Reviewing some IFComp games, part 3 of ???
Games reviewed (or marked DNP) so far: 13
Games DNP'd: 2
Current best-in-show: The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
Favorite game in this batch: The Burger Meme Personality Test, by Carlos Hernandez
For more context, see part 1. For all reviews, see the tag.
Fascism - Off Topic, by eavesdropper
This is a very short one-verb parser piece. You're sitting in a New York subway car eavesdropping on a couple arguing. Your only move is to wait, and then INTERRUPT them by bringing up fascism, which is probably not pertinent to their conversation but it might be. This ends the game; or you can wait until their conversation is over.
This is billed as satire but I'm not sure of what. Mostly this is just a baffling piece; there's some idea being communicated here but I'll be damned if I can find it.
I will say, this does a pretty good job of creating atmosphere with overlapping events; there's a couple additional side characters on the train who add a little texture and also correspond to a very plausible Type of Guy.
But overall, there's not all that much here for me to latch on to.
Us Too, by Andrew Schultz
For people who know what Andrew Schultz' work is about, they don't really need a review. For those who don't: Schultz is an incredibly prolific writer of parser games built around heavy worplay. Not exactly Nord and Bert type wordplay, a more phonetic type of wordplay built around really specific sound-alikes that mostly arise out of nonce phrases where real English words are strung together in nonstandard orders to form other English words when slurred (I think; it's hard to get a grip on the method to Schultz' madness).
The way I'd describe this is that I strongly suspect there are puzzles in these games that break if you're on the wrong side of the cot-caught merger.
This stuff is just not for me at all. I find it incomprehensible to the point of distress. Very quickly I found myself in a game that made absolutely no sense at all to me, top to bottom; Schultz' work is so intricately wrapped around itself that even understanding how to use the hint system (I think it was a hint system) requires being drift compatible with the author; it's unapproachable in the extreme.
Even the very first step in the game required looking at the walkthrough because I was just never going to make the specific leap of logic the game requires without prompting, and the game is entirely built around that type of logic.
I support anyone making things for sickos but I am not this specific kind of sicko.
The Burger Meme Personality Test, by Carlos Hernandez
A pretty funny, short little Twine satirizing the pseudoscientific 'personality tests' that infest job applications. It is mostly just a joke, and it is mostly just funny. There is some underlying extra story you can find in certain routes through the game, but mostly this one is for the jokes.
But the individual jokes are good, and it feels both timely and satisfying in its skewering of some of the most rancid aspects of corpo bullshit. Describing this as a 'shitpost game' might give people the wrong impression that it's a low-effort or slight thing, but it really isn't. It's short, but the jokes are clearly polished and workshopped really nicely to land the way that they do, there are a bunch of nice little touches, and the author recorded an entire, deranged jingle for fictional fast food chain Burger Meme.
Penthesilea, by Sophia Zhao
This is a short sci-fi thriller set in your standard off-the-shelf totalitarian future.
Interaction-wise this is a fairly straightforward Twine piece. On the writing side, I think this struggles with finding specificity. The strongest aspect of the story is the relationship between the point of view character – I won't spoil the details – and her husband, a 'very important man' with the regime. It is genuinely creepy in places, but most of all it achieves a good sense of alignment.
The player character's relationships and circumstances are portrayed in a way that really does enable the player to inhabit that viewpoint, with a good possibility space of choices that makes that alignment feel meaningful as the player enacts their character's story.
Where I do think this piece is weaker is in the writing surrounding that relationship, both in the overall conclusion of the plot (which I felt was weak, but I can't discuss without spoilers) and especially in the rendering of the setting. This really doesn't have an image or a central idea that gives its world some direction. It's not completely devoid of unique detail, but it does feel largely like what you expect; it's every near-future totalitarian dystopia you care to name.
Mostly, the world is rendered in general-purpose signifiers that Things are Bad without going much further. This is the kind of comically repressive state where restaurants have to be named things like On Our Knees Before Our Beloved Prefect and pizza is considered a high-status food. There's precious little material detail to this world; I think I'm supposed to picture a hyper-capital-fascist JG Ballard nightmare more so than Airstrip One. But the whole thing is very ungrounded in any particular place or time – characters are named after figures in the Iliad, like the titular Penthesilea, which gives it a remove from any one cultural context.
It's hard to know how to take this genre of work these days; you can't really fault it for portraying a world where the ruling class is comically, absurdly evil. Not going to call that one 'unrealistic.' But it does feel pretty flat and pretty confined by its genre. I think the sci-fi thriller half of this and the psychological horror half of this are at odds, or at least the writing doesn't successfully find a thematic throughline between them.