Reviews by Tabitha

This is a sweet, fairly simple game that wasn’t quite what I expected based on the blurb. The mystery is solved via notes you happen upon throughout the castle, and is incidental to the main objective, (Spoiler - click to show)which is collecting items of armor (and possibly a sword) in order to defeat a dragon. It took me only about a half hour to finish, and my playthrough started with this infelicitous exchange:

Castle Entrance
You see the entrance to the castle in the east, and it has been thrown open, with no one inside. The entryway is covered in soot and burn marks. Whatever caused this doesn't seem to be nearby anymore. At your feet is a small booklet with the heading "Instruction Booklet"

>get booklet
That's hardly portable.

>x entryway
You can't see any such thing.

>x marks
You can't see any such thing.

>x soot
You can't see any such thing.

Note: quotes from the game are marked with a ">" because I can't be bothered to convert from markdown formatting to html!

I connected to this game’s protagonist, L, as soon as I started reading. Like him, I’m afab and trans. I’ve been through periods where my main social support was online communities. I have little experience with offline queer spaces. I am stricken with debilitating social anxiety. LLLLL’s first scene hits on all these things, capturing painful feelings that I have also had so sharply and perfectly that it had me tearing up. The self-loathing. The feeling that you don’t belong. That you aren’t right. That other people have a confidence you will never have. Longing for human connection but paralyzed by social anxiety. Feeling like I’m broken because I can’t just be chill like normal people.

>I can't sit down at the bar because I don't know how it works. I don't drink just because I didn't have friends back then and I was never introduced to it. Not even for a cool reason others have like religion or diet or personal growth. You're expected to just know what to do and how to order a drink and you can't ask how to do that in a place like this can you?

Feeling a step behind everyone else, lacking essential knowledge that everyone but you has. Having all this laid out, these exact feelings that seem so personal and shameful that they shouldn’t be spoken of, made me immediately invested in L and wherever this story would take him.

And one place where Act I takes him is the internet. While I’ve been lucky to never be in an online space as toxic as L’s Discord group, the personalities and the interactions certainly rang true based on people I’ve encountered and interactions I’ve seen play out online. The game’s antagonist, L’s online friend Gestirn, starts out as a chillingly familiar type. They’re possessive and controlling of L under the guise of caring about him. They act like they’re the arbiter of moral rightness and as if anyone who disagrees with them is committing a terrible infraction. They plaster the label “abusive” on other people while being incredibly abusive themself.

As soon as L meets a fellow trans man in person and strikes up a friendship with him, it becomes clear that there’s going to be a narrative arc of L forming offline connections and recognizing the toxicity of Gestirn and his online communities more generally. But sadly, the game started losing me with the way this arc was handled. I recognized Gestirn as a terrible friend (and person) pretty quickly; they have no positive qualities, and L talks to them not because he likes them as a person, but because he has no other friends. But it takes five acts (and about four hours, at my reading speed) for L to recognize Gestirn’s awfulness and drop them—if you get the good ending, anyway. The momentum of the game’s first half sputters out as the narrative becomes intent on hammering home the point that Gestirn is awful—something I recognized back in Act I. While I can understand why it would take L longer than me to recognize that (I’m 10 years older than him, have been through my share of shit that’s helped me be able to flag toxic people pretty quickly, and have a good support system in place), that wasn’t enough to justify the pages and pages of online arguments between Gestirn and other server members or all the one-on-one conversations between Gestirn and L after that.

The issues with Gestirn also go beyond pacing. By the end of the game they’ve devolved into a villainous caricature, ultimately advocating for eugenics before L finally cuts them loose. And they’re not just a terrible person—they’re also made out to be physically repulsive. Here’s a bit from when L gets on a voice call with them:

>A few moments later, they burp.
>.jesus christ not the burps not the fucking burps again
> …
>"I keep burping from a medical issue," they say, as if I'm not here. "I don't eat much which causes a gas build up. It's why I'm fat. My poverty diet. Nobody believes that's not my fault."

Soon after this conversation, L has a dream about Gestirn, which includes the following descriptions:

>Gestirn stands up, grunting as their leg fat wobbles to keep them upright.

