Wolfbiter reviews Spring Thing 2024 -- Social Democracy (all main festival reviews complete)

Competitions Spring Thing
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33

Alltarach by Katie Canning and Josef Olsson
Playtime: 1 hour 54 minutes total (1 hour 24 minutes for the first playthrough)

This made me want to talk about:

  • This game pays a lot of attention to the material reality of life in the 6th century Ireland, which I think is a really good thing in a historical piece. I also enjoyed the use of unfamiliar words and the hover-over annotations (very slick).

  • It features some beautiful prose:

Young men like that often house a terrible bitterness. And we write stories about them.

listening to the ceaseless sea, the sound that will background the actions of you both until the day you die

You trundle forward until the rain begins. Taking shelter under a rare fir, you look out and discover that you’re utterly alone. No birdsong suddenly abated by the downpour, no foxes foraging or insects scuttling. It’s a strange freedom, and the fear that comes with it nestles comfortably in the back of your mind. It watches and waits, actualises, sharpens everything.

  • Continuing that thought, this has a lot strengths on the story-side, and will probably be strongly liked by those who find the narrative to be in their style. I think that’s not precisely me, but I enjoyed the shape of the folktale and it definitely did put some images and situations in my mind that I found myself returning to after I was done playing.

  • Part of my issue is that I found it hard to invest in the main character because I didn’t really understand her goals. Starting with the brother–why are we so concerned about him? We both seem to be either old teens or young adults, and our peer Ailbhe seems to go back and forth to the mainland frequently, so why is it such a big deal to the main character if the brother left? (Relatedly, we are told later that the brother is actually very unusual among the fishermen of the island in never going to the mainland to sell fish, which explains why we might be surprised but also seems like the kind of thing that would have come up earlier!). I also felt some of the choices offered (to say what your character thinks about religion, or what they want in the future) didn’t actually change the rest of the game, so they just created a feeling in me that the main character was behaving erratically.

  • There were a few minor issues with state tracking. For example, I didn’t meet he mummer in my first play through but text still referred to him, also in my first playthrough I entered the pub through the backdoor, not by breaking in, but later people in the village were gossiping about how the pub had been broken into.

My fervent wish:
This work has a lot of narrative strengths, it would make a good novella, etc. I wish that it had done more with the game aspects by giving the player more to do. I got the distinct sense pretty early that no matter what I clicked I was going to be delivered to the same climactic confrontation with my brother. Similarly, there’s an inventory system but you don’t really even have to click into it, and I’m not sure it ever mattered what items I took? OK, I did play the drum once but otherwise not much was different when I left the island with nothing.

In essence, a well-written and crafted game providing a vivid take on life in pre-modern Ireland, and with the chance to spend time in unique areas and with a good variety of historically-inspired characters, with less of a focus on “game” elements.

7 Likes
34

I kinda love how our analyses overlapped in a lot of ways, but our conclusions were EXACTLY OPPOSITE. :rofl:

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35

Haha, yeah.

I mean a lot of the time writing reviews I feel like I’m stirring the pot without a pot-stirring license, so keep that in mind, but I think part of it is it’s a bit easier to notice “hey, something felt off about [the integration of the narrative and the interactive elements” than it is to fix it!

4 Likes
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Thanks so much for your review! I’ll see if I can fix those state tracking issues for our next update, and we’ll take the rest of your excellent points into our next project.

2 Likes
37

Do Good Deeds . . . by Sissy
Playtime: 28 minutes total (23 minutes for the first playthrough)

This made me want to talk about:

  • Modis has such a cute little smile in the art!
    timed text beloathed

  • Most of the text in the game is timed text, and . . . I dislike it! It makes the game take about twice as long as it needs to, and my engagement is worse because I switch to a new tab every time I can’t take waiting anymore. There was also a noticeable number of typos, and some text / interactions that felt unnecessary (before I can help the hare I have to introduce myself and ask its name and ask what happened and ask if it’s hurt? Mein Gott)

  • Look, I’m a curious person, so I did a playthrough and performed zero good deeds, and I can report back that there’s a “bad end” screen that tells you you made zero friends. Fair enough.

(OK, I did my experiment before I read this, but I stand by my methods!)

