Month: Nov 2019

IFComp 2019: Personal summary

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I haven’t played an IFComp entry since 1st November, so it’s probably a good time to call an end to my judging period. I played 49 games during October, and I’m burned out on interactive fiction for the time being, but I’m glad I did. There are a lot of good games in the comp!

Personal favourites
I haven’t posted scores with my reviews, but I have filled out my ballot by now. These games ended up being my top five:

  • The good people
  • Limerick Heist
  • Night Guard / Morning Star
  • Turandot
  • Zozzled

All wonderful games. I think my tastes lean towards comedy, but the two horror games here, The good people and Night Guard / Morning Star were especially impressive.

Games I didn’t play yet but want to
I used the personal shuffle option on the IFComp website and stuck to it as closely as I could. So there are a lot of games that I didn’t play yet that I’m very interested in. I’m planning to play Skies Above and Sugarlawn sooner or later, because the authors (Arthur Dibianca and Mike Spivey respectively) have made a lot of games I love between them.

The most interesting pitch of the games I haven’t played yet is Jared Jackson’s Language Arts, just because it’s billed as a Zach-like and I want to see how that works in parser form.

Games I owe apologies to
Two games I should have played but didn’t: I had to skip ALICE BLUE by Chris Selmys because it’s Linux-based and I wasn’t willing to do the work necessary to run it on a Windows machine. I also played an hour of robotsexpartymurder by Hanon Ondricek at the start of November before burning out – not nearly enough to write a worthwhile review of it. I didn’t even get to the sex yet.

Two games I needed to play more of but didn’t get around to: I wanted to try Eldritch Everyday by Norbez again post-bugfixes, but didn’t make the time. I also needed to get un-stuck on Call of the Shaman after Larry Horsfield was kind enough to point me in the right direction even after I was mean about the game.

Apologies to these authors for bad/non-existent reviews!

What I learned about reviewing games
Reviewing games is hard! I have a newfound respect for regular IFComp reviewers who can analyse games through an interesting critical lens without feeling like a dipshit.

Good luck to all the IFComp entrants!

IFComp 2019 review: For the Cats (Lei)

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Played 1st November
Online version played
Playtime: 30 mins (6 endings seen)

For the Cats is a short Ink game in which the player character encounters a man selling a cage of sick cats. The player has one day to raise enough money to buy the cats or to rescue them some other way.

The gameplay is a simple choice-based structure in which you visit places in a town looking for ways to raise money. You can sell things in the market, for example, or beg in the town square. There’s a good amount of choice for such a short game, leading to ten different endings (including failures), so it’s very replayable. In addition, you choose from one of three characters at the start of the game, and each one has slightly different choices and their own unique methods of saving the cats hidden away.

I don’t really like the gameplay, which I think has a few structural flaws. You’re on a timer before the cat salesman packs up and leaves town, so you have a limited number of moves. Actions take more time than you may expect, and you can’t check how late in the day it is until you leave whatever area you’re in. But you can only visit each area once, so you can’t check the time at will or even just explore and check all your options before you start. For the Cats is short enough that this doesn’t matter too much – if you screw up a playthrough, it’s no big deal to start over. But I’d prefer freer exploration, personally.

That’s mostly because For the Cats is just a fascinating game to explore. I mean this as a compliment, but everything is just a little bit off-kilter and unexpected. That’s immediately apparent in its odd presentation, the strange clashing gold-and-purple gradient in the background. Comic Sans is a bold choice for a main font, but it works fine for this game (and very readable for those who need it too!).

As you explore, it increasingly becomes apparent that the setting is not exactly of this world. For example, marketplace stalls like the “storytelling tent” and the sinister “Exchange Booth” suggest some light fantasy worldbuilding, but they’re presented alongside stand-up comedians and other more modern concepts. Lei helps the worldbuilding by leaving a lot of blanks in the backstory and setting – we only know enough about what the Exchange Booth actually does to figure out that its prices are always too high, and what we don’t know makes the player’s possible interactions with it far more sinister.

