Reviews by Joey Acrimonious

So, first of all, the cursor is a sauropod. Possibly a brachiosaurus? This fact alone is worth a star.

Quintessence brings a nice combination of physics and whimsy. It asks the player to think a bit about the nature of such lofty subjects as cosmology, consciousness, and agency; but it does so in the context of a lighthearted, cat-centric reality. Definitely an imaginative piece.

Apart from aforementioned sauropod, the graphic elements include pleasant images of the cosmos. What's less pleasant, however, is the fact that the text tends to fade into the busy backgrounds. Even with black outlining, I found that the text was often a strain to read.

The most intriguing thing here, in my view, is the idea of embodying the universe, its rules, and its destiny in conscious entities: the cat and the particle (and its permutations). This allows Quintessence to inject an element of pathos into what would otherwise be cold, impersonal aspects of reality. Neat. But I feel that it didn't run as far with this idea as it could have, and a deeper dive into the psychological and (for lack of a better word) interpersonal aspects of the characters' existence would have made this game into a more compelling mythology.

Right from the outset, The Call of Innsmouth builds itself upon a strong aesthetic foundation. The style of the prose and the parlance of the characters just screams “pulpy noir set in the 1920s.” This, combined with a darkly atmospheric visual presentation, makes for a game that oozes an instantly-recognizeable flavor. About 15 seconds in, I was absolutely hyped to go gumshoeing across Lovecraft Country, slowly uncovering unsettling hints of more sinister happenings behind a seemingly-mundane missing person case.

Except… that’s not quite how it goes.

Generally, I reckon that preserving a sense of mystery throughout the bulk of the story is crucial to the appeal of a piece of detective fiction. Ditto for a played-straight Lovecraftian work. But The Call of Innsmouth goes in the other direction, laying out quite a bit of blunt exposition early-on, so that the entire mystery is explained fairly clearly, even well before the climax. And I do mean explained - in most cases, you as the player aren’t making deductions or trying to weigh evidence to figure out what’s going on. Nor is there much room for ambiguity. You just get told everything directly, either by other characters who are happy to volunteer everything they know in a few major info-dumps, or by the internal monologue of a protagonist who can sometimes be exceptionally quick at jumping to conclusions.

This, I think, is a detriment to an otherwise well-written story. I would have preferred the underlying horrors to be revealed more slowly and gradually, with more opportunities for the player to apply their own logic to the course of the investigation.

That aside, I did enjoy many of the more action-oriented scenes in the latter half of the game. Many of the choices at that point are hazardous, with plenty of opportunities for insta-death, but they didn’t feel arbitrary. On the contrary, these choices reward the player for paying attention to the current situation and applying a bit of logic or intuition to it - for example, realizing that you need to take a hostage because you are unlikely to defeat/outrun your foes otherwise. That’s great. But why aren’t there more opportunities for the player to use their brain like this in the earlier, more investigative sequences of the game? As it is, there are very few points during the investigative phase where the player’s choices matter at all.

Overall, strong writing, has the right vibe, but could have done a better job at making me feel like a detective.

Big Trouble in Little Dino Park puts the player in the shoes of an ennui-afflicted young person working a menial job - until you are thrust into a struggle for survival.

Apart from a few typos, I found the writing enjoyably witty, with some amusing riffs on the little (and not-so-little) absurdities of life. The introductory part of the game, which situates the protagonist in the vacuous world of commercial dinosaur exhibition only to plunge it all into chaos, showcases some of its best writing and does a great job of setting the tone quickly and concisely.

The game’s weak point is in how it executes its choice structure. The thing is, there’s a certain finicky path to victory. Once you’ve felt out that path, then you can work deliberately toward a couple of clear goals, and make a couple of decisions that have some moral/emotional weight to them. Good stuff. But until you’ve stumbled across just the right event to set you on that path, the choices mostly consist of pressing random stuff and hoping it doesn’t get you killed, with little apparent tactical or emotional reason to choose one option over another (except perhaps the knowledge of what got you killed last time). This phase of the game, I think, doesn’t play well to the strengths of the choice-based format, which is at its strongest when each choice comes with a sense of gravitas and agency.

I hope the authors will keep at it and give us more games in the future. With a different and more refined game design that more fully takes advantage of its engine’s strengths, their compelling writing could shine even brighter.

Saint Simon’s Saw is a digitized tarot reading, except instead of traditional tarot cards, it has its own proprietary deck, drawing upon eclectic influences. Crucially, in addition to the ultimate reading of a hand, each card has an easily-accessible in-game explanation, which is where the bulk of the writing is to be found.

The tone of the work is singular and fascinating. It’s an interactive fortune-telling experience, but with the soul of an undergrad’s hastily-written essay, fuelled by coffee and Wikipedia summaries of post-structuralist screeds. There are inconsistently-styled citations of scholars like Jo Freeman and Paulo Freire, but no bibliography… and the citations themselves are basically frivolous, as if they’ve been inserted solely for the sake of name-dropping or because some professor demanded that there needed to be x number of citations. There are points where hugely creative and insightful ideas are touched upon, but these are counterbalanced by vague discursions, obscurantist writing, and nonsensical metaphors. There’s also a ton of misspellings and grammatical errors (including inconsistency over whether the work is titled Saint Simon’s Saw or Saint-Simon’s Saw), which altogether give the impression of something that may have been translated from French into English. And it’s all packed into a smooth-running executable with some lovely illustrations.

To an extent, I’m not sure what to make of this, because I’m profoundly unsure where it falls on the scale of sincerity versus irony. As far as I’m concerned, this could be an ambitious but flawed attempt at something sublime; or a straight-up joke; or anywhere in-between. This quality makes Saint Simon’s Saw perplexing and mystifying.

But this confusion plays into the strange enjoyment I got from the experience. The thing is, it works well enough as both an earnest piece and an ironic one. There’s enough thought-provoking content to grab my interest in spite of all the rough bits. But there’s also enough rough bits to make me laugh in spite of the thought-provoking parts.

Among theoreticians of humour, there are those who suppose that funniness is best explained by what they call the incongruous juxtaposition theory, which, when you get right down to it, holds basically that it is funny when incongruous things are juxtaposed, though perhaps the astute reader will have divined as much. By that measure, it is remarkable that this Russo chap has, with scant experience or prior renown in the venerable art of interactive fiction authorship, produced perhaps one of the more humourous – which is to say, incongruous – entries in IFComp 2020.

The Eleusinian Miseries ostensibly saddles one with a spot of work that needs doing. The activities soon devolve, however, into fast times of the particularly fuddled variety, as the main players get more-or-less sloshed, cut it across the Attican idyll, and commit mayhem upon stony unmentionables. As a rule, you see, one expects to encounter a – and not to imply any condescension, mind you, as we all stash it up once in a blue moon, and reasonably so, given the strictures and stressors of life being what they are – but, returning to the point, one expects to encounter a rather coarse register in association with this sort of blotto bacchanal (not to give the impression that this is in any way directly associated with rites pertaining directly to Bacchus, since it is clearly acknowledged that the initiations at Eleusis are in praise of an entirely different set of deities, but I digress). Yet many a satyr would be outmatched by the refined parlance, both of the revelers themselves, and of the narrator who details their debauchery. And therein lies (or is it lays?) the crux of this incongruity wheeze – in pairing a particular strain of elevated and idiosyncratic diction with what is, quite frankly, an evening of shenanigans befitting any sophomore. Quite amusing, that.

But, wait a tic, for what, upon first reflection, appears to be an incongruity, is, a second consideration informs me, actually a complete congruity as well. The revelries of the game, you see, are lush to the point of excess – extravagant to the point of criminality. The language employed in descriptions thereof is similarly turgid enough to test the strictures of good taste. Upon realizing just how apropos the style is to the substance in this respect, I was as surprised and delighted as one who, attempting to wrangle a mutt, catches a purebred Chow-Chow’s teeth to the face.

