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were trying to out think this wasn t always very satisfying in practice the ratio of fiddly book keeping and waiting around to actual doing shit wasn t the best but in theory there were actual y know tactics last night is not crunchy and it isn t really a tactics game the dictator always loses and the game is mostly about the how rather than the if about what sort of leader you re willing to be do you send in a surgical infiltration team to take key prisoners or burn the whole senate building to the ground do you offer your captive enemy terms or just have her shot are you willing to use your people as human shields what terms are you willing to surrender under but the problem here is that what are you willing to sacrifice doesn t really feel like a weighty choice the general always wins so choosing to do so in a more brutal manner doesn t feel like a cost reward calculation so much as an aesthetic preference the dictator always loses so why make terrible sacrifices to stave off the inevitable and ok there are some consequences here but those costs are all very hypothetical offscreen costs especially for the general the king might be less happy about how i handled things i might have to pay someone some money yeah sure but i don t really know how much leeway i have with the king in the first place or how easy it ll be to round up that money and it s not going to matter within the scope of the game the result is that the stakes feel very marginal and theoretical and i felt pretty off hand about choosing them there are several people other than the author credited with worldbuilding for this game so i have my suspicions that this is a story set in an established shared world of some kind my immediate thought was an rpg campaign world but it could be other things that kind of comports with the sense that the outcome of the conflict is mostly inevitable this story has already been written and you re filling in the details but it really clicks with the sense that the stakes here are about the consequences of details that aren t explored onscreen there are definitely some advantages to this being a world that s already well fleshed out this does feel like a real place astrid said this author definitely played disco elysium and i m not 100 on that but it does have that sense of grimy post disillusionment europe so i ve played quite a lot of gamebooks as a group activity and in general it s great but it s mostly great because of what you re sharing one person reads and the rest yell commentary heckle discuss choices gasp in horror and the game doesn t have to be good in fact it s pretty great if it s terrible because that s funnier and you re all in it together when a narrative game asks you to play with someone else but it also says you shouldn t share information with the other players i always feel immediate distrust very often it s one of those things which was in the designer s original vision and at no point in the dev process did anybody ask them hey so is this element actually contributing anything or are you just attached to it because hidden information if the gameplay doesn t deeply rely on it can cost you a great deal without adding very much if i m playing something multiplayer i want it to encourage talking with my friends if what the other player is contributing is meant to be about the uncertainty of war well it would be pretty easy to make an ai player take their moves one of the big things that feels different between playthroughs in some versions of the story your characters end up meeting face to face and having a conversation and that s kind of weird because you re just alternating handing off codes to someone and then going silent and reading but it feels more fun because it s more immediate you have permission to peanut gallery about it it s more social i d be interested in a whole game that was about this here s the other thing about playing with a partner you re a lot less likely to play exhaustively if the game doesn t absolutely grab both of you you re probably going to call it after one or two playthroughs because look sometimes i ll stick with a game i don t love for longer than i think it deserves but no way am i going to ask a friend to put up with that in fucking around randomly on my own afterwards i managed to find a scenario where the general can make some obviously rubbish decisions and kind of get to a situation where he accepts a lacklustre victory that from the dictator s perspective is basically a good outcome but if you ve played a couple of games with one of you as general and one as dictator it s probably going to look as though the only real thing you re deciding is the details of how the dictator gets her ass kicked and that s mostly up to the general which if this is meant as a competitive tactical game isn t much fun for either player and especially not the dictator well ok so probably this isn t meant as a fun game about competitive tactics but all of the choices you re making are presented as tactical and strategic considerations so it s going to feel as though it is moment to moment the general mostly gets to decide how much brutal suffering he wants to inflict and the dictator mostly gets told about how much of a failure she is and if you consider this as a role playing game an enacted thing rather than a static text that kind of sucks actually another thing about exploring this solo those walls of text frankly are a lot less obnoxious when you re playing alone and i think it s kind of a major problem when a story reads better when not read in the intended manner that suggests pretty strongly that the writing isn t well adapted to its format this is perfectly capable as prose but it s not a good fit as game writing at least for the particular game that it s in which y know is ok this is not a new form by any means but it s not a heavily explored one and anything in this space is going to be something of an experiment i think this would be an unusual thing to design for and would in in particular present some special challenges for testing i m not sure that there s a solution to the problems it s poking up against see also aspel i think in the sense of small group multiplayer if where the multi player part mattered without just becoming a mud but it s an interesting challenge and i m glad to see it explored posted in cyoa interactive fiction review 1 comment if comp 2021 the mermaids of ganymede posted on october 2 2021 by sam kabo ashwell this game is not in any way a reference to vonnegut s the sirens of titan rather it s a straightforward space adventure story that has y know actual space mermaids in it it s divided into chapters each chapter takes place in a different part of the setting and each has a very different central interaction mechanic and honestly a somewhat different tone and set of genre touchstones the first chapter is about managing the mood of your small crew under difficult circumstances in a sf spaceship disaster situation which hasn t quite established how hard sf ish it wants to go things flirt with sf horror before taking a hard turn into mid c20th pulp adventure and the second chapter is about exploring the fantastical dome city of the space mermaids and mechanically is about getting item a walking across town and giving it to an npc to receive item b there are babel fish when you leave the city you end up encountering the evil tentacle queen which still pulpy but now we suddenly are expected