Ratings and Reviews by Joey Jones

This starts out unpromising, in the ultimate entry in the My Crappy Apartment genre, as you awake in a grody underimplemented squat. But it soon picks up. The game is played entirely through going places and talking to your friends— all fellow anarchists. It essentially has two short scenes: before and during the rally.

The core themes— ineffectual action and anxious micropolitics of an activist group— are underdeveloped and gestured towards. You can gather from the notes before and after the game ends that completing the game was a heroic effort by the author and much was left undone. From the bold use of colours, and the menu-based interaction, it's a shame Brendan didn't have Twine to use when he wrote this, as he would have been able to implement the whole thing much more smoothly and would have had more time to explore his narrative vision.

I think the original comp entry was quite buggy. I didn't have any real issues, and I thought the implementation of the conversation system was surprisingly elegant (e.g. you can use a two-letter shortcut command to switch between NPC conversations).

Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country is a parody of AIF in general, especially the sort epitomised by the original SM, which had the MS3TK treatment. It also parodies the genre of XTrek (erotic Star Trek fan-fiction). The AIF plot structure and the Star Trek setting form the loose structure upon which to hang the jokes. And jokes there are aplenty!

This game made me laugh out loud several times and also exposed me to a surprising amount of cybertextual ergodic literary theory. I didn't expect to learn anything from this game, but I did. The funny parts for me were the sendups of people adjacent to the interactive fiction sphere at the time. The Trek/Star Wars jokes are very tired by now, 20 years on, though they probably weren't that great then either, though there was one standout moment with (Spoiler - click to show)the force ghost of a Space Moose and his timely advice.

There's a good bit of genre subversion going on, with the normal AIF skeevy dynamic of the protagonist-as-subject/NPC-as-winnable-object eventually inverted.

As well as being amused and intrigued, I was also disgusted at several junctures. It's an emotional kessel run. With music! And graphics! And very silly sound effects! Actually the multimedia elements really did add to my enjoyment here (except in one very specific instance— if you've played to the end, you know the one).

The puzzles were fair and made to be more amusing than difficult, with a particularly funny sequence where you almost have the right thing in a fetch-quest several times. I completed the game readily without any walkthrough or hints (I don't think either exist).

(Note: it deserves every one of its multiple screens of content warnings. Some parts of it really are gross.)

Brief interaction with a traditional healer, with presumably authentic medicine names. It feels churlish to rate and review something like this, especially as the context of the jam it was submitted to may have been to encourage this sort of entry, but there's really nothing much to it.

As the game blurb says, this is unfinished and not worth playing. From as far as I could get with it, it would have been a neat idea, but this was not the way to implement it.

A few years before this came out, there was an explosion of Twine games around mental illness, and the trans experience. This is a game in this mode, with a range of adroit textual effects— mostly cleverly arranged sequences of links. At their best, these effects help you enact the protagonist's experience and mindset.

There are some sets of imageries that seem somewhat derivative of early works like Porpentine's, and the whole writing approach is to raise many more questions than it answers. Overall, it's well worth playing for a few well-crafted microscenes.