>A mishmash of parts from human and animal alike all built into an organic perfect machine of rage. The way they're jumping and stamping, the fat jiggling up and down and rippling...
>God. They look fucking disgusting.

>And of course they haven't burped. They're too busy screaming to notice what's happening to themself. The gas is building up. It's expanding. Their stomach. Their cheeks.
>But they can't stop. It's too late. If I wanted to help, there's nothing I could do. And, really, I just don't fucking want to.
>Gestirn explodes.
>Their blood and guts, a slurry of fat and green, splatters both of us head-to-toe.

So, the character who has become the game’s epitome of evil is described as disgusting in a way that’s explicitly tied to their fatness. This moment is so suddenly and unnecessarily cruel that it severed my emotional connection with the story. And we’ll get back to that moment in a minute, but first let me talk about Val, the trans man L meets who I mentioned above. During the prologue, we see L self-consciously daydreaming, longing for “My imagined Perfect Person to come along and save me from everything I continue to do to myself and can't help perpetuating.” Right after that, Val walks up and ends up inviting L to come to his apartment sometime. Cue L’s inner monologue:

>This is what I wanted. I wanted someone to walk up to me, be smitten by my mediocrity like a wet cat in an alleyway, and pull me into a world I've been enchanted by for years.

And… that’s kind of exactly what happens. The role Val plays in the story is being exactly the person L needs. He introduces L to latex kink (the world L is referring to in the above quote), helping and supporting him every step of the way. He’s always available when L wants to hang out. He (and a friend he introduces L to) gives L his first sexual experience, which is mind-blowingly amazing. When L is interested in going on a date with Val, Val is likewise interested. When L concludes they aren’t a romantic fit, Val agrees with no hard feelings. Val supports L through the online drama and is there with him at the story’s end, promising lasting friendship.

There’s nothing wrong with L getting this; it’s nice wish fulfillment, but the beginning of the story didn’t lead me to expect that kind of narrative. And more than that… well, let’s return to the dream. As Gestirn rages at L, Val walks up and kisses him. Val, who, in stark contrast with the repulsive Gestirn, is the perfect trans man—he’s fit, he passes, he’s conventionally attractive. And, as the dream strongly foreshadows, it’s his presence in L’s life that causes L to finally drop Gestirn:

>Now, with Valentine, and how he makes me feel, I’ve realised something.
>This isn’t a friendship. This is suffocation.

I have no issue with a narrative of “getting a real friend makes you realize how bad your old friends are.” But I do have a problem when said narrative perpetuates tired stereotypes around beauty and respectability that should have no place in queer media in 2024. I want to see love/lust interests with imperfect bodies. I want to see fat queer characters being happy and loved. I want queer media to reflect the real-life diversity of queer bodies without judgment.

The rest of the game does nothing to subvert the beautiful/ugly or good/evil dichotomies of Val and Gestirn, and in fact it adds another one, offline/online. Gestirn and several other people in L’s Discord server are steeped in online queer discourse, letting strangers with strong opinions dictate for them who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s morally good and who’s evil, which identity labels are harmless and which make you a TERF. The game calls out how reductive this all is, but in doing so it portrays online spaces as inherently toxic and offline communities as inherently healthy, showing the former doing L only harm and the latter doing him only good. I speak from experience when I say that in real life, things are not that simple.

When I started this game, I thought I was in for a nuanced story about being queer in 2024. When I finished it, I just felt kind of empty.

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.

I liked this one a lot! Normally I get a little antsy when an IF game starts with several long screens of non-interactive text in a row, as I start wondering when I’ll be able to participate in the story, but I was drawn into this one right away once I learned the identity of the protagonist: a starving mother taking a desperate, foolish risk for the sake of her family. Way more interesting than a confident, sword-bearing hero! When “what do you do”-type choices start appearing, while they don’t always necessarily matter plot-wise, I liked how much they focused on characterizing the PC, Madelaine. For instance, the first one comes after you’ve entered the monster-infested cave and the opening seals up after you. You can stoically continue on, or have a moment of panic and bang on the blockage with your fists. I chose the latter, which only resulted in bloodied hands, but I liked getting to roleplay Madelaine as getting freaked out in that moment. Games where the PC is a specific character that I get to inhabit are usually my favorite mode of choice-based IF (and the one I largely write), so that alone had me hooked.