to have strong feelings about radical body modification which is the evil tentacle queen s whole thing but hasn t really been at issue before and after that we re in a submersible searching an iceberg for a lost human spaceship and abruptly we re very firmly in subnautica territory mood wise but mechanically we re in a somewhat difficult maze there s a lot of polish on this an appropriate and inobtrusive soundtrack lowkey but solid feeling twine customisation this level of things feels robustly confident there aren t any bugs at the level of implementing design this is solid work what feels lacking is a sense of that design having purpose that s not entirely fair the thing that this wants to do is to fit in an entire space adventure plot of several acts into a comp sized game and it does that there are characters who want things an ambiguous villain the plot proceeds from place to place and offers a couple of twists at the points you d expect things build to a climax a story gets successfully told which is an achievement but if you asked me what s cool about this story i d struggle to come up with an answer this is a work with a lot of competence and no brilliance so here s what i mean the second chapter has you wandering around the alien city aimlessly at first but with a growing sense of needing to figure out a way to escape the city isn t a dazzlingly original creation when i say it feels like golden age pulp the general sense is that it s pretty much like a human city except some of its inhabitants are merfolk and crabs and some plants are palette swapped for coral and it s all mildly goofy without ever quite being funny and sure that s fine but if you re doing a whole sequence about exploring the city then the point of that is to give me some kind of feeling about the city you know maybe it s showing the mechanisms and effects of a utopia or dystopia maybe it s a window into a culture maybe it s an opportunity to describe the protagonist through their reactions maybe it s just about the aesthetics or the mood but i came away from this sequence without any feelings about the city except they sure are fish people hunh in theory this section s about escaping captivity but i didn t ever feel like there was much pressure about this it s just sort of there filling up a block of the narrative a lot of the key plot elements are action adventure sequences to do with fights and man shark attacks and other kinds of physical risk exciting action sequences are always a bit of a challenge in pure text games and this one doesn t really land it the fighting is mostly taken care of by npcs and it s often glossed over in ways that can make it feel as if nothing consequential really happened this effect is particularly notable in the iceberg sequence where the threat of sharks and stuff looming in the background is fairly effective but if you screw up and they get you then it s not a holy shit moment so much as an oh how annoying moment one thing this wants to care about quite a lot is its npc cast in particular the three crew members and the one mermaid who gets attached to them the first chapter is centrally about interacting with them and in a game whose central mechanic was npc management it d be a decent start the problem is that in the next three chapters they re mostly absent or of minor relevance to what you re doing and then in the final chapter they matter again and there s kind of the expectation that you ve grown strongly attached to these characters by now and care a great deal about what happens to them when i absolutely hadn t some of this is that we haven t had time and some is that the player character is a faceless ageless gender neutral etc which makes it harder to develop interesting interpersonal dynamics they re more diverse than you d expect of golden age pulp which i guess is nice but yeah there s a moment where you deliver a rousing speech about how great you think they all are and it doesn t feel like an earned moment it feels like and this is a really common problem the author has spent enough time thinking about these characters that they ve come to love and understand them and that they ve kind of assumed that the audience has developed that feeling too it s absolutely possible that a stronger voice could have made this jump out or woven all of these somewhat disparate elements together i also think it s possible that a game not written for comp length could have had the space to develop and maintain the elements that this sort of grazes briefly against or more likely that a shorter less discursive plot could have allowed more focus on any one thing in general i think it s preferable especially within the limits of a comp sized game to be really good at a couple of things rather than ok at a lot of them so this is probably in the 5 6 zone solid nothing i really hate about it but also not really anything i could get enthusiastic about either posted in cyoa interactive fiction review leave a comment cloud gardens posted on september 8 2021 by sam kabo ashwell cloud gardens is a game by any definition if you re someone who thinks that games describes something that s inherently and centrally about challenge progression and victory states then we are never going to agree on this first of all but the thing is cloud gardens has got all those they re pretty conspicuous even they re tools that it uses what it doesn t do is design around them as the point of games the thing you do in cloud gardens is to place objects inside little urban wasteland scenes you can place seeds which attach themselves to the scenery or bits of scrap from tiny beer bottles to road signs to entire cars or rooms some of the scrap bits also glue on and some have gravity and collision physics and will drop into place topple and roll around if not placed in a stable spot and a lot of the levels are pretty vertical every piece of scrap has a radius of effect when placed and plants within that radius grow a bit scrap bits destroy any sections of plant they directly touch when first placed but after that plants can grow over or be planted directly onto them when plants grow enough they produce flowers and fruit which you can harvest for new seeds to finish a level or advance it to the next stage you need a certain amount of plant cover this has the shape of a puzzle you have limited resources space scrap initial seeds and have to make efficient use of them you can make mistakes trying to prop one car up on top of another only to have it topple over and crush lots of plants there are lots of games that play around with this kind of optimal placement puzzle the question of i want each piece of scrap to affect as many plants as possible but also i don t want to put down too many plants and not leave room for future scrap is very familiar the authors could have designed this as a tight little optimisation puzzle game but they very much didn t every level of the game despite being a confined space with finite resources is really easy to overcome the level complete notification is pretty subtle you can keep playing after it s done and often i didn t notice i d won until some time after most of the time you have way way more than you needed by the end cloud gardens isn t a game about careful optimisation with scarce resources you re given way more scrap than you need to solve the level which converts into way more seeds which you multiply with yet more scrap by the level s end you usual...
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