Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo
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Star trekkin', May 14, 2024I was into a lot of the standard nerdy stuff when I was a kid in the late 80s – DnD, Star Wars, Asimov, Tolkein, you name it. But the one that stood above all others, the one that really made my heart sing, was Star Trek. Even now there’s something about those ships, those uniforms, that idealistic mission of exploration, that deactivates my critical faculties and makes me just hum along with the theme: dum-dum-dum, dum-dumedy-dum… So when I realized that despite being a sci-fi roguelike about getting your ship from one side of a sector to another with limited crew, weapons, and fuel, Voyage of the Marigold owes a much bigger debt to Star Trek than it does to FTL, I squirmed with glee.
Even as a 43 year old, commanding a starship on a mission of mercy is an irresistible draw – and what makes it even better is the way you get to command it. I’ve played plenty of Star Trek games in my time, and enjoyed them, but hunching over a laptop and clicking the comm badge to open hailing frequencies or flailing the mouse around to try to shake an enemy warbird don’t have much gravitas. No, the actual fantasy is to command the way Kirk or Picard did, snapping off a cool “on screen, Lieutenant” or ordering “evasive maneuvers, bearing oh-three-six mark five.” Turning a marvel of sci-fi engineering and its highly-trained crew into an extension of your intellect just through language – that’s the dream, and it’s one Voyage of the Marigold completely nails.
To help you succeed in your mission of ferrying much-needed medical supplies through a nebula in the neutral zone, you’ve got a nicely graphical star-map and a status screen to show you your resources (we’re a long way from default Ink styling), the game itself is played exclusively via your captain’s log, which chronicles your exploits in note-perfect first-person narration, and drops into dialogue mode whenever it’s time to issue an order and make a decision. Your bridge crew aren’t deeply characterized – they aren’t given names, just addressed by their position – but they play their roles well, and I found the vagueness presented a blank slate onto which to project my positive associations of Sulu, Spock, Data, and the rest. The rhythm of warping into a new sector, scanning to see what’s around, planning how to avoid its dangers or take advantage of its opportunities, and then moving on to the next one, provides a pleasing gameplay loop but also nicely apes the show.
It isn’t just the trappings that reminded me of Star Trek, I should add; the game has an earnest, idealistic streak to it and plays with similar kinds of moral dilemmas. Your progress is dogged by not-Klingons and in some cases fighting is inevitable, and supplies are always tight, but throughout, you’re rewarded for seeing the humanity in even the most frightening aliens, not letting your need for resources push you to desperate measures, taking time for exploration and discovery even in the midst of an urgent mission, and respecting the Prime Directive.
That isn’t to say that it’s easy to win just playing as a goody-two-shoes, though – as befits a roguelike, the difficulty is such that I had to play three or four times before victory. That’s par for the course for the genre, and since each run is only fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s well worth giving it a few tries. But while overall I think the challenge is fair enough, there are a series of interlocking design decisions that occasionally can edge on frustration, and create some tension with the otherwise-consistent mood. Success hinges on navigating from one corner of a five-by-five grid to the other, with limited time and limited fuel, and the randomly-generated maps tend to be constricted, rather than open, with a few specific bottleneck sectors offering the only ways to make forward progress. I found it was very easy to make a wrong turn but only realize I was in a dead-end four or five warp jumps later, requiring me to burn significant resources retracing my steps. What’s worse, revisiting sectors you’ve been to before imposes a steadily-increasing morale penalty; I lost my first playthrough when the crew mutinied over being denied shore leave with only two days remaining before the plague killed millions of colonists. This morale hit feels unnecessary, since the thin margins on fuel and time are already punishment enough for backtracking, and it also jars with the professionalism of the Starfleet crews the game’s clearly trying to evoke.
My other complaint is that the deck of possible events is relatively thin; it’ll probably only take one and a half playthroughs to see just about everything except the endgame. This is fine for some of the more open-ended encounters, but some of them are closer to puzzles, offering clear correct decisions rather than context-dependent tradeoffs. As a result my engagement with the narrative layer started to erode in repeat playthroughs, impatiently clicking past descriptions of ancient civilizations and god-like energy beings since I already knew their deal.
Obviously, though, it’s not a harsh a criticism of a game to wish there was more of it. I heartily enjoyed my time with Voyage of the Marigold and was sad when my time with it came to an end – though learning I was the only Federation citizen for decades to come who received the Glexx Crown of Honor (second glass) for my humanitarian efforts helped take the sting off it. This is a gripping but feel-good game that’s precision-engineered to appeal to me, but even for folks who don’t dream about wormholes and bumpy-headed aliens and low-velocity space battles, there’s a lot here to enjoy.
