Reviews by Kastel

The Lady Thalia series is, among many other wonderful things, an indulgently lovingly crafted piece of queer IF. The series debuted at Spring Thing 2021, winning Best NPCs at the 2021 XYZZY Awards. Since then, it has been exclusively a beloved Spring Thing series until this year's IFComp.

I hadn't played the previous games, so I decided to play them before trying this newest entry. The first title made me smile, the second amused me, and the third left me intrigued to see what would come next. The games were easy to go through since they're lighthearted fun. The quips are memorable, the interactivity engaging, and the historical setting always a pleasure to escape into.

Despite having only played this for the past two weeks, the Lady Thalia series has become my comfort food. I chose to spend my limited free time from Japanese language classes playing these games, and I could feel the stress and pressure dissipate. If I played these games at an earlier date, I wondered if I would feel such a strong attachment to these characters -- perhaps, I might have found the fantasy of being a dashing lesbian Arsene Lupin with a detective girlfriend a bit alienating.

I was in the right mood to look forward to playing The Case of Clephan. However, what I got was more than I asked for.

The last time we saw Thalia, she had agreed to work with Mel at her new detective agency following their surprisingly successful collaboration. However, by the time the game begins, that fantasy of solving interesting cases has eroded away. Thalia is now a secretary, a job her late mother wanted her to choose over her prestigious acting career.

She only starts to feel alive when someone posing as Lady Thalia begins stealing artwork. Thalia and Mel must solve the case of the copycat perpetrator.

Anyone who has played the previous games will be familiar with the core gameplay: you talk to people who may have clues, and with the right responses, you can coax them into telling the truth. If a leading question doesn't work, the game may suggest a different approach (perhaps, a friendlier one). The first time I played a Lady Thalia game, I struggled to read the cues. But with having played the three games prior, I knew what to do and solved these cases rather quickly. Mel can also participate, which gives you two options for the same type of response. While I think the game is too easy, it feels nice to pretend to be a master thief for a few minutes.

Other adventure game mechanics also return. For example, you can solve a puzzle by referencing materials and mapping out an area for a later heist. I'm not fond of these mechanics, but they're simple enough that I don't find them tedious.

All in all, the game is another polished and refined entry of the Lady Thalia series. The gameplay feels smoother than ever, and the writing is witty. It's certainly the best Lady Thalia game to date.

But this entry goes beyond what's expected of the series and what I wanted from it. It tackles something that I think is scary for anyone seeking a long-term relationship: settling down.

By this point in the series, Thalia has strong feelings for Mel, enough to tolerate the drudgery of her secretarial job. However, this also means sacrificing her freedom. She and Mel now depend on each other and must work through their differences.

Although there are scenes that play on their homoerotic tension, I'm reminded that they're working together to secure a better future. The exciting premise of uncovering the identity of the fake Lady Thalia is overshadowed by the possibility that someone knows the identity of the real Lady Thalia and could use that information to jeopardize their current lives.

To me, this colors the game as melancholic, almost like grasping what it means to settle down after years of romantic escapades. Clearly, the couple's current relationship isn't what they had hoped for. However, they don't want to lose it because they care about each other. I see it as them trying to adjust to this new life, difficult it may be.

It was a shock to me. A welcome one at least, but I still wondered how these characters could continue to love each other. I think there's something to this dynamism, this uncertainty that captures how long-lasting relationships work in real life. They're not in full harmony, but they're in constant negotiation and a tug-of-war of desires and needs that don't 100% match.

And it's bitter medicine for someone who was subconsciously seeking an escapist fantasy. I understood these characters as people struggling with the same issues I and others face. It's not an understatement to say that this has been a humbling experience for me.

So, I would understand if people don't feel as strongly about this Lady Thalia entry as I do. But like the previous entries, this game came at the right time, just as I was about to leave Japan for home. Now, I can think about other things besides learning Japanese — for example, how should I care for the people I love? Thalia and Mel can't answer that question based on their gameplay mechanics. I look forward to seeing them grow as a couple and think together about what it means to settle down in a new life.

