Reviews by EJ

This is a one-room wordplay puzzle game; the conceit is that it’s a sort of audition for the titular job. To get the job, you must escape the room using five machines that transform objects in mostly word-related ways. A talking rabbit stands by to offer assistance should you need it.

The number of objects available to manipulate is very small, and in most cases the machines won’t work on anything they don’t actually need to work on. On the one hand, this means you can’t learn the rules of the machines by throwing stuff at them; on the other hand, the fact that something being possible to do almost always means it’s useful to do provides helpful guidance in the early portion of the game, which otherwise doesn’t give you much direction.

Once I got past that point, though, the puzzles flowed smoothly, and I enjoyed figuring out each step in the chain of transformations.

While the game is certainly puzzle-forward, the writing is also solid, with fun stage-magic flavor and often entertaining descriptions of the items you create. There are some good jokes (I enjoyed the business with the drawer that you create being basically ontologically closed even though it’s not attached to anything), and the talking rabbit companion, Weldon, is an endearing hint-dispenser (in a somewhat sarcastic kind of way).

I wouldn’t say the ending felt abrupt or unexpected (it’s pretty clear what your final goal is), but it does feel like you don’t get a lot of time to revel in using the mechanics to solve puzzles after the initial stage of figuring out what they are. I think this game would make an excellent intro to (or prequel to?) a longer game set in this universe, and I would happily play such a game if it were to exist.

In this game, you play as a young adult whose archaeologist father has gone missing while searching for the titular reliquary. Concerned about him, the PC rides out to the countryside on their motorbike to find out where he went.

What follows is a puzzle game in an old-school vein. There’s a maze (which felt reasonably justified and well-integrated!) and a light source management mechanic and a decent number of puzzles to solve in which you open up passageways by manipulating the environment with objects that you pick up. The puzzles are largely not too complex, but it is definitely a game that rewards mapping and a certain amount of general note-taking. (An in-game diary is helpfully provided for the latter purpose, although I used a real pencil and paper.)

The game also has simple but evocative descriptions of wilderness and ruins and one rather endearing major NPC. Reliquary of Epiphanius’s most unusual puzzle essentially tests how much attention the player has been paying to all of these things, and I liked that quite a bit. Contributing to the atmosphere are small illustrations for each location and a lot of custom styling for things like inscriptions and handwritten notes, all of which added up to a strong aesthetic appeal.

While the ending reveals that (Spoiler - click to show)the reliquary has likely been destroyed due to careless development of the area, this didn’t make Epiphanius feel like a shaggy dog story. It helps, I think, that the PC has a separate goal to start with and that you accomplish this goal and more—you discover a lot of interesting things and solve an archaeological mystery, even if the solution isn’t what one would hope for. “Surprise, the thing you were told was your goal in this game isn’t achievable!” endings also often feel kind of smug and condescending to me, and this one didn’t, perhaps because it seemed like it had a point to make other than “adventure games and/or certain genres of fiction aren’t very realistic.” The researcher’s joy of discovery is here undercut by the actions of greedy developers and a country that hasn’t always been very careful with its archaeological bounty.

Implementation was a little fiddlier than I tend to prefer (if you can intercept me trying to take action on an item to tell me I need to pick it up first, you can make me try taking it automatically) and I’m not sure the light source management added real, interesting challenge as opposed to busywork (which is how I tend to feel about all light source management mechanics, to be fair). But other than that, this was a very solid traditional puzzle game with some appealingly distinctive aspects, and I hope to see more from this author in the future.

Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games have been a staple of IFComp for almost as long as I’ve been doing reviews, and I’ve generally enjoyed them. The switch in recent years to rhyme- or homophone-based gameplay has made the games a bit harder for me at times because my accent is not exactly the same as the author’s, but they’re still fun.

Us Too is a big, sprawling game with the classic setup of having to solve a bunch of puzzles in order to gain an inheritance from an eccentric relative. It’s also got food theming that helps tie it all together and makes it feel a bit more warm and cozy.

