IFComp 2024 review: The Triskelion Affair by Clyde Falsoon

In spite of being the buggiest game I've played this IFComp – though admittedly I have not played many – The Triskelion Affair still held my interest and/or pulled me through. This parser adventure posits the player as a "medieval detective" (quoth the blurb) tasked with finding a magical item hidden in a church. Perhaps, in retrospect, the key piece of information to take from the blurb is this description: "Inspired by the classic dungeon-crawl adventures of yore." And not this other one that says, "Sword & sorcery", which feels wrong. And also not the paradoxical thrust of the whole blurb, which is that you will only get into deeper trouble if you don't explore diligently. I think it's actually the opposite, that by exploring diligently, you will advance in the game and thus unavoidably get into deeper trouble, the nature of adventures in general. That first note about the dungeon-crawl adventures of yore reins in a range of the game's content and approaches, which could otherwise be described as being all over the place. They still coalesce into a setting of some atmosphere and focus in the last third of the game, which takes place in an eerie abandoned chapel.

(cover art by Ian Yarham, Geograph (2024-08-18))

The parser voice is a mixture of straight reverent description, replete with details of the different architectural features of churches such as the apse and narthex, and personalised snark of the kind parser games have refined over the years but which is going out of style unless you label your game Old School. A rewrite of core parser cues, like asking the player 'What do you do?' every turn, and the inclusion of numerous gags, like wacky doggerel for tombstone epitaphs, or erecting mausoleums to Crowther and Woods of Adventure fame, give the sense of the author's presence. I don't know that the two voices are at war with each other, but they certainly comprise a tonal switch that is thrown rapidly and repeatedly between settings A and B during the course of the game. There's also the odd personal exhortation; typing GET ALL produces: "That’s too much burden for one person, and there’s stuff you don’t want to deal with. Try examining the thing first. Explore! Otherwise, what’s the fun?"

This particular message was a handy cue for me to poke at things for poking's enjoyment and sake, which was the correct attitude to take in retrospect. Much of the game's contents and geographical presentation remind me of a MUD's, which aren't usually designed for single players or for puzzle-solving. The room description of each of a large graveyard's sections consists of a brief note about which sector the player is in, followed by the same general graveyard description. A game warden's hut is chock-full of takeable described stuff that is ultimately of no use on the player's quest. Having taken it all, I ended up leaving it strewn all over the donjon because there's also an inventory limit, albeit a generous one.

I found the chapel part of the game particularly involving. I've found it hard to put my finger on exactly why. I certainly find abandoned church settings inherently creepy and fascinating. There's a sense in this game that there's no overt threat, and that the environment shouldn't be hostile, but it is, anyway. Everyone's left or died. Broken furniture barricades hint at scary troubles. The church is full of ritualistic paraphernalia, the volume of it suggesting numerous stressful prop-based puzzles are ahead (What am I going to do with an explodable canister? With the northern lantern? The southern lantern? The third lantern whose direction I forget? The stack of parchment? The highly suspicious blank parchment? The multiple candleholders? etc.) yet that's not the case. Somehow all of these elements apply an overhead weight, an idea of a past and of a world and kingdom outside, all the better to make you feel stuck in this weird holy place picking at some minor mystery like it's a cog in something bigger. 

There's also a lone RPG fight with a zombie, easily won, but just make sure you pick up and wear again anything the zombie tore off you during the melee!

As my opening declared, I found the game to be really buggy. Increasingly so towards its conclusion, where even room names degenerate into exposed Inform code. All the way through, there's almost always just one way to do a thing that's frictionless. Every other way is troubled, missing, leads in disambiguation circles, or suffers from spelling errors or no synonyms. Most alternate obvious uses for objects are not catered to. I've experienced hundreds of games in this state by now in my gaming and reviewing career. These games just needed testing. How this one's state will sit with each player is unknown to me. It's easy to imagine players tossing in the towel due to a lack of trust. Once I'd established the level of bugginess, I didn't hesitate to turn to the walkthrough when needed, or just break out saved games to repeat actions that I had no faith the game would let me repeat without cutting off future success.

Triskelion also opens with a tutorial. It feels funny and friendly, but already shows many of the implementation omissions. The second command demanded in the whole game seems to be SALUTE. This immediately returns, "What do you want to salute?" Come on, game. The guy who just saluted me. It's also off-target in emphasising a lot of eating, which is unimportant for this game, and a decent amount of communication by the dreaded ASK/TELL system, which is also, mercifully, completely unimportant for this game beyond the tutorial.

