Reviews by Dawn S.

machina caerulea is an entry in a number of jams, among them the Neo-Twiny Jam (sub-500 words) and the Bluebeard Jam. And those are the particular “constraints” that make this game really stand out.

First, the word count: The story is told from the POV of a cyborg–Bluebeard’s latest wife–waking up for the first time. Much of the narration omits articles and other parts of speech in favor of terse constructions consisting mostly of nouns, verbs, and the occasional preposition. This is so effective at creating tension and conveying a sense of urgency. The rhythm of the sentences feels like breath or like heartbeats. I appreciated, too, that clicking links functioned in different ways in this game: sometimes links worked like the parser commands “take” and “examine”; other links underscored the PC’s distressed state by making normally unconscious actions (“inhale” “exhale”) into “choices” the player must deliberately make. And of course there are also the standard “choice” links, like “stab him,” “stab body,” or “drop iron.” I loved this variety; it was even more impressive because the author was able to make all these different modes work with so few words.

Second, the Bluebeard story: machina caerulea presents a terrifying and exciting twist on the tale. In the more canonical versions, the slain wives are all different women. In Machina Caerulea, it seems as though (Spoiler - click to show)the dead wives are all versions of the protagonist, who is herself a cyborg possibly created from the consciousness/body of Bluebeard’s human wife, who may have died from a terminal illness or accident? Maybe I am reading too far into things or perhaps misreading some of the text. But if the dead wives are indeed all the same woman, then wow! It opens up all kinds of potential interpretations. For instance, does being married to a tyrant necessitate disassociating and essentially fragmenting yourself into seven different individuals in order to cope? Is marriage to a tyrant akin to being killed by him over and over again? Or is this a story about Bluebeard making something rather than destroying it (or doing both), which would make it more like a Pygmalion story? Future Pygmalion jam, anyone? There are certainly other notable IF games that already fit that brief!

Anyway, I thought this game was really a standout for styling, language, and its take on the Bluebeard story. I’m so glad I got the opportunity to take a closer look, and I’m really happy it got more eyes on it during the thon.

In The Deluge, floodwater doesn’t pollute, drown, conceal, or cleanse–at least not totally. It mostly just makes everything–the town, the landscape, the protagonist’s sense of themselves, their memories and relationships–kind of vague and eerie and unstable, which is a vibe that I am super into.

Many of the locations have a kind of generic placelessness to them: the mall with its thrift shop and basement club, the school (designed by a “moderately famous architect”), the town square, the forest. There are vague references to the history of the town and the Indigenous people who lived there first, but nothing specific enough to actually place it anywhere on a map (besides being somewhere in an ever-widening flood zone, I guess). Similarly, the main character is going through what seems to be kind of generalized early-20s soul-searching: “In the half-light from the rooms outside, your face’s reflection looks unfamiliar. You can’t look at it for a moment before turning away, colder than you were before.” The other characters feel just as hazy: the “frenemy” who is committed to staying in town, the friend (perhaps more than a friend?) who got out. Everything in this game seems to float just beyond the edge of feeling “real,” which I suspect is very intentional, especially in light of the H.D. poem that closes the game.

On the Review-a-thon poll, the author mentioned that this is their first game, and I did get the sense that, in addition to telling a story, the author might have been testing out a location system, a clueing system, and using conditionals to gate off progress. The clues did help me proceed through the game pretty smoothly, but in future efforts, I think stronger narrative motivation for actions (beyond, e.g., you have a feeling you need to come back here) would be more effective.

In general, though, I thought this was a solid first effort, and a great depiction of a town and a character suspended between here and there.

I moved to a new town in my late 20s. Every week, I drew a map–from memory–of my neighborhood and the spots I regularly visited: the park, the bougie deli, the library, the old timey movie theater. The map started out as basically my house, two streets, and one or two landmarks that I placed in the wrong locations. As the weeks progressed, my maps became more detailed, with side streets materializing, as well as locations of friends’ houses. It was a gentle exercise, and for me, it was a helpful way to make tangible the process of slowly settling into a new life. This is the feeling I got when I played Lauren O'Donoghue’s Ataraxia. In this game, you play someone who’s recently moved to a small island. Over the course of the game, you build relationships, grow vegetables, adopt a pet, and slowly earn the trust of the island’s inhabitants.