This is a masterful example of how minimalism can stimulate readers' imaginations.

Although the game is presented as a horror title, it is better described as a narrative game with resource management elements. You must travel to an abandoned city with two people who have special abilities and carry as many rations as you think you will need. Along the way, you may discover flora that has survived the apocalypse and that you may want to study to understand why the world ended.

Throughout the game, I never felt tense, but the world presented intriguing mysteries and opportunities that made me wonder if I should sacrifice some of my rations or the characters' energy to explore the world. Even when natural disasters occurred and impeded my pilgrimage, I could talk to my partners about their vocations and lives or just go to sleep.

The choices I have taken -- I am an Interpreter, I ignored studying many organisms, and I found something in the middle of the game I couldn't explain -- was certainly less than ideal. I must have missed a lot during my playthrough. There's so much I don't know about what I was doing.

But that is what I find most satisfying about the game: the choices I didn't take made me wonder, the setting feels beyond my reach, there are more stories than what the game can show, and I am awed by how little I know after trekking for 40 days plus.

Saltwrack was a magical experience, and I hope more people play it soon.

Following in the footsteps of games like Counterfeit Monkey and Retool Looter comes an escape-the-room game featuring several linguistic gimmicks.

After a long job hunt, you have finally found a position as a semantagician's assistant, but you have no idea what you should be doing. You are stuck in a dressing room with several machines that each have a specific function. You need to figure out how to use them to get out and pass the test.

While the premise may seem familiar to this community, this puzzle parser game feels a bit different to me. Even in one-room games like Oppositely Opal, there are many objects to interact with and try out. However, this game only provides a bit more than the bare minimum necessary to solve the puzzle. The main challenge is discovering the rules behind each machine.

This led me to think of so-called rule discovery games like The Witness, now popular in logic puzzle game communities like Thinky Games. As it turns out, the developer created this game for a Thinky Game Jam!

I started appreciating the game a lot once I realized how minimalist it actually was. The puzzle design allows for some really satisfying eureka moments, even when I started using the walkthrough for the later parts. If you enjoy word puzzles, this is a great game for a good brain workout.

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)

In a competition that tends to have long and substantial parser titles that demand all your attention, it's always nice to play a short, nice parser game.

You just got laid off from a shitty job, and you're planning to get back at your boss when you found out that the documents you were planning to leak had been taken away from you.

It's been years since I've played an Inform game with a score system, but I don't mind it. They're a quick and easy way to know I'm heading in the right direction. The puzzles are simple and intuitive for the most part as they focus on examining objects and using items in the right situations. But that kind of signposting is always appreciated.

The game also has one of the most amusing >x myself responses that I've seen in an IFComp entry:

There is one puzzle relating to a [spoiler]blob[/spoiler] that felt very guess-the-verb compared to the other puzzles. But thankfully, there's a > help command that explicitly tells you where to go and what you should do.

All in all, this is a nice appetizer for parser games in IFComp 2025. It's a cute, well-scoped game that doesn't take up much of your time -- I beat it in 30 minutes -- and I had a pleasant time helping our protagonist retaliate against capitalism.

The New York City Human Resources Administration might not be the first place that comes to mind when developing a game about an alien exploring human culture. However, the developer has experience in social work, and the game truly comes to life thanks to the specificity of the details.

While the alien prattled away with their whimsical narration, I was taken aback by how much people like firemen relied on the service. Eavesdropping on the various people using the service made me aware how inadequate social services in NYC are. In that respect, the game deserves a lot of praise for highlighting something missing from my political economy education.

If anything, I wish the game went harder on this aspect. The game tries to balance satire and political education/awareness, and it also tackles another theme – studying humans as test subjects – but I was more interested in the circumstances that arose while trying to sign up for the service.

This is an impressive debut title, and I look forward to the creator’s future work.

I have a history with thesleuthacademy’s games that made me enjoy this one a lot.

Their first game, Last Vestiges, appeared in IFComp 2023 (the first IFComp I participated as a judge). It was a rough but interesting attempt on an educational police procedural parser game that require you to know some toxicology to solve the case. They then followed up with The Case of the Solitary Resident for Spring Thing 2024, a Twine game where I thought the investigation was pretty fun but the case was predictable and the text too plain for my taste. I said that the developer should try to flesh out the investigation sequence more.

