Ratings and Reviews by Kastel

You have recently been hired by a generic dystopian science fiction corporation to filter poetry from an accidental merger of the Database of Subsumed Cultures. By filtering, they mean deleting these cultural artifacts from the database because they're unnecessary and pointless.

At first, you're preserving factoids and deleting poetry, but someone named PROSPER.0 comes into your interface, quotes some Shakespeare, and lets you "reclaim" words from the poetry you're about to delete. And now you're tasked with creating a poem based on the words you've recovered. You could create a poem commemorating the highs and lows of the ancient civilization you deleted, or you could create a poem expressing your desires -- whatever you want.

The concept is quite interesting, but I found it awkward at best. I found myself hovering over a sentence and clicking endlessly to grab as many words as I could. The game does throw in a few curveballs like limiting the words you can grab as a creative challenge, but that's about it. The game doesn't test you in any way, and the individual words are so divorced from the specific cultural meanings of the alien civilization that they don't really carry any weight for me when I write my found poetry.

(As an aside, the game reminds me of 18 Cadence by Aaron Reed where you reorganize sentences and paragraphs from an already constructed story to make something creative and personal. I wonder if PROSPER.0 would have benefited from preserving sentences instead of single words.)

As for the in-game poems written by the aliens, they were generated through a telephone game of public domain poetry and several rounds of Google Translate. I've seen reviewers say that this made the poetry sufficiently alien to them, but I was already familiar with some of the poems, and the experience was like reading a recitation by someone who had just forgotten how the lines went. I would prefer original poetry, but I also recognize that writing different poems in different voices is rather impractical. Still, it diminished the credibility of the alien poetry for me.

Now, I have to take off my reviewer's hat for a bit and admit that artistic works that advocate the power of art and culture in a world that rejects them are becoming too superficial for me. Many works in this vein, including this game, advocate for artistic and cultural expression, but they don't really have anything more to say after that. Works like this require you to believe that the plot, that art must be defended once again against the tyranny of dystopias, is enough. No critical interrogation of art or culture -- just the notion of (poetic) injustice.

The game does lampshade this tension: the player character asks PROSPER.0 if their poetry will even memorialize these alien civilizations since the game doesn't check if you do. It responds with a non-sequitur gotcha: you wouldn't be able to summarize the civilization with all the words you have, so make do with what you have. Point taken, but it makes me wonder what the player character is supposed to be: a savior, an egotistical artist, or all of the above? We also don't get much of a sense of PROSPER.0, even with the lategame reveals. I just view them as someone who's way into Shakespeare sonnets and nothing else; their interest in poetry is intentionally superficial, but it's not really explored or acknowledged beyond a few lines.

I'm partly sure that the intention of the game is to open up discussion, especially about the symbolic meaning of the player character and PROSPER.0. However, I found the oblique direction this game takes to be underwhelming: it doesn't explore anything but the surface of the relationships between capitalism, art, and technology. I almost feel like I have to read more of my own theory and philosophizing into the game in order to make sense of the themes in the story because the game lacks any of that exploration.

Which is a shame because I think found poetry is one of the more unique genres that interactive fiction is predisposed to. It would be fascinating to play found poetry that follows the beats of narrative games in the same way that some photography games (like Umurangi Generation) have a narrative for players to engage with. That would make the poetry we make and share more meaningful. I didn't feel like I was part of a movement that the game wanted me to be a part of, but I liked the idea of a movement.

I just wish it was a real movement.

A swashbuckling tale of adventures and embassies led by two intrepid highway robbers deeply in love with each other, Rescue at Quickenheath is a thrilling Twine game with rich worldbuilding and memorable interactions.

You are Valentine and your mission is to save your beloved Aubrey from execution. But first, the game asks you for your gender and then for your love interest's. I find the idea of "be gay, do crimes" appealing, so I made them a nonbinary x lesbian couple. With that out of the way, my player character arrives in Quickenheath ready to save their loved one.

