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

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games with 4 word titles.

Breakfast in the Dolomites by Roberto Ceccarelli
Playtime: 38 minutes

The one where: we check into a hotel and eat breakfast there

One generally applicable comment:

This game ships with a 52-page user manual. I skimmed through it first thing, and so the first note I wrote down was observing that the PC’s girlfriend is “very beautiful, but also shrewish when something doesn’t go her way.” Intentionally setting out to write a “shrewish” girlfriend is a lot of baggage for a game to intentionally to pick up.

OK, into the game proper. It’s a bit of a rorschach test.

I played the whole game and came out thinking, hmm, fancy-hotel-breakfast but that parser sure was fiddly. Then I saw reviews taking the view that the game is in fact trying to generate humor from an overly fiddly / detailed implementation. This wasn’t my immediate sense from playing it, but certainly that’s an available reading and would make sense of the “screwball comedy” tag, which is otherwise a bit mysterious. I ruminated for a while but didn’t reach clarity either way.

So, take your pick:

review of a game intending to be a straightforward vacation simulator

This game was written with a real love of thorough implementation. Many pockets, many containers, many food products. It had an authentic sense of one specific hotel.

I think it would benefit through from smoothing the implementation so players spend the most time focusing on whatever part of the experience the author thinks is most interesting / enjoyable. Maybe this is examining the delicious foods in the buffet—I doubt it’s looking around for a water glass while being criticized.

(I think choice-based simulators get a bit more leeway on this—if they just include, as the only clickable link “lock the car,” that imposes very little friction on the player, and may increase immersion. It’s a bit more annoying in a parser when you have to go back, fiddle around until you realize you need the car key, find the car key, lock the car, etc.)

By “smoothing,” I mean adding automatic actions (e.g., instead of the player having to turn on several lights, they are turned on automatically), making an inventory list that actually shows what is in your pockets, going up a level of abstraction perhaps.

If there’s a desire to include an NPC to prompt the player on what they should do, it would be less grating if they intejected with say, 1/5 the current frequency. Let’s not punish people for wanting to use their “turns” to examine the scenery etc!

review of a game intending to generate humor through fiddly parser implementation

Well, first of all, I would offer a caution. It’s a high-risk move to think “aha, my gimmick will be [something that will deliberately torment the player].” As a player, I dislike being tormented! Thus the gimmick is going to have to be extremely successful, moving, etc. to make it worth it to me!

(And games are immersive, so it’s easy to create strong feelings of say, annoyance if the gimmick asks the player to clicking every letter in the phone book for 20 minutes.)

I think the other key things would be: (1) signal unmistakably what part is supposed to be funny, so the player feels like they are in on the joke, rather than the butt of the joke (starting clearly in the blurb), (2) maybe go more over the top in some regards to convey this? give the player an updating list of goals which at first appears simple (“check in at hotel” “sleep” “eat breakfast”) but becomes increasingly detailed and expansive as the scope of the implementation becomes clear? Give a visible point system, but actually everyone ends up with a negative score because points get subtracted for everything? Etc.

In hindsight, the two scenes that were most effective as comedy for me were:

  • the bit where Mo takes my wallet out of my pants for me. (Possibly this only happens if you’re doing a really dire job finding your ID, which I was. It had not even occurred to me to search my pockets, given both that I’m a woman irl and that nothing was listed there in my inventory. I was still trying to open the backpack I was carrying . . .)

  • The ending where (not verbatim) “everyone in the hotel appears and claps for you”—this was a bit over-the-top as a response to eating breakfast and using a toilet, I could see it working even better if paired with say, a deceptively simple objectives list.

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 blurb gives a detailed description of Mo and Francesco, it would have been nice if it also mentioned it as a hotel since we spend a lot of time there. And, it would also be useful to address in the blurb the “which part should be funny” question from above.

Overall, a persnickety breakfast experience—I’m unsure if that was the point
Breakfast wolfbiter - Copy.txt (46.9 KB)

Gameplay tips / typos
  • Mo keeps saying “on dear”. . . is this a phrase I am unfamiliar with, or a typo for “oh dear”?
7 Likes