Actually, the walkthrough consists only of hints about how to get the achievements! You could check that out. 
2 Likes
Ooh, I forgot about the walkthrough … I played it straight-up, and I still found everything soon enough, which I think is a big positive, since I’m not shy about hitting up walkthroughs.
My big roadblock was probably talking to the barista about everything and getting that conversation started again.
2 Likes
Assembly by Ben Kirwin
There’s an old chestnut in adventure games: the recipe. You’ve got to make a magic potion, and you have a recipe, and now you have to first collect the ingredients and then follow the steps of the recipe exactly… and you’ll get the potion. I’m pretty sure King’s Quest has that kind of stuff. Or maybe it’s a real recipe that you’re trying to make, as in Savoir-Faire. It’s not very engaging – usually the real gameplay is getting the ingredients, or getting things ready, and then actually following the recipe is more a little task you need to get out of the way before you get the reward. You don’t want too many of such tasks in your game. It bogs things down.
So it’s bold to build a game that is all about following instructions! Assembly is such a game, although its not recipes we’re following, but IKEA instruction manuals. It’s like having little walkthroughs in the game, telling you how to construct, and also deconstruct, many of the objects you meet. Our protagonist is good at following such rules. Indeed, they’re incredibly bad at not following rules, being unable to unscrew a light bulb without an instruction manual showing them how to do it.
This could have been very boring, but Assembly keeps the instructions short, gives us frequent rewards for successful assembly and disassembly, and, especially, gives us a series of nice puzzles around these mechanics. This is no doubt the only game where finding an IKEA instruction manual feels good – although, come to think of it, All the Troubles Come My Way has this too, so scrap that. The puzzles are good, starting with some simple ones, moving on to slightly more difficult (such as the lamp puzzle), and ending with one that is both simple and over-the-top and yet completely logical, applying IKEA logic to IKEA itself, giving us the comic reward we deserved.
Well, I guess it ends with one that went the least smoothly for me, because I didn’t realise there was a flatpack box in my location, and it felt a little bit like a regression after the great scene with the collapsing stacks… but that’s a nitpick. This game is fun and light-hearted. There are some Elder Gods involved, but it never goes to dark places… at least, not to dark places you can’t illuminate with a good STRÅLA.
5 Likes
Thank you very much for the review!
I think you’re the first reviewer to mention this connection! I think there’s something interesting to be said about the little rituals that the player and the player-character enact, and how following a script can imbue or rob meaning from a thing, but I never did quite figure out how to work that into the game. Sometime in the future perhaps…
5 Likes
Dr Ludwig and the Devil by SV Linwood
How did Ludwig ever attain his doctorate? Victor Frankenstein never graduated, being a failure at university for having too much interest in the likes of Agrippa and not enough in modern science. And Ludwig is a far more eccentric character than poor Victor ever was! To be sure, his other literary predecessor, Faust, was a bona fide doctor and university lecturer; but Faust would never have stooped to digging up bodies in the graveyard. Faust is more into… well, yes… come to think of it, Faust, the Goethe version that is, is one of the most bizarre and least summarisable books I’ve ever read, and thinking these thoughts makes me want to reread it. (Doesn’t Faust escape from the devil because Mephistopheles is momentarily distracted by sexy angel buttocks?)
Our Dr. Ludwig would never exclaim in such existential despair. He is a mad scientists of the early horror movie variety, here to bring corpses back to life, make deals with the devil, get rid of pitchfork-waving mobs, and, of course, laugh in the very face of God. I think we have to imagine this whole game being shot in black and white, perhaps German expressionist style.
Dr Ludwig and the Devil is a comic parser puzzler, and it is very good at what it does. The implementation is top-notch, not just from a technical perspective, but also in the sense that many non-necessary actions receive responses that are not merely appropriate, but funny. One feels at every point that the author had fun getting every possibly laugh out of the formula, and one cannot help but join in the fun. It helps that the tone is excellently chosen – mad scientists zaniness, yes, but incongruous daily life elements liberally mixed in – and that the writing is very strong. Here’s a paragraph from the opening text:
This is strong, but it’s the last line that makes it very strong; the perfectly executed contrast between the mad scientist prose and the all-too-quotidian and utilitarian “advancing the sum total of human knowledge” shows that we are in the hands of a writer we can trust. (If I want to be extremely critical, I’d say that you can advance human knowledge, but that you enlarge its sum total. But very few people would notice this in reading. I only noticed it after copy-pasting the passage to single it out for praise!)
