Wolfbiter reviews IFComp 2024 - latest: Eikas; wrap-up

[wolfbiter]

I really enjoyed reviewing a bunch of IFComp games last year, excited to be back and see how many I can do this year.

An early thanks to all of the authors who poured their phlegm, spit, and milk into games this year (I see you, less-commonly-mentioned bodily fluids). This is a really special event and it only exists because of you.

A few introductory notes:

• I love it when people interact with my posts, so if something I say sparks a thought please do not hesitate to come in here and post. More opinions! I live for them!
• I blur egregious and specific spoilers, but generalized spoilers are unmarked. The assumed audience for these reviews is people who have already played the game.
  • (With the slight exception that, under “gameplay tips” I will occasionally give spoilered hints for games with no built-in hints/walkthrough if there is a part that struck me as likely to cause problems. This is obviously not the ideal location to be seen by anyone who is stuck, but I have yet to think of a better one.) (Off topic, but I was today years old when I figured out how to make a second level of bullet points in discourse.)
• Authors: if I dislike some element of your game, be reassured that I speak for a highly peculiar constituency of one.

I’ve mentioned before that I think the “front matter” (here meaning title, subheading, blurb, tags, and cover art) can be neglected. It’s the game’s first impression, and it may be the only part of the game that some people ever see. Bait the trap! Prime the pump! For people who go on to play the game, help them get in the right frame of mind to have a good experience. (I put a decent amount of effort into being receptive to whatever experience a game wants to give me, but it’s a lot harder when the front matter is not giving clear cues.) So I have reserved some space this year in my review template to discuss the front matter. (Not in terms of separate artistic merit—I don’t care if the cover art is a stock photo—but in terms of how successfully the front matter conveys a flavor of the experience of the game.)

No reviews today, I need to build up a buffer, but be back soon.

Contents

198BREW by DWaM

A Death in Hyperspace by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Nacarat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
A Dream Of Silence: Act 3 by Abigail Corfman
A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric by Ola Hansson
A Very Strong Gland by Arthur DiBianca
A Warm Reception by Hetzel

An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There by Mandy Benanav
Awakened Deeply by R.A. Cooper

Bad Beer by Vivienne Dunstan
Big Fish by Binggang Zhuo
Birding in Pope Lick Park by Eric Lathrop
Breakfast in the Dolomites by Roberto Ceccarelli
Bureau of Strange Happenings by Phil Riley

Campfire by loreKin
Civil Service by Helen L Liston
Deliquescence by Not-Only But-Also Riley
Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain by jkj yuio
Dust by IkeC

Eikas by Lauren O’Donoghue

Final Call by doq and Emily S
First Contact by dott. Piergiorgio
Focal Shift by Fred Snyder
Forbidden Lore by Alex Crossley
Forsaken Denizen by C.E.J. Pacian

Hebe by Marina Diagourta
Hildy by J. Michael
House of Wolves by Shruti Deo

Imprimatura by Elizabeth Ballou

KING OF XANADU by MACHINES UNDERNEATH

LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD

Metallic Red by Riaz Moola
Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People by Felicity_Banks
Miss Gosling’s Last Case by Daniel M. Stelzer

Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value by Damon L. Wakes

Redjackets by Anna C. Webster
ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by Hubert Janus

Sidekick by Charles Moore
String Theory by W Pzinski

The Apothecary’s Assistant by Allyson Gray
The Bat by Chandler Groover
The Curse by Rob
The Den by Ben Jackson
The Deserter by MemoryCanyon
The Dragon of Silverton Mine by Vukasin Davic
The Garbage of the Future by AM Ruf
The Master’s Lair by Stefan Hoffman
The Maze Gallery by Cryptic Conservatory
The Killings in Wasacona by Steve Kollmansberger
The Lost Artist: Prologue by Alejandro Ruiz del Sol, co-written by Martina Oyhenard
The Saltcast Adventure by Beth Carpenter
The Shyler Project by Bez
The Triskelion Affair by Clyde Falsoon

Traffic by D.S. Yu
Turn Right by Dee Cooke

Uninteractive Fiction by Leah Thargic
Unreal People by Viwoo

Verses by Kit Riemer

Welcome to the Universe by Colton Olds
When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves by Michael Baltes
Where Nothing Is Ever Named by Viktor Sobol
Why Pout? by Andrew Schultz
Winter-Over by Emery Joyce, co-written by N. Cormier

Yancy At The End Of The World! by Bez
You by Carter X Gwertzman
You Can’t Save Her by Sarah Mak

[orion_nebula (Chloe)]

Hi Wolfbiter! Looking forward to reading your reviews!

