IFComp 2021 review: Finding Light (Abigail Jazwiec)

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Played 2nd October using Windows Git
Time played: 1hr 40mins, one good ending found

Some minor puzzle spoilers ahead.

Finding Light is a parser-based puzzler in a fantasy setting. A member of a clan of magic practitioners has been abducted in a raid; you play as his familiar trying to track him down and rescue him. The game plays like a standard parser-based text adventure, but with the extra gimmick that you can shift between a human shape and a fox shape. You have some magical abilities as a fox, but anything that requires opposable thumbs needs a human touch. 

Many of the puzzles in Finding Light are based around checking your surroundings in both forms, and there are a few classic IF puzzles in the mix too: locks and keys, trading with NPCs, even a maze. The form-switching mechanic is implemented well, and leads to a couple of clever tricks, such as the use of colour throughout the game. Otherwise, the puzzles are pretty straightforward. That’s fine, because that lets you keep some forward momentum going throughout the game – you get to feel smart without being stuck for very long. The game world helps with this by only using orthogonal connections between rooms. You don’t need to worry about mapping and navigation.

Actually I think this is a good description of Finding Light in general – it’s straightforward and simple in many aspects, but who cares, because it’s done well and you don’t need it to be complex. NPC conversation is done with a simple ASK system which does the job it needs to. The worldbuilding is very light – not enough to bog you down, but just enough to give you a sense of what’s going on and give you some direction. Some NPC asides and a few interesting objects hint at deeper mysteries which are left tantalisingly unsolved. I like this kind of setting. There’s a wider world out there, and something sinister happening here, but you don’t need to worry about that.

As for the implementation, it’s rather good! Custom responses are present and correct, used well to describe the player character and take advantage of their abilities. Room descriptions change based on what form you’re in, and you can use your senses (especially SMELL) to get a little extra information. The scenery is implemented well. The writing itself functions well, though maybe some of the prose needs slimming down a bit, especially in the final scenes. And the parser can pick up on almost-correct commands and tell you what command to enter instead, such as responding to “enter crack” with “just go west”. (It would be even better if the parser just acted as if you’d said ‘west’ instead of making you type it, since it already knows what you’re trying to do. But whatever, at least it’s recognised!)

However, there were a couple of nasty bugs and oversights when I played, which will perhaps have been patched by the time I post this review. Finding Light is going for politeness on the Zarfian cruelty scale, I think, but you can make the game unwinnable by going through the maze before getting everything you need, since you can’t go back the way you came. (The maze has a warning that you should save before entering, but for some reason it only appeared in my playthrough after I got the key item I was missing. If you don’t have everything you need, you can enter the maze without the warning. This seems like a mistake?) (UPDATE 8th Oct: This bug has since been fixed!) There is a HELP command which is supposed to give a contextual hint, but when you’re in fox form, it always tells you that you missed an item at the beginning of the game. I think it’s talking about the gem you have to wear? I suspect the culprit is Inform 7 and its insistence that wearing something is not the same as carrying it. (I’ll bet the odd line breaks during conversations are Inform’s fault as well. I remember struggling mightily with its funny ideas about line breaks and paragraph breaks.)

So the game’s a little buggy, but nothing that can’t be protected against with sensible use of save games. Outside of that, I had a good time with Finding Light! It’s a gentle fantasy puzzler with a couple of clever tricks in its main gimmick. The ending I got and the aforementioned little mysteries suggest that Jazwiec has more adventures in mind. I hope so – I’d love to see this puzzle concept explored more!

IFComp 2021 – About my reviews

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IFComp 2021 is here! I’d like to review some of the entrants on this blog, as I did in 2019. I don’t except to review that many – I’m busier now than I was in 2019 – but I’ve not played much IF for a while and I really want to get back into it.

