Category Archives: Game Review

Game Review: Smart Theory (2021, AKheon)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Smart Theory is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

In Smart Theory, you’re a college student who is woken up one morning by Paul “Big” Brother, who is excited to have the chance to teach you about Smart Theory, the new academic theory that is sweeping the campus.  Whether you go willingly or not, you will eventually end up at the assembly and you will discover what Smart Theory is all about.  (Personally, it’s more enjoyable and morally more rewarding to go unwillingly.)

Originated by a Texas fertilizer salesman who was trying to win a bet, Smart Theory may seem like a bunch of movie quotes but it’s actually the new way that you are going to be expected to view the world.  And while some of it may sound dumb, it can’t actually be dumb because then it wouldn’t be a smart theory!  Get it?

Designed with the Twine operating system, this is less of a game than a satirical short story about the current culture of conformity on campus.  The more Smart Theory is explained, the more obvious it becomes that no one is willing to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.  The game has something important to say about being weary of any ideology that doesn’t allow its followers to question it.  To enjoy this game, it probably helps if you already agree with the point that it’s making but that doesn’t make that point any less relevant.

Play Smart Theory.

Game Review: AardVarK Versus The Hype (2021, Truthcraze)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

AardVarK versus The Hype is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

This year is 1997 and the students at the local high school have been transformed into blood-coughing, murderous zombies by the Hype, a new soft drink.  It’s up to the members of the world’s great garage band, AardVarK, to defeat the Hype but doing so is going to involve solving some puzzles and spendng a lot of time at a convenience store.

This is an intentionally strange game and it takes a while to get used to the format but I dug it.  There are four members of AardVarK and, throughout the game, you switch back and forth from which member of the band you’re playing.  Sometimes, it can be difficult to keep track of which band member you are but I still appreciated the game’s ambition.  This might be the first true enemble Interactive Fiction game that I’ve ever played.

The story is full of goofy, self-referential humor.  Imagine if Kevin Smith wrote an IF game and you might have some idea of this game’s skewed perspective.  It’s a fun game, though, full of odd dialogue and strange scenes.  Some of the puzzles do have weird, out-there solutions but fortunately, the game comes with a HINT section that will help you out.  The best thing to do with a game like this is to just type whatever pops into your head and see what happens.  The joy here is from the journey and seeing just how weird things can get!

Play AardVark Versus The Hype.

Game Review: And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One (2021, BJ Best)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One is one of the best text adventure games that I’ve ever played and since the joy of discovery is one of the best things about this game, I don’t want to spoil too much of it in this review.  In this game, the time is the distant past.  You are Emerson and you’re fourteen years old.  Your best friend is a girl named Riley.  Riley will soon be moving all the way to Wisconsin.  As the game begins, you bicylce over to her house.  As it rains outside, you two play the games on her computer.

Will you try to beat Infinite Adventure, a series of seemingly simple games where you have to solve puzzles to advance to the next adventure?  Will you once again play the Wizardry knock-off, the one where you kills monsters and find junk?  Will you try out the educational game that Riley’s mother is testing?  Or will you get really brave and risk the sordid world of strip poker?  It sounds simple but there’s a catch.  All of the games are connected and your future and Riley’s future will be determined by the decisions you make.

This is an ingeniously clever game and it will spark nostalgia for the days when everyone owned a bulky personal computer and crude graphics were the only thing that was needed to spark a player’s imagination.  But it’s also a game about friendship, love, and growing up. It’s also not an unnecessarily difficult game and your patience will be rewarded.  I got one of the good endings and I’ve never felt happier about how an IF game ended.  The film is full of great characters, from Riley to the people who you meet while playing the games on Riley’s computer.  I can’t wait to play this one again and see what I may have missed the first time around.

Play And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One.

Game Review: Closure (2021, Sarah Willson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Closure is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

In Closure, you play the best friend of Kira. Kira has just broken up with her longtime boyfriend. Because she wants to find, for sentimental reasons, a photograph that was taken of the two of them during happier times, she breaks into his dorm room to search for it. When she can’t find it, she texts you. She sends you a description of the dorm room and asks you for advice. You can text back with command like “search the desk,” “look in the closet,” and “leave the room.”