I say, astute reader, do you know what this means? This Russo chap, when planning this subtle work, inserted even more incongruity than could reasonably have been anticipated, for not only must we consider the incongruity as previously discussed, but also the incongruity of that incongruity with the aforementioned congruity. If the incongruity taken at face value is quite amusing, then this revelation, surely, is a real knee-slapper.

Having played The Eleusinian Miseries to three different conclusions – being a glutton for punishment – I am deeply impressed by its wit. This whole “Wodehouse” wheeze is a bit of a stumper to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I can see that the writing is impressive. And while the credits acknowledge five beta-testers, the technical ease-of-parser-use gives the impression of perhaps one and one-half times that number!

To conclude, with perhaps a lesser degree of fanfare than is warranted, because I really must be off to peruse recipes for kykeon, The Eleusinian Miseries is a fine achievement and well-deserving of a playthrough.

There were many ambitious entries in the IFComp 2020. This is the only one I’ve played that goes so far as to stake out a new aesthetic school of its own. The bizarre, alien world of Deus Ex Ceviche is inextricably steeped in the unmistakable flavor of this so-called Piscespunk: a marriage of artificial life and marine biology, here examined at the intersection of religion and for-profit enterprise.

The whole experience is packaged with a visually-stunning backdrop of netted fish, rendered with distinctive colors and bold lines that evoke a vague impression of stained glass and its tracery, bringing an ecclesiastical flavor to the table. Against this, the game’s interactive elements are rendered in pixel art that adds a palpable artificiality. The visual design elements of this game are thoughtfully-constructed and I cannot overstate how well they work together to sell the radical new Piscespunk concept.

Gameplay consists of putting disks in slots and seeing what happens, with each input yielding a narrative description of a resulting event, plus a change in your resources (of which a certain amount must be collected for victory). Both the story and the mechanics come off as weird, surreal, and possibly confusing at first. Why is the GUI gooey? How exactly does brine accumulate as a result of accidentally censoring important passages in the holy text? Nothing makes sense according to the logic of reality as we know it.

But much of the pleasure of playing Deus Ex Ceviche is in keeping at it, gradually discovering that this world has an internal logic of its own, according to which everything makes perfect sense. Trial and error (and the advice of a helpful goldfish) will reveal that the strange results of disk-insertion are in fact quite predictable, and one can easily achieve a desired outcome.

Meanwhile, as one becomes more acquainted with the setting and its characters, the weird language and inexplicable causal relationships of the story’s events will gradually decode themselves into something that’s actually quite coherent.

The travails of the faithful as they struggle to perform their duties in the face of a malfunctioning temple apparatus; the underdog tale of an obsolete abbess seeking to fulfil her duties while painfully aware of her own shortcomings; the desperate hope of the congregants to find some kind of comfort or meaning in a corrupt, pay-to-pray religion. From these poignant beginnings, the Section B-2 Temple will spiral into a crescendo of mounting tension, as constructed systems transcend their intended purposes. All aspects of reality - social, ontological, and architectural - will be revolutionized by one’s apotheosis, and one’s faithful will experience the terrible ecstasy of union with one’s divinity. It’s all on display in a series of rich, evocative vignettes. There’s real, human emotion here. It’s the kind of stuff that could be described in terms of heartbeats, smiles, and tears… if it weren’t already described in terms of databanks, replacement fingers, and salt instead.

If that doesn’t already have you hooked, then frankly, I don’t understand you. Just know that my meager review cannot possibly do justice to the raw power and majesty of Deus Ex Ceviche. Without a doubt among the most unique and memorable games of the comp, it definitely deserves a playthrough (or five).

In a classic setup, The Cave thrusts the player into a cave network to explore. But it quickly becomes apparent that mapping out the inscrutable and shifting web of rooms in search of the exit is neither possible nor necessary. This isn’t about the destination - it’s about the journey, as your character is defined by the choices they make along the way, dealing with challenges or opportunities in one way or another.

This is a cool concept, but the decisions I had to make soon started to feel a bit more mundane than I’d have liked. There’s not a lot of emotional weight behind most of what I encountered. Do you search the ashes or just keep going? Do you cross the stream or go around? Decisions like these do indeed reveal something about the person who makes them, but not enough for me to feel fully invested in a game that’s supposed to be about a journey of self-discovery.

There’s a strong element of randomness to the game, with both events and room-connections being (at least partially) randomized. I fear that the RNG may have given me the short end of the stick during my playthrough. The blurb promises lost treasures, forgotten ruins, and ancient magic, but I didn’t encounter any of those things except for a single spell that I never got the opportunity to use. Instead, despite my attempts to try new options in the hope of reaching new areas, I just kept winding up in the same handful of rooms/situations… mostly involving searching ashes and crossing streams. I might return to the game and search for the juicier bits at some point, but perhaps the RNG would have benefitted from a bit more scaffolding to ensure that each playthrough has more variety to it.

Overall, a winning concept that I think would benefit from some tweaking to draw out some more depth and variety.

Quest for the Sword of Justice is a surprising little game that subverted my expectations at every turn. Although, maybe that's just because I haven't played enough self-aware RPGs.

Right off the bat, as an RPGMaker game, it wasn’t what I expected to see in IFComp at all. But then, it also cheerfully ignores many of the salient features of its own engine, eschewing the traditional RPG experience in favor of something a bit different. The thing is, (Spoiler - click to show)the game comes with all the trappings you'd expect: skills/attributes, an XP system, an inventory system, etc., all seemingly included with combat in mind. But there isn't any combat and all that stuff is pure window-dressing. By subverting the expected mechanics of an RPG, Quest for the Sword of Justice cleverly weaves an element of parody into the structure of the game itself.

This is employed in service to the overarching story, which also is basically a comic endeavor. The author does a great job of setting up certain expectations with apparent seriousness, only to proceed to smash those expectations into tiny bits for humorous effect.

It’s a short game and a light read, but I found it successful in (what I think is) its main goal of being good for a laugh or two. There are at least a couple different endings to find, and both of the ones I got were amusing.

The Eidolon’s Escape is a nice, solid choice-based game that puts the player in the role of an incorporeal entity seeking to escape confinement.

The protagonist itself is one of the main draws of the game. Everything is seen and interpreted through the (figurative) eyes of the somewhat misanthropic Eidolon, and it’s written convincingly. The protagonist has an idiosyncratic way of viewing the world, taking a non-human’s view toward human behavior that varies between analytical/opportunistic and judgmental/repulsed. Its unique perspective is palpable at every turn, lending a strong and distinctive narrative flavor throughout.

The design of the choices and branching is, for me, a mixed bag. There are many choices that look like they’re calling for the player to make an inductive leap, levering the Eidolon’s limited insights on human psychology to choose the most effective way to manipulate other characters. And that works very well and feels quite satisfying - as long as the illusion is preserved. But on repeated playthroughs, I found that most of these choices don’t have any importance to the direction of the story, actually serving only to punctuate events and change some flavor text. In many cases, if you select the “wrong” choice, the game will just correct it for you (i.e. that didn’t work, so now you’re doing the other thing instead), the exception being a few landmines where the wrong choice leads to an immediate game-over.

By creating the illusion of important choices to engage the player through at least the first playthrough, the author probably made a judicious use of time and effort, and that’s cool. But I feel that the whole thing would have been more powerful, especially on repeated playthroughs, if there were more choices with actual gameplay consequences other than the occasional possibility of insta-loss.

There are a handful of more-important choices stacked at the end of the game, leaving us with a branching structure that’s less of a tree and more of a spork.

