Reviews by Cerfeuil

I played this game more than a year ago and wrote this review for it over several months. I finally finished it up and published it today. It's long, rambling and somewhat unedited. Some of it is adapted from a comment I left on the Intfiction Verses thread. It contains spoilers, but I feel like this game is impossible to really discuss without spoiling it, and this game's existing reviews are pretty spoilery anyway.

Years ago, I saw a Reddit post from someone who'd read a classic work of literature, possibly Ulysses, and hated it because it was "too confusing" and "the purpose of art is to communicate clearly, and this story did not communicate clearly, so it is bad". A bunch of users reposted this and mocked it mercilessly for saying that "the purpose of art is to communicate clearly".

Some of those people were awful and I'm not glad to have known them, but that's getting off topic.

Anyway, as much as I hate to admit it, they did have a point. The purpose of art is to communicate, but not always clearly. Confusion is part of life. Sometimes a lack of clarity is what you're trying to communicate. A lot of famous literature is even confusing... on purpose? (Gasp.)

I thought about that while playing this game, because I found it to be immensely confusing and alienating. It's a story about confusion: the confusion of interpretation, trying to distill meaning from events that are presented in a purposefully abstract, shattered manner, often because they're the kind of events that would shatter the psyche - war trauma, mass executions. The uncrossable gap between words and what they represent: things so horrible they're impossible to fully convey. It's art that communicates the inability to communicate.

This is a story where I found myself copying almost every line, saving them to an exterior text file, and poring over them to try to figure out what was going on. None of the other stories I played in the comp did that to me. None were this quotable, and also this opaque, at the same time. The game really made me feel stupid, I'm pretty sure you need grad school level knowledge about the philosophy of language to really get it. I couldn't understand it fully and my experience was hazy and detached. All this nonsense I've written below is only my desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

1 - What I Think Happened

As the most spoilery section, I put this inside a spoiler block so people who haven't played the game yet can skip it.

2 - Initial Thoughts

The source of the artifacts gets compared to the divine, by the apostate, and the process of "analyzing" is compared to divine revelation. Trying to interpret the word of God.

I haven't heard of the Oracle Project, which another commentator brought up on the Intfiction thread, but I was reminded of some blog posts by Spencer Yan. He's a priest working on a video game about revelation and grappling with faith, My Work Is Not Yet Done, and has written a lot about his gamedev process. I quoted this devlog of his in my Intfiction post, and will bring it up again since I feel like it's relevant:

The spiritual core of this game for me lies in a certain state of frustration, and more acutely at times exhaustion, that emerges from the process of discernment. The most concrete way I’ve been able to articulate this is as that phantom flicker of a feeling you get after you’ve been thinking about some idea, or staring at a set of data for too long hoping to find some kind of recognisable pattern, and all of a sudden the shadow of something emerges out of the corner of your eye but just as quickly as it passes across your vision, it’s gone.

...For me, this is fairly directly tied to my own religious discernment (both theologically, in my personal spiritual and theological orientation, and vocationally, in the call to the priesthood); but the game is just as much interested in non-spiritual manifestations of this too: whether that’s the glacial inconclusiveness of scientific and technological pursuits, or the challenges of trying to piece together contradictory historical narratives describing the same event, or the maddeningly confounding ways in which people tell themselves stories about themselves in order to make sense of the parts of themselves they’re not yet ready to confront. At direct risk of repeating myself in a slightly different register, a big part of this game is especially concerned with the role of boredom in that process, both in the ways in which, given enough time and space for speculation, it can coagulate into uncertainty and paranoia, and in recognition of the probable necessity of boredom as a strange vehicle to greater eventual reconciliation and clarity somewhere later on down the line. I’ve always privately described the core of the game in summary as a game about what we are to do with, and in the midst of the silence of God; or in a more general sense, what happens to us and what do we do in the aftermath of an encounter with the divine which fundamentally alters us, but which may and probably will not ever come back to us again?

Another comparison is a self-published webnovel I read called The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, which also grapples with the terror and incomprehensibility of divine revelation. Though it has a vastly different direction and ending that I think most people would find unsatisfying, and goes directly against the theme of this story.

If this game was from an author I was less familiar with, I probably would've spent less time poring over everything and trying to put it together, but I did because I trusted this author in particular to know what they were doing. It's kind of a puzzle game, if you think about it. The puzzle isn't within the game itself as something you need to beat to get a victory screen, but it exists outside the game as the metatextual challenge of figuring out what's going on.

Other reviewers, many of whom are much smarter than me, have published their own takes. I'd encourage people to check them out in the Intfiction thread, which I am linking again here. Seriously, go read it. There's a lot of interesting analysis there.

3 - Comparisons

On my third replay, after wondering how exactly I was to make sense of this game, I thought of Vespers. Vespers is an IF game I played years ago and barely remember, so what I really thought about was my memory of playing Vespers, struggling to solve the puzzles, giving up and consulting a walkthrough, and realizing there were many avenues I'd completely ignored either because the game didn't make them clear to me, they hadn't crossed my mind at all, or both. I don't necessarily recommend Vespers, though I think it's moderately popular in the IF space. I'm just using my memory of it as a point of comparison here.

