Author: Jack

Truth be told, I considered writing a dense, opaque review about how erudite and insightful this piece was, and how it leapfrogs over earlier works in ludic philology. My plan was then to hunker down for a few days and hope someone would add a comment that would shed the slightest light on what this work is actually about.

This is a twine… something. It had more the feel of a toy than a story, unless I’m missing something significant.

I did learn a word: logomachy, so I’ll be sure to slip that into dinner party banter.

Continue reading “Review – Hexteria Skaxis Qiameth”

I’ve played the last few games out of randomized order because I wanted to provide some feedback for games that either had no review listed on the spreadsheet or no conversation thread on the forum. I approached this game with apprehension because it is the last game lacking a forum thread — and I soon saw why: this submission is a pdf document with a format similar to a choose your own adventure (CYOA) story.

There’s no argument about it being interactive fiction, but it’s a real outlier in a comp that focuses on computer-mediated games. The estimated play time of over two hours probably did not help attract players, either.

Continue reading “Review – The Silver Gauntlets”

The first thing that caught my eye in the blurb was that the estimated time to complete this work is greater than two hours. I expect that will dissuade many potential players — we will see after IFcomp is tallied how many people voted on this story. It is also a disincentive for judges, since only the first two hours of interaction will count towards the assigned score for the competition. With so many games in this year’s bumper crop, the long ones are likely to sink towards the bottom of people’s playlists unless the author is well known. I read through one iteration of the story top to bottom in about an hour and a half, and I wasn’t pushing hard, so in fact, I think most players will get through this in under two hours and hope it gets played.

Continue reading “Review – The Traveller”

Most twine games are text first, visual later, but playing Charlie The Robot felt at times more like watching an interactive movie than reading a CYOA book. This author clearly knows how to bend the twine platform to his will. The inclusion of blinking elements, color shifting backgrounds, animated sequences, and even embedded videos could have been a discordant train wreck, but the grab bag of visual effects serves the story well.

If I had to describe this story in terms of other familiar works, I would say that it is what you might get if you tossed The Office (British version), Steve Jackson’s Paranoia game, and the movies Brazil, and Blader Runner into a blender, and poured the results into a web browser.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Charlie The Robot”

This is a nicely presented, relatively short Twine game that shares some of its DNA with a Choice Of Games story. Pages are a few paragraphs long, followed by a series of choices, most often two or three, but sometimes more. There are a few parameters along the top of the screen, shown as linear gauges with superimposed numerical values: health, rage, discipline, and claws. There is no back button, so on any given run through the game, there is no taking back actions, and players have to live with their choices.

As the blurb indicates, the player must choose a path through the story, either suppressing or giving into their natural bloodlust. Most choices dial up or down the rage and discipline counters, so the player has some immediate feedback of the degree to which they have turned to the dark side.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Rage Quest: Disciple of Peace”

My interpretation of the cover art and blurb weren’t too far off for this short to medium length parser-based game. There isn’t too much I can say without entering spoiler territory, but I will remark on the long list of extensions employed in the game, including some written by the author. Some relate to the game’s most visible design element, a graphic pane for a game map, but most provide subtle functionality that gives the game a polite, polished feel.

Integrating graphics into an Inform game is not trivial, even with the extensions. Last year, I started looking into various options for graphics and found that a lot of the libraries that worked with earlier versions of Inform no longer worked with the most recent release, and that some were not being maintained. Compared to past years, I found multiple versions of some extensions and spent quite a while digging through revision histories and figuring out compatibilities, dependencies, etc., so I appreciate the effort that this author went through. The map in the game works well even when the interpreter windows is smushed, stretched, minimized, etc., and it updates smoothly when the characters change locations.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Future Threads”

This is an ambitious game with a fun style, but I consider it unplayable in its present state. There’s no hint of proofing or play testing, and the implementation is paper thin. There are confusing parser responses, logical inconsistencies, undescribed objects, narrow vocabulary for understanding objects, and I came across one run time error. Most significantly, there are guess-the-verb issues that players cannot avoid or work around. In summary, it’s a Spring Thing sized romp written to the standards of a SpeedIF.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – Escape From Terra”

This short hypertext story punches above its weight. It’s not that much to look at for the most part: the typography is unremarkable, there are the usual hyperlinks, and the text is displayed is reasonable chunks of a paragraph or two. It looks as plain vanilla as can be, and as it gets rolling, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the reader to think that this will pan out as a typical fairytale involving a witch.

However, this is a modern story; it just happens to involve a witch. I realized that we were headed in a different direction when she complained not so much about the infirmities of old age, but the coming to pass of four live action chipmunk movies. What a world, what a world.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – The Very Old Witch and the Turnip Girl”

I had a favorable first impression when I started playing from the “play online” link. The initial screen is nicely laid out in a somewhat fancy font and displaying useful info like license, version, title, and the introduction itself. I had just started playing when I got called away, so I closed the game and took it up again at home. When I relaunched offline, all the text was rendered in a monospace font. It looks like the font information must reference some web resource, so if you want to see it at its prettiest, better to play online.

Before commenting on the story, I would like to mention two interface features that I thought were very considerate: First, the prompt about whether to play the game with music or silent; glad to see that is becoming an expected feature for works that incorporate sound. Next, a hamburger menu button in the upper right corner that brings up additional options including a way to report bugs to the author.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

Continue reading “Review – The Castle of Vourtram”

I have now played through and posted reviews for thirty-nine games in this year’s IFcomp. I understand that NOIR was withdrawn due to an issue with pre-comp release, so I am roughly halfway through this year’s official offering. I think that’s enough to get a snapshot of where games are falling in terms of my preliminary scoring:

Continue reading “IFcomp: Halfway There”