Tag: 2021

Brave Bear by John Evans (2021)

Posted on by Bryan B

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I can’t believe the doll likes the monkey more than me. I hate netorare.

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I wanna be brave just like Brave Bear. Fear me, shadows!

My Verdict:

This is what happens when you come up with a decent idea for a game, implement about 25% of it, and then click submit just for the hell of it.

Game Information

Game Type: Inform

Author Info: John Evans has been creating text adventures since the early 2000s. His work is known for being ambitious but is also often accused of being unpolished and buggy. He has a website which is kind of…well, unpolished and buggy. If you really want to plant the Chaoseed (I don’t know what that even means), you can check out his Twitter and Tumblr.

Download Link: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2021/Games/Brave%20Bear/brave.z5

Other Games By This Author: Castle Amnos, Gilded, Order, and more.

IF authors have realized for decades that there is a simple shortcut to immediately invoke feelings of nostalgia and childlike innocence in your audience. All you have to do is put characters who are stuffed animals or other toys into your game and the feels will inevitably follow. It’s a fairly foolproof strategy as long as you don’t have the toys murder anyone which is the part I’d struggle with. John Evans’ great realization, to the extent he had one, was recognizing that the formula that worked for David Dyte in 1997 is still potentially just as pleasing in 2021.

I’m honestly not even a stuffed animal kind of guy really, and yet this stuff still works on me. Prior to my participation in the Great Taxidermy Shop Raid of 2002, I had had exactly one stuffed friend in my life. It was a bunny, and because it had been my sister’s before it was mine it was a little worn down. It was also soft, adorable, and an all-around solid kind of friend for a little kid to have. Due to an unfortunate breakdown in the parental-child lines of communication, the news of the changing of the guard never reached my sister, and she reclaimed what was once hers before too long. She still has it, I think, and I still have my grief all these decades later. It was a formative moment in my young life that taught me a few important things. People steal and take. Friends are more easily lost than gained. And as for me, I wasn’t going to be screwed over ever again. So, yeah, the point is if you put a stuffed animal into a game it’s going to invoke some stuff.

In Brave Bear, you play Brave Bear, a stuffed animal with a firm heart, steely gaze, and plush claws that delight in shredding evil. In the house where you, your owner, and your other toy pals live, something doesn’t seem to be right. For one thing, mysterious phantasms have invaded your domain and are blocking various exits in an incredibly rude manner. This won’t do at all. When Brave Bear senses wrongness, he doesn’t debate or ponder…he SMASHES, SLASHES, and EVISCERATES. However, even Brave Bear can’t do it all on his own. He needs help from his friends, and his pals happen to mostly be other stuffed animals and toys. Sometimes they have the special abilities that bears crave while solving puzzles. At other times they just provide moral support. Their help is clearly essential because this thing that’s going on, whatever it is, is definitely going to require some good old-fashioned teamwork to overcome.

This game got me very interested for a while when I realized I would basically be leading a whole gang of toys. Finally, true power would be at my fingertips. Once my team was assembled, I spent a good amount of time trying to direct my followers to solve problems for me a la Frenetic Five. As eager as I was to start fucking shit up, I ran into one major issue very quickly: most members of the team don’t seem to bring very much to the table. Nightlight, the one non-toy in the bunch, is the least exciting fictional character I’ve encountered since Barney the Barnacle Who Refuses to Ever Detach. Nightlight theoretically gives you light and helps you see your way, but all he wants to talk about is how he won’t leave his room no matter how much you need him. One major obstacle you face in this game is a dark room that needs illumination. Can we call on Nightlight in this situation where his powers would undoubtedly come in handy? Hell no we can’t. Nightlight doesn’t move, remember? He’s literally less useful than an actual nightlight would be because a regular nightlight wouldn’t put up a hissy fit just because I wanted to plug it into another outlet in a different room.

