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 2022 review: Nose Bleed by Stanley W Baxton

Nose Bleed by Stanley W Baxton, is a clicking-choice-based story with graphic elaboration – ostensibly about social anxiety – that elicited a combination of visceral nausea and hysterical laughter from me; a pretty strong combination for a ten-minute (to play) game. I don't think the first game I've tried in any previous year's Interactive Fiction Competition has made me feel ill so quickly, so after a fashion, this was a good start.

I'd say that if nose bleeds, or blood coming out of your body in general, either in prose or as animated spatter on the screen, or from the cover image below, are likely to make you ill, then both this game and my review are likely to make you ill ill. You have been warned.

The player-narrator of Nose Bleed works in an office. They're meant to be doing something with spreadsheets but they feel barely capable. The details of the work, or indeed of anything but the narrator's flustered mental space, and later, their spectacular nose bleeds, are omitted by the game. Their headspace and the negative self-talk going on in there are the main event. I am not a psychiatrist, but I have been incapacitatedly socially phobic (two-and-a-half decades ago – treated over years, ultimately left behind) and this looks to be the psychological terrain of this game. Also, the content warning says "social anxiety". In the protagonist's distorted mindset, they expect to be negatively evaluated by others all the time. The narration is a spiral of feeling incompetent, incapable, distressed, depressed, and wanting to flee situations.

When the PC's nose starts to bleed during the work day, it comes in like a metaphor for their anxiety. It starts, it can't be stopped, it seems uncontrollable, others can see it and evaluate them negatively as a result. The bleeding gets worse. The PC is invited to an event they can't get out of, and the blood  keeps-a-coming. Choices about what to do next are made by dragging words on the screen to nouns that light up. The actions tend to be basic ones that are either ineffectual (rub nose) or fobbed off upon selection by the protagonist's own self-defeating brain (apologise).

What makes Nose Bleed so nauseating is the way the blood is animated on screen. The paper-white backdrop is stained first by a single streak, then as spots that appear, and finally as an unstoppable animated splatter that follows the cursor about. Coupled with selectable prose options like "Lick" (the blood off your lip) the effect of all this was to begin to induce in my arms that strange weakness that precedes blood-related nausea for me. And then I began to laugh. The whole thing was reaching the intensity of a skit where a patient sits in a waiting room while geysering blood. Or of the most spectacular nose bleed I ever experienced second-hand as an adolescent, where I was in a car with two sisters, and one of them started jetting from the nose in time with the pumping from her heart. The streamers of blood would hit me whenever the car turned a corner. As much blood gets all over the prose in Nose Bleed. It piles up on the on-screen choices and nothing can stop it. The PC doesn't even try basic techniques I'm aware of like pinching the nose while tilting the head back, though they do come up with the head tilt alone.

Nose Bleed's finale has a kind of twisting escalation that reminded me of a David Cronenberg film or two. I'm not sure what meaning I ascribe to the very last event in the game, but I'll give it time to percolate. The game's overall design is excellent, moving quickly from banal office work and equally banal thoughts, via the start of a typical nose bleed, through the discomfort of being unable to stop the bleed, to an eventual wittily programmed and (to me, hilarious) graphical geyser. I kept thinking as I played, "Surely, it stops here," but I was repeatedly wrong.

If all that animated blood is in danger of having an eclipsing effect, I could say that having all one's thoughts eclipsed by one panicky thing is like social phobia, after all. In Nose Bleed, the blood literally gets in between you and the interface.

IFComp 2020 spiel: Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort

I played Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort today, having only glanced at some reviews of it. I enjoyed it and was curious about its contents, which I knew I'd be able to look at and comprehend.

