Thunder Perfect Witchcraft [français]

Deux critiques plutôt encourageantes de mes jeux, ces derniers temps, sur un blog appelé Arcane Cache.

Une pour The Liberation :

The liberation is a short hyperlink fiction game done with the Twine-Engine.

The story is about a revolutionary who is sitting in an embassy, isolated from the outside and cut from his comrades since many years. He is pining to walk, and if it is for the last time, on the nearby street, knowing that this would be his certain death. Sitting in his chamber, he is about to write a last and incisive letter. What is it about, and what will he do? Any further word would be a word too much.

The game is text only, and the writing is absolutely pristine; tense, with a good and pointed language. The interface uses a special drag & drop quirk that works out quite well here: it fits the tone and atmosphere, and gives a certain feel of both lethargy and gravitas. The freedom of choice that feels reduced for the protagonist is paired in the players freedom to control the events that happen within the game – but in the end, the supposed restrictions are broken – this game offers us its own answer to the question how free the individual really is.

A single run will take less than thirty minutes. The game offers different outcomes, and I recommend to check them all out. Nothing more to say, really. The liberation is a short, very good game.

https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2024/01/04/the-liberation/

L'autre pour Solitary Stars :

Solitary Stars is a hyperlink fiction game.

I was tempted to write that the game circles around questions about the nature of memories, remorse, relations, or the entanglement of individuals within an imperfect world – and this would have been somewhat true, as these themes are present, yet it also would not do justice to this game: Solitary Stars feels much more like a window to its own little cosmos, and evades simple interpretations not only through the amount of different ideas and topics that are touched, but also through a skillful utilization of the hypertext technique.

The game is set in an shadowy post-war country reigned with an iron hand by a small elite – the protagonist, once member of a sect, is invited by an old, rather unpleasant acquaintance, and lured in by the promise of meeting the love interest of their youth, which they were never able to fully overcome. While waiting for the encounter, we learn about the surrounding world, and the protagonists biography, relationships, ideals, and beliefs. Different choices are at hand, and some of them will greatly influence the personality and interactions of the protagonist (and thus the story the player encounters) – the end, however, will always be the same.

Neither does the dynamic story make the game or its message arbitrary at all, as this piece doesn’t ask “What would you do?” but rather, in a honest way, “What does matter?”. Nor do the melancholic and dark tones ever change into nihilism: Instead, the game holds a slightly distorting mirror towards us, in which the grotesque elements of our own world are emphasized; on this stage, the human nature is constructed, explored, questioned, and turned into its own cosmos. This humane and silent approach opposes the cynicism with which most contemporary mainstream fantasy stories appear to be charged. This might be an attempt to catch the zeitgeist and think about important matters, while practically evading the actual issues and causes of global crises such as capitalism, (post-)colonialism, chauvinism, racism, the exploitation of humans, animals and landscapes, and so on.

The game has a rather large scope, and you should expect to play around an hour for a single play-through. The writing is superb, and utilizes the hypertext technique in an all natural, coherent way. Solitary Stars is clearly an attempt to use video games as a medium for serious narrative art (or to extend prosa by digital means), and it’s very successful at doing so. The developer warned me that there are game breaking bugs (locking you on pages), but I didn’t encountered them. Beneath the main game there are also some illustrations available on the Itch-Page.

Solitary Stars is built upon Inform7, a language specialized on supporting interactive fiction, that seems to go way back to the very beginnings of video gaming. It was created by Stephané F., who also created „The liberation„, a game reviewed on this blog a few weeks ago.

https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2024/03/11/solitary-stars/

*

Thunder Perfect Witchcraft est un site web tenu par des développeurs du même nom, également actifs sur itch.io. Je les ai découverts sur une instance Mastodon, je ne sais plus laquelle (et j'ai de toutes façons quitté ce réseau peu après) et nous avons commencé à échanger des mails.