At least Nightlight is semi-functional. The Transforming Robot should theoretically be able to turn from a robot into a car, but I wasn’t able to get him to actually transform despite numerous attempted verbs. I would’ve probably spent hours turning the robot into a car and then into a robot again, but since it didn’t work I wasn’t able to use his incredible abilities to do anything at all. What use is a Transforming Robot who doesn’t transform or robot or car? The robot isn’t the only thing that doesn’t work very well here. Frog Reporter looks cool with his coat and webby hands/handsy webs, but can we use him to climb stuff and flash people? The answer appears to be a resounding, “No!” And then there’s Doll who literally just stands around and looks pretty. Is this really the kind of strong, independent female role model we want our young, hypothetical daughters to encounter when playing IF? The weird thing is there’s a whole sequence where we help rescue Doll so I was expecting her to become an important part of the story…but she just isn’t. We rescue her, she follows us around, and she proceeds to do a whole lot of nothing. It’s as if the Germans stuck Lenin on a train, he went back to Russia, and then there was not even a single attempt made at revolution. Maybe Lenin and Kerensky shared some polonium-free tea together and Vladimir Ilyich grudgingly decided parliamentary democracy might be worth a try after all.

We’ve gotten to the point where we can note that literally the majority of team members do absolutely nothing useful whatsoever throughout the whole game. For my money, there are only three toys who pull their own weight in this whole crummy operation. Monkey has the best redemptive arc in the story. When you realize his only skill is grabbing things, it’s easy to assume the worst. This stuffed simian is no Monkey Weinstein, however, and no doll butts are grabbed during the course of this game…well, at least not by the monkey. Monkey’s grabbing skills are needed to solve one of the puzzles, and that alone is enough to make him one of the most useful team members because as we’ve already established most of the toys are straight up bums. While Plastic Car and Music Maker seem like minor characters — Plastic Car doesn’t even follow you around because he’s an outdoor car — they also absolutely come up huge at the exact moment when you really need them. You know, the way friends are supposed to. That was totally directed at you, Nightlight.

It often seems like the first room in a game can tell you all you need to know about how good the parser is going to be throughout the game. In the case of Brave Bear, you wake up in a bed surrounded by blankets with a dim light shining in the vicinity. You can look at the blankets, but the bed and the light don’t even get descriptions. Meat Loaf didn’t do a song called “One Out of Three Ain’t Bad” because one out of three is, in fact, pretty bad other than in baseball. The parser doesn’t improve much after that first room. Most things you try won’t work in this game. It’s particularly frustrating because the toys are fun and interesting characters. You want to interact with them and see them use their skills. Unfortunately, very little actually works. You can talk and hug most characters. In a few specific situations, you can issue a basic order like “stormtrooper, get tiara.” Beyond that, crickets. The parser is by the far the biggest source of frustration you’ll encounter in this game.

Sometimes I wonder just how a game like this comes to arrive in its final state. John Evans had a pretty solid idea for a game, and a Frenetic Five type of game with sentient toys could have ended up being pretty cool. Instead, the final result feels more like a fragment of a game than a completed work. The game is short and simple in an unsatisfying way. At the very least, I would have liked to see each toy have to use its abilities at least once to move past obstacles in this game. Having a transforming robot that cannot transform is a crime against game design. In fact, most of the characters feel severely underutilized. The ending attempts to explain what’s going on, but it comes completely out of left field and isn’t foreshadowed or even hinted at during the game so it also feels more hastily cribbed together than planned. Perhaps the comp deadline crept up on John Evans and he suddenly realized he had to submit the game pronto. We’ve all had “I can’t do it. We’ll do it live. We’ll do it live! Fuck it! Do it live!” moments in our lives that have left us no time to do anything but improvise. Some of mine have happened this year on this very website. Unfortunately, the ultimate cost of hurry and underdevelopment is that we don’t have the good game we could have had. I would definitely advise anyone in this kind of situation to delay their game until they get it right. You can always enter the next comp, but it’s a lot tougher to revise a game that’s already been released and judged.

Simple Rating: 3/10

Complicated Rating:

Story: 4/10

Writing: 5/10

Playability: 3/10

Puzzle Quality: 3/10

Parser Responsiveness: 3/10

Off-Season at the Dream Factory by Carroll Lewis (2021)

Posted on by Bryan B

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

The whole reason orcs as a concept exist is because sometimes you need mindless, murderous brutes to make a story complete. Sure, you can turn around and say, “Oh, but this particular orc reads books and doesn’t like violence!” but at that point your orc tale is basically indistinguishable from an ugly, green human tale and God knows we don’t need any more of those. Must woke IF authors destroy all of my fictional role models?

