Reviews by EJ
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An uncomfortable moment, April 20, 2024In Chinese Family Dinner Moment, the PC, a closeted AMAB trans person who has been away at college in the US, reunites with their Chinese Indonesian family for a Lunar New Year dinner. (Whether the character is a woman or nonbinary is not stated.) On one side is an auntie who wants to chatter inanely about family members the PC barely knows; on the other an uncle with unsavory intentions. The PC can't eat the food (they're a vegetarian), can't reveal too much about themself, can't stomach engaging with their family's conservative political opinions and general bigotry. In such a situation, what can you do? As anyone who's been through this kind of family dinner might guess, not much...
This is a very quick game, but it works perfectly at the length that it is, because it zooms in on this single moment and really makes the player feel the PC's acute discomfort and sense of being trapped, (Spoiler - click to show)as well as their self-disgust when they finally cave and starts parroting what their family wants to hear. Much of this is accomplished through the use of a strictly limited parser--a great illustration of how "interactivity" doesn't have to mean "making choices" or "solving puzzles." A static short story of a similar word count would not have nearly the impact that this has.
The Good Weapon review, February 2, 2024This short visual novel takes place in a dystopian future where an all-seeing AI, VIGIL, rules the earth. The AI's consciousness is distributed among multiple datacenters (or "nerve clusters") around the world, making it nigh-impossible to destroy it, or even strike a serious blow. If you can't hit all the nerve centers at once, its consciousness will remain mostly intact; it will regroup and rebuild, its dominance not seriously weakened.
The resistance movement, once large, is now down to three people. The PC and their two compatriots are locked in a bunker, dealing with all the interpersonal tensions and jealousies that are bound to come from being in close quarters with a small number of people for an extended time. But one point of conflict is of greater import to the world at large: They've gotten their hands on a weapon that can take out VIGIL, but the group's leader, Sleep, seems to have become oddly reluctant to use it. Why is she backing down now? And is she right to do so?
The Good Weapon's science-fictional concerns aren't new, but they're well-executed. In particular, the moody black-white-and-red art and the terse, sometimes fragmentary prose combine to create a palpably tense and oppressive atmosphere. It's not unremittingly grim, though; here and there, moments of hope and connection can be found--and these moments nag at the PC as they race towards their destructive goal, casting doubt on whether it's all worth it.
It's hard to talk about the way choices are used here without spoiling the game's central twist, but although I don't believe they lead to any branching, they do serve a narrative purpose and I found them effective. Another choice at the end might not have gone amiss, but I think the sparingly-used interactivity worked well as it was.
It's a shame that the game is download-only, since I know that a lack of browser playability puts people off, but if you don't mind that, I feel that this atmospheric and thoughtful little game is well worth your time.
Well-written game, frustrating interface, February 2, 2024In Three Things, the player character is translating a poem for a college class on Russian-English translation while ruminating on their disintegrating relationship with their boyfriend.
The poem is by Anna Akhmatova, whose work I find fascinating because it's often laconic and ambiguous--clearly freighted with emotion, but what that emotion is can be hard to identify. The poem central to Three Things is no exception; it describes a man who's hard to please and especially disdainful of "hysterical" women, and concludes with the speaker's statement that she was his wife. Should we read pride into this last statement? Bitterness? Weary resignation? It's hard to say.
The translation aspect of the game is very much grounded in reality. This isn't Emily Short's Endure, where the possible "translations" you can select from are more loose interpretations of the overall situations in the poem. All of your options are plausible translations; the differences come down to nuance, the way the emphasis and tone can shift depending on the minutiae of word choice. As a sometime translator, I deeply appreciated this more realistic take on the process, because I think it can be a fascinating experience in and of itself; when you jazz it up to provide an artificially wide array of interpretations, that might make it more appealing to the layperson in some ways, but to me the art of translation exists primarily in navigating those tiny shades of meaning, and I'd love for more people to get to see how that works.
And of course, each possible word comes with associations for the PC, a different lens into their own failing relationship. Before making your choice, you can click on each option to see the PC's musings as prompted by that word; through these fragmentary but evocative lines, Three Things conveys the character of the PC's partner and the problems in their relationship. The PC is more of a cipher--but then, so is the speaker in the Akhmatova poem, so that's fitting. The sense of finality given to submitting your translation at the end of the game does suggest that perhaps, through this exercise, the PC has come to some conclusions about their relationship as well.
