Reviews by EJ

Pure is a fairly short parser game in which the player goes through a gauntlet of challenges in a dungeon in pursuit of an unclear goal. There’s some suggestion that whatever it is will grant you some sort of increased legitimacy; there’s also an indication that the PC doesn’t really want to do it but is being forced to by a couple of brutish guards. But what you are pursuing is not really explored beyond this.

The author’s note is quite explicit that this is a metaphor for the trans experience (or a trans experience, at any rate). The dark, disturbing imagery naturally invites comparisons to Porpentine, but what came to mind most for me was A Trial, a surreal satire of the process of getting a legal name change. While Pure’s tone is very different, it similarly seems to be concerned with the hoops one has to jump through to legitimize one’s identity in the eyes of mainstream society.

That being the case, it is interesting to me that the trials as you proceed deeper into the dungeon are primarily about willingness to hurt others, not about hurting yourself or bending yourself into a particular expected shape. You’re compromising yourself morally, of course, but it’s not your own hand you’re cutting off. I don’t really know what to make of that, metaphorically. Does it imply that to legitimize oneself, one must turn around and sacrifice other vulnerable people? But what should we make, then, of the fact that some of the people you’re forced to harm are those who forced you into this situation in the first place? I can’t quite get a cohesive reading out of it, but it is interesting to consider.

Another interesting figure in the game is the Heir, the PC’s love interest, who is sort of the carrot to the guards’ stick. Rather than threatening the PC in some way if they don’t go through the ritual(?) that they’re participating in, the Heir coaxes them, lovingly encouraging them to commit terrible acts because the reward will be so good for them and the Heir is so proud. Given how the guards end up, it seems like perhaps the Heir is the real driver of the whole thing, like perhaps the promise of love and respect (and power? Since the Heir seems to be some kind of prince/ss/x?) is ultimately stronger than the threat of force. (It does feel a bit odd thematically for it to be possible for the Heir to be nonbinary, as the metaphorical representative of cisgender hegemony, but that could just be me.) The Heir was an intriguing and unsettling presence, and doesn’t necessarily need to be fleshed out very much more since their primary role is as a symbol rather than a character, but I did wish it were possible to interact with them a little more.

Before the player gets to any of this meaty stuff, though, there’s a basic medium-dry-goods puzzle and a set of riddles to solve. It may be meant to sort of frog-boil the player into the more disturbing aspects of the game—you think this is a normal text adventure, and then stuff gets weird!—but for me the shift was so abrupt and total that it just sort of felt like two different games pasted together. I liked the latter half much more than the former half; the actions the player must take to continue are better integrated into the narrative and the distressing descriptions are very striking. But of course, this being "part 1", just as you're starting to sink your teeth into this part of the game, it's over.

I did notice a number of polish issues with the game, including typos, missing paragraph breaks, missing spaces, stray extra punctuation marks, and places where the Heir is referred to by a particular pronoun regardless of the gender chosen for them. This was a little distracting, but it's still an interesting work with a lot to chew on.

There are, of course, a lot of surreal and highly metaphorical games about trauma, and there are probably many reasons for that, but one of those, I think, is that the subject matter really lends itself to that approach. Trauma loves symbolism. Trauma revels in taking an ordinary everyday object and turning it into an emblem for the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. And because it’s an ordinary everyday object, it can lurk around every corner waiting to ambush you in the middle of a perfectly good day and remind you that you’re still not over that thing.

Slated for Demolition represents this experience by having its protagonist, as the blurb says, “haunted by a relentless marinara pasta demon”. (It feels slightly inappropriate in this context to say that that turn of phrase delights me, but it does.) There’s something bathetic in this, to be sure, but again, that seems fitting in a way. It’s not really funny to be having a panic attack because you saw a regular everyday object, or something that isn’t even that object but kind of looks like the object, but on some level you grimly recognize the absurdity of it. In practice, I didn’t find the silliness of the concept too distracting; the game mines the pasta imagery for some surprisingly effective horror scenes, and a sequence in a grocery store where the words of the description start to be replaced by types of pasta is legitimately disorienting. Given that most objects in the game have some kind of emotional significance tied to a key memory, I was a little bit surprised that this ended up not being true of the pasta, but at the same time the pasta is positioned within the text as something destructive of meaning—not insignificant, but sort of anti-significant—so perhaps that's appropriate as well.

The game has a world model of sorts, and a list of objects to collect, and at least one actual puzzle; all of this works well enough, but it’s mainly in service of getting fragments of text that you can piece together into something resembling a picture of the PC’s past and present (albeit not a complete one, and deliberately so). In addition, although I’m one of those people who’s always complaining about timed text, I thought it was well-used here—it’s not the default or used very frequently, so when on occasion a phrase appears word by word for emphasis, it has the intended impact.