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games ft. dicks

ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by Hubert Janus
Playtime: 15 minutes

The one that’s: the spiritual (and literal?) successor to last year’s DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, right down to the visual styling and sound effects. (Perhaps without the most err . . . controversial element of that game?).

I spent a while ruminating on the significance of the lexical shift between games:

Dick (penis) McButts (butt) gets kicked in the nuts (testicles) → Rod (penis) McSchlong (penis) gets punched in dong (penis)

but I got nothing. Possibly I am overthinking the dick jokes.

This game has a lot of the same strengths as Dick McButts, including a lot of callbacks to the same plot beats:

1. Funny, bonkers writing that builds its own momentum
2. Vivid attention to the specific details physical reality (i.e., re: difficulties in running on a sushi conveyor belt “to risk the toe of a shoe suddenly scuffing up against the surrounding bartop”)
3. lovingly crafted absurd scenarios

“Oh my God!” yells a teenage girl in some kind of fake-fur-heavy cosplay. “It’s the Sewer Squirrels!” . . . “They’re so cute with all their diseases!”

4. The visual and audio style is crisp and bold. (A quibble—while undo is implemented and useful, for some reason undo often took me back several screens before where I wanted to be.)

My criticisms were two, one serious and one less:

1. One thing I enjoyed about Dick McButts was that it was unafraid to go balls to the wall. Also I recently learned that the etymology of “balls to the wall” is unrelated to human biology. balls to the wall - Wiktionary, the free dictionary. This is a shorter, less expansive game than Dick McButts, and certainly it doesn’t drag, but it lacked a certain ambition. Perhaps this is just me grading harder now that Dick McButts explored this territory already, but alas, that is the curse of the sequel—the demanding audience expects game 2 to top game 1.
2. OK, really, the player character cannot conceive of wearing an athletic cup OVER HIS PANTS??

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

I don’t think I mentioned this last year, but I quite enjoyed the cover art for Dick McButts. It’s kinetic and punchy! It very much gets the point across! Same applies here.

Overall funny and entertaining while it lasted, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. But I’m not sure it has a lot to add to Dick McButts.

[wolfbiter]

LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
Playtime: 2 hours (ran out of time, did not reach an ending)
(I see there’s been an update, this was one of my firsts so I was probably playing before the update.)

The one where: L, a trans man, has a few sexual awakenings, enters the kink scene, and works some things out about his relationships

The player character, L, has a very distinctively sketched voice. He’s a believable and specific character. This is great! He’s also intensely inside his own head, nearly paralyzed by social anxiety, and carrying around a double serving of self-loathing:

“The world’s least fuckable woman-shaped man”

“I barely look the driver in the eyes while my card touches the reader. It always takes a second longer than everyone else’s . . .”

“I don’t drink just because I didn’t have friends back then and I was never introduced to it.”

And he’s got at least a single serving of somewhat unweathered-by-experience views of the world. (racism is OK if it’s against a country that was a colonizer, masturbating to a nonsexual youtube video would “hurt others”)

(And this may not be an issue for most people, but I very much noticed that there is no way to copy-paste text out of the game. Therefore be aware that the pull quotes were PAINSTAKINGLY TYPED BY ME.)

I’ll be honest, I went on a bit of a journey on how I felt about L.

For a good chunk at the beginning, I found him well-written, but also it was exhausting and unpleasant to spend so much time inside his head. But by around the forty-minute mark, approaching the end of Act I (“Latex,”) I came to enjoy him more. His internal dialogue has pretty funny moments:

re: the hairstylist “If I say no I could incur the wrath of someone who in one move could turn me from teenage boy into depressed lesbian.”

And more to the point, I got the sense that I was supposed to be feeling some frustration and exhaustion. L is young, he’s been in a bit of a rut, he’s having a lot of experiences that are new. And I’m certainly not gonna knock anything with the message “maybe avoid having all of your interactions with other people be in online echo chambers.”

And his characterization helps the story being told. In Act I, at least, L is getting his fantasy (which he lampshades early on) of being ushered into a sexy new universe of meat-world people who share his kinks. (Also the fantasy of losing one’s virginity to one’s crush in an intensely pleasurable experience involving multiple orgasms.) And that fantasy tastes even sweeter because of how much time we’ve spent with L’s self-loathing and social anxiety. The lower the pit, the higher the climb. (Still workshopping that one).