This all takes place in a town that has been completely subsumed by its coal industry – the rich residents have moved out long ago, leaving only the poor inhabiting this town which uses coal as currency and which is permanently coated in coal dust. One ending path shows scientists working to save and strengthen the city’s grey and dying grass and bemoaning that the coal industry is always one step ahead, implying that the industry is actively in conflict with nature. The political system is corrupt, and permissive of the animal abuse which kicks off the game. This is a bleak, bleak setting.

I think the central thesis of this game is given in the blurb: “It’s all legal, but it’s also wrong.” I read this as an activist game. Against political and economic ills which suck the life out of everything (cats, grass, people), it’s up to people like the main character to make a difference. There’s some hope for the city in that it’s not just the player standing alone; there are those researchers trying to fight back, and in at least one ending the player can incite a protest against the cat salesman. You can’t change society all at once, but at least you can find some allies and save a few cats.

For the Cats is a much deeper game than I expected, and its off-kilter setting has wormed its way into my head. Very strange, but very much worth playing.

IFComp 2019 review: Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

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Played 31st October
Download version played
Playtime: 1hr 40mins, both endings found

Zozzled is a puzzly parser-based game set in the Prohibition era. Flapper girl Hazel Greene is determined to get drunk, but paranormal events have turned all the alcohol at the party into water; the player, as Hazel, must exorcise ghosts to get to the bottom of what’s happening.

This is the first Steph Cherrywell game I’ve played, so I can’t say how it stacks up to her previous games or how original it is for her. But I’ve got to play more of her games, because I hugely enjoyed this one.

I was worried about the writing going in because the blurb comes on very strong. It’s dense with slang and similes, and it could have become very annoying long before the game was over. But in practice, the game is well balanced – the whole game is unmistakably in Hazel’s voice, but the game eases off just enough when it needs to so that Hazel doesn’t wear out her welcome.

But the main reason the writing is strong is that it’s really really funny. I was giggling through the intro, which is the only reason Zozzled gets away with such a cutscene-heavy intro without the player getting impatient. Gags are alternately very slapstick and very clever, with great lines like “You haul yourself up, feeling like you’ve just gone ten rounds with Jack Dempsey after ten rounds of Jack Daniels.” (I’m limiting myself to this one direct quote to stop this review being a listicle of my favourite Zozzled jokes.) And Cherrywell has a fantastic way with a character name. Donnie Cantaloupes! Kipper Fanucci!

Zozzled is a fairly puzzly game, structured around the ghosts that haunt the hotel. In most cases, you’re required to exorcise the ghosts by finishing the unfinished business of whatever or whoever they possess. I don’t think there’s a single bad puzzle in the game, all based around clever uses of objects, the environment, and a very good dog. I want to single out the séance puzzle and the artist puzzle for special commendation, the former because the solution is very funny so that solving it is its own reward, the latter because it’s lovely and sneaky, a probable contender for the best puzzle in IFComp 2019.

If there’s a flaw with the puzzles, it’s that they’re not completely unified. Zozzled is structured so that you only need to solve so many ghosts before you can reach an ending, with a slightly changed finale if you’ve 100%ed the game. This is a smart structure for IFComp purposes, as it helps out judges who are running out of time or who aren’t so enthusiastic about puzzles. But the trade-off is that the puzzles feel more like a grab-bag than a cohesive sequence. I’m not sure if this could or should be tweaked, since doing so would sacrifice the game’s open structure.

The other problem the game arguably has is that the puzzles and the overall plot don’t join together very tightly. The game’s central conflict – speakeasy owner Donnie Cantaloupe’s confrontation with the cops, who have been unfortunate enough to raid the establishment on the same night that ghosts destroy all the alcohol – is largely addressed in the introduction and the epilogue, in extended cutscenes without much input from the player as Hazel. The main puzzle-solving body of the game has enough entertaining subplots to stay interesting, and Hazel’s exorcisms do influence the climax and epilogue of Zozzled, but the player doesn’t do much to this main plot.

