Reviews by Dawn S.

In New Year’s Eve, 2019, you play Karen Zhao, a college senior trying to endure a new year’s eve party–a harrowing confluence of family, friends, former friends, and potential romantic interests. The stakes are defined early in the game: “Everyone you grew up with between the ages of 10 and 18 are here. Your old friends and acquaintances, and their parents and siblings and everyone else. People you thought you had left behind, or had left you behind. Itʻs as if every loose plot thread of your life has come together in this moment.”

Indeed, one of the most stressful aspects of this game is navigating your continuously shifting identities–and the corresponding expectations–in relation to the people you talk to. You are by turns daughter, sister, niece, friend, ex-rival, possible love interest, symbol of achievement and future success. Even within those identities, there is plenty of anxiety-provoking ambiguity to confront: would you still consider Aubrey a “friend”? How about Miri? Are you just friends with Emily, or is there something more there? Is it all just in your head?!

Though the game tracks stats for hunger, thirst, anxiety, and the status of your relationships with the other characters, I didnʻt discover these stats until I read other reviews–I think because the writing provided enough clues about each of these variables, particularly anxiety. In fact, the only “stat” that I found myself altering my behavior in response to was time: I became hyper-aware of how slowly time was advancing in these excruciating social situations, and it sent me constantly fleeing from room to room in order to avoid awkward interactions.

NYE, 2019 is a great portrait of this age, for these particular characters, with powerful secondary themes underlying the main conceit of social interaction as an optimization problem: For instance, the way the status-focused conversation between the adults is mirrored in the conversation between the young adults, the way that friendships fade, and, the most poignant one for me: the growing distance between Karen and her mom.

(A final note to say that I have not had haw flakes since I was a kid, so I will definitely be looking for them next time I’m at Costco!)

Iʻm going to echo a strategy from Mike Russo’s review and say that my experience playing Kit Riemer’s Computerfriend was equal parts “You’re the birthday boy or girl” and “Tony Leung whispering into the tree at the end of In the Mood for Love.” That’s pretty ridiculous and also a gross oversimplification, but I’ll try to explain:

Computerfriend takes place in an alternate 1999, in Godfield, Louisiana, URAS (Union of Remaining American States). Godfield is a place where the air is unbreathable, the cars are disposable, the cows lay eggs, and everything tastes like death. You have just been released from a psychiatric hospital and are cleared to recover at home, provided you check in regularly with an ELIZA-like computer psychotherapist, Computerfriend.

Author Kit Riemer says Computerfriend was “fun and weirdly relaxing” to write; it was fun and weirdly relaxing to play, too! Despite its toxic setting (not to mention its premise: state-mandated therapy with a computer program), Computerfriend’s strange details and startling imagery filled the game with energy, humor, and life.

However, Computerfriend is much more than dog milk and slimeworms. At first, the eponymous psychotherapist seemed a bit like someone whoʻs busy texting and saying “uh huh, uh huh” as you try to tell them something important. But as the game progressed, it became more and more direct and disarming. I found myself interacting with Computerfriend in a very candid and honest way, and making a genuine effort to examine my feelings–even across multiple playthroughs (I got 4 of the 6 endings so far). And I was moved by its off-kilter yet matter-of-fact exploration of loss, absence, regret, loneliness, and alienation.

By the end of the game, I felt like a menacing animatronic beaver that had just caught fire, like a person who had just confessed an unbearable secret to a random tree–and like a random tree that is full of everybodyʻs damn secrets. Because of this, Computerfriend was my favorite game of the festival and it is one of my favorite games overall.

NYX, a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, takes on the largest of topics–humanity itself–in the smallest number of words: 496. It condenses a sense of vastness, of space and time, into just a few moments. The first person narration feels intimate; the framing (as a final transmission from a doomed space capsule) feels remote. The game vacillates between those conceptual antipodes in a way that feels shimmery and almost playful. This play even occurs on the level of the language itself, in the modulation between longer, layered sentences (“Why me, when the only prayer I know is the astronaut's — dear God, please don't let me fuck this up — why me when there's something spiritual about how oxygen reacts upon ignition, stomach lurching backwards, pressed against spine, dreadful exhilaration robbing air from lungs and rattling teeth as higher into the heavens you spiral — why me?”), and short, direct ones (“I am the only one left.”).

