Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

I playtested this game and have replayed the published version. I can’t really comment on the difficulty of the puzzles because I remembered all the solutions from when I tested (and the ones I struggled with a bit when testing have been updated since), but here are my thoughts otherwise!

First, the game is just plain fun. I enjoyed the slightly wacky magical university setting, learning about the mishaps inherent to this kind of school and the safety measures in place to mitigate them, the rivalries between the philosophy and chemistry departments, and other bits of lore. Of course, as a little blobby synthesis familiar, the PC doesn’t care about any of that! They care about increasing their abilities so they can escape and have their revenge on the creator who abandoned them. I enjoyed the progression of gaining new abilities and realizing/discovering where they’d be useful to gain access to new places and/or abilities, especially given that most were used for multiple puzzles; I liked getting to apply them in a variety of situations. (Spoiler - click to show)The prepare/escape power was especially cool, creating a navigation puzzle with one-way teleportation. The number of powers never got overwhelming, either; each has such limited, specific use cases that there was no temptation (or need) to lawnmower. (Spoiler - click to show)Soliloquize, the one ability that’s not needed to solve any puzzles, was a nice extra touch, increasing my engagement by letting me (pretend to) make grand speeches at dramatic moments.

The dynamically updating map is great; I love a handy in-game map, and very much appreciated the convenience of being able to click on a room to travel there. I did find, on this replay at least, that the exclamation points marking the room(s) where you can progress were a little too much; I wanted to have to think a little more about where to go/what to do next, instead of just gravitating to the exclamation point.

Finally, my only other more critical thought is that I felt conflicted about consuming the other familiars. They’re alive on some level, at least as sentient as our blob PC, so while the PC certainly has no qualms, I balked a little as a player, not liking the thought that I was overpowering and killing these creatures. This is very idiosyncratic to me of course, but I’ll always prefer teamwork/compassionate approaches over violence/aggression. But this definitely didn’t bother me enough to impede my enjoyment of the game!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another comp game that I'm a bit torn about, although the parts I liked made it one of my favorites this year. As a sucker for historical settings, I loved exploring the lighthouses and pubs of mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore and meeting people dressed in gibuses and gabardine (well, I actually encountered both of those items while they were not being worn, but you get the point). I loved the way the plot unfolded as I collected clues and pieced together what had happened to Poe and what was going on with the mysterious characters around him. When I did some Wikipedia-ing after finishing, I was impressed by how well the game was written around the actual circumstances of Poe’s death!

On the other hand, the present-day sections were significantly less engaging to me. That layer’s PC was so minimally fleshed out that I wasn’t really invested in him as a character (I don’t think gender is ever specified, actually, but I definitely imagined this PC as a man); we don’t get any backstory to reveal why he was willing to go to such lengths to achieve his goal of being known for writing without having actually written anything. And as a writer myself, that goal was impossible for me to relate to!

I quite enjoyed this game; highlights were the progression of newcomer knowing no one to being part of the community, the coziness of the setting, the several main NPCs’ stories, and the casual queerness. I did neglect my meal-planning a bit at first in favor of the social aspects, as I'm not much of a cook or foodie, but I hit 4 stars on a meal eventually!

Lowlights: I found the sheer number of recipes I could make by the end (having bought all the cookbooks) a bit overwhelming, and largely ignored some categories (sorry, salad- and sauce-lovers!). I also was a little confused on the theming, as I tried to do a regionally-themed meal but didn’t receive a bonus for it. My only other real friction point was that I didn’t learn how to get berries until over halfway through, and since my third noticeboard request was for a berry pie, I was stuck sitting on that one for a while. But these are minor complaints about what was overall a charming, pleasant, and well-made game!

This game has a unique UI that has a sleekness to it, but is also rather disorienting. Other reviewers (at intfiction.org) have covered this aspect well already, but I'll echo that because of the way the UI and navigation is set up, it took me a bit to realize that you have to look at the truck from three different locations to get all the items you need to proceed with your mission.

While I spent a fair amount of time with the game, replaying more times than I can count, I never managed to get the “good” ending. Even once I (eventually) realized how to do it, I got too impatient (Spoiler - click to show)just sitting in the truck waiting and went to flip the pump switch to make the disposal go faster… and got eaten. I restarted, determined to try again… and that time (Spoiler - click to show)I got eaten just when I’d finished setting everything up. I didn’t have the motivation to do it all over again, so I gave up, only discovering far too late that you can save the game—all those times I replayed from the beginning when I could have been reloading a save!

I enjoyed the spooky vibe and all the different possibilities for what you can do/what can happen. Those aspects reminded me of last year’s A Thing of Wretchedness, although here you have a concrete goal and more of a sense of stakes, which was nice. The glimpses of the world that we get are intriguing, and I enjoyed seeing the descriptions of the environment change (Spoiler - click to show)once you become a mutant—honestly, I think the Mutant Jake endings were my favorites. I also like that (Spoiler - click to show)the duct tape can be used in (at least) two different, mutually exclusive ways (tape the hose to have no leaks, tape the pump switch for speed); I’m so used to items in adventure game puzzles being single-use, so having two different options here and having to choose your trade-off was a nice design feature.

This game is quite polished and has a smooth parser and a nice UI. I followed the advice from other players to look at the instructions for minigame #1 before attempting it, and was glad I did because I don’t think I would have figured that out on my own. However, I did get a bit tired of that puzzle by the fifth or so go-round. Part of the reason, I think, is that having 24 tries after getting the implant upgrade took away the sense of pressure and made me stop thinking very carefully about my guesses, whereas the two I solved with only 8 guesses had that sense of tension and needing to make every guess count.