One of the endings makes clear the conceptual underpinnings of the action: (Spoiler - click to show)that the Mage is holding the Eidolon against its will because it is a metaphysical remnant of the Mage’s dead loved one, and the Mage desperately wants the Eidolon to identify with this person even though the Eidolon does not. This is an outstanding concept which intrigues me immensely. It has huge emotional gravity and lots of potential to be interpreted in a metaphorical light.

But I wish that the game had done more to explore and develop this awesome concept. As is, it’s all explicated in a few short paragraphs right at an ending, where the player no longer has any ability to respond in-character. There’s a bit of foreshadowing near the start (which can be easily missed), but that’s about it. I feel that, had this weighty relationship been developed in richer detail and been more present throughout the experience, it would have taken the story from good to excellent.

Wow. What a journey. The Incredibly Mild Misadventures of Tom Trundle is witty and crude, sage and sophomoric, beautifully authentic and laughably schlocky, all rolled into one epic deluge of mystery, passion, and adolescent angst that absolutely oozes old-school cool.

This is a story about adolescence, and every aspect of the game sells that fact. You have to literally navigate a byzantine, absurd educational institution for arbitrary reasons decreed by an antagonistic adult. Your character is continually preoccupied with carnal thirst at times both appropriate and not (but mostly not), finding sources of arousal in pretty much any interaction with the opposite sex, of which there are plenty. There are at least three different pizzas in the game, each of which serves a crucial mechanical purpose. Everything sucks, but your street-smarts and disregard for the rules are exactly what you need to navigate this sucky world and accomplish some good deeds - fulfilling the hackneyed destiny of the male savior and winning the gratitude of a bunch of young women in distress. Obviously. It’s brilliant at times; it’s bizarre at times; it’s as if the entire fabric of reality in this universe has been warped according to the world-view and desires of an adolescent boy. And that’s definitely entirely deliberate.

Our point-of-view character Tom is at the center of everything here, and his distinctive voice is woven into the whole experience of the game through his endless cynical commentaries and self-absorbed digressions. As a character, he’s compelling in the sense that he feels like an actual, complex human being. Sometimes he’s capable of great sensitivity and insight, showing genuine understanding of the feelings and goals of those around him. Other times, he’s an inconsiderate brat. And as these different aspects of his personality come up during the story, they make sense. He has verisimilitude. I can easily believe that Tom is an actual young man on the verge of adulthood - someone who is mature in some ways and at some times, but who still has a lot to learn.

I was especially amused by the way his deliciously blasé attitude carries over into the game world - for example, through the existence of objects with names like “crappy snack machine” and “uninteresting stuff.”

In terms of implementation, the game is excellent. The parser works smoothly. I encountered no serious bugs nor mechanical struggles. The puzzles are mostly excellent as well - they’re cleverly-designed, with a unique and awesome mix of insight into the real-world applications of miscellaneous things and total disregard for using them as intended. Some are challenging, most are fair and can be solved with a bit of logic once you get into the classic adventure game mindset (i.e. that it’s okay to screw things up and leave a trail of destruction in your wake, taking and levering every possible tool in an inexorable drive toward your goal). But there were a small handful that just threw me for a loop, leading me to resort to the walkthrough only to find that the solution was some arbitrary-seeming action whose utility couldn’t possibly be understood until after having done it - I would have appreciated a more obvious hint, for example, that (Spoiler - click to show)sitting on a certain chair (as opposed to examining or searching) will reveal a hidden item.

Story-wise, I feel that the game is somewhat front-loaded. As I first met some of the other major characters and engaged in a few early puzzles, I was hooked! They, like Tom, were complex and compelling. Interacting with them exposed motivations and emotions that I could believe. The situation that unfolded might have been far-fetched, but the people felt real, and their personalities started to shine through with a slow-simmering richness. I was hungry to interact more with them and learn more about them.

Yet I felt that the climax and epilogue in particular did not fully live up to the strength of those earlier interactions. By this point, the flavor of authentic teenage interpersonal drama had gone out the window in favor of a kind of campy, totally unbelievable depiction of (Spoiler - click to show)the trauma of physical abuse and kidnapping, where several young women who have been captured and imprisoned by a maniac, and who are in immediate danger, just calmly flirt with our intrepid protagonist from their underground prison cells. I’m still not sure whether I want to read this as dark humor or just plain distasteful. Either way, the verisimilitude I’d adored had evaporated.

After this, I’d at least hoped for a strong emotional payoff - an exploration of how the characters ultimately grew and changed as a result of the pivotal events. It materializes… partially. The arc between Allison and her father comes to a satisfying closure. But as for most of the other major NPCs, the epilogue tells us what they go on to do, but it doesn’t show us where they stand on an emotional level. Tom himself seems to come away with a slightly greater sensitivity toward the needs of others (particularly their need for space and boundaries). And that’s awesome. I just wish the ending had hit home a little harder.

The author's postmortem on the Intfiction forum is a fascinating read and it helped me appreciate the game on a new level, as a symbolic piece. Definitely recommend that.

Anyway, Tom Trundle has its flaws and its awkward moments, but I can't deny that it's a hugely memorable experience that left an outsized impression on me. It's not perfect. I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could, but with IFDB's rating system being what it is, guess I'll have to round up.

And just one more thing. It involves a spoiler so huge that I sincerely recommend not clicking on it unless you’ve completed the game for yourself:

(Spoiler - click to show)Why isn’t Darth Vader your father?!

On my first playthrough, this transit nightmare about a confusing commute didn’t impress me too much. With somewhat minimalistic writing, a short playing time, and a bunch of choices that felt like they had no real emotional significance, I felt at first that this was a competently-built game but not a very engaging one.

I was wrong.

Upon completion, the game lists ten possible endings to achieve. I’m glad that I accepted that challenge. Through repeated playthroughs, What the Bus? matures into something greater and more sublime than what it might seem to be on the surface. The labyrinthine web of interconnected bus routes and rail lines in this game meant little to me at first, but they took on a new significance once I’d found a few endings and had to hunt for the ones I still needed. No longer could I blindly click my way to completion - now the game was drawing me into the shoes of the protagonist, as I tried (and often failed) to navigate the insane world to the endings I was trying to get.

Damn! I didn’t realize this interchange took me to the red line again! or Oh crap, I didn’t want to get on that bus. These were the types of things I kept saying to myself as I gleefully embraced the role of clueless commuter more and more. I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment when, after countless times getting lost or winding up in the same dog park again, I finally achieved the last ending by running across a rail line that I didn’t even know existed. Glorious victory, and good fun.

One of the endings is also a nod to a classic piece of Boston lore, which is much appreciated.

This entire review is based on a spoiler that goes straight to the heart of the game, so be warned.

(Spoiler - click to show)Move On is a single chase scene, packed with action and presented with little context. Advancing through it requires the player to press a button at just the right time, determined by watching the movement of a motorcycle at the top of the screen.

I’m ambivalent about this as the core mechanic of the game. On the one hand, it’s super cool and innovative. And the urgency of getting the timing right does an excellent job of conveying a sense of action and danger.

On the other hand, I feel that it doesn’t fully take advantage of the core feature of IF as a medium: namely, a story told through text. Move On does have a good deal of interesting writing, but the thing is, it’s difficult (at least for me) to read it all while also keeping an eye on the motorcycle! I ended up going back to reread it all after completing the game, but by that point, it was no longer joined to the palpable excitement provided by the timing mechanic.

So, Move On showcases a fresh take that has some great strengths but also some drawbacks. I think I’d have gotten more enjoyment out of it if it were easier to read the text while also keeping an eye on the motorcycle, maybe by putting the motorcycle closer to the text or by giving some more conspicuous signal (maybe a sound effect?) when the time is right. But as it is, definitely a fun and interesting game that’s worth seeing for yourself.