Je n'ai pas encore essayé leurs jeux (la 2D n'est pas vraiment ma tasse de thé, je dois l'admettre) mais il y a d'autres contenus sur leur site qui me plaisent bien, notamment Erdspiegel, un projet "dungeon synth" (ou "post-dungeon synth", car ils élargissent pas mal les limites du genre) qui m'a rappelé, sur le premier album, la B.O du bon vieux jeu Darklands.

Ils ont également un projet appelé tout simplement Adventures (partant du principe, j'imagine, que la vie quotidienne est une aventure, avec son lot d'errances et d'explorations) qui est un blog photographique lo-fi, dont tous les clichés sont pris avec un vieux portable, et uploadés sans aucune modification.

J'aime assez le rendu de ces photos, je dois dire, qui me rappellent certaines de mes propres expérimentations avec un téléphone hyper-primitif en 2010. D'une certaine manière, les vieilles photos numériques sont devenues aux images actuelles ce que l'argentique est, dans l'absolu, au numérique : une technique dépassée, imparfaite, mais "chaude", à haute valeur sentimentale, et caractérisée par la rareté – puisqu'on ne stockait pas 50 gigas de photos sur un téléphone à l'époque, on en prenait un peu moins qu'aujourd'hui...

Thunder Perfect Witchcraft [english]

Two rather encouraging reviews of my games lately, on a blog called Arcane Cache.

One for The Liberation:

The liberation is a short hyperlink fiction game done with the Twine-Engine.

The story is about a revolutionary who is sitting in an embassy, isolated from the outside and cut from his comrades since many years. He is pining to walk, and if it is for the last time, on the nearby street, knowing that this would be his certain death. Sitting in his chamber, he is about to write a last and incisive letter. What is it about, and what will he do? Any further word would be a word too much.

The game is text only, and the writing is absolutely pristine; tense, with a good and pointed language. The interface uses a special drag & drop quirk that works out quite well here: it fits the tone and atmosphere, and gives a certain feel of both lethargy and gravitas. The freedom of choice that feels reduced for the protagonist is paired in the players freedom to control the events that happen within the game – but in the end, the supposed restrictions are broken – this game offers us its own answer to the question how free the individual really is.

A single run will take less than thirty minutes. The game offers different outcomes, and I recommend to check them all out. Nothing more to say, really. The liberation is a short, very good game.

https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2024/01/04/the-liberation/

The other for Solitary Stars :

Solitary Stars is a hyperlink fiction game.

I was tempted to write that the game circles around questions about the nature of memories, remorse, relations, or the entanglement of individuals within an imperfect world – and this would have been somewhat true, as these themes are present, yet it also would not do justice to this game: Solitary Stars feels much more like a window to its own little cosmos, and evades simple interpretations not only through the amount of different ideas and topics that are touched, but also through a skillful utilization of the hypertext technique.

The game is set in an shadowy post-war country reigned with an iron hand by a small elite – the protagonist, once member of a sect, is invited by an old, rather unpleasant acquaintance, and lured in by the promise of meeting the love interest of their youth, which they were never able to fully overcome. While waiting for the encounter, we learn about the surrounding world, and the protagonists biography, relationships, ideals, and beliefs. Different choices are at hand, and some of them will greatly influence the personality and interactions of the protagonist (and thus the story the player encounters) – the end, however, will always be the same.

Neither does the dynamic story make the game or its message arbitrary at all, as this piece doesn’t ask “What would you do?” but rather, in a honest way, “What does matter?”. Nor do the melancholic and dark tones ever change into nihilism: Instead, the game holds a slightly distorting mirror towards us, in which the grotesque elements of our own world are emphasized; on this stage, the human nature is constructed, explored, questioned, and turned into its own cosmos. This humane and silent approach opposes the cynicism with which most contemporary mainstream fantasy stories appear to be charged. This might be an attempt to catch the zeitgeist and think about important matters, while practically evading the actual issues and causes of global crises such as capitalism, (post-)colonialism, chauvinism, racism, the exploitation of humans, animals and landscapes, and so on.