In 2019, I noted that I hadn’t made any IF so I didn’t know how hard it is. I have since entered IFComp. My game, Vampire Ltd, got a lot of nice words and a few robust (but fair!) critiques levelled at it, so I know it’s scary to be an author waiting for feedback. And now I know exactly how hard it is to make even a small game. So I want my reviews to be as fair as possible. As such:

I’ll make an honest attempt to engage with each game. I will try to be constructive in my criticism. I will be nice: if I don’t like a game, I will look for things that are cool about it, and not just post something rude. Authors who think I’m flat-out wrong in my assessment of their game are welcome to call me out.

I’ll use the Personal Shuffle option to randomise my playlist, which means I may be playing games from genres or about subjects that I usually avoid – if I’m predisposed to dislike a game because of something like this, I’ll acknowledge it in my review. I’ll keep to the customary 2-hour judging limit. I play a little slower than other judges do, because I’m taking notes as I go (and I might be making a map as well, if I’m playing a big puzzly game), so that means I might not see as much of a larger game as other judges will. Sorry in advance.

I’ll also list the date I played each game, and how I played it (i.e. what interpreter or internet browser I used). If I spend time complaining about bugs, you should check this information. It could be that the game has been patched since I played it, or perhaps I was using an interpreter that introduced a few bugs.

I won’t post scores with my reviews. This is for two reasons:

  1. I don’t decide on final scores until I submit my ballot. I rank the games in a Word document to build my ballot, and sometimes I realise that I actually like a game I’ve given 6/10 more than a game I’ve given 7/10, so I need to juggle some scores at the last minute.
  2. I want to talk about what I find interesting in each game, and the actual score might be at odds with that. A 7/10 game may do most things right, but have one significant flaw that I want to explore and think about more closely, so that the overall review maybe comes off as negative. Meanwhile, a 4/10 game might be buggy and difficult to recommend, but have one really cool idea that I have to gush about for five paragraphs.

What I will say about scores is that I reserve 10/10 scores for games I genuinely can’t fault, and 1/10 scores for games which are actively offensive or hurtful. I don’t give either extreme out very often.

I think that’s all I wanna say up-front! Good luck to all authors. I’m really looking forward to this.

(By the way, I never cross-posted my IFComp 2020 reviews, did I? They were privately posted on the IntFiction forums at the time, since I was an entrant and I felt that publicly critiquing my fellow entrants was a conflict of interest. I probably won’t cross-post them at this point. My long-term project is to build a proper website for all my projects and have my reviews centralised there, not scattered between here, the forums and IFDb. I’ll post the reviews when that happens, but that’s a while away yet.)

Games I Have Made: Vampire Ltd

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~ wisprabbit ~ 1 Comment

Oops I forgot I had a blog. Oops I forgot to update after IFComp 2020.

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Cover art for Vampire Ltd

Nero Brashov, vampire and failed businessman, has revenge on his mind. He’ll pose as a human, infiltrate his arch-enemy’s corporation, and sabotage it from the inside. Just as soon as he’s invited in, that is.

Vampire Ltd is a text adventure game about corporate espionage. You’re a vampire; this poses problems throughout the adventure.

It was first published as an entrant in IFComp 2020, where it won lucky 13th place out of 103 entries and received mostly-kind reviews.. Since then, it’s been updated to fix bugs and typos and add developer commentary. It is screen-reader friendly, but has a few swears, so it’s not necessarily child-friendly.

Vampire Ltd was designed and written by me in Inform 7. It was tested by AKheon, Christopher Merriner, Dark Star, Mathbrush, Mike Russo and Peter M. J. Gross. Full credits are included in the game.

Play online or download at the following links:

itch.io
IFDb

Also, I wrote a postmortem for Vampire Ltd on the IntFiction forum. Check it out here if you like – it spoils some jokes and puzzles, but not the plot.

IFComp 2020 – I’m an entrant this year!

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The Interactive Fiction Competition 2020 is open for judging!

Last year, I wrote a bunch of reviews on this blog. I won’t be doing that so much this year, because I am an entrant! My game is called Vampire Ltd, and it’s an hour-long parser comedy (with vampires in it). I won’t say any more than that in public until after the competition ends, to make sure I don’t make the Author’s Big Mistake or say anything that could influence the vote in my favour.

