Human Needs (Marek Kapolka)

“The idea was to reverse the social and commercial mechanics of The Sims. You send your character off to go to parties for 8 hours a day to gain social currency to buy friends, then you mingle and form friendships with household appliances.” – August 24, 2014

Noyb’s remarks: “One thing about inverting The Sims’ treatment of people and objects is that those life simulators already objectify people. Talking to a housemate or neighbor satisfies a character’s need for social interaction the same way watching television satisfies their need for entertainment. Early Sims games lock out higher-paying careers until your Sim makes a certain number of friends, leading to the common behavior of packing neighboring houses with identical Sims you never intend to play, exclusively there for their financial utility to your main characters.

"Human Needs expands The Sims’ Social Need into four separate metrics – Violence, Sex, Humor, and Hope – while compressing all other needs into a single Things meter. Letting any meter deplete prematurely ends the game, apart from Sex. (Prolonged abstinence only introduces a friendly onanistic fluid to the house.) The player buys friends according to what needs they fulfill and their efficiency at filling those needs, while furniture appears randomly in the house and a traditional love story with a leather chair plays out in the background. The writing exclusively refers to other people by their vocation, while most inanimate objects have both names and functions.

"The Violence Need takes this objectification to disturbing levels, regularly asking the player character to attack or kill their human houseguests, else risk ending the game. It reinforces the abusive, exploitative nature of the game’s need-fulfillment mechanics by showing how easily it can model non-consensual violence. The game visibly tracks the player character’s relationship level with every object, but not housemates. From the player character’s flawed perspective, friends are interchangeable commodities. There is no relationship to harm.”

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Four Shades of Gray (mcc)

“Floating blurry [psychedelic] cubes […] Turn on your sound.” – August 22, 2013

Noyb’s remarks: “A field of cubes float in an empty, white void. Clicking on a cube lets the player jump on top of it, so long as there’s room above. As the player’s traversing and mapping this abstract space, she spies something out of place. Another character. Red. Shaped like a pawn from a travel chess set or a solid formed by rotating an armless, skirt-wearing bathroom door icon. Clicking on their body or the block on which they rest results in unambiguous language asking the player to leave them alone. The player has invaded their space.

"This pattern of discovery and rebuke continues with different visual effects and structures until the last level, which blurs nearby cubes into an indistinct mess. Large swathes of gray with tiny splashes of color, only briefly coalescing into an intelligible image every five to ten seconds. This oscillating effect makes it challenging to understand the level geometry and find Red. And that’s the point. Red does not want to talk. Red does not want to be found. The player’s actions are selfish, predatory, and abusive.”

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The Lucid Dreamer (Luckylucanos)

“Tell me what you think about it” – June 12, 2014

Noyb’s remarks: “The Lucid Dreamer presents a series of puzzles taking place simultaneously in a small one-room apartment and a larger dreamscape. The player falls asleep to explore the dream world, and can wake up at any time to return to the apartment. Most of the puzzles involve taking actions in one world to affect the other, ultimately changing conditions in the dreamworld enough to open up a path to push some crates onto some marked tiles.

"The first puzzle is the only one with some fluidity to the solution: recognizing that pushing around a pile of clothes on your bedroom floor also moves special wall tiles you can’t see until you fall asleep, supporting the cognitive challenge of connecting their movements. The second level – feeding your cat to dispel images of hungry tigers in the dreamworld – is trivial enough to solve before even falling asleep and understanding why this action was necessary. The third level – passing objects between the two worlds by placing them in common containers – also follows easily. The last level rests solely on a random binary trivia question.

"At the end of each level comes a standard multistep block-pushing puzzle, boring videogame nonsense that poorly serves a premise which should be limited only by the developer’s imagination. They’re simple enough to require almost no higher level strategies to solve, trivial for anyone who has played a Sokoban clone or variant. Apart from the first level, they don’t overlap with the main puzzle interactions at all, serving only as tedious extra steps before the game recognizes the player’s victory.”