My fervent wish:
Within the theme of “helping others is good,” I wanted the selected examples to be a bit . . . weirder? My favorite was probably the one with the hedgehog (that led to the sea urchin joke), which had a pleasing sense of novelty and absurdity. Whereas, a squirrel forgot where they put the nuts? I’ve seen that before. Try channeling, for example, the joyous bizarrety of the premise of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I also didn’t think there needed to be quite so many incidents.

At root, a sweet-hearted storybook of a game with issues of pacing and polish that make it hard to play.

Gameplay tips / typos

  • On squirrel page, check spelling of “squirrel” and “problems”

  • On beaver page, check spelling of “conversation,” “ignore,” and “skeptical”

  • On scarecrow page, check spelling of “continued”

  • On the bad end page, check spelling of “friends” and “alone”

6 Likes
38

A Simple Happening by Leon Lin
Playtime: 16 minutes (12 minutes for the first playthrough)

This made me want to talk about:

  • I rather enjoyed the poem generator—poems pretty good and the ones I saw were cleverly incorporating the themes of death and absurdity

  • It was an effective technique to write the spectators at the beginning as caught up in their own banal concerns and not caring at all that you’re going to die

  • The parser elements were fun and smoothly coded, it was easy to accomplish things. In particular, the action sequences were really seamless, which allowed a feeling of momentum (and it successfully performed a kind of sleight of hand where on my first playthrough I felt like I was lucky to scrape by and avoid disaster (phew!), where subsequent playthroughs reveals the feeling of peril as an illusion)

  • Right, so let’s tackle the ending:

you think, “Isn’t this story just An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge set in feudal Japan?”

(1) I read a whiff of apology here (ETA that isn’t the intended read, see below in this thread), which is unnecessary and ineffective—the game is already written! If the player likes it, the apology will feel like you’re telling them they were wrong to like it, and if the player doesn’t like then it the apology won’t help.

(2) I do think the ending is a bit frustrating. “It was all a dream” is risky in most media, and probably more so in a game where the player has been asked to invest their own effort. There may be valid reasons to still do it, but it’s starting from a bit of a disadvantage.

(3) somewhat complicating (2), I actually was kind of relieved at the twist ending, because it eradicated everything that had just happened. I wouldn’t say I’m a pacifist in my gameplay, but I felt kind of bad about slaughtering my coworkers! I take it it’s intended as an absurd blood-spurting-out-of-arm-stumps power fantasy, but I was a bit craving the other kind of power fantasy where I could run off without killing my (presumably) friends and colleagues of many years..

My fervent wish:
I wish the humble blurb got more attention in general. I use the blurb and the other front matter to try to get into an appropriate mindset for whatever the game is, whether that’s receptive to horror or receptive to romance etc. (I’m human, I have preferences, but I do try.) It goes down easier if you start on the same page as the author (it could be annoying, for example, to expect a puzzlefest and be examining everything if that’s actually not called for).

Here, I’ll just say I think the player experience would be improved if the blurb, cover art, or title conveyed that sort of slapstick, over-the-top feel of the game. Since I didn’t manage to pick up on that from any of the front matter, I came in like, emotionally braced to potentially encounter Harakiri (1962) in IF form, and it took me a while to un-brace

Ultimately, a quick, easy-to-play romp with a polarizing ending–but hey, it won’t take very long to find out how you feel about the ending.

11 Likes
39

So… a scientific amount of sociopathy then :]

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Thanks for playing my game and writing your detailed review! I’m glad to hear you had a smooth experience with the parser and liked the poem generator (which was one of the first things I implemented).

I mentioned elsewhere I’m planning on writing a postmortem for this game (if I’m not mistaken, we can’t post one until after the festival is over?) but I do want to briefly address the ending:

I didn’t intend for it to be apologetic in tone. It was supposed to be more of a punchline to the entire adventure. But it seems I miscalculated badly and players have taken it as a lack of confidence in my story.

Thanks again for taking the time to review my game! I really appreciate it.

3 Likes
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Ooh, that’s interesting, thanks for sharing! I like hearing where I got something different than what the author intended, one of those things that keeps life interestng.

1 Like
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Loose Ends by Daniel Stelzer and Anais Sommerfeld
Playtime: 1 hour 5 minutes (51 minutes for the first playthrough)

This made me want to talk about:

  • This is a delightfully complex investigative game, with strong noir and political (here meaning managing different factions) elements.

