Ratings and Reviews by EJ

This is a mystery game in which you play as a journalist whose uncle has been falsely accused of a murder. By the time the PC finds out, the uncle has already been executed for his supposed crime, but the PC is determined to clear his relative’s name posthumously.

While journalism is a not-uncommon occupation for an amateur sleuth in mystery fiction in general, I don’t think I’ve seen it much in IF, so I thought that was a fun choice. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do much with it. It’s not even the thing that grants you access to investigate—for that, the PC has to show an unexplained, never-again-referenced “other credential.” (Implying he’s actually some sort of undercover agent, I guess? Or has forged an ID to that effect?)

The gameplay is evidently parser-inspired, with a world model and progress that mainly involves finding an item in one location and using it somewhere else. Once you’ve found an item, the option to use it will appear automatically, so there’s no need to solve any puzzles per se; it’s just a matter of remembering which was the location where you needed to see something far away once you’ve picked up the telescope.

Polish is somewhat lacking, with inconsistent paragraph spacing and prose that often slips between first-person and second-person POV (possibly as an artifact of machine translation—the game doesn’t state that such tools were used, but it’s a very common problem in Chinese-to-English machine translation in particular). In cases where text appears conditionally or is added to a passage upon clicking a link, line breaks and even spaces between words tend not to appear where they should.

The logic of the narrative is also questionable in places, raising questions such as: Why was there conspicuous physical evidence just lying around the real crime scene (inside the culprit’s house where the culprit is still living) over a year after the crime? Or: Why was there a key in a drawer in a picnic table on a mountaintop that opened two different safes in two different people’s houses? That said, I was able to correctly identify the murderer based on the evidence I collected, so the internal logic does hold up where it counts.

So I’d sum it all up as a messy but enthusiastic first effort with a few interesting ideas (largely related to the small town's dark secret, which involves a crocodile cult), but there was one thing that really soured me on it: the PC is established out of the gate to be inappropriately horny, and when he finds adult magazines under the bed of the murder victim, a 12-year-old girl, this is said to inspire in him “despicable thoughts”. To me this is hard to read as anything other than an implication that he is in some way fantasizing about said 12-year-old. (Alternative possibilities mostly hinge on assuming the author is using “despicable” incorrectly, I feel.) Obviously this isn’t exactly condoned by the text, but it’s also not treated as very important. In the good ending, (Spoiler - click to show)he adopts the murder victim’s older sister, and this seems to be intended to be heartwarming rather than alarming. I think this aspect was in poor taste, and although it doesn’t come up much, it made me like the game much less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a lot to like about The Blind House. The writing is elegant and atmospheric. The characterization is strong. The player has only three brief conversations with Marissa, but everything in her house tells us something about her -- her paintings, the books on her bookshelf, the videos she watches. The player character, Helena, is more of an enigma, but she's supposed to be. The horror aspect is also done well. It relies more on implication than on shock or gory descriptions; throughout the game's series of unsettlingly surreal episodes there's a build-up of dread leading to a climax that's less a shock than a confirmation of the player's worst suspicions.

The gameplay works well for what it's supposed to do, which is to supplement the story without distracting from it (puzzle fans will want to look elsewhere). It's generally clear what you're supposed to do and where you're supposed to go, but the game doesn't overdo the hand-holding. There were a few things I still felt a sense of accomplishment for working out, but I'm pretty terrible at this stuff, so that may just be me.

I have only one problem with the game overall -- and unfortunately it's hard to discuss without mentioning the endings, so please forgive me for the spoilers.

There are vague, but definitely present, homoerotic undertones to the relationship between Helena and Marissa, which makes the whole thing come off as "predatory psychotic lesbian (Spoiler - click to show)stalks, hurts, and possibly kills the object of her affections." The fact that the place where these undertones are most obvious is the ending where (Spoiler - click to show)Helena kills Marissa (while lying on top of her on a bed, no less) really does not help here. I feel a little bad complaining about this (after all, lesbians can be crazy just like anyone else can), but the "predatory psychotic lesbian" thing has a long and sordid history as the most common portrayal of lesbians in fiction. This game feels like a bit of a throwback to the days of Mrs. Danvers and the like, and the fact that it's all kept on a subtextual level only adds to that.