I cannot summarize Sage Sanctum Scramble any better than its blurb has already done: as promised, it’s a grab bag of puzzles. Most of them have to do with wordplay and/or rearranging letters in some way.

The quality of the puzzles is excellent. Professional-quality. Enthusiasts would pay money for them, without a doubt. And they’re implemented extremely solidly, with the parser responding smoothly to almost everything I tried - that’s quite an achievement given the complexity of some of these puzzles, and the variety of different inputs involved. In many cases, the game even recognizes inputs that are barking up the right tree, dispensing hints or encouragement to help the player reach the finish line.

But make no mistake: while this game is easy to pick up and play, it’s quite challenging to master. The puzzles range from easyish to total brain-busters, and everything in between. Winning the game only requires a portion of the puzzles to be completed, so it’s not terribly hard. But if you’re in it to achieve a perfect score, that’s another matter entirely, and will likely require a major time investment. For reference: I think it took me about 5 hours of gameplay before I decided to finish up with a dubious score of 37. But I don’t have a lot of experience with these types of puzzles. Your mileage will vary.

This piece is 98% interactive, 2% fiction, with only the barest threads of narrative tying the puzzles together. Is that a drawback? Or would a more substantive story be a mere frivolity here? I suppose you’ll have to answer that question for yourself. But for me - yeah, it's a considerable drawback.

Overall, if you want a bunch of clever word puzzles without any frills or pretensions, Sage Sanctum Scramble has you covered.

Wonder and whimsy. Political intrigue and murder. Detective work, bureaucracy, and the simple human pleasure of wearing a scarf. A Murder in Fairyland has it all!

This game is a joy to play. The writing is on-point. The graphic design is bright and gaudy in the best possible way. There’s a diverse variety of puzzles to solve: word searches; filling out forms; a card game; as well as more classic IF staples involving clue-hunting, using the right action on the right thing, etc. It’s all implemented very well. The variety of different things to do made gameplay feel fresh throughout.

The world is mysterious and compelling: a realm of thought and emotion, powered by memories and videogames, ruled over (at least locally) by Machiavellian nobility at the helm of a byzantine machinery of state that you navigate via a literal labyrinth of contracts and forms. It seems that the setting is pre-established in the author’s other works. I haven’t read them yet, so some details were no doubt lost on me, but that’s fine. I feel like, if anything, my unfamiliarity with the setting only added to the sense of wonder and intrigue.

The high point of the experience for me was reading the beautifully-written memories of the protagonist’s scarf.

Solving the murder is a well-designed puzzle with many facets and several possible outcomes. It’s easy to come up with an acceptable solution, but it takes serious exploration and a keen eye for detail to reach the best solution.

Overall, A Murder in Fairyland is among my favorite IFComp 2020 games. Would recommend.

Vampire Ltd has the quintessence of a solid parser game. In many ways, it feels like an exercise in moderation. The humor is neither too dry nor too outrageous. There’s an element of social satire here, with the major characters’ vampirism serving as a metaphor for their self-enriching corporate mismanagement, but it’s played with levity. There’s an element of mild mystery with some clues to uncover, but all is soon revealed without a whole lot of head-scratching.

I had an exceptionally smooth time playing the game. Part of this is thanks to the author’s success in presenting a polished experience, with plenty of synonyms, plenty of interesting non-default failure responses, and plenty of useful context presented through dialogue or descriptions to keep the player on the right path. But it’s also partially thanks to the modest scope of the game, with straightforward challenges and a paucity of objects. I see this as both a strength and a weakness: while there were few opportunities for sticking points, the world also felt a little more spartan than I would have preferred.

Overall, I feel that Vampire Ltd succeeds in what it sets out to do. It’s a light, well-built, unpretentious comedy that kept me entertained without trying to knock my socks off.

You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf is a collaboration between the human author and a neural network that generated new text based on the author’s past works. It’s described as “an experimental story about a lifelong romantic relationship,” but I never would have guessed that this was supposed to be a story about anything in particular. It’s a jumble of disjointed events and ideas, perhaps slightly more coherent than an early Buñuel film but not quite as sensible as a typical fever dream. Expect to encounter only the slightest bit of narrative coherence: sometimes sentences on the same page seem to bear a logical relationship to each other, but that’s about as far as it goes.

But there’s definitely some interesting content here, even if it’s not presented in the form of a traditional storyline. Certain themes keep recurring throughout the experience: the narrator’s preoccupations with work (especially the fact of being hired and identifying oneself with a job); family (especially a brother who seems to keep coming up); and mortality (and people who either resist or acquiesce to it). A distillation, perhaps, of what is explored in the author’s other works?

I’m not sure that there is any point to the interactive aspect of the experience. In typical CYOA-style, the player sometimes picks one of two choices, but the choices themselves are often non-sequiturs and they don’t have an obvious relationship to whatever happens next.

Much of what you’ll read here is just a step above gibberish, but there are also scattered gems - sentences that clearly bear the mark of AI uncanniness but which just work in a sublime kind of way. For me, the most enjoyable part of the read was uncovering such gems. For example:

(Spoiler - click to show)The parrot says: “I am a parrot, and I love you.”

(Spoiler - click to show)“Beware, you blind socialist,” he said, “even though you have a heart of gold and cocaine.”

(Spoiler - click to show)Everyone except Wikipedia is shocked

If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is.

I don’t believe there’s any way to give constructive criticism here, nor will I be giving a star rating. It is what it is. Would I recommend giving this one a read? Yes, but only if you’re in the mood to spend half an hour not knowing what in the world is going on.

The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee is a murder mystery which, in many ways, feels like it takes cues from the walking simulator genre.

It consists mostly of exploring various locations and examining items to glean information. But it’s not all business. As you go through the game, you’ll learn as much about the victim’s life as you do about her death. Notes, letters, artifacts, and the comments of your “employer” who is deeply connected to the case all help you to gradually piece together an impression of a moment in a young woman’s life. It’s compelling, well-written stuff. Little things like a pencil case or a sketch are described with enough care, enough attention to detail, to show rather than tell a story that felt very authentic and human to me.

There’s a couple nice puzzles here which call for the player to gather information, make a deduction, and act upon that deduction. But there’s also quite a good chunk of the game that consists solely of examining things until some answer is spoon-fed to you. The whole experience hews to a more-or-less linear path: you go where the narrator takes you, and do things step-by-step according to his whims. It works, but I think I would have gotten even more enjoyment out of a more varied and less linear set of problems to solve.

I wasn’t fond of the way the game occasionally hides the parser for a predetermined amount of time when important text shows up. I get that the author is trying to emphasize important moments, but still, I don’t want to have to wait around counting the seconds until I’m allowed to keep playing after I’ve finished reading whatever I was supposed to read.

There’s a secondary aspect to the story: (Spoiler - click to show)the twist that you’re an AI being exploited by someone who is wrongfully imprisoned for the murder, and you ultimately seek to escape. It’s an interesting concept, but doesn't feel fully woven into the main story, and isn't developed in enough detail to satisfy questions about how exactly the character is able to accomplish what it does. Maybe this aspect is a prelude to a sequel which explores it in greater detail? That would be neat.

Even though I wasn’t totally on board with every design choice here, The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee brings a great atmosphere and strong writing to the table. Overall, I enjoyed my time with it, and would gladly try more of the author’s work in the future.

As others have pointed out, Popstar Idol Survival Game cuts off at the end of the first challenge, just a few minutes into gameplay. It’s a shame, because what’s there makes it seem like an extremely interesting and possibly hilarious RPG, held back only by an almost complete disregard for grammar.