Doctor doctor give me the news, May 14, 2024I can’t think of a piece of IF that’s made me feel dumber than Doctor Jeangille’s Letters. That’s not because it’s got fiendish brainteasers or elevated-but-gnomic prose, I should say – on those scores, this epistolary mystery is accessible to a fault. No, it’s because the game’s eponymous letters are written in a script-handwriting font that after ten minutes started bothering my aging eyes, and only after I’d given myself a headache by persevering to the end did I realize 1) there’s a settings menu in the corner that allows you to shift to something more readable; and 2) I’d actually noticed this menu when I started playing, jotted down a note about the cunning way it rotates in and out of view when summoned, then promptly forgot about it. So yeah, if the game gave me eyestrain, I have only myself to blame – although, now that I think about it, if it hadn’t been so compelling it would have been easier for me to stop, close my eyes for a bit, and consider changing the font, so maybe we should just say the fault is 50/50?
The idea of telling a story entirely through letters goes back almost to the beginning of the history of the novel – partially because in a time of widespread letter-writing, the format added a touch of immediacy and verisimilitude, much as today’s works of fiction (static or interactive) may incorporate emails or social media posts as gestures towards realism, but also because making each chapter its own letter provides a clean structure that wraps up each segment of the tale while inviting the reader to flip another page and see what happens next. So it is with Doctor Jeangille’s Letters, each of which ends on some note that points towards the next exciting development to come. At first, this is simply a matter of wanting to see how the eponymous heroine gets on after she returns to her small French hometown; she’s coming back with a medical degree and a mandate to minister to the health of her former neighbors, but she’s also fleeing a scandal in the capital, one that seems to be wrapped up with the lovely Olympia, to whom her overheated missives are directed. She attempts to push pass the farmers’ wariness of a female doctor; she weathers her parents’ misguided attempts at matchmaking; she meets a charming noblewoman who’s taken up temporary residence in the town, and tries to keep Olympia from feeling jealous. Soon matters escalate beyond this domestic melodrama, however; first livestock goes missing, then one of the village’s children…
The irony powering the game’s engine is that it’s able to go big even as it’s staying small. The prose is all overheated Romantic gushing. Here’s the good doctor on her parting from Olympia:
"The breeze danced with your chestnut curls, untangling and entangling your so lovely locks. Your flushed cheeks, on which I had laid my kisses only moments earlier, were now beaded with tears. Your hand, which had refused to let me go, trembled."
Her inamorata’s eyes are “emeralds”; when she considers her grievances, “rage consumed my body inside out, for at that moment, I was only flame.” It’s gloriously over the top, and if it’s occasionally a little silly and marred by the occasional maladroit word choice, it nonetheless is deeply enjoyable, and clearly establishes the doctor’s passionate but often-ingenuous personality.
The writing nonetheless is capable of subtlety, too. Olympia’s replies to the doctor, for example, are never visible, but reading between the lines it’s possible to get glimpses of what she’s like – and my sense was that she’s decidedly more pragmatic, and observant, than her lover realizes. The choice mechanics are also understated. For most of the game, interaction involves clicking on a key sentence or two in each letter to cycle it between various options, before choosing which one to include in the letter’s final draft. These options don’t generally lead to significantly different decisions, but rather give the player a chance to add slight shading to the doctor’s impressions of someone they’ve newly met, or express either certainty or qualms about a particular course of action. This does mean that every once in a while, I was surprised by the way an obliquely-phrased choice wound up being interpreted, but on the whole that’s in keeping with the doctor’s impulsive nature.
So long as I’m listing flaws, I should say that the game’s mystery plot is not exactly a head-scratcher, and the doctor’s inability to put two and two together occasionally risks drifting across the line separating a laudable desire to think well of people from simple thick-headedness. And the ending I got was exciting and wrapped up the story well, but I was also surprised that my choices didn’t put the doctor in substantially more peril than she wound up experiencing (on the other hand, in an epistolary piece it’s a little hard to sustain suspense about the fate of the protagonist – “Dear Olympia, then I was horribly murdered” is a letter that’s not going to make it into the post – so there’s an argument for just embracing the plot-protection that comes with the format). But this is an endearing, engaging game, with likeable characters and an enjoyable interaction mechanic, so much so that I can’t even hold the eyestrain headache it gave me against it.
Dream theater, May 14, 2024I don’t think it’s a kick against Thanks… to say that its opening is disorienting and dreamlike, since the author’s note reveals that it was in fact directly inspired by a dream. My first ten minutes with the game involved me muttering “oh, now I get it!” three or four times running, as I grokked each potentially-confusing bit of the setup in turn. At first I thought the protagonist was a teenager, but maybe in like a fantasy world with monsters – but eventually I figured out the game’s actually got a postapocalyptic setting and the main character’s just hiding out at a school. Then I wasn’t sure what was going on with the main character’s oddly-aggressive behavior when confronting a trio of passing scavengers, only to realize that she’s got a traumatic backstory and a unique condition (well, unique modulo (Spoiler - click to show)Memento) that actually made those responses appropriate and thematically rich. And then a couple minutes after that the game wrapped up.
There were definitely some high points to the game’s short run-time – while the writing is generally pretty straightforward and the setting and characters remain archetypal, there were details that stuck with me, like the repeated emphasis on the color of the red volleyball courts outside the school. And the choices offered effectively convey that there’s something not quite right with the protagonist, like this set of options for which of the aforementioned three scavengers to engage in dialogue:
-I looked at her for a second too long before answering.
