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area this is the one little note of utopianism in a game that is otherwise pretty literal and unglamorous about the woods like i respect it i m regularly annoyed at off leash dogs too and doubly annoyed when i m trying not to disturb birds it s an odd thing to pick though why this and not i dunno one really cool bird maybe the idea is birding is boring and boring things are good actually but i don t think it s that deep this took a lot of care about implementation and very little thought about design my overall impression is that it s a first game the kind of game you make because you just want to practice making something with the tool replicating familiar elements rather than thinking about what those elements are trying to accomplish it s hard to say how this should be improved because the first step of improving it would be deciding what this game is for then designing to support that it needs to be more anything more of a game or more of a piece of writing more of a compelling experience as it is it s deeply bland this would normally get a 4 from me didn t think it was great but solidly made except that i feel like the glaring lack of design purpose makes it closer to incomplete student project rather than game that s just not to my personal taste so that s a 3 then posted in cyoa interactive fiction review tagged if comp if comp 2024 leave a comment if comp 2022 the thirty nine steps posted on october 12 2022 by sam kabo ashwell it s once again if comp season i ll be doing some reviews disclosure i m married to the lead organiser of the competition this is graham walmsey s adaptation of buchan s much adapted novel the thirty nine steps a mystery thriller of a man accidentally caught up in murder and espionage on the cusp of world war one i m in the odd position having read the book and seen the original corble dimon version of the comic stage play but not the vastly more popular hitchcock and patrick barlow versions the adaptation preserves a lot of the original but adds additional material i didn t notice any major added scenes but it s been a while since i read the book it is certainly possible to skip past many incidents of the original to its credit the distinction between original and supplementary prose didn t jump out to me it has snippets of original music which is very nice as far as it goes but technical limitations make the audio cut in and out rather too abruptly to work in support of the drama all that much the game is designed to a principle of everything advances the plot you can screw up and the story will keep on happening rather than terminating in a bad ending i like this approach in general but it s an odd fit for this specific kind of story the 39 steps is a mystery thriller the action turns heavily on the resourcefulness of the protagonist and the high stakes of the threat you have to believe in a thriller that if the hero is not quite clever or quick or tough enough they ll die or at least incur massive consequences that suspended disbelief is harder when the game keeps reinforcing the idea that while you can fuck up fuck up quite a lot be made unambiguously aware of your fuck ups the core plot will keep trundling along and the same basic finale will result in many ways this is a game that s very good at reminding you about the immediate consequences of your choices very modern in fact about the density of cues it gives you to acknowledge the impact of fairly minor choices you ve made if you don t eat breakfast or shave before fleeing your flat the game will make a point of letting you know that it remembers and by implication that it s keeping close tabs on everything else as well but the most obvious consequence presented at the very outset of the story that hannay is in acute mortal danger pursued by killers is conspicuously not among them the threat of the titular puzzle is also not real you can fail to understand the meaning of the thirty nine steps yet still end up at the appointed place and time and avert disaster in linear media it s easier to accept that the danger is real despite the hero always escaping it it s because the hero was brave or lucky or prepared or clever enough when you show the hero repeatedly not being those things but getting away with it anyway that s no longer a thriller it s a farce an unlikely hero action comedy the hero of a thriller can fail and be saved by deus ex machina but not too often and when the heroism involves solving a puzzle the puzzle has to be actually solved not blundered through in other words this is a narrative that s a difficult fit for a game structure that s about failing forwards about the story not ending just because some objective has been missed at least not without much broader variation in the story than is attempted here and this is more at issue because this medium makes the story much more centrally about hannay s capabilities in the original story hannay is a capable fellow but the story isn t centrally focused on that he is not a sherlock holmes where every story has to loudly reinforce the character of holmes as brilliant he s understated here the vaguely choice of games ish mechanics unavoidably centre hannay s abilities require you to be constantly focused on them choices are marked as clever bold or open and using a skill improves it so later in the game a bold option might not succeed unless you ve been working on your bold so you re encouraged to focus on particular approaches but also to view choices mostly in terms of your character s skills it makes it a story about what a cool guy hannay is or what a hapless failure where the original is more interested in the sense of mystery and danger and ineffable sinister forces but the no losing endings design makes this focus weird because you can t help noticing that the hero s success or failure the thing you re told to care about most doesn t really matter all that much and this shift of focus doesn t make the story more interesting it d be fine to do a version of the story that undermined the original s strengths if it was doing so in service of something that was more fun but this direction isn t really developed enough to be compelling to be clear this is a work that s technically proficient at a lot of different things and that s obviously conversant in a fair amount of design theory where it falls down is at the higher level design questions does this mechanical approach actually serve this narrative is this story actually going to work in this medium or does it have to become something else in order to fit what do i want to preserve to convey to illuminate and what can go by the wayside posted in cyoa interactive fiction tagged if comp if comp 2022 leave a comment if comp 2021 goat game posted on october 5 2021 by sam kabo ashwell goat game is a tightly crafted piece about complicity and corporate careers the difficulty of effecting change and how this intersects with how you relate to people the characters are all anthropomorphic goats there isn t really any reason for or against this none of the characters have very goat like personalities either in terms of resemblance to actual goats or to popular culture ideas of goats usually when you have anthro animals there s some kind of correspondence but here everyone s just very mundane people and you get the general impression that the author just likes drawing goats and had a story to tell and was like why not goats it s just odd it s titled goat game i am