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

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games ft. cheap organizations sending you to your job with questionable tools

The Garbage of the Future by AM Ruf
Playtime: 1 hour 24 minutes (multiple endings)

The one where: We empty the tank of a garbage truck. Also there are unspeakable horrors.

This is a not-that-long (I think my playtime is on the longer end) game with one central puzzle, where the joy is marinating in the “our world but three steps to the left” environment. It’s the uncanny yet banal horror of the pitch perfect employee manual warning employees to always use appropriate safety gear, while the job itself carries a very real risk of being consumed by a ravening horror. (And Jake’s satisfaction if he becomes a mutant was pretty funny.)

The writing is clear and succinct, and effective at creating atmosphere. The line:

Jake looks up at the ugly moon.

which is one of several options if you “wait,” kept taking on more meaning to me the more I saw it . . .

The interface is choice-based. There’s a fair amount of redundancy in the controls (i.e., an item in the environment may be mentioned and interactable in the room description, and the same action may be possible from the same screen by clicking on the item you would use in Jake’s inventory).

Dear reader, here’s your periodic reminder that I write these to accurrately convey information about the game, not to make myself look good.

Completely unrelatedly, I managed to spend FORTY-FIVE MINUTES unsuccessfully looking for the wrench. I doubt that was even intended as a puzzle, just one of those things where you overlook something and it snowballs. (My problem, as it happens, was somehow not managing to interact with the side of the truck that has the wrench on it . . .)

To briefly digress, this is why I really think walkthroughs should come standard with every game that uses puzzle elements. It feels bad to get totally stuck!

I worked through that nadir of frustration but it was a blemish on my experience. I threw in a few learnings / hints below the cut in case it helps anyone else.

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

Loved the cover art, great steam/toxin/lurking horror clouds

Overall: an atmospheric “light” puzzler (in theory).
Boss makes a dollar / I’m exposed to toxic sludge / if I turn into a mutant horror / better hope I don’t hold a grudge

Gameplay tips / typos

• general gameplay tips that are only small spoilers:
  • the truck is at the center of the map and can be accessed from four sides. The sides of the truck are modeled separately by the game, so you have different truck-related options based on whether you are on the west side, behind the truck, etc.
  • locations can be SEARCHED by clicking the name of the location once you are already there
  • when the description observes the flashlight has gone out, navigate to the flashlight and hit it
• if you are having trouble with the hose
  • it is found by accessing the truck while in the field
  • it has two ends that are modeled separately. You can take or drop each one individually.
• if you are having trouble with the wrench
  • it is found by accessing the truck while in the hill
• if you are having trouble emptying the tank
  • you need to use the hose and the wrench at the back of the truck on the shore

  • attach one end of the hose to the valve. Put the other end in the lake (which you can do while on the shore). Open the valve with the wrench.

  • you can turn on the pump from the pump switch (also on the back of the truck, accessed while on the shore) and it will empty faster. But it periodically turns itself off and has to be switched back on

• if you are having trouble SURVIVING emptying the tank

  • you can find a glove that I’m guessing helps with the mutating. The glove is in the trash pile in the field. You may have to search the trash pile multiple times to find it. You can also stand further away

  • by searching the abandoned car at the dirt road location you can find some duct tape. You can put it various places, most useful seems to be on the pump switch (you want to do this while the pump switch is on)

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

It may not be a limerick but that last little couplet deserves to be seen in the limerick thread!

[wolfbiter]

Bureau of Strange Happenings by Phil Riley
Playtime: 2 hours (ran out of time, did not reach an ending)
Going mostly off vibes, I would guess there was quite a bit of this game still to come when I stopped, maybe 1-2 more hours.

The one where: budget cuts and cryptic instructions can’t keep a supernatural investigator down.

This is a complex and pretty large puzzler, with many locations to explore, NPCs to talk to, and items (also a second set of hyperspace paths—which I love–backeast and fronteast are fascinating concepts for directions).

The setting and the writing for the NPCs are highlights. The conversation trees are highly detailed and fleshed out, and you also get a lot of incidental commentary from the characters if you remain nearby. If you’re thinking a supernatural investigation agency might have some colorful characters, you would be right:

Klimp flips his pen between his fingers and says, “Never believe a Freemason when he tells you he’s just a guy who likes to wear aprons. They’re up to something. I know it. Sometimes. Sometimes I believe the exact opposite.”