The only choice in the game comes at the very end, when you decide (Spoiler - click to show)whether you will let your spacecraft return to earth with an alien species on board or whether you will draw the danger away from earth by letting the spacecraft drift. If I had a small criticism it would be that (Spoiler - click to show)letting the spacecraft drift and letting the entity in didn’t feel all that differentiated as choices, because (Spoiler - click to show)it seemed as though the entity had already been inside the spacecraft, and if not, it was on the verge of breaking in anyway. But overall NYX understands that the particulars of the hostile entity are not as important as how the humans react to it. “Beautiful and terrible and surreal” is all we need to know. It could be a plague or it could be an epiphany. You could even substitute “the unknown,” “uncertainty,” or “lack of control” for whatever is outside the spacecraft. The game would be just as meaningful, because the alien species was never terribly important; NYX was always about the humans.

Dark Communion’s most critical choice comes not at the end of the game, but at the beginning. You the player must define how the PC (a teenage girl) is related to Laina (another teenage girl), who is leading you into an abandoned church. Is she a younger sister you’re protecting/competing with, some girl that you kind of know from school but don’t really like, or a crush you’re trying to impress? In addition to affecting flavor text along the way, this choice affects how motivated you’ll be (and what options you’ll have) to help Laina when things unsurprisingly take a turn for the supernatural.

This game encourages exploration on multiple levels. There is the literal exploration of the “big, old, gothic church,” with its “racks of half-melted candles,” its rows of empty pews, “most of which have been nudged out of their neat rows, as if shuffled by the fingers of a giant hand,” and its fractured light, illuminating the faces of judgemental saints. I loved these brief yet evocative descriptions. Exploration in this sense creates a sense of mounting unease. In a particularly chilling sequence, (Spoiler - click to show)you can choose to ignore Laina’s calls from the balcony, and continue exploring on your own instead. A few turns later, you notice that “Laina is quiet now.”

You can also explore the game by replaying it. There’s an achievements screen that incentivizes you to explore different choices at the beginning, and throughout the game. Indeed, there is a lot more branching and variation than you might expect in such a short game.

What was most rewarding for me was shining my flashlight into the quiet alcoves of the church, and through that, exploring the PC’s relationship with her spirituality and her relationship with her sister/acquaintance/crush. I actually found this to be even more compelling than the final confrontation. It reminded me of one of the author’s EctoComp games, Loneliest House. In that game, the act of leisurely looking at the details of the house–and speculating about past and future human presence–was so captivating. It’s a game where the real story takes shape in the negative space–similar to what Tricks of light in the forest does, but on a much smaller scale. It made me wonder what Dark Communion would be like if it had developed this aspect a bit further.

All in all, great writing, tight story (even some humor!), and very replayable. I highly recommend this game!

I opened up VESPERTINE having missed the whole Goncharov moment. Still, I found a lot to enjoy this game. It is brimming with sensual descriptions–the pressure of pen on paper, of fingers on skin. Desire is portrayed as being at once voracious, destructive, desiccating. What felt most erotic to me were the descriptions of characters watching each other, and the descriptions of hands–Andrey’s hands holding an espresso cup, fidgeting with the knife, caressing the pages of his book. (As an aside, I notice this about Adrien Brody’s hands, too. I feel like he manipulates small objects with a practiced artistry that makes me wonder if perhaps he had previously trained as a mime or close up magician?)

One of the most intriguing aspects of VESPERTINE was how different perspectives are woven through the narrative. The main text seems to be in third person–but limited to Andrey’s perspective; the highlighted text connects (via a short popup in Goncharov’s POV) to sections that seem to be third person omniscient; and the footnotes link to passages narrated in first person, as Goncharov. I was puzzled by this choice at first, because Goncharov the film does not seem to be explicitly about textuality, scholarship, citation, different ways of reading, etc.–at least in the same way that a game like Harmonia is about those things. Goncharov the meme/arg, however, is kind of built on that. So in that rather meta way, the format–and its foregrounding of the ways that we “read” texts–really makes sense. There are diegetic ways in which the format is effective, too. “Goncharov’s” footnotes, commenting on “Andrey’s” exposed text, feel invasive, appraising, erotic. I don’t know, maybe that’s reading into things a bit too much. But the text-footnote dynamic did make me wonder: even though Andrey must/will eventually kill Goncharov (I think?), who is really being hunted? Who really is in control? Both are questions that, likewise, sexually charge the dynamic between the two men.

VESPERTINE was the perfect length for a brief but evocative interlude in a larger story. Just when I started to get antsy and wonder whether the plot was going to advance, it was over. It left me feeling curious about the overall Goncharov story, but at the same time satisfied with this glimpse.

