Playing games with an emphasis on story.

We take a break from our regularly scheduled VN games to play some of the entries for this years IF Comp. I usually only manage to get the minimum in, and it's the same with this year, so here's a quick review of the five games I played.

The Golden Heist - A twine game where you need to safely execute a burglary from the emperor Nero's palace. It's a decent length, not too long, and not too short, and seems to have a lot of paths, starting from picking one of three possible accomplices, and then constantly trying to manage threats and dead ends in the caper itself. I am somewhat suspicious of whether or not it's possible to actually make a wrong choice though, because for all the options you get, you seem to be steered in the right direction regardless of what you choose. It's best to go into the game not knowing this, so there's a little suspense in the question of whether or not you're going to survive, never-mind pull off the heist. Without that suspense the game may lose some entertainment factor, but I think of all the games this one had the most interesting branches and felt the most responsive to choice. Recommended.

Starbreakers - The game starts with you trying to escape from a spaceship which is currently being ravaged by an alien monster. You have the choice to run, hide, or sneak away in each room. In the beginning it's hard to say what option will safely get you to the next chamber and what will get you swiftly and gorishly eaten. The first time I died I thought it was just a memory thing and tried to do the exact same choices that got me through the first time, but after failing that multiple times I noticed the hints in the description. After you get through that scenario, you're immediately presented with a completely different one, and another puzzle, and this goes on quite a few times, like, a dozen or so times.

It's possible to fail a puzzle completely, at which point your character is terminated, and a character identical to you but with a unit number one higher starts the puzzle again. This is sort of your way of keeping score. I think I got to Me #8 by the time I finished, meaning I failed 8 times. Some of the puzzles are somewhat forgiving. The first one will let you get eaten by the alien beast over and over again without putting you in a real fail state. But some are pretty strict. There are some math puzzles that show up where if you make a single wrong move your "competitor" will beat you to the goal and you'll be killed and forced to try again. A typo or missclick can therefore sometimes mean death. So if you're going for a high score that can be a problem. However, dying just brings you to the beginning of the most recent puzzle, so it's not a huge issue if you just want to make it through. There's a little meta plot that ties all these scenarios together, and in the end you get something of a choice about how you want to conclude. I chose to go it alone and was satisfied with it. Even though some of the puzzles felt a little mean, I largely enjoyed this game. If you like classic logic brain twisters this game is for you.

Aardvark vs. the Hype - this calls itself a parser game, and it does have a few parser puzzles, but a large portion of the play is actually just picking multiple choice, and that multiple choice is largely inconsequential. It's just there for flavor. The game itself is just three bigish puzzles with a couple of additional moments near the end. There is a swap mechanic, where you can bounce between characters, but it isn't utilized particularly well. I didn't feel like it added anything, and by the time the mechanic had some effect I was kind of annoyed, because the three big puzzles are all pretty flawed.
 

The problems with Aardvark are typical of the genre. Very narrow verb dictionary, convoluted puzzles that are not well written out, and some basic logic problems that in one case resulted in me reloading from a save because I had literally broke the thing. (I put something down and the game wouldn't let me pick it back up. ) Another puzzle has a part where you have to guess what number to dial out of 6 questions and you kinda just have to keep retrying the process until you pick the right thing. It's particularly annoying because the options move around after a certain number of mistakes, and then if you check the hints the answer is for the first arrangement, and doesn't adjust for the new one, meaning it's useless and you still have to guess.

The story itself is a bit of a nothing burger. It's convoluted and not particularly nonsensical, making it difficult to reason out puzzles, and the sense of humor didn't work for me. I don't recommend this one.

The Daughter was unreadable to me. It is a massive pet peeve of mine to introduce characters with a pronoun without any sort of actual identification. I get that the ambiguity is intentional this time but I still don't like it. I was willing to let that go. I'm not that picky. But then all of the incomplete sentences did me in. It felt like I was stumbling over every other sentence wanting to fix it. And I'm really not that picky. I read so much trash on the regular without difficulty, but the sort of prose that finds no value in verbs or just can't find the word "is/was" just ends me. On top of that, the font choice and the soft gray over white (you can swap to a dark mode but that's still a gray over black) meant that it was also physically difficult to read.After trying to just get past it two nights in a row I gave up and moved on.

Off-Season at the dream factory - There was a little bit of wonkiness for me in this game because it insists on full screening and forces font size, preventing you from being able to make adjustments with zoom yourself. This seems to be made for phones, and I almost dropped the game because I spent a bunch of time in the beginning trying to get it so I could read an entire passage without scrolling but without being in full screen mode, and it was literally impossible. The font is massive, so it wasn't like there was no room. On the plus side, the font was massive so it was no problem to read.

But the writing itself is much more tolerable compared to The Daughter. The story appears to be that you are an orc hired by an adventure company to fight customers and then be slain and reanimated. You have some trauma around this cause your dad used to do the same job and his reanimator failed in something like a workplace accident, which makes you a little nervous about combat. Plus, you don't really like hurting things. The result is you get reprimanded regularly for not being scary and challenging enough. I'm a fan of orcs so this game caught my interest, and the writing is pretty good, with a nice quick pace and a touch of a humorous tone without trying too hard. The puzzles depend a lot on you paying attention to the text or descriptions, and there is a point system that rewards you for being inquisitive. There are parts of the game that won't help you solve anything but will give you a point, which I enjoyed, and I got them all, even the one that the walkthrough calls "That Darn Point" There was just one puzzle that I had some problem with. The game had given me a good hint, but it gave it at a point when I wasn't engaged with that part of the puzzle, so I couldn't recall it when I tried to solve it.

Off-Season is something of a linear game in that you're constantly facing enemies that require a particular thing to defeat, but when it comes to collecting what you need you can do that in a relatively open ended way, by exploring the area and interacting with stuff as you see fit. It's probably possible to get through multiple enemies one after the other without doing any extra puzzle solving in between if you play your cards right. While the puzzles aren't hard or complex I thought they were just complex enough that I liked being able to solve them, and the endearing writing, fun characters, and funny art (your uncle is literally a pixelated image of Lewis Carroll with his face paintshop'ed green) all contributed to a overall fun game. Recommended.

Mermaids of Ganymede - This is an Ink game, which I typically don't see too many of in IF comp. It knows Ink's advantages and uses them well. It's visually attractive, has just enough illustration to set the tone, and even has an embedded soundtrack. The game is run on a series of 5 chapters, each of which exist as their own puzzle. The first chapter was the weakest in my opinion, with some sections that felt like scripting errors when text in one scene failed to take into account the results of a previous choice or so on, but after the first chapter I no longer ran into any of this, and the puzzles became a little more straight forward. The story is a good brisk hook. You are leading a group of four explorers into the moon of Ganymede, and have somehow had a disaster resulting in being stranded somewhere in the bottom of the ocean. You are set upon by mer-sharks (sharks with human arms, basically) and are rescued by Mermaids, who aren't sure if they're pleased you're here. Each chapter represents a different little puzzle, but only two of them are the direct problem solving kind, and only one was particularly interesting. The other three are dialog tree chapters, where it's harder to figure out if your decision to promise a witch a coup or specimens for her experiments actually have any effect on the plot. From how the game is constructed, it seems like this is window dressing. I don't know if it's possible to get a fail state by negotiating poorly, or by failing to appropriately give pep talks to your team, especially since some mechanics like team stats, are never brought up again after the chapter where they're introduced. The puzzle I enjoyed most is best done with pen and paper to map out your navigation through an iceberg, and the rest was not super engaging.