Ratings and Reviews by CMG

Birdland is a very long Twine story (probably at least novella-length for each playthrough) about teen girls at summer camp. They participate in standard camp activities like swimming, they gossip, and they fumble with their developing adolescent identities. This could've been horrible. All the ingredients are lined up for a sappy Hallmark special. But it's not horrible. It's great.

It's written in script format with occasional character illustrations (that are very nice; you can look at them all from the main menu, but they only show up once each in the game itself). What this means, of course, is that practically everything is conveyed through dialogue, and what that means is that major emphasis is put on character interaction. There is no flab. The game is laser-focused on these characters' mindsets.

I have the sense, although I could be mistaken, that you'll get the same overarching story no matter what choices you make. Which is no problem. It is a good story, not just about teen girls canoeing at summer camp, but about the dreams that the main character Bridget Leaside experiences -- strange dreams that seem to have ripple effects in the waking world.

Rather, what choices you make influence sub-scenes in the story by changing Bridget's mood, giving her access to certain actions or cutting them off. You're basically presented with different angles of approach to the same goals. What's especially thoughtful is how the game shows you every possible action, even if you can't choose one because you're in the wrong mood at the moment. This way you know what impact your decisions had. I am growing more and more fond of transparent game mechanics like this.

Since nearly all the writing is dialogue, the dialogue has to be good, and it is. Especially in the dream sequences, where humanoid birds speak to Bridget using stilted, mechanical language. Brendan Patrick Hennessy has a history writing stilted prose. You Will Select a Decision is all about the stilted prose. But whereas that was a pure comedy game, and the prose was stilted because it was meant to be a poor translation from Russian, in Birdland there's more going on. It's still funny in Birdland. The technique is just being used with more purpose.

Actually, Birdland feels like the natural next step after You Will Select a Decision and Bell Park, Youth Detective. Those games crashed together, refined themselves during the crash, and became Birdland. Bell Park herself is a central character in Birdland.

This game made me think about Wes Anderson movies. Moonrise Kingdom specifically. Kids who are more mature than the adults around them, but who are still kids learning how to survive. Kids who find themselves in over their heads as bizarre circumstances develop. Birdland is strong interactive fiction, pushing the medium more toward literature, which I completely support.

Aesthetically, this game is definitely polished. Nice blocky buttons. Smooth graphics. It's got "mass market appeal" with a neutral design scheme, like an IKEA catalogue. Which is exactly what it's trying to do.

Not be an IKEA catalogue. Just tap into that commercial zone.

The game is entirely about a product: a contraption that can take "basic creative building blocks" and combine them together to make new products. All that you really do in this game is combine the different ingredients, and then the game spits out an invention at you. The ingredients themselves are vague concepts like "quantity" and "sound."

At the end of my playthrough, the player-character (who had purchased this contraption) was showered with success for the great things they made with the machine.

Maybe I wasn't supposed to react this way, but I felt like this game was making a really sharp criticism about creativity and technological development. Everything that's normally called "creativity" is negated by the GROWBOTICS machine, where you just slot combinations together, press a button, and the machine does all the creative work for you. A product rolls down the conceptual conveyor belt, you snag it for yourself, and then you claim the credit without needing to have a single creative thought yourself.

Not to say that the game's text actually sounds cynical. Everything is upbeat. You're a happy consumer, after all, and you have a shiny new product to play with! Only at one point near the beginning does the game (maybe) show its hand, when the player-character reads the product manual and thinks:

An extended marketing spiel crafted to make you feel good about your purchasing decisions. Absurd thing is, it kind of works.

GROWBOTICS kind of works like that too.

Untold Riches is a simple parser puzzle game. You're an assistant to a wacky treasure-hunting professor, and you've been stranded alone on an island during a treasure hunt. You've got to locate the treasure and then figure out a way to contact someone to leave the island.

What you get from the game's blurb is what you get inside the game. The tone is irreverent. The story is slim and self-aware, with references all over the place to past adventures you've had with the professor, which in turn reference pulp adventure tropes from literature and film. Like the gameplay, the writing is simple and direct, but it knows what it wants to be and it's charming.

The "about" text explains that this game was actually written to be played in a middle-school setting as an introduction to the medium for students. It sets explicit guidelines for itself: clear goals, clear clues, thorough implementation. In all three realms, it's a success.

As an intro-level puzzler, this is solid. The only thing it could do better is provide standard verbs for the player, since the game is assuming that its audience will be unfamiliar with the parser format. Otherwise, it's a nice little snack.

