See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

The headline for Closure by Sarah Willson is “An ill-advised sad teen heist.” That truly is an appropriate summation for this quick and tidy parser game.

Closure opens with a Mad Libs series of questions (“What’s an activity you like doing around the house on a day off?” and so forth) before launching straight into the situation at hand. You receive a text message from your friend Kira:

i did something totally cool and normal that you will definitely not disapprove of

i'm in TJ's dorm room right now

TJ being Kira’s ex-boyfriend, naturally, who is away for the afternoon. Kira is Watergating his room to reclaim an old photo from when they were a couple. Kira texted you because she needs your help searching for said memento.

The innovation here is to use an interactive fiction parser as an SMS interface, where your commands are not actually instructions for the story’s “you,” but rather for Kira as she frantically ransacks TJ’s dorm room. All of my commands received character-appropriate responses from Kira rather than the flat, characterless responses typical for text adventures (although I didn’t try anything too wacky). Even when I got a touch stuck, the hint system remained in character:

>hint
you're asking me? that's why i texted you in the first place!

ok, let's see

if it were me, i'd probably…

Another nice interface touch: When Kira sends multiple messages to you in succession, you have to press a key to receive each one. It’s a clever way of emulating the natural pauses when texting.

There’s a Rorschach test within Closure: My first command to Kira was LEAVE, which she promptly refused. I betrayed my principles and began assisting her in her search. The game’s setup makes you complicit. I felt a bit guilty throughout my session.

Most everyone has been in this situation, or at least knows someone who was—well, maybe not texting while breaking-and-entering, but madly jealous and forlorn, along with the concomitant regrettable decision-making. There’s not a lot of time for character development or nuance in Closure; it’s Kira’s hyper-focused mindset and the frisson of her situation which sustains interest.

Is there room for improvement? I suppose so, but I admire the minimalism of the project: You’re dropped into the situation, you navigate Kira through it, and you witness a transformation. It’s not deep, nuanced stuff, but it doesn’t purport to be. Closure is more like a breezy short story, a slice-of-life, than a full-bodied, novella-like game. It can be finished over a short lunch.

I confess: Within twenty seconds of opening Closure, I thought, “This isn’t my kinda game.” The pleasant surprise was its constrained scope and smart design choices drawing me into Kira’s little adventure.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Amanda Walker’s What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed opens with a scene that could have been cut-and-pasted out of any number of text adventures from the days of yore: A bare room, a closed door, and a locked wooden chest. However, before this comes an introduction suggesting all is not as it seems:

…as you try to bring your hand to your eyes, you have no sense of your hand. No sense of your eyes. It is a strange sort of seeing. Looking down at where you– your body– should be, you see nothing. You try to open your mouth, to call out, but you have no sense of your mouth. No sound comes from you.

This disembodied sensation is not fleeting. This is your state of being throughout the game. Ghost Guessed takes one of the core assumptions of interactive fiction—the player’s ability to interact with the game world—and turns it on its head. You can LOOK and EXAMINE and glide from room to room, but otherwise, you appear unable to interact with the world around you.

Soon, some shattered glass and an opened piece of jewelry reveal you are capable of manipulating the world by your emotions. And your emotions are strongly felt: Doors don’t open, they slam open. Boxes fly across rooms to you, but rather than being caught, they soar through your incorporeal form and crash to the floor. This linkage between strong emotions and violent results is the game’s strongest element. I’m not encyclopedic when it comes to the taxonomy of the spirit world, but I believe this is known as a poltergeist, a “noisy ghost.”

While this concept of emotions-instead-of-actions may sound like a device, it’s handled rather well. Not only is the technique discovered organically, each emotion is tied to the character’s past. Learning how to manipulate the world reveals and defines your character and her history. The other story elements are gleaned through a steady accretion of detail within the house.

The title comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” (“to a young child”):

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

Ghost Guessed is as doleful as its nineteenth-century namesake. It reminds me of other Gothic literature from that time period. As you float through the house, a picture develops of a quiet country estate occupied by a moneyed family, where the secrets are locked away upstairs whilst whispers downstairs are exchanged over tea and cakes. The bulk of the dramatic arc has already occurred when the game begins, but there’s plenty of empty space within this hushed, reserved home for the main character to realize the totality of what’s happened, and to grow from it.

Side note: The content warning indicates the game contains violence and child abuse. This turned me off at first, but I came to see it’s all handled tactfully and without sensationalism. Kudos.

None of the puzzles were difficult, but I would recommend anyone starting the game to examine everything. I don’t think of this as a “puzzle” game, however.

What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is an elegiac game, a story of tones and grays within an interactive fiction, solemn without becoming moody—good for a rainy day.

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.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

The Song of the Mockingbird by Mike Carletta is an Old West tale with a heart of gold and a country-style sense of humor. You are a singing cowboy known as the Texas Mockingbird, although you prefer folks called you “Boots” Taylor. Your sweetie has been kidnapped by the Black Blade and his gang of outlaws. Black Blade also saw fit to relieve you of your sidearm, so it’s only you, your wits, and your guitar (nicknamed “Lulabelle”).