Dr Ludwig turns out to be a surprisingly fun character to inhabit. Yes, he is a mad scientist willing to summon the devil, but he is also very human, feeling attracted to the unlettered, muscular, naive Hans (I somehow feel that their shared future will include Lederhosen) and being unwilling to damn his soul. He is also something of a trickster character, which the mad scientist usually is not. Not only does he manage to trick the devil several times, but – and this was an especially nice touch – he even cheats his way through the recipe, every single ingredient that he obtains fulfilling only the letter but never the spirit of the recipe. This presages how we deal with the devil’s contract.
At the end, Ludwig gets ‘a cookie of his own dough’, as we say in Dutch, when the devil starts using this trick against him.
But you can’t beat Ludwig at his own game.
I got stuck a few times with the puzzles, though I suppose I might have solved them myself with a bit more time. One hard spot seemed to be the place where I had to ask the devil about vacations, but this wasn’t even listed as a topic (even though I had already talked about vacations to the shopkeeper). I can easily imagine getting permanently stuck there.
Brian Rushton (Mathbrush) has a theory that IFComp is usually won by a smooth, comic parser game. On the basis of that theory, and even without it, Dr Ludwig seems a serious contender for this year’s prize, because it is exactly the kind of game that Brian is talking about. (I’ll just add the big caveat that there are few enough IFComp votes that random factors play a huge role in the final ranking.)
8 Likes
Hand Me Down by Brett Witty
In one important, though easily missable, note in the parser section of Hand Me Down, we find out that the protagonist’s dad thought that the best way to give new energy to his relationship with his wife was to take her to an escape room. He enjoyed himself, getting totally caught up in the experience, while she was not enjoying it at all – but he didn’t notice. Until she made him notice by exclaiming, loudly, the she wanted out. Out of the room. And out of the relationship. It’s hard not to sympathise with her, since her husband clearly had no idea what she needed and seemed singularly insensitive.
The reason that this note is important is that it exactly mirrors what happens in the game as a whole. The protagonist’s dad has made her a TADS3 computer game to show her his love, even though she is not into interactive fiction at all and would no doubt have preferred him to express his love in other ways. Pick-nicks maybe. Or talking. Or something that fitted her needs rather than his.
There’s a beautiful depth to the way this game is constructed. You are given a parser puzzlefest, yes. And the game clearly wants you, the player, to enjoy it. But at the same time it presents this game as your dad’s attempt to connect with you. And it clearly isn’t a great way for him to do that. I mean, it’s sweet. It’s the way he was able to express his love. It’s full of fun and jokes and invention – while the game suffers from some implementation problems, especially concerning disambiguation, it is really inventive and contains some good jokes, e.g., identifying the cheese. (It had to be cheese. This is itself is an interactive fiction joke that only old-timers would get, and therefore perfect for the dad. Explanation: Emily Short used to have a running gag about her love of cheese, including a scale on which games could be rated for how well they included cheese. And of course it’s also a Monty Python joke. This dad ticks all the boxes.) But, it’s also not very good as a vehicle of a father’s love. It’s not personal enough. It doesn’t really delve into the emotional stuff. It doesn’t really connect with you, as the person you are now, but only with memories of your childhood.
This is a difficult thing that Brett is trying to pull off! We’re supposed to understand both the success and the failure of the father’s attempts at connection, and then, in the frame story, we must get some kind of emotional pay-off. I’m not sure that that happened exactly. The fact that the parser games doesn’t delve into the real relationship is essential in portraying this relationship, but at the same time it means that we spend most of our time not getting new insight into the relationship… which lessens what emotional pay-off we might get. I fully agree with Mike Russo when he writes:
But, and I think Mike might well agree with this, it’s not really possible to do that! For if the father had created a game that was more emotionally resonant, he would not have been the father he is, and the protagonist would not have been in the situation she is in. Brett takes a gigantic artistic risk in giving his least emotionally mature character the reigns of the author for most of the game. I salute him for taking the risk, and for getting as far with it as he does. But it doesn’t quite succeed, and maybe it can’t fully succeed,
Nevertheless, Hand Me Down is a really interesting (and enjoyable) experiment, which I am glad to have played. And it certainly raises some questions that hit close to home for me; for a man who spends evenings behind his computer writing about the relation between Xanthippe and Socrates while God knows that his own relationship with his wife, in these intense years of having small children and demanding jobs, could certainly benefit from the application of more of his energy.