The writing was a highpoint throughout. It’s not afraid to get a bit grimy. The selected vignettes are highly specific and vivid. It’s effective at conveying L’s feelings of alienation and anxiety. The background illustrations are also pleasingly moody and atmospheric.

I would have liked to have more to do as a player. This is very much on the “akin to reading a novel” side of the spectrum–I checked my timer when I first got offered a choice, and it was 10 minutes in. (This didn’t really fit anywhere, but the emphasis on how fat and “disgusting” Gestirn is during the dream sequence struck an off note with me.)

I have two main beefs and they’re related.

(1) There was more online discourse than I wanted. The tumblr call-out posts were pitch perfect (possibly they were actual tumblrs? I didn’t check), and the discord-server drama was also very plausible. But I very much did not want to be reading that much of it, and I don’t think I needed that much to get the point for story purposes. There were long sections in Acts 3 and 4 where I was pretty much clicking through as fast as I could. (Which occasionally made me miss the last paragraph on a page when the screen re-set, although I think this is really a content issue and not a UI issue because if I had been clicking at a normal rate it would not have happened.)

(2) The entire game could also have been shorter. For an event with a two-hour play limit, it’s helpful if people can complete the game within two hours. Honestly, I think that’s more necessary for interactive-novel type games than games with more of a puzzle focus. If the thing that I’m invested in is the plot, then I really want to know how the plot ends. Here, for example, I’m pretty curious if Val is going to continue to be a 100% helpful kink shepherd, or if there’s a twist coming.

Particularly, in this game, one thing I was really enjoying was how the game would present an idea uncritically and then subvert it later. (i.e., L reading a bunch of tumblr posts about whether people should identify as “bi lesbians,” and then meeting Artemis, L feeling that Val[erie] was giving him nasty looks because of transphobia, but Val actually comes out with a protective speech about how the group should stop treating L as one of the girls [ETA: see comment below from author–sounds like I remembered this scene wrong, so no improvement for Val]).

Those complications and reversal were very effective, but the downside is that since I’m keeping a lot of curiosity and space open for twists in the last sections of the game, my experience really doesn’t feel complete. (And I never found out if my prediction that there was going to be a sixth act for the sextuple L was correct.) So some tightening might make it possible to complete the game in 2 hours, which would be nice.

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

Overall, compelling, raw writing meets a satisfying story, although it dearly left me wishing I could finish in two hours . . .

Gameplay tips / typos

• I took me a long time to realize that the youtube links are real. Hey. The youtube links are real.

• “Masterbated” should be “masturbated” in the section about ASMR experiment videos

[THEBLOOD_2024]

Your review is appreciated. The typo has been caught for the next update.

In regards to L commenting on Gestirn’s weight: This was an attempt to pull on a thread that is very pervasive in transmasculine spaces, that being skinny is an inherent trait to passing, and to a larger extent being taken seriously as a man. It’s also why there’s reference to the rassaku net guide. However, even when writing it, we felt like this didn’t come across and just felt like a mean jab with no context. The deadline was quite close and we were unsure how to fully resolve it. We ultimately decided to publish the story in its current state for feedback, rather than cutting the thread entirely, and see if others picked up on it. In the definitive edition, we’re hoping to expand this by bringing the focus back to L and how this belief has negative impacts on his self image, so his cruelty at Gestirn’s weight is now seen as a projection in the framing that it’s a wholly negative belief, both for those who hold it and those that are perceived under it. Your comment has been very useful in this regard.

There’s one thing I need an answer on. Valerie, at no point, is given any sort of redemption. She is introduced as a TERF, takes every opportunity to make L uncomfortable about his newly-visible manhood, deadnames him, directly tells him that he should go back in the closet and reduce himself to a state where he wanted to kill himself, and after claiming she does charity work “for women” gets outed for lying, then is never seen again. I’m genuinely concerned how you see her as a redeemed figure. Are you getting some names confused?

Cheers,
– THE BLOOD

[wolfbiter]

Oops, I definitely could have swapped the names in my head or swapped who says what. I also may just have not interpreted it in the way you expected. I don’t have a transcript so I can’t go back and check.

what I was going off of: to my recollection, at the lingerie shop, there’s a bit near the end where Val verbalizes what L had thought when he first got invited–that it was kind of thoughtless to invite him to a “girls event” buying lingerie because he is a man. As I recalled after that, Sarah (? whoever invited L) deadnamed him and said some terrible stuff, including that she had lied about the reason for the event because she wanted to get the group back together, and that she had hoped inviting L lingerie shopping would help him “remember how he used to be” or something (implying that she never thought his transition was genuine and blamed COVID, maybe?). The lingerie shop is the only scene I played with those characters.