I was quite absorbed in the specific, sharply drawn if disjointed details of this one person’s life, so it really threw me to reach the ending and (Spoiler - click to show)suddenly be asked to insert myself into the game instead. That’s not a thing I generally find rewarding in games and I especially did not like it as a swerve from inhabiting the consciousness of a very specific person who was not me (and occasionally also a very specific marinara pasta demon). But there’s precedent in this kind of game for reaching out to the audience this way and making them think about their own lives, and it’s hard for me to tell if it’s not well executed here or if it’s simply not to my tastes.

There is a mystery of sorts to solve in The Little Four, a pastiche of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, but that’s not really the point. Instead, it’s a gentle slice-of-life piece showing a rainy day in the life of Arthur Hastings, Hercule Poirot, Hastings’s four children (whom Hastings sometimes refers to as “ours” rather than “mine”), and their dog.

The writer has massaged the timeline of the books somewhat so that Hastings’s wife’s death both occurs when his children are young and is not closely followed by Poirot’s, and so that Poirot and Hastings are the same age. The premise is that the widowed Hastings has moved in with Poirot—ostensibly to another flat in the same building, but as the game goes on it becomes clear that Hastings really lives in Poirot’s flat rather than the one that is supposed to be his. Poirot cooks for the family and has taken an interest in the education and general well-being of the children.

The casual intimacy between the two men and their domestic life together are easily read as romantic, especially with Poirot being described as a “confirmed bachelor” (although, as the author’s blog of sources shows, the portrayal of their relationship is thoroughly grounded in the canon). Certainly, at any rate, something is being concealed by Hastings’s initial insistence that he is merely staying in Poirot’s guest bedroom rather than living in Poirot’s flat. Whether this is denial on the part of Hastings, a veil of plausible deniability for the friends for whom Hastings is writing, or just an attempt to avoid the appearance of impropriety where there actually is none is ambiguous. Romantic or not, they are partners of some sort, in life and not just in crime-solving.

The piece mainly consists of exploring the two flats, examining objects (which helpfully appear in boldface if unexamined and in italics if examined) to get reminiscences about Hastings’s life, ruminations on his hopes for his children and the vagaries of middle age—and, of course, thoughts of Poirot. The writer’s imitation of Hastings’s narrative voice is spot-on, and the portrayal of all of the relationships involved (including that of Hastings and his late wife) is natural and sweet without being cloying.

There is one puzzle, a minor mystery that Poirot engineers to entertain Hastings’s eldest child, but it isn’t very difficult. The point is merely to revel in this moment of quiet domestic happiness for two men, four children, and a dog, all of whom have seen some hard times before (even the dog has been a murder suspect!) and, as the frame narration lightly alludes to, soon will again (this is an inter-war story, but Hastings is writing it down post-World War II).

In this hybrid parser/choice game, you play as a dog in the Hittite Empire (ca. 2000 BCE) whose owner, the village wise-woman, is under a mysterious curse. You cannot, yourself, cast spells, but you can absorb them and transfer them to other objects, and you must use this ability to save your human companion. Mostly, as it turns out, by stealing everything that is not nailed down and selling it so that you can buy magical trinkets that will let you do more things with your spell repertoire. (It’s lucky the black-market dealer assumes you’re doing business on behalf of your owner—well, you are, sort of—and doesn’t seem fazed by this!)

You can only carry one item and one spell at a time, which gets a bit fiddly, but ITEMS and SPELLS commands that let you automatically retrieve things from wherever you left them are a big help. I also appreciated the THINK command telling you what currently-unsolved puzzles you currently have the ability to solve; the map is big, and it can be easy to lose track of things you encountered when you didn’t have the ability to deal with them yet.

The spell-based puzzle gameplay is satisfying, and the eventually-acquired ability to spells is a nice twist on it (unlocking something that lets you modify spells has been a feature of this author’s work before, but I think this particular iteration is new?). The canine PC is also fun, and their concern for their human is quite sympathetic.

But the greatest joy here is the setting—an unusual historical milieu that has been extensively researched and brought to life with vibrantly described locations and a host of lively NPCs, including a shady copper merchant, a world-weary black-market dealer (who is not too happy about fencing stuff from the temple for you, but she’ll graciously do it anyway), assorted townsfolk worrying about their taxes (which you can help them with), and many more.

There are also extensive footnotes explaining the historical basis of many of the things in the game (house layouts, clothing, food), and giving additional context on the political and religious background. You can probably enjoy the game perfectly well without reading any of the footnotes, but I love learning random facts, especially about history, so for me their existence was a huge plus.

In short, the game was fun, well-designed, highly polished, and even educational, and I really enjoyed it!

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.)