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.

How Dare You puts the player in a strange situation: they must find the verbs that will hopefully resolve a potential breakup between the player character and their partner.

It doesn't take long to realize that there's no way to move the conversation forward. The (ex-)partner is simply not interested in reconciliation, leaving the player to wonder what kind of transgression the player character has committed that makes them so beyond forgiveness.

I've always found parser games like this interesting because they suggest that communication is much more than language in action. There is, of course, the interpersonal communication as explored in the game, but there is also the relationship between the player and the parser.

Whenever I encountered errors or silence from the parser, the friction seemed to unfold a wordless story in my head. As I pondered what else to type, I began to imagine nice dates, arguments, and all the little things that couples tend to do. There is a sense of mystery, of something terribly wrong that has torn this couple apart.

The game gives no clues as to what this history might be, but the limited agency the player has in navigating the game provides more than enough clues. There is no need to observe the build-up of tension: I think the player can intuit the "solutions" to this puzzle by simply struggling with the parser a bit and wondering what the parser is trying to say about the relationship between the characters.

The parser in How Dare You is almost like a character in this standoff, an intermediary between the player and this unwritten history. Given life, it wants to write the friction between these characters into parser errors. While the prose uses second-person narration, it's more fruitful to see the implemented verbs and responses as a translator trying to get as much nuance (written and unwritten) into the small space the game has.

And I believe the parser has done a great job at it. When I finally entered one of the many correct solutions, I didn't feel a eureka moment -- it was more like a confirmation that I was on the right track, and I felt like the parser and I were on the same page. While I can imagine players being upset by the game, I wasn't surprised, and that's okay: the "translation" served its purpose because the clues to the tragedy are so well foreshadowed.

But there is something to be said about how opaque this same dynamic can be in real-life relationships. There are no parsers, no puzzles to indicate that something is wrong. People only realize they're in shitty relationships after the fact. We're all unreliable narrators, unaware of the genre we're in.

The fantasy (for lack of a better word) of How Dare You is that it can make such dynamics legible to the eyes of the parser player. I found temporary catharsis when I read the last lines of the game. But as I wrote my thoughts and reflected on life, I realized that this was a pyrrhic victory and the game seemed to ironically acknowledge this: if the player tries to undo an action, the response is

"If only you could undo whatever it was that led you here. But you can't."

I read this as the player character's inability to diagnose what actually went wrong. Instead of discovering a systemic problem that defined their abrasive personality, they searched for the one action, the one incident, the one verb that caused everything to spiral out of control.

The real world is full of scumbags like the player character. They'll never learn to read their transcripts and become someone better.

The premise of NYX is one that many science fiction and horror fans have heard over the years: the cosmic horror has taken over, and the humans must respond to this otherworldly threat. While writers and artists will fixate on the details and how they differ, the real point of divergence is the nature of the human response. How should humans retaliate or negotiate with the alien? Do they succeed or fail?

NYX describes itself as "the final transmission of the ESPM-05 (NYX-V) crew on their final spaceflight". No other context provides any information about what actually happened. Instead, we hear lamentations: the narrator cries that they are not a poet and that their astronaut vocabulary cannot condense the spiritual exhilaration of oxygen and the otherworldly being into prose. Yet, they believe they can make a "final stand, gazing nobly unto the abyss". The narrator can only make choices that lead to three different outcomes.

The game ends, the consequences of the player's choice left untold and only speculated upon by the mind.

There is much to delight in: the minimalist aesthetics, the wide possibility space the game offers with three simple choices, and the intense fear that no choice is perfect and the being will find ways to overcome the setback.

But what I found magical is that there are three potential stories in NYX. Each choice could create a story with its own specific theme, different from the other two, and highlight the player character's lingering dreams and fears before their last breath.

When we put the three choices together, we see a spectrum of what human beings can be when facing the unknown. They are almost like blank slates until that moment, when they see an Other and form a response that "humanizes" themselves. Their actions and inactions, the final stands if you will, create the human in these kinds of science fiction stories.

Rather than settle for a short story with one theme and one theme only, NYX lays the groundwork for many short stories to come, suggesting that there are many ways to define what it means to be human in a first contact story. It allows the player to evoke the human as a wide range of possibilities and to imagine what humans can be, making it a richer and deeper story upon reflection.

There is value in short stories that seem to provide a canvas for the reader to think about the constellation of meanings and ideas out there. We have so many conflicting ideas about what the human condition is that it's worth finding a place to think about what that means. NYX is one such canvas: it shows how human beings are so malleable and indeterminate until that single mouse click, and I'm very grateful to have discovered this little sweet piece.

I'm not familiar with Baldur's Gate 3, but I know that people like Astarion and playing the game made me understand why.

