Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

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.

Almost Goodbye is a series of drama set-pieces: two people, a setting, a last chance to make something meaningful of a flawed relationship that will have no next chapter. It's a deeply theatrical premise: you can almost see the big empty stage, a projection screen, two chairs in the middle of all that space.

This is all based around a science-fiction premise: the protagonist is a scientist about to depart on a one-way space-colony mission. There are genuine observations being made here about sciencey subjects: the unprecedented finality of long-distance space migrations, the way that the all-consuming drive required to be a top-ranked modern specialist is liable to screw up one's personal life. But this is very, very much secondary to the Interpersonal Conflict side of things.

The main problem that Almost Goodbye faces is in its writing. Not that it's bad, by any means: it's consistently well above average. But the nature of the piece, the rawness of its framing - two familiar people, one irreconcilable disagreement, no time - lay things bare. There aren't any flashy explosions, clever puzzles or gorgeous costumes to hide behind. There's no room to prevaricate. So the piece, by its nature, sets a very high bar for its prose. Reed is a good prosaist but not a great one; there are points where the writing hits the nail on the head, and a lot more points where it's... fine, but not quite delivering the staggering emotional gut-punch that the situation calls for. (I'm am an absolute sucker for the theme of leaving a beloved place forever. Dragged-out goodbyes fuck me up. I fully expected to be crying by the end of this. In the event, nothing quite did it; I am aware that this is a totally unfair standard.)

Structurally, it's a very simple scene-based CYOA with a scattering of contextual text substitutions (it was written to showcase what could be done within that scope; and the contextual stuff is well-orchestrated). Your choices are important, for all that they don't influence the broad outcome of the action in the slightest; these are choices about who you are and how you care about people, not what you do. (It treads a thin line in avoiding judgment about which choices are the Good Choices, and mostly gets away with it.)

The regular structure of the thing, the establishing of a scene according to a set of rules, the one-word assertions about the state of the protagonist, the pathos twist at the end, puts me strongly in mind of narrative RPGs. Possibly I am projecting here. But my feeling at the end of playing this was: this would be an amazing story told off-the-cuff. As a polished piece, it's almost there.

(This is a pornographic game. Expect discussion of porny things.)

I7 never really caught on in among AIF authors. Bob's Garage and its available source code, released in the ancient history of 3Z95 (that is, in 2006, the first year of I7's public beta), offers some clues as to why.

The case for I7 flopping as an AIF platform would have been pretty good on its own: I6 was never hugely popular with AIF authors, so I7 didn't have a pool to draw on. Too, AIF often relies on libraries for its sexytimes modeling, and has a smaller community to produce those libraries, which makes for a certain amount of inertia.

And to a great extent, Bob's Garage looks like a first draft of an I7 AIF library; the game itself doesn't ever make use of a lot of the terms it defines. But it also shows strong signs of being a learning exercise. The plot (hot women blow mechanic in a bathroom for some reason, later one of them coincidentally needs her car fixed urgently and only the mechanic can save her) is hackneyed even for AIF, and the interminable-busywork to actual-sex ratio is high. It also makes heavy use of scenes, which at the time were one of the most-touted aspects of I7's design: and the result feels heavily scripted, constrained and dominated by textdumps. The conclusion you'd draw from Bob's Garage, if it was your model for how I7 worked, would be that it was a lot of effort for a rather shabby return.

But perhaps most importantly, I7 is natural-language, which makes code statements feel more explicit as declarations about your world. It's hard to write "ass is part of every woman" or "assfucking a man is being inappropriate" without feeling a tiny bit skeevy about yourself (or else hearing it delivered as if by a preacher in a second-tier SNL sketch). Natural language code means that you read and hear the content of your world-model as you build it, and hearing the built-in assumptions of AIF is usually going to be ridiculous, creepy or both.

(More entertainingly, and an important chapter in the history of AIF penis-modeling: to avoid the player's penis showing up in inventory listings, before inventory is taken, said penis is teleported to a room called FakeStreet, then teleported back again afterwards. In itself this says very little about I7 -- even back then this could have been avoided by using part of --, but it's funnier in I7. The two stars are mostly due to the amount of time I've spent giggling about this particular hack.)