As the story went on, the plot got me, too. This game has a familiar fantasy backdrop but puts its own spin on magic and magical creatures, and I enjoyed accompanying Madelaine as she finds out there’s much more to the world of the Saltcast than she ever knew, and gets pulled into their struggles while still sticking to her own goal. I chose to play her as compassionate, willing to give these creature the benefit of the doubt and choosing kindness as much as she could, and the fact that I could have taken contrasting, more ruthless and self-serving options made my choices feel more meaningful. And playing Madelaine this way meant that the mission she ends up on with the Saltcast became personal, rather than just a means to an end. Even as the stakes grew beyond just Madelaine and her family, the story always stayed very grounded in Madelaine’s role in the events and her concerns, which I appreciated.

(Spoiler - click to show)When, in an excellent twist, Madelaine becomes fully (literally) absorbed in the larger-scale goings-on, I loved the author’s choice to do a time-skip and a perspective shift. Part 3 has the player embodying Madelaine’s daughter, 10 years after the end of Part 2, as, in a parallel to the game’s opening, she enters the cave for her own family-motivated reasons—discovering her mother’s fate. This lets us see the effect Madelaine’s actions had on her family (and beyond), and allows for a resolution to her story that wouldn’t have been as satisfying if we’d stayed in her perspective.

I do have a few things to nitpick as far as presentation. I think a slightly more dressed-up UI would be nice, something with stronger fantasy vibes—a more distinctive font, a curated color for the links, styling of the sidebar, etc. And while I liked the artwork—I think the one of Grissol was my favorite, and the changing representation of the lantern in the sidebar was a nice touch—it could be integrated a bit more smoothly; it usually loaded slower than the text, and its placement in the middle of the page felt a bit awkward. (I also encountered a broken image toward the beginning, the one of a spellbeast.) So some adjustments to the UI and the handling of the images could make the whole appearance tie together better.

There are also some immersion-breaking moments, like when a link reads "Go back", referring to the player returning to the previous page after a digression--I don't want to be suddenly reminded that I'm essentially navigating a website (this is more fully explained in the Intfiction.org version of this review here). But I only mention these things because they’re fairly small changes that I think would make an already great game even better!

I overall enjoyed this game--two of the puzzles were particularly fun ((Spoiler - click to show)wacky navigation!), and overall it wasn't very hard (although I did peek at the walkthrough once or twice). You have a clear goal and get to explore a limited space and collect items in order to accomplish it.

However, I had nearly completed the game when I discovered that I'd softlocked myself early on. (I also did so another way mid-game, but it was easy enough to go back to an earlier save.) Lacking the motivation to completely start over, I just read the ending in the ClubFloyd transcript. And now I'm mostly writing this review in hopes of saving futures players from my fate!

The big softlock: (Spoiler - click to show)Selling the pillow to the thugs too early. This should be the last thing you do, not the first! (The reason being, (Spoiler - click to show)if you go back to that area after selling it to them, they'll kill you on sight, and you need to go there at the end of the game to (Spoiler - click to show)put the egg in a nest in a tree there.) If you're stuck on how to progress initially, (Spoiler - click to show)take a closer look at the inn's back room.

Another potential softlock at the beginning is (Spoiler - click to show)eating the egg. Don't eat it!!

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.

In this game, you play as a recently-deceased mouse who’s been given the opportunity to recall your life before Death takes you away. Each round (a single playthrough is comprised of eight), you have a choice between three possible memories, presented as cards with titles and brief descriptions. The game’s paratext says that there are a whopping 46 of these total! I’ve played through five or six times now and have still only seen 26 (I didn’t always get new-to-me cards, and sometimes purposely chose repeat memories so I could make different choices within them).

