See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.
Unfortunate by Jess Elizabeth Reed opens with a straightforward yet unusual premise: You and your frenemy Lux, both amateur fortune tellers, agree to a bet:
If you could give accurate readings to everyone at the party, then they would teach you what they know. But it [sic] you couldn’t, then you’d be banned from doing readings at their house ever again. Somewhat stupidly perhaps, you accepted the challenge.
This isn’t fortune-telling in the sense of crystal balls and satin-shrouded parlors reeking of patchouli. You merely take a person’s hands and react to the images passing through your mind. The game permits you to decide what fortune you’d like to give, based on a menu system. As you offer readings, you record them in your notebook.
The party is attended by a clutch of hip baristas and bookstore clerks in a house of thrift-store furniture and long-playing record players. From the brief conversations, you gather there’s a backstory between some of these people—just like one would at a real house party of twentysomethings. I wish this exploration could have gone deeper; the conversation system offers a limited number of questions you may ask, and the responses range from perfunctory to minimal. Still, they are in character:
[Your reading:] Your love life is volatile and has the potential to wreak havoc.
Irene: Bite me.
Once the readings have been offered, there’s a shift in the game. Events begin occurring, and those fuzzy readings you gave begin to seem relevant. “Sometimes the only way to be successful is to make your own luck…” reads the game’s introduction.
Alas, the title Unfortunate has a double (or even triple) meaning. The game’s minimal approach is marred by typos and a lack of detail work. You can CHECK NOTEBOOK to review your fortunes, but no notebook is to be found in your inventory. A number of mentioned objects cannot be examined or are unusable, such as a shower curtain that can’t be opened, or a closed door that fails to hinder your path between rooms. Opening a box reveals an important item, but the description concludes “You open the cardboard box, revealing nothing.” None of this is fatal, but it all adds up to an end product that feels decidedly unpolished.
More seriously, at a key point the game settles into a state where I can’t leave the kitchen. I can consistently reproduce the problem. It occurs right when the game is winding up, which takes some of the air out of the tires. I suspect the bug is triggered by one of the readings I’m giving, and that I’m selecting the same reading each time I play. I’m not motivated enough to figure out which reading for which character causes the failure, however.
I sense the author’s intention was for the various combinations of readings to trigger new situations at the party you had to deal with. But as I couldn’t move forward once the readings had been made, my speculations about Unfortunate remain just that.