And well, this game is their best iteration yet, and it’s one I can recommend without too much hesitation.

Investigating the Litchwell residence feels rewarding this time round. I was snooping around different corners, interviewing different people with new leads, and searching for clues and the murder weapon. Compared to previous titles, the game mechanics feel streamlined and things just come in right when I am out of clues. There’s a silly puzzle I got stuck on, but other than that the game captured my attention from start to finish.

Solving this mystery feels satisfying. The logical deduction is fair, and you have enough clues to piece everything together. I was enthralled when I finally figured it out.

I think this is their most realized title so far, but the mysteries could be more ambitious. Nevertheless, I believe the developer has a bright future if they continue to create interesting mysteries. I’m definitely looking forward to their next titles.

I always enjoy playing KA Tan’s games since I like Chinese history and wish more people would create games set in ancient China (myself included). For this title, it seems inspired by a well-known event in Chinese poetry history: the Orchid Pavilion Gathering.

Your player character is a poet from a disgraced family who has been invited to an imperial ceremony. As an outsider, your job is to write a quatrain for the emperor that accurately reflects the conditions of the court and the world, serving as a kind of political code.

The sights and sounds you encounter will evoke the poetic imagery that accompanies your message. You might encounter a group of anarchists who imagine a world without hierarchies. Or you might find scholars interested in using divination to calculate the perfect orderly poem. Either way, your whims align with the game’s fancies in interesting ways, making me feel as if I’m embarking on my own poetic journey.

There are a remarkable number of endings that reflect the variety of choices you can make when writing your poem. Factions can rise or fall based on your diction. You could encourage the censorship of sexual expression. You might even find yourself in danger for speaking your mind. Your choices feel momentous, and I appreciate how your small actions can dramatically change the imperial court.

The writing is lovely too. I like the neat touches of description, and I find the sometimes serene, sometimes funny atmosphere engaging.

If anything, I would have liked more options to experiment with. Many endings seem to depend on making one choice, and I wish I had more sources of inspiration for writing my own poetry. Since the stakes are so high in the last pair of events before the feast, it seems like there should be more choices to try out there.

I am personally biased toward anything related to Chinese history, but I think this is a fascinating approach to creating interactive fiction based on it. I hope this game inspires people to learn cool facts about Chinese history and be inspired to create something.

When I play murder mystery games, I'm not necessarily looking for a "good story" (it's a nice bonus though) but rather the mechanics that make me feel like I'm roleplaying as a detective. I want to feel like I'm in a noir movie without the actual danger of being a private investigator.

The Roottrees are Dead sorta does that but with a genealogical twist. After Carl Roottree and his daughters died in a plane crash, a client approaches the player character for help in determining the Roottree family tree. You don't have much to work with, but you have access to this burgeoning medium called the Internet. It's up to your searching and deduction skills to figure out who's in the family and who isn't. That and a very helpful hint section which guides you throughout the game.

To lock in a guess, the player must correctly enter the names, portraits, and job descriptions of at least three "blood relatives". This number increases in later stages of the game. It's also good practice to uncover the identities of "optional" family members—that is, anyone married to someone with Roottree blood—so you have fewer choices. This encourages players to be thorough and follow the plot closely, which I appreciated.

While the game allows for easy comparisons to acclaimed mystery titles like Obra Dinn and especially A Hand with Many Fingers for its novel approach to clue-hunting, the title which reminds me most is Hypnospace Outlaw. Both games are set near the end of the millennium, and they are interested in how internet communities are beginning to develop and propagate information. While Hypnospace is clearly a lighthearted title about silly subcultures and you're chasing leads to mentally map out the history of a fictional Geocities, Roottrees makes you read summaries of what the player has found on fansites, conspiracy websites, and periodicals that are interested in specific subject matter. For example, you might read up old music album interviews to place someone else's job. The pacing of Roottrees may resemble the slow but methodical and satisfying process of playing an archivist in A Hand, but interfacing with the internet and not expecting what you'll find changes the feel of the investigation dynamic significantly.

