Ratings and Reviews by Jim Nelson

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

I’m a sucker for hard-boiled gumshoes…but when the detective’s shoes are literally made of bubblegum, you have my attention.

Who Shot Gum E. Bear? is a clever parser-based send-up of detective noir. It’s set in Sugar City, an ice-cream tub of vice and sin. You play private eye Bubble Gumshoe investigating the bittersweet murder of your client, the titular Gum E. Bear. You’re to gather evidence, interview suspects, and ACCUSE when you’ve got your marshmallow peeps in a row.

The author takes the central gag to its logical extremes. Gum E. Bear lies dead in a pool of his own liquid center, his bullet wound caramelizing and his face dusted with nose candy. TASTE and SMELL are an important part of your detecting arsenal in this game, which the author uses to great advantage. As the title suggests, this is a Who Shot Roger Rabbit? set in Candyland rather than Toontown.

There’s plenty of polish, such as the status line (normally a dry display of location and move count) being utilized as a kind of rotating banner of hints and atmosphere. (You're occasionally reminded: “It’s always nighttime in Sugar City.”) The colorful and tasty assortment of secondary characters provides a good deal of comic relief, and are adequately implemented for parser- (not menu-) based interviews. The characters always play to theme, such as the candy cigarette-smoking mob boss:

> X DON TOBLERONE
Tall, dark, and delicious.

The prose is sharp and well-crafted, and the story flows smoothly. Humor is always subjective; you’ll know in the first few turns if this game is for you. The fun-sized half-hour listed play time seems about right, which is good—I doubt the central joke could have been sustained for much longer.

The flaw, in my view, is the solution. An eagle-eyed player can legitimately tease out the killer from the ample details provided, as long as she fully enmeshes herself in the internal logic of the game world. My first play-through was in a group setting, and when we finally discovered whodunnit, it landed on us like the punchline of a shaggy dog story, with groans all around. (Depending on your sense of humor, that might not be a flaw.)

Still, it’s a fun ride, an inventive and original take on a form that’s seen more than its share of satires and spoofs.

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

Best I can tell, You May Not Escape! is a parser-based IF built around a random map generator and a premise.

The random maps are the less-interesting of the two cornerstones. Notably, the author has asked that players not share their maps online as “getting lost and the entering the unknown is part of the point.” That leads to the second notable foundation of YMNE!: It’s premise.

You start in an outdoor maze of high plaster walls, too high to scale, which you must navigate while the weather grows worse and worse. A purported guide named John Everyman (not terribly subtle) acknowledges your obvious questions—Why am I here? What is this place?—while sidestepping to offer any real answers. Intriguingly, he suggests many others (“billions”) have or are traversing their own mazes while you walk yours.

Then the conversation lulls, your questions bruise Everyman’s feelings, and there’s nothing left to do but traverse the labyrinth.

Walking the maze is minimalism itself. Locations are described in fleeting, often incomplete, sentences. Occasionally the stingy maze generator manages to cough up a park bench to sit on, or a closed-circuit camera spying on you, but most locations don’t even offer those variations.

At this point, YMNE started to look to me to be little more than an exercise in Inform coding–until I encountered the LED ticker-tape-style wall displays. Each offers a different message, sometimes taunting, sometimes misleading, sometimes patronizing. The messages serve to frustrate and confuse in an already frustrating and confusing game. (The ticker machines do serve one handy purpose: They tell you when you’re walking in circles, or have returned to a previously-visited location.)

Game play develops into the monotony of a foot soldier’s patrol as you wander in search of an exit. With each scrap of new information found, one will naturally try to piece together What It All Means. Some of the details hint at modern controversies, such dead-naming. Others offer empty sentiments for your predicament. Others still are accusatory and self-righteous. The game is patently designed to wear down the player (at one point, giving up is a formal option). It’s a bleak ride.

So: What does it all mean? Just as the author asked not to share maps online, I’m reluctant to share my full interpretation. I do think YMNE! is a reaction to social media and toxic culture online, although the abuse could be sourced from any number of dysfunctional situations. One of the ticker messages is political speech transcribed, the “thoughts and prayers” mantra rattled off after every tragedy:

"The phrase 'thoughts and prayers' is grating in part because it has become a victim of semantic satiation, a phenomenon that occurs when a word or words is repeated so often that it loses its meaning. Thoughts and prayers has become a little bit like saying 'bless you' after someone sneezes…"

That said, I do wish the game had been a bit more ambitious. I would gladly have given up a freshly-minted maze with each quarter dropped for a richer world and more immersion. I think that could have been achieved without losing the stark economy of the prose and setting, which is game’s calling card. More tongue-in-cheek, I was tempted to shave off a point for the use of an exclamation point in the title, but I won't do that.

Bottom-line, I found myself chewing on this game after I finished playing it. A little more oomph would have left me chewing on YMNE! much longer, though.

Adapted from a review on intfiction.org

This browser-based game uses a 1980s color scheme and pixelated typeface, with a rather small window for text beneath a static image of a house or hut embedded in a snowbank. Game navigation is simplicity itself: Up/down keys move the cursor, and Z selects a choice or continues reading. No authoring system is listed, so I assume this is a home-brew effort. I found no bugs and the game played smoothly for me every iteration through it.

The game’s epigram is a quote from Japanese poet Shumpo Soki (“My sword leans against the sky. / With its polished blade I’ll behead / The Buddha and all of his saints”) before its opening proper:

"You are a man being sexually penetrated in a hut in the alps. … You are being entered, no doubt about that. You could use more lube."

Soon thoughts turn to the man penetrating you:

"Time for reflection: You don’t have the capacity to kill."

This casual swinging between mood, tension, and tone persists throughout the game. The choices offered tend to fall between the static and the dynamic, negotiation versus lashing out, security versus risk-taking.

The author lists Death by Lightning as experimental, “a repository for writing my thoughts; made unconsciously.” The prose flows into unforeseen territory like water seeking its own level. It’s intensely personal, an invitation into a consciousness, yet the reader is kept at arm’s length at all moments, as though instinctively self-protective. This is a raw and searching text, but not a confessional one.

That self-protectiveness is what keeps the narrator a touch too distant and unindividuated. Sometimes the abstractions do beg the player to stick with them. (“What sort of closeness do you have with the command of your insurgency?” is perhaps the one line in the game I have to question outright.) The ambiguity works against the game to some degree, but it is an artistic effect, and it’s used to its fullest here.

None of the prose is throwaway, though. The author managed to form several concrete scenes in my mind, impressive when limited to an interface all of five lines, 18 characters wide, presenting one sentence at a time. With each brief passage displayed in solitude, and having to press a key to see the next, the effect is of reading a long poem through a sleeve revealing only one line at a time. That focus shapes into a deliberative effect, and that’s impressive too.

Returning to Soki’s poem, it should be noted it’s a jisei, a Japanese death poem penned to convey an “‘ah, now I see’ moment.” Marilynne Robinson offers an analysis of Soki’s death bed declaration relevant to Death by Lightning:

"His meaning is not that he has rejected his belief but that he will move beyond the forms in which it has been known to him in life."