Very thoughtful. I playtested this, and have been turning it around in my head ever since. Your review broadened my thoughts on this piece.
Also:
Gummbah. Heerlijk!
4 Likes
I thought about that Borges story, too, even though it didn’t get into my final review! (It should have. I should reread it in full.)
This review (and According to Cain) reminded me of (among other things) one of Kurt Vonnegut’s more famous Kilgore Trout stories that discusses the gospel of Jesus in slightly different terms. Vonnegut is a bit more sardonic about the message we actually take away and the message we should take away, but I think both the Kilgore Trout story and AtC take it upon themselves to look for the messages we really SHOULD be getting from the gospels.
2 Likes
Thank you for the extensive review!
I’ll keep your comments in mind when I work on the post-comp update 
2 Likes
Thank you! This is a remarkable review, and well above any response I could have asked from a player. I very much want to respond, not in a negative or a refuting manner, but to continue the conversation. I’ll wait until after the comp, though, and make it part of my postmortem / author’s notes.
4 Likes
Looking forward to it! (You can also send me a private message, of course, but perhaps it’s more fun to have the conversation in public at the end of the competition.)
2 Likes
Witchfinders by Tania Dreams
Witchfinders is a short Twine game about a witch in a 19th century Edinburgh where detecting and prosecuting witches is still a pastime for some. The game begins rather bizarrely:
Even if we ignore that both ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Renaissance’ are misspelled, and that there are no fewer than three article errors in the sentence, there is still the problem that this makes no sense. How can it be the case that the Age of Enlightenment giving way to Romanticism makes us leave behind the ‘brutality’ of the Middle Ages, which ended some four centuries earlier? This doesn’t inspire confidence, which is very important to inspire at the start of a game. The game then goes on to tell me that I’ll be surprised that I won’t be able to play a witchfinder, because instead I am… the witch! Actually, there are so many IF games in which you are a witch (or wizard) that it would have been a lot more surprising to be the witchfinder!
Thankfully, the rest of the game is significantly better. It is also very much more down to earth. You visit a handful of locations in Edinburgh, learn about a few problems, collect some ingredients, and solve the problems. At all points the prose is very sparse; NPCs are just quest-giving machines, locations are never detailed in more than two sentences, and the PC doesn’t have much of an inner life. There is a system in place where by earning ‘witch points’ you can get yourself persecuted. But there’s no real tension, in part because it is easy to avoid the witch points, and in part because everything is so sparse and functional that you’re never caught up in the fiction.
Actually the experience is somewhat reminiscent of playing a mediocre graphical RPG like Oblivion. There’s a sick child to be saved, but the only possible interaction with him is to click and hear ‘ugh’. You can talk to his father, who has two endlessly repeated sentences of text to give you the quest. You walk into the woods and harvest the necessary ingredient. You return to the father, click, press the ‘give medicine’ button, get the XP and gold coins, and walk away towards the next quest. Without the visuals to distract us, the equivalent experience is Witchfinder shows more clearly how bare bones this approach is. Why don’t we have a more detailed conversation with the father? Why isn’t there a story in which the suspense slowly mounts as even the people we care about start getting suspicious? Why aren’t we forced to choose between helping the needy and our own safety? Why isn’t our character more fleshed out? In general, why isn’t there more fiction in this interactive fiction? I’m just left wishing for a lot more.
3 Likes
I also beta tested According to Cain, and while I won’t read your review until after I replay it and try to write up my own thoughts, I’m looking forward to doing that, and hopefully some post-comp conversation too.
FWIW, I also spent way too long turning this over in my head and trying to figure out what it’s supposed to mean:
Age of Enlightment gave a way to Romanticism, leaving behind medieval brutality and aspiring beauty of Reneissance.
My best guess is that this is just an awkwardly-written sentence and it’s meant to communicate an overall progression – now that Romanticism has come, the earlier periods (Medieval and Renaissance) are even further in the rear-view mirror. But beyond getting the chronology slightly neater, this is still a but of a confusing opening because a) Romanticism actually hearkened back to Renaissance and especially Medieval models in some respects, arguably bringing those eras closer to contemporary society, and b) I have not a single clue what the quotidian action of the game, which you accurately describe, has to do with Romanticism anyway.
