to indicate, with the character class, how you should distribute your points. So… what problem is The Cave trying to solve? You could go in, cast a lot of spells, and end up with scores that are good for a wizard; but then it seems you could as easily just have chosen scores that are good for a wizard. (And it’s not the case that the game is a good way of discovering that you would like to play a wizard. For that, it is far too far removed from the actual D&D experience.)
I can imagine a game like The Cave being actually quite interesting in a very different context. Take Ultima IV, where character creation takes the form of being presented with a series of ethical dilemmas. “You are honour-bound to serve a lord who tortures innocent people in his dungeon. Will you free the captives or honour your commitments?” That could be interesting. Traveler had a character creation system where you basically simulated an entire life-path. That could also work really well in a choice format. More in general, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to use interactive fiction as a way to create interesting, surprising, narratively meaningful characters for particular roleplaying games. (It depends on the game, of course! You can’t do this kind of thing for a game like My Life with Master, where the characters have to fit a detailed collaboratively created setting.) So I see some potential in the underlying idea, but I don’t really see The Cave itself as a particularly useful tool.
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Little Girl in Monsterland by Mike Stallone
Note: Little Girl in Monsterland is supposed to be a 15-hour game. This review is based on approximately 2 hours of play, perhaps a little more, and just looking at the map it is obvious that I haven’t seen most of the piece yet, though I solved a fair number of puzzles (by myself or using hints) and suspect I have a reasonably good idea of what the game as a whole is like.
With its use of graphics and an interface with persistent buttons, Little Girl in Monsterland sits somewhere between a choice-based interactive fiction and a point-and-click adventure. It tells the tale of a little girl, Olivia, who teams up with princess Camilla in order to have adventures. Possibly there is a greater point to the whole narrative, but this has not been revealed yet. Mostly, you’re just goofing around, trying to help people with little quests, and doing things that sound fun, such as meeting a famous knight, seeing a mermaid and winning a horse race. The entire thing is very good-natured, rather silly, sometimes a bit puerile, over-the-top in its parody, and overall just fun in an inoffensive way. To be honest, I rather liked playing a small girl who gets into all the weirdest situations and tries things that most adventure protagonist wouldn’t even contemplate. The atmosphere is definitely strengthened by high quality graphics; and judging from some screenshots in the forum, a future version of the game will have much better graphics yet.
In the puzzle department, Little Girl in Monsterland is trying to solve a problem that people have been thinking about for a long time: how to test player comprehension. Sure, the player used object A on object B… but did they anticipate what that combination would do? The way that Mike Stallone attempts to solve this is by explicitly asking the player for a rationale. If you try to use the paint on the statue, the game asks you to choose what you then expect to happen from a small list of options – and Olivia will only proceed with the action if you make the right choice. This is a nice idea. When it worked well, it was pretty satisfying; and it certainly discourages trying to brute force your way through the world.
That said, it didn’t always work well for me. [Just to be entirely clear, major puzzle spoiler will follow.] For instance, at one point you have to find a necklace in high grass. So I decided to use Camilla’s horse to eat the grass so I could more easily find the necklace. You choose to use the horse; then you state that you want to use it to cut the grass; and then you have to state “what will happen next”… but finding the necklace wasn’t there! This totally stumped me, and only use of the hints made it clear to me that I should have chosen the “someone will eat something” option. But that doesn’t happen next (it just is the cutting), and it wasn’t the reason for taking the horse to the grass.
Overall, I found the puzzles somewhat hit and miss. Some were quite logical and satisfying, such as finding the mermaid, entering the castle, and winning the horse race. Other seemed to be unsolvable without hints, such as the bizarre things you have to do in order to (unsuccessfully) cut the wood: somehow, a news item about a wooden house struck by lightning must give you the idea that you can cut wood by standing on top of it with a parasol. This is the kind of puzzle that makes no sense even when you have heard the solution. Another example: in order to get little girl’s tears, you must somehow come up with the idea that you will cry if you have a bellyache, and then seek out some nasty berries and eat them. I mean, I could hurt myself in a million ways in real life (and frankly there seem many more reliable ways of making myself cry then eating something bad); thinking of this specific course of action seems to be a study in reading the author’s mind.