But you can do what any would-be star popstar idol would do when faced with a seemingly impassable obstacle: cheat.

Since Popstar Idol is game-breakingly bugged in multiple places, there are multiple different fixes you'll need to make by hand in order to play the whole thing from start to finish. As an aside, it might be easier in Twinery, but I know nothing of Twine, so these notes will show you how to make quick-and-dirty fixes in Notepad++.

(Another aside, kudos to Mathbrush for developing the first part of the fix and posting it to the Intfiction forum, which is what inspired me to keep going and fix the remaining gamebreaking bugs.)

Step 1: Download the html file and open it in Notepad++ or a similar text editor.
Step 2: Delete all the text on line 198, where it says (display: "Untitled Passage 12"). Leave the line break on line 198 for ease of line-reference going forward.
Step 3: Navigate to line 1073. Near the end of that line, you'll see (if: $singinggoal is 300). Change just that part to (if: $singingprogress &g-t; 299). Then remove the hyphen between g and t, I just put it there as an admittedly inelegant solution to preventing this form from reading the html and messing everything up.
Step 4: Navigate to line 683. Change Failed to True Ending.
Step 5: when you play the game, be sure to pick Song A rather than Song B when first given the choice.

And that's it. Now, you may be asking, is it worth going through all that rigmarole just to be able to play a buggy game?

My answer is yes. Popstar Idol Survival Game, in its full glory, is a wild ride. The prose is full of errors, the pacing is odd, and the whole plot seems rushed-through without as much time to simmer as it deserves. But the ideas… the raw potential of the wild, zany, epic ideas that unfold in the latter parts of this story is astounding. I genuinely hope the author returns to this work and spends a whole lot more time refining it into the masterpiece it was meant to be.

Gave it 1 star in its current state, but if you apply these fixes, it's easily worth 2.

Edited 26 April 2022: the above instructions were for the version of the game downloadable from the IFComp 2020 site, which is no longer available. For the version that is now on IF Archive (and linked from this IFDB page as of this writing), the basic instructions are the same, but the line numbers have changed.
Step 2: now look on line 223.
Step 3: now look on line 1098.
Step 4: now look on line 708.

The Turnip takes place in a world almost like our own, but just different enough that it seems impossible to fully grasp the nature of the setting or the motivations of the characters. There’s a dog that acts almost, but not quite, like a dog would act. You have a job that seems almost, but not quite, like a job that a person would have. There’s a turnip that acts almost, but not quite, like you’d expect from a turnip. The whole thing feels kind of like what would happen if an alien from some other planet were asked to write a short story about life on Earth, having heard a little bit about it but not having studied it in any detail.

It’s a piece that provokes a bit of thought. The world of The Turnip may seem weird to us. To the eyes of folks in a hypothetical alternate world like this one, presumably our society would seem equally as weird. It might seem odd that the society in this story attaches economic value to a dirt field full of holes, but who are we to judge? To them, maybe it would seem odd that we attach economic value to a field full of… Christmas trees, for example. This, I think, is the strong point of The Turnip: it invites us to question our frame of reference.

It’s also totally linear (apart from your choice of whether to read certain brief descriptions along the way), and reading everything from start to finish takes a few minutes at most, so there’s not much to it. It’s an efficient story, in that it packs a fairly high degree of interesting content relative to its tiny size. Worth the time to check it out.

#VanLife is a day-to-day personal economic simulator with some interesting mechanics, but sparse writing. You live in a van with solar-powered appliances. Can you balance your mood, your cash, and your battery charge to succeed in this minimalistic lifestyle? At its core, the premise is great, and I’ve got to give props to a game that encourages less-resource-intensive living.

But the implementation can be wonky at times. Everything depends upon a small pool of random events which cause wild and unpredictable swings. You can be doing great one day, only to lose the game on the next because you got stuck with a couple bad events that you couldn’t do anything about. Or you could be on the cusp of failure, only to skyrocket back to prosperity because of one or two lucky events. Your decisions kind of matter, but I felt like they were totally overshadowed by the sheer importance of luck.

The other thing that hampered my enjoyment here is… I quickly came to dislike the protagonist. That feels odd to write, since the protagonist doesn’t have any lines and isn’t ever described directly, yet they come across as someone who isn’t serious about the #VanLife. I felt like I had to constantly battle my own protagonist’s unreasonable expectations. This is a person who earns a living by posting photos with inspirational quotes. Regularly, thousands of dollars fall into their lap from making guest foodie blog posts. They never have to pay money for food or gas or parking, and they never get harassed by the police for parking illegally either.

Basically, the protagonist is privileged in many ways, and yet they’re constantly unsatisfied. Got an offer to receive a bunch of cash and a free appliance, possibly more energy-efficient than the one you already have, in return for a product endorsement? Well, your protagonist loses mood, because capitalism = bad. Craving some pancakes but don’t have the right cooktop because the game hasn’t given you the opportunity to buy it yet? Well, you’re about to lose a giant chunk of mood, my friend. Want to hop online and frag n00bs, but you don’t have enough battery because you already spent it on two cravings for avocado toast today? Well, that’s probably a game over. Sucks to be you.

I found myself losing the game often in the first few days because the protagonist was full of so many capricious requests that there simply weren’t enough resources to indulge. The protagonist is defined by one personality trait: the trait of being someone who never should have set foot in a van.

According to the webpage, the game is still in beta, and that makes sense. It feels like a rough draft of what could (and hopefully will) become a good sim. A wider variety of random events would help spice things up, but what the game would benefit most from would be a rebalancing of the events’ effects so that they don’t cause such wild and unpredictable mood swings. Then, there would be room for players to start thinking about long-term strategy, without the immediate threat of game over due to lack of pancakes looming over their heads from the start.

The first thing I noticed about Tangled Tales is the ambition of its presentation: it’s a multimedia experience with a parser, graphics, and sound all bundled into a .exe.

I have to respect the amount of work that went into the design of this interface. This could have been breezed through in good old Inform 7, but no, Tangled Tales insists on going the extra mile. Was it worth it? For me as a player, the answer is probably not. I didn’t feel that the graphics or sound added much to the experience. The window is set up so that you can only display either the text or a location graphic at a given time. Consequently, I spent almost no time appreciating the graphics.

Everything about this game seems to be painstakingly built to induce a very particular kind of nostalgia trip for a very particular kind of player. That’s true of the interface, which bravely bucks the familiar and minimalistic presentation of a typical modern parser game. It’s also true of the writing, the world design, and the parser itself, which I swear came straight out of an era from before I was born. The world is more-or-less a maze, full of indistinct locations connected in a large, convoluted network, and you may indeed be driven to draw yourself a map in order to try navigating this game. The story and the characters are amusing, but they aren’t developed in any great detail - they’re not the focus here.

The focus is a series of puzzles which would look extremely easy in theory, but which are viciously difficult in practice due to Tangled Tales’ cheerful indifference to the kinds of quality-of-life details that modern IF players are accustomed to. This is a game in which the parser is so finicky that I didn’t even know when I was playing guess-the-verb or not. Looking at a table might yield a brief description, but there’s no indication that what you really need to do is to look on the table. Sometimes you have to give an NPC a command in one syntax, sometimes you have to use a totally different syntax for no apparent reason. If it were not for the walkthrough, I never, never in a million years would have finished this game, because I wouldn’t even have understood that the things I tried were usually correct, just not phrased properly… with the proper phrasing often being some idiosyncratic command that I’ve never seen before and never would have thought to try.

