Ratings and Reviews by Kastel

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.

The myth of Andromeda prefigures all tales of knights, dragons, and damsels in distress. Here, we see a retelling that looks at the structure of such stories from the perspective of Andromeda herself.

This time, the player is Andromeda. The iron manacles "are for you". The choices given to the player dictate the meaning of what it means to be chained to the rocks and rescued by Perseus.

There are branching paths that do make her opinions of the situation more nuanced, but the results are always the same. There's no escaping the role she's been forced into: she'll always be the princess to be rescued and thus a footnote in ancient Greek mythology, whether she falls in love with Perseus at first sight and sees him disappear off to another adventure, or whether she resents her father and Perseus for not being the heroes they claim to be.

This is one of the more successful Andromeda retellings I've come across, perhaps because it's a work of dynamic fiction. We have all these choices, and yet nothing can be done. She has to be chained, re-chained for the myth to persist and activate our imagination. No matter how the game is replayed, the player will always be Andromeda, suffering and sick forever. I doubt the game has a secret ending where Andromeda gets to run away; that would turn the game into a much rosier picture of liberation from patriarchy. A far nicer picture, perhaps, but it wouldn't be the Andromeda myth at all.

I respect Andromeda Chained for sticking to its guns. It depicts her thoughts, the world around her, the absurdity of the situation, and the miserable state she's in without a whiff of sentimentality. In this way, the game is quite sobering: it reveals that the fantasy of knights and dragons can only be realized by limiting the princess's agency. This is not an uncommon lesson, but it's done so well that it's worth relearning once more.

Thread Unlocked is a very clever game about the dynamics of group chats on services like Discord. It simulates the experience by turning off slow mode and letting the player choose from a set of words that continue to another set of words before the game unceremoniously completes the line of dialog for the player.

It creates a feeling of deja vu, showing how group conversations often follow recognizable patterns. There must be a reason why slow mode was turned on, and these problems will be familiar to anyone who uses these services frequently.

This is doubly true because the player, through their choice of words, creates the backstory that leads to this confrontation between the speaker and their interlocutor. The feeling I had when the game completed my dialog for the first time was shock, and then the realization that, yes, this was something I could have said in a heated argument with a friend.

The uncanny experience of playing this game makes me reflect on past conversations. No matter what the context, I always felt like I was following a kind of formula: cliches and platitudes seem to be the only rhetorical weapon of choice in the heat of the moment. I wonder if their generality can downplay the source of these tensions -- one line of dialogue in this game seems to suggest that someone may have said something offensive, and the speaker is willing to move past it in order to de-escalate the conflict. It never struck me as absurd when I used it, but watching the game auto-complete it for me was so jarring that I realized how contrived this tactical move is.

The game reminds me of sweetfish's vanitas, another short game about the internet that shows how communities of all ages repeat the same patterns of flourishing and dispersal. The history of communication is a constant state of interruption and continuation.

But Thread Unlocked goes in a different direction: it taps into the subconscious patterns I've developed in communicating with people on the web. The responses I have accumulated from getting into fights, negotiating with others, and so on are on full display here. And I wonder if these were actually useful lessons or detriments to understanding between semi-anonymous people on chat clients.

I don't know, and the game doesn't provide an answer (even if it really cared). At the very least, I will continue to struggle to find a satisfactory solution thanks to this game. It's a thought-provoking simulation that deserves more recognition.

The game seems simple at first glance: the player watches their character walking home on a winter's night. A phone box rings. Will the character pick up the phone and talk to whoever is on the line, or will they just go home?

It's a well-worn premise, but what makes the game unique is its implementation. What I've described is a synopsis of events, but before the player even picks up the phone, they're already choosing what the character will eat and drink for dinner. A box of salad and lager, perhaps? Or a pizza with white wine?

And when the player has the character pick up the phone and speak, they can control the tone of the conversation. The appearance of the player character is determined by answering some choices in the game. The endings seem to be different depending on the choices made.

Not Just Once is a game about an encounter that can spiral into different outcomes depending on the player's choices. The amount of choices to ground the player is impressive. What felt like unnecessary choices ended up being relevant in some passages, depending on the path you took. It's quite refreshing to play a game that tries to integrate what I choose for dinner into the narrative.

That said, I find the UI quite odd and awkward. Unlike other Twine games I've played, the entire text is one long scrolling page that unfolds after each choice -- much like an Ink game published for the web. However, because there are so many choices, and the browser doesn't autoscroll, it's quite irritating to navigate. The game encourages multiple playthroughs, but the UX definitely makes me less interested in playing it more than three times.

