Reviews by JJ McC

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Parser
Played: 7/30/26
Playtime: 4.75hr, finished

I did not know you could sell these things for money! Good work author! There were codes available to get review copies, but because your humble reviewer is composed of UNIMPEACHABLE integrity (and untenable amounts of coffee), I purchased it anyway (it was on sale at the time). MY REVIEW WILL NOT BE BOUGHT WITH INDUSTRY FAVORS!!! Also I could not make the codes work.

This is an old-school cave-bound puzzle fest with really handsome production values. The whole package is clean and slick and integrates really evocative background illustrations and music. A personal favorite was the toad-Sphynx, but all of it is appealing. Even my wife, when walking by the screen, commented “That’s a cool picture!” There is an “old school” mode, that as far as I can tell removes the illustrations and changes the font to something slightly less rounded. Don’t bother with that, enjoy the sensory feast.

Gameplay hews to classic parser conventions, for the most part, and does a good job of cuing the player when more elaborate commands are called for. There are some windows superimposed on the screen: an optional inventory pane, a command pane, a response pane and a location description pane. Splitting the last two into separate spaces was a two edged sword. On the one hand, it really cleaned up wall-of-text responses, while keeping the high level interesting nouns readily at hand. On the other, for an old hand like me whose fingers hit ">L[return]" by reflex between commands, it took a while to get situated, especially because the game’s response to this redundant command was "try something else." It ALSO had the effect of wiping details you had just read before the next command, adding some friction to exploring lower level items. If you needed to reference those lower level nouns there was nothing for it but to repeat prior commands to refresh the text. A nice touch might have been to add those details to the master pane once initially found… assuming that could be done without crowding things.

As far as its parser capabilities it was pretty good but had some frictions. Occasionally I was in the space of knowing what I wanted to do, but it took multiple formulations to get it accepted. It was never TOO onerous, just frictiony enough to be noticed. To be fair, the game was just as often quite generous in accepting wildly different commands to accomplish the same things, so kudos for that! Too, while most nouns were dutifully implemented, there were examples of missing synonyms (especially singulars or plurals) and a few "you see no [noun mentioned in room text description]" peppering the proceedings. Notwithstanding those quibbles, the interface was on balance responsive, pleasing on the eye, and a nice twist on convention.

The story is pretty classic IF stuff: nameless protagonist deposited in mysterious under-mountain complex, solving puzzles to progress. The architecture of the game compliments its stripped-down gameplay really well. It is broken into 8-9 chapters (depending how you score them), each a MOSTLY standalone puzzle space where unlocking doors or circumventing barriers ushers you to the next chapter. The spaces are pretty Spartan, each requiring close examination of minimal details to reveal its secrets, and by its Spartanness imposing helpful guardrails on the player. In the second chapter, there is a poem hinting at what to accomplish, but the WAY it must be accomplished is a real logical leap. The fact that there are so few moving parts in the space kind of soft-prompts you to try things a denser setting would obfuscate.

So how are the puzzles themselves? I would say 3/4 of them were both clever in their own right, and were satisfyingly staged in terms of escalating complexity. They also span quite a variety of gameplay which was nice: mechanisms to manipulate, riddle solving conversations, put things in things, word games, lateral thinking, spell casting. It made for an intriguing variety and a real challenge to solve (with commensurate feeling of accomplishment). There were some really clever subversions of expectation too - the aforementioned toad-Sphynx solution was really funny, and integrated the soundtrack into its puzzle play in a satisfying way. The multi-step word puzzle was devious and just obtuse ENOUGH.

Look, there’s always going to be a spread to these things: some puzzles hit harder, some will near miss. One ancient convention I don’t PERSONALLY miss are IF mazes. They always seem a lot more work than worth, which was my experience here. This one was compounded by initially hiding behind a “Do Not Enter” barrier, which sang off a nice “Unimportant Item” gag on the level, giving me hope it was not necessary. No, it was most definitely necessary. The maze was made more difficult by assuming sense-of-direction defeating passages between two classes of identical rooms, meaning reverse paths were broken. Not impenetrable by any means, just a lot of trial and error and mapping.

