IFComp 2020 Mini Reviews

All reviews are under the read-more; links below will jump to a specific review within this post.

• (s)wordsmyth
• Stand Up/Stay Silent
• Passages
• The Shadow in the Snow
• The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee
• Trusting My Mortal Enemy? What a Disaster!
• Sheep Crossing
• Vain Empires
• Popstar Idol Survival Game
• Captain Greybeard’s Plunder
• BYOD
• Red Radish Robotics
• The Moon Wed Saturn
• A Catalan Summer

(s)wordsmyth

I liked this game’s plot; it was a neat twist on the you-killed-my-master revenge quest. The protagonist has a sword (inhabited by the spirit of their late master), but you learn pretty quickly that using it is never actually the way to get out of sticky situations. As the title implies, it’s more about wordsmithing than swordsmithing. The conversational puzzles were challenging, which I mostly liked, although a few of them had me yearning for a back/undo button rather than just the ability to restart the whole conversation. My only major criticism of the game is that the VN format doesn’t really work for me, aesthetically, when there are no visuals–there’s just so much unused screen real estate.

Stand Up/Stay Silent

This is very much a “message” game, which is not in itself a bad thing, but generally the goal with such a game is, if not to fully win people over to your cause, at least to get people thinking about things they weren’t thinking about before, or seeing situations in a new light. And this game is so slight that I can’t imagine it being very effective at this. You have no time at all to get emotionally invested in the PC, their partner, the other major NPC, or the political situation in their science-fictional setting. The collection of real-world resources at the end is useful, though.

(Also, I don’t think the game is using the State.metadata API to store data on which endings the player has achieved, and it really should be.)

Passages

This one is tough because I love it as a piece of fiction, but as a piece of interactive fiction I’m not so sure. I don’t know if it benefits at all by its interactivity. If I had read it as a piece in Daily Science Fiction or on Tor.com or something, I don’t think I would feel it was missing something. But it is still a very good entry into the subgenre of “spec-fic elements as metaphor for failing relationship.” Reminds me a little of Carmen Maria Machado’s “Horror Story.”

The Shadow in the Snow

I think this could be an enjoyable little horror game if it weren’t so buggy. Its prose is spare but efficient in creating a tense atmosphere, and I really wished I could get through the game successfully. But it doesn’t seem to reset properly after you die–unless you close and relaunch the game, on replay you almost immediately get stuck in an endless loop. Ultimately, I didn’t have the patience to work around this.

The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee

I found the concept of this game promising, but ultimately I wasn’t really feeling the execution. Part of this is that I never quite figured out how any of this was supposed to work, logistically, in-universe. (So you’re an AI running on a game console in a prison? But you can also discover real-world physical evidence that no one was aware of previously? And was the human directing you supposed to have made you? Because that seems like the only option that makes sense, but there’s no textual indication that he did or that he’s that level of tech genius in general.) Trying to puzzle this out unfortunately kept me from getting fully immersed in the story. The other main issue I had was that the plot turns out to heavily involve a sexual relationship between a teenage girl and a man in his late twenties, and I wasn’t comfortable with the way the game seemed to be arguing that the man in question had done nothing wrong.

Trusting My Mortal Enemy? What a Disaster!

I’m not usually a fan of superheroes, but I was very charmed by this game, in which a superhero defeats her supervillain nemesis and then makes a deal that they’ll pretend to keep fighting so the superhero won’t have to move to another city right before her daughter graduates high school. The story alternates between the superhero’s and supervillain’s POV; both of them are likeable and real-feeling characters and their reluctant friendship is very sweet. The only criticism I have is that I would have liked more elaboration on the supervillain’s motivations for going into supervillainy to begin with; the game brings up the idea that supervillains are people who are not happy with the status quo, and I would have loved to see that explored more. But I really did enjoy it overall.

Sheep Crossing

This is a parser-based version of the good old “wolf, goat, and cabbage” logic puzzle (or in this case, bear, sheep, and cabbage), where the point is less to solve the puzzle than to find all the ways you can fail at it. It’s pretty entertaining, but there’s not all that much to it. Also, I think more detailed descriptions of the environment would have helped point players towards amusing things to do.

Vain Empires

This angelic/demonic spy-versus-spy game has an enjoyably dry sense of humor and an innovative twist on parser gameplay. You, as a demon who doesn’t exist on the material plane, can’t directly interact with objects; instead, you have to manipulate the intentions of humans so that they do things for you. You start out essentially distributing verbs to people, and eventually unlock adverbs that modify those verbs, which adds a nice layer of complexity. Several of the puzzles seem to have multiple possible solutions, which I appreciated, and there’s some fun wordplay with verbs that have a variety of possible meanings.