  • You get to select a class and background for your character, which bestow special powers (and thus, gameplay options). This was a fun twist, and I was impressed when I replayed a bit at how different the available options and therefore paths were

  • The game reminded me a bit of the book Altered Carbon (this is a compliment): the main character is an outsider hired to complete a thankless investigation by a powerful local figure, it’s “noir” in that things are more complicated than they appear and everyone is corrupt, the main character has to quickly learn who the powerful factions are and play them off against each other.

  • I got very caught up in the game and wanting to resolve the plot threads! So much so that I forgot to save quotes, but trust me that the writing was effective crime-style writing.

  • On a personal note, this game reminded me how weak I am to trying to help NPCs . . . show me an NPC who provides scenery or an NPC that *I* need to help *me*, and I am capable of feeling normal about them. Show me an NPC who is at risk of being KILLED by VAMPIRE ENFORCERS they know nothing about and I’m over here rearranging my initial priorities so I can SAVE THEM FROM GETTING MUR-DIDDLY-ERED.

  • The mechanics of the locations and the investigation were impressively well handled. The process of visiting locations, talking to people, collecting evidence and favors, was very smoothly handled, and seemed to permit you to go around in a lot of different orders and still have the plot make sense. (There’s a “night time” mechanic that seems to last . . . as long as you need it to, which I appreciated).

  • Unfortunately, I found this game to not really be re-playable short of actually doing a full replay, if that makes sense. I don’t think this is a flaw in the game, in fact the authors clearly tried to make replaying easier, but it’s just got enough moving parts (your character’s class and background affects how you approach tasks and what evidence you find, pieces of evidence can be given to multiple different factions) that it would make it really hard. I tried a second playthrough mostly to see if I could avoid being told I had joined a faction at the end, eliminate or get revenge on Varkonyi [although still while destroying the painting, displaying it seems like it’s not going anywhere good for Rosa], and do a better job helping Nyx find Crow, but after I got a ways in I realized that changing my class and background had messed me up (in that the evidence I originally used to get Nyx to even admit to me that he needed help with Crow seemed to be tied to my initial class and background). But, as I said, I don’t really know how this could be fixed while keeping the delicious complexity of the game, and I had a LOT of fun on my first playthrough.

My fervent wish:

OK, unfortunately this is me raising an issue without an idea of how to address it, but the scope of this work is so ambitious in terms of the choices / alignments offered, that I found myself forming definite opinions about what kinds of things I wanted to happen, but not really being sure how to translate that into game-allowed actions. (For example, I wanted to try to get Varkonyi in trouble for carelessly feeding in front of humans, but without dragging Rosa into it—it seems like my character would have some sense whether there’s a vampire faction that would act on evidence against him without involving Rosa or not. Or it seems like something I could ask Belmont about once I was his bff, but this didn’t always line up in a transparent way to the in-game options). Or sometimes I would be offered favors and being offered the favor was the first time it occurred to me that I would want that thing (for example, the favor Belmont offered me was dealing with hospital records, which hadn’t really realized was something I needed to do, and also it sees like I know like 3 other NPCs with tech expertise who could have helped me with it if I wanted). And although I could tell the game was generally trying to help me understand what the results of my actions would be, there were a few where I still did not actually understand what was going to happen until it happened (I was trying not to join any factions, but got told I did at the end, I wanted to not take the painting with me to the gallery one specific time, not give up the option to trade it for the whole game. These were really pretty minor quibbles.

Upon due consideration, a very well executed, complex, engrossing game offering a delectable bite of political intrigue urban fantasy. Definitely worth a play.

6 Likes
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Thank you so much for your review! We’re really glad you enjoyed it so much!

One part of that is definitely changing asap: originally, working with Lucille at the end was only possible if you explicitly joined the Camarilla, which is why her ending assumes you did that. Then we added a different way to earn Belmont’s loyalty. Another reviewer also found that one—oops! We also want to find a better way to hint at what favors someone can offer before you actually ask for one. So hopefully in a post-comp release!

P.S. If you want to screw over Varkonyi while still destroying the painting, you can give the painting to Shahar, then find some way to record that meeting in the alley (Tech background, Obfuscate discipline, favors from Nguyen or Solomon), and give it to Agatha or one of the Camarilla vampires. They have the right connections to destroy his reputation with it.

2 Likes
44

Thanks for the tips!

