Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

This is another game that I would most likely have skipped if it weren't for the Free IF Playoffs. The moment I see "dating sim" in the description of a game, my interest drops to zero. Still, the intriguing provenance of this game, which was apparently produced by an outsider who has never participated in the online community, was enough to warrant at least loading it up.

With a blithe disregard for the tags on IFDB or other reviews (which I like to read after I've tried a work), I did so. My minimal interest was not increased by the Harry Potter-like feel of the opening chapter. A short time later, the game seemed like it was going to be over before it had even begun. Interest took an uptick when it became clear that what seemed like an end was actually just the beginning.

Here's where we get to the spoilery part, and like other reviewers, I recommend that you play the game before proceeding.

This is a time-loop game, and in terms of story structure it is well done. I agree with Passerine that author E. Jade Lomax has an excellent sense of how to anticipate changes to the player's viewpoint over time in a way that works well, though I felt that it failed to adequately convey how the protagonist must have felt after enough loops to span a normal human lifetime and more. After a period of exploration, one necessarily begins to treat each iteration as a chance to conduct one or two key experiments in how to affect the timeline. (Spoiler - click to show)As a memorable in-game description of science puts it, the player begins the process of "grinding the particles of the world down to answers and making new questions with them." The way that the description of events changes with the growing understanding of the total situation is remarkably smoothly implemented.

It does seem as though the opportunities for significant change are few and far between, but this is something of a necessity in a time loop of such scale. This is Groundhog Day writ large -- a Groundhog Decade or more. The time loop trope seems inherently more powerful in interactive fiction, where the player must guide the protagonist's discoveries and planning instead of being a mere observer, and Lomax explores many interesting ethical questions along the way. To achieve the implicit objective, the PC must become an interloper who lies, steals, commits acts of destruction that likely result in the death of innocents (and certainly result in large-scale destruction of property), and more. (At least, it seemed like that was the case; perhaps there are options to avoid such questionable trade-offs.) Are the "failed" timelines inherently unreal? Do your harmful actions somehow not count in them? Do the ends truly justify the means when trying to "win" the game?

In addition to the big questions, there are smaller ones. For example, a key NPC will more likely than not (Spoiler - click to show)go on a magic-induced rampage at a pivotal event early on, killing several people and possibly the PC. At a "later" point in the game, the player is presented with a choice that effectively asks whether or not to forgive her for something that she hasn't done in this cycle. Are you judging her for who she is in the here-and-now, or what you know she could be under the wrong circumstances? This question isn't new to time travel tropes, but it felt new here, stressing the way that both the player's and protagonist's perspectives shift due to the "outsider" viewpoint being experienced.

The "key scenes only" approach sometimes feels limiting. I would have loved a more fine-grained treatment of the plot -- one that starts to answer the in-game question (Spoiler - click to show)"How much are you changing things, by breathing and walking and sometimes being a little late for breakfast in unrepeatable patterns? How much is just the universe's randomness?" -- but I recognize that the complexity being managed is already quite large. The choice interface seems like an appropriate decision -- it's hard to imagine the same game with a parser. (Hadean Lands is the closest thing to it, but it has no need to implement NPCs.) To be sure, I'm probably underestimating the total complexity -- my own play took several hours but was far from a completist run, since I opted out of every romance thread. (A special hat tip to the author here: I truly appreciated that "none of the above" was an option for the romance subplots.) Since the PC can develop close but non-romantic relationships with various NPCs, it's clear that that the alleged dating sim aspect is driven by the author's diligence in exploring the potential of what RadioactiveCrow's review calls the "human connections" of the situation space.

This game is very good, but I'm going with 3 stars instead of 4 because there are a few places where it slipped a gear (i.e. seemed to be responding to things that had not happened or had happened differently, due to errors in state-tracking). The writing is a bit flat, as well, with a workman-like functional quality that doesn't always do justice to the scenes being portrayed. Relatively small improvements in either of those aspects would have gotten it over the edge. I definitely recommend this game both as an enjoyable play experience and as a rewarding subject of study in the craft of interactive fiction.

Choice games are not my usual cup of tea, but I have taken the opportunity to play several of them as part of the Free IF Playoffs. As many other reviewers have noted, this ostensibly choice-based work offers surprisingly few choices. Although the reading experience requires quite a few clicks -- a design choice that works very well given its format and the PC's characterization, as noted in Rovarsson's review -- not very many control a decision that affects the PC's actions. I, too, counted a "handful" of these (five or so) over the course of the work, an average of less than one per chapter. The number of story-significant choices seems even fewer.

The writing is very good at the small scale, though CMG's pointed critique of the overall structure is accurate. I would add that what I thought was one of the story's major strengths, its pacing through the first six chapters, is abruptly abandoned around the midpoint, and the remainder of the story feels rushed by comparison. This does much to undermine the contemplative mood that prevails in the first half.

Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my encounter with this work. It could easily stand on its own as a straight-up novella. I found myself quite absorbed by the Lovecraftian feel of the opening act and the various intriguing references to real-world utopian literature. I was not prepared for the sudden shift of tropes to H. G. Wells territory when the protagonist (Spoiler - click to show)discovers that the "gateway" built into the Astrolith is a time portal, but it did change the significance of the story in interesting ways. (Spoiler - click to show)I was particularly stricken by the portrayal of the modern era as a utopian dream come true by the story's villain. That was clever misdirection.

I did like the Windrift interface more than that presented by the average choice engine. Perhaps its biggest drawback is that it lacks an "undo" feature. It would have been nice to be able to go back and explore the other ending that I didn't pick, but since it will require another entire "playthrough" I probably won't be doing it any time soon. The story is interesting enough that there's a good chance I'll circle back around to it sometime in the future, though, especially after reading some of the novels that it cites.

This work feels much more like a "hacking game" than what would typically be called interactive fiction. The game has a graphical user interface, and the only text entry to be done by the player takes the form of multi-digit numbers. A sort of limited choice-like player input is also accepted via button-clicking to initiate or respond to messages from NPCs. The fact that all significant narrative events are depicted via text arguably places it somewhere at the outskirts of the form. It doesn't feel quite out-of-bounds to qualify as IF to me; your mileage may vary.

The world of the game is a strange one, a kind of alternate 1980s much like our own but in which (Spoiler - click to show)early breakthroughs in computer science had developed truly self-aware AIs. The most far-fetched component of the plot is the idea that such a program could run on a 16-bit home computer.

As other reviewers have noted, the author goes to great lengths to capture the feel of the BBS era despite having no firsthand familiarity with it, even accurately portraying the sounds of the dialup sequence for 1200/2400 baud modems. This work may have some value just as a kind of "living history" display, making it easier for those who grew up with the internet to appreciate its technological roots.

The overall plot is relatively constrained. The early parts of gameplay have a richness to the NPC userbase that rapidly falls off as the main plot gets going. Gameplay options are expanded over time as new programs become available, but their implementation is limited to the need to run them at certain times; fundamental gameplay is not altered. The pacing is rather too quick for my taste after the first act, robbing a significant twist of much of its intended impact. Based on the order in which some messages were received, I may have gone through key events in an unanticipated sequence, so again your mileage may vary.

Despite these significant flaws, I admire the work done on the interface and did find it to be an enjoyable short play experience.

Note that although this game is tagged as "queer" on IFDB, that seems to have no relation to gameplay. Although an interpersonal relationship is an important part of the plot, it is handled in an entirely abstract and non-sexual way.