The Triskelion Affair feels like a lot of buggy, parser-loving parser games I've played before, but it comes on friendly, even if the tutorial's off piste, and the church section ultimately pulls together to menace with atmosphere. Whether you will get that far in spite of all the bugginess is not a prediction I can make in general.

IFComp 2024 review: Winter-Over by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier

After enjoying The Killings in Wasacona (KIW) so much, I got wind that another Twine IFComp game, Winter-Over by Emery Joyce and N. Cormier, might present a similar experience, and a comparable one for reviewing purposes. It does and it does. Were you to read no more of this review, what I would say about Winter-Over is that it's fairly dense and challenging on various fronts, and even with the help of its excellent auto-taking Notes feature and character summaries, it's probably best approached not in a hurry, and with mental resources to spare.

The game's sublimely atmopsheric cover image is a real photograph that looks unreal, and this primes the player to enter the strangely cloistered reality of Pickering Station in Antarctica. The PC is Pickering's "mechanic, handyman, and general jack-of-all-trades", and they've brought along their somewhat edgy brother, Daniel. This makes for a complement of about fourteen working at the station, a mixture of men and women, scientists and maintenance staff. When one of them murders Daniel, the PC is driven to try to solve the case themselves because the New Zealand Police are ten days away.

The game's title refers to Winter-over syndrome, a kind of stir craziness particular to workers enduring the long (two thirds of the year) winters at the Earth's poles. The irritableness, depression and aggression from the syndrome potentially affects the behaviour of all the characters in this game. Having paranoid characters trapped in a dangerous situation in the Antarctic immediately recalls John Carpenter's film The Thing (1982), and the game acknowledges this and dispenses with any need to dwell on it by having copies of both The Thing and its same-named 2011 prequel present in the game's rec room video library. This gesture says: You know about The Thing, we know about The Thing. Let's just continue.

Winter-Over (WO) presents as a more cerebrally veiled mystery than KIW. This grows out of its more restricted setting, and the fact that its PC is not letting on, while questioning suspects, that Daniel's death is suspicious. It's being passed off as an accident. Characters and geography tended to be tied together in KIW. You would explore the map, meet different characters and speak to them on their own turf about their experiences. Memories were easier to anchor because each interviewee could be visualised in a particular place. In WO, all the characters work and live together in a finite space. Their work is interconnected. They are not met in discrete venues but roam the station. You will meet almost every character in every location at some point. In fact, a challenge is just working out where particular characters will be at given times when you need to speak to them. It is all challenging; remembering who's who, what to go back and ask someone about, or whom to spend more time with to butter them up. These elements would allow a player to investigate smarter on a replay, though.

WO also offers considerably less commentary on physical environment than KIW, which makes sense as WO's environment is closed and more uniform. This puts the focus on the character dialogue and the PC's thoughts on their interactions. It's a tricky balance keeping dialogue sufficiently lively while also indulging enough repetition that the player can grab onto some routines. While it is a bit drab to be given the exact same questions to ask every major NPC, it means the answers can be more easily compared, even as a samey feeling does threaten the first few questioning sessions.

The characters perhaps need more tics to enable them or their interrelated pecadilloes to be distinguished in the long run. Again, it's tough when they have to frame themselves almost without action, just by responding to similar questions asked repeatedly. It is exciting when you find something that will allow you to goad more out of someone you've already met, whether that something is revelations from a security camera, info about their medical problems or evidence of their handedness (the killer was not a lefty). But just finding a target character can be tough. If you haven't developed their schedule, which is collated for you in the automated Notes section as you play, you can spend many game days trying to encounter them again.

There is some dense plotting in WO, and while I always enjoyed learning new things during play, and feeling the tension of the looming deadline, events often felt like they were floating away from me. I couldn't find people I needed to find, or the PC would become too sleepy and need to take a break, or an exciting one-off event would occur (e.g. the lights go out) that would interrupt both my physical progress and train of thought.

Perhaps this is all less stressful if you consider, going in, that you might need to play again. Given the level of detailed I uncovered, I wasn't sure if I'd be prepared to try again (at least during IFComp) if I didn't succeed. The thought was more stressful than warming. I'd not acquired a sense of how important saving the game would be, either. Maybe I still don't have one. I don't think you can die during the investigation, but can you identify any landmark moments? The investigation is all cumulative. And there is ultimately a lot to enjoy, from the mystery and revelations, and the claustrophobic atmosphere, to the odd violent shock or attack upon the PC.

Comparing it to the broadly similar KIW, I enjoyed KIW more for its varied presentation of characters and the possibilities presented by its skill system, but both games offer a stiff mystery challenge coupled with a lot of helpful features. Both can be replayed. I think KIW offers more replay appeal.