As I often do, I’ll start by talking about the UI, which is lovely; it includes a non-standard font that I still found perfectly readable, as well as lightly drawn background art depicting the space where the mice live, complete with cute isopods. There’s also a menu with a glossary and a handy setting to change the font size (although it took me a bit to realize that it existed, because the isopod drawing that opens it blends into the background a bit—and I'm pretty sure the font resets to the default every time you replay, which is a bit annoying). And in the interstitial sequences there’s an illustration of Death themself, a fittingly skeletal, hooded mouse. I wrote recently that I don’t care a lot about art in IF games, but this is a nice touch, elegant in its simplicity, and allows Death’s dialogue to be presented in speech bubbles. It helps set the “conversation with Death” mood better than text-only would, I think. Certain memories also trigger the addition of significant items to the background art, which was both fun and useful as my subsequent playthroughs began to blend together; these unique illustrations were good reminders of what important memories I had experienced that go-round.

I quite enjoyed the storylets themselves, too. The worldbuilding is great—details like the mice having a fungus farm and Floki the Tinker helping make mobility aids for your daughter particularly stood out to me—and you learn more and more on repeated playthroughs; it’s also fun to see NPCs recur in different memories. There’s a good variety to the memories, too, with spectrums from adventurous to domestic, solitary to social, nature-focused to human-focused. As mentioned, within each memory you have several choices, too, which help characterize the PC. I found the game emotionally engaging, in both the general poignancy of looking back on your life, and in specific moments in the memories—such as (Spoiler - click to show)my friend Mip dying because of a choice I made, and the storylines about having pups. I enjoyed the experience enough to play multiple times, and intend to play more to uncover the hinted-at larger plot!

There were some things that made it less smooth than it could have been, though. There are typos throughout (never anything major, but fairly pervasive); several terms I went to look up in the glossary weren’t there (“nest rot” being one); and on my first playthrough, I thought I was getting accidental repeated cards when “Nestmouse” kept coming up after I’d already picked it (I did later discover that it’s just that this same title is used for several different memories, though). Another thing is that in the middle portion of the game, the interstitial dialogue with Death gets repetitive; I would have liked if it varied more. And then I’m torn about the adjectives that appear at the end based on what choices you made in each storylet—in a way it’s a nice summary, and I enjoyed the contrast or even contradiction between them—even mice contain multitudes!—and the way that illustrates your growth/change over time. On the other hand, each memory being summed up by one or two adjectives seems a bit reductive, and the animation of the words dropping away was much too slow.

My other main critique is that I wanted more of a sense of continuity. The author explained on the Intfiction forum that you’re getting one memory for each year of your life, but I hadn’t realized that while playing (although I’ve since noticed that it's kind of indicated by one line of Death’s dialogue), as there wasn’t a sense of the arc of a life; the memories didn’t necessarily seem to build on each other, save for a few that were clearly unlocked by having seen a certain prior one. While on the one hand I liked the isolated snapshots, how you're picking out these few individual incidents to reflect on, the lack of continuity was jarring sometimes, with the endings of some memories feeling like cliffhangers that never resolved. I might prefer a structure where each set of memories you get to pick from is related in some way to the prior chosen memory, as I think the playthroughs I enjoyed most were the ones that had more of a throughline.

Finally, this is the tiniest thing, but as a rat lover I must protest the portrayal of rats as speaking in broken English! Rats are very smart, and having had both pet rats and mice, rats are definitely the smarter of the two. But all my quibbles aside, it’s an impressive and well done game, and I'm certainly going to return to visit some more mousey memories.

There’s a lot going on in this game, as you’ll see from the length of this review! I’ve played multiple other IF works by Kastel, and this one was quite different from the rest—it’s longer, less tightly focused, and has more characters and dialogue. I wrote a lot of notes while playing, and screenshotted multiple passages to look back at later, which was great as I love when a game gives me a lot to think about. (Spoilers abound throughout, so I'm just spoiler-tagging the entire thing.)

(Spoiler - click to show)The premise here is: you’re Jing, a high school student and closeted lesbian who is accompanied everywhere by the ghost of one of her former fellow students, Hanna—a trans girl who committed suicide after being bullied. (We learn her full story slowly over the course of the game, through asides where Jing remembers different pieces of it.) Besides Hanna, Jing doesn’t have any friends at school, and is pretty miserable there. The gameplay is guiding her through this particular school day as she sits through classes, witnesses another student being bullied, and gets singled out by a popular girl—Clara, one of Hanna’s bullies—chatting with Hanna on and off the whole time.

