Reviews by HereticMole

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

I’ve played the previous two Social Democracy games, and enjoyed them even if I didn’t fully understand what I was doing most of the time. The same goes for Popular Front. I played on normal difficulty, and found it much more approachable than Petrograd 1917, where I felt like I was chasing an endless amount of tails while being thrown to the wolves in that game. At least in Popular Front, it felt like the wolves were polite enough, though this may also be chalked up to my prior experience with the series.

You take control of the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière/French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO for short) political party, and must create and lead a coalition strong enough to endure workers strikes, political infighting, and fascism both at home and abroad. Gameplay uses the same systems as previous Social Democracy games - take actions through advisors on a 6 month basis or through randomly drawn cards. Every month or so historical events, economic disasters, or angry factions/parties will come up and throw a wrench in your plans.

In my first playthrough, I came to a quick game over (Spoiler - click to show)when I didn’t enact strike demands, causing the SFIO to be kicked out of the ruling coalition and fall into obscurity. My second playthrough went all in against domestic fascism, pro-workers rights (but leaving the capitalist structure unchanged), and checking off every goal in the Popular Front’s platform. My greatest woes were budget, an uncertain economy, and appeasing the Senate, the Radical-Socialists, the French Communist Party, and internal division among the SFIO - I spent the majority of advisor actions just to lower party and coalition dissent to a reasonable amount.

Honestly, internal affairs were more stressful than Germany itself. France easily repelled German attack with two rounds of defensive-focused rearmament and UK aid. I’m not sure if that’s the intended difficulty, as I couldn’t (Spoiler - click to show)take the option to persuade the UK during the Munich conference because they thought I was too weak, so I thought I’d be crushed but turns out not. I consistently caused 100,000 casualties for the Germans and 00,000 among my troops, which might be a bug?

I found other things that I think were oversights (in the foreign relations storylet, Poland’s relationship status doesn’t display and it also won’t let you back out like it does with other countries so you are forced to send diplomats there), plus what could be a display error in the stats sidebar (Popular Front enthusiasm went from none to 8.194577954319762 after a propaganda campaign in July 1938, and continued to be displayed in numbers instead of words for some time; a small difference between the Defense and War sections where armor divisions production is 0.25/month in Defense, 0/month in War, all other division productions were the same between both sections).

At the end of my playthrough, the final outcome of the war is uncertain, and the SFIO would probably get trounced come election time, but France, and the Popular Front, endures. When I reached the end, I had much more of an urge to replay this game compared to the previous two Social Democracies.

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made

Back when I was in high school, the oral exams for Spanish class terrified the (non-Hispanic/Latine) student population. We had to take a historical figure from a Spanish-speaking country and give a talk about them to the teacher and the rest of the class, a former Jesuit and very strict, He would grill us on our technique and pronunciation mistakes mid-presentation, with a lot of scathing comments directed towards the hordes of people who did Simón Bolívar or Gabriel García Márquez (although all he had to say to the guy who did Augusto Pinochet was “Oh! Very controversial” and a B+ grade).

In Latinorum, you’re also a student experiencing dread over language exams, although you’re Italian, it’s the 1980s, it’s ‘merely’ a written exam, and the good thing about written exams is that you can steal the test materials and cheat from them.

The game is much more friendly than I was expecting from it being a Commodore 64 game made over forty years ago (the C64 was quite a bit before my generation). The limited two-word parser, small scope, interactable objects being highlighted, and lack of death/no-win states means it’s approachable. I was never in any doubt about what to do despite an abundance of red herring items to pick up (and limited inventory space). Some of the writing was funny, I was reminded of all the dread my classmates and I had to go through preparing for the exams. A good way to spend fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

You take on the viewpoint of a simulacrum, a recreation of a human being. In meminerimus’s brief timeframe, you exist only in the view of your parent (no gender given in the text but one of the author's chosen post-Thing ribbons is "Father of the Year"), (Spoiler - click to show)who alternates between “I did nothing wrong, it’s my kid who is at fault,” and “Maybe I did something wrong?”

This is a very short game, probably the shortest in the entire Main Festival lineup. Because of this, it didn’t feel like there was a lot of build up or breathing room - we know from the beginning that (Spoiler - click to show)the parent has been terrible to their child, with little change in tension. I liked the interface styled in Bisquixe, with toggleable hyperlinks that you can use instead of typing in commands. I can tell the author has put quite a lot of thought and deliberation over this work. If there’s more on the horizon, I'd gladly welcome it.