-Something compelled me to address the whimpering man at the back.
-I didn’t want to admit that I was alone, so I turned to face the short man again.
It reminds me of a Scientology personality test I saw one time, where all the questions were like “What do you do on a Friday night? 1) I stay home by myself because I’m alienated and don’t have friends or 2) I go out and party, trying to pretend my life isn’t meaningless by pursuing hollow pleasures.”
(This is I think the first time in my life I’ve said “hey, this is just like something Scientologists do!” and meant it as a compliment).
And the setup is does arrange some conventional tropes into a promising configuration (spoiler time): (Spoiler - click to show)the zombie apocalypse generally raises the stakes and puts issues of trust front and center, and also interfaces well with the protagonist’s inability to make new memories: is it actually a blessing to be able to forget the massive trauma of the past, as the main character’s abusive ex suggests, or is there a price to be paid for disconnection from one’s past? That memory issue in turn sets up the interpersonal drama to center on whether and how the other characters, like those scavengers, might try to manipulate and take advantage of her.
Unfortunately the game’s short running time isn’t nearly enough to actually do more with this framework than establish it; there’s a final, climactic scene that adds some action, but it felt very abrupt to me, forcing catharsis and resolution on a dilemma that hadn’t had time to sink in and have any impact. Short games can be great, don’t get me wrong, but there needs to be congruence between a game’s ambition and its length; Thanks, but I don’t remember asking, I fear, has a premise that demands more elaboration than it gets. There’s certainly a risk of dulling the force of an idea by padding it out too much – and I suppose that’s especially the case here, given that nothing makes a dream more prosaic than trying to explain it at length – but I think the author needed to either expand their scope, or trim the number of themes they were working with, in order to right-size the work.
Commit to the bit, May 14, 2024I was raised Catholic, and unsurprisingly given the wide range of material included in the Bible, I remember often being confused by what on God’s green earth some bits of scripture were trying to say. Revelation was of course both especially exciting – it’s the Avengers: Endgame of the New Testament, all sorts of cross-overs with other characters heading towards a big showdown – as well as especially bewildering, and there was one passage in particular that always stymied 10-year-old-me, an angry missive from an angel to a congregation that had fallen short in some way: “You are neither hot nor cold… because you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.” I was smart enough to recognize that this was a metaphor, but figuring out what hot and cold meant into this context was beyond me, and wasn’t spitting a kind of rude, earthy metaphor?
I still can’t claim to fully understand this verse, but if I could send A Simple Happening back to my ten year old self, it’d give me a substantial leg up. This parser game set in feudal Japan runs through every cliché you can imagine – you’re a samurai about to commit seppuku, but you have to write a death poem first, there are carp in the nearby river, you get a katana and a tanto and a shuriken, you get the drill, it’s all fine and correct enough so far as I can tell but just very vanilla. It also features an annoyingly slapstick vibe that throws away any gravitas the setup earns: you’ve been ordered to commit suicide because you threw a helmet at your lord and insulted him, for no real reason that’s ever disclosed; the ambient events that fire every turn include a member of the crowd of spectators mumbling that he’s late for another seppuku; you smash through a wooden door with your bare hands.
But! It’s also quite well implemented and paced, running through a linear series of set-pieces with aplomb, and utilizing a random-haiku-generator for that death poem bit that actually throws up a substantial percentage of hits. Even as I made my way through one deadly situation after another, I don’t think I ran into a single guess-the-verb issue, and the puzzles, while all straightforward, boast a pleasant variety. The mostly-pedestrian prose even has a few moments of real strength, like the response to taking inventory at the beginning of the game:
"On the day you’re to die, you’re holding nothing, just like the day you were born."
Admittedly this is undermined by the addition of “How poetic” at the end. No! Stop! You were doing fine! I’d be tempted to say that one line sums up the whole experience of playing A Simple Happening, except there’s one at the very end that’s even more perfect, the protagonist’s final moment of reflection:
"…you think, 'Isn’t this story just [literary reference redacted] set in feudal Japan?'"
That this is correct, and that redoing the cited work in this setting is a fine-but-not-spectacular idea, is completely besides the point – take just about any acknowledged classic and you could knock it down a peg with this exact formulation. Who cares!
So yeah, this is a lukewarm game – which isn’t just a matter of strengths and weaknesses cancelling out, but I think also the author feeling diffident (or at least projecting diffidence) about their own game. So per the angel, I’m cranky and spitting it out, but I’m also frustrated because it didn’t have to be this way: buddy, you’ve got good Inform skills and you can write when you get out of your own way! This game would be really solid if you didn’t undermine yourself at every turn! Be hot, be cold, be whatever you want, but just commit!
And er while you’re at it, watch out for seven trumps and seven seals and if you see a weird leopard thing with extra heads and feet like a bear, book it.
Historical mythologies, May 14, 2024(This is a game with a narrative that unfolds in layers, and as a result it’s hard to talk about without engaging with some elements that seem to be meant as surprises; unmarked spoilers ahoy!)
