Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

First things first: when you play this game, turn off the time limit. For me, playing with a real-time counter on the screen turned my interaction with A Death in Hyperspace into an experience that was harrowing in all the wrong ways. And the game really doesn't need it.

With that out of the way, let's get to the review. This game was written by many authors, but it's not particularly large. In fact, each of the authors wrote a single character. This makes sense, because A Death in Hyperspace is a murder mystery in (what at first sight appears to be) a classic vein, and a murder mystery needs a lot characters -- as suspects. There's no good whodunnit without a large number of whos that might have dun it. And so it's your job as the space ship's AI to find out where the characters are, collect two clues about each of them, and then decide which of them to accuse.

Interestingly, there (Spoiler - click to show)doesn't seem to be any truth to be found; or rather, whomever you choose to accuse, it will always be presented as the right person. It feels a little more canonical to decide that the captain died from natural causes, in part because it's asymmetric compared to the other endings, and in part because you only unlock it on your second playthrough. Otherwise, though, anything goes. That's fine. The traditional murder mystery where all is revealed at the end is way too comforting; it's good to shake things up once in a while, and this is a way of shaking things up that requires the medium of interactive fiction, so it's a good fit. More could have been done with the moral implications of the baseless accusations that we indulge in in most endings, but I guess the authors wanted to keep things light-hearted.

Gameplay is not entirely successful. On the one hand, the game wants you to play more than once. On the other, it quickly turns into an exercise in finding two clues per character, accusing them, and collecting another ending for your trophy case.

What is most interesting about the piece is the experience of playing this obviously naive AI whose reading of murder mysteries completely structures the way they see the situation. It’s like Northanger Abbey, except mystery instead of romance. There is something fairly hilarious about the inane questions and accusations that form most of one’s dialogue options. Underneath the somewhat mechanical mystery, there is a poignant little comedy playing out, where the player character is too blinded by grief and excitement to see the plain truth: (Spoiler - click to show)that the captain died of natural causes. That is ultimately the point of the game.

At first, there are strong vibes of howling dogs. It's a Twine game set in a small cell-like environment -- though this time it's a space ship -- where we perform boring daily tasks and kill the time, while the environment seems to be decaying around us, and we experience strange dreams at night. A cookie cutter recreation of the original Twine sensation, then? Well, no, not at all.

The first difference that becomes apparent is the vibe. There's no sense of true alienation here, nor of helplessness, nor of confusion. The protagonist owns this space ship, even if its not much, and they have a measure of control over how they live -- if they can arse themselves to do it, they can tidy things up, grow plants, do some exercises. Basic self-care, sure, but there's a sense of ownership and accomplishment. "I can give you the gift of meaningful labour," is what a character will say to them later on, or words to that effect; and then too it is the mundane things, mixing a salad dressing and helping clean up a kitchen, that anchor life and self.

Basic self-care, and emails. It's a good storytelling device, used often because it works: messages coming to us from outside to paint a fuller picture of the world and our life. There's a father in the background, a friend who would like to meet us but is also willing to support us if we need to absent ourselves for a while, and a surprising amount of information about esotericism, including tarot, but mainly focused on some ancient Greek cultic beliefs which also inform some of the protagonist's dreams. The juxtaposition of spaceships and Eleusinian Mysteries is surprising, but it works.

It turns out that (Spoiler - click to show)we are travelling to a cult that made a base under the ground in some small, otherwise uninhabited planet. The cult is not scary at all; in fact, it feels a bit like coming home, seeing some old friends, sleeping in your old bed, having a sense of community. But the protagonist is here with a specific goal: they want to renounce their membership. The want to do undo the rituals, unsee the revelations, return to the state of the uninitiated. It's not clear whether this is possible, although there's certainly nobody who tries to stop them. It's perhaps also not clear what it means.

But, perhaps, if it means anything, it is renouncing dreams of what is beyond this world in order to truly anchor ourselves in meaningful labour. As they are returning to the awfully mundane, we must imagine them happy.

As you can no doubt tell, I liked Metallic Red. I especially admire its understated, subtle approach. There are wild elements here (space ships! cults!) but it handles them in a way that is the exact opposite of pulp, going instead for the quotidian, for the mundane, for the abandonment of grand grand dreams that mean to pull us away from the solid core of our very material life. We need no blind seers to show us the way.

Someone has died: our father, mother, grandmother or grandfather. The choice 'grandmother' feels canonical, since the author dedicates the game to Elizabeth Walton Williams who I think is their grandmother. But as far as I know the choice makes no difference to the game.

The deceased was a famous painter, and as part of their will they have left us seven paintings -- though not seven specific paintings. It is up to us to choose seven pieces from among those that are left in their atelier. This is where play starts. We are given brief descriptions of paintings, often though not always accompanied by a sentence indicating its emotional mood. Then we choose whether to take it or leave it. If we take it, the painting triggers a memory of our interactions with the deceased. These memories are somewhat randomised, although they are chosen to fit the painting at least a little. Both the chosen painting and memories are saved for the player's perusal. Once seven paintings have been chosen, a non-interactive scene follows in which the player character finishes an unfinished painting, taking inspiration from the colours, subjects and moods of the chosen paintings. This final painting and the stages of its completion are shown as pictures in the game itself -- the first and only time that the game uses visuals.

The game is highly polished, both when it comes to details such as the Twine customisation and the music that plays in the background, and when it comes to what is most important, the writing. The paintings are diverse and described as well as it is possible to describe a painting in a few sentences. And the memories, which are the most important parts of the prose, are interesting, vivid, and well-written. Some feel slightly more generic -- a burst of anger after the child ruined a canvas -- but others manage to generate a real sense of individuality -- such as the one about the bakery.

Necessarily, a character portrait done in seven brief memories remains impressionistic; or, to use another metaphor from the history of painting, cubist, giving us a few snapshots of the deceased from different directions, which suggest but don't actually constitute depth. There's only so much you can do with memories that are brief, few in number, and narratively independent from each other. I would hesitate to call what results a 'character study'. We remain far too much at the surface for that.

The mechanics of the piece raise questions both mundane and philosophical. One soon finds out that the total number of paintings is not very large; the 'next' painting seems to be chosen entirely randomly, so you will start seeing paintings twice, or even see the same painting twice in a row, as if the protagonist is too confused to remember which paintings they've already looked at.

More importantly, there is something strange about first choosing whether to keep the painting, and then getting a memory. Shouldn't we choose based on what the painting reminds us of? Of course the game needs to work the way it actually does, because it would deflate the experience if we could first check out all the memories and then had to choose seven from among them. You want to have seven memories, no more, and no going back. Still, the current set-up doesn't leave the player with much agency. The main thing one can do to steer the story one way or another is choose paintings with 'positive' emotions or paintings with 'negative' emotions; this will definitely colour the memories one gets, and it may also colour -- literally -- the final painting we ourselves make.

Here the philosophical question pops up. There are paintings both negative and positive. If we choose the negative paintings, our memory portrait of the deceased will be emotionally negative; if we choose positive paintings, our memory portrait will be positive. But this is clearly and explicitly a selection effect. We can only end up with negativity by ignoring the positive, and we can only end up with positivity by ignoring the negative. Is Imprimatura trying to tell us that we can form our own relation to the past by choosing what we want to remember? That's an interesting vision, no doubt, but it would seem to require us to abandon the quest for truth and perhaps authenticity. Given the centrality of these ideas to how Imprimatura works, I would have liked it to engage with such questions more deeply.

An extremely short puzzle game, at least in terms of moves needed and objects implemented – perhaps not so much in terms of time needed to solve it. The basic conceit is that the objects in the room you’re in are not named; you have to find out what they are by interacting with them. I’m fairly certain that I’ve seen this before in a more traditional text adventure when you find yourself in darkness, but I can’t remember where exactly, so perhaps I’m wrong.

It’s not too hard to get a basic idea of what the objects are, and after a fairly short time I was sitting on other thing with something in my hands and the thought of making other thing move. But I got completely stuck on the right command. (Spoiler - click to show)‘go’, ‘push other thing’, ‘hit other thing’, ‘press heels’, none of that worked. I needed the walkthrough to tell me to ‘ride’. A bit of an anticlimax, naturally.

There’s different endings depending on (Spoiler - click to show)whether you take the cat, which is a nice touch.

There’s an old chestnut in adventure games: the recipe. You’ve got to make a magic potion, and you have a recipe, and now you have to first collect the ingredients and then follow the steps of the recipe exactly… and you’ll get the potion. I’m pretty sure King’s Quest has that kind of stuff. Or maybe it’s a real recipe that you’re trying to make, as in Savoir-Faire. It’s not very engaging – usually the real gameplay is getting the ingredients, or getting things ready, and then actually following the recipe is more a little task you need to get out of the way before you get the reward. You don’t want too many of such tasks in your game. It bogs things down.

So it’s bold to build a game that is all about following instructions! Assembly is such a game, although its not recipes we’re following, but IKEA instruction manuals. It’s like having little walkthroughs in the game, telling you how to construct, and also deconstruct, many of the objects you meet. Our protagonist is good at following such rules. Indeed, they’re incredibly bad at not following rules, being unable to unscrew a light bulb without an instruction manual showing them how to do it.

This could have been very boring, but Assembly keeps the instructions short, gives us frequent rewards for successful assembly and disassembly, and, especially, gives us a series of nice puzzles around these mechanics. This is no doubt the only game where finding an IKEA instruction manual feels good – although, come to think of it, All the Troubles Come My Way has this too, so scrap that. The puzzles are good, starting with some simple ones, moving on to slightly more difficult (Spoiler - click to show)(such as the lamp puzzle), and ending with one that is both simple and over-the-top and yet completely logical, applying IKEA logic to IKEA itself, giving us the comic reward we deserved.

Well, I guess it ends with one that went the least smoothly for me, (Spoiler - click to show)because I didn’t realise there was a flatpack box in my location, and it felt a little bit like a regression after the great scene with the collapsing stacks… but that’s a nitpick. This game is fun and light-hearted. There are some Elder Gods involved, but it never goes to dark places… at least, not to dark places you can’t illuminate with a good STRÅLA.

Recent world events are fairly disheartening and would give a lot of comfort to those who believe that violence is the dominant force in human nature, if comfort were something that such people could be given. On my Mastodon account, I wrote:

The willingness of others to engage in massive violence and cruelty can make our own attempts at kindness seem so impotent and pointless.

That that is not so, that even the smallest human gestures are of supreme importance, that in some sense they redeem the world, that is the faith we need.

It’s not an easy faith, but there is no alternative.

I ended up liking The Witch quite a bit more than I started out liking it. It does a lot of stuff early on to make you bounce off of it, from having a map full of empty locations (most of them, unfortunately, in the beginning) to failing to implement prominent nouns.

What also made me consider quitting was the first puzzle I solved. (Spoiler - click to show)I get the sign, went to the beaver, brought it to the tree, get ten points… and then, happy as I was, typed ‘score’ and read that my puzzle solution had made the game unwinnable. As this was literally the first thing I did in the game, I found it rather discouraging!

But I persevered, and as I went on, I actually started liking the game more and more. The setting is more fun that it at first appears, with many neat little touches of world building and some good descriptions, especially around puzzle solutions. It also made sense, once I came across the mill, that my little adventure (Spoiler - click to show)with the beaver had the undesirable result it had. I came to appreciate the ‘score’ message as a helpful guide to what made the game unwinnable. And I started solving some of the puzzles, such as the mill and the mine, without hints, which made me feel good. These puzzles are not completely groundbreaking, but they are fresh enough to be fun. And the programming is very solid.

I wasn’t able to finish the game without hints, though, and that had mostly to do with implementation – so I strongly suggest that Charles returns to the game and make some changes based on what I’m going to say now, because it can greatly improve the experiences of future players. (Spoiler - click to show)(1) The owl puzzle could be better clued. Showing the seed leads to death, okay. But the current behaviour of the seed is rather overwhelming: dropping it anywhere in the game leads to instant death. This does not suggest that it’s possible to throw it at the owl in its den, given that the owl can instantaneously move to the other side of the map to kill me! I wasted quite some time trying to protect myself with a bucket on my head and things like that. Perhaps the seed should simply do nothing outside of the tree; and perhaps it can be a bit better clued that you might have the time to throw it. (2) I had the exact right idea with growing the peach tree, but “put plant food on peach pit” gives an error message, and so I abandoned the idea. This should probably just work! I also think it would be good to have a more positive message for dropping the pit at that location, and maybe allowing something like “put peach in mud”. (3) I also got stuck with ‘apricot’, but that was more my own fault for not being a thorough enough old-school adventure player. But it might be a bit better clued that you need to say a password to the mirror. I spent time trying to show it different objects. (4) When I crossed the river for the end game, the game told me that it had become unwinnable. But it hadn’t! I could still win, using the exact chain of commands in the walkthrough. I had all the right objects with me. Not sure what was going on there. (5) I’m not sure if I would have ever solved the final puzzle, but I love the idea of it: the race through the maze and the final imprisonment. Perhaps it would have bee nice to put an object somewhere in the maze over which the player trips the first time they go there? That would be a great clue.

All in all, I think The Witch is a really neat game. It has gotten a fairly cold shoulder in the reviews, which is unfortunate. Solving some of the implementation issues in the early game, and improving cluing of a few of the puzzles, could go a long way though. You’ll never get the love of people who don’t like difficult parser games, but you sure can get the love of those who do. It’s all solid, well thought out, and with some seriously good puzzle ideas.

It had to be a printer. Printers are evil. I'm relatively tech savvy, but the one computer accessory that I look at with trepidation is the printer. There's so much that can go wrong, and it's all so unclear. I mean, it would have been easy for Geoffrey to focus on a tech issue that makes the protagonist's mother look like an elderly ignoramus. But the steps needed to solve this printer problem are completely realistic, and realistically maddening. (Spoiler - click to show)Why can't that stupid printer just tell you that the paper is missing from the second tray? God knows that I have desperately clicked options like 'deep nozzle clean' in the hope that it would magically solve whatever unfathomable problem I had in the past. Also, after I tried to clean a printer with a leaking ink cartridge, I've sworn an oath to never every buy another inkjet printer... but (a) I ended up with a laser printer that somehow got toner in the inner machinery, and (b) my wife later bought another inkjet printer anyway. So printers are stronger than oaths, is all I'm saying.

In a sense, the tech issue in Fix Your Mother's Printer is only there to give a framework for family conversations. That too is very realistic. The practical is the justification, and then of course your mother wants to talk to you -- and at least as I played the protagonist, they also didn't mind talking to their mother. I liked the conversations, which hit some good personal notes and add interest to the game. It seemed to start out a little silly, with the mother's obsession for topiary, but ended up at a slightly more serious level that seemed to fit the game as a whole quite well.

I have two points of criticism, one about what the game sets out to achieve, one about how it sets out to do so. The former kind of criticism is always a little fraught: shouldn't I just judge a game on its own terms? Maybe. But I think Fix Your Mother's Printer could have been more memorable if it had given up on its intention to stay at the level of the light-hearted. These people have a bond, but they also have problems, and it would have been interesting and possible affecting if their bond had actually helped them gain more insight into those problems. One does not feel that (Spoiler - click to show)reconciliation between the parents comes any closer, or that the protagonist has gained any real insight into their romantic hang-ups. I would have loved the game to be more ambitious in that regard, even if it would have meant straying from the current tone.

The more internal criticism has to do with the choices we are being offered. There are way too many moments when the choices come down to "(A) be mean, (B) be neutral, (C) be nice". It felt a bit like the unfortunate type of CRPG dialogue (far too prevalent even in otherwise great games like Baldur's Gate 2) where the dialogue options often come down to "(A) be evil, (B) be neutral, (C) be good". It's not very interesting. It's not very clear why anyone would choose being nasty to their mother. And crucially, it means that you're making exactly *one* choice: your attitude. And then the rest of the game is just you either choosing the option that fits your attitude, or turning the character into a tonally inconsistent mess. The dialogue could have been more interesting if the author hadn't felt the need to support three tones throughout the game, and had instead focused on more interesting aspects of characterisation.

All in all, this game is simply very enjoyable.

Let me come right out and say I don't like the title of this game. Sure, I get the The Lord of the Rings reference, but, first of all, this game has nothing to with post-Tolkienian fantasy (precisely not!) and second, the suggestion that this king is just out to loot is totally wrong. The title sets low expectations that don't do justice to the remarkably fun game we actually find.

I don't think the main character is ever named, but we're obviously playing Conan the Barbarian as written by Robert E. Howard. It's perhaps important to emphasise that Howard's Conan is not stupid and does not overcome his foes through brute force alone. He's a cunning guy who manages to become king and isn't at all bad at ruling, even though some of his subjects resent his origins among the barbarians. Brouwer follows these ideas to the letter. I'm almost certain that there's a Howard story that starts exactly like One King to Loot them All, with Conan as king being surprised by some magical assassin whom he defeats; but even if I'm wrong about that, our game is pitch-perfect Howardian Sword & Sorcery. Even the prose is Howardian, which is admittedly not an unreserved compliment -- Howard tends to indulge a bit too much in long sentences and rare words that do not quite add up to great prose (although not as much as his friend and fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith). There's something of that here too, which is especially noticeable in the error messages, that are too long to be easily scanned and mentally discarded.