IFComp 2024 review: The Killings in Wasacona by Steve Kollmansberger

Minor tech note: Planet IF seems to display a white gulf at the head of my blog post if I add a graphic, so I may not share the cover graphics of reviewed games any more, or I may at least experiment with placing them at the bottom of the posts instead of the head.

The Killings in Wasacona (KIW) by Steve Kollmansberger is a thoroughly involving and suspenseful police procedural murder-mystery game in which the player, a fresh FBI graduate, is tasked with unravelling the reasons behind an abruptly rising bodycount in the eponymous town. It comes as a choice-clicking Twine with some minor graphical embellishment in the form of maps. It also utilises a skill mechanics system. Whenever the agent's skills are challenged, the skill test is delivered transparently as a die roll, with the modifiers and results announced. The player can pick from various classes at the start to decide where they'd like their skill emphases to be. I picked Analyst because (a) I liked the sound of it and (b) Claudio Daffra recommended it in his review on intfiction.org (link to that review)

In my experience, games where you have to solve crimes by producing solutions are extremely challenging to beat. They're probably as difficult to create. Players will perceive all kinds of patterns in everything, assuming they get much of the everything – it's often part of the game design that just getting the information is half the challenge – and they can divine wild solutions that are rarely what the game wants when it's piper-paying time. Often these solutions can't even really be inputted, leading to frustration or disappointment.

KIW pretty much avoids all these problems. It has tight mechanics that focus the player on the clue-gathering, prose that summarises what the clues might mean in relation to clues already gathered, and it offers an ultimate refresher on gathered evidence.

The game's writing mode has a Visual Novel kind of feel. I don't refer to graphics. I mean that the characters are perhaps a little overlit. They speak with a touch too many exclamation marks, a touch too much exposition and too many gestures. This isn't my preferred mode, but by the end, I realised I probably actually needed this extra illumination in order to have been able to take in the amount of info the game was dispensing. The prose is efficient, at times rising to a level of strong perceptiveness that I'd have liked to have seen more of:

"The house is clearly lived in, but with the deferred maintenance one might expect from a single person trying to keep up with the demands of life and inflation."

KIW follows a cycle where turns usually take up an hour of the day, and there are on average five locations or people available to visit on any turn. The player can choose from amongst all the necessary tasks for the investigation: Visiting crime scenes, the morgue, the local college, interviewing other officers, interviewing townies, following hunches, even just driving around at random to see what hits. (Remember that Ted Bundy was twice caught red-handed by randomly patrolling officers in cars, just because they thought he was acting suspiciously, so don't neglect this option.)

KIW emphasises efficient use of the player's time, and a clock up in the corner creates a pleasurable suspense and urgency, even though technically, the game is generous in allowing you to get a lot done. The amount of apparently cross-referenced knowledge of the player's progress, used to cue developments in the prose, is also impressive. The game state looks to be complex but the game knows its state, and the player's. (Don't get me started on games that don't know their own state.)

Perhaps the only incident I found too unrealistic, and disconnected from other events, was when I was given the opportunity to accuse only the second officer I spoke to on the case of actually murdering the apparent drug overdose victim whose corpse she'd found – just because this officer displayed a prejudicial attitude towards drug dealers. With great bloody-mindedness, I took the game up on this offer. I admit I only did this because I'd yet to realise that the presentation of the skill-testing options (the first one had gone great! I'd had +3 on my roll) seemed to endorse them. Big font, imperative mode. I then realised all the choices appear this way. Lesson learnt, I botched this accusational die roll with a -6 modifier and thoroughly pissed off officer Amanda. However, I don't think Clarice Starling would ever have entertained this option in the first place.

There's finite time to solve the crimes, and when that time is up, the player chooses their solutions from an incredibly detailed menu of possibilities, considering the gathered evidence for each case in handy point form. Perhaps this has been done before, but I've not seen it, and it seemed a great compromise of all the systems involved. It helps the player a lot, but also doesn't make it at all easy to just guess solutions if one's not on the right track.

The results screen is also lots of fun, showing how the player's outcomes fare against everyone else who's played the game. I felt very positive during my investigation that I was handling KIW at an above average skill level for me re: this genre, but my outcomes were all those shared by the majority of players to date, probably indicating my averageness. I didn't feel bad about this. The Killings in Wasacona is a game with a lot of details, but which makes those details accessible. It made me feel the pressure of the investigation, the opening of possibilities, of mysteries, the thrill of discovery, the possibility of solution – and still give that final reminder that yes, solving crimes is  hard. I think future crime-solving games could take leafs from this one.

