Reviews by Tabitha

I had fun playing this one, but ultimately came away with a rather poor impression of it after looking at the walkthrough. Initially, I really enjoyed exploring the possibility space, both as far as testing out commands and, on replaying, being more strategic and seeing if any of my strategizing would pay off. After five playthroughs (some of which, admittedly, were not actual attempts to do well), I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was and wasn't possible. But when I cracked open the walkthrough out of curiosity, I saw multiple possible actions that I'd never thought of.

The walkthrough starts out with a list of useful commands, which I think should have been included in the game itself; players could have a choice of whether to view them or not, but I think the player should definitely be made aware of their existence. Especially because I learned from the walkthrough that some of my attempted actions that had been rejected by the game were actually possible, I just hadn’t been using the right phrasing. Implementing more synonyms and/or including helpful failure messages that point the player toward the correct wording would help with that issue, too.

But what's a bigger deal to me is that, pre-walkthrough, I’d concluded that ending the game (Spoiler - click to show)with some level of failure was inevitable—whether the empire being completely overtaken, or its borders shrinking. And I liked that; the game seemed to be saying (Spoiler - click to show)“No matter what you do, empires are doomed to fall.” But the walkthrough presents (Spoiler - click to show)a series of commands that leads to an ending where you've not only held onto your current territory, you've expanded and conquered others'.

Given that this is the only path presented in the walkthrough, clearly the author considers it the ideal ending. With Drew Cook's essay on "The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode" fresh in my mind, I couldn't help feeling that my whole experience of the game had been deflated by this authorial intervention. My own interpretation went out the window, replaced by "Oh, it's just a game where (Spoiler - click to show)you win by growing your empire." The game's fantasy world is very generic/traditional, with barbaric tribes harassing your borders and women appearing only as courtesans or brides. Before, when left to interpret the game myself, I could see these as purposeful choices; now, though, they just seem lazy.

This is the third mystery IF game by thesleuthacademy. I enjoyed the previous ones, and I had a good time with the exploration and deduction process in this one too, ultimately successfully figuring out the killer, motive, and means (although I did miss the actual murder weapon). Some of the criticisms I had of the previous game, The Case of the Solitary Resident (my review) were resolved here, making for overall smoother gameplay, although some of them still apply (namely, the lawnmower nature and not distinguishing between visited and unvisited links).

But the biggest issue with this one is something I only mentioned in passing in that last review. There’s a limitation to these games in that the scenarios and the characters all exist solely in service to the deduction puzzle. With this one in particular, that setup really didn’t work for me. While we meet a whole cast of characters, with names and emotions and secrets, in the end, all that matters is finding whodunnit; the details—the human details, that is—aren’t important.

This is a straight-up spoiler of the solution, so be forewarned: (Spoiler - click to show)at the end, having successfully solved the case, we’re told: “Lionel Litchfield, a workaholic [and the murder victim], barely had a social life. He ended up having an affair with the young Marguerite Hansel [the culprit].” Marguerite is Lionel’s child’s governess. Lionel is married. So these lines reveal him as both a cheating husband and an employer who’s fine with starting a sexual relationship with a young woman in his employ.

The short story A Jury of Her Peers, in which (Spoiler - click to show)two women choose not to share their conclusion that a neighbor murdered her abusive husband with the local sheriff, came to mind as I thought about this game. In The Litchfield Mystery, (Spoiler - click to show)Marguerite doesn’t get a jury, of her peers or otherwise; she gets a male police detective, embodied by me the player, whose only pursuit is of law-defined justice. There’s no option to take the power imbalance implicit in an employer-employee relationship, in the even-more-sexist-than-today society of 1937, into consideration; neither is there any concern for what Marguerite’s fate may be as a young women convicted of murder at that time. I think a version of the game that did consider these things, and perhaps let you choose whether or not to reveal your findings after solving the case, would be a stronger one.

This is a haunting story with gorgeous visuals and a lovely, unobtrusive soundtrack. It opens with a pair of mysterious, compelling lines and then shifts into a slice-of-life scene of the young teen narrator, Pierce, having a typical interaction with his mother—which serves to immediately characterize both of them and sketch a picture of their relationship. Brief statements from Piece, who often speaks of logic and uses mathematical analogies, his voice tending toward mechanical and detached, illustrate what it’s like to live in this house, with these parents:

"I set my backpack against the leftmost wall of my room and check the note [from his mother] on my desk. On our better days, this note makes up most of our communication."

"Father has already taken his seat at the chair opposite mine. I don't usually see him for dinner."

