A place to put my stuff
Related to interactive fiction / text adventures.
This is a medium-length parser game in three acts. As he often does, this author set the story in a world that would be at home in the HP Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos. I’m not sufficiently schooled in the mythos to tell whether this borrows specific elements from the mythos or just its flavor.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
The Wizard Sniffer, one of the longer parser-based games in this year’s competition, strikes a successful balance between silliness and game play. It checks an impressive number of boxes: Comedy, Fantasy Setting, Castle Venue, Medieval Combat, Monsters, Non-human Protagonist, Multiple NPCs, Magic, and I’m probably leaving some out.
I had a good time playing the game, but if I could offer a bit of advice to anyone who hasn’t played it yet: don’t be uptight about using the built-in clue system. It isn’t a crutch so much as an integral part of the game. One of the reasons my game session ran up against the 2-hour limit was my pig-headedness in not making greater use of this part of this game feature.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
I think this is a serious entry, so I’ll review it in the usual manner. While the author may have put some effort into learning the authoring system and incorporating graphics, I don’t get the sense that a lot of time was spent on the writing or editing. If there was editing.
Continue reading “Review – The Adventure of Esmeralda and Ruby on the Magical Island”
If you’re judging this for IFcomp (or just playing for fun), my advice is to give it the full judging period. This Twine story can be over in a few clicks, but if you think that’s all there is to this story, have I got an iceberg to sell to you.
In an IFcomp full of RPG, evil shape-shifting wizards, goblets and goblins, this one might not get much attention. There’s goblet, there’s a goblin. Probably course of action: Take A and Kill B or, for variety, Kill B then Take A. THINK should not even enter into the equation, yet in this game it does.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
This work does is not strongly interactive, but I thought the story was strong. It was not as feared, yet another wizard’s apprentice story, nor did it turn into a dark, gothic horror.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
By habit, when I play a parser game, I am always in beta-tester mode and the first thing I type is “script”. In this case, the document that is produced kind of is a script, at least according to the blurb. The author nailed a classical film vibe with a twist of Latin flavor.
This is a lovely premise: what’s worse than a crime lord? A crime lord consultant! Compared to a convention of consultants, lawyers, or lobbyists, the the Mos Eisley Cantina is a kindergarten. Dr. Owl has an ideal job for someone whose stock in trade is pure cunning: he provides advice at a distance so he can reap rewards but not expose himself to danger.
The consulting mastermind does, as I had predicted, bear some resemblance to Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Dr. Moriarity, although in this case, Dr. Owl is not so much evil as amoral. He maintains a laser focus on his bottom line. He’s not out to ruin anyone’s day, but if there is some collateral fallout along the way, it’s not his problem.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
Alice Aforethought is a hypertext IF that leverages characters and some of the otherworldly mechanics of Wonderland. According to the splash screen, it is written in AXMA Story Maker, a system unfamiliar to me, but one that seems promising in terms of capabilities. The core of the story is told in prose, with highlighted hyperlinks either leading to other pages or bringing up floating text boxes in front of other text. To the side of the screen, there are other areas with clickable text, for example, inventory.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
With a name like Off The Rails, I was prepared for a screwball comedy, but that’s not what is in store for this relatively short Twine work. That’s not to say the author doesn’t have a sense of humor or at least irony: the story begins on a train, and if you don’t get off the train, the story is entirely linear, i.e., the player is railroaded to a quick but not all that enlightening end.
[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]
Fake News was a fun piece, made even more so by the way it was written. Anyone who blows past the ABOUT at the start of the story may miss the author’s explanation: this was written in SpeedIF style by taking the top headlines for one day and building a story around them. The quality of the writing and certainly the editing are far beyond what you’d typically find in a SpeedIF, but this work captures some of the zaniness of having to weave together these otherwise unrelated headlines into one relatively cohesive rollercoaster of a story.
[I don’t think any specific spoilers follow]