In addition to sharing what looks like a pretty yummy recipe, How To Make Eggplant Lasagne (With Cats!), very accurately captures cats’ behavior and attitude (that mixture of indifference, contempt, and adorableness). For example when you try to “dislodge” your larger, dumber cat Boris from your recipe, he stands up, pivots 180 degrees, and sits right back down back down. When you squirt water at your cat Natasha to get her off the stovetop while you preheat the oven, she freezes and glares at you. For me, the exclamation mark in the title does a lot of work to set the tone and parameters of the game. It suggests that you’ll be in for challenges and antics (in a sort of crying laughter emoji plus gritted teeth emoji way), but you won’t have to worry that choosing to ignore the cats would result in them setting the whole house on fire or seriously injuring themselves. The key to success, HTMEL(WC!) suggests, is being able to adjust your expectations (downward, obviously), and being adaptable. This funny and well written game contains a surprising amount of variation that rewards replaying, enabling you to experience many different combinations of chaos, ending up with anywhere between the best lasagne you’ve ever eaten, and no lasagne at all.

Vampire stories–and interpretations of vampire stories–have often been vehicles for addressing serious issues such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. If Teatime with a Vampire has an underlying theme it might be something like “pop culture under late capitalism”? And in this, it is witty, incisive, and totally entertaining. For example, “‘They’re just like us!’ touted magazines around the world for years, featuring the nightly walkers in every of their issues, tracing family lines and connecting individuals, reporting on the horrors and the wonders. And between the awe and hatred for those mystical beings, it turned out this catchline was not completely wrong…aside from the whole blood sucking thing and living only in the dark, that is.” Ultimately, the integration of vampires into human society has turned out to be mostly a source of entertainment, a business opportunity, and a welcome solution to a third-shift labor shortage.

My favorite part of the game is the vampire Mr. Orlok, who is the host of the titular TV talk show. Whereas the Orlok of the Murnau movie is stilted and awkward (like everyone in silent films, to be fair), Mr. Orlok is handsome (“honey blond short hair, parted and twisted into finger waves, unwavering thanks to a surely ungodly amount of hairspray”), magnetic and flirtatious, and has the audience–and the mopey PC Alex–eating out of his hand. There were some spelling errors and agreement errors which, if fixed, would give the game a more polished feel, but I didn’t really care because I felt swept up by the rhythm of the show, and dazzled by the lights. For a game that takes as its premise the guilty pleasure of a gossipy talk show (a format that the author really nails, btw, with segments like “Eat or Dish” where the guest has to answer a personal question or eat gross food), this game has a lot of depth and humor, and a pretty outstanding NPC in Mr. Orlok, who I will definitely be nominating for best NPC in the next round of IFDB awards.

The Fall of Asemia is a story about loss and violence and language and memory that, to me, evokes the war in Ukraine and works like Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, as well as the asemic writing of authors like Henri Michaux. In this game, you play a scholar who is translating an old text–an account of war and exile–from “Asemian” into English. You click through variations of each Asemian glyph, which causes the corresponding English translation to shift. Even though the story was bleak, I enjoyed inhabiting this world of churning meaning. The variations of each line were similar enough to suggest that they all might have come from the same source text, yet distinct enough to feel satisfying and novel, even over three “rounds” of translation.

The notion of gesturing toward meaning but never really nailing it down reminded me of John Cage talking about the relationships among syntax and sense and militarization, and how deliberately making language less understandable in effect “demilitarizes” it. I wondered how this might relate to translation–specifically, translation of a story about military invasion and occupation.

To get at this idea from a different direction: I felt a little let down by the final choice, both because I was hoping that it would feel more consequential, and also because I was disappointed to finally land on a definitive translation. Throughout the game, the failure of meaning to be pinned down felt like a kind of resistance, a kind of opening. This continuous movement, combined with the very strong writing, infused the game with energy and preserved a sense of possibility, albeit limited. Taking a narrative that was multivocal and constantly shifting, and freezing it into a single voice, a single sentiment, conveyed a finality that also felt a bit like defeat. It was a fitting and effective end to this haunting game that was as much about translation and the writing of history as it was about Asemia.

I enjoyed this, and was content to let the music wash over me, and the associations cohere and dissolve as I clicked through the story. It reminded me of my weirdo MFA program, which I really enjoyed. There is a flatness or generic-ness to the references--fields, tornadoes, school, parents, tv, birds, God, cigarettes--that became interesting when they were juxtaposed in such odd ways. I did find myself wanting a little more variety or tension. I don't know anything about GPT-2, but I wonder what would happen if different seeds or corpora (like with different styles of writing, or period-specific cultural references, or references to a specific place) were used within the same piece to modulate the tone a little bit more.

Surprising, odd, well written, and nicely designed, with an allusion to something like climate change and changing demographics (unless "kids" refers to goats and not children). For such a small, contained story, the number, type, and scale of the choices felt appropriate to me.