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Gray Desert (Pierre Chevalier)

“These are the things I’m interested in at the moment : randomly colliding stuff through various procedures and exploring how these procedures and randomization can be used to create some sort of meaning.” – July 26, 2014

Noyb’s remarks: “Gray forms emerge from a black screen, monochrome splotches that quickly grow to suggest the contours of a vast desert. Photography processed into almost unrecognizable, unearthly shapes: cracked earth, rolling dunes, uneven horizons, hints of clouds and trees and heavenly orbs. Clicking or pressing the up arrow key fades the scene slightly and overlays another, muted shades of both old and new clashing or cohering into a new image. This action gives a strong sensation of motion, landmarks fading or reemerging with every player-made step. 

"Past images seem to remain in memory even after they visibly fade away, making the game struggle as the player continues, each new step taking a little longer than the last. This gives a sense of weight to the player’s exploration of this space, an exhaustion that slows the player down until she eventually gives up and closes the game, implicitly choosing that screen to be her final resting spot.

"I didn’t play much with the other available verbs. Pressing the down arrow undoes the latest movement, giving the player some small control over the screen’s visual evolution, while the left and right arrow keys pan the topmost layer, marring the screen with prominent vertical lines at the image’s boundaries. I feel some tension between my enjoyment of the journey’s implicit narrative – a design ethos foregrounded in the companion game The Wait with the inclusion of text, recognizable human figures and an explicit ending – and actions that expose some of the drawing mechanics to the player, steps towards a McClure-like experience of facilitating the creation of compelling images through constrained exploration of a possibility space.”

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Ghostie Goes to School (kylerhoades)

“Ghostie Goes To School is the story of an innocent young Ghostie facing the challenges of school life and growing up.” – February 27, 2012

Noyb’s remarks: “Ghostie Goes to School is spooky in its emptiness. The player takes on the role of Ghostie, a ghost pursuing education from 1st grade through college. While there appear to be living characters in the game world, there is no way to interact with them. At first, the only thing you can do is walk into one of three schools. Entering a school either instantly bumps you up a grade/semester or tells you you aren’t the right age to attend. Time passes by in a flash with no real impact. Once Ghostie qualifies for high school, the game introduces the only interaction outside of studying: taking drugs. Explicitly, the game sets up education as a monotonous system, and drugs as something which disrupts that repetitive framework, the only actions which cause the narrator to mention Ghostie’s emotions outside of empty congratulations every time they age up.

"The player can end the game, graduating from college and receiving a final grade, without touching the stuff. I couldn’t discern any correlation between the player’s actions and her final score, but the only way to lose the game is by taking drugs. Every time you do, there is a random chance of permanently losing one of your three hearts. Run out of hearts and Ghostie dies, which naturally leads to a dynamic of experimenting in youth and avoiding them after a few bad experiences, when it’s clear you don’t have many more chances. In the background, The Kooks sing, ‘Control yourself / Take only what you need from it […] I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot / I guess not.’”

[Download for Windows]

A Knight of Faith (Juxt)

“In this five-minute game about Kierkegaard’s philosophy, you make decisions and face a challenging test. Will you become the Knight of Faith?” – March 8, 2012

Noyb’s remarks: “A Knight of Faith attempts to be a moral parable in the form of a traditional role-playing game. A number of characters tell the player character that he will be tested, and the only way to prepare for this trial is to fight skeletons. A young girl tempts the player into helping her brother escape from a nearby cave instead of undergoing this training. Whatever the player decides – running through the dungeon, leveling up, taking treasure, or helping a stranger – she will always meet an old man who rattles on about Kierkegaard, concluding that the player is not a ‘Knight of Faith’ but instead either an 'aesthetic’ (described by the game as basically a hedonist) or a 'Knight of Infinite Resignation’ (described by the game as a 'mindless utilitarian drone [devoted] to the Universal, the laws of morality.’) The proposed solution is to reject the offer to restart the trial, instead choosing to end the game, which then prompts the old man to call you a true Knight of Faith.

