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cobaltnineOf note, I did do a randomly generated list and so there won't be any order to these. I'm also going to try to be less quantitative and more qualitative in the written reviews this year. Near the end of both years last year I looked at my spreadsheet of scores and kept considering how much relativistic merit I wanted to use to twitch the scores - it's hard to say if, given a year's worth of games, any particular one tends to be more of a 5 or a 6. I acknowledge the possibilities of no 10s or 1s, and I'm not going to curve, per se, but in the intermediate games, I think reflection does help score it. Memorability is something to be assessed at least a few days later.
Okay, enough cut-tag fodder.
NB: I will definitely give away plot, but I will try not to give away puzzles. I'll say if I have to.
Mite, by Sandra Dee.
Let's get the preliminaries out of the way: in previous years, I've had the amazing luck to draw, for my first game, something that had technical issues. It's a relief to have a z-code game that runs cleanly, for my first game. Of note, there's no real issues I had with the actual writing. I'm not a huge fan of the way the prologue is set up, making me thump through some screens to restore my old game, but I'm just cranky and possibly sick right now. Another annoyance, and this may just be me, but I'm not a fan of ordinal directions for major paths. I do appreciate the 'up' shortcut, though.
The setting is the becoming-familiar 'fantasy with a twist.' Not a human, no, you're a little green being in the depths of a suburban lawn. Oho. It's cute, but not hugely compelling. I didn't get a great sense of place - the gnome was, I think, well executed as a sort of combination between what is fantasy knowledge by the character and real world knowledge of the player - but beyond that, it falls apart a bit. Isn't all this action and shiny gems moving around kind of...noticeable on a maintained lawn?
Puzzles seemed to require a bit of guesswork from me. Some of the conversations were repeated from different characters (the squirrel and the snail, when asked about the goblin), which seemed a bit flat. This is approximately 40 minutes worth of game, and it feels like it. If it's meant to be a teaser trailer for a future, longer work (which one may feel it hints towards, although I've rarely seen that come to fruition), the characters before the river seem a bit more fleshed out than the ones after. The second half, as it were, feels different, somehow weaker, than the first. I'm not exactly sure how. The presence of some characters we can't interact with - the lack of interactions with objects - just seems uninteresting.
In summary, it isn't a bad premise, but it's not an execution I can get excited with. Maybe fleshed out - a full length adventure could be made from this, and even keeping with the ending. But as it is, it feels flat.
Qualitative rating: competent.
Okay, enough cut-tag fodder.
NB: I will definitely give away plot, but I will try not to give away puzzles. I'll say if I have to.
Mite, by Sandra Dee.
Let's get the preliminaries out of the way: in previous years, I've had the amazing luck to draw, for my first game, something that had technical issues. It's a relief to have a z-code game that runs cleanly, for my first game. Of note, there's no real issues I had with the actual writing. I'm not a huge fan of the way the prologue is set up, making me thump through some screens to restore my old game, but I'm just cranky and possibly sick right now. Another annoyance, and this may just be me, but I'm not a fan of ordinal directions for major paths. I do appreciate the 'up' shortcut, though.
The setting is the becoming-familiar 'fantasy with a twist.' Not a human, no, you're a little green being in the depths of a suburban lawn. Oho. It's cute, but not hugely compelling. I didn't get a great sense of place - the gnome was, I think, well executed as a sort of combination between what is fantasy knowledge by the character and real world knowledge of the player - but beyond that, it falls apart a bit. Isn't all this action and shiny gems moving around kind of...noticeable on a maintained lawn?
Puzzles seemed to require a bit of guesswork from me. Some of the conversations were repeated from different characters (the squirrel and the snail, when asked about the goblin), which seemed a bit flat. This is approximately 40 minutes worth of game, and it feels like it. If it's meant to be a teaser trailer for a future, longer work (which one may feel it hints towards, although I've rarely seen that come to fruition), the characters before the river seem a bit more fleshed out than the ones after. The second half, as it were, feels different, somehow weaker, than the first. I'm not exactly sure how. The presence of some characters we can't interact with - the lack of interactions with objects - just seems uninteresting.
In summary, it isn't a bad premise, but it's not an execution I can get excited with. Maybe fleshed out - a full length adventure could be made from this, and even keeping with the ending. But as it is, it feels flat.
Qualitative rating: competent.