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I wish I’d had an uncle like Uncle Carroll when I was growing up. I definitely could have used a few spells of my own to ward off playground bullies and turn their attacks back on them. My actual uncle did know Wax Lips, but he was never interested in teaching the spell to me despite my pleadings every time I came to visit. On the plus side, my time with Uncle Charlie did leave me with permanently waxed lips and now I have to consume all fluids and nutrients intravenously. I was always a pudgy kid, but weight gain is no longer something I have to worry about!

My Verdict:

My showstopper closing sentence for a fifth grade book report on this would be, “It didn’t make any sense and it was very entertaining.” If Miss Pembroke doesn’t appreciate that line of genius, I’m dropping out of school and joining the circus.

Game Information

Game Type: Adventuron

Author Info: Carroll Lewis is the kind of name you get when your parents decide it would be fun to take the name of a popular Victorian children’s author, reverse it, and then slap it on their firstborn, irreparably scarring you for life. The good news is that a reverse Lewis Carroll is probably not going to turn out to be a pedophile. The bad news is I can’t Google this dude even when I use quotes and as such I was not able to find any information about him which makes for a rather pitiful Author Info section. We found a way to enjoy it anyway, though, didn’t we?

Play Online Link: https://2410.play.ifcomp.org/content/index.html

Other Games By This Author: I have no idea. Maybe none?

I think the primary difference between fantasy and science fiction is that scifi tends to have rules. Despite the futuristic technology, sexy aliens, and exotic planetscapes, you still expect a consistent world that probably resembles our own world in highly significant ways. When it comes to fantasy, there aren’t necessarily any rules. Things don’t have to make sense and the world doesn’t necessarily need to be consistent. The only real limit is the author’s imagination. In fantasy, a powerful spellcaster can leave destroyed armies and toppled empires in his wake only to be stopped in his tracks by one willful, precocious child. When this kind of thing happens in science fiction, it’s annoying as hell and people create angry threads about it on the Internet, but when it happens in fantasy, it’s completely normal (and also annoying as hell).

Off-Season at the Dream Factory is definitely fantasy by my definition. It’s not a world much like our own, and not everything makes sense or is explained. The game takes you to the kind of place where songs can be sung in color, dreams are bought and sold like commodities, items can travel freely between dreams and reality, newly planted cabbages spring up from the ground fully-formed, and orcs don’t necessarily like to kill things. In particular, the orc you play — a morose teenager named Zildud — is strongly pacifistic by nature. That’s problematic because your job at the local Dream Factory is to play a monster and fight with adventurers in their prepackaged, purchased dreams. You simply show up, barely put up a fight, and get “killed” over and over again like an unusually green and charmingly hapless Bill Murray, enraging your manager who insists adventurers want monsters to give them a good fight and even defeat them from time to time.

If you still have any doubt as to whether this game is actually a fantasy, I think the Dream Factory’s ostensible business model should effectively settle the matter. Who exactly is going to fork over good money to explore dungeons and fight things in their dreams? I like a good dungeon crawler and monster (sorry, Zildud) basher as much as the next guy, but I don’t want to have a bad day because my head got smashed in by an ogre in the dream I FREAKING PAID FOR. If Excedrin and a free sandy beach and palm tree dream aren’t included as part of the dungeon package, I’m guessing the Dream Factory has a terrible Yelp rating.

OatDF does several things quite well if you can look past the whole not making much sense at times thing. Personally, I AM quite inclined to look past it. It’s fun to shut your analytical brain off temporarily and go on a mad adventure every now and then. The quality writing throughout the game tells the story of Zildud’s journey through the realm of dreams and back quite vividly. The puzzles are fun though straightforward. The parser is solid, and the author does a good job of providing descriptions for everything and responses to many common verbs. The gentle game design makes errors easily irreversible — even the final fight can be repeated without needing to reload a save or restart. I tend to think it is generally good to have consequences, even dire consequences at times, in interactive fiction, but I also think forgiving games like this one can be very good for newbies who might need a more gentle introduction to the medium. There are times when the game spells things out only after first giving the player the chance to figure things out for him or herself. For instance, an experienced IF player is likely to figure out Zildud’s mom is giving him directions before the game breaks it down explicitly. Similarly, you have the opportunity to find the sponge by looking around before you get pointed to it more directly. There are also a number of secrets to discover that often give you extra points but aren’t vital to the story. I feel like there’s enough here to interest and please IF players of all skill and experience levels.

