Ratings and Reviews by P. B. Parjeter

The Story

In Cut the Sky, you’re a nondescript person with a blade that can cut almost anything within reach. Your goal, as the title suggests, is to Cut the Sky.

In each chapter, you encounter characters who are defined mostly by their archetypal roles: a gunman, a wizard, a thief, and the like. These are simple roles, but they’re always well-sketched.

About the gunman...
(Spoiler - click to show)Is the gun-spinning gunman who tells you you’re pretty good “really something” a Revolver Ocelet reference? I don’t know, but I guess it says something about how archetypal these characters are.

But describing how Cut the Sky relies on archetypes undersells its originality. It’s somewhere between a grand-scale myth and a fully fleshed-out sci-fi/fantasy story with real worldbuilding. It’s just the right amount of detail for a game of this length.

The Puzzles

Playing Cut the Sky is just as unique. It’s made almost entirely of “think outside the box” puzzles, which are, again, centered around your cut-anything blade.

From the start, you’re given a way to solve a confrontation directly or indirectly, i.e., using brute force or not. Violence is the answer to this one, but only if you really want it to be.

From there, the story puts you into gradually more complex situations. There are about a dozen or so chapters, most of which are pretty thoroughly-drawn setups. The marketplace chapter is a particularly fleshed-out scenario. Then, once you reach the tower at the end, things get a little simpler again and the game enters its denouement.

Overall, the puzzle solutions are pretty straightforward, but the game does challenge you by reframing things. Each puzzle solution is similar, but not exactly the same.

In other words, “thinking outside the box” means something different each time. By the time the game threw the color spectrum riddle at me, it got the better of me — I was overconfident in my expectations of what I was supposed to do.

Technically Spotless

This game is almost technically spotless. Parser rejection messages are broad and make sense in context. For example, you never hear “that’s fixed in place,” but rather something along the lines of “that’s absent or not important.”

More importantly, there are basically no overlapping keywords. The game never asked “which one do you mean?” unless I was actually interacting with similar objects.

On top of that, many of the commands are diegetic — ie. framed as in-game actions. To be fair, you’re not going to do much apart from cutting and talking (and optionally kissing) in Cut the Sky. But even saving and restoring are framed as remembering things. Plus, you “wander” instead of using compass directions, and you need to “think” instead of typing hints. I liked this a lot.

I have only one complaint: a few of the puzzles had overly specific requirements, especially the thief and wizard puzzles.

In the case of the thief, it’s unclear how her pattern of movement reacts to your actions. Similarly, the wizard would have been a little more straightforward if his spells were ordered instead of cycled. But these are minor complaints.

Themes

I’ve saved this section for last because I’m not too confident in my ability to analyze the game’s themes. What is Cut the Sky about?

Other reviews have described it as atmospheric and cathartic, which seems spot on to me. The game’s meaning has to be approached indirectly.

(Spoiler - click to show)Cutting the sky at the end of the game is a powerful act, but it’s not really backed by anything. It’s not really righteous or rebellious, nor is it justified or unjustified. It’s just what you do. What else would you do with a sword that could cut anything?

Yet the final action does have weight, mostly due to the span of time and scale of civilizations portrayed in the game.

So you can project any motives you want onto your quest. Maybe I’m wrong here and the author had more specific intentions — in which case it’s my fault for glossing over in-game information that I thought was peripheral.

The bottom line is: this is a really one-of-a-kind game. I rarely vote, but I’ve nominated this for best in show, and I hope it wins. Admittedly, I was swayed by the existing reviews and IFDB scores, but Cut the Sky certainly deserves the attention it’s getting. Best of luck to the author!

Basically, you’re Hans Christan Andersen’s Little Matchstick Girl, aka Ebenezabeth Scrooge, and you’re trying to stop a team of mad scientists who are working to crack into a mysterious space artifact. They think it contains (Spoiler - click to show)heaven, but in fact, it’s a sort of (Spoiler - click to show)primordial life preserve.