In this hypertext game you explore a ruined city that's stuck in time, or abandoned by time, or abandoned by the world at large -- it's all the same. The era this city exists in (or the era that it died in, anyway) shares similarities with early twentieth century Europe, and certain characters are mentioned as being French and German and so on, but its connection to real history is tenuous. Fantastical elements play a large role. There are clocks that don't tell time as we know it.

Gameplay involves poking around, finding keys, unlocking doors, opening safes, and gaining entrance to new areas. Sometimes you can activate memories that reveal how the city came to be in its current condition.

Despite the focus on memories and exploration, though, I never got a good sense about what was going on or what the city even really looked like. The text is written in an abstract, verbose style that often aims for higher marks than it can hit. And when it doesn't hit them, it produces confusion. You have to be an extremely skilled writer to pull off a style like this.

The game's opening references Umberto Eco, but I found myself comparing it more directly with Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which is an Italian book from 1499 about a man wandering a dreamscape. Almost the entire book is dedicated to explaining the architecture of buildings in the dream, and the text will go on for pages lavishing elaborate philosophical descriptions on columns and fountains. I found it suffocating to read, and while To Burn in Memory is not nearly as overwrought, it does share Hypnerotomachia's interest in allegorical architecture. Both these texts also prefer complexity for its own sake, for its flavor.

Hypnerotomachia is a famously beautiful book, and To Burn in Memory also has a very lovely physical design. But they sit heavily in your gut and are hard to digest.

If you are "in the friend zone," what this means is that you have been relegated to being "only" friends with someone (usually a woman) who you actually just want to sleep with. If you are a "nice guy," what this means is that you consider yourself an upstanding personality, but in relation to the person you want to sleep with, all your "positive" attributes are really just ploys to get them into bed. Both the "friend zone" and "nice guy" concepts are used seriously by people who feel they're unjustly treated, and satirically by people who think they're being babies (and misogynists).

In the Friend Zone takes these concepts as the basis for its story. Actually, it doesn't have much story. It's more concerned with deconstructing the concepts and fleshing them out into a surreal allegory.

It bills itself as "a horror-parody in the tradition of Franz Kafka," but I don't think this is accurate. Of course the game does owe something to Kafka. The Nice Guys™ in the game's world feel that they're being persecuted by obscure forces beyond their control, like many characters in Kafka's fiction, and one passage is inspired directly by the parable "Before the Law" from The Trial. But the piece is otherwise not similar to Kafka. You have nothing like Kafka's bureaucratic prose, circling around as it eats itself; you have nothing like Kafka's off-kilter absurdity; in fact, you always know exactly where you are with In the Friend Zone. The allegories are obvious, monstrously obvious. They smack you over the head and invite no alternative readings.

I don't think that this is precisely a problem. It just means the game is not advertising itself correctly. It's got much more in common with Pilgrim's Progress. The entire thing involves wandering around an allegorical landscape, and the protagonist is even referred to as "Pilgrim." Kafka fans are not necessarily going to enjoy what's being offered here.

When I went into the game, what I expected was snark in industrial quantities. I wasn't eager for this. What I got instead wasn't snark at all. Make no mistake, this game is critical of its material (criticism that I happen to agree with), but it's not interested in taking cheap shots. It really does dedicate itself to the allegory, painting a surreal hellscape that has been carefully constructed. More than that, it goes a step further and truly considers events from the perspective of the Nice Guys™, trying to walk in their shoes and unravel why and how people exist with such attitudes. They aren't being used as punching bags, which is what I was certain was going to happen.

I also admit that I expected the writing to be dismal. It is not. There are some typos here and there, but for the most part it's smooth, sometimes it's shiny, and the author has a knack for chipper dialogue.

In other words, I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing, but at the end I was also left thinking, what's the point? Who is this written for? What is it actually doing? It's not written for the Nice Guys™. It won't change their minds. It's not written for their critics. It won't change their minds. Rather, it's simply using the "friend zone" and "nice guy" ideas as jumping-off points to create a fantasy nightmare world.

But this is an unstable nightmare world that's anchored to something ephemeral in pop culture. In twenty or thirty years, will people still be thinking with this game's terminology? Many people right now don't even know about "nice guys" and "friend zones." They hover around in the same space as internet memes. They're more persistent, yes, but In the Friend Zone is essentially an entire game written to deconstruct a few passing linguistic fads.

Pilgrim's Progress and Kafka are still around because they're universal. I don't see In the Friend Zone sticking around. Maybe it's ridiculous to apply criteria like that to a Twine game -- to ask, will this be universal, will it withstand the ages? -- but that's actually something that I ask about every game and book and movie that I consume. Something like howling dogs, I can safely say, is universal. It strikes deep, major veins in humankind. In the Friend Zone doesn't, but the author certainly seems to have the writing chops to produce something more substantial in the future.