After a grueling battle at the camp, the player character searches for Astarion who is trapped in a never-ending nightmare. He's trapped in a tomb and he's losing his mind. You can only manifest as an incorporeal being and have to spend your precious ten energy points to learn Speech, Touch, and Spell to reassure Astarion that he's not going mad and that there's someone who still needs him. You can only tell him so much to make him remember that he's not alone in this tomb. Astarion is starving and dying of loneliness, so every interaction you have with him is important. I realized I was enjoying this game when I saw him lose his guard and reveal his vulnerability to me. It confirms that not only did I manage my resources well but that I was able to connect with him as a person in need of companionship. The feedback loop feels rewarding and I feel closer to Astarion as a character.

I appreciate how much Corfman is able to express how much she thinks Astarion is a compelling character, but what I find particularly cool is that she's able to show how lovable this asshole character is to non-BG3 players like me. It made me even more interested in the game (if only it weren't so expensive and data hog) because I really like characters like that.

Unfortunately, it was a shame that the game ended early. What we have so far is an early access game that shows the first act. I wanted to read and learn more about Astarion. He's the kind of character whose moody temperament is intoxicating and I can't imagine the volume of interactions one could have in future acts. I trust Corfman to flesh out the mechanics and put him and the player in interesting situations that challenge how I've handled resource management and his trust.

I didn't expect to like A Dream of Silence as much as I did. I was not the "right audience", but I think Corfman's approach to the character worked well with me. Her prose invited me into the world of Baldur's Gate 3 in a way that few reviews can because she focuses on a specific character she adores and is able to express what she finds so fascinating about him. It is a passionate and infectious love letter to the character and I can't wait to see the full version one day -- maybe after I finally get to Baldur's Gate 3.

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 is the kind of horror that gives me nightmares. There are no supernatural beings in this story, just a diminishing sense of security in a world that is getting increasingly dangerous to sleep in.

For the avid (and paranoid) parser player, it pays to get to know your player character and what she's like. In the first half of the game, she has to do her chores like emptying the dishwasher and (Spoiler - click to show)remembering her new identity. As the game progresses, the web browser turns orange and gradually dims, imitating the sun going down. If the player snoops around with the right commands, they'll learn about her backstory, why she has moved to a new part of town, and why she's constantly exhausted but still aware of everything around her.

As the second half begins, the web browser goes dark and everything onward is written in the future tense. The inciting event hasn't happened yet. All the parser input the player enters is the sequence of actions she will take to overcome (Spoiler - click to show)the armed intruder.

Studio is a very tense game, especially when the player is starting out. The game reacts to your every command without hesitation and you can feel how precious every move becomes in this (Spoiler - click to show)life-or-death situation. Every step feels like a step into the unknown and I have to remember the right numbers, where things are and where (Spoiler - click to show)he is.

I've lived in studio apartments this small before, so it's impressive how spacious this environment becomes when we add this obstacle to the mix. Navigating around the apartment, grabbing important items, and possibly creating distractions makes this living space feel a bit larger -- but it's still overwhelming because I have to remember that her smartphone is by the bed, her laptop is in the office area, etc. This game could have been set in a house, but the compactness of the studio apartment makes it more intense. In the parser game model, the player character and the obstacle are in different rooms. In the actual writing of the game, they're just a few feet away from each other. This proximity overrides the way I usually map parser games in my head, and I find it thrilling, if not nerve-wrecking.

There are multiple endings to this game, which may not seem like much at first. However, the game only counts endings not by how we got there, but what the outcome is. (Spoiler - click to show)Multiple ways to kill the intruder exist as a quick example. This made me replay the game a lot to explore what other outcomes are possible and which one would be satisfying for the player character. Normally, I would find replaying a horror game less unnerving. However, the constant search for new things to do keeps me on edge, and I really like how the game encourages that experimentation.

If I hadn't, I wouldn't have noticed that (Spoiler - click to show)fleeing the apartment with everything you have is the same as fleeing the apartment without your valuables. After all, the armed intruder can still find you and kill you. Or how the armed intruder reacts to sounds and things that look off (he noticed the keychain was missing). Or how you can just turn on the radio and listen to some great hip-hop. This makes the setting very believable and grounded while creating a kind of sandbox environment for the player to play around in.

It took me a while to get the last two main endings, that is (Spoiler - click to show)subduing and murdering the intruder while alerting the police. And I had to ask Cochran for help for that since they weren't really smart ideas for the player character to have. But I do appreciate that these endings exist as they remind the player that every variable is in fact in check.

While I enjoyed the game very much, I have to admit that the game doesn't go beyond its atmospheric horror roots. The way the game handles its themes doesn't make me want to write an essay about it. I think this can be a downer for people who want more than just a sandbox horror game.

That said, I think its brevity works in its favor. Studio knows what it wants to do, and it delivers. I am extremely impressed with the title and how many secrets it has -- I'm sure there are more to be found, even though I've spent hours on the game. It's simply an effective horror parser game because it preys on something most people feel vulnerable to: our safety.

I remember wondering what the player character meant in the second half when she said that (Spoiler - click to show)she was missing the weapon that kept her safe, and I restarted the game and searched the apartment as if I were burglaring her place. After a day of searching, I found (Spoiler - click to show)her taser and time stopped for me. I thought about all the associations with the object, her backstory, and why she needs it.