I then went to read every other review of it to see if anyone had said what I might say, thus removing the need for me to say anything. I was surprised at how much negativity the game had drawn. Reviews declaring Amazing Quest could be full of hidden meanings that might elevate it if they weren't hidden, was some arms-length ironic joke, must be full of in-jokes, was definitely trolling them, had wasted their time, meta-this, meta-that, etc. So much suspicion for something so simple! Below I share some thoughts and rhetorical meanderings on the game with reference to some ideas coming from the reviews.

Does knowing (not even necessarily understanding) tech/historical context help one like Amazing Quest?

Probably.

This is the kind of game you can (and did) write in BASIC in the 1980s, especially if your microcomputer was low on RAM. The Commodore 64 that Montfort has used was not low on RAM, but contests to produce maximum program bang for minimum listing length (sometimes called 'one-liners' for a single-line program, for instance) were popular in the day. Now they remain popular in retro circles. Amazing Quest is in the spirit of such contests in either context. Looking at its listing, it's also a good example of getting that much effect out of that short a program.

In my review survey, I see that even amongst reviewers who lived through these times, had such computers and/or performed such activities, opinions on the game still vary. Someone said (paraphrase), 'I wrote better (programs) when I was fifteen.' Well, I did as well, but I don't think I ever went in for the minimal source approach. In itself, Amazing Quest's source to outputted game ratio is impressive.

The context of the instructions and strategy guide

The instructions for the game are presented as a single typed sheet. It may have come from a typewriter, a daisy wheel printer or be a facsimile of such output. The upshot is, this is a pastiche presentation of 1980s instruction sheets that came in games.

At the stage of the instructions alone, interpretation can sit easily between sincere and cute. Instructions absolutely were this florid about basic content in the day, often embellishing a game's simple graphics with some imaginative strokes to get them to take off in your brain. Similar mechanics are at work with the simple prose in the Scott Adams games. Neuroscientifically, I don't know how younger people today read into the Adams prose. Does it ever take off for them? Or does it just sit there on the page looking literal and undernourished? I assume it, and other prose like it, could work for them if they persisted, thanks to neural plasticity. But who's going to do that work now unless they have a special interest in the kind of material they're doing the work for? There's not enough of it around now, casually, to generate much need or interest. Response to Amazing Quest also shows there's not much tolerance for it per se, but this has to be figured in with some sense of IFComp expectations. IFComp always generates haste and a degree of intolerance that, objectively, we'd have to say is reasonable, especially now there are so many games to play. This means an Amazing Quest can get eyeballs on it, but those eyeballs are primed to quickly move past anything for almost any reason. And relatively speaking, Amazing Quest has prompted a lot of folks to come up with a lot of reasons.

The strategy guide is definitely even cuter than the intro, raising the embellishment stakes even higher and at further length for what is, mechanically, an all probabilities-based random game.

Is the game's randomness so obvious?

It wasn't to me. However, knowing I was dealing with a tiny BASIC program - and still before looking at it - I suspected it could be. There was definitely no way to know just from playing. I think it's testament to the prose Montfort wrote and the style of choices offered, and the fact they can turn out clearly positive or negative outcomes (even if only two!) that players can feel their actions altering things, as reviews indicated they did.

Does it matter if (or should I say That) they don't? For this kind of game in the 1980s, it didn't to me then (assuming the game didn't screw you over. Then I'd be angry. But this game is just measured progress towards victory) and so it doesn't matter to me now so long as the journey evokes something.

Would it matter if the same game had been presented to me in Twine?

Here's context again: For me I'm sure I would not have received it as well. I've got my memory of the time the game can be said to be a pastiche of, the context, the knowledge of how it's done then or now, the knowledge that the knowledge is specialist knowledge. That all impresses me and I enjoy the technical level a bit, but only because I enjoy the experience of the game enough. If we took all that away and I've just got small, random texts in the Twine interface for a short duration, I'd be considerably less entertained.

Am I consistent about this kind of thing? Definitely not! But I expect my own sliding scale involves the scale of the game. As any game gets larger, I feel it can stand more on its own by the girth of its design, no matter what system it's being delivered with. My positive appreciation of Amazing Quest is both dependent upon its small size and outsize to its size because of the tech involved.

