Reviews by EJ

I live in a city where a lot of the public buildings are in the Brutalist style. If you hang out with architecture nerds at all, sooner or later they'll start in on an impassioned defense of the style, which goes something like this: Making a building out of poured concrete is actually an incredibly difficult thing to pull off, so every single one of those train stations and city offices is a marvel of engineering that one or more clever people put a huge amount of effort into. And I appreciate that! I really do! But at the end of the day, my feelings on Brutalist architecture can't help but be shaped by the fact that I don't really enjoy being in those buildings.

I thought about that a lot while playing The Van der Nagel Papyrus. The things it does with Inform are very impressive, all the more so for having been done on a very short time limit. And unlike with architecture, I do in this case know enough to understand how hard this stuff is to do and admire the technical chops it must take. But as impressed as I am, the feelings I'm coming away with can't help but be shaped by the fact that I spent a lot more time feeling like I was slogging along than actually having fun.

The Van der Nagel Papyrus is set up as a classic "treasure hunt in an eccentric person's mansion" puzzlefest; the Van der Nagel mansion is about to be demolished and it's up to you to try to rescue its treasures, most notably the titular papyrus, before this happens. The details of who you are and why you're doing this are unspecified and basically immaterial. You're here for the puzzles; that's the point.

This is not to say that the writing isn't good; it's fairly spare but has well-chosen, vivid details. There's a general atmosphere of eeriness and melancholy that I think makes the moments of humor hit harder when they appear, similar to Veeder games I've enjoyed like Fly Fishing (and in contrast to the more consistent zaniness of the Little Match Girl games, which I personally don't have a lot of stamina for). But it's a garnish, and the puzzles are the actual meal. If you're enjoying them, you'll probably have a great time! If you're not, it's not really a "play with the walkthrough open to see where this goes" kind of game. (There is no walkthrough currently, but I assume there will be soon.)

Anyway, picking up the papyrus turns out to be only the beginning, as it transforms the world around it in strange ways. I did enjoy this initial phase of exploration (which takes about an hour); the puzzles were reasonably sized and satisfying to solve and the rewards of new discoveries come pretty steadily. But once that initial phase is over, the effort to reward ratio changes considerably as the game comes to revolve around a fiddly, time-consuming puzzle mechanic that I did not enjoy engaging with.

In fairness to the game, once that initial phase is over, it does tell you that you can quit, and it goes on to restate this several times. But doing so gets you nothing that really feels like a finale, either narratively or mechanically, so the "really, you can stop if you want, you're not expected to continue, it's fine!" assurances feel a little hollow.

I will now discuss in more detail the puzzle mechanic that makes up the bulk of the game by play time and why I didn't enjoy it; this is technically a spoiler, so I will hide it for the sake of people who don't want to diminish the "wow!" moment of the initial discovery, but it may be worth looking at regardless if you, like me, enjoy some kinds of puzzles and don't get on at all with others.

If you’d rather not be spoiled, I’ll just say this: The game’s considerable length is not because it has a ton of content (understandable given the constraints under which it was made), and only a little bit because the puzzles are fiendishly difficult and take a long time to figure out. It’s mostly because, once you get past that initial segment, the puzzles are of a type where actually executing the solution is quite time-consuming (and easy to mess up, and more time-consuming if you do). And that, for me, was not a very satisfying game structure—I prefer the ratio of figuring-things-out to grinding-away-at-a-solution to be a little more weighted towards the former. Obviously I’m in the minority here; a lot of people did love it. And again, from a technical perspective it’s a very impressive achievement. But I hope my perspective might be helpful to people in deciding whether this is the kind of thing they would enjoy or not.

This is set up as a classic piece of “explore a weird and architecturally impossible house” horror, and the uncanniness does escalate nicely, especially if you decide to turn back at any point. Instead of reaching a spooky climax, however, the endings present situations that are merely sort of odd, and the PC’s muted reaction (“Huh.”) contributes to the draining of tension.

I suppose it feels a little like games you play as a child to try to scare yourself, or even just the experience of walking down the hall to the bathroom at night at an age where that passes for spooky. Coming out in the light and finding nothing too badly amiss is somewhat fitting for that kind of vibe. But as a grown-up I think I’d prefer some actual payoff.