My other main critique is the writing of the NPCs, of which there are six or seven. It’s immediately very clear that they only exist as pieces of the game’s puzzles; none of them interact with you until you approach them, and while some are introduced with a characterizing line like “A bureaucrat peers at the deck’s monitor with dead eyes,” others simply get “X is here.” Livening up those introductory descriptions (sure, Dr. Mohr is here, but what’s she doing?) and having them act more naturally—e.g., greeting you when you walk into their offices—would go a long way toward making them feel more like actual people and better integrating them into the game.

Overall though, if you're looking for a short, word- and grid-puzzley hacker game, you'll have fun with this one.

This was a polished and well-written game that unfortunately I didn’t really connect with. After finishing my first playthrough, per the game's explicit encouragement I restarted, expecting to see entirely new memories and paintings. But then five out of seven paintings and the same number of memories were repeats from my first playthrough. The memories were tied to different paintings, though, and it was disappointing to learn that the pairings hadn't been deliberately curated.

I also was never really emotionally engaged. The PC is clearly a specific character, rather than a blank-slate/self-insert; they have these specific memories of their relationship with the artist character, and they’ve made certain life choices like giving up painting to work at an ad agency. So I couldn’t pretend it was actually me going through this, but I also didn’t learn enough about the PC to really give me a sense of them as a person, which left me feeling emotionally distant from them and their remembrances of the artist. (It doesn’t help that the memories I got on my initial playthrough made that character come across as an asshole who I personally wouldn’t have kept putting up with.)

I also didn't vibe with the choice (Spoiler - click to show)to make the painting be automatically created for me at the end; it felt like the game was dictating what my emotional response to the memories should be. (Spoiler - click to show)I would have found it much more meaningful to get to decide for myself what subject, mood, etc. the painting should focus on—being able to interpret the memories for myself, using the choices of what to paint to reflect on what I took from them. Being allowed to adjust the painting afterward was nice but didn’t hit the same way doing it myself from the start would have.

I was very excited for this one, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s got a similar-but-distinct mechanic from the Prime Pro Rhyme Row series, so it was fun to get to try something new. It’s also shorter and a bit simpler than the longest of those games, which may make it more accessible to newcomers. At first I worried it would be too easy, but there were some spots that stumped me!

Unlike in the PPRR games, there are no in-game hints or puzzle cheats, so I turned to the walkthrough a couple times. Hints and a bit more clueing on some of the puzzles would make the game just about perfect IMO. (Update: after writing this I found out that there is a hint item; I just didn't realize its function while playing. So a clearer indication of its use would be helpful!)

I apparently didn’t get the best ending on my first playthrough, so I’ll definitely be coming back to see if I can fix that!

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)I’m torn on this one. It’s like a bleaker Queers in Love at the End of the World—you only have a brief amount of time left with someone close to you, and you have to choose how to spend it. Both play out in real time, with a clock far too short to exhaust your myriad options. In this one, though, only one of you will die when the clock runs out, which brings an entirely different (grimmer) mood.

There were moments where I really felt the emotional weight of the situation, but also moments where I was thrown out of it and felt very disconnected. The game starts in media res; the PC is already here with their friend, both of them knowing these will be the friend’s final moments. But the game didn’t fully sell that; the range of options you’re given includes things like “do research” and “ask if she ever learned why this is happening, neither of which makes sense when she’s literally dying in front of you. There was a tension between “let the player try all the things” and “these two people know each other and have history together and would naturally already have exhausted some of these options.”

Going along with this, on my initial playthrough I felt a bit overwhelmed at how many options there were and wanted to know more about the situation, which immediately put me at odds with the PC, who would already know all the things I was curious about. Instead of roleplaying as a good friend, at first I was just seeking out information to give me more context for the present moment.

In general, there’s a feeling of coldness and remove, which contrasts with the horror of the situation. In the friend’s final moments, as her death is actually described, you can no longer act at all; she melts away and all you can do is sit back and watch. Over and over if you replay, which I did, wanting to try different options, and seeing her die repeatedly left me desensitized to it. Replaying also made me very aware that while the game is about trying to comfort the friend, the emphasis is very much on the PC. They’re the the only one with agency; the friend has no last requests unless you prompt them (e.g., if you bring up her family, she asks you to keep an eye on her brother after she’s gone, but she won’t mention that otherwise).

But then, there are some excellently written, emotionally hard-hitting details that convey so much in just a few lines. If you take her hand:

"You hold it lightly. There is a shocking amount of give to it. You could squeeze, and her whole hand would gush out from between your fingers. It wouldn’t even be a hand anymore."

In response to this gesture, she tells you, “My mom wouldn’t hug me, wouldn’t even touch me, the last time I visited. She said the ‘goop’ I left would stain her sweater… she said to keep off the rugs.” Damn. No wonder she values my simple company so much. The line that hit me the most with its pure evocative horror was: “You listen to the steady drip of her toes and feet along the rim of the drain.”

And in all my replays, I managed to find some options that felt the most right, the most meaningful. There aren’t any wrong choices—even if you do absolutely nothing, just let the clock run out, she’ll still say she’s glad you were there—but my favorites were the things that made her smile or laugh (dancing, and drawing in the goop of her melting body). Like in QiLatEotW, seeing those moments of joy in the midst of horrible circumstances made me feel something.