And the game features one of my favorite genres of setting—a place that is about to imminently be destroyed—ahhh, the poignancy.

I never had any implementation problems or noticed anything wonky coding-wise. The game has also paid a lot of attention to the details—i.e., both Moira and Margaret’s dialogue explains to the PC why they don’t have a car parked in the parking lot, which answers the question of where all of the cars are.

I had a lot of fun exploring the areas and solving some of the puzzles near the beginning. The puzzles that I got to were pretty fair and very well implemented, although I did check hints a few times. I’m not sure if I have a good read on how hard the rest of the puzzles are going to be because the back half of my playtime was consumed in an orgy of exploring locations and collecting things. I do have some theories about what I’m going to do with them, but we’ll see how that works out.

Two notes, one trivial and one structural.

(1) Every time you walk through the south end of the parking lot, which is the starting location for the game, you get offered HELP and ABOUT like you did on the front screen. I’m not sure if this was intentional but I found it slighly distracting.

(2) So, thinking about the structure of the puzzles. This game does include both hints and a full walkthrough, both of which I really appreciate as quality of life features that will help more people play the game.

I’ve expressed elsewhere that I really like it when a game starts with an intro puzzle that I find easy (this probably means that the author thinks of it as extremely easy). It’s nice to put some deposits into the player trust account before things get too rocky. This game sort of faked me out, in that the first “hook” is that your phone is ringing. Answering a phone should be trivial, no? After a bit of poking around it seems at least medium-difficult. And well, let’s just say as of 2 hours in I still haven’t answered my phone.

I think the intent was to be highlight the absurdity of the scenario—and it is funny, leading to conversations like:

“Moira, do you have any money so I can buy a screwdriver, so I can get the hex wrench out of the vent, so I can open the drawer of my desk, so I can answer the phone?”

“No, I gave all my money to a vagrant this morning as I walked the 5 miles to work. I’m sure he needed it more than I did.”

But it was harder fro me to appreciate the humor in the moment, because I was very hung up on the idea of Answering My Phone (which has a certain inherent time-urgency) and I had initially thought was going to be easy! (The hints were also not ideal on this topic—at that point I would have liked to be told up front “hey, forget the phone, you can’t answer it for a while,” but instead there was 3 levels of hints to click through before being told “There is no way to get any money, at least not yet.”

This was not a huge deal to me, but just more of a niggling sense that I could be having even more fun.

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 did an effective sales job of both telling me about the game, and amping me up that there were some help structures in place.

I seem to not do a great job recording transcripts (saving and loading???) but I do have a partial.
BOSH wolfbiter partial transcript - Copy.txt (248.0 KB)

Overall, a very fun, expansive puzzler featuring entertaining characters and smooth puzzles. I’m definitely looking forward to coming back and finishing this after the comp.

[jwalrus (Adam Biltcliffe)]

@wolfbiter

Completely unrelatedly, I managed to spend FORTY-FIVE MINUTES unsuccessfully looking for the wrench. I doubt that was even intended as a puzzle, just one of those things where you overlook something and it snowballs.

Man, I did this too! I’d successfully realised that you could interact with the truck in different ways depending on where you were standing, but still missed the tool box for goodness knows how long. I also failed to notice the abandoned car at any point until I’d finished with the game and came to see what others had made of it.

[wolfbiter]

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

The Dragon of Silverton Mine by Vukasin Davic
Playtime: 37 minutes

The one where: an apprentice mage assists in a cave-in

This is a fairly straightforward, choice-based puzzler set in a collapsed mine in a fantasy world.

The descriptions are tangible and evocative:

Thick wooden pillars hold up the large chamber. They creak under the strain of the mountain. An earthy smell of damp stone and metallic dust lingers in the air.

The choice-based menu was easy enough to use. Items can be combined in your inventory, and your magic spells can also be used from your inventory.

The puzzles were eminently solvable, which I personally prefer. Although the PC has magic, most of the puzzling involves traditional mechanics (ropes, hooks etc.) The game also ships with invisiclues-style hints, which I think is a great feature to include in case someone gets stuck.

I enjoyed the puzzles and there were several quite funny bits (there’s a cute subplot with an animal—yes, I do want to say hi to douglas for you, kobolds!).

