IFCOMP2014: Arqon: A Criminal's Journey review

Arqon: A Criminal's Journey by H. J. Hoke placed 39th in the 20th Interactive Fiction Competition IFCOMP2014. You can play online at ifdb. This series of blog posts are mini-reviews I wrote as a fellow author to document my impressions of other games.

Spoilers below

You play the part of Arqon - a criminal basically forced to work as an assassin for the bureau of magic. It took me awhile to get used to which commands worked - probably my lack of familiarity with parser games. I encountered a few bugs:

In the room before meeting the hermit the description said I could go up, east and west but exits said I could only go west and up.

After killing the Hobgoblin and meeting the hermit:
*** Run-time problem P47 (at paragraph 663 in the source text): Phrase applied to an incompatible kind of value

I almost couldn't make the game work after that. #sadface And just as I was starting to have fun...

Ok, I managed to get past that bug and a misspelling of hermit as "hermet". Then the game was over. And just as I was starting to have fun.

A few things: a criminal recruited as an assassin ... yeah maybe. Your inventory being left intact after being imprisoned... nope. The mayor hanging out a few levels deeper than the dungeon... nope. If the placement issues were fixed then this could be enjoyable enough to play in a larger version.

The writing could do with some proof reading and edits. I didn't mind the combat, but I blanked over the combat text since it didn't seem to matter.

The verdict: skip this game unless there are major updates.

IFCOMP2014: The Black Lily Review

The Black Lily by Hannes Schüller placed 17th in the 20th Interactive Fiction Competition IFCOMP2014. You can play online at ifdb. This series of blog posts are mini-reviews I wrote as a fellow author to document my impressions of other games.

Spoilers below

At first I thought this was some story about a man reaching a point in his life where he was deciding to leave aside the passions of the flesh and settle for more stable relationships. This was some bookish withdrawn guy who lived a quiet but comfortable enough life. Then I met Lily. What the heck! So I go back and open up the safe. Oh. I'm a murderer. Heck. So I play again. I'm also maybe a woman. Well that shows how much I'm projecting into the story.

Yeah, my suspicions were raised by the title: The Black Lily being similar to the Black Dahlia (a murder victim). As I played I saw the recurring Black Lily motif as some kind of marker - a symbol that linked the encounters into something to be left behind. But then it became a great plot device to represent the urges of the player character without giving too much away.

At first I wondered why the shower scene was needed. Why not just go straight to the albums... but in the end it made sense. This was the time to discover the identity of the character and I missed it.

The commands were easy enough and the world richly described. I didn't get all the endings or much of a score. But Yep. I liked it. Play time is under an hour and you might want to play a few times.

Display text at end of passage macro for Twine

I was helping Harry Giles out with some modifications to his IFCOMP2014 entry Raik. It became useful to set text early in the passage that would be shown only at the end of the passage.

An easy way to achieve this in Twine with custom macros. They are <<atend>> ... <<atendd>>.

::PassageTitle
<<atend>>

This text appears at the end of the current passage.<<atendd>>And this text appears in the usual place.

How do you use this in your own projects? Add the following line to your StoryIncludes:

http://raw.githubusercontent.com/tweecode/TwineQuest/master/macros/9999%20Macro%20atend.twee

Why might you want this macro? Here are some examples. You be inside an <<if>> macro from which you want to set a choice to appear at the end of the passage. You might be using the excellent ReplaceMacros from Glorious Tranwrecks and want to have text that always appear at the end of the passage no matter what the state of the rest of the passage.
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