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

…and learn profound inner social truths. The game directly starts with the most important choices (really, the only substantial choices) at the beginning - deciding your viewpoint character and the rest of the party. Then you go explore a room, get a backstory reveal from one of your companions, repeat until you’ve learned about everyone (including yourself), (Spoiler - click to show)get your Puppy of Friendship, and end the game. The number of available characters, eight, is perfectly suited for a second playthrough with the characters you didn’t pick the first time.

Each character has their inner monologue written in a different font and color (Some can be a little hard to read). One thing The House does well is make them all have a unique voice, if a bit too reliant on humor and pop culture references. Zany referential humor isn’t quite my personal taste, so a lot of the stories left me cold, though there I did like the two that stepped into darker territory.

I did find it kind of weird that apparently guys can run a whole spectrum from space aliens to weird robots but girls can only be a mundane romance writer or a literal dog (the doll doesn’t count). Certainly that’s not an automatic red flag, there’s a lot of good stuff with a “mundane girl meets the otherworldly” premise and an ordinary person can have great character development. However, I never got the sense if Jessica (the writer) was a character we were meant to root for - I also felt this confusion with some of the other characters like the comedy duo or the doll, but not nearly to this extent - or go “hah, look at that unmarried girl and her silly notions, now let’s go back to our fantasies of cool wizards and vampires.” I wasn’t fond of this move.

Without the above considerations, I would feel comfortable saying that The House is a cool proof-of-concept for a larger work. Along with tightening up the writing, adding some puzzles or really taking advantage of the “let’s put a bunch of characters from wildly different genres together” premise by adding whole party interactions (since it’s mostly your chosen main character listening to the others monologue) could be done to expand the foundation.

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

I greatly enjoyed Lamp Post Projects’ The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens and Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade when they were submitted last IFComp, and was very hyped when I saw the return of the fantastical Italian opera setting for the 2026 Spring Thing.

Like the first game, you play as a private investigator investigating trouble, this time strange dreams affecting the musicians, before an important performance. Compared to the first game’s crime, here I personally found the conflict much more relatable and insular. (Spoiler - click to show)I certainly feel the fear of a wasted life and being envious towards a superior, so I could relate to Vitale.

Gameplay was smooth, with helpful tutorial popups and score information (the latter can be turned off). There is a handy notepad and history log section for reviewing evidence and the theater layout. You can even download the history as an HTML file to read as a full narrative, if you wish. You can select pronouns (including rotating sets and inputting your own), your race (mainly the well-known D&D/Pathfinder races), picking two out of three of musical prowess, magical aptitude, or architectural knowledge, and whether you’re a charmer or really good at detecting people’s tells. Nothing substantial is tied to race bar some comments and selectable choices for roleplaying purposes, but skills are tested through d4 die roll skill checks, where a random number is rolled and you add your skill bonus to the check. You automatically fail if you roll a 1 or automatically succeed if you roll a 4 regardless of how good or bad you are at a skill. Success mainly determines if you can get clues out of the people you interview, or can find out some hidden facet of the theater’s construction or possible magical influence.

It was easy to guess the culprit, as I passed most of the Observe skill checks which gave me the text equivalent of a red flag waving “this one is really sus” before I even talked to the other two suspects. However, the final setpiece is not reliant on skill checks, but is pure deduction, a rather involved puzzle where you (Spoiler - click to show)direct five of the victims to a specific row and section of the theater corresponding to the contents of their dreams in order to break the curse. I had a good time solving the puzzle, it wasn’t too hard especially when the game gives you a handy automatically updated notepad, dream log, and full text history (nice try being sneaky with that (Spoiler - click to show)“I normally play harpsichord but this time I’ll sing” move, I almost fell for it). I’m glad that The Theater of Memory’s climax is much less dependent on being lucky compared to Mischief at the Masquerade (though I did like Mischief’s more fast-paced, action-y third act)

The epilogue where you go back to the theater with a work friend/date could be expanded. I recognized some of the names from the initial preset character options but I couldn’t remember who exactly they were, and the narration didn’t go into any detail. It felt perfunctory compared to the first game, whose romance/date options were at least people you spent some time with in the story and could get to know further.

If you’re in the mood for a light and friendly mystery, I would push this game forward. Try putting on a performance of, say, La flora (or another period-appropriate opera) in the background to go with it!

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

I was intimidated from looking at the long (relative to other entries in the Thing) length and that you could mess up due to improperly managing the many moving parts like monks moving around and a strict time limit. But the setting intrigued me, so I bravely ventured forth.