In terms of constructive ideas, I have two:

(1) A lot of the text is timed (i.e., there is a delay before each word appears).

The timed text became really grating at points. I find timed text in general to be an anti-quality-of-life feature. It’s very painful for me to stare at a screen waiting . . . for . . . the . . . next . . . word . . . to . . . appear . . . . The intended effect here is a mystery to me, but what actually happens is I tab over to my next window and don’t come back until I think the whole page has appeared. As you might imagine, this is not the ideal experience for me to get immersed in a game.

(2) The game struggled at some points to motivate the correct player action. I think this was caused by some lack of clarity in the descriptions, although I can’t point to an exact spot. For example, I never felt I fully understood how the different passages and shafts connected. And, my vague impression from the intro text was that I was looking for maybe 20 people trapped underground somewhere—so after I found the first guy and freed him, I thought I was supposed to go somewhere else and find more people, so it was a bit of a surprise to realize I was supposed to be finding medical attention for the one guy. These didn’t really impede my progress, but smoothing this out would have made it feel more polished.

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 quite liked the pixel-style cover art.

Overall a quick and fun puzzler with fantasy elements.

Gameplay tips / typos

• to use items, you have to go to your inventory (it won’t offer the option when looking at the thing you want to use it on)

• in the epilogue, “reccomendation” should be “recommendation”

[wolfbiter]

The Bat by Chandler Groover
Playtime: 1 hour 43 min

The one where: your dry British reserve is thoroughly tested at a soirée in Wayne Manor.

Albert (in my head, the PC’s name is Albert) works as a valet for the Wyatts. The game gets a lot of mileage out of the (tacit) contrast between Bryce Wyatt and another fictional character with dead 1%-er parents and an unusual affinity for bats. Bryce appears to recently have been mentally compromised by something involving the sinister (but generous to charity!) Doctor Malatesta, and is now even more eccentric than before (eccentrities include eating crickets and relieving himself on the floor). Bryce is so helpless that one does want to help him. I wondered from very on in the game if Bryce was going to demonstrate Hidden Depths at any point. The answer is: not really.

A lot of humor arises from the absurdity of watching a fancy event proceed while its ostensible host acts completely demented:

[during a thematically appropriate performance of Die Fledermaus]
Master Bryce squirms and covers his ears. . . . He snarls. He spits. He even bites. . . .
“I’ve never seen anyone so passionate about opera!” says Dr Malatesta.
“Clearly you have not been to Bayreuth,” Countess Orlofsky retorts.

Albert is called upon to wrangle Bryce, serve drinks (and meet the other demands of the various guests), and also manage the various crises that transpire. There’s also a lot of humor in the contrast between Albert’s cool outward demeanor and the ridiculous tasks he is called upon to perform (and using “attend” as the key verb helped me remember to be valet-y throughout).

I quite liked that the game started with a prologue, which gets us set up with the limited parser system, and the manor’s layout. I love when puzzle-y games start with some easy wins to build trust between the player and the author. Act I also continues to be pretty relaxed, and Act II doesn’t seem to involve time pressure.

The limited parser system generally worked well, and makes the game feel very approachable. I was also fine with the limited inventory space–absent that, there would really be no friction-y feeling in some of the tasks. The Diner Dash-esque elements of serving drinks were fun at first, but went on slightly longer than I wanted them to (although I appreciated that the requests for drinks dwindled in the second act).

This game has an incredible amount of polish and is just a very professional feeling product.

• overall plot and ending

This game is very much a cinematic experience, where the fun is watching the plot unfold. You solve puzzles which creates some investment, but doesn’t change anything about the plot. (I don’t think the player gets a single “consequential” choice in the game).

Although the player has no option but to advance along the set path, you don’t get a lot of interiority on Albert. At a few points I recall him being longsuffering / frustrated at what he had to deal with, but I felt pretty free to fill in his inner life myself, and, given that you have no choice but to address all of the crises, I decided on a sort of highly dedicated service professional vibe.

I actually think it would have been really interesting if say, Albert could decide to assist or frustrate the detective; or to tacitly allow Célina’s blatant theft all night (tantalizingly, she suggests at one point fond feelings for Albert) or turn her in. But that’s not in the game.