Bad Beer is an enjoyable little game! “Little” in that it’s a pretty quick experience; in contrast to the stated playtime on the IFComp page, I reached an ending in less than 30 minutes, but did spend some time replaying. The setup is brief and lets you quickly get into your investigation, which rapidly reveals that there is something (Spoiler - click to show)supernatural going on…

I enjoyed exploring around the pub and chatting with the several NPCs; the game uses an “ask person about subject” conversation system, which worked well here, as your explorations and conversations reveal new topics to ask about. There are two people, June and Sally, in the kitchen, and sometimes one would chime in while I was talking to the other, or I’d ask one about a subject then ask the other and get a different answer, and both of these things made the conversation feel natural and well developed—the NPCs aren’t just information-giving-machines, but have their own personalities.

Something that clashed a bit with this, though, was the ambient messages (is there an actual term for these?)—the ones that fire every one or two turns and usually repeat in a cycle or at random. They got repetitive fairly quickly, and the ones in the kitchen were sometimes at odds with the ongoing conversation.

The pacing felt a bit rushed, too, especially since the investigating was less about finding clues and more about (Spoiler - click to show)triggering a supernatural incident that suddenly whisks you back into the past—but that was a very fun and unexpected twist, and I enjoyed (Spoiler - click to show)seeing the same place in two vastly different time periods. Even better, you’re given the chance to change the past and thereby put to rest the ghost who’s been causing the problems in the present day.

This was a fun little puzzle that allows for experimentation, as you get several attempts before the game moves on. The reset felt a bit random, though, as there was no in-game explanation for why you were given repeat chances (but only three of them). But fortunately it’s easy to continue trying, as the sub-optimal ending conveniently gives you the option to jump back to the beginning of the puzzle.

Either way, after you fail or succeed, the story suddenly skips ahead an unspecified amount of time (Spoiler - click to show)(back in the present day), with no transition explaining what happened when you returned to the present, how your friends reacted to your story, etc. I liked (Spoiler - click to show)the wrap-up at Will’s grave with the vicar, but I would have preferred some closure with the pub owners, too, given that they were the reason the PC got involved in all this. But overall I definitely enjoyed my time playing!

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.)

DOL-OS is less a choice-based game and more a hypertext exploration game—or more specifically, a “found document” game, with the documents consisting of computer programs, web browser history, images, music, text files, log entries, etc. Being given this trove to explore was compelling, even as at first I was very confused about what all the things I was reading/seeing had to do with each other.

The lovely UI does a lot to create immersion—it’s a great faux computer interface, complete with a green CRT emulation, a variety of icons, and different looks for different programs. The pacing is handled well, with puzzles gating the content you’re meant to see later, meaning the tension slowly escalates as you learn more specifics about who this computer belonged to and what they were working on. There’s one point at which it’s clear you’re getting to the meat of the game, and pieces of what you’ve seen earlier start connecting, until finally you have the full story—and the full horror of it. And there’s still one more twist after that…

(Spoiler - click to show)The moment where you realize that the AI is still present, and you can interact with it, was a great one—perfectly chilling after all you now know. The conversation with it was a little bit of a let down to me, though. Here you get a list of questions you can ask, which you can lawnmower through---picking one doesn't lock you out of any others. However, some of those options lead to sub-menus of questions, and typically you can only ask one of those before you’re shunted back to the main menu. I didn’t see any in-game reason for this, and would have liked to be able to ask all the sub-questions. There’s also, as wolfbiter's review points out, the fact that you don’t get to pick every piece of dialogue from the PC—some back-and-forth happens without your input, which was a little jarring because up until that point, there hadn't really *been* a PC, just me, the player. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, when given the choice at the end, I didn’t see any reason why I’d want to save the program—the game certainly gave me no evidence it was at all a good thing!

I liked that most of the links are keybound—i.e., there’s a little number next to each, showing that you can press that number on the keyboard to open that link. But there were a few hiccups with this system; not every clickable option on each screen is keybound, on one screen there’s a “10” option instead of a 0, and some parts of the game simply can’t be played via the keyboard. I also discovered only after completing the game that there are in-game hints accessible only from the keybinding menu—not sure if I missed something at the beginning indicating they were there? Finally, I don’t want to be a dick about translated games, but the text could use a final proofreading pass to clean up typos and errant phrasing.

Despite my quibbles, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game; it was fun to progress, solving the small puzzles to unlock more text and finally learn the answer to the mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)And a game about the perils of trusting in AI too much feels very timely…

While I didn’t call this out in my review of the prior entry, it’s true of all three games: the cast list provided at the beginning is a great introduction to the characters, introducing the two or three people who appear in each game with two positive and two negative adjectives, giving you a sense of who they are without giving away any of the games’ secrets. Like the others, this one also has a nice UI, again with a great use of color and starting out with a well-done emulation of a messaging app.

In contrast to the slow build of the prior installment, in this one you’re given the details of the situation—and the possible danger you’re in—right away, immediately establishing tension. Other notable contrasts are that you have much more agency (or at least, there’s the illusion that you do), but instead of choosing actions to do/try, you’re picking nouns to engage with. The game has a mini world model and is focused on exploring your environment, and there’s even a small puzzle (although you can finish the game without solving it). This entry clearly belongs with the two previous games while still having its own distinct type of gameplay. As I said about #2, the range of options the player has in such a short game is impressive(Spoiler - click to show)—while, as in the prior installment, it always ends the same way, there are variations to the ending (I found three) depending on what you do or don’t do during your playthrough.

While technically this is a review of the third game, the rest of this is thoughts on the cycle (as it stands now) as a whole. As such, it has major spoilers!