I also wonder if I care about these choices. While it's nice to see that my choices actually affect some of the gameplay, I ultimately don't care what I choose. There are some choices that also cut the game short (most notably leaving the phone booth without any action), which is a nice thing to include -- but when I first played the game and reached it, I thought that was it. It was not until I read some reviews about it that I decided to give it another try and explore it more thoroughly. It seemed to me that the choices didn't matter because they didn't really feel like they should matter -- they felt like choices that personalized my journey a bit and nothing more.

This is still quite an ambitious first work. Creating these many choices and influencing the journey in some way is very neat. Despite its simple premise, it manages to evoke a strange, tantalizing atmosphere -- I hope the author makes more games in this style because I can see them coming up with something more complex and evocative in the near future.

Bydlo; or the Ox-Cart by P.B. Parjeter

Pictures at an Exhibition is a famous piano composition by Modest Mussorgsky that depicts a musical tour of an exhibition made by Viktor Hartmann. The ten numbers are all based on Hartmann's works, one of which is called "Bydlo", which imitates an ox slowly pulling its cart. Its slow tempo and repetitive nature echo the menial labor of the ox as it trudges forward, ceaselessly, painstakingly, without ever stopping. The music rises and rises as if the ox is approaching the listener, culminating when the listener is finally close enough to inspect the hard work of the passing ox. The instruments then soften, suggesting that the ox is receding into the distance -- this song captures a moment of labor, both its ordinariness and its grandeur. It is boring, exhausting work for the worker, but it is also a kind of spectacle for the listener.

That is my interpretation anyway. We don't have access to the paintings on which this composition is based, but most people tend to agree that it is a negative interpretation of labor. Patrick Bouchard's stop-motion animation of the same name reanimates an overworked ox, which is then overwhelmed and eaten alive by miniature clay-like humans. The dread this track inspires makes it difficult for anyone to present work as something positive or meaningful.

This is where P.B. Parjeter's Bydlo comes in: it is a Bitsy game where you play as a human who has to capture dots in a small farm while an ox moves across the screen. Each time the player collects all the dots, they are taken back to the beginning, but the layout of the farm has changed. More and more obstacles appear in the fields, turning them into a chaotic maze full of abandoned objects and bones. When the ox finally leaves the screen, the player can follow its trail [spoiler]and reach an orchestra with a conductor and the letters FIN.[/spoiler]

The game describes itself as a Bitsy game about [spoiler]the triumph of art over drudgery[/spoiler], which left me a tad confused. I understand the game is trying to say something about labor. The repetition is meant to provoke boredom and ennui in the player, and the choice of music makes it clear that it's meant to signal to the player to reflect on how tedious the gameplay is. However, it ends on a laudatory note: the tasks you have performed are actually quite meaningful and artistic -- think about it, player, because you are just like the ox that worked its heart out and that labor is beautiful.

The message reminds me of the realist movements in painting: these painters reject their predecessors who painted historical and mythical figures in favor of ordinary laypeople working under the sun. When painters take their fine oils to paint a butcher's shop or a woman cleaning turnips, they are making a statement that these people are as remarkable as the kings and symbols they once painted. There is beauty to be found in the people who break stones or people harvesting potatoes according to these realists and I think so too.

However, there are many tensions for those who subscribe to the realist dogma in the art world. These ordinary subjects will only be art if someone bothered to paint or photograph or make a video game about them, and that's only relevant to the people involved in the art world. For the workers, they certainly want to be listened to and loved, but they also work to attain subsistence.

This usually doesn't matter because there are plenty of grounded works of fiction in our world that follow and respect the lives of ordinary people doing ordinary things. (I like to think of myself as doing just that.) However, I think this particular game describes a realist philosophy of art in the abstract and implicitly valorizes work. This creates a tension with the imagery of the ox, an animal that is chained to our exploitative production methods, that the game does not resolve or tease out.

As a result, I find the ending particularly strange because the [spoiler]orchestra[/spoiler] suggests that the way we produce goods, while exhausting and debilitating, is still artistic. And I think that's a risky conclusion to arrive at: the rhythm of field work is always pleasant to listen to, but it does not negate the environmental and political implications of labor. Art does not overcome our dependence on labor. It can heal us from the drudgery of work, but that's about it.

All that said, I think this game is an interesting, if not provocative, interpretation of a notable piano piece. I enjoyed thinking with this game a lot. If anything, it was fun writing this review and figuring out where to place this game in the contexts of labor discourses and people's interpretations on the piece. While I disagree with the message of the game, I respect that the creator has written a love letter to the song and what it means to them in a language that may confuse most people unfamiliar with the song's history. The language they've chosen is full of love and care and I'm glad they've stuck with it because it makes me engage with its themes on labor and art on its own terms.