The Golden Firmament is a bit like Ian Finley’s Babel and similar works in that it puts a sci-fi spin on religious and scientific ideas of hubris.

Veeder’s game relies much more on random humor, situations, and characters, though some of those are more thematically linked than at first glance.

Would it be better if it were more focused? I don’t know. The manic nature of the game means that commenting on anything would amount to mostly describing the jokes that I liked — which is a lot of them. So I’ll move onto how it played.

Approachable Difficulty Level

Before talking about the timer, I’ll touch on the puzzles and map.

I usually call myself bad at puzzles. While I rarely was confused by the puzzles here, I used the built-in hint function to solve a few (by typing ‘hint 2’). That worked pretty well.

There also seemed to be one point toward the end where the hint function gave me hints about the previous situation. It was close to the end, so it didn’t really matter.

More often, I lost myself in navigating the map. The layout started to make more sense toward the end, but I referred to wolfbiter’s transcript to get through parts of the game.

How the Timer Works

This isn’t the only IF game to use real-time gameplay. However, I imagine that most others are brief games focused on delivering a short experience and replayability. Most aren’t ambitious enough to apply a countdown to a full-fledged, parser adventure game.

The Golden Firmament encourages you to set aside time for a full playthrough. At first glance, that means setting aside 30 minutes.

However, the game actually awards more time as you progress. So it will probably take longer than 30 minutes, but it will also be more forgiving than you expect — unless you spend all 30 minutes stuck in a single segment.

More importantly, the game (Spoiler - click to show)gradually drifts away from the original time limit entirely. Sometimes, it puts you in timeless spaces. And toward the end, it puts you in a space with a shorter time limit (I had ~8 minutes). This serves to disorient the player – not just putting them in a different space, but under different time constraints.

What’s The Timer For?

That raises the question — what’s the intended effect of the timer?

A stripped-down version of the game can apparently be played without the timer — judging by the downloadable .gblorb version. On top of that, you can pause and even restore saves with the original time limit, which is a nice convenience but mostly a fallback for the player.

So the time limit basically exists to put pressure and relief on the player.

On one hand, I think that this pressure is enjoyable due to the manic nature of the game. In a heavier work, it would be more frustrating.

On the other hand, I think it would be better to make the importance of the timer entirely illusory. Making running out of time a ‘game over’ is a bit too much, IMO. (One point of comparison might be Chandler Groover’s The Bat, which had a money tally that seemed important and somewhat stressful, but which was ultimately inconsequential.)

But overall, I enjoyed The Little Matchstick Girl a lot, and I got what I was expecting out of it — plus an extra hour of playtime.

This is a short game (less than 15 minutes long) that takes its central idea from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to examine eating disorders.

What It Is

Like some other Twine games, The Goldilocks Principle plays with choice and limited options.

Apart from advancing passages in a mostly linear way, the player mainly decides how triggering an episode is, based on a scale marked 1 to 5.

(The game uses the word “triggering” to describe the scale. But more accurately, maybe, it’s a scale of viscerality, since not all players are necessarily going to have a strong response to the subject matter. The writing is reasonably strong and definitely unrelenting, but I didn’t have a very strong response to it, probably due to my distance from the topic.)

Each of the five segments stands on its own, and each is very short, so I won’t comment too much on those. I did want to say that I thought the timed text was done well, contrary to @JoshGrams. This game overall is a good example of light styling and effects.

Anyway, the third choice, in the center of the range of options, makes it clear that it’s nigh-impossible to get things just right — subverting the Goldilocks lesson.

For the player, that means you’re not going to get a fully satisfying ending. For the author, presumably, it means eating disorders are something that you never sure you’ve full kept in check, though I don’t want to speak for them. But it’s a structure that allows for a bit of extra empathy between both author and reader, I think.

What It Isn’t

I also wanted to comment on what this game isn’t. I went into it expecting a full-fledged, dark parody of Goldilocks and the Three Bears centered around eating disorders.