It's almost impossible not to be reminded of Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom when playing One King to Loot them All, because both are restricted parser games with a barbarian protagonist. But actually they do not have much in common. S. John Ross's game is a geographically open puzzler involving quasi-RPG-style character progression, whereas Onno Brouwer's game is a tight story-line with no real puzzles to speak of. Perhaps even more importantly, Ross' barbarian really is stupid, and the limited verb set is used to streamline puzzle design. Brouwer's Conan is pretty smart (he has no trouble explaining the logic he used to get through the paths of order and chaos) and the limited parser is used to... yeah... mostly to tease the player with some intentional parser frustrations, actually! (Spoiler - click to show)One's inability to open the wine bottle is pretty funny, as is the fact that this puzzle solution if given away in the Help text, where you probably won't notice it. (Though I did. Right when I was about to give up in the Pit.) There are some real parser frustrations, though, which don't help. (E.g., "water" is not a synonym of "waters", the two guards cannot be disambiguated by the adjectives the game itself applies to them, etc.) I can imagine that some players hit their head against a wall. A pit wall, perhaps.

But they really should keep playing. For what had been an entertaining if far from perfect sword & sorcery romp, suddenly turned into a game that had me play it with a giant grin on my face, (Spoiler - click to show)a grin that grew bigger and bigger when I realised how far I could undo, and then, that I could save the priestess, and then, that everything after that also subtly changed (including the nice scene where the priestess points out that she should be the sacrifice), and... well, yes, it was just lovely. The final fight with the necromancer was a tad confusing (I never really understood how the interception worked), but otherwise it was so much fun. Including the revelation about the three chosen ones.

The one thing I think is a little sad is that you can't actually (Spoiler - click to show)start UNDOing when you've just opened up a new game. Famously, you can win Slouching towards Bedlam on the first turn, but by taking an action that you only have reason to take once you've finished the game and know what's going on. One King to Loot them All could also allow the player the freedom to start on the winning path immediately; if anyone stumbles upon it without preparation, that's fine too!

Anyway, really nice game.

It’s pretty clear from, well, everything that the protagonist is going to be lured into a Battle Royale style game involving real death. So I guess it’s a Battle Royale battle royale game, where the italicised & capitalised phrase is the title of the 2000 Japanese movie about a high school class that has to fight to the death, and the second phrase is the name of the gaming genre named after the film, which usually does not involve real death. Turning a battle royale style game into a Battle Royale style game… yeah, that’s kind of meta. But GameCeption is not afraid of being meta.

(Spoiler - click to show)I didn’t quite guess the plot development where we are actually playing our partner and then have to go out into the world to rescue him. Maybe that’s in part because it makes no sense. How exactly did we control them? And how is it possible that all these players that were originally in the physical arena didn’t die instantly when they were chopped down with an axe / exploded / were overrun by a car, but all had the chance to phone their partners? To your questions there will be no answers. Better to revel in the terribly clichéd but still satisfying survival part of the game, and then the ultra obvious and nevertheless also satisfying dynamite scene. Oh, and the “you are the player” meta joke at the end. You really must turn off your critical thinking and just go along, but if you do so, it’s great fun. And I think that’s what GameCeption wants to be: great fun. It’s not so bad to be the player.

Several reviewers said they wanted to see more depth to the relationship between the characters. But I don’t think that would work. It’s camp! Embrace the cheesiness! Take that car and go full Carmageddon! More emotional depth is something for a different game, is what I think. And if you disagree with me, please hold this bundle of dynamite while I hide behind the corner with this remote control.

I'm still not sold on Texture. There's the weird bug with the extremely small button text, but let's ignore that. Then there's still the problem that the affordances of the text are hidden; that is, you cannot see at a glance how you can interact with the screen; you have to grab each button in turn just to find out what your choices are, then go back to grab the button you want and go to the place where you can drop it. It's so much more laborious than link clicking, that there should be a large upside to make it worth it. But I'm not yet seeing it. All Hands, for instance, could just as well have been done in Twine.

Now we'll talk about the game itself. No, I'm lying! I first want to make a completely random comment about the blurb. This is the entire blurb: "The sea is calling you. Its voice is getting louder." And that is such pitch perfect Fallen London / Sunless Sea prose that I was surprised to find out that the game is not Failbetter Games fan fiction! But it's really not.

So let's finally talk about All Hands. It's a short story about someone who enters what it for all intents and purposes a ghost ship. They've always been drawn to the sea, but their farmer father forbade them to so much as think about anything nautical. And perhaps with good reason, because their sister drowned in the sea; more than that, was pulled under by waves that seemed hungry for her. Now the mysterious ship that has been sailing in this neighbourhood has come to shore, and of course you enter it, drawn in by the fascinating woman who owns it. Once you're on board, there's a geographically organised exploration section in which you can find several songs. When you are finished, you return to the woman in charge, dance with her, choose a song to sing... and depending on that song, you get one of several endings.

All Hands is nicely atmospheric. (Spoiler - click to show)I think it might not have been a great design decision to hide the room which explains the backstory most behind a lock that can only be opened if one has picked up the compass in the beginning; especially because it is extremely easy to miss this compass. After my first playthrough, I thought the story made no sense. Only on my second playthrough, when I got the compass, did things click. (I especially enjoyed the fact that you get a puzzle and then the protagonist just solves it without your input.) The 'good' ending, where the magic is dispelled and the characters embrace each other, was a fairly nice surprise.

I enjoyed this snack sized game, and would gladly play something more substantial by the author.

So here's a strange autobiographical fact, or at least, a fact that felt strange when I started playing The Whisperers. I once made some plans for an IF in the form of a play. The players would not play any particular role, but would only make choices only at the end of scenes, choices that decided the final outcome. I can't at the moment remember the title I had in mind (though I suspect I have plot sketches somewhere in a drawer), but I certainly remember the setting: that would have been Russia during the time of the Stalin purges. So... I guess those sketches can remain where they are, because Milo van Mesdag has very much beaten me to it!

Now my game would have been a piece of interactive fiction. Milo's piece, on the other hand, very much wants to be a play, and one feels that he mostly put it in interactive fiction form because it's hard to find a theatre group to performs one's script! This is not to say that it doesn't work as a piece of IF. But there are certain aspects of The Whisperers, including some of its most intriguing ones, that don't translate well to the medium in which we currently experience it.

The most obvious of these is the whispering. Most of the characters are whispering most of the time (and should be heard through microphones -- not sure if that really works to be honest, but maybe it does). That's in part because this is Stalinist Moscow, and the secret police is everywhere. But it's also because they're all living in the same 'paper wall' apartment, where everyone hears everything. And they're living in that apartment with a member of the secret police. A not insubstantial part of the characterisation is done through voice volume. Sergei speaks up, especially in the beginning, when he's still a confident young officer of the NKVD. The Guide always speaks at full volume. But most of the other characters do not, or only when they forget themselves.

The main plot is fairly simple, and the choices of the audience don't make that much difference. Young Agnessa has followed her brother Sergei to Moscow. But she's not a Stalinist; in fact, she's a secret Trotskyist who believes that Stalin has betrayed the revolution! She falls in love with the young architect Nikolai, and he with her, and gets pregnant. Her dream is to strike a blow against false ideology, and Agnessa and Nikolai conspire to bomb the foundations of the new Palace of the Soviets. (In reality, this megalomaniac construction project was dismantled and abandoned during WW2.) Depending on the audience's choices, this may or may not succeed, but either way, they end up getting caught.

There's a subplot about a middle-aged couple, a Russian man and a Ukrainian woman. The woman's entire family has starved to death in Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine that Stalin intentionally exacerbated. She has taken to the dangerous practice of icon worshipping. And there's a very minor subplot about Sergei's ability to find enough traitors to condemn to death.

It's all interesting enough, and the underlying research is immaculate. But I'm not entirely sold on the plot or the characters. There's something nihilistic about it. The three men have all found ways to submit to the state. It's only the women who dare to have any individuality: Dariya through her religious parctices, and Agnessa through her political action. But surely Dariya's husband, Georgy, is right when he points out that God will also listen if you don't endanger yourself with the possession of physical icons. As for Agnessa... in another review, I read the suggestion that we are supposed to empathise with her political ideals. But I don't believe that. Sure, Trotsky looks pretty good when you compare him to Stalin's terror and remind yourself of the fact that Stalin had him killed with an axe. But Milo has no doubt very carefully chosen to highlight one particular episode from Trotsky's thinking in the play: his stance on the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion. In that rebellion against the Bolsheviks, sailors and civilians demanded, and I'm quoting Wikipedia:

reduction in Bolshevik power, newly elected *soviets* to include socialist and anarchist groups, economic freedom for peasants and workers, dissolution of the bureaucratic governmental organs created during the civil war, and the restoration of civil rights for the working class.

*To Sea in a Sieve* is a prequel to *To Hell in a Hamper*, J. J. Guest's 2003 game where you find yourself in a hot air balloon with a crazy person who has brought way too many heavy items. That game was a sequence of puzzles about getting rid of all these objects; because if you don't, you're both going to die. The setup of *To Sea in a Sieve* is... more or less identical, except that this time you're in a boat, and your companion is a pirate captain who wants to bring all his treasures. I wonder if the character of the pirate captain was inspired by the captain from Ryan Veeder's game *Captain Verdeterre's Plunder*, or whether Veeder and Guest are just both leaning into standard pirate tropes.

I looked up my review of *To Hell in a Hamper* and found this final paragraph:

My single complaint is that the game doesn't actually contain that many *jokes*. It has a good comic setup, and some of the stuff you discover inside Booby's coat is hilarious; but there are few events or descriptions in the rest of the game that make one laugh or smile. This game would have benefited from having Admiral Jota as a co-author; his gift for stuffing a game full of funny remarks would have been very effective here.

Heist games are well-known genre, and with good reason. There's a clear goal that requires ingenuity to achieve; there's a spatial and temporal element that fits IF world building well; and of course here are opportunities for puzzles and suspense. As others have noted, The Finders Commission starts of with some pretty bizarre world building (and a weird choice between what seem to be five indistinguishable characters). But then it quickly turns into a fairly standard heist game. There's the museum; there are some people to either manipulate or watch out for; a few opportunities for puzzle solving; and if it all goes well, you walk out with the loot!

Apart from one possible bug (the box that I believe I needed to turn off the alarm suddenly disappeared from my inventory), everything was solidly implemented. It's bit strange that you cannot investigate the display before launching the chariot -- the first few times I tried, I got interrupted, but later on the room was empty and I still wasn't allowed to read the label. This threw me for a while. But I ended up solving the puzzles without too much trouble, felt some nice tension as I had to defeat a timed sequence, and was satisfied. There's nothing truly memorable or innovative about the game, but it succeeds at being what it wants to be.

The biggest mystery of all was the breakfast my character claimed to be their favourite: buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy. This sounded like the worst and most implausible thing in existence, so I did some googling, and found recipes in which I saw: biscuits that did not look like biscuits; sausages that did not look like sausages (but more like the minced meat you might put into a sausage); and most of all, gravy that really, really did not look like gravy. From what I gathered, it was more something like minced meat in a creamy sauce. All of which left me only more flabbergasted. Cookies served with meat and cream? As a breakfast? Now this is a mystery someone should make a game about!

Allison's game is a very effective piece that puts you into the role of someone who stutters, as they get through a day in which they need to perform several tasks that involve talking. Interactivity is key. By giving you the choices that the protagonist faces, and letting you live through their successes and failures, Dysfluent does more to generate understanding of what it's like to stutter than a non-interactive story does. The use of slow timed text, usually a big no-no, is actually something you are not allowed to complain about in this case. To complain about it would be to refuse to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes -- and while that's fine for, let's say, some random horror game, it's not fine for a piece that is all about generating understanding of a real-world phenomenon.

I love the use of colours in this game: green dialogue options are easily said, yellow ones will come out with some difficulty, red indicates a full-on block. I assume that it's a good reflection of how the protagonist experiences their stuttering. It's not a complete surprise; there's some premonition of what you'll be able to say, and what you won't be able to say (as easily). And it generates some excellent dilemmas. The best of those is during the job interview, where you can choose fluency (green) or accurateness (yellow). Of course you choose accuracy. And then you get another choice, but not fluency is green and accurateness is red. Ouch. What do you do? It's a tough call, and of course that's precisely the point. (I also enjoyed the sense of dread when, after telling the game what my favourite food was, I also had to tell it what my least favourite food was...)

If I have any criticism, it might be that the way the world reacts to the protagonist is so insensitive that it strains incredibility. Especially the flashbacks are all just straightforwardly horrible. I hope they weren't taken from real life, though they have something of the autobiographical about them. It seems to me that even when I was a kid, stuttering was explained to me in terms that were far more nuanced than those used by the supposedly professional specialist we meet here in the therapy scene.

But overall, I think this is simple a very good piece of interactive fiction. It's solid as fiction, built on smart design decisions, and it's effectiveness as a tool for generating understanding boosts it further.

The best moment in The Sculptor is the description of the final statue. This is a hard moment for any artist. When you're writing about a fictional masterwork, you need to describe a masterwork in terms that make it believable for the reader -- but of course, without having to actually make that masterwork yourself. Here's what Yakoub gives us: an old nude man, wrestling down a falcon that attempts to peck his heart, raising a scythe with which to kill the falcon; meanwhile, the old man is being strangled by his own beard, and water flows around his feet, washing the shame away.

What I love about this is how it audaciously combines several motifs from European art into a single vision. The man is, clearly, Old Man Time, or Death, with his scythe. But he's also Saint Michael fighting the dragon, as well as Prometheus, his innards being pecked at by a bird. And being strangled by his own beard, well, this cannot help but remind one of Laocoön being strangled by the snakes. As for the water, I heard these lines of Elliot in my mind:

A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.

On the marble's waves ran the memories of your lost days.
And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.

On the marble's waves danced the memories of lost days, shimmering and distorted as one, two, three tears squeezed past your wrinkled lids.

Is The Little Match Girl my favourite fairytale? There are other fairytales that have better, more interesting stories. But ever since I was a kid, The Little Match Girl has had a special place in my heart because it makes me cry. Not that it's that hard to make me cry. In fact, dear readers, it's (in)famously easy. When in Piglet's Big Movie Piglet realised that the other animals were really his friends, I cried. And I was 40 years old when I watched it. When I and my wife have a spat, I usually end up holding back my tears while my wife complains that it's no fun being angry with me because I cry too easily. But most fairytales don't go for the tear ducts. Except, of course, for The Little Match Girl, which goes for it in the most direct and melodramatic way possible. What can I say? It's not great art, but I love it.

Although The Little Match Girl 4 is ostensibly by Hans Christian Andersen, it doesn't have much to do with the original story. Not having played the previous instalments, I rely on the in-game background to tell you that the original little match girl, instead of dying in the Copenhagen snows, found that the she could travel through time and space by looking intensely into a fire. She then became a sharpshooter and vampire hunter, as well as the adopted daughter of Dickens's Scrooge, who christened her Ebenezabeth. All of which makes little sense. Luckily, however, Ryan Veeder has a talent for taking something that makes little sense and then handling it as if he had no inkling about its senselessness... and then it starts making sense. Throwing together crazy ideas and then revelling in their craziness tends to get old pretty fast. But throwing together crazy ideas and then moving forward as if it's all perfectly normal, well, that is a way to generate unique and memorable settings. And I don't know if there's anyone in the IF scene who has developed that technique as much as Ryan has.

TLM4 is a light puzzle parser game with all the impeccable writing and smooth gameplay that one expects from a Veeder game. It's supposedly inspired by *Metroid Prime*, which I haven't played, but I gather that the basic idea is that you get new powers as you move forward, and these powers open up new passageways in areas you have already visited. In this case, your list of powers is simple: the ability to transport through fire, shooting flaming bullets, turning into a mouse, scanning things, and unlocking anything. All the puzzles in the game require you to use one of these powers, so it's fairly easy to get through everything without using the hints. You'll visit a wide variety of locations, which are heavily interconnected, and all of which correspond to one or another standard genre trope: dinosaurs, vampires, pirates, the Old West, spaceships. But Ryan brings enough charm and slight twists to each of them to make them feel fresh. The vampires are trapped in a terrible endless meeting; the pirates are, if I'm not mistaken, straight from Gilbert & Sullivan; the spaceship is being looted by space pirates who are more interested in vague mischief than real harm; and the journal you find near to an abandoned mine is... not what you expect. It doesn't cohere into a single setting, but all of it is fun.

The most intriguing thing about TLM4 is its tone. So much about it screams 'light-hearted fun' that I'm tempted to say that this is a game of light-hearted fun. The off-beat genre takes. The smooth, simple puzzles. The standard video game trajectory of getting more and more powers. The basic treasure finding plot line. And yet... it is quite obvious that at least one person is not having fun, and that is the little match girl herself. She is, if not quite a tormented person, at the very least troubled; even, perhaps, a little dead on the inside. We are told repeatedly that she no longer has the ability to be astonished at the majestic grandeur of the universe. She claims to make friends in all kinds of places, but she doesn't make friends at all, and the only person she has an emotional connection with is a guy she cannot forgive. And then there's a brief scene where we are transported back to Copenhagen, to the snow, to the hovel where she, as a child, is suffering with her brothers and sisters, waiting for salvation. It's all there in the game, but it's never really thematised; it's not hidden, but still never allowed to take over from the light-hearted fun.

