wolfbiter reviews IFComp 2025 - latest: Operative Nine

Competitions IFComp
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21

Frankenfingers by Charles Moore

Flavor: to quote the subtitle, “A Gothic Tale of Love, Redemption, and Dismemberment” in parser-puzzler form
Playtime: 1 hour 19 minutes

A delightful puzzler where you play as a disembodied hand exploring Frankenstein’s manor. (More the pop-culture Frankenstein—Igor is there—than the original book.) I got a big kick out of the concept, which was creatively implemented, and came with enough gameplay restrictions to add some spice but also a tongue-in-cheek sensibility (how can I . . . see anything. Do not ask these questions).

Entering a new location generally triggers a description in rhyming verse (in contrast, action responses and some item call-outs are not in verse). For reasons that pre-date this game, I am not always the hugest fan of rhyming poetry, but this didn’t bother me at all—it did add a sort of playful-gloomy atmosphere and I didn’t find myself having to work too hard to parse the meaning.

I really enjoyed the puzzling. Generally it was fairly straightforward, with a universe of items that was comprehensible, and I generally felt that as the map was expanding or I was encountering new challenges I had ideas about how to solve them. All of the puzzle solutions worked well and I didn’t have any problems with fiddliness.

There are a few spots I would maybe smooth a bit more—(1) I had a really hard time coming up with the first command (I feel that perhaps “hit sconce with arm” should not yield the response “You can’t reach the sconce” if the intended action is “turn sconce with arm”, (2) I admit, I resorted to the walkthrough because I couldn’t figure out why my horse wasn’t going anywhere, and (3) I also think that perhaps "cut lid with hatchet” should not yield the response “The hatchet is too blunt for that” if the intended solution is “attack lid with hatchet”. Oh and look, I’m posting my transcript so I clearly do not stand on my own dignity, but yes, there may be an entire section I undo-scummed.

A medium-spoilery-but-not-actually-a-specific-spoiler that you may want to know before playing

There is at least one item in the game that doesn’t have any particular warning attached to it, but has consumable “charges” that can be depleted. Based on the author’s prior games I was not that shocked about this, and fortunately only used that item in one big chunk, but this could cause problems not easily solved by saves or undo if you spread out your use too much.

In addition to the puzzlers, I really enjoyed the plot / character elements. The game did a good job dropping clues early that motivated me (I have in my play notes after the re-animation sequence “gee, I sure hope I have some class consciousness with the creature,” which, slightly; and “this game better lead to me resolving something with my spouse,” which . . . ). A fairly warm story, in some ways (although [major spoiler about the ending]the ending surprised me a bit—I just roll over and die? I could be useful! I was imagining maybe we were going to have a very unconventional home life.)

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Probably my favorite by this author yet, and truly proves the old maxim: never give a dismembered-but-animate hand a trampoline!

wolfbiter - Frankenfingers - Copy.txt (187.4 KB)

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BTW thanks for your reviews so far, I really like your format and insights!

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Horse Whisperer by nucky

Flavor: some humor, remains an untested alpha build
Playtime: 9 minutes

I was excited at the concept of “a social manipulation game for horses,” but alas, the execution fell short.

In terms of gameplay, the game felt very unfinished as of 9/23 (I mean literally messages that say “coming soon. Sorry!”).

In terms of writing, I think the concept is intriguing, and the author has thoughtfully provided 3 fairly distinct horse-voices to interact with. But the writing had an unedited, could-be-the-first-thing-a-funny-person-thought-of feeling. E.g., you ask a horse what it wants money for, the horse replies “Stuff. And things” and the two allowed responses are “Like what?” and “Too bad nobody in their right mind would ever give a bum like you that kind of money.” Also, I was surprised in a bad way by a scene where the PC is implied to have a sexual encounter with a horse.

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All in all, I see definite potential, but it was with equal parts amusement and relief that I was stabbed by a horse with a switchblade and died.

