Archive for October 2014
could you break your hand on your bathroom wall
macy broke hers
you could do it too
one hard smash is all it would take
I find dividing interactive fiction into “choice-based” and “parser-based” a little troublesome, in part because there are other options for an interface (like Ice-Bound or 18 Cadence) but also because point and click games can reflect different gameplay styles: the inventory-and-puzzles of The Contortionist inhabit a different universe than the strategy choices of Begscape. Half-Life 2 and Portal are considered to be in entirely different genres even if they are both first person using the same engine.
Of yet another genre are some visual novels with no choices at all (including “kinetic novels” and “motion comics“). They usually have some sort of multimedia (otherwise they would be almost completely indistinguishable from reading an ebook) although there have been exceptions in Twine.
Venus Meets Venus is of related style, with a linear story where the only “interaction” is the option to view side scenes. It’s a little like reading a book with footnotes. (While we’re categorizing, I’d say The 39 Steps more or less falls into the same category.)
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What does it mean to ask? How do I ask?
A: Ask the divine cosmic intelligence by simply closing your eyes and start to feel how you want to feel. Make it a habit to ask your higher self for guidance in this process. Guidance is always given if you know how to listen.
B: There are more than one way to ask, but all includes a need for something. You need to feel a desire. So, you might say that it all starts with a feeling, a need or desire. The stronger the need or desire, the stronger the asking and the stronger the message. Make sure always to be in a state of allowing yourself to receive. Then start receiving.
Laterna Magica by Jens Byriel is a maze, of sorts. It asks a series of questions answerable by choices A and B, and only responds with more questions.
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Alon Karmi & Glenn Parker’s Milk Party Palace is the first choice-game I’ve seen done in Unity. It has its own clean and minimalist interface aesthetic.
The plot is mostly summarized by the clip above: the PC works at a hotel and is invited to a milk party, and needs to bring milk. The only catch is there is no milk left in the hotel refrigerator because the gallons have been given to guests, and your quest is to reclaim them from the various hotel rooms before arriving at the party in glory.
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Form of address :
1) street etc.
2) unit etc.
3) ratio etc.
4) horatio etc.
4) exhoratio etc.
5) X etc.
6) when etc.
7) Ms. etc.
So this is a … job interview, I guess?
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An arm wriggles out. Your arm. Then a leg. You hyperventilate before flattening your chest and sliding it sideways through the bars. Your pelvis, warped into something inhuman, follows almost by itself. Other limbs slip out easy as shadows gliding on the ground.
Nicholas Stillman’s The Contortionist is the first competition game I’ve played with a point-and-click interface that has the puzzle-and-inventory ambitions of a parser game. The plot is a pretty good choice for a puzzle game: you have to escape from a prison of a dystopic society that incarcerates people by random lottery to use them as free labor.
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“Fine. Perfectly fine.” he says shortly. He glances nervously at the monk before looking back down at his experiment. The monk stares, stony faced. It seems Galileo doesn’t want to talk in front of him.
I’m going to address this one directly to the author. Feel free to listen in, though–
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As you step outside, the world shifts from day to night. Looking behind you, the tent disappears, slowly fading into the background, until it disappears. You pat your pocket and realize you have a knife in there. You take it out of its sheath, and accidentally knicking your finger on it. You promise yourself that you won’t do that again.
I am a fan of “get out of a mysterious puzzle” movies like Cube (1997) and Exam (2009) so I’m in the target market for S. Elize Morgan’s Unform. In this case you have amnesia and are facing “Judgement” from a series of tests.
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Your Habitat is a huge complex designed to house a bustling, self-sufficient human society. The reality, though, is that your habitat runs like music that has gone on long after the singers have fallen silent. M8 forever fulfills its countless imperatives that now serve a “society” with a population of just 1.
I really wanted to like this one. Icepunk gave me a early-90s-BBS-door-game vibe with the ANSI art (as seen below; the writing is vivid as well). However, I couldn’t even bring myself to finish.
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You call all the tourists to you, “Listen, everyone to me, I’m going to shut off the exterior lights. We’re going to take the opportunity to look up at the universe.” Everyone tilts their heads up expectantly. The lights dim before turning off (so as not to be frighteningly sudden) and then it’s there. Nothing but the uninterrupted universe. No sun, no lights, no atmosphere, no reflection from Earth. Just the unending, beautiful eternity. There are audible sighs and gasps. You’re certain you hear someone sniffling back a few tears, but you give them the benefit of not checking whose audio trace it was.
Dating sims have never appealed to me, in that the situations tend to the unnatural. You just HAPPEN to be stuck at a school where everyone in your class is the appropriate gender for romance, and you have just-so opportunities to meet with the person of your choice and get to choose correctly or incorrectly from a list of choices where your goal is to match the personality of the character you want to romance enough to gain “love points” and eventually get an Achievement.
Lynnea Glasser’s Creatures Such as We (written in ChoiceScript) strikes me as falling out of an alternate universe where dating sims were instead story scenarios with natural opportunities to meet and befriend and possibly get closer to, like real life.
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Tim Delbrock has been your best friend since junior high school. He is your favorite fellow student. You have known each other for a long time. He is a part of your best memories. It was just a question of time until he became the boyfriend of your younger sister Gina. You really appreciated that development.
I wasn’t grabbed by the blurb/intro text of Simon Deimel’s Enigma, but I did find the concept interesting: you are frozen in a traumatic moment with a sort of amnesia, and have to recreate everything in the scene by examining and thinking about it.
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Renga in Blue 