Alltarach is an impressive Twine game that does a whole lot of things very well. The setting is perhaps the most unique element: its take on Dark Ages Ireland engages with the displacement of druidic paganism by Christianity, while taking each side of the struggle seriously and leaving more than enough room for fantasy. There’s also a large cast of appealing characters, each with their own role to play in a complex society but also boasting enough personality to feel like real people. There’s moody art, evocative writing incorporating lots of Irish, strong pacing, and a really well-done climax that introduces a satisfying twist to everything that’s come before and allows your choices to have a significant impact on the story’s resolution (or at least, it really feels like it does – the game autosaves, so no going back to check – but isn’t that all that matters?) As a result, I really really liked it!
I didn’t love it, though, so this is review is going to be one of those unsatisfying ones where I pick at a game I thought was very good and try to determine why I didn’t think it was great. Given that the word-count is going to be disproportionately devoted to nit-picking, let me emphasize that the above paragraph is not just me doing a bit; this is legit a really strong, enjoyable game, and I hope it gets the audience it deserves. And I suspect some of my reaction is down to matters of idiosyncratic preference – I was really digging the grounded historicism of the first section of the game, for example, and found myself slightly disappointed when the fantasy elements came to the fore; other players might find their reactions to that flipped.
Sticking with that shift, though, I don’t think my negative reaction is wholly down to a matter of taste. For one thing, it happens fairly abruptly and without much foreshadowing in the game’s first act, in which the game’s protagonist, an orphaned teenager living on a tiny fishing-dependent island, realizes that her brother has abandoned her and makes grounded preparations to voyage to the mainland and track him down. There are other youths with whom she shares a history (and maybe a flirtation or two), scant possessions to gather, a prized sheep to make arrangements for, and a colloquy with a priest that establishes some of the axes of conflict in this alien world. It’s an effective prologue, so I was taken aback when some mid-journey dialogue established that the brother was under an apparently-effective magical geas preventing him from setting foot on Ireland proper – and then even more taken aback when almost the first person I met upon arrival was the god of the dead himself. True, he’s come down in the world quite a lot what with the rise of Christianity, but still, this felt like a major escalation without much buildup.
Beyond this matter of craft, the density of supernatural people and occurrences – seriously, you wind up meeting at least one major figure from Irish folklore a day – seems sufficiently high that it calls into question the success Saint Patrick appears to have had; there’s no indication that the protagonist is at all special in terms of attracting more supernatural attention than normal (if anything, as a Christian herself, she might be getting less?) but surely the living presence of the old gods would inhibit the adoption of a new one? What’s even more challenging to the story’s integrity is that the player doesn’t get a sense of how this impacts the protagonist’s beliefs: her faith is established as perhaps a bit flexible in that opening act, as much born out of adherence to her dead parents’ wishes as sincere personal engagement with Christianity. But at least in my playthrough, none of the things she experiences causes her to question her allegiance.
Some of this may be due to the authors’ reluctance to characterize the main character and therefore make it harder for players to project themselves into her, I suppose. But I’m not a big fan of that approach to player characters in general, and it seems especially ill-suited for this story, which is no generic quest narrative. And it’s not just the question of religion: the protagonist often felt like a cipher to me. It wasn’t until a throwaway comment in the ending sequence that I realized that she was meant to be deathly afraid of the sea since her parents were killed while sailing during a storm; that hadn’t come through at all during the extended voyage sequence. I also hit a moment in my playthrough where during a conversation with a nun, she was struck by the twin revelations that a) lesbianism existed and b) she was probably one – but as far as I can tell this is never mentioned again.
That’s not the only thing that falls by the wayside as the game progresses. Much of the well-drawn supporting cast largely exits the narrative halfway through, and while there are newcomers who are no less interesting, I have to confess this reduced my engagement. There’s also an inventory system that feels like it has real weight early on – this is a society where most people have very few possessions – but that likewise didn’t seem to have any impact after reaching the convent.
The final thing that kept me at arm’s length was the occasional inscrutability of the game’s prose. I’m fine with confusing writing when it sets a mood or serves a purpose – I will never shut up about how much I love Queenlash – but I sometimes found myself baffled by unclear pronoun referents or glancing references that I think I was supposed to get. Here’s a bit where the protagonist is reflecting on her brother’s flight:
"The suggestion of the mainland comes to you again. Men in golden chariots, wheeling around bellowing dreadful cries of vengeance, the great brown bull loose amongst them. But also culture, indigenous and Roman, hiding in their fortresses and churchyards. He wouldn’t fit in there, but nor would he much care. Stubborn, like yourself."
The game doesn’t provide any clues I found to decode that second sentence, and I really can’t parse the third at all. Or later:
"When the sailors are red-faced and tired enough and the hooker swaying with the weight of her cargo, the captain, a big, weatherbeaten man who looks half-squid, barks an “all aboard” and stares down at the druidess."
I guess the hooker is the boat, but it seems like there’s a tense change happening somewhere in the middle? This isn’t a matter of the occasional typo, I don’t think; just an element of the writing style that I think adds enough friction to exacerbate some of the other things that occasionally took me out of the story.
