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playingstory2018-11-10 11:16 pm
got_quiet) wrote in playingstory2018-11-10 11:16 pm
IF Comp 2018
Every year when the IF Comp comes along I tell myself I'm going to play a ton of games and then I barely manage five by the end of judging. It is so strange that my attention span nowadays is so significantly worse than what it was than I was younger. Anyway, I did just finish getting my five games in, so here is a quick review of what was played.
(Also, I did play most of the Yaoi Jam 2018 games, I just suck at keeping this blog up to date about it.)
Ahem, so, games played by alphabetical order are,
Charming - You're a magician and you've made a massive mess.
Dead Man's Fiesta - Soon after the death of someone close to you, you buy a haunted Ford Fiesta.
Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night! - A classic pulp adventure where you need to escape a death trap and stop a villain from destroying the earth!
Intelmission - You're a spy stuck in a room with another spy.
The master of the land - You're a noble at a ball. Lots of politics.
And here are my impressions.
Charming - The only game out of the five that I straight up gave up on. It was a parser puzzle game, but the puzzles were not well structured. I hit a snag in the very beginning, where there's a bunch of scattered pages that appear to need to go back into their books. So I took a page and tried to put it into its respective book. "Which book do you want to put it in?" the parser asked me. So I tried again, using the exact name of the book that the parser gave me. "What book do you want to put it in?" The parser asked me. So I tried saying it a different way. Same response. Tried just answering with the name of the book, didn't know that command. Unsure of exactly what language I was supposed to be using to put the damn page in the damn book, I asked the magic hint cat in the room. "You need to attach the book with some sort of adhesive so the page doesn't fly right out," the cat says. Well, I don't even know how to get it in there in the first place, but I dutifully figure out how to get something sticky on the page. I then try the exact same language I had used before to put the page in the book, and voila! It works this time! Bad design, having the error response indicate that the problem was the language and not the logic. So ok, it's not good that the very first puzzle I approach had this problem, but I'm willing to try again. Unhappily, the next thing I tried to do ended up being the same way, and the next, and the next. It appears that the author did not account for any fail scenarios, and if you don't do just what you're supposed to at a specific time you get a generic parser error that doesn't tell you if you worded something wrong and are on the right track, or you are on the wrong path. The result is that you try a billion different methods of saying the same thing, whether or not it's what you're supposed to be doing. Even the hint system has this problem, as after giving up yet again and trying to ask the cat what to do about a puddle on the floor, the cat informed me that he was uninterested in that topic and I should be cleaning. The problem was that the game wanted me to work on something else first. It was a frustrating experience, and after an hour I gave up.
Dead Man's Fiesta - A CYOA that's a little bit artsy fartsy but manages to hit some emotional bullseyes none the less. Has a lot to do with grief and loss. You're on ambiguous individual, dealing with the death of two people who are never explicitly given a relation to you, but you have their ashes and need to let them go. You also buy yourself a Fiesta with some of the money you've inherited or something, I don't remember exactly where it came from, but basically you're treating yourself. The impala happens to be haunted, and the rest of the game is you trying to figure out how to unhaunt it. On the emotional side everything felt very real. The PC is enduring a sort of numbness and frustration about that numbness, and the people around the ghost have a complicated relationship with the man who passed away. It seems like the ghost (ghosts, really) also have a difficult relationship with the world they left, and the way you interact with them feels remarkably sensitive. By the end I really felt for the dudes, and ended up enjoying the story overall.
Mechanically Dead Man's Fiesta is just the sort of structure that I enjoy. There are a lot of choices, some of which feel more meaningful than others, and I never felt like I was going to be gatcha'd, or that I was being railroaded. The endgame was hard to figure out throughout. Even though you want the ghosts gone it's difficult to figure out how to do that, but I didn't mind so much, because that ambiguity felt natural, rather than contrived. I ended up "getting" one ghost by the end, which after taking a look under the hood appears to mean I pleased him. All in all a successful game, with a good, engaging story that is not hobbled by its mechanics.
Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night! - The first game I tried and out of the batch the only parser game I ended up enjoying (out of 2, but still) The puzzles were straightforward but had enough little twists that exploring the possibilities was fun. I only got frustrated twice. Once due to some problem with language, the other again because of a language issue, but in a different way. What follows are spoilers, so if you want to try the puzzles out skip it.
Dynamite Powers is a relatively short game that consists of 4 somewhat independent puzzles. The first is quite straightforward and very hard to screw up, but there is a timer on account of the fact that you are being lowered into a death pit, so failure can happen that way. Wasn't too hard to figure out. The second puzzle puts you in a room with what is basically one of those mix and match monster machines, where you need to pick a head, body, and tail and then manipulate some stuff to get the machine going. I got stuck here for a bit because I didn't know where to stand to get the thing to work. I had tried going to a certain spot, but had not used the right language and failed. Eventually I had to use a hint for this one thing, which directed me back to a place I had already tried, just with slightly different language. So that was a bit of an annoyance.
The third puzzle is tied to the first in that whatever strange combo of alien live you put in is what you become. You then have to deal with the mars atmosphere, get over a ravine, and into a station on the other side. There are a number of red herrings here, and multiple ways to solve one part of the puzzle but find your particular monster combo can't get past the other. There's also a timer, because you will turn back into a human and die in the mars atmosphere if you don't get it right fast. If you didn't save in puzzle to this is a big issue, but luckily I did. I enjoyed this puzzle a ton, because even though I died a lot it was interesting to see the different combos of fail you could make. If you screwed up the head you'd just die instantly because you couldn't breath. You could fly over the ravine or jump over it, but only one would leave you with the right limbs to get into the door. If you tried too long to figure out how to use the hand pad at the door you were screwed, and you needed a little bit of lateral thinking to make that final success.
The last puzzle turned out to be much more frustrating than it had to be, but it also had a small trick to it that I appreciated a lot. You need to take a bunch of different colored lenses and stick them in their respective slots. While the game refers to red, blue, yellow, green, etc, all the lenses are a variety of grey or maybe sepia. Which, suddenly made me realize that throughout the game there had been a lot of odd color choices made, and then I remembered what I thought was a throwaway line at the very beginning of the game about this being the classic and untainted version, but I could switch to the inferior, colorized version at any time. So... I had been playing a black and white (or grayscale) text game and hadn't even realized it! I can't even call this a twist because it was laid out for me right in the beginning, but I was still chuffed by it.
Problem was that when I did what I thought would fix my issue and turn on "color mode," all of the colors were "colorized mode," aka not good matches with basic reds, greens, or yellows. There were oranges and fuchsias and shit, and since I don't have any sense for color theory I was still stuck. I ended up just cheating and letting the guide tell me which color was supposed to be which, which marred an otherwise enjoyable game. Still gave it a good score though.
Intelmission - Urgh. This is a game that fell down on the writing side. The concept was neat and so were the mechanics. You're a spy who gets caught and ends up trapped in a room with another spy who has constantly been screwing up your missions. Something is going to happen, but you don't know when, and you think that maybe they want some info from you. In order to fill some time the two of you get to talking, and the game is basically just one massive conversation tree. So far so good.
But the characters drove me mad with fury. The PC is some chick who appears to be kind of shit at her job. She lets this guy fuck her over constantly it seems, and her getting caught in the mission the game starts with was not impressive at all. The guy is... the sort of person that I would get tired of immediately. He flirts a lot, and has a strange philosophy that embraces excitement, and feels a little bit like a pickup artist cum randian fanboy. A lot of the times when you talk with him you are debating philosophies, and this guy thinks that you've got a stick up your ass and not creative and need to let loose a little. I've never met a guy who voiced those opinions and didn't mean, you should let me have sex with you, so maybe this is my bias speaking, but my immediate reaction was, eh, go fuck yourself. Problem was that the game did not give me that option. As the main character you happen to be shit at debate. I felt like the author clearly felt that the NPC was wrong, and that silly things like social equity were wrong. You couldn't actually defeat some of the shittier arguments he put up, because your options were, "Sputter in inarticulate indignation, admit he's right, offer up a strawman for him to burn down." I let this happen for a while, hoping they'd just drop the fucking subject of whether or not equality was a bad thing, but after they came back to that topic for the fourth or fifth time I threw my hands up and left.