Since it sounds like I was wrong about what happens in that scene, I went back and corrected my review.

I don’t mind people telling me if I got something wrong. The “need an answer” and “concerned” in your reply felt a bit more personal than I want get in this space, though. I’m writing about reactions I have to games–I don’t make judgments about the authors and I hope folks give me the same courtesy. (Sorry if I’m reading that more aggressively than you meant it, it’s hard on the internet.)

[THEBLOOD_2024]

The concern was about how I’d written the scene that could cause confusion of who’s who, not your reaction. Thanks for the reply.

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

@wolfbiter

I recently learned that the etymology of “balls to the wall” is unrelated to human biology.

I get it generally means “all in” like if you were needing to plug a hole in the dam using your genitals, you wouldn’t just go in halfway to save the population of your entire down-stream village…you’d go balls to the wall… and make sure no water gets through…

I’ll be over here on the naughty step as usual…

[jkj_yuio]

someone told me it was about flying a Spitfire. But maybe that was just “balls” ?

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games ft. phones

Final Call by doq and Emily S
Playtime: 24 minutes

The one where: a plan to rob a casino results in unsettling horror /exploration

This game is a solid, short, somewhat basic game. It’s got a horror feeling, an enjoyably creepy location to explore, and a light puzzle. There are some rough edges remaining that could be sanded off.

The puzzle is light but I had fun. There’s multiple endings that do reflect something about the PC’s choices. The horror mood was evoked well (I particularly enjoyed breaking the mirror).

The game provides a helpful pane on the left. It was nice that it collected clues, although honestly it’s not the type of game where you’re going to need a lot of assistance.

The rough edges in question:

• descriptions could use maybe one more editing pass (two descriptions of the air in a row: “The air fills with electronic dings, buzzes, and overall chatter from the patrons here. The air is heavy and slightly disorienting.”)
• occasionally inconsistent tone (I was surprised when the PC’s reaction to inspecting a dead body was “sweet,” even if the body did contain a clue)
• the input system for the puzzle was a bit temperamental (I very much appreciate the in-game note that the answers are case sensitive. But perhaps even better would be just not making it case sensitive in the first place, and also accepting the clues in any order?)

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

The front matter is in the right ballpark, but I think instead of (or in addition to) “thriller” it would be nice to convey that it’s in the horror genre—or as the game says “some psycho Saw shit.” Drinking in the creepy atmosphere is one of the pleasures of the game, so let people know that.

Overall, the bones are here, and I had a good time. I would be curious to play a next game / expanded game by these folks.

Gameplay tips / typos

• Most of the rooms get names after you visit once, but “room 5” never changes to “janitor closet”

[wolfbiter]

198BREW by DWaM
Playtime: 45 minutes

The one where: your attempts to settle into [redacted horror plot beats] are thwarted by lack of coffee

This game is somewhat like being dropped into one episode of a TV show you’ve never seen before. The show clearly has a fascinating premise, and the details you get about the world are highly unsettling, but also when the plot of that episode is over you’re out and you’re never going to fully understand what was going on.

It has puzzles, but it’s not about them, is what I’m saying; it’s about wandering around picking up the creepy little worldbuilding nuggets being delivered through the environment. I really enjoyed that aspect:

“The fridge is well-stocked. In the corners you can still make out the faintest traces of still-fresh blood.”

At the end of the game, I sure hope that the barista solved his time loop problem but I’ll never know. Will the choice I made help people / cause problems / damn me? Also never know!

On the less-than-ideal side, there was quite a few nouns that I would expect to be implemented, but were not:

In the corner of your eye, you can see a trembling cameraman clutching the tripod. It’s hard to tell if he’s merely holding it or holding onto it. Whether because of his job or because of his actual beliefs, he seems to be the one most attentive to the actual speaker, occasionally nodding along. Strange, given the pendant around his neck. He’s a member of the Church. . . .

>x pendant
You can’t see any such thing.

>x bowl
The round pink bowl, still half-filled with dry cat food, has “Colin” written on its side. He’d stopped eating right around when Fiona went away. The vet said he couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Perhaps he simply didn’t like you enough to keep on living?