This is unfortunately one of the less accessible pieces I’ve encountered in this year’s ECTOCOMP, and I don’t mean that in the way that poetry can be inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the artform. I know I repeat this constantly, but please, please use a contrast checker to make sure your text is legible. This gave me a headache to read. Also, I don’t usually complain about font sizes since that’s the easiest thing to change on the user’s end—any old browser will do it—but as someone who doesn’t generally need to boost the font size for vision reasons I did need to boost it here because it is tiny and my poor fine motor control was not up to clicking to continue when the target was so small.

The chained poem conceit is interesting, with each poem taking the last line of the previous as the first line and spinning off into a different direction with it, and the poems cover many different topics. The one that stuck with me most was the one about relatives squabbling over an inheritance, which I thought made interesting use of the unique affordances of the medium in what it was doing with cycling links. The rest of the poems don’t really make use of anything besides (sometimes very slow) timed text; I see in theory why that’s appealing to a poet and seems like a natural outgrowth of the way line breaks and general space on the page are used in static poetry, but I personally did not feel like it added to the experience. I do think there’s promise here and I would be interested to see more interactive poetry that really explored the question of “what can you do with interactive poetry that you can’t do with the regular on-paper kind?” (Other than make the text fade in really slowly.)

The least important thing about this game is that every time I see the title I start humming the similarly-titled folk song, and I don't want to be the only one doing that so I'm sharing it with you. You're welcome.

Moving along, Beneath the Weeping Willow is an Ink game where you play as a ghost. A couple of vacationers have rented out your old house on AirB&B on Halloween night, the only night you can interact with the living, so this is your one shot to try to get them to solve the mystery of your death and lay you to rest properly. Despite the ghost situation, the spookiness factor is low, and the general atmosphere is one of autumnal coziness tempered by slight melancholy.

You can’t interact with your guests directly, so it’s a matter of figuring out what you can interact with, what effect it will have, and how the guests move around the house at various points in the evening. Restarting at least once may be necessary, as the whole thing is on a tight timer. The apparent complexity of it really impressed me given the four-hour limit on a Petite Mort game. In general, I found it surprisingly polished and rewarding to play, and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a satisfying bite-sized puzzle game of moderate difficulty.

Sometimes the mechanisms we develop to protect ourselves or make ourselves feel better outlive their usefulness and become actually detrimental. (Sometimes, also, they weren’t that healthy to start with.) They can spin out of control and start running your life while you feel helpless to break free of them and do the things you actually want to do.

Also, some types of internalized bigotry can create a kind of double-think, especially for a well-meaning person who wants to extend some understanding to others: Here’s why it’s okay for other people to be like this, but not for me. It’s perfectly valid and I wouldn’t judge people for it, it’s just that I don’t have it bad enough to really count. Of course, despite one’s best intentions, this often ends up manifesting in ways that do hurt others, especially if they remind you of yourself.

To elucidate how I Got You explores these themes would be to spoil several of the turns its narrative takes over its relatively short play time, and I do think it’s better to go into it with minimal knowledge about where it’s going, but I will say I found it effective and relatable.

When I first played it, I assumed this was an "illusion of choice" type of game; the outcome I got felt fairly inevitable, and a lot of time choices that I made that were too honest or vulnerable got redirected to a "safer" choice, so I assumed that would happen regardless of what you chose. But in fact it turns out that options that are silly or obviously inappropriate will not be redirected, and you can choose those and see a wildly different version of events in which nothing very horrific happens to you because you self-sabotaged to avoid confronting how you really feel. So that's... good...? (Well, narratively and as a way of using interactivity, it's very effective! For the PC, though, hard to say what's a better outcome.)

Detective en habitación cerrada es un juego de Inform alucinante protagonizado por un detective que sólo puede investigarse a sí mismo. Sin embargo, necesita un delito que investigar, un cliente y un culpable; descubrir cómo conseguirlos es el objetivo del juego.

El tono de la narración es sarcástico, y la premisa se utiliza para satirizar el individualismo y la privatización, deleitándose con un juego de palabras sobre los distintos significados de “privado”. La prosa es uno de los puntos fuertes del juego (aunque la perspectiva cambia de segunda a primera persona a veces; no se si era intencional).

Una vez que entendí la mecánica básica, pude avanzar bien un rato, pero hacia el final empecé a tener problemas con entender la lógica, aunque parece que me he encontrado con algún error en el juego.

Al final logré resolver el caso; el resultado no fue precisamente un final feliz, pero en este juego me sorprendería si algo así fuera posible. En general disfruté de la experiencia.

Detective en habitación cerrada is a mind-bending Inform game featuring a detective who can only investigate himself. Nevertheless, he needs a crime to investigate, a client, and a culprit; figuring out how to produce these things is the goal of the game.