I'm tempted to read all of that as a parable of Ryan Veeder's creative activity. If you follow him, you see a man who creates fun in many ways: elaborate RPG campaigns, highly polished IF games, cute plush toys, music tracks. But there's a darkness there too, never allowed to take over the work, but never quite absent. Like the little match girl, Veeder is shooting his flaming bullets around for all of us to enjoy -- but who knows how he feels on the inside?

Which is probably terrible psychologising. But hey, that's a parable for *my* creative activity; always trying to bring that darkness to light, get it out in the open, put it at the centre of attention, and then, if I really indulge myself (which I usually try not to), go for the tear ducts. What can I say? I love it.

Magor is an Italian cheese made up of alternating layers of Mascarpone and Gorgonzola. (The name, which is an obvious portmanteau of the names of the two constituting cheeses, is apparently mostly used in the Netherlands.) It's what you buy when the strong taste of Gorgonzola seems a bit too much, and you want something smoother, less adventurous. Of course, when you're eating it, the enjoyment is somewhat tinged by regret. Why didn't you get the straight Gorgonzola?

Magor is also an old magician in Larry Horsfield's extensive Alaric Blackmoon series, of which this is the first game I've played. He's more the goofy Merlin from Disney's The Sword in the Stone than a serious Gandalf type, prone as he is to losing his spectacles, and given as he is to using most of his magical talents for the production of whisky. But Magor is pretty effective when he wants to be. When the king and duke Blackmoon come to you and ask you to find out what their family connection is, you quickly solve a sequence of problems (all there for you in the Tasks list) and give them the answer they crave.

I've had less-than-optimal experiences with Adrift games in the past, having fought the parser much more than I'd like to. But Magor Investigates... is truly one of the smoothest parser experiences ever. Whether we should thank Adrift 5 for that, or whether Larry is just a really good implementer and had really good testers, I don't know, but it's something for which the game must be applauded. Larry is certainly responsible for the detailed implementation of objects, the quality of life features, the useful messages when you're doing things not quite right, and all the other little touches that make the game feel helpful and interested in your success.

I'm less sold on the aesthetics of the game. Like many Adrift games, it has the look and feel of a 1996 website hosted on GeoCities, with sans serif fonts in multiple colours on a black background. The only thing that's missing are animated gifs that make fun of Bill Gates! At one point, the game even seemed to switch to Comic Sans... but that must have been an illusion. It must have been. Of course none of this really impacts one's enjoyment of the game, but I don't understand why the Adrift Runner doesn't look a little bit more professional. (I should try Frankendrift to see if that's better.)

On to the substance of the game. As Magor, you have to solve a sequence of 'puzzles' in order to get the information the king and the duke wants. I've put 'puzzles' between scare quotes not because the puzzles are especially scary, but because they're not scary at all; they're so not scary that one wonders whether they are really puzzles, or simply tasks one has to perform. Not that I minded. I liked pottering about, relaxing, enjoying the descriptions, which are pretty enjoyable in a low-key, relaxed way. It's a no stress 'adventure'. I've put 'adventure' between scare quotes not because... well, I guess you get the idea.

Indeed, although my play experience had been extremely smooth and quite enjoyable, I nevertheless wondered why all of it had been *this* low-key. The central stakes of the game are so incredibly tame. The king and duke already know that they are related, and now they want to know exactly where in their vast lineage this link happened... well, turns out it was six generations ago. Not very exciting, but they immediately start a huge party! I think it would have been way more surprising if two nobles had not been related to each other in the sixth generation, and it also got me thinking that the Axe of Kolt, which can only be used by those with the blood of... I forgot his name... must be usable by, oh, I don't know, but after so many generations, it must be usable by almost everyone in the kingdom, right? Anyway... I suppose I was eager for a little more adventure. It was really nice to play this game, but next time, I'd prefer to leave out the Mascarpone and go for the straight Gorgonzola.

I'll spend some of this review being critical about the prose of this entry, but I'd like to start with the good stuff, of which there is quite a bit. First off, there's the pictures. There's not that many of them, but they help not only set the mood, but also make the people you interact with more concrete. The immediate, visual knowledge of who it is that has walked into the coffee shop somehow makes the encounters more real; and therefore it makes it all the more disconcerting when you have to pick one of them as the potential serial killer. It's all the more disconcerting because there is literally no reason to think any one of them is guilty of so heinous a crime, and the only reason you, as a player, are likely to pick a name anyway, is that the police imply very strongly that they'll try to prosecute you if you don't.

The scenario is pretty fun too! It's a good choice to start the game with the police interrogation. This ensures that the coffee shop scenario, which is relatively slow in terms of the build-up of tension, is immediately charged. You're already looking at all the NPCs with suspicion, which is precisely what the games wants you to do. And it feels less strange that the protagonist is so easily scared, because we know that's she's right to be scared. I enjoyed wondering what was going on, and I enjoyed no knowing what to do when I was called on to accuse someone. Then... well, depending on what you choose, you may either be left in the dark (which I suspect is not a very satisfying ending to get) or you may find out what is really happening... and that's pretty horrific. A good twist ending that left me blinking in disbelief for a while. (On further reflection, it's an extremely literal take on the idea that you shouldn't fear people who don't look like you, but you should fear people who DO look like you. A pretty good idea for a horror story!)

I don't think you can do much in the game to learn more about what is happening, or to change the outcome. If you can, I'd love that, and it would raise my rating of the game. But I didn't find any promising avenues to explore.

Okay, so as I indicated in the beginning, the weakest part of *Please Sign Here* is the prose. It's always possible to understand it, but it's marred by frequent grammatical mistakes and sentences that don't quite work in a variety of ways. Sometimes it's a metaphor gone awry:

Silence cuts through Jackie's next intended sentence.

The cop returns the evidence and brings forth new ones.

Until close! No butts!

It begins to thunder outside, and the lights of the store flickers. Jackie makes a move to look out the window, rain blearing reality and greyness together. The road is empty, and the light from the streetlamp barely illuminates against the concrete.

Of course I should have known there would be a devil from the title alone, or if I'd actually looked at the cover art instead of just clicking that 'Play' link. In In the Details we take on the role of a young musician, a burgeoning pop star, who is about to play the biggest gig of their lives, the gig that will catapult them to serious fame. It's slightly weird to soon find out that we're drunk or high -- not a smart choice. But a few minutes later, we understand the immense stress that the protagonist must have been under. For all their talent is actually borrowed from the devil, and they failed to return it on the agreed upon day. Well. That can't end well. And guess who that is, waiting for you in the dressing room?

In the Details is a very short game. Depending on your choices, you can be eviscerated immediately. have your neck snapped, or be forced to perform with no talent at all. The latter seems to be the 'canon' choice, since it's the only one to suggest that the story will be continued.

It's all very fine, but it's a very short game which is over by the time we're getting into it. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it, something that really got me to think, was the purposeful use of a bug. When the devil, still in disguise, asks you to tell him the secret of his success, you can drag either "Truth" or "Lie" to the option. But dragging "Truth" doesn't do anything! I don't know how Texture works, but I assume this is just the result of a programming bug... except that the bug must be intentional. There's simply no way you can tell anyone this truth. It's close to Texture's equivalent of a grayed out choice in ChoiceScript, except that here, you won't know about the impossibility until you try it.

Max Fog's Milliways: the Restaurant at the End of the Universe is an old-school parser puzzler, and an explicit homage to the Infocom games of yore. Not only does it bill itself as a sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is also written in ZIL, the programming language used by Infocom. This makes it a little bit awkward to review, at least for me. On the one hand, there are certain design decisions which I personally think we're better off without, including the inventory limit and the fact that you can easily put the game in an unwinnable state. On the other hand, it makes absolute perfect sense to make those decisions when you're explicitly positioning yourself in the tradition of Infocom games. So let's let all of that slide.

Milliways puts us in the shoes of... well, I think it's strongly implied that these are the shoes of Arthur Dent, hapless earthling, as he is travelling space and time with his 'friends' Ford, Beeblebrox, Marvin and Trillian. The game explains almost nothing about its setting and characters, and prior knowledge of Douglas Adams's books is almost necessary to not feel completely lost. Perhaps it also helps to have played the Infocom game; I can't say, because I haven't played it. Descriptions in the game tend to be very short and/or non-existent, or even downright unhelpful:

> x television
What did you expect? It’s a TV.

The premise of All the Troubles Come My Way is exceptionally silly: you are a cowboy who has been transported 150 years into the future. You wake up in a bathtub (an empty one) and the point of the game is to find your missing cowboy hat. Or procure another hat that suits you. But this premise is worked out with a lot of what we can maybe call southern charm, as well as tobacco grit, and when all else fails, a real sense of rodeo, so I think we should say that Sam Dunnachie does cowboy justice to it. Those are the four 'stats' of the game, and mechanically, much of the gameplay consists in finding ways to increase these stats, since you'll need different stats to follow different paths to a cowboy hat. Cowboy Justice allows you to find your real hat; Southern Charm allows you to out-hustle the hat-wearing hustler; and I assume that the other two stats unlock their own paths (it's strongly hinted at that Tobacco Grit will allow you to go to the discount shop).

It's all genuinely charming. My favourite part was probably that involving the IKEA manual and the table, but all the interactions are well-written and inventive. So I enjoyed my time with the game. It's not a long time; All the Troubles Come My Way is very short. Indeed, the stat raising part in the apartment lasts longer than the actual quest to retrieve a hat, which feels a bit unbalanced. But it's a minor complaint. This entry is not very ambitious, but it delivers the entertainment it wants to deliver, and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Earlier his year, I read Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a truly great book of popular science about the Neanderthals. So I had some of the background that one might need to fully appreciate Cecilia Dougherty's story about Neanderthals, Shanidar, Safe Return. Not that the piece is only accessible to people who already know something about its topic; but it can't have hurt that terms like 'Neanderthal' and 'Denisovan' alreasy meant something to me, and that I was able to get some of the many references to archaeological finds. (On the other hand, I did not play Time Before Memory, to which Shanidar is a sequel.)

In Shanidar, we follow a group of Neanderthals as they make their way from one of the most impressive archaeological sites associated with them (Bruniquel Cave in present-day France) to another of those most impressive sites (Shanidar Cave in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan). Bruniquel Cave is famous for the circle of stalagmites built by the Neanderthals. We have no idea why they did it; whether it had a religious meaning, or an artistic meaning, or something else; in Shanidar, the site is a focal point for ancestor worship and shamanistic ritual. Shanidar Cave is famous for its burials, and some of the characters in Shanidar not only end up being buried there, but are indeed identifiable as specific skeletons, Shanidar 1 and Shanidar 4 being clearly referenced. This plays somewhat fast and loose with the archaeology, since those skeletons might have been buried there many thousand years apart... but frankly, what writer could resist the temptation? I for one was waiting the entire game until somebody got the right kind of head wound to turn them into Shanidar 1.

The structure of the piece is fairly strange. There are several parts to the game, and each is laid out not so much as a linear narrative, nor as a garden of forking paths, but more as a tapestry in which your gaze can follow different strands that happen parallel to each other, and then hop back to follow another strand. Initially, I found this very confusing, and it does tax the reader that one often reads passages that refer to events of other passages that one has not yet read. One has to put oneself into what for want of a better word I will call a cubistic mood, thinking here of the paintings by Picasso and Braque that show objects in disconnected ways and from different sides. You'll have to piece things together yourself, but you'll manage to get a relatively clear picture, especially if you are willing to replay parts of the game.

Two things make the experience more difficult than perhaps it might have been. First, there are many names. I understand the impulse to show these societies in a broad way, and also to show three different groups of early humans in one game. But perhaps it's a bit much for a piece of this size. Second, the choice to name one of the characters 'you', even though this character is not much more central than some others and is not a focal point of choices, is quite confusing. It seems to be that the game would have been a bit clearer if everything had been in the third person.

In the end, reading Shanidar, Safe Return is a strange experience. We are always at a considerable emotional distance from the characters, nor do we make choices for them. We observe a story that is both wide-ranging and long -- indeed, there's even a strand about the people who will move to Australia and Oceania, and there are flash-forwards to today -- and which doesn't have much narrative pay-off. Sure, these people who have survived an attack manage to get to their safe haven, but we never doubted that and weren't too invested in them. On the other hand, there's a intriguing sense of scope. Something of the mystery of thinking about and dealing with the Deep Past has been captured here, perhaps better than it could have been captured in a more straightforward narrative.

There's a tension in Rebecca Wragg Sykes's book, in that she both wants us to be impressed by how different the Neanderthals were, and by how close they are to us (in fact, they are partly our ancestors, though not nearly as much as the Cro-Magnon humans). The moral is something like: we should celebrate the diversity of humans, because there's an underlying unity; it's great that we're different, because we are also one. It's hard to see how this works. It's hard to see how tales about common ancestry can effectively combat racist thinking, say, unless uses them to squash diversity. In Shalidar, the idea of common ancestry comes in the form of an ancient shaman called Bihotz, neither male nor female, and from before the splitting of humans into Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Denisovan. They are a fascinating figure, but there's something of the same problem about them. It's hard to use the idea of primordial unity for the cause of celebrating diversity. I don't have a clear suggestion for a better way of approaching these issues, but perhaps it is something we can contemplate as we let our minds roam through the Deep Past.

Virtue: an interactive narrative is a short-to-medium choice-based game about an English middle-class woman whose pathetic need to feel like she's made it, like she's one of the successful 'haves', puts her on a path towards darkness -- where darkness is, more or less, Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman. The point of the game is clearly political. It wants to pull the mask from the xenophobic, transphobic, everything-phobic Tory right and show us the ideological emptiness and self-serving psychology beneath. The protagonist of our game, Gloria, is shown to be the type of person who can fall for this sort of politics, even to the point of becoming such a politician herself.

This is not an easily achievable set of intentions, but I can see at least three ways of making it work. One would be to lean sharply into one's political disgust, showing the disastrous human effects of the policies one opposes. A second would be to ramp up the satire and lean into humour, taking the protagonist all-too-seriously while turning her into a laughingstock. A third would be to go for sympathy and understanding, showing in psychological detail why the protagonist, without being in any sense a terrible person, nevertheless ends up in a terrible political place.

I don't think Virtue works very well in its current incarnation, and I believe that is in part because Oliver tries to do all of these things, and perhaps other too, at once. But they don't mix very easily. A lot of time is spent on showing us the inside of Gloria's thinking, which fits the third, sympathetic approach. But her thinking is so shallow and self-serving that we don't actually feel like she's a real human being. At the same time, it's too realistic, too repetitive, to provoke laughter. And precisely because we never leave Gloria's mind (and her obsession with appearances), we don't really see the effects of her actions. It feels like the game knows exactly what it wants to be about, but it doesn't really know how it wants to be about that.

One feels that because of this, the writing also doesn't succeed nearly as well as it could have. Passages are often overly long -- making points that were already clear, such as the shallowness of Gloria's middle-class ambitions -- again and again. But they also tend to be a bit vague. In this respect, the encounter with the Polish man stands out. Here the reader is trying to understand what has actually happened near the canal (is it a flasher? sexual assault? something else?), but the game is vague about that because it also wants to establish the embarrassment of the Polish doctor in talking about this, and the embarrassment of Gloria in not remembering his name, and the fact that these people are making too much out of a relatively minor incident, and Gloria's incipient xenophobic thoughts, and Gloria's determination to be a strong woman, and her panic as her dream is threatened... which is a lot, and it's all mixed together, and none of it comes out as clearly as it could have. I think with a more consistent aim, it would have been easier to find a more consistent tone, and thereby to write more entertaining, to-the-point dialogue. Suppose we go for humurous, biting satire.

"There's a streecker in the park," he whispers.
(A) A streecker? What's that? Must be some weird Polish word. If only the people who were allowed to come here did their best to learn proper English.
(B) Probably one of those foreign foodstuffs. Raw mutton with garlic, or whatever they eat in the Balkans.
(C) Oh, wait. A streaker. How unseemly!

A Dark and Stormy Entry was an entry in LOTECH Comp 2001, a competition in which the most important rule was that the games had to have a multiple-choice parser. The title of the game, and the fact that it appeared under the pseudonym of Lord Lobur-Bytton, suggest that it will be a send-up of the bad, purple writing associated with Lord Bulwer-Lytton and his "It was a dark and stormy night" opening sentence. However, there are only a few story branches (the Scotland/gothic ones in particular) that actually present overwritten prose. And a good thing that is too, because that joke would have worn thin very quickly.

In fact, A Dark and Stormy Entry has less to do with Bulwer-Lytton and more with Italo Calvino's book "If on a Winter Night a Traveller...". In that book, Calvino tells the story of a reader who, in their search for a book, comes across opening chapters of many different books. Again and again a story is started that is then abruptly cut of and never finished. The stories are in widely different genres and styles.