(Spoiler - click to show)You may have noted that I didn’t review the first game; it wasn’t as striking to me as these two, mainly because it feels like necessary setup before things really get going in #2. As I said in my review of that one, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters. Each has a different PC; the one in the first game is the current wife in a Bluebeard scenario who kills her murderous husband and escapes. However, in the second game this same woman is the villain—she murders that game’s PC, and has been doing the same to any man who gets too close to her daughter. “Men are horrors, every one,” she says in seeming justification.

When playing this entry for the first time, this statement reads as a misguided belief based on her traumatic experience with her husband, with the PC an innocent victim who we have no reason to believe deserved this. But in the third game, we’re taken back in time and shown that he’s actually a serial killer—he’s the villain now, with a new PC as his hapless victim. Just as this man is reframed, so is the woman from #1 and #2 yet again—maybe she was entirely justified in taking out her daughter’s fiance! Of course it’s much less black-and-white than that, but I loved how I was made to rethink her character twice over the course of the cycle.

It’s an excellent linked series of games. All three feature a PC trying to get out of a dangerous situation alive, and all have only a single possible outcome—someone always dies. In the first one—the only one with a woman PC—you succeed, but in the second two, you don’t. Two of the games have a serial killer meeting his end, both killed by the same woman. In the first one, a man threatens a woman’s life, but ultimately she kills him. The third one has a presumably queer man killing another queer man. The trilogy is playing with the idea of victim and perpetrator—anyone can be either, or both—and showing how context-dependent our judgments of who deserves to live or die are.

I know there are a few more games to come in the cycle, and I’m curious what they’ll do to change my view of these three and their characters. Will we see more of the PC from #3, or the daughter from #2? She feels like a foil to the Bluebeard character from the first game; him clearly evil, a perpetrator only, her clearly innocent, solely a victim. But will we learn things that call her innocence or that of #3’s PC into question? I certainly look forward to finding out.

This is the second of three games (so far) in Charm’s RGB Cycle, all of which were made for this year’s Neo-Twiny Jam, which had a length restriction of 500 words (not counting code). I definitely recommend starting with the first entry, not because this one can’t stand alone, but because playing it within the context of the first adds a layer to the experience. In this trilogy, each game builds on the previous one to recontextualize what came before it and what you think you know about the characters.

But on to the actual game! It’s very stylish, with a nicely presented introduction screen (containing instructions for playing and a cast list) and making good use of color throughout, presenting each character's dialogue in a different color in order to distinguish them. The opening lines set a sinister mood that ramps up as you realize what exactly the PC’s current situation is—I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say that you spend the game trapped in a dark room. Reminiscent of Abigail Corfman’s A Dream of Silence, you have a range of available actions—looking, speaking, and moving—which result in more information and/or different outcomes as you repeat them.

The pacing is excellent, with conversations overheard from outside your prison conveying the passage of time and adding to the suspense. The game uses its small word count very effectively, and because of the several options always available to you and the different ways they build on each other, you likely won’t see all the text on a single playthrough(Spoiler - click to show)—and while the game always ends the same way, there are at least two variations on the ending. After my first playthrough I replayed it immediately to see what I'd missed.

I won't say much more due to the risk of spoilers, but it's a great little horror game. The two moments of peak horror for me: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a point where your choices are “Crawl”, “Scream”, or “Bleed”, and damn, that reveal at the end.

I encountered one small bug (a line of text appearing at one point suggesting I do something that I'd already done), but I only happened upon it after multiple playthroughs, so it certainly didn't impede my enjoyment!

I played Not Just Once back when it was first released and enjoyed it then, but encountered a few bugs. Having just played the updated version, I’m happy to report that my experience this time around was bug-free! Both on my original playthrough and again today, I found it quite compelling from the get-go; there’s a very moody vibe to it as the PC walks home in the snow on a January evening, preparing to eat a sad corner-store meal, and soon it takes a mysterious and somewhat spooky turn. (I found myself reading parts of it in the voice of Jonathan Sims from The Magnus Archives, which was delightful.)

Early in the game, the choices are about characterizing the PC—do you find Christmas lights still up in January charming, or irritating? What type of ostentatious shoes are your favorite? (Later, there’s also an appearance customization section, but it subverts expectations in several ways; clicking “skin color” does not actually allow you to choose a skin color, and the things you do get to choose have an immediate, very effective payoff.) We’re never told much about the PC outright; there are hints at your past, and apparently you knew going into it that today would be difficult, but the reason why, whatever happened prior to the game’s start, is never revealed.

Players also get to help shape the PC’s reality in an interesting way, going beyond looks or fashion choices. When a stranger tells the PC the two of you have met before, you get to choose if she seems familiar or not, and whether or not it’s possible that you had the encounter she describes. For these reasons, I felt somewhat distanced from the PC the whole time, like I was co-crafting them more than playing them, but that wasn’t a bad thing; having all these different options made it feel like the game was full of possibilities, and I was eager to explore them.

After playing several times, I definitely have a favorite ending, one that felt most fitting with the game as a whole. Multiple times throughout you’re given the choice to pursue/continue your odd encounter or give up and just head home, and continuing was the most rewarding to me; heading home (alone) at any point feels like it cuts the game off early, and leads to an ending I found less satisfying than what I consider the “main” one.