>eat cat food
You can’t see any such thing.

I did get pretty stuck at one point, (turns out I was playing guess the verb, but I didn’t realize that at the time), but thankfully there is a walkthrough. I do like it when hints / walkthroughs are provided–I need them a fair amount of the time and the rest of the time it’s still nice to know I have the option.

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

The title “198BREW” doesn’t particularly conjure anything for me.* The cover art is cute (independently, I like it!) but it didn’t give me a correct expectation about the game (having finished the game, I think the cover art depicts the derelict golem from the lake in the park? But that’s basically scenery). The blurb fills in some of these gaps—it hits the high points that there’s going to be immortals and mysteries and a fair amount of dead things, but it jumps right from prosaic description that could describe our world (she went away, buried the cat, coffee) to a blandly high level of generality (immortals, fanatics, robots). What I didn’t get from the front matter was any sense of the uncanny / portentous mood of the game (which is chock full of lines like “It’s a hypnotic tune, downright mesmerizing – and almost never-ending. Like the worst kind of goodbyes.”)

* (OK, after I initially drafted this I woke up thinking “wait, is the title a riff on 1984?” So I have gone from 0 theories to 1 theory, I guess)

Overall, an engaging visit to a well-written and unsettling world

Gameplay tips / typos

• Although the game prompts you to mostly talk to NPCs with the “ask ___ about ___” format, IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE to use “talk to ____.” This caused me great annoyance at one point, so save yourselves.

198BREW wolfbiter transcript - Copy.txt (143.7 KB)

[JoshGrams]

@wolfbiter

I have reserved some space this year in my review template to discuss the front matter.

Nice! Sam Kabo-Ashwell had several years where he reviewed only the front matter and his comments were always insightful…

[wolfbiter]

Oh good pointer! I had seen folks this year reviewing just the front matter but didn’t know the history

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games ft. zombies / ghouls

Yancy At The End Of The World! by Bez
Playtime: 1 hour 23 minutes

The one with: a “cozy” zombie apocalypse and an high-school-buddies’-creative-pursuits discord server

I enjoyed seeing the art, and it helped flesh out the game. The MS-paint style images for Yancy’s photos were bold and energetic. Seeing the art created by the other discord-server characters helped with versimilitude and immersion—somehow seeing their different art really put over the top that these were different people with different lives going on. The papercraft one was great!

I liked how quickly and efficiently the game set up the central premise (people are turning into zombies and also Yancy is getting into photography). Yes, let’s geaux! And I was a big fan of the overall theme, which I read as something about giving yourself permission to chase the dreams you had as a child (I just find this to be a very healing topic, yes, you have to accept your child self and recognizing that they were worthy of care etc., including care from yourself), and something about the importance of making art even even in the face of the apocalypse (echoes of Station Eleven, etc.).

Some of the choices the game made were unexpected in a good way for me, i.e., the time skip ahead about zombie rights, the plot with your mom.

There were also elements that I bounced off a bit.

• choice of zombie apocalypse as plot element

I went through a few phases on this one. My initial reaction was surprise at how little the characters tried to do anything to help with the zombies (stockpile food, do scientific research, take precautions against transmitting it, etc.).

Later, I realized that (I think) this is intentional: the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for world-threatening problems that individuals can’t fix themselves, like climate change or global thermonuclear war. On that reading it makes sense that the game is focusing on questions about how we should live our lives sort of in the shadow of these terrible problems, instead of focusing on concrete steps to fix things. That’s certainly a theme worth exploring, and some of the bits from that direction were landing for me:

yancydrewmysteries (Yancy): And I feel like a lot of people are doing that, because society is still functioning as normal, for the most part. Nobody wants to admit that things are very, very wrong right now. And that makes it harder to talk about.
yancydrewmysteries (Yancy): I wish I was like Babbit, my pet, oblvious to the goings-on of the world aside from food, water, and scritches. But I’m not. I’m a person. And I can see everything.

That said, I’m not sure if that choice was totally successful. People you know turning into zombies still seems like it would call for an individual-level response. People’s brothers in the game are becoming zombies, but they’re not talking about how it spreads, etc?.

• dialogue

The characters from the discord server talk with what struck me as an unrealistic amount of self-awareness and emotional competency for people dealing with a zombie apocalypse:

lazthedad (Laz): I understand both of your anxieties so well. I’m trying to stay optimistic but I’ll admit that I’m scared too, mainly for my daughter.
lazthedad (Laz): I don’t want her to grow up in a broken, destroyed world. That’s got to be so traumatic for a kid.
lazthedad (Laz): I’m trying to make sure she’s able to talk to me about how she’s feeling, I’ve always aimed for this household to be one where she can share her emotions freely, and express them in a productive way.

