Reviews by Tabitha

I’ve now played all three games entered in IFComp 2025 by Lamp Post Projects (LPP; this review is going to get fairly acronym-heavy!), and have, inevitably, been comparing them. My favorite is Fantasy Opera (FO); one reason for that is its specific details, making it very grounded in its 17th-century-Italy-inspired opera house setting. The other two LPP games, while drawing on specific historical inspirations (which are detailed in the “behind the game” documents that each links to at the end), had much more generic-feeling fantasy settings. Another thing I preferred in FO is that the PC was a bit less of a blank slate; they have a defined profession (detective), and depending on the stats you pick, they may have knowledge of different areas of the world/society.

In The Path of Totality (PT), the other LPP IFComp game which this review is not actually about, you get to pick at the beginning what it is that’s drawn you to go on the central pilgrimage, which allowed me to characterize the PC a bit. In The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens (SSG), though, you are pretty much the blankest of blank slates. In both SGG and PT, a big part of the focus is on forming relationships with the NPCs—but in both, the way to form those relationships is basically just to always pick the nice/pleasant dialogue option, as opposed to the more neutral or cold/rude ones. As such, the relationship building in SSG didn’t feel authentic to me; I wasn’t developing relationships with these people, but just avoiding being a jerk, and that alone was enough for them to become attached to me. I would have liked opportunities to actively characterize the PC more. For example, what if there were multiple nice/supportive options, but in different tones, like earnest/sincere, commiserating, and lighthearted?

I liked the setup of SSG, with the PC’s mysterious draw to the titular gardens, getting pulled into an old mystery and the current woes of the staff. But again, I preferred FO’s investigation mechanics—rolling dice for knowledge or dexterity checks, interviewing people; in SSG it often just felt like “make sure you click every option.” And the puzzles felt too easy: the (Spoiler - click to show)naiad’s name was so strongly signposted it didn’t really feel like a puzzle; the (Spoiler - click to show)tooth one was easily solved by lawnmowering (although I did like the line-drawing one; it was satisfying to get it right on my first guess!). I also missed the sense of time pressure from FO; the pacing of SSG felt almost too leisurely, where there was a sense of (or sometimes it was literal) just waiting around until circumstances were right for the next story beat. The journal segments also slowed the pacing; I’d prefer if they were available to view anytime from the menu, so I could refresh my memory on prior events (as I played over several days), instead of being inserted into the story.

Going back to the actual plot: you discover that (Spoiler - click to show)three staff members at Sylvan Gardens have magical ailments (one of which is an “everyone you love will suffer a terrible fate” curse) and that the long-deceased founder of the estate, Pecunia, hid her store of magical plant seeds behind various puzzley gating mechanisms. The fourth NPC, ostensibly the gardens’ hermit, later reveals himself as a centuries-old dryad who’s the only surviving member of his species as far as he knows, after Pecunia destroyed his forest to build her home, inadvertently wiping out all the other resident dryads. So there’s a lot of pain and trauma in these characters’ backstories, more than I had expected given the gentle tone and vibes of the game, and the way these past tragedies were incorporated didn’t quite work for me. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)Felix the gardener discovered his curse when his wife died tragically, but I don’t recall ever getting to ask him about her; she’s just a sad fact to add pathos to his plight. I wanted the game to sit with the tragedies imposed on its characters a bit more, rather than just using them as motivation for the player/PC.

This is a fairly critical review, but I think LPP is a skilled author who’s clearly put a lot of work into all three of these games and is doing cool things with Ink (replacing the continuous-scroll text pane with a single page + history view; adding a nice menu system with multiple save slots; incorporating lovely watercolor art and original music). I did enjoy my time with SSG, and I look forward to seeing what LPP does in the future!

Originally posted at intfiction.org on September 25, 2025

This is a visual novel that drops you straight into the life of the PC with little to help orient you. In short order you meet a virtual boss and a character that seems to be an AI that lives in the PC’s head, and learn that the PC is happy with her low-level waste management job and has no interest in climbing the ranks (which, it’s later revealed, does seem like it comes with more risks than rewards).

What is “waste management” in this sci-fi world? It seems to be collecting detritus from various planets, cataloging it, and then destroying it. But it was never clear to me why this is being done. Why is this corporation “managing waste” on a bunch of long-abandoned planets? In a way the finds are treated as archaeological objects, with the cataloguing component of the process, but the motivation behind documenting rather than just destroying is never elaborated. Also, when the gameplay shifts to you going on these search-and-collect missions, you’re only allowed to take one object from each, which seems entirely counter to the idea of waste management, and is likewise never explained.

The heart of the story, though, is the PC’s relationships—with Maria, the AI she (from what I gathered) designed and had implanted in her own brain, and with the two mission companions you get to choose between. I replayed to experience both paths, one with the company golden child turned defector turned reeducated drone (or so the PC initially believes) Zinnia, and the other with the volatile former racer, now condemned criminal Raven. In my playthroughs, at least, the PC develops an attachment to whichever one you choose, which happens largely without player input; the main player choices are of which piece of junk you salvage on each trip, and from peeking at the walkthrough, these are what determine which ending you’ll get.

On the Raven path, my choices led to (Spoiler - click to show)me forming an attachment to him, ripping the AI mechanism out of my head, and preparing for the two of us to flee together… only for me to ultimately betray him to the company, turning him in and ending the story with my AI back in place. I’m not sure what it was about my choices of objects that led to this dramatic series of events. The Zinnia path, in contrast, was much more subdued—the PC’s opinion of her slowly changed, and (Spoiler - click to show)the two ended by professing love for each other. This path also had more tension with Maria; her presence seemed like more of a burden to the PC in this route, with regular interludes emphasizing that.

While the sprites are original art, the backgrounds are photographs of real places (mostly buildings), some with real people in them, which made them a hard sell for portraying abandoned sci-fi planets. Maybe this was on purpose, the game using its sci-fi trappings to comment on real life, but if that is the case, the parallels it’s drawing definitely went over my head.

So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, but my main feeling coming away was one of confusion. The company the PC works for seems to be powerful and evil, but I was never sure what they were actually doing aside from sending employees on these waste management missions. What do higher-ranking employees do? What does it mean to be a “defector” in this world?

I’m not sure if this is the kind of VN where getting all the endings will unlock a “true” ending that sheds new light on everything that’s gone before; I only played each path once, but the walkthrough reveals they both have a variety of possible endings. Having spent an hour and a half with the game already, though, I wasn’t particularly motivated to replay several more times in order to collect all the endings. I may dip back in at least once, though, to at least see just how different the outcomes of each path can be.

I really liked this one... up until the ending. I enjoyed inhabiting the main character and exploring the unique situation they (she?) found themself in, pulled from academia into the military to work on a top-secret translation assignment, with the shadow of their deceased war-hero mother constantly looming over them, influencing everyone's perceptions and expectations. But ultimately, the payoff was disappointing. In my first playthrough, after making basically zero translation progress, the outcome of the climactic moment came down to a random guess--which I got wrong, to disastrous consequences.

Fortunately I had enabled the "back" button and could easily try different choices until I got a "good" ending, but even this one felt very abrupt and perfunctory and was unsatisfying. Both endings referenced a character who I hadn't heard of before, leaving me feeling like I had missed something important. But with the "save" function broken, replaying over and over until I discovered the key path(s) felt like more trouble than it was worth (until today, when I opened the JS file and poked around a bit to get some guidance. But obviously, having to resort to that is not ideal!). This feels like a game where you need to see multiple paths to get the full picture, but it fights against itself by not making it easy to do so.

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.