Jing is never directly bullied in the conventional way—no name-calling, no mean-spirited pranks. But players can still quickly see why she hates school so much. The bullying she sees is toward fellow student Harold, who’s mocked for a love poem he wrote to Clara and is later tricked/coerced into reading it on stage in front of everyone. Having to see someone else be treated like this while those in power do nothing to stop it, all the while feeling complicit for being a bystander, spurs thoughts for Jing about the bleakness of the future—the same people who rule the world of high school are going to grow up and rule the world outside it, too, and there will still be no place for people like her.

Jing has much less of a reaction to Clara throughout the game. Clara makes many creepy, fetishizing comments about Jing being Chinese and how desirable that will make her to men. She even goes so far as to try to set Jing up with her counterpart, the school’s lead male bully. But despite these conversations/monologues clearly making Jing uncomfortable, she has a crush on Clara. She listens to Clara without comment, disassociating through the worst of it and never reflecting on the racism in Clara’s remarks. The lack of acknowledgment by Jing upped the awfulness; dealing with things like this is normal for her, just one of the many miserable aspects of high school.

The game’s four endings vary a lot, and they depend on one choice you make early in the game and one at the end. In the first ending I got, after telling off Clara Jing feels emboldened to tell Hanna how she feels about her—that she loves her. This gave their relationship throughout the game a solid arc, with their bickering and disagreements and support of each other culminating in this affirmation of what they mean to each other. After all Clara’s invalidation of both Hanna and Jing, they validate each other as queer people. It’s a lovely moment, and ends the game on this hopeful note of “the world sucks, but we can support each other.” The same vibe is present in the ending where Jing encounters Harold in the rain after school and shares her umbrella with him. She goes on to talk to him about how she wants to make a space for people like him, her, and Hanna, those sidelined by society.

The other two endings are quite different. In one, after Clara goes on a transphobic rant where she misgenders Hanna and uses her deadname (represented by a series of dashes), she kisses Jing. Jing’s immediate response is to be “intoxicated” by the kiss. After this, Clara has a complete about-face; apparently she was only nasty to pre-ghost Hanna because she was jealous of Hanna’s friendship with Jing, wanting Jing for herself. Now, suddenly, she feels bad about how she treated Hanna, and her transphobia is forgotten: “ ‘Hanna is a really nice name,’ Clara says, ‘I wish I could call her that.’ ” Upon realizing Hanna is actually present, Clara says she’s sorry, and Hanna tells Jing to tell Clara she forgives her.

This is a lot all at once, and it’s hard to believe from any of the characters—that Clara would have this sudden change of heart, and that Jing and Hanna would forgive her so easily. Well, Jing does specifically say that she doesn’t forgive Clara, but she also says, “you're hurt. You're just hurt in a different way from Hanna and me. I don't want to ignore that. You may have harmed me and other people, but you are also a victim trying to survive.” In a way, it’s the extreme version of the other two endings—the solidarity of suffering people coming together, including the one who was the cause of the suffering, because guess what, they’re suffering too.

Now, contrast all that with the final ending (well, it’s labeled ending 1, but it was the last one I got). In this one, Jing beats Clara to death with an umbrella. Yup. (Aside—I love how the umbrella can be either a tool of connection OR a tool of violence.) It’s so different from the other three endings, with a catharsis not present there but at the cost of any sense of peace or future okay-ness. Was it worth it for? “You feel alive for the first time,” the game tells you, and “Freedom is a privilege immersed in guilt and violence[,] and you don't want to squander the precious little you have.” (This line feels more broadly applicable, too, for example with Hanna having to kill herself to be free.)

I wrote in my notes while playing that these two endings in particular felt like fantasies—the bully is actually gay and in love with you; you get to murder the bully. In the author’s afterward, which you can read if you see all the endings, they say that that’s exactly what they were aiming for: “The routes all involve the fantasies I had: the violent escape, the free romantic, the camaraderie of the oppressed, and forgiveness. They're all fantasies Jing and I wished for.” Placing these four endings on equal footing didn’t entirely work for me, though; while the first two felt plausible for these characters within the world of the game, the second two didn’t. Fantasizing about killing a bully is one thing, but actually acting on it is another; I could see Jing giving Clara a couple good punches, but brutally beating her to death seemed a bit extreme. I think the other ending is even more implausible, with both Jing and Clara acting very counter to what we previously saw of them.