This particular level ALSO had one of the few cross-chapter dependencies. You had to remember a detail from the previous level (Spoiler - click to show)(the location name of a magic sphere) which I did NOT. After some ineffectual noun spamming, “Ok,” sez I, “There is a pile of maps on this level. Surely that was the author’s way of maintaining chapter atomicity.” It was not. The maps were narrative chrome that had nothing to offer. “Hmm..,” sez I. “The game has a text log, how about I just go back and look it up?” Oh, but no. The log only tracks the CURRENT LEVEL, I was not able to find a log of the previous level. “I see,” sez I. “Well, there is also a chapter-save system, I can just go back and quickly play the previous level to get the detail I need…” Only when I did, I was told it would erase all my subsequent progress! Ack. Instead of hewing to the established independent chapter paradigm, I had to REPEAT the previous level to find the magic noun that would work, then retrace my steps in the subsequent level as well. After all that, the reward being… a maze. This likely colored my dissatisfaction even more than it might have otherwise.

Then the final level was a (Spoiler - click to show)time loop combat puzzle. Suss out the moves to defeat the monster, dying many many times while doing so. This was a lot of trial and error, requiring little of the brain power needed in previous levels. It wasn’t BAD per se, but it was both significantly less challenging (and rewarding) AND draggier than previous levels and so kind of disappointed as a capstone. These deflating and grindy puzzle levels were unfortunately back loaded in the game, tainting the earlier levels’ accumulated good will.

So let’s pull it all together: really appealing package; 6/8 puzzle levels clever and varied; 2/8 not terrible, but likely better received by players more open to combat/maze gameplay, and positioned to disappoint players not so inclined; all powered by a very tight design and nifty variant parser paradigm. Even a cold math summary puts the experience at 75% + bonus for graphical slickness. Evaluates as a B/B-? Hey, that is totally worth the $2 I spent. In this economy? Probably worth more.

POSTSCRIPT: Worth noting that there is a walkthrough available for those truly stuck, though I found the game tight and responsive enough that my OWN incompetence did not demand it. In retrospect, it might have saved me some replay though.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/29/26
Playtime: 10m, playthrough, bonus “Progress” exploration

recqiescat is a dark tale of toxic love. Its title and initial framing are that of looking back on a once-in-a-lifetime emotional relationship, overflowing with milestone memories of meet-cute, great dates and romantic confessions. It hits all the beats of early relationships by presenting a layered recollection where the initial text is warmly reminiscent, and where clickable links expand to even greater detail. The player’s interaction is mostly just exploring these links in an otherwise linear narrative. It presents a world where memories are not cloudy, representational things, but so vital as to have layers of detailed, still-accessible depth. Oh, there are dark clouds too, as the narrator/protagonist recalls (and seemingly brushes aside) warning signs and misgivings of friends and family. Those dismissals actually enhance the totally-smitten character beats in a resonant way, except… we’ll get there.

The early part of the work capably builds its atmosphere of in-denial foreboding. When the turn comes, it is shocking, but maybe not quite the way its textual construction would have you expect. Yes, I am now discussing EXPECTATIONS of THE UNEXPECTED. This one is going to be impossible to talk about without spoilers, so be advised. Whatever blurring I end up doing is almost certainly NOT going to get the job done.

Here’s the thing. This is a past tense narration by one of two principles in a horrific event. The narrator experienced the events of the story, and is relating them to us. We the audience experience the narrative as a shocking twist, but the narrator decidedly does not. They already know how it ends! And yet, the story almost never acknowledges this. Certainly, what the narrator chooses to convey for the first two thirds of the work focuses on the dreamy, rewarding parts of the relationship. This… does not ring true to me. How on earth can these early impressions NOT be colored by subsequent events THIS DIRE? How could hints and clues NOT become apparent in retrospect, given where things led? There is an explanation, but give me a few more minutes to rant first.

This is a story of memories, of what and how the narrator chooses to focus their reminiscing on. A lot of time is devoted to the heady flowering of romantic emotion. Almost NO time is devoted to the inciting event, a narrative whirlwind of (Spoiler - click to show)sexual entitlement exploding into violence. What time IS devoted to it is weirdly oblique and rushed, lacking the immediacy of the more positive memories. The effect is to present a relationship, a reasonably long one, where NO HINT of storm clouds is evident to the protagonist, barring some offhand acknowledgement of others’ concerns. Where the protagonist’s response to the shocking development is not only matter-of-fact but also kind of self-satisfied. You can almost feel their hand waving dismissively! There is no sense of loss, of betrayal in the recollection. Just a matter-of-fact “this is what I did instead.” A loss and betrayal one might easily expect to color ALL PREVIOUS MEMORIES if not PERMANENTLY SCAR. But the prior narrative suggested neither of those things, quite the opposite actually, and that omission becomes the most notable thing about the whole work.