Combat in Off-Season at the Dream Factory is essentially a series of simple puzzles, but watching Zildud somewhat reluctantly climb up the ranks at the Dream Factory is one of my favorite parts of the game. For some reason (and yes, this is another thing that doesn’t make much sense), Zildud’s morality allows him to cast spells that turn his opponents’ attacks back on themselves even as it frowns on Dud making direct, physical attacks on anyone. I suppose the idea is that anyone fighting Zildud could choose to back away and not have anything bad happen to them because the spells only affect them when they try to attack. The test of each battle ultimately is to find the correct spell to thwart your enemy’s particular type of aggression. The opponents are interesting, fun, quirky, and among the most interesting of the game’s NPCs — I could imagine the demonic couple or the angels of death popping up in a Robb Sherwin game or a Slayer game for that matter.

The combat and Zildud’s attitude towards combat is the backdrop for the one major moral choice in the game: ultimately, is Zildud going to turn out to be a killer like the orcish stereotype or is he going to be true to his initially more pacifistic nature? I would say Carroll Lewis definitely and unambiguously has a preferred path he’d like to see players follow, but at least he gives us meaningful choices and appropriate endings that more or less fit the choices. I did find myself wondering if it was really so bad to kill people in dreams. Yeah, it’s bad when Freddy Krueger does it, but that’s because people tend to die in the real world when he does his thing and there’s no consent for any of it. If it stays in the dream and has no significant real world consequences, is killing really so bad? When Zildud is confronted with real world, remorseless evil, the game still seems to suggest killing in that situation might be wrong. I think it could actually be more wrong to NOT kill under circumstances like that. It’s to the credit of Off-Season at the Dream Factory that it makes you think a little when it’s not busy being silly and fantastic. Even if you struggle to relate to Zildud and his moral qualms at times, his sensitive heart is fundamental to his character. He’s consistent even if the human controlling him is not. Unfortunately, however, the evil Zildud ending I was hoping for never quite materializes because no matter what Dud does he never seems to get roasted by Heather Langenkamp starring as Heather Langenkamp.

Simple Rating: 7/10

Complicated Rating:

Story: 6/10

Writing: 7/10

Playability: 8/10

Puzzle Quality: 6/10

Parser Responsiveness: 7/10

An Amical Bet by Eve Cabanié (2021)

Posted on by Bryan B

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I’m hoping the sequel will focus more on the hot lesbian action and less on the item gathering.

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

A cell phone? Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

My Verdict:

It certainly has its charms, but the gameplay is more basic than pumpkin spice. It is more basic than sodium hydroxide. I’d even go so far as to say it is more basic than 10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD” 20 GOTO 10 which is rather basic indeed.

Game Information

Game Type: Quest

Author Info: Eve Cabanié is a French game designer, graphic artist, and student. You can view her art on ArtStation and Instagram or buy prints from Displate. You can also play her other games on her Itch.io though sadly An Amical Bet seems to be her only text adventure so far.

Download Link: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2021/AnAmicalBet.zip

Other Games By This Author: Free Ticket, CUBI

My first thought I had while playing this game is that it was probably the author’s first text adventure. It has that feel of having been created by someone who is still experimenting with the form and who is creating rooms, NPCs, and objects on the fly largely because she can. I don’t hold that against the game — we all have to start somewhere, and sometimes our early beginnings are interesting in their own right. We must first learn and become comfortable with the basics before we can improve and achieve mastery. It’s all part of the process. Taken as a first game, An Amical Bet is not even close to being the worst of its kind that I’ve played, but playing it feels more like you are looking at a hastily put together sketch in an artist’s sketchbook rather than viewing a fully realized, polished masterpiece in an art gallery.

The game has an interesting enough concept. You play Svetlana Asimov, a noted thief, who is living it up in an Italian villa with her romantic and business partner Jodie following a successful joint heist. Jodie has an interesting challenge for you that for once doesn’t involve your cunnilingus skills. Your paramour wants you to steal an item or a group of items that meets three criteria: there should be something shiny, something useful, and something unexpected. If you were to add a goat’s head to the collection, you would have everything you need to make a bride of Satan’s special day truly memorable. There’s a large villa with interesting objects available for the taking. Go forth and steal, young lady!