To top it all off, we’re given a fifteen-page walkthrough file. The actual walkthrough is a chunk of run-on text encompassing about half a page. Then there’s an image that takes up one page. One page is dedicated to explaining what interactive fiction is, and briefly introducing this game in particular. The other twelve pages? Instructions. This astounding document is what cements my belief that Tangled Tales is designed to provide, as faithfully as possible, the authentic oldschool experience, deliberately complete with all the shortcomings and frustrations that may entail. It’s a metaphorical middle finger to every new idea or convention that has been developed in the realm of IF-design theory over at least the past 30 or so years.

There’s definitely a certain audience who will get a kick out of this.

Fight Forever is a martial-arts RPG that focuses primarily on stat-building - you’re trying to train a character who will be capable of taking on your opponents. The game has all the bones of a fairly expansive RPG, but from what I’ve seen, it appears to be unfinished. There are many greyed-out options that don’t seem like they can be unlocked at present, perhaps teasers for future content?

The writing is terse but effective, and it intrigued me. I wanted to explore more of this game, see what different options are available, and experiment with different ways of building a character. Unfortunately, this proved very difficult, because the way stats are handled is extremely opaque. Unless I’m missing something, there’s no way to see a comprehensive summary of all your character’s stats at once - instead, you have to rely on occasional notifications that you’ve increased x stat to y level. At no point did I ever come across a listing of what all the stats even are, much less what they’re supposed to do. There’s no obvious way of telling what the numbers mean. Within a few fights, I had increased my mindset to 3000 while my heart was 52 and my kicking was 2… but I couldn’t figure out how to tell what effect any of those had, or how they compare to my opponents’ stats.

I found the fights to be frustrating for three reasons. They occur through infernally slow timed text that can’t be skipped. They are narrated in a very spare and repetitive manner. And, most importantly, they give no actionable feedback. I was left with no clue why I was winning or losing! Was it chance? Was it because of my scores in some crucial stat(s)?

The system intrigued me enough that I wanted to keep playing and exploring - maybe, with time, I would figure out things that weren’t immediately apparent? But my plans were cut short when I decided to retire and try playing as my 14-year-old scion. That didn’t work, because a 14-year-old can’t enter fights, so I’d have to wait for time to advance… but after exhausting a few training options that can only be done once between each fight, I was left with no obvious way to make time advance. I was stuck at 14. Oops. Game over for me.

Should you try Fight Forever in its current state? Maybe. There’s definitely some interesting mechanics here, even if they are hidden behind a totally opaque presentation. Maybe you’ll be clever enough to figure out things that I missed? I had some fun trying, so hopefully you will too.

Shadow Operative is a cyberpunk adventure that can be played through a parser or through a sidebar with links: both options are easy to use and work smoothly.

The story here is not groundbreaking, nor is it fully committed to the grit and pessimism of classic cyberpunk. But it’s well-written, offering a good dose of wit and nerdy humor, and enough of its own unique spin on genre tropes to keep things fresh. There are a series of tasks/puzzles to solve, which I found engaging if a bit on the simple side - it felt like infiltrating a corporate office to do leet hacking was a bit easier and more straightforward than it should have been. A more expansive web of problems to solve, I think, would have elevated the game.

In general and especially with regard to the UI (which is built with Vorple), the technical side of Shadow Operative is where the game really shines. Gameplay was impressively smooth and intuitive, and the UI presented a whole lot of options and information in a neat and accessible format. It was both functional and really nice to look at. The credits list quite a few testers, which makes sense: I can easily believe that the author put a great deal of effort into testing and iterating upon the game in order to present us with this very slick, well-oiled piece. Also of note: it has a bangin’ soundtrack.

Overall, I’m glad that I played Shadow Operative. The author’s professionalism is abundantly clear in the design of this game, and I have a lot of respect for that.

I was very interested to play this game, which is described by the author as an “historical gay melodrama.” Indeed, it does what it promises, putting you in the shoes of various members of the Vidal family as they live through a succession of scenes taking place over the course of a summer. Through their actions and interactions, a series of events will unfold that are historical, gay, and dramatic.

The interface is a bit odd. It’s a hypertext game with the kind of navigable world-model that’s more commonly seen in a parser game. That’s fine, except almost all of the interesting action (such as dialogue between characters where you have to make important choices, for example) occurs in pop-ups. With all the interesting stuff happening in these pop-ups, I quickly came to feel that the navigable world-model was frivolous, and mostly just served to make the screen look overly busy whenever a pop-up would be sitting on top of the room description/navigation buttons beneath. I think if the entire thing had been presented as a traditional CYOA-style game - no navigation, just conversation choices - it would have felt a lot smoother without really sacrificing anything.

The story is intriguing and it introduces a lot of awesome ideas. There’s interwar Catalan politics, the strictures of bourgeoisie propriety, a strained family dynamic, a little bit of a coming-of-age story, a consideration of gender, and of course plenty of gayness, all coming together in a fascinating and very multifaceted plot.

Certainly, there’s the foundation of a great story here. And yet… I feel that the game doesn’t fully realize its ambitions. Things happen very quickly. Often, you play a character for only a very brief scene before suddenly switching to another character, so I found it difficult to fully sink my teeth into any given scene. Sometimes, the writing is very evocative. I greatly enjoyed the description of the instant attraction between the family patriarch and his daughter’s suitor, for example. But elsewhere, the writing seems overly minimalistic and matter-of-fact, and I was disappointed that later interactions between the aforementioned characters weren’t described with the same degree of detail.

Overall, I liked A Catalan Summer and feel that it’s worth a playthrough, but I also feel that it has the potential to be much better. If the author were to treat this as a rough draft, go back and flesh out what’s already there with more evocative prose and more melodrama, it could become something excellent.

Ascension of Limbs is a deliciously creepy parser game that’s heavy on resource-management mechanics. Every turn, the player is presented with a listing of valid commands and objects, so while there are definitely horrors to encounter, the dreaded game of guess-the-verb is not one of them.

Technically, the game is very well-polished, especially considering that it relies heavily on NPC behavior and ever-changing numerical variables. In my experience, everything seemed to work as intended. It might take a little while to get familiar with the mechanics and figure out the strategies for victory, since the whole thing is very unlike the typical text adventure, but it’s worth the time to get used to it. I found it quite satisfying once I’d worked out an effective business scheme through trial and error.

The palpable strength of Ascension of Limbs is in its unique brand of casual, creeping horror. It’s a game that might slowly draw you into a situation that isn’t quite right, and gently draw you to become complicit in it. The truth of the situation, and the consequences of your complicity, are not revealed at first. Maybe they’re never fully revealed at all. For the most part, it seems, the reader is afforded only disquieting glimpses into the horrors of this world, and left to try to piece things together for themself.

A very solid piece, well worth multiple playthroughs to experience the variety of different endings (and journeys) this game has to offer.

The Arkhill Darkness is a lighthearted, trope-laden fantasy romp that delights in goofy humor and breaking the fourth wall. It’s a fun time. The visual presentation is slick and does a good job of setting the mood. There’s a very simple RPG-style combat system which is, in my opinion, entirely unnecessary.

If you’re looking for flawless prose, a deep story, or characters that you’ll come to care very deeply about, I’d say this is not the game for you. On the other hand, if you’re in the mood to see what happens when high fantasy meets kung fu and yo momma jokes, The Arkhill Darkness might put a smile on your face.

Just be warned: your greatest foe won’t be a dragon or a demonic horsething. It’ll be the typos.

Alone is a gloomy exploration of post-apocalyptic survival. It has some nice, succinct writing and some implicit commentary on current events, but I read it first and foremost as a vehicle for puzzles. In classic parser fashion, you’ve got a problem to solve, and you have to work out how to do it through exploring and using the tools you find. For the most part, I thought the challenges were very well-designed: neither too obvious nor unfairly hard, they require a bit of logic and sometimes a bit of an inductive leap. I found them satisfying to solve.