The game has a rather large scope, and you should expect to play around an hour for a single play-through. The writing is superb, and utilizes the hypertext technique in an all natural, coherent way. Solitary Stars is clearly an attempt to use video games as a medium for serious narrative art (or to extend prosa by digital means), and it’s very successful at doing so. The developer warned me that there are game breaking bugs (locking you on pages), but I didn’t encountered them. Beneath the main game there are also some illustrations available on the Itch-Page.

Solitary Stars is built upon Inform7, a language specialized on supporting interactive fiction, that seems to go way back to the very beginnings of video gaming. It was created by Stephané F., who also created „The liberation„, a game reviewed on this blog a few weeks ago.

https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2024/03/11/solitary-stars/

*

Thunder Perfect Witchcraft is a website run by developers of the same name, who are also active on itch.io. I discovered them on a Mastodon instance, I don't remember which one (and I left that network soon after anyway) and we started exchanging mails.

I haven't tried their games yet (2D isn't really my cup of tea, I must admit) but there's other content on their site that I like, notably Erdspiegel, a "dungeon synth" project (or "post-dungeon synth", as they're stretching the limits of the genre quite a bit) that reminded me, on the first album, of the soundtrack to the good old Darklands game.

They also have a project simply called Adventures (based on the premise, I guess, that everyday life is an adventure, with its share of wanderings and explorations) which is a lo-fi photography blog, with all shots taken with an old telephone, and uploaded unedited.

I rather like the rendering of these photos, I must say, which remind me of some of my own experiments with a hyper-primitive phone in 2010. In a way, old digital photos have become to today's images what film is, in absolute terms, to digital: an outdated, imperfect technique, but "warm", with high sentimental value, and characterized by scarcity – since we didn't store 50 gigabytes of photos on a phone back then, we took slightly fewer than we do today...

Notes sur la fiction interactive et les RPG / Notes on interactive fiction and RPGs

Après les avoir laissé en sommeil pendant quelques années sur mon compte Google Drive, j'ai trouvé le courage de rassembler mes notes éparses en matière de fiction interactive, dans le plus grand désordre, sur ce PDF. Courage et merci à qui voudra les lire.

https://archive.org/details/notes-sur-la-fiction-interactive-et-les-rpg

After leaving them dormant for a few years on my Google Drive account, I've summoned up the courage to compile my scattered notes on interactive fiction, in the greatest disorder, on this PDF. Courage and thanks to anyone who wants to read them.

https://archive.org/details/notes-on-interactive-fiction-and-rpgs/page/n1/mode/1up

Heaven is waiting [français - english]

Superbe chanson de The Danse Society, mais aussi désormais le nom d'un forum phpBB que j'ai décidé d'ouvrir après une discussion avec un ami.

Je suis assez vieux (ce n'est pas un exploit, mais une chance) pour avoir connu le temps béni des chatrooms Caramail, des pages perso en HTML, des bons vieux blogs (qui existent toujours, mais pour quel public ?) et des forums, phpBB ou pas. Netgoth, Axesscode, Wardance, Oraison Funèbre, sans compter mes propres forums : celui de Cauldron Music, celui, quasi-privé, ouvert avec Delwiche au temps de la Nihil Pop Organization, etc.

C'est un authentique drame que la disparition des forums. Internet n'est plus qu'un gigantesque flux, ininterrompu, inassimilable, abrutissant, sans mémoire. J'y vois une volonté politique – qu'elle soit réellement consciente ou pas – de tuer toute possibilité technique, pour le commun des mortels, de sortir de ce flux hypnotisant et de s'organiser, de communiquer, de conserver des informations, dans des espaces numériques publics ou privés, mais maîtrisables, appropriables, comme pouvaient l'être les forums à la grande époque. Ni les groupes Facebook ni les "spaces" sur Twitter, ni les boucles Whatsapp, ne peuvent entièrement remplacer ça.

*

Great song by The Danse Society, but now also the name of a phpBB forum I decided to open after a discussion with a friend.