It'd be one thing if I felt that the game was in good faith trying to work out some of the problems it brought up, but I don't believe that was the case, given the options the player has to try to pick at the issues there. And I don't play games to be lectured by NPCs over shit that I think is idiotic. I'm not sure what the author thought making the PC the dumbass, but whatever, this one got dropped too.
The master of the land - I'm not super sure what to make of this. I enjoyed it, but also stopped playing once my two hours were up. You play a noblewoman in a complicated family. You're off to some big party during a holiday where the lower class are supposed to get the chance to be the boss for once. You have sympathies for people who are getting screwed over by prejudice or power, but you also know you need to deal with the consequences of acting out of line. Your goals are to get a letter that will let you wear mens clothes (and do your job more effectively) and also to figure out some sort of intrigue about your sister, who is not to be trusted.
The format of the game is a CYOA with a map overlay, so you can just click on a location on a little side bar and move. Something is happening in each room, and you can choose to either act by choosing a given option or move on. One gets the sense that no matter where you go something is happening somewhere else, which is great and gives your decision making a sense of purpose and weight, even if all you're doing is trying to find someone. It was fun to find little encounters and just interact with what was going on around me, and honestly I didn't care about the main plot. In fact, the main plot is the game's weakness in my opinion. The writing in this game is such that things feel like of vague. It's got a bit of a Fallen London vibe, where things feel just a big surreal (and are more than just a bit surreal) and what exactly is happening is a tiny bit difficult to grasp. On the one hand, this, along with a clear indication that for every choice you make time moves forward, gives an ominous overlay to the whole game. On the other, it makes the steaks hard to identify. I ended up not really caring about the PC, and using her as a vehicle to explore the manor, which was enjoyable but didn't require me to complete the game.
(Also, I did play most of the Yaoi Jam 2018 games, I just suck at keeping this blog up to date about it.)
Ahem, so, games played by alphabetical order are,
Charming - You're a magician and you've made a massive mess.
Dead Man's Fiesta - Soon after the death of someone close to you, you buy a haunted Ford Fiesta.
Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night! - A classic pulp adventure where you need to escape a death trap and stop a villain from destroying the earth!
Intelmission - You're a spy stuck in a room with another spy.
The master of the land - You're a noble at a ball. Lots of politics.
And here are my impressions.
Charming - The only game out of the five that I straight up gave up on. It was a parser puzzle game, but the puzzles were not well structured. I hit a snag in the very beginning, where there's a bunch of scattered pages that appear to need to go back into their books. So I took a page and tried to put it into its respective book. "Which book do you want to put it in?" the parser asked me. So I tried again, using the exact name of the book that the parser gave me. "What book do you want to put it in?" The parser asked me. So I tried saying it a different way. Same response. Tried just answering with the name of the book, didn't know that command. Unsure of exactly what language I was supposed to be using to put the damn page in the damn book, I asked the magic hint cat in the room. "You need to attach the book with some sort of adhesive so the page doesn't fly right out," the cat says. Well, I don't even know how to get it in there in the first place, but I dutifully figure out how to get something sticky on the page. I then try the exact same language I had used before to put the page in the book, and voila! It works this time! Bad design, having the error response indicate that the problem was the language and not the logic. So ok, it's not good that the very first puzzle I approach had this problem, but I'm willing to try again. Unhappily, the next thing I tried to do ended up being the same way, and the next, and the next. It appears that the author did not account for any fail scenarios, and if you don't do just what you're supposed to at a specific time you get a generic parser error that doesn't tell you if you worded something wrong and are on the right track, or you are on the wrong path. The result is that you try a billion different methods of saying the same thing, whether or not it's what you're supposed to be doing. Even the hint system has this problem, as after giving up yet again and trying to ask the cat what to do about a puddle on the floor, the cat informed me that he was uninterested in that topic and I should be cleaning. The problem was that the game wanted me to work on something else first. It was a frustrating experience, and after an hour I gave up.