Does it matter how something was made?

There was a quote somewhere in the IFComp debates like, 'This isn't a competition for technical proficiency, it's a competition for interactive fiction.' True on the surface. Nobody can hold any player or judge to more than that, but where individuals know or are interested in more than that, or are authors themselves, they probably can and will apply it. We'll also typically write such evaluations into our reviews.

Re: how things are made, in movies, I particularly dislike how CGI has stepped in for things that weren't even that hard to do practically when they were all done practically. Every time some character stands on a nondescript hill in a Lord of the Rings film and I'm supposed to believe the sun and sky are behind them when they aren't, I'm irritated. I can see the fake, intensity-lacking light that's barely falling on anything, unlike even in the cheapest sword and sorcery film of the 1980s. In the context of a film filled with tons of photoreal people and Earthy environments, I wish they'd gone and shot on a real hill at the right time of day. I've plenty of similar annoyances with CGI blood and other cinema topics, etc.

Why do these things matter to me? It's not just dogmatic principle. Certain ways of doing things create aesthetics which may not be obtainable in other ways. If I value the aesthetic, I value the way of getting it, and may not accept substitutes that produce poorer facsimiles. In films, I mostly like real light when there's real light everywhere else. If it's a hypercolourful ballad like The Phantom Menace, then I'm open to the CGI look, because that's the whole aesthetic.

I'm sort of speaking to Amazing Quest's isness here. It's a C64 game, and has that aesthetic. If you don't know about or care for that, or feel (justifiably) that you're only here for interactive fiction, the words on the page, I can see why it may not have done much for you. For me, it's a case of all of how the words get there, what they are, how the game's made, how the whole thing feels, and how the instructions and guide reproduce a certain technological and historical context accurately.

(y/n)

How would I rate Amazing Quest, were I still able to? I don't know, and because I don't have to, I'm spared agonising over it. The more things are unlike each other, the harder they are to rate against each other on a single scale. Amazing Quest is a lot less like the other things in this IFComp, and there are tons of other things. My appreciation for it stands out on some other limb of the tree that I probably can't see if I stand so I can see the other hundred limbs all at once. In life, I encourage anyone to go more towards any game and stand there, rather than standing out in the tower/bungalow/semi-detached house of yourself and looking in with unnecessary suspicion. This isn't the worldview I endorse just for Amazing Quest, it's the one I try to endorse for any game. I probably fail myself sometimes, but that'll always be the dream.

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: 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:

Final Girl, inaccessible stuff from the past, porting old reviews to IFDB

There was a topic on intfiction.org recently where someone was asking if it was possible to play Hanon Ondricek's StoryNexus horror game from IFComp 2013, Final Girl, amongst other games. The short answer for Final Girl is: no.

Someone else commented they felt lucky to have played the game at the time. I realised I also felt that way, and I enjoyed my memory of this thing that I can't guarantee I will have access to again, though there are rumblings of a remounting from the author.

This in turn led me to look at the IFDB page for Final Girl, from which my original blogged review of the game was linked. However, in a fashion similar to what had happened to the game, tech change or rot had occurred, so the link didn't work.

This was more easily repairable than Final Girl itself – I just updated the link. But it made me realise all my other links from that vintage have probably broken in the same fashion. Then, at risk of repeating the phrase 'This in turn led me to...' ... this in turn led me to think that, in a fashion similar to previous sweeps of review transference to IFDB that I've done, I should do a new sweep of review transference from old blogs to IFDB.

Looking at reviews I hadn't ported yet, I could see in each case there was usually some apparent reason I hadn't done it. Some had to do with spoilery-ness (which usually has to be couched in tags on IFDB) or contemporary-ness (they'd make less sense outside of IFComp) or over technical-ness for IFDB, at least in my own opinion (my review of Ollie Ollie Oxen Free was mostly a long critique on the implementation, and I don't know if the game has been updated from the comp version I played).