But while I appreciated many aspects of Three Things, the actual act of playing it was an exercise in frustration for me. I honestly do not understand why the game has the options come up on mouseover, instead of on click as is the usual way of things. I'll admit that this might be a me problem; I do have fine motor control issues, so I handle a mouse more clumsily than the average person. But the experience of playing through the game for me was one of accidentally mousing over a word I'd already selected a translation for, having the dialogue with the choices pop up, having to move my mouse to close the dialogue, then trying to move my mouse over to the next untranslated word, whereupon I would accidentally mouse over a word I'd already translated, and then...
Having the words that don't bring up a list of options be translated on mouseover is fine; I did keep getting them out of order due to the aforementioned clumsy mouse handling, but most people would probably find it clunkier to have that be on click. But I would dearly love for there to at least be a selectable setting to have the translation dialogue choices come up on click instead, because the interface as it is now made my time with Three Things much more frustrating than it had to be and distracted me from appreciating its artistry, which I very much wanted to do.
One Does Not Simply Fry review, February 2, 2024One Does Not Simply Fry is a short ChoiceScript game laden with Lord of the Rings puns and jokes about cooking competitions. Possibly also jokes about ChoiceScript games—I’m not sure whether the bit where the PC is exasperated at having to fill out endless forms about their identity, preferences, and motivation before they can start the cooking competition is a friendly dig at the usual Choice of Games style, but if it is, it amused me.
Rather than actually filling out those forms, you select a premade character—essentially either Legolas, Eowyn, or Frodo—and then get frying. In effect, you’re skipping the part of the CoG game where you decide how to build your various skills and going straight to the part where you figure out how to apply them to your best advantage. I’m a bit impatient, at least when it comes to this style of gameplay, so I appreciated this.
I was easily able to win the fry-off with every character except poor Leggy Ass (his high stat of “breadcraft magic” simply doesn’t seem to have as many potential applications within the competition as some of the other skills). The game encourages you to play multiple times for the full experience, but I was a bit disappointed at how little changed between playthroughs—the differences are mostly at the beginning and end. This seemed especially glaring with Froyo, who is accompanied by an assistant (Samfool, in a slightly lazy joke) when none of the other characters are; this seemed like it should at least have an impact on flavor text, but Sam apparently didn’t have much to say during the competition. Even the special unlockable character of the Which King (he can’t remember which king he’s supposed to be, you see) mostly gets the same text as the other possible PCs during the competition, although the divergence at the end is more significant.
This is a little unfortunate because the game trades primarily on its humor, and seeing the same jokes over and over again tends to take the shine off them. (Although I was unreasonably amused by “mistainless mithril” every time.) If the style of humor seems like a good time to you, it’s worth a play, but I think the optimal way to go about it might be to do one normal playthrough (probably not as Leggy Ass), then play as the Which King, then call it quits.
Antony and Cleopatra review, February 2, 2024The Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective gamebooks have spawned a whole genre of multiplayer games where the players take the role of detectives provided with a number of leads; limited to a certain number of actions per day, they must decide what to follow up on and hope they manage to get enough information to solve the case. These games generally end with a quiz asking not just about who the culprit is, but about a number of other particulars surrounding the case, to see how much the players have discovered or deduced. Antony and Cleopatra is an attempt to bring this genre into the realm of multiplayer IF; it’s an ambitious and interesting attempt, but not, I think, an entirely successful one.
Rather than emulating Sherlock Holmes, Antony and Cleopatra take their cues from Nick and Nora Charles, but the chemistry and charm that have made the Thin Man movies enduring classics are largely absent; the influence is obvious mainly in the staggering amount of drinking on the job that the characters can do. Characterizations for the protagonists are fairly thin and their interactions with each other are minimal. This seems like a missed opportunity—Antony and Cleopatra are colorful figures with well-established pop-cultural personas that seem ripe for some engaging repartee in the interstitial scenes between investigative activities. But the only moment in the game where this comes through is the bit in which Antony has to explain to Cleopatra why a jewelry store being named “Blood Diamonds” might be off-putting, as Cleopatra thinks it’s only natural that diamonds should be paid for in blood. I would have liked to see more moments like this one—more character interaction, more dry humor wrung from the absurdity of these two larger-than-life figures investigating a murder.
Antony and Cleopatra’s innovation with regards to the genre’s traditional gameplay is to add investigation sequences where both players are offered dialogue options to question people connected to the case, but the lack of distinction between the two characters here is disappointing—sometimes you can get the same question worded slightly differently, but only slightly. In combination with the lack of focus on developing the characters and their relationship, the lack of any game-mechanical difference makes the two-protagonist conceit feel somewhat pointless. In fact, since you always have time to ask all possible questions and it makes no difference who asks them, the interactivity isn’t doing much for the investigation scenes in general.