This is what Short does in A Dark and Stormy Entry too, except that the player takes the role, not of a reader, but of a writer. We are looking at a blank page, and our job is to make decisions about which story to tell. These decisions lead us into widely different directions, from Calvino-like stories about a philosopher who ties himself to a kite, only to be rescued by a sensual queen; to autobiographical stories about teenagers having to confess that they have had sex to their prudish parents; to clichéd Macbeth-like stories involving witches on the Scottish highlands; to strange explorations of a world that is a cube. All the branches are short, and we are clearly supposed to play the game many times. Sometimes, we are told that the ideas will lead to a novel. Sometimes, we end up with writer's block, or the writing process fails for some other reason.

It's fun and inventive, but I'm not sure it throws any real light on the creative process. Has any writer ever sat down before a blank page with no idea about what to write? This is the opposite at least of my own experience. But my experience need not be universal. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that anyone's brainstorming process would be as chaotic and random as what happens in A Dark and Stormy Entry.

One's feeling at the end of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... may well be frustration that the author didn't finish any of the books he started. And that may also be one's feeling at the end of this piece, although it's much less pronounced, since here most of the stories are only outlined, without much of the actual prose appearing. I feel the piece might actually work best for a discussion group, where the topic of discussion is: which branches would you most like to see turned into a real story, and why?

Agnieszka Trzaska is well-known, perhaps even famous, for using choice-based text interfaces to recreate styles of gaming that are more familiar from either parser text games or visual games. Five Scarabs is no exception, and in fact it is meant as a proof-of-concept for a particular interface, one that mimics a certain style of adventure games. At the bottom we have links that correspond to verbs. Once we select a verb, nouns in the room's description become clickable. So we select "Look At", then "golden mask", and we are rewarded with a description of the golden mask. This is clear and intuitive, though the handling of two-noun actions could be explain a little bit better.

The problem with this style of interface is the classic possibility of lawnmowering. You just try every verb with every object, until something happens. The fact that the verb remains selected, which is arguably an essential quality-of-life feature, combined with the ultra fast response time of text interfaces, makes this even more tempting. It takes only a minute to try to open, then close, then talk to, everything in the room! This ensures we can't really get stuck, but also removes a certain need for thinking. I'm not sure what the solution to that is. (Yes, bigger games generate combinatorial explosion, making lawnmowering more tedious... but it's not ideal to make a strategy less palatable merely by making it more tedious! Gamers tend to accept the tedium.)

The story here is slight but perfectly suitable for a quick puzzle game.

I've Attached My CV And Cover Letter is a short game in which you... write a cover letter. The idea is quite brilliant. You're given a word processor interface and you're simply seeing the current state of the letter. Unsatisfactory parts are underlined in red and can be changed by clicking. There are a few cycling links where you get to choose the final words used, but mostly you'll end up in a pre-determined place. That doesn't matter. This is not a game where choice matters, it is a game where you explore the thought processes of someone trying to write a cover letter.

Writing a cover letter is terrible! You need to make yourself look good, which is already a deeply uncomfortable experience, and there's something tangible riding on the result. You also know that chances of success are low. In addition, it is really hard to get a good grasp of how your letter will strike the people that read it. And so you get to agonise over every word. This agonising is portrayed well by Jaime Monedero March, both in its anguish and in its humour. I had fun with this cover letter.

Recommended, especially since it will take you only ten minutes.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

Zymurgy is a SpeedIF game, which means that it was written in a short period of time to fit a certain prompt. In this case, the prompt was: "Write a game in which the PC is fighting for his religion, which should involve the worship of cheese and/or alcohol. Try to include pasta, Decepticons or Windows XP." Roger Carbol decided to set the game inside a brewery, indeed, inside a vat of beer that is fermenting. The protagonist is a yeast cell trying to do everything it can to please its god, the Brewmeister, and the holy law, the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot.

It's certainly unique, and the implementation is solid. Of course, as a SpeedIF the game is very short and over almost before it has begun. Finding the winning solution also contains a non-trivial element of luck.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

IRL: The Game was written by Julia Mkivic and accompanies a book by Chris Stedman. I haven't read the book, but it supposedly explores the challenges and opportunities of living part of our lives online; and the game is a companion piece that allows players to think through these issues for themselves.

Unfortunately, IRL: The Game reduces a nuanced and multi-dimensional issue to a series of black-and-white questions that float in a narrative void. The basic idea of the game is that you are following several people on social media. Three appear regularly: a cartographer who is struggling with how to best resist the way that gentrification destroys existing communities; an online performer (possibly drag, but I'm getting that more from the book description than from the game itself) who loves being in front of their audience; and someone who is organising a furry convention. The idea is that all of them are struggling with how to weigh their online presence against their physical contacts. Each of them asks you several questions, and you can always answer these with either a pro-online or a pro-offline option. Depending on how many you chose, the final screen will give you a different description of how they continue. For instance, the furry organiser will either organise a fully in-person conference, or organise a partly online conference.

So... yeah. Online and offline interact in complex ways, and getting a bunch of dichotomous questions that make me choose either one or the other isn't really getting me to think about any of the complexities involved. Furthermore, the game doesn't even attempt to hook the choices up to the unfolding narrative. Yes, your answers determine what exactly the characters will do. But what the characters do has no effect on me, on the questions I receive, on how I feel about things. One does not in the least identify with the outcomes.

A missed opportunity, one feels, and certainly not one that made me eager to read the book.


(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

How do we approach the singularity? is a choice-based game written in Quest. At the time of writing this review (February 2023) the online version of the game throws an error, but downloading the game and playing it in the Quest interpreter works fine.

In terms of structure, the game isn't very adventurous. Most passages give only one choice. Where there are two choices, one of them usually leads to an untimely end, often immediately. In effect, there is only one route through the story. While walking this route, the player will have to contend with many spelling and grammar errors, including some that a cursory spell check would have found.

I still kind of liked the game. You are a soldier from Earth sent on a military mission against an invading alien army. The mission is action-packed, fast-paced, and, most importantly, written with creative energy. While you have played or read or viewed similar scenes before in similar stories, they nevertheless tend to have their own unique twist. And of course the mission is more than it originally seems to be, and the end has something to do with the singularity. It doesn't make too much sense, perhaps, and we end up having to make a big choice with very little information or investment, but still -- the journey wasn't boring.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

I'm not particularly given to nostalgia for old school adventure games, but ANDROMEDA 1983 gets it right. The graphics and music are fitting and fun, and the minimal descriptions are used to great effect, with 'talk to stranger' in the first room setting the tone brilliantly. If anything, I would have liked to see more of this slightly over-the-top logic.

ANDROMEDA 1983 quickly turns into a small puzzle game. The puzzles are fair and not too difficult. I used a walkthrough twice, but mostly because it was time for me to go to bed and I wanted to finish the piece. The first thing I looked up was something I should have tried myself. The second was for the final command, and that was more or a syntax problem. (More verbs could have been accepted there.)

I didn't play the original game, so I can't make a comparison, but ANDROMEDA 1983 is a nice diversion that is enhanced by its graphics and music.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

You actually won't meet a tall dark strangler (as far as I know), but this is the message you get from the fortune teller in the game, whose sole purpose is to make this joke. That gives you a fine impression of Paradise in Microdot. It is (obviously) an old school adventure game that has you walk around the map, struggle with a limited parser, pick up objects, and use them for puzzles that are usually not too hard, but certainly made more difficult by the parser and one's complete inability to gain extra information through the 'examine' verb. There are also quite a lot of riddles. I used the walkthrough by Dorothy Irene to get past the more difficult points.

The game has good-humoured charm. Some of these older adventure games have a tendency to berate the player and make fun of them. There's a little bit of that here, but mostly the game seems to enjoy your success. It throws pictures of smiling people and animals at you when you've solved a puzzle. And one just feels that the author enjoyed themselves a lot when they came up with the riddles and the weird locations.

You can play the game on your own PC on a ZX Spectrum emulator (though I couldn't get my keyboard input to function) or online. The online emulator wasn't entirely stable, and when the game crashed on me close to the end, I decided to not replay everything. But I suspect that the final parts will not be too different from the earlier ones.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

In Rough Draft we take the role of Denise, an author of children's fiction who is plagued by the combination of an approaching deadline and writer's block. She decides to just start typing whatever comes into her head. Our job, as players, is to make choices about where to take the story. Almost all of these choices lead to dead ends in the writing process, but some of them give Denise an idea that she can then use in another branch of the story. Thus we need to visit the unsuccessful stories in order to be able to construct the successful one.

The story that we are writing is not very inspired, but it does the job. The game gives us a visual representation of all the story lines, which is very helpful indeed. Care has clearly gone into the presentation of the game.

Some things about the game are puzzling. For instance, it's not just ideas from one story branch that pop in another, but so do items -- we can use items that we haven't actually obtained yet. I suppose that we are to understand that Denise will later restore continuity. More importantly, it seems to me that the process presented to us by the game has little to do with the process of writing a story. Denise has only a starting situation, and nothing else -- shouldn't she think about at least some structure, or an ending, or something like that, before just writing? But I suppose just writing is a possible technique. But even then, surely the problem you run into and the solution you need is never going to be 'I don't know how to continue this story here in the forest, let's start again from the beginning but now they go to the mountains'. That's just not the kind of change that could be relevant to getting a plot sorted out.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

When people come across systems for writing choice-based stories, and then start writing a quick first game without much forethought, usually one of two things happen. Either the author focuses fully on exploring the system, neglecting the narrative and creating a game that goes like: 'You're on a street. Do you go left or right?' Or the author becomes somewhat giddy with all the possibilities offered by a branching story, creating a game that goes in all kinds of directions without forming a meaningful whole. Bender Lyfe is very much that second type of game.

Our protagonist is an aspiring football (soccer) player who is almost late for high school. Depending on where we go in the house, and what we do and do not investigate, we usually end up at one improbable death or another. The game is not without some humour in the form of dramatic irony; in one passage, we are given the opportunity to follow a man who tells us that he has candy in the back of his windowless unmarked van, something that doesn't set off any alarms for our protagonist. This unwise course of action in fact leads to a very unexpected (Spoiler - click to show)death by watching too much football.

If one is willing to click through all the choices in this very short game, one can even find a happy ending that involves... football. But there is not much reason to make this effort.

Here’s what I like most: the fact that we’re playing a variant of rock-paper-scissors where you are told in advance what the opponent’s move will be. Of course this makes it utterly trivial to win the fight that’s playing out in this cyborg arena; but that’s precisely how you’re clued in to the fact that winning isn’t the point. Making the audience happy, that’s the point, even though that may involve taking some heavy hits yourself. This is not a real fight; it is a cooperative ballet. And your partner trusts you so much that they never conceal what they’re planning to do. That’s the subtlety. That’s what you have to realise.

All of this is placed in a serviceable framework, but apart from the mechanic described above there’s not much subtlety to be found. The political commentary is simple to the point of being simplistic and so are the emotional strings that get pulled. It works; but it’s no more than a vehicle for delivering this one brilliant idea: combat as trust.

Reason to play this game: it makes us think about the narrative potential of combat mechanics.

I Should Have Been That I Am is a short game, but it has a surprising amount of variability in its text: as the robot protagonist follows one or another line of thought, the card game they are playing plays out differently. (I didn’t fully understand the card game -– it seems to be poker, but it was unclear to me whose cards I was seeing. I don’t think this mattered much, though.) But the card game and who wins it isn’t really the point. No matter how it ends, (Spoiler - click to show)the stranger infects you with a virus that suddenly gives you free will. And at that point, the hyperlink interface turns into an interface where you can type anything you want.

The strong aspect of the game is the atmosphere. Using a minimal amount of prose, it paints a distinctive future society, it shows us the peculiar mindset of the protagonist and it manages to create real tension about the stranger. Well done.

The weak aspect of the game is the story it tells. In theory, it’s a nice idea to (Spoiler - click to show)link the two different interfaces to the notion of free will. But it certainly takes a lot more to actually make it work. There is another game about (Spoiler - click to show)robots developing free will in this very competition, and there I complained that it didn’t really confront the problem –- the solution it presented was just too easy. But I Should Have Been That I Am presents a solution that is even easier. (Spoiler - click to show)A virus, and boom! Type in anything you like! Okay, so we should be aware of the immense space of possibilities available to us. But that’s a statement of the problem, not of the solution. And the current effort is weakened further by the fact that the game cannot actually process what you type, so your ‘free’ choice turns out to be even less consequential than the constrained choices you made earlier.

So: great atmosphere, impressive variability of the text, but it’s disappointing that it all boils down to the message: (Spoiler - click to show)you are free! (Really!) I’d like to see a more ambitious, more sustained effort from this author, since the writing skills are certainly here.

Anno 1700 is clearly a labour of love. It is the story of a guy who really loves pirate stories written by someone who, I suspect, really loves pirate stories. It’s a big game –- too big for the competition, really –- of a very classic variety: you’re let loose in a location and have to follow your innate desire for exploration, solving puzzles that lead to hidden tunnels, caves, coves, and so on, while slowly discovering what has happened. It may not be a fashionable genre in IF today, but it’s a classic for a reason. When done well, this type of game can be very satisfying.

Which leads us to the main question: does Anno 1700 do it well? Yes and no. Yes, as I said, it’s clearly a labour of love; and a piece like this, which simply wants us to enjoy the pirate theme, needs that most of all. It needs to clearly show that it was written by someone who is enjoying the pirate theme. This it does.

But there are two reasons the game in it’s current state doesn’t fully succeed. The vaguer and less easily remedied one is the quality of the prose. It’s not bad, but it’s kind of bland; sometime repetitive; sometimes awkward. The opening text is a case in point. It’s quite long, but it nevertheless fails to characterise the protagonist. It contains awkward sentences like this: “You just know within yourself, that you would never have passed the final exam.” The comma is misplaced; the “you just know” phrase is a bit of a cop-out; and one certainly wonder whether it is also possible to know things outside oneself. The text ends up not having much life in it. And this is true in general; the prose is mostly functional, but it doesn’t exude the same zest that the world building does. It’s hard to be much more specific, and hence hard to give very concrete advice to the author.

I can be much more specific about the second reason that the game doesn’t fully succeed: implementation. The game really needs another round of polishing to make play smoother and give the player more confidence in the author. Polishing a parser game is a lot of work, but it’s not hard, not once you see where things can go wrong. So I’m going to give a list of irritations that I made notes about; the aim being not to criticise the author, but to give pointers about how to improve the game.

[The version of the review that I posted in the authors' forum had a list of specific bugs here, but I'm leaving it out of the IFDB version.]

Certainly the most important thing here is to add more synonyms and recognise more actions. This would also help with some of the more obscure puzzles –- I started using the walkthrough after a while, because I sometimes got stuck because of guess-the-verb issues (as with the floorboards), and I’m pretty sure I would never have thought to try (Spoiler - click to show)“braid threads”. Around the time my two hours were up, I also got stuck in the walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)“prime wick” returned an error message, and I didn’t how to proceed any further.

All in all, I think this game needs to be improved. A lot of work has already been poured into it, so it would just be a shame to leave it as it is, with a relatively high number of parser issues and other small problems. Once polished a bit more, this could be a very enjoyable pirate romp. Light, but enjoyable.

This is the third game I played in the 2018 IF Comp in which the protagonist’s not being (strictly) heterosexual is important, making it something of a theme in the competition. That said, Time Passed actually doesn’t make a big deal about it. The story is essentially about an unconfessed teenage love and the protagonist’s desire to find out, years afterwards, what would have happened if he had found the nerve to speak out; the fact that the object of desire was another boy does not heavily impact the narrative.

In terms of structure, the first few pages gives us some links that lead to optional extras; and then we arrive at a single choice moment that determines which ending we get. (Spoiler - click to show)We either never meant anything to the person we had a crush on, or it turns out that they might have responded somewhat favourably.

The writing is quite good, although I felt that the diary entry didn’t really capture the tone of a teenage diary. For instance:

It’s true that I would give anything to feel Billy’s love, but I’d also do anything to avoid the feeling of rejection, and those two desires are in conflict with each other.

Nightmare Adventure comes an an executable file that has to be opened, at least under Linux, in the terminal. A bit weird, but it works. Unfortunately, the home-brew parser seems to have been built in complete ignorance of conveniences that have been standard for, I don’t know, three or four decades? You cannot abbreviate “examine” to “x”, “inventory” to “i” or “go east” to “e” or even “go e”. You cannot refer to the ruby amulet as “amulet”, but have to type out the entire name. I tried to wear or drop the amulet, but was unable to do so. What doesn’t help is that “verbs” gives you a gigantic list of all the synonyms of every verb. (Friendly advice to the developers: players don’t need to know synonyms! They only need to know which base verbs are supported.) Also, there’s no save/restore/undo. So why exactly are we using this system instead of Inform or TADS or Quest or Adrift?

The game itself is rather sparsely implemented, but clued well enough that I proceeded through it without much trouble. I (Spoiler - click to show)walked through the village, collected amulets, entered the towers, visited all the rooms, and ended up in a dream world among the stars. And then: instant death. In a game which does not support save/restore or undo. I’m afraid that equaled instantly losing this player.

In a sense it’s impressive that a home-brew system works this well, but the designers/authors really need to play some modern parser games in order to get a good sense of what are and what are not acceptable standards today.