The initial backdrop for the text is an abstract digital illustration done in soft pastels, but the visuals shift as the narrative progresses—becoming louder, darker, the colors less harmonious. Pierce doesn’t understand just how wrong things are here, from his limited, inexperienced perspective, but readers will start to pick up on it, and the horror is only amplified by the gap between his knowledge and ours.

His neighbor and peer Avery makes for a good contrast, more worldly, picking up on things Pierce has missed, pointing Pierce toward truths he's failed to see. While the story never becomes genre horror, the vibes remain: a refusal to confront or acknowledge grief or to address underlying issues; children scrutinized and molded without commensurate care or love—these are all their own horrors, and Pierce does realize that on some level:

"It feels like every wall is a window with something on the other side looking in, looking at me."

"I don't think I could take him into this house, even if he wanted to give it a try."

"This house is not your home, no matter what everyone around tells you. Every hall has no end. Every window is just your reflection for someone else to see."

The use of second person here is a subversion of the typical IF “you”; the reader is not an agent in the story, the character we inhabit not playable at all. Pierce is addressing his lost sister, who has already made her choices. I won’t spoil this plotline at all, but it's the central throughline of the piece, and its resolution both cements the horror and also leads to hints of hope. At the end, the visuals resume the same colors they started with, soft and gentle again. The long-unacknowledged truth has been revealed, and maybe that means that for Pierce, the horror won’t continue indefinitely.

(One note to hopefully prevent future players from flailing with this as I did: if you visit any of the menu options, the way to return to the story is to right-click!)

An expansion of a short review originally published at Intfiction.org on May 8, 2025. I beta-tested this game. This review is based on the published version.

This game is simply delightful. A good-hearted cat protagonist, protective of her human boy but also empathetic to other creatures; a constrained environment that’s still full of details and ripe for exploration as only a cat can explore. Simple on the surface, but deep underneath, and cut through with an understated sadness that adds poignancy to what could have been a purely light-hearted adventure story.

There are many player-friendly features, making the game accessible even to players who may be new to the parser game medium. To boot, there are also several charming illustrations as well as bonus material that you can unlock based on your score. Highly recommend!

An expansion of a short review originally published at Intfiction.org on May 8, 2025.

Radiance Inviolate had me at “queer vampires”, and it did not disappoint. Trapped in a pit with sunrise on the way, the vampire Lysander has few options... but the options he *does* have lead down more different paths than you’d expect, revealing different layers of his backstory on each route and presenting some quite varied possibilities for his future. The game encourages replay with a friendly ending screen that summarizes your choices and lets you jump back to past choice points. Other highlights are the enjoyable NPCs, rich worldbuilding, lovely writing, and gorgeous UI. Highly recommend.

An expansion of a short review originally published at Intfiction.org on May 8, 2025.

My overwhelming feeling after playing Succor was frustration. I related a lot to the protagonist's situation; I've been in that kind of headspace many times before, no energy or motivation to do anything besides lie in bed. The game starts just when you finally do drag yourself out of bed because you need to eat. But almost immediately, I found the work's portrayal of living with mental illness overly simplistic. Early text spells out your goal:

Hunger drags you awake despite your wishes and you reluctantly get out of bed. It's already almost the afternoon, and you're starving. [...] Time to find some food.

But initially, your only options are to explore your apartment... and clean it. *Deep* clean it. Fridge, sink, microwave, stove--you can scrub them all to shining, before you've had even a bite to eat! This really clashes with the "too depressed to get out of bed until hunger literally drives you to it" protagonist the game set up, and simply makes no physical sense to me--I, at least, would literally be unable to do all that work on an empty stomach.

The other aspect I found grating is that at certain points you're presented with a choice of coping mechanisms that are clearly framed as either healthy or unhealthy. Pick the healthy ones, and you’ll feel better. Ah, I wish it were that simple in real life!

One aspect of the game that did work for me was the sections where the protagonist reflected back on various memories tied to food and cooking, giving us a picture of their life up to this point, including family, school, and what led to their current bout of depression. I found these parts much more effective than the “mental illness simulator” aspects.

An expansion of a short review originally published at Intfiction.org on May 8, 2025.

This is a very vibes-based piece; I got a strong sense of emotion from it, and feel it was successful on that front. However, I never fully understood the chronology or the details of what was going on. Past and present melded together, slipping back and forth between the two; characters blended together, leaving me uncertain exactly how many lost loves the protagonist had to mourn. Possibly this ambiguity was intentional, but I would have preferred a little more concreteness. As other reviewers have mentioned, I also struggled with the lack of contrast between the text and the background images.

