Ratings and Reviews by pieartsy

When I played this game, I expected a single choice (given what Jam it was for), not no choice, so when I finished, I was pretty surprised. I replayed it a few times to see if there was literally anything else I could do, and read a few reviews to see if I was missing anything. I don't think I am...? The closest thing I can think of is that you can kind of hop between listening and looking during the leg moment, which seems to delay the leg moment progression, but nothing changes because of this and I wasn't 100% sure it wasn't an Inform implementation bug.

Past my initial confusion-- I think that this game is very good at depicting the moment and feeling it's trying to convey, a profoundly uncomfortable family dinner trapped within the bonds of social/familial norms and the echoes of past abuse, both gender and sexuality based in the text, and possibly more. The lack of agency throughout the whole game is a simple and perfect execution of ludonarrative harmony, where our own lack of agency as players reflects the lack of agency of the protagonist. I also found it poignant and sad that this feeling of having no right to voice their problems extended past their family dinner to their attempt at a social media escape, which only seemed to hurry on the death of their willpower.

I just played Repeat the Ending today as well, and in the metatext, the author comments that while his game may seem like a miseryfest, sometimes life is just abject shit for people. This seems to reflect that sort of approach. This isn't a fun game, it isn't particularly fulfilling, but it's not trying to be fun or fulfilling, it's trying to depict a very specific experience, and it does quite a bit thematically with very few words.

However, I have to admit that I am not rating it very highly, though for an extremely subjective reason.

I am Chinese, however I am specifically a Chinese-American adoptee. I really don't relate to most stories, anecdotes, memes, or anything that other Chinese people tend to use as cultural touchpoints (whether those living in China or those in the diaspora). Nothing currently makes me feel more alienated from my ethnicity than Chinese (and honestly, East Asian diaspora people in general) people talking about "subtle asian traits" or the relatability of having Tiger Moms or whatever.

While I *fully acknowledge* that this game is not trying to claim that Every Chinese Person Has Had This Experience, and in fact the protagonist appears to be *incredibly* specific (being, presumably, a trans person who was AMAB, along with other particular details), and I also fully acknowledge that this is an "i am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?" take of mine, I can't help but feel a little cold about this game labeling the experience as a Chinese™️ Family™️ Dinner™️ Moment™️. I didn't have a Chinese Family™️, I've never had a Chinese Family Dinner™️, and I've certainly never had a Chinese Family Dinner Moment™️ , so this game is definitively Not About Me, and it's not trying to be about me, but the labelling sure does remind me that I am not Chinese™️. (I also know that this was not Kastel's intention. It's just a subjective feeling of mine.)

An extra dimension of it is that I did not know my birth parents, and I get a little horrified at the idea that this is what I was ""missing out on"". It seems a little flattening, because I think, surely not all Chinese Family's Dinners are like this? But then I remember that I do not actually, and will never actually know, so it gets me feeling weird.

I will lastly note there are a few verbs that get Inform standard responses, like "jump", "hit (or any violence term)" "eat", and "touch" which kind of ruin the agency-robbing effect to a degree, when everything else points you toward one thing.

I wanted to show my boyf a recent IF game since he’s played parsers ages ago but wanted to get back into the swing of it. When polling for reccs in my IF communities, this got recommended a few times, and it seemed up our alley, so we tried it out. We alternated reading passages and voiced different characters, which was fun (he was Aubrey, I was Kit).

It’s a very charming game, with a lot of genre notes that I love (faerie stuff, historicalish setting, breaking the law, queerness) that are well written and fun. I felt like all combinations of choices were weaved in organically, and while we got most of the puzzles right, I liked that it was forgiving when we got the Queen’s riddle horribly wrong and turned into a fish…put a pin in that.

I also continually marvel at how games pull off romance plots, not because I think it’s impossible, but because I am abjectly terrible at writing romance. I really enjoyed the sweet dynamic between Kit and Aubrey. I also appreciated that I could see that Aubrey is a fae from like forty million miles away but even though Kit was completely oblivious, the “mystery” was cleared up incredibly quickly so I didn’t have to groan about Kit being so slow on the uptake for long. Overall, I left the game really enjoying the experience.

Now, take that aforementioned pin and read what I actually wanted to talk about.

**Illusion-ruining and/or Experience-enhancing game design spoilers**
(Spoiler - click to show)
When we talked about this game at the little IF book club I’m in, it was a conversation of compliments. Then someone pointed out something I hadn’t realized playing it the first time: at least some of the puzzles in the game don’t actually affect the outcome of the plot.

I got turned into a fish in one run, and the whiskered fae saved me. In this run, the whiskered fae saved me from the frog faeries. You can get the password for the warden egregiously wrong until he just tells you the answer. If you get Aubrey’s True Name wrong, they turn into a Fae anyway.