In Pegasus, we play a commando on a mission gone horribly wrong: you and your team mate are trapped and she will sacrifice herself so you can get out. At that point, the game turns into a series of flashbacks that tell the story of how you got to be in this situation. This is really quite neat: they are tightly choreographed scenes in which you are continually doing non-standard things that move the plot forward at a brisk page. The early scene where your teamwork is tested, for instance, is a great example of how to do something like that in a parser game. Really nice. I seem to recall that The Duel That Spanned the Ages had a bit of a similar feel, although that game was even more about straight action scenes.

The narrative development isn’t quite up to the same standards. The personalities of the two protagonists remain rather vague, as does the nature of the Pegasus organisation. We learn that (Spoiler - click to show)Sarah was pressed into service, but this fact isn’t developed any further. In the end, what it comes down to is that the game is simply too short: I was extremely surprised when the game ended, because it felt like I had just played through the first chapter of what was going to be at least a three chapter story: disaster, investigation, revenge. Instead, we have a sort of moral choice, but we’re not invested enough to give this a real punch.

Should have been significantly longer. That’s a complaint, but also a compliment.

In Junior Arithmancer, we play a prospective student of magic doing an entrance examination in arithmancy, which is more or less the magic of the integers. More or less: the range of numbers is restricted to a finite interval, with overflows wrapping around; and the laws of magic turn out to have a curious in-built preference for the decimal system. Anyway, during the examination we are supposed to learn and then cast spells that add, subtract, multiply, and so on, in order to create specific sequences of numbers. Meanwhile, three examiners comment on our progress.

It is really only that last element that turns the game into a fiction: the comments of the examiners form a satirical story about university politics and cast severe doubt on the wisdom of trying to enter this particular academy. (Unless we like indoor swimming pools.) It’s fun, but there’s not much here, and if someone were to complain that Junior Arithmancer is hardly interactive fiction at all… well, I wouldn’t have a principled counterargument, although I certainly could point at similar puzzle games that are part of the IF canon.

Because it’s all about the puzzles. And if you like puzzles about numbers, then these ones are glorious. They’re brilliant. At first, the aim is to use your limited repertoire of spells to get as far as possible in recreating the given number sequences. Then, as your repertoire grows, it’s all about completing the sequences. And once you have all the spells at your disposal, you have to try to optimise your solutions and solve an entirely independent set of puzzles that are all about getting to a specific end point. (And about factorisation.) It’s great fun, and I think the difficulty scales up nicely: most(?) players will be able to get to a winning ending, and diehards can try to achieve a perfect score.

I’m a diehard, and I did get a perfect score.

Junior Arithmancer is certainly not a game for everyone. You have to like number puzzles. (I won’t say ‘mathematics’, because the puzzles are not really mathematics. If I had been required to prove that a certain sequence is the only one you can solve in three moves, that would have been mathematics. Equally glorious, but a lot harder to turn into a game.) But if you do, well, Mike Spivey has prepared a real treat for you. Highly recommended.

Birmingham IV is quite polished; nothing wrong with it in terms of basic craft. A couple of things soon rubbed me the wrong way, though, especially the annoying sentence you see after every examining action, and the inventory limit. The “I’ll drop you in the middle of something but won’t tell you who you are or what you are supposed to be doing” school of plotting is also not my favourite. Still, I was willing to persevere.

Then I hit the puzzles. The solution for getting past the guy on the bridge was so far out that I seriously doubt I would ever have arrived at it even if I had found all the necessary objects; but getting one of those objects in fact requires you to go into a direction that is not mentioned in the relevant room description! That bumps the puzzle into the unfair-and-impossible category. The next puzzle is getting past the troll, and here the solution doesn’t even make any sense. Why on earth does a troll go away if (Spoiler - click to show)I give it a portrait of my brother? Having lost all faith in my –- or anyone’s –- ability to solve this game’s puzzles, I decided to abandon it.

The pictures are nice, that’s for sure, but three things made Space Punk Moon Tour hard to play for me. First, the immense number of objects. I thought it would just be the first room, but then the second room printed out a whole list of things as well. Every object takes up some of the player’s mental space, and this is really pushing it. This is aggravated by the second point: lack of implementation. Many of the objects don’t have a description… so why do they exist? Or you can’t do obvious actions with them, such as climbing the bed or the Air Fresh -– the latter being a big thing clearly right under the cat, and so the apparently obvious solution to the getting-the-cat-puzzle. Sometimes, even actions that the game expressly tells you to perform are not implemented: if you open the Air Fresh, the game tells you to read its inner contents with your phone, but none of the four objects inside the Air Fresh can be read with your phone.

But the third and main problem is the constant battle with the parser. Exchanges like this were fairly typical of my play experience:

get on bed
I can’t see that.

enter bed
I don’t understand your command.

climb bed
You can’t climb it.

get in bed
I can’t see that.

take science book
Do you want to pack it?

yes
I don’t see that.

A game of smooch.click consists of three to four small vignettes, each of which ends when you make one of three choices; and then… a kiss! Of varying quality. Immensely varying quality, if you take into account the most negative ending, which is certainly worse than any real kiss has ever been. In the accompanying walkthrough the author explains the underlying mechanics, which I appreciate (and which motivated me to seek both special endings).

The vignettes are taken in random order from a pool of possibilities, which means that the emerging narrative is quite disjointed. In most cases, I would not be a big fan of such an approach, but for smooch.click, it works. What, after all, do you remember from the date leading up to that first kiss? Some moments, not a coherent story. And it really brings home the message that that delicate thing that maybe we can call ‘mood’, and that determines how our kiss will be received, that this mood depends on the smallest of events, barely noticeable, often indeed unnoticed.

This theme reminds me very much of Railways of Love. But that game worked towards a more serious, more profound conclusion, where smooch.click is happy to remain as fleeting as a kiss. Which is, in its own way, appropriate. Light but recommended

As far as I could determine by playing through the game twice, Campfire Tales is an extremely short horror story in which a few bits of text are randomly determined, but not enough to make any real difference to the narrative. Interaction consists of typing in some names, clicking a next-button a few times, and answering two open questions that do not, I think, affect the story at all.

The prose is at best barely coherent. Your group is, for instance, described in the following way: “They owned a collection of lonesome owl figurines and they spent their days dreaming about getting super fit.” That makes little sense, but a lot more than the next sentence, which makes no sense at all: “Most people would describe them as the merest person that they have ever met”. What? A few sentences later, I’m walking on “the parametric ground” and I’m told that “[t]hey culturally grabbed the nearest stone”. The English language should sue the author for assault and battery.

Institute for Advanced Genetics or Incomplete Adventure Game: I.A.G. Alpha presents itself as an unfinished alpha version of a game set in a dubious research facility. The purported story is hackneyed in the extreme, with an obsessed scientist failing to ask questions about the ethics of his work until one day he finds out that his partner has not really been finding ‘volunteers’ at all… after which there’s a dramatic rooftop fight and the good and the bad guy both die. Fortunately, this story is merely the backdrop for something much more interesting: our quest to get through the game using the debugger.

There are, in essence, three stages to the game. In the first, we use the debugger to solve puzzles. For instance, we (Spoiler - click to show)click on a plant and find out that it contains a key, after which we obtain it. This use of the debugger is optional, but it was already fun, and I found myself relying on it extensively. In the second, we learn to use the debugger’s single active power, which is the power to rename objects. Our insights into the source code of the different objects in the world allows us to solve puzzles through smart renaming. Serhii Mozhaiskyi does a good job of guiding us through progressively harder versions of this puzzle, although I must admit that I got stuck at (Spoiler - click to show)the axe. (I spent a lot of time trying something far too complex: rename an object to axe", is_fixed = true –, in order to add real source code to the object. Of course that didn’t work, and the solution was far simpler.) In the third stage, (Spoiler - click to show)we are invited to use our expertise to change the plot against the fictional author’s wishes, exploiting a bug-like feature in the source code of one of the objects.

All of this was a lot of fun and I.A.G. Alpha is a very memorable game. I do think the author could have been more subtle about the third stage: it would have been much more satisfying to (Spoiler - click to show)defeat the fictional author’s plot without first having been told, quite explicitly, that this was the idea of the game. Perhaps the real author was afraid that too many people would then miss this possibility? Perhaps – but I think that’s a risk very much worth taking.

Dungeon Detective is a game with a lot of promise, but it doesn’t quite live up to it. Let’s start with the promise. The idea of somehow lampooning old-school dungeon crawl adventures is, of course, almost as hackneyed as those adventures themselves. But Dungeon Detective finds a way of doing this that I have never seen before, which is pretty impressive. A dungeon has been looted by a band of adventurers, and you are the detective tasked with finding out who the culprits were, so that they can be persecuted. Nice.

The second good thing about the game is the player character. You play as a gnoll, and especially the early game suggests a fictional world and a character of some originality: you have been sent to university by the Spotmother, apparently a matriarch ruling over a rather diverse community of gnolls, some of whom embrace violence, and some of whom, like the player character, are pacifist. Add ADHD kobolds and a civilised dragon, and we’re in a fantasy world that manages to be utterly D&D and yet fresh.

Finally, the game manages to set up a fair challenge by requiring close attention to detail and good memorisation of important details. In order to solve the mystery, for instance, you have to (Spoiler - click to show)connect a herb later on in the game to a seemingly throwaway remark about that same herb much earlier. I thought this worked well, although I might think that simply because I could still recall the details and got a sense of satisfaction from this.

With all this set-up, it is a bit disappointing that there isn’t that much to the game proper. Once you enter the dungeon, you simply walk around and spot a few important clues that reveal the identities of the culprits in a very straightforward way. I was expecting a bigger dungeon, a need for more complicated reasoning, and certainly much more emphasis on the special abilities of the protagonist. He isn’t called ‘Sniff’ for nothing, but his sense of smell plays only a minor role in the solution to the mystery. I was also expecting the game to go on after the dungeon, with the protagonist having to track down the culprits and help bring them to justice –- this was certainly foreshadowed by some of the dragon’s remarks –- but instead the game ends rather abruptly once you have found all the clues. I thought this didn’t do enough justice to the interesting world and character. For instance, then protagonist’s pacifism doesn’t come into play at any time during the game.

There were also some unfortunate bugs, indeed, a somewhat surprising amount. For instance, my character made a torch that would last for the entire dungeon several times in the dungeon, as if the game just forgot to set the right flag. Certain investigative actions suddenly disappeared from the list of options for no discernible reason. Most irritatingly, as the game came near its end, the list of clues was suddenly empty –- I couldn’t review what I had discovered! Luckily, I still remembered it all, including the name of the city, but otherwise this would have been extremely unpleasant.

I wanted to really like Dungeon Detective, and to some extent I did… but it needs polish and also, in my opinion, extension.

Our protagonist is a street illusionist, but one whose illusionism is true magic: she can really make people see things that don’t exist or not see things that do. It’s not entirely clear (a) how she gets away with this in the world of ubiquitous smartphones, given that her illusions probably don’t show up on film, and (b) why she is living in abject poverty, given the strength of her powers. But living in abject poverty she is, and one of the first choices offered by the game is whether we should try to get some fast food or illusion ourselves into a posh restaurant.

Doing the latter leads to (Spoiler - click to show)a near disaster, as we apparently manage to kill and then resurrect everyone. Or maybe this was an illusion we played on ourselves? We then meet a girl who we can either trust, in which case we learn that she is a superhero with the powers of telekinesis and so are we, or we meet an insane killer who is very resistant to our illusions, in which case we learn that we are a superhero with the power to shoot lightning bolts. The narrative isn’t very coherent either on one or on multiple playthroughs, and I was left wondering what the point of the story really was.

Haywire is well-written and I enjoyed my time with it, but it feels like a small fragment of what should have been a much larger story.

[Note: this review was written in 2018 during the competition. I have now played more Chandler Groover games, especially the brilliant Eat Me. Also, I believe that Groover wasn't impressed by most interpretations of his game, this one included, so possibly it misses the point!]

Chandler Groover has been a massively productive author in the past few years; but I have been a massively absent reader in those same years, so I can’t compare +=x to his other games. (The only Groover game I’ve played is Rape, Pillage, Makane, which has few obvious connections with the current effort.) I originally thought that I would be in a good position to compare +=x to the 1994 game <a game=1z2lxiqua980sedk>+=3</a>, but the affinities between these games end with the title. Conclusion: I’m going into this game like a blank card into a fortune telling machine. What will be written on me?

The production values of +=x are high, from the very nice cover art to the smart drag-and-drop interface. We quickly catch on to the fact that Groover is exploring a sort of inverse of the standard choice-based pitfall of ‘fake choices’: instead of differently looking choices that in fact lead to the same text, +=x gives us identical looking choices that do not lead to the same text. It’s a nice idea, and it suggests a world in which we are mere playthings of some nameless force we cannot comprehend. It reminds me of nothing so much as of a great passage near the beginning of Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens:

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e. everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Here I sit amongst the cogs, amongst the code, dealing my cards. Some say that I’m a wizard, and some say I’m a machine. I strike two lines, and those two lines determine what I mean. And what I mean is time, and what I mean by time is space, and what I mean by space is who and how and in what place. It’s faster to travel by not traveling. It’s faster to be when you already are. All it takes is a shift in the continuum to make something near turn into something far. And to make something far become something nearby. To move through the galaxy, just multiply. One atom, one hour, one lifetime displaced, and everything as it exists is erased, replaced by another existence equal to the fuel that I burn when I dip my quill pen. Again, I’ll deal another card. Again, I’ll strike another line. These equations are games in the game I’m inside. Now you’re down too inside the text, where numbers crunch, bullfinches nest. We are the stars, the universe, Alpha Centauri, Betelgeuse. Wherever you or I might be, you’re here right now, and you’re with me.

One of the questions that kept nagging me as I played through Railways of Love was whether the game really had a Russian vibe, or whether I was just imagining this, based on the fact that you can choose between Russian and English. Of course, the long train journey might conjure up images of the Trans-Siberian railway, and the failing lights fit well with a perhaps clichéd idea of the state of household technology in the USSR… but there are long railway trips in the rest of the world too, and I’ve seen the lights in Dutch trains fail at times. But then there was the Progress Program, which sounded ever more like a science fiction version of Marxism-Leninism, 5-year plans included. And when I got to an ending in which the protagonists fail to hook up because one of them is praying and the other cannot refrain from making a hard-line atheist comment, I was certain: this is light years away from Hollywood, and very much in the cultural space also inhabited by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

The structure of Railways of Love is quite original. The two protagonists are sitting in the train, some minor events happen, and all you can do is try to make them confess to each other. But the situation isn’t quite right, and nothing happens. The potential love affair dies in the bud. Then, you get to replay the game; but this time, you are in control of which events happen. Brilliant -– instead of controlling the protagonists, we control the environment, hoping to get them together. We will fail a few times, revealing more about the people and the culture involved as we do so, but with a little perseverance, we can get them together. At which point we get an ending that is at least as negative as the other ones –- finding somebody who loves you turns out not to be, by itself, the recipe for happiness. Light years away from Hollywood, absolutely, and for me this was the point at which I became really impressed by the game. The sad ending rang true. And yet, it was not the end.

In order to reach the real ending, you have to first find all the other endings. I think the developers should put just a little more effort into steering players who get stuck in the right direction. It is very hard to predict which events will lead to which endings, and the possibility space is large enough that one can get lost exploring it. I certainly did, stuck on 6 of 7 endings. In my particular case this was extra unfortunate because there happened to be a bug in the walkthrough, now supposedly fixed; but the game is so nice and atmospheric that having to use the walkthrough at all is a bit of a bummer.

But getting to 7 of 7 endings is certainly worth it, (Spoiler - click to show)for when we accept our fate, rather than try to change it, the game turns into a neat little comment on the human condition. There are all these wild possibilities that we can fall in love with, but pursuing them will ruin the quiet happiness that is ours. Life is choice, and that means it is sadness, for every choice precludes an infinity of other paths we might have taken. But if we learn to accept the sadness, it is also a joy. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina never learns this lesson; but the protagonists of Railways of Love do. For what is, after all, only a little game, I found it surprisingly moving and surprisingly deep.

After playing two random Spectrum adventures (the very good Celtic Carnage and the decent Time Quest), I was perhaps getting unrealistic expectations about works coming from this community. If so, Shore Leave put me squarely back on my feet.

In this game, you take on the role of a minor character on a big space ship with the aim of getting it to a nice place for your shore leave. I can't say much more than that, because I found the experience deeply off-putting and never got very far. Part of that is the difficulty of getting the game to understand you. For instance, there is a cinema where you have to buy a ticket in order to see a film. There's someone who sells ticket, and someone who keeps you from seeing the film if you don't have one. Now the documentation specifically lists the verb "buy", but no variation of "buy ticket" that I tried had any effect; nor did "get ticket", "buy" by itself, and so on. There were already various points in the game where I knew what I wanted to do, but didn't find the syntax to actually do it.

