Reviewing some IFComp games, part 2 of ???
Games reviewed (or marked DNP) so far: 9
Games DNP'd: 2
Current best-in-show: The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
Favorite game in this batch: 3XXX: Naked Human Bombs, by Kaede
For more context, see part 1.
The Wise-Woman's Dog, by Daniel M. Stelzer
This is a parser game made in Dialog, intended to be played with one of them newfangled link-based interfaces rather than by typing commands directly.
The premise here is that you play as the titular dog, helping the titular wise woman get rid of a powerful curse in late Bronze Age Anatolia. As a dog, you have the power to pick up curses and move them around between people and objects, which is the main tool used to solve puzzles.
This game is doing a lot of parser game acrobatics. There's the complex world model supporting a well-developed magic system. There's the nonstandard player character – you play as a dog, so every interaction has been adjusted to account for that. Everything that I saw was handled in a polished way and worked or at least had a solid parser response; this is clearly a pretty polished piece that went through multiple rounds of feedback (I see a lot of beta testers credited here).
In addition to that, the game is loaded with quality-of-life features, general polish, and an extensive set of footnotes giving historical context about life in the Hittite empire in 13C BCE. The unusual historical setting coupled to a detailed and well-featured magic system is reminiscent of Emily Short's Savoir-Faire.
It's an old-school puzzly parser game at its heart, even with a huge and impressive effort to maximize approachability. It has a structure where you only need to solve a subset of its puzzles to be able to progress, which is always a good idea in a puzzle-centric parser game – you can simply not do the puzzles that are stumping you, as long as you can figure out enough of the game overall.
Ultimately though, this is an entry that is more impressive for its sheer effort, polish, and attention to detail than for its storytelling. I'd describe the prose here as 'serviceable'; never really calling attention to itself but generally avoiding confusion or major aesthetic problems.
The characters are fairly flat, and the game is not the most consistent about using its canine point of view. For example, you can KISS most humans in the game – you are, after all, a dog, and therefore it's socially acceptable to go around licking people unbidden. But on the other hand, the spinal structure of the game's main puzzle involves you, a dog, obtaining then selling various commodities to make enough money to afford something.
So I'm calling this one a very impressive piece of work that some players will certainly love, but which didn't speak to me personally as much as it might to others.
3XXX: Naked Human Bombs by Kaestel
So this is explicitly an extremely personal piece, and writing a review of those is always inherently very fraught as it can amount to, basically, poking and prodding at someone's spilled guts on the floor. But I'm going to take this mostly as it is, which is to say: a really interesting mess.
This is a fairly linear story with a few choices interspersed set in a comically grim dystopia ruled by extreme prudes. In this society, showing any skin below the neck is illegal, people aren't considered adults until the age of 43, and sexual repression is so thorough and so complete that experiencing arousal causes people to violently explode.
This is obviously a loose allegory for all of the overlapping fronts of social conservatism: the increasing impossibility of posting porn or even discussing sexuality online and the increasingly insane and censorious age-verification laws in various jurisdictions are obviously at the forefront. But this seems just as inspired by fandom 'anti' discourse and extremely-online 'puriteens' who might disemvowel words like 'k*nks' and 'f*tishes'. It also alludes, of course, to the wave of transphobic fascism that seems intensely deranged about children's genitals and what people do in bathrooms.
By far the best writing here is the prologue, which is set firmly in this insane dystopia and proceeds more or less as a pastiche of a police procedural – you play as a cop who investigates people who've exploded due to unresolved sexual tension. But the story very quickly pivots away tonally to a very different thing, which is more of an exploration of intimacy, gender, and specifically trying to enact your intimacy in a world where everyone around you has had their ability to be intimate curtailed in some way by society.
From a pure writing craft standpoint: I think it struggles to maintain its energy throughout. I think it pivots tonally too hard between the absurd hyper-puritan dystopia and the much more earnest material later on in the piece. The prose is definitely clumsy in places, unsure of how to move the story forward or convey information and thus resorting to some fairly flat exposition.
But taken as a whole, it's also this really brash piece of gonzo queer storytelling. I think other games I've reviewed so far are certainly more mature or technically competent, but I found this to be one of the more interesting and fun pieces so far. It has zero interest in being subtle, in a good way.
This is one of those pieces that I think more people should try out and play; out of this batch of three games in this post, this one is my personal favorite.
The Semantagician's Assistant, by Lance Nathan
A classic one-room parser puzzler in the genre of wordplay games. You're locked in a room full of devices that can change things through word transformations – an example that doesn't occur in this game might be to use the letter-remover to turn a BEARD into a BEAR. Your ultimate goal is to turn the miscellaneous items in the room into what you need to escape.
I ran into some small polish issues here and there, but overall the puzzles here are functional and there's a pretty big possibility space given the relatively small scale of the game.
I do think that the overall puzzle design here needed some reworking; the game expects you to figure out what all the magical devices do through experimentation and a degree of guessing, but each device does something specific enough that they generally don't work with most available items. This results in some frustrating initial flailing as you try to use different items only to be rebuffed with text like:
You reach out towards the rings with the photo. But as you get close, the air seems to thicken, until you feel like you’re moving your hand through molasses. You’re not going to be able to put the photo through the rings.
Generally, the possibility space of what you can do feels too tight at the beginning, balloons very abruptly towards the middle, and then collapses into a conclusion with similar abruptness. This game for me demonstrates that while it is really important to do all the small polish things we associate with good parser puzzle design, thinking about all your puzzles holistically and figuring out their arc is also really important.
At the micro level this is a fairly charming version of this style of game; at the overall structural level I think it flags a bit. Still one I'd recommend to anyone who likes wordplay puzzle games.