That’s a lot of critique, so let me toggle back now and wrap up with some praise, because I really did want to be beguiled by this story, and sometimes was, especially in that first section which I think is the strongest. Here’s one of the first descriptions, of your tiny little hovel:
"You stumble into the kitchen area. Like the rest of the little cottage, the walls are bare stone, unpainted and unornamented, and in the centre is the hearth where last night’s sad embers, smoored with ash, struggle on. You look away reflexively, flushed with the shame of knowing that it’s not the same fire that Mam had tended every night since she moved to the island; you had let it die, not long after it happened, and for a long time you lay barely sleeping with him in a hollowed home, damp and dark, wind groaning through every crack. Now you keep it diligently, even though it still feels like someone else’s responsibility."
That’s a great, grounded way of showing the impact of grief with some efficient world-building on the side.
And I really did like many of the characters – I’m not surprised everyone seems to have a crush on Ailbhe – and some of the creative worldbuilding touches – it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Brigid wasn’t just the goddess, but somehow was also the saint of the same name, which is really cleverly done. Again, a lot of the ingredients here are excellent; there’s something about the recipe that didn’t fully click for me, but I do appreciate the care that went into making it.
Ferns and forensics, May 14, 2024So this is a slightly strained parallel, maybe, but you know Evil Dead 2? The title makes it sound like a sequel, but actually it’s more of a remake, taking the same basic ingredients from the first movie (cabin in the woods, Necronomicon, first-person POV zombies, Bruce Campbell) and redeploying them with significantly higher production values. It’s the same story with The Case of the Solitary Resident, which is recognizably of a piece with Last Vestiges, the author’s IF Comp entry from last year, sharing a locked-door-murder premise and a focus on forensic deduction while moving to Twine, incorporating visuals, and better communicating its expectations to the player. While even in its more accessible form this gameplay paradigm is still a bit dry, the end result is a satisfying intellectual puzzle.
I sometimes struggled with Last Vestiges because it looked like a more conventional mystery than it wound up being – in particular, there were a series of standard adventure-game logic puzzles that gated progression, which made it seem like solving those would likewise solve the mystery. However, that just provided the raw clues; actually understanding what happened also required bringing medical knowledge to bear, and while a police-inspector NPC was on hand to provide some of that information, their expertise wasn’t clearly telegraphed, and accessing that information was made challenging by the open-ended parser interface. Solitary Resident improves in both areas, eliminating the out-of-context game-y elements to focus on its core competencies, while using the affordances of its choice-based interface to make clear what kind of data you need to gather and how you can get it analyzed.
The real strength here is the high level of detail; you can search for blood, hair, and fingerprints in each room of the victim’s apartment, as it becomes clear that poison may have had something to do with her demise, you’ve got lots of tools to come to grips with what’s happened, including sending samples off to the crime lab and two different keyword-driven reference manuals. Beyond that, you can also get formal statements from half a dozen or so suspects, and then question them to push on key elements of their stories (this is the one place where the otherwise-smooth interface falters – I was stymied for a bit after launching my first interview since I didn’t realize that I could go back for Q+A after reading the initial statement). Chasing down every single lead requires paying close attention to everything you’ve learned, and a few use text-box input to make sure you can’t just lawnmower your way to victory – I felt very satisfied when the game told me I’d found all 16 clues after finishing the game and aced the multiple-choice test where you lay out your theory of the case, since I’d had to use my noodle to get there.
My only real critique is that the forensic side of things feels like it far overwhelms the personal elements of investigation. The suspect interviews are much more straightforward than the evidence-gathering gameplay, and none of the characters – the victim very much included – never threaten to feel like real people. That perhaps fits the author’s design goals (the game is tagged as “educational”, and a few references within it suggest that it’s at least partially intended as a more-engaging experiential-learning alternative to textbooks), but does feel like something of a missed opportunity – a few more colorful characters to liven things up wouldn’t undermine the pedagogical possibilities, I don’t think. This head-down approach to detective-work also winds up making the solution to the locked-door mystery easier to guess: (Spoiler - click to show)when the thinly-sketched suspects are a son who needs money but clearly could have just asked for it rather than tried to hurry his inheritance, an old business associate who had a moderately-intense falling-out with the victim a decade ago, a neighbor who has no conceivable motive whatsoever, another neighbor who had a strained relationship with the victim since she was annoyed by his smoking habit, and a near-comatose ex-husband, it doesn’t take too many little gray cells to realize this was an accident and not murder.
If there’s a third game in the sequence, I think I’d enjoy it more if it paid more attention to the personalities involved and created as much suspense around the question of who did the killing, as around how it was accomplished. A full-comedy installment a la the third Evil Dead movie, Army of Darkness, is probably not needed here, though – the authors have cracked their formula and there’s plenty of room to keep playing with it.
