Author: Jack

I like role playing games, but I am not a big fan of simulations of role playing games. Ironically, I found this simulation of a simulation of a role playing game fun. This was not the highest-end RPG in the comp this year in terms of production quality, mechanics, or implementation depth, but it really played well and I found it strangely addictive.

In this parser-based game, the player visits a near-future casino in which one of the attractions is a virtual reality role playing game, along the lines of a holodeck. It is a veneer, but the running gag sprinkles flavor throughout the story. For example, complimentary drinks continue to be served to the player even while he carries on slaying and pillaging his way through the adventure.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – VR Gambler”

This is a lightly implemented parser game written in Adrift. I found gameplay impossible without the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself contains errors. I bailed after about fifteen minutes, so my evaluation is limited. This is one of those games that I think a lot of reviewers would have summarily skipped: no instructions to players, about, credits, help, or hints. Standard responses. Minimal Descriptions. Lack of Proofing.

There is the briefest frame story around what I suppose are a series of dream sequences, each taking as a theme one of the four humors. Just an observation: why does IF so frequently make sets like this a central theme? The seven colors of the rainbow (Rainbow Bridge, The Wand, The Cube In The Cavern), the four elements (Domestic Elementalism, The Cube In The Cavern), and the four humors (Temperamentum)?

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Temperamentum”

This is an obsessively detailed parser-based sci-fi story that took me the full two hours to play, albeit not all in one sitting. The richness of the game’s background, character backstories, and the number of rooms and detailed objects in them more than makes up for however many stories I have criticized as under implemented in this IFcomp.

The amount of detail is at first overwhelming, but I am sure it is only a fraction of the world that this author has generated. I don’t doubt that in creating this game, the author generated extensive histories of each alien world and extensive character sketches for each character, but had to make some tough choices about how much of this material to hold back on in order to condense the story to two hours of playing time.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Word Of The Day”

Finally, after years of being harassed by the java updater, something that needs java to run!

This program wins my own personal Banana of Discord. On one hand, a tremendous amount of work has gone into its production and it goes the extra mile to get some things just right. On the other hand, I don’t think most people with play with it for more than a couple minutes.

The overall objective is neat: to give the player a toolkit and parts and see what they build. From the title, I infer that the player is supposed to build things from text objects in the same way that a Minecraft player creates items out of raw materials. Both games require exploration and combination of found items to produce novel things. In Minecraft, an individual player would have to discover what resources are needed to build new things (or hear about them from other players), but it should be even easier to figure out how to combine items described in text to achieve specific objectives.

When I fired up the game, I was pleased to see a number of play testers credited, and certainly having an ASCII artist as part of the game design team was icing on the cake. In addition to the game itself, the author has created a number of detailed resources including an online wiki. The wiki provides a walkthrough and explanation of the various solutions possible, and also goes into some detail regarding game background and design considerations.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – TextCraft: Alpha Island”

The story opens in a familiar setting: a witch and her cat.

This is a short twine story premised on the commonly accepted wisdom that cats have nine lives. In this story, Nyna the cat is sent on a mission and must make a few choices along the way. In contrast to many twine games full of non consequential choices, almost all of them in this story are life and death decisions. Luckily, as we are playing a cat, there are lives to spare. Every the player chooses poorly, the story rewinds up to the fateful decision and Nyna has an opportunity to take another path.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Nyna Lives”

Redstone is a murder mystery set in a casino on a american tribal reservation. The game was written using Gamefic and is played online in a web-browser. The game interface consists of a number of locations, each of which has a background image and presents the player with a number of clickable actions and objects. The actions are a subset of typical parser commands, like “go”, “examine”, “take”, and there are no more than a handful of objects in each location.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Redstone”

My Night is a text adventure, which uses a web interface with limited features to communicate with a backend server. By limited, I mean that many of the commands normally available for a parser-based game are not implemented or do not work correctly. There is no status bar, the parser’s understanding of words is limited, some common verbs like “search” are not understood, and out of world commands like “undo” do not work (although there is a restart button). After every command is sent, the screen clears and new text is displayed, so there is no way to scroll back to see previous text. So, I would term the user interface “punishing”.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – My Night”

This game was built on top of the Unity Game engine, so it should be inherently cross-platform. I was not able to evaluate the Mac-specific version because the machine I had on hand was fairly locked down and the game was compiled to be compatible with a more recent version of the MacOS.

The windows version is provided as an executable file, which ran fine on a Windows 7 machine. For whatever reason, this game’s folder within the IFcomp 2017 zip download file contained a lot of other files including some DLLs that I did not need to play the game. The Mac-specific file is not provided in that distribution, but an HTML document points to copy in the cloud that can be downloaded.

Continue reading “Review – The Dream Self”

This combat-based game is written in Adrift, so I know of two ways to play the game. It is distributed as a self-contained but relatively hefty (10+ MB) windows executable file, or you can load the blorb file into an Adrift version 5 interpreter, available from the Adrift website. Of the two, I would recommend grabbing the interpreter because you can later use it to play other Adrift games.

The story is minimal: you have been summoned by a witch to rid the land of the evil X, where X equals mountain king. I’m pretty sure that there is another game in this year’s competition where X equals wizard. This has been a boom year for witch subcontractors.

The ABOUT makes no bones regarding the nature of the game, the most important verb will be kill, followed by kill some more. The ABOUT is also helpful in highlighting use of a less common pair of verbs: equip and unequip to wield weapons.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Land of the Mountain King”

Following my customized playlist, I can see that this story falls into the same category as the previous one: parser-based epic fiction based on a Scandinavian saga. I guess that’s a category now. So be it.

This game has an inconsistent feel to it — some parts are really excellent, but other parts seem neglected or play poorly.

The game opens strong in a well-implemented room, which provides some understanding of the game’s setting, of the main character’s place in that world, and about what has just transpired. Most players will probably look in detail at everything in the room and collect everything not nailed down before exiting the hut. Once they are outside, though, the level of detail plummets.

It is understandable that the game plays out using a limited number of locations, but if the world is so limited in terms of geography, the existing locations should have some detail. In particular, I felt hemmed in by the generic-sounding responses I received walking in any direction towards the borders of the map.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Tuuli”