Possibly I would have tried harder if the content of the game had been more to my liking. But this is a game that is desperate to be funny, yet only made me cringe. Here's an example. When you take the elevator to the main bridge, you end up in a location that is a bridge across a river. That's actually kind of funny. But the room description goes on to say: "As this location is nothing more than a cheap joke you are advised to proceed back to the lift." That really kills the joke for me. Worse are rooms like this: "You are on the main engineering concourse. This is a really boring place and I'm finding it difficult to make it sound otherwise." This is a cardinal sin -- boring the player and then treating the boredom as a joke. And then there's the Terminal Illness ward: "The people here are doomed to spend the rest of their days in this room. [...] South leads to the spare parts room." "You are now in the spare parts room. Bits of body are hanging from the ceiling on large metal hooks."

To me, it all feels as the worst kind of juvenile humour; utterly tasteless and unlikely to get better as the game proceeds. So I'm not exploring it any further. Nevertheless two stars, since from what I've seen this probably is a competently programmed puzzle adventure. There are those to whom it might appeal.

Escape from S.S.A.D.B. is a very primitive adventure game in every respect: prose, story, puzzles, parser. Although it is a very small game with maybe a dozen locations and only a handful of puzzles, it is easy to get stuck because of the unhelpful descriptions and many guess-the-command situations. For example, the very first puzzle is perhaps the most clichéd of all adventure puzzles: retrieving a key that is in the keyhole on the other side of the door, using nothing but a newspaper. However, due to a very unclear description of the situation and an unhelpful parser, I had to resort to the walkthrough to solve it.

It seems that the parser understands only one and two word commands. Okay, I guess you can work around that. But the parser will happily act as if it understood the entire command. So you may write "put X in Y", and the game says "okay", but actually it has only acted on "put X" which it apparently sees as a synonym for "drop X". Of course this is nothing compared to the elevator where the room description tells you that there are buttons labeled 1, 2 and 3... but the game only understand your commands if you write those numbers out as "one", "two" and "three".

Does the story or world or cleverness of the puzzles in any way make up for the pain of interacting with Escape from S.S.A.D.B.? Alas, no. It's just a bare-bones escape scenario involving some crazy adventure logic and an off-hand killing of a 'worker'.

Best avoided.

My review of 9/21: My Story must start with an explanation of how I came to play it, especially since readers of the review will most likely not be able to play it for themselves. I was doing an 'IFDB Spelunking' expedition, where I let the IFDB generate a random list of ten games and then try to play and review them all. One of the games on my list, this one, didn't seem to be available on the internet any longer. Instead of giving up, however, I decided to track down and contact the author, Kronosaurus.

Kronosaurus was very helpful, explaining to me that 9/21: My Story was a very intense and personal game they made when they were around 14 years old. Kronosaurus took it offline a few years later because they thought it was in certain ways immature and not something they wanted out there attached to their name. However, Kronosaurus was also kind enough to send me a copy for my personal perusal, allowing me to write a review of it if it didn't contain any quotes or screenshots. And so that's why I'm able to write this even though you will be unable to find a working download link on this page.

Clearly, my playing experience was heavily coloured by all of this. Had I encountered 9/21: My Story without any context, I would probably have spent a lot more time being annoyed at spelling errors or wondering at the author's artistic intentions. But I hope that even then I would have been open enough to the experience to appreciate this game for what it is: a raw, intense story about how personality and creativity can be killed off at school; how it hurts when you are forced into a mould you don't fit and when your most cherished artistic designs are discarded as worthless trash. The protagonist of our story gets through the day at school by designing maps for a computer game. Their thoughts about this are actually quite detailed and subtle. But they face an abusive teacher who, through contempt, almost succeeds in erasing this part of their life. Almost. For the game -- which even includes an almost-suicide -- ends on a hopeful note.

I found 9/21: My Story engaging and moving. I can also understand the author's desire to keep some distance from it; it is perhaps too personal, too much a document of a particular moment in one's life, and does one want to keep this around for every random person on the internet to give a star rating to? It's not art that rises to the level of objectivity. But the lack of an 'objective perspective' (whatever that may be) is surely part of both the intense pain and the unbelievable glory of being 14.

Not being 14 any more, I rejoice and despair.

In Hippy's Quest you play a young man trying to become a hippy. This reminds me of Frank Zappa's satirical album "We're Only in It for the Money", and there does seem to be a connection between these two works of art. But before we get there, a little about the gameplay. Hippy's Quest is choice-based. Often you choose from a list of option, though now and then there is also free text input. Many options lead to instant death, after which you will have to restart the game. For the rest you'll just have to try everything, hoping to hit on the path that will give you the items you will need -- I assume -- to proceed on your quest.

Ah, yes, the quest. Apparently, this involves entering a hippy hotel in order to register as a hippy; wearing hippy clothes; and then, for reasons that remain obscure, walking to a cliff and climbing down a rope, jumping into a dangerous river, and swimming past a series of lethal rocks.

These lethal rocks are the shareware protection. You need to enter some combination of numbers, but only by sending $10 to John Blake for full registration (or, if you're not rich, maybe sending $5 for 'just the hint kit') will you be told which numbers they are. So it seems that John Blake is, after all, only in it for the money.

Whether anyone enjoyed their random deaths enough to actually send him their hard-earned bucks is a question to which we may never know the answer. If you want my two cents, I'd advise any aspiring hippy to spend it on pot and an acoustic Bob Dylan album instead.

For the first minutes, Three Mile is utterly unremarkable. You and some friends are on a midnight trip towards a haunted road. There's the usual characterisation of the protagonists (the couple who aren't happy together; the socially awkward guy; the girl he's in love with). There's the linear interaction mechanic, which basically just involves clicking on the text to see a new piece of text. Any tension is the tension of anticipation. What will go wrong? What horrors will appear in the night?

And then things change. And I continue behind spoiler tags.

(Spoiler - click to show)The horror never happens to us. The horror is us. Of course it's an old trick to give us only fragments of a story and make us guess at what happened -- what we vaguely imagine is always more horrifying than anything spelled out in detail. And using technological breakdown to create this fragmentary nature is effective, but also a well-worn trope. But what makes Three Mile original and powerful is the fact that the protagonist-author is a manipulative, creepy bastard; and we know that he (he's probably male) is writing and rewriting with the specific goal of manipulating us. This gives everything that we read or see, and every act of interpretation that we perform, an added element of dreadful doubt. If this is what we are shown, if this is the bast face he can put on it, then what really happened? Psychological abysses open up before us.

One more thing: take the trigger warning about self-harm seriously. It's not really the focus of the story, but when it appears it has impact.

Hyper Rift is a choice-based interactive fiction for mobile platforms (Android, iOS, and perhaps also Windows Mobile). It's partly graphical -- you navigate between rooms using arrows on a map -- but almost all information is conveyed to you through text. The game is free, with some small ads in the bottom, and (I believe) the option to purchase an ad-free version if desired. I found the ads no distraction at all.

In Hyper Rift, we find ourselves waking up without memory in the medical bay of a spaceship full of horrors. So far so System Shock, but Hyper Rift is actually centered of saving and leading a large cast of NPCs. While these will mostly silently follow you to the point that they function more as inventory items, in certain situations they will do or say something that has a significant impact on the game. As you lead your (hopefully) growing band of equally amnesiac shipmates through the four levels of the spaceship, you will solve some mathematical puzzles and learn more and more about what was going on on the ship and what might be done to put things right.

Making everything come out in the optimal way seems to be a complex puzzle, requiring significant trial and error as well as careful exploration. From what I've seen, the puzzles have been carefully constructed; and there are more than ten different endings to be reached. While I'm personally not the kind of completionist who will search for them all, and while I'm also not motivated enough to try to get a better ending than my own (probably middle-of-the-road) ending L, I do think that there are many IF enthusiasts for whom this game can mean hours of fun. I certainly enjoyed the 2 to 3 hours I spent with it. Recommended.

In Assignment 46 (a sequel to Assignment 45: A Harry Flynn Adventure) you take on the role of captain Harry Flint, who has to save the galaxy by tracking down a shipment of plutonium. The first thing that happens to you, is that you find a poisonous lizard in your bed; and approximately the second is that you meet a beautiful woman in a casino; so, yes, this is pretty much James Bond in space.

What this also is, is CYOA of the most terrible sort. At every choice point you get a little menu of options, most of which lead to instant or near-instant death. BOOM! Your mission is a failure. You then have to restart the entire game, sitting through some timed text, and try a new option. BOOM! Getting through this partiuclar assignment will require much more patience than this particular reviewer has.

I came across Triune while playing ten random games from the IFDB; and this fact itself is somewhat astonishing. For here we have a game that did fairly well in the IF Comp and is about exactly the kind of themes that I would be exploring just a few years later in games like The Baron and Fate. Why did nobody every draw a link between my work and Papillon's earlier piece, or recommend this game to me? One thing we need to become much, much better at as a community is to keep the conversation going, to keep talking about games beyond the momentary attention they may get in a competition environment. We always need more IF, obviously, but what we need even more is more writing about IF.

As the above indicates, Triune deals with some heavy issues. The game starts when you, a teenage girl, are fleeing into the bathroom to escape the violence of your alcoholic father. Very soon afterwards, you find yourself in a fairy tale country -- no doubt both a representation of your own fantasies and a archetypal map of womanhood -- which offers you several destinies to pursue, all of them linked to a particular image of what the feminine can be like in a world that is dominated by maleness.

In terms of vision, Triune offers us a lot. Some reviewers have called the symbolism heavy-handed, but I don't think that's a totally fair complaint; we are in the realm of the fairy tale, we are incarnating Jungian archetypes, so of course the symbols are in some sense obvious. They have to be. What matters more is the daring of the vision, and this, I think, is where Triune shines. To have us (Spoiler - click to show)literally repeat the sin of Eve, burn down the entire forest, marry a prince who kills unicorns but is totally asexual; that is glorious stuff.

Whether the player will get to enjoy it is another matter. It also seems that most reviewers relied to a large extent on the walkthrough, as did I. There are some real implementation issues that decrease our confidence in the game; a few puzzle solutions are hard to discover; and the heavy use of a keyword-based conversation system leads to many places where the player can get stuck. While I did not encounter any bugs per se, Triune could have benefited immensely from more play-testing aimed at a smoother play experience. In fact the very reliance on puzzles seems a mistake: surely this game is about choices much more than about finding solutions to problems!

As I played the game, I saw three endings corresponding to three different visions of womanhood: (Spoiler - click to show)the Earth mother, dominating the male but totally lost in the world of sensuality; the fairy-tale princess, pampered and sterile; the vengeful witch, craving a revenge that lays waste to everything. None of them were portrayed by the game as particularly satisfying. One assumes that the real message and the canonical ending are (Spoiler - click to show)when we return to the real world after the forest has burned down; and we quit the game and are told that this was just a story; that in reality there is no message announcing that you have won; and that every game, while it can be played and replayed, may also be ended when one has had enough. What does this mean? I don't think it's about suicide. Is it about stepping out of an abusive situation? About refusing to meet the world on its terms and instead dictating your own? Or instead about facing reality rather than escaping into fantasy and dreaming of magic? Surely somehow it must be an indictment of the very way of thinking womanhood that leads to the three archetypes mentioned. But how?

I feel that my uncertainty about the point that the piece is trying to make is indicative of the game's greatest weakness. For while I do not demand a game to have a message, let alone one that is spelled out in detail, I feel that Triune ends up being too diffuse. How do its different narrative threads relate to each other? What do all of them have to do with the piece's insistent meditations on the nature of magic? We can certainly understand all the narrative strands; but can any sense be made of the whole? Still -- the very fact that my criticism is on this level shows that the piece is well worth experiencing.

You’re a demon and you have to save your mother from an unconventional convent. Luckily, while security is tight, you have the power to possess people, taking over their body. Most of the puzzles in the game revolve around finding the right person to possess in order to get some task done. To get to a certain location, you might need to find someone who is small, or strong, and so on. There are some object puzzles along the way, but nothing terribly difficult.

This is the second Quest game I played during the 2018 IF Competition -– after Space Punk Moon Tour –- and again I ran into a host of parser issues, making me suspect that it’s Quest that is at fault rather than the individual authors. Here was a particularly frustrating sequence:

x crypt
A large stone mausoleum, the door slab flanked by ersatz Greco-Roman columns and moldering marble cherubs. A large crack bisects the slab blocking the entryway to the crypt, deeply enough that a strong enough human could probably pull it down.

enter crypt
I don’t understand your command.

go in crypt
You can’t go there.

in
The door to the crypt is paved over.

pull slab
You can’t pull it.

hit slab
You can’t hit it.

pull door
I can’t see that. (door)

x crack
There’s a large crack across the door to the crypt.

kick door
I don’t understand your command.

x slab
A large stone mausoleum, the door slab flanked by ersatz Greco-Roman columns and moldering marble cherubs. A large crack bisects the slab blocking the entryway to the crypt, deeply enough that a strong enough human could probably pull it down.

pull it down
I can’t see that. (it down)

Time Quest is in many ways an old-school parser game. We explore a relatively large but sparsely described world; solve some puzzles; avoid deaths; and don't worry too much about the story. The parser itself is relatively limited too, something that is especially evident from the lack of helpful error messages. (There's no real distinction between an action that was understood but didn't work, and an action that wasn't understood.)

But there are some ways in which Time Quest is more friendly than one might expect. There is, as far as I know, only one way to make the game unwinnable, and this is relatively clear. (Spoiler - click to show)It's when you get caught by the Gestapo and do not have the rope. The game world is very open, allowing you to explore more or less everything. There is only a small number of items, and the puzzles are generally very simple. And while the existence of different temporal eras to visit opens up the possibility of all kinds of complicated dependencies between them, in fact your progress in one era is (Spoiler - click to show)completely independent of what you do in other eras.

The story is rather limited: you have to search through time for the bad guy who has collected nuclear warheads in an attempt to dominate the pacifistic future from which you both hail. And that's what you do, with only one thing that could be described as a plot twist. It is especially weird that (Spoiler - click to show)the other temporal eras simply have nothing to do with your quest. This does feel like a bit of a lost opportunity.

However, despite the primitive story, Time Quest's handling of its theme of violence and pacifism is actually rather subtle. (Spoiler - click to show)First of all, every era that you visit is emblematic of a certain fictional genre that revels in violence: the fantasy quest with its trolls and dragons; the gladiatorial fight; the World War II story. And in all of them, we are able to engage in violence ourselves using the laser gun we are given at the start. But -- and this is quite wonderful -- it is never necessary to use the gun. The entire game can be played and won without ever picking it up. In this game, despite all the invitations we get, violence is never the answer. Which is a great fit for its story, and an interesting thematic message. (I wonder whether this theme of pacifism is present in more of B. J. Curtis's games.)

This is a very fine example of SpeedIF. Post-Christmas Letdown is very short, but well-implemented, with easy puzzles and a lot of charm. It made me smile and I enjoyed it for the ten minutes or so that it took me to play it. Which is precisely what one may hope from a SpeedIF game.

The little game Room is supposed to be an exploration of depression. You wake up, have to face the new day, and then make choice like whether you'll get out of bed, whether you'll try to find a job, where to get your food, and so on. It's all very short. Some choices lead to a "you have lost" message, others do not, but it's not clear that the non-losing outcomes are any better. Mostly, you're just going to be facing another day tomorrow.

While the protagonist is clearly unhappy, as a portrayal of depression the game isn't very illuminating. The prose is also plagued by typos and some very unfortunate sentences indeed, such as:

The day ahead of you is something to dread and opening your eyes is the first step towards facing them.

Nerd Quest ended up placing 33rd out of 35 in the 2008 IF Competition, which means that it is least better than The Absolute Worst IF Game in History, though this is, one supposes, a rather low bar to clear. Gabor de Mooij's game is written in a self-developed Java-based interactive fiction system. This means playing the piece is a bit of a hassle, since one must first install java. (I recommend getting the game files from the IF Comp 2008 installer or zip file, since this gives us all the files we need together in the right directory structure.)

Unfortunately, the self-made system is incredibly primitive, failing to recognise most of the common commands and -- what is worse -- failing to give helpful parser errors. Guess the verb issues are very common. Saving is impossible. The story is short and shallow: we need to escape from the server room by solving some brief and not too interesting puzzles. In other words, Nerd Quest has not much to recommend itself. (Although Gabor de Mooij is one of the few fellow Dutch interactive fiction authors that I know of, so there's that!)

I always find it tricky to rate SpeedIF games. They were written under very tight time limits; so should we rate them for what they are, or for how impressive they are given the time limit? In the end, I lean towards the former; here at the IFDB we are no longer in the competition context, and what the review should indicate is whether the game is worth playing.

In this case... well. The Courier Who Missed Me is a very short parser puzzle game in which you need to get some secret plans. There are only three locations, and basically one puzzle to solve. This puzzle doesn't make much sense. It is of the 'use the objects and these people because they happen to be present and then something illogical but useful happens' variety. The game is bug free and competently done, but I can't say I got anything out of it. So that means a single star.

Celtic Carnage (written by Ian Brown as Traveller in Black) is the fourth and last instalment in the Phoenix series. I haven't played the other games, but I understand they all feature a time travelling Traveller in Black who has to perform heroic deeds at different points in history. Or perhaps I should say mythical history, for that is where Celtic Carnage puts us, right in the middle of Irish mythology -- especially, if I judge this correctly, the tales of the Ulster Cycle.