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The Tempest of Baraqiel by Nathan Leigh

Flavor: a nicely textured alien-contact-ish adventure story
Playtime: 56 minutes

I really enjoyed the sci-fi, fiction, and multimedia components of this one. To break that down:

  • Sci-fi: this has a lot of fun tropes. We’ve got humans in conflict with aliens due to what appears to be significant communication challenges (did we . . . blow up a bunch of alien babies during spawning season?), untranslatable languages, robot assistants the PC seems to feel a bit uncomfortable with, etc.
    • I also liked the plot points on the xenotranslation elements, and I enjoyed the twists.
  • Fiction: I enjoyed the writing and the worldbuilding. I thought the author did a good job putting in a bunch of . . . hooks for conflict? that fleshed out the world and also helped set up dilemmas throughout the game. For example, we’ve got the PC with a complicated relationship with their hero!mom, the colleague who went through a horrific experience and came out xenophobic, the mysteriously diplomatic captain, etc.
    • My (fairly minor) quibble about the writing would be that the descriptions of the PC and team working rang a bit empty (“Wen begins the project of preparing what known data you have access to, while Vidiez grabs the stack of punch cards from Martov and begins writing a program to parse the data.”) I get that this is a hard ask when writing about a fictional scientific investigation into a non-existent language, but I never really managed to believe the PC or the team were doing something research-y.
  • Multimedia: I read that the soundtrack is procedurally generated based on your choices, which is a cool concept! The music itself seemed atmospheric. I enjoyed the illustrations which helped me picture the setting.

In terms of gameplay, there were highs and lows, and I wish the “main” feeling ending especially had gotten more room to breathe.

Given that the PC’s main goal is to investigate the alien language, and it’s a choice-based game, the game is somewhat required to be in the business of just delivering cool-sounding epiphanies whichever way you click, but some of this was done very enjoyably (I enjoyed for example, the sequence where it seems that whichever TV show the PC watches will inspire a breakthrough).

In many scenes there were plenty of choices, and I replayed enough to feel that there were a lot of different endings and scenes to explore, which is cool. (I particularly enjoyed the coffee-drinking-in-the-galley scene I found later.) But I think there was maybe a bit of missing connective tissue to really flesh out the game.

There were many places I wanted to have more options (for example in the climactic weapons bay scene there seemed to be no option except to play the PC as acting unusually escalatory.) There were some very pivotal decisions that seemed forced, and not in a way that I understood to be mandated by the PC’s personality.

I would have liked if the choices felt more logically consequential, too. I loved the concept of managing my team’s morale, but I didn’t notice any ways that affected the story. At other times I suspect earlier choices must have led me to a particular place, but it didn’t feel that satisfying because I didn’t understand which choices led me there.

Choosing between the options was also more confusing than I wanted—sometimes actions would be listed and you could choose them all, sequentially; other times after choosing the first one, the rest would go away.

(Also, there were buttons for save, load, and map, but they didn’t seem to do anything when clicked.)

But, all in all, I quite enjoyed my time with this one, and I’m glad I saw the end of what felt like the “main” plotline.

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Dead Sea: The exile of the soul by Binggang Zhuo

Flavor: creative, surprising, short fable-like experience
Playtime: 21 min

So, I was drawn to this title by recalling the secret alligator cult in the author’s previous work. I didn’t even have to look it up, that plot point definitely made an impression!

The general tenor of Dead Sea was a bit more fable-like and allegorical than I expected from the front matter. There’s a sort of dream-like feel that’s probably intensified by the tersely unorthodox writing style.

I think the biggest highlight was the originality on display. I frequently felt surprised or wanted to note down interesting little things that happened (I mean, the game opens with procuring fanta for a gravedigger in an unorthodox way).

This was an enjoyable game. No specific puzzle was particularly hard but I don’t think that was the point, the point was sort of like being inside a story and the puzzles are how you progress, but I enjoyed the plot and worldbuilding, which was creative and surprising.

There were some QOL features that I’m not sure totally made sense–I liked the idea of resetting a zone as a supplement to allowing saving, but I didn’t try it, and from other reviews it sounds like resetting an area may not have worked. There was a fairly sophisticated inventory tracking system with different locations that, as far as I could tell, had no effect because my inventory was handled automatically.

I did vibe with the overall plot, although I thought the “normal” ending was probably “better” in my opinion than the “true” ending, but hey, tastes differ.

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Saltwrack by Antemaion

Flavor: literary horror inflected expedition
Playtime: 31 minutes

This was a really fun one. The genre is definitely horror, a slower kind that revels in descriptions and the uncanny. I saw several others mention the Southern Reach series as a comparator, which I agree with, and there’s also a decent helping of “contagion” body horror.