Obviously, that’s partly because Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a children’s story. The cover art seemed to double down on that – it looks like children’s book illustrations, particularly the rough-line styles of Lauren Child, Quentin Blake, Andy Stanton, and the like.

On one hand, I’d like the author to have taken the risk of writing a full-fledged parable that really plays off the Goldilocks story and its characters.

On the other hand, this is clearly meant to be a somewhat minimalist game that gets its point across about a personal experience, then leave you with it. And the central mechanic holds it up pretty well – maybe even better than it would with a larger game.

The Story

Ghost Ship is a Monkey Island fan game. It’s also a critical essay about the series and one of its central characters, Elaine Marley.

The plot is fairly bare-bones: Ghost Ship has the player solving a few simple puzzles to turn Elaine into a ghost. Once that happens, Elaine can accomplish her role in the original plot of the Monkey Island games.

Major spoiler: Ghost Ship literally ends with Elaine (Spoiler - click to show)fading away.

It’s a pointed conclusion, and I’m pretty sure the author means for it to relate back to Ghost Ship’s overarching themes. The in-game author’s notes describe how Elaine has been overlooked or had her original characteristics erased throughout the Monkey Island series. That fits into the overall ‘ghost’ theme.

When I put it like that, Ghost Ship sounds like a shaggy dog story. Maybe it is — maybe it has to be since it’s a slice of an existing story — but it’s also a character piece. So let’s look at how that does the heavy lifting.

Characterization

In Ghost Ship, Elaine is portrayed through her interactions with a few other characters, but mostly through the narrative tone.

I was going to say that Ghost Ship leans on internet-era snark, with a little more venom than classic Monkey Island humor. I remember Elaine being indignant in context in the official games, not so much snarky for the sake of snark.

But after reading @SpaceTurtles’ review, I see that the exact dialogue choices are left up to the player. I guess the fact that I was put off by some of the snarkier options says more about me than the game.

There are also some concrete attempts to add depth to Elaine’s character. For example, in one key repeated scene, the author tries to portray Elaine as traumatized by LeChuck and as overcoming that trauma. That sort of weightiness would be out of place in the original Monkey Island, but this isn’t the original game, and I think it will be well received by the right audiences.

Ultimately, Elaine is a competent character with some edge, as she is in the games, so the slightly different tone works in the end.

Portraits of Elaine

The game also concerns itself with Elaine’s visual appearance. The author prefers Elaine’s original design and is very critical of the cartoonier designs. The cartoonier designs arguably correspond to poor characterization, with Elaine being reduced to a love interest in some of the later games.

Here’s everything side by side in a single image.

Notably, Elaine is portrayed as a black woman on the cover of Ghost Ship. I like the new portrait for its own sake. Elaine looks good in her own right, and it works as a race-blind interpretation of the character. And above all, it made me want to play the game.

Usually there would be no need to say more than that. However, Ghost Ship is explicitly about Elaine’s appearance. Early on in the game, the author argues that a change to Elaine’s skin tone — a gradual shift from dark to light — is something that’s been taken from her over the course of the series.

But actually, it’s in some of the later games that Elaine has an olive skin tone relative to certain characters. In the first two games, most Monkey Island characters had exactly the same reddish skin tone as Elaine. In fact, most video game characters had that tone as well.

That’s because there were few viable options in the 16-bit EGA color palette. You can see a bunch of Monkey Island characters here, including one who was meant to have a darker skin tone.

It’s debatable whether Monkey Island handles race and culture well or not — how much of it is pirate clichés versus Caribbean etc. stereotypes? But I think it’s clear that some other characters in the series would provide a lot more substance in this area. Trying to apply it to Elaine seems like looking for a problem.

Game Design and Styles

Lastly, how does Ghost Ship play? It has a pretty ambitious design visually and functionally. It’s not perfect, but it’s original and it works.

In terms of function, you’ll interact with the game through an inventory, things that are sort of like contextual boxes, text that replaces itself on hover, images, and regular links. The game is split into chapters and author notes, all united through a main menu, with some repeated scenes sprinkled in.

