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playingstory2020-11-22 07:13 pm
got_quiet) wrote in playingstory2020-11-22 07:13 pm
Entry tags:
IF Comp
I haven't had the patience to play many IF comp games this year, but I wanted to get my five in at the very least, and will manage to do that. So far the games I've played have all been ok. Nothing drove me nuts like some from previous years had, but none felt particularly outstanding either. This may simply be because I wasn't into it, but since I've been able to enjoy other things around the same time I don't think it was just that
Anyway, here are the games I've played so far and my reactions to them.
You have inherited a house from your great uncle, and if you can solve his deadly puzzles you will also inherit his job as the gatekeeper of the realm of the dead. This is a game that very simply requires you to pick up a bunch of trinkets and solve a few puzzles that are based on your understanding of comma usage. If you do know your comma usage it's a very easy game that simply requires you to systematically search through a couple of dozen rooms, picking up little plates as you go along. There are a couple minor puzzles outside of the grammar tests that I ended up solving by accident before I was even aware they existed. The rest are single room puzzles that present you with, say, four buttons connected to four sentences, where only one has correct comma usage, and you need to press that button. There was only one spot at the very end where I hemmed and hawed about what might be correct. The rest was pretty obvious, so I didn't get to see any of the fail states. The idea that the thing that qualifies you as a mystic guardian of the gates of hell is your ability to identify a comma splice is endearingly comical.
There are some technical issues. For example you can be prompted to start a dialog about an object before you have discovered that object, and the character will ask you for it before you have it. On the one hand this is nice because it serves as something of a hint, but it's clearly a botched execution of code.
Because a large portion of the game is picking up little plates, many of which are just lying about in one of the many rooms, if you miss one it can be hard to figure out where you need to find it. I couldn't find one last plate, and trying to find it lasted just as long as it took the previous 11. That was frustrating, especially since when I gave up and looked at the walkthrough it didn't say which plate was hidden where, just gave a list of randomized locations, so I had to check every single one of them because most of them were in rather innocuous places that were not memorable. While trying to find this last plate, I made the mistake of getting into a reflecting pool, at which point the limits of the vocab in the game made themselves known when it ended up being impossible for me to get out again. I tried everything I could think of. Leave pool did not work. Get out of pool, which was the exact language used by the game to inform me that I wasn't going anywhere ("You'll have to get out of the pool first") did not work. So I restored to an old save, but that was before I had acquired other keys, so the problem was starting to compound itself. Frustrating. Another problem I came across was reading a "map" which was actually a series of instructions based on whether or not a given sentence was grammatically correct. The problem was that the further you go in the cave the further from the map you get so I made the mistake of losing my place and getting lost. When you get lost..... YOU END UP IN THE REFLECTING POOL which I was yet again trapped in for all eternity until I reloaded. Amazing. Eventually I figured out that you cannot tell it to get out of the pool in any other way than simply typing "get out," but that didn't happen until the third time I got trapped. This problem drastically dropped my opinion of the game overall.
The gameplay is very direct and the game is extremely short. You are given maybe three parts where you even have a choice about what you should be doing, and otherwise the game tells you what to do and you have to do it. This typically means going in the only direction that is available to you. There are maybe 2 puzzles. In one you have to find a book. Here the game spreads out a little bit because you can put in the name of any author you want and you'll get a response, though if the author was after Issac Newton's time the response is just that he doesn't know the person, and that covers about 99% of all the authors I am familiar with. The person you're supposed to look for is obvious in hindsight I guess, and does give you a hint within the game, but I spent most of my time in this short game trying to guess up the right answer and feeling a little frustrated because my history of science is not very strong.
The second puzzle is so simple that it feels like it shouldn't have worked. But there's literally only one object to manipulate so I didn't spend much time trying anything else. And then once you put in the right two commands the game ends. It's a very brief game and nothing is really going on in it.
I'm leaving the story for last because the game is so short that any discussion of it is basically a spoiler, so scroll on if you are anal about that sort of thing. Basically you are Isaac Newton and you get sent into the future to find a book by Einstein and bring it back. That book happens to be the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or, the Principia Mathmatica, for which the actual Newton is famous. In other words the game posits that Newton didn't come up with his own math, and instead just got shot into the future by a witch to steal Enstein's work, all so that flat screen TVs and cell phones could work in the future. Even for a time travel game the concept here makes no sense, cause you end up in modern day London and everyone says they've just forgot a bunch of science and all of their electronics are broken, but still exist. How does that work if somehow the foundations of gravity or whatever were not properly discovered until 2020? Newton steals the Principia because that way the mathematical foundations of physics will be known sooner, so that Einstein will have time to work on his theory of general relativity instead, but really this game makes very little sense.
There were no real technical issues with the game. Commands worked as expected and there were decent responses for wrong choices. In fact I think there is more code here dealing with looking for the books than there was in the rest of the entire game. But the lack of brokenness only really elevates this into the kinda dull category.