There’s a parallel universe where this game takes place in a VILLA OF SECRETS. There young Svetlana must dodge guards, traps, and the suspicious wealthy to complete her death-defying mission. Unfortunately, in our universe the game takes place in a villa of yawns. It is mostly empty, and our intrepid thief faces no opposition whatsoever to her stealing whatever she wants. Indeed, there are no puzzles to solve or obstacles to overcome here. You simply go from room to room and gather whatever you need. No item is hidden. There’s no secret passageway behind the bookcase and no trap door under the rug. It is the most straightforward and simple text adventure you’ll ever play. Quest’s built-in mapping feature and clickable objects and verbs make it even more trivial to solve than it would be otherwise. The best Quest games hide verbs that are unusual but essential to completing puzzles so as to not make solutions obvious, but An Amical Bet only recognizes a handful of verbs and you can easily click your way to victory. Things that are mentioned in the room descriptions but aren’t listed as objects can never be examined or otherwise interacted with.

The only thing that keeps the game from being a total snoozefest is Eve Cabanié’s lively and often humorous writing. There are some hilarious one-liners when you try to pick up or otherwise interact with certain objects, particularly the ones you don’t need for your quest. At times, it feels like Svetlana (and by association Eve) is having a conversation with the player. When you try to pick up a vase, you get told, “And where do I put it ?… Don’t answer that.” There’s a statue you can try to talk to; the response is, ‘”Having fun ?”. Of course, no answer. “What a bitch.” Joke’s on you, cause she probably speaks latin.’ When you read lines like that, you know this game isn’t really THAT far from being good even if it doesn’t quite make it. Eve has style, a great sense of humor, and verve which are all qualities that are not easily taught and which many IF authors lack. She uses a word in this game I’ve never seen before and which I immediately assumed was a typo or an English fail until I actually bothered to look it up. This is probably the only text adventure in the world which has a fastuous corridor and it is fucking fantastic. There are some genuine typos and grammatical errors around like “somptuous” being used instead of “sumptuous” but they hardly seem worth mentioning considering Eve correctly used the word fastuous in a sentence and as such is automatically better at English than I will ever be.

Ultimately, this game would need a lot more depth and challenge to be truly recommendable. As it is, the gameplay is just too shallow and simple. Even the quality writing can’t make a game where all you are doing is essentially walking around and picking up objects in plain sight interesting. A game without real puzzles like this one would at the very least need to give the player a lot more freedom to interact with the environment and offer more things to do to be entertaining. Even when it comes to the writing, I feel like there isn’t quite enough of it because portions of the game are quite underdescribed. It needs a little more of everything.

There are games I don’t enjoy which make me want to never play anything by that author again because I would not want to voluntarily experience that kind of mind-atrophying misery ever again. This is not one of those games. If I heard there was another Eve Cabanié game out, I would immediately go and play it. She has genuine writing talent, and the factors that keep An Amical Bet from being good could be remedied easily enough if she keeps honing her craft. This one won’t go down as a great game, but Eve is a young IF creator to watch in my view.

Simple Rating: 4/10

Complicated Rating:

Story: 5/10

Writing: 7/10

Playability: 6/10

Puzzle Quality: 1/10

Parser Responsiveness: 3/10

Waiting for the Day Train by Dee Cooke (2021)

Posted on by Bryan B

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I would have expected a game with this much crack to be a little more amped up than this.

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I want to save the day! Literally.

My Verdict:

It’s a dreamy, artistic triumph with a few nonfatal flaws.

Game Information

Game Type: Adventuron

Author Info: Dee Cooke is a British text adventurer, writer, and editor. She has written a number of Adventuron games which can be played on Itch.io . She blogs at Spirit of Dee, tweets on Twitter, and posts photos and art to her Instagram .

Download and Online Play Link: https://dee-cooke.itch.io/waiting-for-the-day-train

Other Games By This Author: Barry Basic and the Quick Escape, Goblin Decathlon, The Cave of Hoarding, and more!

Introductions are vitally important in interactive fiction, perhaps even too much so. Players count on the opening text to set the vibe and give a glimpse of the story that is about to unfold. I’m certainly guilty of discounting and dismissing games too early when they failed to grab my attention right from the start — it’s just easier to quit a game when your expectations haven’t been raised yet. On the other hand, when a game has a great introduction it’s tough to set it aside even if the rest of the game doesn’t quite measure up to the start.

