Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

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.