This feels like something is missing, especially when we consider Hazel as a character. I think the game’s storyline ultimately centres around Prohibition, and the way it didn’t stop alcohol distribution so much as displace it and make it more dangerous. Hazel is, let’s be honest, an alcoholic, and she’s prepared to do a lot to get drunk. When ghosts remove the alcohol, she goes as far as ghostbusting just to get some booze. I think the 100% ending, featuring a certain reveal exclusive to that ending, supports this reading of Zozzled as being interested in the dangers of Prohibition. But the time we spend in Hazel’s head is largely separate from the Prohibition struggles taking place in the plot; it feels like Hazel is a passenger when she could be more of a driver. Maybe my reading is wrong and I want Zozzled to do something it’s not actually trying to do? But it still doesn’t feel like the player does that much to the story, even comparing the basic ending and the 100% ending.

Honestly, though, I enjoyed playing Zozzled too much to care about this in the moment. Any quibbles with Zozzled’s plot are more than made up for by its great puzzles and hilarious writing. And the story itself is still pretty good! Highly recommended.

IFComp 2019 review: Old Jim’s Convenience Store (Anssi Räisänen)

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Played 31st October
Online version played
Playtime: 40 minutes, one playthrough

Old Jim’s Convenience Store is a short puzzle parser game. The player character inherits a dilapidated store from an estranged uncle and discovers a secret inside.

This is primarily a puzzle game, where the plot and the writing is secondary to the exploration of space. It’s pretty nicely written, though. The plot doesn’t really give you enough to get invested in it, but incidental descriptions fill in more of the world, like the empty bottles of booze littering the store.

In fact, I’m pretty certain the setting is riffing on Zork, or at least heavily inspired by it. An abandoned building which expands downwards into a much bigger space, complete with an oil lamp to light your way. Old Jim’s Convenience Store feels very much like a more modern, much lighter take on retro cave-crawling text adventures.

The central gameplay here is solving simple inventory puzzles. These puzzles are generally light, using objects in a straightforward manner with only a little lateral thinking required here and there. The main issue is that the implementation is a little spotty. It’s never so bad that you can’t easily guess the required verb or sentence structure, but a lot of reasonable guesses get failure responses (for example, “climb ladder” doesn’t work early on, but “up” does). Also, some scenery objects aren’t inscribed, such as the river which should be present in all the rooms along the river shore.

Another short review for a short game. Old Jim’s Convenience Store is a pleasant little puzzler, and a nice break from the longer, more intense entries in the competition. I hope Räisänen is interested in updating the game after the competition, because with a bit of polish this could be a nice way for new players of interactive fiction to ease into classic puzzle-heavy text adventures.

IFComp 2019 review: the secret of vegibal island (ralf tauscher)

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Played 30th October
Download version played
Playtime: 1hr 55mins, unfinished

The secret of vegibal island is a long parser puzzle game, and a tribute to the Monkey Island series, especially Secret of Monkey Island. The player character is a tourist who tries to holiday at a pirate-themed resort and gets caught up in something else.

Before I begin, I should note that my interpretation of the game may be all wrong, because the translation has some issues. Many sentences are difficult to understand; a few words are untranslated from their original German(?). For example, there’s a “windbeutel” in your inventory, whose description is “Its a creamy puff. Its creamy between the puff.” (It’s a profiterole.) Tauscher has asked for help refining the translation on the game’s IFDb page, which is fair enough, but the game is difficult to play in its current state.

I’m going to talk about the gameplay first, just because it’s the least interesting part of the game. vegibal island feels like a parser-based version of a Lucasarts game, which I think is exactly what it’s going for. It nails the dialogue system – you talk to NPCs through choice-based dialogue trees which update based on what the player character knows. It’s some decent implementation, probably the game’s strongest point.

Puzzles vary in quality, often feeling very surreal and arbitrary, but they seem to be hinted at well enough. I stumbled on the solution to a particularly offbeat puzzle just by talking to NPCs repeatedly and checking new dialogue options. Often, the biggest obstacle is the translation, as you try to figure out what NPCs actually want you to do. There are also a few implementation issues and oversights in the code, such as being able to pick up a whole pigsty.

