Reviewing some IFComp games, part 6 of ???
Games reviewed (or marked DNP) so far: 24
Games DNP'd: 3
Current best-in-show: The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens
Favorite game in this batch: Technical tie between every entry listed other than The Pharaos' Heir
For more context, see part 1. For all reviews, see the tag.
The Little Four, by 'Captain Arthur Hastings OBE'
Some of you will no doubt recognize the pseudonymous name of the author; this is Hercule Poirot / Captain Arthur Hastings fan fiction.
In specifics, this is a little slice-of-life parser game about Captain Hastings and Hercule Poirot living together. It's very simple and straightforward, not really interested in significant puzzles, and fairly polished – with comprehensive responses, a fairly explorable world, and a generally thoughtful design.
Prose-wise, this is doing a good impression of exactly the voice you'd expect: posh, British, midcentury. It's a fairly well-realized world obviously written with a lot of thought and care for the source material, although it's certainly a soft-glow, 'cozy' version of the source material; I noted some anachronisms, like Poirot having an espresso machine in his kitchen – in 1939, a decade before the Gaggia company existed and at least two decades before domestic espresso machines were commercialized.
There's not a whole lot to say beyond – it's a nicely crafted thing that'll appeal most to fans of not just the genre, not just Poirot's stories, but the ao3 tag Arthur Hastings/Hercule Poirot. The whole thing is about the relationship between those two men and the role they have in one another's lives.
whoami by n-n
This is a short Twine sci-fi piece, probably most notable for its overarching UI that imitates navigating through a Unix-style filesystem and shell doing stuff. This is definitely computer-toucher fiction; I imagine it might be a bit bewildering to people who are not coming from that milieu, but if you've used those kinds of computer systems it is pleasingly verossimilitudinous. I found it pretty fun to potter around the filesystem, poking at things.
The presentation is more or less the star of the show, with multiple text effects that effectively emulate various typical elements you find in programmer-y CLI interfaces. I won't spoil details of the story here; it's fairly short and you can get through it pretty quickly.
Overall this is a pretty confident piece with a novel interaction model, except for one specific thing I do have to call out: this game's critical path includes an implementation of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle (4,3), which I do think is a sin. The instant I saw it I was ripped entirely out of the fiction. It's a baffling inclusion in a game where the other puzzles feel very grounded in the milieu.
Writing-wise, there actually isn't that much narrative prose here. Most of the game is told through in-universe text – emails, README files, and the faux-CLI interface itself. This stuff all functions well and feels grounded; it's not flashy. The bits of prose narration that are there are a bit rough around the edges, I'd say, but they do get the point across and I'd qualify them as effective; this is one place where the author could go through making something more traditional to hone that and get some reps in writing this style of text. But this game is constructed in such a way that the narrative design tells the story using a pretty spare amount of prose, which is definitely a valid way of getting there.
So, overall, kind of mixed here. Very effective presentation. Narrative design is excellent except for that one puzzle which mars the experience. Writing is good enough for what this piece is trying to do, but definitely shows some limitations.
The Pharaohs' Heir by smwhr
This is a short-ish piece of choice fiction, written in Ink. The one thing I'm going to praise here is the presentation, which is pretty good – some care went into selecting fonts and styling the text scroll to make it both highly readable and evocative of a certain time period.
Unfortunately, this piece just isn't very good otherwise. Structurally, this seems to me like an order-of-operations puzzle; the player character is recounting events in an interrogation, and you have to put the correct events in order. In practice what this felt like to me was that I was lawnmowering through disjoint locations and things with no particular goal or understanding of what I was doing; it has almost no on-ramp, and you very quickly come to feel like you're moving in circles without making meaningful progress, even in such a short game.
This isn't helped by the writing, which definitely needs a lot of work. This reads to me like the sort of beginner prose that doesn't really have a good sense of when to add detail and when to pull back, leading to a rhythmic landscape that's flat as Wyoming and nearly as boring. Every line of dialog is delivered with an adverb while the dialogue itself reads as very flat – the text here has all of these kinds of common beginner missteps.
So besides the presentation, there's not a lot to recommend this one.
A Smörgåsbord of Pain, by FLACRabbit
This is a parser game that I would describe as a pastiche of kung fu exploitation movies but everyone is a horse. It is extremely, extremely silly, to the degree that I think a lot of people will find the humor on display here grating. Personally, I did mostly enjoy it; it is genuinely funny in places, and the whole thing is built around several mechanical conceits that are unusual for a parser game, including a pretty extensive (and again, very silly) combat system, with the entire game culminating in a sort of freeform arena designed to use it.
This knows pretty much exactly what it is – a vehicle for cartoon jokes – and delivers on that pretty confidently; either it works for you or doesn't. I do think that it could have used parser polish purely to help the player acclimate to the game's various unusual features – a lot of the game takes place in open areas where you can see across multiple rooms and are expected to take action based on what agents are doing in those other rooms, for example. Some of the systems feel a bit shaggy and loose in a way that means there's not always a clear answer on a given turn.
But those are ultimately nitpicks of a piece that isn't really about formal exactitude so much as it's buildup for exactly one very extensive set of jokes.