“Boots” is a character unto himself. He’s liable to break out in song if you give him half a chance. Playing his guitar rewards the player with a nickel jukebox worth of country-western lyrics, which “Boots” is capable of warbling in even the tensest of moments.

The game starts in the thick of things, with Boots pinned down by gunfire. His lack of a sidearm means your options are dashing about, staying out of lines of sight, and attempting to eliminate the gang by more indirect means. The dialogue between Boots and the outlaws adds nice dashes here and there. The game never goes blue or resorts to cruelty, at least within my two hours of play. It’s a clean-shaven game.

The prose is exceedingly well done, understated in a way that great Western prose is:

Thunder’s powerful muscles move steadily under you as you gallop down the arroyo toward the showdown with the Black Blade. You don’t know what you’ll do without your trusty revolver, but you trust that fate will provide. Rosa’s life depends on it.

And like all good Westerns, the author adds a couple of “end of an era” touches, such as the post-Civil War worthlessness of Confederate money, or how the dreaded “Devil’s Rope” cordoned off America’s Great Plains:

They call it “barbed wire.” The spikes keep the cattle from leaning on the fence and bustin’ through. You shake your head sadly. This land was meant to be open for all. The Devil’s Rope means the end of the open range.

Mockingbird self-declares as Merciful on the Zarfian scale, and the game is indeed merciful as you work through the puzzles. They’re interwoven well and always organic to Boots’ situation. Generally, solving them merely requires thinking how a cowpoke would think under such tight circumstances. I did get stuck a few times. The robust HINT system helped me out of most of the jams. I was so engrossed by Boots’ predicament, I had trouble setting the game aside. The only bugs I found related to a barrel’s hoops, of all things.

What other problems did I have? Few, to be honest. One light criticism I would make regards the title. As a game which falls squarely within the Western genre, its spirit lands closer to The Ballad of Buster Scraggs than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but the current title doesn’t capture either tone. It’s a minor nitpick; I’m putting it out there.

Another problem is more serious: When I mentioned the game starts with Boots pinned down by gunfire, well, the rest of the game is more of him being pinned down. The puzzles keep things fresh, but I grew to wonder if there were any other dimensions to this otherwise polished package. Perhaps if I had more time to play.

The Song of the Mockingbird is an enmeshing parser game with a sense of drama as well as a sense of humor. It avoids the corn pone and the usual tropes of the Western genre. I’m sold.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One is a lighthearted and inventive game about growing up in the 1980s. It’s chock-full of nostalgia for members of Generation X (raises hand): Its copious use of ASCII art, a righteous mix tape, the awesome BBS scene, and the totally bogus INSERT DISK #2 when your pirated 5 ¼″ copy only has disk one. I don’t know how well this all translates for younger players, but I bet most will be savvy enough to catch the references.

Beyond the pop culture touchstones, House also has a heart. Set in 1986 or 1987, the game opens with you, fourteen year-old Emerson, a teen gifted with a healthy imagination, and your friend Riley. Together you play Infinite Adventure, an era-appropriate computer adventure where every stage involves solving some pretty elementary puzzles. Eventually you begin moving between the computer world and the “real world” of Emerson and Riley, whose relationship is more complicated than it first seems. I found myself chuckling one moment and moved the next.

The rapport between the two teens feels authentic. Their fragility is never laid out in bland exposition. It comes through in their banter and their interaction with the computer before them. Both have their baggage, but the emotions are never overwrought. It’s not a John Hughes film, but it’s cut from a similar cloth.

Riley’s the same age as you, and you’ve been friends—unlikely, perhaps, but friends—since you moved to Columbus three years ago. You both like computer games, Journey, and not being cool. In another year, she’ll only wear black.

The execution is excellent. The prose and dialogue are spot-on, and the story develops organically. The shifting and blending between the “real world” and the computer world never left me confused. NPC interactions come off seamlessly.

That said, in the two hours I played, I was entertained but never intrigued. I felt the narrative heat could have been turned up a degree or two; I had trouble getting involved with the stakes. (Maybe I’m just too old.) When I broke off playing, I wondered if things were about to “pop”—but then again, I thought that a few times over the course of my session. The tension never rose above a low simmer, save for one moment when things were, say, a medium simmer.

And for all its admirable polish, the game felt a bit serialized. I wonder if I replayed it how similar the next run would be.

Still, And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One offers an amusing trip down Nostalgia Lane. Of course, I’m pretty much its target audience, but I think most anyone will find something to enjoy in it.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Plane Walker opens as an intriguing thriller aboard an empty plane. Not just any plane—you wake up mid-flight to discover you’re a passenger aboard a jumbo jetliner devoid of travelers or crew. Your destination on your ticket has been mysteriously defaced. While this rings out like the set-up for a Twilight Zone episode or a Hollywood action movie, the opening lines hint at something more thoughtful:

You awaken to the comfortable drone of the aeroplane’s engine, feeling rather disoriented after a long sleep. Then again, you’ve felt disoriented almost your whole life, as if you’ve been living in an unreal dream. … Only one thing are you sure of: that you do not belong on this plane.

