Ratings and Reviews by EJ

In this substantially sized parser game, the player takes the role of the valet of billionaire Bryce Wyatt. Master Bryce is holding a soiree for charity, and of course it would be your job regardless to make sure that everything went smoothly, but now there’s an added wrinkle: your employer was recently bitten by a radioactive bat and now he’s acting… strangely.

The charming (if sometimes hapless) rich man and his devoted, efficient valet are well-established figures in pop culture, and the dynamic between them is generally supposed to be endearing. The Bat methodically dismantles the familiar archetypes, emphasizing the dehumanization of the servant (while the master is treated like a person even when acting like an animal, the PC may as well be furniture as far as the wealthy guests are concerned) as well as how fundamentally childish it is for a healthy adult to insist on having someone else attend to their needs in this way. (Dealing with Bryce often strongly resembles dealing with a toddler.)

“Attend to” (helpfully possible to abbreviate as “A”) is in fact the main verb you will need to use in this game as you try to take care of an ever-growing list of tasks. Your inventory is also limited to what you can carry in your two hands and your pockets. The item-juggling that this type of limitation requires can, in many games, end up feeling like busywork, but in this case it plays nicely into the farcical tone of the proceedings, and I was ultimately entertained by it even as I was asking myself where I’d left the goddamn drinks tray this time.

On the other hand, while limited verbs usually don’t bother me, I struggled somewhat with this one. If your one verb is, say, EAT, you can apply a certain amount of in-universe logic to what would be useful to eat in this scenario, but since ATTEND TO is vague and there’s an intentional lack of consistency around what ATTENDING TO something actually entails, it tends instead to turn guess-the-verb into guess-the-noun. (There is a reliable out-of-universe logic, which is that if something can be picked up or dropped, ATTEND TO has to do that duty, so if you’re trying to use something portable, there’s probably something else around you need to ATTEND TO in order to make that happen. But I had trouble keeping that in mind.) If I squint I can also see the PC repeatedly picking up and dropping the dustpan as he tries to figure out how to empty it as part of the farce, but for me it mostly created frustration in a way that didn’t feel entertaining or sufficiently diegetic.

I also found the puzzles in Act II harder to figure out, but I can’t tell if that’s because they’re actually less well clued or just because at that point my brain had burnt out on keeping track of everything (which is possibly fitting as well; I can imagine the PC also becoming increasingly frazzled as the evening wears on).

But all in all, it’s a polished, funny, and inventive game that blends farce, parody, and satire, filtered through the PC’s dry, circumspect commentary. It also draws on bat behavior in surprising detail; while the low-hanging fruit (screeching, hanging upside down, producing guano) is certainly present, I was tickled to see allogrooming as one of Bryce’s bat-related compulsions. And while I sometimes struggled with the parser, I thought the final command was just perfect. So I’m content to assume that my problems with it were mostly, well, my problems, and regardless of those, I do feel it’s one of the strongest games of the year.

(Litcrit BS side note: While I understand the role of the compass in this game to be a dig at the hold that convention has over parser IF, I couldn’t help noticing that it also serves as a locus of subversion of the typical power dynamic between master and servant, so if you felt like being a bit cheeky, I think the text would support an argument for The Bat as a pro-compass game. But I don’t feel like engaging in high-effort trolling at the moment, so I won’t take this any further.)

In this compact single-puzzle parser game, the PC has been asked by the proprietor of their local pub to figure out what’s souring all his beer. It soon becomes clear that the pub is haunted, and the PC finds themself yanked back in time to try to prevent the ghost’s untimely death.

The game is a little sparse (in the sense that there’s not much you can do besides the things you need to do, although there are a few optional secrets to find), but it’s charming and highly polished, with a strong sense of place and some entertaining fake beer names. The central puzzle took me a few tries to get, but I always felt like I had an idea of what to try next. I also really appreciated the option to skip the opening and jump straight to the “past” segment, which made retries less of a pain.