Shambolic but endearing, May 13, 2024In my experience, an amusement park appearing halfway into a game that hasn’t previously established said amusement park as part of its premise is typically a sign that the author has given up on their own theme (OK, my experience here starts and ends with Sorcerer). So I have to confess I winced when I stumbled out of Zomburbia’s haunted bayou and came upon a zombie midway – but then I smiled when I got to the description of the bumper cars, where zombies wearing trash cans ran around bumping into each other while burbling motor noises with their decaying lips. Sure, this is a bit old-school for my tastes and maybe not great game design in some abstract sense, but it’s so good-natured and entertaining, it’s impossible to stay mad.
To subject Zomburbia to a degree of pretentious literary theory that it is probably too innocent to deserve, the midway could be synecdoche for the whole: this is a decidedly 80’s style adventure, complete with inventory limits, hair-trigger unwinnability, and a find-the-deed-to-the-haunted-mansion-you-just-inherited plot (someday one of these games will inform the heir that if getting the deed is going to be too much trouble they can just go to the county registrar to get a replacement; sadly SUE ESTATE LAWYER FOR MALPRACTICE goes unimplemented).
I am typically somewhat allergic to such things, and I have to admit that I gritted my teeth the first couple of times I borked a playthrough by not knowing the exact right actions to take in a five-move timed section, or found myself juggling items between my pockets, my backpack, and the ground in an area I wasn’t going to be able to revisit. But Zomburbia’s bark is worse than its bite – notably, there’s an option to allow the SCORE command to tell you whether you’ve made the game unwinnable, and typically an UNDO or two will be enough to get you back on the right path. There are roving zombies, but they’ll typically ignore you for at least a couple of turns, and again a single UNDO will rescue you from their clutches. Similarly, while the game suggests that there’s an overall time limit setting a clock on your adventures, this is either a head-fake or just set at an absurdly generous level so that it adds flavor without frustration. And eventually its goofy enthusiasm won me over.
Make no mistake, there are some rough edges here – there’s a lot of unimplemented scenery, some guess-the-verb issues (PSA: you can’t POINT or AIM the laser pointer at anything, instead you have to SHINE it), at least one read-the-author’s-mind puzzle (or at least if there’s a clue about how to get past the muscle zombie, I missed it), and I found a couple bugs, though the author was responsive about fixing the one I flagged (including a game-breaking one where (Spoiler - click to show)the steamboat didn’t start sinking even after I blew up the boiler – fortunately I had a convenient save and I believe that's also now seen an update).
But look, this is a game where a skeleton band plays “I Left My Heart (in the Other Room)”, which boasts an actually good dumbwaiter puzzle, a giant alligator out of Peter Pan and ooky spooky ghosts out of the Haunted Mansion, and the world’s politest hedge-maze (it has a sign out front telling you you don’t need to bother mapping it!) If you have any affection at all for throwback puzzlers, Zomburbia is a great excuse to put on a headband and a Member’s Only jacket, slide a Van Halen cassette into your boombox, and enjoy a nostalgia trip that’s actually better than we had it back in the day.
All buckles must be swashed, May 13, 2024I hope nobody reading my reviews is under the misapprehension that I ever strive for, much less achieve, objectivity, but I figure it’s probably worth acknowledging when I’m coming to a game with an especially large bias: I am a complete sucker for 18th Century stuff, and this game’s Blurb With Frequently Capitalized Words, use of “&c.” for etc., and broadsheet-style fonts are speaking one of my love languages. Now, this can sometimes be a double-edged sword, because it means I started playing with high expectations and a nagging dread that they might be dashed. Happily, that is not at all the case, so much so that I’m quite sure Rescue at Quickenheath will delight even those benighted souls who don’t have strong feelings about perukes, coffee-shops, and Tristram Shandy.
Admittedly, part of what makes the game work is that it doesn’t wear its setting too heavily; this is a fantasy-tinged take on Georgian London where the fae have an embassy, for one thing, and the author’s note disclaims any pretense of historical realism. Still, there are enough authentic touches to lend some nice flavor, from the sensationalized news coverage that relates the backstory (you’re a highwayman whose partner in crime has been nabbed and is slated for execution in a few hours – thus the need for the eponymous rescue) to the acknowledgment that the execution really should be happening at Tyburn Cross rather than the titular Quickenheath. The language also strikes a solid middle-ground; the prose eschews complex18th-Century sentence structure in the interests of readability and pacing, but the entertainingly flippant narration still seems a fit for the story, like this description of a prison:
"In all your years of highway robbery, you’ve never been captured or arrested, so this delightful little escapade marks your first view of the inside of a prison. You can’t say you think much of it. It’s a little bit damp, and not even with the poetic, angst-ridden kind of damp, merely the boring kind."
(OK, that dig at poets is maybe aimed more at the Romantic era, but it still works).
The characters are likewise relatable without feeling like they’re jarring with the setting, albeit it helps that the only ones who are fleshed out are the main duo of outside-of-society criminals and a number of faeries. These latter don’t have the alien, cruel bent that characterizes the oldest fairy stories, but they are an appealing bunch nonetheless – my favorite was a bewhiskered fairy who responded to my overly-audacious plots with a litany of “don’t say that!”s and “dreadful, dreadful.”
