Rovarsson's Spring Thing 2024

[rovarsson]

>X BAJORAN LILAC

Small reddish and purple flowers on thickly branched stems.

>SMELL IT

Your scent-receptors are overwhelmed by the extra-terrestrial scent. Strange visions appear before your mind’s eye, visions of the…

• Voyage of the Marigold

A deadly plague has broken out on one of the colony planets! A cure has been synthesised, ready to be administered. First though, we must safely get it through this Glexx-dominated nebula.

A voyage through a danger-ridden region of space. Aside from hostile Glexx-attacks, expect space-time whirley-whorleys and monsters-of-the-week.
The way you choose to deal with the randomised threats and opportunities you encounter will add up to determine the eventual outcome of your mission. Death is a not-uncommon consequence. But the call of victory and the lives of the inhabitants of the plague-infested colony urge you to try again.

I had a lot of fun with this. Each new area of the nebula holds a surprise that could be a pitch for an entire episode of the TV-show this game is based on. I was especially enthralled by the huge debris-field of remnants of a collosal statue floating in space. My imagination went in overdrive at that sight.

I think that is the main strength of Voyage of the Marigold: its many storylets serve as an imagination-catalyst, making the story, the characters and their backgrounds, and the history of the Glexx ↔ Federation conflict larger than what is described in the text alone.

The beautiful images support the scenarios, inviting the player to dream along with the story.

Great short space-exploration simulator. Very inviting to replay and find new pathways through the nebula.

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

Wait a minute.

This sounds almost identical to the plot of an unreleased concept for a graphical game by Infocom, called Timesync!
You are sent across the galaxy to find and return a cure for a deadly disease an evil alien race called the Greybacks have set to be unleashed on Earth! My main realisation was about alien races and TV shows! The main concept on Timesync has to do with TV reception (but never broadcasting), and therefore each alien race watches a different 60s/70s TV show depending on their distance from Earth and their frequency regarding TV reception. Gas animating! Fascinating!

[AndrewStephens]

Thank you for playing, I am glad you had fun.

The sector you mention is one of my favorite ideas as well. I wanted to lean into the crazy cosmic-scale concepts of 60s and 70s scifi and leave a lot of things unexplained. It is one of the simpler sectors in terms of choices but was a pain in the neck to implement due to the direction the statue is pointing not being random.

I have never heard of Timesync although I think we all know I wouldn’t be above ripping that awesome idea off.

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

It’s cool when coincidences like such arise! I agree about the idea of 60s and 70s stuff closely related to high tech sci FI stuff! (You get what I mean by stuff…)

[rovarsson]

>X ROSE

A strangely stylised rose, shimmering into existence and out again. You feel the urge to cup it protectively and simultaneously show it proudly to the world.

>HOLD ROSE

You raise the rose up high for all to see. Thorns cut your palm, blood runs down your wrist. A red haze comes over your vision, swirls before your eyes, takes you through time and space to a crucial moment. A time to rewrite…

• Social Democracy; An Alternate History

This game scares the shit out of me. More than any horror or mystery thriller.

The heavy burden of responsibility toward the future, the painful but necessary trade-offs between deeply felt ethics and often ruthless pragmatism, the betrayal of my personal morals in the face of a rising tide of evil…

And the realisation that a lot of this could easily be transplanted to our present time.

Scary as shit. I’ll be playing this a lot in the coming weeks. Maybe I’ll be able to come up with a more analytical review then.

[rovarsson]

>X SORBUS AUCUPARIA

A rowan tree shades this part of the garden. The white fluffy blossoms spread a fresh and slightly bitter scent.

>CLIMB ROWAN TREE

You start climbing the small tree, higher and higher, until it’s obvious that this tree is bigger on the climbside. You poke your head above the highest branches, and realise that you are just in time for a…

• Rescue at Quickenheath

A stirring tale of robbers and lovers! You must rescue your true one who was sentenced, no matter what it takes!

I really liked the fast pace of this story. Even though the interaction is pretty fine-grained, the available choices are mostly straightforward enough not to impede the tempo. There are a few obstacles that require some further thought or deeper reading, but even then the forward pull of the game is strong.

The major cause of all this is the personality of the protagonist. Decisive, gung-ho, arrogant, with a tiny heart of soft fluff and softer feelings hidden beneath the boisterous façade.

Well-written, a lovable pair of main characters, many glimpses of a more fully-realised world just behind the curtains. I for one would love to see more of this world, perhaps in a sequel (or series of sequels) to Rescue at Quickenheath, or a larger adventure set in the same world. (A political espionage thriller about a human agent embedded in the Faery-embassy. With fake cobweb wings poking out her back…)

I liked it!

[wolfbiter]

@rovarsson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
[Emily Dickinson]

I enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!

[mo]

thank you very much for your kind review! i’m particularly glad to hear that you liked the protagonists - i honestly had no idea whether people would get on with them or not. there are a couple ideas for related stories currently languishing in my heap of unfinished projects, so we’ll see if they ever actually see the light of day!

[rovarsson]

>X RHEUM HYBRIDUM

In a corner of the garden, a rhubarb plant has been left to bloom.

>TASTE IT

The slightly sweet and strongly tart taste overwhelms you. Once you come to your senses, you find yourself at the front door of an apartment, ready to unleash your sleuthing skills on…

• The Case of the Solitary Resident

The neighbours were worried about a putrid smell coming from the next door apartment. You find the corpse of a woman in a rather advanced stage of decay. What caused her death, and did someone else have a hand in it?

In terms of space, The Solitary Resident is a small game. Just a few rooms to explore. But when taking into account the large number of leads and indications these few rooms have to offer, it turns out to be of impressive size. The amount of physical evidence found in the apartment, lab-results, and information gleaned from interviewing witnesses and close connections grows and grows, leading to a challenging investigation trying to interconnect all the facts and clues.

