Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

This is a well-written, well-made game with some unusual aspects. While it uses the default Twine Harlowe font and color scheme, there is some customization, including the use of text effects and a dynamically-updated family tree. The latter (which is complete with little illustrations!) is a touch that’s both just nice and also proved helpful to refer to during the game ((Spoiler - click to show)especially when things get more complicated than they first appear… Also, seeing Ben added to it at the end was really sweet). The game also employs hyperlinks well, making use of false choices, cycling links, and even the simple “click to proceed” to control the pacing, ensuring that the player never faces a wall of text.

Players will also soon discover that there are special links (usually highlighted with a text effect) sprinkled throughout that lead to NPC flashbacks. I have to admit that I didn’t initially realize these weren’t the memories of Jay, the PC; this is fully on me, as on a replay I noticed that the first one makes it clear by having the POV character addressed as “Jimmy” twice, but I somehow managed to overlook that on my first playthrough. Even putting that aside, because these sections feel set off from the main story, I think a graphical cue (change of background color and/or font?) would be nice in order to differentiate them. I also wished there was an undo/back button, because sometimes I wanted to look back at the last screen of text (whether to refer back to something or because I clicked too fast and accidentally missed a flashback link).

Now, talking about a different aspect of the flashbacks, at first I thought that they were simply giving me, the player, a look into the NPCs’ pasts, giving me knowledge about them that Jay didn’t have. I liked the way they humanized even the worst characters (looking at you, Uncle Jimmy…), adding depth to portrayals that could otherwise seem stereotypical or one-note. But where it gets weird is when it becomes clear that Jay is experiencing these flashes on some level, too. This gave what had initially felt like a very grounded and realistic game a surreal vibe, injecting some sort of magic into the world that never gets addressed or explained.

I liked the exploration of the complicated family dynamics, but I think the game packed in one or two too many sensational reveals about Jay’s family history; it got a little over-the-top, and the more extreme ones weren’t really explained, which left me more confused than anything else. I also wasn’t sure what the purpose of the ambulance flashback was; I didn't feel it added much to the story. And one of the two possible endings felt more satisfying to me ((Spoiler - click to show)the Venice one, due to the emotional beat of Jay meeting Ben’s grandmother and being immediately accepted, after all he went through with his family).

But while I didn’t feel like all of the elements fully cohered, I was engaged and invested in the story and enjoyed both my playthroughs, and what I saw as the central theme resonated with me: while we can’t choose our families, and we’ll always be stuck with their trauma and mess to some extent because it’s where we came from, we CAN choose the other important people in our life, and it’s possible to find love and acceptance elsewhere even if our families can’t or won’t provide it.

This is a fairly brief and mostly straightforward sci-fi puzzler that’s a bit rough around the edges. There were a decent number of times when the first command I tried wasn’t accepted by the game; fortunately, that was never a problem, as it was easy to figure out the correct command (sometimes thanks to helpful customized error messages). Ideally, though, more synonyms would be implemented, and there’s also the classic “you can’t see any such thing” when examining some mentioned nouns. Interactable nouns, on the other hand, often tend to be capitalized and set off on their own line, e.g. “You see Crate here,” rather than integrated more naturally into the room descriptions. There’s also one puzzle that felt very “read the author’s mind” to me, and I would never have solved it without the walkthrough.

My other main point of critique is that I wasn’t emotionally invested in the story. You, the ship’s captain, regularly come upon the bodies of colleagues who have been wounded or killed, but there’s no emotion in the descriptions of them, and more often than not their only purpose is to provide you with an item or clue you need to progress. For example:

The dead body of, Lieutenant Yostin, lies on the floor. It looks like his left arm has been severed from his body.

>x yostin
He is wearing his dress uniform and dress coat with pockets.

And then you need to "x pockets" (the uniform and coat are not implemented) in order to obtain a plot-necessary item. While clearly the PC knows who this person is, the presence of his dead body elicits no reaction; nothing would be different if he was, say, a desk, with a drawer you had to open and take the item from.

I did enjoy exploring the ship and working my way through the puzzle chain, and the story had me intrigued. I’d just have liked to see more acknowledgement of the horror of what happened on the ship, and thus be made to feel a sense of the stakes, rather than simply being told about them.