The game is minimal in its prose and detail, and does not waste the player’s time by attempting to simulate with pedantic accuracy every cubbyhole and feature of the passenger jet. The first act of the game is spent moving up and down the plane’s aisle attempting to understand the situation you’re in, and how to extricate yourself from it.

I loved the thriller intensity of the set-up and the speed with which the game cuts to the chase. Within a few moves I knew the stakes. It’s a locked-room mystery, but the locked room is 20,000 feet in the air.

Some of prose text is pleasantly existentialist, almost philosophical in its quiet resignation:

> get in toilet
You try to step into the loo, but the clashing of worlds prevents it.

The premise is exciting, but some authorial decisions undercut it. One early puzzle requires a double EXAMINE, that is, you must look at the same object twice to discover the detail. I’m not a fan of such obstacles. Another early puzzle is essentially a brute-force problem—the game essentially admits as much, so at least the author recognizes it. Removing yourself from the plane is a head-scratcher, a strained management of inventory (although a couple of clues suggests there’s a logic to it that eludes me). I spent a great deal of time working through it, and had to resort to the walk-through to complete the first act.

Still, I found myself amazed when I stopped playing to learn that my score was a paltry 16 out of 111. The start of the second act suggested the game was only winding up. Would I keep playing? I’m not certain. But I appreciate the high stakes and the conspiratorial intrigue of an empty jetliner flying high over Arctic—or is it Atlantic?—waters.

See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.

Ghosts Within is a game of mystery and suspense set in and around the quiet fishing village of Foghelm. The game’s ABOUT command reveals author Kyriakos Athanasopoulos wrote it

as part of his Diploma thesis on Interactive Fiction, for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Greece! It is the first-ever attempt of the author to create such a game.

Ghosts Within opens with a combination of familiar tropes. You awake in a dark forest with your memory fuzzy how exactly you got there. Wandering around, you meet a number of mysterious characters who give dodgy answers about their backgrounds and their relationships with the others.

The author went heavy on atmosphere and location for Ghosts Within. Fog comes and goes. Locales are bathed in moonlight. A young woman tends to her flowers in the middle of the night. You visit a rustic graveyard and a seemingly abandoned lighthouse. A hotel manager seems friendly enough, but she keeps glancing behind you as though someone just passed by, although no one else is in the lobby.

The smell of damp moss fills the air. Wet grass and dirt surround you while you are lying face down on the cold forest floor. Your clothes are dirty, wet, and slightly torn in places. Your head’s left side is throbbing, your heart is pounding irregularly, and your limbs have gone numb from the pain. You try to examine your surroundings, but the lighting is dim from your current position to do that. You try to stand up, but it feels way too exhausting. You try a second time with the help of a nearby fallen branch; finally, you manage to raise yourself from the ground…

Also in the ABOUT, the author admits there are not many puzzles, and I would second that. Ghosts Within is a game of exploration and conversation, with details gradually accumulating to reveal histories and submerged connections. It’s a rather large game for a first-time author. Most of my play time was spent wandering about and talking with the residents of Foghelm.

In fact, I came to realize the game’s map-heavy layout was complemented by the count of NPCs one can converse with. Speaking with one NPC will unlock new topics with NPCs you’ve already met. I appreciated that you may lie to some of the residents of Foghelm—and that telling the truth is not always in your best interests. There are three starting points and multiple endings; the author expects players to play several times through to truly finish the game. The different starting points create Roshomon-like effects when encountering the same NPCs in different play-throughs. (For example, from one starting point, I wondered why I met a certain character at a phone booth in the middle of the night. After a second starting point, I at least had a clue why she would be there.)

For all the game’s promise, there are disappointing, but forgivable, issues. Some of the grammar and dialogue is a bit wooden, and there are a number of minor typos. On the flip side, this game did teach me that “clowder” is a collective term for cats, and casually drops the word “seiner” in a description, which I’m convinced I’ve never seen before in print. And as the above quote suggests, these are not pervasive problems.

Another issue deals with movement around the map. Many of the outdoor descriptions are little more than enumerating exits and directions. Some are confusing, with directions and details becoming a blur of compass points. This is one of the problems with a map-heavy game, especially in one so conscious of atmosphere and setting.

The most jarring bug is related to NPC interactions. For example, a nearby research facility can be a topic of discussion with another character, but I had no reason to know about it before that moment.

All said, I’m thoroughly impressed with Ghosts Within. Hats off to a first-time implementor writing a game that leans heavy on NPCs, conversations, and knowledge. Ghosts Within offers spookiness, tons of ambiance, and a gradual accretion of details that lead toward solving at least three mysteries: Who you are, why you’re there, and what really happened long ago in the village of Foghelm.

Addendum: The author posted an updated version after my first run through the game. It’s possible the issues I mentioned have been fixed, as I did not have the chance to try to reproduce them later.

Also, the author informed later that English is his second language. While I stand by my criticism on the points about dialogue and grammar, it certainly makes his effort that much more of an achievement.