Cybersecurity experts call what the player is engaging in "open-source intelligence". I found it amusing to learn that a family member was revealing so many details about other family members. Thanks to the internet, it's grimly funny that your cousin might host pictures of you on their personal website without your consent, allowing someone to figure out what you're like. The game uses the internet so effectively that it sometimes feels like a satire about how much information we're putting up.

Since a few family members are musicians, the game also lets you listen to their music. This makes their place in history feel more real. Overall, the soundtrack is quite great, with lots of jazzy music, folksy vocals, and disco appropriate for the setting.

The best part of the game is tracking down old periodicals and books in databases to learn about earlier generations of the Roottree family. I enjoyed learning about the different political factions and how they're tied to this patriarchal family structure they dislike. Everyone wants to live their own lives, but they have to accept that the Roottree Corporation has investments in many different industries, and someone has to sacrifice their time and money to run the business. It's #RichPeopleProblems, but I found it more organic and believable than most mysteries because you read primary and secondary sources to understand each branch's perspective on the situation. I found myself invested in some family members not only because they're informative, but also because you get a sense of how neglected or controlled they feel by the larger family.

However, the very thing that made the older generations fun to investigate is also a detriment to the newer generations. It's cute that the game follows the family from the interwar period through the baby boomer generation and hippie generations to more current times; this means we also see the fracturing of the larger family structure into smaller nuclear families with distant ties to each other. Much like in real life, these newer family members are distant cousins who don't have a reason to connect with each other. The few times it does happen in the game, it feels contrived, as if to remind the player that they're not simply pursuing one of the many separate rabbit holes out there, but rather investigating a cavernous network of relationships. But I found this part of the game just unconvincing from a narrative standpoint. Since the game acknowledges that families are breaking off and are not interested in taking control of the corporation unless forced to do so, everything that follows feels like a chore that must be done but not necessarily enjoyed. The newer members have little to do with the political drama. I understand that's more realistic, but I still found it unsatisfying.

The game's art direction is also frustrating to deal with. The original free game uses generative AI illustrations, and the commercial version does use human-made art but seem to be very based from the existing AI illustrations. While I've heard that the free game is harder to play since it requires you to spot characters with slightly different outfits and hair, I found the commercial version unsightly and irritating to play too. I think it's because there are so many puzzles that require you to identify individuals in large group photos. There's only so much you can do to make each family member stand out during their respective time period. This might be one of the ugliest mystery games I've ever played.

After beating the game, the commercial version adds a new, harder section called "roottreemania". I won't go into detail, but I found it to be a more focused and streamlined experience. It seems the staff recognized that the original game had too many meandering subplots that ended abruptly, so this new game stays true to its premise and offers a few fun surprises.

I had fun beating roottreemania, but once again, I felt unfulfilled. While I admire the novelty of its mechanics, I don't feel like I solved many interesting mysteries. Most of the work involved placing different family members on a large family tree. There wasn't much foul play; no one was murdered, and the stakes were monetary. I learned what I already knew about large, wealthy families: some people are pricks, some want the inheritance money, and many don't care and want to live their own lives. While some family secrets deserve to be made public, the conspiracy I was unraveling wasn't that interesting. I played the game not for the mystery, but because I found genealogical detective work fun.

And I suppose the final solutions to both the original game and roottreemania didn't win me over either. The title tries to bring up the sociopolitical implications of your discovery, and I appreciate the intent, but I just didn't really care. The themes revealed in the solution weren't reinforced enough for me to find them substantive.

This is why I said that The Roottrees are Dead sorta makes me feel I'm playing detective but not really. I was attracted to the game not because I wanted to solve the "big mystery" of who's in the family tree but the secrets and intrigue within the family. The tree, I thought, was going to be a way to organize the clues I've found about the family to solve a bigger and overarching mystery. Unfortunately, my misguided expectations had made me imagine a more interesting, subversive mystery scenario, which didn't really happen. In fact, the game was more historical fiction than mystery.

