Reviewing some IFComp Games, part 4 of ???
Games reviewed (or marked DNP) so far: 16
Games DNP'd: 2
Current best-in-show: The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
Favorite game in this batch: Murderworld, by Austin Auclair
For more context, see part 1. For all reviews, see the tag.
Violent Delight, by Coral Nulla
This game has a real-time component in that it makes you wait some amount of real time to progress – it's intended to be played across a stretched timeframe, as far as I can tell, going back to it over and over. In fact, early on, the game makes you wait a full hour.
This is not... conducive to being an IFComp entry. I'm not sure how the two-hour rule interacts with a game with this type of mechanic, to be honest. And from the perspective of someone trying to play a lot of games in a short period of time, this kind of doesn't function, although in practice I did play another game (the entirety of Penthesilea) while waiting.
Because I did not get far enough into this to really get to a twist or to a sense of what the game is ultimately about, I don't know that I can give meaningful feedback either, beyond just saying that I don't think the format here is a good fit for the venue it's published in.
What I saw definitely fits into a sort of vague emerging genre of fiction about the existential misery of modern life and wanting to escape into nostalgic worlds – in this case, the protagonist's purchase of an old video game cartridge. This iteration of that is tinged with some englandcore jokes about life on the sad rainy island – while waiting an hour for the package to arrive, for example, you can try to play some games that are a parody of IFComp entries... only to be rebuffed because, as we know, having fun is now illegal in the UK.
For the record, I believe the game is completable in a Comp timeframe, as I see others have done so, but because it involves significant periods of waiting during it, I did not really want to go all the way there; sorry, too impatient. The piece's tagline is 'an experiment in withholding', and, yeah, what's there has been successfully withheld, for me at least.
Crescent Sea Story, by Stuart C Baker
What's impressive here is the very high-effort presentation; there's illustrations (watercolors which the author painted himself), there's multiple color schemes that change as the story progresses, there's various text effects, there's music.
Unfortunately I don't think the writing lives up to the presentational flair. This is a fantasy piece – it's tagged as 'science fantasy' but I didn't play far enough to see the science part – with a highly allegorical tone. I'd describe this as 'floaty' more than anything; I never got much of a sense of a real place or real people in it, so much as archetypes and loose scenarios.
Occasionally it delivers something startling, but most of the time it doesn't, and there's just an insistent nonspecificity to a lot of what's going on. This is an amnesiac-recovering-their-memories story, which contributes to an overall feeling of vagueness.
I don't think the writing is bad so much as it's Doing Something and I did not feel like sticking around to find out what that Something is. What stopped me from powering through is the narrative design. While this is a Twine piece, a lot of the material here are spaces broken up into rooms that you explore in the traditional text-adventure idiom. There are puzzles, but they're constrained by the fairly limited interaction design. Both of the ones I encountered I would qualify as 'mazes'. I get the sense that most of the game is not like that, however.
Someone with more patience than me might find something to love here but this just didn't work for me at all. Ultimately my rubric in writing these reviews is that two hours is a long enough time that I'm evaluating whether things are actually demanding my attention early enough in that I want to spend that time with them, and this wasn't one of those entries.
Murderworld, by Austin Auclair
This is, just straight-up, X-Men fanfiction. The title made me assume it had some tedious twist about superheroes actually being bad and violent, or that it's a 90s-grimdark type story about the X-Men being made to kill each other; but no, turns out that (unbeknownst to me) a murderworld is just a concept in Marvel continuity, which fans familiar with the comics would recognize.
Murderworld is a fairly large and ambitious parser game; I played enough to know it is significantly longer than two hours. Among other things, this game features tons of NPCs, multiple alternate solutions to puzzles, and most notably multiple playable characters. As you'd expect of an X-Men game, you play multiple characters1, with the expected differing powers and capabilities. Wolverine, for example, has special responses to SMELL in most places, in addition to the signature claws.
The writing here is solid; it doesn't overburden with unnecessary detail but still has enough flavor to get across the comic-book world being explored. A lot of care is put into the characterization of the various x-persons, both when inhabiting their viewpoint and when interacting with them as another character.
Implementation, too, feels solid. I definitely found some jank or rough edges, but nothing that broke the game. Most of the puzzling I encountered was of the kind liable to be solved by just exploring everywhere and talking to everyone – this game is filled with NPCs, unlike most parser games.
The first sequence of the game, set in Xavier's mansion, is the one that uses the multiple-characters conceit more effectively; here, you can pick to play as any one of the x-folks and you have an overlapping but not identical set of goals depending on whom you play as. I did find that some of the puzzles are a bit odd because they rely on, essentially, other characters moving about and doing things on their own to progress things in ways that aren't signaled to the player, so you might not think to revisit an area that has changed since you last saw it.
The later section of the game, where you play through scenarios specific to each character in turn, doesn't have that flair but remains interesting and shockingly extensive.
I was definitely pleasantly surprised by this; this is a large and complex puzzly parser game, of the kind that you don't see many in a given IFComp.
Obviously there's been millions of X-Men but the available lineup here is Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Dazzler, and Nightcrawler.↩