Reviews by EJ

You Can’t Save Her is a short piece about two friends raised in a monastery in a fantasy setting. One friend finds a forbidden tome that reveals the existence of a different god and becomes a heretic, gaining strange powers in the process. The other remains loyal, and when the heretic becomes a threat, the church sends the loyalist to kill her.

The most interesting part of this piece, to me, is the way it deals with faith. The loyalist, it is suggested, also has her doubts about the god she was raised to believe in; her refusal to follow her friend into apostasy isn’t due to an unwavering commitment to the worldview the monastery espouses. Rather, it’s because she’s also skeptical of the new god her friend has found. To overcome the inertia of her upbringing, it’s not enough to no longer believe in her original faith; she has to find something else she believes in more. (Spoiler - click to show)(Which she does, ultimately, though it’s not a god at all.)

Leaving a highly dogmatic faith that has been a large part of one’s life to that point is something I don’t have personal experience of, so I can’t say if this rings true. But it is an interesting contention, and a somewhat unusual angle on this type of narrative.

The prose is fairly laconic, but there are moments of striking imagery—a cathedral that “pierces the sky like a stalagmite”, moonlight through stained glass “painting a rose of rainbows on the floor”, a rift in space that “closes like a wound”. It adds up to an atmosphere that’s beautiful, nearly empty, and uncanny, enhanced by a droning industrial soundtrack. The sparseness of the words on the screen (most of the time) also feels appropriate to a story that’s largely about two women alone in a vast desert.

The interactivity was the work’s weak point for me; I found that the choices felt largely cosmetic (does it matter if you’re trudging off to kill your best friend with a saber or a broadsword?). This was thematically appropriate to the earlier parts of the game, in which the loyalist’s perceived lack of choice figures prominently, but later on it might have been fitting to let the loyalist’s belated rebellion be something the player had more of an active hand in. (This not being the case then makes the earlier lack of meaningful choice feel less like a thematic decision, also.) Failing that, I think it would also have been an improvement to stick to the use of cycling links that probe a little deeper into the character’s psyche with each click, and just get rid of the choices that change a bit of text in the next passage but don’t really carry any weight. But it is an enjoyable piece of writing nonetheless.

Where Nothing Is Ever Named is a very short parser game taking place in a mysterious space where… well, see title. There are two things in the space with you, and the game’s one puzzle consists of interacting with the things enough to figure out what they are, whereupon what you need to do becomes clear. It took me five minutes.

I see how this conceit could rapidly become unwieldy from a disambiguation perspective, but I did wish there were a little more to the game. What’s there is well-implemented and enjoyable, though, and the game gets some bonus points from me for (Spoiler - click to show)letting me pet not one but two animals.

Welcome to the Universe is an homage to/parody of Alter Ego, a 1986 choice-based game. Alter Ego was created by, I believe, a psychologist, and purported to be able to accurately model the player’s personality and life up to that point and show them what the outcome of their life choices might be, as well as allowing them to experiment with other life paths and identities. Alter Ego’s claim that it would “change your life” was a little tongue-in-cheek (because you can model the outcomes of making different choices, get it?), but it was earnestly meant to be thought-provoking and somewhat educational, claimed to be rooted in a deep understanding of human psychology, and was perhaps even intended to provoke empathy for others in bad situations, in a “there but for fortune” kind of way. A contemporary review called it “consciousness-raising.” Of course, it also made a number of normative assumptions about the player, and in a game that’s supposed to be so all-encompassing of the human experience, there’s a particular kind of discomfort that that causes for a player who finds that the array of choices on offer hasn’t taken into account the possible existence of a person like them.

You may wonder why I’ve spent a whole paragraph of this review talking about an entirely different game, but I think if I had not already been familiar with Alter Ego—not only the game itself, but the way it was marketed and received—I would have been pretty baffled by Welcome to the Universe. The latter game is framed as the creation of a fictional academic, Dr. Balamer, who believes in the importance of “life-changing video games” and their ability to provoke empathy by drawing on universal human experiences. His earnest ambition to connect humans by creating a universally relatable game produces something that is both obviously filtered through the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white American man (witness, for example, the schoolchildren arguing about the merits of their hometown based on the presence or absence of particular chain restaurants—can a town really be said to be good if it doesn’t have an Applebee’s???) and frequently absurd (featuring heated arguments about Parisian dentistry and a placeholder for an incident involving “goop” that somehow leads to you declaring yourself the “goop master” or “goop servant”). I won’t spoil where exactly this goes, but my read is that Welcome to the Universe affectionately mocks some of Alter Ego’s grand ambitions and gestures towards universality while ultimately affirming the impulse towards human connection that underlies it.