And here it is unfortunate that the hint system is unhelpful to the point of being hostile and dismissive. First, it is slow, requiring you to open it up anew and wait a few seconds every time you want to show an additional hint. And then most of the hints aren’t really hints at all. Sometimes they’re even messages that say something along the lines of: “You don’t need a hint for this, you can just solve it.” For instance, when you try to find an out-of-circulation coin, the first four hints don’t tell you anything at all! (To be exact, the fourth hint is: “What place have you seen that could contain old coins?” If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking for a hint, would I?) I found the combination of slow, dismissive hints that then reveal a totally obscure puzzle solution sometimes rather disheartening.
As it is, Little Girl in Monsterland is promising and I did enjoy checking it out; but I also found it somewhat frustrating. A more helpful hint system would go a long way in addressing this. And possibly also some code optimisation to speed up the interface? I at least experience notable lag after most button presses, and this really slowed down the play experience.
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Thanks for trying my game Victor 
Maybe the hint system is a bit too “progressive”. I’ll try to change that. I was assuming the first few hints should only tell you how to reason in order to solve the puzzle. But for those particular puzzles I might have been too gradual and cautious…
I’m a bit sad that you’ve seen the worse puzzles. Basically you’ve mostly only seen the “side puzzles”, because it seems you haven’t finished talking to Van Helsing, which didn’t unlock more interesting objectives. Interesting… I wasn’t expecting that… Maybe I need to make it more clear that the yellow talk button is supposed to be pressed. Thanks a lot for your useful feedback!
Actually you don’t need to come up with that idea. You are supposed to read it from the available choices (and recognize that’s the correct option). One of the purposes of that interface is exactly to reduce the number of possibilities you have to consider.
The same holds for this puzzle: actually you don’t need to come up with the idea just from that clue. To the contrary, you can read the ending sentence “a lightning bolt will come” in the UI. (disguised among 7 other sentences). And this was supposed to instill the idea in your mind, without giving away the puzzle.
Thanks again for the valuable feedback! 
I hope you don’t give up
1 Like
The Moon wed Saturn by Pseudavid
Note: I was an alpha-tester for this game.
The Moon wed Saturn is an experimental piece that plays with non-chronological narration. Of course, that’s by itself is innovative, but Pseudavid uses the possibilities of electronic fiction rather nicely in making the three moments of time across which the story takes place happen in three different columns on the screen. Thus, we always see where each of the three threads of the story has been left hanging. Switches from one to another thread are generally motivated by causal connections: we go back to the past to understand what just happened, or we move to the future to see the results of something play out. I found this an interesting technique, and one that should definitely be explore more by authors of interactive fiction.
The story of The Moon wed Saturn is relatively minimal. It tells us about the love of the nightly caretaker of an abandoned building site and the possibly unattainable girl who comes to visit her. The main theme being explored are those of satisfaction and safety. Are you willing to settle for just a little bit of future, or will you embrace a more dangerous but possibly also more satisfying life? The protagonist is inclined to the former, but her desire for the girl is slowly pulling him towards the latter. I did find that the story remained rather abstract and the characters rather distant from me – I wasn’t really drawn in to it. So although The Moon wed Saturn is definitely more than an abstract formal experiment, it’s the formal aspects that had the biggest interest for me.
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Interesting. I found a different solution to this puzzle.
If you lose the horse race, Camilla will also cry. In fact, I did this before I got to the point where I needed little girl tears. One I knew I needed the tears, I just went back to the finish line of the race and collected them. I never discovered there was another solution to this puzzle involving berries.
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Unfortunately Victor had already defeated Mike Stallone, so he could only find the fallback solution, which is admittedly the worst puzzle of the game.
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Ah? No, I managed to get to Van Helsing, but he didn’t seem to have anything interesting to say, so I left him among his admirers. I didn’t realise that I should have persisted! (I did notice that at some point I had only objectives that the hint system said I couldn’t solve yet; but then the witch came home and some new options were unlocked, so I thought it was on purpose.)
I still don’t think I would have made a connection between lightning bolts and cutting wood, to be honest. But actually – and this is possibly useful feedback, or possibly just me being weird – I was avoiding contemplating all the other options in these menus, because I guess they would be about future puzzles and it felt like cheating to consider them too closely!
Well, no promises… I first have to get through about 90 more games and I tend to be a bit burned out after that. 
But the game is certainly on my radar, and I might well return to it as some point! Though I’m tempted to wait until that gorgeous graphical version is released…
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Well actually I had first lost the horse race, but I had not anticipated that rerunning the race would cause the tears to disappear, so it was a bit of a nasty surprise when they were gone… and then I had to find the alternate solution.
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(puzzle explanation removed — I think I know how to redesign the puzzle now. Thank you for pointing out the problem! 
