Reviews by EJ

*OVER* is a long, sprawling game about a large family at what is obviously Disney World, although it is carefully not named, in the ‘90s. There are three main narrative threads, following a player-nameable college student with much younger siblings, awkward closeted lesbian aunt Lou, and cool grandma Phil. These plotlines all entwine around the walkie-talkies that the family uses to keep up with each other, sometimes also overhearing other families who have had the same bright idea.

I’m also from a large family and have been on Disney trips reminiscent of this, although by the time I was 20 we, unlike the family in *OVER*, had cell phones, Fastpass, and normalized sunscreen use. But that only does so much to alleviate the chaos of a sufficiently large family vacation, represented here in a cavalcade of sensory detail and busy descriptions of what everyone in the family is doing even if it doesn’t matter much. These are cut with the occasional biting observation: “Equality and fairness for a family vacation is oftentimes choosing the option that makes everyone equally upset.”

When I reached the end of the game’s first day, I was exhausted on the protagonists’ behalf—“Damn,” I thought, “all of that was only one day? And we have how many days left again?” (Which is exactly how I feel whenever I go on vacation with my family, even now that there are fewer small children involved.) Yet the prose has a compelling, even hypnotic quality that made me want to keep going.

If the game has one major flaw, it’s that although there are three protagonists and the college student seems intended to be the PC as much as there is one, it’s really Lou’s story that gets the most focus and is the most fleshed-out. I was a little disappointed—I wanted to dig more into those eldest-sibling woes—but Lou’s story is nevertheless very good. Its eventual (Spoiler - click to show)descent into a surrealist or magical-realist mode, as Lou becomes trapped in a time loop and then bursts through a mirror into a parallel universe, might feel disjointed or unconvincing to some, but it worked for me: the frenetic fever dream of the family vacation having finally reached such a pitch as to become divorced from reality entirely.

This story takes place in a world where magic-users make pacts with demons to do their bidding. The protagonist, Finnit, has a natural aptitude for the magical language that allows this, but no real interest in asserting control over demons, the way his terrible academic advisor, Raekard, insists is necessary. (The game starts by listing the advisor’s authoritarian principles of demon-summoning, which led me to assume at first that they were treated as a universal truth in this world, but perhaps not so much; while there do seem to be some cultural norms backing this up, as seen in historical documents we eventually read, Finnit also has some allies in the academe—it’s just that the person upon whose goodwill his career depends isn’t one.)

When Finnit exploits a loophole to be the winner-by-default of a demon battle royale (having his demon float above the fray while the others destroy each other), Raekard tries to teach him a lesson by brutally killing the demon he summoned. This leaves such an impact on Finnit that later, when given the probably-impossible task of relighting a cursed lighthouse on a treacherous island, he decides to construct a summoning that will call this specific demon to help him.

He does this with all the desperate optimism and lack of concrete information of a Craigslist “missed connections” posting (yes, I’m aware this dates me; no, I don’t know what the modern equivalent is). Luckily, it works, mostly because the demon in question, Vosaphar, is happy to have anything to do other than wander the calciferous wastes.

Vosaphar also has injuries from Raekard’s assault that won’t heal; as we learn, demons’ forms tend to revert to something resembling their self-conception, but the wounds were so deep that they’re part of him now. (This is quite on-the-nose, of course, but in a way I found more charming than exasperating.) And so the two of them fall in love while conducting archival research, fighting off giant birds, trying to figure out how to heal Vosaphar’s wounds, and unraveling the mysteries of the lighthouse.

The love story was sweet and believable (perhaps on a bit of an accelerated timeline, though I’ll admit I was playing late at night and didn’t quite manage to grasp how much time they spent on the island—but even if it is a short time, it makes sense they’d become attached to each other under the circumstances). But what was most interesting to me was what the game does with point-of-view and who exactly is making choices. I do think, though, that discovering that for yourself is probably preferable to listening to me talk about it, so I won’t spoil it.