There are a number of different approaches one could take here, any of which I think could have been effective:
1. Dispense with the two-PC conceit entirely and make the whole experience more like playing Consulting Detective with your friends, where you’re not really controlling multiple distinct characters, just trying to hash out among yourselves where you should focus your investigative energies. As in SHCD, make the investigation scenes static passages; have the planning sessions be the bulk of the actual gameplay and rely on discussion between players to keep them engaged otherwise.
2. Conversely, take inspiration from some of Consulting Detective’s successors that were actually designed as multiplayer games (unlike the original) and make the characters mechanically distinct. Give them unique investigative abilities (with limitations on when and how often they can use them); give them actually distinct conversation options; have them notice different things. In IF, this is an opportunity to work in characterization in a way a board game can’t, but honestly, in my experience, if you give players the mechanical distinctions, their imaginations will often fill in the rest.
3. Go the IF sleight-of-hand route and keep the two characters mechanically identical, but give them very distinct personalities. The player may always get the exact same information in the end, but the initial formulation of the questions is so different that it seems like it matters which PC is asking what. The illusion would fall apart on replay, of course, but SHCD-likes (if you will) usually aren’t replayable anyway.
The mystery itself also didn’t quite work for me; maybe there was something I didn’t find, but as far as I can tell, you’re meant to solve it by noticing a single discrepancy that you can’t in any way follow up on and extrapolating the whole situation from there. I understand SHCD cases usually did require some leaps of logic (which I presume is part of the reason that it turned into a multiplayer event when it wasn’t designed as one—more likely that someone in your group will make the right connection), and my preferences here are probably shaped by having spent much more time with recent games like Detective: Modern Crime than with the original. But I would argue that what’s fitting for a game based on the controversial deductive style of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t feel so natural elsewhere, and in an interactive mystery I do prefer having firmer grounds for my conclusions.
On a technical level, the experience is smooth, and that's an impressive feat in itself. But gameplay-wise, this game feels to me like it makes just enough changes to the formula to introduce new problems without fully committing to the strengths of the new medium.
Citizen Makane review, February 2, 2024When you think about it, text adventure games are a triumph of phallogocentrism (as originally defined by Jacques Derrida and expanded on by feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray). The world of the parser leaves no room for indeterminacy, for ambiguity, for self-contradictory ideas. What matters is concrete objects, represented by words, able to be manipulated in predictable ways and be used in puzzles with a single solution that can be reached (ideally) through logical reasoning. As this worldview is associated with a Western, patriarchal system of values that tends to set up hierarchical oppositions that define men by what they have and women by what they lack, games like the original Stiffy Makane—which is quite literally phallocentric—can be argued to be the ultimate expression of this tendency, having the player engage in this system with the explicit goal of the subjugation of women. Meanwhile, Citizen Makane demonstrates its commitment to complicating the phallogocentric worldview in its first scene, which requires (and it is key that this is required, not simply allowed) the player character to unequip his penis in order to proceed...
Okay, okay, that’s enough. Citizen Makane is a porn parody deck-building game, and although it has moments of sincerity and some actual commentary to make about masculinity, most of the game is very, very silly.
It is the story of a man who wakes up after centuries of cryosleep to find himself in a world where men have otherwise died out. He has been revived as an experiment in reintroducing men to society, and is also playing host to an AI, Shamhat, whom he is tasked with providing with training data by having sex with as many women as possible.
The sex is represented by a very simple deck-building card game; once you’ve figured out the basics of how it works, it becomes rote, with little variation between encounters. The acts you perform are described with semi-randomized ridiculous similes clearly parodying bad erotica, which keeps things entertaining for a while, but the fun of that wears thin eventually too. This is unfortunate, as the player does have to grind (no pun intended) to advance the plot. But then, maybe the tedium is intentional; as the game goes on, the PC himself obviously begins to tire of the whole thing and long for some real connection.
This is one of a number of ways that Citizen Makane sets up gender-essentialist and heterosexist elements for the purpose of knocking them down. The player must afford the game a certain amount of goodwill for this to work, as much of the knocking-down comes fairly late in a long (by IFComp standards) game, but—all semi-joking attempts at feminist litcrit aside—the opening sequence did serve its purpose of giving me some confidence that these elements weren’t being replicated uncritically.