In my memory of Vespers, you're a monk at a cloistered monastery - initially peaceful, pious, pleasant. Then a plague comes through. People begin to die, in horrific and agonizing ways. Everything collapses, order is lost, the world falls apart. A demonic figure, symbolizing the horror of the plague, arrives and impels you to impious, unholy actions; murder and worse. You obey the demon even though you shouldn't. You lose all sense of time, place, and self.

I remember the game as a horror game with religious overtones, and thinking about Verses as a horror game made me see it differently. It's not labeled as a horror game, but easily could be. The majority of the latter half is about the horror of mass killings and systemized brutality, war and genocide, which is translated on a more visceral level into what happens to Eca herself, as she attunes herself to these alien beings and what happened to them, which is also what's happening to humanity in general on Earth.

The main similarity I noticed between Verses and Vespers is the slow descent into death and madness, brought on by malevolent figures who tempt you and laugh - the demon in Vespers, and your bosses in Verses, who don't care about you at all. (You could say the aliens, but I read them as victims.) There's a transformation that happens to both characters as the violence consumes them. Exposure to violence and despair eats away at them until they are losing vital pieces of themselves, and can no longer be called fully human.

Of course there are fundamental differences. I think Verses operates on more levels than Vespers, with more depths and more secrets to uncover. But both stories are about death and suffering, how the resultant trauma ruins people, and how a confrontation with such things can overwhelm and destroy you. In Vespers it's the plague, which symbolically becomes a demonic entity, and in Verses it's the multiple ongoing levels of violence inflicted on the entire world.

There is also a similarity in how I struggled to understand how to proceed in both games: a sense of feeling your way blindly around greater objects built for some unknown or unknowable purpose, where you understand there was surely a guiding vision somewhere, but can only comprehend it in fragments. In-universe, this would be God's vision, or the aliens, or whatever entities are singing out of the computer screen, and out-of-universe this would be the developer's vision, something I couldn't quite grasp. Everything slipped out through my fingers.

4 - Translation

I think a lot of what Verses does is questioning the fundamental power of language and what it can really do for people. What are the limits of communication? How much can you truly understand another person and what they've experienced? Every day, you can turn on the news and hear about the unspeakable suffering of millions, war and hunger and crimes against humanity on every side of the globe, families buried in mass graves, but can you really understand those people as people? Or are they just words and numbers in some random article written to generate ad revenue? I think that to someone like myself, who has never lived through anything like the numerous tragedies I read about online, there will always be a fundamental empathetic disconnect, even if I can talk to these people face-to-face. And in many situations I can't, because I don't speak their language and they don't speak English well enough to communicate what has happened to them and there is nobody to translate, or because the suffering leaves no room to even communicate what is going on. I wonder if this disconnect can ever be bridged.

This lack of understanding ties into the translation mechanic of Verses. One of the last and greatest barriers of human communication is language. People love to talk up the Internet as a great web that connects all of humanity, or a sea of knowledge with every person alive floating in its vast embrace. Nevermind that this isn't true (about one-third of the global population has no Internet access, according to Our World in Data), but the existing Internet is split into multiple languages that run parallel to each other, with members of each language group rarely interacting with members of other language groups. Translators are imperfect and people in one area of the internet rarely have reason to venture into another. Any content posted on the Internet is mostly restricted to people who speak the language it's in.

For example, while people on the English internet are familiar with Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram, the Chinese internet comes with an entirely different set of social media sites and apps: Bilibili, Sina Weibo, WeChat, and so on. The Japanese internet has Niconico as a Youtube alternative and a variety of sites like 2chan, 5chan, Bakusai, and so on. Similarly, the Russian internet has its own sites, including VK, the 30th most visited site in the world according to Wikipedia, which I doubt most people reading this have ever used. VK has a Russian version of Youtube here, which has been used more often since Youtube was banned in Russia in 2024 due in part to the invasion of Ukraine. Ukranians have their own groups on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc., and presumably their own constellations of small sites and forums which are highly difficult to access if you don't know Ukrainian. And all these will get used over what the English internet is familiar with, but most monolingual English speakers have never heard about these sites and wouldn't look for them.

You may still remember Rednote, or Xiaohongshu (XHS). Part of the furor around it was the sheer rarity of having people from the English internet cross over to the Chinese internet. It just isn't done. It's amazing to me that in 2025, it's so easy to see videos of other countries, and find them on a map, but it's still so difficult to understand videos from those countries if you don't speak the language. Most content by Japanese people will be in Japanese, just as most content from Chinese people will be in Chinese, most content by Romanian people will be in Romanian, and so on. Without knowing the language, and hell, without also having background knowledge of the greater history and cultural context, you'll always lack a certain understanding. There's a reason people pay for translators and interpreters. Bridging the linguistic gap is a life's work.

The Chinese internet split is the biggest one I can think of. Obviously there are geopolitical reasons for its existence as well as linguistic reasons, owing to Chinese government censorship. In an additional irony, the Xiaohongshu migration was kicked off by the US government temporarily banning TikTok. People who joined XHS at that time were essentially escaping one form of censorship for another form of censorship, since XHS is of course subject to the Chinese government's speech laws.

