Reviews by Kastel

The Prisoner (1967) is an enigmatic British television series that refuses to be pigeonholed into any genre. Led by Patrick McGoohan -- an actor who's made his name in spy dramas but was sick by how pornographic and violent the genre has become -- the TV show is reacting to the counterculture movement of the 60s, the absurd drama of the Cold War, and the false feeling of progress technology has given us. In the foreword to Alan Stevens's Fall Out: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to the Prisoner, episode writer Ian Rakoff claims if McGoohan was more an artist like Orson Welles that the show would be nearer to high art and not affect as many people. This tension between amusement and expression remains compelling to audiences today.

The Prisoner (1980) is an Apple II game that takes the spirit of the show and refracts it into our postmodern times. In this revealing interview, David Mullich (the creator) said that he "wanted to make a game in which you needed to do the opposite of everything that games were at the time." What he could never have imagined is how subversive, baffling, and exciting it will still be to 2023 eyes.

Just like the TV show, the game begins with a spy agent resigning from their superiors. They are given a code that they must never reveal at any cost. As the player character happily chooses where to fly, they are gassed and taken to a mysterious room called THE CASTLE. The player is supposed to guide their character out of this crudely designed maze and hopefully avoid the traps that put them back in the starting point, but there's one problem: the controls are peculiar, to say the least - [U]p, [D]own, [L]eft, and [R]ight don't seem so intuitive when the keyboard has arrow keys. At the end of the room, a voice greets them and you can only respond in numbers. Type any random number and they'll grumble and tell the player that the Caretaker wants to see them.

The player can finally step out of the castle and freely explore the Island -- except that the controls are [N]orth, [W]est, [E]ast, and [S]outh, the buildings are somewhat randomized and only numbered, and everyone and everything wants the player's resignation code.

And that is just the beginning of how weird and surreal this game is going to be.

The Prisoner is designed to be the player's ultimate enemy: to force the resignation code out of them, by hook or by crook. Each numbered building is a different minigame, with different rules, obstacles and goals: they flash subliminal messages and numbers, (Spoiler - click to show)cause an error page where the player can debug and accidentally reveal the code, or put you into a long scenario inspired by the TV show in order to psychologically deflate the player's motivation to play any more. It is in keeping with the ethos laid out in the manual: "just as in real life, the rules are not laid out before hand but must be discovered as you go along." Yet, even with this precaution, the title has always surprised me in my playthroughs because I've never seen a game so willing to gaslight me, just for those three digits that define my life. Its hostility unnerves me in every single way.

It's this esoterically frustrating experience that I found to be rather meaningful and even liberating. Here is a game that doesn't want to be fun. In fact, it hates you for even trying it. The game is more than happy to exempt itself from the arbitrary rules of Good Game Design because it wants to fight the player. The Prisoner is a menace. You cannot escape it. Only until the player learns to resist it will they be free from the game.

I don't expect people to flock to this game. It's hard enough recommending what I think is a stellar TV show to people, let alone a buggy abandonware title.

But for those who are interested in how a game can challenge you not with elaborate puzzles or dexterity but with enmity, this is a game worth experiencing in one form or another. The most obvious choice is to play the game itself, but I think people who aren't inclined to old computer games can read this detailed GameFAQs walkthrough.

The players who take up this challenge are guaranteed to find something worthwhile in this abrasive mess. To cop from another review, the player must "game out of the box". It is a game that asks itself in earnest, "How exactly do you make a computer game about social resistance?", and that answer is going to differ from player to player.

The five stars are therefore not an indicator of how well made or fun the game is. Rather, they refer to how provocative the game is to me. The Prisoner is an inspiring title that opens up a new horizon of what games could be and I want to make games as thought-provoking as this.

Be seeing you.

In this game, the player is a frequent user of the titular website. The character in the game is an "alternate anime girl" reflection of you. Your "objective" is to hurt this character by clicking a button with text that reads "CLICK TO EVISCERATE".