I'm old enough (not a feat, but a stroke of luck) to have known the blessed days of Caramail chatrooms, HTML personal pages, good old blogs (which still exist, but for what audience?) and forums, phpBB or not. Netgoth, Axesscode, Wardance, Oraison Funèbre, not to mention my own forums: the Cauldron Music, the quasi-private one I opened with Delwiche back in the days of the Nihil Pop Organization, and so on.

The disappearance of forums is a real tragedy. The Internet has become one gigantic, uninterrupted, unassimilable, mind-numbing flow, with no memory. What I see here is a political will - whether really conscious or not - to kill off any technical possibility for ordinary people to escape this hypnotizing flow and organize themselves, communicate and store information, in public or private digital spaces that can be controlled and appropriated, as forums were in their heyday. Neither Facebook groups nor Twitter "spaces", nor Whatsapp loops, can entirely replace this.

Nouvelle Église [english]

Since this autumn, I've been working on a text-based game in Basic, for the Amstrad CPC, which will allow the player to wander through a semi-rural neighborhood on the outskirts of a city; this neighborhood is where I grew up. In it, I reproduce with the greatest possible topological realism the tangle of streets, alleyways, wastelands, orchards and fields where I spent my childhood, which I explored from top to bottom, and which today in part no longer exist. I could have done it in Inform and that would undoubtedly have had its charm; but by resorting to Basic and the aesthetics of the Amstrad, I've brought together content and form, since at the same time I owned a 6128 and today the lost scenery of my childhood and that of the few adventure games I played are one and the same in my memory. The game is displayed in Mode 2, which I don't usually like, but which here gives the text, smaller than in Mode 1, something colder, more "computerized" (it makes no sense, but that's how I perceive it) and this is further accentuated by the gray background I've chosen. Grey like the sky, like the stones, like the concrete. The coldness of the technique and at the same time the comforting greyness of the sky in this region, a greyness that I feel is my childhood home, just like certain styles of houses or a certain way of arranging landscapes. Strictly speaking, there's nothing to do in the "game", nothing to win, and no mystery to unravel. But certain actions will act as triggers, opening up new locations or triggering scenes here and there on the map. It will be, for anyone who isn't me, a completely cryptic experience, and that's just fine.

Nouvelle Église [français]

Je travaille depuis cet automne sur un jeu textuel en Basic, pour Amstrad CPC, qui permettra au joueur de se balader dans un quartier semi-rural, à la sortie d'une ville ; ce quartier est celui où j'ai grandi. J'y reproduis avec le plus de réalisme topologique possible l'enchevêtrement de rue, des ruelles, de terrains vagues, de vergers et de champs, où j'ai passé mon enfance, que j'ai exploré de fond en comble, et qui aujourd'hui en partie n'existent plus. J'aurais pu le faire en Inform et cela aurait sans doute eu son charme ; mais en recourant au Basic et à l'esthétique de l'Amstrad, je réunis le fond et la forme, puisqu'à la même époque je possédais un 6128 et qu'aujourd'hui les décors disparus de mon enfance et ceux des quelques jeux d'aventure auxquels je jouais ne font plus qu'un dans ma mémoire. Le jeu est affiché en Mode 2, qu'habituellement je n'aime pas mais qui ici donne au texte, plus petit qu'en Mode 1, quelque chose de froid, de plus "informatique" (cela n'a aucun sens mais c'est ainsi que je le perçois) et cela est encore accentué par le fond gris que j'ai choisi. Gris comme le ciel, comme les pierres, comme le béton. La froideur de la technique et en même temps la grisaille réconfortante du ciel dans cette région, cette grisaille que je me ressens comme ma patrie d'enfance au même titre que certains styles de maisons ou qu'une certain façon d'agencer les paysages. Il n'y aura à proprement parler rien à faire dans le "jeu" et rien à gagner, ni aucun mystère à éclaircir. Mais certaines actions serviront de déclencheurs, ouvrant de nouveaux lieux ou provoquant des scénettes ici et là sur la carte. Ce sera, pour quiconque n'est pas moi, une expérience tout-à-fait cryptique, et c'est parfait comme ça.