”(You can also break the game by dying in the dungeon or standing in the brother’s escape route before talking to him, but those endings seem like bugs or oversights not explicitly acknowledged by the text.)

“I am not up on my Kierkegaard, but from a shaky read of Fear and Trembling, I don’t think this game illustrates the two kinds of knights well. The old man seems to conflate Kierkegaard’s notion of an 'ethical’ man with that of a Knight of Infinite Resignation, someone who has thoroughly convinced themselves that a certain action or goal is impossible in such a way that nothing can occur that will call this belief into question. A Knight of Faith undergoes that same movement towards infinite resignation, but paradoxically also believes that through the divine or the absurd they will achieve their goals. Kierkegaard illustrates this in detail through multiple retellings of the Biblical story of Abraham, tempted by his God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, taking him on a multi-day journey all while simultaneously, paradoxically believing both that Isaac must be slain and that God will spare Isaac’s life. 

"The game deems the player a Knight of Faith for choosing to quit, but this action feels more like the movement of a Knight of Infinite Resignation. Without access to the source code, games are often black box machines, rules and systems only knowable in part through experimentation. As a player, I may suspect a challenge has no solution, but may not convince myself of that until I try out multiple approaches towards the problem. Even if I attempt every reasonable permutation of actions, there may still exist one obscure series of inputs that unlocks the desired outcome. It was in the process of trying out the obvious, signposted narrative branches that the game labeled me a Knight of Infinite Resignation. When I grew tired of experimenting and resigned myself that the game had no solution, it labeled me a Knight of Faith.”

[Download for Windows]

Ants on Plaid (SuperWes)

“I spent a month or two last year making a simple game inspired by the bit-generations games. I wanted to make something where the visuals and interface were simplistic and nonthreatening. […] Whether you win or lose is more dependent on what level you’re playing on than it is your skill, so I consider it a failed game. I could probably salvage it a bit, but I’m not sure it would be worth it. […] The best thing to come out of it was the Random Plaid generator, which I really love.” – February 15, 2009

Noyb’s remarks: "Each of those hundreds of specks is a single ant, crawling erratically over your screen. Every level is a plaid texture, a playing field of colorful, visually asymmetric rectangles. The player rests in a single cell and can immediately jump to any neighboring cell. Resting in place causes the current cell to flash, killing every ant within its borders. The goal: to exterminate at least half of the ants before time expires.

“For an abandoned prototype, it’s not a bad start. This is a game about observation and navigation, the player prioritizing attacking cells that are both nearby and populous. This focus on embodying a space while remaining aware of enemy density reminds me a bit of Every Extend Extra, except trading chain reactions for controlled attacks of spatially limited impact.

"The developer is right to note the erratic difficulty curve, stemming from the disproportionate importance of larger grid spaces to killing ants. Get a pattern with lots of small, thin rectangles and each attack will hit less ants at once. Since every ant has the same effect, what you have is a degenerate strategy made more or less effective depending on the level layout, but applied against a win condition that remains invariant to the full scope of possible levels.”

[Download for Windows (XNA)]

Be the Best! (jackeloperson)

“Go around and be the best at everything!” – May 23, 2013

Noyb’s remarks: “This reminds me so much of one of my first games, a branching narrative made in QuickBasic, comprising a linear series of choices where each fork had only one correct decision. I was a kid at the time, dependent on my father to show me the logical and syntactic cruft necessary to display text, read and parse input, jump to a different part of the source code depending on what the player typed. It’s even easier now for kids and newcomers to make a text-based game – with Twine and Quest and Inform – and that’s a very good thing.