The last command is one that I sent a few times because I’m not a teenage girl and I guess I had the stereotypical male response to Kira’s problem. Sad over a breakup in college? Leave the dorm room, suppress all of your emotions and your feelings, drink until you pass out, wake up with a monster hangover, keeping going out and turning off every girl you meet by constantly talking about your ex, and, after everyone finally tells you that they’re getting sick of hearing about it, move on with your life. That worked in college (or, at least, everyone always pretended that it worked in college) but it wouldn’t make for a very good or emotionally rewarding IF game.

Closure, however, is a good IF game. Once I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to talk Kira into leaving the dorm room, I helped her investigate and solve the mystery of why her boyfriend had dumped her. At first, I thought the texting approach would make for an awkward game but it actually ended up working pretty well and the game ends with a good message about moving on and yes, closure. It also ends with a suggestion of things that you could tell Kira to try the next time that you play the game. This is a simple but rewarding game, one that can be played more than once.

Play Closure.

Game Review: You Are SpamZapper 3.1 (2021, Leon Arnott)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You Are Spam Zapper 3.1 is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

Sometimes you play a game and it totally takes you by surprise. That’s what You Are Spam Zapper 3.1 did to me.

This Twine game takes place in the early 2000s. You are Spam Zapper 3.1. Your job is zap spam emails and keep them from getting into your human’s email inbox. Sometimes, the job is easy. Many of the emails are obviously fake and it’s easy to know that they should be zapped. Sometimes, it’s more difficult. Do you zap all of the ads or just some? What do you do when humans use weird symbols in their emails? Is it an emoji or is it a virus?

When I started playing, I thought the entire game was just going be reading email that were meant to parody the type of junk that we all used to get back in the early days of the the new century and laughing at how the internet used to be. There is a lot of that in the game but, as you read the emails, another story develops about your human and their friends and their attempts to communicate in a world that’s becoming depersonalized by technology. Do you get involved in your human’s life and with the lives of their friends? Do you reach out to the other plug-ins, who all have their job to do whenever the human turns on their computer? Or do you just do your job and zap anything that looks suspicious?

You Are Spam Blocker 3.1 is a memorable mix of comedy and drama that will take most players by surprise.

Play You Are Spam Blocker 3.1.

Game Review: This Won’t Make You Happy (2021, Mike Gillis)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This Won’t Make You Happy is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

You are standing outside the Caves of Despair and you’re feeling sad. Maybe it’s not a good idea to go into the Caves of Despair, then. Maybe you should stand outside and check your phone. Take a look at Twitter. Check out your dating apps. Play a game … you know something? Caves of Despair are looking pretty damn good right now.

Inside the Caves of Despair, there are gems! That shouldn’t come as a surprise to any Interactive Fiction veteran. How many games have we played where we were supposed to be happy just because we found a gem or a diamond in some musty old cave? This Won’t Make You Happy is one of the few games with the courage to directly address the absurdity of wasting your imaginary life on not only gems but also protecting them from obnoxious gnomes.

This Won’t Make You Happy is a meta game that comments on the shallowness of hunting for gems and paying attention to a narrator. It’s the type of game that will probably annoy people searching for a more traditional IF adventure but I liked it because it addressed several issues that I always wondered about whenever I played any of these games. For instance, who is the narrator and why are we following his orders? It’s a quick game and there’s enough funny moments that it’s worth replaying.

Play This Won’t Make You Happy.

Game Review: The Waiting Room (2021, Billy Krolick)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The Waiting Room is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.  All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

In The Waiting Room, you have just been hired work at a nursing home. From the minute you show up for your first day, it seems like something is off. The lights keep flickering. A patient named Ethel says she needs help but your co-worker, Austin, orders you to ignore her. The night nurse, Maria, refuses to go in the back hallway. The patients all say that the nursing home is haunted by shadow people, waiting to abduct the dying.

Can you solve the mystery? That’s up to you. One of the things that I like about The Waiting Room is that it actually is a work of interactive fiction. The choicse that you make actually do effect the direction of the story. How the game ends will depend on how brave or cowardly you decide to be. Will you be a compassionate caregiver or will you be cruel and self-centered? The choice is yours but there are consequences for each choice.

