Healy's Journal

The IF Comp of 2015 is over (or nearly so), and I've got some things to say about it overall, but first, some capsule reviews!

( Let's just put all this behind a cut, shall we? )

Aaaaand that's a rap! This year was a stunning success in terms of churning these reviews out, so I hope to do these again next year. See you then!

Hello, all and sundry! We're in the final stretch of the IF Comp judging period, so I'll be reviewing one game a day until Saturday, November 14th. (That's an extra 4 reviews!) Up next, it's Chandler Groover's Taghairm.

Taghairm (the "agh" is very important) is a horror game about two Scottish dudes who perform a magic ritual involving... well, let's not mince words here, it's basically torturing and killing cats. The subject matter is legitimately horrifying, and I couldn't go through with the ritual the first time I played. The second time, I had cooled down a bit, and managed to disengage enough to go through with it and see the "true" ending. Taghairm is essentially a test of player complicity: How far are you willing to go in order to continue on with the game? Taghairm is in some pretty high company here, from Victor Gijsbers Fate to Toby Fox's Undertale. (Spoilers in that last link!)


The horrible deeds you do in Taghairm become very repetitive very quickly, which means it's only a matter of time before mental fatigue sets in. This puts the player in much the same position as the game's protagonists, who by the end are tired, cold, hungry, and surrounded by dead cats. The ending comes as a terrible relief for both player and protagonists. These and other aspects makes Taghairm very interesting to think about, but not so much to play. I don't mind that I played it, but I would really rather not do so again.

Conclusion: ( Click for verdict )

Hello, all and sundry! We're in the final stretch of the IF Comp judging period, so I'll be reviewing one game a day until Saturday, November 14th. (That's an extra 4 reviews!) Up next, it's Katherine Morayati's Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory.

Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory is a short piece about a female tech employee, recently fired from her job of creating hallucinatory technology. The mechanics of the game is pretty weird: it's a typical parser IF, but the responses to the stuff you type in can be very freeform, sometimes even ignoring it to continue the story. It's very reminiscent of The Space Under the Window, which receives a shoutout in the backmatter.


I have to admit I bounced off of this one; the prose style, a sort of rambly free verse, just wasn't my cup of tea. I also had a hard time figuring out the controls, such as they were. It was hard to tell the difference between direct responses to my commands and responses that were just continuing the story at large. This was especially in the ending scene, which was more railroaded than the rest of the game. I still can't figure out if you can make things go differently there, or if there's only one way for things to go. Still, the game is pretty good for what it is, so if you like weird IF experiments, give it a look-see sometime.

Conclusion: ( Click for verdict )

Hello, all and sundry! We're in the final stretch of the IF Comp judging period, so I'll be reviewing one game a day until Saturday, November 14th. (That's an extra 4 reviews!) Up next, it's Chandler Groover's Midnight. Swordfight..

Midnight. Swordfight. (the periods are very important) is a raucous game about a duel that's about to go very poorly for you. Though you may try again and again to win, nothing works... until you wind up in the past and get the chance to change the duel's circumstances in your favor. There are several ways to do this that I found; the game claims there are 25 different endings, and I stopped after I did 3 or 4. Getting around is a little confusing at first, but other than that, manipulating things runs smoothly.



The writing in this game is stellar, and conveys a sense of setting and mood really effectively. There's a dark, black humor that permeates the game (this is definitely not a game for children or the easily offended), punctuated by lighter moments (the noblewoman in the swan costume comes to mind here). And I must give special props to the author for the one NPC you can interact with in any detailed way; they feel really responsive and alive with just a simple keyword conversation system system.

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 Brendan Patrick Hennessy's Birdland.

Birdland is short story about a stay at a summer camp that gets pretty weird. The protagonist, Bridget Leaside, spends a month at a summer camp near Toronto, and while there she keeps having weird dreams about birds that slowly start to bleed into reality.


The dreams introduce a Choicescript-esque aspect to Birdland: Each dream you have can affect your moods, which function as stats in this game; they determine whether or not you can take a choice associated with that mood. The outcomes remain mostly the same, I think, but your choices can bring a different flavor to a scene, which requires defter writing skills than you might think.

The writing is really charming and clever. The characters in particular pop out (in fact, there's a surprise appearance by Bell Park, from a previous game by Hennessy), and helped make the story engaging (I was feeling pretty pumped by the end). Hennessy's known for writing funny, witty games, but I think he's really outdone himself here.

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 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 )