This is a game about exploration, about discovering strange and wondrous worlds. It'd be easy to consider it a companion-piece to Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home. In general, it's structured like a classic IF adventure: explore a cave network, collect objects, use each object to solve its one puzzle, thus opening up new areas and new objects. Monsters attack; keys must be found; there's something of the sense of an old-school Zorkian cave, all juxtapositions. The structural difference is that it's rendered in a CYOA format: each exploration reaches a dead-end and then returns you to the start, retaining any inventory. (The protagonist, in each playthrough, is both different and the same.) This is classic adventure gaming boiled down to its structural essence: get thing, go to place, use thing. And as such, it's skilfully executed: it's fair and easy, but not a cakewalk.

Invisible Cities ranks highly among my desert-island books. For me, this puts Bigger Than You Think in a precarious position; I'm comparing it to a book which, well, I would cheerfully throw every IF game written before 1995 into the fire to preserve one page of Invisible Cities. And my intuitive reaction is to see if Bigger measures up. (That general reaction, as well as not being hugely fair, is probably a sign that I'm not really cut out for fanfic.)

Where Invisible Cities is very much about personal experience (melancholy, nostalgia, romantic longing), Bigger Than You Think is less personal, more rational. There is a good deal of aesthetic and intellectual wonder, as well as action-horror adrenalin, but it has a generally cool affect. The protagonist(s) are academically-minded archaeologists; on making a new discovery, they are often described as dedicating the rest of their lives to its study. The strange worlds are ultimately not an unreliable reflection of personal experience: there is a central mystery to work towards, and in doing so you will reveal a unifying logic to the world. The direction provided by that mystery is perhaps a necessary change to make it work as a game. But compared to the rich emotional landscape of Calvino's original, it feels a little arid.

That said, it's a fun game with capable writing, well-established motivation, solid design and an attractive setting, which is not to be sniffed at.

(Also: at one point, the game adopts an Arabian Nights structure, with stories told by an NPC that lead the player into alternate worlds. This was a cool thing that I'd like to see used more extensively.)

Ex Nihilo sits on the cusp between IF and e-poetry: a very short, very abstract, highly atmospheric CYOA in which you make choices about a deity. It will take perhaps five minutes to play, but you'll want to play a few times.

The core plot is always the same: a divine being creates the universe, abides alone for eons, encounters a race of lesser beings, and finally meets a being that is something like an equal. The value of interaction is primarily about the attitude and tone of the piece: depending on your mood and tone choices, the lesser beings and your relationship to them will turn out rather differently. God's mood is the shaping force of the universe. Events are described in terse, cool tones, at a high level of abstraction; and when you meet your counterpart, at the end, things are left massively wide open.

The game's colour choices and the decisive nature of the final encounter, which determines the fate of the world, suggest a kind of Manichean universe*, in which the nature of the two sides is always different. The suggestion of these strange dualisms is the main thing I took away from the piece; it has the weirdly fruitful nature of procedural generation about it, and in this context the awkward juxtapositions that this kind of thing often throws up seem more like the product of minds alien to one another trying to communicate.

To be more specific: the final choice of the game is a text entry, the first thing you say to the Other Being. From what I can make out, the game stores the entries of everyone playing the game, then feeds them back out as the Other Being's responses. Like letting players choose their character's name, this is the sort of thing that you'd expect to be tone-breaking, and often it is; when you encounter a divine being who greets you with "Eat at Joe's", you're kind of catapulted into a Douglas Adams cosmos. But at best, the disconnect that this creates, the feeling of talking at deep, unbridgeable cross-purposes, makes for a pretty good suggestion of cosmic conflict: Heaven and Hell fundamentally don't understand one another.

All this is rendered in a smooth, simple, effective graphic style with appropriately vast-and-lonely-sounding music.

* that is, a world shaped by the struggle between two roughly equal gods or cosmic forces: in classic Manichaeism, these are the forces of good and evil.

An academic-mystery adventure about European art history. It's large, attractively illustrated and amusingly written, but (as with many games that have a lot of action territory to cover) doesn't work awfully well on the interaction front.