For similar reasons, I will not be posting reviews of other games here until after the competition has closed. I think I might write reviews in the private author’s forum on IntFiction, but if they ever show up here it won’t be for a couple of months at least. Sorry!

I’ll also use this space to thank my game’s beta-testers, and point you towards their entries:

  • AKheon, Dark Star, Mathbrush and Mike Russo are entrants in the IFComp who beta-tested my entry. The other beta-testers were Peter M. J. Gross and Christopher Merriner. Many thanks to all of them!
  • I beta-tested Dark Star and Mike Russo’s entries, Entangled and the Eleusinian Miseries respectively. (They are both excellent and I highly recommend them! I’ll write a little about them when I get around to playing the competition entries.)
  • AKheon has entered Ascension of Limbs, and Mathbrush has entered The Magpie Takes the Train. I haven’t touched these yet, but I’m looking forward to them!

Play all these entries, and a hundred others (including mine too I guess) on the IFComp website!

Good luck to all entrants, and enjoy the competition! And to all those authors who I gave negative reviews to last year: I’m sorry. It is harder than it looks.

Spring Thing 2020 review: The Land of Breakfast and Lunch (Daniel Talsky)

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Played 24th + 27th April (I took the weekend off)
Download version played
Time played: 55mins

Link to The Land of Breakfast and Lunch on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot

The Land of Breakfast and Lunch is a parser-based game from Daniel Talsky of Rabbit, Rabbit, who previously submitted Ürs to IFComp 2019. This game is a “diorama” of individual scenes for the player to poke at to their heart’s content.

I should note that this may not be a worthwhile review because I didn’t manage to solve the one puzzle alluded to in the game’s help. I also didn’t find an ending, though I don’t think there is one. Apologies if I’ve missed out on some important content that would change the review.

LoBaL is a kind of game I haven’t seen many examples of, though I’m sure plenty exist: a sort of sandbox game, an interesting space for the player to poke at. Without any obvious narrative direction, the game goes for detailed implementation instead. LoBaL registers and responds to every verb I can think of (thank you, 77 Verbs) in some way. A lot of default responses have been changed, which is always a pleasure to see. The only notable implementation issue I found was some disambiguation trouble here and there. (For example, “open box” will work to open the jack-in-the-box, but you have to type “close jack-in-the-box” to close it up again.)

LoBaL is full of toys to play with (including a box of literal toys) to give you something to do other than looking. These are fun to poke at! I think a lot of them are Inform 7 coding exercises in some way, but that’s okay, it just means there’s a lot of interesting effects that objects could have. It’s also a pretty funny game, and I got a laugh out of some of the object descriptions, such as the randomised TV shows. (I think my dad watches “Fix ‘er Up and Flip ‘er”.)

However – and I can only speak for myself here – I found myself getting bored quickly once I’d found all the spaces I could. I feel like LoBaL could have done with one more element to maintain interest, like maybe a more cohesive atmosphere or narrative. There are glimmers of something deeper and darker here – the “Land of Unrealized Possibilities” and the appearance of the player character’s childhood dog suggest nostalgia and regret to me, and scenes like the ship that can’t sail and the abandoned liquor store have a very melancholy feel to them. But without much of a story to tell, I felt like I was spinning my wheels investigating this.

I found myself thinking of Ocean Beach from the last IFComp, a game which also expects the player to explore a sensory landscape (and which I reviewed here). Ocean Beach has its own issues, and I think LoBaL is a more fun space to explore, but Ocean Beach’s gameplay loop of finding different places to wait for sunset helps to drive the player’s exploration and gives them a greater sense of eventfulness. I suppose that could be what the puzzle hidden in LoBaL is trying to do, but without a clear sense of what solving the puzzle will achieve or what it even is, it didn’t motivate me much.

I like LoBaL and the idea of interactive dioramas in parser games. A lot of good work and interesting ideas have gone into this. I’d like to see what Talsky and Rabbit, Rabbit can do with a text parser and a little more narrative thrust.

Ribbons: Best Setting, perhaps – it’s not too cohesive but it has variety and atmosphere. Best Implementation too. Best Dog?