But that was all generally fine until the end of the game. I’m not a huge fan of the ending. I had seen the “quit [the compass” / “quit [the game]” ambiguity coming when the compass instructions were initially provided. There’s no option NOT to quit your job, yet quitting then was counter to the characterization I had developed for Albert. Having made it this far, he must be pretty tough and dedicated! Plus Bryce is more cogent now! (Which is going to be, errr, a fascinating transition as they say.). So the end felt jarring, and I didn’t love that the game imposed that choice after providing so little input on Albert’s characterization for most of the playtime (i.e., if that was going to be the ending, it could have been foreshadowed more). I also noticed while I was writing this that I instinctively referred to what “Albert” thinks and does in this whale review. Often in reviews I find myself writing about what “I” or “you” do, which I think indicates that I did not come out of the game feeling a very strong sense of identity with Albert.

(Finally, it feels like the “gag” at the end is that the player types “quit” expecting one thing to happen, but instead, something different happens—this seems a bit dangerous of a move to me. Sure, it creates surprise, but it does so by taking away agency that the player thinks they have.

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

10/10 on blurb and cover art, no notes.

Overall, a highly polished and professional experience, with escalating hilarity in the early and mid-game, although the emotional resolution left me a bit cold.

The Bat wolfbiter transcript - Copy.txt (307.9 KB)

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games with titles that almost rhyme

The Curse by Rob
Playtime: 1 hour 28 minutes (did not finish)

The one that’s: a custom Windows executable involving a girl kidnapped by a sorcerer at the pyramids

OK, let me start where I feel most strongly:

• This game should have shipped with a walkthrough*
  * To be clear, by walkthrough I mean a separate file that contains all of the commands required to complete the game, in order, exactly as they need to be typed into the game client.

It’s an eccentric game. Important features of locations are undescribed. The player is required to guess nouns and verbs. Solutions that work in one order don’t work if you did the wrong thing first. Many puzzles have no hints, or have unhelpful hints. While I applaud those who soldiered through (@DemonApologist), this game is asking a lot of the player.

I think sometimes authors are reluctant to give a walkthrough, perhaps out of a desire to ensure that players experience the game in one intended way (by figuring out the puzzles themselves). Fair enough, of course, we all get to have different priorities, but I would really urge reconsideration if that’s the reason.

If people get stuck and frustrated, they’re more likely to just stop playing the game altogether. (And I think it’s quite hard for authors to predict how intuitive or easy puzzles will be—there’s always going to be someone who reacts unexpectedly or is distracted by a testy baby, etc.) I love that recent years have seen all kinds of games giving people more on-ramps (walkthroughs, story mode, Let’s Play videos, etc.).

So, what I’m saying is, while I spent a good amount of time with this game, it was not all spent with joy. I typed up as far as I got beneath the cut [which was not to the end] in case it’s helpful to anyone else.

At the end of the day, banging in a walkthrough is probably the single most impactful way the author could spend twenty minutes in terms increasing the number of people who complete the game.

• everything else

Credit where credit is due—although I am often skeptical of homebrew game systems, the custom parser here was fine. It wasn’t buggy. In enabled sound cues and pop-up images that were pretty fun and added to the experience. None of my issues would have been better if the game had been in, say, Inform.

The best part of the game was the sort of charmingly retro attitude, (this is a game where the voice of the game mildly snarks at the player, and a wrong turn will get you a reference to A Horse With No Name). The images and sound cues were also part of building the casual, unserious atmosphere.

I did enjoy the images and sound cues, they helped build mood.

The text might have been improved by giving it a bit more editing, it’s bluntly straightforward to the point of awkwardness:

I’m calling you to inform you that the girl’s kidnapper, a certain Shamir, died during the capture. From our informants we learned that the girl should be inside a pyramid not far from where you are now. Shamir was kind of sorcerer, a shaman. He may have infested the place with magical rites and witchcraft of all kinds.

(This and other fairly long text sections would also be more digestible if they were formatted into multiple paragraphs.)

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 give full credit to the blurb for accurately previewing the play experience (although I might quibble with the idea that “complete spoilers” are available). But, after about an hour and a half with this game, I remain lamentably ignorant about who “Chronoboy” is or why he is mentioned in the subheading.

Overall, an eccentric throwback puzzler with interesting use of audio and visual elements, but very much in need of better hints and a walkthrough.