[about how zombie apocalypse is going]
ARTEMIS: I’m doing ok! My girlfriend Leah and I have been basically holing up in the house together. It’s a good thing we both work from home, because it’s not much different from our normal routine (laughs). We’re both trying to stay communitive about the whole, uh, zombie thing, and talk about how it’s affecting us.
NEKONI: That’s really smart.
LAZ: Yeah, you’re crushing it as usual, Artemis.
BECK: I agree with that, haha.
RAINER: Hell yeah girl, good job!

I’m sure this approach will hit in a satisfying way for some people, but it’s just not my personal preference. I found it a bit immersion-breaking and it felt like conflict / emotional reactions were being papered over. Relatedly, the characters dodged some conflicts that I expected to come up—for example, I was really curious if there was going to be any reckoning about the fact that apparently Yancy ghosted Nekoni when Yancy went to college (the two were best friends, but Yancy changed all of their socials and didn’t tell her the new ones). Regardless of Yancy’s reasons it was probably still pretty rough for Nekoni to get radio silence from her best friend, no? That seems like a fascinating topic for them to discuss, but in actuality it never comes up and Nekoni just immediately starts calling Yancy “bestie” again once they reconnect.

• other

I would have liked if there was more for me to do in the game as the player. Some of the offered dialogue choices were very similar, which makes them feel not much like choices:

[options after hearing about someone’s podcast]
yancydrewmysteries: It’s certainly interesting! [OR]
yancydrewmysteries: It sounds like you’re super passionate about it!

And there was a few things I really wanted to do that just weren’t options (walk out on my mom after she refused to correctly gender me, not talk to the snail guy who wanted to be left alone).

Finally, there were a few technical issues. I was playing the downloaded version in Firefox on September 3. The audio and visual elements didn’t seem to be loading correctly. The images all looked like broken links. I managed to view the images by checking which file name the game was calling for and then opening that separately from the downloaded folder. I did miss out on the audio (although I am not the biggest fan of audio as a format, I frequently play things on mute, so I didn’t feel that too much).

Also, the conversations didn’t seem to update based on the game timer. In other words, if I waited six months in game to talk to someone for the first time, the dialogue still seemed to be set as if I had messaged them when the zombie apocalypse first started. For example, I DM-ed the guy who just announced in all chat that his brother was a zombie—thinking maybe I could offer him some emotional support—but there was no option to talk about that, instead we talked about our high school relationship and how he had been rude to me when I joined the server.

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

Overall, this is an ambitious game, with a compelling concept and high-level theme. It attempts a lot of interesting multimedia elements, although the implementation of those is rough. This game connected with me emotionally and spurred a lot of thoughts.

[wolfbiter]

Hildy by J. Michael
Playtime: 2 hours (ran out of time, did not reach an ending)
Going on vibes, I would estimate I had maybe another half-hour of game left when I stopped.

The one where: an apprentice enchantress fights evil in a derelict underground mall

The writing in this game is delightful. It’s got a lot of good humor writing, and footnotes that provide additional commentary:

Your Pajama Party Barbarian doll was a gift from your parents for your sixth birthday. When you opened it, your father remarked that it must not have been easy for its creators to blend the innocence of a teenaged slumber party attendee with the lust for vengeance of a bloodthirsty barbarian in one little face [fn: Your father must have grown up around very different teenage girls than the ones from your middle school.]

Other highlights include the chance to give a robot a pirate personality, and one of the funniest in-game explanations for why there is no inventory limit:

[equipping an item] “A brief tingling sensation starts in your palms and creeps up to your shoulders. When it passes, you feel…different. It’s hard to explain. Your body looks completely normal, but you now feel as if you have one hundred arms. “

I also enjoyed the setting and the characters a lot. I was ride-or-die about Hildy from the first scene, where she’s in trouble for killing a cave troll by teleporting herself into its stomach (although regrettably, she was played the rest of the game by me, which lent itself somewhat less to badassity). The magic system was convenient and easy to use (and the error messages when you use a spell on an invalid target were good about clueing the intended use). It’s mentioned in the blurb that it’s set in the Zork universe, which meant very little me, but there you have it.