Spring Thing 2020 review: Catch that kitty (Rohan)

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Played 23rd April
Online version played
Playtime: 27 minutes, all endings found (I think)

Link to Catch that kitty on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot

Catch that kitty is a short comedy game made in Twine. The player character is on a mission to retrieve something, but gets sucked into a small conspiracy.

This is also billed as a drama, and Rohan’s author comments suggest that they were interested in how comedy can leaven drama. I’m not so sure that Catch that kitty is a good example, though. There’s little focus on emotional response or tragedy in the game, and the comedy has a slapstick, Looney Tunes-esque bent that undercuts rather than complements the game’s tension. It’s more of a thriller, I’d say, because of the fast pace and the emphasis on action sequences. Not better or worse than a drama, just different.

There’s a major issue with Catch that kitty’s writing. There are many grammatical errors and meandering sentences throughout the game. These don’t usually interfere with the game’s clarity, but sometimes they do. The extra time it can take to understand what’s happening drains the pace from the game’s action and comedy. I don’t want to pick on this since I don’t know anything about the game’s background (maybe it’s been translated from another language?), but it is a real issue.

Catch that kitty does show a good bit of expertise with Twine, though. The game uses a braiding structure so that you’ll usually end up in the same place regardless of your choices. (It looks like a lot of the endings branch out from the final scene.) This allows you to pursue some character-led choices, and become a participant in the comedy rather than just someone who does things and who things happen to. I think some of the choices are false, actually, leading to the same next page regardless of what you choose. Although this feels a little cheap when you’re searching the game for endings, it’s good for encouraging some thought from the player and getting them into character on a first playthrough.

There’s one moment I really loved in this game that comes from this structure. Jumping out of the bus early on has you justify yourself to the narrator, and one possible choice (you jumped out because you didn’t want to confront the driver) is reflected as the player character’s anxiety in text later on. Although I don’t think this affects the choices you have, I enjoy this style of character development, encouraging the player to choose reasoning as well as actions. The only other game I can recall doing something like this is Victor Gijsbers’ De Baron, a work which is significantly different in tone and themes.

(This game also pulls my favourite trick of letting you just sack the plot off and go home, ending the game early. That joke always makes me laugh.)

I think Rohan knows enough to do some cool things with Twine. If they can get a proof-reader or beta-tester to take the rough edges off their writing, they could make some really fun works.

Ribbons: The multiple endings and small scale make this a candidate for Most Replayable. Perhaps Most Surprising too, for its twisty structure and focus on non-sequitur humour.

Spring Thing 2020 review: The Golden (Kerry Taylor)

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Played 22nd April
Online version played
Playtime: 23 minutes, two playthroughs

Link to The Golden on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot

The Golden is a 5-10 minute Twine game. In this game, the player character interacts with her father and brother in a tense household without food or electricity over the course of an evening.

I’m trying to be vague about what’s going on to match The Golden’s blurb, but I’d suggest that this is a horror game. Not a jumpscare kind of horror, though – it’s more about atmosphere and creeping dread. There’s something wrong in the game’s world, which all the characters know about but which the player needs to put together for themselves.

So of course, the first thing the player is likely to think of at this time is COVID-19. I’m pretty sure The Golden is actually directly inspired by a different disaster, but we can draw strong parallels between self-isolation and food supplies under COVID-19 with the tense family crammed into rooms too small for them subsisting on popcorn and old sugar. The Golden becomes a recognisable, albeit heightened, exploration of total isolation. As with Braincase, I’m not case whether the perhaps-accidental topicality is helpful or whether it’s obscuring a different intended message.

The Golden is a well-structured little game. The choice system of Twine can be used to go off the narrative path a little and explore other rooms. I recommend doing this because it gives the writing more space to breathe, and Taylor is a good writer. Little environmental details like the unfinished puzzle give the player character time to reflect, helping Taylor to bring out the game’s atmosphere of despair and dread.