The writing was poetic and evocative, and I rarely object to an appearance of “cnidarian”. The world is well-developed, we have words like “oilshell” and “oilsilk” for plastic, mentions of the different economic structures adopted by the different cities (the fascinating background drop about that guy who got exiled for bringing someone “back to life”). The backstory on the expedition was interesting—my personal take was that it did sound kind of like a foolish, wasteful plan for little clear benefit (just like those boring squares back home said!), so that made me think the PC was foolish/reckless in that way—if I was supposed to have learned why it wasn’t foolish or wasteful I missed that.

I enjoyed learning about the companions and wouldn’t have minded a bit more, although I take it our culture is somewhat repressed. (It may or may not have been an inspiration, but the option to ask your companions their names after a good period of travel reminded me of the anecdote about Hjalmar Johansen and Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian polar explorers who ended up wintering in a 3 foot hole on Franz Josef Land–as the story goes, they lived in the hole for three months before they started using informal pronouns for one another.)

The simple tracker at the top did an elegant job letting me know how the journey was going. (Since I saw it mentioned elsewhere, I guess I should throw in that I *did* actually think the whole time that food was being tracked behind the scenes.)

The two things that come to mind that I think might have made me like it even better are, (1) I wouldn’t have minded feeling more emotional impact from companion deaths—at least when it happened to me, it was so fast, and I didn’t even have the option to make a (possibly doomed) attempt to help, that it felt pretty muted. (2) there were some spots I would have liked more choices! I kind of wanted the option to assemble the world’s worst crew (although I get that would probably be harder to code) and occasionally the PC would just do things I didn’t really want to do. (After visiting the epicenter, it kind of seemed to me that perhaps my community would be better off if I self-exiled, but just not going back wasn’t an option, which put me kind of at odds with the game [I did, despite my ambivalence, make it back]).

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Thanks for this lovely review, Wolfbiter! I feel you really picked up what I was putting down.

You’re absolutely right about the Southern Reach series; it was a huge inspiration. (Among other things, it’s why everyone is nameless, denoted by their roles.)

Some trivia: I haven’t seen anyone bring up The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed—but they were just as influential in the creation of Saltwrack’s setting.

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Oooh, good info! I was definitely getting The Left Hand of Darkness vibes (except that here, both of my companions died, whereas no one should even try to convince me that Estraven kicks it. I refuse to believe). I don’t know that The Dispossessed came to mind as strongly while I was playing–although it’s probably my favorite LeGuin book–but I can see it now a bit in the PC’s feeling alienated / compelled to leave their home to pursue science.

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Mooncrash! by Laura

Flavor: a whirlwind fantasy adventure tour
Playtime: 39 minutes

Overall, I had a good time with this one, but I got off to a bit of a rough start. Part of this was a miscalibration of expectations I read the blurb—I thought this might be a longish, in-depth, quest-y kind of game. In actuality it’s a zippy package of 4 scenes (plus a culminating finale scene), and the PC steps into each scene already in the exact moment to move things along.

The other part is I was served the Fateweaver segment first and thought it was probably the least suited to my tastes (and I’m glad to see that others had a warmer reaction). The type of puzzle that’s pure conversation and you have to “hack” the NPC into agreeing to your demands by figuring out which options to click is probably not my default favorite, and I was also spending 10% of my brain going "is this . . . the whole game? This is just a conversation system! I wanted to fight somebody with magic!” Anyhow, I was quite relieved to discover that it is not, in fact, the whole game.

And, the game did pick up speed for me from there. I enjoyed the laboratory segment, which was fun and well done (lava! also I was amused by the clearly labeled interplanar and intraplanar portals). I am not afraid of the grind, and honestly kind of enjoyed grinding the guard fight (I mean, it took me maybe 5 minutes? I hear it takes some games 12 times that long just to be delivered . . .) I was sad/annoyed at being compelled to kill those (in my head, adorable) juvenile black dragons, but I moved on quickly. I did like the concept of the 4 scenes each showcasing a different type of game.

And you know, even though there wasn’t a lot of detail or deep engagement with the plot, when I got to the finale the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The power of recognition and familiarity was working on me. I made that Eldritch Comb! I heard about that guy!

And while it wasn’t a very deeply implemented world, I thought that was fine in service of the goal of delivering a streamlined adventure experience and I didn’t notice any bugs or issues that hindered my progress.

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wolfbiter - Mooncrash! - Copy.txt (163.8 KB)

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Same; it’s always going to be a hard sell for me to feel good about killing something with “baby” in its name!