Make no mistake: it's a fun game that deserves your time and money. I can see it influencing other mystery games because it's doing something very different. Any mystery game that doesn't simply retread police procedural plots and mechanics is a welcome change.

But Roottrees never made me feel like I was uncovering a bigger plot. For me, learning who's who doesn't feel like a good substitute for murders or conspiracies in mysteries. I need something with stakes that makes me feel like I'm getting to the crux of something important.

Otherwise, I feel like my efforts don't amount to anything worthwhile. I felt like I was just giving more paperwork to the lawyers figuring out the Roottree inheritance problem. I didn't care about who's related, and the game even lampshaded that concern but ultimately did nothing to assuage it. Everything about this game made me feel I'm just helping some rich family for the sake of it.

Just before I played this game, my mom told me that I should get married next year, so that she and my dad would be happy to see all their children living happily and starting new families of their own. For her, I imagine it would be the end of her life's work of raising us. For me, it's another symptom of how much dread and affection I have for my family.

Remembrance plays on similar feelings: the player character's mother has passed away, and they can bring one of three objects of intrinsic sentimental value related to their mother on the spaceship back to earth to bury her body. The player reads the story behind each object and why it is a viable candidate to express the player character's ambivalence and distance from their mother. And then they have to make a choice: which object should they take and bury with their mother?

As a short story, this was a nice read. The writing is appropriately somber, and the science fiction worldbuilding provides an interesting backdrop for this story of grief. It captures what it feels like not to know how to feel about the people who have cared for you. As a short, single-choice Twine game, it was an effective and interesting one: the player has to choose for the player character how to grieve, and it's such a heavy responsibility that I remember pausing and thinking about my choices.

I see my single choice in this game not as the player character per se, but as a slight motivational nudge. Much of the game is about clicking the next hyperlink to get to the next page: only at the very end does the player have a choice to affect the story. While I was reading the thoughts of the player character, I was also quite detached from their perspective; it felt like I was reading someone else's diary, and I wasn't really internalizing their thoughts to roleplay as the character. I guess the lack of diegetic agency, aka the fact that I was doing nothing but reading and clicking to the next page, made me feel like I wasn't part of the story. It was their story, not mine.

So when I had to choose for the player character, it felt jarring. I had to choose for a fully realized character on how they should feel, grieve, and move on. The jargon term — ludonarrative dissonance — comes to mind, but that has always been used as a pejorative to indicate a failing of the game. But in this case, I think it adds weight to the choice because I'm some nobody whispering to the player character to choose, I don't know, the woodworking tools. I have to think about the other two objects the player character could have chosen, and what it means to leave them behind. It is strange to come to this conclusion, that the fully sketched out character and the detailed backstory of the objects made it hard for me to attach myself to the player character.

And I think that's why Remembrance is effective for me. To some extent, I feel similarly about my own parents and sometimes imagine how I would react if one (or both) of my parents were no longer in my life. But that's where the parallels stop: at the end of the day, I'm not that character in the space station wondering what to pick. The closeness of the narration already makes me feel like I'm invading their privacy. Paradoxically, the distance between me and the character makes my choice feel significant because it feels like I'm giving them a guide to life and beyond.

I don't have an answer for how to mourn the inevitable passing of my own parents. And yet, I have to give this character a satisfying answer. This dissonance makes me think about how I should prepare for this one day. I know that in the near future, I will be following a similar path to the player character in Remembrance; I just won't have the helpful voice of the player. Hopefully, I'll know which object to choose when the time comes.

The tale of Bluebeard is a violent story about a woman who learns that her husband was a rather gleeful murderer of his previous wives. The story has invited many different interpretations, ranging from a moralizing about the evil curiosity of women to a feminist stance against trusting one's husband in a patriarchal society.

Cochran seems to have recognized the versatility of this fairy tale by offering us three acts, three colors, and three Bluebeards.