It turns out that managing these parts is intuitive once you get down to it. The monks spend the entire game staying at their assigned locations until it’s time for them to go and sing choir. I personally found the schedule to be generous, starting in the wee hours of the morning until seven in the evening. You can freely look at the current time and when events take place through shortcut commands, and can wait until the hour choir offices start to minimize entering “Z” repeatedly. I meandered around a lot and was stuck in a couple of spots but finished with 30 minutes left before the deadline. Most people will probably get to one of the endings at a faster pace than I did.

To progress, you solve puzzles around the priory to get evidence, so you do have to look under several nooks and crannies, but thankfully you don’t have to find absolutely everything in order to accuse someone. I was stuck for a while on two parts, both related to (Spoiler - click to show)getting into guarded places by giving gifts, and had to use hints. Although, to be fair, one of these instances was because I completely forgot the flashback hint when examining basil, so I didn’t know what to say and the hint seemed to come out of left field until I did a replay. And as for the other, I just didn’t know you could give a cat to somebody (I did “SHOW CAT TO WILFRED,” assumed that was simply a moment of characterization fluff and moved on until I saw the gift hint). I also had to read hints about searching the barrels. Additionally, the first time I went to the crypt I didn’t catch a vital piece of evidence, thought “that was cool but pointless” after I escaped, then looked at the hints and saw I missed a thing, after which I reloaded a save right before going down there in the first place.

In my first playthrough, I spent a large amount of time having information about one person in particular, but didn’t find any connection to the game’s inciting incident. (Spoiler - click to show)Ultimately I pretty much stumbled into a solution by being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. The person who found me, who was also the culprit, attempted murder after seeing the evidence I was holding but divine intervention saved me. So my process of discovery went from “how does all this stuff lead to poisoning a kind old man” → Hugh tries to kill me after seeing I had the evidence to report him → “well if he reacted like THAT I guess that’s how there’s a corpse.” After getting the mercy ending, I started a new game to do things more efficiently and to see if I could get him to confess, incriminate himself, or open up to me, but after a while concluded that there’s no such thing implemented (and that it’s not that kind of game).

OLoT is a hefty parser IF that should be appreciated slowly. It would be best to play it not as a deduction game or a cross-examination of peoples’ alibis, but as a free-roam exploration with object manipulation as the primary element. Joel Burton is definitely an author to watch!

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

The game initially shipped without a blurb at all, until it was added a day after the Thing opened for public consumption. The lack of a description, a wordy title, and what looked like a chocolate dessert on the cover art served to pique my interest.

As the description says, your character is a mute summoner who calls up a spirit to speak, or fight, or do whatever the situation demands. In the tradition of all aspiring fantasy adventurers everywhere, you go to the guild of violent monster hunters for work and to prove yourself. One of the things I found interesting is that the narrator is one of the summoner’s spirits. The narrative voice is non-intrusive (unless you consistently summon Cathareen, which I understand the appeal of), with the occasional cutting comment or inclusion of the pronoun “I” to signify that it’s not a usual second-person point-of-view.

Your choices are basically deciding which of your four spirits to summon. They have a few things they excel at and a few things they don’t, and you have to remember what they were like in their introductory scenes, and what the situation calls for, to get a good outcome. At the beginning and middle of the game, most of the choices seem to be for flavor text, with the exception of a (Spoiler - click to show)climactic fight, which acts as a final exam where you summon the appropriate spirit in response to an enemy’s attack. I managed to come out unscathed in my first try, though after using the back button to click as many “wrong” choices as I could, the outcome isn’t too different, just changes your score a bit.

I liked the pacing and could clearly visualize the action scenes from the writing. A valiant first effort, and if the author gets the urge to write the continuing adventures of the summoner, origin stories for the spirits, or other stories set in this world, it would be interesting.

Originally written on the intfiction forums, slightly expanded after getting the intended end state in a second playthrough.

The in-game ABOUT section says this was made as a school project, and they plan on adding more content and custom implementation.

Due to a series of mysterious and sudden events, you fall into a portal to another world, filled with strange fungi and some otherworldly creatures. You must explore this world to find out what’s going on, and how to get back home.

I found it a bit hard to progress, as the game doesn’t give a lot of hints, but the puzzles that had their solutions hinted at (Spoiler - click to show)(luring the creature to the platform, or moving a ladder to climb somewhere else) were satisfying to figure out and solve. The game will end when you (Spoiler - click to show)give a yellow fungi to a prisoner in a cell, but as there is no ending text (the game just says “You have won” and gives you the Restore, Restart, or Quit spiel), I don’t have any idea of what will happen next, or how he’ll use it to unlock the cell door.