I found this pretty entertaining (the high point for me was probably (Spoiler - click to show)the mid-game survey that asked you if you thought the game should add an incident involving a stranger in an unmarked van and then asked you if you thought it would be fair if your character died if they interacted with the stranger in any way, a reference to an infamously jarring episode in the childhood section of Alter Ego where your character can be kidnapped and murdered). But at the same time, I’m not quite sure if there’s much of a point to this mockery of a specific aspect of a specific game that didn’t exactly spawn a host of imitators. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a monument to someone’s complicated feelings about an ambitious but flawed game, and maybe that’s all it needs to be.

There is one aspect that I felt might rise to the level of a commentary on choice games in general rather than Alter Ego in particular. Alter Ego was a game that gave you choices of actions and determined your (or rather, the PC’s) qualities based on what you did, and that has remained a popular model for choice IF (see the whole Choice of Games oeuvre—in fact, Alter Ego’s latest incarnation seems to be in Choicescript). Welcome to the Universe, on the other hand, allows you to choose what you are (a traveller or a homebody? Cool or uncool?), and determines your actions based on those qualities. It inverts the usual framework, perhaps calling into question how much choice we really have in what we do versus how much our actions are the inevitable result of who we are as people. (Of course, this has particular relevance to Alter Ego’s claim that you can create a perfect replica of yourself but then see what happens if you make different life choices, and a little less relevance to the majority of choice games, in which you’re not supposed to be playing a character who’s Literally You. But on the other hand, I’ve often heard people lament that they replayed a game planning to make different choices this time, but couldn’t bring themselves to do it….)

There’s also something there about the inadequacy of binary choices to really capture the range of human experience, but this falls a little flat when you consider that most games don’t have purely binary choices, including Alter Ego itself.

All Alter Ego considerations aside, I didn’t consistently love the experience of Welcome to the Universe; the humor was a little hit or miss for me, and also I don’t really like playing as Literally Me in any game and so I didn’t and then I felt like I’d undermined the intended experience of the ending. (This is a me problem, I know.) But it’s definitely unique, and it gave me some ideas to chew on, and I appreciate that.

The one-way street I live on dead-ends at a busy four-lane road onto which I frequently have to turn left (the US equivalent of the game’s UK right turn). Often, as I’m sitting there waiting for this to be possible, some jerk in an unnecessarily large vehicle will get impatient and try to go around me, although the street is not really designed for that. Of course, the reason I’m just sitting there is because there are no openings, so the overly large vehicle will just sit there for a while blocking my view of traffic, and then take the first opening that comes along before I can get to it, even though I was there first!!!

When a similar incident happened in Turn Right, I may have started yelling out loud. Just a little.

This short parser game simulates the experience of attempting to turn right onto a busy road. I’ve been vocal over the years about my dislike of games that simulate boring and/or frustrating experiences, but Turn Right’s spot-on observational humor makes it work. At first, out of some sort of contrarian instinct, I tried everything I could think of besides what the game wanted me to do, but while it was all implemented, the responses were terse enough that I gave in and committed to my fate of repeatedly trying TURN RIGHT. I was then rewarded with a surprisingly varied set of exasperating events, related in wry tones. (Although I am glad I tried (Spoiler - click to show)examining the car park and saw that the van responsible for the aforementioned incident was taking up two parking spaces, foreshadowing that the driver was an asshole.)

I did experience a touch of cultural dissonance; you see, I’m from Boston, and to get anywhere in this godforsaken city, you have to drive aggressively. So on one of the several occasions when someone in the near lane stopped to try to let the PC through, I would have just barged on out there on the assumption that someone on the far lane would let me through sooner rather than later once I was conspicuously blocking traffic. But I understand that in most of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, people are too polite for that sort of thing.

Turn Right is probably not nearly as funny to people who don’t drive, but I would recommend it to anyone who does.

Final Call is the tale of a small-time crook who gets kidnapped and chucked into something that resembles a cross between an escape room and a Saw trap. It’s a solid premise; not groundbreaking, but there’s definitely an audience (one that includes me!) that will happily take several dozen of this kind of thing as long as it’s well-executed.

The game, which took me about a half hour to complete, is ambitious and very unpolished. There are a lot of rooms, but most of them don’t serve any actual purpose. The puzzles are entirely lawnmower-able, which is just as well because the logic can be shaky. Sometimes sentences are capitalized and sometimes they aren’t; sometimes they have punctuation and sometimes they don’t. There’s timed text. There are intimations of backstory, but nothing is ever really explained. The ending comes abruptly and is somewhat confusing. (At least, that was true of the ending I got. I did wonder if things might have wrapped up more sensibly if I’d made a different choice, but the timed text dissuaded me from trying again.)