Deep Dark Wood by Senica Thing

This is an anthology of micro IF written in Twine by seven elementary and middle school students from Senica, Slovakia. More information can be found here. Each work goes in different directions, but the framing narrative is always the same: the player is "entering a dark place full unpredictable twists and hostile creatures." If they feel uncomfortable or have exhausted all the options found in these works, they can return "to the Main Crossroads and try another path". The premise of a dark forest is more than enough to spark the children's imaginations, and I like how the games are different from each other. It's great that they're collected in an easy-to-read anthology like this.

Some of the games have not been edited by adults, with zero or few changes at all ("The Land Owner left the path nearly untouched"). Others were redesigned ("The Land Owner had to redesign some parts of the story to balance the beginning and the ending and make the adventure sound bit more logical.") for us unimaginative adults in mind. So all these games are written by kids whose creative voices are not drowned out by outside forces, and I like that.

Overall, Deep Dark Woods is an impressive anthology of children's fiction. I own several anthologies of children's poetry and fiction, and this would fit right into my library. It's fun to read what kids have to say about the world they live in, what they find scary and exciting, etc. And I would say this is a step up from the anthologies I own because there is a common theme/setting. We can trace the imaginative journeys kids take from the premise here, and it's quite enlightening for anyone interested in children's education.

I'm going to go through each game because I think they deserve their own review and I agree with the project's goal of giving feedback and encouragement to the kids.

Back to the City by David

The game begins with us standing in front of a log cabin. We are presented with three choices: join the party, leave the forest, or explore the forest. Each choice leads to other choices that may or may not help the character find their way back to the city.

Leaving the forest is a rather funny option as it's the quickest way to safety. Joining the party doesn't help us achieve our goals, but we are able to talk to some of the characters for a bit. It's unfortunate that I wasn't able to party with them for long because our character realized that it had little to do with getting home. That's probably true, but maybe talking to these people in the party could give us some clues about how to get home, and we could have some fun and intelligent conversations with them.

In fact, I think we see that opportunity when the player character meets Steve the horse when we choose to explore the forest. Steve has a map to the city, and that means that our exploration of the forest is rewarded. It feels good to help someone and then find a way back to the town. This is my favorite path because we can lead Steve back to his owner by exploring the town.

So the best parts of the game involve the player character talking to other characters and working together to solve a common problem. I would have liked to see situations like the one with Steve in Back to the City. Steve is also a fun character and I think it would be great to see more scenes of him horsing around with the player character. All in all, a pretty good game.

Dark Dreams by Baily's Sisters

The player character wakes up in an old house that has a table with a lamp, an apple, and a cup of coffee. The windows are closed. You have three choices related to the items on the table.

Without giving away the game's secrets, the choices are excellent and lead to some incredible scenarios. I laughed at the hand-standing wolf and was engaged when I learned I was poisoned. The game knows that things have to happen to the player or they will get bored.

The best part of this game is how each ending reflects what the player has done while exploring the house. I like how it remembers what I did and what I didn't do. It's nice to play a game that remembers my actions and implies that I should have done something better. More games should do that.

This is a well-designed game that makes you think about the consequences of your actions. There are many satisfying endings, and there's always something to do and think about on every page.

Halloween by Hailey and Milka

The game starts by asking us to enter our name and then welcomes us to the Halloween Hunt. There are many different paths the player can take, but I think there's a bit too much.

I think the main problem is that the choices don't feel connected to the previous scenes. I don't feel like I'm in control of the world or my character, so the choices don't feel as meaningful as they should.

Still, I am deeply impressed by how much text there is in the game and how much attention is paid to building a world full of surprises. I enjoy exploring every link and being surprised that there's more to read and explore. I feel their energy and passion in their words.

I think developers should think about which branches are important for the player to reach. They should try to play the game at least once, so that they can imagine what the player will feel while reading through their game. It's an ambitious game that could be even better if the developers considered how people will experience their title.

IXI in the Forest by Leontine

IXI wants to make friends in the forest and there seem to be two animals he can befriend: a doe or a bird. The doe turns out to be hostile, but choosing the bird gives us a story of friendship.

It's a pity that the bird is "good and nice but lazy". The choices in this game revolve around making the bird or the doe do things, so we need to make the bird not lazy.

I like the bird because she seems happy to help people out but only if we remind the bird what it should do. I also like the rabbits who can choose to invite the bird or not. I wish I could learn more about the bird, rabbit, doe, and IXI. They seem like interesting characters and I would like to know what each of them had for dinner. Animals do have interesting meals after all.

The game is short, but I think it has memorable characters and environments. I just want more because I think it's very good.