An incomplete walkthrough

The beginning of a walkthrough (I borrowed some of this from DemonApologist and @mathbrush)

1. 1 [to view intro]
2. [close pop-ups except the window that starts “Are you the chosen one”]
3. Enter the name of your choice
4. y [close pop-ups]
5. exit
6. answer [press enter to close pop-up]
7. n
8. get stone
9. s
10. e
11. climb dune
12. x altar
13. read inscription
14. kneel
15. pray
16. get cage
17. w
18. n
19. n
20. w 
21. (in fog of perdition) open cage
22. enter cave
23. x ceiling
24. x ground
25. dig
26. touch walls
27. exit
28. n
29. climb hill
30. open door
31. enter house
32. x walls
33. x drawings [press enter to close pop-ups]
34. x mirror
35. [type in the free response field from the mirror] anubis
36. x mirror
37. enter mirror

[You are now inside the pyramid. There are two directions you can go, north or west.]

to the WEST

• wander around, you’ll come to a room with a black sarcophagus
  • below the black sarcophagus room is a room with skeletons and bones, you can take the bones
• there are drawings to look at in the room of the dead
  • at the black sarcophagus, you can put your selected name (or anything?) into the free response field
  • then open the sarcophagus
  • the “move the mummy” that is inside [strangely, the response for “get mummy” is not at all helpful]
  • revealing a key beneath the sarcophagus, which I have no idea how to get.

To the NORTH

• there’s a room with a snake
• examine the flute
• examine the flute (again)
• press the button
• play the flute, this should drive off the snake [once I played the flute before pressing the button, and then this didn’t seem to work after, so don’t do that]
• up from this room is a room with a sphinx
  • put “shamir” in the free response field on the sphinx
  • push the sphinx to move it partway out of the way, but it is still blocking the path up, and I don’t know how to continue
• south of the sphinx room there is a room with a white sarcophagus. It is locked and I don’t know how to unlock it
• north of the snake room you can fall into an endless well. There’s a note on the wall and probably some way to catch yourself but this is where I ran out of steam

[wolfbiter]

Verses by Kit Riemer
Playtime: 1 hour 26 minutes

The one where: an analyst / translator develops a taste for cryptic knowledge at a new job in a former church

This is probably the most literary game of the competition so far, and also the most obscure. Let me warn that: (1) my ability to identify spoilers is limited, so you might encounter some concepts that would constitute unmarked spoilers, and (2) I’m recklessly publishing this review without achieving clarity about the game, so my purported facts might be non-factual and my interpretations might be heretical (well, more so than usual, I guess).

As befits a game with a poetry focus, it’s beautiful written, and also at times deliberately inscrutable:

“The apostate. He has forsaken his faith. You can ignore whatever he has to say.”

“The sun mistaking the words for us while we mistook the word for its meaning.”

I don’t criticize when I say it’s inscrutable, I had the feeling that was necessary for what the author was trying to say (and to some extent, I think the difficulty of understanding *is* what the author was trying to say).

Eca, the PC, is an “analyst” of mysterious samples, a translator (of poetry), and a cannibal. The themes of the game seem to involve how these things are similar.

One thing that definitely comes up thematically is something about how we communicate, how we consume ideas from others, and how that consumption reshapes us.

The game seems interested in the ways that communication is unreliable and contingent. (“That understanding could not exist in a body built for communication. That the idea can have itself expressed, or understood in its abundance, but not both. Not at once” ??) Hypertext is often used to provide additional context / definitions of words that were used in the above-the-line text. Sometimes these are literal definitions, other times they’re:

smoke: something becoming something else.

Eca also translates poetry during the game, which I’m now pondering as an act of cannibalization—taking the orginal work and using that raw material to construct a new work in the target language, that requires the original but has also been filtered through the translator and necessarily changed. I was reminded of some reading I’ve done about the challenges of poetry translation specifically, and how different translations by different people can come out (e.g., Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei).

Eca makes translations without input from the player (the player just clicks to advance). Still, although I take it the process has been simplified, sped up, and abstracted for the game, it still has some fidelity. The first click yields a basic gloss of the word or phrase in English, and further clicking will separately adjust the gloss to smooth the gestalt translation / add meaning present in other lines of the poem, etc. (This didn’t fit anywhere, but I really enjoyed some of the poetry.) I really enjoyed watching the process—my favorite way to play was to get all of the English glosses first and then watch how they were adjusted.