The gameplay also takes a middle course. While Rescue at Quickenheath isn’t a full parser-like choice game, for the first two-thirds of the story can you can freely navigate between different locations, and there are puzzles to be solved – a couple inventory puzzles, a riddle or two, a hidden password… The game does a good job of implying that there are high stakes for getting these right, though after having failed a couple, I think this is something of a bluff, and even if you fail fate will contrive to keep you on course – which is appropriate to the game’s easygoing vibe.
Do I have some quibbles? Of course I do! There were a few times where I wished the game did take its own conceits a little more seriously –in particular, there’s one moment towards the end that seems to undermine a key plot element having to do with your unfortunate partner (Spoiler - click to show)( (after having made such a big deal of True Names, surely it’s not great that you blab out their new True Name in the middle of a hostile crowd?). And since much of the real drama of the game turns on the two main characters working up the gumption to reveal their feelings for each other, I felt the lack of any real barriers that would have prevented them from doing so earlier.
There are minor, minor complaints, though, ones that I noted in passing out of a sense of intellectual rigor, but which did nothing to reduce my enjoyment of the game. Rescue at Quickenheath is a pure romp, accessible while remaining true to its inspirations. And hey, it might even work as a gateway drug for people who are 18th-Century curious…
A gentle fable marred by implementation flaws, May 13, 2024Lately I’ve been thinking about my approach to a reviewing for an article I’m working on for The Rosebush, and in particular my hesitation about reviewing games submitted to the increasing number of excitingly-themed jams. These are often shorter games by newer authors, and I think are frequently trying to do things other than just competently execute standard IF tropes, all of which should be up my alley (for evidence see my just-written review of Dragon of Steelthorne, where I spend 1,200 words moping about an entirely competent bit of IF!) But I know that jam games are also typically written in a short period of a time, might be pretty narrowly focused, and are sometimes more about communicating one key idea or trying to provoke one specific response rather than building out robust implementation. Which is all fine, but really at odds with my reviewing style, which tends towards the overly-detailed, the nitpicky, and (above all else) the verbose – it seems unfair and unedifying to subject that kind of scrutiny at games that are not really asking, or designed, for it.
All of which is to say that I’m going to try hard here to play against type and write a short review that doesn’t excessively harp on my complaints. So: Do Good Deeds… is a relatively compact Twine game that tells a sweet, fable-like story of an unlovely elf who makes friends with a bunch of animals who are initially wary of him. He helps a hare escape a hunter’s snare, comforts a rat who’s afraid of his own shadow, rescues a drowning porcupine, and more, all illustrated with appealing cartoon-style pictures. There are some light puzzles, like picking the right object to use to resolve these various situations, but there are no penalties for guessing wrong, and all the choices reduce to either being helpful or ignoring the animals’ distress, so the overall vibe here is very gentle.
It’s the kind of game that might be good to introduce a younger kid to IF, in other words – for them, the moralistic, didactic streak might even be a strength? – and even though that’s obviously not me, that’s still something I can appreciate. But there are two disastrous issues. First, the prose is riddled with typos, infelicities, and confusing verbiage; per the last paragraph, I’m not going to pick on any specific examples, but trust me that every single passage led to me furrowing my brow at the language at least once. I’m not sure whether the author’s primarily language is something other than English, which might explain some of these issues – and I recognize that’s a hard problem – but there are also a bunch that a basic spell and grammar check would have caught, which would have drastically improved the game’s readability.
Second, Do Good Deeds… uses more timed text than any game I can think of off the top of my head. Again, it’s in just about every single passage, and it is very slow, with no facility for altering the speed. The game also has a small readable window, with no visible scroll bars, all of which combined to make progressing through the game frequently tortuous, as I clicked on links, waited for the timed text, realized it had moved past the window, tried to drag-scroll down the page and overshoot, then tap the arrow key to try to scroll back, only to see that the timed text was still crawling snail-like to the end… it’s excruciating, and as a result it probably took me an hour to play this 15-ish minute game, since I ultimately starting alt-tabbing away to kill time doing other things in between every click.
As with Octopus’s Garden, I can’t help but feel that having just one or two testers would have made a world of difference here; their feedback could have hopefully helped the author recognize where some changes were needed, which would have made for a far better game. So I’ll close this uncharacteristically-terse review with three uncharacteristically-terse pieces of advice for what seems to be a new author who shows some promise: 1) always get testers (the IntFic forum is great for that!); 2) always spell-check; 3) never used time text without a really good reason, and recognize that “it’ll make the player slow down and really concentrate on the writing!” is not a good reason because you’ll actually achieve the opposite.
Grinding gears, May 13, 2024I had some trepidation going into Dragon of Steelthorne, born of my previous experience with a fantasy-themed ChoiceScript game – in 2023 IFComp entry One Knight Stand (colon part one colon the beginning of the end), the character-creation process takes the better part of an hour, and requires you to set such minutiae as the color of your favorite mug – so I was pleasantly surprised to see that here it was just a matter of picking a gender, picking a name (entertainingly, “Maurice” was one of the default options; I couldn’t resist), and choosing your class among fighter, cleric, and… engineer?