Disclaimer: I playtested this game back before it was released. But today was my first time playing the published version! I love that it includes so many non-essential-but-very-nice-to-have features, like the introduction about how to play, including the command for starting a transcript—it drives me up a wall that every parser engine has a different transcript command, but the pain is much lessened when I’m told upfront what it is! Also immediately notable are the lovely stylistic flourishes, includes the meandros border (thanks to JJMcC for the new vocab word!) and the use of color to differentiate commands, clickable links (another handy feature), the PC’s thoughts, etc. Items and directions are also always listed in a status bar at the top of the screen and are clickable from there, so all in all it’s very user-friendly.

I also found the parser especially user-friendly. I often struggle with Adventuron's parser, but this game understood everything I wanted to do on my first attempt (okay, it probably helps that I tested it, meaning poor Manon received documentation of all my struggles lol). The one time I ran into an issue was when talking to Daedalus; I was writing commands like “tell him about [thing]”, but he kept replying with a custom “I didn’t understand you” message. I thus thought I was phrasing my commands wrong, or hadn’t yet done something that was necessary to unlock the next conversation, but it turns out I needed to type “ask *Daedalus* about [thing]” (which I finally discovered by turning to the walkthrough). I also think I ran into a bug with Eriboea; I thought I’d done what I needed for her to talk to me, but she still wouldn’t, so I couldn’t complete her part of the story.

A nice thing about the game, though, is that multiple aspects are extra—Eriboea and Icarus are both present as NPCs and each have their own little storylines (I remember doing Eriboea’s when testing the game), but they aren’t necessary to win. So I was able to complete Icarus’s like the completionist I am, but wasn’t stuck due to being unable to finish Eriboea’s. While walking back and forth in the maze did get a bit tedious (although I did more wandering than I needed to while trying to get un-stuck on Eriboea and Daedalus), fortunately there’s a downloadable map which I made good use of.

But now let’s talk about the story. In short: I love it. I love that it makes the monstrous minotaur into a loving friend to Lysidice, and I love that her motivation throughout the game is her love for him; she wants to escape the maze with him so that he’ll stop getting hurt protecting her. The first sequence in the game has her tending his wounds, complete with a kiss on the forehead at the end. Throughout the rest she makes valiant but fruitless efforts to push/move/lift heavy things, and the minotaur always steps in to help. It was very sweet, and a nice subversion of the myth. I also enjoyed Daedalus and Icarus’s brief roles, and the dramatic irony of their ending. While, stripped down to the basics, this is a medium-dry-goods parser puzzler, the framework around it makes it so much more.

I played this game last year when it was first released. Replaying it today, I found it even shorter than I remembered, which I think speaks to the punch it packed on that first playthrough. I remember starting it up and trying the usual initial parser commands—“x me”, “inventory”, “x [mentioned noun]”—and trying to reply to the woman who’s speaking to the PC, only to find that most commands have been rendered ineffective. The descriptions of you and your inventory are brief and atmospheric, but the responses you get when you try to speak, examine anything, or travel in any direction are all explanations of why the PC can’t or won’t do those things.

It’s of a piece with Rameses and other games with an agency denial mechanic, a game where the point is what you can’t do rather than what you can. Figuring out how to advance CFDM’s story as the parser rebuffs you at seemingly every turn (both through custom error messages and the Inform defaults—rewriting the latter or remapping those commands to the game’s custom catch-all message would take the polish to gleaming, to borrow from JJMcC) could be considered a mini puzzle, one that’s satisfying to solve even as discovering the solution brings on a sinking sense of despair.

This constrained parser format is an excellent choice for conveying the protagonist’s circumstances and frame of mind—they aren’t going to push back against their situation at all, no matter what the player might attempt to have them do. The title is apt, as this really is just a brief moment, a snapshot in this person’s life, but one that’s rendered effectively enough to be visceral and memorable. I felt for this nameless protagonist and understood their choices, even as I wished they would stop sitting back and accepting the harassment, racism, and transphobia happening around and to them.

Taking the one alternate choice you can make, (Spoiler - click to show)simply leaving the restaurant where this is all going down (by typing “quit”), is just as unsatisfying as playing through to the end, which I think is the point. There aren’t any good choices here; maybe, under the looming specter of familial obligations, disassociation and passivity are the best you can do.