The object, in my view, challenges how we balance safety with other needs while reminding us that one wrong step could be the end of everything. It is a symbol of how (Spoiler - click to show)gender-based violence is everywhere and the police are useless. All she can do is fend for herself, and I think that's the real horror of the story: she's alone in a violent, violent world.

The studio apartment just happens to be a microcosm of that world.

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.

This game is an antidote for those obsessed with personal histories and their ultimate meaning.

We first learn that this game was originally created in 1993 by a thirteen-year-old Eddie Hughes. It was rediscovered by a forty-year-old Ed Hughes in 2020, and the version we have includes his thoughtful commentary. Hughes has also helpfully provided us with maps of the game in the form of his old math notebook. And as we'll learn later, the game is a recreation of the old lake house and the time he and his good friend Richard spent at the lake.

As the player progresses through the game, the author seems to gain and lose interest in a work he was once obsessed with but now barely remembers. Hughes laughs and apologizes for his younger self's antics -- a fully realized house with descriptive rooms like More Halls is very funny -- but the player will almost immediately encounter oddities. They can't go to his sister's room -- in the maps provided, it's blotted out. (Spoiler - click to show)Why are we collecting memory shards? The more we traverse, the more personal this game becomes.

It’s very tempting to compare it to B.J. Best’s other old-IF-in-IF work, And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One. Not only are they reminiscences of the past via interactive fiction but they relate to the relevance of the past and interactive fiction in our present. That work is, however, a coming-of-age relationship between two adolescents. We are playing the game with someone who is reflecting on his youth.

Instead, the game is more like Drew Cook’s Repeat the Ending as both include fictional commentary and also look to the past for meaning. In Cook's game, we find an affirmation of interactive fiction as a mode of artistic expression. We leave that game emotional and hopeful for Cook's growth.

In Hughes's game, we find nothing.

What remains of LAKE ADVENTURE is an adventure game full of bad memories not worth revisiting. Hughes doesn't want to remember (Spoiler - click to show)how heartbroken he was over his sister's death from leukemia nor does he want to think about Richard's death after drifting apart for so long. But the past has caught up with him and won't let go.

The finale gives me dread, especially since it felt like I was roped into relive his trauma. I wonder what went through the minds of young and old Eddie. Why did they put me through this torment? I guess they just didn't know what they were getting into -- and that's the really terrifying thing about rediscovering memories: we don't know what's going to come out of it.

This game is my nightmare. It goes against my beliefs about the importance of memories and traumas in autobiographical works, but I cannot simply look away from it. I know I have to stare at its truth because it is after all naive to believe that uncovering and reliving memories is unconditionally good for you. It can harm you. It can compound your trauma. It makes you remember what you've rightfully forgotten. You become an empty shell, begging "ancient history" to fill you with something, but all you've really done is widen the hole in your heart.

LAKE ADVENTURE is a tragedy for Ed Hughes and people like me who seek comfort in introspection. We can only relive the past for so long before it hurts us in our most vulnerable. Only through forgetting some memories can we find real meaning in our personal histories.

I'm always fascinated by puzzle Twine games with inventories because there's the obvious question, "Why not parser?", that lingers in the background. Many answer that question differently -- and with this game, there's several reasons but one particular reason stands out the most: it evokes transient, elliptical connections that remind the player is never fully in control, which is perfect for a story like this.

Your player character is packing up things in the middle of the night. Scattered around the apartment are photos of the past, of what felt like better days now long gone. But as the player mindlessly clicks hyperlinks to figure out where to go next, they'll (Spoiler - click to show)stumble upon three poets in a cafe who cryptically ask them to consider (and interact with) some old history between the player character and someone whose name is obscured. There, the game finally opens up and reveals its true self, a meditative journey on the meaning of memories and what to do with them in the face of necessary change.

As I played through the game, I'm reminded of Amanda Walker's After the Accident and especially Steve Evans's Photograph: A Portrait of Reflection as both games explore flashbacks as interactive spaces and are relatively puzzleless. However, The Gift of What You Notice More takes a more dream-like puzzle game approach: it has light adventure game puzzles that border on the surreal. These memories are to be puzzled out, grasped, shaken to their fuller meaning by the player character. They are, in other words, allegories that only make sense to this character.

I think this is the main reason why this game has to be hypertext. In parser games, you have a direct connection to the player character because you're typing their actions. Clicking on links feels more detached. The player character in Twine games always feels more autonomous than their parser counterparts. Some decisions we as players make in the game feel life-changing, but we won't see their results. Their consequences are secrets only known to the player character.

As a result, the title was more of a spiritual journey for the player character than the player, despite it being written in second-person. It feels like I've just played through someone's dream-diary except it's lightly dressed up as an adventure game. This is likely why I couldn't connect with the player character, but at the same time, it felt good to help them achieve their goals. The game itself is therapeutic for the character and their resolution to change things resonates with me.