There are a few hint items, which were definitely helpful. (I did accidentally use the one that auto-solves puzzles for you in the process of trying to figure out what it did and thereby locked myself out of some bonus points, but the game will explain to you exactly how it works if you ask it to, so that’s on me.) The game does, however, contain some puzzles that aren’t word puzzles, and I wished there were some way of getting hints on those. (I ended up turning to the walkthrough to figure out how to access the various areas to the south and I’m still not quite sure how I was supposed to reach those conclusions based on in-game information.) The other thing I struggled with a bit is how often you’re supposed to return to the restaurant, which felt like it could have used some more in-game nudges; the final time in particular, I just went there because basically every other area was closed off so if there was anything left to get, it would have to be there.

The word puzzles worked well for me, though (occasional accent difficulties aside); I was usually able to reach the right answer after no more than a couple tries. The THINK command was also very useful in keeping track of cases where I’d come up with the right command but didn’t have the item needed to carry it out yet. Since there’s so much going on in the game, it was especially nice that it would tell me if I now had what I needed to solve an area’s puzzle. That the game will shut off areas that have no puzzles left to solve is also nice (and I think it does leave them open if there are optional bonus puzzles there still, which I appreciate).

The game also seemed quite polished; I didn’t encounter any notable bugs, and while it’s not a very traditional parser game, implementation seemed solid. And while the writing isn’t the draw for this type of game, it has its charming moments (I like the cowardly knight who (Spoiler - click to show)decides to become a surfer instead).

So, if you enjoy this type of wordplay game, Us Too promises an enjoyable couple hours of puzzling, with a lot of thought given to quality-of-life features.

The eponymous protagonist of WATT wakes up on an island, his memories somewhat fuzzy, and is told he has to collect six keys to get into a lighthouse to perform a task that will save everyone. This could be a setup for a classic puzzle game, but WATT is instead a slow, meditative, lightly interactive experience (I’m not sure there’s more than one meaningful choice) that muses on life, priorities, grief, and regret. Its dreamy vagueness was sometimes hard for me to connect with emotionally, but that could be my problem more than the game’s. It still had moments I found evocative and moments I found amusing. I especially liked the Chinese opera segment, which explores a man trying to find a balance between caring for his family and meeting societal expectations of masculinity in a way that’s metaphorical but also specific and unusual.

I did, however, find the work a little unwieldy to interact with. WATT tells you that to move forward, you should click on the colored text if there is any, and if there isn’t you should just click anywhere. This is fine; the problem is that sometimes it isn’t quite true. First, the game also makes heavy use of text styling, sometimes including color, for effect, which means sometimes it’s unclear which colored text is actually clickable and which isn’t. Second, sometimes the links did not seem to be colored—given that when they were visibly colored they were usually blue, it’s possible that the ones that seemed black were actually a very dark blue that my blue light filter was sucking the color out of, but they didn’t look different from the surrounding text to me. In addition, text effects (including colors) did sometimes get in the way of readability, and there was some timed text, particularly towards the end, that I found frustrating.

The visual design is otherwise very nice—including the use of text effects when they don't affect readability too badly—and the original artwork done for the game is excellent. I just wish I'd been able to spend more time thinking about what the game was trying to say and less time thinking about where I was supposed to click or trying to make out low-contrast text.

Errand Run is a short Twine work, nominally about going to the grocery store, but all is not what it seems. It has a few choices that I feel work well to keep the player engaged, (Spoiler - click to show)although there’s no real branching.

The writing sketches out an intriguing portrait of the PC in a short amount of time and doles out “wait, what?” details with carefully calculated escalation. By the time the player reaches the ending, the broad strokes of the situation are unlikely to be a surprise, but there’s still a lot that’s unexpected in the way those lines are filled in, with some striking, well-chosen imagery. The Twine styling is Harlowe default, but the use of text effects and colors was effective and I never found it unpleasant to read or distracting.

It won’t be to everybody’s tastes, of course, but it’s a short enough piece that I think it’s worth checking out. I found it well-crafted and look forward to trying this author’s other entries.

The Burger Meme Personality Test is a satirical short game that mocks the personality tests that some companies use as part of their hiring process.

Certainly there is a rich vein of absurdity to be mined here. The last test of this nature that I took consisted of placing yourself along a continuum between two statements, except that the statements weren’t really in opposition—think “I like to make friends” vs. “I like to experience new things.” How do you answer if it’s neither, or both? What answer are they even looking for when both options seem like things you would broadly want? I probably thought a little too hard about the implications of it all. I didn’t get an interview. And that’s on the tame side for this type of thing.