Final Call is aiming for a little more emotional depth than your average “what if escape room but lethal” tale via the PC’s relationships with his girlfriend Roxy and partner-in-crime Mike, but none of the characters quite gets enough development to rise above stereotype status. As such, I wasn’t sufficiently invested for the crime-doesn’t-pay message to hit home in the way it was obviously meant to. (So I will be blithely carrying on robbing casinos IRL—sorry, authors!)

That said, the authors of Final Call do have excellent instincts for quality-of-life features (timed text notwithstanding). I was initially disheartened to encounter a list of links to “Door #1”, “Door #2”, et cetera, but once each passage has been visited, the link text is replaced with a more descriptive phrase. Every clue you come across and every puzzle you encounter is listed in the sidebar for easy reference, which was great. There’s a text entry bit that’s case-sensitive, and the game specifically tells you it’s case-sensitive—which may seem like damning with faint praise, but a lot of newbie Twine authors don’t think to do that. (My personal preference is for these things to not be case-sensitive in the first place, but you do have to dig into JS a little to figure out how to do that, so I don’t blame people for not realizing you can.)

And despite the issues with the writing and game design, on a technical level, Final Call was a very smooth experience for me—I didn’t encounter any bugs. Which is pretty good for a first outing, especially considering that the game is doing some things I would consider at least advanced-beginner-level, SugarCube-wise.

All things considered, while Final Call was overall rough, I did come away with the feeling that the authors had promise and might someday make an escape room thriller I would really enjoy. They just need some practice—and maybe a proofreader.

In this game, the PC is run over by a car that veers onto the sidewalk and killed—and then regains consciousness in the body of the last passer-by they looked at. They loop through the events surrounding their death, trying to manipulate their environment so that everything aligns in such a way that the car doesn’t hit them. It is essentially what in board-gaming circles we would call a programming game, where you’re queuing up a set of actions for each participant that will then execute the next time through the loop.

As far as I’m concerned this is a fantastic premise, and I love the unusual elements of the gameplay structure, too. The writing also serves the concept well; it’s pithy and funny (if more in a wry-smile than a laugh-out-loud kind of way). I can imagine a version of this game that would be one of my favorite games of IFComp 2024.

Unfortunately the puzzles all had moments where they were pretty obtuse, and Traffic doesn’t quite know how to nudge the player in the right direction through helpful error responses or other environmental info. Since there are also no hints, whenever I got stuck, I really hit a wall. My experience of the game was largely one of getting 2/3 of the way to the solution of a puzzle, getting stumped for an extended period of time, and finally turning to the walkthrough (which very bluntly gives the shortest possible path to the solution).

For example, when playing as the baby, (Spoiler - click to show)I found the pacifier and I had the idea to throw it, but the response to trying to throw the pacifier without a target is simply, “Futile.” Therefore I assumed I was on the wrong track with throwing it, and gave up. If the response had been something like “You don’t think the woman will notice if you just throw it in a random direction” (much less funny, I know), that would have been really helpful. I then at one point tried TAKE PHONE, which just got the response that I couldn’t reach it. This, too, seems like a missed opportunity to steer the player towards the solution (“Your arms are too short, but maybe there’s another way…” or what have you). The former suggestion and the latter combined would probably have added up to THROW PACIFIER AT PHONE in my brain; nothing currently in the game did.

In general, even just a VERBS command listing the verbs needed to complete the game would have been a big help. Anything to point me in the right direction just a little bit.

This string of almost-but-not-quite-figuring-out-the-puzzle-myself experiences left me feeling vaguely disappointed and unsatisfied; like a cat chasing a laser pointer, I have stalked my prey (the puzzles) at length but not, ultimately, gotten my kill (the triumph of actually solving one). So I walked away mostly feeling cranky about the whole experience, which is a shame because there’s so much going on here that I do like.

In this game, the PC leads a team of specialists to explore a mysterious castle. It’s a choice-based game that tries to emulate a parser experience, having the player click to select a subject, verb, and object before submitting the action.

The concept of gameplay that revolves around figuring out not just what action should be taken, but who should be taking it, is unusual and intriguing. In practice, however, I found this game's implementation of it unwieldy. It just takes so many clicks to complete any action (except for moving around the map). Having the subject default to “me” unless otherwise specified would have helped, I think, though that still leaves a lot of clicking and I’m not really sure what else could be done to streamline this interface.

