Ratings and 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.