One of my favorite screens was a section where the player is called upon to perform a similar task, choosing among similar words to place in a phrase:

The	longing	to be	deleted	by one’s own	product.
	appreciation		obliterated		compiled code
	lust		killed		progeny
					fecal waste

It was fascinating to observe my own reactions to each permutation, which did carry a distinct meaning.

But the game focuses on the sinister / disturbing / horror beats of the process of obtaining knowledge from other sources. It’s linked to mass killings of humans, and what seems to be at the least some highly suspect ethical treatment of aliens (???). By the end, Eca feels compelled to consume the flesh of others, and through that flesh leans about past atrocities. I’m left thinking about how much the game’s world has changed from our own, how much Eca changes from the beginning to the end. Are we all changed that way by our intercourse with the world? When people are committing terrible acts, is there a clean way to eat? Is it better to eat the dead, or to let them be unremembered and uncomprehended?

I was definitely a bit confused about the basic plot / setting, but here’s what I gathered:

Plenty of bad things have happened to the world in the future. Plant life seems scarce, giant “cells” (containing bacteria and viruses?) wander the landscape. “Either deathly ill or a mutant” is a plausible thought for the PC to have on meeting a new person. Some old objects (bakelite?) are still in use. We see soldiers with guns that are described as very old, from a time they had to operate in zero-g.

Eca is transferred to a new worksite as an analyst. We don’t learn this right away, but the new site is feeding Eca samples disguised as biscuits. The samples are biological material from aliens (??). The samples have gone through some kind of processing (compared to or identical to processes used to dispose of corpses from mass killings, etc? And in fact I think the nearby town was emptied for the project and all of the people—including people in cryogenic storage [carceral?] put through the same processing??) While working Eca can go to the town and translate poetry or view a barn where genetically human “livestock” are used to grow replacement organs, or go into the hills and talk with the “caretaker” of a pool of molten metal. Through communing with the samples Eca is able to achieve some kind of intercourse with the aliens, although Eca’s human body deteriorates. At the end, Eca consumes the body of their roommate and then the body of a dead soldier, and there are three endings Eca chooses to go.

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 am very much sympathetic to the challenge of describing this game, but it would be good if the blurb conveyed something about the themes present in the game. I didn’t get very much out of it except that the game was poetic and perhaps involved themes about truth and change. I think it would be worth giving up a bit of the poetic-ness for clarity in the blurb.

Overall, a fascinating, thought-provoking work, very much worth a play

Gameplay tips / typos

• one description of the barn as “The smell is appealing. But you can’t spoil your appetite so early in the morning.” This is the kind of game where I’m not really sure which was meant, but given the “spoil your appetite” line, I wonder if it should be “appalling”?

• the second day I met the woman by the pond, she said it was good to meet me? Perhaps out of order?

• at times it kept telling me I hadn’t been to the barn, but I had

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@wolfbiter

one description of the barn as “The smell is appealing. But you can’t spoil your appetite so early in the morning.” This is the kind of game where I’m not really sure which was meant, but given the “spoil your appetite” line, I wonder if it should be “appalling”?

Having not played this at all, I would read “spoil your appetite” as “if you eat the appealing-smelling thing now, you won’t be hungry for the actual meal later”.

[wolfbiter]

You make a valid point . . . based on the context, I was dubious of the possibility that the PC wanted to eat anything in the barn, but hey, the PC eats some wild stuff

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games with minimalist approaches to cover art

Forbidden Lore by Alex Crossley
Playtime: 47 minutes

The one where: you poke around in a library and learn that a good book can take you anywhere.

I’m a big fan of the concept of this game (mild spoilers, you’re in your late grandfather’s library—which is chock full of books, artifacts, a parrot, etc.—and as you explore you come to realize everything you need is right there in the room with you).

The writing is perfectly serviceable. I was impressed that all of the fantasy names sounded pretty good (hard!), and there are some pretty funny moments:

“Read it again! Read it again!” the bird squawks. [after I accidentally read the same book twice]

For a one-room game, there’s a surprising amount of interaction and conferring with the parrot and the bust was well coded and relatively expansive.