Taken together, the early rose-colored focus and the all but dismissed culminating drama, it kind of paints a picture of the protagonist as a sociopath! To them the dramatic climax is every bit as meaningless (in the long run) as (Spoiler - click to show)the antagonist’s own victims. They are focused on their OWN emotional pleasure to the complete exclusion of others’ concerns and even their lives. It morphs from a story of (Spoiler - click to show)surmounted victimization to one of (Spoiler - click to show)two monsters meeting and only one surviving. That is honestly kind of cool, though the wording and tone of the work does not suggest this is its intent. I am choosing to embrace the ambiguity here, as this is a much more subtle, affecting read than its face value presentation. I wish I were more confident that read was the work’s intent.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/29/26
Playtime: 10m, finished

Safety tip: this work requires webGL2. If you are a brain-damaged privacy paranoid who has bewilderingly locked their browsers up TIGHT, you will need to play on your poor suffering wife’s wide-open courting-disaster machine. Know the risks, people.

GOIO a visual novel that uses music and images to enhance its spare story of indirect grief. Indirect grief is a sturdy dramatic conceit. It deftly resonates our OWN experiences of grief into the proceedings while 1) not having to evoke those feelings directly via artificial constructs and 2) adding a layer of sadness by emphasizing how SOLITARY grief can be. How even those around you might EMPATHIZE with you, but might not actually experience the same emotional depths. The vehicle for this in GOIO is a child protagonist who barely knew their aunt supporting their mother as they explore the deceased’s property. Like the protagonist, we the reader only experience the loss through observing the mother and her clumsy, human reactions. Because it is framed as a later-in-life recollection, we are free to integrate OUR mature experiences of grief alongside the now-grown protagonist.

The implementation is gorgeous: evocative backgrounds, moody music, and an impressionistic character illustration for the mother that suggests imperfect memory yet still delivers some pathos. It’s text is timed, but quite rapid, which delivers a conversational, off-the-cuff informal vibe without slowing the reading experience down. This lends a welcome naturalism to the proceedings, as well as reminding me that timed text need not be the Boogie Man of IF.

This is very much a visual novel, a recollection of grief. It’s interactivity is of the page turning variety, so the experience is more about pacing and word/picture interplay. I don’t know that the illustrations achieve the “worth 1000 words” standard, but they are quite impactful anyway, reinforcing the mood of the piece (along with the somber soundtrack). In sum, it is a very attractive, well realized package that delivers its melancholy intent precisely and effectively.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 25m

Visual novels are clubbed in with IF pretty routinely, but my experience of them is usually quite different. Ok, I COULD at this point develop an elaborate multi-axis schema whereby works are placed on a continuum of interactivity/graphical flare/narrative pacing. I could further build to the stunning revelation that NO! Everything is in fact a spectrum! To this crowd, I could as easily spend my time diving into light physics and confirming that YES! Our human eyes perceive the sky as BLUE!!!

What that spectrum analysis asserts is definitely true, but it kind of white washes that different points on the spectrum ARE IN FACT DIFFERENT. Purple is not red! SIOH does something new here, to my experience. It manages a quantum superposition at TWO discrete points on this continuum. In gameplay this is a visual novel. Clicking pretty universally means ‘advance story.’ UI-wise though, it is an interactive epistolary work. The reader is navigating a variety of computer interactions, the input simulating encountering the story at your keyboard. It is a neat trick. Without offering choice or agency to the player, the work nevertheless envelopes the reader in interactivity, and by such transforms them from consumer to participant. It is a very specific kind of keyboard trick, but uniqueness is not an INDICTMENT of art, is it?

Man did that specific trick work like gangbusters on me. From its opening screen, a wry 8-bit-era click-thru license agreement, we are ushered into a… hmm. Ok, I’m going to need to create some vocabulary, bear with me. Steampunk as a genre takes the tech-wonder sensibilities of cyberpunk (usually jettisoning its deep cynicism), and re-imagines its technologies in anachronistic gears and hydraulics. Retro-future does the same thing (kind of) with a 1950’s Middle American sensibility. How about the 80s/90s? What is a term for anachronistic sci-fi tech grafted to the last millennium’s computer interfaces? Leg-Warmer Punk? 8-bit Futurism? CyberGrunge? I kinda like that last one, let’s go with that.