Two minor mechanical things—this is a stretch-text Twine game without an auto-scroll function, so constantly having to scroll down after clicking a choice was a bit annoying. The other is that the game doesn’t properly restart if you click the “end” link, which returns you to the beginning screen, and then click “start” again; if you do this, the game still remembers the appearance choices from your prior playthrough, and you don’t get to pick new ones. To fully clear the slate and start fresh, you have to click the “restart” icon. But these are small complaints about an overall rich, intriguing game!

The problem with hype is that it raises your expectations, and when the hyped thing fails to meet those expectations, it inhibits your enjoyment in a way you wouldn't have experienced if you'd gone in without those unfairly high hopes. I've experienced this with a lot of popular IF works, not just this one, so it's definitely more me than the game--and it was a very good game! The completely alien perspective, positioning humanity as foreign, is narrated in rich language that uses common English words in never-before-written ways and was compelling and lovely to read. The horror elements were well done, understated in their matter-of-factness, which made them all the more horrifying. Contrasted with this, the beauty of the Song, of the alien world, of the bond that forms between alien and human--it all makes for an excellent story.

But I think I might have enjoyed it more if it were a story alone, a work of static fiction rather than a game. The whole time I felt like I was being guided through an on-rails experience, always nudged in the correct next direction, not encouraged to experiment or take my time. While I appreciate the game's helpfulness in keeping players on the right track, allaying potential frustration, what I enjoy most about parser games tends to be the exploration and experimentation that the form typically encourages. Coloratura held my hand a bit too much for my liking; I would have preferred a little more freedom.

This is a brief excerpt from a longer work-in-progress that packs a lot into its short space. We, the readers, watch the scene unfold in third person as two long-separated men reunite in a confessional booth. Their dialogue has script-like formatting, most of the work a conversation with brief pauses for description. Said description paints a vivid picture of the two, deftly characterizing them through both their appearances and actions. We’re told none of either one’s backstory or their shared history, but are left to infer it based on their conversation, which is sufficient to provide a strong sense of who each is—Andrey, charming and flippant; Joel, earnest and emotional—and why this reunion matters to them.

The religious aspect is well-employed, both to hint at what drove them apart—Joel is a priest, while Andrey has lost his faith—and to serve as an analogy. The work’s title is taken from a Catholic prayer, which when excerpted at the end is cast in a new light by what we’ve just seen play out. A hint of sacrilege, delightful in the deep meaning it gives their relationship.

There are no choices in the piece; the reader simply clicks a link on each page to continue, with the short length of the pages encouraging you to linger on each, taking in the richness of the writing, processing each beat of this emotionally fraught moment as it unfolds.

I enjoy this sort of item-gathering optimization game (someone on IFDB has dubbed the genre “Verdeterrelike”), and I had fun with this one! A brief introduction explains that you’re at this museum to steal the famous “Mon Alicia” and then grab as many additional items as you can in the next 10 minutes before you leave. Like other Verdeterrelikes, it’s meant to be replayed multiple times, so on my initial playthrough I took my time examining everything I encountered, exploring the museum to see how big it was and understand the layout (ADRIFT’s automapper was helpful for this, although not strictly necessary as the map is quite simple).

Every action you perform takes 15 seconds, and you’ll need to be efficient if you want to maximize your score. Acquiring all the items requires solving small puzzles revolving around access and transportation. If time runs out before you’ve manually escaped, the game has you escape automatically—at the cost of dropping everything you’re carrying. So you have to make sure you leave enough time to go through the departure steps after grabbing your items. A single playthrough is quite quick, and I was sufficiently motivated to replay many times in order to keep increasing my take (ultimately hitting $681 million, which I was happy enough with despite knowing a higher score is possible).

The game was made over a brief time period, which shows a bit as there are some rough edges that could be smoothed out. Every turn takes 15 seconds, whether you successfully perform an action or not—so typos and commands that don’t work will cost you as much time as anything else. I also encountered a bug in one playthrough where I was able to do an action I don’t think was supposed to work ((Spoiler - click to show)pushing the Corvette Stone into an adjacent room without the wheelbarrow), because when I tried the same thing in subsequent playthroughs I was told it wasn’t possible. Still, for anyone looking for a quick little optimization puzzler, I recommend checking this one out!

This game was written for the 2022 Goncharov Game Jam. While I am 100% out of the loop on the Goncharov meme, beyond knowing it exists, that fortunately didn’t stop me from comprehending or enjoying this short game. You play as Sofia, whose backstory remains largely a mystery beyond her being under the thumb of a mob boss. Tasked with getting information out of Katya, the wife of Goncharov (said boss’s rival mobster), at a party, Sofia studies and chats with her but is ultimately left with more questions than answers.

Throughout the game, optional links provide more information on people or situations mentioned with brief, evocative descriptions. The choices that exist are which dialogue options you say to Katya, ranging from flirtatious to apologetic, direct to subtle. Which you choose will determine in part the content and tenor of your conversation, especially its ending. I enjoyed replaying to see the different possibilities and gain a little more insight into Katya each time, seeing her and Sofia connect, however briefly, in different ways. In one variation, a line from Katya directly alludes to the title: “This isn’t our story, Sofia.” But while these women may be on the periphery of men’s rivalry and violence, the game itself centers their experience, with Goncharov never making an appearance. Well-written and compelling, this is an excellent little bite of a game—like Sofia, I’m left wanting more.

I like to write reviews for old(er) games when there's something that strikes me about the game that isn't mentioned in other reviews. In this case, it's that (Spoiler - click to show)there's more than one way to solve it! Everyone you encounter wants something, and if you can provide them with what they want, they'll give you something in return. But (Spoiler - click to show)for most of the items, there isn't just one correct person to give it to--two different people will be happy to take it, each providing a different item in return. I've encountered new items on each one of my three playthroughs, and discovered that there are even two possible different heads you can provide to the Duc!

