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 Marco Vallarino's Darkiss - Chapter 1: The Awakening.

Darkiss is a short puzzly game about a vampire who's trying to escape from his hideout after being ganked by his nemesis. The vampire and horror stuff comes off as very Halloweeny (all those rants about serving evil and darkness and yadda yadda yadda), so it's hard to take the protagonist's atrocities very seriously. Conversely, it's also pretty hard to sympathize with him; after all, he is a jerk and a vampire. I greeted most plot developments in this game with a flat "oh cool, whatever".


Darkiss is very much a game that lives or dies by its atmosphere, which luckily it has in spades. Most of the game's environments and objects get at least a paragraph of description, if not more, and while it can get pretty text-dumpy at times, the game usually reserves long text descriptions for important plot events. The writing itself is pretty good, although a little stilted (likely due to its translation from the Italian); I ran into a couple spelling and grammar issues but nothing fatal. I ran into some trouble with the puzzles, though, and played through most of the game with a walkthrough. I still enjoyed the game, but it would have been nice if it had better in-game hinting.

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 Norbez's The Speaker.

The Speaker is a short, subtly branching culture-clash story about a guy named Riveria who works for an alien advice columnist/blogger after the latter gets paralyzed. Over the course of the game Riveria has more and more doubts about the alien's advice. Should he just parrot the alien's advice? Should he even take the job at all?



I wasn't really feeling this one, and I think it all comes down to a crucial lack of detail. The setting isn't filled out very well, and both the problems people send to and the advice given from the alien are very sketchy, making the protagonist's outbursts over them seem a little out of place. Probably the worst example of this is the question that kicks off the main plot. Although I can see how the alien's response lacked prudence, I didn't think there were enough details given of the situation to say it was 100% the wrong thing to say, either. Sometimes an environment really is that crappy and you just gotta escape, man. (Of course, read as written, there's no way to know for sure if this was the case. I would love it if the story was about an advice columnist who sends people crappy advice because he doesn't think things through, but I don't think this was it.) And while the game seems like it's trying to push the alien's worldview as if it were unbelievably, well, alien, it's well within the range of normal human opinion (if a little fringey at times), so I'm not sure what the author's trying to say here. It's a shame, since advice columnists are a rich, juicy subject with plenty to satirize, but the game fumbles the execution, making for a weak satire and social commentary.

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 Jack Whitham's Final Exam.

Final Exam is a heavily puzzle-based game about an exam for a futuristic administrative position that goes wrong thanks to some kind of cyber-attack. We're not given too many details about either the attack or the setting itself; there's some hints that much of the world may be experienced in VR simulations, but nothing too concrete.



Anyway, after a handhold-y introduction, you have to save your organization through some technical wizardry involving cables and robots and junk. I had to work from a walkthrough almost the entire game, so I'm not too sure about how fair or good the puzzles are; most of them are fiddly manipulate-the-machine type puzzles, and there's a lot of mapping to do since the rooms are really spread out. For what it's worth, though, I did end up liking the game, despite a few minor problems here and there (like the inconsistant handling of identically named objects).

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 Arthur DiBianca's Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box.

Grandma's Bethlinda's Variety Box is a fairly short puzzle game, with little-to-no plot to speak of. Most of the focus in the game is on the goofy interactions between the various gadgets and gizmos on the titular box. I had a lot of trouble solving this one, but that may just be because I am kind of dumb when it comes to puzzles. All of the interactions are very pared down (the most common verb is likely USE, or as the game cheekily calls it, UNDERTAKE TO INTERACT WITH, abv. U), so it might be a good game to give to a parser-IF newbie. There were a couple bits I found overly fiddly (like the display), but otherwise it was pretty fun.

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 Cha Holland's Growbotics. (I refuse to type it in all-caps on principle.)

Growbotics is, essentially, a toy-game parody with a bit of plot mixed in. In it you're the recipient of the latest new thing in creation technology, Growbotics! The basic gameplay is combining essences, like Vision or Sensation, to take just two examples, into either more complicated essences or a new shiny object, depending on the game mode. It's very satisfying to combine stuff to get more stuff (special thanks to the sound design here), although it's frustrating when you keep getting the buzzer again and again.



The game design of Growbotics is fun and all, but unfortunately it seems to be trying to say something and I can't see what. There's an obvious parody of over-promising art apps, creation technology, and the like (the game is really good at making fun of the overblown writing style these products tend to use), but it doesn't get much further than point-and-laugh-at-the-thing, satire-wise. There's potential in the purely cosmetic choices of the beginning, and I like how the manual, which makes it easier for you to create things, also prunes some of your possibilities away, but the game seems divided by what exactly it wants to say. Both the "winning" and "losing" endings are tongue-in-cheek portrayals of opposite (and undesirable?) extremes, but the game never achieves synthesis between them. Maybe it would have helped if the game took itself a bit more seriously, or maybe art and creation is just a tricky subject for any artist to tackle.

Conclusion: ( Click for the 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 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 )

... so here's a link to a new Ryan Veeder text adventure, Winter Storm Draco. It's pretty neat!

Let's get back into the swing of things, shall we?

Currently I'm reading A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, which is a comic autobiography about the early days of the gekiga movement. I'm liking it so far, but I keep mixing people and events up; I think a glossary or a dramatis personae would've helped here.

Also, I played through Molly and the Butter Thieves by Cosmic Hamster from ShuffleComp, and I really liked it! It was a very sweet game that plays around with fairy folklore. Definitely one for the "recommend" pile.

Just a quick update: Shufflecomp games have been released! You can play a good amount of them online, and Gargoyle should take care of the rest. Which game did I submit? Not telling! (It's supposed to be a secret, you see.) But I will be reviewing some of these games shortly, maybe even starting today. Because of the unusual voting structure of the competition, where both negative and positive reviews count as a "yes" vote, the positive reviews will be posted publicly while the negative ones will be friend-locked. After the competition is over, I'll de-lock the negative reviews so that everyone can see them. I hope that's satisfactory to everyone. Until next time!