(Cover art by the game's author using DALL-E 3)

IFComp 2024 review: House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo

...

(cover art by Mango Azalea)

My clinical-sounding and admittedly cynical summation of House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo might be, "Depression Quest but shorter and with you forced to suffer at others' hands as well." I correctly predicted what kind of experience was ahead when the first choice I picked from three offered basically said, "You can't do that yet, pick a different choice." Then the second choice I picked said, "You can't do that either, pick a different choice."

This is a mostly metaphorical(?) Twine piece that looks to me about being completely depressed, broken and non-functional, hiding these facts from the world, and also being in an environment of zero care or flexibility and where you are forced to go against your own wishes in terms of what you want to do, or when, or even what to eat. This manifests as having a round of chores to do each day, unsatisfactory eating supervised by some unspecified They at night, and visiting three other storylets on the way.

The storylets were the best parts, I thought, because they offered specificity. They approached character and situation. Learning, friends, college, those kinds of things. Returning to the House Of Wolves at night returns the prose to heartfelt but too generic prose of the dirge of hopelessness. That is what most annoyed me about this piece in the end, its non-specific version of hopelessness. I know I've made this same criticism of many other pieces of this type over time.

I also didn't understand the wolf metaphor. I am extraordinarily glad it all ended on a note of hope, but it doesn't actually feel like it should. There's not much hope on the way, so the end feels like a deus ex, and I view this shape as the outcome of both thematic and writing problems.

Paradoxically, content warnings don't have to evince much detail before I find fault with them, and this piece's were highly detailed and did it no favours. Too long, too much detail, robbing the piece of surprise, overstimulating the listed effects before they'd even been attempted to be executed by art. Shopping-listed out of their context, I felt worse from the content warnings than I did from the fiction itself. This is a reminder of one of many reasons I don't believe in what are called trigger warnings, or overly specific content warnings. I believe they make people over-believe in their own vulnerabilities. They do that and they spoil stuff, too.

House Of Wolves was plainly not my cup of tea, and I regard its trajectory as unsatisfactory, but it does have a simple grace of execution and presentation on its own terms.

...

PS (September 9)- Having written, "I don't believe in what are called trigger warnings," in the review, I thought afterwards this isn't a personal belief issue, and I should not be treading diplomatically like that and framing it as one. Shouldn't we believe or not believe in the usefulness of these warnings (in a broad context, that they have spread to) based on the best scientific evidence? I used to work at the Medical Journal of Australia and I am interested in evidence from good research.

I googled the topic anew with "is there any scientific evidence for trigger warnings". The results of a series of peer-reviewed articles and meta-analyses clearly sum up the answer in 2024 as "no". I tried to coax google to produce an opposition to these results, "a scientific study that supports trigger warnings". There isn't one. This is not contentious. There are effects from trigger warnings, they just don't help people's mental health. The most consistent finding is that being presented with them and reading them generates anticipatory anxiety for most people.

Anyone can find all of the same research I found with any google search on this topic, as it is all of the multiple front pages, but here are a few specific links:

A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes (in Sage, from Clinical Psychological Research, 2023)

Typology of content warnings and trigger warnings: Systematic review (PLoS One, 2022)

Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories (in Sage, from Clinical Psychological Research, 2020)

Trigger warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead (Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2018)

Spring Thing 2024 - Wade Clarke Roblox game prize information

I'm listing here the details and conditions of a prize I'll be offering for Spring Thing 2024: a custom Roblox game based on your Spring Thing entry.

If you choose this prize, here's what happens:

I'll try your Spring Thing game. If I decide it's possible for your game, I (maybe with help from my nephew) will build a simple Roblox game based on your entry, or at least the first room or a prominent thing from it. We have a lot of Roblox building experience between us.

Qualifiers for this prize: I say "game" loosely! It will probably be an environmental toy you can walk around in. But you never know, it might have an objective to reach, or health, or a time limit, or a baddie chasing you, or a physics joke. It might be a reproduction of a location. We'll try to make something of charm based on your game, spending a week max to do so.

If you don't know Roblox, it's free to join, and the game will be pretty G-rated and explorable by anyone on Roblox at any time (which, there being millions of Roblox games, will mostly be you and people you let know about it. Plus the odd random visitor.) You'l be able to share a link to the game wherever/however you like. People only need to have a Roblox account to visit it.

* If you pick the prize, and I try your game and decide I can't produce something satisfying based on it within a week, don't be offended. Roblox suits some things and some subject matter a lot more than others. I'd let you know my decision quickly so you can pick another prize instead.