Burger Meme definitely gets some good hits in. I like the unexplained “sins” counter at the bottom, and the part where it makes you rate the relevance of the test and then reveals that it’s taking those answers into account for hiring. (I do always wonder if they’re doing that.) The game also makes good use of multimedia, is highly polished, and is short enough not to overstay its welcome. On balance I definitely think it’s worth your time to play through at least once. (I played twice and got two different endings, neither of which involved getting the job.)

But the “good ending” you get for refusing to completely abase yourself feels a little hollow, to me. Like, sure, I’m too good for that evil company, good for me! I still need a job, though, don’t I? Do I even have any non-evil options? (I’m projecting a little, of course, but at the same time, the game seems to invite that.) “How much am I willing to suck up to the corporate overlords in order to pay my bills?” is in real life a complicated question, and in providing karmic rewards of a sort to anyone who decides the answer is “not that much”, the game makes it seem much simpler.

But hey—in the unforgiving landscape of the current job market, maybe a little bit of (occasionally schadenfreude-flavored) wish fulfillment is perfectly reasonable.

(That said, if you question the AI nature of the supposed chatbot administering the test, there is another suite of endings that are a little less expected—but I haven't had the chance to explore them very fully yet.)

Ataraxia is a small-town life simulation game that takes cues from “cozy” games like Stardew Valley while having a more melancholy tone and some horror elements. As a recent arrival to a wooded island, you must make friends in the community and make money by crafting with found materials while learning about the island’s sometimes bloody history and investigating something strange in the woods.

The daily gameplay loop of waking up, tending your garden (once you have plants to tend), crafting, and visiting various locations is satisfying; the only fly in the ointment is that the game obscures how much energy you start with and how much each action takes, so it’s hard to plan out how much exactly to do. But as there are no hard deadlines here, it doesn’t matter especially much. And with the helpful to-do list, I never lost track of what my goals were.

The prose is lovely, especially in the more surreal scenes, and the atmosphere is strong. The characters are delicately drawn, a little more grounded than usual for the genre; that they're a bit older and have loves and losses and career changes behind them is a nice change of pace. The island’s history of beasts and pirates and missing children is intriguing to uncover, doled out piece by piece to propel you through the game.

Sometimes the game genre and the horror trappings sit awkwardly alongside each other. When I realized the cryptic utterances of the oracle in the forest were just to tell you what kind of gift each potential love interest likes best, that was jarring, and the resolution of the plotline with the strange presence in the forest being just an artifact you can put in your museum was a bit anticlimactic.

But this is a minor complaint. I enjoyed playing Ataraxia, all the more so for its sharp edges and dark mood. I romanced an ex-sailor, adopted a cat, grew various fruits and veg, opened a museum, and maybe got possessed a little bit. I had a good time.

I would recommend Ataraxia to anyone who has ever looked at a cute farming sim and gone “okay, the idea of this is somewhat appealing, but what I would really like is if it had some eldritch forest deities and a sense of quiet tragedy, and if all the love interests seemed like they were probably at least 30.”

Making a satisfying piece of IF in under 500 words is hard. Though I’m a vocal short-fiction aficionado, I find a lot of Neo-Twiny Jam works miss the mark for me; they often tackle concepts that are too big for the word count to handle in a way that feels complete, especially if there’s branching.

The Moon’s Knight deals with this by zooming in on a single moment in a toxic relationship, a moment when one lover chooses whether to trust the other or not. It lets poetic language and a sort of allegorical approach (the fickle beloved is literally the Moon) carry the emotional weight instead of trying to establish two realistic, well-rounded characters and sell the player on caring about them in so short a time, which I think is a good move. The language is rhythmic and alliteration-focused, which, in combination with the subject matter of knights riding into battle, is strongly reminiscent of Old English/Middle English poetry. I mention this because I enjoy that kind of thing, but also because it suggests we’re also drawing on the medieval framework of courtly love here, with its treatment of a knight longing for an unattainable lady and laying down their life for her as an ideal to be aspired to. (The Moon’s Knight takes a darker view of this, of course.)

My only criticism is that I feel the import of the game’s one choice isn’t particularly clear before you make it, depriving me as the player of the ability to feel a faint echo of the player character’s agony at deciding whether to risk her life to trust a lover who has been known to be inconstant, or whether to blatantly demonstrate her distrust. Instead my feeling on the first go-round was “I guess I’ll just pick something and see what happens?” which seems like perhaps not what the piece is aiming for. Making it clearer ahead of the choice that the Moon has promised the knight her protection (probably when first mentioning/describing the ampoule?) would have given the choice more impact the first time for me.