4 Likes
You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book by Austin Lim
There are two sides to You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book. On the one hand, it’s a hypertext adventure of a familiar kind. You are a faceless adventure person, you receive a strange quest, and by walking around town you manage to collect some objects and pieces of information that just happen to allow you to solve the problem. It’s more a matter of thorough exploration than of real puzzle solving, and because everything is so disconnected and distant, it is hard to care about what’s going on. As an adventure game, You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is competently implemented but ultimately forgettable.
On the other hand, You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is a collage made out of locations from other works of literature. So while you are playing the adventure game, you’re also playing a ‘guess the original’ game. This is certainly a more original conceit than the quest itself. However, the lack of interactivity with the surroundings makes it less interesting than it could have been. You get one paragraph of text, and then you either know it or don’t know it; there’s no way to explore further and interact with the environment to get more clues. In some cases, clues are not needed. The violin playing inhabitants of the apartment next to apartment 221 who seem very interested in murders? Check. The farm that is run by the animals themselves? Check. Waking up as a giant insect? Check. It might still have been fun to explore that farm more, say, and find that we’re in the middle of the scene where the horse is being sold off; but at least we don’t need to in order to guess the source. In other cases, the source material seemed a lot harder to guess. And the problem is, if you don’t know it immediately, there’s no way to investigate further. Does this three sentence description of a forest not ring a bell? Tough luck.
What I found very interesting indeed is that in several cases, I immediately recognised what the source material was… and then found out, at the end, that Austin Lim and I had different things in mind. You enter a church and are almost driven to madness by a bell that won’t stop tolling? Obviously this is a reference to Emily Dickinson’s stunning I felt a Funeral, in my Brain; but actually the scene was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells. In another scene, you are walking across a beach and warned against staying out in the sunshine for too long. No clearer reference to Albert Camus’s L’étranger is possible, right? Except that the reference was to Dune. Which just goes to show, one, that our literary heritage is highly overdetermined (as the literary critics like to say; we philosophers would say that the works of literature are underdetermined by the clues, but it means more or less the same thing); and, two, that you really need more space for exploration if you want to implement a puzzle like this! Maybe let me check my inventory to see whether there’s a gun, and then have me discover some… spice? (I’ve never read Dune, so this is stab in the dark.)
5 Likes
I’ve read Dune, and although the scene that part of You Feel Like You’ve Read this in a Book is riffing wouldn’t have a gun in it (the characters at that point didn’t have one), spice could definitely have helped clue people in and would be plausible. That, or worms on the beach that needed to be avoided (the other thing that is in regular cultural osmosis from Dune) - particularly if it was by walking in a non-rhythmic or otherwise unusal way. (Travelling by day being a bad idea is definitely a thing in Dune… …and at least two-thirds of the other books set in deserts I’ve read).
1 Like
Esther’s by Brad and Alleson Buchanan
Esther’s is a short piece of interactive children’s literature about two mice eating at a child’s (both real and make-believe) cafe. No age range is indicated, but the simple premise and the straightforward plot (the mice want a particular meal and are happy once they get it) make me think that the authors are aiming at children of about 3 to 5 years old. The piece is implemented well and accompanied by a small selection of cute, professionally executed pictures.
I played through the game myself, but then decided to also play it with one of my children. My eldest is now 6 years old and I usually read books to him that are far more demanding – from a narrative and language perspective – than Esther’s; so I decided to play it with the 4-year-old. Her native language is Dutch, so I had to do off-the-cuff translation, but I don’t think this posed a problem. Did she enjoy it? Yes, and she wanted to read it again afterwards. (But couldn’t because it was bed time.) So one can certainly count that as a success.
