Reviews by Cerfeuil

[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, 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 that's thrown at them so they can make money, so they can 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 can 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.

You might expect a game about fascism to be angry and confrontational about why fascism is bad. This one is more indirect than that. I'm not even sure I ultimately got the point.

The title is certainly a reference to the Fascism - Off Topic thread that was created on intfiction.org in relation to the itch.io and Steam adult content bans, and the growing trend of internet censorship in the West. I caught that reference (and funnily enough, there's a movie poster featuring fictionalized versions of intfiction users that you can examine), but still felt too stupid to understand the game completely.

The game takes place in what seems to be a fascist US, in a subway in NYC. There are hints at a fascist takeover: the rundown subway, the ominous detail that there are "only a few people left riding".

The protagonist, from the x self response, seems to be onboard with the fascists: "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic." (Unless that was supposed to be irony, and I missed it, but the use of "clowns" feels too derogatory to be ironic. Or maybe that description is supposed to be from the narrator's perspective, and the protagonist is separate from the narrator, but the narrator seems to be an impartial spectator on every other occasion, so I doubt it.)

But the protagonist also has the option of interjecting in an argument between a couple on the subway to talk about how fascism works, indirectly accusing either the man or woman of fascism. The woman has cheated on the man; the man is confronting her not about that but about an Instagram post she made. Both are paranoid and controlling of the other. We don't know the content of the post, or the couple's political views.

If you interject (Spoiler - click to show)in a way that accuses the man, as I initially did, he fumes and asks "Is that what I am now? A fucking fascist?" If you interject and accuse the woman, which is what got me the true ending, the man just pointedly looks away and the story ends. If you interject at other times, your interjection about fascism is off-topic and the two react with confusion or disdain. For me, the whole situation was ambiguous and hard to read. Possibly the entire game is a shaggy dog joke based on the title: (Spoiler - click to show)when I got the true ending, it told me "You made fascism on-topic. You lost!"

I had a hard time figuring out when to interject for the true ending, and needed a fair number of tries to get the right timing: you need to do it (Spoiler - click to show)right after the woman says "Where are you going, then?"

My major point of confusion: I'm not sure if the fascist protagonist is the right kind of person to talk about the evils of fascism to random people on the subway. I can't imagine the kind of person who would describe himself as "Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car... white, male, patriotic", and then read a news article about fascism and tell two strangers on the subway that "the enemy ain't anyone. The enemy is uncertainty. Uncertainty and fear, that's fascism." (I'd sooner expect this kind of person to explain how leftists/islamists/illegal immigrants/etc are the enemy.) Maybe I'm missing the life experience required to comprehend this type of person. Is it supposed to be irony that the protagonist has read a news article about fascism and can spout eloquent talking points about it but can't comprehend that he currently lives under it? Is the point of the game that his words are empty and meaningless because he (presumably) supports the fascist government?

Another message of the game could be how life continues on as normal, no matter how awful the government becomes. The other people on the subway are browsing their phones or trying to get to Central Park, ignoring the argument, completely caught up in their own worlds. It speaks to the ability of humans to remain oblivious to what's going on around them, as long as their own lives can continue on unimpeded. No one can be bothered to get involved in strangers' problems. I did this the first time, too, hesitating to intervene until the man had left the subway car and the game informed me it was too late. --- But then, considering the lackluster response if you do intervene, and the protagonist's character in the first place, is intervention really a good thing? In this case, all you're really doing is getting involved in an argument between strangers. Are you actually helping people?

There's an element of helplessness in this game world, a world where awful things are happening far away and you can't see or prevent them. You can only deliver your off-topic monologue to strangers who are just as helpless as you. "maybe a bit something like... our own world currently, to be extremely heavy-handed about it."

No "fascism is bad" or "we must stop fascism"; just "fascism is off-topic".