Gilbert Fontenelle, a crabby professor of Pre-Renaissance Italian art, is brought in to investigate a Mysterious Clue on a painting in the Vatican archives. This will end up taking him on a grand journey across Europe, on which he will discover ancient plots, rampage through a great many art museums, meet attractive, intelligent younger women and be grouchy to the latter. (They will find this endearing and gently needle him.) There are strong shades of Indiana Jones here, if Indy was frailer, grouchier, Frencher and much, much more interested in the actual content of his academic field. ("Sorry, beautiful," Fontenelle subvocalises to a Polish hostess, "Gilbert Fontenelle already has a vice: the study of Pre-Renaissance frescoes.")

The characters are thoroughly hammed-up, the action slapstick. Most conversation happens in (large) press-any-key-to-continue cutscenes, a lot of which are very funny: the comedy generally derives from Gilbert being a horrible grouch who hates everything, but who (despite protestations) is willing to engage in a great deal of impish mischief. There are a lot of fourth-wall-bending jokes; on several occasions Fontenelle grumbles about all the adventure cliches, suggests some more that would be even more ridiculous to encounter, and promptly encounters them. The conspiracy-and-mystery plot is not taken enormously seriously; (Spoiler - click to show)there does turn out to be an ancient and cloaked cabal, but they're mostly in it for the annual dinners. But the sense of a grand adventure through cool places is strong regardless. Also, though saying this feels kind of like a disservice to the author, everything is funnier in French.

My French is good enough to read IF (if I read aloud, and go to Google Translate for idiom, and the French version of Zarf's Play IF card for standard commands) but not really sufficient to judge the quality of prose, and the parts of my brain that scan IF for puzzle content don't link up well with the parts that read French. So, while I felt that a lot of necessary actions were heavily underclued, I'm not sure that this impression is fair. Less ambiguously, this is a full-sized story about fast-paced intrigue and action, with fairly traditional IF puzzles worked in. That combination tends to lead to punishing timed sequences and wobbly implementation, which is certainly true here. In other places (the Bond-ish card game, the final puzzle) the gameplay aspects make the pacing sag. It's admittedly difficult to twin certain kinds of plot to IF that plays smoothly, and Ekphrasis' failings here are hardly extraordinary. The game managed to be compelling despite this, largely because I liked the characters so much; but expect to grind your teeth at a few points.

It's not wholly bug-free, either; there's at least one-point where dropping an object makes it impossible to pick up again, rendering the game unwinnable. (The walkthrough at the Archive is not entirely to be relied upon, either, which can cause big problems in certain timed sequences.) It's not entirely clear whether the extant version was intended as a final release. Regular saving advised.

This is a game that's deeply interested in art history, and there's an appropriately extensive use of graphics The choice of images is generally excellent, particularly when it comes to setting. Their combination is less so, and often feels a bit clip-arty. (At the time, this was about as much as you could squeeze out of Glulx; I live in anticipation of what will ensue once the Euro IF crowd get to grips with I7 Vorple and native-language I7. If this entire game could be rendered in the style of the chapter-break postcards... that would be pretty spectacular). There are also sound effects, which are more squarely in the just-a-clip department.

This is a slice-of-life game, heavily influenced by lad-lit novelist Nick Hornby, that deals directly with a romantic relationship and its breakup. That's a pretty rare thing in IF, and Mix Tape gives some hints as to why.

The author's focus is definitely more on the writer side. Essentially all of the significant actions come pre-scripted; only one scene involves much interaction, and even there your actions are about preparing dinner, rather than directly engaging with the relationship. Much of the significant plot is doled out in walls-o'-text. The prose wanders, a good deal of the time, into overwritten or overwrought territory; it avoids being bland, it maintains voice, but it's in need of a ruthless edit and some repurposing to fit its medium better. Significant action is pretty limited throughout; veering from the script will either get you stuck entirely, or dragged back on course.