Just the passing of time has dealt with some of the issues above, whether for real or just in my mind, so I've started porting another selection of unported reviews to IFDB.

Time Warp extension rejigged, CC licence added

Thanks to a suggestion by Robert Patten, I've put a proper Creative Commons licence in my Time Warp Inform extension's documentation. This way, anyone who wants to add it to their project knows where they stand. I'm using the most accommodating licence that exists, the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence:

"Summarily this licence allows users to distribute, remix and build upon a work, and create Derivative Works – even for commercial use – provided they credit the original creator/s (and any other nominated parties)." (full details in the extension docs)

I also polished the extension itself, and the demo project, so I'm calling them both version 2.

Time Warp runs in Glulx projects and Z8 projects, and has been tested in all Informs from 6G60 to 6M62 (which is the current one as I type this). The code is simple so I expect it to not break easily, to be easy to fix if it does in future, and also that it might work in older versions of Inform 7, though I offer no guarantees.

If you don't know what I'm talking about because you missed my Time Warp plug post, click here to go to it. Basically, Time Warp could be an easter egg in your game! And it requires almost zilch effort to add it in. The demo project shows you how and the extension itself explains how. Click here to try or download Time Warp / the demo project / the extension.

Time Warp's thrilling title screen. There are still more intrigues here than in the court of the Medicis.

Plug 2 of 2 - Time Warp

Back in 2014, I put an easter egg inside Leadlight Gamma (By the way, don't buy that game right now, it'll be on sale in about a week). The easter egg consisted of a second game: Time Warp, a CYOA I programmed on the Apple II when I was eleven or twelve. I included it verbatim, complete with spelling mistakes and in its original all caps presentation:

Time Warp's thrilling title screen. There are more intrigues here than in the court of the Medicis.

Time Warp is a self-contained Inform 7 extension. That means you can hook it into it any other Inform game with almost no effort, and without affecting the code of that game. Going into Time Warp, staying there for any duration of play, and then leaving it, takes a single Inform turn. Or no turns if you know how to suppress the advance of time using the Variable Time Control extension or its ilk.

As far as I know, Time Warp is the only technically non-intrusive whole-game-in-one-extension out there so far.

Therefore my very serious proposal is this: If it suits you to do so, why not put Time Warp in YOUR next Inform 7 game?

Whether Time Warp turns out to be an actual feature of your game, appearing on a playable computer, console, arcade cabinet or tablet of the glowing future, or whether you bury access to it in some ridiculous nook or cranny, or whether you make its appearance conditional on the use of an especially unpopular command phrase – it's a whole game! And you could do much worse.

Let's face it, easter-egging XYZZY is pretty old hat these days, and you can't put Zork in your game without breaking a bunch of copyright laws. Plus it's probably really hard to put Zork inside your own game, just from a technical standpoint.

Personally I think it'd be great if Time Warp could become the Wilhelm Scream of Inform games.

If I can't convince you to brandish Time Warp, how about you make your own easter egg game, bottle it in an extension, and increase the inventory of this particular app space to two? That would be neat. In the meantime, consider Time Warp. After all, it considers you.

Where are the links to Time Warp, you ask? In the spirit of easter eggdom, I've made it so that to get to the Time Warp page from this one, you have to find the easter egg entity in this post and click on it.

Plug 1 of 2 - Captain Piedaterre's Blunders

As I mobilise myself to the idea of self-promotion for itch.io's annual summer sale (first traditional mental hurdle – it's not summer where I live, it's winter) I'm casting my eyes back over the last few IF things I've made. My assessment is that two of them have been under-patronised.

