Tag: choice-based

Devotionalia

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Author: G.C. “Grim” Baccaris (as G. Grimoire) | Choice-based (IFDB)

play time: 15-20 mins

The reader plays the last remaining priest devoted to an unnamed being, whose worship takes the form of daily ritual.

Loneliness and duty run through the story: this priest houses not-quite-human children, and they too make up part of the priest’s daily duties. While there may be loneliness in unanswered prayer, there is, ultimately, solace and a kind of community in this sort of care. And if a religion lives only with belief (deity is an entirely different matter), then the player/character holds existential power.

The overall aesthetic, both in writing and visual design, is appropriately gloomy and formal. There are subtle nods to a deeper backstory, but the focus still lies squarely on the earthly: the priest, the children, the physical setting.

Different levels of choice are made transparent to the reader with the text formatting to indicate its importance in the narrative’s progress. The story has shallow branching which converges in a suitably ambiguous ending, as befits a deity which may or may not exist – whose existence may, in fact, depend on the player’s choices.

IFComp 2021: 4×4 Archipelago

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Author: Agnieszka Trzaska (IFDB) | Choice-based

A Twine-powered roguelite*/D&D imagining. It’s surprisingly expansive with lots of side quests – I took well over 2 hours. There is some inevitable lawnmowering, but with enough random in it to make it interesting. I think it stands up to replay, mainly because of the different main quests. I found the speed of progress largely determined by the starting class and characteristics.

*it’s been a while but I think that’s right? Procedurally generated, permadeath if you don’t reload from game save, turn-based combat

Otherwise a well constructed RPG, with all the bits you would expect (map, money system, combat, side quests, lore). This did well in IFComp, ranking 8th out of 71.

IFComp 2020: Academic Pursuits, Savor

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Academic Pursuits (As Opposed To Regular Pursuits)

By ruqiyah (IFDB)

This game is ostensibly about unpacking and furnishing your new office. It has a simple mechanic, but has enough intriguing details to make it more than an (ahem) academic exercise. To tell more would probably be spoilers…!

If you liked this, Bruno Dias’s New Year’s game Not All Things Make it Across should scratch the same itch. Unpacking, after all, is a liminal space sort of activity – marking a transition from one location to another, and in this case one stage of life to another.

Savor

By Ed Nobody (IFDB). CW for suicide.

Seeking a cure for chronic pain, you meet a dying man in a strange house surrounded by strange creatures.

Foreboding from the start, it uses the “creepy country house” setting to good effect. The landscape echoes the story. The style is what I’ll describe as baroque, partly due to some turns of phrase which suggest the author’s first language is not English.

The branching tends to be lawnmowery, where redundant choices dead-end and lead back to the main path. Some choices are obviously signposted, and I would have liked more consistency in the formatting – especially since some choices that result in a premature ending are not signalled as such. What makes it more frustrating is the sheer speed at which the text is revealed. Mathbrush’s review on IFDB suggests that this is incredibly deliberate, yet something which even the author couldn’t stand on repeated playthroughs…

Another thing that struck me, in the time waiting for text to appear: the player’s main motivation appears to be a mystical curse, but in most aspects is chronic pain – a relatively common experience. Sans an obvious supernatural cause, I had to wonder why it warranted this treatment in the text.

IFComp 2020: Big Trouble in Little Dino Park

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Authors: Seth Paxton and Rachel Aubertin. (IFDB)

You play a kid working your summer job in a theme park with a teeth-grindingly twee theme. But everything goes wrong when the dinosaurs are let loose!

It’s technically sound, though some proofreading would have ironed out a few typos here and there. It did have the breadth I expect of an IFComp game, though with the multiple ways to die I almost expected a running tally or achievement board.

The biggest thing for me was that I found it hard to be invested in the player character. With few details on who the player character is, the stakes for their survival becomes relatively low. The way the story is laid out also means the player’s first time navigating the park is during the attack: without me, the player, being able to make a plan, the deaths might as well be random.

The setup is not bad, really; with more preamble and more distinctive characters I might even get invested in it. But as it is now, it feels more like a skeleton not given enough flesh.

IFComp 2019: The Milgram Parable, The Good People, Each-uisge

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Only a year late, that’s not too bad, eh?! I spent a little time catching up on IFComp games today.

The Milgram Parable

By Peter Eastman. (IFDB)

Starting with the story of Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiments, The Milgram Parable reads like an allegory, using the setting of a corporate militia. All the elements are there: unquestioning obedience, limited information and one to one meetings with superiors. I guess the sporadic binary choices come with the narrative territory, too.

So the game forces you to make increasingly abstract choices. Showing compassion at the start of the game yields the admonishment that you are quick to judge using very little information; this is what the game forces you to do. Ironic? Purposeful? Maybe. The scope of the game is so narrow, the stakes and emotional impact so vague, that the decisions start to feel academic.

The Good People

By Pseudavid. (IFDB)

This is a conversation-powered, living poem in which two people uncover a village previously submerged by a dam. As they uncover layers of the physical landscapes, so they also uncover the landscapes of the PC’s childhood and family.

Everything is fragmentary, forgotten, which creates a sort of creeping horror. The unpredictable visual design adds to that.

The game has a striking use of images throughout, and whether by design or browser variability, the text design occasionally looks buggy – text sometimes appears in unexpected places, or laid out in odd ways. Here I chose to see that as part of the effect of the game.

The Good People was intriguing, not least because it scratched my particular itch of exploring abandoned landscapes and memories.

