Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Dead Man's Hill by Arno von Borries

Dead Man's Hill is a detailed, parser-driven World War I trench combat simulation in which you play a German soldier at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. It's the work of Arno von Borries, who created the Japan-set work-rambling-life sim Gotomomi for IFComp 2015. There are a few technical ambition and technical verbosity similarities between the games, but while I got off on the wrong foot with Gotomomi through no fault of anyone in particular – an anecdote that didn't qualify as a worthy review of the game at the time and which I thus didn't share with anyone, but which I may recount in another post now that a year has passed – I got off very much on the correct feet with Dead Man's Hill.

The game's HELP frames proceedings grimly and efficiently with a potted history of the horrors of Verdun and explicit how-to-play info. A how-to-play can overwhelm in some games, but here it accurately telegraphed that Dead's scale was going to be detailed and micro-leaning. It made me feel strangely confident about my pending experience, even as I was anxious due to the framing text's foregrounding of grueling trench violence.

When the game opens, you and a couple of German soldiers under your command find yourselves forced into a French-held trench beyond no-man's-land. The trench maze environment is arranged differently in each game. Searching for a way out leads you into one violent encounter after another with the French soldiers. The game mechanics focus on the minutiae of manipulating weapons and giving orders. The game tracks both of each soldier's hands, what object is in each hand or being clasped by both, and makes you manually wield, unequip, load, reload, share and discard a range of weapons ranging from bayonets and pistols to flareguns and grenades. The result is a technical orchestration of death as you and your enemies stab, shoot, flamethrow and grenade each other into oblivion in detailed steps and with detailed results. Health is tracked, injuries are tracked and listed verbosely, and death-dealing technology is all over the place. You can save but there's no UNDOing. The situation in the trenches is also dynamic. New soldiers can join you, enemies can be surprised, or ambush you, or rush to avoid a thrown grenade. The dying mutter about their loved ones, or being thirsty, or just non-sequiturs.

I found this all extremely impressive and engrossing as I probed at the spectacle of pointless death and wondered if it might be possible to survive, but I also had to acknowledge numerous apparent bugs and oversights. Importantly, I believe the game is more than over the line of what I perceive to be its intended effect; that effect is not diminished by the bugs enough to pull it backwards over the line, but it is diminished.

There are passage-of-time issues: for instance, enemies react quicker to a grenade thrown by yourself than they do to a grenade you order another soldier to throw. There are major redundancies in a lot of the damage reports, with duplicate or irrelevant injuries being listed along with relevant ones. The game asks many effect-muting disambiguation questions (Throw the primed grenade or the harmless grenade? Stab the dead Frenchman or the alert and healthy Frenchman?). There's the pronoun issue of 'myself' appearing instead of 'me' when you're attacked.

Admittedly some of the redundancies could be interpreted as a hyperbolic demonstration of the degree of violence that's being visited on soldiers' bodies, but they still read as bugs. In all other areas, verbosity and a kind of pedantry are part of the emphasis on the mechanics of the weapons:

UNEQUIP MACHINE GUN
WIELD GRENADE
PRIME GRENADE
THROW GRENADE EAST
EQUIP AUTOMATIC
EQUIP LANTERN
LIGHT LANTERN
LOAD AUTOMATIC

No abbreviations for any of the basic commands are made available, which I found to be a (probably unintentionally) effective inconvenience in terms of generating gruel for the player. The matter-of-fact reporting can also be chilling:

Ebert fired his flame thrower at the Frenchman.
The Frenchman burned to death, flailing his arms, shrieking in pain and panic.
The Frenchman was killed instantly.

The only complaint I have about the game thematically is a very minor one, specifically relating to one moment in the introductory text. Its final line lays blame for this kind of warfare on mindless patriotism. It's not that I necessarily disagree, only that the entity of patriotism is not manifest in the mechanics or prose content of the game proper. The game reads as being about the futility of all these battlefront deaths and the anal mechanics of the weapons that enable them. It doesn't read as being about the dangers of patriotism. Setting that aside, I found Dead Man's Hill to be a thoroughly absorbing experience whose design and programming I admire, even though there's still need for a lot of technical revision. The game satisfies both as a war simulation with measurable mechanics and tactical elements, and as a conceptual piece with overarching ideas about its content.