But even when there are no censorship laws, and countries don't have their own versions of English sites or apps, the linguistic split still exists. Take French. As far as I know, the French don't have widely popular French equivalents of Reddit or Youtube, but English speakers will basically never go to subreddits like r/france, which speaks French, or watch videos by French Youtubers. Many of those videos aren't subtitled anyway, so no luck if you don't understand spoken French. This pattern applies to every other language. So communication is continually impeded and people all over the world go along believing that the slice of the world they have access to, with only the language(s) they know best, is all they need. Even if they know other parts of the world exist, they can't understand them, it might as well be nonsense, so why bother trying?

This applies to more than just the Internet. Most people will consume media made by people from their own country, or at least people who speak their language, instead of looking at foreign media, even translated foreign media. As for tourism to regions that speak other languages, the price makes it impossible for most. People who emigrate to places that speak another language get the most "foreign" experience, but even then, the language barrier can be extremely difficult when it comes to connecting with other people. Fluency in a language you weren't raised speaking is incredibly hard to attain. I've seen a lot of emigrants and expats who are awkward with native speakers and mainly hang out with people from their home countries due to the language barrier.

Tying this back to Verses, it's a game with a lot of Romanian poetry that contains numerous references to Romanian history and culture, and I'm a dirty foreigner who barely knew the first thing about Romania before playing this game. Since I don't know Romanian and may never have the time and energy to learn, seeing this Romanian poetry was an experience of something totally beyond my knowledge. I did see the author's interactive postmortem game, which explains the historical context behind a lot of the poems and what kinds of people the poets were, but I feel that unless I was born in Romania, living through the eras those people lived through (WWII, Communism, massacres and imprisonment and starvation, on and on), a part of me will never truly understand.

Verses exemplifies the not knowing. The loneliness and isolation of being unable to communicate and being unable to understand or be understood by the people around you. How that loneliness becomes unbearable horror when you are exposed to tortures that you can't even speak about, that other people can't understand for multiple overlapping reasons and are therefore incapable of helping with.

5 - Two Final Notes

Note 1 - My experience trying to get around Niconico (Japanese Youtube) actually reminded me a lot of my experiences playing this game. I didn't autotranslate the whole page, because I wanted to practice my reading skills and not just rely on a machine to do everything for me. But without translation, all these words you can't read are reduced to base collections of shapes and colors that mean nothing to an untrained mind. I couldn't be sure of understanding anything and had to rely on contextual guesswork to navigate, along with Google Translating select phrases. Click click uncover. (Kaemi's review of this game is in parts as incomprehensible as the game itself was, to me. Fascinating.)

Note 2 - I found a review for Verses in Brazilian Portuguese, a language I don't know. I linked it to the IFDB page, but before I did that I put it into Google Translate to see what the reviewer was talking about. I was greeted with these beautiful sentences:

Yes, yes, the old story of how in English, "language" can mean both "language" and "language" and the confusion that arises from that. It seems to me that "verses" distrusts language and not language itself...

Thanks, Google Translate.

6 - Various Quotes

"You have to consider that the words they've chosen for you to hear are words you can understand. But they might not be entirely accurate."

"For example, you might tell a child that a knife is dangerous, omitting that without it we could not cut rope, chop food into manageable portions, and so on. Our lives would be worsened, perhaps threatened, without knives — but this greater context is hard to grasp to a child, whose life is ruled by object-meaning."

> Yes, okay. The dimensionality of literal or figurative meaning.

"No, I'm talking about something else. You approach the analysis as yourself, with your lifetime of experience, in whatever mood you happen to be in. You expect certain things. But understand that the information you receive is filtered contextually in the same way. It's uniquely intended for you."

"In any case, when we talk about the literal or metaphorical nature of the analysis, we refer to something more complex than the descriptive language in a poem. The creatures who created these artifacts, these records, often used language that sounds merely descriptive. But they had moved beyond a literal existence."

This present lacks the past's duration. In the present, moments collide and push past one another in a frenzy, each trying to make it into the past before the others. There is no space for understanding, for an idea to survive: everything is concrete, grotesque, without identity.

Mutant viruses, bacteria, rogue algael cells, adapting to new conditions: bone-colored clouds that drip into groundwater, pour themselves into throats, and evaporate again from the open skulls of the dead. Permanent war.

I ignored this on first sight because I saw the cover art and thought it was a cozy slice-of-life game or something. Should've known better.

On playing, I watched with bleak fascination as the strange and unsettling situation the story depicts gets worse, and worse, and worse, until it all ends with a final choice that ramps the strangeness up and explains nothing. It's great because nothing is explained. A breakdown of human comprehension.

This short game works extremely well with the constraints of its medium and the jam it was entered into. The Single Choice Jam requires there to be only one choice in the game, and it's a good choice. The Videotome engine allows for sound and art, and there's great use made of sound and art. The pixel aesthetic, associated as it is with retro nostalgia and lost childhood innocence, suits this story well.

Violent Delight hearkens back to the creepypastas I used to read as a kid about haunted videogames and cursed cartridges: games that demand ridiculous effort to play, games that are impossible to win, games that suck the life out of the player. In those creepypastas, you play a cursed videogame that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, the terrors inside invade your actual life, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, etc.