The first act, He Knows That You Know and Now There's No Stopping Him, begins with the wife hiding a knife as her husband confronts her for opening the door. The player is given some dialog options, either to ask for forgiveness or to tell him that he will never be forgiven. The look of the game feels like I'm interacting with a play script, especially with the early modern English dialog. The Bluebeard character responds appropriately to my choices and makes me feel like my input matters. And yet, the outcome will always be the same -- it is that the choices the player makes will slightly contextualize the inevitable act.

The second act, Suspended In the Air so that All of Your Weight Is Concentrated on a Single Point Halfway Down Your Spine, puts the player in the role of the Bluebeard character who is, well, suspended in the air. There's not much context to be gleaned from the story: the player character wakes up in a daze, hears his wife and mother-in-law running around, and bleeds to death. There are several actions the player can take to escape, and the illusion of player agency is best expressed in this game. Several choices branch off into different narrative threads: in my second playthrough, I swung my player character too hard to open the door, and his wounds tore apart. He gets new options: crawl, scream, and bleed. Not the most useful set of actions, but it felt like my actions led to that bloody conclusion. It didn't matter that I knew that the ending was predetermined; it was so convincing that I didn't feel cheated at all.

Perhaps the most surprising fact is the mention of a [spoiler]laptop[/spoiler] at the end. The first act had primed me to see everything as historical, so I was quite unnerved by the dissonance.

The third (and as of this writing, the latest) act, It can't be true it mustn't be true, seems to reflect the player's state of mind as they near the end of the cycle. Set in the present, the player character receives a warning message about the man who invited them into his apartment. He's another Blackbeard character, of course, but the player character admits he's kind of hot. The game then transitions into a small escape room format: the player can examine objects and solve mini-puzzles to find new items that can help them escape.

But we all know how it must end. Echoing the first game, the player character can do a lot of meaningful things, but the ending will always be the same. No matter what Bluebeard iteration we're in, someone has to die.

The three games differ in structure, gameplay, characters, atmosphere, and time period. But they all play on the same horror: the patriarchal horror of the man you sleep with. There's no place to run because this is the person you've chosen to spend your life with. He is your life as far as the games are concerned. You either fight or become a victim.

How should we then understand the RGB Cycle as a whole? Is it a fatalistic interpretation of how abuse will always occur? A call to arms to be skeptical of charismatic men who might take advantage of you? A sobering reminder that the Bluebeard fairy tale is timeless because we see so much domestic violence in families and households?

It's hard to say: the cycle offers no palatable interpretation that rationalizes or softens the chaotic horror of the Bluebeard tale into something understandable. Arguably, the RGB Cycle resists such easy, authoritative readings because it is ultimately faithful to the spirit of the fairy tale. Unlike the more moralistic versions like Charles Perrault's, it revels in the sheer violence and paranoia of Bluebeard as a character. At most, the RGB Cycle acknowledges that yes, there is a cycle, and the actions we take will never free us from it -- but it is strangely silent about its message.

I find this silence quite admirable because it means that I have to meditate on the violence and find out what it means for me. Horror is most interesting to me when the "monster" is explicit, but its themes are contradictory and ambivalent; we know who the monster is from John Carpenter's The Thing, but the ending and its implication on the story remain a lively source of debate. Enigmas are more interesting to think about than something that has a clear solution.

I'm willing to admit that I don't understand the RGB Cycle, and that's why I really like it. I often thought I had an idea or two, but it was immediately negated by the next passage or something before that. Replaying the game helps very little except to reveal the lack of agency -- and even that is hard to parse thematically. What does it mean to have false choices in a Bluebeard story? Who knows, and that's why I find it exciting to think about it.

The RGB Cycle understands the timeless appeal of the Bluebeard fairy tales. The confrontation between husband and wife over a dark secret may feel simple as a plot device, but it leads to profound interactions that reflect gender norms, the cycle of abuse, and much more. Many people, then and now, revisit the fairy tale because there's something truly scary and compelling about not knowing everything about the person you've chosen to love. The RGB Cycle simply repeats this horror over and over again, never satisfied with one interpretation. It seeks diversity, repetition, and reiterations. There may be no ultimate meaning in this loop of writing and rewriting Bluebeard, but the horror remains resonant: the tale is still unsettling in 2024 and the years to come.