Having (Spoiler - click to show)multiple possible solutions like this, leading to different item exchanges and character interactions, is clever and adds replay value. But even more impressive to me is the consistent state-tracking, with small details of the descriptions changing based on what you've done, and every character having a specific remark for whatever nasty item you're currently carrying around. Truly an excellently designed game.

The first thing that struck me about this game was the UI. It’s gorgeous! The softly textured main background, the handwriting fonts (with choices so you can pick one that you find most readable), the paper-like background for the text. It’s the perfect aesthetic for the story; there’s even a little quill you click to continue!

The story itself has a compelling start, with Isabelle having suddenly had to leave her home and return to the village she thought she’d left forever, now separated from her lover, Olympia, and pouring out her longing for reunion in her letters. What exactly happened is revealed slowly in bits and pieces (although on a second replay, when I chose a different option early on, I found that the explanation came together more quickly), and it was satisfying to put the pieces together, figuring out Isabelle’s background and why she had to suddenly leave the city.

Sometimes I didn’t feel like I was entirely following the ups and downs of the relationship as time and Isabelle’s letters went on, as we only get Isabelle’s side of the correspondence, but the tension between the two, the strain that the inciting incident and the distance was putting on their relationship—the way the distance allowed mistrust and suspicions to creep in, both jumping to conclusions about each other—was gripping to read and made me invested in the conclusion. I was less interested in the external plot going on around Isabelle, though, and because the ending focused in on that plotline, it fell a little flat for me.

Two other notes, first on the interactivity. I can’t help but compare this to other epistolary IF works I’ve played, and unlike in First Draft of the Revolution or Something Blue, in DJL the player/protagonist isn’t choosing what pieces of information to share with Olympia, or what spin to put on them; rather, you’re deciding which of the offered choices is actually true. Or at least, that was my interpretation after multiple playthroughs, and I felt almost like this gave me too much power over the story; things that felt like small choices in the moment ended up being major shapers of the way events played out, in ways I wasn’t prepared for.

Finally, I know this was translated from French under a time crunch, and that showed a bit, with some confusing phrasing or word mix-ups. This wasn’t a major distraction, but it made the reading experience a bit bumpy at times and created another barrier to my feeling like I’d fully grasped everything. I’m glad the translation was finished in time for Spring Thing, though, as I enjoyed the story and had fun playing through it!

I was drawn into this one by the stylish UI and the character-focused setup, immediately interested in our three MCs’ circumstances and their relationship. Their teasing, comfortable dynamic was fun to read about, especially with the sense that these were some precious, stolen moments in an otherwise strictly regimented life. However, the introduction to these characters’ lives doesn’t match up with what actually plays out in the story; the setup gets quickly got thrown out the window, especially when the cozy domestic moment we start out witnessing becomes an urgent mission.

As other reviews have mentioned, I think the confusion definitely comes in part from this being the third in a series. Not having played the preceding games, I couldn’t follow what was going on with the mission, completely lacking a frame of reference for it. This ended up creating a major disconnect between me and the characters, which was the opposite of my experience at the beginning, when I thought I understood what they might be thinking and feeling.

A final issue is that most of the game’s passages contain two types of links—ones that lead to brief asides and return you to the passage you came from when you're done, and ones that advance to the next main-text passage. However, both types of links are colored and styled exactly the same, and the game has no “back” button, meaning that if you inadvertently miss an aside, there’s no way to rewind and see it. While I was able to crack the code as to which type of link is which—single-word links are asides, multi-word links advance—signaling the difference in a more obvious way would have been a better design choice.

This game has a very fun premise and voice; unfortunately, though, I had to guess-the-verb my way through it, at one point resorting to asking someone else who’d played for a hint because I was completely stumped (and the in-game hints didn’t have anything for that particular situation). After that I made some progress on my own, but ultimately turned to the in-game hints quite a bit. In retrospect, I could see how the things I got stuck on were clued, so I think this was a case of me just not being as clever as the game required! There were a few small implementation errors that I found, but overall it's a well-done game with excellent writing, fun puzzles utilizing unique, world-appropriate objects, and a great comedic character in Captain Booby. Maybe just a liiiittle more cluing for those of us who might otherwise (Spoiler - click to show)(fail to) struggle.

This was another game that had me quite confused at first—I couldn't for the life of me understand what I was supposed to be doing (Spoiler - click to show)if I couldn't use verbs! After some flailing I turned to the in-game hints, which fortunately clearly explained what was going on. From that point on it became a fun and unique little exercise. It's got an unusual parser game mechanic, and I'm impressed by the coding it must have taken to make it all work. The story was cute too; I liked the reveal and that there were multiple possible endings.

A downside is that it was very short—by the time I felt like I’d gotten the hang of the mechanic and was gearing up to do more complex things with it, the game was over! So it felt a bit more like a proof of concept than a full game, but if the author ever did make a longer game with this conceit, I would be first in line to play.

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...

This is a cute game! I've never played a game with an octopus PC before, and my favorite aspect was the descriptions, which paint such delightful pictures as an octopus snuggled up in a drawer full of sweaters and an octopus sitting on a window ledge high above the city. "You're splayed out on the hardwood floor" is just perfect too. I also thought the plot was well done; your goal is to get your owner to move back out of her boyfriend's apartment, and I wondered how I might possibly accomplish that until it became clear that (Spoiler - click to show)her boyfriend is cheating on her, and thus my goal was to expose him.