I found I was taking RESEARCH NOTES on my in-game reading (which I enjoyed doing), so it was pretty successful in conjuring that “all-nighter in the library except it’s incredibly productive” vibe. Very much channeling the research montage from say a TV show where our teen protagonists go into the spooky library to learn about the old gods, etc.

This game has a lot of promise but could use another round of polish / quality-of-life features to put it over the top.

The parser struggled to disambiguate similar objects:

>show statuette

Whom do you want to show it to?
>statue

Which statue do you mean, the statue, or the gruesome statuette?
>the statue

Which statue do you mean, the gruesome statuette, or the statue?

A few of the commands are so basic that it’s surprising when they work (“shoot fire at priests”).

And the game doesn’t do a great job coping with the fact that the player’s order of exploration is arbitrary and going to differ (e.g., I managed to go destroy the evil statue pretty early, before I understood why I was trying to destroy it, which was confusing and ended up sending me into the walkthrough). I think this game would really benefit from something like a “think” or “reflect” command that tracks the player’s current objectives (like, it could start with “discover what your grandfather was concerned about” and at some point update to “prevent invasion from the sky” and “prevent invasion from below” etc etc as appropriate). I was glad that there was a walkthrough though.

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

Since one of the pleasures of the game is doing research in the expansive library, it might be good to cue that element in the blurb. (As is, it’s a bit ambiguous if the focus of the game is exploring the library or something else [wandering around a different location?])

Overall, a fun promising adventure in a library, with some rough edges

Gameplay tips / typos

• This is one of those games where SEARCH yields different results than EXAMINE
• This is in the hints but it should perhaps be upfront—you can examine each bookcase separately and you can look for books on specific topics to read
• sometimes you have to ask the same question repeatedly (it will yield different results)

[wolfbiter]

Turn Right by Dee Cooke
Playtime: 9 minutes

The one that’s: a driving simulator

Short but good.

The driving instructions at the start and the detailed schematic at the top really added to the experience (as others have noted, they’re completely unnecessary, but that makes it funny. Also the diagram did help me really inhabit my role).

I found it fairly relaxing and fun, actually. Perhaps:

1. a sign that really anything is more fun to experience in a game than in real life, or
2. I happen to be an extremely zen driver, to the point that I wondered if I was getting a Bad Grade in playing this game. I was just enjoying the narration! I had an unshakeable confidence that I was going to make the turn eventually! In hindsight, my approach could really have backfired if the game did require a lateral solution . . . but hey.

The little moments are all well sketched and true to life. When another driver tries to wave you out–seemingly unaware that the other traffic is not stopping–it reminded me of this xkcd:

Driving PSA

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, a fun, well observed slice of life

Turn Right wolfbiter transcript - Copy.txt (19.4 KB)

[Rob (Roberto Marcarini)]

Thank you for your precious time.
When I decided to work on The Curse several months ago I had the idea of ​​making the Walkthrough system part of the game.
I thought it would be more convenient for the player to access the solution to a puzzle directly from the game session rather than looking for the solution in an external file.
I thought I had included an exhaustive help system.
Now I know that this was not the case.
Thanks to you I will try to improve it in future versions of the game.
Who is Cronoboy?
A “nostalgic old boy” (with his fake smile) who lives in the past.
The adventure would like to be “commemorative” of some past events and things lost forever.

Maybe you are the only one who found The Note.
The only element that talks about future events.

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

Okay, I just went back and checked, and it’s being small via the green mushroom AND getting underlined by floating in the river.

[wolfbiter]

Thanks, appreciate that! I may have to try that again. I was trying to get underlined but it seemed like I was frequently getting un-underlined again before I made it to the mushrooms . . .

[dee_cooke]

Thank you so much for your great review and for the transcript!

[belaton]

I am really glad I played verses and enjoyed reading your review of it. You got some different interpretations out of it than I did. I’m not sure I got any concrete interpretations at all frankly, but I think the experience was worthwhile enough without much in the way of concrete.

