Healy's Journal

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Wes Lesley's The King and the Crown.

The King and the Crown is a light puzzly story about a king searching for his lost scepter and crown. Though I initially struggled with this, finding them turns out to be pretty trivial, and the meat of the game is in discovering all the secret endings. Unfortunately (for me, anyway), most of the mechanics involved are deliberately obscured, which for me means it's a stab in the dark to get all of them. I checked the walkthrough to see how to get them, then figured that was enough for me.

Hmm, still need to talk for another paragraph... I did think the new parser errors were a nice touch, and the one secret ending I did manage to get (involving some daydreaming) I liked a lot better than the regular one.

Conclusion: ( Click for verdict )

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Michael Thomet's A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood.

A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood is a Medieval period piece about a vagabond of obscure gender who meets a mysterious figure and suffers an eerie fate after being told their fortune. At first it seems to be leading up to some kind of morality play, what with all the ethical choices near the beginning, but it quickly leads into something different.


Because on replay, during the fortune telling (hidden in a hyperlink near the bottom), there's a scene where the figure directly addresses you, the player, and asks you why you thought your choices this time around would make things turn out differently. It's a neat little bit that encourages you to replay to see what, if anything, could be done to avoid the vagabond's fate (and it explains why the story is in third-person, which I had been wondering about until then), but unfortunately I think it's pretty clear to the player that there's no way out of this before the game admits, yeah, there's no way out of this. And the final point of the game, as revealed in its new subtitle, felt a bit facile to me; haven't we seen this message a hundred times before? But I think the game manages to rise above these faults.

Conclusion: ( Click for verdict )

As I posted at the beginning of September, last month I tried to write at least one post here per day. And, despite a few snags here and there, it was a resounding success! The biggest problem I faced was getting the entries done early enough; many a time I had to write something quick at 11:00. (This was particularly a problem with the Writer's Block entries, which use UTC instead of the local time. That's why there are a couple dates with either no entry or two.) I really hope to work on that the next time I do this.

In the meantime, IF Comp games are out! There's 55 games this year, whoa! Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I'll try to review at least one IF Comp game, from now until Noember 15th, which is when the judging period ends. Look forward to it!