The game is a branching plot with many fail states. You basically have to navigate the conversations in each encounter so that your adversary doesn't decide to just kill you, at which point it's game over. Luckily the game does let you retry from the beginning of each scenario... if you don't accidentally quit, so failing isn't a huge deal. The concept that you have to talk your way out of all conflict because you'll be instantly killed otherwise is a pretty good one for IF and it was fun enough when I was succeeding, but failing is a little frustrating because you can just get immediately murdered. The client is not very good either. In addition to the aforementioned lack of any save, there is also a lot of UI weirdness. For example if you want to click on the button that opens up the text history you will also advance the text, and if you want to click on the scroll to scroll through that history you will advance the story yet again.
I ended up not finishing, because I didn't want to have to replay up to where I had gotten for the third time. If it hadn't been for that I think I would have enjoyed the game well enough.
So mechanically I thought this game was nice and innovative. I didn't really like the story because I didn't really like the love interest, and this game is just a whirlwind romance between the PC and the love interest, with no other characters. Your choices are for how you behave around her, how you answer her, and so on and so forth. You appear to be attracted to her and like her a lot, but as the player I didn't like her much at all because she seemed self-absorbed, overbearing, and shallow. So I'm not sure if the emotional beats hit quite the way the game may have wanted them to. I also wasn't sure how some of my choices affected the text. I thought I was picking choices that were pretty straight forward and honest, but at some point I was chided for being false and just saying things I thought the LI wanted to hear. It's also a little hard to see how choices affect the game when you're bouncing around in time and some scenes may refer to events that you haven't hit yet.
Another gripe I have about the writing is that it relies on vagueness a little more than I'd like. It's not as bad as some games about it, but it's hard to be asked to make choices when you don't know what's actually going on.
Despite the fact that the story itself didn't really inspire much emotion in me I liked the mechanics enough that I think this a game worth checking out.
Anyway, here are the games I've played so far and my reactions to them.
Ferryman's Gate
There are some technical issues. For example you can be prompted to start a dialog about an object before you have discovered that object, and the character will ask you for it before you have it. On the one hand this is nice because it serves as something of a hint, but it's clearly a botched execution of code.
Because a large portion of the game is picking up little plates, many of which are just lying about in one of the many rooms, if you miss one it can be hard to figure out where you need to find it. I couldn't find one last plate, and trying to find it lasted just as long as it took the previous 11. That was frustrating, especially since when I gave up and looked at the walkthrough it didn't say which plate was hidden where, just gave a list of randomized locations, so I had to check every single one of them because most of them were in rather innocuous places that were not memorable. While trying to find this last plate, I made the mistake of getting into a reflecting pool, at which point the limits of the vocab in the game made themselves known when it ended up being impossible for me to get out again. I tried everything I could think of. Leave pool did not work. Get out of pool, which was the exact language used by the game to inform me that I wasn't going anywhere ("You'll have to get out of the pool first") did not work. So I restored to an old save, but that was before I had acquired other keys, so the problem was starting to compound itself. Frustrating. Another problem I came across was reading a "map" which was actually a series of instructions based on whether or not a given sentence was grammatically correct. The problem was that the further you go in the cave the further from the map you get so I made the mistake of losing my place and getting lost. When you get lost..... YOU END UP IN THE REFLECTING POOL which I was yet again trapped in for all eternity until I reloaded. Amazing. Eventually I figured out that you cannot tell it to get out of the pool in any other way than simply typing "get out," but that didn't happen until the third time I got trapped. This problem drastically dropped my opinion of the game overall.
There's also a note in the map which reads: "DO NOT USE "L" FOR "LEFT". IF YOU MEAN TO GO LEFT, MAKE SURE TO TYPE "LEFT" INSTEAD OF "L". Which is hilarious and also suggests that this thing is kept together with string and toothpicks.
Despite the clear problems with a too-narrow vocabulary, the game was straight forward and the puzzles were an interesting way to test grammar. It's a bit rough around the edges but not so much so that I didn't have a little fun.
Standing on the shoulders of Giants
This game was written in past tense, which I can't say I like in IF. Even that notwithstanding the writing is pretty weak.The gameplay is very direct and the game is extremely short. You are given maybe three parts where you even have a choice about what you should be doing, and otherwise the game tells you what to do and you have to do it. This typically means going in the only direction that is available to you. There are maybe 2 puzzles. In one you have to find a book. Here the game spreads out a little bit because you can put in the name of any author you want and you'll get a response, though if the author was after Issac Newton's time the response is just that he doesn't know the person, and that covers about 99% of all the authors I am familiar with. The person you're supposed to look for is obvious in hindsight I guess, and does give you a hint within the game, but I spent most of my time in this short game trying to guess up the right answer and feeling a little frustrated because my history of science is not very strong.