Little Frogie by Natalie

You are a hungry frog, but you can choose not to buy food and starve. It will be a sad moment, but that's how the game begins: it wants you to consider your choices to find the best moments a frog could have.

The mistakes the frog could make are mistakes many of us would make. On a personal level, I understand using salt instead of sugar for pancakes, or how a delicious cake could make my teeth hurt. We have to consider things like the time of day and our other needs if we want to help our frog friend.

So I think the game does a very good job of exploring how our actions and choices should be aimed at satisfying a need and nothing more or less. Why would we want to paint the Mona Lisa when we could paint a cool cat with funny sunglasses? Each page makes me think about what I should do next, and it's fun to click on a choice I know is wrong to see the hilarious results.

This is my favorite of the Seneca Thing games because of the balance between gameplay and text. Looking for different endings always makes me laugh, and I like how Natalie finds ways to summarize the endings into moments. It's an impressive game with a good sense of humor and a great understanding of interactivity.

Survive or Die by Unicorn Sisters

This is a real horror game. We are in an old house and we have to explore the creepy attic or stay in the hall.

The atmosphere of this game is really captivating. I didn't know what to expect, so I was surprised that there was a monster running around. The descriptions of the attic and other rooms are very well done and make me anxious on what I should do next.

I also like how the good choices are the ones people don't tend to do in horror movies. Sticking together is always the best idea, but movies don't do that. This game does and I appreciate that it has some common sense, so when the scary stuff happens, it feels more believable.

The monster is also quite effective at spooking me. The game never describes the monster, so it's up to my imagination what the monster should look like. My own imagination is scarier than anything the developer can come up with, so I'm glad I was given the space to come up with the scariest monster to crawl around the house.

The ending surprised me, but it made a lot of sense since the monster was hungry and [spoiler]we just happened to order pizza[/spoiler]. That was a great twist and I think the ending is very clever. Scary yet hilarious, this game is a great example of how horror can be mixed with comedy to create something very special.

The Dark One by Mushroom

This game starts by talking to you and asking if you'd like some blueberries. It feels like you are talking to a friend who has come up with a fascinating story. However, this friend doesn't seem to know much about you since you can't swim and oops.

So I like how the narration has personality. The narrator doesn't know everything about you, but they are friendly and helpful if you earn their trust.

That said, I want to know more about the narrator and why they wants to help me. Their lines are so funny that they make me curious. It would be fun to see scenes where the narrator and I hang out and do things together, like friends tend to do. I would also like to read what the narrator thinks of me, so that we can avoid the swimming accident from now on.

I'm also interested in the title. The game never mentions what The Dark One is. Is the Dark One the narrator? Or is there something lurking that I haven't found yet?

There are a lot of mysteries in this game that will be fun to unravel and explore. I like mysteries, so it will be fun to solve a few and leave the rest for me to ponder about the world. I'm looking forward to learning more about The Dark One, the narrator, and the world this game takes place in because it feels like there's a lot of potential here.

That's a lot of writing, and I hope it's useful to developers and readers alike. Writing all this was exhausting, but I'm glad I did it.

A rewarding moment.

These are the three words that keep popping into my head as I read and re-read idle hands, a game about "idolatrous devil-fucking". I keep coming back to this title, not just for its erotic prosody, but for the way it taps into the modern world's complicated relationship with religious customs and symbols.

Its epigram and namesake seem to originate from Proverbs 16:27 in The Living Bible:

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece.

Other translations like the King James do not mention the devil, rather preferring to describe an "ungodly man [who] diggeth up evil" and his lips "a burning fire". They are certainly clearer about its messaging, but they don't evoke the kind of tantalizing imaginary that the game needs.

What is so inspiring about this particular translation is that it evokes a taboo, a possible transgression for the player to seek their desires.

The player reads how the devil caresses their character, the way his hands slide over their body, and the intricate movements that titillate both him and the player character. No backstory or character motivation exists: we just read what the devil's idle hands do to the player character. There's pleasure in treating religion as erotic and erotic as religion.

But we know that this is "wrong". Its wrongness is sexy, though. I'm not into most men, not especially the way the devil is described, but I was thrilled to see him reach into regions so private and intimate to me. His seduction is so successful that I drop any religious pretense and feel as if I have surrendered to his words and actions.