The opening segment requires you to hit a certain number of triggers related to experiencing ghostly activity in order to advance the plot, and I did get hung up a little at that stage, mostly because I felt like I’d already experienced enough ghostly activity to get that that was what was going on, so it wasn’t totally clear to me that I needed to look for more. Other than that, though, my experience playing Bad Beer was smooth, fun, and quick (it took me about 20 minutes to complete, including the two retries of the past segment).

The Apothecary’s Assistant is an unusual beast. It’s set in a mysterious shop where you can work between one and three shifts per day—in real time. A day’s gameplay consists of doing one small task—such as selecting a recipe to make for a customer or playing a game of Mad Libs with a child—and then, optionally, talking briefly to the shop’s owner, Aïssatou, and solving some cryptic crossword clues. Despite the title, there’s not a lot of herbalism going on, just an assortment of low-stakes odd jobs.

I’m charmed by the overall conceit; it’s a bold idea and I was eager to see how it played out. I also love cryptic crosswords, so I had fun with that aspect of the gameplay. I can’t say how it plays for people who don’t have prior experience with cryptics, but the clues seemed reasonably “entry-level” to me, not requiring deep knowledge of cryptic lingo, and the repetition in the first three clues seemed like a helpful way to get people on board.

That said, with each session being so short (five minutes at most) and the sessions being so spaced out, I never really got immersed in the game, and I had trouble retaining anything about the characters (other than Aïssatou, since she’s always around). Between sessions, I was left with a vague impression of a charming woodland setting and very little else (besides the cryptics). All things considered, I did enjoy the game quite a bit, I just wish each individual session had been a little meatier.

I did six shifts and solved all the cryptic clues, which gave me a satisfying resolution to Aïssatou’s personal story, but I know that there are many more anecdotes I haven’t seen and customers I haven’t met, and would be interested in going back and spending more time with it later.

It’s such a drag when you run out of your preferred source of caffeine. Especially if you discover it first thing in the morning and then you have to formulate your plan to acquire caffeine while you’re still groggy. It’s even worse if you’ve had a bad night, like if for example you just took over your girlfriend’s body, destroying her consciousness (consensually, sort of) in the process, and you’re trying to adjust to the new body while also processing the loss. And it’s snowing.

I love 198BREW’s weird, dark world (that nevertheless still has Nespresso pods), the evocative descriptions of its bleak setting, and its lightly sketched but intriguing characters (including the late girlfriend, who is very present in the narrative). I also love that this is a time loop game where the PC is not the person in the time loop—the actual time-looper is just so done with the whole thing that he’s looking to delegate the task that will get him out of the loop. The standard version of the time loop trope is evergreen to me, but I do appreciate the freshness of a sideways take on it.

Unfortunately, however, the game is distinctly underimplemented, with the full range of “inexperienced parser author” issues—from lack of synonyms to objects mentioned but not implemented to default responses not changed. (If any game really, really needed to ensure that the response to X ME was not “As good-looking as ever”, it’s this one—and I’m not even the kind of parser player who always types X ME just to see if the author put in a custom response; I only did it because the hints the game was dropping about the PC’s situation suggested to me that the response might be interesting.)

The logic behind the actions I needed to take also didn’t always come together for me. In the art gallery, for example, it didn’t occur to me to (Spoiler - click to show)talk to the painting, in part because the descriptions seemed more focused on the tangibility of other elements of the painting than the liveliness of the central figure. I was otherwise able to follow the logic trail that led me to acquiring change for a pay phone, but when the game then told me that I needed something interesting to say over the phone, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. Because I’d completed everything else there was to do in the game by that point, I essentially solved that puzzle by interacting with the last conspicuous setpiece that hadn’t been relevant yet and then going “Well, I don’t see anything else to interact with, I guess it’s phone time,” but even once all was said and done I wasn’t really sure why (Spoiler - click to show)telling Jacob to eat the crows was more interesting and/or convincing than any other random task the PC could have made up.

So I really liked 198BREW as a work of science fiction, but I liked it somewhat less as a game. Not that I think it would have been better as static fiction—I do think it benefits from its interactivity, and in most cases the underlying structure of the gameplay is fine—I just wish the interactive aspects had been a little better executed. But I’d definitely be interested in future games from this author.