I can’t say if all the puzzles are so forgiving, such as getting lost in the caverns with the chaperone or the maze or being chased by the Wild Hunt – I couldn’t bear to get those wrong even when I replayed – but a lot of the ones that seemed most critical to get right still looped you back to the same track, usually within a few passages.

We had a lengthy discussion about this. At first I was very resistant to the idea that these were puzzles if they didn’t actually affect the plot of the game, and had a negative reaction to their advertisement as puzzles. I am someone who’s VERY invested in the thematic and narrative purpose of puzzles, having made an entire presentation on it, and I was confused about why it didn’t seem to “matter”. In my presentation, I posit that puzzles need to have different outcomes based on different attempted solutions. There has to be at least one answer that gives a different outcome than another answer, usually wrong vs right. If the puzzle gives you the same outcome no matter what, it’s not a puzzle, but possibly an instance of a ludonarrative structure that represents inevitability or lack of agency or some other theme.

But then after other people’s points were made about Rescue, I have come to this expanded understanding:

The game does give you a different outcome if you’re wrong vs if you’re right, and after replay, I realized it is a deceptively linear game – there is actually far more branching than is obvious from one playthrough. While it doesn’t affect the plot as a whole, insomuch as most of the same key conversations and scenes occur, and you still save Aubrey/Aubrey saves you by turning into a Fae at the end, your experience is different, as a player.

An experience where Kit has to survive being chased after by the Wild Hunt and turned into a fish and get the True Name wrong is different from the one where they nearly fall asleep with a boring chaperone and eat Faerie food for too long and get the True Name right. That experience matters just as much for games as different endings do, it just isn’t so obvious. Sure the branch quickly bottlenecks back to the main plot, but the branch is there for a qualitative reason.

It also reminds me of a talk that Ian Michael Waddell gave at Narrascope 2019, about how games kind of suck at the concept of failure. In real life, when you fail, it’s often a learning experience, and you have to deal with the failure but move forward. Meawhile in most games, when you fail, it’s a blocking and often punishing experience – lose progress, lose a life, lose time, get a worse ending than if you were smart, or simply sit there banging your head against the obstacle until you solve or beat it. This game feels like it moves past that sort of dynamic (the way that IMW was advocating for) elegantly.

Lastly, if I do end up pushing the puzzles through my lens of thematic puzzles or through ludonarrative mechanics or whatever such framework that analyzes the themes inherent in the design…I think i could argue the theme is “the power of love overcomes all obstacles”. That’s a pretty cool way to weave the theme of love into a romance game!

Overall, I left the game really enjoying the experience in the end, even after all the twists and turns it took to get there. Very fitting for this game in particular, I think ;)

A linear game until the very end choice, about a pitiable old sculptor trying to create his last masterpiece, essentially before he dies. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it suicidal ideation implication.

I was a little thrown off by the sculptor’s prose making it seem like he was in the Renaissance era and then having Ricky walk in to reveal it was clearly the modern era, but my guess is it was an intentional dissonance, so I kinda liked the artistic decision there.

I did encounter some bugs and several typos, like the Texture words that I dragged being exceedingly tiny for some reason and one of the choices saying `sand still`. My biggest issue was the prose was very clunky and often ungrammatical or switching tense. Some parts approached empty-sounding purple prose and other parts were brief, perfunctory half sentences. Like, the opening lines of the game are:

> Numb. Unsure if it is joy that overtakes you or fear. It may be both, it may be neither.

When you complete the sculpture you get the empty-sounding phrase (along with others):

> Its radiance cures the blind.

No one’s personality feels more than sketched out, including the protagonist. I did feel bad for him, at least, considering his situation of being an aging fine artist in the 21st century. I also think it is a strong character choice to have the option to utterly destroy the sculpture (completing the masterpiece doesn’t mean keeping the masterpiece, after all!), but I wish it didn’t appear at the last possible moment. I also wish it was flagged more clearly what exactly I was doing with such a momentous choice before I couldn’t back out.

I don’t know if I have much to say about this one, being as it was so short. It didn’t leave that much of an impression on me…

This one had all my favorite things—a murder mystery, an “escape room” vibe like the author’s previous game (The Kuolema), fun foreshadowing and symbolism, and an ending that thrilled me! The vibes were suitably spooky without being horrifying to my weenie self, and I loved the art and aesthetic of the game.

Paranoid as I am about AI art these days (not a fan, personally), I started with scouring the initial pictures for telltale signs of it (especially considering the Kuolema did make use of AI art) but I couldn’t find any, so I am willing to hope that all these beautiful assets for the game were custom handmade and photoshopped like god intended. Either that or AI art has jumped in quality and undetectability and I will be a little more afraid of our overlords in the future. (Future note: it was confirmed that there was no AI art in this game!)