Waiting for the Day Train absolutely nails its intro. The first thing you see in the game is moody, original art and thrilling, enigmatic text that tells you about a world ruled by angry spirits who seem strangely obsessed with keeping you from catching the day train. Is it all punctuated by mysterious, evocative background music? Of course it is! It’s honestly one of the most artistic and immediately involving game introductions I’ve ever seen. I knew right away that this was the 2021 ParserComp game I wanted to review first. The intro was seriously just that good.

In practice, Waiting for the Day Train is a game with two distinct moods. The verbose, richly drawn intro gives way to a sparse, more traditional text adventure that involves familiar activities like mucking about with rocks and sticking your hand into possibly moist, gaping crevices. I know little of day train despising spirits, but rocks and crevices are my jam. I won’t lie and say I didn’t feel a little disappointed at the game’s sudden change in approach because the beginning was so intriguing, but I think I can understand what Dee Cooke was going for. This work doesn’t tell a story so much as it evokes one. As a player, you know you need to get on the day train and avoid the spirits. It is revealed along the way that this is the last time anyone in this area will see the day…it’s going to be eternal night from here on out. Why? I haven’t the foggiest and it isn’t explained anywhere, but it does underscore the fact that getting on the day train is indeed a damned good idea. It would be cool to know the whole story of just what is going on, but if Dee revealed everything the game wouldn’t feel as mysterious and dreamlike as it does now. Though I generally prefer complete stories to mysterious fragments, Waiting for the Day Train works as a beautiful, intriguing art piece which doesn’t even try to offer us all the answers. You’ll have to fill in parts of the story yourself, but that’s not always such a bad thing. The way the game transitions between moods is quite well done. Drawings give way to photos; the music changes; the paragraphs shrink.

This game incorporates a clock which starts at 10:30 AM and ends at 12 PM when the day train arrives. It’s a short game: some actions take multiple game minutes, and each play session won’t take much longer than fifteen minutes in real time. If, unlike me, you actually know what you’re doing, you can reach the end game quite quickly with a lot of time left to spare. Otherwise, the limited amount of time you have to solve the game gives it most of its difficulty. I have to confess to not being a huge fan of move limits and timers. I’m someone who likes to play IF at a leisurely pace that gives me plenty of time to look at everything and mess around. That’s what makes game worlds seem vivid and real to me. So, as you can predict, my first couple playthroughs ended with me running out of time. Damnable clock! I freely admit I shrank under the time pressure…I think I even had a Varicella flashback at one point complete with all the night sweats and projectile diarrhea that necessarily entails. Ultimately after a number of attempts and a fair bit of save scumming, I did muddle through, and in retrospect I wouldn’t call the puzzles exactly difficult. Unintuitive to me at places, sure, but not objectively difficult. One I found tricky mostly because I had tried the winning solution in a different (incorrect) place and it hadn’t worked there for reasons that still don’t entirely make sense to me. Perhaps the lesson is just that location is extremely important. That’s certainly something I’ve found to be true during my sundry adventures in public nudity. For instance, at art museums you can pretend to be a statue while at mosques everyone (and I do mean everyone) seems to be quite angry and unappreciative all the time. It’s the subtle distinctions between similar places that always throw me off, but clearly location is very important.

I haven’t played a lot of Adventuron games before this, but I was favorably impressed with Dee’s implementation here. The parser even handled a four word input at one point like a champ. A lack of synonyms is my main parser-related complaint. For instance, the row of stones can’t be referred to as ROW — CROSS ROW won’t work and X ROW gives a generic description different from X STONES. At another point in the game, there are at least three reasonable verbs that would do all pretty much the same thing, but only one works. The most confusing parser mishap occurs at the stone outcrop. You get different descriptions if you type X STONE or X OUTCROP, but only one description tells you about something very important in the room which I found a little odd. One thing Adventuron clearly handles very well is multimedia. The music, sound effects, and pictures are all flawlessly incorporated into the game and play a big part in making it memorable. You might notice that Dee has two versions of the game available: both are played in the browser like all Adventuron games, but one can be downloaded for offline play. The big difference is the offline version doesn’t have the photos or background music that the online version does. The offline version has all the drawings (plus a placeholder drawing instead of the photos) and some cool retro sound effects. I recommend you play them both like I did. I’m glad Dee offers both versions since online games that use external resources tend to break over time. We’re going to want Waiting for the Day Train to live forever so we need that offline version!