1. Captain Piedaterre's Blunders

This comic game is a CYOA spin-off I made from a popular game (Captain Verdaterre's Plunder by Ryan Veeder) by a popular author (... Ryan Veeder) that's been pronounced to be canonical by that author. Plus I drew the cover art on paper with my hands, and I'm pretty chuffed with that cover art. Alright, I coloured the art in the computer after scanning the paper, but I drew the black and white lines using my hands.

Piedaterre's is also a CYOA made with Inform, not most people's first engine of fancy when they think CYOA, and under the hood it's running an unnecessarily powerful (for this game) WIP extension of mine that lets you to play it by clicking links, or by pressing keys, or by using one method or the other method or a mixture of both methods. It's mixing the world model and choices, a la Andrew Plotkin's Unified Glulx Input. It was originally a demo module for my extension.

In spite of all this exciting provenance, the game's been rated three times on IFDB in total and reviewed zero times. The most recent rating was 1 out of 5.

I reckon this game's a good, if un-major, entertainment for folks who've played Plunder, therefore I encourage you to try it, especially if you've played Plunder.

* Here's the online playable version of Captain Piedaterre's Blunders
* Here's its IFDB page

I'll talk about the next thing of mine you've probably under-patronised in the next post.

Captain Piedaterre's Blunders

I have released a short CYOA game called Captain Piedaterre's Blunders. It's a spin-off from Ryan Veeder's IFComp 2013 game Captain Verdeterre's Plunder.

Blunders was attached to a longer term project of mine that I don't know will ever get done. So, because lots of time was passing, I decided to snap it off and release it rather than leave it in the cupboard of uncertainty. This way we can all enjoy it.

The game has a quicksave slot (that is barely required!) I only mention this because the quickload works sub-optimally if you play online. When you reload your game online, the current node's choices don't reappear. You can give the machine a kick by entering and leaving the menu on the spot; this brings them back. It's some quirk of Quixe and this tech.

(You know you're back in your IF blog when you find yourself writing a paragraph about some technology that's not working across the board, and you then feel compelled to describe in detail how a player can deal with the non-working case in a fairly irrelevant context – in this case, how to deal with saved games in a game that's so short you don't need to use saved games.)

Link 1: Captain Piedaterre's Blunders play/download page

Link 2: Captain Piedaterre's Blunders IFDB page

PS - Obviously my IFComp playing/reviewing went nowhere this year. Next year I won't write a prelude blog entry; I'll save that for a situation where I know I'm not going to disgrace myself!.. should one ever arise again, and I'm able to tell it's arising. There are many overlapping circles of time and interest that all people deal with, so I don't think mine are worth elaborating on specifically. But where I'm at, the number of entries to IFComp is getting too big now for how I like to try to handle the comp.

IFComp 2017 review: The Living Puppet by Xiao Lin (web browser)

The Living Puppet is a creepy and classically styled horror IF about a pupeteer’s mysterious relationship with the doll that is the sole source of income for he and his wife Li Shaoxian. It’s delivered in a web browser as long passages of click-scrolling text broken up by several major decision branches that the player can choose for Shaoxian. I downloaded it to play it because the ‘Play Online’ button wasn’t working at the time and I’ve written the IFComp organiser about this issue. I played Puppet several times to different outcomes in 40 minutes. I enjoyed the game and recommend it generally, and to horror folks specifically, accepting that a couple of its presentation choices may be too irritating for some players. The game sports horror themes and one explicitly violent scene.

IFComp 2016: "Whoops!". And other updates.

"Whoops!"

My plan to start reviewing IFComp games in a more targeted fashion was obviously a great one. The problem was it immediately fell down when I passed what time I’d hoped to spend on it to action in the categories of music and ‘life stuff’.

In retrospect, it was dumb of me to start out reviewing in a random order when there were so many entries in the comp. A moment’s planning would have made me realise I’d no chance of getting far into the catalogue overall. The trouble is, reviewing at random is really fun. I remember that from the years when circumstances allowed me to review everything (or close to it) to a certain personal standard, and in a mostly random order dictated by the IFComp site.

