PyramidIF

ULTRAMARINE: A SEAPUNK ADVENTURE (Seven Submarines) - This appears to be the only full-on Ren'Py Visual Novel in Spring Thing. Seven individuals (submarines?) are credited and a lot of obvious work went into this presentation. The art skews more toward superhero comic than anime, and I got a very He-Man/She-Ra after school cartoon vibe from this. Sexy Mer-People! Look at the hair ! I like the visual design a lot but had to turn the music way down  - not because it was  bad , but because the music is performed with very synthetic instrument patches that I (personally) couldn't take much of. That could be easily fixed in software by remixing the tracks. The mer-hunks are described as "giants"...but nothing seems specifically out of proportion beyond a comic book or professional wrestling scale here... I'm a newcomer to VN, so I'm interested in how the presentation varies from text parser and choice IF. One thing about VN is that there's a lot of ...

  Really, If / Really Always, Dawn Sueoka ( The Orange Juice Public Library )  - A conversation with a simple AI based on Eliza, one of the earliest chatbots who could hold somewhat natural-seeming conversations by reframing the querent's input as another question in almost psychotherapy fashion. Since this is Twine, the player chooses from a list of responses which sometimes feel random. It seems procedurally generated, but there are only so many ways I can answer...I'm navigating a syntactical maze - am I interviewing it or... Am I still playing this? It's not long. It doesn't force itself on you, so don't be put off by the warnings if horror is not your thing - it's not exactly - but  Really, If / Really, Always got into my head in a way that most games don't. I know its still back there. It's trying to be quiet, but I can feel it.

I'm surprised no one before this has thought to make a game out of George Orwell's 1984 . The novel includes a very game-able scenario in that the main character's profession is to change printed publications--and therefore history--by editing news stories to reflect positively on the government and slander its enemies.  This dystopian concept is actually frighteningly more plausible now thanks to the internet.  Witness Wikipedia, where well-intentioned editors often constantly battle to prevent vandals from changing details about real-world events and personalities, putting their own thumbprint on general perception. Redactor casts the player as an employee of the Ministry of Truth in the Records Department ("Minitrue RecDep" in 1984 's prescient stylization preference of eliminating extraneous words and syllables) and presents a slim time limit and rules of how a news article needs to change: You will have 25 seconds to rectify a newspaper article...

Choice of Games has made Eerie Estate Agent (retitled For Rent: Haunted House ) available for free but supported with ads on the iOS app store. I'm really glad I had the chance to check it out, because it is quite a departure from their normal style. The writing is excellent and dryly comical, lacking the earnest seriousness of many previous CoG games I've sampled.

Invisible Parties is a ShuffleComp entry authored by its seemingly-tireless organizer, Sam Kabo Ashwell, who has re-released it, correcting a lot of technical problems of the type that can arise from organizing a comp and implementing a small but complicated game simultaneously.  

The Stanley Parable is a really interesting short game available on Steam.  It is a first-person exploration that plays with the idea of player agency and the concept of free will as it is implemented in computer games.  The new version is an expansion of the original free Half-Life mod, and contains all new art and music, and brilliant honey-voiced British narration by a guy I wish would read me a story every night before falling asleep.  With all the meta-commentary and magical realism, it gives off very strong Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibes, with a dash of Portal .  For me, this is vibe heaven.

I had a chance to check out the Indie/Twine game my father's long, long legs and thought it was pretty well done.  It's a good example of the story types that work best on Twine. In this case, there's not a whole lot of back and forth deciding on what to do.  You're advancing quite long passages of story (which are very well written) and then only at the end are you dropped into sort of a climactic scene where you have decisions.  Not story decisions, but pretty much it controls how long the tension is drawn for. Worth checking out.  It reminded me a lot of the stories I had seen on Creepypasta, and is a good read if you have an hour to spare for Halloween shivers. Spoilers after the break.

Wade Clarke reviews FINAL GIRL . In response to his confusion about saving on StoryNexus, saving is not necessary.  StoryNexus remembers where you are in each world and picks up right where you left off. I think that's okay to say since it's about StoryNexus and not the game.