The tone of the narration is sarcastic, and the premise is used to satirize individualism and privatization, playing on different meanings of “private”. The writing is generally a strong point of the game (though the point of view slips from second person to first person at times; I wasn’t sure if that was intentional).

Once I figured out the basic mechanics, I was able to make good progress for a while, but towards the end I started to struggle with the logic, although it seems like I may have encountered a bug in the game.

In the end I did manage to solve the case; the result was not exactly a happy ending, but in this game I would be surprised if such a thing were possible. Overall I enjoyed the experience.

Go-Strange-Ghost Range is one of Andrew Schultz’s oronym games in the vein of Why Pout and Us Too. If you’ve played those games, you likely know whether you’ll enjoy this one; if not, this might be a good way to see how you get on with this particular form of wordplay-based gameplay, since it’s a short and straightforward experience. There is a particular order puzzles need to be solved in, but you’re not keeping track of a complex interlocking set of dependencies like in the longer games. A set of progressive hints is available for each room, I believe, although I only needed to turn to them once. The whole thing is remarkably smooth for speed IF, and in general I found it a delightful little morsel.

Especially impressive is that this (and its two companion games) was created in Adventuron, so none of the code from the previous oronym games was used. As an added bonus, this has allowed the addition of pixel graphics, which are an endearing supplement to the game’s whimsy.

Dad’s Shiva is a choice-based game about visiting your sister during the official mourning period for your father, though you didn’t have a good relationship with either of them. The family’s past is a thorny mess of hurt and secrets and resentment (mind the content warnings if you’re sensitive to stories about child abuse), and while poking around your sister’s apartment you can ferret some things out, but you can’t really fix anything.

The writing is simple and effective, and I liked the specificity of the New York Jewish community that it’s set in, reflected in the details of the setting and the distinctive Yiddish-inflected syntax of some of the dialogue. The PC is a little bit of an enigma outside of their trauma; the true character centerpiece is not the PC nor even the titular father, but the PC’s sister, Miranda, who is complicated and unpleasant but not one-dimensionally hateable.

The endings deny any real closure or catharsis; I wouldn’t say they come unexpectedly, but there’s an uneasy sense of non-resolution, a lack of some significant final action to take. Which is perfectly appropriate to the subject matter; really, anything else might have felt too pat.

(I was a judge for the inaugural episode of the Iron ChIF event, and this is the evaluation I wrote for that event. As such, it is organized around the scoring categories of Iron ChIF.)

Writing

The writing here is spare but effective, and the simplicity of it makes sense for a protagonist in this kind of survival situation. I appreciated the little looks we get at the protagonist’s personality and history; they are someone who once had big dreams and has been ground down by life, only for a dream to come true in a situation where they cannot at all appreciate it. There are little bits of pathos to it all—the ship named after your mother’s, the radio you can’t afford to fix—but most prominently the PC comes off as tired. They’ve been through a lot, and now something that should be an awe-inspiring experience is just one more thing to deal with.

The game also takes its opportunities to throw in details that make the alien craft feel truly alien—the interiors of enamel rather than metal, the unpleasant color that’s somewhat outside the human-visible spectrum, the mysterious darkness. Even the way they name celestial bodies suggests some complex system that we don’t know enough to understand. It makes sure that what should feel unfamiliar does, which is an important thing for any first-contact type of narrative.

It is definitely a puzzle-forward game with narrative, prose, and characterization as flavoring; the PC’s personal journey isn’t taking center stage here. But it’s effective flavoring, and very tasty.

Playability

I’m biased on this one as a multilingual person, dabbler in linguistics, and lover of language puzzles; I think I had an easier time of it than many people did. But I did like the language puzzle a lot and felt a lot of joy and excitement when getting a new word or finding a new instance of a word I’d seen before that helped me nail down its meaning.

I think the way the puzzles escalated made a lot of sense and I felt triumphant and smart at various moments when solving them. The thing that tripped me up was nothing so difficult as the language, but rather just your basic adventure game stuff. I got stuck for an inordinately long time at the red door, because the game said (Spoiler - click to show)(roughly translated) “turn coil to open red door”, but I was convinced I had to (Spoiler - click to show)touch the coil to the red door or somehow stick it in the red door, and none of the commands I tried to use to make that happen worked, and the hints were of no help… but then, is this the game’s fault if it told me in so many words what to do and I didn’t try (Spoiler - click to show)TURN COIL? Then at the end, I figured out (Spoiler - click to show)what message I needed to send with the device but didn’t realize I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)scan stuff to send it as opposed to speaking it or putting it into the device somehow, and spent a while spinning my wheels on that. Is that the game’s fault? Could it have stopped me from being an idiot? I’m not sure. But it did reduce my feelings of playfulness, whatever that’s worth.