A little quality-of-life feature that I really appreciated was that if you try to use a verb/adverb that you don’t have on you at the moment, the game will tell you where you left it. I also loved the map, since I have absolutely no ability to maintain a mental map when playing IF.

All that being said, in the third section of the game, I started running into more and more instances where I didn’t know how to make progress with the puzzle. I usually had an idea of what ultimately needed to happen, but couldn’t quite see the way from point A to point B. The hint menu should have helped with this, but the first two major points that I got hung up on both had issues with the hints. In one case the hints were clearly for an older version of the puzzle and weren’t accurate anymore, and in the other case the hints for the puzzle didn’t appear when they were supposed to. On the one hand, I encountered no such bugs in the main game, and if you’re going to pay less attention to polishing one part of the game, it might as well be the hints menu, which a lot of players won’t look at. On the other hand, if I’m hitting up the hints menu, my frustration levels are usually already high, and this didn’t help. This experience did dampen my previously considerable enthusiasm for the game. On the whole, though, there’s still a lot of good stuff there.

Popstar Idol Survival Game

This game is not terribly polished–it could really have used both playtesting and proofreading–but I found it surprisingly compelling despite its roughness (and despite my general lack of interest in or knowledge of KPop). The writing has a humor and warmth^ to it that’s really endearing. Unfortunately, as several reviews have mentioned, it currently dead-ends after Day 1, where none of the options have any links out. I would definitely give this another shot if it were updated to address this issue, though.

^Well, the warmth is presumably only if you choose to be nice to people and not murder them, but still.

Captain Greybeard’s Plunder

Captain Greybeard’s Plunder is a choice-based game in which an aging pirate captain, the only survivor of a clash between his crew and some trained soldiers of the crown, pulls a ship, a crew, and a weapon out of various works of literature in order to get his revenge. It’s an interesting and unusual conceit, and I enjoy the magical realism of it–there’s no explanation of why or how the PC can manifest people and objects from books, it’s just taken for granted that that’s something that can happen. (Although I suppose it’s just as possible that this is all taking place in Captain Greybeard’s head).

However, my enjoyment was hampered a little by the game’s decision to use a different “handwriting” font for the text of each book. I like the idea of using different fonts for each book, but I think that could have been done without using handwriting fonts specifically; I find them mostly hard to read. All in all, though, it was a fun and memorable small game.

BYOD

BYOD is a very short game about having an internship at a shady company and using a cell phone app to hack into various devices at the office. I really enjoyed this game’s central hacking mechanic; playing around with it to figure it out was pretty fun and definitely took a bit of thinking, but wasn’t frustrating. The app’s list of functions is pretty short, but I think with a little creativity you could build some fairly varied puzzles around them.

I would really love a full game based on this concept. As it is, BYOD feels a bit like a tutorial; it ended just as I was really getting into it and getting the hang of the gameplay. To complete the game successfully, you only really need to accomplish one task, which has about two steps and doesn’t require the use of all of the hacking app’s functions. There are a few things you can do that aren’t strictly necessary to complete the game; these seem to actually be the meat of the game both gameplay-wise and story-wise, although it is possible (if not terribly likely) for a player to miss them entirely. I feel like this optional content could easily have served as the main focus of a longer game, which I think I’d have really enjoyed. I hope to see more from this author in the future.

Red Radish Robotics

Red Radish Robotics is a game that takes place in a dystopian future where there has recently been some kind of a robot uprising. The PC, a scientist’s robot assistant, was allowed to continue existing on the condition that their fingers be removed when the scientist leaves for the day so that they can’t strangle anyone while unsupervised. Collecting all your fingers is the main focus of the gameplay, and it’s a weird and slightly disturbing detail that makes the game memorable despite other aspects of the setting/premise being nothing new.

Most of the game plays smoothly enough–sometimes you have to try a few things before you figure out which new area has opened up, but generally you can keep a good momentum going. However, there’s a gameplay element that shows up in a couple of places that I don’t care very much for. There are a couple of items that you can examine early on and get descriptions that imply there’s nothing you can do with them, but that become useable later on. The first instance of this, the fusebox that doesn’t tell you two switches are in the “off” position until you’ve reached the point where you need to turn them on in order to advance, wasn’t so bad. There’s nothing really directing you back there, but it’s natural enough to double-check the fusebox when you have a dark area you need to light up.