That said, I don't think the puzzle design is perfect. My issues boil down to two things:

(Spoiler - click to show)1) You have to keep going back and forth between the poets and the photos in order to advance the game state, which can be quite cumbersome.

2) I came into the game assuming all the puzzles in each memory are internally solvable, but some puzzles require items that are only acquirable in a future game state. It's frustrating to advance a puzzle so far only to be confused why I haven't found the next step. In the end, I ended up following the walkthrough, which is a shame because I was enjoying the strange puzzles.

But overall, I like The Gift of What You Notice More because it's simply an uplifting game that inspires and soothes. While I've seen the subject matter played out before in different contexts, its use of hyperlinks and allegorical constructions of memory evokes the relatable tensions of uncertainty, powerlessness, and the necessity to change. I came out of the game feeling like I had just helped someone untangle their feelings, and that's not an experience I get to have in games every day.

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.

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.

We know little about Socrates. We know even less about Xanthippe, the second wife of Socrates. And yet, here is a story that imagines their last romantic night together before the esteemed philosopher took the hemlock.

As historical fiction, it teeters on the edge of implausibility. As an homage to the philosophy of Socrates, it is deeply Platonic and not very Socratic. But as a fantasy that disrupts our popular notions of the past, it does the job quite well.

On the Dedication page, Gijsbers writes that we'll never know who Xanthippe is or what she's like. However, it is possible to "complicate our idea of her; reimagine her; give her a voice that is necessarily our own voice." Putting on the mask of Xanthippe (and Socrates by extension) in the theater of interactive fiction brings them back to life and lets us "dwell in possibility". They speak with our voices, of course, but "the dead do not resent us." Instead, they will recognize this dialog between Xanthippe and Socrates as necessary "for our sake".

Keeping in the spirit of relevance, the game revels in our current vernacular of love-making: Xanthippe calls Socrates her "big man" and may choose to stroke his cheek. She wants to fulfill her marital duties and the player can make her pounce on poor Socrates. It is no wonder then that Gijsbers's version of Socrates often shudders at her actions. Grumpy at first glance, he is actually vulnerable to Xanthippe's sensuality. He becomes apologetic after a fit of rage and even uncertain of his own beliefs when he talks to her -- a far cry from the popular image of the individualistic Socrates from Plato's Apology. But it's also later revealed that (Spoiler - click to show)both characters lead adulterous lives because they can't help it. Socrates even gets a feminist lecture from Xanthippe about the sex workers he's involved with because they might not be consenting figures. As a result, their relationship has the baggage of most contemporary amours, but they choose to stay together in Socrates's final hours. Their love transcends time and space itself. I imagine their affection is strong enough to melt even the most stoic of hearts.

This is only possible because we have a rigid conception of the Ancient Greek world. We read in Plato's Phaedo that Socrates drinks the hemlock because he believes in his own philosophy and is first and foremost an Athenian citizen. A simple shift in this narrative changes everything. Socrates is not the ubermensch of Platonic philosophy in this story; he is someone who loves Xanthippe in his own way and he owes his life and death to her. Everything in Phaedo, from the Forms to the immortality of the soul, is attributed to his love for Xanthippe. She is his muse and, echoing Stephen Granade's romantic masterpiece of age and death, he "will not let her go". This work reframes everything we know about Socrates and his philosophy into a love ode for Xanthippe.

It's ahistorical and improbable, but the fantasy in Xanthippe's Last Night with Socrates is so strong that I want to believe in it. Those amorous embraces between those two characters we'll never know feel so real to me because I know it's fiction. The dialectical tensions between anachronisms and the quasi-historical details only speak to a higher understanding on why the love of wisdom feels so empty.

Perhaps, Socrates never loved Sophia. Xanthippe is a "horny cow" who sees Socrates as a "beast" that knows how to make her feel good. She's a far more beautiful figure than wisdom herself.

Citizen Makane may be the best (Spoiler - click to show)deckbuilding adventure game based on The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane.

After an eerily familiar dream, you have awakened (Spoiler - click to show)to a world where the male sex has been wiped out. Students, milkwomen, passersby -- they're all eager to find out how stiff Stiffy Makane really is. (Spoiler - click to show)Even scientists are interested in your sexual prowess because it may provide insights into human evolution.

Just one small problem: (Spoiler - click to show)you haven't worked your genitalia in at least 267 years.

To get you back up to speed, the game gives you some simple adventure game objectives. You help (and bang) people: a librarian (Spoiler - click to show)wants to expand her collection of taboo books; a priestess (Spoiler - click to show)believes the chalice has been stolen by a beloved philanthropist; and the milkwomen (Spoiler - click to show)want to extract your male milk and sell it on the market. These tasks may or may not be available depending on the day, but there are no deadlines in the game.