Setting and story are the strong points of Celtic Carnage. Ian Brown has clearly done his research, and the source myths shape every aspect of the game. Indeed one has to pay close attention to details in order to be able to solve the game, since names mentioned only in passing sometimes turn out to be crucial later on. The story, especially in the second half of the game, is structured in a way reminiscent of RPGs, where NPCs give us quests that tells us where to go and what to do there. This gives the story momentum in a way that is harder to achieve in more exploration-driven games. Sometimes I found it hard to follow what was going on; where much fantasy and sci-fi errs on the side of explaining too much, Celtic Carnage explains perhaps too little. Of course this can and perhaps should be seen as an invitation to delve into the Ulster Cycle ourselves and become better acquainted with them.

Although I ran into a few guess-the-command issues here and there (tips: you can 'search' without a noun, and you have to 'mount' the chariot rather than 'enter' it) the game is actually quite forgiving. There are some instant death moments, but they are clearly sign-posted (and 'ramsave' and 'ramload' are your friends). As far as I know it is impossible to bring the game into an unwinnable state, except maybe by missing an item in the castle early on. I ended up using the walkthrough a couple of times, mostly because I wanted to keep playing at a moderate speed, but the puzzles are fair.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised. (I stumbled on the game during an IFDB Spelunking expedition in which I play ten random games.)

This game sent me to Wikipedia multiple times, researching topics as seemingly disparate as Lífþrasir, Nichiren Buddhism, the Voynich manuscript and Benjamin the last Tasmanian Tiger. This may have easily doubled the time it took me to play the Endling Archive -- which is very short -- but it also shows that the fictional author of that piece of software achieved their goal: making me want to know more about the topics he talked about.

At first, the Endling Archive seems to be a database about the last surviving members of otherwise extinct species. It quickly branches out into other areas, often with the same note of loss and loneliness, though some of the entries are here to explain a science fiction scenario to us. I love the underlying idea, and for a while I thought I would love the piece too. But in the end it is too ephemeral while at the same time trying to tap into something that is not ephemeral at all; its invocations of thousands of years of history (Jesus, Buddha) falling flat compared to the more thematically appropriate invocations of Benjamin and Earhart; and its SF story too trivial and unoriginal.

I still recommend playing it! It's short and there are the elements of something fantastic here.

This short CYOA-style piece -- originally published as an 8-page gamebook PDF -- has you wake up in a dark and strangely deserted Bodleian Library in Oxford. You can take a variety of paths through said library, experiencing terrors of suggestion more than any actual horrors, in what is basically a cyclical structure.

The piece seems very dependent on prior knowledge of the Bodleian. Not so much to solve it (there is no solving involved), but to appreciate the places that are evoked, since the writing is heavy on naming specific parts of the building and letting that do the work. Perhaps this is more enjoyable if you know where you are and how things connect to each other. But my knowledge of the library is incredibly meagre (I once walked past it as a kid) and I didn't get much out of this piece.

I wish I had not played this game: this certainly reminds one of the bad old IFComp days when people would enter games with titles like "Worst IF Game Ever". But despite appearances, this particular games is not disparaging itself in its title; for the game it mentions is not the game we play, but the 'game' of living for your work and sacrificing all for wealth.

In fact, I wish I had not played this game is a tidy little morality tale. We follow a poor immigrant as he works his way up a cut-throat corporate ladder until he is very wealthy indeed. Every little scene leads to two choices, one which expresses regret over our actions, one which expresses determination to win the game. Except for some minor variations in the final message, our choices make no difference, for they all lead to this end:
(Spoiler - click to show)

I am in a nice room, with great windows, soft curtains. The sun is shining high. A warm breeze is making me smile.

I am dying alone.

When the game is flawed, there is nothing to win in the end.

If you do not want to sacrifice your life, play another game.

As Hanon has remarked in his review, this is not a porn game. This is not a game in which you bang. It is a game that wants to bang you. And it has been saddled with all the confusion and uncertainty and obsessive horniness of a teenager, which makes the endlessly looping conversation -- that spirals out towards God and friendship and the emotions but always returns, sooner rather than later, to the idée fixe of banging -- at once funny and a little heart breaking. Have we not all been here? Or have we not wished to be here, where we at least had the courage to ask?

The game -- not the game that you're talking to, but the game itself -- even allows for an amount of role playing. After going along with the idea of banging for a while, I found myself slowly attempting to take on the role of the adult who is definitely not going to bang this teenager but who might help them attain a state of at least comparable emotional rest. I never succeeded; but then, that seems highly appropriate. For how can one find rest from horniness... without banging?

An unfulfillable desire. The madness of Tantalus.

Lime Ergot is a short game, but makes the most of its premise. You are one of only two surviving officers of a colonial military force; the other being the black-hearted and possibly insane general, who orders you to make her a drink. The game's central task is to find the ingredients for this drink. But rather than traversing a physical space through movement, we traverse a partially sensory and at least partially hallucinated space through use of the examine command. Examining things not only leads us from one object to others that were not initially described; rather, by making things present to our mind, it gives them reality and allows us to physically manipulate them. A fascinating mechanic that is combined with beautiful, evocative prose and a great atmosphere. A little gem.

I've been playing "Choices: And the Sun Went Out" for several hours, having just finished the fourth 'story arc', and I don't think I'm anywhere near the end yet. That assessment is partly based on descriptions of the piece as containing 600k words, of which you'll apparently see 150k on any one playthrough; and it's partly based on the story I have experienced, which, frankly, hasn't gone anywhere yet.

Or rather, it has gone everywhere. It has gone to Canada, to Peru, and now to Japan. A lot has happened along the way: murders, shootouts, car chases, confrontations of secret cabals of scientists, human sacrifices, attempted kidnappings, frantic attempts to save an entire town from natural disaster, and more. But I am no closer to understanding anything about the game's central mystery (the fact that sun sometimes 'goes out'); rather, every story arc has given me some new 'leads' to pursue, sending me packing to yet another country where more action can happen. Emily Short called the prose of the game "urgent and weightless"; and it seems fair to apply that to its entire approach to story telling.

I was bored by the game's first two story arcs, but things got a little better when I came to Peru, where the writing picked up some personality and the NPCs were slightly more interesting. Still, we never move far past some rather trite set pieces for an investigative action-mystery; one goes to Peru, and lo and behold, there will be human sacrifice in an ancient but unknown Inca temple!

Furthermore, the story seems to be constrained more by what is convenient for the writers than by any sense of plausibility: if you need to be shipped off to Peru, then this tiny Canadian town turns out to have an international airport with direct flights to that country. If one of your enemies tries to abduct a friend and force her, at gunpoint, to board a commercial passenger air plane, then helpful local custom officials prevent this by planting some drugs in your friend's luggage. I think.

There are many paths through the game, it seems, and your choices about where to go appear to have serious consequences in terms of which content you will experience. But I find this a dubious blessing. Rarely have you any idea of what the effect of your choices will be. So what's the point of choosing, and what's the point of all the content I'm not seeing? One could say: replayability. But I would only replay a game like this if its world and story were truly intriguing, and replaying might allow me to achieve deeper and deeper understanding of something genuinely interesting. "Choices: And the Sun Went Out" is far too breezy and generic to inspire that wish.

It's competent, and I've had some fun, so I'm giving it 3 stars.

We Know the Devil is a relatively short visual novel, which takes perhaps one hour to play through once and two hours to play through exhaustively. It follows three teenagers -- Venus, Neptune and Jupiter -- who have been sent to a strange Christian summer camp for 'bad children' where it seems quite possible that they have to literally fight the devil. All three suffer from the fact that they do not fit the societal criteria for being a good person, and they have developed some rather unsuccessful coping mechanisms for dealing with this.

The piece is great at building atmosphere, coming with excellent writing, minimal but very appropriate art, and an unsettling sound track, all of which strengthen each other. Choice points are relatively rare, and always of the same type: you have to choose two of the three teenagers to do something together, leaving the third one out. This is also the main thing that the piece is exploring: the dynamics of a group of three people, and the results of being the one who is left out.

In order to truly experience and understand the piece, one has to seek out all four possible endings. This is no doubt the weakness of the game, since doing so requires one to revisit again and again text one has already experienced, and making rather mechanical choices in between. While there is a useful ad irresistible fast-forward button, using this is very detrimental to the reading experience.

That said, pursuing all endings pays off. The game wrestles with serious questions about relationships, acceptance & self-acceptance, queerness, and the universality of love. (I say much more about this in my spoilery video analysis.) It's a piece that I kept thinking about long after I had finished it.

I hadn’t come across the term ‘flygskam’ before, but apparently it is Swedish for flight shame. This is going to be a short story about taking the bus from London to Hamburg. Sounds nice enough, although the casualness of the blurb’s final sentence is perhaps a bit overdone: “Just, you know, don’t forget your passport, okay?” Do you even need a passport to enter or leave the UK? Wait, yes… they never joined the Schengen zone, just like they never adopted the Euro. Brexit is not a sudden eruption; it has been in the making for decades. But that’s neither here not there. Flygskam Simulator is!

This is the pretty laid-back story of someone who travels from London to Hamburg by bus. The decisions are very realistic: stand in line by the door or remain seated? Try to sleep or read a book? Talk to the person next to you or play a game on your phone? The trip can take an unexpected turn, for instance when you get to know a guy who leaves the bus in Rotterdam and you decide to hook up with him. (Rotterdam! Of all places!) But it is also possible to just travel to Hamburg. The trip seems to be based on personal experience; at least little details, such as the difference between English and Dutch bus waiting zones, are correct.

It’s a nice little tale to relax with. But there doesn’t seem to be much to it, not much of a point beside sharing an impression of travelling by bus. Perhaps the branching narrative is meant to evoke the sense of possibility that belongs to a journey? On the other hand, the game focusses precisely on the mundane and expected. So I end up not being precisely certain what the author intended, and not truly able to recommend people to either check it out or leave it alone. It’s, you know, okay?

Eye Contact is a short, experimental choice-based game that allows you to play through a single conversation. Most of the talking is done by your conversation partner, who is worked up about something her brother said to her. It turns out that he had the audacity to criticise the filo pastry for her samosas. You can be sympathetic, non-committal, or overtly critical about her (over)reaction. Depending on your choices, some backstory may be revealed – there has been a death in the family – and you may end up helping your friend move along, or not. All this takes a few minutes at most, so it’s easy to replay a few times, and the writing is snappy and to the point. An enjoyable light snack; better executed than the samosas were.

There’s one more crucial ingredient to the game: the eyes. A large picture of your friend’s eyes is always at the top of the screen, looking at you (or away from you) with different expressions as the conversation moves in different ways. The game labels itself as ‘experimental’, and this is clearly the experiment: to see what impact these eyes have on our experience. Will they increase the emotional impact? Will they create a sense of intimacy? Certainly, they were very present. I was sitting behind my computer late at night, in my pyjamas, slumping in my chair… and I felt the urge to straighten up and make sure that my dressing gown was closed; then felt the urge to resist that urge, because I’m not going to be manipulated by a picture of two eyes; and then gave in to the urge anyway. So, yes, I think it did enhance to some extent the feeling of realness. I’m not sure what we gain from the experiment, since a longer game with the same lay-out would get old very quickly, I think. But I can imagine a game in which this only happens occasionally; a re-make of Spider and Web, for instance, in which the interrogator stares at you. That could work.

IFComp 2019 contained quite a number of very short games built around a single idea. Eye Contact didn’t quite have the impact on me that The Surprise and Out had, but it’s nevertheless a worthy addition to this category.

I believe this game is made in ink, and it looks good… but it looks utterly different depending on whether I play it in Chrome on my Android phone, or in Firefox on my Windows computer. In my phone, the type is a very curly handwriting, beautiful, although it does not match well with the blocky sans serif type of the choices. On my computer, the main font looks more like Comic Sans. I wonder how this is possible?

The game itself is not at all what I was expecting based on the blurb. The basic premise is indeed that you want to save a bunch of cats. But we are thrown into a world of unexpected aesthetics – everything is grey, the unit of exchange is coals – and unexpected possibilities – there are sell-your-soul type corporate agents at work, and you can enlist a sort of semi-scientific environmental resistance to rescue all the cats. This means that it’s a lot more interesting that I had originally expected, and I found myself reaching most of the endings as I was investigating the different paths opened up to the different characters. For the Cats is not a moralistic exhortation to take care of your pets, as I had feared. Rather, it is an almost poetic short story about humanity in the midst of bleakness.

Well done, would play again.

I decided to gamble and have the IFDB generate a list of ten random games for me. Appropriately, the first of those was this little Speed-IF that asks you to gamble -- sort of. You can choose to cross the road or not, and if you don't, new prizes become available that might be either better or worse than the original. Given the slightness of the piece, you won't care either way.

Most notable, I would say, for being a game in which you can win the phone number of Stiffy Makane. Alas, said number cannot then be called.

There is a tradition of games in which you can select different squad members for different missions, the aim being to maximise the match between your squad’s capabilities and the challenges you will face in this particular situation. The Syndicate/X-Com games do this, as do some of the Mass Effect games, if I’m not mistaken. There’s something like this in LET’S ROB A BANK, except that here you are doing only a single mission, which makes sense, since you’re planning to make so much money that you’ll never have to work again.

The bank robbery will unfold in a variety of different ways depending on whom you put in your squad and which choices you make during the robbery itself. (The latter are in general far less consequential than the former.) Some of these differences make perfect sense: take the muscle guy who hates drivers and the irritable driver, and infighting will doom your effort. Other differences make absolutely no sense at all. There’s one squad member whom you cannot really choose, because taking her on board will always coincide with the total destruction of the world. Frankly, this feels less like a serious possibility and more like something put in at the last moment when the author realised they wouldn’t have the time to develop content involving this character.

The different ways in which the robbery can develop are often pretty entertaining, and you’ll probably see a few losing ones before you hit on a winning ending. A fun diversion, but I didn’t feel compelled to hunt for all the endings.

We’re in vampire territory here, and it’s the “living in a sewer and keeping herds of thralls and human cattle” kind of vampire. Clan Nosferatu, maybe, if we’re thinking in terms of Vampire: the Masquerade, which the author is probably not. There’s some in-game indication that not all vampires live this way, since both the protagonist and their rescuer are or can be animated by much less selfish desires. Indeed, the game starts out by giving us a choice of goal: freeing the other thralls, avenging ourselves on the elder vampire, or obtaining an amulet that will allow us to withstand the light of the sun. The game might have been more interesting if we had actually been forced to choose between these three goals – as it is, we can simply do all of them. It’s not so much a choice as a list of goals, then, although we can decide to murder the thralls if we so prefer.

The caverns that we traverse are a curious combination of good and not-so-good world building. The dungeon is especially effective, conjuring up images of horror without descending into gory details. But there are also numerous points of the “you’re at an intersection and can go in these and these directions”-type. I did enjoy traversing the catacombs, but it seems there was a lot more potential here for atmosphere and memorability.

There did seem to be a bit of a mismatch between the way the game tells us that the elder vampire is really scary and powerful, and the incredible ease with which one can depose of him. How did this guy ever earn his fearsome reputation if a newly freed thrall can kill him with no trouble at all? I certainly didn’t dislike the ending, but I again felt that there was untapped potential here. (What if you could only become strong enough to defeat the enemy if you first sucked every last drop of blood from the two human prisoners? Okay, I realise that that is the kind of game design that takes us squarely into the realm of my own obsessions, and the current author might not be interested in it at all. Still, it’s one way to make victory feel more costly and more consequential.)

I ran into a couple of bugs – a game-ending one if you tried to avoid the pit trap for the second time, and a bug where you can repeat the fight with the elder vampire as if it had never happened before – but those can easily be fixed.

All in all, enjoyable, with some strong moments, but more could have been achieved.

I have little interest in policing the boundaries of IF. Yet I'm willing to state that Linear Love should not have been entered into the interactive fiction competition, since it is not interactive by any reasonable standards. The piece is simply a short story about a guy(?) who falls in love with a French girl until their very happiness weakens the attraction. The text is presented in a rather unusual way: rather than scrolling down to read more, in this particular piece you have to scroll up. (You can also scroll sideways indefinitely, but this serves no purpose.) The difference between scrolling up and scrolling down surely does not map onto the difference between traditional and interactive fiction.

However, there was one, perhaps unintended aspect of the piece that actually made reading it an interesting experience to me. If you right-click and press “Escape”, you are suddenly in an environment where you can select different portals to different stories. I quickly got stuck in the steel door of a Panopticon, unable to move any way. This wasn’t particularly entertaining, unless one interprets it as a parable about getting through the prose of Foucault. (For the record, I like Foucault. I just don’t always like his prose.) But what interested me was that I wasn't entirely sure where the boundaries of Linear Love lay. Was it just the original story, and was using the escape option a way of leaving the work and entering other works? Or was it all one whole, an entire universe of stories hidden behind the tale of linear love? It made me realise that the IF community still has a relatively traditional conception of a work, even though digital environments allow for much more vagueness and flexibility.