There is, however, one area in which the game doesn’t try to question the assumptions that undergird the genre that it’s parodying, which is the treatment of sex and gender as strict binaries. Granted, I’m not sure quite what I would have liked to see the game do here, given the “all men have died out” premise; it’s inherently difficult to handle the idea of sex and gender as spectra in that context. I don’t think any recent take on the premise has handled this in a way that I was entirely satisfied with, or that didn’t cause a certain amount of controversy; even the best-regarded example that I’m aware of, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, came in for a decent amount of criticism within the trans community (of which the author is also a part). So I can’t entirely fault Citizen Makane for simply avoiding the issue, but I was still a bit uncomfortable with the lack of acknowledgement that trans, nonbinary, and intersex people exist. Though I did appreciate that the game made a point of showing that some of the women still prefer relationships with each other, even with a man available.
Ultimately, despite these flaws, I did find Citizen Makane a largely effective deconstruction of the toxic machismo of the genre that Stiffy Makane, in its particularly egregious awfulness, has become emblematic of. The opening and ending scenes are particularly strong, and there are plenty of humorous moments to be found along the way. But I’m always a bit on the fence about whether intentionally boring the player is worth it, and while I recognize its thematic import here, it still made the long middle section of the game a bit of a slog.
Finders Commission, February 2, 2024In The Finders Commission, you play as one of the members of the eponymous group, a euphemistically named band of thieves-for-hire. You’ve been hired by the goddess Bastet (or maybe just a regular talking cat) to steal an artifact belonging to her out of a museum. You navigate the museum exhibits, in the process avoiding police officers, creating distractions, entering various codes, flirting with a guard for information, and so on, all in preparation for the moment when you finally take Bastet’s aegis from its case. There seems to be no way to fail at this, but you receive a score at the end grading how well you pulled it off.
As this description might suggest, in a case of convergent evolution, the gameplay here is rather similar to the heist sections of Lady Thalia, which makes it a bit awkward to comment on due to the bias involved. That is to say, I think it’s a very solid foundation for a heist game, but of course I would think so. In any case, barring a few bugs and one puzzle that was somewhat opaque due to the underdescribed environment, I think the structure was largely implemented well here. Nothing is really that difficult to figure out, but there’s some challenge involved in fully exploring the museum and finding all the things that you can do.
That said, the writing was a little spare for my tastes. The prose consists of terse sentences with minimal variation in structure; many rooms lack sensory detail, and not much characterization comes through either. It’s very much a straightforward recitation of a list of facts. If the gameplay were more complex, that might have been enough to carry the game, but as it is I think it could stand to be punched up a little.
Also—I don’t want to be told that the detective “could be a friend or maybe even a lover” if the two of you were on the same side of the law. I want to see that tension between them; I want to feel the star-crossed chemistry for myself. (I mean, again, of course I would, but.) Even though they don’t interact, this could still be demonstrated through how the PC thinks about the detective and what they notice about him. Obviously this is a trope I enjoy, but I’d like to think this isn’t just about me wanting to see more of it in general; if you’re not going to make the player feel the gulf between the two characters and genuinely regret that it’s impassable, why even bring it up?
You can choose to play any one of a number of different Finders, who apparently have different strengths and interests, but as far as I can tell, the only difference this made in the game was to the three-sentence description of what you do with your morning before heading to the museum. This seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for greater variation in both narration and gameplay actions available.
I could see an expanded version of this game, or a sequel, becoming something I would very much enjoy, but as it is there’s not quite enough there for me to become fully invested.
A too-fleeting glimpse of a life, January 29, 2024June 1998, Sydney is a short narrative about a Chinese Indonesian woman living in Australia whose family moves in with her after anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia force them out of their home. Her white girlfriend then dumps her for being unwilling to come out to her family, hurling a racist insult as a parting remark.
Many people seem to have found it resonant and moving, so I'm a bit of an outlier here; my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. But to me, the 500-word limit of the Twiny Jam did this narrative a disservice. You get very little background on the main character, her relationship with her family, or her relationship with her girlfriend; the player is more or less launched straight into a conversation with the girlfriend that escalates from "hello" to total bridge-burning in the space of three or four exchanges. (I also couldn't really tell where on the scale of "blindsided" to "long aware that something like this was coming" the PC was in all this.) Then there's a brief scene with the family watching television coverage of the riots; then it's over.
I can feel bad for the character in the abstract; it is clear that she's dealing with a lot. I can fill in some of the emotional blanks from personal or secondhand experience (and others would be able to fill in even more). But to me, this 500-word vignette doesn't paint a clear picture of a person or a situation or a particular tangle of emotions; it's just a series of events moved through so briskly and with so little detail that it's hard to really feel the emotional punch.
The Whisperers review, January 29, 2024The central conceit of The Whisperers is that the player is an audience member watching a play in Stalin’s USSR. At various points in the show, the audience gets to vote on what the characters should do; the idea is that this is a teaching tool, meant to show, essentially, what happens to people who cross the Party.