However, I really took issue with the sledgehammer. It’s in the first area you explore, and for the first ⅔ of the game you’re told that you can’t see a use for it. You’re aware this whole time of the locked doors that you will eventually break down with the sledgehammer, it’s just that the PC is only willing to use it once they’ve become desperate. Which, fair enough, but there’s no signposting of this at all. I would really have liked the game to tell me, “At this point you’re getting so frantic that you’d even be willing to break the door down, if you could find something to break it with” (or some more elegant version of that). Then I could have been like “hey, didn’t I see a sledgehammer in that storage room earlier?” As it was, the only way to figure out how to advance is to just go around reexamining everything you already examined until you see that you’re now able to take the sledgehammer… or to check the walkthrough, which I confess I resorted to after only a little bit of reexamining. Mostly the game prevents sequence-breaking by gating things off behind having a certain number or configuration of fingers, but in these cases it seems like the author couldn’t quite make that work and struggled to figure out how else to do it. Although thinking about it, it makes sense that you would need most of the fingers on both hands to operate a sledgehammer, so I’m not sure why that method of gating wouldn’t have worked for that one.

I also will admit to being a little confused by the handling of the oppression of robots in the setting. Humans have unquestionably been treating robots as property even though they are people by any meaningful definition (the PC in fact is not aware they are a robot at first), and the PC’s love of humans mainly scans as naivete to me. But the one robot we meet who is anti-human is a pretty flat villain who will stab you in the back if you try to side with them, and the PC ends the game without really having to reexamine their feelings about humans at all. Then again, the PC is clearly an unreliable narrator, and maybe realizing that you are actually a robot is enough upending of your worldview for one night.

The Moon Wed Saturn

The Moon wed Saturn follows Verónica, a security guard for a half-built gated community in what seems to be a dying tourist town, and Araceli, the cool older girl who shows up for a bit of urban exploration. Verónica, the viewpoint character, falls for Araceli, who might care for her or might just enjoy toying with her.

The game jumps back and forth among three days, labeled “Monday,” “Wednesday,” and “Saturday.” Many reviewers seem to have taken this to mean that the whole thing takes place over the course of one week, but I had the impression that this was taking place over a longer time and that using days of the week rather than, say, dates or a “Day 1/Day 15/Day 20” kind of notation was meant to avoid pinning it to a very specific timeline. The whole thing is an almost dreamlike episode in Verónica’s life–she mentions at the end that the memories of that time now seem unreal–and it seems fitting that it’s somewhat vague as to when it happened and how long it went on.

I thought the non-chronological narrative worked well, and Verónica’s anxious self-consciousness (“The second I go into a place where someone might perhaps eventually question my presence, I feel like everyone already does”) felt very real. It makes sense that, despite their very different personalities, she’s drawn to Araceli, who at least seems to possess effortless confidence (although I suspect that may not be as true as Verónica thinks).

I really enjoyed this my first time reading it, but on the second playthrough I became a little disappointed by the fact that nothing really changes based on your choices. I don’t expect major narrative divergence from a work like this, but, for example, there’s a scene where Araceli calls Verónica out for just saying/doing whatever she thinks Araceli wants her to, and this happens even if you’ve mostly been selecting the options where Verónica stands up for herself more or is more honest about what she thinks and feels. And the final choice of whether to do the graffiti or not doesn’t seem to change Verónica’s closing narration at all. So I was a little disappointed by it from an interactivity standpoint.

A Catalan Summer

It’s 1920 in Catalonia, and every member of the illustrious Vidal family has a secret that they’re trying to conceal from the rest of the family. The patriarch, Josep, is in love with his daughter’s prospective fiancé; his wife, Maria, has been propositioned by the gardener’s son; his son, Jordi, is attending meetings of a local anarchist group; and his daughter, Clara, has been seeing a ghost.

The player takes the role of each member of the family in turns (though Josep comes off as the main main character, to me), and of course the choices the player makes in each role affect what happens in the other characters’ storylines. I only had time to play through once, so it’s hard to say with certainty how well this works in general, but in my playthrough the storylines came together in a very natural-feeling way. The narrative also brings in a lot of historical detail that informs the characters’ actions and helps the story feel distinctive (at least to me as someone who doesn’t read a lot of literature from Spain) without ever seeming like an info-dump. Maria’s storyline does seem a little thin compared to the others, but I’m not sure if that’s just the choices I made.

My biggest complaint about the game is the green-on-red color scheme, which I found borderline painful to read. Fortunately it wasn’t the majority of the text, but it still detracted somewhat from an experience I otherwise enjoyed.