These two endings, and some other moments throughout the games, felt so exaggerated/unrealistic that they jarred with the emotional beats that did ring true. But these choices make more sense in the context of the game’s creation, as it was made for a horror game jam; the murder ending, for example, feels very fitting for that genre. But I think perhaps the jam origin was a detriment to the game; it could still effectively—perhaps more effectively—showcase the everyday horror of high school without the more extreme elements. (Another downside of its having been made quickly for a jam is that it could use another round of edits to clean up typos and some rough patches in the writing—some of the dialogue especially felt a bit clunky.)

Finally, some more technical notes: the width of the text area is inconsistent from page to page (wider or narrower depending on the line length), and the position of the sidebar moves along with it, which was a bit visually annoying. I also hit a rough spot when I reached a passage containing about 70 single-word links—this is fully on me, but I struggled with figuring out how to proceed here for a lot longer than I should have, as each link seemed to go to the same single-sentence passage, which then routed me back to the many-links passage. Turns out there is one correct word to click, which seemed obvious once I knew I had to look for it (I ended up asking the author what I had to do to proceed haha), but my struggle there realllly killed my momentum on that playthrough (to the point that I initially gave up and started over, only returning to the choice that yielded that passage after I’d gotten all the other endings). But one gameplay design choice I really liked was the option you get after finishing a playthrough to jump to the pivotal choice points, so that you can see the alternatives without having to fully replay.

So yeah, this was an interesting game—clearly it gave me a lot to talk about! In the Afterward, the author mentions possibly returning to this cast/setting, and I would certainly love to see what results.

I love rats, and I enjoyed Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder (both when I first played it and after replaying it today in preparation to play CPB)—so I was primed to enjoy this short spoof game, and enjoy it I did! You play as the titular Captain Piedaterre, a rat captain with a distinctly different approach to life than your brother Verdeterre’s. Discovering exactly how this game inverts the conceit of Verdeterre is part of its charm, so I’ll include the details under spoiler tags below.

First, a note about the interface: this is a choice-based game implemented in Inform 7; there’s no typing (unless you choose to hit number keys to choose from the list of options), just hyperlinks. Overall it works well, with the two caveats that the blue link text on the black background doesn’t have great contrast (an issue that’s worsened if you replay, as all the links then turn to dark purple), and that the autoscroll is very jerky. There’s probably a better way to describe it, but the result is that each link click results in a rather jarring movement of the text.

Now on to the actual game! With the PC’s latest ship sunk, he washes ashore near the house of a pirate who happens not to be home. The gameplay has you searching the house for loot, of which there is plenty(Spoiler - click to show)—but it’s not the actually-valuable items, like a diamond or a Fabergé egg, that you want; rather, the things that are treasures in the PC’s eyes are items like a broken chair leg, a black banana, a dust bunny. While taking each of the actual valuables is presented as an option, clicking those links will simply tell you why Captain P. doesn’t want them. The gimmick of “ignore the jewels, the garbage is the real treasure!” was amusing, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome; once you’ve collected all seven items (with no time pressure or optimization-replays needed), you’re whisked out of the house to “the one and only end”, where you show off your haul to your baffled brother.

Without the context of CVP, this game might not make much sense or be particularly engaging, but the contrast between the two made it a humorous experience. And while (Spoiler - click to show)there are indications that Captain P. is meant to not be very bright, my interpretation—as a former pet-rat owner—is that, unlike his brother, he’s a much more typical rat, drawn to hoarding bits of junk. My rats wouldn’t have cared about a diamond, but they would have loved an overripe banana! Other things they liked to steal and hide included pens and dog toys. So the rattiness of this game brought an extra layer of enjoyment to it for me. (I also have to shout out the Bop-it joke—for whatever reason, it hit me just right.)