Reviews by Tabitha / alyshkalia
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A fun DM sim, March 18, 2024This game is a great implementation of Pinkunz’s “AD&D” seed, with a supernatural twist that adds another layer of charm to the “friends playing D&D” setup. I love this kind of game (social resource management? social roguelikes?), and I imagine that it’s tricky to make, so kudos to E. Joyce for continually pulling it off!
The setup is compelling; the PC is a newbie DM with anxiety who’s running her first game for a group of people she mostly doesn’t know very well (all of whom, including her, are neurodivergent). This requires a balancing act between accommodating your own needs and those of the players, figuring out their personalities as you go along and guessing at how best to engage them or help them feel comfortable. Your girlfriend is also a player, and you need to navigate your interactions with her as well—do you tell her when her backseat-DMing bugs you, or just grin and bear it?
I always found there to be a good variety of choices, without an obvious “best” one, and after failing to successfully finish the session on my first playthough, I enjoyed replaying to try for the best outcome. After achieving it I still replayed a few more times to hunt down the other “failure” endings. Often in this type of game I find collecting all the endings as fun as winning!
I do have two bits of critique, one being that the contrast between the text and the background isn’t great on light mode (dark mode is much better, except for the links). The other is regarding the way you can check in to see how engaged or disengaged the players are; “Look around the table to see how everyone is doing” is something you can do any time, but I didn’t clock the purpose of it right away, and sometimes its description of what someone was doing contradicted what the passage text had just said.
Despite those quibbles, this game is a treat that I certainly recommend!
Trenchant, March 17, 2024This game is dark and heavy (mind the content warnings!)---it's not a feel-good game by any means, but it is very, very good. Charm has done an excellent job combining the three seeds the game takes inspiration from into a cohesive and meaningful story.
First, I'll quickly mention the UI, which is well done. Color-coding differentiates links that add more text to the current page from links that advance the story; website and chat-log text mimics those format; and the page backgrounds have different colors and occasional light animation that subtly punctuates the text.
Now, on to the content...
(Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist, who I'll mostly refer to as "you" because the game is in second person, feels like a recognizable character type---neurodivergent, unemployed, isolated, lonely, listless, and self-loathing. You subsist on energy drinks, barely bothering to eat, and constantly put yourself down in your thoughts. You're desperate for connection of any sort, needing someone to accept you, to love you. Which makes you the perfect target for this promise by the latest crypto fad:
> ***Community Awaits.*** Our user base is thousands strong. Once you buy in, you will have access to our private Discord...
There isn't a choice for the player here; the protagonist will always buy in. Having been cruelly bullied by an online community in the past, you now know to be careful---not to vet the community, but to shape yourself into whatever you need to be to fit in.
As you prepare to craft your intro message, you reach the end of your energy drink supply and are given the choice to ignore your thirst or settle for water, which you hate. If you choose the latter...
> the tap begins to belch out brackish water, with little solid pieces floating in it. ... The water itself is murky, somewhere between brown and black[.]
Despite how disgusting this sounds, this is another point at which the player has no choice---you must drink the mold-infested water.
> You're prepared for it to taste awful, but it's actually the sweetest, most decadent syrup you've ever had. ... You have been missing this all your life.
And there's the game's central metaphor. The protagonist is an isolated person clutching desperately at whatever community will have them, no matter how ugly, and in their desperation they're even willing to embrace the ugliness, to unite with it, in order to feel like they belong. Because belonging, feeling wanted and loved, is a need just as much as water is.
As your crypto journey continues, you also find no food in the house but a moldy apple, which you've given the choice to eat or not. The mold situation escalates; it begins whispering to you, telling you you're special and deserving of love. The crypto situation escalates too---you're suddenly rich! But when the currency's value drops dramatically overnight, causing a mass exodus from the community, Xisor, its inventor and the owner of the Discord server, instructs those who remain:
> Find a forum or a messageboard where GlisterCoin has not been mentioned recently. Make a post talking about [it]. ... Link back to the website, bring more people into the fold. Do not engage with replies. Then go look at the sky for a while, and wait for your new family to pour in.
The mold and the community both make promises, but neither actually values you; they just want to use you for their own benefit.
There are three possible endings. You reach one by continually embracing the mold, and in this ending the protagonist heeds Xisor's instructions, posting the message and then going up to the roof. At this point the mold fully takes you over, having used you as an incubator and now bursting out of you so that it can spread---and this makes you happy:
>You feel the beginning of something grand, something larger than you.
>
>You open your arms to welcome it.
As you cease to be, the voice of the mold assures you that you’re loved. Becoming its vessel is how you've found a sense of purpose and belonging for your life.
In contrast, the two other endings both have the protagonist despairing. If you haven't fully embraced the mold, it doesn't have the same effect on you:
>Something in you squirms, trying to convince you that *you are not alone*, but you know that it's a lie.
In this ending, when Xisor's mandate to spread the crypto word comes, you can't bring yourself to fulfill it, and you hate yourself for that, because "you are failing your community". The mold slowly kills you at your desk while it bemoans what you could have been.
In the third ending, the protagonist directly confronts and rejects the mold's whispers, and we see a version of them that experiences a burst of hope:
>You decide here and now to get things under control. Tomorrow, you will hire a cleaning service. Tomorrow, you will go grocery shopping and eat a *real* meal. Tomorrow, you *will* make friends in the community. You will do better. You will *be* better.
The next day, though, the cryptocurrency's crash arrives and sends you plummeting, feeling worse about yourself and your life than before. You commit suicide by jumping off your building's roof, the mold mocking you as you fall.
