Ratings and Reviews by Passerine

recombinatorial is a short experience that leads the player character on an involuntary journey through a place of ruin and dislocation. You can select certain words and phrases along the way, or not. The story notes how people who arrive in this place purge their past and replace the old with new, which the interactivity mirrors with its fragmentation and regurgitation of words.

Mostly I got impressions. The urge to go north, more familiar from the popular media I grew up with as some kind of admirable drive to explore, is repurposed into something more like the mindless compulsion of an animal being puppeted by an invading fungus. I also sensed echoes of the siren calling travelers to the shores, with all the wrecked boats and bleached bones.

There is something else at the end of this journey, a meadow beyond the rough sea. Whether it’s real or imagined, I couldn’t tell. The distinction between yourself who must go north and those who stay behind in the narrows is something else I’m still not sure about. There’s a lot to ponder.

But it felt like the impressionism was the point here, and using more words to elucidate the details would be counterproductive. The concept fits well into the 500-word limit of the Neo-Twiny Jam, and the terse writing reads like smooth yet uncomfortable poetry. Reusing snippets at the end is an interesting way to stretch the boundaries, though it ended up being one final question mark for me since I couldn’t tell how or whether the end sequence connected to what I’d clicked earlier.

But the overall piece was intriguing and transportive. It felt quite cohesive as a game poem, even if I didn’t fully understand how everything connected.

I feel I’m not the intended audience for this game for various reasons, but I gave it a try anyway because it was entered into the Review-a-thon. It’s a very brief demo of a longer game about moderating "sexy selfies" on an online platform. And by sexy, they mean you will be seeing all the (illustrated) body parts.

The gameplay involves reading instructions from your presumably sexy supervisor about what type of photos are allowed, then moderating the selfies accordingly.

Since the gameplay involves accepting or rejecting images à la Papers, Please, the whole thing relies heavily on the graphics. Not to start questioning what IF is, but I think this game would be fundamentally different without images, if not wholly impossible. The "cheeky banter" parts are pretty slight (though it is a ~5-minute demo).

I have no particular complaints about the game, but as a hook for a longer experience, I think I’d need more evidence that it was going to build to something more substantial that wasn’t included in the demo.

This is a compelling, well-crafted short story with limited interactivity, written as speed IF, which means it's even better.

Worth noting up top: This game deals with religious themes, which is something I know very little about. And I’m gonna spoil the game in a minute.

At first this felt like a familiar story of a girl who has her eye on you in class being more...complex than you expected. In fact, that’s how I remember reading it when I first played, during Ectocomp last year. I felt sympathy for her, being continually spurned, and the final choice was easy: yes, the devil can repent. By the end I believed it was possible.

This time around I was more intrigued by the protagonist. Why are they so blasé about the possibly supernatural classmate who no one knows anything about? If their life is as lacking as it seems to be, why aren’t they at least a little bit tempted by power, money, knowledge?

It felt unusual that this devil was more interested in the random mortal who probably never has anything interesting happen to them than vice versa. Perhaps it’s rare to encounter someone who’s so empty that there’s nothing they want more than to be leveled with as an equal (“All I ever wanted was your name”). There’s definitely biblical lore here I’m missing, so instead I thought back to my younger days, when I spent a lot of time with people who didn’t value their own souls. (“You really don’t know what you’re worth, do you?” she says, and every high school crush flashes before my eyes.)

Anyway, this time the final choice was just as clear: no. Even this devil can’t try to be good.

The really cool thing about this game is that the protagonist arrives at a similar conclusion no matter which choice you (they) make. They had no real agency. As a reader, with an encounter like this, of course that’s how it ends. And a story that enthralls without surprise is doubly impressive.

I’m still in the middle of playing this game, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be done.

In this story, our focus character Aisling slogs through an endlessly looping tunnel. The setup evokes Exit 8, but with solo-Danganronpa levels of psychic torment. Point is, it’s a trap that Aisling was destined for, and proactively sought out, but does not deserve.

Something interesting is happening with perspective here. We observe the narrator as they observe Aisling’s struggle, which is also content Aisling is creating for their audience, based on someone else’s content they watched once and have been searching for. Later we learn the narrator created this experience for Aisling, without their consent or understanding. Does content have a value, or a cost? Is it good or bad to be watched? Is there a risk in consuming all this content—content like the video Aisling was looking for, which doomed them; content like the video Aisling is making right now? The arrows point in all directions.

I’ve made four loops and each time I ended up somewhere different. Every time I restart the game I notice something new—sometimes because something is slightly different based on my choices, and sometimes because nothing is. A couple times I clicked through the dialogue too fast—did something change that time? But I can't go back. Despite that this story has a straightforward script with occasional binary choices, the gameplay mirrors the setting. I’m lost in the maze. (This is a good maze.)

Nothing feels concrete, but as I look carefully, the details get clearer. I find references to a past audience being spectators to someone else’s public trauma. A ghostly figure appears: did they shed layers of themselves until they became transparent? Can we really learn from watching someone else’s struggle, or is it just gratuitous and damaging? Can I get to the bottom of this after a few more loops? Maybe there’s a path that will let me achieve the satisfaction of a True End or a 100% completed decision tree. Or maybe the paths will keep changing so I can never find what I’m looking for.

I will play at least four more times to find out.

Blossom, NY is interactive nonfiction—a researched history of a real community, presented like a brief guided tour. This is cool to see! I often wonder why there isn’t more interactive nonfiction storytelling. It would be interesting to see more experiments like this.

Structure-wise, this tour isn’t linear, because the game jumps around via hypertext, as if you’re encouraging your meandering tour guide to expound on whatever topic you’re particularly interested in. (I appreciated the game making sure we were situated by explaining how this would work ahead of time.) At first this nonlinear presentation made it harder for me to understand things, with historical facts revealed out of order, and even some future reflections from a couple years after the tour took place. But as the same highlighted topics kept appearing in different passages, I began to see more clearly the matrix of connections between present, past, and more distant past. I wonder if this repetitive presentation might actually help with learning.

Overall, this mini tour didn’t feel to me like storytelling as much as a history lesson for educational purposes. As a picky reader with a wandering mind, I felt myself grasping for a deeper present-day story layered over the history: Why was the narrator there? Who are they, and how did they discover what they know about this hamlet? When the narrator said something like “Last time I saw [this house] was before they put [the vinyl siding] on,” I wanted to hear the rest of that story. This is probably my IF habit kicking in, but I wonder if a little personal storytelling—whether true or fictional—would’ve made my visit more captivating. Then again, maybe here the point is to educate more than to captivate. And that it certainly did.