I wonder if people in the future will find this erotic. It's hard to say what kind of future we're entering, but suppose we're entering a more secular, atheistic future or a future that is quite theocratic, would this still have the same kind of power it had over me? I'm sure people will appreciate what Sophia is writing -- it has a timeless quality -- but I feel that its erotic qualities are too "dated" for future earthlings to appreciate. They reflect, I think, a lot of people's qualms about religion and symbols at the moment: even agnostics know a thing or two about Jesus and Krishna. The ambivalence modern society has toward religion is what I think that makes this work so erotic for me right now. Our inability to reach a consensus on how we should think about religious customs really speaks to our times, and more importantly, it gives us a space to explore, transgress, love, and despise the many facets of religion -- something people from the future may never get.

For now, idle hands is an excellent work of erotica for our times. The prose and the symbolism it possesses are able to seduce me and make me think about why I thought the devil was so sexy. He provoked my imagination in a way I didn't know I had: a quasi-religious one that I wanted to cross and feel his devilish touch. Even my strong adherence to agnosticism must admit that I was seduced by his idle lips.

This game, for better or for worse, simulates the drudgery of waking up to a new day.

It plays with the expectations we have as we go through our morning rituals, but the prose betrays its own optimism. "Another day is here," the narration greets its players, "rise up!" This seems too bright, too cheerful for the player to take the text seriously.

Even before I typed in a command, I anticipated some layer of irony around the corner. I looked for a corner to no avail -- no "corners" were implemented in the parser -- and examining myself simply reassured the player character they'll always stay as themselves until the end of time. Going to the light as the game wanted only repeated the cycle.

"Another day is here," the game says again, "rise up!"

Even though the player is locked in these two rooms, the game does not induce anxiety or even the feeling of being trapped. Rather, a sense of ennui and regression permeates the air. The player character must constantly mask their exhaustion with the most false language as the cycle repeats itself over and over again.

Until the player figures out the solution, Look Around the Corner is a rather melancholic experience. It captures the somber violin tones from the song it's based on through the player's gentle struggle with the parser. There are only vague clues provided by the sparse implementation, and this evokes a gloomy spell on the morning I spend playing and writing about the game. It's such a dour experience that the cloudy morning I see out the window seems so appropriate: I look for the rays of sunshine, but everything feels so gray.

The solution, on the other hand, is a clever throwback to the song, but I don't think it extends its exploration of the liminal state between waking and sleeping. It ends without any buts or ands. The idea of endlessly waking up to a new day is nipped in the bud.

What would a respite from the drudgery of looking around the corner would look like? Or is there no way out? These are tantalizing questions that cease to be once the player reaches the end.

Indeed, I wished Look Around the Corner could have been a little more curious since it did a convincing simulation of waking up in the short time it had. The game is doing something very clever with the idea of "new day" as a vague promise, but I'm not sure what it is. With a little more looking around the corner, I suspect the answer could be very interesting.

As it stands, this is a very cute game that is worth your time. I just think it could have been something very special.

Kiss of Beth is a debut game from Charm Cochran before they ever set foot in the interactive fiction community. The player character is a roommate of Beth's who seems to be doing a vibe check on Beth's date before he's allowed in her room.

This premise seems strange: what is so scary about it, except that maybe the date is someone scary? The more you learn about the date, the more he sounds like an average guy who's neither great nor bad, but at least he seems to have a future. What is the horror of an average-looking date besides boredom and a potentially soulless future?

That's part of the mystery of Cochran's games. They often explore horror in unconventional ways: Gestures Towards Divinity is a meditation on the queer contradictions of a famous artist, Studio plays with the paranoia of living alone in a studio apartment, Your Body a Temple, or the Postmodern Prometheus allows you to redefine your body, and 1 4 the $ toys with the consumptive nature of cryptocurrency and how it devours its own consumers. The horror of Cochran's games may vary, but I notice a common thread: the range of possible actions is already determined by a predetermined story that the player may not be aware of.

It's interesting to see this "players make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please" philosophy taking shape in this early game. Once I realized what I had done, I felt like there was no way out. The game says it has two endings, but neither is a "good" ending; they're both bad endings, just with different outcomes. The guilt sustained by this abusive loop of actions cannot be wished away by the player. The past, which the player cannot see, can only offer so many choices before it must inevitably betray expectations of a happy ending. The game traps the player in its unwritten history, and the perpetual cycle of abuse and addiction between the player character and Beth can only be imagined. All we have is one episode of their relationship, everything else is left to the imagination to fantasize endlessly.

I enjoy playing debut titles by creators I've played before because there's a certain kind of raw simplicity that foreshadows the later and more sophisticated titles they'll make in the near future. Kiss of Beth offers much more: with a simple premise, it's able to conjure visions of the Cochran games made and not made, of how meaningful interactivity can be when negotiated between the player and the fictional past to which they are not privy. It's an intriguing title that predicts the unpredictability of Cochran's work, and I look forward to seeing more of their work.