45

Octopus’s Garden by Michael D. Hilborn
Playtime: 27 minutes

This made me want to talk about:

  • As an inveterate invertebrate enthusiast, I’ma big fan of the concept. (Yes, this sentence exists purely for the pun.) And the game pays off the premise, generating some very funny images: octopus pouring itself in and out of a drawer, octopus clinging to a clothesline.

  • I got stuck once (more later), but fortunately there are hints, which were appreciated! The instructions were also appreciated, but perhaps remove the inapplicable ones—I was correct in my initial suspicion that I was not going to need to TALK TO or COMMAND anyone in this game.

  • I always enjoy environmental storytelling, and here it’s pretty funny to get characterization of the humans via the octopus (me hearing my owner puts me in an aquarium where I can “barely” unfurl my tentacles: grrrrr. Me hearing my owner covers me with a blanket before having sex: awww. The octopus’s thoughts on its owner’s boyfriend and his affair partner: “Very odd what goes on . . . . Looks like it could hurt.”).

My fervent wish:
This is a peppy, pretty short game, and I had a MOSTLY peppy experience, but there were just . . . a . . . few . . . friction points. None of these were egregious, and certainly would not have been out of place in something puzzlier, I just would have preferred this game land at quick and easy romp.

Specifically, I still don’t really get why you can’t win if you get caught out of the aquarium *after* leaving the undergarments out—my owner can see them later, right? They’re not going to dematerialize? I kind of kept wanting to like, stick the toilet plunger on a vertical surface suction cup style and then climb it, but perhaps that’s just me, ok the place that drove me to the hints was the ink bit . . . let’s just say that I found myself looking up the viscosity of cephalopod ink [roughly 3 mPa*s, apparently] to try to justify my belief that it’s not a great lubricant before I realized that was Unhinged Behavior and stopped.

To sum up, a very right-sized game. The amount of puzzling and concept was well matched, a pleasingly slight and entertaining puzzle package with a few rough spots.

7 Likes
46

PROSPER.0 by groggydog
Playtime: 12 minutes

This made me want to talk about:

  • A straightforward game, but it’s pretty short so that’s a good match for the length. If you’re having trouble distinguishing poems from the factbook entries, keep in mind that the factbook entries use lots of colons and other internal organization, whereas the poems are generally unformatted and often start with “translated from.”

  • If you’re having trouble with malicious code, check under “user data” at the top of the screen

Putting that all together, nice and quick game, probably good for fans of data entry

2 Likes
47

Whew, sorry for any confusion, a rogue AI posted the first draft of my review. But I was able to recover the real review, see below. (Ed: No, not actually, it just struck me as funny and I couldn’t resist.)

PROSPER.0 by groggydog
Playtime: 54 minutes total (this was multiple endings, I didn’t record splits)

This made me want to talk about:

  • You know, I’m here for the theme of “poetry can break us out of monochrome dystopia” (e.g. Sean Bean: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams” [fans of semi-obscure 2000s movies, unite!])

  • Really creative premise. I think I saw @groggydog mention that one point of inspiration was the “EmilyBlaster” game described in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin–I see how “blasting” poetry could connect, but this is its own unique concept.

  • Everything about the UI and mechanical gameplay was great. There’s a custom-built interface that effectively conveys the mood of our corporate overlords, PROSPER.0’s text is also a good match for its personality, etc. The custom game mechanic is also smoothly implemented. Also, I thought watching the poems get deleted one word at a time was an effective even before the introduction of the custom game mechanic, which then justified that choice even more. And THANK YOU for including a “see the other final choice” button on the last page.

  • The corporate speak is well-written and pitch perfect:

There is unfortunately no room for art of any kind in the Database of Subsumed Cultures.

  • I was interested to read after the game about how the base poems were generated, but they did come out kind of same-y, perhaps as a result—I wonder if using multiple different generation techniques would have yielded poems that plausibly sounded like they could originate in different alien cultures

  • I would have liked a bit more autonomy in how I engaged with the concept. Like @pbparjeter, I got chastised for trying to delete an entire poem. There’s also a few spots that come across as the in-game-character PROSPER.0 clunkily telling the player how to think (possibly this is not meant to also be the game telling the player how to think, but it feels a bit that way when there’s no other in-game option than to play along):

You get the chance to be something more than a worker bee sitting day after day in front of this cold computer terminal, doing exactly what you are told and adding nothing of beauty to the universe. You get the chance to touch the stars.