However, some missions are gated based on your (Spoiler - click to show)sexual stamina level. (Spoiler - click to show)If you try something intense from the start, you'll only make a mess and embarrass yourself. You gotta start slow: (Spoiler - click to show)wait for a woman to look at you as you travel between town, engage in a conversation, and bring out your (Spoiler - click to show)deckbuilder. Much like real sex, the game involves collecting and using cards that are scattered around town and hidden in quests. You can wield three cards at a time during an encounter; each card can be submissive or dominant and there are ratings that indicate the amount of pleasure you versus what your partner get. (Spoiler - click to show)The goal is to simultaneous orgasm (and maybe a little more!), but the beginning is an exercise on humility -- you may have to ejaculate before your partner even feels anything. As long as you don't make a mess of yourself, you'll earn EXP. The more skilled you are at pleasuring each other, the more EXP -- just like how I remember my RPGs.

The entire game had me laughing and enthralled from start to finish. I really enjoyed the witty writing: it never gets old because it keeps juggling different kinds of sex jokes and the comedic timing is varied enough. The prose is also clean and the plot always moves forward, especially if you know how to optimize the sex gains. Honestly, I can't get enough of the raunchy and amusing writing.

But by the end of the game, I became somehow emotionally invested in this strange setting and (Spoiler - click to show)the relationship between the two main characters. For a game that revels in bawdiness, I didn't expect such tender and emotional writing. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense: (Spoiler - click to show)this game has foreshadowed that it'll be tackling uncomfortable misogyny present in the original Stiffy Makane and other adult games. No matter how many consenting women there are in this game, we cannot undo Makane's shooting of Pamela. Not only do we see it in the introduction, but in certain sexual encounters, our player character tries to go on a date with one of his liaisons, only to be rebuffed because she's only interested in his technology. He can only relate with a partner through sex and that's why he's so lonely. And the final action the player might be the best answer to his unquenchable longing because it respects him and the history of the Stiffy Makane games. Perhaps, the ribaldry makes the few nice scenes even sweeter. It adds emotional weight to the overall message about sex and turns the game into a fascinating character study of one of the best characters interactive fiction has to offer.

Citizen Makane is an incredible game that lives up to its name. I had so much fun that I wished the game was longer and more substantial, but I knew that brevity and polish made for the best stuff. Orson Welles would have been so honored to have such a wonderful game named after his mediocre movie.

High-octane action doesn't lend itself well to adventure game engines designed for exploration and puzzles. Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine parser games without some exploration and puzzling.

But this game presents an alternative and perhaps more exciting approach to interactivity. Originally made for the Single Choice Jam, its spartan design allows no room for superfluous commands for players to get stuck on. You are a barbarian who's taken over the kingdom, not some lowly adventurer. You have no need for the standard Inform 7 verbs: you don't open chests, you > loot them. You > smite any instances of downtime, > regard the rich textual descriptions, and > march toward the antagonist for one final showdown. And if you simply want to indulge in the spectacle, you can switch on and off the story mode at any point in the game.

You are the One King to Loot Them All.

Your interest in this game begins and ends in how interested you are in the spectacle of sword-and-sorcery stories. The game abandons any pretense of more conventional interactive fiction sensibilities; it instead revels in the genre as a pastiche. Love it or hate it, all the cliches are there. It will not attempt to subvert the genre or go beyond. The game simply asks for your commitment to roleplaying as this barbarian king.

This straightforward approach to storytelling may be too old-fashioned for many people, but adapting it to a parser work makes the story refreshing to me. Like Plundered Hearts, the game seems uninterested in IF works before it -- the implementer was unaware of Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom weeks after they started developing the game and the only influence it had was on the help system -- but it's definitely infatuated with the sword-and-sorcery genre and is more than happy to learn from it. The stories of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry are all about escalating tension. They're always in danger, but once they've killed their enemies, more will appear -- and there will be more bloodshed. Only when they've slain everyone will they finally put down their swords and axes. I can't imagine how much effort it would take to adapt these conventions to the Inform 7 engine, but it's definitely worth the effort. Scenes feel seamless as you encounter one obstacle after another. Your actions are always purposeful and move the story forward. And the descriptions feel authentic to anyone who's read their fair share of sword-and-sorcery works. Playing it brought back fond memories of immersing myself in the world of pulp fiction.

But it's more than that: when I type in the words and read the player character swooping the corpses away, I feel like I'm actually interacting with the story. I'm brought into the power fantasy not just as a macho hunk, but as someone who can meaningfully change the state of the game world. To borrow from Jimmy Maher's appraisal of Plundered Hearts, it's close to the "Infocom ideal of interactive fiction" because there's a "narrative urgency" that pushes players and events to move forward. It's interactive and fiction the way I thought of those terms: there's a lot of action going on and we, the players, have to interact with it.

One King to Loot Them All is therefore not just an orthodox version of sword-and-sorcery fiction. It may open up new avenues for interactive fiction as a medium, perhaps taking a cue from a recent review of Plundered Hearts that brought up the notion of "story-forward games" from another review. We can > seize these opportunities if we dare to break this paradigm and try something different. They don't have to be a minority. The promise of interactive fiction is still great, and I look forward to seeing more works with action-heavy plots like this terrific game.