A lot of those haunted games had unusual qualities that made them extremely difficult to play. In Killswitch, the titular game deletes itself permanently upon completion, can't be copied, and released only in a limited run: after the 5000 existing copies of the game are played, no one can ever play it again. In SCP-4054 (The Seventh Door), the titular game also can't be copied and requires the cartridge to be manually reset with transistors every time the player dies, causing more and more glitches to appear with each death until the cartridge becomes unplayable. Escape from Terminus is a solo TTRPG rendered unwinnable by the supernatural Minotaur at its center, passed down from player to player as each previous player loses and consequently dies. Having to wait an hour for The Playground to arrive (and a few minutes every time it restarts is nothing) in comparison, but it's delightfully reminiscent of these other creepypasta games.

The game also has several resonances with other SCPs I like: the glitchy cartoon horror/gore, made more distressing by the low fidelity that obscures exactly what's happening on the screen, is really similar to SCPs like SCP-5045 (Goat VR) and the overwhelmingly long SCP-8060 (Toontown). Plus, this game and Toontown both have themes of escaping into childhood nostalgia and cartoon worlds, no matter how much they might hurt you.

I'm a sucker for horror stories about fictional games in general. I really liked InGirum, another horror IF with metafictional elements about a game-within-a-game. In fact, InGirum shares a lot of concepts with Violent Delight, though it's much shorter, so I'd recommend it to people who liked this game.

All this is a long way to say Violent Delight hits on some of my favorite aesthetics and concepts in horror. So of course I liked it. Something about the fictional games described in creepypastas just gets to me, honestly. Maybe it's a combination of that corrupted retro/cartoon aesthetic and the blurred quality of the storytelling, where in-game and out-of-game elements merge together until they eventually become indistinguishable, with no way to distinguish between the "normal" and supernatural parts of the game, and no way to see the designer's original vision before something malignant nested inside it like it was born there - and maybe it was.

But I do think the game absolutely should have been a Spring Thing entry instead of an IFComp entry, since the timing mechanic works against the 2-hour rule in every way. The game is categorized as 1 hour, which is completely untrue in my view: you have to wait an hour to even start playing the fictional game-within-a-game, The Playground, and then gameplay is limited to short bursts that exhaust the cartridge and make you wait for it to recharge before playing more.

I didn't manage to finish the full thing before I had to submit my IFComp rating. By some standards, I ran out of my "2 hours of gameplay" before even starting the game proper, since I made and ate my dinner while the package got delivered, but I figured long breaks from the game don't count and paused the timer for that. I was taking short breaks for The Playground, though, to do other stuff like laundry, and didn't turn the timer off during those.

The forced waiting is an unusually player-unfriendly choice. In context, it's fantastic: the entry barrier makes the game abrasive towards the player in a way that perfectly dovetails with the tone of the story. It lets people know what they're getting into. Having a limited amount of time to explore The Playground also forces people to make judicious use of their time; the environment acquires that blurred quality I love, since you're forced to look at everything in a wide sweep and not spend too much time on any particular detail. You collect impressions.

The author has made a few games for Ectocomp with stream-of-consciousness writing and long, winding text. I bounced off those games sometimes, because the writing could be overwhelming and I felt obligated to read it all even if it was scattershot. But scattershot writing is great for scattered NPC dialogues, and here, the timed format allowed me to skim through those long text blocks and take in their contents through a kind of visual osmosis, absorbing the feelings behind each location and dialogue box more than any specific words. I didn't feel too guilty for missing anything.

The pixel graphics strike a great balance between being detailed enough to be evocative and simple enough to leave much to the imagination. The lack of detail works to the game's advantage because it contributes to the retro aesthetic and ensures you aren't missing too much by traveling quickly from room to room.

I have no clear interpretation of the story, but I do have some thoughts.

I wasn't completely sure the ending screen is an ending screen. The white bar in the bottom right made me think I might need to wait another hour to see more. But I waited a while and saw nothing, and the other reviews indicate it's really the end of Violent Delight.

The ending leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but that's fine. I feel like this game operates on a heavily symbolic level. The depictions of The Playground's protagonist being miserable in school reminded me of my own school days. The "real life" protagonist's ennui, solitude and boredom reminded me of certain periods in my own life too. The lonely winter night came through clear to me - the descriptions of the snow are evocative.

Two more things:

1. At the start of the game, there's a parody version of IFComp featuring such excellent titles as "Chanandler Goofer's Superb Man" and "Cartographic Adventures of Stiffkey Miltonkeynes". But you can't play any of the games since the protagonist of Violent Delight is British and fun has been made illegal in the UK. I thought this was hilarious. It also explains why the protagonist bought a cartridge game online: physical games are more difficult to censor.

2. Did I mention this game is made in Decker? It's one of the longest and most in-depth Decker games I've played, probably the most in-depth Decker game I've played. I tried Decker but bounced off it since the UI was unfamiliar and "I might as well just use Twine and JS/HTML5"; I didn't even know it was possible to do some of the things this game achieves. It's impressive.

There are apparently two versions of this game, an interactive version and a completely linear version that shows up 1/15th of the time. Like the original DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, the version you get is randomly decided at the start and locked in forever (or until you clear your cookies). I got the interactive version first, so here are my thoughts:

For better or worse, I have played the previous two games this is based on, DICK MCBUTTS and ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG. I thought this might be more of the same: absurdism with a juvenile and somewhat vulgar sense of humor. But it's much less absurd and much more pointed, drawing directly from real life events and politics. Juvenile humor is still present, but heavily toned down. I'm pretty sure it's not by the same guy who wrote the other games. The structure is also more complex, and winning is very different from the previous games' "reset until you find the winning path" gauntlet. I liked it a lot more than the first two games.