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 the default response, “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”, 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.

Even though The Copyright of Silence was punishingly difficult and I never actually completed it successfully, I have a lot of fondness for it, so I was happy to see that the author was back with another (much smaller) optimization/replay-based Twine game with an unusual visual design.

In this one, you play as a detective trying to intercept a black-market weapons shipment being transported by a young man who thinks the world revolves around him. Progressing in the game largely entails figuring out how to exploit your quarry’s idiosyncratic reactions to his environment.

I enjoyed the process of replaying and making incremental progress, and was able to finish the game in this case. Getting the timing right was fiddly but didn’t seem too unfair. However, this is a small slice of a larger story and I haven’t played the other installments in this series, and I was kind of fuzzy on what the larger situation was and how the PC was involved in it (as he appears to be acting in a less-than-official capacity here). For a game that’s not really going for emotional punch or complex characterization, that’s less of an issue than it could be as long as it doesn’t impinge on the player’s ability to figure out the puzzles, which I didn’t think it did in this case, but it was a little bit distracting.

Eikas is a community kitchen management sim. The PC has moved to a small, rural town in a gently fantastical setting to work as a chef, employed by the town council, which sponsors a community feast every five days. The game covers their one-month probationary period before becoming a full employee.

In between feasts, you can garden, shop for ingredients, learn new recipes, get to know the townsfolk, and make snacks to sell for extra cash because the stipend from the town council doesn’t quite stretch far enough (a bit of less-than-idyllic realism that I appreciated). I found it very satisfying to gradually expand my repertoire, and the scores for my meals increased pretty steadily as the game went on, making me feel like I was authentically growing as a chef. Plus, all the food sounded delicious.

The four characters you can befriend are also endearing; my favorite was the initially prickly artist Antonia, possibly because I feel like she has the most substantial arc as she regains artistic inspiration and learns to open up to people again after an experience with an artistic and personal partnership that went south.

(I will confess to not loving the “I thought I didn’t like small-town life but I see now that it’s actually the best!” trope, which crops up a couple times with the companions, but that’s a me problem, I think. It feels tiresomely ubiquitous in fiction sometimes, but I gather “of course everyone wants to leave their small town” can feel that way too, and it probably depends on what kind of fiction you consume and which angle you’re more annoyed by.)

I did end up feeling like the game was a little too low-key overall; I like my management sims to stress me out a bit, whereas here I usually felt like I had plenty of time for everything that I wanted to do. Indeed, by the run-up to the final meal I had maxed everyone’s approval, unlocked every recipe, and served a four-star meal, and started to feel like I was aimlessly killing time until the last day. But that’s also a personal preference, and I think the lack of tension is probably just what some people are looking for in this kind of game.

Which is essentially my overall feeling about Eikas: there were a few things that were minuses for me, but all of them are things I can easily imagine being pluses for someone else. I think it’s one of the best games of IFComp2024 and I ultimately enjoyed it a lot, even if I occasionally wished it were just a little less relaxing.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is on my to-play list, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I am also pretty sure that when I do, Astarion will not be my favorite character. Actually, it might be for the best that I played A Dream of Silence now, rather than playing Baldur’s Gate 3, becoming unreasonably attached to some other character, and developing a simmering resentment of Astarion for being the fandom’s darling. But I am aware that I’m missing important context here.

The premise of this three-part series is that a monster has trapped Astarion in a nightmare based on his past trauma. You, the PC of BG3, are able to enter his dream, but only as a sort of ghostly presence whose ability to interact with the world is limited. In Act I, you try to balance improving your abilities with keeping Astarion sane as he spends his days trapped in a dungeon with no human contact aside from you. I’m not really sure what happens in Act II, which exists as an add-on to the post-Spring Thing version of Act I and can’t be played on its own, but Act III covers the escape—first from the dungeon and then from the nightmare as a whole. It includes an abbreviated version of Acts I and II to play through if you haven’t played them before; this recap was efficient at getting the player up to speed, but had a somewhat incongruously jokey tone.