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood by Andrew G. Schneider

Introductions to games and incomplete games traditionally fare poorly in IFComp. They do so for logical reasons that have been discussed before at various times by various people. (eg In this review of Sigmund's Quest for IFComp 2014, one of the times I mentioned it.) But that's IFComp, whereas this is Spring Thing, which has a non-competitive Back Garden section. So I was relieved to be able to fire up Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood – which its author describes as 'just a taste of ‘Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood,’ to be released on iOS in the Summer 2016.' – without having to worry about making some kind of 'How would this game fare in a brutal fistfight with competing game X?' assessment of it. In this season (AUTUMN) of reduced pressure, young men possessed of certain fancies can often be heard saying things like, 'Get thee to the Back Garden.'

Nocked is an adventuresome, statted CYOA in which you play the legendary figure Robin of Locksley – who may be a woman. BLAM!* (More on that underneath the review.) The game has been made with a Twine-descended engine called Disbound.

Nocked! drops you in it immediately by having the Sheriff of Nottingham and henchmen descend upon the Locksley residence. You can click listed links to choose your next action or dialogue choice. Your major stats (Gold, Renown, Merry Men, Bounty) are always on display, and the import of each is described early in the piece. Stat-interacting choices or blockades are highlighted in colour. I don't think I've previously seen a Twine game that handled stats gracefully in a way that also appeared to be very built-in, so this Disbound engine is looking pretty good. The stats can also be slid out of sight, a feature obviously intended for iPhone displays.

Now, in what light should one read that line about Nocked being 'True Tales of Robin Hood?' Well, if you always thought the Robin Hood story sorely lacked a magic-using Maid Marian, a unicorn and a talking wolf who says stuff like, "Don’t worry, Robin. You’re also a special, special snowflake." – then indeed, Nocked! has finally excavated the truth for you. In other words, this is a tongue in cheek truth for a game mythos that has a hint of Nintendo's potpourri approach to fantasy about it. But I've been prejudicial in isolating the 'snowflake' line; the game action is essentially serious adventure stuff. Gathering supplies, outwitting pursuers, dealing with other characters, solving puzzles and exploring the terrain under time pressure. The major Robin Hood characters all take part. I particularly enjoyed the tension of the race against the dwindling daylight which acted as the timer on the puzzle of passing Little John.

In presentation, I found the choices to be in danger of being visually inseparable on screen. They're all link-coloured, and they aren't spaced apart from each other or dot-pointed. The narrower the screen, the more pronounced this effect. It also enhanced the mild trouble I was having parsing the value of the dialogue options in relation to each other. I think sharper writing would allow the choices to flow with a greater sense of motivation from the preceding text, and to more clearly differentiate the dialogue ideas from each other. The game worked for me better when I was choosing physical actions than when I had to decide which of several multi-line dialogue texts to say.

Another issue is that choices whose obvious intention is to allow the player to exit the current stage of the game read a bit gauchely when they find themselves unable to deliver, due to the player having failed to encounter or exhaust some vital content in the current scene. There are a lot of choices worded like: 'I had no more to say so decided to listen to Marian instead' – which don't necessarily move the game forward as you'd hope, but force you to click more choices in the current loop. I understand this is a design complexity for big branching CYOAs like this, but I've seen the outs (or the logic for them) handled more gracefully than they are in Nocked!

The game offers selectable difficulty levels which should speak to your stat management, though the difficulty level naming is a little curious. Easy is called 'Story-Mode' but normal is called 'Normal'. I think Story-Mode definitely needs renaming to avoid confusion. I played the demo through a couple of times on Normal mode, in completely different ways, and was impressed by the major variance in content and characters – and character groupings – encountered on each pass.

Nocked! grew on me the further I got into it. Personally I wasn't crazy about the introduction of talking animals, magic and the like, but I've observed that instant or unquestioning acceptability of that aesthetic in fantasy gaming (well, I didn't know it was going to be fantasy. This is Robin Hood, for cryeye!) comes about a generation of gamers after me. By some standards, I am an oldening man sitting on a throne of dust. As I was saying, the game grew on me in general, particularly when I was trying to solve particular puzzles. Dealing with the dialogue options always felt gauzy to me, so between that and the general aesthetic, this isn't a game I myself will hit up for the full version. But I think it's doing most of its stuff well, and the folks who are in the target audience should enjoy it. The mechanics present as focused and transparent, and traditional adventure content is well, if typically, handled.