(cw: abuse from parents and institutions, mental health, suicide)

Bez realized he's having difficulty remembering things.

This made him feel like he wasn't in control of his life. After an unspecified traumatic incident ("my mother did something terrible to me (which I am not ready to discuss fully yet)"), he tried to end his life. He was sent the ER, later psych ward, and finally through several residential treatment facilities for a total of 14 months. During his time there, he learned that he was suffering from pseudodementia, a range of psychiatric conditions that results in symptoms similar to dementia but is thankfully reversible on treatment.

But 14 months is a long time. This game -- or shall I say, museum exhibition -- charts his time in these facilities as he struggles to recover from pseudodementia and the abuses of mental health institutions.

In lieu of memoir conventions where we simply read scenes like a novel, Bez has selected notebooks, a few photographs, rants scribbled on notebooks, young adult literature, and so on for all of us to see. They are mundane items, but they mean a lot to him. Each object has a powerful history that is detailed on the plaques. Unlike most museum exhibitions, the plaques offer a deluge of text and sometimes hyperlinks to a .txt file explaining the significance of the item to Bez. After we're done contemplating, we move onto the next room and read more text.

As we navigate through this curated history of objects, we learn that Bez was unable to return home after his time in residential care because his abusive father refused to allow him to return. He was reluctantly moved between different residential facilities and each exhibit room represents the length of time he spent in each one. Every step brings him closer to the "real world", but the facilities differ in quality. The first residential facility allowed Bez to connect with a neurologist who believed he had pseudodementia and even tried to accommodate his gender identity. The second consistently misgendered him. There are also different levels of care that he must undergo, resulting in limbo and long waits.

In return, stickers declaring his pronouns become more prominent on his notebooks and folders. More and more objects clarify and deepen his own understanding of who he is, but the end of the exhibition reminds us that there's still a long way to go: (Spoiler - click to show)"Recovery is not a destination you can reach; it’s a mountain you can choose to climb."

After writing my thoughts on the guestbook, I thought I had little to say about this game. It was a sweet and poignant time capsule. But I kept returning to it because this autobiography has emotional weight. The objects have so much potency that they feel as important as the historical artifacts I've seen in museums; Bez's folders are just as compelling as a cannon recovered from the Battle of Waterloo. And like other exhibitions, this game has taught me about the inner workings of mental health institutions in the US and how patients are treated especially in regards to gender-affirming care. I really appreciate how honest Bez's depictions are.

And parts of the game resonate with me because my life changed after I contracted COVID-19. While I never suffered memory loss, I was (and still am) constantly tired and could only maintain a "normal" life by following certain routines. I 100% share Bez's thoughts on recovery.

My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition is a gorgeously personal exhibit that is worth visiting at least once. Although it deals with some painful subjects, it hugs you and reminds you to keep living beyond your doubts. And as you learn to recover, every object you interact with along the way is special and important -- you should take note of it.

The works of Francis Bacon evoke different reactions for good reason. He inspires controversy and awe. But as the game's blurb points out, "This game is not about him."

We are first introduced to him through plaques explaining his overall life story and his triptychs. As we view his works, the middle panel beckons us to LOOK CLOSER. We accidentally enter these paintings and emerge into his strange, surrealistic visions. There, depending on which triptych we've gone through, we can talk to a Fury, George Dyer, and Dyer's corpse.

The entire game revolves around exhausting conversation trees between these characters in the artworks and the people in the gallery. By asking around, we'll learn about what Bacon has thought about life, art, God, the soul, love, and some more. While it may remind players of Emily Short's influential Galatea, this game is mechanically far simpler: you'll be switching back and forth between different characters to unlock new topics to talk about.

While the gameplay was tedious, I couldn't satisfy my curiosity. I wanted to know more about Francis Bacon's art and how people understood them. Why are people so drawn and repelled toward his works? Is there some deeper meaning or could it simply be nothing at all? What was his relationship with Dyer? Why did he paint the Fury like that? Is the painting of the corpse just shock art or is there more to it?

As we ask these questions to different people, we begin to get a portrait of an artist from different perspectives. One fan sees him as a surrealist artist capable of subversion and bold new ideas. A detractor, on the other hand, finds his work too grotesque and even opportunistic. But those who are close to him -- the models of his work -- see him as (Spoiler - click to show)someone who craves masochistic pleasure and forced his partners to replace for his long-lost desire. He desires violence upon himself. For those who remain unconvinced and decide to investigate the question of Bacon's intentions even further, (Spoiler - click to show)you'll have the opportunity to "talk" to his self-portrait at the end of the game. He doesn't respond to anything you ask him because he seems too interested in himself as an artist. But you can tell him *who* he is, and he screams, implying you taught him something he didn't realize he had all along. At any point in the game, we can leave the gallery and get on with our lives.

Whether you dug through every topic or not, the game suspends its judgment on Bacon's art. We are left with our own voices to find out how we feel about his work. In my case, I wasn't aware he was a real figure until I started writing this review and I found his work beautiful. But his actions are inexcusable to me: he was an incorrigible, abusive artist who profited from people's misery for the sake of art. At the same time, he's been dead for so long that I don't have an ethical problem with his work being seen all over the world. Other people could disagree with me and that's fine.