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Thank you for the kind and thoughtful review! I normally would respond more deeply and have done so a bit faster, but I have been quite sick lately. Anyway, I really appreciate your willingness to play along even though you had a rough start. :grin:

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Oh yeah, this was 100% intentional. Maybe I’ll remember to talk about it in a postmortem, but tl;dr I tried to make sure that none of the four routes was 100% a feel-good time. (The Watcher is a jerk, The Fateweaver is nuts, The Wildfire makes you kill baby dragons, and The Shroud isn’t very helpful + can be even meaner depending on your choices)

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A Conversation in a Dark Room by Leigh

Flavor: short, conversation based suspense (?) story
Playtime: 14 minutes

Timed text, my beloathed. :frowning: There was a limited amount, at least.

So, the PC is meeting a stranger in a pub for [REDACTED] suspenseful reasons. Most of the game is navigating the conversation between the PC and the stranger, which can lead to several different outcomes.

One thing I thought the game did well was indirectly convey information about the PC to the player. The most interesting hook / moment in the whole game was the reveal that I’m there because I hate vampires, which is only delivered if, at a certain point, you choose to tell the truth in conversation. I had been lying a bunch on principle but that was definitely not what I thought the truth was! I thought this was a fascinating direction although it could have been unpacked more. I also enjoyed the visual styling of the game UI, which felt appropriate to the topic.

I played through to a few endings. I didn’t really feel engaged enough to look for more. The premise I think has plenty of potential for drama, I suspect it came down to feeling low agency, which often translates into low motivation. Player agency is reduced by the fact that it’s pretty unclear what effect different responses would have on the game state. The detailed play instructions say “There are multiple ways to end this game and reveal unique interactions! It may not be clear which ‘path’ you want to take in the beginning and how it may affect the ending, but that’s okay; there is no right way to play the story,” so I take it the obscurity was intentional.

Certainly there are a lot of different game concepts, but I find I’m often less engaged when it feels like I have less agency. Like, in some games, you can at least frequently click “go left” or “go right” (which feels satisfying in a small way), even if what happens to you on the left path is arbitrary and you have to learn through exploration that there’s a pit trap over there or something. In this game, you often don’t even get offered the option to do the thing you would naturally want to do (like, whether to go through with your plan or not at the key moment, or leave the bar). Instead you have to experiment with your limited options to try to figure out which one will trigger the option to leave the bar and then try to figure out what will happen if you leave the bar.

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Operative Nine by Arthur DiBianca

Flavor: entrance yourself with spatial reasoning puzzles
Playtime: 1 hour 29 minutes

@@
^ it me!

This is a light surface game expediently tying together “hacking” sequences, which are represented by little tile-based spatial reasoning puzzles (in reading other reviews, I learned that some of these are called “sokoban” puzzles!). The hacking puzzles are played through the same parser interface in a little side window. No idea how that worked behind the scenes, but cool!

The surface game was suitably zippy and I appreciated that, although the frame is spy-themed, the asks are all kept plausibly harmless which kept the tone light (we’re not killing anyone, but we are putting a mild sedative in the vents. We’re disarming the bomb, etc.) I liked the inclusion of a list of objectives in the starting inventory, which actually updates as you complete them!

A big part of your enjoyment of the game will probably turn on how much you enjoy the spatial reasoning puzzles. I had an intensely-focused good time! I had a lot of trouble with the third level of the vent puzzle, and I did resort to the walkthrough to get the final few steps off the path-optimization one (which, looks like the walkthrough solution has 0 slack? Fiendish). My favorite puzzle was the one with the :slight_smile: who were willing to engage in commerce, especially given how nice that one guy was when I lost his lawnmower.

I will also say I was glad to see that this game shipped with a walkthrough, it’s something I really look for and it gives me faith that the authors want people to experience the whole game. And I might have been big sad if I was stuck indefinitely on the path-optimization puzzle . . .

The only thing I was still craving was maybe some kind of climatic, tie-it-all-together puzzle at the end? I have been spoiled by past games from Mssr. DiBianca that had really great ending / synthesis puzzles.

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(Attaching a transcript for completeness, although since I did not know to use the special command for the puzzles, it’s low-content, and contains absolutely no overlap with the walkthrough . . .)
wolfbiter - Operative Nine - Copy.txt (22.9 KB)

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