While I did miss the individual freedom to OPEN WINDOW or LOOK BEHIND FRIDGE at times, the choice-based approach is very sturdy in keeping the player’s focus on the important things and avoiding a flailing easter-egg hunt consisting of an endless series of LOOK UNDER, MOVE, LIFT, etc… Moving about the few rooms of the apartment, looking through some encyclopaediae for additional knowledge, and the gradual discovery of a number of persons of interest to interrogate provide enough sense of exploration.

An interesting simulation of a (possible) murder-investigation. Very detailed, it requires a sharp focus from the player, a dedication to meticulously sift through the available information, and the powers of deduction to narrow down the possibilities to a satisfactory solution.

Very engaging. I liked it.

[thesleuthacademy]

(Rhubarb, indeed!)

Thank you for the review and I am really glad to see that you enjoyed it! It really does seem Twine works better for such genres.

[rovarsson]

>X PARIS QUADRIFOLIA

The spindly flower of a plant commonly called Leopard’s Bane. Mayhaps its poisonous berry would deter dragons too?

>TAKE LEOPARD’S BANE
As you pick the berry in the middle of the flower, it bursts. Droplets of juice spray into your mouth and eyes. When you wake up, you find yourself paralysed, unable to speak coherently or act upon your surroundings. You’ve been reduced to …

• Nonverbal Communication

A delightful little puzzle! Its small map and constrained parser make it highly focused, condensing all the action in a few rooms, the search for answers in a compact solution-space. Meanwhile, Nonverbal Communication manages to present the player with a very large degree of freedom to experiment and try variations within those constraints.

A few things stood out for me, lifting this game from a good find-the-correct-sequence problem to a great narrative puzzle.
-Small variations on the sequence of actions produce decidedly different outcomes.
-The frame story offers a funny and consistent in-universe explanation for the limits on the parser.
-The key move to start solving the game is hidden in plain sight. This provides an uplifting aha-experience when you find it.

Very good.

[Ally (Allyson Gray)]

Thank you so much for playing and reviewing Nonverbal Communication!
I’m delighted to hear that you enjoyed all those little elements of the story and puzzles, and your feedback was truly lovely to read.

[rovarsson]

>X MYOSOTIS

Little blue and white mouse-ear petals seem to be actively drawing your attention. Small as they are, their golden heart vibrates strongly, with star-radiused miniature rays shooting off to five sides.

>SNUGGLE CLOSER TO FORGET-ME-NOT

A sudden impulse demands that you draw closer to these little flowers, there is something you must remember. As you lie down beside this humble plant, your cheek softly caresses one of the stem’s leaves…

• The Trials of Rosalinda

What a happy reunion! But not so much for Rosalinda. The player may be happy for Rosie to have all her bones and joints together (and separable at will, of course), she herself still feels a skeleton needs to know about her life.

Where else to start searching for your personal history than at the local boneyard…

Unfortunately for Rosie, and fortunately for the player, she is taken prisoner. Because, well, an ambulating bone-frame of what used to be a person stumbling around between the gravestones is not particularly in line with a wholesome city, wouldn’t you say?

It’s probably because I already played the previous installment, but I found the first few rooms quite tedious. The Trials of Rosalinda is a hybrid [----cough----Russovian----cough----] click-based parser-feeling puzzle-narrative game. I think the prologue is intended as a gentle introduction to the mechanics, patiently feeding the player low-level key&lock puzzles, all the while providing ample holding of hands. Personally, I would have preferred a text dump through the Graveyard-scene.

However…

Once those puzzly-clickety phalanges are shaken loose (and contrarily the skeleton itself locked up…), the game does open up and speed up.

A lot.

The puzzles are inventive, based on switching active characters (or parts thereof…). A lot of them happen (contrary to “are presented”) in the midst of action-sequences. I was particularly impressed with how the author manages to keep the tempo going, impregnating each click with importance and urgency. Either in parser or choice, player input is a gap in time, a pause in the story. To incorporate these pauses into the narrative believably, without ostensibly breaking up a tense scene, is good writing. Good writing around the limitations of the medium, even bringing those limitations into the excitement of the situation.

Freezing a fight-scene to let an outside-player issue a command is swampifying. Having the protagonist be the only one able to act because everyone else is being strangled, wrangled to the groung, or holding a gleaming blade inches off their neck enhances the tension, quickens the tempo.
The game waits for the command, sure, so there is no time to gain, no matter how many minutes between commands…
But the circumstances in the story convince the player that there is no time to lose!

And the story is delightful. Or rather, the characters make the story delightful. Every bit of over-tropeyness is supported by the protagonist’s or her sidekick’s personalities. They pull the player along into the world where these things are natural. Which doesn’t mean all the events are expected, there are a number of twists and turns to put the players expectations on their heads.

I really hope this is not the last in the series. I love Rosie, and I’d love to swing her rattling bones to this tune:

Tom Waits - "Rosie"

---

And I’d love to taste Tekla’s chili.

[rovarsson]

>X ROSE

A dew-bespeckled dark rose…

>TOUCH ROSE

Petals fall and flutter into darkness…

>FOLLOW PETALS

• Doctor Jeangilles’ Letters

A pink petal…

A red petal…

A silhouetted Black Rose…

A link to a review about the French version...

Le concours est commencé! And the Seeds have sprouted! - Competitions - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum (intfiction.org)

→ A lovely bunch of flowers for @manonamora as a thank you for this great story:

[manonamora (Manon)]

Thank you!!

[agat (Agnieszka Trzaska)]

Thank you very much for the review, and for all of the feedback you sent me! Now that the competition has closed, I’ve published an updated version of Trials to itch. io - it fixes the various issues you found.