Regardless of my idiosyncratically stupid experiences, from chatter during the play period I get the impression that the puzzles were pitched a little too hard for the average IF player and the hints weren’t quite the ones people needed at times, but I think this is something that would have easily been fixed if playtesting had been feasible.

Design

This game was extensively taking advantage of the abilities of Dialog. The interface for adding or changing translations was easy to use and I was happy to be playing a game in a system that could have that mechanic instead of requiring typing for all of that (or just making you keep track of it by hand). The automap isn’t really a necessity in this small of a game, but it’s a nice convenience.

It also uses options Dialog has for visual styling, with the inclusion of the cover image and light and dark mode CSS. The color schemes mostly look nice and fit the vibe of the game.

(Note: In light mode, the link text/background contrast is a little too low. I think the background could just be lightened a little and that would fix it—that’s what I did with Stylebot, anyway. A very understandable issue, though—I’ve done the same thing when trying to put together two color schemes in a hurry.)

In general, it’s just really identifiably a Dialog game, and for a less-used authoring system I think that’s very cool to see.

The puzzle design is also something the chef discussed during the process, and I think their planning for how to establish, build on, and then twist the puzzle mechanics shows through in the finished product—even if some of the puzzles could benefit from more scaffolding I think the basic structure of puzzle progression is good.

Inventiveness

Endymion clearly owes a lot to its forbears in the “translation game” genre, but it’s worth noting that this is a genre that has very few entries to date. I remember when I finished Heaven’s Vault (before Chants of Sennaar came out), I went looking for recommendations for similar games, and the recommendations were very sparse (and one of them, Tork, is no longer playable anyway). I also think the way that Endymion marries the language puzzle aspect to adventure game puzzling (decipher these messages to learn exactly how you should be manipulating these medium dry goods!) is fairly unusual—it has its forerunners in things like The Gostak but there’s nothing quite like it as far as I’m aware.

The premise of the spaceship crash in a remote location is an old one, in IF and elsewhere (actually, is it meaningfully distinct as a trope from the sea-shipwreck in a remote location, do we think?). But I do think that the goal being communication in an alien language gives the story a different core from many such stories, where the PC might repair the spaceship or devise some other clever method of escaping their situation. It’s a little less about self-reliance and a little more about striving for connection. (Or maybe it’s just about how aliens are cool??? I’m sorry, I have to get on my litcrit BS sometimes, otherwise what did I waste all that time in college for.)

Challenge Ingredient

It’s hard to imagine a dish more suffused with its challenge ingredient than this one. Both the device itself, as a physical object, and the nonhuman language of its messages are absolutely central to every puzzle in the game, as well as to the story overall. It’s integral, you could say, to both the “interactive” and the “fiction” pieces. Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider is a game about a fairy and a weird machine and, well, an ancient treasure and a secret spider, and Endymion is a game about a device that emits messages in a nonhuman language. What more can I say?

(I was a judge for the inaugural episode of the Iron ChIF event, and this is the evaluation I wrote for that event. As such, it is organized around the scoring categories of Iron ChIF.)

Writing

The narrative voice of the fairy is very strong, and every parser response I saw was infused with it. She (I assume, because “every other fairy you have ever met also thinks the same of herself” implies every fairy is a “she”—though perhaps they just use the generic feminine?) is an unreliable narrator in the way that matters most to IF, which is that she doesn’t understand or accurately report on her surroundings, but she’s also not a very reliable reporter of her own feelings, adding some layer of bluster to anything that might get too personal. It’s not that she wants to attract Lind’s attention, it’s that she knows fate has ordained that she do so. It’s not that being kept in a pocket with the corpses of her fellows for ages has been traumatic or even upsetting, it’s just that it’s dented her cheerful disposition slightly. Everything she says has to be scrutinized a bit for what’s really going on.

When it comes to the NPCs, the clear standout is the stranger. At first he seems sinister, and that’s not entirely inaccurate; he does eat fairies, who are sapient creatures, and torments them (however obliviously) by keeping them captive first. But ultimately he’s looking for love, and he’s willing to risk being devoured for it, and this wins the fairy’s sympathies in the end. Trala and Lind, meanwhile, are more stock characters who never get very much depth, but this works fine for the arc of the fairy’s imagined alignment with them (when they have not even noticed her) vs. her actual alignment with the stranger (whom she actually speaks to in her own voice at the end, a rare occurrence).