As the game goes on, the visuals become more surreal and the writing turn toward self-deprecation. The character asks you why you're visiting this website when the gameplay itself is this tedious. Are you gaining any catharsis from doing this? Or are you just doing it out of routine?

Self-harm and self-destructive tendencies in general are pretty difficult to discuss. For example, there are decent IF titles like Hana Feels, which are meant to be more didactic and empathetic. However, they're usually from a point-of-view that isn't from someone feeling suicidal. You are usually trying to help them and persuade them by telling them you're there for them. Something like EVISCERATETHISGIRL.COM is rarer to see and it's certainly more visceral and disturbing. You are roleplaying as someone who loathe themselves so much you are checking this website out.

In my experience playing this game, I feel like I was being interrogated about my own feelings. It made me peer into myself, which is quite impressive for a game purporting to be less than 500 words. This game is not for the faint of heart, but anyone interested in why people (including themselves) find themselves entering phases where they want to hurt themselves may find this title interesting.

In less than five hundred words, this game gets to the heart of what it means to be a new parent. More importantly, it reveals how parenting is in actuality a state of vulnerability.

I think that's a valuable lesson for anyone of any age, even those who plan to not have children. Too many stories deal with either the best or worst parents, which leave experiences like this hidden from plain view. Stories like this are more needed than ever.

I had high hopes for Gotomomi since it's appeared on many IFDB lists about city simulation experiences. It started out strong, but it ended up being this obtuse and somewhat unfair puzzle-y experience that didn't feel like I was walking around this city.

The game begins with Ayako, a 16 year old girl, who is running away from her dad. Not much is known about her background besides her dad's men being able to track her by phone and that she wore expensive traditional clothing which suggests she came from an upper-class background. She arrives at Gotomomi, a fictional city that is the next stop after Shinjuku. Ayako has two goals in mind: a ticket outta here and some clothes to change into.

But when she gets out of the station, she loses all her funds. The player must now guide her around this small area of Gotomomi and acquire enough money to get clothes and buy a ticket to somewhere far. This sounds like an interesting enough premise.

However, once I started checking the game out, I ended up feeling a bit confused in a bad way. It's one thing to be initially disoriented by the world because once in a while, some of the best games are abrasive and demand attention from the player to get into the world; it's another to remain bewildered by these design decisions until the end of the game.

At first, I was enjoying my time figuring out how the world works. I walked to a place called the Docklands (an "artificial island ... home to a flotilla of small fishing boats") and found myself working in a "Seng Heng fish packing co. ltd." I was a bit unsure why there's a fish packing facility with a very Chinese name and the area didn't feel like I was in Japan, but either way I got the job and was told to move the buckets between the tinning room and gutting room.

For a rather simple job, I found it quite confusing to do.

Ayako has to wait for the buckets to get filled up with some dead fish in the gutting room and then move them to the tinning room. Then, fish mysteriously disappears from the bucket. Repeat the process: but you get an angry foreman saying you haven't done the job quickly enough or put the buckets where you let it.

I'm fine with simulations having asinine supervisors because work in real lie esucks, but I find the foreman character rather disruptive to play. They seemed to respond to any action (or non-action) with anger, but there were no consequences regardless. The lack of feedback between player and the game is a constant throughline in the simulation. The shift also took forever. I know it's supposed to be a tedious manual labor simulator here, but I found this entire experience lacking. There's no exploration of how exhausting this kind of labor is; the player is constantly typing > get buckets and Ayako seems like she has the strength of Superman as she lifts buckets of gutted fish. It's just busywork for the player.

After getting paid, I thought this simulation of work was more like a bad minigame. Other jobs aren't as bad as this, but this gave me a bad first impression of the game.

