Reviews by Tabitha

I found this game disorienting at first, to the point that I almost stopped playing. I was confused about both the situation and the location (and still am about the latter to some degree, even after re-reading---I'm not sure where the chapel, school, and volleyball courts all are in relation to each other... or why there's a stage outside?). So initially I was more frustrated than intrigued---but when I read on I discovered that there's a good reason for the disorientation, and suddenly it became quite compelling.

Unfortunately, the story didn't live up to its promise for me; I never got enough of a sense of the wider world to understand the stakes for the NPCs, and they weren't developed enough for me to be invested in their fates. I didn't understand why (Spoiler - click to show)they became fixated on the PC after discovering the journals; there was an escalation there that I couldn't see a reason for. I also never felt much for/about the PC. (Spoiler - click to show)Her circumstances reminded me of the film *Memento*, but what makes that movie so good IMO is that the protagonist has a goal that he's deeply passionate about. Here, the PC has no goal beyond maintaining her status quo---and she is able to achieve that very easily.

I also had some quibbles about the writing; the dialogue was stilted at times, and the tense randomly switched between past and present. Finally, it would be nice if there was a "restart" button at the end; as-is, in order to replay you have to close and re-open the game.

I do feel like there's something interesting to be said about gender in the game---the PC is a woman, (Spoiler - click to show)as was her former lover, and the sole female NPC in the story has a different fate than the two male ones. I'll have to stew on that aspect some more...

Having enjoyed the author’s *Last Vestiges* in last year’s IF Comp, I was happy to see another mystery game from them! This one is done in Twine rather than Inform, which allowed for some nice features, like a “case file” page documenting the evidence you’ve collected and pop-up notifications letting you know when analysis results are ready. The latter was a nice way of making it feel like time was passing in the game world and of ensuring that not too much information was dispensed at once.

Some aspects of the UI didn’t work as well for me; once I had all the analysis results, that section of the case file became overwhelming, so I would have liked to see it divided up somehow (whether with subsections or perhaps a sub-page). I also didn’t feel that the stock images representing the different locations and actions added much, as they were too generic to provide meaningful flavor.

Writing-wise, the tone was a bit odd, with the PC making some unjustified assumptions early on ((Spoiler - click to show)really, we never have any reason to suspect there was foul play), which didn’t fit with the otherwise realistic nature of the game. In contrast, the NPC dialogue was rather flat, and I wished there had been more depth to the interview segments (at least with the deceased’s son).

As far as gameplay, investigating the apartment felt somewhat lawnmower-y, and I would have liked if visited and unvisited links were distinguished with different colors. Seeking out evidence does get more complex later on, though, as new information opens new avenues of questioning and there are things you have to look up via keywords. The most fun part to me was once I had all the evidence and could start constructing a theory about what happened. Reviewing the various pieces of evidence and making connections between them made me feel like I really was solving a mystery. And when I saw how granular the game wanted me to be in describing my conclusions, I went over it all again before committing, because I was really invested in getting it right—and it was very satisfying when I did!

This game hooked me with the premise and vibes on the Spring Thing page, and it definitely delivered! I was drawn in right away by the lovely presentation, with a fun old-fashioned font for the title screen and pleasant spring-like colors. (The UI is well done throughout, with in-game documents set off with different fonts/colors.) The beginning clearly establishes the PC’s goal, and then it’s up to you to get to work accomplishing it!

This is a Twine game with a world model, so there are various locations you can visit and items you can try using in different situations. I enjoyed the puzzlely elements, which were simple enough that they didn’t slow down the story’s momentum. The game also balanced imbuing the choices with a sense of stakes (at one point I certainly thought I’d messed up and was in for a “game over”!) and leaving room for experimentation. The worldbuilding was fun (especially the details of the fae embassy), and the writing suits the PC in a way that often made me smile—e.g., “Your heart lifts at the sound, like a string of pearls from around a rich person’s neck.” It’s altogether a very polished work.