The central relationship concerns Peter and Valentine, twentysomethings from nowhere in particular. Although you play as Valentine, the protagonist of this story is definitely Peter; Peter is the one whose interests dominate the narrative. Val isn't given much that makes her stick in the mind as an individual. In the frame-story, wherein Peter gets Val to burn her scrapbook of their relationship, it felt to me very much as if Peter was using Val as a prop in his own internal drama while justifying it as a necessary step for us.

A lot of the problems with characterisation are ultimately interaction problems: Peter isn't deeply-implemented, so he comes off as distant and inattentive. Peter's role is to direct the plot, so he comes off as controlling. The combination makes him feel self-absorbed and emotionally manipulative. (True, this is meant to be about a failed romance, not a healthy one. But it's meant to resolve into a failed romance but a reaffirmed friendship, and doesn't really succeed at it.) But it's also a problem with the writing: Valentine mostly thinks about Peter, Peter mostly thinks about music. It's hard to form much of a picture of Valentine other than as Peter's cute girlfriend.

In this particular corner of cultural history, we tend to have some fairly strong feelings about parity in romantic relationships. But the basic formula of interactive media involves a highly asymmetric relationship. This means that IF stories about romance are a very fine balancing act; small errors can have far-reaching, unintentional overtones about manipulation, coercion, emotional blackmail. Moments intended to be touching often become creepy even in more traditional media; IF is even more vulnerable to this. (Violet, a more mature piece than Mix Tape, still ends up falling into this trap.)

The game's structural conceit is a retrospective of a romantic relationship in the form of a selection of songs. This is kind of self-indulgent on the face of it, and suffers badly because the songs aren't (and can't be) included in the game. This was perhaps more of an issue in 2005 than it is now, when more or less any song can be listened to on YouTube; but it still has a translation problem if you're unfamiliar with the songs, dislike them, or simply have no emotional resonance with them. (For me, most of it falls into the category of Earnest Indie-Pop Rock with a side of Boring Indie That Nerds 5-10 Years My Senior Like.)

(I liked this considerably more when it first came out, but on re-examination its flaws feel far more acute. The score here splits the difference.)

Zero Summer is a browser-based game using the StoryNexus platform (best known for Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, and a bit like a social network game without the social network nonsense). It's set in a strange postapocalyptic Texas: you show up in Amarillo with amnesia and are obliged to find your way in the world as The Man With No Name.

The StoryNexus platform has a good deal more friction than is usual in a CYOA. Your choices are never single-click: you have to draw cards, mouseover them to see what they mean, click to bring up the card's options, assess those options, decide between them. In some games (this one included) you have to travel between regions to get the options you need, which is not in itself a content-offering process. Grinding -- repeatedly doing the same thing in order to raise your stats -- remains a significant game element. Even on a decent internet connection, none of this loads instantaneously; every click is a little slower than might be desired. And the system itself limits how much you can play by giving you a set number of turns that refresh slowly over time.

All of this, importantly, is dumb friction: it doesn't add challenge or engagement to the experience, it just slows the rate of content-delivery down. This places really high demands on the content itself; and, indeed, the Failbetter house style has generally been to set very high standards for the writing side, with strong and distinctive worldbuilding that's evoked with dense, punchy, elegant prose, richly evocative but (at its best) understated.

Zero Summer's take on the house style is a little different, but only a little. It veers somewhat away from the generic characterisation of Fallen London, towards more specific, continuous characters. Its snippets of text are more on the lengthy side. But these are very small departures, and most of the core elements are much the same: a strange, dangerous world full of sinister wonders and gradually unfolding mysteries, explored by a enterprising (but vague) jack-of-all-trades and delivered as a series of anecdotes in juicy prose. The rhythms of the text, the way the story is paced, the detail-oriented aesthetic feel for the subject-matter are fundamentally familiar.

As with Fallen London, the world of Zero Summer has been transformed by a fantastic and sinister apocalyptic event. In Zero Summer, however, it's less a matter of mysterious fiendish machinations and more a force of the harsh, inhuman desert. Demons won't be offering you scones and employment, here. On the other hand, the protagonist feels like less of a hedonistic sociopath; this is a story concerned with hospitality, with getting to know people because you'd like to know them better, rather than for the sake of money, sex, information, patronage. Notably, while three of your base stats correspond to Fallen London ones, there's nothing that matches the thievish Shadowy. (The particular combination here, of people who are immediately hospitable but also very private, thorny and hard to get to know, feels just right for a frontier US context.) It's concerned about staying human in a tough world.