Ok, this is a CyberGrunge story of body mods, (Spoiler - click to show)aggressive AI and emergent terror. All with a Win3.1 feel to it. As a reader/player you are shadowing a member of an online body-mod community whose hacker ethos takes the protagonist DEEP into a rabbit hole. Let me just say outright I loved everything about this work. Its graphical language is an inspired take on the past’s design sensibilities, especially when things get really WEIRD for the protagonist. Its interactivity is immersive and engaging, propelling the story via an amazing variety of computer (and not-so-digital) interactions. The story itself has a LOT of concerns and twists, any one of which could support a full narrative of its own. This is not to say any of its elements are SHORT-CHANGED. Not at all! Its twists steam forward, loop on themselves and are increasingly outre’ and dramatic and it all just WORKS SO WELL.

I am loathe to dive too deeply into the plot, as its surprises are bonkers and really well executed and deserve to be encountered fresh. How those surprises are communicated in its 8-bit vernacular are, if anything, MORE inventive and delightful. There is one flourish where the overwhelmed protagonist’s thoughts are rendered in barely readable background that was just amazing in its narrative inventiveness. I am unabashedly gushing over my appreciation for this thing. Were I rating these works to my IFCOMP scale (which, per my R-A-T tradition I DO NOT) it would earn a ‘Transcendent’ rating from me, a rating which as of summer 2026 I have conferred fewer than 5 times.

The more I go on, the more likely I am to spoil things for all of us. Instead let me close by highlighting a minor detail whose pithy perfection I will assert is a microcosm of the entire work. I have, in the past, revealed that Ren & Stimpy’s Big Red Button spoke directly to young me’s psyche in a way I was previously unaware that art could. (This is totally relevant, I swear.) There is a line in this work that captures that same perilous fascination at least as well: “I’m on the edge of something irreversible I’d rather have someone push me off of it” Despite its DEEP sci-fi conceits, the work grounds itself in recognizable human impulses and dissatisfactions and does not skimp on consequences or danger. Or, improbably, hope too.

This one is great. Play it with a soundtrack of telephone-modem squeals. Or not, just damn well PLAY IT.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Parser
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 45m, defeated witch

There is an aspect to parser creation that really speaks to an author’s intentionality. In book-fiction the author is attempting to paint a picture and mood in the reader’s head. They have full control over the depth of detail they present, and how that depth manages pacing and foregrounds environment versus character versus plot. There can be a lot of ‘camera work’ to vary focus to surroundings, to actors, to events. A fundamental difference between parser-IF and book-F is that the author has only limited control over the camera, as it were. Elaborate environments can be explored in arbitrarily deep detail at the player’s whims. This is where cracks can often appear - a block of setting description repeatedly giving "you see no..." in response to deeper poking is about as dispiriting as it gets. Thanks to early computer memory limitations, such textual flourishes were EXPENSIVE and hence back pressured. This had the effect of creating a terse, meaningful-detail-only paradigm that served early developers quite well.

Today, the temptation might be use all that suddenly-cheap memory (though who knows? Maybe AI’s gluttonous memory diet will take us back to those days!) and go hog wild. That would be overlooking the second, perhaps more important, aspect of these early designs. Few nouns mean few things to distract the player mean MUCH tighter control over gameplay. Over the camera.

ATS did not overlook this. Whether painstakingly deliberate or intuitive, this is as tight a gameplay implementation as I can remember. (Almost) Every noun’s importance is signaled by simply BEING MENTIONED AT ALL. Descriptions yield actionable items and directions and almost nothing else. Conversations are minimal and transactional, never muddying the waters. It may not be OBVIOUS how to use things until fully explored, but rest assured they absolutely are. It makes for an immersive gameplay experience where you are never pulled out of flow by missing some small detail buried in description.

Why is the witch bad? Immaterial, she just is. What else is in the shop besides a water vending machine and a sample plate of cheese? Nothing and doesn’t matter anyway. Where is the resident of that dog house? Who cares? None of this is to say that the environment is bland. It is not! The text is suffused with good humor and amiability and judiciously uses evocative adjectives to apply some color. And where the text stops, our brains gladly shade in the remaining background.

I found it as controlled, concise a work as I can remember experiencing. Given this gushing on text discipline, it will come as no surprise that this work MOVED. It was more like fencing than crossword puzzling. Game proffers this! Player ripostes with that! Game pivots to this other! Player responds with a flurry of blocks! There was no sitting back and stroking my chin, mulling over possibilities - it’s time for another thrust! What a great experience! It helps that it felt perfectly sized to its aims. If I had to fence for three hours I would be EXHAUSTED (and probably quite scarred). Here, the puzzle sequences roared from one to the next until it was done! It didn’t forget the casual player either. There is one quirky NPC who, once discovered, basically acts as a hint machine. I don’t know how critical the hints WERE, given the tight text all around it, but lord knows I have run aground on simple puzzles before. This NPC was a safety valve of information, just in case.