Between this and the white text that contrasts poorly with the busy pixel backdrops and lacks paragraph spacing, I have to say that I experienced so much friction in the process of trying to play the game that I wasn’t really able to appreciate the content. I’m sure there’s a lot to like here if you’re less frustrated by the interface, but I didn’t have a good time. That said, I do have to give it some respect for its success in bending Twine into a pretzel without breaking it—which is to say, it’s a highly technically ambitious game that clearly has had a lot of care and attention put into ensuring that it’s bug-free.

Redjackets is a paranormal thriller about a sort of vampire bounty hunting agency, which is to say that they hunt vampires and also some of them are vampires. I will confess: there was a time in my life when this was my shit. But I delved too greedily and too deep in the vampire fiction mines and unleashed the terrible spectre of vampire burnout, so I am not the ideal audience for this game. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to give it a fair review.

So, the game starts by having you choose one of the characters to play as: the naive one, the cynical one, or the brave one. (This is pretty much all you get to know about them in advance.) I picked the cynical one, who turned out to be seasoned vampire hunter Lynette (who is a vampire). Her version of events opens with a few lines about Lynette trying to find someone (unspecified at this point), and then it hits you with this:

“And it looked like the database was frozen to boot. If someone forgot to renew the license again, you were going to lose it. You always wondered if you'd snap one of these days. You just didn't know that a licensing agreement to a database would be the thing that did it.”

Honestly, I loved this as an opening move. It’s so specific! So unexpected! So real! There is a long list of reasons why work might make me snap one of these days, but people not renewing the fucking license on the fucking software I need to do my fucking job is definitely on that list. Vampires: they’re just like us!

Despite the vagaries of software access, Lynette and Declan (the brave one, not a vampire) soon succeed in capturing Fiia (the naive one, a vampire); this turns out to be because they want to recruit her to go after her sire, Rosco Jeppson, an art-loving mob boss. (As vampire baddies go, he seemed a little tame from Lynette’s perspective, but I understand Fiia’s route contains more gory details.) The Redjackets’ scheme to take Rosco down proceeds from there, mostly unfolding as dynamic fiction with the occasional choice. In most cases, these choices’ effects, if any, were unclear, although the choice of who to place in which role for the assassination clearly does change things considerably (enough that one combination in Lynette’s route causes a game-breaking bug, or did when I played).

On the whole, though, what I found myself most invested in was not the action and intrigue, but the low-key moments of vampiric slice-of-life, as Lynette deals with red tape and gives young vampires printouts on how to control their hunger. The romance between Lynette and Declan also has some nice writing around it, although I was a little surprised that the interspecies aspect was treated as a total nonissue. I mean, on the one hand there’s not much new ground to be broken in the area of human/vampire relationship angst, so it’s almost refreshing to just skip the whole thing, but on the other hand, it does seem a bit odd for the characters not to feel some kind of way about it (at least the “one of you is immortal and the other is not” aspect, since the game makes a point of saying that Lynette isn’t tempted by Declan’s blood).

Most of the prose is pretty transparent—casual, modern, not too fancy. This works fine. Every now and then, though, it tries to get ornate, and out of nowhere you get a description like: “An unnatural dysphoria winds its way into the many emaciated oxbow bends of your insides.” I would say I enjoy ornate prose more than the average person, but I think you’ve got to commit to it more than this. If you just drop it in one sentence in twenty, it’s jarring.

The aesthetic is slick, with the obligatory red-and-black color scheme and attractive character portraits (mainly to help you remember whose POV you’re in, I think), but the portraits were a little buggy. Sometimes they covered the text; at least once I got Fiia’s while the POV character was still supposed to be Lynette; on another occasion I got two portraits (both Lynette) next to each other for some reason. If this were cleaned up, though, I’d have no complaints about the visual design.

There were also polish issues with the writing, mainly tense slippage between past and present. Initially the dialogue punctuation was also consistently wrong (in ways I don’t often see combined—it’s rare for the same work to have both dialogue ending in a period followed by a capitalized dialogue tag and dialogue ending in a comma followed by an uncapitalized stage direction, but Redjackets manages to get the rules exactly backwards on this front for a while). It does get cleaner after the introduction, although the errors never totally disappear.

But although Redjackets’ reach exceeds its grasp in various ways, I did enjoy a lot about it, and I would probably check out more works with these characters and/or in this setting—especially if they focused less on the hunt and more on the downtime and the vampire office work.

In this game, the protagonist finds her favorite teacup missing, and embarks upon a quest to retrieve it—a quest that will take her into a spooky forest, a poison swamp, a wizard’s tower, and maybe even the depths of hell. The game was created in RPGMaker to achieve the correct aesthetic (which it does in charming and attractive fashion), but functions as a gauntlet in which one choice will progress the main plot and the other(s) will lead to a bad end.