On that note, I think the PC, whose name I forgot to write down but I think it was Jane, is a subtle strength of The Golden. She picks up on little sensory details, and notes of resentment creep into her narration here and there to set up the final scene. These are an effective representation of familiarity breeding contempt, especially since her contempt seems to be unfounded – for example, she resents her brother for taking the popcorn, the nicest food left in the house, only for him to offer her some popcorn a second later.

My only big complaint is that more could have been done with the CSS styling. There’s a little use of colour in the text – links turn gold when you hold your mouse over them, and there are a few coloured words in a playful late-game sequence. But for a game called The Golden, it’s very black-and-white, and I feel like that’s a missed opportunity. Even a simple trick like changing the background colour as the game goes on (to reflect the sun setting, or certain other environmental changes in key scenes) could have made the game a lot more visually appealing. (As a practical example in Twine, maybe see Stephen Granade’s Will Not Let Me Go, a game about Alzheimer’s Syndrome which darkens the background colour to reflect its lead character’s failing mental faculties.)

Ribbons: Most Atmospheric, and a candidate for Best Writing. Maybe Best Player Character too.

Spring Thing 2020 review: 77 Verbs (Mathbrush)

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Played 14th April
Download version played
Playtime: 37mins, end reached with 52 points

Link to 77 Verbs on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot

77 Verbs is an Inform-based game geared at players who are new to text parsers. The player, auditioning to be a player character, needs to use all the verbs built into the Inform engine to navigate a gauntlet of hazards.

I think this has been submitted to the Back Garden because it’s not making its debut in the Spring Thing – it was originally submitted to the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition, a contest organised by Ryan Veeder in which the aim was to please Ryan Veeder. (I can’t check how pleased Ryan Veeder was by 77 Verbs at the time of writing because I’m having major internet connectivity issues, which started as soon as I committed publicly to reviewing games for Spring Thing 2020. So it goes.)

77 Verbs acts as a tutorial for newer players, so it’s difficult for me to judge how successful a teaching too it is as someone who’s played plenty of parser-based games. But it is interesting to compare 77 Verbs to the game I used to learn parser games, Andrew Plotkin’s The Dreamhold. Dreamhold and some other tutorial adventures like Emily Short’s Bronze are full-fledged puzzlers. You get taught the most common verbs to start off with, and maybe a little extra help when you need to learn a new action, but you’re largely trusted to get stuck in and figure the game world out yourself. 77 Verbs is a much more guided and linear experience by contrast. You are almost always explicitly given the verb you need to progress, without many opportunities to wander off the path, so that there’s very little puzzling to actually do here. (Out-of-world actions such as saving and restoring are also taught, albeit incidentally in random(?) NPC chatter.)

Does this work for 77 Verbs? Again, I can’t judge accurately, but I think it does make sense for the game’s aims. There are a bunch of verbs in Inform and older text adventures which are so rarely used that they always, always catch me out when they come up (“wave,” for example). I don’t think there’s a game like this which acts like a reference manual for verbs, which demonstrates some of the less intuitive actions you might be expected to take. It’s better to be explicit about these than to set a puzzle and expect the player to make the leap themselves – otherwise you’re recreating the problem you’re trying to solve.

(Besides, I recall complaining about The Dreamhold back in the day because some of its puzzles were pretty complex and intimidating to me as a new player. I think I stand by that. I’m grateful to Plotkin for trusting in my ability to figure things out myself, though, even though his faith was misplaced.)

Although 77 Verbs is arguably puzzleless, a lot of its segments reflect some common interactive fiction puzzles. There’s a machine to operate, there’s a construction puzzle where lots of smaller items are combined, and there’s even a maze! (Albeit not a maze that will cause anyone serious trouble.) I wonder if there’s a more subtle tutorialisation of text adventures going on here – not just teaching you the verbs you need to use, but showing you what situations you might think of using them in.

One more thing I should mention is the presentation. 77 Verbs doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of events, but it’s a lot of fun to speed though. It’s energetically written and fast-paced. There are plenty of in-jokes and references to other games for old players to spot and new players to realise years later. (I hope the appearance of the rat in a pirate costume pleased Ryan Veeder.) I also love the suggestion that the text parser is diegetic – that is, that every player character interacts with their world by yelling “> GO NORTH” before heading north, for example.