What distinguishes this mostly-generic fantasy realm, you see, is that it’s a little bit steampunk – the protagonist is a military commander in an empire that’s mastered construction of armored landships, and is using them as the backbone of a campaign of expansion. With a city-management minigame that kicks off once you establish a new base, a combat system where you leverage your previously-generated resources and manpower to win battles, and the usual Choice of Games coterie of friends and advisors with whom to curry favor, Dragon of Steelthorne would risk feeling overstuffed but for its pacing, which whisks you to the next bit of the plot whenever things start to drag. It’s all well enough executed, but bland prose and an even blander story, which doesn’t execute well-worn tropes so much as it just gestures at them, mean that the game didn’t leave much of an impression on me.
The deadly flaw of Dragon of Steelthorne is that it rarely gets specific. Here, for example, is the description of your character’s travel to the abandoned city they’re tasked with recolonizing for the empire:
"Time seems to fly as you pass a seemingly endless stretch of flora and fauna, with day rapidly turning to night, night to day, and day to night again."
A bit later on, you get a choice of spending time building your relationship with one of your advisors. I picked Chang, a mercenary from the awkwardly-Asian-themed empire next door – they’re obsessed with honor, have a Great Wall, and their emperor has as one of his titles “Mandate of Heaven”, it’d risk coming across slightly offensive but for the fact that the “western” empire is a similar deracinated hodge-podge of signifiers. Anyway unlike some of the other characters, who include other officers you’ve been serving with for a long time as well as your sister, Chang is a stranger, and from an alien culture, so surely this would be an opportunity for an interesting exchange of views and getting to know each other better? Nah:
"Chang initially seems surprised when you strike up a conversation with him. Nevertheless, he spends the afternoon talking about his adventures, while pointing out interesting bits of scenery every now and then. As evening finally approaches, he thanks you earnestly for your company before heading down."
In fairness, Chang does at least have a tragic backstory, which he parcels out over further meetings; most of the rest of the crew lack that, coming across as mildly-flavored bowls of oatmeal, ranging from a plucky servant to a reckless commander. The only one of your group who struck me as an actual character is your sister, who’s lazy, violent, and treacherous (this is of course the personality type that feudal aristocracies actually produce, of course, so kudos for accuracy there).
I also found myself not very engaged by the two minigames. In both city management and combat, you’re given incomplete information about your capabilities – you know the cost of new buildings and which stats they’ll increase, but not by how much, and you’re likewise given numbers of the different troop types, but their relative strength is only rendered in qualitative terms, and it’s not clear whether there’s any rock/paper/scissors effects impacting their effectiveness. This means that they’re not very satisfying as abstract games – I felt like I was making decisions based on insufficient mechanical information. That could have been an intentional choice, forcing the player to read carefully and base their decisions on narrative factors rather than openly-disclosed statistics, but if that’s meant to be the case I found the game’s loose allegiance to realism undermined the effect. Like, in the tutorial combat, I was faced with a horde of cavalry, so I sensibly decided to counter with my pikemen; to my horror, I read that rather than setting themselves against the charge, instead they decided to try to chase down the horsemen, and then to my greater horror I read that this actually wound up working okay.
Fortunately, then, these strategy elements wind up being so-much opt-in busywork – all of the fights are easily avoidable, and in fact in all but one case it was obvious that peace was the far better option, so the only reason to engage with the combat is if you’re role-playing as a short-sighted hothead. And since as far as I can tell the only narrative impact of the city-builder stuff is how many troops you get, the stakes are low there too (admittedly, I was playing on the Easy difficulty; things might get trickier at the harder level, but new players are strongly pushed to avoid that one).
Also on the plus side, while I found the gameplay and the characters somewhat soporific, the core narrative, while likewise feeling quite generic, has some moments of excitement and twists and turns that, while tropey, land reasonably well. To its credit, it avoids the post-Game of Thrones thing of having war crimes be edgy and cool; at one point, a character violates the laws of war and it’s clearly a mistake, generating disquiet and a loss of trust from previously-allied characters. That sets up the finale, where I found the momentum faltered at last; the narrative suggested that I’d have a bunch of options, including allying with various factions or attempting different stratagems, but in the event I could only kowtow to the bad guy or flee ignominiously. I suspect this might have been because my approach to relationship-building was to spread out my attention and shore up weakness – I tried to spend more time with people I was afraid would backstab me – so I never triggered “high relationship” with anyone, which I think cut me off from those previewed options. As a result, I missed out on the possibility of a stirring conclusion that tied things together; my playthrough of Dragon of Steelthorne mostly just petered out, which I guess is of a piece with the rest of it.
For all that, I should say that for someone who likes generic fantasy more than I do, or who’s better versed in the CoG house style, this review might be better seen as praising with faint damnation than damning with faint praise; the lack of specificity and straightforward gameplay do make the game go down easy, and it isn’t afraid to get to the point, with most decisions feeling like they have clear, quick impact (again, it’s much better on this front than One Knight Stand!) But even by those standards I think Dragon of Steelthorne would have improved by a more distinctive prose style, more memorable characters, more robust gameplay, and a little more creativity and willingness to get weird or difficult.
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