The game feels like it has a big world, even though in retrospect the game is quite linear. It accomplishes this by having a few places to go that open up to newer places after completing a few puzzles. Progression feels great and you get more and more juicy worldbuilding details. By the time I finally got to the infodumps, I was already engaged with the world, so I was happy to learn more about the inner politics of fairies and humans.

There are a few contrived scenes that exist to keep the game moving, and I kinda like it. The fairy embassy scene (Spoiler - click to show)where the ambassador decides to give you access to the fairy world is an obvious example and the game seems to recognize that, but I didn't mind it as much as I would've thought. This scene, while inelegant, makes sure the player keeps engaged with the drama of the story, and I believe that a few scenes that don't make much realistic sense is better than many dull scenes to make it work in a story like this. I'm glad that the author understands pacing so well and I think it adds to the atmosphere of an adventure-romance game.

The puzzles are a bit silly, but they are inoffensive and short enough that they are fine. The game will give you solutions if you mess them up too much anyway. And the Twine styling, while simple, is effective and easy to read. The fonts are easy to read on my phone at night and I just found it a breezy game to play.

Rescue at Quickenheath is the kind of game I'd be happy to recommend to newcomers of interactive fiction. It has enough drama, comedy, complexity, and most importantly gay shit that it can be a crowdpleaser. I personally want to see more gay interactions in this game, and that is always a sign of a good game.

A samurai parser game is bound to raise some questions for me: will it be authentic to the historical figures, or will it play on the popular image of honorable brutes serving lords they dislike? The answer is clearly the latter, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Orientalist premise makes it a foregone conclusion.

The protagonist is a samurai who has offended his lord and is sentenced to seppuku, the ritual act of honorable suicide. His lord is watching and Koji is waiting to behead him as soon as the ritual blade touches his flesh. This is all very stereotypical: after eating the mackerel and drinking sake, the player can compose random haiku as his last words. I found all of this a bit silly.

But the game gets interesting when the presentation breaks down. (Spoiler - click to show)The player character realizes he wants to live and the game finally starts as an action-packed title. There are no puzzles, but there are intense descriptions that disorient the player as they try to find a way out of the section. There are fights in the game that remind me, for better or for worse, of the combat in Zork 1, but they are there to enhance the hectic nature of the game.

As for the ending, the game jokes that it's a play on another work, but I'm reminded of the movie The Green Knight: (Spoiler - click to show)both works are set in medieval times, deal with dream sequences of a dishonorable life, and inextricably link duty with figuring out a good death. Compared to the movie, this game falls short in fleshing out that connection, and that was something I was looking forward to.

The game also doesn't question the roles of samurais and lords. The characters seem to behave more like concepts and archetypes than actual people within a system. For a game that revolves around the samurai code, it doesn't seem interested in exploring the theme, and the ending feels rather abrupt due to this approach.

Still, I found this game exciting and enjoyable to play past the seppuku scene. I've always found parser games interesting when they delve into the language of action movies. The intensity of the prose there, the claustrophobia the player feels as he guides the samurai, and the sequence of events are all impeccable, and it's something I wish the game did more of.

A Simple Happening is a short, tight game with a good mix of set pieces and decent writing. I wasn't particularly thrilled with the standard samurai movie setting, but everything else is pretty neat. I thought the core mechanics were pretty solid, and I wished there was a deeper interrogation of how honor and samurais work because I think the subject is actually more fascinating than the game lets on.

I don't believe it is possible to discuss this title as a "Twine game" but as an experience: it creates visions of a state so unfamiliar to me that it invites me to wander alongside it and learn about it through iteration.

