Reviews by CMG

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.

You're a nautilus, but not a normal nautilus. You inhabit an airy world and it is yours. You are its overlord. You've lived in other worlds before, and now you've mastered this one too. It's time to move on to yet another world. Gameplay is about assembling the necessary magical/metaphysical elements required to open the next "great doorway" in your journey.

Movement in this game is three-dimensional. You can travel in all the cardinal directions, and also up and down, and combine directions, i.e. down north. This seems like it could be overwhelming, but it's not. All the directions have different qualities (less pressure in the upper atmosphere, for example) and you've always got a clear sense of where you are and where everything else is in relation to you.

I feel like this would be a great game for beginners. It gives you simple challenges, rewards you with new powers when you complete the challenges, and rounds itself nicely off at the end by throwing you into a situation where you have to use all your powers in combination.

Your nautilus character isn't completely fleshed out, but has a definite personality and memories from its past worlds, and the game gradually resolves itself into a kind of epiphany for the nautilus on a grand scale. Everything is blended together: the story, the mechanics, the exploration, they're all the same thing, and it feels effortless.

(Spoiler - click to show)It's also really neat how you slowly realize that, hey, this game has an NPC, and the entire world is the NPC.

I don't think that Ether will appeal as much to experienced players who want more difficult puzzles, but that's not the goal it's setting for itself. It wants to be casual and uplifting and it succeeds.

You're in a room with a box and that's all there is in the room. Your object is to manipulate the box until you've triggered all the little bells and whistles attached to it. And also the horns, buttons, ropes... you get the idea. It has secrets and surprises and you want to find them all.

This game has an extremely streamlined verb system. "Examine" and "undertake to interact with" (abbreviated "u") are its two primary actions. This is so smooth and prevents so many potential problems. The box is totally stuffed with weird contraptions, and if you had to worry about turning or pulling or tapping them, etc., etc., all but the most patient players would throw a fit trying to figure out what syntax to use. But "u" covers everything while still preserving the need for players to think about how they should manipulate the box.

I could see some people saying, Well, with so few verbs, why isn't this just a Twine game? Click the equivalent "u" or "x" hyperlinks and be done with it. But that wouldn't work, again because the box has so many components. In a hypertext game you'd have to click each component, click components within components, and then return back to previous screens to see what's changed or hasn't. It would be a headache. The parser allows everything to be right out in the open so that you can interact with anything at any time.

Since this game is a pure puzzle and descriptions are brief, I could also see some people overlooking how good the writing is. It's very good. It manages to give you clues, reward you for solving puzzles, and paint a clear description of the box (no matter how complicated the box gets) all within the same snappy little sentences. A tone, a personality emerges from the game that's perfectly complementary to the bizarre Variety Box itself.

Confessor Destine is an unimpeachable authority. His spotless personal record ensures that he can wield great power in society by exploiting other people's indiscretions, charging them with crimes, without ever having his own position questioned.

You play as someone who has a bone to pick with him. You have been preparing for years to break into the Confessor's mansion and dig up some dirt. You begin the game wearing a pellucid llama-suit that makes you invisible, and you will enter the mansion through a spatial intersection in a giant leather cliff that cuts into another physical plane.

I want to say that this game is surreal, but I don't think that's accurate. It's set in a fantasy world with very unusual qualities, but within this world everything is consistent and makes sense. There's no dream logic. There's just strange logic. The finesse required to achieve this subtle distinction in the writing is spectacular.

I don't want to say too much about the world, because the game's primary pleasure comes from exploring that world. I do think you will have to have a certain taste for peculiarity to enjoy the game though. It made me think about Edward Gorey. Consider this organization system in the Confessor's library:

You could choose a specific book or one of the seven eternal categories: damp, forgotten, implausible, pejorative, exhaustive, unsettling and beseeching.

If you look at the "forgotten" books, some titles you'll find are Urn Dwellers, Emponderations Most Wearysome, and History of The Boundless Plains. In the "damp" category there is a book about milking called Milking.

This library is probably the game's greatest achievement. It has 101 books, and you can read them all, and they are all different and wonderful and enrich the world. At the same time, the library also illustrates the game's biggest weakness, which is that it demands an exhaustive attention to detail from the player to solve its puzzles.

Sub Rosa rewards patience and critical thought, and it does not respond well to being rushed through. Some players will be frustrated by its difficulty, and the puzzles could certainly be clued more overtly, but this is exactly what will draw other players to the game who want a challenge. Even though I personally needed hints, that didn't detract at all from my satisfaction with the game's other elements.

YOU'VE JUST ENROLLED IN SPY SCHOOL, AND ALREADY YOU'VE BEEN PROMOTED TO MASTER SPY BECAUSE ALL THE OTHER SPIES HAVE DIED FROM SPY-MUMPS. NOW IT'S UP TO YOU TO CARRY OUT THE SPY MISSIONS ALONE.

I was hesitant to play this game. I find ALL-CAPS unpleasant to read, and COMEDY ALL-CAPS usually comes off as someone screaming PLEASE LAUGH AT MY JOKES! I'M FUNNY! PLEASE! I'M BEGGING YOU! As such, I expect that many people will dismiss this game out of hand, and I really don't blame them.

But once I got into it, I started to realize that something very different was going on than I had originally anticipated. The game is written in Twine with an impressive interface, where the screen is intended to mimic a helmet you're wearing. One panel shows your placement in the branching timeline, allowing you to accurately predict what paths will lead to victory or death. The spy-world is loud and obnoxious and absurd, drowning out everything else, filling the helmet with a static field in the background.

