Reviews – Page 16 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Windhammer Prize 2015: Instrument of the Gods (SA)

The 2015 Windhammer Prize is now running, which means you can download and play any of the 16 PDF gamebooks entered; if you play a reasonable number of them, you may also judge the competition by submitting a list of your top three favorites. (Full details are at the judging site.)

(Disclosure: the following review is the result of a trade. SA asked me to review their work, and I agreed, if SA would in turn review a currently-running IF Comp game. SA responded with a review of the gamebook-like Kane County, which I will also post on this blog.)

Instrument of the Gods is set in a post-apocalyptic version of the Parisian sewers, which — thanks to five hundred years of nuclear winter — have become one of the few outposts of human survival. The first action you take in the story is to glance at your own reflection in a pool of urine, which does somewhat set the tone for what follows. Though you have your choice of character profiles, they are all variations of hitman or hired gun, willing to do more or less whatever is necessary in order to put together some money. One of them is a serial killer whose impulse to kill you cannot control, but the others are not exactly saints either. Their environment, meanwhile, is full of brothels, violence, and dealers in weaponry.

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Fabricationist DeWit (Jedediah Berry)

Fabricationist DeWit is not an IF Comp game, but something I stumbled across this month via Twitter. It is a lovely Twine about a fabricationist that wakes after (it is implied) apocalyptic climate change, and sets about restoring the world. I wasn’t previously familiar with the author, Jedediah Berry, but after playing the game I checked out his website and was not surprised to discover that he is an award-winning author of short stories and at least one novel.

It’s not just the writing that works here, though. Among Twine games that attempt a world model, this one offers an unusually strong sense of NPC presence. There is a character who accompanies or confronts you, challenges you on your actions, and comments on what is going on. The story as a whole is about the movement from loneliness to connection, from ignorance to understanding. The interaction recapitulates this; your environment becomes more populated, your actions stop being purely functional interactions with machines and become dialogue and social gestures.

The effect is enhanced with music and sound effects, and with beautiful backgrounds to each screen, which seem meaningful in ways you can’t put your finger on — until, eventually, you can.

IF Comp 2015: Gotomomi (Arno von Borries)

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Gotomomi is a very open-ended, sandboxy puzzle game set in a Japanese city. It took me several attempts and a look at the walkthrough even to really understand what my goal was. Once I did understand, it turned out that there were many many ways to try to pursue that goal, and the game didn’t give me clear hints about which way would be best. Even with the walkthrough, I did not complete the game in even one way within the two hours. I have the impression that multiple endings are available and that I’ve seen only a fraction of the game.

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IF Comp 2015: SPY INTRIGUE (furkle)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

SPY INTRIGUE is a long Twine game. I played through to one ending; this took more than an hour. It tells a story of espionage in a science fiction universe in which you are controlled by a robotic spy master. There are some scenes of violence and at least one optional sex scene narrated in some detail.

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IF Comp 2015: Kane County (Michael Sterling, Tia Orisney)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Kane County is a choice-based game about surviving in the desert, light on plot but with lots of branching and simulation elements. I played three times, and on the final playthrough finally managed not to die in the wilderness. It could be more polished — I ran into some punctuation issues and typos, and the user interface includes some strange typographical choices. Nonetheless, the scenario keeps up a good pace and the setting is described in detail. I stayed interested throughout.

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IF Comp 2015: Two Dungeon Crawls

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Here I’m going to talk about two entries, Pit of the Condemned and TOMBs of Reschette, that riff on old-school dungeon-and-monster-fighting games.

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