Nothing in this resembles the dreams I have: text blurs into other text, the narrator wakes up but finds himself dreaming again, pink hyenas appear, a plethora of images and roars clash with the player, etc. but there is a kind of lucidity to the narration. The narrator is awake but not quite because they are under the influence of drugs. It's also not quite like what I think of as hallucinations because the symbolic imagery resembles the memories of the character. This state where the real and familiar become tainted with the nightmarish uncanniness of dreams is -- as the game says -- sometimes charming and sometimes horrifying. To be conscious in this state is to see the mundane disappear into the ether, to watch memories emerge as dreams manifest into reality.

While it may be comfortable for me to rationalize this as another example of the false dichotomy between dreams and reality, I think this work is trying to get at something more practical about how we experience the world:

The hypnagogic state can be defined as “spontaneously appearing visual, auditory and kinaesthetic images; qualitatively unusual thought processes and verbal constructions; tendencies towards extreme suggestibility; symbolic representations of ongoing mental and physiological processes; and so on” (Schacter, 1976, 452–453). Schacter noted that the most common factor of these phenomena was their occurrence in the drowsy interval between the waking state and sleeping.

(Source: The hypnagocic state: A brief update by Roman Ghibellini and Beat Meier)

I had never heard of hypnagogic states before playing this game and only looked them up after reading the game description on the Spring Thing website. But I find this description familiar to me now: as I followed the hyperlinks, I found myself meditating on the liminal state between waking and dreaming.

I can't say that I've experienced this state, but I've wondered about other media that deal with this particular blurring of reality. The work of David Lynch comes to mind: his films don't just have bizarre symbolic imagery, but they are ultra-sensitive to how sensory everything is. Reality in these kinds of works is ultra-phenomenal: every mundane sensation seems to matter a little too much, and the sensory overload the game evokes is frightening yet fascinating.

And all of this is achieved through decent writing, clever use of text effects, and some memorable background images that move around the screen. These effects create an otherworldly atmosphere, and I wonder if the fact that some text is unreadable (yellow-white text on yellow-white backgrounds) is one of the tools the game uses to disorient you.

You Can Only Turn Left is a deeply memorable experience for me. I can't predict how other reviewers will feel about this title, but as for me, it gave me a few seconds to ponder about how the perception of reality is sometimes a bunch of dreams and fictions. A kind of mixed reality, if you will. I'm definitely biased as someone who enjoys reading about the philosophy and psychology of perception, but it really is a unique work and I hope people get to experience it.

A police procedural from the creator of Last Vestiges in IFComp 2023, The Case of the Solitary Resident is a Twine mystery that explores police investigations in an edutainment kind of way.

The player can navigate through the victim's apartment using hyperlinks and ask forensics to look at samples. Results come in as you get more clues and time passes. There's a lot of clicking compared to other Twine titles I've played because objects and rooms have their own hyperlinks within them -- it reminds me of other Twine games that try to mimic the look and feel of parser games.

The writing can be somewhat charming when given a chance to shine. I particularly like the description of examining camembert cheese and the narrator goes "It looks innocuous enough, but you cannot help but wonder... is there death in the cheese?" It's a delightfully cheesy line that I kind of wish was more prominent in the game because I found the title too serious.

Indeed, the narrator doesn't have the hardboiled cop vibe for me. Although the narration suggests that they've got experience and a desire to avoid wrongful convictions, I don't think they have much personality. I realize that the character is simply an avatar for the player, but it makes for a rather plain reading experience. The text wasn't engaging for me, and I found myself skimming lines to see what links to click on next.

The mystery itself isn't that interesting either. Having played Last Vestiges, I thought the solution would be similar and it's disappointing that there are no twists and turns in this game either. The interviews have very little interactivity since you only ask the suspects about the few clues that exist. And when the player is ready to make an accusation, they are presented with several options that look similar to each other and the jargon doesn't help much. Unlike Last Vestiges, there is an attempt to help the player learn the jargon through books, but I find them very unhelpful and wonder if this is even accurate (kudos to the developer for adding a disclaimer that this may not be accurate for the two books you read). I didn't get any satisfaction from solving the case as I found the general outline of events predictable; I just didn't know the specific jargon needed to close the case.