This would make for a disjointed interface in a more complex game, but Ghost Ship has pretty simple puzzles and progression. I never got stuck or lost.

On the visual side, there’s a lot of font styling and a variety of page layouts. It’s usually appropriate and it sometimes looks good, especially the ectoplasmic green font used for ghost dialogue. Occasionally, some of the colors aren’t really visible against a black background. (The author has also apparently fixed some problems with automatic text, so that’s good.)

In the end, Ghost Ship is rough around the edges at times, but I’m glad that it was made since there are very few semi-documentary IF games like it.

Related Media

Anyone who’s interested in the meta-ness of Monkey Island that Ghost Ship builds on might be interested in this YouTube video.

In fact, you might want to watch it beforehand — I’m no expert on the series and it covers some stuff that is directly relevant to Ghost Ship. Knowing the things that video explained helped me get more out of the author’s notes.

I also wanted to mention a movie called The Cry of Granuaile. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I guess there is something about legendary, semi-forgotten pirates that invites this sort of metafictional roleplaying. The film goes into Spartacus-esque “we are all Granuaile” territory. Anyone who liked Ghost Ship would probably enjoy it.

The Story

Marbles has a simple story: you’re a cat, and you’re investigating some sort of creature at a stage show alongside your human owner, D.

D is just the secondary protagonist. For gameplay purposes, you are strictly working from the perspective of Marbles the cat. I really like the way she is written: she’s conceited, but she’s also ignorant of human things and willing to gloss over that.

Just as important as those two characters is the one that’s not in the title. The creature you’re trying to deal with is a (Spoiler - click to show)grue from Zork.

I’ve never played that game, so the fact that this centers around one of its characters didn’t make a huge impact on me. I did recognize the name, though, and I know it’s not something you want to come across.

Marbles tries to balance feelings of slight terror but also compassion toward the creature. The writing gets the tone across effectively in its own right, but I can’t say exactly how effectively it does that in relation to the source material.

Gameplay

Onto the game mechanics. Since Marbles has you playing as a cat, you rarely manipulate objects directly. Instead, you direct D’s attention to them. (And later, you direct the other character in another way.)

In some ways, this approach to gameplay is straightforward, since it advances the plot significantly after each successful action. However, as the game progresses it asks you to negotiate some spaces and draw attention to objects in very specific ways. None of these have very strong conceptual links in their own right, IMO.

In other words, I think Marbles really demands the player to build up a mental space of how the stage/auditorium is laid out. If I had played with the pictures on, that might have helped, but only a few would work as useful diagrams.

In the end, the game isn’t terribly difficult, and it’s probably about as easy as the author intended. But I’d say that’s mostly due to the small map and limited number of objects. I think that the gameplay would quickly become complicated in a larger game.

I did check the hints a few times. Speaking of hints, this game does something smart: it only allows you to see hints for the part of the game that you’ve reached. So there’s no way to spoil things for yourself accidentally.

On top of all that, the game can be even more straightforward — it also gives you the option to read it as a linear story.

Themes

What is the game about? It’s a short story that touches on themes of family, empathy, being together with someone else, and knowing what they’re like. (Those things are all nicely contrasted with a setting in which the characters are alone).

As I said, I don’t know much about the source material, so I had to create my own premise for the plot. More specifically …

Based on the initial D, and based on the fact that Drew uses a cat in his profile picture, I couldn’t stop myself from assuming D is the author’s childhood self.
Maybe it’s him as a child daydreaming about both the thoughts of his cat.

That’s the premise that I made up in my head – since it’s the sort of way I imagined myself with fictional characters and animals as a kid. And even now, I guess.

But the game didn’t validate me whenever I accidentally typed “Drew,” and the character D is apparently from one of his earlier games.

So that may or may not be what he was going for.