8 Likes
Wow! Thanks for the review. As much as authorial intent matters (it probably doesn’t), you’ve hit on some core stuff that I’m keen to talk about in my post mortem, but I’m leaving that until after the comp.
Thanks again, and thanks for all your dedicated work reviewing and entering the comp!
3 Likes
The Vambrace of Destiny by Arthur DiBianca
DiBianca is by now extremely well known as the author of streamlined puzzle games with limited command sets. The Vambrace of Destiny is no exception. I got exactly what I was expecting as I went into the game, but since I was expecting enjoyment, that’s not a bad thing.
DiBianca worlds tend to be relatively sparse, and his prose tends to be relatively terse and functional. Everything is made so that it will not detract from the puzzles; red herrings are not on the menu. That’s all true for The Vambrace of Destiny, except that it had one laugh-out-loud moment for me in the very beginning:
Zolmaskar did not know that we possess the Vambrace of Destiny, a Krotonian artifact that is fortunately small enough for you to wear. (Krotonians were quite large, but Destiny was the king’s young daughter.)
The point of this are the puzzles, and the puzzles are good. There are two main components to that. The first component is the well-timed progression of puzzle structure. First, we have single commands. Then, we get combinations of commands; we get timed bonuses that we must bring from another location; we get situations with state (that is, in which commands do not always do the same thing, depending on the exact turn in some sequence); we learn to teleport; and finally, we sneakily receive a verb-noun command, although it is implement as two separate verbs. The complexity keeps increasing, but never overwhelms.
The second component is that all puzzles have good cluing. By trying out different spells, you get subtle hints as to what might and what might not work. I managed to solve almost the entire game without hint, and the places where I used hints were basically just cases where I had forgotten about a glyph, or failed to notice something I could tag.
So, another classy game in Arthur’s ever-expanding oeuvre! I’m already looking forward to next year’s sequel, The Pauldron of Chastity.
8 Likes
Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses by Lacey Green
One thing I may never understand is that there are so many ChoiceScript games that allow you to first choose your own gender, and then choose the gender of potential romantic partners. I just don’t get the point. If the gender of the protagonist and/or their romantic partners are relevant to the story, then I’d like the writer to pick them for me and make sure the story works as intended. And if they are not relevant to the story, well, why am I being asked to make an irrelevant choice? (I suppose somebody could make a game that is intended to be replayed and in which you find out, during play, the difference between playing as a male or female, straight or gay character… but that would be a particular kind of game, and these games are usually not that.)
Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses is an extremely short game, and yet it still starts with a sequence in which I choose my gender and the gender of my love interests. Since the romance really doesn’t go anywhere, it almost seems like a parody of standard ChoiceScript practices, but there is little indication that it was meant that way.
Despite a rather large number of language errors, Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses shows some potential. The main character’s grim determination to find out who stole their glasses reminded me a lot of the main character of a German children’s book that is also popular in the Netherlands, Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat (translated into English as The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit). It’s about a mole who sticks his head out of his hole, and then somebody poops on it. So even though he is almost blind, he goes on a determined quest to find out which animal did that to him, because he’ll make them pay! It’s pretty funny.
Unfortunately, Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses seems unfinished. You can get back your glasses… by going to sleep. You can pursue two suspects, but one investigation starts of an interesting storyline that then just stops, and the other investigation goes nowhere. I tried several paths, which was made quite annoying by the fact that you have to click through the same introductory scene every time. Finally, I used the walkthrough, and it turns out that what you have to do to get your glasses back… makes absolutely no sense at all. There’s no logic to it. It’s just that if you happen to jump through certain hoops, a random event will occur that solves the case. Well, okay. It also turned out that many of the achievements have not been implemented yet. Having invested some energy in trying to solve the case, I felt a bit let down by the author.
