Leadlight Gamma Halloween Sale 2020

My horror/retro/CRPG/survival-horror IF adventure, Leadlight Gamma, is appropriately on sale at itch.io now for what you might call the Halloween Season. That means it's half price until November 4.

You can play Leadlight Gamma on MacOS, PCs (Windows, Linux) and, via the Frotz app, on iPads and iPhones (iOS)

Here's an interview I did about the game for the Indiesider podcast back in 2015 (Youtube link. Interview starts after 8 minutes 34 seconds of gameplay)

IFComp 2020 review: The Place by Ima

The Place by Ima is a short (5 minutes) Twine story that asks for some typed user input.

Due to the Twine's size, my whole review below must be considered a spoiler.

IFComp 2020 review: For a Place by the Putrid Sea by Arno von Borries

For a Place by the Putrid Sea (PS from now on) is a parser game sequel to Arno von Borries's remarkable and demanding 2015 IFComp debut parser game Gotomomi. No knowledge of the former is necessary to play, but my memories of it did help me tune back in to its gameplay style and aesthetic, which extend into the latter. Gotomomi's PC was a teenaged girl who was sharp with both street smarts and intellect. Her goal was to scrounge up the money to buy a train ticket out of the seedy Gotomomi docklands area of Tokyo. In PS, she returns a few years later, fleeing some unspecified shadiness in Manila and looking for a place to live.

Gotomomi was a large, quite open and difficult game of great mechanical and cultural detail. It offered many monetary paths through its world (e.g. the ability to take on and complete different jobs and to haggle over prices) and a lot of optional experiential content. Some sequences were implemented with microscopic granularity, for instance the (in)famous timing-critical fish-bucket-carrying challenge, which I described as a kind of Tetris and which marked the point at which I stopped playing due to feeling overwhelmed in general. The game was a very impressive construction, but fans and onlookers alike admitted it was not the kind of project to clean up in the context of IFComp.

The arrival of this sequel suggests to me that Borries likes the original game, wants to revisit its world and reinforce it, and maybe address some of the criticisms levelled at the original.

I travelled better and further in PS than I did in Gotomomi, but again, I didn't make it to the end. PS is definitely a more player-focusing game than its predecessor. The geography is tightly gated so it shouldn't take the average player long to acquire a clear goal or two, and the catchment area for exploration and solutions is more localised. The heroine Ayako again finds herself dealing with a range of shady and eccentric residents of Gotomomi – amongst them a very non-community-minded landlord and that guy who runs the fish factory – as she seeks sources of money and behaves quixotically.

Minor spoilers beyond this point.

IFComp 2020 review: SOUND by Cynthia P

SOUND itself is sufficiently small (for me, a few minutes per play) that my whole review amounts to a spoiler. Therefore, don't read on if you don't want to know about this text-on-black Twine before going into it:

IFComp 2020 review: The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee by Daniel Gao (The game is by Daniel Gao, not the murder!)

IFComp 2020 is on now, so it's an inspiring time. You can find the 100ish entries plus the instructions and rules for voting on them at the IFComp website. There's also a helpful/informative/motivational video you can watch on YouTube, by Victor Gijsbers, called How to be a judge in the IF Competition. I will be reviewing some games here in my blog as my time, energy and health allow. My reviews will probably be detailed, but without major spoilers (revelations, twists, solutions, ending details). If I want to talk about those things, I'll put it after a jump break. That said, my level of general detail tends above average. If you are ultra spoiler-averse, you shouldn't be reading strange reviews before playing the games they address, especially mine, and it's always your own fault for doing so the moment you experience spoilage. It definitely isn't mine! Disclaim, disclaim!

_________________________________

I like to kick off my IFComp experience of a year with the playing of a parser-based horror game that I expect will tickle my fancies. In this year's entries list, I definitely could not go past the title The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee (hereafter referred to as BM) by Daniel Gao. It's not actually a horror game, and I should point out that it correctly bills itself as a mystery. Its blurb also indicates that sci-fi (time travel) is involved. It doesn't dwell on its adult elements, so references to sex and violence are at the level of any restrained modern whodunnit.

BM took me about an hour to complete, and I was impressed by its interwoven layers of mystery, reality and narratorship, even as the gameplay remained straightforward look, read'n'search throughout. The issues of the PC/narrator split and narrator reliability get a triple workout here. The player initially doesn't know who they are, or why they're investigating Jenny's murder back in 2003. A bold-text-voiced narrator issues instructions that initially seem to intrude on the prose in real time, indicating that the player is under surveillance. Yet that narrator also alludes to having their own problems with another entity. I see BM's sci-fi factor landing individually with different players, but I think the whole is grounded by the specificity of Jenny's world. She was a 17-year-old Chinese immigrant to Canada, was academically pressured by her mum, and lived her teen life in rounds of the band room, the library, and the ACE Tutoring Agency. In the best narrative tradition of the murdered, she also kept secrets.

The whodunnit element presents a decent catalogue of speculative possibilities for the game's size. It's fuelled by the details of Jenny's life, one that evokes some typical migrant experiences but also has enough texture to give Jenny individuality. The way the player experiences her world is as retrospective "recordings" of her most-frequented locations, devoid of people but rife with intimate notes, diaries, library cards, signs and messages on computer screens. The rooms are full of stuff, so much so that even when a lot of objects are "real" (implemented) players are still likely to bounce off the ones that aren't. Weird implementation or under-implementation – and almost no synonym support - are typical shortcomings of the Quest engine, and they're present here. Ninety-five percent of the time, you don't need to guess verbs in Quest games, but when you do, you're in trouble; the walkthrough got me through two such bits in BM. Nevertheless, compelling forward progress and little mysteries come thick and fast.

I was also struck by a lot of the physical environmental details in this game. The letters cut out from cardboard spelling "Asian American Heritage Month" in the library, for instance, or the markered masking tape instrument labels in the band room. The accumulation of these sorts of observations conjured the atmospheres of schools and libraries of my past.

In retrospect, BM seems to mix some unusual elements, but then again I've got a feeling this kind of thing is more common than I think. (For instance, in the Young Adult genre. I just had a flash of the novel Slide by Jill Hathaway.) Ultimately, I liked the Jenny's World elements best, and I see how the sci-fi elements facilitate the exploration of her world in a prying, adventure-gamey way that would otherwise be realistically impossible. In fact, it occurs to me I used almost the same mechanism for exploring a character's past in my contribution to the game Cragne Manor. Rough edges and implementation troubles aside, BM is novel and ambitious, often well-observed and delivers an involving story with elements of cultural specificity.

The author's note recommends playing BM offline by downloading the PC-only Quest app. This is how I played, and based on my personal and anecdotal experiences of both the Quest system and textadventures.co.uk website, I'd say: if you can play offline, don't muck around. Play offline. However, if you can only play online, then you can only play online.

Click below to read my spoilering thoughts on the game's ending.