The second puzzle is so simple that it feels like it shouldn't have worked. But there's literally only one object to manipulate so I didn't spend much time trying anything else. And then once you put in the right two commands the game ends. It's a very brief game and nothing is really going on in it.
I'm leaving the story for last because the game is so short that any discussion of it is basically a spoiler, so scroll on if you are anal about that sort of thing. Basically you are Isaac Newton and you get sent into the future to find a book by Einstein and bring it back. That book happens to be the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or, the Principia Mathmatica, for which the actual Newton is famous. In other words the game posits that Newton didn't come up with his own math, and instead just got shot into the future by a witch to steal Enstein's work, all so that flat screen TVs and cell phones could work in the future. Even for a time travel game the concept here makes no sense, cause you end up in modern day London and everyone says they've just forgot a bunch of science and all of their electronics are broken, but still exist. How does that work if somehow the foundations of gravity or whatever were not properly discovered until 2020? Newton steals the Principia because that way the mathematical foundations of physics will be known sooner, so that Einstein will have time to work on his theory of general relativity instead, but really this game makes very little sense.
There were no real technical issues with the game. Commands worked as expected and there were decent responses for wrong choices. In fact I think there is more code here dealing with looking for the books than there was in the rest of the entire game. But the lack of brokenness only really elevates this into the kinda dull category.
(s)wordsmyth.
First, here's no save state. So you have to sit down and play the whole thing at once. It says it's only a half an hour but twice I hit exit instead of retry because I just click fast and I'm not about to start over from the beginning again after failing in the same place twice and then accidentally restarting.The game is a branching plot with many fail states. You basically have to navigate the conversations in each encounter so that your adversary doesn't decide to just kill you, at which point it's game over. Luckily the game does let you retry from the beginning of each scenario... if you don't accidentally quit, so failing isn't a huge deal. The concept that you have to talk your way out of all conflict because you'll be instantly killed otherwise is a pretty good one for IF and it was fun enough when I was succeeding, but failing is a little frustrating because you can just get immediately murdered. The client is not very good either. In addition to the aforementioned lack of any save, there is also a lot of UI weirdness. For example if you want to click on the button that opens up the text history you will also advance the text, and if you want to click on the scroll to scroll through that history you will advance the story yet again.
I ended up not finishing, because I didn't want to have to replay up to where I had gotten for the third time. If it hadn't been for that I think I would have enjoyed the game well enough.
Trusting My Mortal Enemy?! What a Disaster!
A straightforward game in which you play both the superhero and the supervillain. In the first encounter the superhero defeats the supervillain, but rather than bring them in for arrest (and execution, apparently) she decides to suggest that they keep fighting, and arrange the circumstances of their battles beforehand. The story is cute and kind of wholesome, between an older woman hero who has a family life and is trying to keep the city safe while also being a little selfish, and a supervillain who is just trying to change a world that doesn't understand her into one who does. The writing is decent and the pacing is pretty brisk. The choices are of two types. There are a few battle-type choices where you decide attacks, but I don't know if they have any real impact on the path beyond the combat flavor text, and then there are the plot choices, which almost all boil down to "trust" or "don't trust." Those sorts of choices tend to feel like "good choice" or "bad choice" so it wasn't particularly interesting to me. I chose to be trusting pretty much every time and got a very good end. There isn't any problem solving or anything in the game, so you're basically just going along for the ride, and maybe might pick the bad choices to see the bad end.There are also a couple of formatting issues, particularly not all dialog was properly laid out, but that was the only real issue. Overall a perfectly fine but not particularly interactive game.
The Moon Wed Saturn
The layout of this game is probably the most interesting thing about it. The entire game is played across about a week, with one scene for Monday, one for Wed, and one for Saturday. Each of those days occupy a column of text on the screen, and the narrative bounces around temporally between these scenes, which is indicated by the active text shifting back and forth between those columns, it works extremely well actually, and gives a clear sense of time even though there's a lot of bouncing around.So mechanically I thought this game was nice and innovative. I didn't really like the story because I didn't really like the love interest, and this game is just a whirlwind romance between the PC and the love interest, with no other characters. Your choices are for how you behave around her, how you answer her, and so on and so forth. You appear to be attracted to her and like her a lot, but as the player I didn't like her much at all because she seemed self-absorbed, overbearing, and shallow. So I'm not sure if the emotional beats hit quite the way the game may have wanted them to. I also wasn't sure how some of my choices affected the text. I thought I was picking choices that were pretty straight forward and honest, but at some point I was chided for being false and just saying things I thought the LI wanted to hear. It's also a little hard to see how choices affect the game when you're bouncing around in time and some scenes may refer to events that you haven't hit yet.
Another gripe I have about the writing is that it relies on vagueness a little more than I'd like. It's not as bad as some games about it, but it's hard to be asked to make choices when you don't know what's actually going on.
Despite the fact that the story itself didn't really inspire much emotion in me I liked the mechanics enough that I think this a game worth checking out.