The game did get better, but I thought it was more middling than bad instead. Indeed, my main issue with Gotomomi is that I didn't feel like I was in Japan. Descriptions made me think I was in Kowloon, Hong Kong or Macau instead of something like Kabuki-cho (the real life setting of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series) or Shibuya. Indeed, half the cast is from some underground subculture from China, which strengthens that impression. There is the "Little China" that seems remarkably close to the train station and police box for comfort; it's clearly an underground ring for sex work with minors. Later on, you'll meet a (Spoiler - click to show)Chinese drug dealer that can be, for some reason, referred to as a "Chinaman" by the player. I only learned about this in the walkthrough. Did the author know this is a slur?. I'm not sure why the emphasis on Chinese people here. There are, of course, Chinese people within the seedier districts of Japanese metropolitan cities, but Koreans and Vietnamese are just as visible.

I don't expect free English-language games to be accurate depictions of cities in the other side of the continent, but it is baffling for me to see so many references to Chinese people doing crime in a game about some Japanese city.

There are at least some attempts to make the characters more fleshed out through a branching conversation system. These may lead to more opportunities for cash, but much of the dialog feels stilted. For example, the game likes to pepper in Japanese and Chinese words, but I find them rather awkward since they're all variants of greetings (konbanwa and nihao for example). It's a pet peeve of mine to see languages be reduced to greetings like this in English-language games. In later quests, Ayako -- a sixteen year old who barely spent a few hours in this city -- would suddenly sound like she's a hardboiled detective who's seen it all and comment about the degeneracy of the city. That always struck me as weird. Her thoughts don't really make sense to me; she seems aware that drugs and sex are what sells, but she just sounds like she's been in the business for ages. I could charitably interpret this as part of her background, but it nevertheless was out of the blue and remained dissonant anyway. This dissonance is very strange considering that the game begins with her somehow losing her wallet because she hasn't planned things through.

Speaking of money and not planning things through, the game does have a handy walkthrough provided by the author, which I made use of after I got stuck. But what was surprising to me about this game is how it doesn't really prepare the player what is easily the worst mechanic of the game: haggling.

In order to get to anywhere, you need to buy and sell clothes and other tools from stores. The player is supposed to buy low, sell high; however, the haggling mechanic is basically RNG. The shopkeeper may or may not accept the price after a few turns and that's it. It's possible to get them to immediately buy or sell an item at a price they initially rejected and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why. For the player, it's simply pressing the same sequence of keys until the dice rolls are in their favor. Since Ayako is trying to save up money to buy a ticket on the Odakyuu Line, the player is always going to spam and spam.

Otherwise, they'll find themselves in an unwinnable state, which happened to me while following the walkthrough till the end.

I didn't have enough money to buy a ticket because I haggled my items too poorly and got poor RNG on (Spoiler - click to show)trading drugs, which is also just a giant mess. With no opportunities left, I had to restart and go replay the entire game again. After five or six tries, I ended up having a surplus of around 4,600 yen through savescumming.

I was left unsatisfied when I finally got Ayako on the train to nowhere. For a game set in a Japanese city, the world doesn't have many rooms or interesting things to do. There are detours the player can do like (Spoiler - click to show)buying drinks from a bartender or getting vaccinated, but they are not substantive enough to feel like you're in a proper city. I was downtrodden when the mall had three rooms worth of content. The game feels empty, even as a caricature of some East Asian nightlife.

I mean, there's not even a yakuza character in the game! At least, have some Japanese and Korean criminals roaming around!

Don't get me wrong: I think the game for what it is was interesting to play and I don't regret playing it. But despite reading reviews lamenting they wish they had more time to spend with the game in IFComp, I ended up feeling let down by how small the game was. It didn't feel expansive like A Mind Forever Voyaging where the player got to walk around the city street by street; Gotomomi felt more like I was traversing between abstract locales that vaguely resemble some East Asian "thing".

I wanted to like this game because it sounded my jam. I love exploring Japanese cities, especially the nightlife. But even discounting the design frustrations and awkward depictions of Japanese and Chinese cultures, the game never went beyond being just okay. The simulation simply felt artificial and superficial, plus I don't buy the Japanese noir atmosphere it's going for at all. It's a lackluster experience that doesn't seem grounded in anything Japanese and systems that don't ever coagulate into anything whole.

By most metrics concerning interactive fiction, this game is very flawed: it is far too linear even for a Twine game, the writing can be overwritten, the metaphors are heavy, etc.