Animal Player Characters

One more thing. A few of the games I’ve recently played have had animal PCs (or secondary PCs). During IF Comp, there was Draconis's Miss Gosling, and I also played CMG 's Toby’s Nose and malacostraca’s free bird at some point.

Broadly, animal PCs can serve as a basis for a unique gameplay style — a chance to reduce the number of actions that the player has to deal with while adding in extra considerations.

And apart from that … it’s just fun. Similar to Toby’s Nose, Marbles gives you a chance to freely act like a cat in ways not directly tied to the plot, which is fun. (I don’t think I tried in Miss Gosling since Watson the dog is the secondary character).

Anyway, in Marbles, you earn a score for being appropriately catlike. I’m not sure whether this actually affected the final outcome, but scoring oneself on performing properly feline actions seems in character for a self-concerned cat.

Come to think of it, there was also Octopus’ Garden last Spring Thing, which was enjoyable but probably didn’t fully realize the alien mindset of an octopus in its gameplay. I know there many others, but I don’t see a list on IFDB, so I’ll leave it at that.

This is a well-made Twine/Sugarcube game that tries to get as close to the traditional adventure game format as possible.

I’m going to skip right to the game’s main mechanic: the telekinesis spell.

Often in Twine and choice-based adventure games — and even in graphical adventure games — I feel like I’m just doing object association. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing something, because unlike in parser games, I can’t spontaneously try a verb.

Despite those limitations, using the telekinesis spell in The Dragon of Silverton Mine kind of does feel like performing an action. That’s because it has slightly different effects throughout the game: sometimes it just moves a thing where the game needs it to go; sometimes it shifts something to dislodge a buoyant object, and sometimes it doesn’t work and you’re informed that you need to power it up.

(Certain other Twine games also have central mechanics with diverse effects. I got the same feeling from Agnieszka Trzaska’s The Bones of Rosalinda. Bones has a more complex and more impressive central mechanic, but I also enjoyed the simplicity of Dragon.)

These systems still don’t give total freedom of action, but they do give a sensation that can’t just be reduced to handling or using an object.

Otherwise Pretty Traditional

Apart from that, the The Dragon of Silverton Mine is short and sweet.

Not all puzzles involve the telekinesis spell. Many puzzles fall back on object association, and the game gives you a lot of information when you need it. If you try and use two things and you did it wrong, the game pretty much tells you what you need to do.

I only felt misdirected in one puzzle — the one where you need to get oil. You need to find it in the (Spoiler - click to show)shed, but oil is also mentioned in a few places that you’ll probably have visited more recently.

I think I spotted a few minor bugs, too. The hidden burrow is described in the inventory screen before you actually uncover it. And I think the note about the ring reappeared in its original position after the game took both the ring and the note out of play. These are minor things, and I didn’t see any errors that broke the game. It’s very well-made, especially for what seems to be a first game — though maybe the author has made stuff outside of IF.

The humor is good, and the final twist is fun. However, I would note that the game gradually becomes funnier as you progress — I was expecting a much more serious game when I started.

Decent Design

Finally, I wanted to comment on the design. This game modifies the Sugarcube layout a bit.

I’ve come to kind of dislike Sugarcube’s default sidebar because it takes up a lot of space and is very empty by default. I assume that the reason it’s laid out like so that authors can easily add things line-by-line, like in @agat’s 4x4 Galaxy. However, most games don’t make full use of the sidebar, leaving me to collapse it.

Anyway, The Dragon of Silverton Mine opts to simply move the buttons to the footer, which I like. It would probably be better if they were fixed in place so you don’t need to scroll to see them, just like how the sidebar is fixed. However, The Dragon does something else that’s really important: it keeps each passage reasonably short, even when it appends object text to the end of the page. So I like the layout overall.

Moving onto another topic of design, the game also uses italics to distinguish object links (which append text) from room links (which go to a new passage). Verses also visually distinguished links in a similar way. I don’t know where this started or how widespread it is, but I guess it’s good if it’s becoming more common.