Instruction Set consists of a series of abstract puzzles of varying originality, embedded in a narrative about scientists who attempt to wake up a comatose woman. The puzzles are fine, but not great. The weakest is perhaps the 3-by-3 number sliding puzzle, which basically forces you to solve a puzzle you've already solved before, but this time in an inconvenient medium. On the other hand, the falling ball puzzles are fun, and the list-copying puzzles are also entertaining. Overall: adequate. The main storyline too is best described as adequate. It works to create interest, but nothing too unexpected happens, and there's no real drama.

Still, I liked the game more than the previous paragraph may suggest. I liked it because it has charm, a charm created by the combination of the pictures and the often quite funny dialogue. To give some inexact quotes: "I chose to interpret it as a rhetorical observation rather than a command." "Would you like a soothing cup of mildly warm water?" These moments brought a smile to my face and made playing the game a pleasure rather than a chore.

(Spoiler - click to show)More could perhaps have been done with the memories of the protagonist and the reaction of her mother; more character building, more narrative. We learn that there was a car crash, but this fact alone has little impact. On the other hand, more dramatic development at this level of the story might not have meshed well with the tone of the cartoon scientists.

One interesting question that the game raises is this: who are you playing? The comatose woman? Well, her memories are present as external to us, not internal. So perhaps we are merely a part of her brain, the part specialised in puzzle solving? If so, I think this is a very original choice of PC!

Unfortunately, Instruction Set can no longer be played, because an update to the software platform it runs on has broken keyboard input. I hope it will one day be restored, because it if worth checking out.

Diddlebucker!'s cover art looks as if it came straight from Infocom, and there's some obvious Infocom-era nostalgia going on here. We are participating in a great puzzlefest, recreating some of the feel of, say, Hollywood Hijinx; and the year is 1987, the last great year for the company that gave interactive fiction its name. But Diddlebucker! is evidently a 21st century game, as can be seen from the nice in-built hint system, the relative fairness of the puzzles and the fact that it is almost merciful on the cruelty scale. (Almost: you can get yourself into an unwinnable situation near the very end of the game, so it's useful to save when things get intense.)

The game consists of several segments, and I found some of them more compelling than others. For me, the stand-out section is the part along the river. Here, all the puzzles made perfect sense to me; I did not need the hint system at all; and I was particularly pleased by the use of geography. (Spoiler - click to show)It is satisfying when you get to explore the roofs and the river that you already know are there but did not expect to be able to traverse. This part of the game was very enjoyable for me.

I found the theme park section more difficult to like. There are many red herrings (e.g., all the shops and games and attractions you don't need); some of the content is arbitrarily restricted or appears only at certain moments (e.g., the white house tour, the employee, the couple); and a few of the puzzles were beyond me. (If anyone solved the song clue without using hints, I'm impressed.) Perhaps the experience was made more difficult for me because I had to look up many of the arcane Americana, although it turned out that none of that was really necessary for solving the game. In this part, I frequently relied on the hints, which of course makes for a less satisfying experience.

I nevertheless persevered, and was happy that I did. There is a nice plot twist near the end, a sudden ramping up of the danger level, and all in all a satisfying ending to a mostly satisfying game. Although if a popcorn king called 'Diddy' invites me to come to his 'seaside mansion'... I'll find a polite way to decline.

In summary: a very competent puzzle-fest, executed with charm, though perhaps a little rough around some of the edges.

Careless Talk is a short choice-based game about a very heavy topic: lethal violence against homosexuals. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the game is about living in a world where revealing who you really are could have the most dire of consequences. The protagonist of the tale is a gay sailor -- in fact, a sort of techno-magician -- and he has been speaking about his predicament to the ship's clergyman. This is risky, since you never know whom to trust, but perhaps also necessary, since you need somebody to talk to. As the game starts, our protagonist has heard that one of his former friends, also a gay sailor, has been betrayed and killed on another ship. He needs to talk to the clergyman again, but, at the same time, has the possibility of betrayal more clearly on his mind then ever.

Now there is nothing really wrong with this piece; there are no bugs, and the writing is competent. And yet it failed to make much of an impact on me. It's about something really dramatic... and yet, the drama wasn't conveyed to me. I'm not exactly sure why that happened, but I have a few hypotheses, all of which take the form of describing a way in which the game's impact might have been bigger.

(Spoiler - click to show)One possibility would be to increase the emotional impact of finding out that our friend Tom has been betrayed and killed. This would require spending more time establishing Tom as someone we know and like, a real person; and probably also spending time developing the personality of his betrayer. Perhaps the betrayer even found out about Tom's sexuality because of something we ourselves did, or were at least part of? A lot of potential here, if we were willing to start the story much sooner.

A second possibility, probably closer to the author's intentions, would be to ramp up the tension in the present-day scenes. I never really had the idea that something bad was going to happen to the character. The only homophobe we meet is a stupid as the rear end of a pig, so harm is unlikely to come from there. And what possible reason could the clergyman have to betray us now, at this moment, when he could have outed us much earlier? Perhaps if someone had been on to us, and we needed to convince the clergyman to take a risky action in order to save us, this would have created more real drama in the moment.

A third possibility, on a slightly more meta-level, is to tone down the overt discussion on the world's violent homophobia. From its very first words, the game signals to us exactly what it is about: violence against homosexuals, who therefore have to hide their sexuality. And the game proceeds to show us what is has already told us. I'm not a big fan of the old adage "show, don't tell"; but perhaps we should be wary of first telling the reader what is going on and then also showing it in concrete scenes. This surely lessens the impact of those scenes themselves.

A fourth possibility, perhaps closest of all to the author's intentions, would be to focus more on the nature of friendship. There is a sense in which the main question that the game raises is this: why would anyone risk their very life just in order to talk about their true self? (It was a good choice on the author's part to have the relationship between the protagonist and the cleric be purely platonic. The question why someone would risk their life to enact their sexual preference is also a good and deep question, but most people have a ready-to-hand, if perhaps too simplistic, answer to it: lust is sometimes irresistible.) This is a very interesting question; and I would have liked to see a bit more exploration of the protagonist's struggle with this question. Perhaps multiple encounters with the clergyman could have helped here, including possibilities to either tell him about it or not, and then a subsequent struggle with the negative effects of either choice.

The game, then, ended up falling a bit flat for me. But there's a lot of material here that I could see being developed in ways that might have much more impact on me. This is the author's first piece of interactive fiction, and it is a worthy effort. I'm interested in seeing how they'll develop their craft in the future.

I did not in any way participate in or follow the 2017 IF Comp, so I had never heard of The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now, the game to which Re: Dragon is a sort of unofficial 'sequel' -- if that's the right word, which it almost certainly is not. But since Welch's game is quite insistent about our playing that 2017 game first, I decided to do so. Given how low it placed in the competition, The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now is surprisingly fun. I especially liked the way that it goes from 'ominous' (better watch out, if I make the wrong choice I'll be killed, that owl is out to get me) to utterly zany (let's try a flying ninja kick by first ricocheting off of the opposite wall, the shocked expression of the owl be damned). The fact that you can't open the door is... yes, unsatisfying, but that is part of the deal. Not a great game, but certainly not bad.

This means that I entirely sympathise with Welch's wish to rehabilitate the 2017 game through his own 2018 game, which puts it in an entirely new context and thereby gives everything in it an entirely new meaning. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. I love it. (My own game Nemesis Macana contains a long non-interactive essay in which the fictional author gives a bizarre sex-obsessed reinterpretation of a whole series of famous IF games. Very different from Re: Dragon in form and tone, and yet, there's some underlying similarity.) Of course, this is also why the 2018 game is not really a sequel to the 2017 game. A better image would be that of phagocytosis: Re: Dragon eats up The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now and incorporates it, turning it into something else in the process. You can never read the original work again in the same way.

As a game, it's quite enjoyable. I especially liked the weird e-mails we got as a competition organiser, and if there's one thing I was disappointed about, it was that the e-mail interface sort of stopped being relevant as soon as you got to the choice-based dragon story. It could have been a lot of fun if weird mail had kept coming in, and perhaps also some mail based on the choices we make in the story. Now the two parts of Re: Dragon feel a little disconnected.

Still, playing through it was a good time. I'm not sure the final story makes complete sense -- it certainly doesn't seem to fit all the fictional details of the 2017 game -- but that's fine, since it is in keeping with the essential zaniness of the original. Re: Dragon wants to be fun, and it is fun.

(Though one thing was, alas, missing: a cameo by Stiffy Makane!)

This is a short choice-based game about going to church. You sit through an absolutely nonsensical sermon, perhaps spending the time checking out some good-looking girls, and then there's a wide-branching set of choices at the end. You may end up seeing God, getting your soul eaten by a demon, or just going home after the sermon.

I fail to understand what the point of the piece is. If it had really focussed on how boring a sermon can be, and how the attendants are mostly killing time while keeping up the facade of piety -- then it would have been a piece of satire. But most of this game is so far out that it doesn't work as a commentary on anything, be it the sociology of church going, the hypocrisy of much piety, the teachings of some particular religion, or indeed anything else. All it is, is irreverent: it refuses to take any aspect of religion seriously.

But what is the point of mere irreverence? There is perhaps a slight chance that a person who is struggling with a suffocating religious upbringing will experience any and all forms of irreverence as liberating. But I doubt it. If you're being oppressed by dogmatic teachings that you neither believe in nor feel able to reject, you're better off reading something substantial -- Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, say, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or even Richard Dawkins, though I cannot fully recommend his scientistic world view. If you just feel a lot of anger towards certain forms of organised religion and need to get it off of your chest, then you're better off screaming along to some crazy satanic black metal. If you are frustrated by right-wing conservative Christianity, go and read some left-wing progressive Christian authors, like Dorothee Sölle and Gianni Vattimo. If you are interested in a Christianity that can inspire even those who do not embrace the dogmas, delve into Kierkegaard or Renée Girard or Paul Tillich or even someone like Henri Nouwen.

Of course, I'm taking this game far too seriously if I end up recommending you to read a whole bunch of philosopher and theologians; and, to be sure, spending more time writing the review than playing the game. But it irritated me, even though I am (perhaps*) an atheist. There is so much about religion that is worth saying and exploring, much of it positive, much of it negative, but all of it important... and this game manages to do nothing with it. I guess I needed to get that off of my chest.


* It all depends on your definitions, of course. When Tillich tells us that God is not a being but Being itself, and that theistic belief in God as an entity is atheistic, well, then perhaps I am not an atheist after all. And since this conception of God is more useful to me than most, because it allows me greater access to the tradition... why not embrace it?

This is a masterclass in new-school puzzle design. Old-school games had many puzzles, but they were all unrelated: solving one of them did not help you with the next one (except perhaps by providing you with new tools). Playing the game, you are not building up expertise. Did you get the items from the demijohn in Curses!? Nice! But it doesn’t teach you how to retrieve the attic key from the cellar.

New-school puzzle design, on the other hand, is all about teaching the player to think in certain ways, to consider certain possibilities. As you progress through the game, you become better and better at understanding how the puzzles in this game work and hence you become better and better at solving them. This allows the author to make the puzzles more difficult as time goes by, to compensate for the increased expertise of the player and keep the balance between frustration and achievement at exactly the right point.

Temple of Shorgil is, as I said, a masterclass in this kind of design. It does it perfectly. First of all, it restricts the players actions to movement, taking statuettes and putting down statuettes. Except for some information gathering, that is all you ever need to do. Every puzzle then revolves around taking and putting down statuettes. The first few are very simple, teaching us the basics; we are then slowly introduced to the idea that the plaques are useful; and before we know it, we are solving some quite complicated riddles with, if not ease, at least a modicum of skill. Very nice.

(Spoiler - click to show)The hardest puzzles are semi-optional, since they involve the ‘secret’ rooms that a player might never find – although the ending you get if you haven’t solved the secret puzzles isn’t too positive, so that might clue you in that there is more to discover. But even these are utterly fair.

If there is a price to pay for the razor sharp focus on efficient puzzle design, it may be that the game feels somewhat sparse and clinical. The completed legend and the story of our archaeological rivalry are both nice, and the sketches help to bring some life to the world. But the protagonist remains a blank and most of the game world is described in the most utilitarian terms. This is inevitable; anything else would have spoiled, at least to some extent, the masterclass. And yet it makes me feel that for all its faults, a game like Curses! had more charm.

That may be an unfair gripe; or maybe it is merely a statement about my personal tastes. Whatever may be the case, Temple of Shorgil is highly recommended.

I’m not a fan of superheroes. Perhaps you need to be at least a little bit sympathetic to the American libertarian/frontier mentality to enjoy fictions about this one guy who can go and solve problems that society as a whole can’t fix! Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t grow up with superhero comics. My childhood was defined by the Flemish comic Suske & Wiske, in which one of the good guys, Jerom, is as preternaturally strong as any superhero. But the writer ends up devising ever more complicated ways of getting Jerom out of the story, because his entrance solves every possible problem immediately. Boring. That’s why superheroes need supervillains, I guess, but then why bother going to the level of super?

Also: why bother with this introduction? Well, only to point out that it is entirely irrelevant to my appreciation of The Origin of Madame Time, since MathBrush’s effort is not in fact a superheroes game. Of course, it looks like one. It’s chock full of superheroes! But they’re all frozen in time, so they’re not doing anything; and you yourself do not have any special powers that you can use to solve the problems you are confronted with. Admittedly, you have the power to unfreeze time, which is spectacular enough. But you can only use it after solving the problems, not in order to solve them. So we end up with a very human puzzle game, even if it is set in colourful surroundings and uses a plethora of what are, for all means and purposes, magic items. There is not a single action sequence – we are light years removed from the Earth and Sky series.

The Origin of Madame Time ends up being a game that I find very easy to like. The puzzles aren’t trivial, but they won’t stump a seasoned adventurer. The setting and the set of characters are memorable. The implementation is top notch, and the humour is light but effective. It doesn’t break new ground, but it makes me smile. Since I assume that that is precisely its main purpose, I would declare it a clear success.

A detective story that is very traditional indeed, being set in an English manor and going as far as to incorporate some of the basics of the Cluedo board game. Its main selling point is the protagonist-narrator, whose arrogant and extravagantly clichéd demeanour is indeed quite funny. The writing is good and the mystery at least adequate. (Spoiler - click to show)There are clues pointing to everyone, but there’s an early one that breaks the symmetry and points to one person as the most likely perpetrator.

(Because of the arrogance of the narrator, I originally thought he could only be right by dumb luck; and I ended up assuming that whoever you accused, that person would turn out to be the guilty party. Nope, it’s just a classic mystery with one criminal. (Spoiler - click to show)But I did make the correct choice on my first try, since I tried the person against whom I had most evidence – and that turned out to be the right way of thinking.)

It is less clear that this story is well-served by being an interactive fiction. Indeed, there are no real choices before it is your turn to accuse someone; just large pieces of text and then some ‘choices’ that obviously only change the order in which the pieces are presented to you. The entire thing would have been just as effective if it had been printed as a short story, ending with the message: “Who do you think is the killer? Turn to page 120 to see whether you are correct!” One could argue that nothing is lost either by presenting it as an interactive piece. But the reader has other expectations when sitting down to play interactive fiction, and those expectations here turn out to be disappointed. And it wouldn’t have been that hard to make the piece more interactive. So overall: enjoyable, certainly, but also a bit of a missed opportunity.

In a sense, I am not the ideal player for a game that is filled with as many palindromes as the author could device. First, I am not myself an ailiphilist, I mean, a tsiliphilist, nor do I suffer from the darker and more kinky cousin of ailihphilia, ailihparaphilia. Second, and more to the point, English is not my first language. For a game based on wordplay, and especially a kind of wordplay with constraints so severe that it necessitates the use of many obscure and slang terms, this is decidedly a negative. I remember banging my head against Goose, Egg, Badger because my English language skills were just not good enough to realise the nature of its main wordplay puzzle. This could certainly also have happened with Ailihphilia.

But it didn't, and that is because the author has taken great care to ensure that his game is accessible and free from frustration. He has indeed expended immense efforts to achieve this, giving us an almost -- but not quite -- bewildering amount of ways to get reminders, hints and solutions. The player who wishes to solve all the puzzles herself can do so, while the player who is mostly along to revel in the author's inventiveness can relax and enjoy the trip. (I myself fell somewhere in between, taking pride in solving most of the first half of the game by myself, and then using the hint systems to speed up my play in the second half.)

Revelling in the author's inventiveness is indeed the main draw of the game. Christopher Huang complains that there aren't enough puzzles in which the player has to come up with palindromes, but I don't think the aim of the game is to challenge the player to be as smart a wordsmith as the author. Rather, I imagine Andrew gleefully making up and combining palindromes into a (somewhat) coherent fiction, managing to cram in more and more as he continued to refine and expand the game -- and I, the player, am invited to laugh along with him while at the same time being in awe of what he's doing. Playing Ailihphilia is like watching a juggler: it's amazing that somebody manages to do this, and being amazed is where the fun of the experience lies. Or perhaps an even better comparison is this: playing Ailihphilia is like reading a rendition of Poe's poem The Raven that contains not a single 'e'. Fun and awesome, because it is both difficult and done well. Of necessity, it is not the greatest of literature; but it doesn't have to be to be really enjoyable.