But it might be one of the most incisive, rawest works about LGBTQ+ relationships ever. The major theme of the game is acceptance, but unfortunately that can be complicated for reasons rarely explored even by the most beloved queer media.

The protagonist, Lynn, has a complicated relationship with Macy. Throughout the story, she wonders if Macy is the person she wants to be with. But she keeps finding reasons to not get close to her: she hesitates; she loathes herself for not being a good ally; she doesn't know why she can't accept Macy for who she is, so she keeps finding ways to make Macy someone more comprehensible to her.

This often means categorizing her into a simple stereotype. I am reminded of what the creator of the Caligula Effect series had to say about the young LGBTQ+ people of today:

"When you say 'LGBTQ people have these kinds of problems' in the hopes of getting outsiders to quickly empathize with them, it actually means that you’re categorizing them by seeing them through a uniform perspective. It may not be a huge, drastic mistake, but it’s very different from something like being talked about as a single element of potential knowledge and feeling that you’ve actually been properly understood."

However, this train of small mistakes culminates into a huge fuck up, which the game constantly warns you about since the very beginning. You know Lynn is going to fuck up somehow and the limited choice sets mean you'll see her fuck up very hard. She wants to make amends, but she keeps making mistakes and she knows that. She doesn't know how to accept Macy in a way that works for both of them. It's clear she has feelings for her, but she keeps fucking up for various reasons related to sexuality, gender, and just utter confusion.

The story explores so many interesting aspects about this relationship but also leaves questions unanswered. Why? It's obviously intentional; LGBTQ+ acceptance remains an unsolved mystery, even for queer people and their purported allies. It's difficult to accept that we can't ever understand someone 100%, even if we love and "accept" them. Acceptance is much, much more complicated than waving a flag and marching in some Pride thing. It's psychological, physiological, and everything in-between. We want easy answers, especially when it comes to sexuality. It would be nice if answers like "just accept, man" are fine, but they don't come easy for everyone involved. People don't just accept trans rights, that's a fantasy for people who believe transphobia can be erased with the snap of a finger.

We, even the queer folks, are all suffering because we find it difficult to accept queerness in our lives. After all, we are born under this heteronormative patriarchy hellscape. Accepting the unacceptable is anathema to even the queerest of people.

I see this story not just about relationships but about untangling what it means to be queer even today. I'm shocked this is a 2014 work because it feels like something many queer people today are figuring out themselves. I don't think it's prescient; rather, the game is far more honest than even LGBTQ+ discourses today.

I appreciate its honesty. Venus Meets Venus is a messy work that, in spite of its flaws, melts my heart. I can't really stress how much the characters hurt my soul and yet, they are lovable in their own right. It's queer in a way that isn't lovable by mainstream conventions but what I want to see more.

The Warbler's Nest is about one strong idea and commits to it.

At first, your character is tasked to do some strange ritual with eggshells in the middle of the reeds. And the mystery deepens as more steps trickle in through the player interacting more with the parser.

Much of the touted psychological horror involves you trying to understand what the player character is actually doing and, later on, whether you agree with their actions. The parser becomes an obstacle between the player and the protagonist. You're trying to convince her that things are alright, but her state of mind refuses to accept this.

How do you tell someone that their fears are unfounded? The main puzzle is pretty simple as parser games go, but the protagonist's reluctance means the parser implementation can get a bit finicky. And part of that is intentional; the parser is the protagonist's state of mind. The character is frustrating to work with, but you can't also blame her for what she's going through: (Spoiler - click to show)a mother indoctrinated by awful folklore would easily have their judgment be clouded by uncertainty. It reminds me of 9:05 in that sense. As a result, I find the use of the parser to be really effective. It would've been easy to adapt this to a hypertext game, but the player struggling to guess the action feels intended. The protagonist is after all having a bad day.