This is an early portion of a game about a detective who has been asked to rescue somebody from the drudgery of office work — though the job seems allow for a little bit of rebellious creativity.

There a few things that the author did well. The written voice is very direct, conversational, and concise, which is refreshing.

And, mechanically, this is Twine at its most straightforward. It has choices that lead to other passages, and those passages usually return to the mainline plot.

Possibly Dada

However, as others have noted, it’s a bit unclear exactly what’s going on. Some people have called it surreal.

I visited the main author’s website and found he’s done some other work in dadaism, which seems to be distinct from much of surrealism.

Here’s an explanation I found by Googling:

As Dada’s artistic heir, Surrealism presented a contrasting idea: instead of wishing to overturn society, the Surrealists sought to re-enchant life by probing the inner-workings of reality by exploring irreality.

That’s just one explanation, but building on it: I’d say that this game isn’t surreal in the same way as Verses is, which seems like a more common type of surrealism.

Verses has tightly interconnected themes and images that don’t necessarily point to anything in real life (especially the core analysis process), but which do point to things in the reader’s internal being.

By contrast, The Lost Artist has a lot of core parts that are pretty grounded individually and draw on real things (like bank heists, private investigations, and corporate jobs) rather than abstract ideas — they just don’t connect in a normal way, and they rely heavily on non-sequitir.

The Lost Artist also has the anti-institutionalist themes that apparently define dadaism. The fact that the characters are trying to apply originality on top of corporate work makes me think of possibly the most well-known example of dadaism: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which turned a signed urinal as an art installation. The Lost Artist’s repurposing of corporate/industrial stuff is less crude, but the idea is similar.

Sometimes Confusing
If dadaism is the author’s intended goal, it’s natural that the game feels disjointed. However, I’m still going to highlight a few jarring things, because I don’t know whether they’re intended or not.

First, the prologue has its own prologue. The story begins in media res with a bank heist, then transitions to an office scene. It seems like the characters become indentured servants as a result of the heist — but maybe not, since it’s a fuzzy transition.

Secondly, the story tells you what’s artistic and what’s drone work in a way that’s hard for the reader to infer for themselves. As Mike Russo noted in his review, the bit about saving money on logos is confusing. The work that the characters are doing isn’t clear on the whole, and the game is currently very short, meaning that there aren’t really enough examples to make this all gel. (The game is unfinished, so my impression could change as more content as added.)

Third, there’s a co-author, Martina Oyhenard. I have no idea what she contributed. Perhaps she refined the main author’s ideas, or perhaps the idea was to combine two authors’ disjointed contributions exquisite corpse-style. Or maybe the goal was something in between.

It’s impossible to say. It would be interesting to hear the authors comment on the writing process. Maybe they will in a post-mortem, but this strikes me as the kind of game where a magician never reveals their secrets … so who knows?

I felt kind of detached from this game, but it’s decent.

It’s a bit of a Rorscach test. Throughout the game, you’re given a range of choices which seem to range from most active to least active.

The situation is clearly pretty bad early on. But acting passively and risking neglect is conceivably as good a response as a heavy-handed solution that makes things worse, so all of the options are viable at face value.

This made reading other people’s reviews pretty interesting. The apparent differences in reviewers’ preferred choices intrigued me and convinced me to play.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the choices are that interesting on their own right. First of all, the ruler in the game is portrayed as excessive, but was hard to feel that anything he did was particularly shocking. I thought the weird stuff might be par for the course, since the game seems to have a historical setting (or possibly a fantasy-historical setting).

Secondly, I got the feeling that the author was trying to draw a parallel to the modern day in some way that isn’t clear. I suppose the central famine could be highlighting concerns about an ecological disaster or a global food crisis. However, it could be a stand in for any kind of fatalism (or, derogatorily, “doomerism”). But in the end, the specific events in the game don’t seem to add up to any sort of parable.

Since the game presents extremely broad life philosophies at the end, maybe I am totally off base in trying to find social commentary. My apologies to the author in that case.