Maybe I just won’t be able to do that again, especially if the number of entries continues to rise. So I think I need to say to myself, ‘Right, I’ve had that particular fun in the past, I don’t need to try to recreate it,’ and change to a more targeted reviewing tack next time I come at this.

So, congratulations to Robin Johnson for winning with Detectiveland, and then to all the other entrants for everything else. Also, I know a few people were keen for me to review their IF, and I didn't get to it. I will eventually, but just because it looked like I was probably going to get to it during the comp and I didn't, I'm sorry.

American Financial Restoration Sale

I eventually noticed there was this Black Friday sale thing going on in the USA. If I’d been more on the ball, I might have taken advantage and put Leadlight Gamma on sale again. Instead I was too sluggish on the uptake, so I think I’ll just wait ’til Christmas or something. This way I also get to say I’ve avoided participating in yet more cultural behaviour doled out by Americans.

Works in Progress

My CYOA Extension for Inform 7 has been coming along really well. I need some third party tech put in place before I'll be able to finish it.

I continue to gather notes for my mystery IF project. The phrase ‘mystery IF project’ makes it sound like I’ve talked about it in this blog before, but I haven’t. What is it? Not telling! Yet, anyway.

I’ve been getting annoyed at myself over the past year for losing too many good ideas for the project. When I say lose, I mean that I didn’t write them down or type them up at the moment I had them. I think my lack of vigilance came from the feeling that their graceless accumulation in a few text files was amounting to a disorganised idea splat for the future that would probably annoy me in the future. How would I sort, find or string together relevant bits from the splat? And there are different types of bits in there. Dialogue riffs, character ideas, incident ideas, structure ideas, etc.

In response to these note-organising problems, I downloaded and am trying out the writing software Scrivener. (Interjection: Holy crap, it's on sale for Black Friday! I must buy now! Buy Buy Buy!) I find it’s working well. It allows me to store all my notes, research materials and prose for a piece in a single document in ways that make it easy to index, connect and rearrange that material. I expect I will produce the text of the IF project in Scrivener and then port it into my CYOA extension. It turns out that I can actually make a pretty direct correlation between blobs of text in Scrivener and choice nodes in a game.

An incidental bonus is that using Scrivener is looking like a good way to write manuals, too, and I expect to have to write a manual for the CYOA extension. I may even be able to publish it directly as an e-book from Scrivener.

IFComp 2016 review: Tentaculon by Ned Vole

Here's a joke:

"I met Tentaculon today but we got off on the wrong foot."

The joke is only for people who know that the game Tentaculon contains squid-related material and that squid have eight tentacles, like octopuses.

I had to look up all of the following in order to make the joke:

1. The number of tentacles a squid has.
2. What's the plural of octopus?
3. What's the plural of squid?

Because of the quality of the resulting joke (low) I feel in retrospect that I put too much time and effort into its creation, and then into writing about it. I apologise to the author of Tentaculon, whose game this is supposed to be a review of.

Tentaculon is a link-driven Twine game that initially appears to be an eat-or-be-eaten squid simulator. Its prose is keen, a bit gooey and very slightly uncomfortable-making as one cruises around trying to kill and eat stuff while not being subject to sudden spasmodic jerks at the same time. I admit I feared some kind of cheap game-ending blow to the back of my head was iminent, for instance a message saying 'HA! You killed to live! You lose!' – but this was unfair misapprehension on my part based on some past negative experiences.