Framing the central problem-solving task are a cast of characters, a story, and a world, all of which are successfully employed to buttress the action, but none of which are really the focus. The level of polish is good, with no bugs that I encountered.

I would have liked to have seen a bit more on the storytelling front. What kind of person is the protagonist? Where have they been? Where are they going? Exploring details like these, I think, would have made me feel a bit more invested in the problem-solving. But even so, it was a good time and I reckon fans of oldschool text adventures will be pleased with Alone.

This entire review is a giant spoiler, so:

(Spoiler - click to show)This is one third of an interesting trio of ostensibly puzzle-based games. I say “ostensibly” because, once you figure out the central conceit - that “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane,” “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!,” and “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” are all pieces of one overarching adventure - there really is no puzzle left. By reading each of the games concurrently, they supply cut-and-dry solutions to the other games’ puzzles, and these solutions cannot possibly be missed. They’re marked with huge blinking text! The entirety of the puzzle to be solved, then, consists of this single realization. Everything else is just doing what you’re told. While the intertextuality is a clever idea, for this reason, I didn’t get much out of these games in terms of meaningful interactivity.

The story itself confused me a bit since each of the games includes the same set of names applied to totally different things - is Ilfane, for example, the leader of an ancient nation? A spacefaring species of alt-right aliens? Or just a cabinet? I found myself wondering whether there is a deeper meaning behind how the names are assigned differently between the games. Is it an invitation to consider the importance of context in generating meaning? Maybe a comment on the unreliability of the games’ narrators? Perhaps it is meant to suggest a kind of symbolic connection between the (seemingly totally different) people and objects who get assigned the same name? Or maybe it’s just for shiggles? At this time, I have no answer to these questions, but it’s interesting to think about.

The games are well-polished, with a pleasing color scheme and no bugs that I encountered. My one gripe with the technical side is the inclusion of timed text. Timed text is a finicky thing that’s almost impossible to get right. In this case, I thought it was too slow, and that detracted from the excitement of some otherwise-dramatic sequences… except for a few times when I glanced away for a second and missed a line. Oops.

Where these games shine the most is in the quality of the prose and cleverness of the writing. The included myths and parables, especially, were a pleasure to read. With delightfully unexpected/cynical riffs on established tropes, these pieces of fiction-within-fiction are extremely effective for communicating the disturbing value system of their in-universe authors. The ultimate goal of the games, it seems, is to stake out a certain position in contemporary social/political discourse. But they do it with a certain levity and campiness that makes them feel more like a fun romp, even as they deliver the messages of a gloomy cautionary tale.

Overall, the games bring plenty of cool ideas to the table, and they execute some of them very well.

This entire review is a giant spoiler, so:

(Spoiler - click to show)This is one third of an interesting trio of ostensibly puzzle-based games. I say “ostensibly” because, once you figure out the central conceit - that “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane,” “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!,” and “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” are all pieces of one overarching adventure - there really is no puzzle left. By reading each of the games concurrently, they supply cut-and-dry solutions to the other games’ puzzles, and these solutions cannot possibly be missed. They’re marked with huge blinking text! The entirety of the puzzle to be solved, then, consists of this single realization. Everything else is just doing what you’re told. While the intertextuality is a clever idea, for this reason, I didn’t get much out of these games in terms of meaningful interactivity.

The story itself confused me a bit since each of the games includes the same set of names applied to totally different things - is Ilfane, for example, the leader of an ancient nation? A spacefaring species of alt-right aliens? Or just a cabinet? I found myself wondering whether there is a deeper meaning behind how the names are assigned differently between the games. Is it an invitation to consider the importance of context in generating meaning? Maybe a comment on the unreliability of the games’ narrators? Perhaps it is meant to suggest a kind of symbolic connection between the (seemingly totally different) people and objects who get assigned the same name? Or maybe it’s just for shiggles? At this time, I have no answer to these questions, but it’s interesting to think about.

The games are well-polished, with a pleasing color scheme and no bugs that I encountered. My one gripe with the technical side is the inclusion of timed text. Timed text is a finicky thing that’s almost impossible to get right. In this case, I thought it was too slow, and that detracted from the excitement of some otherwise-dramatic sequences… except for a few times when I glanced away for a second and missed a line. Oops.

Where these games shine the most is in the quality of the prose and cleverness of the writing. The included myths and parables, especially, were a pleasure to read. With delightfully unexpected/cynical riffs on established tropes, these pieces of fiction-within-fiction are extremely effective for communicating the disturbing value system of their in-universe authors. The ultimate goal of the games, it seems, is to stake out a certain position in contemporary social/political discourse. But they do it with a certain levity and campiness that makes them feel more like a fun romp, even as they deliver the messages of a gloomy cautionary tale.

Overall, the games bring plenty of cool ideas to the table, and they execute some of them very well.

This entire review is a giant spoiler, so:

(Spoiler - click to show)This is one third of an interesting trio of ostensibly puzzle-based games. I say “ostensibly” because, once you figure out the central conceit - that “Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane,” “Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!,” and “Terror in the Immortal’s Atelier” are all pieces of one overarching adventure - there really is no puzzle left. By reading each of the games concurrently, they supply cut-and-dry solutions to the other games’ puzzles, and these solutions cannot possibly be missed. They’re marked with huge blinking text! The entirety of the puzzle to be solved, then, consists of this single realization. Everything else is just doing what you’re told. While the intertextuality is a clever idea, for this reason, I didn’t get much out of these games in terms of meaningful interactivity.

The story itself confused me a bit since each of the games includes the same set of names applied to totally different things - is Ilfane, for example, the leader of an ancient nation? A spacefaring species of alt-right aliens? Or just a cabinet? I found myself wondering whether there is a deeper meaning behind how the names are assigned differently between the games. Is it an invitation to consider the importance of context in generating meaning? Maybe a comment on the unreliability of the games’ narrators? Perhaps it is meant to suggest a kind of symbolic connection between the (seemingly totally different) people and objects who get assigned the same name? Or maybe it’s just for shiggles? At this time, I have no answer to these questions, but it’s interesting to think about.

The games are well-polished, with a pleasing color scheme and no bugs that I encountered. My one gripe with the technical side is the inclusion of timed text. Timed text is a finicky thing that’s almost impossible to get right. In this case, I thought it was too slow, and that detracted from the excitement of some otherwise-dramatic sequences… except for a few times when I glanced away for a second and missed a line. Oops.

Where these games shine the most is in the quality of the prose and cleverness of the writing. The included myths and parables, especially, were a pleasure to read. With delightfully unexpected/cynical riffs on established tropes, these pieces of fiction-within-fiction are extremely effective for communicating the disturbing value system of their in-universe authors. The ultimate goal of the games, it seems, is to stake out a certain position in contemporary social/political discourse. But they do it with a certain levity and campiness that makes them feel more like a fun romp, even as they deliver the messages of a gloomy cautionary tale.

Overall, the games bring plenty of cool ideas to the table, and they execute some of them very well.

Academic Pursuits (As Opposed to Regular Pursuits) is a very smooth, very well-polished, bite-sized parser game that takes a fairly simple scheme and executes it wonderfully. The task that awaits the player in-game is, more or less, rote. It’s not a puzzle to be figured out, nor is it a series of decisions that have much of an effect on the course of the plot. Instead, it’s a series of opportunities to experience a moment in the life of the protagonist, and gradually piece together a picture of what’s going on (beyond the immediately obvious).

In some key respects, Academic Pursuits has the qualities of a slice-of-life work. You’re playing a moment in time. The focus is on the internal life of the protagonist: what she thinks, feels, and remembers as she goes about the work of arranging her things. But there’s also a bit more to it than that. Within this moment in time, there are enough surprises, enough mysteries, and enough spiciness to keep it quite interesting. Put it all together, and it works beautifully.