And then, eventually, the static dissolves, and the ALL-CAPS disappear, and you enter a passage written in lowercase... before you die and have to use your helmet to revert back to the spy-world and choose another branch. Once again, the ALL-CAPS drowns everything out and you plunge ahead on your ridiculous spy mission. But you can't forget what you saw, what the SCREAMING SURFACE GAME was hiding under its mayhem. In that buried story, the protagonist isn't a master spy, but a vulnerable young person grappling with drug abuse and suicidal thoughts.

Saying it like that makes it sound like it could be cheaply emotional, but it's raw and affecting and very well written. You feel as though the game is truly opening itself to expose something intimate and honest.

Furthermore, this is not a simple case where the CRAZY SPY MISSION is mirroring "real" things happening in the background. There is not a direct correlation between what is happening in the ALL-CAPS and lowercase worlds, even though they are connected. Reconciling that connection and coming to terms with how the two halves relate to each other is how you reach the game's apotheosis.

Something curious about this entire set-up is that as you continue to play, you start to look for the branches that lead to death on your helmet's timeline and, rather than avoiding them, you steer the story toward them, hoping to break back into another lowercase passage. The game is coaxing you into sharing the protagonist's own suicidal impulses. I've never encountered a mechanic like this in a branching narrative before, where you want to hit as many dead ends as possible.

A few comments I've read have stated that this is currently the longest Twine game ever written. It certainly is long. Once I'd settled into its rhythm, I was glad to have it keep going, and the second and third acts are very satisfying. However, because the first act is so long and contains its own internal three-act structure, I thought the game was preparing to end when it wasn't even halfway done.

This strikes me as its largest defect, and further editing could have probably adjusted the text to fix the pace. But I think it's also a defect that can be counteracted if players know about it beforehand, because then they can simply go into the game expecting a lengthy reading experience.

I played SPY INTRIGUE four days before writing this review, but I couldn't just write the review after I'd finished. I had to process the game. It stuck with me. I'm still turning it over. It gets better and better as I continue to absorb it.

Also, it doesn't need to beg you to laugh at its jokes. It's genuinely funny.

This review is for the entire Robyn Saga, which is told in four parts. They were uploaded to IFDB but then deleted, and are currently available on the ifarchive under "unprocessed." They're meant to be played in the following order: The Elevator, The Box, The Diary, The Prism.

But I don't think I can recommend that anyone should play them.

These games are transgressive, pornographic, scatological. They feature abuse, kidnapping, torture. Both children and adults are victimized. Both children and adults are abusers. If they had content warnings, those warnings would have to list just about everything under the sun. These games are in the same territory as the Marquis de Sade's writing.

I don't find transgressive media enjoyable in any conventional sense. It disturbs me. But I feel like I have to confront it. I seek out books and movies about horrible things. No matter how disturbing, they are still only books and movies. Fiction is the safest way to experience these horrible things. And I've consumed enough transgressive media to actually become rather picky about it. I don't care for de Sade; he might write about terrible stuff, but he exaggerates ridiculously. Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden and Lautreamont's Maldoror are more my style.

I'm providing this background about my own tastes to explain why I played the Robyn Saga, and to explain that my negative reaction is not a reaction against transgressive media in general. In fact, when I first learned about these games, I was excited to think that someone might be pushing interactive fiction in such an extreme direction.

But then I played the games, and I couldn't bring myself to finish the last one.

This was a good experience for me to have. It made me realize that there's another layer to the whole transgressive media thing that I hadn't perceived before. As I said, fiction is a safe way to explore horrible ideas. Whatever someone may write in a book, the words are just words on a page. With a movie like Begotten, you know that it's scripted and the actors are consenting and everything is fake.

For that matter, you can even take away the fictional element sometimes. You can read Albert Fish's letters, and they will turn your stomach, but they are still inert letters. There's a boundary in place. The text itself creates that boundary.

Well, with interactive fiction, that boundary is stripped away. Especially with indie games like the Robyn Saga, where "indie" means that anyone -- anyone -- can make a game. Usually we think that this is good. Game developing tools are accessible to everyone! Yes, well, imagine if Albert Fish had made a Twine game and released it onto IFDB.

The Robyn Saga is written well enough, but not that well. It has a philosophical slant in places, but more often it feels as though you're reading about someone's personal fetishes. These fetishes become more and more grotesque. Was the author writing this because they wanted to legitimately explore the material, or because it turned them on?

I cannot say. I do not know. The games never establish trust with the reader. Never. You are on unstable ground the entire time, and then you reach The Prism. This game requires a password to unlock. When you unlock it, what you get is erratic text, sexually charged and violent, completely unhinged. It calls itself a "child porn simulator."

This is where I bailed. Oh, did I bail. As quickly as my little mouse could drag over to close the browser window.

Now, I have to say that if the Robyn Saga is truly an intellectual exercise, then wow was it a success at plunging into the most depraved depths. But if the author was writing about their own fetishes, using Twine as an outlet... then I don't want to know what The Prism contains.

Based on how carefully the first three games were structured, I am inclined to think that the Robyn Saga is well intentioned. Actually, I'm almost positive. But still... some doubt remains. And since interactive fiction can throw anything at you, from text to images to video, I now realize that I cannot tolerate even the smallest doubt. I don't have to trust Albert Fish to read his letters. I do have to trust a game designer to play a Twine game.

I'd like to see transgressive games being created. But an author writing one will need to tread very, very carefully -- much more carefully than they would when writing a book.