A personal quibble is the selectable gender (of both the PC and the LI). I'd assumed based on the characters' names and the LGBT tag that they were both women, and "lady thieves" seemed like a very fun premise, a la Lady Thalia, so I was disappointed to find that their genders were blank slates. In cases like this, where gender is the only facet of the character the player gets to choose and where it has no effect on the game beyond what pronouns and labels get used in the text, I’d always prefer to have characters that the author wrote with pre-established genders (or lack thereof) in mind, because those characters tend to feel more real to me.

On to some more mechanical things, in the latter half of the game, once you’ve (Spoiler - click to show)entered Fairy, there's much less autonomy in where to go or what approach to take, so it felt much more on rails. I also found it odd that the game didn’t acknowledge some of the information the PC (Kit) finds—(Spoiler - click to show)when you read Aubrey’s journal she all but says that she’s in love with Kit, but Kit doesn't react or acknowledge that in any way. Same with the letter to Aubrey that starts “Dear Sister”—despite this clear indication, Kit doesn't seem to know that the letter-writer is Aubrey’s sibling. Finally, I would have liked to learn more about Kit’s backstory and motivations, as they remained largely a mystery throughout, and as mentioned above I always love a richly detailed character!

I played this game because it was the only entry in UseComp, and I was curious what gameplay would be like with "use" as the only verb. It turned out to be... mostly annoying, to be honest. This is a short game with a brief plot and brief descriptions, but having to type "use eyes on [noun]" every time I wanted to examine something made it feel much more convoluted than it was, and got old pretty fast. Nothing particularly clever was done with the limitation, nor was any in-game reason given; it was just a straight-up reframing of every standard command with "use" instead.

The best part to me was the mini mystery and the architecture theme (the plot is (Spoiler - click to show)finding and freeing the trapped ghost of Sir Christopher Wren, who the architecture-obsessed former owner of the old house you're exploring had summoned).

This is a short little game with nice styling. I enjoyed the setup—with several entangled relationships at a single’s Valentine’s Day party, some sort of drama is bound to go down… It’s a very effective use of Amanda's “reverse a poem” seed, with the dramatic longing of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 128” recast to a modern-day setting where the PC is able to hit on his hot, married, harpsichord-playing acquaintance the moment he’s alone with her.

The game has some nice mechanics; informational text on the various characters is given via dialogue box pop-ups (although one issue with these is that, while the game lets you increase the font size—which is good, because the default is quite small—the text within the dialogue boxes doesn’t change.) The story is divided into parts (poetically called “first quatrain,” etc.), and at the end of each you can either continue the game or restart from the beginning of that part.

This is especially handy once you reach the final quatrain. Up to this point the game is mostly linear, but once the climax hits there are many possible variations. This is where the game really excels at reversing the poem, as the sheer existence of so many possible endings subverts the poem’s near-devout obsession with its subject. While there’s clearly only one outcome that would satisfy the poem’s speaker, in the game you might (Spoiler - click to show)get cozy with Aline, the object of your affections, OR end up kissing your friend Henry, OR reject Aline after she kisses you. Even if you do take the opportunity to get it on with Aline, the last line of that ending is, “it’s hard to see this bringing lasting joy. But for now, it’ll do.”.

Also, it was just fun to see how differently things could go within those few minutes of the story!

This game is a great implementation of Pinkunz’s “AD&D” seed, with a supernatural twist that adds another layer of charm to the “friends playing D&D” setup. I love this kind of game (social resource management? social roguelikes?), and I imagine that it’s tricky to make, so kudos to E. Joyce for continually pulling it off!

The setup is compelling; the PC is a newbie DM with anxiety who’s running her first game for a group of people she mostly doesn’t know very well (all of whom, including her, are neurodivergent). This requires a balancing act between accommodating your own needs and those of the players, figuring out their personalities as you go along and guessing at how best to engage them or help them feel comfortable. Your girlfriend is also a player, and you need to navigate your interactions with her as well—do you tell her when her backseat-DMing bugs you, or just grin and bear it?