I try try try to not dwell on an author’s identity too much when I review works. Rarely can any good come from that and the opportunity for misstep is HUGE. However, I am also patently unafraid to confidently stride into quicksand so here we are. I am unfamiliar with this author, and could only find two works by them, both seeming quite recent. The fact that a relatively new author produced something so tight and accomplished is a great testament to either their preparation or DEEPLY intuitive understanding of the medium. Both are quite commendable.

There were a few glitches I noted - most of which were location descriptions that failed to annotate their exits. There were a few items that were never used, which really stood out and became jarring by their exception. I don’t think I ever found a use for the tape, for example. There was a nice bit of business with (Spoiler - click to show)the name on a doghouse whose missing component existed, but seemed irretrievable and unnecessary. That might have been the item I spent the most time fiddling with. Honestly, those were completely UNimpactful on the wonderful, fleet vibe of this thing.

Sure, not ALL that shimmers is gold. But sometimes shimmery things ARE IN FACT ABSOLUTELY GOLD.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 25m, two playthroughs (second kinda quick)

For much of history, story-telling has been constructive, in the sense of architected to a climax. Its dramatic beats tightly coupled, practically engineered to resonate with satisfying if-then consequences that come together dramatically and often surprisingly. Originally in service of a moral lesson or thematic exploration like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Inevitably, humanity decided words were more powerful than that, and could convey vibes and abstract concepts. Decided that dissonances and non sequiturs would trigger our pattern-searching brains to make something MORE of them.

UU is decidedly a modern work in that sense. There are two narrative threads intertwined here. Most superficially, an internet influencer is documenting his discovery and exploration of a liminal space hidden in a subway station. Layered on that, the narrator positions themselves as creator of the scenario (though not necessarily the characters?), and reflects on childhood dynamics that led to THIS creation, of animating THIS work. There are plenty of “author messing with character” post-modern narratives out there. What I find fascinating is that so few of them (at least that I’ve encountered) interrogate the CHARACTER CREATION role of the author. They often, as here, seem preoccupied with the PLOT and SETTING they craft, but treat the characters as victims in some sense. Which is wild, right? It’s not like authors are not creating all of it in whole cloth. The purpose of this focus sometimes seems to be to examine moral questions behind voyeuristic entertainment. Other times, it can be to examine the craft of writing and its grasping for emotional relevance. In these cases, it deliberately or as a side effect puts its characters in agency-free subject roles.

I didn’t really get those vibes here though. Oh, the fictional protagonist is VERY MUCH an agentless target of narrative. But in service of what was harder to pin down. His reaction to his circumstances was muted, dominated by concerns with his parasocial impact over physical safety. That’s kind of a resonant modern dynamic. But other than the fact of it, it doesn’t really mature into much. Our protag encounters enigmatic NPCs that are more off putting than threatening, and then after a while is rescued by a deus ex libriana.

Interestingly, the PLAYER is no more effectual in the work. It is mostly a visual novel, with one choice repeating itself as the protagonist explores. (I’m just calling the influencer the protagonist out of convenience. There is an argument that the NARRATOR is actually the protagonist, but let’s leave that for the moment.) After playing twice I can state there is no discernible effects those choices have on the narrative. Maybe a more rigorous exploration of the choice sequences might reveal something, but my playthroughs had identical feel both times despite different selection scheme. This raises the prospect that the narrator/author is also playing with US. That we have no more agency than the poor protagonist.

Protagonist, check. Player, check. Which leads us to the remaining of the gameplay troika: the narrator/author themselves. They periodically inject themselves (cued by nameless white text on black background) at first to comment on the proceedings, but increasingly to present unconnected musings about their life and artistic journey. The whole vibe is melancholic and relaxed. Like their motivations in this creation are little more than a pleasant boredom, a way to fill the time. If it sounds like I am poo-pooing it, I’m not. It was a fascinating mood to meander around in. I found it wonderfully reinforced by the graphical language of the thing. It hued from the Amazing World of Gumball school of design: a collection of COMPLETELY different artistic styles mashed together as a disjoint whole. This palette (including a female character with a male representation) seemed to underline the narrator’s enuii. Almost like they couldn’t be BOTHERED with a coherent visual palette and instead plopped down whatever placeholder flashed into their mind, so long as it was expedient. It really coalesced into a casual, reflective atmosphere, much more relaxed and ad hoc than the poor protagonist’s journey.