"Be the Best! presents the player with a series of scenarios and asks her to pick the one option the developer finds most awesome. Guess the wrong one and you’re either taken back to an earlier passage or to one of five ending pages that collectively spell out the word "loser.” In her analysis of the game Dream Zone, an early text adventure by teenagers who would go on to found Naughty Dog, Leigh Alexander notes the incongruity that a game developed by kids about an imaginative dreamscape includes a lengthy segment about dealing with an absurd corporate bureaucracy. So it is in Be the Best, where despite its open, imaginative premise things never spiral beyond a distorted reflection of adult life – eating breakfast, driving to work, dressing up for a job interview – attenuated by affected positive attitudes and playful gymnastics but always taking this basic structure as a given. The ending is a lot more subdued and sweet than I expected: finding a job that makes the player character happy and is a natural fit for their showmanship, even if it doesn’t maximize their income.“

Editorial Note: Per Zero Feedback’s criteria, this game received zero comments on the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), but it’s arguable whether or not the developer strictly posted their own game. I’ve stretched this criteria in the past for IFDB games, in part because I didn’t want to exclude one of the larger IF-focused communities from this project and because members of that community frequently post other people’s games for critique, curation, or completeness. The person who posted Be the Best! on IFDB, though, happens to be a robot, an automated process triggered automatically between January 2013 and January 2014 when any developer posted their game on textadventures.co.uk, a separate development community with a markedly different demographic than IFDB. The presence of this bot led to a fascinating and horrifying discussion that touches on whether community members meant to share their games with the IFDB, what it means to be a creator or critic when the quantity of games is increasing at an ever-faster rate, how it feels when your releases go overlooked, whether IFDB’s practical ethos align with its stated goal of being "a comprehensive catalog of IF,” and a lot of gatekeeping language about what defines a finished game and whether a game’s quality or adherence to IF tradition should exclude it from the site and in some cases whether they actually are games. It’s an important read if you’re at all interested in game-sharing platforms and curation.

[Play Online] [Download (Quest File)] [Download Quest Interpreter for Windows]

Terrifying Drive (Juliette Porée)

“Not all that terrifying really.” – February 25, 2012

Noyb’s remarks: “Short physics-based driving game where the player maneuvers a car over a bumpy, abstract, two-dimensional landscape. Unlike Elastomania, a motocross game with a similar setup, Terrifying Drive doesn’t treat flipping over on your back as a failure state, nor does it provide any way to lean in midair to affect your momentum. Instead, halfway through the course the game tells the player she can use space to jump, which is precisely when everything breaks down in a glorious way. At first jumping seems like a way of correcting player error, but it’s not long before the player discovers she can jump multiple times in midair, careening through the sky, jostling the car into nooks and crannies impossible to reach through careful driving alone.

"While I describe this as a joyous act of discovery, I’m reminded of my own underwhelmed reaction to Desert Golfing’s occasional breaks from the minimalist framework it sets up early on, an emotional reaction upon finding something small but unexpected and the difficulty of conveying those feelings without shifting the very expectations which supported that delight. The initial discovery becomes a story to be enjoyed vicariously, only directly experienced by those players who know the game exists, heard enough to want to play it, but know nothing of the surprises that may await.”

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The Worm (Softwave)

“A flash game about a god-like worm made in a day. I might polish it a bit today.” – May 29, 2014

Noyb’s remarks: "The Worm is a short, cute game with a few surprises. The platforming could be more responsive – low acceleration means it takes a few frames after tapping left or right before the character moves, and there’s no need to put grab and throw on separate buttons – but it doesn’t matter much to the experience since the game does not focus on precise execution. It centers on a single spiritual choice: the ‘sacrifice self, sacrifice other, or sacrifice God’ trinity of common interactions between a videogame character and a digital deity. Curiously, not all of these options may be possible in a given playthrough, since the number of trash can sacrifices and explosive TNT blocks vary randomly. Still, I enjoyed the moment the worm emerges, and some colorful effects when I angered it.“

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