6 Likes
Dick McButts Get Kicked in the Nuts by Hubert Janus
This was surprisingly fun, at least once I got past the first five minutes or so. The crude picture and sounds that played every time the protagonist got kicked in the nuts didn’t work for me. The text is actually far less crude than that, and once things got rolling, and the dead ends became fewer, I started to enjoy myself more. Sure, the idea of characters who are aware of their story has been done to death… but here it’s taken to such absurd extremes that it once again feels fresh. At one point in the game, you have to dial a machine up to eleven; but the game itself also dials everything up to eleven, and the author has the writing talent to deliver. The ending was even almost touching. Okay, who am I kidding. It wasn’t. But it was unexpected – to me, at least, though I guess I might have seen it coming – and entertaining.
Best kick in the nuts I’ve ever had.
7 Likes
HA HA!
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Citizen Makane by The Reverend
This is not a full review. Not because I didn’t like the game and/or have nothing to say about it, but because I do have something to say about it and maybe want to turn it into an article that ranges a bit wider than just Citizen Makane itself. It’s a very smooth parser game; there are a few smaller issues, especially concerning the card game, which becomes mechanical quickly (but it could be argued that that is the point); but mostly, the game is really good at engaging with the narcissistic logic of most depictions of sex in games, as well as in the larger world of porn. If you can handle a game that generates quite a lot of purposefully bad porn prose like this
then it’s recommended.
7 Likes
I haven’t played a lot of the big ChoiceScript works, but in the ones I have, it’s like building a character in a tabletop RPG: I come up with a character idea, build and customize them in the game (both in aesthetic things like name and mechanical things like the stats on their character sheet), then watch what they get up to. If I especially like the game I’ll replay it coming up with different characters each time and trying to make the choices they would make to see if I can make a cool story result.
So it’s relevant, to me, insofar as it gives me another knob to tweak to build my own character. I recently started replaying Night Road aiming to go 110% in on the toxic romance with the guy who’s using you as an unwitting test subject for his research, so it’s relevant (again, to me) that I’m playing this character as a trans woman who ended up unhealthily devoted to the man who offered her a way out from an unsupportive situation. This probably isn’t something the author specifically considered when writing it, but it’s the story I’m going to make. (I haven’t played the new Baldur’s Gate game but I think it has a similar appeal to a lot of tabletop gamers.) But that’s mostly for the big stories; I don’t think I’d find it as engaging for IFComp-sized pieces.
(I haven’t played Help! I Can’t Find My Glasses! yet, so this isn’t meant as a specific commentary on it.)
2 Likes
Thanks for the review! Looking forward to that article, if it happens
2 Likes
20 Exchange Place by Sol FC
So, you’re apparently the least competent hostage negotiator ever – at least, you don’t seem very competent in the game, constantly battling your nerves – and yet they let you plan the assault on the building, which is surely not your job. And then everything goes wrong… but is it your fault? Not really. It’s just the newspapers that will say it’s your fault. Tough luck, man, but who said life was fair?
This piece is a bit rough around the edges when it comes to things like prose polish, but I nevertheless enjoyed it for its chutzpah. Wanna smash up the report? Okay, smash up the reporter. Wanna go in through the roof guns blazing? Sure, that’s what we’ll do. Of course, most of it ends terribly… and that is where the trouble begins. This is a game that requires you to walk a very narrow path. That can be fine, but (a) with only save slot its a little harsh that you can lock yourself out of the good ending without noticing, and (b) finding the right path seems mostly a matter of luck. It’s not that careful thought and reading will show you why you have to do what you have to do. In fact, the best ending would be reached if you did absolutely nothing. Because it’s only when you act too soon that things are blown up and people die. Also, smoking a cigarette is essential to victory, something you can’t possibly know.