Along the way, there are some fun and confounding sound bites. I laughed out loud at “thank Google.” I was puzzled, and ultimately frustrated by trying to parse “reflection leads to addiction (and then death)”. But one in particular crystallized my experience of this work into something I could hold onto (paraphrasing):

“I don’t have a point. I just want to spend time with somebody.”

That sad, insightful line really summarized the experience of this narratively slight but emotionally evocative work for me. I don’t think Grimm’s Fairy Tales could accomplish THAT.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Parser
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 1hr, 23/23, unclear bonus?

Andrew Schultz has long been the Stephen King of interactive word games. Not the cocaine part, the insanely prolific body of work that sometimes references itself but mostly inhabits a narrow band between “pretty darn entertaining” to “what an accomplishment.” (I am ignoring Under the Dome for rhetorical purposes.) This work sits squarely in his playful ouvre’. Piloting the protag, you must treasure hunt through a wordplay world with Spoonerism sorcery. (Too bad it wasn’t alliteration!) You can accumulate objects, many of which also spooner to make progress, ultimately securing the McGuffin to win. On the way, you are treated to an explication of Graham Nelson’s Player Bill of Rights? And also some pretty extensive handholding?

These last two kind of show the work’s origins: an introductory text using wordplay and narrator asides to walk a new player through the conventions of parser IF. I could choose to write about how the ADVENTURON paradigm supports this education, carrying the esthetics of a grade school primer that kind of sings off its gameplay. And extends to the generous, primitive map and playfully amateurish illustrations. And to the use of color to emphasize text to cue different gameplay utility. Arguably, discussing the work without all that is to miss the point of the work entirely, nevermind churlishly ignoring the thoughtful, effective, and time intensive approach to indoctrinating the theoretical newbie audience. Except, some of my documented performance notwithstanding, I am NOT a novice player. All that stuff is a drag on MY experience. No, I am here for the wordgames, and I expect to have MY PANTS JUST CHARMED RIGHT OFF WHILE COMPLETING THEM.

Spoonerisms are kind of the Dad Jokes of wordplay. A little bit corny, more clever than we give them credit for, and delighting in their own obtuseness. They feel charming by how belligerently UNHIP they are. Isn’t Adventuron’s dawn-of-computer-graphics sensibility just a little bit like that too? And did the mad genius who thought to pair them have any idea they would work together SO WELL? Yeah, it’s some primitive, out-of-date sensibilities, wrapped around some not-all-that-difficult puzzle construction. But its just so FUN. The presentation has so much personality it is easy to take the educational intentionality for granted, and isn’t that really the best way to learn anyway? In my play-all-the-games haste, I zoomed through the gameplay, gamely consumed the required reading, and STILL managed to solve a few extra points by game’s end. I would tell you how many, but there seemed to be a glitch in the score code. For a while it was showing BASESCORE + BONUS/23 but somewhere before games’ end the BONUS dropped? I’m not sure how many I had, but less than 17 (as informed by the post-game achievements).

Two more “bugs” to report. Pacing Rations does not resolve to Racing Patience. And Quirky Test requires NO TWERKING WHATSOEVER. I am very sure I did not get all 17 bonus points. I am JUST as sure I will not rest until I do. Yes, once I complete the field in R-A-T, I am going back. Once again, Andrew Schultz has deployed his clever BROWSER TRICKS to defeat my belt with TROUSER BRICKS.

Consider the falling-slacks-based charm success metric MET.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/20/26
Playtime: 30m

Some things I can endlessly revisit, not experiencing anew exactly but not exhausting their novelty either. I have a decades-long relationship with Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii where familiarity has not eroded the experience even a little bit. I have a similar relationship with Reanimator, The Blues Brothers, and Fury Road. This is not limited to music and movies. There are boardgames on my shelf that hit the table decades on, and despite years-long gaps I relish revisiting my beleaguered copy of Catch 22. This is not the RULE of course. Far more entertainment is disposable or.. timeful? Is that the opposite of timeless? As a young person, I discovered Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards and adored it. It is a chore to endure now. (It came out within months of Star Wars, isn’t that wild? Artistically, they seem separated by DECADES.)

So, Vampire IF. Despite my self-avowed bona fides as a Horror Fan, vampires have never been my thing. It’s cool, some of my things would probably repel many of you. Despite vampires being low on my revisit list, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say my review corpus is dominated by them. I’ll have to run the numbers one day. Seems likely the Queer Vampire Jam is the root of that. I mean, if there were a, I dunno, Ribald Mathematics Jam it could have broken a totally different way but here we are.