Still, I’m not convinced that Esther’s was as successful as it could have been. While reading it to my daughter, I noticed more clearly than when I read it myself that the game makes some heavy and perhaps unnecessary demands on the young listener. The basic idea of mice wanting specific food and not being able to communicate with the cafe owner is easily grasped. But the foods in question were highly unfamiliar. Even I myself had to look up mimosas. In addition, my 4-year-old has only a vague knowledge of avocados and guacamole, and none at all of tapioca pudding. Possibly this is a cultural issue. But I think my daughter would have been more invested in the game if she had had a better grasp of the kinds of food that were required, and therefore of the steps needed to make them.
This problem is exacerbated by the rather complex cognitive task of keeping in mind the current inventory of the mice. Children are really good at grasping and remembering narratives. I read long books over many nights with my daughter, and she’ll still know what happened to the horse ten chapters ago, no problem. Story is easy. But I noticed that it was really hard for her to mentally keep track of the foodstuff that was on the table in Esther’s. The mice now have… an empty cup, a slice of orange, toast with the cinnamon & sugar still on it, a quesadilla with cheese and some guacamole. I mean, that is hard. But if you’re not keeping track of this, you don’t really understand how far you are along in the story; what you have done; what still needs to be done. It makes me wonder why the authors chose this particular form for the game, rather than a more traditional narrative that requires less complex non-story state tracking.
So, yes, it was fun and visually attractive, and I’m happy to see more interactive fiction for young children. But I also have some doubts about the design choices that went into Esther’s.
8 Likes
It’s very cool that you took the game out for a test-drive with your daughter to see how it works in practice! I’m curious, from what you say, it sounds like a status display of the food on the table might have been helpful – is that right, or was it just the overall cognitive load rather than the interface that was the challenge?
I suspect this is cultural, yeah – from the authors’ IFDB profile it looks like they’re in Seattle, where I’m guessing those foods are pretty common (I’m in California, and my one-year-old has already eaten all those things, albeit a Persian version of rice pudding rather than tapioca specifically). It’s interesting to consider how to translate a game like this in a way that uses more culturally-relevant foods while maintaining the puzzle structure!
3 Likes
A status display might have helped, I think. But it also seems to be something you might not want to go for with this type of story and presentation. It kind of distracts from the text and the pictures (even more so given that you are quite likely to play this on a phone when you’re reading it with a kid).
Surely your one-year-old did not have samosas? 
2 Likes
Ha, true, my eyes skipped over that part of the paragraph! I have eaten a samosa in front of him and told him he’ll get Indian food when he’s a little older, though
2 Likes
Wait, I’m confused! It’s not samosas but mimosas. I knew vaguely what samosas were, but had to look up mimosas (which is probably why I’m confusing them now). Mimosas sound kind of horrible, to be honest; a waste of good cava.
2 Likes
Thank you for the review!
2 Likes
Oh geez you’re right, haha! I’d forgotten the mimosas (in fairness, I believe they’re nonalcoholic in the game, right?)
2 Likes
They settle for orange juice, yes. 
3 Likes
I was thinking a small round drawing of the table with pictures of the available foods on it, updated for food that is added or eaten. Easy overview of the items while still keeping with the drawing style.
Somewhere to the right in the bottom corner.
4 Likes
I agree completely. Now, pomosas are a different story. The bubbly goes so well with a little sour pomegranate juice.
3 Likes
An Alien’s Mistaken Impressions of Humanity’s Pockets by Andrew Howe
The credits tell us this was a class project, and since the aim was no doubt to get some experience with Twine, it can be counted as a success. There are several locations, there’s a simple but clear puzzle structure, and everything seems to work as intended, including a colour mixing puzzle that must have required some programming skill to implement. (I did run into one game-breaking bug when I entered a name for the key-chain and pressed enter. This is so early in the game that it hardly matters, but it will still be nice to fix.) On the other hand, the game is absolutely rife with misspellings, omitted capitals, strange amounts of white space, and other problems with the basic presentation of the text. This made it feel very sloppily executed even where the underlying programming was solid.
The game’s basic premise is that two alien investigators misinterpret the human artefacts found at archaeological dig sites. This is a nice idea that could have been worked out better; as it is, it disappears from view very early on in the game. All in all, a good step in the learning process, but not really ready for the limelight yet.
5 Likes