Dad vs Unicorn is a choice-based, slice of life story with three major strands. It takes perhaps five or ten minutes to play each strand. Review after the jump, any spoilers after a longer spoiler space.
Continue reading “IF Comp 2013: Dad vs Unicorn (PaperBlurt)”
WHO AMONG US is a choice-based murder mystery/thriller set in post-Soviet eastern Europe. It’s fairly substantial for a choice-based piece, and took me 30-45 minutes to complete. Review after the jump.
IndieCade is this weekend in Culver City. I will be there talking about narrative alongside Nick Fortugno, and also moderating a panel about Twine featuring Porpentine, Merritt Kopas, Kat Chastain, and Christine Love. Besides the Twine panelists, I know at least a couple other IF folks who will be there as well; some really cool games are nominated, including Kentucky Route Zero and Gone Home, a Twine compilation by Porpentine that includes howling dogs and several other works, Hide and Seek’s Tiny Games collection, and a new pen-and-paper game by Elizabeth Sampat.
AIIDE 2013 is in Boston October 14-18. I will not be there, but Richard Evans will be, and will be talking about Versu from an AI perspective.
PRACTICE is in New York, November 15-17. This is one of my favorite game-related conferences because it focuses on the details of craft and tends to involve really nitty-gritty discussion, far more than your average GDC talk. I will be talking there about Versu from a narrative design perspective.
November 20, Graham Nelson and I are speaking about publishing IF at an evening on transmedia publishing, run by the Oxford Publishing Society.
AdventureX is December 7th in London. I am not speaking, but am planning to go unless my schedule makes it impossible somehow. Jon Ingold (long time IF author and cofounder of inkle) and Dave Gilbert (Wadget Eye) are both lined up to speak.
If you’re planning to be at one of these and want to meet up, ping me! (Except the Boston one, obviously. If you’re going to be there, have fun, and I wish I were going to be able to do that too, but the scheduling just didn’t work out.)
Right! Time to do some IF Comp reviews. As usual, I am not reviewing parser games that list no beta-testers. (I’m a little more flexible with Twine pieces because there’s not really an obvious place to put that list.)
Further is a parser-based, lightly puzzly surreal story about a ghost negotiating its passage to the afterlife. Play time, roughly 10 minutes. Review after the jump, light spoilers in the sense that I describe what the gameplay is like.
As usual this time of year, the annual IF competition (the 19th!) is now in progress, featuring both parser-based and choice-based works in a range of systems, including games in Inform, TADS, Twine, Quest, Undum, StoryNexus, and some other hand-rolled systems.
Games can be downloaded or played online here, and most do have some sort of online option. As usual, anyone who didn’t submit a game can judge as long as they rate at least five games. (Some of the games are pretty short, so this is unlikely to be a very onerous task.)
I will review as I have time. My usual rule is try to review every game that a) either has beta-testers or has a reasonable cause not to list them and b) can be played on my machine with reasonable efforts. I make no guarantees this year that I can actually do that: there are 35 games, and I have a lot of work and travel in the next month or two. But we’ll see. If you’d like to check out what other people are writing about the same games, this thread on the intfiction forum is meant to list some of the other bloggers who are also reviewing.
You may also like to review the games yourself; people who don’t have blogs or sites of their own often do this by posting comments to the intfiction forum.
My Father’s Long, Long Legs is a deeply creepy Twine game, a horror story centered on an unusual and startling premise. The structure seems linear at first: often in the early stages there is only one link forward, or there are multiple links but they control only the order in which you will read the same text. Later, things branch more, but in a way that still never gives the player a sense of strong agency. The experience is instead always of being drawn onward to explore even though there’s the strongest sense that you won’t like what you’re going to find. There’s no chance that you’re going to be able to control what that something is.
Sometimes text appears only after a delay — sometimes after so long a delay that you just start to feel that the story might be broken. Sometimes it becomes invisible except in a small, flashlight-illuminated circle around the mouse, forcing the player to move the cursor just to read what’s there. I tend to consider this kind of effect a gimmick, but in this particular case it works, keeping the reader constantly off balance. The text is brief enough, and comes in small enough snippets, that the need to scan past it doesn’t dramatically slow things up.
All this technical variety and aesthetic finesse is in service of a narrative that I found genuinely horrific. I am not, as a rule, a great fan of horror. But the horror of this particular story does not depend on exaggerated gore and never descends into a pornography of disgust.
It reads to me as a story of mental illness, of what mental illness is like to observe in one’s own family, of the effects it has on oneself and those one loves. The story is carefully observed and occasionally funny, and most of the really terrible things in it could actually happen, or be understood as a metaphor for things that actually happen.
Which is much, much creepier than zombies.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 