Simple Rating: 7/10

Complicated Rating

Story:: 6/10

Writing: 7/10

Playability: 7/10

Puzzle Quality: 5/10

Parser Responsiveness: 6/10

Special Ratings For This Game:

Art: 8/10 (Sure, it’s a text adventure, but the bleak, otherworldly, and consistently intriguing art is one of my favorite aspects of the game.)

Mean Mother Trucker by Bitter Karella (2021)

Posted on by Bryan B

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

You’d be bitter if you were annexed by Russia too. I still feel pretty salty myself about Putin seizing my right toe in a daring nighttime raid last year. Fuckin’ Putin. He doesn’t even really need it because it’s way too big for his childlike body.

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I enjoyed the nontraditional romance, the diversity, and the inclusion, but I’m worried about the armadillos and the over-caffeinated pup. Won’t someone please think of the armadillos?

My Verdict:

It captures the seedy atmosphere of a truck stop perfectly and has great characters, but the game design and the parser need a little work to say the least.

Game Information

Game Type: Inform (Glulx)

Author Info: Bitter Karella is a text adventure writer and artist who frequently enters games into the Interactive Fiction Competition, Spring Thing, and Ectocomp and has multiple IF Comp top ten finishes under his belt. He describes herself on Twitter as a genderfluid transvestite goblin himbo who uses both masculine and feminine pronouns. Millennials, amirite? If you guessed this means I’ll be using both sets of pronouns to refer to our intrepid author in an extremely confusing manner throughout this review, you are correct, sir! You can check out Bitter Karella’s games and art over at her itch.io.

Download Link: https://www.springthing.net/2021/stories/MeanMotherTrucker/MeanMotherTrucker.zip

Other Games By This Author: Poppet, The Curious Incident at Blackrock Township, Santa Carcossa Nights, and many more.

In Mean Mother Trucker, you play a mean mother trucker named Ester who is preparing to navigate her big rig down the treacherous Devil’s Taint, a particularly hazardous mountain road. You’ve arrived in the small town of Desecration, a one horse, zero armadillo, one diner, one gas station, and one convenience store town. Desecration has everything a trucker needs to get back on the road, but it’s also home to someone who’s very special to you: Flo, a waitress at the local diner. You might be a tough, three hundred pound trucker, but underneath the fat and muscle lies a sensitive heart that still yearns for love despite three failed marriages. Are you a bad enough dudette to finally win Flo’s heart and convince her to run away with you?

MMT does a bunch of things very well. It does a fantastic job of capturing the seedy but not entirely unfriendly atmosphere of a truck stop — Desecration is technically a tiny town, but it feels more like an oversized truck stop. The characters are memorable and lots of fun to interact with. Helpfully, they tend to be gossipy so you can pretty much ask any character about any other character among other topics and get useful information. An interesting cross section of people inhabit Desecration, including a prostitute with a sweet tooth, a lean hitchhiker who hates the local police, and a religious but extremely horny biker gang. The love story is light and charming, and Bitter Karella is an entertaining writer with an excellent sense of humor.

Ester herself is an interesting protagonist and the reason the game got the Best LGBT Characters ribbon in Spring Thing 2021. That may not be as prestigious as it sounds because Spring Thing gives out a lot of ribbons each year, including Best Lil Fluffy Wuffy Dog in 2021, but I thought Bitter Karella took an interesting approach to developing his main character. We find out Ester is transgender only in passing — you’ll see a reference to her dead name in the truck paperwork if you happen to examine it (it’s not needed to solve any puzzle) and a reference to hormone therapy if you try to enter a men’s restroom. It’s not made a big deal of in any way. The game’s not about transitioning or discrimination. There’s no angst to be found here, and the author isn’t heavy-handed or preachy at any point. Ester just is who she is…and fundamentally, she’s just a person. You don’t need to be an activist or an ally to enjoy the game or the character. You don’t even need to know the lingo — I personally didn’t even realize I could accurately be called “cishet” until I visited Bitter Karella’s Twitter feed. I think that’s pronounced “cis…het” rather than shishet seashells by the seashore, but I’m not completely sure. Hey, I’m still learning here. One thing that is for sure, I’m never going to start writing slash fan fiction based on a text adventure character before I’ve actually finished the game and learned all the details of a character’s backstory again. Something always seems to go wrong whenever I try. You see, I was going to include a story about Ester in my upcoming anthology entitled “Large, Leather, Cis Lesbian Goddesses of Phobos”, but now she doesn’t fit the theme and people hate it when the theme is not fitted properly. Luckily, I’ve still got one story about Rosie O’Donnell and five stories about Ruby Rose that begin with her consuming millions of bags of Doritos in a relatively short time frame to fall back on.