…Then I read a hint thread saying there’s an intended solution. I went back to the game, spent a lot more time figuring out what to do, but got stuck with trying to open up a box (Spoiler - click to show)at the top of the slope. I could’ve tried more, but at the time I felt like I had spent enough time with the game to write an informed observation and I had other games to review during the Spring Thing voting period. After the results came out, I revisted the game and made it to the proper ending thanks to further hints. That ending didn't tell me anything new but I was just glad I went back to finish the game in the intended way.

I found an interpretation error with a pressure plate/platform that opens up a door when something is standing on it. You can actually pick up the entire platform and everything on it (thankfully dropping it immediately afterwards makes things work). The aforementioned box’s description was confusing, as the default examine text implies that it’s open when it’s really closed. There are also a few placeholder examination text and descriptions that say something like “this object isn’t implemented and you don’t need to do anything with it to progress at this point.”

So far I liked the atmosphere and there’s some clear objectives (Who are those two ladies at the beginning? (Spoiler - click to show)What’s the prisoner’s story? How do we dispel that glowing energy field? How do we get back home?). If a future version with expanded functionality and story released, I’ll definitely be down to revisit Unseelie.

Originally written on the intfiction forums.

A 23 minute walk and you think on being a father, a mental grocery list, career woes, angst, breathe in and out, traffic, loss of control, your child, (Spoiler - click to show)snapping at your wife, distraction, politics, change your path, (Spoiler - click to show)your dad spiraling into xenophobic conspiracy theories, traffic, your students, the baby, don’t forget those groceries, will you really change?

I liked the background being a video advancing frame-by-frame as each line is revealed, it added immersion. I appreciated the pacing and variation between lines, moreso in the early parts of the poem compared to the end. I did brace myself when (Spoiler - click to show)the narrator’s thoughts turned to his father, because I wasn’t in the mood for “talking to my parent(s) is difficult because they turned into conspiracy-believing bigot(s).” That is relatable (though more applicable to my grandparents) but something broke, a connection fractured, we can no longer pretend the broccoli, your wife and baby, and your job have no relation to your father. Yes, nurture can determine behavior and all that, but is it that simple to attribute everything to him? How he treated you and how he turned out recently? That’s like saying eye and hair color only comes down to a 4x4 Punnett square when there are about a hundred or so genes that determine those traits. Genes can be weird.

Still, a good twenty-ish minute walk being stuck in well-expressed and communicated thoughts. That's the perfect length for me.

Originally written on the intfiction forums.

I first attempted to play this game weeks earlier - on a commute, using my phone, and on spotty public WiFi. Definitely not the ideal conditions. I spent an embarrassing long amount of time stuck on the very first puzzle. Then, when I finally figured it out, I clicked into a few of the other puzzles to find out that some were dependent on pictures that didn’t load, or were laid out in a way where I would need pen and paper to solve. I ran away screaming closed the browser tab and made a note to myself to save this for last, so I could devote brain space to it without putting the game down and moving on to another Spring Thing entry.

I started off with the fill-in-the-blanks and the association puzzles (sandwich cookies and oatmeal variety pack), the ones I found the simplest to get started on. For most of the others I had to use the provided hints for just to get my mind on the right track. Figuring out (Spoiler - click to show)the hair dye and icing puzzles gave me the feeling of accomplishment as equal as completing a short comp game. I made it through about twenty puzzles before the remaining ones frustrated me enough to look up the answer.

In between solving puzzles there is also a story going on. Initially, it seems to be a shopping trip turned app testing stint. Then (Spoiler - click to show)it takes a turn for some themes that are very relevant to what’s going on with corporations and needless changes to processes that everyone has been satisfied with for years. This is going to sound strange from this puzzle-averse mole, but I don’t know if I necessarily needed the frame story. Enigmart’s plot made a lot of good points (Spoiler - click to show)about how corporations consume everything we love like a leech, but it could’ve worked fine as a pure collection of themed puzzles.

I was definitely not the target audience for Enigmart, but after giving it a chance I liked it! The problems felt fair, were well-implemented, and I had fun solving them once I got past the first one. If you really hate puzzles, this game won’t change your mind, and if you’re a puzzle fiend, you’ve probably already jumped on this game already. But if you’re open to being convinced and are ok with being stuck for forty minutes on assigning True/False to cryptic statements, get your thinking caps and writing materials ready - you’ll need them.