The Reprover is a piece of digital art; or a lightly interactive comic book; or a French film whose pacing you control yourself; or a story written on the surface of a polyhedron. Or perhaps it is most accurate to call it a hypertext, but, if so, it is considerably more coherent and satisfying than most literary hypertexts I have encountered before.
Over on Grand Text Auto, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is running an interesting experiment in peer-reviewing: a blog-based peer review. Visit the site to read portions of his text and comment on them.
For some time I’ve been arguing that the way forward for interactive storytelling is to heal the long-standing breach between narrative and puzzle, and make the interactive parts of a game reinforce and enhance the story. The player’s action should in some way help him better understand the characters, explore the constraints of the circumstance in which they find themselves, or intensify his feelings towards the participants and the outcome. (There are probably other possibilities too, but those are the obvious ones that present themselves.)
The casual game Miss Management accomplishes all that surprisingly well.
After my recent good times with Chocolatier 2 (and, I have to confess, a string of stressful working days that left me too brain-dead to want to work on IF in the evening), I decided to try some demos for other games being sold by Big Fish and PlayFirst. Sadly, none of them were nearly as cool as Chocolatier 2, though not all were quite as maddening as Mystery in London, either. The run-down, for people who enjoy reviews no matter of what:
Recently I tried Mystery in London, a search-for-lost-objects game. I’m not sure what possessed me to do this; possibly it was the pretty screen shots, or possibly it was curiosity about what this genre involved.
Or: In which I make 630 million dollars.
Some time ago, I tried Chocolatier, a game about running your own chocolate factory. Overall, I thought the game play fell short of what it wanted to be, but I had fun anyway because of the chocolatey goodness of it all. (See also Sushi Go Round.)
A few days ago, JayIsGames announced the existence of Chocolatier 2, and I downloaded the demo, figuring that I probably wouldn’t purchase the full version this time around. But in fact, they’d fixed quite a few of the things I thought were underwhelming about the original, and the second episode is considerably better rounded as a game; by the time I finished the demo hour, I was hooked. Again.
JayIsGames is now running a review I wrote of Suveh Nux, so yay!