3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS takes place in an over-the-top dystopian future in which sex has been so thoroughly banned that any amount of seeing or touching another person’s skin is taboo. The age of majority seems to be about 40—we’ve got to protect those 35-year-old minors!—and the useless asterisk censorship that you see people use for “s*x” or “p*rn” has extended to any word that could conceivably be used in a slightly lascivious context, like “m*sculature” and “mo*th”. The sexual repression all of this creates causes people to literally explode as soon as they experience arousal for the first time.

It’s an unsubtle send-up of the bizarre censorship era we’ve ended up in through a combination of poorly-conceived and messily-implemented legislation, corporate algorithmic social media, squeamish payment processors and credit card companies, and “think of the children” advocacy groups. This, of course, disproportionately affects queer people, as our lives are inherently considered unsafe for the children (or the corporations)—worse yet should we actually talk about sex at the level that cishet people do all the time, and anything more than that is just unimaginable. Alongside that, it’s also an explicitly transgender take on the kind of gender-bender anime scenarios beloved of many trans people. The PC, a 40-something police officer tasked with protecting the populace from the evils of sex, transforms instantaneously into a hot young woman—and in this new, strangely more comfortable body, she suddenly finds an interest in being desired and connecting to others sexually that she never thought she’d have.

Taura, as she begins calling herself, is soon enticed to join an underground resistance group, and there she falls for Ollie, a leader of the movement. He is also interested in her, but his own dysphoria and struggles with repression cause difficulties between them. But this isn’t dwelt on much, as the plot moves along at a breakneck pace through political twists and turns, culminating with Taura’s not-really-premeditated assassination of the prime minister.

Where things really get interesting, though, is the epilogue, which takes the form of diary entries by the author. (Exactly how fictionalized these are is unclear, and I make no assumptions one way or another. When I refer to "the author" in the following paragraphs, I mean the persona depicted by the diary entries.) These discuss the author’s original plans for the ending, in which Taura and Ollie manage to overcome their respective hangups enough to share a tender moment that is physically and emotionally intimate. But that doesn’t feel right to the author; it doesn’t ring true. They wonder whether they truly understand intimacy; they’ve never been comfortable enough in their own skin to really open up to another person. Thus, instead, the ending we’ve just read.

And to me, this is 3XXX’s most striking condemnation of the social strictures that it satirizes: that they’ve created a world in which the fantasy of blowing up the prime minister by performing sex acts on live TV feels more achievable, less hollow, than the fantasy of achieving a moment of mostly-comfortable intimacy with another human being.

I have to start this review with a confession: according to IFDB, I did play this game’s predecessor, A Matter of Heist Urgency, but I have barely any memory of it. This is not the game’s fault; my “IFComp 2022 reviews” document is conspicuously lacking any actual reviews and I seem to have stopped even recording my scores there after the first few games, so clearly I was going through something that year, although I also don’t really remember what.

So due to this mysterious IFComp 2022 amnesia, I approached A Smorgasbord of Pain as one unfamiliar with the ways of Anastasia the Power Pony. The first scene, in which you seem to be talking to some work friends about the events of the previous game (while not letting on your role in them, of course) had me a bit at sea, but whatever else one can say about the game, it moves along at a brisk pace (a canter, at least, if not a gallop) and soon I was being chased through a buffet and learning a bit about the combat system by fighting thugs in an alley. I had to redo the fight a couple times, but picked it up relatively quickly.

After a quick breather in which you get more coaching on the combat system and a little more background on the heroine, there’s a trip to a warehouse in which you rescue the heroic but hapless fellow superhero Ponyheart, and then it’s back to the buffet again for an all-out brawl with many members of the llama mafia that appears to be Anastasia’s main foe.