From an outsider's view, all three endings are bad for the protagonist; either the mold ends them, or their suicidal ideation does. While in the first one they at least go out happy, we're left to wonder how many other people will end up mold-infected as a result of their actions, and how many will be lured into the crypto scheme. The only actual benefit has been to Xisor and the mold.
I don't know what to say to end this except... oof. That's what I call a trenchant commentary.
Unfortunately mechanical, March 3, 2024I've been reading up on the IF Art Show recently, and was particularly interested in playing some of the games (pieces?) from the "portrait" category (besides Galatea, which was one of the first parsers I played). This one... didn't work for me. It does little to capture the personalities of the individual animals (the eponymous Sparky and Boots, a dog and a cat respectively), instead creating a rote mechanical exercise of "feed, pet, throw ball, repeat" (only, more frustrating than that because these actions must be done a certain number of times and in a certain order to make progress). Having a score system seemed antithetical to the spirit of the Art Show, driving me toward completing a goal instead of meaningfully interacting with the subjects--and there wasn't really any meaningful interaction to be had. So unfortunately, for me this fails as both a portrait and a game.
Emotional story with meaningful choices, January 11, 2024This game really hit for me emotionally, partly because it captured some feelings/experiences that I remember from childhood but also because it's just well written and evocative. The magic of a beach vacation, friends you see once a year and don't have any contact with otherwise (us millenials may be the last generation to have that particular experience), uncertainty about the way a friend feels about you... it's all conveyed so well.
As I played through the first time, I completely forgot that there was any state tracking going on, but when I remembered at the end I was impressed by how that aspect worked. There aren't a lot of choices throughout the game; more passages end with a "next page" link than with a choice. But the five or six choices you do have, determining what you said to Caspian at certain moments in several childhood flashbacks, what direction your adult life has gone, and one action you take in the present, subtly interact to result in one of at least three different endings. After playing through the first time and getting a very satisfying, fitting ending, remembering that I'd brought about that ending through my choices made it all the more meaningful.
Playing through several more times revealed that the game is also subtly responsive to your choices throughout, in ways that heighten the emotion. So all in all, this is just what I look for in a narrative game: a good story that the player is able to help shape.
Moody and haunting, January 3, 2024This is a simple game where you play through several different lucid dreams the protagonist has over the course of the night. I enjoyed the descriptions of the dream worlds and their variety, but what really got me about this game was the mood. There's a strong sense of loss as the protagonist continually reflects on how their experience of their lucid dreams has changed: once, they had such control in their dreams that they never wanted to wake up; now, sleep is a source of stress as they deal with insomnia and something like sleep apnea. There are also hints at tension in their marriage caused by these issues. So the game has a pervasive sense of sadness, which I appreciated as an enjoyer of a good melancholy, wistful tone. And there is the possibility of a happier turn at the end.
That's the other thing I found impressive about this game--it's quite polished, with the implementation overall being quite good (I just had a few struggles with (Spoiler - click to show)the rope), and there were a decent amount of non-essential actions/responses coded in, including two different possible endings. A great little game!
Implementation issues, December 31, 2023The implementation in this game was frustrating throughout and made it very rough to play. I was able to finish only by reading the spoilers in MathBrush's review; before that I was hopelessly stuck on how to open the sarcophagus. Some other issues were the game telling me "this painting looks like the other one you saw" when I hadn't yet seen another one, and (Spoiler - click to show)being able to put the fuse in the junction box despite the box being closed and locked. I think this could be an enjoyable escape room game; it just needs to be made more player-friendly.
Fun but a bit bumpy, December 31, 2023This was a fun idea and I enjoyed the "switching between worlds" aspect. Unfortunately, that part became unfun by the end, as I was left with a single multi-step task to do in one of the worlds, but I could only complete one or two steps at a time before being shunted into a different world and having to make my way back to the one I needed to be in. The commands for that task were also unintuitive and somewhat at odds with the rest of the game (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)while you have to read each piece of text you encounter instead of having "examine" tell you what it says, for the coffee-making task, trying to take the beans out of the roaster doesn't work; you have to type "grind beans," even though the grinder is in a different room).
I think there was also a bug with text firing at the wrong time; at one point, the "score" command was giving me both "Your muscles are ready to spring into action" and "You feel too tired and lethargic to move" at the same time. I also think there must be an intended order to do things in that I didn't follow, because I (Spoiler - click to show)made the coffee last, and got a message pointing me to the gardening tools, but then as I tried to walk to them I woke up and the game ended.
Basically, I think this is a fun premise with some fun gameplay that just needs a bit more polishing to really shine.
Made me laugh, December 28, 2023Having just played (and loved) The Gostak, I looked up other games by the author and found this one. It's a speed IF game, so it's quite short and simple, but even in that small space it had me laughing more than once. Recommended if you're in the mood for a tiny, amusing game!
Fun sequel, December 25, 2023This is a fun follow-up to Advent Door. It's shorter and simpler than that game, but features a different twist on navigation that makes for an enjoyable small puzzle. Again, the brief environmental descriptions, especially given the core mechanic--(Spoiler - click to show)there's a second version of the map that you can enter through a mirror, which seems to be the same place at a much earlier time period--are a highlight.
A very fun little puzzler, December 13, 2023I don't have much more to say than what's in the title--this was a quick game with a clever mechanic that required mapping and doing some careful thinking to figure out how to achieve what I needed, and it was very satisfying when I succeeded! The bits of worldbuilding and descriptions keep it from being too abstract. A nice way to spend a half hour.
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