I did have some struggles, mostly notably with the faucets as Mike already pointed out in his review. I also thought (Spoiler - click to show)opening the window latch with the plunger was a bit far-fetched; I don't think that would actually work IRL, and from the setup described I would have thought my arms would be able to reach it without issue. (Also, minor quibble, but octopus' limbs are actually arms, not tentacles!) It also got a bit old having to return to my tank every so often--I liked the realism of this, but I wish the game would've had me automatically drop everything I was carrying when I tried to get in, so that I wouldn't have had to type "enter tank. drop all. enter tank."

I had a little trouble with the endgame, too. Partly because I had completely failed to (Spoiler - click to show)examine myself in detail, so I missed that I could squirt ink until I turned to the hints for help with the clothesline--that one's definitely on me. But I also had to use the tip from Mike's review for getting the winning ending; (Spoiler - click to show)having to close the bottom drawer seemed pretty unintuitive, and I wasn't sure why it mattered that I was out of my tank at that point---I would have thought the presence of a stranger's underwear would take precedence. So overall I found it an enjoyable little game, just with a few hiccups along the way.

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!

The implementation in this game was frustrating throughout and made it very rough to play. I was able to finish only by reading the spoilers in MathBrush's review; before that I was hopelessly stuck on how to open the sarcophagus. Some other issues were the game telling me "this painting looks like the other one you saw" when I hadn't yet seen another one, and (Spoiler - click to show)being able to put the fuse in the junction box despite the box being closed and locked. I think this could be an enjoyable escape room game; it just needs to be made more player-friendly.

This was a fun idea and I enjoyed the "switching between worlds" aspect. Unfortunately, that part became unfun by the end, as I was left with a single multi-step task to do in one of the worlds, but I could only complete one or two steps at a time before being shunted into a different world and having to make my way back to the one I needed to be in. The commands for that task were also unintuitive and somewhat at odds with the rest of the game (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)while you have to read each piece of text you encounter instead of having "examine" tell you what it says, for the coffee-making task, trying to take the beans out of the roaster doesn't work; you have to type "grind beans," even though the grinder is in a different room).

I think there was also a bug with text firing at the wrong time; at one point, the "score" command was giving me both "Your muscles are ready to spring into action" and "You feel too tired and lethargic to move" at the same time. I also think there must be an intended order to do things in that I didn't follow, because I (Spoiler - click to show)made the coffee last, and got a message pointing me to the gardening tools, but then as I tried to walk to them I woke up and the game ended.

Basically, I think this is a fun premise with some fun gameplay that just needs a bit more polishing to really shine.

Having just played (and loved) The Gostak, I looked up other games by the author and found this one. It's a speed IF game, so it's quite short and simple, but even in that small space it had me laughing more than once. Recommended if you're in the mood for a tiny, amusing game!

This is a fun follow-up to Advent Door. It's shorter and simpler than that game, but features a different twist on navigation that makes for an enjoyable small puzzle. Again, the brief environmental descriptions, especially given the core mechanic--(Spoiler - click to show)there's a second version of the map that you can enter through a mirror, which seems to be the same place at a much earlier time period--are a highlight.

I don't have much more to say than what's in the title--this was a quick game with a clever mechanic that required mapping and doing some careful thinking to figure out how to achieve what I needed, and it was very satisfying when I succeeded! The bits of worldbuilding and descriptions keep it from being too abstract. A nice way to spend a half hour.

I found this game to be an effective argument that the fear that games may be hiding secret hateful content is silly, because games don't need to do that in order to send ideological messages. While in the accompanying essay the author writes that he "decided to take out all the Nazi stuff," just because the hidden mode is gone (or at least, has been rendered inaccessible via the originally intended method) doesn't mean the game is suddenly perfectly innocent. We're told that the PC took bus 88 to get to their destination, which is Muranowska Square, and our task in the game is to seek out the hiding places of frightened rabbits--which given this context takes on a deeper, more sinister meaning. A child playing this game might never understand or pay attention to these references, but an adult can see that the game is not, as it claims, simply a cute story about bunnies.

This game is an effective illustration that messaging can be baked into games in far more subtle ways than via a "hidden Nazi mode", and for that reason, vetting games for objectionable content is never going to be as simple as glancing over the source code and verifying that it doesn't contain any slurs.

I had fun with this game and found it a lot easier than the prequel, To Sea in a Sieve. But I wanted to note that it contains some insensitive material, with (puzzle spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)Cherokee smudge sticks used to ward off an Egyptian curse. The cursed mummy itself is a tired, rather culturally insensitive trope IMO, and the idea of mystical Native Americans is also based in othering stereotypes. Of course this game is over 20 years old, but I wanted any future players to have a heads up.

All the Little Match Girl games are just plain wacky fun. The time/space-hopping, the Metroidvania-ness, and the outlandishness of the premise all make them a delight to play, and LMG4 is no exception. I loved the humor of the parser responses, the vividness and variety of the settings, the construction of the puzzles, the way the various worlds connect to each other, being able to (Spoiler - click to show)turn into a mouse and have chats with other animals, the commentary from the scanning lens, and (Spoiler - click to show)the poignant character moment at the end.

My only critiques are that I would have liked a bit more implementation of synonyms, and that when playing in browser (which I did for the pretty colors/other stylings), there’s a long sequence of timed text that repeats every time you sit down and reflect on how things are going. As you progress in the game, new text is added to the end of this segment; however, you still have to sit through the slow doling-out of the text you’ve already seen each time, with no way (as far as I could tell) to skip through or speed it up. But that's quite a minor thing--on the whole, I love this series and this game!

