IF Comp 2019 Mini Reviews Part 6

Short reviews of The Milgram Parable, The Mysterious Stories of Caroline, Extreme Omnivore: Text Edition, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure, and Limerick Heist.

IF Comp 2019 Mini Reviews Part 5

Short reviews of For the Moon Never Beams, Frenemies, Faerethia, Out, The Chieftain, and The House on Sycamore Lane.

IF Comp 2019 Mini Reviews Part 4

Short reviews of Sugarlawn, The Shadow Witch, Language Arts, and De Novo.

IF Comp 2019 Mini Reviews Part 3

Short reviews of Valand, For the Cats, The Sweetest Honey, Ocean Beach, and Abandon Them.

IF Comp 2019 Mini Reviews Part 2

Short reviews of Roads Not Taken, Planet C, TruckQuest, Slugocalpyse, Meeting Robb Sherwin, and Enceladus.

IF Comp 2019 Mini Reviews, Part 1

Short(?) reviews of Heretic’s Hope, Summer Night City, Flygskam Simulator, and Río Alto: Forgotten Memories.

Goetia

Originally posted 28 Apr. 2019

Note: This review contains spoilers for some puzzle solutions.

I loved Goetia as a work of horror fiction. The Gothic atmosphere, supported by the art and subtle but evocative soundtrack, was great, and the game did a good job not only of doling out breadcrumbs of story through various documents, but ensuring that it didn’t matter much what order you read them in. It also found an angle on World War II that I hadn’t seen in fiction before, which is hard to do with the amount of WWII fiction out there.

2064: Read Only Memories

Originally posted 5 Aug. 2019

Game website

I really wanted to like 2064. I’m a huge fan both of point-and-clicks and of modern cyberpunk that’s actually interested in doing social commentary rather than just aping the aesthetic. Unfortunately, this game was a let-down on both of those fronts, as well as many others.

2064 isn’t the kind of game that spends 90% of its time making you sit back and watch cutscenes or click through pages upon pages of text. It has plenty of gameplay: point-and-click puzzle solving, dialogue trees, “blocking pursuers in a maze” bits that I don’t have a pithy description for, and even a few shooter segments. It’s surprising, then, how non-interactive the game feels. In part, this is because none of these things are at all challenging. The puzzles have very few steps and the player is often hand-held through them by NPCs, and which dialogue option is the right one is always blindingly obvious. I got the Golden Ending on my first playthrough without aiming for it–without even really knowing what there was to aim for–simply by choosing the dialogue options that weren’t blatantly rude.

The Last Express

Originally posted 14 Mar. 2011

Game page on Jordan Mechner’s website

The Last Express is an adventure game set on the last Orient Express train from Paris to Constantinople before the start of World War I. The player is Robert Cath, an American of mysterious background and equally mysterious goals, who boards the train to meet his old friend Tyler Whitney, only to find that Whitney has been murdered. So naturally it’s up to Cath to solve the murder, find out what happened to the mysterious artifact Whitney was carrying, and learn the truth behind the political dealings Whitney was embroiled in.

Depression Quest

Originally posted 23 Feb. 2013

Game page on IFDB

[Later note: I realize that the tenor of the beginning of this review, in which I assume that I’m speaking to an audience that has never heard of Depression Quest, reads really weirdly these days, but I haven’t been doing any heavy rewriting of these reposted reviews, so just bear in mind that it was written in February 2013.]