Dead Man's Fiesta - A CYOA that's a little bit artsy fartsy but manages to hit some emotional bullseyes none the less. Has a lot to do with grief and loss. You're on ambiguous individual, dealing with the death of two people who are never explicitly given a relation to you, but you have their ashes and need to let them go. You also buy yourself a Fiesta with some of the money you've inherited or something, I don't remember exactly where it came from, but basically you're treating yourself. The impala happens to be haunted, and the rest of the game is you trying to figure out how to unhaunt it. On the emotional side everything felt very real. The PC is enduring a sort of numbness and frustration about that numbness, and the people around the ghost have a complicated relationship with the man who passed away. It seems like the ghost (ghosts, really) also have a difficult relationship with the world they left, and the way you interact with them feels remarkably sensitive. By the end I really felt for the dudes, and ended up enjoying the story overall.
Mechanically Dead Man's Fiesta is just the sort of structure that I enjoy. There are a lot of choices, some of which feel more meaningful than others, and I never felt like I was going to be gatcha'd, or that I was being railroaded. The endgame was hard to figure out throughout. Even though you want the ghosts gone it's difficult to figure out how to do that, but I didn't mind so much, because that ambiguity felt natural, rather than contrived. I ended up "getting" one ghost by the end, which after taking a look under the hood appears to mean I pleased him. All in all a successful game, with a good, engaging story that is not hobbled by its mechanics.
Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night! - The first game I tried and out of the batch the only parser game I ended up enjoying (out of 2, but still) The puzzles were straightforward but had enough little twists that exploring the possibilities was fun. I only got frustrated twice. Once due to some problem with language, the other again because of a language issue, but in a different way. What follows are spoilers, so if you want to try the puzzles out skip it.
Dynamite Powers is a relatively short game that consists of 4 somewhat independent puzzles. The first is quite straightforward and very hard to screw up, but there is a timer on account of the fact that you are being lowered into a death pit, so failure can happen that way. Wasn't too hard to figure out. The second puzzle puts you in a room with what is basically one of those mix and match monster machines, where you need to pick a head, body, and tail and then manipulate some stuff to get the machine going. I got stuck here for a bit because I didn't know where to stand to get the thing to work. I had tried going to a certain spot, but had not used the right language and failed. Eventually I had to use a hint for this one thing, which directed me back to a place I had already tried, just with slightly different language. So that was a bit of an annoyance.
The third puzzle is tied to the first in that whatever strange combo of alien live you put in is what you become. You then have to deal with the mars atmosphere, get over a ravine, and into a station on the other side. There are a number of red herrings here, and multiple ways to solve one part of the puzzle but find your particular monster combo can't get past the other. There's also a timer, because you will turn back into a human and die in the mars atmosphere if you don't get it right fast. If you didn't save in puzzle to this is a big issue, but luckily I did. I enjoyed this puzzle a ton, because even though I died a lot it was interesting to see the different combos of fail you could make. If you screwed up the head you'd just die instantly because you couldn't breath. You could fly over the ravine or jump over it, but only one would leave you with the right limbs to get into the door. If you tried too long to figure out how to use the hand pad at the door you were screwed, and you needed a little bit of lateral thinking to make that final success.
The last puzzle turned out to be much more frustrating than it had to be, but it also had a small trick to it that I appreciated a lot. You need to take a bunch of different colored lenses and stick them in their respective slots. While the game refers to red, blue, yellow, green, etc, all the lenses are a variety of grey or maybe sepia. Which, suddenly made me realize that throughout the game there had been a lot of odd color choices made, and then I remembered what I thought was a throwaway line at the very beginning of the game about this being the classic and untainted version, but I could switch to the inferior, colorized version at any time. So... I had been playing a black and white (or grayscale) text game and hadn't even realized it! I can't even call this a twist because it was laid out for me right in the beginning, but I was still chuffed by it.