IFComp 2016 review: The Little Lifeform That Could... by Fade Manley

I thought I recognised the 'blob of goop evolves to starflight via all the stages inbetween' premise of Little Lifeform from somewhere. I've not played Spore but I've read about it, and that's the game. But I don't think Little is 'just' doing Spore via prose and the Choice Of Games engine. It has a particular aesthetic slant that is somewhat cute, somewhat dapper (hat-orientated) and generally encouraging. Simultaneously, it seeks to avoid throwing any eggs into particular baskets of peril. It presents a version of the universe that equalises all paths. Frankly this is not something I am used to, and in some bizarre way, I found it a little sinister. The most violent way through life turns out to be as good as the most arty, which is as good as the most capitalistic or the most dapper. That said, I don't think my subtextual reaction is worthy of any great dark spin. The goal of the game is obviously to let you play any way you want, give you a corresponding experience via its cute aesthetic, and allow your way to work. Then, if you like, you can try another way and see what humourous take the game offers on contrasting modes of behaviour.

Your stats in categories like Charm, Defensiveness and Patience are tracked, checkable at any time, and don't seem to lie, though I found the game's ultimate prose assessment of some of my performances a little off (one said I'd leaned on trade when all I remember doing was being the greatest artist and aesthete in the whole universe.) The game is otherwise pretty perfect at what it does, and it's charmingly written. I just missed having some emphases somewhere, because that's how I've always liked my games.

The Little Lifeform that could is certainly not the amoral spectacle of violent death in an uncaring universe that it could have been.

Or is it?..

No, it isn't.

IFComp 2016 review: Aether Apeiron: The Zephyra Chronicles. Book I: The Departure --- Part I: Prelude to Our Final Days on Kyzikos by Hippodamus & Company

(I wrote this on an iPad over a few days while on holiday on an island where I occasionally had 1G/GPRS, and no signal the rest of the time. It made me glad that good old text-based IF requires very little bandwidth to function.)

Aether Apeiron: The Zephyra Chronicles. Book I: The Departure --- Part I: Prelude to Our Final Days on Kyzikos is an extraordinarily long title for a game, or for anything else. Its multiple clauses of descending magnitude promise tons of episodes, galactic-scaled adventuring, locally-scaled adventuring, sci-fi societal sculpting, a cast of thousands (or at least dozens) and the highly agreeable portentousness of prolonged high fantasy. This is a set of promises no single IFComp entry can keep within the context of its IFComp; the two hour rule makes that physically impossible. Folks can, have and will continue to use IFComp to introduce punters to their big multi-part IFs, and I expect a cross-section of judges will continue to be bemused by these introductions – some of which end in really weird places – as they try to interpret them as standalone experiences for scoring purposes, and regardless of whether or not the judges want to play more of them.

Aether is one of those introductory games that ends in a really weird place. And it starts in a confusing one. The end is not inherently weird, but it's weird in light of the experience it just spent all its time imparting. That experience is a link-based sci-fi / fantasy adventure with a scaffolding of Greek idylls, philosophers and mythology. The first screen, a page of prose from a log, indicates rhetorically that the narrator is or was something like a familiar of the eponymous Zephyra, then confuses by setting the scene with a series of nested geographical relationships (paraphrasing: the moon with the woods orbiting the planet surrounded by the clouds in the Propontis system) and raising the spectre of a great many groups of people and other entities with unusual names involved in Zephyra's story. Plus there's a quote from Plutarch. It's a tad overwhelming.

Zephyra turns out to be a space pilot in the now...

IFComp 2016 review: All I Do Is Dream by Megan Stevens

Short, existential Twine game in which you specify the manners in which you will veg out in the house during your girlfriend's next night shift at the pickle factory. This is an experience hailing from the drab end of the slice of life cake. You can think about the bedclothes, fiddle a bit with the bedclothes, clean objects in several boring stages. Your character is clearly depressed, as the prose is insistent about the pointlessness of any activity. A few prose studs of specificity about the characters' shared life don't make up for the more macroscopic lack of specificity that prevents any insight into their plight over the short duration.

Perhaps this is the Twine equivalent of the parser world's 'My Crappy Apartment Game'. The apartment is still there, but the focus shifts to the immediate crappy existential rather than the immediate crappy physical. 'All I Do's...' observations of fiddly-stuck depression make for better writing than that of most My Crappy Apartment games, but its small catalogue of anxious domestic activity didn't interest me because I knew almost nothing about the characters, before or after.

