Sub Rosa: The Seven Deceits of Confessor Destine (a review)

"Sub Rosa (The Seven Deceits of Confessor Destine)" is a parser-style interactive fiction written by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy for the 2015 interactive fiction competition.

"Sub Rosa" is part mystery, part spy intrigue set in an alternate meta-verse.  The writing is remarkable for the detail and uniqueness of the alien culture it describes.  From the moment I checked my inventory, I was sucked into this game.

[transcript]
>x llama suit
From feet to appendages to head, your form is completely covered by a thin-weave suit made wholly from the wool of the pellucid llama. It renders you undetectable to all the senses that matter, including your own.

You wove it yourself under the tutelage of the master weaver, White Widow. For her knowledge and silence she only asked for the whereabouts of her seven wayward sons. As you wove the invisible thread, she slowly and solemnly sapped each one, all the while instructing you on how to avoid dropping unseeable lines.

Your lower legs are splattered with mud from the trek through the Mambling Plains.

>remove suit
Merely wearing the suit would be pointless, anyone would see straight through to the person beneath. No, in order to make use of it, you had to weave it into your own skin. In time, the suit will peel off as your skin is shed, but not today.

[/transcript]

As the blurb suggests, the goal of this game is to infiltrate the compound of a corrupt theocrat and uncover evidence of his deceitfulness.  The puzzles are clever and approach a level of difficulty I have not seen in modern IF, perhaps not since "Spellbreaker".  There are only seven points (seven deceits to discover) but each one requires pulling together information or using tools gathered from multiple different source locations.  But the game is so solidly coded that I felt the puzzles were fair, and I did not turn to the walkthrough until halfway through the game, well after the two hour judging period had ended.

In a game this large there are, of course, a few minor bugs in the implementation, but overall I was impressed by the professional quality of the writing, programming and game design.  The Confessor's compound includes a library with over a hundred books.  And unlike so many of the libraries I've run across in past works of IF (where reading the tomes individually returns a default message 95% of the time) the Confessor's books have been individually implemented, each one with a brief, interesting and often useful piece of information.  I will say, however, that I wish the library had not been at the center of quite so many of the puzzles.  Reading through every one of those books, some of them more than once, became a little tedious and non-interactive after a while.

Really a great game.  One of the top in this year's competition.

Switcheroo (review)

"Switcheroo" is a web based story by the Marino family, entered in the 2015 interactive fiction competition.

Switcheroo is a story about a boy's magical transformation. This can be read and enjoyed at two different levels.  If you're a shallow thinking sod like me, you can read it as a goof-ball children's story, and enjoy it quite a lot.  But at another level, it gives the adult reader or older child some deeper symbolism to consider and discuss.

As a goofball children's story, this was a lot of fun.  There are funny bits, an embedded card game, a silly (mostly irrelevant) scoring system and references to other children's stories.  I loved the simulated card game, which parodies both "American Girl Dolls" and collectible card games like "Magic".

At another level, this game is about identity and the difficulty that all children (but especially foster children) have understanding and asserting their own identity.  I say this even though I had initial concerns that this would be JAHPAGI (just another hypertext parable about gender identity).  After playing the game to the end, I concluded that it went much deeper than that.  Sure, it is consistent with the modernist view that gender is a social construct:  one can wear girls clothing or not, play with the other boys or not, act aggressively or not, and none of those choices has any dependency on the others.  But this isn't JUST about gender identity.  Identity is complex, and the story recognizes that complexity.

Lucian Smith has reviewed this game and analyzes its meaning as it relates to foster children in greater depth than I feel qualified to do.  I recommend reading his review, but not until after you've played the game.

IF comp (almost) 50% done

I just finished writing my 25th review for the 2015 interactive fiction competition, which is more reviews than I've written any other year (almost double what I've written any other year.)  Yet I'm still not even quite half through with this year's competition entries!!!

This really has been a great competition year, both for the number of entries and the quality.

My favorites so far have been
Brain Guzzlers from Beyond
11th Sandman
Life on Mars?

Some others that have improved their standing, upon reflection, because they stuck in my mind are
Baker of Shireton
Forever Meow
Spy Intrigue

I know I won't be able to play all of the games before the end of the competition season.  Indeed, I need to take a break from this, as I have some other obligations piling up.

I have been been inspired this year to start learning Twine and Java script.  I have in mind a slice-of-life story that focuses on character development.  Characters are boys in their late teens, closing shop in the last week of their summer job.

Some of my other goals include:

Realistic modelling of both PC and NPC changes over time.
Realistic modelling of the passage of time in location descriptions.
Use of integrated puzzles to control pacing. (by integrated puzzles, I mean not arbitrary puzzles, but obstacles that contribute to the story arc)
Point and click map navigation

Contact me if you are interested in beta testing later on, though it will be at least six months before I have a testable game.  Contact me if you already write Twine and javascript and are looking for a beta tester yourself.

In the Friend Zone (review)

"in the friend zone" (lower case) is a Twine game by Brendan Vance entered in the 2015 Interactive Fiction competition.

The writing, dream sequences and game design all have a strikingly surreal quality to them.  For me, this worked reasonably well as a surreal horror story.  I was less satisfied, however, by the depth of insights this tried to provide regarding obsessive love and failed relationships.

More after the spoiler.

Crossroads (review)

"Crossroads" is a multiply branching story by Cat Manning, written in Twine for the 2015 interactive fiction competition.

In the past two days I have set about learning Twine and javascript for myself.  This new knowledge changes rather fundamentally the way I look at Twine games, sometimes becoming more distracted away from the story, while I imagine the structure of the code.

The story is about a planned encounter with a witch at the edge of the woods.  The text suggests that this witch may not be entirely good-natured.  The writing here starts out strong, which is good, because the beginning is the only part of the story that every player will necessarily see.  The narrative then branches off rather quickly, depending on what reason the player has chosen for seeing the witch, and what herbs they've brought along to help her with her spells.  I played several times, to check that the alternate story pathways lead to fundamentally different conclusions.  They do,.but with this many different endings, I didn't think the ones I played were written to the same high quality as the opening passages.

In past IFcomp years, against weaker competition, this story might have been in the top third.  But this year will be especially challenging, and this story (thematically) didn't light my fire.  I would recommend this game to players who like this particular game design. (hypertext interface, multiply branching CYOA).  I would not expect it to finish in the top thirtieth percentile.

A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood (review)

"A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood" is a web based interactive fiction by Michael Thomet entered in the 2015 Interactive Fiction Competition.

The PC is a vagabond, asked to make a series of choices during his journey through the woods, prior to an encounter with the figure described in the title and blurb.  I played three times, and then began to develop some new understanding of the meaning of the blurb.

The writing was good enough to hold my interest through what was only about a fifteen minute game (depending on how many times you replay, your times may differ).  The vagabond character is described in what I thought were self-consciously gender neutral pronouns.  I guess that's the trend in writing now, but I thought the prose would have read more smoothly with "he" or "she" rather than repeatedly "they".  There appeared to be some minor bugs in tracking the players choices.  But the players choices are tracked, which makes this a more sophisticated programming effort than many of the Twine games I've played.

Major Spoilers after the break.

Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box (a review)

"Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box" is an interactive fiction by Arthur DiBianca, entered in the 2015 Interactive Fiction competition.  Weirdly enjoyable, in the way that listening to any well-told shaggy dog story can be.  Demonstrates how many clever puzzles can be introduced with only a limited selection of verbs.