Each-usige

By Jac Colvin. (IFDB)

MacLeod the neighbour has a kelpie – the water horse of yore – the same kind of creature that drowned the PC’s aunt.

The story was compact; the writing descriptive and the storyline fairly straightforward. Each decision has realistic moral stakes, and if we’re talking about moral decisions in IFComp 2019, this was much more convincing than, say, the Milgram Parable. Overall this was a polished piece of work and very competently done.

IFComp 2017: Redstone

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By Fred (Choice-based; IFDB; play here)

“A VIP’s been murdered at the reservation casino. As the deputy on call, it’s up to you to find the killer. You have until morning before the FBI turns up the heat.”

This murder mystery takes the form of a parser-choice hybrid, with an interface reminiscent of Robin Johnson’s Detectiveland. Settings are individually illustrated, and the system is more or less robust, with a separate conversation mode. It may not look the slickest of interfaces – it recalls, vaguely, flash web games; the illustrations are…

The stakes are not always made clear: there are hints about this being troublesome because it’s on reservation land, and about FBI involvement, but these hints never added any tension to gameplay.

I would have liked a little more flair, a little more panache in the descriptions, but overall this is a mystery which does what’s expected of it.

You’re Tiny People. Can You Open The Fridge And Get The Lemon?

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By Clickhole. (Custom CYOA; IFDB; play here)

viewgame.jpg
Cover art: a tiny hand sticking out from a white grating

Clickhole has built a reputation for prolificacy, having released 20 games in 2015 alone. Their games are usually absurd and light-hearted. Their games usually have long titles which presents its central premise. Then again, I have not played many of Clickhole’s games, so I shouldn’t really generalise like that…

In Tiny People, you play a… group (swarm?) of tiny people, navigating someone’s apartment. At your size, everything is huge. How will you get to the lemon? And what’s Music Duck doing there?

Tiny People favours photos over textual room descriptions to illustrate the environment, which was really a welcome change to the usual Clickhole house style of generic stock images. It also features an especially location-based world model, even if it mixed cardinal directions with relative directions (you can go leftward and east in this game).

The perspective brings to mind other games with smaller-than-human PCs – A Day for Soft Food and Snack Time in particular. The close-up photos of everyday objects from a non-human perspective remind me of Mateusz Skutnik’s 10 Gnomes series.

The central premise (i.e. the fact that you, the PC, appear to be a swarm of tiny people) is already surreal enough, but the ending is even more so, almost to the point of incoherence. Your mileage may vary, here: fans of Clickhole’s writing will probably enjoy this, but those who are not may find it over the top. Still, I found this a reasonably enjoyable, short, slightly absurd piece.

Howwl

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By Tipue. (Choice-based web interface;  IFDB; play here)

[Warning: this game contains sometimes unexpected descriptions of death and gore.]

You wake up in a North London flat, unable to remember how you got there. Tottenham is devoid of people. It’s time to go.

The game is initially a lot about exploration. There isn’t much of a clear goal, but as you explore, it’s clear that something very bad has happened. The game never makes it clear what you’re aiming for – perhaps a vague attempt at safety – even to the end.

Howwl is written with a vaguely Twine or Undum-like format, where you click links to progress.The links suggest what would be common actions in a typical parser game – taking inventory, inspecting objects and so on. The layout is attractive and neat, in which links add to a growing transcript which can be scrolled back. Header images mark changes in location. You can create an account to save your place in the story, but given that the scope of the game, as it stands (I played Beta 0.81), isn’t too long, you might not need this.

Howwl aims for the gritty urban apocalyptic atmosphere in its abandoned buildings and filthy interiors, and does it quite well. You never get to see the source of ominous (and sometimes uncomfortably human) noises. You stumble over unexpectedly gruesome sights. The writing style is detached – is it resignation on the PC’s part? Hopelessness?

I found the PC to be way too generic to give the reader a stake in how the story progressed- not that you get to make many significant choices, anyway; the author’s method of removing options if they’re not necessary makes it impossible, for example, to escape a certain place or to explore more buildings than the author intended you to.

Some mildly spoilery stuff below the cut.

Continue reading “Howwl” →

The Sacred Staff of Deck Koji

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by David Guyadeen and Alex Barrick (IFDB, play online)

[Time to completion: 5 minutes]

Styled as a spoof fantasy adventure, complete with wise old sage, you play a hero venturing in search of the titular Sacred Staff of Deck Koji. True to the spirit of the thing, the obstacles you face are silly. The writing is competent and the game isn’t buggy, but it was a rather unmemorable game – it felt more like a test game – but the ‘Making Of’ section included in the game is worth reading.

I just have one quibble, though given the size of this game, it may be a trivial one – many decision points have choices which result in dead ends. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why this should be, which made it, in the authors’ words, ‘mildly irritating’.

So, is it fun? Er. Hardly. I had more fun reading the ‘Making Of’ than playing the game, so… your mileage may vary, I guess.

Everyday Misanthrope

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by Liz England. (itch.io page)

Go forth and make people miserable! Armed with ‘misery tokens’, make choices and ruin people’s lives! 

Sarcastic and witty, Misanthrope twists the initial encouragement for your life-ruining into a subtle guilt-trip. In the beginning/middle, the game gives sometimes cruel options – options that people in real life clearly opt for, but at that level of casual cruelty. At first, it’s weirdly satisfying to wreak havoc, but towards the end, the author turns this around by humanising all the people whose lives you have ‘ruined’. Despite the title, Misanthrope is, in truth, surprisingly compassionate. 

A fairly short game – about 10-15 minutes if you read as fast as I do, with plenty of branching and some replay value.