* The way the other sex possibility came up quite charmed me, but I should point out that I rank myself as way behind the curve in the world of big, statted CYOAs. I know that the Choice Of Games style has become a major force, but I've barely played any of those games myself, and all I'm saying is that maybe the way the choice of character sex is handled in Nocked is typical of lots of these games by now. In any case, I found it to be an amusing dialogue moment.

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Evita Sempai by Florencia Rumpel Rodriguez aka Rumpelcita

Evita Sempai is a short, link-based story about a young woman in 1950s Argentina. She narrates in the first person on her family troubles and her admiration for Eva Peron. Her feelings about Peron are intensified through a personal encounter. I don't know what 'Sempai' means or in what language, but 'semp' words are usually about 'always' and/or loyalty, which fits.

The narration is direct but without much elaboration. In most cases, links telescope out to slightly longer lines of prose, showing runs of actions or little vicissitudes. In places where there's opportunity for emotionality, I felt I was expected to supply it, rather than that the prose would, but the story's shortness and modesty of exposition meant I didn't invest much.

I would have liked to re-read a couple of details in retrospect, but without a back button or transcript available, I could only do that by playing again from the start. For the same reasons I did not want to replay Ms. Lojka, I did not want to replay Evita Sempai. Pauses in Evita are fairly constant and enforced. For instance, four lines can fade in to form a paragraph over twenty seconds. I don't want printed prose narratives to do this kind of thing. I want to be allowed to read and digest prose at whatever is my desired or current reading speed, then have my brain sort the appropriate mental pace afterwards based on the prose content.

Interestingly (but probably not coincidentally, in terms of ways Twine projects are developing) Evita Sempai has almost the same link structure as Ms Lojka: Linear with clickable details on the way, followed by one big choice at the end. The two games also have similar blurbs:

Evita Sempai: "I made a game about family, duty, idealization and heartbreak."

Ms Lojka: "A short game about ignorance, defiance, and freedom—or: self-knowledge, acquiescence, and fate."

What happened with Evita Sempai was that I spent as much time reading bios of Evita and Argentina, to try to fill in gaps I felt might exist in my understanding of the story, as I did reading the story. This didn't help, since detailed history isn't particularly graftable onto or around a game as sparse as this one. I perceive a story that sort of interested me, but I felt I was outside the context and just wanted more detail from the prose itself.

One specific and important detail obviously was intended by the author, because it's a keyword for the game on the Spring Thing site that I only spied after playing, but again, with the game's overall vagueness, that keyword hadn't necessarily been part of my interpretation. Considering this incident (of mine), and the big theme blurbs for Lojka and for this game, and the Famous Baby blurb, and my memory of reading plaques in art museums and sometimes puzzling over their relationship to a work, I'm starting to think the blurbs for these short Twine games are pretty loaded. That is, they can figure much more heavily in the overall interpretation of the work than they necessarily would for longer pieces or different kinds of piece. And I'm not sure how hard authors are thinking about this yet. IFDB is full of Twine games with short content-listing blurbs that don't need or bother to hide anything, but here in Spring Thing where authors are trying to frame story-stories more coyly, it looks to be a harder task.

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Famous Baby by N.C. Kerklaan

Famous Baby is a microgame about a famous baby. You play the famous baby.

The punchline made me laugh, if eventually only on the inside, every time I read it. Which was five to six times.

The whole thing was over five to six times in two to three minutes, or even less time than that (no smutty jokes, please.)

The review of Famous Baby will probably seem bigger and longer than Famous Baby, both to me and to readers.

This reminded me of those times I've gone into the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, looked at something briefly, then read a plaque about it. In this case, the plaque is the blurb on the Spring Thing website. Given how microscopic Famous Baby is, you shouldn't read the plaque first.

Famous Baby randomly generates most of its content at points you'll identify after the first pass. A few non-sequiturs inevitably materialise that will strike you as inspired, but once you realise you're walloping away at a random content generator, you'll decide whether you want to persist. The design is the situation, the random mechanic and the content inventory. The scope is tiny. Personally I am skeptical of small scope random text generation as a standalone entity, but Famous Baby made me laugh and offers more than some not dissimilar things that I have seen in the MCA.