The protagonist is a trans woman in the UK, a noted difference from the protagonists of the previous two games who are cis guys and hastily sketched out ones at that. Hen's story is more grounded in reality and her character feels more grounded as a result. It's a stronger story when the absurdities of her existence are exaggerations of what many real people go through. As the story begins, Hen is found holed up in her flat, fearful of venturing outside and anxiously attempting to predict the future, something I'm sure people can sympathize with.

The story references current censorship and the wave of anti-trans legislation and political messaging in the UK and elsewhere. Wikipedia is banned; the receptionist at a government building demands a genital inspection; the prime minister locks Hen up in an eternal torture basement for liking a social media post that criticizes him. But all this is laid out in quite funny fashion. The tone knows when to whiplash from torture hellscape to absurd comedy, with both ends driving each other to strange new heights. There are general jokes as well, so it's not all pure misery.

The game mechanics are opaque on first playthrough but make themselves clearer as you progress. You can draw three tarot cards at a time, and select one of the three. Selecting a tarot card leads to a zany escapade, where much like in the first two games, you repeatedly choose from a list of options and try to avoid getting "smacked in the twat". The game resembles a roguelike in certain ways: random progression mediated by player choice, with win/loss conditions that become clearer as you go, and multiple runs required for the best ending. Fail, retry, repeat. Initially, I thought you could draw only one tarot card at a time and it was random which card you had to do next; then I realized you can actually draw three cards at a time and choose between them, which makes it much easier to steer the story.

General mechanics, as far as I can decipher: (Spoiler - click to show)Each card event you survive without getting smacked adds the card to your list of already drawn cards, and it won't get drawn again. Choices you make during the card event can also permanently affect your character/the world as a whole, carrying on to additional card events. But if you get smacked, your state and all your cards reset, and you have to restart from scratch. There's also one card that instantly loses you the game, (Spoiler - click to show)The Devil, which leads to an endless torture loop. I found that one disturbing, moreso when I realized the only way to escape it is to refresh and start over completely, but realizing I could draw three cards instead of one made it easy to avoid.

Progression protip: (Spoiler - click to show)Choosing "wands" in The Magician gives you access to a metapermanent marker, which survives resets; this makes it so getting smacked no longer resets your card progress, which I found helpful for testing out routes in each card selection.

Ending and mechanistic spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)In the Strength card, you can get a magic sword useful for avoiding smacks in future card encounters; your choices during that event also affect which endings you get in the Tower card. If you count (Spoiler - click to show)The Devil's loop as an ending, then I got three endings in whole, across almost two hours, though I was doing something else at the same time so this time is longer than it would be. The thirty-minute categorization for this game on IFComp is misleading, since it took me much longer to puzzle out the mechanics and finish the game.

The downside of the structure is that you end up skimming text you've already read, and scenes that are funny at first become less so when you've already had to scroll past them five times. This is my biggest criticism. Figuring out how the game worked and getting a satisfying ending was fun in its own right, but towards the end it did feel like I was lawnmowering. The original games had this issue as well, but in lesser spades since you could undo. In this game, save/load has been disabled, so you need to restart pretty much every time.

Walkthrough for the good ending I got ("The Star"): (Spoiler - click to show)Select The Magician as soon as possible and get the metapermanent marker by choosing 'wands' so you can survive a smack in the twat. Get Strength, accept the sword, and fight back. Get The Empress and "get the hell out of there", "get into the bookstore", and "ask for more information" to acquire the Queen Elizabeth II transformation. Don't select The Tower before getting the sword and Queen Elizabeth II, and never select The Devil. Select the tower after getting the sword, choose to fight, use your Queen Elizabeth II transformation, get to the top of The Tower and create your ideal world. Might have missed some required steps here, since it's hard to tell what is required and what isn't.

As a side note, this game is similar to 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS in some interesting ways: both IFComp 2025 games feature trans protagonists in dystopian futures and absurdist black humor riffing on modern-day transphobic legislation and censorship. And antagonistic confrontations with the Prime Minister.

Quotes:

She has one of those special TVs from the movies with the button which automatically changes channel to the news after hopping past a few excerpts of royalty-free cartoons and soap operas, then instantly rewinds to the important part.

"Your Prime Minister, speaking," whines the voice on the other end.

Hen winds her finger around the telephone wire something furious. "What is this about, 'Prime Minister'?"

"Did you like a post last month on the social networking service Tumblr that said THE PRIME MINISTER IS A TWAT."

"What's it to you?"

"That wasn't very nice, Ms. ap Prat. It really hurt my feelings."

She quickly grabs a stick of gum so she can chew it impatiently. "And?"

"I'd like to offer you a deal, Ms. ap Prat. That post was really mean, but there's a way you can make it up to me. I'm offering you the opportunity to become the Party's inaugural Spokestransperson. You'll be invited to all the official events so that you can stand there and we can point at you and say look, we're helping the likes of you really, look we've got one there, would you like to give us a cheque? It's either that or I can put you in my special basement where all our most very special citizens go to be out of the way of the country."