An expansion of a short review originally published at Intfiction.org on May 8, 2025.

I'm clearly in the minority on this one, but I didn't find The Goldilocks Principle effective. The piece wants readers to interrogate why we're engaging with it, but while I can understand asking the question, “Why do you want to know details about someone’s eating disorder?”, in this case, the author specifically chose to put the game in front of a (relatively) large audience. I opened it up in good faith, prepared to take in a personal story that the author clearly wanted to share... only to be met with a confrontational tone by a narrator who seemed to be judging me for having clicked the "play" link at all.

I think that generally when IF authors write about sensitive, personal topics, they're choosing to be openly vulnerable in that way because they want to share their stories--they want readers to understand what they went through, or for people who have experienced similar things to feel less alone. So presenting a piece that looks like it's meant in that spirit, then pulling a "gotcha" on the player and mocking them for wanting to engage with the work, was very off-putting to me.

During Spring Thing '25, I wrote full reviews of several of the games in this anthology. I never made it to all of them, but I'm posting the ones I did write here, as I figure sharing some reviews is better than sharing none!

A Brand New World by Raiden

This is a fun story that starts with a relaxing walk on the beach but (possibly) goes somewhere very different! The opening descriptions drew me in, capturing the feeling of unwinding from your stress in nature: “It’s moments such as these that remind you that you are alive, that you can breathe and simply… be.” The descriptions are detailed and vivid, with some nice phrases like “the horizon painted in a hot pink colour as the last bits of sunlight embrace it.”

The main storyline is about visiting a fantasy world, but you can choose not to go, and in that case you get a completely unrelated story about encountering a lost child (with two possible endings). I think the game would be stronger if it eliminated that second possible storyline and focused on developing the fantasy world further and giving the player more choices about how to explore/interact with it (which I’ll elaborate on in the next two paragraphs!).

Remy was a good NPC; we get a strong sense of their personality, and I liked seeing their interactions with Mikhail. But I wanted to have more choices for how I interacted with them. For instance, at this part: “Should you say something? Should you keep quiet? Should you question why the dragon took to the skies the moment they showed up?”, I would have liked these to all be options I could pick from. I wanted to feel like I was shaping my relationship with Remy through my choices, instead of the game simply telling me how I responded to them.

I liked the choice of whether to approach the dragon or not—the text clearly signaled that doing so would be risky, and if you choose to do it anyway, you face the natural consequences! But the final choice of whether to stay or go was weaker; similar to entering the hole or not at the beginning, it felt like a “Do something interesting” or “Don’t do it” choice. I think it’s generally more fun when both choices are interesting; for example, at the end you could pick which trinket you want to buy, or which part of the market you want to explore before you have to leave.

Anyway, I had fun with this and I look forward to more IF by this author!

Fragments of the Nile by Storyteller

This story has a fun historical-investigation plotline and a twist! I especially liked the scene where I entered the memory. And this was a funny reference by one ending to another: “At least you died pain-free, unlike some poor guy who might have been cursed in a parallel reality.”

Some of the choices were “Do the interesting thing”/“Don’t do it” like I talked about above. I liked that at the beginning, even if you choose to stay home you can still get a full storyline related to the Egypt mystery, and I think it would be nice if the choices reflected this. Instead of simply go/don’t go, the choices could be “Travel to Egypt” and “Offer to help out with research from home.” That way, the player knows they’ll get an interesting story no matter which one they pick.

A few other small things!

-I was confused when I exploded like a tomato but wasn’t dead! Maybe the game could tell me I died, but give me the chance to go back and try again? Or make it clear that the explosion wasn’t life-threatening.
-I noticed only one ending has a link to go back to the beginning, but it would be nice if all of them did.
-There are a lot of small spelling errors (a frequent one is “trough” instead of “through”), so I’d suggest running the text through a spellchecker, or having someone proofread it.

Power Turtle by 3N

This game is very cute; I enjoyed playing through multiple times and exploring all the different outcomes for my new turtle friend.

I liked that the opening choices were not “investigate the interesting thing”/“ignore it”! But, when I replayed, I found that both choices just lead to the same result, finding the turtle. Because of this, I don’t think a choice is needed here; you could just give a “Look in the water” link, and then let the choices start once the turtle has been found.