So that’s how vegibal island basically plays – it’s not great as a puzzle game, but it’s not horrible. But I really want to talk about the plot and setting, because vegibal island has something to say and I don’t think I’ve unpacked it all yet.

vegibal island starts out as a parody of Monkey Island – you begin the game as a tourist who needs to collect three wristbands to be allowed into the holiday resort, a riff on the pirate trials Guybrush needs to overcome in The Secret of Monkey Island. It is extremely daring to do a parody of a beloved comedy series, as there’s very little chance your work will be funnier or more insightful than the original. Not a lot of the jokes in vegibal island actually landed for me, maybe because they got lost in translation or they’re references I don’t get.

The angle that vegibal island takes for its parody, focusing on the effects of tourism on the island, is potentially interesting. For example, one of your wristband trials is to catch a manatee, but it’s implied that manatees have become extinct in the area, presumably overfished by previous tourists. This would be more of a critique of unsustainable tourism than of Monkey Island, but there’s something here – something about how Guybrush has to clean the environment of valuables and manipulate the NPCs in order to progress through each game, perhaps. Plus, Monkey Island arguably has its roots in tourism, being partly inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride at Disneyland. vegibal island doesn’t stick with this tourism angle beyond the opening, so maybe it was never intended to be the focus, but it could offer a new way of thinking about Monkey Island.

As you explore the island and talk to the NPCs, the game becomes more of a tribute to Monkey Island. It starts to make thinly-veiled allusions to the production of Monkey Island and the fate of Lucasfilm/Lucasarts. Most notably, there’s a key NPC called Ron who is implied to be Ron Gilbert himself. (Other NPCs in the area are called Tim and Dave, presumably representing fellow Lucasarts alumni Schafer and Grossman.) Ron tells you about his unsuccessful attempts to find an island’s secret, and how attempts to find it were stymied or defunded by “big L” of “Saculfilm,” as well as “Yensid” who bought out Saculfilm and who now sends all the tourists to the island.

So… assuming I’ve understood things right, it sounds like Tauscher is implying that Lucas and Disney caused the Monkey Island series to die out? If I have understood this correctly (and my apologies to Tauscher if I haven’t), it’s a metaphor I’m not sure about. I’m all for yelling at Disney for its relentless attempt to monopolise all of entertainment, but I think Monkey Island was dead long before Disney bought Lucasfilm. Maybe you could make the case that Disney stifled Monkey Island’s ability to break into popular culture with its far more successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but I don’t interpret any allusions to Pirates of the Caribbean in vegibal island. (Which feels like a missed opportunity given its role in the inspiration for Monkey Island.) The game also makes no obvious attempt to engage with the other difficulties in the development of the Monkey Island series, such as Ron Gilbert leaving Lucasarts partway through the series. If this is an obituary for the Monkey Island games, it’s too simplistic to really work for me.

This is still all Act I. There’s an Act II in which the game outright takes you to Monkey Island itself. The map opens up a lot, mimicing the layout of Monkey Island in the games. You can go on a little theme park tour of the island and visit a lot of the famous locations and people – the monkey head, the big rock plateau, Herman Toothrot, the voodoo lady (who, in one of the few bits of actual parody, has now pivoted to homeopathy). You also meet the titular vegibal here, and after thinking about it a lot I’m pretty sure this is a portmanteau for “vegan cannibal.” This would mean that Tauscher has replaced Secret of Monkey Island’s cannibals with their slightly-less-troubling vegan incarnations in Curse of Monkey Island, probably a good move.

I didn’t complete this act, because I was almost out of time and the included walkthrough only covers Act I, so take what I say here with a pinch of salt. But because this act is so open and extensive, I think that this is the meat of the game, and that the opening act about tourism is more of a prelude. If so, this would be a shame – the first act is doing something a lot more interesting in terms of interrogating Monkey Island’s history and production. This second act is more of a fangame, or a demake of Secret of Monkey Island. It just feels like a less accomplished version of another game, rather than something that is in conversation with that game. I’d be interested in seeing if vegibal island picks up its commentary on Monkey Island later in the act, but I’m almost out of time in my judging period and I think I’d like a walkthrough on hand before I continue playing.