A Good Foundation

Even though I was presented with choices that didn’t intrigue me. the game did gently nudge my pessimistic tendencies, and the basic scenario was good enough to hold my attention for the 15-20 minute playtime.

I think it might difficult to make a thoroughly compelling story around this structure because the audience is waiting for a collapse that acts as a payoff, which kind of devalues the incidental events that lead up to the ending.

A counterpoint might be The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which relies heavily on side characters and plots to tell its story of impending doom and is highly regarded. However, I haven’t played it for decades and never played it in full, so I don’t know how closely you can really compare it.

A Squiffy Game in the Wild

Finally, this is the first time I’ve come across a game made in Squiffy, or at least, the first time that I’ve consciously noticed one, which is surprising since the engine is apparently about ten years old.

I only see a few games tagged or keyworded with ‘Squiffy’ on IFDB. Can anyone tell me how common this engine is?

I played Chandler Groover’s “The Bat.” I really enjoyed it. Its frustratingly relaxing, kind of like Sim City and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

The game keeps piling things onto you and there’s an ominous money score in the corner. I don’t know exactly how this works. I think the game could have deducted money more aggressively, but I’m happy with it regardless.

The situation is this: you’re a valet for a Bryce Wyatt, who is (not much of a spoiler) a (Spoiler - click to show)Batman/Bruce Wayne analogue. He seems to be a sort of were-bat.

The game doesn’t use the term were-bat, but I wanted a word that distinguished his situation from vampirism. Unlike vampires, which are famous for flying, sucking blood, and their brooding elegance, Master Wyatt appears to have adopted the more mundane aspects of bats, such as screeching, climbing, preening, hitting walls, and, most importantly, dropping guano on people.

The plot develops as (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a Selina Kyle/Catwoman analogue starts stealing things from the other guests. You, as Master Wyatt's valet, have to deal with this and everything else that goes wrong.

The writing is very funny, and it’s one of the funniest IF games I’ve played in recent memory. The situations are absurd, the wealthy patrons’ ignorance of the situation is hilarious, and there are some great one-liners. For example:

There’s no good reason to remove this magneto-polonium from the vault right now, but there are many bad reasons.

The baron, of course, is both an oil baron and a real baron.

You wring the soggy newspaper into the pond. Now it’s as good as new (which speaks volumes about its original state).

There is some mild implied adult content. It’s not explicit and doesn’t really merit a content warning (which I don’t think the game has). And, on principle, I wouldn’t request a content warning on any work. But, as a matter of reviewing the game, The Bat requires you to make some inferences that might be uncomfortable if you’re playing this with friends, family, or other company.

The Gameplay

In The Bat, gameplay is simplified so that you only need to “attend to” certain items in the presence of someone or something.

This means that the complexity of the game generally comes from the fact that you can only hold one or two objects at a time. In other words, you need to keep track of where you leave everything across the game’s roughly 13-room map.

On top of that, there are a lot of things to do in “The Bat” at any given time. Many of these tasks are repetitive (especially serving drinks), but since you don’t have to do them in any specific order, it doesn’t actually feel repetitive, and it encourages you to keep moving.

Technically, this does pad the game out more than necessary, but I don’t really have any complaints. The only thing seemed excessive was the need to close certain things, like the icebox or vault, before leaving a room. This is pretty rare, but it could have broken the flow if there were a larger number of containers throughout the game.

The bottom line is that the tasks are simple. There are a few times where you do need to solve light puzzles, but these are straightforward, well-clued, and mostly limited to Act II. I only checked the walkthrough — which is styled in an interesting way — once and I would have solved the problem if I was more patient.

The Characters

There’s a large cast of characters. The valet and player character, aka Albert, is characterized as dryly satisfied with and accustomed to the idiosyncracies of his job.

Since the characters are analogues, Albert is presumably meant to be (Spoiler - click to show)Alfred Pennyworth. However, that character isn’t really iconic on their own; rather, I imagine this is what P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is supposed to be like.