In Act III, you can no longer improve your stats; instead you’re trying to manage your energy levels and fuel Astarion’s belief in his ability to escape while avoiding attracting the attention of his master, Cazador (the one who locked him in the dungeon). The game offers a choice of either an easy “exploration mode” or a standard “balanced” difficulty, warning you that if you choose the latter, you may fail several times before figuring out how things work and what you need to prioritize. I played on “balanced” and did indeed end up having to restart twice. Even with the ability to refresh your energy once in each scene, your actions are quite limited, and basically the only way to figure out what is and isn’t worth spending them on is to try things and see what happens. But I do love a bit of resource management, so while the balancing act was tricky and required some trial and error, I found it very engaging. I also enjoyed meeting Astarion’s various vampire siblings, who I get the impression might be original to this game, or might at least be briefly-mentioned characters who have been significantly fleshed out here.

However, when I finally reached the “escaping from the nightmare” sequence, my lack of canon knowledge and existing emotional investment let me down. In this part of the game, Astarion asks you a bunch of questions about the waking world, and then you tell him stories about your adventures together. I can see what the emotional beats are supposed to be here, and I can imagine how they might work for me if I knew much about BG3, but the thing is, I don’t know the answers to his questions, so I don’t know if I’m telling him the truth or not or what the other implications might be of choosing one answer over another, and I don’t know the stories being referenced, so I have no idea what the emotional valence of each one might be. I’m not sure any of the choices in this section matter mechanically, so that’s not an issue, but the emotional weight of the scene relies on the player remembering these adventures with Astarion and making thoughtful choices about what to highlight out of a desire to inspire him by showing him how far he’s come and how much things have improved. So that fell completely flat for me.

And that’s fine, really. I’ve always felt that fanfic is its own unique art form and doesn’t need to—perhaps even shouldn’t—prioritize being enjoyable to people who don’t know the source material. But entering the game in IFComp puts it in front of a broader audience than just the fandom and invites analysis of it as a standalone work of fiction, and in that respect I didn’t think it quite worked.

The protagonist of Civil Service appears at first to be a naive positive-thinking type taking a job in a dysfunctional government agency. It soon becomes apparent that something else is going on, and you are instead playing as a ghost who’s been tasked by a set of three unspecified supernatural entities (tripartite goddess? Three witches?) to (Spoiler - click to show)save a woman who fell down a ravine on a company outing and was left there to die by her apathetic coworkers, who didn’t notice she was gone.

The game bills itself as dynamic fiction, so I was expecting no meaningful choice, but this was not the case—not only are there multiple endings, but you can miss entire plot-important scenes by clicking the wrong link. The problem is that the import of the link you are clicking is in no way clear before you click it. For instance, there’s a passage early on with two links, one on a mention of a tin of biscuits in the office and one on a mention of the need to smile. The former gives the reader a scene that provides the first intimations of what you’re really here for, while the latter just skips over that and moves to the next “main” passage. But there’s no indication that the biscuits are particularly significant until you click on that link, and a player who clicks on “smile” hoping to get some elaboration on that idea (which they will not get) will never know what they missed. Sometimes the digression is just a single short, nonessential passage, and sometimes both links in a passage seem to lead to the same passage, but there seems to be no way to even guess at when that’s the case and when you’re missing whole scenes. Early on, I made ample use of the back button to make sure I was getting the most out of my experience, but this got a little tedious and took me out of the flow of the story, so after the first in-game day or two, I gave up.

(I did like that the cycling links were a different color from the links that move the player forward, though!)

Once I stopped hitting the back button so often and started letting the experience carry me along, I was entranced by Civil Service’s prose-poem-like writing and its effectively dreary atmosphere with occasional flashes of hope, and I was excited to further explore its premise, which is exactly the kind of weird that I enjoy. As a commentary on modern office culture, though, it has some sharply observed details, but leaves the bigger picture kind of fuzzy, and doesn’t seem to have much to say about what underlies workplace dysfunction other than individuals being jerks.

So I was intrigued and often charmed by Civil Service, and on the whole I would say I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure the way it was using interactivity was to its benefit, and it ultimately feels a little less than the sum of its parts.