It is true that the community has made it easy on me in one regard: the overwhelming majority of them spin unique takes on the lore, the metaphoric linkages, the imaginative execution. There is probably an essay somewhere about the LGBTQIA+ community’s dialogue with vampire mythology. Demonstrating I AM capable of bare-minimum introspection, I AM NOT THE ONE TO WRITE IT. No, instead I’ll just accumulate an ever-growing critical engagement with works in the vein. (I know you saw it, I won’t lampshade it. THIS TIME.)

These twists on lore are so pervasive, something like oxblood carves out its novelty by reengaging more traditional vampire beats and making THAT feel transgressive! “Wait reviewer, surely that is dependent on the ORDER you encounter works in! Without the large body of prior art as context, its seeming uniqueness couldn’t possibly land!” Ah, knee-jerk strawman reader, you are lucky I am here. oxblood has anticipated this possible refutation. You see, the text of the work presumes a romantic human-vamp relationship as its setup, then proceeds to unwind the peril that has ALWAYS been in the subtext. And does it while making a statement about toxic romantic attachment! It seems in conversation both with romantic-vampire genre AND selfish romantic expectations! For me, it was a startling breath of fresh air… wait, that’s not what I want to say. That implies I have been breathing stale air for some time which is decidedly NOT my experience. For me, it was a startling subversion of expectations executed with PRIOR EXPECTATIONS. And it caught me in exactly the right critical context to feel novel and insightful.

Crucial to all this is the prose of the piece. We spend most of the piece inhabiting a vampire at the dissolution of a romantic relationship, privvy to the hurts and pettiness of the protagonist. Which then sings off their affliction (is it ok to call it that? my foot-in-mouth sense is tingling…) to spiral into something dangerous and self-destructive. This is an all-too-common aspect of human relationships, and vampire lore is used to shine a bright light on it. The repeated euphemism of INK, which pretty quickly is understood to be (Spoiler - click to show)blood highlights the self-deception that attempts to fend off the darkness prior to an eventual surrender. The prose paints all of this against a kind of matter-of-fact portrayal of vampire life that feels lived in and well observed. The PURPOSE of this backdrop is to center the protagonist’s experience and bring it into sharp focus without distracting dissonances. I found it really well done, decidedly dark, and doing a lot to inject the HORROR back into its genre. As much emotional horror as supernatural, that simultaneously echoes and counterpoints the larger body of engaging vampire IF.

When I am praising prose, as I mean to do here, I often try to grab samples to prove I am not just making it up. That manifests as a quick pause in my playthrough to cut’n’paste, spurred by an out-of-flow recognition of ‘hey that’s a nifty phrase.’ I do not have that for you this time. I think it’s because in the moment there were no showy textual flourishes. It was just a slow build of atmosphere and character decline that accumulated over the course of the piece to a very affecting (and (Spoiler - click to show)tragic) climax.

It is not lost on me that SO many of my reviews of this genre start with ‘Ehh, I’m not about vampires really.’ Is that actually helpful to you, the reader? I THINK it gives you some context to process my words with, but at some point the repetition might feel like dismissal. Maybe I can redeem that a bit by revealing that I AM about THIS vampire story. It emphasized the STAKES of these tales in a tense and insightful way. (Don’t cry to me. You had to know it was coming.)

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/17/26
Playtime: 30 min, solved in 16 days

If there is one thing I fail at pretty consistently, it is resisting the urge to invoke comparisons in reviews: either between works in an author’s ouvre’ or among games with similar concerns and conceits. If there are TWO things I fail at consistently it is the above AND metering my clumsy attempts at empathy with humility. If there are THREE things… you know what? This feels like a bottomless pit yawning before me, let’s get back to number one.

I have declared myself thoroughly IN THE BAG for Damon Wakes's Bubble Gumshoe games - a noir-detective series set in a world of sentient candy. Almost immediately with KC I felt those same endorphins coursing. Here, you are a noir-detective solving a Christmas Crime at the North Pole. This one makes use of its choice-select UI by styling the choices as an Advent Calendar: a holiday tradition of daily surprises, opened throughout December until the Big Day. There are 25 days to check, but oh no, its already the 5th, so you must deliberately find the six clues in twenty days to solve it in time! The conceit doesn’t QUITE work, as it would be unthinkable to consult a real advent calendar out of order - civilizations have fallen for such transgressions. It’s fine, the conceit’s narrative load bearing responsibilities are dispensed with pretty quickly.

