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.

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.