I thought this game was terrific. Several factors contributed to its success in my estimation. First, the mechanics and pacing: Soon after you move in, you begin receiving mail. Your first letters are from the Council of Islanders, inviting you to periodic festivals and special events. These punctuate the story and prevent the resource-gathering aspects of the game from feeling too grindy, and the day/night cycle from getting too monotonous. As you settle into your new life, letters from other neighbors begin arriving, which introduce additional opportunities to change up your routine. A seemingly “small” feature like being able to pick a book off your shelf and read it pulls way more than its weight in terms of freedom it gives the player.

Second, the character interactions: In my playthrough, I began a very tender romance with Sanvi the publican. In my interactions with her–and the other characters too, in fact–I felt less like I was manipulating a battery of stats, and more like I was just talking with somebody. Maybe this is because the stakes were lower than something like, say, Mask of the Rose, where your dialogue choices determine whether or not another character is executed? I don’t know. But as a player, I felt relaxed enough to let conversations and relationships unfold naturally.

Finally, the language: The language in Ataraxia was evocative without being self-conscious. This is my favorite kind of writing. Of course, the vocabulary and syntax were modulated when necessary (different in-game books are written in different styles, for example, and characters have different linguistic quirks). But overall, I could remain happily immersed in the game world rather than being jostled out of it by the showiness of particular words or constructions. There was so much care taken even with the “flavor” text that appears when you choose to explore a particular region (rather than collecting resources or talking to someone). From the insects beneath the forest rocks, to fishing boats returning with their nets full, to the habits of the village cats, there’s a world brimming with life there, whether you choose to look deeper or not

If I had a suggestion, it’s that I would have liked to have reached the game’s ending without being required to play through all four of the main character arcs. I was more invested in some stories than in others, and personally, I love the feeling of exiting a game world knowing that there’s still more left to explore.

This brings me to a theme that I really appreciated: (Spoiler - click to show)the impossibility of definitively “knowing” a place or people. Throughout the game, there are references to conflicting histories, gaps in knowledge, and the importance of holding multiple truths at once. For instance: “I was looking for answers. Clear, straightforward answers. But there’s no such thing, is there?” (Jonah). “My attempt to catalogue some of the most fascinating examples here will never be sufficient, but may at least give an impression of the curious nature of this ecosystem” (Ivo, A Natural History of the Western Archipelago: Volume 2). “Though record-keeping in that era was poor, it is now believed that…” “Accounts of what followed are conflicting. What we do know is that …” (Our Island Through the Ages). Insisting on the indeterminacy of the island’s ecology, mythology, and history introduces breath and movement to the game. It very effectively animates the world.

Earlier in this review, I mentioned that the game didn’t feel too grindy. That’s not to say that it didn’t feel grindy at all. And to me, the grind was actually the most effective part of the game. (Spoiler - click to show)I can’t remember how many days my playthrough took, but I think it was around 50-something? That means, 50 times over I repeated the sequence of harvesting my fruits and vegetables, visiting different parts of the island, talking to people, and sleeping. There is a cumulative effect to this mechanical repetition that is delivered through the descriptions: The house gradually feels more and more like home, you become accustomed to the forest paths and smells, you have fewer nightmares. The mechanics of the game suggest that a big piece of adjusting to something, whether it be loss, grief, a new environment, a new relationship, is just straight up time and repetition. It’s developing enough muscle memory so that, groping in the dark, your hand immediately connects with the lightswitch.

I’m so impressed (and kind of dumbfounded, tbh) that Ataraxia is this author’s first game! It felt so sure, so polished. I would put it up there with games like Master of the Land as an exemplar of how much depth, breadth, and freedom of movement an author can create in a Twine game. I very much look forward to this author’s future games.

A House of Endless Windows by SkyShard is a moody, claustrophobic game about a child trying to understand a family secret. Its soundtrack is evocative without being intrusive, and it is beautifully designed, with clean lines over abstract backgrounds that feel pensive and restless. Sometimes the backgrounds resemble the marbled endpapers of a book; sometimes they evoke 19th-century photographic processes (another kind of glass window), with images in various states of emergence and obfuscation, like spirit photography. This game’s vibes are definitely strong.

The story is told in first person, from the perspective of 12-year-old Pierce Windrow. In addition to managing their studies and social life, Pierce is coping with their mother’s depression, their father’s absence, and, most centrally, the death or disappearance of their sister Jane. There is a stiffness to the language that very effectively mirrors the tension the characters feel around each other, and the walls they have built to protect themselves. For instance, Pierce praises their mother this way: “I appreciate her thoroughness,” and they describe returning home from school this way: “I set my backpack against the leftmost wall of my room…” In fact, the narration is so analytical and unemotional that I initially thought that either Pierce was a robot, or that (Spoiler - click to show)their dead sister had been returned to the family as a robot. The game builds on that strangeness in the way that it employs architecture as a metaphor for deception, isolation, and convoluted thinking: “Every hall has no end. Every window is just your reflection for someone else to see,” Pierce says. This is a house that’s dark even during the day, where all the windows are shut tight, and each room has secrets.