The Waiting Room is a well written twine game. (If you’ve never played a twine game, they’re like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, just with more options and details.) There have been a lot of good IF gams about haunted house and the atmospheric The Waiting Room brings to mind some of the best of them while also establishing its own identity. There are a few puzzles to be solved but they’re not extremely difficult. Instead, the emphasis is just on making the right decisions when it comes to dealing with both the living and the dead.

Play the Waiting Room.

Game Review: Zox The Zombie: Neighborhood Mayhem (2021, Joanne Sylver)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Oh no! Zox has turned into a zombie and he’s already on the run! Can you stop him before he turns his family and then the entire neighborhood into zombies?

That’s the challenge behind this simple but entertaining text adventure. You chase Zox around his house and the neighborhood and, along the way, you run into the people who Zox has already turned into a zombie and you react accordingly. (For instance, you can shake your finger at Zox’s little brother because he was a brat who got what was coming to him.) You can also grab items that you can later use to fight the zombies.

This is a horror game, solely because it involved zombies. Otherwise, there’s not really anything scary about it but it’s not supposed to scary. Instead, it’s a clever throw-back to the type of crude but addictive text adventures that people played on some of the first computers. Trust me, back in the early 90s, something like Zox the Zombie would have been considered the height of computerized adventure! Zox the Zombie definitely has a strong nostalgic appeal to it, with everything from the simple zombie drawings to the enthusiastic text descriptions bringing a nice retro feel to the game.

Zox the Zombie was programmed with Twine and it can be played online.

Sign Me Up For Lawn Mowing Simulator!

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

There’s a lot of people making fun of the lawn mower simulator right now but I just watched the trailer and I’m ordering.

Yes, the trailer make it look like Lawn Mowing Simulator just a game about mowing lawns but we all know what the game is really about.  How many weird pictures can you mow in the grass before the homeowner comes home and figures out what you’re doing?  How many sticks and stones can you run your lawn mover over before you have to replace the blade?  Is your lawnmower powerful enough to destroy a pair of roller skates?  If you accidentally clip the neighbor’s yard, do you even it out or do you just play innocent and say you have no idea how that happened?

I did some research and I discovered that this game is not just about lawns.  It’s also a business simulator, where you build your landscaping business from the ground up.  You get chances to upgrade your lawnmower and there’s also mini-games involving trying to find and remove objects from the yard before you actually start cutting the grass.

I’ve actually always enjoyed business sims so this looks like the perfect game for me.  I get the sense of accomplishment of building a successful business without having to worry about accidentally shooting people just because I pushed the wrong button.  Sign me up!

Thank you, Destroy All Humans!

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When I reviewed Destroy All Humans! last year, I ended the review by saying that I couldn’t wait for the remake to be released in 2020.  When I wrote those words, I didn’t know just how much 2020 would sometimes make me want to destroy all humans.  It’s been a hell of a year and distractions from reality have been not only welcome but necessary.  I’m happy to say that the remake of Destroy All Humans! lived up to all of my expectations and it’s often been just the distraction that I needed.

With the exception of one new mission (which was planned for but cut from the original), the remake of Destroy All Humans! is the same game as the original.  Some of the images are a little crisper and the sound quality has been improved but there really aren’t any major differences as far as gameplay is concerned.  For me, that’s not a problem because I consider the original Destroy All Humans to be about as perfect as game from the period can be.

For me, Destroy All Humans! is the perfect game for 2020.  If there’s ever been a year that’s called for a full scale alien invasion, it’s been this one.  I’ve destroyed Santa Modesta and the Turnipseed Farm more times than I care to count.  When the news is bad, there’s something very gratifying about boarding a spaceship and blowing up a grain silo.  Normally, I’m not a fan of mindless violence but the key to Destroy All Humans! is that, no matter how many times you blow Santa Modesta, the town is always rebuilt by the time you return.  Destroy All Humans! may not have been made to show that humans are resilient but it really one of the main lessons of the game.

Thank you, Destroy All Humans!, for being there when we needed you.  Now, let’s just hope for a remake of Destroy All Humans 2!