This game is not about Francis Bacon the artist. It's about how the people inside and outside his works are affected by them.

When we ask people and the subject matter questions about Bacon's art and philosophy, we're actually teasing out something else entirely: our lives. Bacon is simply an author-function; his biographical details don't really matter. His works are the real focal point. What's more important is what we take away from it, and that journey is always meaningful.

As for me, his works and this game embody the sadder parts of queer desire. What we desire is often taboo because we cannot decouple love and dehumanization from our thinking. Losing it hurts even more because we can't talk about what we've lost. Shame and fear drive us into abstraction, into talking about nothing else because words and gestures no longer reflect our state of mind.

Is it so wrong for us to seek it?

Gestures Towards Divinity, like other works of art, cannot answer that question. All we can do is enter the game and explore it. Perhaps, we could chance upon some important truth that even their creators don't know -- or we don't. Satisfying or lacking, they are all we have.

Whatever the case, our personal answers we find are always gesturing toward something. Our curiosity is what makes art divine to us.

DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS is about a guy named Dick McButts who gets kicked in the nuts. That's the entire story in a nutshell. However, questions remain: How did Dick McButts get kicked in the nuts? Who did this? Where? Why?

These pertinent questions deserve to be answered by the most curious players of interactive fiction. While I recognize that people may feel uncomfortable about this game, this is actually a witty work that plays with the expectations and mediums of interactive fiction. It rewards curiosity and good faith with tons and tons of silly humor. In fact, it's most interesting when we realize it's having a deep conversation with us about how it's using the craft of interactive fiction to achieve its one goal.

But it sure doesn't mind giving players a bad first impression. Unlucky players with less patience may stumble upon a colorful bonanza riddled with typos and punctuation. They will be forced to read the epic highs and lows of the nut-kicking saga between Dick McButts, Adolf Hitler, and, of course, Darth Vader. Their session ends all of a sudden, with a red hyperlink that goes to nowhere.

If those players keep at it, or -- as in my case -- get lucky the first time, they'll get a more normal-looking page. If we pop up the Twine editor and look up the game's code, we can marvel at the Freudian symbiology and also uncover a script that can randomly put any player into two different game states: the aforementioned battle royale with Darth Vader and the calmer and more fleshed out DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS scenario.

The Dick McButts in the latter scenario is calmer and more intelligent. Unfortunately, he's also aware of the game's title and hates it. He wants to avoid this terrible fate. There are many scenes where the player must choose between two ridiculous options: one option is the correct one and the other choice results with Dick McButts getting kicked in the nuts. McButts may lament all he wants, but he'll soon be chased by cyborgs with impressive hydraulic legs ready to deliver the final blow. At one point, (Spoiler - click to show)a time-traveling Hitler materializes into existence and McButts simply has to deal with it. And somehow, the absurdity keeps on escalating from there: (Spoiler - click to show)Chapter 2 begins, Fanny McTits doesn't want her nips to be flipped, and the ending defies explanations. This whole scenario is a cinematic romp full of crude humor -- and I loved it!

But I understand why people might be put off by this game: it's just a one-note joke, nothing more and nothing less. The game is so proud of this that it refuses to consider alternative ideas. That approach will ruffle many people's feathers and it's almost certain it'll win the Golden Banana of Discord.

At the same time, I also find its commitment to this one single joke inspiring and ballsy. This title was a creative shitpost with a surprising amount of depth thrown at an unsuspecting public. Everyone may choose to laugh at it or with it. Those who laugh with it will find deep within the game a genuine appreciation for what makes interactive fiction fun and engaging: the choices, the little snippets of text revealed, the comedic timing... all in service of a nutty joke. The real comedy comes not from the copious amounts of immature humor; it comes from the fact that someone has dedicated their passion to the craft of interactive fiction to make a bombastic work about jokes about genitalia. The fact the author is willing to hide that makes the work even funnier to me.

DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS is delightfully juvenile because it encourages curiosity into its one-note joke. I am left with questions like "Why?" and "How?" because it's so strange and weird. It leaves an impact on me, not so different from getting kicked in the nuts. But instead of cowering in pain, I am crying with laughter at how much effort the author had to put into this game. I won't be able to get up for a while and that's okay.

Sometimes, you gotta let the pain do its thing. It's part of the joke.

Of the many retrospectives on interactive fiction (some of them being outright games themselves), Repeat the Ending seems to be the one that gets to the essence of why people write and tell interactive fiction.

The "meta" premise is simple: this is supposedly a "critical edition" of a parser game that came out the same time as In the End and it predates influential puzzle-less and linear works like Rameses and Photopia, but it was so buggy and people weren't into these kinds of "personal games" that it was largely forgotten -- until people started talking about it again in interactive fiction Usenet groups and a "2003 transcript". This led to some interest from academics and critics to resurrect the game and publish it in Spring Thing 2023, with one of those critics lamenting it as part of "the unfortunate critical phenomenon of 'rediscovering forgotten classics' for retroactive canonization".