This has been a long review, but vegibal island is a lot of fun to discuss. It’s another fan game like Winter Break at Hogwarts, another attempt to recreate a famous space and atmosphere, but vegibal island is doing a lot more work to process the legacy of the franchise that inspired it. But as a work of commentary I don’t feel that it’s fully formed yet (keeping in mind that I haven’t seen the ending), and as a game it needs a lot more polish.

IFComp 2019 review: Island in the Storm (JSMaika)

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Played 29th October
Windows version played
Playtime: 2hrs exactly, 70/100 points, didn’t reach best ending

Island in the Storm is a parser game which uses the author’s custom Python engine, IntFicPy. The player character has been shipwrecked, and they must repair their ship and find a way to quell the storm that traps everyone on the island. It’s on the long side for IFComp – I used my full 2 hour judging period and only just reached a winning (but not ideal) ending.

New engines are having a pretty good showing this year, between this game, Bradford Mansion and other experiments. In general, the IntFicPy engine on show here works pretty well! Verbs and abbreviations (like x for examine) are implemented well enough that I never got hung up on guessing the right verb for a puzzle. There are a couple of welcome quality-of-life features, such as verb help commands which give you the recognised command structures for each verb (super helpful!) and numbered choices for disambiguating between objects. Also, the text and coloured boxes look lovely.

It does, of course, have the same fundamental problem that all new engines have: it’s not as refined as other IF engines which have been around for 20+ years. Dialogue is a little clunky – there’s sort of a suggested keyword system to walk you through dialogue trees, but occasionally the keywords you choose aren’t recognised. (You could get around this by numbering conversation options in the same way that disambiguation options are numbered, perhaps?) There’s also no Undo implemented right now, which tripped me up a couple of times. I also think it’s a little buggy (playing the Windows version): loading games would sometimes crash the engine to desktop, and some map system seems to be broken in my download (I noticed the message “Could not create pixmap from island_bg2.png” in the console a couple of times; there is no island_bg2.png in my game folder).

Anyway, the engine is fine and usable. Island in the Storm itself is not bad either. The puzzles are generally fine, a mix of fetch quests and more Myst-like challenges like interpreting codes. (The combination lock is my favourite of these, referring a little mathematical thought and pattern recognition.) The story and setting have a strong start when you manage to offend and terrify your shipwreck rescuer for unknown reasons in the first puzzle of the game. The island and its inhabitants are interesting to dig into as well. The central religion of this island is a little off, especially the band of worshippers who berate you in unison like the Delightful Children from Down the Lane.

The really interesting idea JSMaika has, in my opinion, is to suggest that many of the island’s inhabitants lack independent thought. One character has gotten lost on the shore and can’t move without a path to follow; other background characters are explicitly shown as being completely static, unable to move. The story leans into their NPC-ness; for reasons revealed in the game, they can’t break out of their programming, whereas outsiders such as the player can move freely. I think most players (myself included) are happy to accept basic NPCs without questioning them too much, but by drawing attention to it JSMaika makes the setting’s central mysteries a lot more engaging.

I feel like Island in the Storm tails off in the second half, though. The mid-late game is sort of a dungeon crawl, with a denser amount of puzzles and traps to overcome. Some puzzles require an item from an NPC, but the player character can only request the item when they know they need it. This requires a lot of backtracking between the dungeon and the town, which are not that close together. It slows down the game a lot and feels routine and frustration – perhaps a fast travel function or a shortcut between the dungeon and the town could improve this. There’s also a light-giving crystal which is required to navigate the dark dungeon, and which needs to be recharged in sunlight every 50 turns. With good timing, you’ll be recharging the crystal on your backtracking trips into town; with bad timing, you’ll be standing outside the dungeon pressing z, z, z, z, z until it’s safe to go in again. Essentially, this back half of the game has a couple of design decisions which don’t make the puzzles harder so much as they take up more of the player’s time.

So a little more thoughtful design and a little work on the engine would streamline Island in the Storm. But overall, it’s a pretty nice island to explore. I’m interested in seeing more of the IntFicPy engine if the author continues to work on it.

