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.