{"id":7544,"date":"2023-11-05T15:27:58","date_gmt":"2023-11-05T23:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=7544"},"modified":"2023-11-05T15:27:58","modified_gmt":"2023-11-05T23:27:58","slug":"ifcomp-2023-bali-bb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/7544","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2023: Bali B&#038;B"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Every once in a while I see some mention of someone&#8217;s plan to quit the 9-to-5 grind and open a little B&#038;B, and I always find it flabbergasting. Your idea of a relaxing retirement is a customer service job?  This piece goes a long way toward explaining that mindset to me. It&#8217;s essentially a B&#038;B fantasy, from the exotic locale to the incredible financial success of the place before you even get there to the fact that you&#8217;re only committed to being responsible for the place for one week.<\/p>\n<p>The author accurately describes it as &#8220;cosy&#8221; &#8212; there&#8217;s a sort of action-packed finale involving a minor flood, but even there, it didn&#8217;t feel stressful. The game offers you lots of decisions, but I never really felt like it was possible to make unrecoverably wrong ones. (Possibly you could with some effort.) Rather, you typically get a problem and a choice of different ways to solve it, all of which work. When the story relies on something going wrong, it&#8217;s never the player&#8217;s fault &#8212; even when, in one case, it&#8217;s the fault of the player character.<\/p>\n<p>Mainly the decisions seem to affect your relationship levels with the various other characters, which are viewable from the stats menu &#8212; the game seems to track a lot more stats than it ever uses for conditionals. This includes your rapport with not just the various guests but the cook, the PC&#8217;s grandparents who own the place, and a wild monkey that&#8217;s taken up residence on the grounds. Occasionally it was clear that I had to choose one character over another, as when a teenage girl has a disagreement with her parents, but the consequences always seemed fairly minor.<\/p>\n<p>So, that&#8217;s the fantasy: Making friends, most of them temporary, and impressing them with your competence. Also, adopting a litter of kittens along the way. It&#8217;s simply all very pleasant, with just enough easily-manageable chaos to keep it from getting boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every once in a while I see some mention of someone&#8217;s plan to quit the 9-to-5 grind and open a little B&#038;B, and I always find it flabbergasting. Your idea of a relaxing retirement is a customer service job? This piece goes a long way toward explaining that mindset to me. It&#8217;s essentially a B&#038;B [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,53,739],"class_list":["post-7544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7545,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544\/revisions\/7545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}