I chafe a bit at that kind of direct instruction. Or, in PROSPER.0’s native analogy: this Ariel wants to be free, you know?

My fervent wish:

I would have loved a bit more nuance in addressing the themes (i.e., the philosophical nature of the themes calls for a bit more nuance). If you accede to be PROSPER.0’s accomplice, you get a bunch of money. Convenient! If you refuse, the game tells you that you spend the rest of your life wondering if you made the right choice. Could, perhaps, someone who made the “correct” choice still find themselves questioning it later?

Similarly, there’s questions that get teed up here but don’t get much engagement. Are we archivists or are we independent creators? Is whatever the player is doing even a form of memorializing? (This is lampshaded in the game but I didn’t find that explanation that persuasive.) Would you prefer that your artistic work be destroyed or survive in a form unrecognizable to you?

Putting that all together, a highly creative game that raises a lot of interesting questions in joyful, seamless to play way. A tantalizing yet at times frustrating grouping of ideas, but it definitely stirred me up in ways that not every game does.

7 Likes
48

late in replying to this, but thank you so much for the review - it means a lot! re. hinting, i used to work at an escape room, so i feel like my approach to providing hints is probably shaped by that :laughing:

1 Like
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heh, that makes sense! can’t leave people trapped in the escape room forever :wink:

50

The Case of the Solitary Resident by thesleuthacademy
Playtime: 1 hour 11 minutes

This made me want to talk about:

  • The overall design for allowing the player to visit various locations and take actions, as well as interact with records and results on the “case file” page was well designed and easy to use.

  • There were several items that the player could interact with by entering specific prompts. This was an effective way of having progress available but gating it until the player got another clue somewhere else. I did have two issues, though. First, once you learned the names of most toxins, they could be searched in the plant book, but “glycyrrhizin” did not yield any results. If you search “licorice” you will get a page that tells you about glycyrrhizin but that expects quite a bit of plant lore from the player. Second, for the phone specifically, it seems to be a bit too player-unfriendly to make the player enter specific contact names to see if they are in the phone or not—just, in reality, one of the big advantages in having access to a victim’s unlocked phone would be the ability to scroll through contacts without needing to know their names already.

It looks innocuous enough, but you cannot help but wonder… is there death in the cheese?

This game gets me. :wink: That is indeed what I was wondering.

  • I was pretty engaged in wanting to put together the clues and deduce the answer. It was a fun sort of hunter-gatherer feeling to be able to go gather a lot of information and then have to put it together.

  • Thinking about the game in connection with Last Vestiges, a previous mystery by the same author, in general I think the switch away from parser successfully put more focus on the clue gathering / detecting elements and probably reduced the barriers to engaging with the mystery. Personally, I missed the explicit puzzles from Last Vestiges, but accept that they probably didn’t fit the author’s vision for this one.

  • On the ending screen, the different options could be described / differentiated better—I was pretty sure what happened but it wasn’t clear which of the options I was supposed to select. (For example, the presented options made me ponder for a while if some of the substances in the game would be considered “drugs” or “herbs”.)

My fervent wish:
I did have a problem where the last two results (web trawl and medication analysis) never came in even though I waited a L-O-N-G time for them. Unsure if the game was using clock time or actions (or just a bug) I spent quite a bit of time going back and re-looking at things I had already done, because I didn’t want to accuse anyone impetuously, but ultimately I gave up and just completed the game without those results.

Tying that all together, an engaging mystery where the player is able to collect and synthesize a variety of different clues.

5 Likes
51

Thanks so much for your thoughts and review! I really appreciate it

1 Like
52

Thanks for the review and feedback! Glad you found it engaging :smiley:

Added the missing word in the book. I intended for players to search based on the plant name since it was provided first in the gameplay, but I suppose there’s no harm making the name of the associated compound searchable! Thanks for pointing this out :slight_smile:

I didn’t want to make it too simple w.r.t. the phone contacts as I recognise the downsides of using Twine in taking away some of the fun of investigating/sleuth work (and hence incorporated a few open-ended input boxes in this piece).

Web trawl and medication analysis - the results should appear in the case file if all the links have been clicked on (including the suspects’ statements).

2 Likes