The main thing I knew about this game going in was that it makes significant use of the "timed text" mechanic. While I did find it slightly too slow at times, and wasn't sure it was needed as prevalently as it was used, it didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game, and definitely served the author's intended purpose. It's also very nice to be able to turn it off on subsequent playthroughs.

Anyway, on to the rest of the game! I felt for the protagonist a lot; the game seemed to really capture what it’s like to go through life with a stutter, and how difficult it can make everyday interactions. The flashbacks to childhood were quite sad, witnessing this struggling child be ignored and othered (the My Cousin Vinny one especially...). I enjoyed the gameplay, and how it was never a matter of picking the “right” option--rather, it’s left up to the player to decide if they’d prefer to stumble over ordering their favorite food, or smoothly order a food they hate. The color coding of the choices was a good way to indicate how fluently each option would come out.

Ultimately, the game isn’t about beating the stutter; you’re simply experiencing what it’s like to have it, and coping with it however you think is best. I played through four times, interested in seeing the differences between a covert, overt, and middle-of-the-road approach, and enjoyed each playthrough (and getting all but two of the achievements!).

One point of critique is that, regarding the job interview plotline, I would have liked some more background on the PC’s adulthood experiences, in addition to the childhood ones. I wondered if the stutter played a role in them leaving their previous job, and what it might mean for future job prospects. I think more of an exploration of the PC’s dreams, and to what extent the stutter has impacted those dreams, would add a bit more depth. But on the whole, a great game that accomplishes its purpose very well.

I have to admit that I was a little underwhelmed by this game at first; the worldbuilding felt a bit bizarre and random for what’s essentially a museum heist story. But once I got into the puzzley portion I was hooked. It’s easy to locate the item you need to liberate from this museum, but less easy to acquire and escape with it.

The gameplay reminded me of the Lady Thalia games—explore, find useful items/info, heist, escape. The game does a good job at creating tension, with an officer following you around to keep an eye on you, appearing and disappearing as you traverse the rooms, and at creating a sense of time passing, with the security office going from occupied at first visit to unoccupied at later ones. The achievements at the end make it clear that there are multiple methods for escaping detection, and that it’s possible to succeed at the job but incriminate yourself in the process. All of this added a great amount of complexity and made for a fun game! (Another note: you’ll find an in-game map, which is nice—I had thought about drawing a map at first, but then I was glad I didn’t bother.)

I do have some nitpicks; I found the (brief) dialogue section rather clunky, and didn’t buy the supposed romantic chemistry between the PC and their conversation partner. And then there were some elements that felt set up to have an impact on gameplay, but didn't seem to in the end, such as choosing your character at the start, and the list of locations to go other than the museum. But I certainly had fun solving the puzzles and will gladly play any future games in this series!

This game's delightful UI, emulating a video call (complete with a Mom sprite), struck me immediately and was a very charming touch. The game also features an accidental call disconnect and a few appearances from the family dog (<3), increasing the verisimilitude.

What I soon found, though, was that the verisimilitude goes a little too far for my taste. A significant part of the game is a very realistic depiction of remotely troubleshooting for a non-tech-savvy older relative, and while I had expected that premise to be balanced out by a certain level of goofiness, that portion of the game is actually played pretty straight and felt a bit tedious because of it.

Each set of choices throughout the game typically consists of a patient/nice choice, a more neutral choice, and an impatient/rude choice. I went mostly with the nice choices, because why would I want to be cruel to this cute old lady sprite? But that made making choices less fun, because there was usually only one option I even considered. After reaching the end I did start a replay to see some of the other content, with the intention of being consistently mean, but I quickly found that I didn’t enjoy doing that, and honestly I wasn’t motivated enough to go through the whole troubleshooting portion again, so I stopped pretty quickly.

There’s definitely a lot to like in the game: lines like “bush-shaving is a legitimate and beautiful artform!” and place names like “West Furthersburg”, for example, as well as the cute art. The story overall is sweet, too, at least if you pick the nice dialogue options. But in a way, choosing only those options made it feel too simplistic. So while I found aspects of the game well done, on the whole it didn't fully work for me.

Trail Stash is similar to Andrew's other wordplay games, but it’s written in Twine (Sugarcube specifically) rather than Inform—so it’s not up to the player to think of (in this case) spoonerisms, but rather, to figure out which of the spoonerized objects you acquire will be useful in each of the spoonerized locations. Success unlocks new locations, which yield new objects.

Being familiar with Andrew’s other wordplay games was definitely helpful in catching on to this one; the “use object in place” mechanic isn’t too hard to figure out, but it also is never spelled out, and the need to spoonerize the place names and object names to figure out which object goes with which place isn’t either. Of course it’s a matter of personal preference, but I don’t tend to enjoy when the first part of a puzzle is “figure out the conceit of the puzzle;” I’d rather just be told upfront. Of course, with the choice-based format of this game, it’s entirely possible to solve it by simply collecting all the items and then lawnmowering through them in each location; I tried to avoid doing this and actually think each one through, but I found some to be clued better than others, and I did resort to random guesses a few times.

I enjoyed Trail Stash as another entry in Andrew’s world of wordplay, but I do think it has a rather niche audience and isn’t going to feel particularly accessible to newcomers to Andrew’s work. But if the concept at all appeals to you, I definitely recommend checking it out!