I had gotten into a decent groove with the game at this point, but the second buffet fight pulled me up short. See, instead of relying on the combat system that’s been used up to this point, you’re expected to take down the llamas with food-based puns (the example given in the tutorial for this bit is RAM WITH RAMEN, although it also seems to consider rhyming to be sufficiently punny). I don’t know if it’s a matter of being unprepared for it, having too different an accent to the writer, or just being really bad at puns, but although I’ve done a creditable job with many rhyme-based wordplay games in the past, my performance here was abysmal. I came up with one (1) pun and was thoroughly beaten by criminal camelids. (You can just use normal attacks in this scene, but as far as I could tell they were much less effective.)

I wanted to replay the fight, as I had done with the alleyway thugs earlier, but the game threw an error when I tried. Fortunately, it’s also an option to move on while accepting your defeat, and the suboptimal ending I got still seemed to be classed as a winning one even if the llamas got away.

Action is hard to do in IF, and I think this game does a surprisingly solid job with it, between its vivid writing, simple but engaging combat system, and refusal to let a scene go on too long. And I recognize the pun combat as a way to spice up something that might get a bit stale if you have to do too much of it (since, as mentioned, there’s not too much complexity to the combat), and if it had clicked with me I can imagine having a great time with it. Maybe that would even have happened on my second go-round if I’d gotten one. As things stood, the frustration of the food fight knocked my enjoyment down a few notches. But the premise is entertaining and ambitious and the series does do some things especially well, so I would certainly try a third installment—hopefully with my memory of this one intact this time.

Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata? is the third in a series of games starring Bubble Gumshoe, a detective searching for what justice she can find in the sweets-themed yet hard-boiled environs of Sugar City.

The first game was basically a one-note gag, while the second had the player solving puzzles to escape an abandoned factory and find clues along the way. Whether you solved the case in the end, and how conclusively you did so, depended on how many clues you found, but the summation was delivered by Bubble Gumshoe in a non-interactive fashion.

Jimmy Piñata, meanwhile, is the series’ first attempt at a full-on investigation game, where the player must make an accusation and present clues to support it. It’s an ambitious step and probably ultimately a good direction for the series’ growth, but I was feeling some growing pains with this more open-ended entry.

For the most part, this wasn’t an issue with the actual mystery. If you can make it through the car chase sequence, I think you can get a pretty good idea of who was behind the titular crime. But I came to that conclusion without actually getting most of the physical evidence I needed to support it, because how to access various areas and where to look for evidence felt a little underclued to me (or else I was just very not on the game’s wavelength). Not everything needs to be as straightforward as “this security guard has asked for cigarettes and there are cigarettes here” or “a paper costs 25 cents and here’s a quarter”, of course, but I felt like the more complex puzzles weren’t giving me enough nudges in the right direction (getting upstairs at the church was particularly opaque to me, although to be fair (Spoiler - click to show)that’s not strictly necessary to complete the game).

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to enjoy here. I’m impressed by the author’s ability to keep finding new angles on the sweets + noir thing such that the jokes don’t get stale (the piñata victim really is inspired!), and I liked the car chase and the subplot about the mysterious new drug lord in town.

In the end, I think I enjoyed the experience of playing it a little bit less than I enjoyed Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?, but if the series is planned to continue from here, I’m excited to see what comes next!

(Side note: While playing I complained about not getting to know what kind of candy the Pope was, but then it occurred to me to search for “Pontefract”, which I only knew as a place name, to see if it was also a candy, which in fact it was. The things I miss by being a licorice hater, I guess!)

The Tempest of Baraqiel is a game in which the protagonist, military linguist Kel Shem, must decipher the settings on an advanced alien weapon so that humans can figure out how to operate the weapon and make a show of being able to hold their own against this superior foe.