Everything is just well-coded and works smoothly. I didn’t notice any implementation issues. The puzzles are fair and not too fiddly (although some of them require an intense level of attention to detail and recall). A few of the puzzles in particular were real bangers (the one with the chalk and the one with the unusual machine).

And I love it when a puzzle game starts with an easy opening sequence. Give the player some wins, build rapport between the author and player, bank some trust for when the going gets tough later.

There is also a robust and well-sequenced hint system, and a full walkthrough available. I definitely used both. (I needed the walkthrough once when the hints mentioned an item I had missed so completely I had no idea where to look for it.)

The main area for improvement that I saw—and this is very much offered in the spirit of “well it would be EVEN BETTER if”—is something other than hints to help the player know what area to work on / if they have done the prerequisites for a puzzle. It’s a decently large map and the puzzles intertwine. It’s also possible in a few places to mistakenly think you have completed an area, to pretty rough results (for example, I did the bathroom and went through the abyss before fighting the ghoul near the beginning, so I lacked the fabric fixing spell. Without that spell, the fabric scraps in the abyss just seemed like scenery [and there were other plot relevant items there] so I didn’t prioritize grabbing them and the game teleported me out. It was quite hard to figure out that’s what I was missing . . .).

I’ve played a few games that had some system to hint to you where you should go (or gated the player out of some areas they couldn’t complete yet) and that would have been a nice quality of life feature to have.

What happened to me instead was that I felt like I did a fair bit on my own, but using the hints to get the last 30% was a bit of a slog. In a smart move, the hints are well-structured to tell you “well make sure you completed x and y before you try this,” but that still requires toggling back and forth between the hint pages for a bunch of locations to try to figure out which one hasn’t been completed.

Finally, in a minor note, the game shows available exits in the header, which I love, but occasionally same exit is listed multiple ways (i.e., “up” and “east” are synonymous and both take you out of the bathing room). That makes it harder to keep track of whether I have taken all exits, so I would prefer if it were just listed one way.

(I’m attaching a partial transcript—it could be user error but I seem to frequently mess up transcripts by saving and restoring. Anyhow, this one is not the complete 2 hours, but starts after I used the hints to cross the bridge and ends when I was about to do a lot of hint reading to see what I missed.)

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

So, I felt a bit conflicted about this one. I think the blurb, title, and tags are all great and gave me the right idea. I like the cover art as an independent work (it’s kinetic and has kind of a “cool” vibe that fits the character), but to me the pink grid, black sillouette, and pink glow at the horizon all read as sci-fi or spy (maybe she’s in a Mission Impossible movie), not fantasy.

Overall, I had a very good time. A fun, smoothly coded puzzler with engaging characters and settings. The puzzles range in difficulty and require a lot of complex sequencing. I am looking forward to coming back and finishing after the comp, would definitely recommend for those who puzzle.
Hildy wolfbiter partial transcript - Copy.txt (125.0 KB)

[wolfbiter]

Campfire by loreKin
Playtime: 19 minutes

The one that’s: a camping simulator

I have looked deep within myself and realized that I like it in games when you get to shop with a limited amount of money. And hey, you get to do that in this game!

A reasonably successful camping simulator, with some roughness in the implementation.

The text styling is simple and uncluttered, and the overall writing creates an appropriately meditative feeling. It was satisfying to choose among the activities, and to see the results of your shopping choices reflected later (what activities are available, what foods you can eat, etc.). I half-expected fishing to be, in the way of my people, a separate minigame of unreasonable difficulty, but that is not the case.

I liked all of the touches that made things feel low stakes—for example, even if you don’t shop, you will still bring food so you’re not going to go hungry. Although I’m a big fan of text, I do wonder if soothing music or a background illustration would fit the objectives here.

And there’s a bit more going on than is immediately apparent—I had to restart (err, popcorn, as mentioned later) and learned that the weather is randomized, and there’s different workplace openings at different workplaces. I preferred the shorter workplace sequences—if the goal is to deliver a relaxing and decompressing experience, people probably don’t need to be reminded so much about work.

Some of the implementation wonkiness I noticed (from the game-specific thread, it sound like some of these have been patched since my playthrough):

• each store during shopping can only be visited once, and if you choose home first you can’t visit any stores. This is fine as far as it goes but might be nice to flag for people before they start (and does mean people have to replay if they want to really optimize their spend)
• as others have noted, on the second day, the number of acitivties I could do counted up instead of down
• when I made popcorn it broke the game (screen with no links to click), I had to restart

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

The cover art, title, and most of the blurb were perfectly fine and did a good job conveying that the game was a camping simulator. No shade on any of that.