It was fun how many different paths there were in this story. “The fish and the turtle became besties” was one of my favorites; that line made me smile. There were some paths where storylines I was interested in didn’t get resolved; in one, the turtle grows bigger than me, but after that happens it isn’t mentioned again. In another, the turtle refuses to eat, and I never got a chance to solve that. So my advice here would be to keep exploring those story threads once they’re introduced. When the turtle gets big, maybe I can ride it, or I need to find a medicine that’ll make it small again.

Overall, a cute story with many different endings to find!

Those voices are getting louder, captain by Mushroom

This is a very funny and clever work; I replayed a bunch to see all the different possibilities, and every one was delightful. I loved the voice of the narrator talking to me, giving commentary and advising on what I should or shouldn’t do. And when I discovered the in-story reason for it, it was even better! Some examples:

-Ask him if he´s okay -Simply ignore him. (I mean…this guy is always nervous, why would you bother him and yourself by asking stupid questions.)

This is the first choice in the game, and it’s kind of the “do the interesting thing”/“don’t do it” sort of choice—but it works here because we have that outside voice pushing us to pick the “don’t do it” option. To me, this makes both options equally intriguing. I want to find out what’s up with this guy, but I’m also curious what will happen if I listen to this mysterious voice.

(You´d better comfort him, I´m not giving you other options.)

I loved this moment, where the voice takes away my agency because this poor guy just needs comfort so badly.

(Don´t. You. Dare.)

Another great moment, where the voice does give me two options, but it really doesn’t want me to pick one of them! (Of course, this meant I had to pick it…)

One tiny note that should be an easy fix—when I start up the game, it goes straight to the story instead of the opening menu screen like the others in the anthology (but the opening menu screen does exist; the “Play Again” button takes you there).

Finally, two more very funny quotes that I copied into my notes:

´´Crow, Crow! Captain is a #### !´´the parrot says. You don´t argue. The captain truly is a #### . You´re just about to teach the parrot a new curse word when the captain walks in.
.
“AND STOP MAKING OUT!!!´´ Captain yells with his nerves on edge. (He hates when sailors are not doing their job, he hates not yelling at sailors and he hates love…

Basically… go play this game.

I like history as a subject, but for a long time I thought I didn’t, because it’s often taught as a zoomed out, big-picture overview with few points of connection to individual human lives. This work illustrates a perfect way to counter that remove, presenting decades of Poland’s history through the lens of how it impacts, and is impacted by, one particular woman.

Thousand Lives has an unusual format for IF, each of its six chapters delivered by email 24 hours after you make the preceding chapter’s choice. A decade can pass in a few hundred words, with events both large- and small-scale described in brief summaries. Every chapter ends with a life-changing choice, establishing the path the PC will take through the next few years.

The story is in second-person, but because of the broad strokes, I didn’t feel immersed in the character; I was picking choices for her rather than as her. I thus found it easy to choose the more noble actions—for instance, when (Spoiler - click to show)I the character was told I was tempted to sleep with my imprisoned friend’s partner (“One warm evening, after a few drinks of moonshine, he kisses you and asks you to stay at his apartment. Your body wants this. Your heart wants this”), I as the player was not actually tempted, because I didn’t want to play out the narrative arc of her betraying her friend.

But while at first that remove led me to easily pick the choices that seemed like “the right thing to do”, on my final choice, in chapter five, I wavered. Here, I had to choose between (Spoiler - click to show)exposing files revealing political corruption that also implicated the PC’s brother, or covering up the story. I hadn’t gotten to know the brother at all; I didn’t particularly care about him as a character. But that didn’t matter, because once again I didn’t want to play out an arc of personal betrayal—even though it probably would have more sense for my heretofore politically-minded PC to make that sacrifice in service of the greater good.

Typically, after finishing a branching work like this, I’d immediately restart and play through again in order to see different outcomes. But Thousand Lives explicitly does not want you to do this—the description says “you have to live with your choices. There’s no do-overs or restarts.” If you return to an email and try clicking the other choice, you’ll get a message saying “You’ve already made your choice for this chapter. Sorry, no do-overs!” The title is "Thousand Lives", but while many different lives are possible, the format impresses on you that everyone only gets one life; that we can wonder about the roads not traveled, but never know where they would have led. This is a work where each reader collaborates with the author to tell a story, and seeing other versions of that story isn’t the point. But, while that's my conclusion about the intention behind this choice of format, I do have to admit that a big part of me would still appreciate the ability to easily replay after doing an initial "six days of emails" round.

Clearly, this work gave me a lot of thoughts about form, point-of-view, branching narratives, and the player’s relationship to the player character. I appreciate all of that, just as I appreciate the look at late-twentieth-century Poland, and the focus on one woman’s life there.