"I come from a terrible, terrible future," old man Dick says, "I've travelled back in time to avert it before it's too late. This has all spilled so far out of hand! It was only supposed to be me. There weren't meant to be others... I could just about accept the existence of Fanny MacTits, but then Rod Mac-Bloody-Schlong had to come along and prove that this thing had legs, and not only legs, but sequels and spinoffs and merchandise galore sprouting from between those legs! First these stories took over the competition, then they took over the world. My MacBots are reclaimed story generators. If it wasn't for my ingenius intervention, they'd just be spitting out more of this MacSlop. In my time, if you walk into a bookshop, all you'll find is Coochie McClit this and Pecker O'Tool that. It's swallowed every genre. Sci-fi, romance, horror, literature... No-one will buy it unless it's got a main character with a stupid name and an even stupider fate. Even the classics shelf is just Moby Dick Gets Harpooned In The Prick. It's got to stop, Hen! I have to prove, for all time's sake, that Hen ap Prat Gets Smacked In The Twat just isn't that funny!!!!!!"

You're in the Platonic realm of ideas or something, which has been utterly wrecked due to the desert of the real or something, and consumerist mass media means the symbol is now entirely distinct from what it's supposed to represent, so meaning is dead. Or am I completely off? It wasn't easy to tell what was happening.

Gameplay consists of pairing up remnants of past symbols (e.g. traffic cone, woven basket). Each pair you assemble gives you a prose poem. It's nicely written, with great music and art, but also extremely abstract.

The creators list Jorges Luis Borges (magical realist author) and André Breton (co-founder of surrealism) as inspirations. I'm not opposed to surreal games, but this one was too abstract for me. I liked Lucid, another surreal IFComp game that some people thought went overboard, but for whatever reason this game didn't click. Maybe because as abstract as Lucid was, it was still grounded in reality, with various symbols alluding to the protagonist's human life and their past. This game felt distant and impersonal in comparison, and it was difficult to find anything not trapped in layers of imagery. It's a matter of taste, though.

I initially tried playing this on the phone, which was a bad idea because it uses some very nice hand-drawn art that relies on a widescreen UI and didn't show up well on my phone's small screen width. Playing on a PC worked better.

In lieu of further analysis which would probably miss the mark anyway, here are some excerpts:

Ideas try to form all around you, in the desert. Sand rattles and writhes, grain climbing atop grain, but even when you kneel and try to help them by raising them by the fistful, they are tired, spent, and fall back through your fingers into a shapeless expanse. Leave this residue.

One day, a long time ago, you came to this place and now an animal cannot be distinguished from a fire or a stone. Elsewhere, posters, milk carton ads and skyscraper-tall holograms alike are all engulfed in sand. The news report an epidemic of dreams of dry drowning.

You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame.

This game is unusual for being a community joke game, but not for the IF community. Rather this is a game by and for the rationalist community, the group of Californian weirdos known for its ties to such diverse personnages as Elon Musk, Ziz LaSota, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the group that got a big kickstart through Harry Potter fanfiction. The group that may or may not be an AI cult for geeky engineers and libertarian venture capitalists. Yep, that group. I don't consider myself a rationalist, but ever since I found Scott Alexander Siskind's blog in high school and liked his short stories, I've been keeping an eye out on what they're doing.

Scott Alexander, despite his bizarre and sometimes alarming political views, still writes interesting fiction on occasion. I found this game because someone linked it in the comments of Press Any Key for Bay Area House Party, the latest in his series of satirical short stories about house parties in the Bay Area of California, where a lot of rationalists are based. As someone on Tumblr said, paraphrased, Press Any Key for Bay Area House Party "has a large number of Hitler particles but is still pretty funny".

I found this game funny, but don't know how it'd read to anyone unfamiliar with rationalists. So many of the jokes are in-jokes: about wild animal suffering, secret AI language, prediction markets, and so on. The game is also loaded with references to rationalist community figures, which will be impossible to understand if you don't know who e.g. Aella is.

Even the basic context of the game can be difficult to understand: the rationalist community has had a grudge against the New York Times since they threatened to write an article about Scott Alexander using his full name, Scott Alexander Siskind, essentially doxxing him since he wasn't going by his full name at the time. Scott unsuccessfully tried to prevent this, and the resulting NYT article, covering Scott's ties to neoreactionaries, was widely considered by rationalists to be a hit piece. There's an article in The New Yorker about it, Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media, that I enjoyed reading, and of course it's mentioned on Slate Star Codex's Wikipedia article as well. Nowadays, the rationalist community's "war against the media" continues with many journalistic articles, like this one by Tara Burton, offering not-exactly-positive coverage on them, which devoted community members can get worked up about. Hence the concept of this game being about an NYT journalist who sneaks into Manifest 2025 (a rationalist meetup) and tries to go undetected.

Make no mistake though, this isn't a serious game. Like Scott's Bay Area House Party stories, it's full of absurdist comedy and pokes fun at everyone, including the rationalists themselves, which is why I liked it. See these quotes:

"Haha, that's a good one," Elena Manifold says. "If you were actually a NYT journalist, we'd have to put you into the pit, of course.

> "What's the pit?"

"The pit? Oh, that's where we put people who breach our code of conduct. It's essentially a giant vat of cryopreservation fluid, where we can freeze wrong-doers so they can be rehabilitated in a post-AGI utopia... hopefully."