But the blurb also contained a self-deprecating note. You made a whole game and you’re sharing it with us for free! You don’t owe anyone any apologies! Sail on in and demand that we play it with confidence! (But in all seriousness, really, don’t open by running yourself down. It could discourage some people from playing the game at all [if the author doesn’t like it, why should they bother] and it gives the rest of us a weird conflicted feeling.)

Overall, delivered what was on the tin.

Gameplay tips / typos

• “endevors” should be “endeavors” in the description after shopping at the market

[wolfbiter]

You by Carter X Gwertzman
Playtime: 33 minutes

The one where: you search for pronouns in the woods

This game has a pleasing fable-like atmosphere, with talking animals giving you quests and supernatural elements. I did enjoy helping the goat and crow complete their ritually-obligated nuptials. The central theme is the PC’s alienation / loss of sense of identity.

The game offered accessibility options at the start, which I didn’t take, although I did almost wish I had later (the text color used for the word “snake” matched the background color too closely in same places, “you” also matched the background text too closely in the blue area).

I enjoyed the puzzles pretty well for about 90%, there were some fun little mechanics that meshed well with the relaxed-woods vibe. I got a bit stuck then, and unfortunately there’s no hints or walkthrough available, although I think one or both is generally a good idea in any game that is even slightly puzzly. Anyhow, the problem that I was having was that I couldn’t figure out how to get the mushrooms to talk to me, which I think involves becoming more like them. I resolved this by changing my color from the side-menu in the pane? Which seemed like it was maybe a left-over from debugging and not intentional? But that worked and I was not really feeling it enough to find another way. (I suspect the answer has something to do with the river because I noticed that while floating in it, there was a message about feeling like the color was leeching out of me, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that to work.)

At the end, I kind of thought I might get to select a cool neopronoun but it’s just different versions of “you.” Which made me realize I had somewhat misunderstood what the PC was looking for the whole time, but so it goes.

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game	Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

Overall, I enjoyed the soothing atmosphere and light puzzle aspects.

[alyshkalia (Tabitha (ey/em or they/them))]

@wolfbiter

I couldn’t figure out how to get the mushrooms to talk to me, which I think involves becoming more like them.

When I tested this game, this was solved by becoming small by eating the green mushroom. I think that was the only thing necessary, but of course I’m not sure if it’s changed at all!

[wolfbiter]

Hmm, unfortunately I am pretty sure I tried that, although maybe not with every permutation of earlier steps etc.

[Frotzing]

@wolfbiter

Hildy by J. Michael
Playtime: 2 hours (ran out of time, did not reach an ending)
Going on vibes, I would estimate I had maybe another half-hour of game left when I stopped.

The one where: an apprentice enchantress fights evil in a derelict underground mall

The writing in this game is delightful. It’s got a lot of good humor writing, and footnotes that provide additional commentary…

Thank you so much for playing Hildy! And thank you for taking the time to write your thoughts down on this game and all the the other reviews you are posting.

I am thrilled that you enjoyed playing my game. My goal was that people would have fun playing it and I’m delighted that you enjoyed it so much.

I’m also happy that your review gives me the chance to brag on one of Hildy’s beta testers.

The punchline in the joke that you referenced was the result of a comment that Mel Jason made in his transcript while testing.

Originally, the description of the doll ended on the following line with no footnote or reference to Hildy’s dad:

“You have to hand it to the creators; it’s not easy to blend the innocence of a teenaged slumber party attendee with the lust for vengeance of a bloodthirsty barbarian in one little face.”

Mel’s comment in his transcript was the following:

“Not easy to blend the innocence of a teenage girl with the bloodthirsty lust for vengeance? Hildy has known very different teenagers than I have.”

I literally laughed out loud while reading his transcript and knew there was no way I could pass up such a great line. I reworked the description of the doll, finding a way to fit a version of his line into a footnote. I contacted Mel, showed him the new description and asked if I could credit him for the joke in the acknowledgements section of my game. He happily and graciously agreed. All of my beta testers are credited in the hints/acknowledgements section, but Mel got a well-deserved additional shout-out for his contribution here.

Again, thank you for your review! Reading it made my day. Mel was one of several fantastic beta testers. A very great deal of what makes Hildy work comes from their selfless desire to help out just because they were asked to do so. I owe them a lot.