Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

Witch's Girl a browser CYOA framed as a children's story, and combines gently snarky humour, simple but charming illustration and a turn-to-page-N conceit to suggest a picture-book. Two small girls, Oblivia and her best friend Esme, encounter a witch who directs them on a time-travel adventure to save their (slightly hazily-defined) fantasy world.

The emphasis here is rather more on the adventure part than the saving-the-world part; in a few important respects the story resembles a game of make-believe more than a work of authored fiction. The long-arc plot is conspicuously an excuse to run around and have adventures, and is often temporarily forgotten in favour of more immediate distractions. There's a pleasantly childlike focus on the cool stuff that's happening now; but there's also a certain snarkiness about the whole enterprise that gives it a more disaffected grown-up feel at times.

Structurally, a degree of puzzle difficulty is added by a time-travel mechanic; in order to find items to solve gateway puzzles and advance to the next stage of the central plot, you need to use the witch's cauldron to travel back to earlier points of the plot and choose alternate paths. This means that you have to consume most of the game's content in order to win. Towards the end this devolves into lawnmowering through all the options, but it's less annoying than it could be; finding the last few items took about the right amount of time, as far as I was concerned.

My feeling was that it could have benefited from a little more use of state; it's a game about collecting items that doesn't have an inventory, which can make it a little hard to keep track of things. And it'd have been nice if there had been slightly more illustrations, more evenly distributed through the text. But overall, a pleasant experience.

A shortish CYOA piece that combines the Teenage Dirtbag tone (familiar from a million My Crappy Apartment games) with the game-as-zine approach of recent Twine offerings. The difference from normal My Apartment is that instead of being a cynical asshole middle-class American kid, you're a cynical asshole Pakistani kid from a class that's privileged enough to share a lot of middle-class Western tastes.

In line with its Teenage Dirtbag tone, its perspective is the sort of South Park nihilism where the only function of ethics is to allow you to be scornfully aware that everyone's morally bankrupt, and to enable sick humour to function. The protagonist cares more about cute girls, Facebook and the next Game of Thrones episode than actual political issues or religion - and, in this counterfactual universe where he is motivated to vote for no very clear reason, there's not much to suggest that changing his mind would be worth it.

The game is largely linear, with significant variations depending on whether you go to vote with your metalhead buddy, a cute girl from your college, or your inept, shotgun-toting security guard. Invariably your polling registration is messed up and you have to venture into the violent slums of Murdabad to cast your vote, leading to slapstick culture-clash scenes. The main fear of your wealthy contemporaries is Taliban attacks on the polls, but the real obstacles to voting are more to do with massive income disparity, apathy, corruption, everyday violence and a society deeply inured to all of this.

If you do manage to vote, there's no political effect; in fact, there's no political outcome even mentioned, confirming the general sense that it's taken for granted that nothing will change. Rather, voting (and telling people how you voted) is more of a social gambit, allowing you to get the girl or party with your security guard. In at least one ending, your hipster buddy votes for the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party for ironic purposes. Similarly, the game frequently claims to give you points - positive for looking good, negative for being a terrible person or just looking lame -, which are not actually recorded and have no impact on the story.

It's a somewhat rough effort; spelling and punctuation occasionally wobble, and the integration of graphics is spotty. It seems at least partially addressed to an outside audience, explaining some of its dialect and references, but by no means all (and sometimes the explanation is no more enlightening than the original). In at least one ending the game seemed to give me the wrong companion. Very little information is given about the candidates you're voting for; this obviously reflects the low-information, low-engagement stance of the protagonist, but it does make it harder for an outside reader to grasp things. (The semiotics of having the One Pound Fish guy represent the PML-N totally elude me. Possibly it's a sick burn if you're up on Pakistani politics; possibly it's a throwaway YouTube joke.)

I don't feel qualified to rate this, but it's definitely the most interesting Quest game I've played to date.

18 Cadence is a story about an American house built at the beginning and destroyed at the end of the twentieth century, and the families that live in it.

It's interactive fiction in the weak sense: interactivity here provides different ways to view the same events, rather than giving you any power to affect them. In this kind of IF, presentation is hugely important, because the player's involvement is all about manipulating presentation. Without presentation, they're mere hypertext novels, a bunch of static text that you might encounter in a somewhat different order. Cadence does a rather lovely job in this respect: the visual metaphor is of a cutting-board on which you arrange scraps of paper, each describing someone's perspective of an event or some aspect thereof. It's a very tactile, hands-on kind of process; what control you're granted is very immediate, and much more fine-grained than is usual in weakly interactive formats.

A few specific kinds of scraps can be combined into one another. Scenery objects can be combined into single-paragraph descriptions akin to a generated IF room description. Specific information - the date, age of the character in focus, the location - can be added to individual fragments. You can also click on scraps to change the way they're structured, or compress them into a summary. All this is useful, but doesn't do a great deal to change or recontextualise scraps: the important thing is positioning different scraps relative to one another.

The player's involvement isn't a process like being an actor or a co-author, a director, a stage manager: you're an editor. Someone else has already shot all the footage, and it's your job to choose which material to use, and where. The cutting-board is far, far too small to hold everyone's story at once: if you use it to keep track of key events as you go through the full century, it'll quickly overflow. You have to decide whose stories, which elements of those stories, to focus on. Montage is a powerful storytelling tool when put in the hands of the audience, as with vidding, or the endgame mechanic of the RPG Fiasco. But remixing requires familiarity with the stuff you're working with, so Cadence play is sort of divided into two stages: lawnmowering through all the material, which is rather like reading a fragmentary novel, and then selecting and arranging content.

The story has its own foci, though, apart from any manipulations you exercise on it. It's in large part a conversation about what families are and aren't; while being very clear about the importance of family in general, it shows actual families as being based on the best you can do with what you have available, rather than reflections of some platonic ideal; both happy and unhappy families are all different. Even where traditional family households exist and function well, society doesn't flinch from sacrificing them to economic or military ends.

As far as its genre touchstones go, 18 Cadence is a sort of historical dynastic tale, a tale of changing eras, in the same category as Woolf's Orlando, Forrest Gump, even Little, Big; the usual pattern there is to follow a family, or an individual, through decades of change. (It seems to take care to avoid trying to cleave too closely to a high-school-history kind of summary: we're not Forrest Gump, coincidentally central to every event of canonical modern history.) It's not unusual for a home to play a big role in this sort of story, but in 18 Cadence, a little unusually, it's not a home that remains in the same family for generations, but one that gets resold or repurposed many times over the course of the century. So whereas in dynastic, tale-of-our-times stories the house tends to emphasize continuity, in 18 Cadence it foregrounds discontinuity much more. People break apart more than they hold together. Houses are not things that remain in the family by default, but rather to be rented, mortgaged and remortgaged, repossessed. A family home is not a source of constant stability, but a tenuous moment, striven for and then lost, not to be recaptured. Thus also romance, parenthood, family. The rapid, gap-filled pace of the story, a handful of fragments for an entire year, makes for a world where entropy is king, where old age and death come too quickly.

So the mood of Cadence is strongly downbeat. You are forever losing people, and people are forever losing homes. The fragmentary nature of the narrative paints a picture of a world full of gaps: gaps between people and their loved ones, between hopes and realities, between the glimpses you're afforded of people and the full story of their lives.