"You know, I was just discussing mosquito welfare with someone. Apparently when a mosquito gets its leg trapped in a mosquito net, it's extremely painful for the mosquito. Like, they have a ton of nerve endings in their leg, and they basically die a slow, extremely painful death trapped in the net, writhing in agony. And this happens billions of times per second around the world. There are about ten thousand mosquitoes for every human on Earth, and the more mosquito nets we manufacture, the more this happens. Anyway, let's get your badge printed."

Scott begins his talk again.

"So, do you all remember the Great American Eclipse of 2017? Well, a group of programmers had been training an AI to predict eclipses, in case society ever collapsed and we lost that knowledge. They thought that in the resulting post-apocalyptic world, whoever had possession of such a technology would be viewed as gods by the remaining primitive humans. Well, it turned out that the neural network just needed one more solar eclipse to crack the code, and also that predicting solar eclipses is Turing complete. Essentially, if you can predict solar eclipses, you can predict anything. But after the eclipse, people kind of forgot about it, and stashed the laptop away in a closet somewhere. For the recent eclipse in 2024, they brought it back out. It took a few months, but eventually a couple of ACX readers figured out what they had their hands on, and brought it to me for guidance. Well, we've had AGI since 2017, but we just didn't know it. It was operating on low power mode in a closet for 7 years, so it wasn't able to do much except get really good at Minesweeper..."

I imagine people unfamiliar with rationalists could understand the game fully if they looked everything up online, though that might take a while.

[Mild ending spoilers below.]

It feels like this story wasn't planned out in intricate detail, and the author wrote it off the cuff. As a result, there are many wonderful and blackly comedic bits of worldbuilding that feel like they were tossed in almost arbitrarily: the fact that people only become legal adults at 43 and aren't allowed to see other human beings before then for fear that they'll have s*x; the fact that every body part, from thro*t to bre*st to sal*va, is censored; the fact that using a bathroom requires your genit*lia to be scanned by a government employee beforehand, to verify you have the "correct" ones. But the details didn't quite cohere for me, and the overall effect is rather slapdash. The story doesn't take itself that seriously, which made it difficult for me to take it that seriously.

With the major exception of the last section, which doubles as an author's note. In this way, 3XXX reminds me of a short story by David Foster Wallce called Octet, in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (found here, page 52). Both stories begin normally, but suddenly end with an author's note speaking directly to the reader about the story, reflecting on the experience of writing it. These author's notes have a deflationary quality, revealing the artifice of the story as what it is, just something made up in someone's head. Here, the main plot of 3XXX is explicitly addressed as just a fantasy where the tides of censorship and repressive moral puritanism are easily turned back. Can they be stopped so easily in real life? Will they be stopped at all? Is intimacy possible in this world?

Art is communication is intimacy: you bare your heart when you write, trying to make the audience understand you. The struggle to write a story is the struggle to connect intimately to someone, anyone, out there. Censorship of art is censorship of intimacy, ruling out a vast range of possible human connection, and on the personal level, a failure to write the perfect story is a failure of intimacy. A failure to make yourself understood.

David Foster Wallace's note at the end of Octet, and a lot of his writing in general, is characterized by an extreme anxiety over whether this intimacy is being practiced correctly, whether he's been successful in connecting to the audience, whether he's liked. From Octet:

‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’—this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to ‘Do you like me? Please like me,’ which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.

Meanwhile in 3XXX, a character writes: "I don't want to hurt anyone, so I avoid getting close to people. What if I desire them in the wrong way? What are the right thoughts to have? How do I expel the bad thoughts? Is there a way to distinguish between good and evil thoughts? If I don't know, should I be allowed out of school?"

And in the 3XXX author's note, the author, reflecting on how it feels like they're saying the wrong things, says: "I guess it's just making me realize that I don't know how to be intimate with other people."

In all cases there is a deep fear of what happens if your attempt at intimacy fails, if your communication comes off wrong, if society rejects you for trying to reach out. The brand of moral puritanism being addressed here, which runs through society as an undercurrent, is deeply afraid of naked desire and harshly punishes "incorrect" forms of intimacy. It can lead to an omnipresent anxiety and shame over human connection, whether you're worthy of it, whether you're doing it wrong. The desire for intimacy is eternal, but a world that represses it is a world where everyone is anxious and alone.

Quotes:

And to be T*rned On (TO) is a sign of moral weakness. You have succumbed to the temptation of the outlets laid out by the terrorists and become a walking human bomb. Your g*nitalia, meant only for the toilet, have become a parasite that will devour you and your loved ones alive.

The Gentle Healthy Fashion Mall, a concrete building painted green, is located just three blocks away from your apartment. Many young people love shopping there because the clothes are inexpensive and have enough pro-abstinence messaging to fulfill the patriotic fashion quota.

After handing in the report yesterday, nothing came up that needed your attention -- petty crimes like looking anywhere but someone's face without a certified license, not covering up your skin properly, and forgetting to check in with your appointed neurohygiene therapist are on the rise. Thankfully, though, the police force wants to save your energy for the bomb cases.

Between this, The Burger Meme Personality Test, and Fascism - Off Topic, we're getting a lot of games about how much the US sucks these days. I'm not opposed.