77 Verbs is a pretty fun experiment. Although I don’t know how successful it will prove to be, it’s a worthwhile alternative tutorial to more puzzly efforts, and it’s a cute and fun way for anyone to spend half an hour or so.

Ribbons: Best for Novice Players seems obvious. Could also be a candidate for Best Writing, for the sense of humour and playfulness that pervades the game.

Spring Thing 2020 review: silences (beams)

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Played 9th April
Online version played
Playtime: <30mins to see everything (I think)

Link to silences on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot

Spoiler warning: Although silences isn’t a narrative-heavy work, it’s not very long either, and this review will inevitably reveal a lot of it in the analysis.

silences is the first Back Garden entry I’ve played, and one of two entries in the competition by B Minus Seven (writing here as beams). This entry is a poem programmed in Texture, in which the reader/player selects adjectives to build one of “six sorts of silence.”

To select adjectives, the reader drags one of two words, “eye” and “shoulder”, onto their choice. “Eye” will bring up a list of related concepts, like a word association game; “shoulder”ing an adjective appends it to the word “silence,” continuing until you’ve shouldered three words. The choice then changes, asking you to either “uphold” or “drop” the silence. Upholding leads to a screen which is blank except for a full stop and a button to return to the first choice. Dropping leads to a message of defiance. For example, choosing to drop “a loamed silence, listing and eventual,” told me:

“I won’t have need much longer. Services (assemblies, deliveries) are for moving parts only.”

This is the only quote I’ll transcribe here, to stop myself from posting the whole poem. I wanted to share that one because it made me pause for a while. beams has an excellent way with a turn of phrase.

silences is fairly restrained as a piece of interactive fiction, and what you think of it will probably depend on what you make of the text, as with any poem. I can tell you what it meant to me, but I’m a little wary of declaring what it means or what it’s inspired by. I say this because I remember a previous work by B Minus Seven, the IFComp entry Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes. The author’s comments indicate that Lanes is deliberately nonsensical, broken and obtuse, and many IFComp judges seemed to agree. And yet the game’s depiction of a completely arcane bureaucratic system which seems to do nothing but confound the player character really stuck with me (perhaps because I’m still job hunting). All this to say, anything in the review after this point may just be over-analysis.

Having said that, I think there’s a pretty clear theme in silences of silence as a burden to be shouldered. Uphold them, and nothing changes, no progress is made, no enlightenment is reached. Only when you drop them do the narrators assert themselves and cry defiance. (I assume there are multiple viewpoints, rather than just one narrator with a varied life.)

But I don’t think silences depicts broken silence as good, necessarily – it sounds to me like many of the narrators are in dire straits, facing battles or their own deaths. Many of them assert themselves against a “they,” an other. When I consider what silences have dire consequences when broken, I immediately think of figures like Harvey Weinstein, powerful people who take all they can and enforce silence with NDAs, threats of legal action; I think of how every month some game industry boy is found to have done horrible things to women and all his Twitter followers immediately mobilise to harass whoever spoke out. I won’t go as far as saying silences is a #MeToo poem, but it presents a pretty powerful image of silence as something to be survived, a burden which is trying to crush the bearers (but not if they can help it).

There’s other little strands in silences – references to the body, and to folk tradition – but I’ll stop here, before I go down some House of Leaves rabbit hole trying to extract answers. I found this poem engaging, as someone who doesn’t read too much poetry. It’s still making me pause to think about it a few days after playing it.

Ribbons: Best Poem, maybe, though the only other entry tagged “poetry” is also by B Minus Seven. Maybe also Best Use of Medium? I feel like Texture was the right choice for this work, and the use of simple binary choices between eye/shoulder and uphold/drop is spare and effective.

Spring Thing 2020 review: 4×4 Galaxy (Agnieszka Trzaska)

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Played 7th April
Online version played
Playtime: 1hr 45mins for one full playthrough

Link to 4×4 Galaxy on the Spring Thing 2020 ballot

4×4 Galaxy is a Twine-powered procedurally generated space explorer with RPG elements and trading. You’re dropped into a galaxy of 16 planets with randomised skills and a randomised main objective. In my run of the game, for example, my quest was to rescue a friend from slavers.

