ifcomp: quickies
Nov. 2nd, 2019 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
antimonySome short impressions of short games (I haven't been having much time/energy to play, but did a bunch of short web games while commuting -- I stuck with going forward on my personal shuffle to the next half-hour or shorter web/choice game):
For The Cats, by Lei: Atmospheric start, and cats! The pacing felt a little odd in places, and I expected it to be harder to get a good ending than it was. Perhaps I got lucky. There isn't much to it -- it's a short little vignette, but it does what it sets out to do. About the only thing I'd suggest? A button to play again when you hit an ending. (And maybe an ending tracker, to be fancy, to try to get them all.)
Arram's Tomb, by James Beck: This is a very, very standard hack-and-slash short adventure, with no real thought to moving beyond stereotypical stock characters (complete with one character having a phonetically-written accent). To be honest -- it was hackneyed enough I kept expecting a twist, and there didn't seem to be one.
Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir, by Damon L. Wakes: Okay, here we do have intentionally-comedy stock fantasy tropes. Weirdly, this one expects you to keep track of your own stats, and only once knocked me for flat-out lying (the initial roll, which has you roll 2d6 (not d10) and say if the number is > 15, which, uh, obviously isn't). I only had my phone and no paper, so I completely lied to the game going forward, but it was still pretty funny for the next 10 minutes or so of ridiculous silly fantasy parody.
Flygskam Simulator, by Katie Benson: A bus ride simulator, with slightly cleaner buses than we tend to get in the US, but the same hassles of multi-leg transport trips. Plus a little pointed political commentary in the passport control sections. I'm not sure if there was a point to it (beyond the political bits), but it was engagingly written the whole way through. Also I was playing *on* a bus, which felt very appropriate.
Lucerne, by Dimitri Kaviani: I'm not sure this one ever had any interactivity? It was a sort of basic dream-fantasy scenario, and I wanted it to be stronger-written than it was, because I often really like that sort of kid-dreamquest in IFComp, but it needed more work on the storyline and some real branching narrative so that I felt invested. There's an idea in there to be polished, but it wasn't quite there yet.
For The Cats, by Lei: Atmospheric start, and cats! The pacing felt a little odd in places, and I expected it to be harder to get a good ending than it was. Perhaps I got lucky. There isn't much to it -- it's a short little vignette, but it does what it sets out to do. About the only thing I'd suggest? A button to play again when you hit an ending. (And maybe an ending tracker, to be fancy, to try to get them all.)
Arram's Tomb, by James Beck: This is a very, very standard hack-and-slash short adventure, with no real thought to moving beyond stereotypical stock characters (complete with one character having a phonetically-written accent). To be honest -- it was hackneyed enough I kept expecting a twist, and there didn't seem to be one.
Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir, by Damon L. Wakes: Okay, here we do have intentionally-comedy stock fantasy tropes. Weirdly, this one expects you to keep track of your own stats, and only once knocked me for flat-out lying (the initial roll, which has you roll 2d6 (not d10) and say if the number is > 15, which, uh, obviously isn't). I only had my phone and no paper, so I completely lied to the game going forward, but it was still pretty funny for the next 10 minutes or so of ridiculous silly fantasy parody.
Flygskam Simulator, by Katie Benson: A bus ride simulator, with slightly cleaner buses than we tend to get in the US, but the same hassles of multi-leg transport trips. Plus a little pointed political commentary in the passport control sections. I'm not sure if there was a point to it (beyond the political bits), but it was engagingly written the whole way through. Also I was playing *on* a bus, which felt very appropriate.
Lucerne, by Dimitri Kaviani: I'm not sure this one ever had any interactivity? It was a sort of basic dream-fantasy scenario, and I wanted it to be stronger-written than it was, because I often really like that sort of kid-dreamquest in IFComp, but it needed more work on the storyline and some real branching narrative so that I felt invested. There's an idea in there to be polished, but it wasn't quite there yet.