Insofar as Zero Summer has failings, they're generally to do with problems inherent in StoryNexus. The art is stock. The world is, at present, perhaps a little sparse; you can travel to areas before there are any actions unlocked there, and you often find yourself drawing the same five cards over and over again (which undermines the purpose of having a card-based opportunity system instead of a static set of options). There is a shade too much grind required, and the turn-limit system remains an unhappy compromise. But within its established idiom, Zero Summer is a capable and engaging piece of work.

maybe make some change is a rare thing: a political game that's powerful without being preachy, a heavily-multimedia piece that doesn't feel gimmicky, a limited-action/brutalised-protagonist piece that feels justified. Dealing with the Maywand District murders, it puts you in the shoes of Adam Winfield, one of the US soldiers convicted of the premeditated killing of unarmed Afghan civilians.

PAX East 2011. At the IF Demo Fair, Aaron Reed is showcasing an early version of maybe make some change, then titled what if im the bad guy. To me, the experience of play feels like an attempt to represent post-traumatic stress disorder. The game is played with headphones: the soundtrack is a garble of radio static, yells and gunfire, through which emerge fragments of speech clips about the Afghan conflict and the War on Terror. In the screen's background, behind the text, clips play from first-person shooters set somewhere in the Middle East. The central text is terse and repetitive, the verb-set narrow; interactivity feels distant, a struggle through a haze of stressful stimuli. As a piece of multimedia IF, it's astounding, leagues in advance of anything comparable; otherwise, it feels more like a theatre-of-cruelty experiential piece than a playable story. A woman stops playing, refusing to enter the commands that she feels the game's demanding of her: Aaron gives her a hug. "That's a totally legitimate response."

maybe make some change is a more meditative creature than what if im the bad guy, less easy to read as designed primarily to shock and brutalise the audience. The voices are chosen more for calm tones, the crackle of radio and gunfire is less jarring (the predominant sound is of an eerie air-raid siren), the video more blurry and ghostlike. The game doesn't try to overwhelm you with multiple stimuli anywhere near as much. The narrators use less racist language. The overall effect is less of a hammer-blow to the face: still disturbing, but allowing more focus on the underlying content.

The game's basic conceit is a cycling Rashomon story: the same vignette is told over and over again by different narrators, military and civilian, before and after the event: sergeants, a pro-war relative, a liberal blogger, an army trainer, your prosecutor. Each retelling takes only a single action before switching to the next; the initial feeling is that this is a one-turn game like Aisle. The same sentences are used in each retelling, but as well as tenses, many of the words shift between narrators -- most significantly, the word used for the Afghan man killed by the platoon, which varies from 'civvie' to 'insurgent' to 'fuckhead'.

The game focuses on the strained and difficult positions that the protagonist faces, about situations and interpretations framed by other people. Most actions are invalid, either denied by the narrators or self-censored by the protagonist. The central thread to the piece is obviously about the conflicting pressures and limited freedom of the protagonist. But there's more to the piece than the weary The Game Is Oppressive, The Player Is A Victim dynamic.

(Spoiler - click to show)The central point of gameplay is to unlock the full suite of available verbs, then apply them to the correct narrators in ways that might conceivably have helped. For me, this successfully threaded the needle between ironic nihilism and demanding perfect-world outcomes.
There's a definite element of disassociation or derealisation about gameplay, a post-desperation feeling of 'okay, I'm fucked anyway, let's try anything'. But it avoids becoming navel-gazing; the game does an excellent job of contrasting the various American-centric fantasy wars with the man in front of you, the ghost of Mullah Adahdad who you must confront again and again from different angles (contrast De Baron). Similarly, for a piece that's about different perspectives, it does a fine job of avoiding pure-subjectivity soup.

The multimedia features are largely lost in the non-browser version; not recommended.