I like 4×4 Galaxy a lot, but I have to admit I was nervous about this game before playing it. Procgen games can be really good, with a lot of work and care put into the level-generating algorithms, but they can also be so much less interesting than static level design. I’ve played some absolutely miserable dungeon crawlers which were just square rooms and long squiggly corridors ad nauseum. And even when a procgen game works, can you confidently say that the programming is solid, or did you just get lucky with your version of the game? So when I say that I like 4×4 Galaxy, that comes with the caveats that I liked my version of 4×4 Galaxy, and that I had perhaps unfairly low expectations for it.

Having said all that… I really did like 4×4 Galaxy. The procgen worked for me here. I think Trzaska got the scope exactly right – 16 planets is big enough to make the game’s universe feel expansive, but small enough not to overtax the planet generation and make it feel seriously repetitive. This generation looks pretty simple from the outside (though I’ve tried game development before, and goodness knows it’s way harder than it looks), but with enough variety that it’s exciting to land on a new planet throughout the game.

It helps a lot that the core gameplay loop is a lot of fun. You get a little guy and a spaceship, and you rove the galaxy trading resources and buying items to upgrade your guy and your spaceship while you work towards your quest. 4×4 Galaxy is sort of a bite-size sci-fi RPG, and its simple loop and constant character progression scratches that same itch for me as a good Cookie Clicker-like game does. There’s good variety in what you can do, too, from trading to mine resources to exploring dungeons and fighting monsters. (Admittedly, a lot of these dungeons were just long corridors of rooms in my playthrough, but that’s fair enough for a choice-based game – I think I’d rather keep it simple than have to navigate a complex and confusing space with a long list of directions.)

In my playthrough, I found that the character generation had a huge influence on the gameplay loop. You get two skills assigned to your character out of a list of five, which influence your likelihood of success at certain tasks. For example, one of my character’s skills was piloting, which gave me an advantage in spaceship fights and a better chance of avoiding negative random events while flying between planets. On the other hand, I didn’t have the Combat skill for hand-to-hand fighting in dungeons at first, so I struggled a lot with even the easiest fights, even after upgrading my health and weapons. But I was able to pick up the Combat skill in a sidequest, and the difference in my fighting success was like night and day. So I think 4×4 Galaxy is weighted to encourage or even demand a playstyle based on your character’s skills. This is pretty good for keeping replays interesting, though I wish I’d realised this before butting my head against hand-to-hand combat for the first half of my run.

As in any game with a high degree of randomness, luck can interfere with the game in other major ways. You have a notable chance of bumping into very powerful warships as you travel between planets, and these encounters can just go against you rapidly. Even with the Piloting skill, I wasn’t able to do much about the most powerful enemies like the Drone swarms. Thankfully, you can buy items to help you land free hits or escape these fights (though if you forgot to stock up or didn’t have the money to buy any, good luck). In some quests, though, you’ll need to fight these ships to collect items, and that can be its own trial – I was stuck roving between planets for a full 15 minutes trying to get a specific type of warship to show up for my quest, for example.

One more quibble: although the layout of 4×4 Galaxy is good, I would like a more involved UI. For example, I’d like some way to track which planets have things left to explore on them and what sidequests you’re in the middle of. (There’s a journal, but it only really tells you about your main objective and describes the planets.) I’d also like finer control over selling star fragments specifically – you can sell them one at a time or in bulk, but if you have 200 fragments and you need to retain 80 of them for your quest, you end up clicking the sell one button 120 times or until you get fed up.

These aren’t really major quibbles. Outside of these, I enjoyed my afternoon spent with 4×4 Galaxy, and I’d recommend the game. I’ll likely return to this the next time I need to scratch that game progression itch.

Ribbons: I’d say Best Use of Procgen, but I don’t know if any of the other entries use procgen yet. Maybe Best Gameplay?