Kel is also dealing with hostile superior officers, a lack of information they need to do their job, and the legacy of a famous mother that they’re struggling to live up to, and before you get to the translation stuff, you have to go through quite a lot of scenes of them trying to navigate interpersonal interactions around these things. Although the POV is exclusively Kel’s and they are unquestionably the main character, the player is often expected to select dialogue options for both Kel and their hostile superiors or skeptical team members, a design choice that I found somewhat odd and disorienting. I’m not sure what effect it was intended to have; for me it made it harder to fully identify with Kel and feel the pressure and frustration of navigating the situation they were in, and felt a little bit like I was playing both sides of a two-player game.

The translation sequence was absolutely the most compelling part of the game, and the part where I most felt like I knew what my goal was and what effect my choices were having. Even if you sometimes choose options for other members of the team in this section, at least you’re playing as members of a team with a unified purpose, not two people who are supposed to be clashing. Unfortunately I’m enough of a linguistics nerd to be bothered by how incredibly tidy and logical the language was—more of a code designed for puzzles than an actual language—and by the technobabble by which the characters sometimes reach realizations. I do understand that an accurate simulation of the process of deciphering an unknown language would take several years for the player to complete and be impossible to beat if you didn’t have a team of academics in relevant fields helping you out; I like to think I cut translation games some slack here. (I do love Heaven’s Vault!) But (Spoiler - click to show)“every word is exactly four phonemes and each position corresponds to a color and each phoneme corresponds to a number” is fully into “this is something I would expect to see in a puzzle hunt rather than while reading about real languages” territory. Even for aliens it seems like a bit of a stretch.

The game is definitely doing some intriguing things and some people seem to have gotten a lot more out of it than I did. I will confess to not being in the most charitable mood while playing most of the game, because I tried to play it in two sessions but, due to the faulty save function, ended up having to replay the first 1/3 and then rush to play the rest of the game in one sitting. But in the end I think it was not really for me.

Accessibility note: Due to the lack of light mode I had to use Stylebot to be able to play this game, so it was ultimately no more of a problem than a well-designed dark mode would have been, but I have to say the option buttons making the text darker and the background lighter was not a good choice. Once again I feel obligated to beat the drum of “please use a contrast checker!” (Some things pass that shouldn’t, so it’s not a guarantee you will not have problems, but it is the bare minimum.)

(Note: I was originally going to skip this game due to the “flashing images” warning, but others who had played it said they encountered no flashing images, so I gave it a shot. To the best of my knowledge, I explored 100% of this game’s content, and I also found no flashing images.)

Retrograding’s blurb states that its protagonist, the cyborg Ioanna, works in “waste management”—quotation marks and all—and I have to say I expected that to be a euphemism, but this is indeed a game in which you collect trash, and many of the key choices involve what pieces of trash to collect.

In fact, Ioanna is the best trash collector in this whole dystopian future (run by a single interplanetary Corporation, which is so monopolistic that it doesn’t even appear to have a name). She could be promoted, but prefers not to be because she prefers dealing with trash to dealing with people.

Unfortunately for her, doing your job with unusual skill and efficiency can get you saddled with responsibilities you don’t want even without the promotion. In the game’s first major route split, she is offered a choice of two unenviable waste management jobs, each of which includes an aspect of essentially baby-sitting a problem worker. The first is Raven, a death-row inmate who is scheduled to be executed at the end of the job, and the second is Zinnia, a nepo baby who keeps trying to rebel against the Corporation and being demoted (and brainwashed, it sounds like?) each time.

Due to this very early route split, Retrograding is functionally two games, one very good and the other distinctly underbaked. I spent about two hours seeing everything the game has to offer; a little over half an hour of that was Zinnia and the rest was Raven. His route has more variation, more endings, better pacing, more convincing relationship and character development, and more information about Ioanna’s backstory and the worldbuilding. Zinnia’s is elliptical and confusing, with a somewhat unconvincing romance and dialogue options that often change at most a word or two in the response. Also, one of Raven’s five endings is a solid happily-for-now, while Zinnia’s three are all different shades of downer.