As a rule, I'm not that enthusiastic about puzzles, and yet I was drawn into this game and beat my head against it for two entire days. This was more than a hard puzzle for me. This was a mini life experience.

What happened? I'm not that great at manipulating finicky things in parser games, and this game is loaded, loaded, loaded with them. I usually give up on puzzles, and although I talked with other people to make some progress by exchanging hints, I didn't make much progress that way at all. But I never considered stopping. I had to finish. I needed to figure out what the hell was going on, both on a story level and on a meta level.

Hard Puzzle is set in an apocalyptic world where you have been tasked with assembling a stool for "The Family" because they "like the look of it." This stool is intended "for milking." Even though the story is sparse, little details here and there worked their way into my brain like parasites and wouldn't get out. Whereas other puzzle games often lose my interest by requiring too much mechanical tinkering, Hard Puzzle's strangeness wouldn't release me, even while it was clobbering me with more and more mechanical tinkering nightmares.

But what made me truly unable to leave the game alone was that I didn't know on what level I could trust it. Hard Puzzle bills itself as silly speed-IF, but is this true? It has implementation errors, as you would expect in speed-IF, but it acknowledges these errors. And perhaps more than anything, it was written by Ade McT, whose game Map placed second in the IFComp mere days before Hard Puzzle was released onto IFDB.

Normally, not being able to trust a game means not wanting to play it because you think it might be unfair or broken. In this case, not being able to trust it made the experience even more compelling for me.

Now that I have solved Hard Puzzle, I look back at my time playing it these past two days and... feel inclined to say nothing about how right or wrong I was to suspect anything about this game. I think that some people might never solve it. I think that some people might solve it much faster than I did.

There is a famous murder mystery play by Agatha Christie called The Mousetrap that has been running since 1952, and although countless people have now seen the play, its ending is rarely ever discussed in order to preserve the surprise for new audiences. For that same reason, I hope that no walkthrough is ever provided for Hard Puzzle. I hope no solution is ever published. I hope that anyone who solves it will remain silent.

I feel like this game shouldn't work, but it does. You play as a character in the totally improbable situation of being the only person awake to monitor a spaceship ark transporting the entire human race in cryosleep. At one moment that would be fraught with drama in most stories, you find yourself dressed as a clown. The game is just filled with ridiculous situations like this, and it doesn't take them very seriously, but it also does take them seriously. There's real emotion at stake.

Everything comes down to the narrative tone with this game. It's conversational and confessional, and despite the crazy environment, the protagonist usually has genuine reactions. The story also spans a few years, and sudden jump-cuts in time are effective at conveying how things continue to deteriorate.

There are some very nice graphical elements in this game, especially when you consult the ship's database. It looks good all around. Sometimes the writing is rough. Sometimes it's meant to be rough, filled with misspellings and such, but that's not what I mean. The normal prose could use some extra polish.

Whether you want to humor the game will depend largely on your taste, how much slack you're willing to give it. Personally, I enjoyed it.

In this game you play as a convict who's been dropped into a pit to be killed by a mysterious beast. The "pit" is actually humongous: a lost city underground. Every room seems to have multiple exits leading to new places. I was able to familiarize myself with a few key spots, but I never completely wrapped my head around the whole map. Which wasn't a problem. You're meant to be lost and disoriented.

There's not much plot. You don't know why you've been sentenced to death-by-beast. Probably it was an unjust punishment: you have a fellow convict in the pit named Iza who suggests she's there for petty theft. All that you do know is that you need to somehow kill the beast.

I think there must be at least three different ways to do that, judging by items I stumbled across during play. But in the end I only needed to make one functional trap to win.

The room descriptions are terse, but still have flavor. You're not meant to stop and poke around. You're meant to be running for your life as the beast chases you. Still, I came across lots of unimplemented scenery. No flagons, for instance, in a room described as being filled with discarded flagons. For the most part, the writing is workmanlike, but it's got a few really nice lines. This one especially stood out to me, as you're crawling through a sewer and pass beneath a hole in the ceiling:

Spectators are gathered around the hole even though the chances of
you coming this way might have been small; they’re delighted to see you.

"They're delighted to see you." It's so casual that it's sinister.

This game isn't breaking new ground. It's just meant to be a pulp fantasy experience. Discovering traces left behind by the underground city's vanished inhabitants is the best part, and you can even activate a "walking sim" mode to remove the beast from play so that you can explore at your leisure if you want.