The titular Bat, aka Master Wyatt, doesn’t really have much characterization. Throughout most of the game, he can’t speak and only causes chaos. There’s a bit of a development when you start putting his disruptive talents to use (particularly when you have him (Spoiler - click to show)deal with the Baron’s moustache), which seems to give Master Wyatt a bit of agency. But at the end of the game, he’s just a normal billionaire playboy with no recollection of events.

I think one thing that makes Master Wyatt in bat form likeable is that the rich patrons’ superficially gentle and civil demands are far more irritating than the trouble caused by Master Wyatt himself.

And despite being oblivious to the Master Wyatt’s general condition, the rich patrons have a bit of savviness among themselves. (One remarks that there’s nothing interesting up there as Master Wyatt stares at the ceiling; another quips: “You’ve always had trouble appreciating things from another person’s perspective”.)

Otherwise, I kind of lost track of the guests’ unique identities, apart from (Spoiler - click to show)Célina, who gradually emerges as a key character.

Finally: this is a really approachable game. I finished this game almost entirely without using a walkthrough. I played it in two sittings across three days — the middle day involved dealing with a surprise tax notice in real life, which seems appropriate — and I managed to pick up the game again easily and complete it. A really good game overall.

This is a Twine game where it’s easier to grasp the themes than the plot.

It’s broadly about the human mind, language and comprehension, and the utility and horrors of those things.

The game mainly conveys its theme through mechanics: specifically, it uses text-replacement links that reveal translations and interpretations.

You, the player character, interact with the text mainly in dark-colored passages. You’re analyzing possibly alien objects that have degenerative effects on the mind and body. The task involves analysis and language translation at times.

I think it gets a little excessive in the light-colored passages. This portion of the game contains a lot of technobabble and obscure words. I wasn’t sure how much of this I was supposed to gloss over, but I think the excess is partially a joke because a few of the responses were kind of evasive and ironic.

(That said, there is some real player engagement here, as these light colored passages are where you actually navigate the world through conveniently marked red links. There are also some more involved poetry translations in the light section, too.)

I’m not going to go deep into anything else Verses features, such as the horror and gore or the poems it adapts, but those things are certainly in the game.

What Does It Mean?

What does it all mean? It’s hard to say but I’ll hazard a guess. Mathbrush’s review noted the game has “violent semi-religious imagery no explicit moral or meaning.” However, in this sort of work, there’s usually a standard implicit meaning, usually with a moral slant — the idea that knowing too much is painful, usually as a result of suffering or committing evil, which I guess is next door to scientific hubris.

I think it’s safe to say all of this applies to Verses. There’s a monk character that discusses whether the protagonist will continue looking for answers through a religious/philosophical/spiritual lens.

Verses additionally frames the effects of your analysis work in a scientific way, and there’s some agonizing over knowing the impact of your work.

That’s the broadest explanation I can give. Saying this game is open to interpretation is a bit of a cop out, since a lot of the musings seem deliberate and sincere.

I think that the author is depending on the fact that the audience can feel anything at all means it has some correspondence with reality. I found a few striking. And if you don’t relate to the game’s musings on a personal level, you’ll probably be impacted by its strong atmosphere regardless.

Lots of Comparisons

Within IF, Verses should draw comparisons to Babel and Slouching Toward Bedlam, which tackle similar concerns about knowledge, language, and cognition and have religious/scientific/philosophical overtones.

There might be an even better point of comparison outside of IF: the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, and the novel it was partially based on, Roadside Picnic. In addition to the Eastern European setting, the film and novel concern the search for things or places that carry a similar danger of knowledge.

I don’t mean to undermine Verses’ originality or elevate its quality by making that comparison, but those two works are very similar in some ways.

Finally: is it good? I only rate about half of the games I review, and Verses is especially difficult to assign a rating to because I didn’t really grasp it in full. Other people have rated it highly. I think I still prefer Computerfriend, which is relatively approachable in my opinion.