I always found there to be a good variety of choices, without an obvious “best” one, and after failing to successfully finish the session on my first playthough, I enjoyed replaying to try for the best outcome. After achieving it I still replayed a few more times to hunt down the other “failure” endings. Often in this type of game I find collecting all the endings as fun as winning!

I do have two bits of critique, one being that the contrast between the text and the background isn’t great on light mode (dark mode is much better, except for the links). The other is regarding the way you can check in to see how engaged or disengaged the players are; “Look around the table to see how everyone is doing” is something you can do any time, but I didn’t clock the purpose of it right away, and sometimes its description of what someone was doing contradicted what the passage text had just said.

Despite those quibbles, this game is a treat that I certainly recommend!

This game is dark and heavy (mind the content warnings!)---it's not a feel-good game by any means, but it is very, very good. Charm has done an excellent job combining the three seeds the game takes inspiration from into a cohesive and meaningful story.

First, I'll quickly mention the UI, which is well done. Color-coding differentiates links that add more text to the current page from links that advance the story; website and chat-log text mimics those format; and the page backgrounds have different colors and occasional light animation that subtly punctuates the text.

Now, on to the content...

(Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist, who I'll mostly refer to as "you" because the game is in second person, feels like a recognizable character type---neurodivergent, unemployed, isolated, lonely, listless, and self-loathing. You subsist on energy drinks, barely bothering to eat, and constantly put yourself down in your thoughts. You're desperate for connection of any sort, needing someone to accept you, to love you. Which makes you the perfect target for this promise by the latest crypto fad:

> ***Community Awaits.*** Our user base is thousands strong. Once you buy in, you will have access to our private Discord...

There isn't a choice for the player here; the protagonist will always buy in. Having been cruelly bullied by an online community in the past, you now know to be careful---not to vet the community, but to shape yourself into whatever you need to be to fit in.

As you prepare to craft your intro message, you reach the end of your energy drink supply and are given the choice to ignore your thirst or settle for water, which you hate. If you choose the latter...

> the tap begins to belch out brackish water, with little solid pieces floating in it. ... The water itself is murky, somewhere between brown and black[.]

Despite how disgusting this sounds, this is another point at which the player has no choice---you must drink the mold-infested water.

> You're prepared for it to taste awful, but it's actually the sweetest, most decadent syrup you've ever had. ... You have been missing this all your life.

And there's the game's central metaphor. The protagonist is an isolated person clutching desperately at whatever community will have them, no matter how ugly, and in their desperation they're even willing to embrace the ugliness, to unite with it, in order to feel like they belong. Because belonging, feeling wanted and loved, is a need just as much as water is.

As your crypto journey continues, you also find no food in the house but a moldy apple, which you've given the choice to eat or not. The mold situation escalates; it begins whispering to you, telling you you're special and deserving of love. The crypto situation escalates too---you're suddenly rich! But when the currency's value drops dramatically overnight, causing a mass exodus from the community, Xisor, its inventor and the owner of the Discord server, instructs those who remain:

> Find a forum or a messageboard where GlisterCoin has not been mentioned recently. Make a post talking about [it]. ... Link back to the website, bring more people into the fold. Do not engage with replies. Then go look at the sky for a while, and wait for your new family to pour in.

The mold and the community both make promises, but neither actually values you; they just want to use you for their own benefit.

There are three possible endings. You reach one by continually embracing the mold, and in this ending the protagonist heeds Xisor's instructions, posting the message and then going up to the roof. At this point the mold fully takes you over, having used you as an incubator and now bursting out of you so that it can spread---and this makes you happy:

>You feel the beginning of something grand, something larger than you.
>
>You open your arms to welcome it.

As you cease to be, the voice of the mold assures you that you’re loved. Becoming its vessel is how you've found a sense of purpose and belonging for your life.