The game does have its flaws. While I do think the limited implementation works for the most part, the game doesn't really give you much to examine or interact with. Very unfortunate as the reeds are a unique setting -- there's just too little description to place the player in the protagonist's shoes. The game feels aimless in the very beginning because of this. You're trying to figure out what you're supposed to do and that's fine, but I do think more interaction with scenery objects would keep the player more engaged. I also found it strange that the game doesn't really advertise it has multiple endings, which may mean people probably went with the worst ending and thought that was that.

But as far as short games go, I do think this title deserves some praise. It delivers an intense experience and it's hard to not be moved by the happier endings. The afterword provides some thematic context that really brings the point home. I admit I'm giving an extra star to the title, but I do appreciate any short game that can enunciate its message and leave a long-lasting impact on the player.

That's not easy to do and The Warbler's Nest does it without breaking a sweat.

Moquette is an interesting title that is best described as a sparse simulation with a rather confusingly written narrative slapped onto it.

Your protagonist has a hangover on a Tuesday morning and ostensibly you're supposed to go to work or check out a park, but the entire game is about the player guiding the protagonist through the labyrinth of the London Underground. Indeed, the entire game has lovingly created this network so well that one could play this with the Underground map on another page in the browser.

I've actually ridden this subway many times, so I've found myself figuring out which station to go next. It's fun to read descriptions of the passengers, the station history, and the "tips" for quicker and safer transits because I found it to be more or less accurate. And there's a few bits of trivia that I learned along the way. I imagine Londoners would've had more a kick out of this experience too.

But while I find this simulation aspect to be fun, it's definitely no Fire Tower or a city sim. What I mean is that the game lacks interactivity and simulation aspects. You're not interacting with the scenery except the passengers who would come in and out of the train. In parser games, you'd be typing "smell" or "listen". In Twine games, you'd click on hyperlinks that let you focus onto objects like the seats. This game forgoes this interactivity for a certain atmosphere to help aid the narrative (more on that later), but I find this to be detrimental. The dearth of sensuous experiences is simply jarring for a simulation that does go out its way in recreating the train networks. The game needs far more text to accomplish its simulation goals because, as it stands, the entire game is just about riding the train and switching lanes. None of that vicariously experiencing of the train through the text, only the chores of switching lines. You're aimlessly wandering through different station lines and it's pretty easy to feel like you're doing nothing without much stimuli.

Which is why there's a narrative added into the mix, I suppose. I'm not sure how to feel about it because it dabbles in some psychiatry cliches and has a muddled message about agency. While I've mentioned that the descriptions are clearly sparse in order to supplement the narrative, the narrative ironically doesn't feel connected to the simulated experience of riding the train. It may seek the chance encounters we may have on the train, but it is more interested in (briefly) exploring the psychology of the protagonist. And I found that to be weak too since it's so quick that the explanation feels ambiguous. This narrative is only tolerable with the help of some admittedly impressive text visual effects, but I wasn't too won over by them either. The story just loses itself in these effects. And while there is a line or two about being part of the London masses, that feels more like a reach than anything.

It also seems that the web app for Quest is very buggy on Firefox. I've had the game crash on me multiple times and was surprised that the game could time out if you leave it for too long. This was my first Quest game, so I'm not deducting points for that -- this is mostly a warning to anyone who wants to play the game.

Regardless, I find this game interesting, which is why I'm overrating it a bit. If I wasn't so interested in the London Underground, I'd imagine I'd not even finish the game. But I was pretty happy going around the Underground and wished there was more to the simulation. The narrative, I'm not too fond of and wish it was either more relevant or just gone; it's divorced enough that it doesn't affect the experience but is still jarring enough when it does emerge. Moquette is short enough to give it a whirl, but I definitely feel like I wanted more from this experience and players with sympathies like mine would probably agree.

It's been a while since I played a title that made me go "Yep, I've been there."

Pageant by Autumn Chen is one of the most authentic descriptions of what it feels to be a closeted queer Chinese person. You roleplay as Karen Zhao whose parents came from China and immigrated to the United States. And they asked you to do a simple thing: attend a pageant.