Unfortunately, Mean Mother Trucker doesn’t have a very flexible parser and it has some game design quirks that are likely to annoy you despite the game’s charm. Part of the problem is that Bitter Karella seems to have deliberately sought to implement a very limited set of verbs. There were situations in the game where I wanted to use verbs like buy and pour but couldn’t because the author wanted me to use the verb put in those situations: put money in machine, put water on ground, etc. It’s good to allow for those inputs since some users will try them, but I strongly prefer a parser that lets me be more precise and conversational. What’s next…a game with no eat command, but you can “put cheese in mouth” or “put teeth in cheese”? I’m already fearful that IF is going to be secretly taken over by AI as is, but if our human authors are going to start sounding like AIs of their own volition we really have no chance at all to resist the machines. It could be the game was rushed because there is a noticeable lack of synonyms throughout the game. You get a cup of coffee at one point, but you can’t refer to it as a cup. Your quarter can’t be referred to as a coin. These aren’t huge issues, but in practice they force you to repeat commands and add friction to the playing experience. What’s even worse is that sometimes commands seem like they’re giving you reasonable responses when they aren’t so you won’t realize what you really need to do is word the command differently. For instance, there’s something you have to shove in the game. If you push the object instead of shoving it, the game tells you, “Nothing obvious happens” and, indeed, nothing obvious does happen. To be fair, the description of the object mentions shoving it rather than pushing it so there’s a hint on what to do, but it’s still bad game design. When it comes to the item you have to buy without using the command buy, you might see a couple of confusing messages. If you do try to buy it, you’re told, “Nothing is on sale.” As if we’re supposed to wait until Black Friday or something to make the purchase. If you try to just get the item (thief!!), you’re told, “You can’t carry that” which is a terrible error message for this situation. It might make the player think the item can’t be picked up or that he or she is already carrying too many items. Sadly, this game won’t win any awards for playability any time soon.

The puzzles tend to be more fanciful and whimsical than strictly logical in keeping with the light theme. Sometimes the game has to guide you through the final and often least sensible step which isn’t ideal, but it helps a game which already has a lot of friction go a little smoother. My least favorite puzzle is decidedly the one in which you must first find a tool to pick up another item which you can’t get with just your bare hands. I can’t tell you how many ways I tried to pick up that thing with the tool until I finally decided to just try to pick it up directly again. And, sure enough, if you have the tool in your inventory you can indeed just get the item. It’s terrible game design again because the solution makes it seem like you’re not using the tool which isn’t even mentioned.

So Mean Mother Trucker certainly does have its flaws and can’t be called a great game in its present form. It will probably irritate you on your first playthrough, but once you know what you need to do it’s much easier to appreciate all the things it does do well. When you’re busy parser wrassling, you don’t always see the quality dialogue or take in the atmosphere. Having played the game twice now, I can say with confidence that Bitter Karella is in the perfect position to easily improve her games. If he were just to take the testing up a notch, that alone would probably have solved most of the issues I had with this game. I think that’s a better place to be in than, say, the position Matt Barringer found himself in shortly after the release of Detective. Matt needed to find a way to make literally everything about his game better whereas Karella just needs to do some damn testing.

My final thought might be disturbing for some viewers, but it’s been bothering me for a while. I’ve played just two Bitter Karella games: this one and Poppet. The two games don’t have a lot in common except they both feature a dead animal you suddenly find just lying in a room. Seriously, what the fuck is up with that? They’re not animals you know or anything, but it’s still upsetting and Mean Mother Trucker isn’t even supposed to be horror. I’m guessing you don’t want to look inside the chest freezer Bitter Karella has in his basement under any circumstances.

Simple Rating: 6/10

Complicated Rating: 25/50

Story: 7/10

Writing: 7/10

Playability: 3/10

Puzzle Quality: 5/10

Parser Responsiveness: 3/10