The prose worked for the spooky Victorian-y aesthetic, though no phrases specifically stuck out to me as especially lyrical. The puzzles were difficult enough that they made me feel smart to solve, and I only used a hint twice–-if I’d have glanced over my objects a little further then I would have solved the game without any at all!

I’ll spoiler my discussion of the ending this time since it is a mystery after all:

(Spoiler - click to show)I adored all the symbolism that the protagonist is a werewolf. When I picked up on the very odd detail of why the protagonist would be locked up with their own notes and cipher locks, I was able to guess that they were actually the murderer…how cliché, I thought initially! However, it was only after viewing the Lunar Almanac that things started to fully slot into place in my mind and the cliché turned exciting, as I realized just how damn much foreshadowing there was from the very beginning. From the title screen, even! I admit I have a serious soft spot for werewolves, and this game fondly reminded me of my favorite series of the flash games of yesteryear: Don't Escape, which at least has a werewolf who knows it. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to accuse the right person (me) at the end, but I was able to after all!

A really fun game. I’m still riding that high of solving it!

A fun sea adventure indeed, even for a landlubber like me! Very good title too. I love a solid puzzler, and this one had me feeling very clever, only needing hints at the very end. I was very relieved that only Captain Booby (I snickered at this a few times) spoke in piratey pidgin, because if the entire narration was written i’ th’ way tha’ pirates be speakin’, I’d get very irritated. Luckily the author must have foreseen this potential problem so made Peter and the prose itself sound relatively normal.

The prose itself was fine in the same way that puzzle parsers often are—descriptive enough that you know what’s happening enough to solve the puzzle. The characterization and implementation of Booby was strong (although the emphasis on his foppish idiocy made me slightly uncomfortable as a queer person…), enough so that I could predict his reactions in an appropriately puzzley way. Even though I desperately wanted to throw him overboard and solve that weight problem handily! I empathized with Peter’s plight of trying to navigate around Booby’s…boobery while also finding it entertaining to work around.

This is a very kind puzzler on the scale of Zarfian cruelty, having multiple different failsafes and accessibility features: an octopus will return items you still need if you mistakenly threw them overboard, and `> hint about [item]` will let you know if an item has exhausted its use in the puzzles so you don’t have to hold onto it (a feature I also had in Erstwhile, though not as nicely implemented). I kept hoarding all the items (even the obviously useless ones) until I realized this, but that’s on me!

I did encounter a bug with the sack of cayenne where I used it for its intended purpose (making the Captain sneeze) and the octopus kept giving it back to me, with the hints not seeming to realize that I’d solved it either.

I had a great time and recommend this game, especially if you’re wary of parsers this IFComp. If you’re afraid of parsers, this one will help you get your sea-legs!

Hmm…as someone who wrote er own game about someone solving their own murder, I wanted to like this game more than I did. It was a surprisingly melancholy and somber one, for being named “Detective Osiris” and its blurb including many exclamation points.

To start more positively: I enjoyed the beautiful depiction of Egyptian gods, so rarely shown in comparison to the glut of Greek myth takes and European folklore out there (no shade on them, it's just nice to have variety!). It was cool to see the takes on the Egyptian pantheon and their cosmology, such as the dome of the sky producing this lovely image:

> the baked glass mezzanine sky smells like hot stone roads cooling in the night air.

In fact, the writing really shined the most when it was focusing on that sort of mythic imagery and making it more grounded and vivid. I also liked the endless ladder between the sky and earth, and the notes on Osiris’ exhaustion on account of his travel between the two realms (and also his being dead).

The portraits were well-drawn and I was eager to meet gods and see the illustrators’ take on them (though Khonsu’s portrait didn’t load!). Some of the gods’ voices were pretty distinctive, most notably Geb as a weed-smoking “content consumer” of humans’ little lives as if they were shows on TV. The music was very nice too.

On the critique side: This wasn’t much of a mystery, was it? Anyone who knows the real life myth of Osiris is probably going to accuse Set (as I did)—and even if they don’t, all noticeable signs point to him. The game really doesn’t foreshadow or indicate who the real killer was at all before its big reveal, aside from maybe the metagaming tactic of “surely they won’t just make the mystery’s answer the killer in the actual thousands-year-old myth, right?”

Also there were…two? Riddle-puzzles that I could actually identify: the Sphinx riddle and the pyramid riddle, and both allowed you to just trial and error them—I got the pyramid riddle wrong, being absolute garbage at math, but it hardly mattered because I was allowed to guess again. Granted the game does bill itself as only having “light puzzles” but I didn’t expect there to be that few…there might have been a third one I forgot about?

It was a pleasant enough experience and very beautiful visually, but to me as a mystery game and riddle designer, it failed to live up to its promise, and I felt all the more disappointed for that.