IFComp 2019 review: Black Sheep (Nic Barkdull and Matt Borgard)

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Played 28th October
Online version played
Playtime: ~85 mins (one playthrough with liberal use of walkthrough)

Black Sheep is a longish Twine game billed as “cyberpunk noir”. The player character’s estranged father passes away, and then her estranged sister is kidnapped – she has two days to find her before her father’s cult, the Light of the Future, enacts some unknown plan.

I have a soft spot for cyberpunk settings, and this setting is very cyberpunk, very Blade Runner-y. Happily, Black Sheep remembers to include the -punk part – although it’s not the focal point, there are clear class and wealth imbalances in the game’s society, comparing the protagonist’s precarious employment to her father’s large estate. I think you can read some analogues into modern society here, too – I’m pretty sure the Light of the Future cult is a riff on Scientology (even described as “late capitalism devouring religion”).

For the most part, though, Black Sheep is concerned with its central noir mystery. It’s a nice little story, with a couple of neat twists. Interactivity comes from visiting locations relevant to your father and picking at leads, as well as from a lot of optional conversations which serve to build the world a little more. There are a few puzzles to solve, which are generally logical and satisfying, well-hinted with a little observation. (One puzzle stumped me completely, but I suspect I fell for a red herring and missed the real hint.)

I’m impressed with how this was all implemented in Twine. Black Sheep feels like a point-and-click adventure in its structure – you have an inventory, through which you use items by clicking on them and then on a hyperlink in the room description, and dialogue trees for NPCs. You also have a notebook, and are able to make deductions by comparing clues your character writes down automatically. I love this kind of thing (Río Alto in this competition does something similar, and Discworld Noir is still my favourite example), but it isn’t used to its full potential here – I only ever made two successful deductions, both near the end of the game.

I mentioned above that the player character is racing the cult and its plans. You are, in fact, on a timer of sorts – you can visit five locations before the cult does its thing and you lose. But when you run out of time, you’re transported back to the player character’s office with all clues and items intact, and the timer resets. This means that the timer is more of a mild inconvenience than a threat. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to beat the game in one instance of the timer (the walkthrough doesn’t, anyway). This is lovely for the player who just wants to solve puzzles, but perhaps it relieves the in-game pressure a bit too much – no need to hurry to rescue your sister.

You can also fail the game with certain wrong actions. The one I found was using a match on a barstool, thus striking the match and causing other NPCs to panic (?). This carries the same non-penalty as running out of time, and being knocked back to the office discourages brute-forcing puzzles. The problem is, since the interaction is basically “use X on Y”, I didn’t know and couldn’t guess that this would be the outcome, as opposed to just a “you can’t use these things together” type of message. So I’m now not sure what interactions are safe to use together and what interactions will tell me I failed and take me back to the office. This discourages any experimentation, which is a problem in a puzzle game.

Compounding this is the lack of any undo or save functions. Black Sheep will probably take 2-3 hours if you’re not using the walkthrough at all, and that’s a big chunk of time to give to a game. A save function would be very much appreciated for longish Twine puzzle games like this, although I know it’s a lot of extra work to ask. Much more immediately useful would be an undo to reverse failing actions quickly. I’m pretty sure the authors are using the default Twine style with the undo function disabled, and I’d like to see it put back if it works with the complex programming that already exists in Black Sheep.

Using the default Twine style is another issue, by the way. There’s so much effort put into the writing and programming, and then the game completely undersells itself by looking like any other quick Twine game. A little CSS styling would go a long way to polishing Black Sheep.

(Can’t quite work this into the review properly, so here’s one other thing I appreciated about Black Sheep. There’s a lovely secret hidden away for players who poke at the game a little more than they need to; it’s one final twist which explains one of the game’s quirks that was bugging me for a while. It is, maybe, a little too clever for its own good – I contacted Nic Barkdull to report that the final choice I made was bugged, and he patiently told me that no, it’s supposed to go like that, I missed the joke. Thank you, Nic!)

Despite my complaints, I did enjoy Black Sheep. Most of the game plays well enough, and it’s a fun noir story. It just wants a little extra bit of polish to elevate it.