This is all in service of a parody of RPG tropes, which is not exactly untrodden ground. Observations about RPG characters breaking into people’s houses and taking their stuff have been made before. Commentary on the lengths to which a PC will go, risking life and limb, for relatively inconsequential sidequests is not new either (and in fact this isn’t a million miles away from the same author’s Elftor and the Quest of the Screaming King, although the main focus there was more on the also-much-mocked convention of messing around with sidequests while the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance and you’re supposed to be saving it).

The wizard tower was my favorite bit: (Spoiler - click to show)he has a fake teleport pad at the base of his tower that actually vaporizes intruders hoping for an easy way up, and when you prove your worth by taking the stairs, he offers you a perfect magical teacup that will never chip or allow its contents to go cold. (You can accept, but this is a Bad End because you didn’t get your teacup.) This is still in the territory of “RPG protagonists are thieving murderhobos and also have bizarre priorities,” but the wizard’s involvement (less as a straight-man comedic partner than a different kind of weirdo) adds an entertaining extra layer. The two of them are both baffled to minorly horrified at aspects of each other’s behavior, and they simultaneously are correct and really don’t have room to criticize.

I’m also a sucker for a “we’re going to make you deal with this legendarily annoying game mechanic—haha just kidding” gag, so I enjoyed the poison swamp ((Spoiler - click to show)it just insta-kills you, and the PC has an “I don’t know what I expected” moment).

If RPG parodies are the kind of thing you can’t get enough of, Quest for the Teacup is a well-executed entry in the genre and you’ll probably have a great time. In its best moments, it entertained me too—and it’s a half-hour game with a concentration of good moments that’s fairly high, so I would say I enjoyed it more than I didn’t. But I did always have that nagging sense of deja vu.

This is a murder mystery game in which you play as an FBI agent who’s been called in to investigate a string of murders (possibly the work of a serial killer, possibly not) in a small town in Washington. Over the course of several days, the player must choose how to spend their investigation time, and at the end they are asked a series of questions to see how much they’ve managed to figure out.

The Killings in Wasacona clearly takes heavy inspiration from tabletop games, starting out by making you distribute your character’s stats and then having skill checks done via a link that says “Roll a d20.” The simulated dice were kind to me in my playthrough and I passed most checks for skills that I didn’t have penalties to, so my experience wasn’t frustrating in this regard, but I still didn’t love this as a design choice. I found it made me feel like, rather than playing a game that was simulating solving a murder, I was playing a game that was simulating playing another game that was simulating solving a murder, which had a distancing effect that kept me from ever truly getting invested. The many spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and occasional clunky attempts at poetic language in high-drama scenes also distracted me, although as an editor I’m aware that I notice these things more than most people do.

I was also kind of uneasy at the way that it used the possibility of a racist cop committing violence against people of color as a red herring, and at the way that procedural red tape that exists to protect people’s rights, such as the need to obtain warrants, was treated as an annoying and unfair imposition. (The latter is of course very common in the genre, but that doesn’t mean I like to see it, and the fact that the game doesn’t even give you the option to actually do this stuff—you can either circumvent it via intimidation or give up—doesn’t help. I gather there are negatives to taking the intimidation route, but there are also negatives to just not getting the information, so it doesn’t quite feel like a “giving the player enough rope to hang themself” situation.)

Also, I don’t like picking on this kind of thing because in real life people can have all kinds of names, but when you have one singular Latina character in your game, naming her “Jamal” gives the unfortunate impression that the writer reached for a name that seemed “exotic” without bothering to check which cultures it’s commonly used in or which gender it’s commonly used for. The Somali refugee siblings also have the somewhat unlikely surname "Brown", and the country they come from is referred to as “Somali” instead of Somalia. Individually all of this seems like nitpicking, but it adds up to a sense that not a lot of care is being taken.

On the positive side, I liked the built-in graphical map, and I think the mystery was well-constructed (I managed to solve all the pieces of it and didn’t feel like I was wildly guessing on any of them). I liked the way the game laid out your evidence for each possible culprit before asking you to answer questions at the end, although I did wish it had used the suspects’ names (titles like "the drifter" may be clear enough, but there are a bunch of suspects who are professors at a local college, and they’re listed in this end-of-game evidence rundown as “the $subject professor”, which I had trouble keeping straight). And I enjoyed seeing the statistics at the end that showed what percentage of players had gotten various outcomes.

So the game does have a number of good aspects, and as far as I can tell most players liked it substantially more than I did and my opinion is not terribly representative of most people’s experiences. But I thought these points were worth raising, in case anyone else is particularly bothered by any of these things.