Still, I find the game a pleasure to play because I like the mystery genre and exploring the apartment as an investigator is always fun. While it does feel like a chore at times, obsessively clicking through the hyperlinks and making sure you've asked the lab to check for fingerprints and hair is quite refreshing. The procedural work is fun to click through, so I wonder if the game would be more interesting if we were just looking for clues. The game falls apart for me once I'm in the solving stage; the investigative parts have more depth (and are perhaps more attuned to the expertise of the developer).

To put it another way, I think the ideal mystery for me may not be about inventive solutions or ingenious logical puzzles. Rather, what I enjoy most is roleplaying as an investigator looking for clues -- the process, not the solution. Mysteries, even the great ones out there, tend to be sloppy in this regard and I can see games like The Case of the Solitary Resident correcting this trend.

I hope the developer continues making this game and polishing their craft.

This game is a box of good ideas.

All of the puzzles revolve around following IKEA instruction manuals in interesting ways. They don't test your general puzzle-solving skills but rather how well you understand the logic of the world. If you're able to internalize it, solving the puzzles feels effortless.

Every eureka moment I had deepened my appreciation of this game. It understood and exploited the greatest strength of text-only games: the ability to conjure up truly strange images. The fact it was all my doing made it better. And I also thought the gimmick didn't wear out its welcome either; it was explored just enough to feel satisfying and to keep the narrative moving forward.

While the game was never going to focus on the story, the writing and the action were quite engaging. I was curious about the world and the tantalizing little details we got seem to evoke a larger cosmology.

Assembly is a humble work of genius. For such a simple conceit, the game unfolds in so many surprising ways and I can't stress enough how clever the game is. It's a clean and refined game that's easy to get into unlike the furniture it's inspired by.

If someone asked me which parser games with puzzles would be good for beginners, I would wait until the clock struck midnight, laugh like a mad scientist on the Discord voice call, and point to this game.

Dr. Ludwig's only goal was to create life, but his repeated failures had led him to seek help from the Devil. But as the Grand Grimoire warned, beware of the Devil's contract and look for any loopholes! He's not going to sell his soul right just when he's on the verge of a new scientific discovery -- that would suck.

Much of the comedy plays with the popular imagination of the mad scientist and the 1931 Frankenstein movie. For instance, the Torch and Pitchfork Society tried to make Dr. Ludwig sign a reasonable charter to be a less annoying and more cordial neighbor. But Dr. Ludwig refused, preferring to get excited about picking up shovels ("The shovel was mine! All mine!"). The problems the characters face are also very similar to our own: queer love, lack of free time, and the question of unionization for better working conditions. These playful gestures aren't profound or anything, but they're certainly very funny.

Not only is the humor quite enjoyable, but it also alleviates the usual frustration that comes with parser titles. It follows the wisdom of other beginner-friendly games like *Lost Pig*: instead of punishing you with error messages, it rewards you with some musings of Ludwig. The overall map is also quite small and the hint system is convenient and easy to use.

What makes the game stand out is how the game juggles conversational mechanics with puzzles. Most of the puzzles are classic object-hunting puzzles, but they're gated behind conversation topics. The game is thus able to carefully drip the most relevant information to the player at appropriate moments. I find this approach refreshing since most new players feel overwhelmed by the many moving parts of parser games. Though it sacrifices mechanical depth, later puzzles build on earlier ones and this helps keep the story moving forward.

It's impressive that Dr. Ludwig and the Devil has somehow managed to appeal to both the sensibilities of new and experienced players. Everyone will probably enjoy it because the puzzles, implementation, and writing are consistently high quality. It captures what makes puzzle parser games so much fun in a matter of an hour and a bit more.

I hope this isn't the end of Dr. Ludwig. He's such a compelling character that I would love to see him take on more genre movie cliches. As the youngsters would say, let him cook.