But I persevered, and I enjoyed going in Die Hard style… and then the ending was a bit disappointing (the robbers get away), but it also seemed to hint at more. It seems to hint at a greater mystery to unravel! How did they get away? Is there something I should have noticed? Did they [drum roll] exchange place with someone else? Is there a way to catch them? But I can’t come up with anything that makes sense. The bomb squad? (No.) The old lady? (No.) Or maybe they’re already gone by the time you arrive? (But no, someone opens the door for pizza, somebody kills a hostage if you phone.) Maybe they disguise themselves as hostages? (But surely those are all screened and their loot would be found.) Maybe you can phone them at the wrong moment, and then somebody’s phone goes off, and you know they are secretly the perpetrator? (No, you can’t actually do that.)
In the end, I just checked out the contents of the Javascript file. Friends, there is no better ending. You can pain your brains as much as you want, this game is always going to end sniggering at your incompetence. Which… okay, nobody said life was fair, but I suppose I’d like a little more fairness in my games?
6 Likes
Beat Witch by Robert Patten
Beat Witch has an intriguing opening which leads into an exciting and consistently unpredictable horror adventure. You don’t initially know what/where/why you are, only that you are in dire trouble. As soon as you think you’ve got a handle on this state of affairs, the state of affairs changes. And as soon as you think you’ve got a handle on the next state of affairs, that state of affairs changes as well. Though the game may be more linear than some players would like, it is great at pulling the rug out from under you time and time again, while also building up a complex set of rules about the witchcraft shenanigans that are going on.
Okay, that entire paragraph was stolen from Wade Clarke’s review of The Hours, with just a few changes to update it to Robert Patten’s new game. I don’t mean to imply that his two games are too similar (they are not), but Patten definitely has his own style, a breathless, linear, action-packed, inventive style. This style is pretty rare, so it’s good to see it return.
I really like the premise of Beat Witch. It takes a rather traditional vampire / teenage girl trope, but turns it into something fresh by making our beat witches mute and allergic to music. We also get both draining and life-giving powers. And then we are sent on a mad dash quest to destroy another beat witch, who has been killing people and wants us to take the blame.
It’s enjoyable, but it’s also extremely on rails. I’m not the only reviewer who wonders why this game is a parser game rather than a choice-based game. I think it would have worked better as a choice game; that would have allowed for more natural pushing in the right direction and less of a disconnect between the mode of input and the possibilities allowed us. The current game often hints very heavily at the one thing we have to do to advance the plot. And it is jarring how little it allows us to explore. We’re in a huge building, but we’re not allowed to go anywhere – and even though there is always a plot explanation for this, it’s still grating. In a choice-based game, this would have felt much more natural!
(After finishing the game, I suddenly wondered whether the title was a big joke and you could win the game by just typing ‘beat witch’ at every prompt. After all, that’s exactly what we have to do! That would have justified using a parser! Alas, no. Or maybe it’s for the better, because who, besides me, would have enjoyed that?)
Of course the other option is to allow us a little more room for exploration. The game might have actually benefited from that. The scenes are pretty intense, and some downtime looking through a few rooms, learning some details about ourselves and the setting, wouldn’t have been amiss. If anything, the game moves too fast, bringing us to climax after climax without really allowing us to get to know our character.
There’s some good stuff there! I liked the walkman (technology from when our character was ‘turned’) and the family backstory. But the game could have used more of it, or more ways for us to experience and maybe give shape to the inner life of the character, to set up more of an emotional resonance for the final scene. This is maybe also true for the villain. There were one or two great moment (like finding out that she has childishly molested our notepad), but there’s no emotional pay-off when we learn about her past.
Beat Witch is memorable, and I’m looking forward to the implied sequel… but I suggest taking it a little bit easy, and trusting the player a little bit more to veer off the intended path and then return to it.
6 Likes
Thanks for taking the time to play and review Beat Witch, Victor! I was hoping you’d get to share your thoughts on it.
I didn’t set out to constantly pull the rug out from under the player – it just happened … again! Sigh. 
As far as why I chose a parser and why the game kept up such a high pace – other reviewers have noted those things too, and I think it’s best that I address those observations in the post-mortem. For now, all I can say is that these choices were deliberate, though perhaps not the wisest. And you’re onto something about the “big joke” …
I’m glad someone noticed the pun in the title! And that’s a great idea about adding beat witch as a command. I doubt you would be the only person to try it. Maybe in the post-comp release …
(It occurred to me after the comp started that a different, fatalistic title might have helped players know what kind of experience to expect, such as Polly Miller Must Die.)
