Introcomp 2015: Beyond Division, Deprivation, Walker's Rift

Beyond Division, by Joseph Geipel

A parser-based game about interspecies telepathic communication, Beyond Division immediately creates a positive impression by its implementation. For instance, commands like "follow hare" are understood. During the entire game, the implementation just feels solid.

The writing attempts to rise above the level of the mundane, but sometimes comes off as forced or awkward. A sentence like "Tall trees with tops full of the remnants of unobtainable varmints are scattered all around." does not give us a clear impression of what is going on. "As you wait in the midst of the blizzard, your sense beyond the blizzard improves somewhat." is abracadabra to me. And I'm not sure the verb 'to emanate' is well chosen in "Pure power is emanating all around the cavern from a glowing circle on the west cave wall." But this is nothing that a good round of editing couldn't fix. The general tone is fine and the prose suffices to keep the reader interested.

Other reviewers have pointed to the weird frame story -- apparently about some guy trying to teach you Latin while commenting on his mother's taste in music and his artistic progress -- as something which doesn't show its value yet. I agree. It is highly unclear what the author is envisioning here, and he should make sure that he actually has a coherent vision.

Perhaps more problematically is the lack of direction. While it may not be absolutely necessary, establishing some kind of goal for the player is often important to get parser fiction going. But Beyond Division never really manages to do that. The wolf in the first sequence is merely doing 'stuff' until an 'event' can happen to it; while the various protagonists in later sequences may have an abstract goal to defeat the Tide, but no very clear short-term or medium-term plans about how to do that. The entire sequence could be made more compelling by fixing this.

That said, Beyond Division seems like the beginning of a good game, and I'm interested in seeing the full version. Of all the Introcomp 2015 entries, this is the one I liked most.


Deprivation, by Michael Coorlim

Deprivation: A Story of Obsession and Transferance starts off with a spelling error in the subtitle. Not a good sign. It turns out that most of the prose is better edited, although the writing could be tightened and made more detailed and interesting. For instance, describing a graveyard like this: "At night, it looks far more dark and foreboding, lit only by sporadically spaced lights that illuminate only the paths immediately around them, leaving the gravestones as dark shapes lurking in darkness." betrays a certain imaginative laziness. The sequence "lit / lights / illuminate" isn't very engaging; but the double use of "only" and the triple use of "dark" is even worse.

The game itself gives the player a clear goal -- fall asleep -- but absolutely no clue about how to achieve that goal. You are in your apartment, and apparently, the author just wants you to do stuff. The effect of doing stuff is that the protagonist starts agonising about how his girlfriend left him, sometimes in grotesque ways -- as when he gets under the shower fully clothed and, for some reason that was completely opaque to me, smears his own face with a piece of cake that he has earlier decided he doesn't deserve to eat.

So it seems that the author's aim with the piece is to indulge in flowery descriptions of self-indulgent grief. The soundtrack should be an emo teen band. Given that this was entirely unappealing to me, I quit after the shower incident.

If the author's aim is something else, my advise is to change the game to make it clear to the player that this is the case.


Walker's Rift, by Hope Chow

I have no idea what this game is trying to accomplish, and once again I quit early. So apparently the protagonist is a magical monster hunter of some kind, but it remains entirely unclear what kind of monsters or what kind of hunting we're thinking of. Instead, we are treated to the protagonist's boring office life, and then to an investigation where every lead you follow leads to nothing.

To anybody who wanted to run a mystery/investigation type roleplaying game, I would give the following advice: make sure that any lead followed by the players leads either to a new lead, to some information that allows them to draw conclusions or at least formulate hypotheses, or to a scene that is somehow so engaging that the lack of leads and information isn't a problem. That advice probably also holds for IF. But what Walker's Rift does is that it forces you to follow lead after lead -- sending you to the library, to four different people who have come down sick, and so on -- without ever giving you anything in return. "Yeah," they'll say to you, "I have strange dreams." "About what?" "I don't want to talk about it." And that's it. I quit in boredom.

There's probably an interesting story and game waiting to happen here, but the author should tighten up the plot. Drop us into the action! Make sure that our actions lead to progress! Check out any of the official Choice of Games games to see how this is done: they start delivering immediately, and that's why we keep clicking and reading. Walker's Rift can use something of that.



Final scores

Based on the question: how much do I want to play the completed game?

  • Beyond Division: 7
  • Deprivation: 4
  • Lair of the Gorgonanth: 5
  • Meld: 6
  • Voltage Cafe: 3
  • Walker's Rift: 6

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