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Superhero Stress by Michael Yadvish

Well, they didn't skimp on the stress.

Superhero Stress is a fairly light, traditional CYOA of mutually exclusive options that are dramatic, like (paraphrasing): "Will you save person A at the possible expense of person B, or person B at the possible expense of person A?" You can play through most of its situations in about five minutes. It's got goofy, typo-y writing and the traditional sexism of old comic books: Ladies are for rescuing, or for picking up while you're rescuing 'em. It's also got a touch of offhand gore that I found very mildly disturbing amidst the silliness, but only very mildly.

Superhero Stress does have a message that it delivers a few times; that a superhero can't be everywhere at once. The film Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, had roughly the same thing to say about the Man of Steel, but Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice took more than 150 minutes to say it, whereas Superhero Stress did it in about 5 minutes. I also found Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice to be a portentous, depressing and unlikeable experience that made me ask myself why I was even sitting there watching it. Therefore, by some measures, I would recommend Superhero Stress over Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Ms. Lojka by Jordan Magnuson

I just finished a music and video project and have turned my gaze back to IF to find Spring Thing.

They say that in Australia, I could call it 'Fall Fooferal'. If 'they' are trying to do me a kindness in saying this, they are off base. No Australian would say 'Fall'. I doubt they'd ever say 'Fooferal', either. Therefore I'm calling it Autumn All Stars, prejudice of positivity be damned.

Ms. Lojka by Jordan Magnuson (you can click this link to play it online)

Ms. Lojka is a weird lady who lives in a weird tower in New York and does weird things: so says the weird narrator, via my paraphrasing, in the tale also called Ms. Lojka. The game says on the box that it is not for children. It took me about twenty minutes to play.

My response to this game was all over the place, though I must frame this statement in a positive arch where I would say that if you like morbid intrigue, I recommend Ms. Lojka. It also has great audiovisual and aesthetic strength of the kind that makes me say it is the most expensive-looking (in a Hollywood sense) Twine I have encountered. I will still elaborate in this review on link offerings whose rhyme and reason I could not discern, features I wish creators would not enforce when using the Twine engine, and, at considerable length after some dots, what I made of the game's final message.

Ms. Lojka's introductory image, a scary pastel of a dour woman looking right at you, establishes a mood of anticipatory fearfulness that prevails for the duration. The next image fades in, an impressionist-style pastel of a New York street. An improbable ziggurat stands in the background. The prose of the narrator's thoughts begins to appear, typed onto the screen in real time to the accompaniment of chattering typewriter audio.

Here's something really creepy about the typing, at least on a Mac – if you hide the browser window which is running the game, or move it to another space, the narrator stops typing right where he is. The sounds stop. The letters stop appearing. As soon as you unhide or bring the window back, he continues typing from the very next letter. Awesome!

The narrator turns out to be a glib and somewhat sardonic observer of New York. He speculates on the existence of one Ms. Lojka who dwells in the tower, what she does up there (violence) and what she might represent. Clickable phrases in the narration lead to prose elaborations of the kind you might expect. You can guide the narrator's thoughts around a little bit, but over the course of the game, no prevailing design scheme of much force emerges. Sometimes you get one thought or one slice of history instead of another. Sometimes the choices just aren't very different or comparable. They don't start to construct a frame of reference in relation to each other that would cause you to invest in them with intentionality, or even with much useful speculation.

In short, for ninety percent of the story, I didn't really know why I was clicking one link or another except to make the prose advance in general. I did have a fearful sense of, 'What might happen next?' but that came from (1) the strength of the game's outward aesthetic (2) the game's initial cues that I should be fearful (3) the morbid-leaning speculations of the narrator. It didn't come from anything I clicked, or any anticipation of outcomes or changes based on words I clicked.

Some of the links are emotion or concept words which, when clicked, send you to a black screen which types the narrator's less-filtered inner thoughts, making for a sort of pathological critic channel. The thoughts are brief and often self-correcting (the latter a neat effect) but they are so abstract in relation to the regular narration that they didn't make me feel things. I couldn't hang them on details at the time, though I was tempted to do so in retrospect of the game's ending.