Problem was that when I did what I thought would fix my issue and turn on "color mode," all of the colors were "colorized mode," aka not good matches with basic reds, greens, or yellows. There were oranges and fuchsias and shit, and since I don't have any sense for color theory I was still stuck. I ended up just cheating and letting the guide tell me which color was supposed to be which, which marred an otherwise enjoyable game. Still gave it a good score though.
Intelmission - Urgh. This is a game that fell down on the writing side. The concept was neat and so were the mechanics. You're a spy who gets caught and ends up trapped in a room with another spy who has constantly been screwing up your missions. Something is going to happen, but you don't know when, and you think that maybe they want some info from you. In order to fill some time the two of you get to talking, and the game is basically just one massive conversation tree. So far so good.
But the characters drove me mad with fury. The PC is some chick who appears to be kind of shit at her job. She lets this guy fuck her over constantly it seems, and her getting caught in the mission the game starts with was not impressive at all. The guy is... the sort of person that I would get tired of immediately. He flirts a lot, and has a strange philosophy that embraces excitement, and feels a little bit like a pickup artist cum randian fanboy. A lot of the times when you talk with him you are debating philosophies, and this guy thinks that you've got a stick up your ass and not creative and need to let loose a little. I've never met a guy who voiced those opinions and didn't mean, you should let me have sex with you, so maybe this is my bias speaking, but my immediate reaction was, eh, go fuck yourself. Problem was that the game did not give me that option. As the main character you happen to be shit at debate. I felt like the author clearly felt that the NPC was wrong, and that silly things like social equity were wrong. You couldn't actually defeat some of the shittier arguments he put up, because your options were, "Sputter in inarticulate indignation, admit he's right, offer up a strawman for him to burn down." I let this happen for a while, hoping they'd just drop the fucking subject of whether or not equality was a bad thing, but after they came back to that topic for the fourth or fifth time I threw my hands up and left.
It'd be one thing if I felt that the game was in good faith trying to work out some of the problems it brought up, but I don't believe that was the case, given the options the player has to try to pick at the issues there. And I don't play games to be lectured by NPCs over shit that I think is idiotic. I'm not sure what the author thought making the PC the dumbass, but whatever, this one got dropped too.
The master of the land - I'm not super sure what to make of this. I enjoyed it, but also stopped playing once my two hours were up. You play a noblewoman in a complicated family. You're off to some big party during a holiday where the lower class are supposed to get the chance to be the boss for once. You have sympathies for people who are getting screwed over by prejudice or power, but you also know you need to deal with the consequences of acting out of line. Your goals are to get a letter that will let you wear mens clothes (and do your job more effectively) and also to figure out some sort of intrigue about your sister, who is not to be trusted.
The format of the game is a CYOA with a map overlay, so you can just click on a location on a little side bar and move. Something is happening in each room, and you can choose to either act by choosing a given option or move on. One gets the sense that no matter where you go something is happening somewhere else, which is great and gives your decision making a sense of purpose and weight, even if all you're doing is trying to find someone. It was fun to find little encounters and just interact with what was going on around me, and honestly I didn't care about the main plot. In fact, the main plot is the game's weakness in my opinion. The writing in this game is such that things feel like of vague. It's got a bit of a Fallen London vibe, where things feel just a big surreal (and are more than just a bit surreal) and what exactly is happening is a tiny bit difficult to grasp. On the one hand, this, along with a clear indication that for every choice you make time moves forward, gives an ominous overlay to the whole game. On the other, it makes the steaks hard to identify. I ended up not really caring about the PC, and using her as a vehicle to explore the manor, which was enjoyable but didn't require me to complete the game.