In contrast, the two other endings both have the protagonist despairing. If you haven't fully embraced the mold, it doesn't have the same effect on you:

>Something in you squirms, trying to convince you that *you are not alone*, but you know that it's a lie.

In this ending, when Xisor's mandate to spread the crypto word comes, you can't bring yourself to fulfill it, and you hate yourself for that, because "you are failing your community". The mold slowly kills you at your desk while it bemoans what you could have been.

In the third ending, the protagonist directly confronts and rejects the mold's whispers, and we see a version of them that experiences a burst of hope:

>You decide here and now to get things under control. Tomorrow, you will hire a cleaning service. Tomorrow, you will go grocery shopping and eat a *real* meal. Tomorrow, you *will* make friends in the community. You will do better. You will *be* better.

The next day, though, the cryptocurrency's crash arrives and sends you plummeting, feeling worse about yourself and your life than before. You commit suicide by jumping off your building's roof, the mold mocking you as you fall.

From an outsider's view, all three endings are bad for the protagonist; either the mold ends them, or their suicidal ideation does. While in the first one they at least go out happy, we're left to wonder how many other people will end up mold-infected as a result of their actions, and how many will be lured into the crypto scheme. The only actual benefit has been to Xisor and the mold.

I don't know what to say to end this except... oof. That's what I call a trenchant commentary.

I've been reading up on the IF Art Show recently, and was particularly interested in playing some of the games (pieces?) from the "portrait" category (besides Galatea, which was one of the first parsers I played). This one... didn't work for me. It does little to capture the personalities of the individual animals (the eponymous Sparky and Boots, a dog and a cat respectively), instead creating a rote mechanical exercise of "feed, pet, throw ball, repeat" (only, more frustrating than that because these actions must be done a certain number of times and in a certain order to make progress). Having a score system seemed antithetical to the spirit of the Art Show, driving me toward completing a goal instead of meaningfully interacting with the subjects--and there wasn't really any meaningful interaction to be had. So unfortunately, for me this fails as both a portrait and a game.

This game really hit for me emotionally, partly because it captured some feelings/experiences that I remember from childhood but also because it's just well written and evocative. The magic of a beach vacation, friends you see once a year and don't have any contact with otherwise (us millenials may be the last generation to have that particular experience), uncertainty about the way a friend feels about you... it's all conveyed so well.

As I played through the first time, I completely forgot that there was any state tracking going on, but when I remembered at the end I was impressed by how that aspect worked. There aren't a lot of choices throughout the game; more passages end with a "next page" link than with a choice. But the five or six choices you do have, determining what you said to Caspian at certain moments in several childhood flashbacks, what direction your adult life has gone, and one action you take in the present, subtly interact to result in one of at least three different endings. After playing through the first time and getting a very satisfying, fitting ending, remembering that I'd brought about that ending through my choices made it all the more meaningful.

Playing through several more times revealed that the game is also subtly responsive to your choices throughout, in ways that heighten the emotion. So all in all, this is just what I look for in a narrative game: a good story that the player is able to help shape.

This is a simple game where you play through several different lucid dreams the protagonist has over the course of the night. I enjoyed the descriptions of the dream worlds and their variety, but what really got me about this game was the mood. There's a strong sense of loss as the protagonist continually reflects on how their experience of their lucid dreams has changed: once, they had such control in their dreams that they never wanted to wake up; now, sleep is a source of stress as they deal with insomnia and something like sleep apnea. There are also hints at tension in their marriage caused by these issues. So the game has a pervasive sense of sadness, which I appreciated as an enjoyer of a good melancholy, wistful tone. And there is the possibility of a happier turn at the end.

That's the other thing I found impressive about this game--it's quite polished, with the implementation overall being quite good (I just had a few struggles with (Spoiler - click to show)the rope), and there were a decent amount of non-essential actions/responses coded in, including two different possible endings. A great little game!