When Jane (Spoiler - click to show)returns home six years after her disappearance, the parents try to convince Pierce that she is a live-in housekeeper named Ms. Stirling. She mostly stays indoors, bringing soup and tea to the mom’s bedroom. She avoids church, and when she does go outside, she wears a veil over her face, “for the mosquitoes.” I found this detail so strange, dreamy, and chilling. What’s most chilling, of course, is the parents’ lie. I mean, convincing their child that their dead sister is now the family housekeeper? This is some truly next-level gaslighting! And this is the part that sort of rang a little hollow for me. A teenager having a tough time at home and going to live with a relative for a while does not seem like a super uncommon scenario. Faking the sister’s death and maintaining that lie for six years feels totally out of proportion as a response.

Then again, our understanding is limited by Pierce’s perception, and Pierce is an unreliable narrator. For instance, they try to comprehend the distance between Earth and Saturn this way: “I know very little about engineering, but the space between here and Saturn is almost impossibly large. I could not walk or run or drive that distance in a lifetime.” On the one hand, it makes sense to conceptualize this distance in terms they understand, and it’s technically true that they could never walk or run or drive that distance in a lifetime. But the units feel so fundamentally ill-suited to the distance being described. For me, this encapsulates the way Pierce, with their child’s logic and frame of reference, tries to make sense of the family’s huge, adult-sized secrets.

Several reviewers have commented on the lack of choices in this game, but to be honest, I didn’t even notice. The game so effectively created an atmosphere of confusion and confinement that I guess I wasn’t expecting to have any choices!

Blood and Sunlight is one of three games in a series. The author notes that it also stands on its own, and this is how I experienced it. In this game you play Zach, a 23-year-old vampire who must decide whether or not to spend New Year’s Eve at the house of his partner Lyle.

Some of the most charged vampire tropes (blood drinking, forbidden desires, sleeping in coffins, etc.) are rendered rather benign and quotidian in this game. Spending the night with your ~lover~ (using that term to be dramatic) is, in Blood and Sunlight, more about discreetly trying to figure out whether or not to borrow their toothbrush (for your fangs?) while they’re passed out. Being turned to ash in the morning sun is, in this game, more like trying to make your way home on new year’s day with a very bad hangover. Because, as we learn, sunlight won’t kill you, but it will make you pretty sick. Waking up in Lyle’s bedroom, therefore, means waking up without the blackout curtains and other lightproofing measures you’ve implemented at your own place. It means navigating Lyle, Lyle’s sister, and Lyle’s Mario Kart-loving cousins while trying to call an uber and trying not to barf or otherwise embarrass yourself and/or Lyle.

Defusing vampire tropes really opens up the story, and gives the player a lot more room to explore what the game really seems to be about: your attitude toward aspects of your identity and your body that you can’t change, but that impact those you love. You can be stoic and isolate yourself; you can endure discomfort for the sake of your partner–but in a passive aggressive way; you can endure–but in a sincere way; you can accept help or not; you can feel sorry for yourself or not. And you can do all of these things in a way that’s jumbled together and even contradictory, which I thought was just terrific. Throughout the game, I felt like I was really just doing my best to navigate a stressful and fluid situation, sometimes being whiny, then immediately after that being stoic, and then totally contradicting myself. I never felt like the choices were trying to maneuver me onto one of four or so distinct “tracks”--or that there were “good” endings or “bad” endings.

A small thing: As someone who hasn’t (yet) played the other Blood and games, I felt like I wanted a little better understanding of the context and significance of what Lyle is asking of Zach. Would this be the very first time that Lyle and Zach spend the night together (in which case it’s presumably a big step for them)? Or is it just the first time they’d spend the night at Lyle’s house instead of Zach’s (a big step, but in a different way). I assumed the latter was the case. If it had been their first ever night together, my choices might have been a little different, skewing more toward agreeability at the expense of my own comfort.

Finally, I just wanted to add that the family scenes were described with such warmth, which really underscored Zach’s loneliness and his longing for connection. I’m looking forward to playing the other Blood and games and perhaps even future installments? Lyle was so sweet and Zach was such a relatable overthinker. I’m really rooting for the two of them.

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.