)
I see both of your points, but I think that a game needs to stand alone without having to be explained by the author. If you have to explain how the puzzles are fair, it usually means the game itself needs to be tweaked. I liked Monsterland a lot, and I know it’s weird to see people point out flaws, but for me I’ve made it my goal to respond to criticisms by improving the game or by making the next one better, or to accept that people will just not like some of the stuff I like to do.
Because for everyone who posts their problem online and you respond to, there are 10 who don’t and who will never talk to you. Talking might fix it for one person, but changing the game or adding a few more hints fixes it for everyone (or leaving it in and not worrying if people don’t like it).
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You’re completely right 
very wise words
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Update: I’ve fixed or worked around all the issues raised by Victor
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The Wayward Story by Cristmo Ibarra
The final sentence of the walkthrough for this game is: “I hope you find some meaning in it.” And that does seem to be a bit of a challenge. The Wayward Story is a sequence of seemingly unrelated vignettes, some of which are tied together by a door-that-needs-keys puzzle mechanic. When I played it, I started out in my apartment watching television. Having fallen asleep, I was at the house of an old friend to fix a television. Then, suddenly we are in a throne room which gives access to three dreamlike scenes – a dark ritual in a fantasy setting, a trek through the desert, an apocalyptic hellscape – which led to one more normal-life scene about a guy delivering a package, and then en ecstatic reunion with two people. There were some recurrent themes (social anxiety, the wish to be reunited with loved ones) , but no real cohesion. So, well, meaningful it felt not.
On the positive side, this really was a painless parser experience. The hints about what to do were so clear that I never got stuck even for a moment, which is essential to a story-centric experience like this.
On the negative side, I had a lot of trouble with the prose. Much of it was of a breathless, try-too-hard variety, where the author tries to cram a joke, some slang, a weird turn of phrase, a sudden reversal into every single sentence. Some scenes were hard to understand because of the sheer chaotic energy of the writing, as here:
I just can’t keep up with this. Less is more, I would say, and I’m tempted to think that the author can improve a lot simply by being a bit more relaxed about their craft. In this particular case, I spent altogether too much time trying to understand why anyone would think a five-year-old cannot open doors… was that supposed to be a meaningful detail showing that the protagonist knows nothing about kids? Or not? Or?
Anyway. Because the experience is so easy to breeze through, the game never annoyed me, and I certainly don’t resent the time spent with it. But I can’t say I got much out of it either.
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Chorus by Skarn
The 2018 IF Comp had a game called LETS ROB A BANK, in which you had to choose a team of bank robbers and then found out whether you had chosen a successful combination. Chorus feels like a new, more complicated entry in that genre. This time, though, we are not robbing a bank; rather, we are in charge of an association for non-humans who have to take care of several occult tasks. We meet nine of them in more detail, assign them to three different groups, then make further assignment choices for each group, and finally find out whether this was any good.
It’s definitely not standard! This game feels like every aspect has been thought through and infused with real imagination, serving to give it its own voice and character. The flip side of that is that it’s hard to really wrap your mind around as a player. Any of the nine characters could easily have sustained an entire story just to explain what they actually are; in the case of Chorus, I still don’t understand the nature of most. Of course, this also means it’s hard to make informed choices about whom to assign to what. First, I have to remember which name corresponded to which weird ‘species’; and then I have to use my extremely vague and incomplete mental picture of a species to make an assignment decision. It also doesn’t help that in the end, most of this is rather arbitrary: as far as I can see, there’s no way to know in advance which districts you need to visit, for instance.
So… yeah. I enjoyed reading the piece, but I never really grasped it, and the play experience was mostly making some random choices and then seeing that the results were predictably bad. Now LETS ROB A BANK was so short that replaying many times wasn’t a problem; but Chorus is much more substantial, and I can’t see myself trying this many times in order to get better results. So some good writing and word-building, but I’m less sold on the puzzle/interaction structure.
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The Eidolon’s Escape by Mark Clarke
The Eidolon’s Escape tells the story of an otherworldly spirit that has been trapped by a mage. Now you finally have a chance to use your powers of possession to escape from her tower. Success is not predestined, though, as there are at least three different endings (and possibly a fourth), some of which are clearly better than others.
The first thing I want to compliment Mark Clarke on is the strength of the writing. Setting and characters are deftly defined; the prose flows smoothly; and while I would in general prefer shorter pieces of text between choice points, I found that I didn’t really mind the longer prose passages in The Eidolon’s Escape because they were always interesting and well-written. The characterisation of the protagonist as a spirit who doesn’t really understand human communication and finds human bodies rather disgusting was strong, without ever becoming ridiculous.