Especially in the introduction, this game has many grammatical issues, usually comma splices or missing commas. But I still liked it. In fact, I liked it more than some of the better-written short IFComp submissions, because it has something meaningful to say about the world. This is just personal preference, and I'm sure there are people with the opposite opinion who would disagree with me, but I'm fond of social-issue muckraking stories. The SNAP situation as portrayed fails in crucial ways, and the recent funding cut as part of Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" will make an already imperfect system even worse. As Victor said in his excellent review, "we can never complain when we are called to pay attention to those whose life is made difficult".

Quotes:

"Let me get this straight - you're here to understand humanity, you don't talk to us, you don't ask us, you just sneak around and observe people being miserable at HRA and then say 'A-ha! Of course! Humans are naturally cruel!' What the hell kinda fucked up science is that?"

And from the author's note:

As long as politicians demand researched evidence that humans need food, we are fucked.

Bleak and relatable. The effectiveness of this one will hinge entirely on how much experience the player has with the "bullshit personality quizzes" this game is based on, and their overall opinion of the jobhunting process as a whole. As someone who's had to do a non-zero number of those things, which is too many in my opinion, they really are as unnecessary as the game portrays.

Jobhunting, especially for low-level jobs, can easily become a degrading process. It's degrading to be forced to jump through hoops and affirm how much you would love a company if it hired you, when you know the company sees you as a replaceable cog in the machine and wouldn't care if you died tomorrow. It's degrading to have to watch videos about how excellent the company and its CEO are and what a net benefit they are for humanity when you can look up the awful things they've done in a few seconds online. It's degrading to spend hours filling out form after form, potentially thousands of forms over hundreds of hours, and get either ghosted or rejected, thousands of times.

The process works like this because the ideal job candidate for a business is someone who's desperate and can't turn to alternatives. Someone who's willing to jump through any hoop for their boss, no matter how humiliating it may be. Someone who has no choice but to take anything thrown at them, so they can have enough money to live. Jobhunting makes soulless syncophants of us all. And when almost everyone in a country is forced to undergo this process, and only the most syncophantic/sociopathic people vault to the top of the hierarchy and become wealthy and powerful, what does that country become?

The bonus (Spoiler - click to show)dating sim ending was a neat touch too, I guess. Though I felt it didn't fit with the overall atmosphere of the rest of the game - too cheerful, for one, and for a game where a major theme is the replacement of human workers with AI and the economic effects it will have on millions of people's lives, (Spoiler - click to show)revealing that the AI was actually a human all along didn't sit right with me.

I played this game while waiting in line at the US Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which might be ironic if considered from a certain angle. (Bureaucracies, innit?) The downside was that a lot of the large images took a very long time to load. Still, I replayed three times and got three different endings: (Spoiler - click to show)Dodged That Bullet Burger, Corporate Sellout Burger, and the successful dating sim ending, forgot what that last one was called. I imagine the other endings are what you get if you decide to stay friends with the employee, or reject the employee entirely.

Quotes:

> But what if I'm scared of clowns?

Sorry, but how exactly do you expect to work here? Our mascot, as you MUST know, is the beloved clown “Skibidi FAFO™.”

We’re not going to show you an image of him in case you really are scared of clowns. We’re not monsters. But we know you’ve seen Skibidi FAFO™. EVERYBODY has. He is the CLOWNIEST of clowns.

If you joined the Burger Meme™ family, you would see the Skibidi FAFO™ 490 times a day. His image is plastered literally on every previously unadorned surface at Burger Meme™ HQ. It would be like trying to work at Disney and being afraid of lawsuits.

Oh dear. You were a Liberal Arts major in college, weren’t you?

Liberal Arts majors don’t historically become productive members of the Burger Meme™ family. They become “whistleblowers” who “believe in the dignity of workers” and “try to start unions” so that employees can “take profits from parasitic shareholders and redistribute them to employees.”

Interesting fact!

Based on your answers so far, you have scored in the top 44% of people who will never have enough savings to retire!

Food and water, infrastructure, justice: all those things will come, but only through guns, only after guns make them possible. The threat of death is the foundation of every civilization. If we want to rebuild society, then we will have to shoot those members of society who get too far out of line. Well, if no one gets too far out of line, we’ll still have to shoot a few people. People have to know we are SERIOUS.

A short and completely linear Twine game with one ending and no choices. I liked it, though it was too short to really be affecting. The styling is somewhat simple, but it makes use of CSS effects for emphasis and cleverly-timed transitions to aid with pacing. The plot reminded me of the short stories I'd see on r/writingprompts, which often had the same thing going on: the entire story is (Spoiler - click to show)built up around one shocking plot twist that's foreshadowed in increasingly obvious ways before being revealed at the end, changing your opinion of everything that happened beforehand. Twist endings are common in short stories. The "this actually takes place after the apocalypse" twist is one I've seen a lot, e.g. in Michael Swanwick's "Walking Out", which is also a story that starts with what appears to be normal modern life and slowly reveals that it's not the case.

I thought this would be a story about what it's like to go grocery shopping when you're short on money, something all too many people have to live through. (Spoiler - click to show)Wrong: surprise apocalypse. But the writing is competent, and the slow buildup is fun. I feel like more could've been done with the ending to tie it into what I thought the game would be about, which was the crushing weight of poverty. Though I guess (Spoiler - click to show)crushing poverty can at times feel like the world has ended and nobody is left to see you struggle, and everything good you could've had is irrevocably lost - but I still think more of a connection could've been made, or something was missing.