Reviews – Page 78 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Infidel Again

Finished Infidel this evening, after consulting the hints about just a couple of points (which turned out to be guess-the-verb-y things where we had the right idea).

Overall, I’m surprised by how relatively easy it is — the hieroglyphics puzzles are fun and consistent but not that hugely brain-teasing. It’s really easy to lock yourself out of victory by doing the wrong things in the wrong sequence, but mostly that’s about execution (remember to pick up your knapsack again before leaving an area!!) rather than about figuring anything out in particular. I found myself thinking that the emphasis on performance actually makes it a little more like a platformer than modern IF tends to be. It’s very hard to get to the end without having to replay parts — probably most of the game at least once, and some pieces perhaps multiple times — and even when you’re replaying it’s easy to screw something up if you drop the wrong thing in the wrong place and forget to pick it up again, or take a wrong direction by accident.

After a while it becomes a kind of proficiency run, to do all the necessary steps with no extras and no mistakes.

Guilty pleasures

After hearing about it for a while and thinking it basically sounded like a silly gimmick, I finally tried Achievement Unlocked; and I have to say that it actually is fun, as well as being a goofy send-up. Its sequel/relative This is the Only Level is not bad either, though some of the mechanics were irritating in practice; it struck me as a good sort of mental exercise for the designer (what are all the different twists we can put on this one simple challenge?) but less awesome to play.

These days I mostly don’t play time management games unless they’re sent to me for review, they’re demonstrating some new mechanic, or they show hints of having a more interesting storyline than average. The first few were fun, but I’ve now pretty much been there and done that. But I made an exception for Burger Shop 2. The first Burger Shop was simply very well constructed; and number 2 won my heart and my registration with its goodnatured jokes about casual games in general. The game opens with the protagonist of Burger Shop having mysteriously lost his empire and needing to rebuild it (the question that most time management sequels have to answer somehow or other, usually hamhandedly). One of the first things he does is to hire a detective, but the detective is useless and keeps bringing him pointless objects, in a screen that spoofs hidden object games. Other casual game styles are sent up in later screens.

There’s no great depth here, just strong design and a perky self-awareness that many casual games lack.

Outside take on Anchorhead

Here is a review of Anchorhead by someone who’d never played any IF before but was persuaded by TIGSource and Play This Thing! reviews to give some a try. It’s kind of cool to see what he thought was good and what he thought was frustrating about the format.

The rest of the site is interesting too.

New HiS

On DinerTown Tycoon.

King of Shreds and Patches at Play This Thing

Over here.

Passport to Perfume

Now and then I get review copies of things that turn out to have too little narrative content for a Homer in Silicon column, but are decent enough that I play them for a while anyway. Passport to Perfume is one such: a new casual game from Playfirst.

Passport does the thing a lot of casual games do these days: “innovate” by combining standard existing types of gameplay — in this case time management and hidden object segments.

This is not what appealed to me. I’ve played enough generic time management games for a lifetime now, and hidden object has never been my favorite.

What appealed to me was the third element of the game, the ability to mix ingredients to create your own new perfume blends. It sounded derivative of Chocolatier: Decadence by Design, where you can mix ingredients to create your own chocolates — but since I liked Decadence by Design and thought there was some unexplored potential in its mix-and-match gameplay, I was curious whether Passport took this idea further. (It was pretty clearly ~~ripping off~~ borrowing heavily from the Chocolatier series in other respects, with retro-looking maps of the world and exotic locations for the heroine to visit for new ingredients.)

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