The setting has often been one of the major pleasures of Pacian’s game, and in this one-room game we get a lot less of that, but I appreciate the flavoring of the D&D-style high fantasy with a little bit of sci-fi. It’s familiar enough to be gestured to quickly instead of spelled out in more depth, with enough zest to keep it from seeming like something you’ve seen a million times before.

Playability

The game plays very smoothly for the most part—it’s hard to get hung up for too long, mostly thanks to its one-verb conceit, which makes the puzzles come down to figuring out what things are based on what details you can get from the fairy’s descriptions and the noises of the mysterious device. Once you’ve twigged to what’s what, there’s no additional step to figure out how to execute what you need to do. Nothing is too complex, but it’s satisfying enough as it is.

I did find that as the game went on and the number of doohickeys, whatsits, and thingummies mounted, it became difficult to keep track of what was what, and I wished that the game had been designed to take already-used items out of play, or had some other mechanic to limit the amount of time a player can spend combing through the stranger’s pocket examining everything to try to remember which name goes with what characteristics.

The other part of the game I struggled with a bit was the final sequence on the platform, where I had to figure out the means of searching the treasure pile for a specific thing. This takes on a sort of (Spoiler - click to show)telescoping Lime Ergot mechanic that hasn’t appeared before; it works well, but did take me a few frustrated moments to even think to attempt. It’s hard to get out of the groove, right at the end, of a game whose puzzles have otherwise all worked one way. So if more varied mechanics are going to be present, probably best to introduce them earlier. But it didn’t hold me up for too terribly long.

There is an in-game hint system, which I perhaps should have tried for the sake of the evaluation, but I didn’t end up needing it in general–which is a compliment to the puzzle design, at least!

Design

The game’s puzzle design mostly feels solid and unified, other than the last-minute introduction of a different puzzle type. Outside of that part, the puzzles refined on the same single concept and flowed nicely one into the next.

There’s thematic resonance, as well, between the gameplay of attempting to decipher the surroundings by piecing together information from two people (beings?) with an incomplete understanding of them and the thread of loneliness and frustrated communication attempts that runs through the game.

The game also has a tendency to set up and then immediately puncture well-worn tropes, such as the monstrous enemy being revealed to be a corrupted form of humans or a humanlike species, or the good old “lost technology of the ancients” (they don’t make machines like this anymore… because they make them much smaller now). This is always a solid source of humor and keeps things fun for jaded types like me who have perhaps consumed too much genre fiction for their own good. (Of course, frequently-used tropes can still be done well; it’s all in the execution. But when you have little space for that execution, sometimes a quick humorous nod is the right choice.)

Showing off the unique affordances of Dialog was not perhaps so much a focus here; I do understand that it makes a one-verb game easier to put together in this short time and saves a lot of effort getting rid of default responses, but I do feel like “it makes it easier to limit its capabilities” maybe leaves less of an impression than showing off what it can do.

Inventiveness

Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider definitely felt fresh and unusual to me in a lot of ways. I can’t quite think of a good comparison point for its figuring-out-what-things-are-based gameplay (Where Nothing Is Ever Named, maybe? But it’s certainly not a crowded field). I also can’t say I’ve encountered many interdimensional spiders in trenchcoats pretending to be human in IF or elsewhere.

The PC did feel very Tinkerbell-esque, as Pacian tacitly acknowledged, but to get that kind of character as a protagonist is somewhat unusual. (I personally can’t name any other works from the point of view of a Tinkerbell expy, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it’s something.)

The setting is perhaps the least original aspect, spiders and passing trope-subversions aside, but it’s a one-room game, which makes setting harder to convey, so it’s more that it would have been impressive if it did manage to evoke a unique setting than that it’s disappointing that it didn’t.

Challenge Ingredient

The device held by the stranger—which seems to tell him things about his environment, albeit in a way not quite so straightforward as saying the names of objects it’s pointed at—is central to (most of) the gameplay, providing information to supplement the fairy’s limited perception of her surroundings. The nonhumanness of the language may not necessarily matter, but the nonhumanness of the spider matters (to his motivations, to our interpretation of his character), so I’d say that aspect of the ingredient is not neglected.

The ingredient is, however, just that little bit shy of being fundamental to the dish. You could have had almost the same game if the spider were just chittering to himself when he looked at different objects. But it’s still an excellent use of the ingredient.