[wolfbiter]

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games in which the PC hides behind a physical object used to delineate the boundary between two spaces

A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric by Ola Hansson
Playtime: 16 minutes

The one where: you visit a gym locker room and collect evidence

This is a short, fun game, and smoothly implemented. You have 4 comic strip panels that represent locations available to visit. Each panel updates to indicate the passage of time, with characters moving between them. I really enjoyed the custom interface which was easy to use and catchy–very fun to get a bit of texture on the NPCs’ lives by watching what they did in the panels I wasn’t in, and this is the kind of world where people write graffiti like:

“My name is actually Mikael Lundberg. My phone No. is [redacted], and yes, I am single ”

My biggest quibble is it didn’t feel like a complete game. I see that there are separate installments occuring before and after, but each game should still feel complete on its own. Here, it might have been nice to have a page of set-up about what our objective was, and something more congratatory / resolution-y at the end (I was actually driven into the walkhrough to confirm I finished the game because it felt so odd [kudos on having a walkthrough]).

Semi-off topic, games like this, where you (mild spoiler) restart the game and use knowledge that you got in earlier playthroughs, like Mikael’s phone number, but that the player character would have no way to know, sometimes bend my brain a bit. Like are we also implying the existence of a time loop?

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 quite liked the art style for the comic strip panels, which also features in the cover art.

Overall, a zippy, satisfying Game of One Puzzle with a fun art style and distinctive character voices

Gameplay tips / typos

• at one point you can click inside the comic illustration to zoom
• it worked best for me after I tweaked my browser zoom to fit four panels across the top width

[wolfbiter]

The Saltcast Adventure by Beth Carpenter
Playtime: 1 hour 48 minutes (1 hour 30 minutes to first ending)

The one where: our hero’s subterranean fantasy journey becomes more complicated than expected.

I enjoyed being the PC, Madelaine (semi-relatedly, perhaps the rng-gods have shorted me so far, but this is my 18th review and only the second PC stated to be a woman, so that was a nice change of pace!). In a nice departure from the most typical fantasy hero, she’s a parent. And actually parents and children turns out to be one of the major themes of the game.

There’s a creative, mirror-based magic system, and a fairly fleshed out mythology of gods (I wanted to hear more about whether Torbet cut off his dick!) and explanations for the existence of the Saltcast.

This rises above the standard fantasy tropes. Madelaine quickly ends up tangled in internal Saltcast politics (despite having arrived in their lair with the goal of somehow weakening them). I also enjoyed how in Act III, Patricia has quite a different voice and point of view as a narrator—for example, as a trained bard, she is not as impressed by the spooky-singing Saltcast’s vocal technique.

The writing is generally competent. There were a few spots that struck me as slightly rough, but others that moved me. I particularly enjoyed the in-game legend riffing on the minotaur:

The storyteller flashes her commentators a quelling look. “However, the lord insisted on seeing his new son. When he looked in on it, he was silent for a long time. Then he raised his voice in a shout—of jubilation! For he said, ‘Our souls must have met when we made this child, for I have the heart and the courage of a lion, and so my son is a reflection of my inner self.’”

I also found the scene where your companions use their source mirrors to intercept the trap-beams emotionally hard-hitting.

I thought the opening screen with hypertext options to “consider everything you’re afraid of” was highly entertaining and a good way to provide background. Of course, then I was disappointed when about three screens later I was dragged through every topic regardles, which retroactively made the earlier choice pointless.

This game is definitely more of an interactive novel than particularly puzzle-y. The player gets a fair number of choices, and they affect the immediate plot (not just shading a conversation), which I like. I did one very quick replay, taking pretty much the opposite choices, and it seems that the broad shape of the ending is the same, but the specific text and details changes based on your choices, which felt interactive enough for me. I also found one non-death way to end the game early, but like death, you can use “undo” so it’s pretty forgiving. (Short of death, wounds don’t seem to matter, although the author mentioned in the other thread that they may lock you out of some choices.) This is certainly the type of game where there’s generally one choice that is clearly the superior moral choice, although how and whether that choice gets rewarded is slightly more mysterious.

That said, I wouldn’t mind a bit more interactivity. One place that seemed to cry out for this was around the choice of which god you are going to petition—although this is set up as a significant moment, it doesn’t seem to affect anything later, and the game doesn’t even provide a custom speech for each. Also, I regret that I never got to draw seditious graffiti. I think that would have been a winning strategy.

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, an entertaining fantasy yarn, elevated by interesting worldbuilding and some thematic complexity.

[wolfbiter]

Thanks, this was very nice to hear

@belaton

I’m not sure I got any concrete interpretations at all frankly, but I think the experience was worthwhile enough without much in the way of concrete.

^ Exactly how I felt re: Verses