Reviewing some IFComp games, part 8 of ???
Games reviewed (or marked DNP) so far: 32
Games DNP'd: 4
Current best-in-show: The Witch Girls, by Amy Stevens\
For more context, see part 1. For all reviews, see the tag.
Backpackward, by Zach Dodson
This has a very polished presentation, with audio soundscapes for different segments of the story and a mechanic built around arranging the contents of your backpack – inventory tetris in the Resident Evil idiom. The inventory items are very nicely illustrated and generally this is one of the most presentationally impressive entries I've seen in the comp so far.
I gather that this is all in service of a pastiche of isekai tropes; you'll eventually fall into a portal and wow medieval peasants with a cigarette lighter. I didn't get that far, because I found the writing to be genuinely obnoxious.
The opening, pre-isekai sequence of the story is a pastiche of every story you've ever read about a sadsack with an insufferable retail job, and it's the kind of thing that's just... exhausting in its contempt for everyone in the world and everyone in this person's life. The older I get the less patience I retain for this type of thing; everyone in a paper-thin stereotype defined mostly by their unvarnished cruelty towards the player character.
This is the kind of writing that doesn't feature many actual jokes, mostly just bilious observations towards the kind of people the author views as cringe or unpleasant, and that set of people seems to encompass everybody. Sorry, this just doesn't work for me.
A Day in a Hell Corp, by Hex
Did not play; used AI art in the cover art. Since there's no disclosure and the cover art is clearly a collage of various clip art sources, I'd guess this is a mistake on the author's part, but I'm still going to stick to my rule here. Check the origin of images you use.
Operative Nine, by Arthur DiBianca
This is kind of a cute example of using the Glulx virtual machine in highly unsanctioned ways. The parser game here is only a wrapper for a series of sokoban-esque puzzles in which you use WASD to navigate a tile-based space (presented as an ASCII grid). You push blocks on to pressure plates and the like. The framing story is that this is, essentially, a hacking minigame in a silly retro spy fiction setting.
The spy-fiction setting is pleasantly silly, and I also appreciate the tight focus – the parser component of the game is stripped down to an absolute minimum, with only movement and EXAMINE being required to proceed other than the LINK verb used to engage in the hacking puzzles.
Some of the puzzles here work better than others, which is to say: I also dropped this when I ran into a puzzle that I knew how to solve but would be too annoying to resolve. I think the specific uses of this affordance could have been curated a little better to avoid this; a Sokoban-style puzzle that requires counting your steps and inputting an exact sequence of moves to avoid failure isn't ideal.
Willy's Manor by Joshua Hetzel
This is a pretty bare-bones and straightforward puzzlefest. You're locked in the house of an eccentric rich guy who loves puzzles; here's a series of escalating puzzles. The overarching structure is of a box that demands that you solve various riddles by inserting various items into it, with the items requiring increasingly complicated series of steps to get.
Mostly this is not all that polished, with things like missing synonyms ('shelf' not referring to a 'bookshelf', eg) and various typos. The puzzles range from pretty straightforward to fairly obscure, and overall there's a lack of niceties I'd consider basic nowadays – for example, opening a container might reveal 'a square jar' and 'a round jar', but you'll need to examine them to see that they contain things.
People who love playing pure parser puzzlers will probably get a kick out of this. The narrative and even humor are pretty thin, but they're very clearly not the point; it does end up feeling underbaked because of those basic polish issues. I do appreciate puzzly parser games, so I'd love to see a further effort from this author that had a more thematically coherent idea, better polish and a more immediate sense of direction.
Monkeys and Car Keys, by Jim Fisher
Another pure parser puzzler. Mostly, I found the puzzles here to require some arbitrary leaps in logic; the way you pick up the thread of solving the first puzzle is something I would not have guessed (and that wasn't clued at all; you're sort of expected to just think of it as something to try), so I resorted to the game's built-in hints pretty quickly.
Solving this first puzzle then requires a lot of back and forth, but is straightforward once you do make that leap. At which point the game presents you with another similarly obscure puzzle.
That second puzzle is one of those cases of something really spatially complicated with a lot of steps; the setup was surely clear in the author's head but the text does not make at all clear.
Rope is notoriously complicated to implement, but I think puzzles involving this type of thing are even more so difficult to design so that a reader understands what they're supposed to do and the spatial relations between everything. In this particular case, the setup is so arbitrary, with no real referents to life or fiction, that it's difficult to really internalize how the elements relate to each other and how they might be manipulated. To me this feels like a case where the puzzle design is overcomplex, and the writing is struggling to convey it to a player.
The writing here is fine, it's functional for the type of game that this is. It's not bad, but it also doesn't really have a personality that enticed me to push through the wonky puzzle design. I think if you're really going for a cardboard world that's purely a setup for puzzles, those puzzles need to really be on point, and they're not here.