Also, I have to say, the Raven route had a weird toxic horny energy (complimentary) that was completely and totally absent in the Zinnia route. (To be clear, there is nothing spicier than kissing in either route, but the Raven route ramps up the tension via things like Raven rummaging around in Ioanna’s internal robot parts and Ioanna making Raven suck on her gun, and one of the requirements for the best romantic ending is to be consistently kind of mean to him, which he seems to enjoy.) I understand that the two routes were written by different authors who have different styles and interests, but Zinnia's route just felt a little bloodless to me and I wanted it to be about 50% more unhinged to better suit the energy of the rest of the game. (I am also personally less interested in male/female romances than in any other gender configuration, so my bias here is that if the genders of the two romanceable characters were swapped, I would be obsessed with this game and would talk about nothing else for weeks regardless of its structural flaws.)

Regardless, I enjoyed Ioanna as a protagonist, and the setting in the Raven route is very atmospheric with some interestingly off-kilter concepts. The character art is loosely sketched, but appealing, and the music and backgrounds chosen mostly do a good job of setting the mood (it’s a little distracting that some of the photos of places that are supposed to be abandoned have people in them, but I understand that when looking for free-to-use photos you get what you get). I also liked that each character you meet and each bit of trash you pick up adds to a database labeled “Records”, which provides you little extra scenes to attempt to piece together with the larger story. (Some players may find this annoying or distracting, I think, especially in a game that already gives you a lot to take in and doesn’t explain much of it fully. It’s possible I was simply brainwashed into liking this mechanic through exposure to the When They Cry series’ similar “Tips” mechanic at an impressionable age. But whether or not it’s objectively a good idea, I enjoyed it.)

Even leaving my personal preferences aside, the clear disparity in attention given to the two main routes is noticeable and awkward, and makes Retrograding cap out at merely good when I think a fully fleshed out version could be great. More content for the Zinnia route could also help with the larger setting feeling ultimately kind of underexplained. But there were a lot of striking moments and interesting character beats here that I think I will find particularly memorable. For those who only checked out the Zinnia route and left with a somewhat lackluster impression of the game, I do think the Raven route is worth a try.

This is a short, lighthearted puzzle game in which you play as Layla, the so-called assistant to star archaeologist Herbert Tapioca (who is actually useless on his own). You are being questioned after apparently breaking into Versailles and engaging in some property destruction in pursuit of ancient Egyptian artifacts hidden there. (The lack of direct tomb-raiding and the fact that Layla is half-Egyptian herself seem like an effort to make this classic adventure-archaeologist tale reasonably guilt-free—your claim to go messing about with these artifacts may not be impeccable, but it’s better than the late French royals’, probably.) Amusingly, the police only seem concerned with whether you are giving an internally consistent account of your actions and not whether that account exculpates you in any way (it doesn’t); you've just got to get the right events in the right order.

I had a bit of difficulty getting started before realizing the central conceit; that the (Spoiler - click to show)time travel elements are treated as a twist at the end is a slightly awkward decision given that you can’t make progress without figuring out that there must be some, and I wonder if flagging that a little more specifically up front (without giving all the details away, of course) might be helpful for people.

Once I got to grips with the way the game worked, though, I had fun figuring out the secrets of Versailles/the pharaohs. The puzzles weren’t too hard but provided satisfying “aha” moments, and the game employs a few tricks to make them brute force–proof that I think make sense under the circumstances. I also appreciated the way the interrogators’ comments point the player towards segments where there are unsolved puzzles remaining. There were just a couple of pain points:

In general, though, I had fun with the puzzles and the little interactions between the hapless Herbert and bold and clever Layla, and I found this a nice little diversion!

The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens is a choice-based fantasy game featuring a PC who has been feeling a mysterious draw to the titular house and grounds. They resolve to learn more about Sylvan Gardens to figure out why they keep finding themself there in the middle of the night; in the course of their research they solve some puzzles and uncover some hidden pieces of the town’s history. The puzzles were pretty well constructed and I generally enjoyed them, although sometimes it strained credulity a little that no one else had ever figured out a particular riddle.