While it seems ridiculous of a premise, I honestly feel like it isn't too far off from the stories I've heard during Chinese New Year. And the game commits to this "what does it mean to be Chinese" quite well, ranging from sexuality to "the need" to translate Chinese to simply taking a million AP classes and doing homework.

The game is very much a "raising" sim. I've played Chen's recreation of Bee with the support of Emily Short and I was pleased to see the familiar interface here. In the context of Bee, the mechanics are used to restrict the player and make them think on what they should do next. The free time in homeschooling can disappear so quickly. But here, it's freer: Karen is simply preparing for a pageant and she can look up Wikipedia or ask some friends to help her out. You are raising her stats while perhaps having a fling or two with her friends.

But Karen isn't brave. She may be smart, but her self-deprecation can turn into self-loathing quickly. Karen's a closeted queer Chinese woman whose only stressors in life are exams, classes, and Bible study. Her interactions with the girls she can date really bring out her awkwardness: she's genuine, but she doesn't know how to react. When the player gets deeper into Emily's route for example and learns (Spoiler - click to show)that Emily is trans, her choice of responses is -- let's just say -- not the best to choose from. I had to think on what to say without worsening the situation.

And that's precisely what I like about this game: Karen feels like a real person I could have met on one cumbersome Chinese banquet. She reflects a lot of the frustration and self-hatred young Chinese diaspora feel. Her actions, lines, and thoughts are things I think about too. She gets criticized by her parents, even when she follows orders. She does Science Olympiads and labwork because she has the "opportunity" her parents gave her, but she doesn't know what she wants to do. The "family dinner" section , in particular, really resonated with me: (Spoiler - click to show)I have heard all these stories about the atrocities that happened in China and, just like Karen, started to belittle myself for feeling isolated. There's no way my pain would be able to compare to the pain experienced by survivors of mass murders. It's hard to feel like you matter in a family dinner. I get why Karen's closeted and hates herself because I'm kinda the same too.

It's very hard for me to not write about Karen, which is funny since the title is supposed to be a dating sim. I should be writing about how Emily is cute for example, but the real star is the protagonist here. I enjoy the writing a lot and how truthful it is. I look forward to the sequel when I get to it.

P.S. I laughed at the mention of the mahjong anime mention. It's actually a favorite anime of mine, though I definitely agree it could have been more explicit with the lesbian characters.

What makes or breaks a mystery title for me and many others is the investigation. One can craft the most intricate mysteries with clever plot twists, but if you aren't able to make the investigation interesting, you aren't really playing on the mysteriousness of mysteries. You're just making a puzzle for yourself.

Toby's Nose seems to get this. You're a dog, so you have to smell everything. Each scent leads to another scent, but they act more like impressions of other rooms. You have to read carefully and think about what might be important to sniff about. It's not just a gimmick, it's a proper investigation methodology where you learn so much about characters' backgrounds and where they've been.

This also leads to some interesting stream-of-consciousness narration. While the title likes to delve into mostly period accurate linguistic fancies, you are never too detached from the perspective of a dog. Your narration reflects a dog living in those Victorian times: the "worlds" these scents conjure are still spaces that dogs (and not humans) would particularly notice. So much of the sensual description revolves around smell, which shouldn't be surprising, but it is still impressive how much the title lands this aspect. You really do feel like you're a dog detective.

I also quite enjoy how you're supposed to "solve" the mystery too. You are supposed to explore all the scents to your content (more likely scenario: as much as you could) and then figure out what actually happened by barking at them. If you're not savescumming and you're indeed thinking things through, the game doesn't really hold your hand. You need to go over the clues, think about how they are connected to the case, and then finally bark them. It makes nabbing the culprit so satisfying because the clues are just waiting to be connected and there's no gimmick or theatrics with it. It's just you and the clues.

All in all, I find this to be a compelling mystery with a really interesting way to do investigation. It's short enough that it doesn't wear its welcome and the game pushes this idea to its limits. I personally find it thrilling to discover new clues through smell. Every new clue strikes me with awe and wonder and I feel I was being rewarded for careful "smelling". Any mystery that makes investigations exciting is always worth commending about.