The inner thoughts become more mottled and unsettled as the game progresses, but their practical effect on me was to swell my annoyance that I couldn't really tell when the thought links were ready to click. You have to wait for the thoughts to settle, then you wait a bit more, then you realise, 'OK, the words have stopped moving. I can click now.'

This bumpy business took me in and out of the headspace. My belief is still that the performative/interface/temporal effects that Twine authors can brandish are mostly being used to querulous effect. They are definitely of querulous effect when the issue of replayability is a factor. This game does eventually ask you if you want to play it again in a different way, thus implying there would be a significant variance of content if you were to do so. Knowing that I could not hasten through any of the real-time typewriter text or the thought-shifting black screens was the most immediate reason that I didn't.

I frankly discuss the game outcome that I obtained below the dots-meets-cut.

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Choice of choices

Since I'm programming a choice-creating / CYOA extension for Inform 7, I have not been able to help but notice the large number of other choicey tools that are either out there already, or that people are making or releasing right now. For authors, this means they have a growing choice of choices. For me, I know it motivates me to some kind of competitive freshness in my own extension.

This particular post isn't an exhaustive list of choice engines. I'm not doing any research here or being super-helpful. I'm just typing in what I'm aware of to show which ones are on my mind:

– Twine
– ChoiceScript
– inklewriter from inkle
– Ink from inkle
– Undum
– Raconteur, a spinoff of Undum which creator Bruno Dias describes as 'Undum with batteries included'
– Salet, a spinoff of Raconteur which is a spinoff of Undum, of which creator Oreolek says: 'It’s actually Undum refactored and rewritten in CoffeeScript with some bits of Raconteur sprinkled in.'

(Homer Simpson: "I just hope we put in enough steampunk, whatever that is.")

To demonstrate the value of competitive motivation, I'll tell you the story of Oreolek's promotional post about Salet. There was one line which said just you wait until I finish the inventory management (those words were italicised in the post).

My first reaction was, 'Oh geez, I haven't programmed my own deeper inventory management system yet.' And my second was, 'Oh yeah? Well how about YOU wait until I finish MY inventory management system?!'

I don't know if the second reaction was a question, or a challenge yelled at people not even listening to me or in the room at the time or who should even have to tolerate such nonsense, so to cover both contingencies I have put both a ? and ! at the end of it.

I then ran off and created an inventory management demo and game for my extension. To make it interesting for myself, I included a glass basket, a transparent container. Then I had an infinite recursion problem –

'The apple (in the glass basket (containing an apple (in the glass basket (containing an apple)...'

– and then I got rid of the infinite recursion problem.

I'm continuing to develop examples and mini-games for my extension. This is turning out to be quite fun, and makes me wonder why I don't place the idea of deeper implementation on a bonfire and just make more games like these ones. I suppose it's because of the split between the things I enjoy playing versus what I would like to make myself. I have enjoyed a huge range of IF, but if I mobilise to make one, I feel like I want to go to a lot of trouble in certain directions. The extension examples are excused for their simplicity, in my own mind, by being examples.

Here is some source from a simple moment in one of the games:

A node rule (this is the bridge-crossing rule):
if cyoa-node stage is prose:
print "The bridge creaks as you place your foot on it. The whole length of it wavers, all the way out over the abyss.[paragraph break]Do you feel brave enough to continue?[paragraph break]";
if cyoa-node stage is choices:
link 1 to "No";
link 1 to "Maybe";
link 2 to "Yes";
if cyoa-node stage is react:
if cyoa-choice is 1:
say "Then you'd best not until you feel bolder. The faint of heart are likely to fall.";
switch to the parser;
if cyoa-choice is 2:
say "You place your other foot on the bridge. The structure is so long and mist-clouded that you can't see the far end. There'll be no escape if it collapses. All you can do is proceed carefully. ";
create a continue moment;
say ".[line break].[line break].[line break]";
switch to the parser in room Over the bridge;

Like at least two similar examples people have pasted from similar choice tools lately, it's pretty clear what this one does and easy to follow even if you don't consider yourself a programmer. It comes from an example demonstrating how to stud a parser game with CYOA moments and conversation.