Everything in this game is made with care; most everything a player might do is met with interesting and satisfying responses that convey a rich attention to detail.

The only thing I didn’t like about Academic Pursuits is that there isn’t more of it. Take your time, explore all that there is to explore, and you’ll see a fascinating vignette unfold before your eyes.

(s)wordsmyth gives the impression of a quest for revenge, but it’s actually a quest for redemption. You must fight without fighting, using only your words to win over your opponents. It’s a simply-structured but fun adventure featuring a series of verbal duels.

I appreciated the uniqueness of each encounter, as they all demand a different approach. Negotiation? Flattery? Intimidation? The best course of action depends on the situation, and you’ll have to read your opponent to figure out how to deal with them successfully. The prose is well-written, especially when in dialogue with certain powerful opponents: many of their lines are written in a beautifully dramatic, almost poetic style that really sells the supernatural feel of such encounters.

The presentation of the game, in the style of a visual novel except without any visuals apart from a game-over graphic, seems an odd choice. Another minus: defeat can happen quickly and sometimes feels arbitrary. Unless you're far more observant than I - or just plain lucky - expect to be doing a fair bit of dying and replaying from checkpoints.

Throughout much of the game, the main characters (the student and the master) seemed a bit inscrutable. I didn’t feel a whole lot of personality from either of them. They’re laser-focused on their mission and most of their dialogue serves to establish this, and this alone. In the case of the master especially, I felt that she suffered from her dual role as character and narrator - her distinctive voice as a character seems to evaporate and turn generic whenever she begins narrating events and surroundings.

The ending, however, is a satisfying and strong one - strong enough to elevate the whole experience of the game. Once I reached it, I finally felt like I understood the personalities and motivations of the main characters. I just wish there had been a bit more build-up to that point, a bit more meaningful and varied dialogue between the student and master throughout the game.

Overall, (s)wordsmyth packs a good amount of punch despite some less-than-perfect design choices, and it’s well worth a playthrough.

Not everyone is going to “get” this game. But I’m here to tell you that, to the discerning eye, Amazing Quest is a brilliant and deeply moving masterpiece. Be warned that there’s simply no way to plumb the depths of this work without diving right into all the details, so there will be spoilers ahead.

This first point should be obvious to anyone who has played the game: Amazing Quest is a radical, surrealist deconstruction of the Odyssey which takes the familiar tropes of this classic work and turns them on their heads in order to reveal deeper meaning. Ancient Hellenistic literature, we are doubtless aware, is predicated upon the experience of presence. Presence, indeed, is axiomatic - and the importance of this cannot be overstated, because this same mode of thinking underpins virtually the whole of traditional western culture. Odysseus, you will recall, is a Greek man with a name. We know he has a name because it’s right there on the cover! His journey is to hearth and home, where he expects to reunite with his wife, Penelope, a woman who also is named. Matters like these are where Amazing Quest diverges most obviously from the Odyssey. Its protagonist is nameless and genderless, their origins unknown, their relations unspecified, their future inscrutable. It is with these flagrant omissions that Amazing Quest reveals itself as a dialectical synthesis of western classicism with Buddhist philosophy, recasting and recontextualizing the “journey home” trope within a frame of emptiness, juxtaposing the conspicuous experience of absence with our expectation of presence. By stripping out names and details from the familiar narrative, it invites us to consider the experience of their absence. To what extent can we alienate the signified from the signifier? To what extent is it truly possible to distinguish the internal experience of subjective identity from the external facts of socially-constructed gender identity, or family affinity? The game itself suggests answers to these questions, while simultaneously, and brilliantly, subverting its own answers: y/n? Yes and no, obviously, tell us nothing about the concepts in question. And yet, these are presented as the only answers to any given question. Is this a pre-emptive criticism of the cursory and ineffectual analysis which the author anticipated in response to the questions his game would provoke? Or is it perhaps a riff on the limitations of language itself - a suggestion that all language, ultimately, is an exercise in futility? No, it’s neither. It’s merely an open invitation for us to consider whether the questions that we are asking are the questions we ought to be asking.

But this is only the most superficial of what Amazing Quest has to teach us. In the enclosed strategy guide, Montfort cautions us: “What you (with your cultural world-view) might think of as chance […] plays an important role in this game.” This remark takes on unexpected significance as we progress through our amazing quest. At first, it appears that the results of each choice are random - indeed, there is no way to predict whether a yes or a no will yield (or shall we say, precede) positive or negative feedback. We, with the expectations instilled in us by our cultural background, perceive this as “chance,” yet Montfort’s comment seems to imply that this is not the only way of looking at it. What, then, is the alternative? Do our inputs effect some predictable feedback? Does it matter to the game whether we select yes or no? The answer, of course, is no. Montfort knows this, and we know this. Where, then, is the space for ambiguity? This is what we are invited to question. And in doing so, we will eventually have to ask ourselves, what is chance? This is where we are invited to consider our own ontology. If we believe in Enlightenment determinism, we must ultimately hold that nothing is truly chance - that everything ultimately has a cause, and that randomness is merely an illusion, revealing our imperfect understanding of that which we perceive to be based on chance. According to this view, the apparent randomness of Amazing Quest is merely an indicator that its course is determined by something other than our input. Or if we posit an indeterministic ontology, then we suppose that the apparent results of our choices were indeed random, and, still, not caused by our choices at all. Why, then, are we asked to make choices, when they are apparently meaningless?

Here is where Montfort’s strategy note exposes itself to a new interpretation: eventually, we will win the game. We cannot lose the game. Assuming we continue to play long enough, there is no question as to our ultimate victory. At this point it becomes clear that, ontological questions aside, what we perceived as chance was not chance, because it was nothing. The marginal effect on the gamestate of us getting positive versus negative feedback for any given choice… was nothing! We merely anticipated that the outcome of individual events would be of importance to the ultimate result, but it was not so. In this way, we are invited on a critical intrapsychological journey. What does it mean for us to be proven wrong? Why did we expect this? Where did our expectation come from? To this latter question, the author has already suggested an answer: it is our cultural background which has led us to this point. Our intrapsychological journey, now, becomes an interpsychological one. What did we experience, what were we exposed to, which caused us to feel that the events of this game would be of some consequence?

We are in good company, of course. Humans, for as long as history has been recorded, it seems, have ascribed causal significance erroneously. Let us now return to the Odyssey and the superstitions which it embodies. The reason Odysseus struggles to return to Ithaca is because he has been cursed by Poseidon. To our modern eyes, this is an obvious contrivance: you cannot be cursed by the god of the sea; angering such a non-existant entity will have no effect. And yet, is there not another way to read this event? Genesis P-Orridge famously observed that religion represents an early attempt at psychology. Poseidon may not seem to be a person with agency unto himself, but perhaps he could be said to exist, in some sense of the word, in the minds of humans. And if so - were we perhaps premature in concluding that he has no causal significance? Similarly, were we premature in concluding that the events of Amazing Quest had no causal significance? Perhaps it was their existence, in our minds (and thus embodied in our physical brains), that caused us to keep playing the game and ultimately win. This is likely to be among the more controversial of Amazing Quest’s implications: its idiosyncratic sort of panprotopsychist thesis - the implication that all things material and otherwise, through their potential for embodiment within the mind, have the potential for agency.

This is all just to scratch the surface of the, frankly, amazing content of this quest. I won’t be attempting a more substantive analysis at this time - after all, the field of IF studies is still in its infancy, and future critics will doubtless pick up on important details I’ve missed! Perhaps I’ll return to write a full essay once there exists a larger corpus of critical analysis to cite, but for now, these are my initial thoughts. I greatly enjoyed Amazing Quest and will be watching the author with interest.