But other than that, it’s a striking piece that does a good job of making its emotional point in an economical number of words.

Resurrection Gate is a demo for a choice-based dark fantasy work with RPG elements. It seems that in the full game one will be able to choose from different characters to play as, but in this version the player is limited to the point of view of Yasha, a traumatized soldier searching for a comrade who is probably dead.

The game throws a lot of worldbuilding and a lot of characters, both present and referred to in absentia, at the player in this short preview, and just when I felt I was getting to grips with Yasha’s story, that section of the demo ended and I got a brief interlude featuring a mysterious woman and then a longer one featuring a lich-duke. Baccaris’s writing is vivid as always, but with all the hopping around in the demo I’m not sure I got my teeth into anything in a way that made me go “oh, I have to come back for the full game.” But that could just be me—I know some people are thrilled by the beginnings of secondary-world fantasy novels where you have a lot of proper nouns flung at you all at once and have to figure out from context what they are, but I don’t really start having fun until I get my bearings.

As is usual for this author, the game has art, elaborate styling, and music. The art is stylish and the low-key ambient soundtrack is atmospheric, but I had some issues with the styling. At this point in my life I pretty much need to play things on light mode to avoid eyestrain, and while I appreciate that the demo includes light mode, it seems like an afterthought that was not tested thoroughly. Parts of the character information screen (or “mirror”) are illegible in light mode, as are the credits at the end, and some links don’t seem to have changed the way they should.

If the idea of RPG-flavored IF in a world beset by various types of undead described in vividly nasty detail, featuring beleaguered protagonists who have been through some rough times (and who sometimes also are the undead), sounds like something you’d enjoy, Resurrection Gate is worth a look. Just be prepared to come out of the demo feeling somewhat confused.

It’s a common human foible to spend a lot of time contemplating the past decision points in one’s life and thinking about how differently things could have gone, and accordingly it’s a common theme in fiction—even more so in interactive fiction, where the audience can actually play out the experience of making different choices and seeing how things go. I would go so far as to call this a staple of interactive fiction, going back to the days of Alter Ego.

Thousand Lives, as its title suggests, revolves partly around this thematic concern; the rest of its core focus is Polish history, from the post-WWII era to the 2010s. It offers five sets of binary choices with simple branching—it doesn’t seem to have state-tracking more sophisticated than what you could accomplish by saying “turn to page 40.” But its gameplay does have a unique twist, which is that the installments are delivered to the player by email, once a day. After making a choice, the player must wait 24 hours to see the results.

This is an intriguing design choice that has the opportunity to make the player slow down and really engage with the story, and think over their choices carefully in a way they may not be inclined to do if they can easily start over and choose differently. Pulling against this, however, is the fact that the pace of the narrative itself is quite breezy, covering a decade or more per installment in just a few hundred words.

This does give a sense of the tumult of this period of Polish history; things are happening fast, changing sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, and often leaving ordinary people like the PC feeling like they have little control over their situations. (Or perhaps I’m just projecting the way I often feel about living through politically interesting times.) The game also seems to have educational aims, and this broad overview serves to get a lot of events in and give players a lot of keywords to use for their own research should they wish to look further into recent Polish history.

On the other hand, the all-summary, no-scene style is somewhat detrimental to emotional investment and the ability to really inhabit the PC. After completing a playthrough, I still don’t have a very strong sense of her as a person, much less any of the other characters that dip in and out of the story. But then again, many players probably wouldn’t appreciate longer and/or more granular installments in what seems to be a game designed to be played in bite-sized chunks in moments of downtime, so this is ultimately a matter of preference.

I played through once, choosing to move to the city and go into politics (among other things), and did find it interesting from a historical perspective. From discussion I’ve seen, it seems there are many other strongly divergent paths the PC’s life can take, touching on other corners of the 20th-/early 21st-century Polish experience. I might play again, but the desire to see what other lives the PC could have lived is more rooted in historical curiosity than attachment to her as a character. Still, I would absolutely say Thousand Lives is worth playing through at least once—and it won’t take very much time out of your day.