The "actual" 2023 game itself meanwhile is a pretty personal story. Think the works of Porpentine, especially their angelical understanding. The protagonist is on medication, poor, and he's learned that his mother is gravely ill. He needs to go to the hospital, but it seems that the text parser isn't very cooperative. You could simply type > WIN, but the game gives you a speedrun of the game with no catharsis. Instead, you are asked to contemplate the scenery and interact (more like dawdle around) with the objects. In fact, the game rewards you by finding fail states, usually ridiculous death sequences. There's some Enchanter-like magic systems to solve some puzzles, but it's a surprisingly grounded work.

Each puzzle, like wearing your clothes, is just an everyday task but rendered far more complicated by the introduction of a magic system that deals with entropy. While your protagonist can be a superhero, they're usually just trying to get things done on their end. I was somewhat familiar with the period of interactive fiction the game purported to be from and I imagined how players saw this then. To these players, they probably saw it as a puzzle. To me, the magic system feels like an interesting allegory on disabilities, much like the oft-touted "spoon theory". Am I reading this too deeply, like one of the many critics that is sapping the enjoyment of playing this game? Who knows, it's not my game.

The way I interpreted this story has little to do with subjectivity, class, (good) criticism, game design, or even the history of interactive fiction. Instead, I'm more enamored by the need to express a story through interactive fiction.

Why did the in-game author create this game in a community that wouldn't understand the kind of storytelling he's trying to do back then? Honestly, even today, people still see parser games as that outdated mode of presentation with puzzles that boomers would only adore (oh, the Infocom trauma). We can only wonder what the in-game author was thinking when he made this game. In one footnote, he even joked about wanting a time machine to study Photopia. If we simply consider it in the realm of alternative history shenanigans, then this game would indeed be considered a classic. Or even better, if the in-game author saw what the Twine revolution was doing and picked that as a time traveling spot too. But, would it be the same story that shook the interactive fiction community? Would it just be something else entirely, the autobiographical work that we descendants of the "personal games" movement actually want but not the work that in-game Drew Cook made? Would it be Repeat the Ending?

I don't know. And I think that's the main point I got from the game. Whatever that in-game Drew Cook made was something special -- a parser game that seems to hate its own construction/self and revels in this paradox of identities -- and the academics and us the reviewers are trying to turn it into something more understandable at the risk of ruining its own uniqueness. It almost feels like canonization of something so personal and expressive to Cook can strip that away. That even the "personal games" movement can turn what is really a heartfelt game into a talking point about game design should raise some eyebrows.

I am reminded of nonlinear literature like House of Leaves that explore the (academic) obsession of a text to the point the text consumes those who read it.

But Repeat the Ending isn't interested in that angle: it is concerned about why people write these kinds of personal interactive fiction regardless of trends, canonization, or legacies. It takes the lessons of interactive fiction before and after to tell a story so therapeutic that it must be fulfilling for the author: "The never-ending discourse on fate vs free will in IF? Let's use that to tell the story I want to write."

The game is rich with rabbit holes that would excite the academics (indeed, that's the point of the paratext), but it eludes them that perhaps notions of "escaping the narrative" may simply come from Drew Cook's drive and not some grand theory on interactive fiction. Beneath all this claptrap lies a simple message from Cook: he wants to be heard.

Cook may devise stories based on witty narrative tricks, but in the end he's trying to write some story. He found an engine and played some games, so he's using it to explore his trauma and history. We don't know if we can understand what he is going through, but we get a sense that he found something cathartic and resonant doing this journey. All he is asking is to be heard, to be taken seriously not as some work on IFDB but as his own expression.

How do you hear a voice like Cook? Do you do close readings of his game like the critics before? Remake his game like the academics? Write a review that's meandering like this one?

It's difficult to know for sure, but I think this game gets to the heart of why people keep coming back to interactive fiction, including text parser games. There's something very powerful about playing a text parser game because you are interacting as someone else in a different world. For a few hours of your day, you are in this person's clothes and you are screwing around in this world. This simulation is what makes expression in interactive fiction so utterly fascinating and beautiful.

But for the designer, it is even more poignant: they are envisioning worlds they can interact with. There are limitations (and the game acknowledges that), but text parser games can be powerful essays that mean a lot to the creator (and nothing to the reader). While we readers may scratch our head and write analytical articles on it, the creative process of the game is the real reward for the creator of this game. It's why game making can be (and is) therapeutic.

In a way, the most important "reader" is the creator of the title themselves. That's the meaning of interactive fiction in my eyes: a mode of self-expression undaunted by what reviewers and critics think. Everyone else clarifies and obscures this self-expression from the author and we are surely important in this ecosystem, but the essayistic creator knows what the process has giveth and taketh away. Those who create and express themselves so purely must be commended, not simply "canonized".

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.