IFComp 2016 review: Letters by Madison Evans

In Letters, you're a teenaged girl reading, tracing and clicking your way through a pile of letters from your ostensibly cool school friend Cadence after certain events have occurred.

Both main characters have solid writing chops and some wisdom beyond their years, and they communicate everything to each other by handwritten letters in the year 2008, give or take a few years. I felt this setup was a bit of a contrivance, the kind of thing that is outrageously possible in real life yet which takes a certain amount of feinting or explaining when delivered as fiction to get people to buy it. I decided to accept the premise and move on once I acknowledged I was enjoying Letters's sparky, emotional teen writing, and that I was also being prompted to think about how I was interacting with this IF. It worked for me both as emotional writing and as something with a bit of a puzzly feel, an experience I've rarely had with similarly presented IFs in the past.

I spent about twenty minutes with Letters and felt that I had satisfactorily experienced most of its content by that point, though probably not all of it. It's not easy to track which links you've previously clicked, unless perhaps you lawnmower them, or have a better memory than I do. It was a testament to the game's effectiveness that I had no interest in mowing the lawn. I was clicking particular links I wanted to click for reasons I possessed or imagined in relation to the story. Contrivances accepted, I liked Letters a lot.

More detail, with spoilers, beyond.

IFComp 2016 review: Snake's Game by Nahian Nasir

Snake's Game is an exotic, pretty inscrutable prose'n'clickable choices piece in which a man walks into an eatery when some manifestation of existential evil – Snake, aka The Vermin – visits his brain and starts having a natter with him about a not-forecasting-the-future game they could play. If they do, the resulting conversations lead to the 'several psychedelic experiences… with demons, monsters, and some more!' promised by the blurb.

The inklewriter engine presents Snake's prose handsomely, and aesthetically it's very good prose, sometimes ripe, only wavering in a bit of proofreading and a rare mistake of the kind that makes me think English is not the author's first language. For other reasons, it is not easy or transparent writing. Not just because of its poetic leanings, but because I don't claim to really know what it was going on about half the time.

The game actively requests replays, encouraging you to build up a bigger picture of something, plus it thanks you every time you reach an ending. (I was thanked five times. That's a fair bit of thanking.) I almost quit after my first play because that first path I happened down was short and, in retrospect, still one of the least scrutable I ever read within the game, and not even in an abstract way. It was just like reading the middle few pages of a wacky book. So I was unlucky in that sense. I tried again, grew more interested, tried again, tried again. Ultimately I played one more time than I thought I would (and for about twenty minutes overall) feeling that I was building up some enjoyment, but there still seemed to be a cap on things making much sense, which is why I didn't continue on to try all the endings.

If you like, or think you might like, any of these things – existential psychedelia, flying into the sky suddenly with a cat, vivid visions of gore, celestial types chatting like they're in the pub, religious-leaning imagery – you might like Snake's Game.

If you love, or think you might love, the aforementioned things, you may truly love Snake's Game. I can as easily imagine people hating it pretty quickly. I admired it but in the end I like written fiction to make more coherent sense. I can say that Snake's Game shifted my perception of it significantly on each iteration, and that's something of a feat in a pretty abstract work.

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IFComp 2016 reviews: The Mouse by Norbez

In which a uni student in small town America negotiates domestic abuse and violence from her roommate.

The Mouse feels like a comic book with the multimedia additions that computers bring: audio and music, dynamics of delay, a few choices. You click through its pages in a forwards direction, usually by the tail of the last sentence on each page. I think it's assured in its comic bookish sensibility, for instance with a fan of images of the heroine's domestic preparations going from left to right down the screen, or with its generally well-judged interplay of text and images. However, I was frustrated by the story framing and scale in general, and by the constant hesitance of the main character in dialogue and narration. Spoilers below.