Again, I’m really appreciative of this review. Next time, I’ll give you a little more breathing room. I look forward to surprising you and putting you in dire trouble again!
4 Likes
I don’t know how Wade meant it, but I didn’t read ‘pulling the rug’ as negative. It’s more like, wow, okay, what’s happening now? Which is surely part of the charm!
By the way, I noticed in another review that there extra background information if you type ABOUT. But unless I missed it, the game never suggested that command to me. I went back and read it, and it would be a shame to have missed it.
2 Likes
I don’t view the rug-pulling as negative in itself – in fact, I get a kick out of doing it! But as an overly sensitive writer, I do get worried people will think I can only write one way. I’m probably overthinking it.
Oh my! I thought I had mentioned the bonus material at the beginning of the game! Thank you! I’ll add that mention in the next release. It would be a pity for people to miss out on Emlyn Berlin’s words of beat witch hate …
2 Likes
My Brother; The Parasite by qrowscant
I went into this game with one extremely important question burning in my mind: why the semicolon? ‘My brother, the parasite’ – sure. ‘My brother; or, The parasite’ – absolutely. ‘My brother: the parasite’ – could work. But a semicolon? So I was happy to find out that the semicolon is the perfect, indeed the only correct, choice. It’s such a weirdly ambiguous punctuation mark, used when somehow, two phrases are neither independent sentences, nor the same sentence. And that is exactly the relation between the brother and the parasite. Who are we talking to? What do his (its?) words mean? What can we expect it (him?) to still mean to us?
My Brother; The Parasite explores the relationship between a sister and a brother at a very meaningful moment: just after the brother’s death. The twist is that a neural parasite in the brother’s brain allows his to keep communicating for a while – if it is still him – and so this is the last chance for closure for these two characters. In some ways, this is not so different from my own entry, Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates! But qrowscant’s piece is much, much darker. Xanthippe and Socrates have their problems, sure, but they are coming from a place of genuine love and respect. Ines and her brother, on the other hand, have a history of frequent, long-lasting and extreme abuse, both physical and emotional.
There’s not going to be any closure. That’s for sure. There wouldn’t be closure, or forgiveness, or anything in that area, if the brother were still alive. And there sure as hell isn’t going to be closure, or forgiveness, or anything in that area, when we are talking to an inhuman parasite instead of the living being that hurt us all those years ago. Ines is doomed from the start, doomed to remain with all of her emotions, all of her memories, just as unresolved and unbearable as they have always been. This is what the set-up requires. And it is, quite properly, what qrowscant gives us.
To me, the piece would have been significantly stronger if it had focused more relentlessly on this: on the abuse, Ines’ need for closure, and the impossibility of getting it. Of course that is a main theme, even the main theme, of the work. But it gets diluted somewhat by other concerns, such as rivalry for their mother’s love, resentment about one or the other leaving the house for a prolonged time, horror tropes, and, at the level of the player, a struggle to piece together what the backstory of the characters actually is. Some of it felt extraneous to the main concerns. And some of it made me less able to get into the game emotionally. This may just be me, but I felt that the extremely graphic scene at the end was far less effective at driving home the emotional point than the earlier scene in which Ines is simply sitting alone in her hotel room. Suddenly I’m not feeling the sadness and loneliness, but I’m being grossed out by the fact that she has rotting brains all over her hands. Yuck.
I’ve read some reviews where the game seemed to really click with the reviewer, so my own experience may be idiosyncratic. But I’d like qrowscant to be more confident about the ability of their own scenario to pull the emotional strings. Flashing texts, weird colour schemes, body horror, escaped monsters, scary pictures – it felt a bit heavy-handed when a lighter touch would have done more justice to the soul of Ines.
Maybe this review sounds critical, but I can be this critical only because My Brother; The Parasite gives me intense and interesting stuff to be critical about. I love what the author is aiming for, and am looking forward to the sequels(?) that seem to be promised.
4 Likes