The PC also meets a variety of characters who have curses or other problems that can be solved only by particular magical plants; they can befriend all of these people and choose to romance one. I appreciated the range of ages that these characters spanned and the varied exploration of the impact that their magical difficulties had on their lives.

I did have some issues with the fuzziness of the worldbuilding. The game revolves around the historic home and gardens of a figure who’s positioned as a sort of early-Enlightenment proto-naturalist; she lived three hundred years ago. At any rate, attitudes to magic vs. science are definitely post-Enlightenment at this point. And yet in terms of tech levels, we seem to still be at the ren faire; you don’t so much as see a typewriter. When you go stargazing, the constellations are the same as the ones in the real world; it seems there’s Greek mythology, although it’s unclear if there’s a Greece. There are also multiple fantasy races here; there are some more unusual ones that get a lot of time and focus devoted to how they fit into this world, but some of the more “standard” fantasy races, like elves, just get some gestures in the direction of discrimination against them by humans possibly existing and not a lot of examination of what that means, even if you’re playing as an elf. But it’s pretty clear we’re not really meant to think about any of this that hard; I’m just a nitpicker.

Sylvan Gardens is created with Ink but with a good deal of customization, including a history function that was very helpful to me in some puzzles (I didn’t take notes and maybe should have). It has an appealing visual design and watercolor illustrations; along with the soundtrack, these create a gentle, pleasant ambience.

All in all, the game may not be quite to my personal tastes, but it’s substantial (it took me two hours and will probably take most people longer) and highly polished, and will likely appeal to fans of character-focused cozy fantasy.

There’s a subgenre of Japanese portal fantasy/isekai in which the main character finds themself in a fantasy world transformed into some sort of non-human being. This started out reasonably enough with monsters and animals, but in the endless pursuit of novelty in a rather crowded genre, somewhere along the way it got weird, and now we have series like Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon (no, I’m not making this up). The focus is often on how the MC circumvents their limitations or even manages to turn them around into advantages, inevitably becoming super powerful and probably impressing some cute girls.

This tale of waking up in a fantasy world as a rock seems like it would fit right in—except that instead of unlikely power-leveling, you solve everyone’s problems with plain old social skills. (It is possible that the PC being a rock makes people more likely to open up, though—it seems safer as they’re not a humanoid creature and don’t live in the town, perhaps?) Also, while there are cute girls, they’re more interested in (Spoiler - click to show)each other than in the PC, which is refreshing to see. (One of them is a tough woman who secretly loves cute things, which is a classic anime character beat, but I like it better in this context.)

The main substance of the gameplay has two parts: one is successfully navigating conversations with characters, and the other is figuring out which characters to talk to in which order so as to nudge people towards those who might be able to help them. The latter worked nicely; the former was mostly good, but there were times when the conversation options were fairly similar and I couldn’t tell if there was a meaningful difference and if so, what it was.

The game also has a lot of endings, and the way they're presented as unlockable achievements on the final screen gives the impression of this being an "ending chase" game in the vein of Insomnia; I've since learned it's not meant to be, but as we players are easily led astray by "here's a list of things to unlock", I feel compelled to note that actually chasing those endings winds up feeling unrewarding because they're somewhat repetitive. They can have amusing moments (I think the one where you get thrown in a lake is my favorite, even if it’s mostly kind of an expanded version of the “forgetting you’re a rock” joke that gets made in a number of other contexts), but the majority of the non-ideal endings are “someone takes you somewhere and you just have to sit there because you’re a rock”.

A related issue is that there is, as far as I can tell, exactly one non-ideal ending that you actually need to see to make progress, so you have a bit of a “doing X is not useful except in the one case where it’s essential” problem.

These hiccups aside, though, it’s a charming game with cute characters and most of its structural choices are solid, and I had fun playing it.