The story revolves primarily around the doomed romance of two Trotskyist would-be revolutionaries, Nikolai and Agnessa. Agnessa’s brother Sergei is an NKVD officer, and their neighbors, the older couple Georgy and Dariya, show up occasionally to chat and offer advice. All five characters have things to hide from one another; this is presumably the reason for the game’s other conceit, the idea that the actors are whispering at all times unless otherwise noted. This is an arty touch that sits oddly with the play’s in-universe status as a piece of Soviet agitprop, a genre not really known for metaphor or anything that would open the intended meaning up to interpretation. (Though it may be that while The Whisperers the game intends the whispering to be symbolic, The Whisperers the play intends this entirely literally and the agitprop writer just thought that that was a normal thing for people in an apartment building with thin walls to do?)
Of course, no matter what choices you make, Agnessa and Nikolai’s fates are sealed from the outset. The only question is how much collateral damage will be incurred—making the characters do things the Party wouldn’t approve of naturally leads to worse outcomes for Sergei, Georgy, and Dariya.
The game is well-written in many respects. The setting is clearly well-researched, and the necessary information is communicated deftly to the player without any awkward “as you know” info-dumps (though there is a glossary to help anyone who’s lost). The characters also feel very real; Agnessa’s mindset of being unable to relax or do anything fun because the world is in a horrible state and she could be doing something about it, particularly, was very familiar to me from my experience in activist circles. (If she hadn't (Spoiler - click to show)decided to essentially go out in a blaze of glory, she'd be on the fast track to burnout.) And while some of the choices don’t mean much, at their best they provide a window into the struggles of flawed people trying to live under intolerable circumstances and striving, however vainly, to keep their loved ones safe.
But I’m not sure how to feel about the theatrical framing. It has a distancing effect, especially given that you’re playing as either a faceless audience member or the collective will of the audience. You’re not inhabiting a particular character who can experience any consequences for the choices the player makes, and you’re constantly reminded that the characters who are experiencing consequences are fictional. This encourages the player to hold the whole thing at arm’s length, and I can’t quite figure out what it’s meant to add in return, or, alternatively, why it’s to this story’s advantage to be viewed at a few layers of remove.
The author also provides a link to the script and encourages people to actually perform the show, and as an amateur actor and general theatre enthusiast, I couldn’t resist taking a look with performability in mind. The first two-thirds or so seem quite doable, but toward the end, the combinations of variables to be taken into account become complicated and the text diverges quite significantly, going from changes to a few lines to, in some cases, entirely different scenes. I’ve seen a few pieces of somewhat-interactive theatre in my time; usually there’s only a single point of divergence and it comes fairly late in the show, so that the actors don’t have to keep track of so many things and memorize so many different versions of their scenes. This is considerably more ambitious than anything I’ve seen performed. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but certainly I think you’d need a cast of highly skilled professionals to pull it off. I would be interested to see it done, though!
Last Valentine's Day review, January 9, 2024Last Valentine’s Day represents the experience and aftermath of a breakup as a time loop in which the PC relives the last day of the relationship over and over, passing from shock and disbelief through despair before finally reaching the point where he’s able to move on with his life. The world around him reflects his mental state—the weather, the condition of the park he passes through, and the lives of the people around him go from pleasant to miserable, then gradually improve again.
This externalization of the PC’s feelings serves as somewhat of a substitute for actual interiority—there's little specific detail to be found here, so I don’t have a strong grasp of who the PC is, who his partner was, or why their relationship fell apart. The most we get is a letter from the ex describing their relationship as "like a roller coaster," which, in addition to being a cliche, has a whole range of possible meanings, some of which would make the PC a rather unsympathetic figure. But the evocative descriptions of the environment and the predicaments of the somewhat more distinctively drawn side characters help to ensure that the game sounds the emotional notes that it means to, for the most part.
The game effectively captures the post-breakup emotional arc of a person who has been dumped; choosing to represent this as a Groundhog Day loop emphasizes how difficult it can be to move past this experience, and the fact that choices don’t matter much makes sense inasmuch as this kind of post-relationship grief is, to a degree, something you have to just wait out. (Others have suggested that this passage-of-time aspect makes the time loop framing a bad fit, but to me the emotional logic of it made sense -- the PC is obsessively retreading the breakup in his mind, but with each cycle he comes a little closer to being able to actually put it behind him.) But without any distinctive characterization for the main ex-couple or insight into how things got to this point, it all feels a little hollow in the end.
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