A place to put my stuff
The blurb didn’t lie — this work is capable of spewing a great many things, some of them potentially offensive. And it will do it for two hours. And it uses an unusual technology to do it.
The game is written as a floo script, i.e., a text file that gets run through a floo interpreter. What’s floo? I don’t know, what’s floo with you? Sorry for the dad joke.
This may not be the first IF with escape-the-room as a theme (I’m pretty sure of that), but I think it is the first one to be a simulation of an Escape Room. I thought this worked very well as parser IF. The puzzles were of the sort that might be encountered in a real escape room, allowing that the player has to experience them through the medium of text. I thought the level of difficulty was spot on and that cluing was was fair (except maybe for a certain stealth futon).
This story is, as the blurb advertises, depressing. But more to the point, it’s not engaging. The premise is that you’ve somehow gotten a hold of a phone of a recently deceased young girl and receive a text from one of her contacts that the owner of the phone would want you to go through the phone and see what happened.
If this were a murder mystery plot and I were a forensic detective, sure that could be a good gimmick, but barring that, if I found a phone and received that weird message, I would most likely turn it into the police to avoid disturbing any of the data on the phone. Objectively, I don’t even know for certain that the owner is dead. Best to rid myself of the device.
Measureless is a medium-sized parser game in which the main character is cursed by unspeakable, ancient evil. In most cases, the protagonist has it coming — they know the risks of seeking books bound in human flesh and full of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, but they do it anyway. In this case, however, the protagonist did not say aloud the forbidden spell, sign a blood contract with a demon, or seek world-crushing power in exchange for his soul, he just handed a key to the wrong guy and was a collateral victim. The moral for young players: don’t hand a key to someone holding an ancient tome. Just say no.
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I am curious to hear the story behind this game. In the banner information, it is copyrighted 2004 and the serial numbers agree. Further, it appears to be written in Inform 6 and the story file is in z5 format. Did the author find an old 1.44M floppy behind a couch?
This is a story about squirrels, and I am sad to say that squirrel stories are not yet recognized as a sub-genre of interactive fiction, but perhaps one day they will be. I have been sitting on an idea for a squirrel story for a number of years, and perhaps this will finally give me to the motivation to code it.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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