The game’s structure is also well-done. I believe that most of the game is on rails, so that you’ll always manage to end back up in the laboratory with the password; but then it starts branching, in ways that make perfect sense. Does the eidolon attempt to reign in its anger or not? Does it attempt to satisfy its curiosity about the mage or not? The choices you make about this will lead to entirely appropriate endings. I also loved the fact that the possible endings were foreshadowed in the game’s opening text: the revelation that the mage has kept you in captivity because of a mistaken hope that you were their long lost love was no revelation at all, but something that was clear from the beginning. This adds to the sense of player agency.
In conclusion, I found this a delightful little tale.
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Academic Pursuits (As Opposed To Regular Pursuits) by ruqiyah
Here’s a problem that many authors of interactive fiction have had to deal with: how do you keep a player engaged as you spin out a story that has already happened? One common solution is to rely on the player exploring the world, walking around and examining items. Another is to give the player character something to read, like books or journal pages. Neither feels particularly fresh, and neither gives us much of a sense of agency – although this may be mitigated by, for example, creating a stunning world or hiding the journal pages behind puzzles.
In general, I tend to think that the best way to solve this predicament is to not get into at all. Wouldn’t it be better to have the story happen right now rather than tell it in retrospect? This is my beef with games like Babel, that tell an elaborate story through diary fragments while the protagonist in the present is just walking around.
Academic Pursuits (As Opposed To Regular Pursuits) takes these questions on in an interesting way. In this piece, we are given a clear if rather mundane task: work our way through four boxes of items, putting all our items somewhere in our new office – in the top drawer of the desk, maybe, or on the nail where we can hang a picture. Since there is not enough space, we’ll also have to throw some of the items away. While this starts as an exercise in being organised – surely a pen should be in the top drawer – it soon turns into an exploration of the character’s background and relationship with the Professor, as almost every new items adds something to our understanding. We are a vampire; and the professor is our nemesis-cum-lover, who has been trying to kill us for ages and who, given our mutual attraction, will probably never stop trying nor ever succeed. This is certainly pursuit in both the physical and romantic senses of the word.
One thing that the game does really well is recontextualising earlier text. Once we find out that the main character is a semi-vengeful vampire here to pursue her female nemesis, the mug that says “Bad Bitch Juice” becomes a lot funnier, and now we understand why the protagonist had to laugh about it. We understand why she was nervous about the very sharp pencil. Indeed, we even come to understand why the protagonist waits in the hall outside the room on the very first turn, and only enters when the assistant invites her in.
What’s more, the backstory that is slowly revealed adds a level of agency to the process of deciding which items to keep and which items to throw in the bin. Are we here to keep ourselves safe, or will we embrace risk? Are we interested in academic pursuits? And the game acknowledges this agency, frequently endorsing some reason to throw particular items away.
One final thing that works in the game’s favour is the fact that it is clearly set in media res, in the sense that there are both an implied past and an implied future. This means that the feeling of just uncovering a story after it has already been ended is mitigated.
Now it’s still possible to feel a little bit disappointed that we see only a small fragment of the story; that we don’t really know what’s going to happen; that we never get to meet the professor. But given that we would get only this glimpse, I would say that the game has been done about as well as it could have been. Easy to recommend.
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You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf by B. J. Best
There’s a nice track of electronic music playing in the background, which I quite enjoyed. But otherwise this seems to be a string of utterly disconnected, barely intelligible prose fragments. It is full of metaphors like this:
How does blood coming out of a rubber glove ‘break up’? Or we get this:
What is a majestically colored bikini? How does it raise its hand? Or how could raising one’s hand be like a bikini? Or we get this:
I played until I hit the 45% mark and then quit, since it seemed unlikely that the rest of the game would make more sense than what came before.
Perhaps the bizarre nature of You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf is explained by this sentence in the About text: “This work is a collaboration with GPT-2.” GPT is the same technology that underlies AI Dungeon, a piece of technology that purports to tell a collaborative story with you, but that in fact quickly degenerates into absurdity and incomprehension. I’m afraid it fares no better here.
One sentence written by a human being is still worth more than a million ‘written’ by an AI. Perhaps this is comforting.
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Thanks very much for the comment, Victor! And I’m glad you found aspects of interest, I really didn’t intend much more than that.
One detail that might change a bit your view… They are two girls!
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