I will confess to some reservations initially. A mystery to solve with 25 different possible interactions and few signposts. Was this just a random walk problem? I need not have worried. Divorced from the calendar conceit, the game responds to thoughtful investigative approaches: (Spoiler - click to show)interview likely witnesses/suspects, develop background, investigate important scenes, test hypotheses. Leads develop, informing subsequent calendar choices in satisfying and humorous ways. All of it undergirded with completely committed-to-the-bit Christmas mythos clowning. It is not Bubble Gumshoe, but it tweaks all the same pleasure centers of investigation and deeply-committed, over-the-top absurdity.

It ALSO mines the inherent contradictions of ridiculous pastel fairy tale and hard-boiled, cynical misanthropy to great effect. The 90s were kind of famous for “grim and gritty” takes on childish fantasy. A self-serious take on this contrast (only with tongue firmly OUT of cheek), whose main aim was to strip-mine dramatic impact by sullying, polluting and dismissing the charms of their settings. Like strip mining, exhausting its frisson pretty quickly, leaving only ugly destruction in its wake. Both Bubble Gumshoe and this work tack to the Roger Rabbit tradition of moving that tongue 90 degrees to the right - of using their settings’ bright optimism to expose the hollow center of edge-lord nihilism. And also have a few good laughs at its expense.

I mean, a few really good laughs. I’m only giving you two, though I could easily quadruple this essay with more examples.

"And a child’s belief is a powerful thing… which is why they must never play with satanic toys like Dungeons & Dragons or the Ouija board.”

(To the tune of Jingle Bells)
"Pooping log, pooping log, time for you to go
CENSORED-CENSORED from your bowels, right here in the snow — oh!

Pooping log, pooping log, gee, I hope this works
Oh what fun it is to deny Krampus — he’s a jerk!"

Beyond tone, the work really ups the ante with its omnivorous engagement with diverse cultural Holiday oddities, all of them surprising and delightful. Then stitching them into a patchwork mystery that ultimately works, albeit according to its own logic. Actually, the word ‘albeit’ seems to suggest some necessary forgiveness and compromise. No, it works BECAUSE OF its bonkers internal logic.

My biggest regret… well, is not investing in NVIDIA a few years ago. My biggest regret HERE is playing this in the middle of a national heatwave, nearly as far from Christmas as the calendar gets. This game is CRYING for a holiday playthrough, and that is my recommendation. If you are reading this review to determine if you want to play The Krampus Case, December only please. But December DEFINITELY.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Parser Hybrid
Played: 7/17/26
Playtime: 45m, won after dying a few times

Ok, two scenarios. Scenario 1: Earth is far older than we give it credit for. Sometime before dinosaurs a race with opposable thumbs advanced to near-magical scientific capabilities before being erased from the fossil record. Then, Renaissance Italy somehow discovered some artifacts from that time. Scenario 2: In the far future, the human race develops near-magical scientific capabilities before suffering an apocalypse. An impossible number of years after that, humanity recreates Renaissance Italy who discover artifacts from this prior civilization. In either case, intrigue ensues!

What a delightfully weird and ambiguous setup to a spacial puzzle of infiltrate/steal/escape! Throw in some elemental spirits and we are COOKING. This is a pretty tight navigation/chase puzzle of securing a mysterious weapon, then using it to evade capture and escape. If you can effect a rescue in the process so much the better. I would say the UI is indispensable and effective here. You get a map, and a parser gameplay paradigm, augmented with hyperlink help. This kind of UI, when done well, smooths some of the potential gotchas with parser gameplay like verb guessing and sussing important nouns from background chaff, and soft steers the goals of the piece. I found AW to be done VERY well on this count. A compact but effective dashboard adjacent to the > prompt, married to a compact but effective map, including foes. Your goal is never in doubt, the enemy and object parameters reliably communicated, leaving a playground of experimentation and timing to work through.

The work is brief, requires some restart/undo trial and error, and delivers legit feelings of accomplishment when successful. The text is spare, injected with just enough wry playfulness to keep things bubbling along crisply and succinctly. While the HOW of accomplishment is very much the crux of the game, the WHAT of it is conveyed naturally and subtly without contradicting or muddying itself. Doing so this effortlessly is much harder than it looks. I found it to be very well conceived, implemented and communicated, leading to a very immersive puzzle solving flow. With just enough weird chrome to keep it from becoming some kind of intellectual-only exercise.

Just one buggy artifact to report: the UI dashboard disappears on RESTART, requiring a full QUIT to reappear. Invisiclues also provided, which is always a welcome touch. In this case not consulted, but having them available is appreciated. I never know when my IF competence will abandon me. All in all, a nifty, short, rewarding game.