extremely fond of goats but i like them because like cats they re egocentric jerks who respect neither man nor god and will cause the absolute worst trouble with a bland indifference to the concept of guilt this is clearly not what goats mean here but i can t really tell what they do mean here other than i just think they re neat the illustrations are very nice they re sweet and cosy warmly lit with grainy soft lines and have a sort of lo fi nostalgia vibe going for them not ghibli precisely but that kind of children s book illustration warmth and this is actually a bit of a contrast in useful balance with the writing which tends towards tones of of grey anhedonic anxiety modernist alienation mild subdued desperation the prose is clear efficiently descriptive does the job to the point of veering into being a little stiff i think the art s really necessary to impart some colour emphasis on mild here this is more of an ambivalent world than a relentlessly bleak one the protagonist works at a tech company and seems to be in a junior ish but not insecure job money isn t really a major anxiety for them in most paths they don t fit in perfectly with the work culture and their work might not be deeply fulfilling but they re also not personally dealing with anything deeply toxic and their angst is mostly described in fairly low affect terms the company s problems affect a different set of workers they re serious but they re not your problem unless you make it your problem your ability to affect change appears very slight it has more consequences for who your friends are and where your career goes and even those can feel like fairly low impact choices you can shift which characters you re more likely to confide in not so much which characters are likely to like or trust you it s a bit like you know how there are some visual novels where the intro is just an incredibly prolonged sequence of the protagonist emphasizing how boring and nondescript and nothing special they are and how they re vaguely angsty in a non specific manner the idea here is to make em an everyman who works as an audience insert character i think but to me it just makes them feel dull that s not precisely what s going on here it s snappier for one thing but it s also hmm the protagonist gets an clearly defined visual identity in the illustrations lanky glasses blonde the text doesn t give them a name the illustrations give them a skirt and high boots so i assumed woman or femme presenting but nothing in the text really supports this if totally ambiguous protagonist was the goal it d have been straightforward to just avoid drawing them but instead we get a nice recognizable character design a lot of this is about the presentation of choices i think a lot of the choices are if not precisely reflective choice a matter of how do you feel about this sometimes that kind of choice can feel like an opportunity to assert something strongly about the player character and sometimes it feels as though the protagonist could take or leave any of these options here s an example well how are you feeling about the lab these days do you like aegis liora better now that you ve had some time to settle in she asks i like working here advance to next page i like living here advance to next page i don t like it here advance to next page a choice like that doesn t automatically feel like i m choosing different realities for the protagonist because it s framed as a dialogue choice it feels as though i m choosing how frank the protagonist is being about the same situation lie diplomatic evasion truth with characterisation the signal of possibility space is often more important than the actual choice choosing paragon or renegade doesn t customise an individual shepard so much as it asserts that shepard is always a character capable of and pulled between those approaches there is a lot of low key polish in the general presentation too this feels really solid in ux should feel invisible way lots of little customised touches that don t intrude but feel really solid the little progress tracker at the bottom right the way the images scroll the way menu options expand into secondary choices the lowkey three frame animations which bring a little extra life into the images without making them distracting those illustrations are used consistently it s really common for hobbyist if to front load all its art and run out later which feels really janky but that isn t going on here choices are labelled meticulously there are fifteen endings and i know i ve found five of them because it keeps track a ton of effort has gone into making this thing feel accessible and smooth the one thing which is a little awkward are the pages where you have to make a choice in every one of several fields before you can advance to the next page and often that means that you have to scroll back up to find the option you didn t pick but this isn t a big issue and i feel like often in a twine piece you need a tiny bit of ui friction to hold the player s attention quibbles this is a pretty compactly designed work and i think that for the length and compactness it has it perhaps has a bit too much worldbuilding done too much in the wiggly river and jaggedy mountains mode there s clearly been work put into capital w worldbuilding to the extent that i suspect the author is pretty attached to this setting and plans to use it for other things but it s focused more on encyclopedic information than on creating a sense of place there s a map of the city and a few bits where characters discuss the recent history of the city its relation to other cities that kind of thing and it still feels a bit generic the art is exclusively interior shots it s a game of subtle nudges not big dramatic decisions and this can make it a bit tricky to gauge what effects you re having i think that s probably part of the point you are not prince hamlet nor are meant to be this is a game that rhetorically focuses you on choice fifteen endings that status tracker at the bottom but also kind of feels designed to make your individual choices end up feeling less consequential than they initially appear most obviously there s a big commitment early on where you sign or don t sign an internal petition about a major safety issue and then the next day there s a major explosion and your caution s a bit moot i found five endings but this took quite a bit more than five playthroughs one of those endings made me a little huh there s an ending where the protagonist leaves the company and is struggling for opportunities a bit and without player input makes a seat of the pants decision to kind of exploit her disabled niece for marketing purposes i suspect some players would hate this because it s an unethical act that the player is forced into that doesn t bother me so much as the fact that it s kind of unprecedented character wise and therefore feels like it should be a character turning point rather than an epilogue the main story isn t really about the character being consciously desperate for work or being willing to manipulate people and earlier in the story their niece is one of the few things they clearly assert caring about so it just feels like an oddly weighty character pivot for an epilogue regardless of how i ve behaved earlier in the story except hm while writing this review i found a sixth ending which wasn t hugely notable except that a sequence after that suggests that there s content unlocke...
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