I don't mean to suggest that the author played into this stereotype on purpose; I know how easy it is to stumble into these things without meaning to. But it left a bad taste in my mouth in a game I otherwise quite enjoyed.

The Legend of Horse Girl is a gleefully absurd take on Western tropes, starring a heroine raised by wild horses and featuring a bar staffed by coyotes, apparently sentient tumbleweeds, snake oil farmers, dairy spiders, and more. It’s also pure, (mostly) unadulterated fun. I am not exaggerating when I say I laughed out loud multiple times while playing this game. I was unreasonably amused when the character Butch McCreedy turned out to have a twin named Femme McCreedy, for example. And then there’s one puzzle solution that involves (Spoiler - click to show)dunking bats in milk as if they were cookies until they get fed up with this treatment and fly away, the mental image of which just killed me. (I thought I was going to be (Spoiler - click to show)actually drowning them, which would have been ridiculous enough, but the way it played out was funnier.)

Speaking of the puzzle solutions, they’re generally just as absurd as everything else in the world of the game, but most of them are signposted well enough that it works anyway. Given that the gameplay is very straightforward (get items, use them on other items, repeat) and requires few unusual verbs, one could say that trying to figure out what might work per the internal logic (such as it is) of the zany setting is the puzzle, in most cases. And when that works, it’s tremendously satisfying. There were a few places in which the leap of logic the game wanted me to make was a bit too far for me; I don’t know if there were things in the game that I missed that would have hinted at these solutions, though.

I did wish a little bit for a built-in hints function, although the list of necessary verbs in the “about” text sometimes proved helpful – not so much for guess-the-verb issues, which I didn’t feel the game had many of, but because in some cases the very presence of a verb in the list hinted at an approach to a puzzle. Also on the subject of quality-of-life features, I did appreciate that the game usually removes objects from your inventory if you don’t need them anymore.

There was also one aspect of the structure with which I struggled a bit: you can, essentially, encounter the introductions to the majority of the game’s puzzles right off the bat, without even beginning to solve anything. This made it sometimes unclear to me what order I should be trying to solve the puzzles in, and whether I didn’t have what I needed to solve a particular puzzle yet (probably because it was gated behind the solution to some other puzzle) or whether I did but hadn’t figured out how to use it. But this is, I think, not an objective flaw but a matter of taste – I personally get a little overwhelmed by having a ton of "open" puzzles at the same time, but others might prefer that to a more linear approach.

And in the end, the charm of the writing carried me through these minor frustrations without much difficulty. Despite any nitpicks, I had an absolute blast playing this game, and that’s the important thing.

My favorite kind of horror fiction is the kind where supernatural horror elements are used to explore struggles that people face in the real world. Thin Walls takes this approach to a topic I haven’t seen explored in this way before: having housemates.

This probably sounds like a joke, especially if you’ve never lived in shared housing, but Thin Walls is very serious about this, and so am I. Like the characters in this game, I live in a very expensive city and I spent most of my 20s unable to afford rent on an apartment of my own, instead living with a series of housemates, most of whom I knew very little if at all before moving in. Having strangers in your space all the time can be draining, and for me, at least, housemates rarely became much more than strangers. It’s hard to be friends with someone when long before the point where you could really get to know them as people, you already know that they like to practice guitar in the living room at 1 AM, or that they refuse to touch anything that might be even a little bit dirty (thus leaving you to do all the cleaning), or that they keep using your dishes even though you put a sign on the cabinet saying “EJ'S DISHES, PLEASE ASK BEFORE USING.” Or, in the game’s own words:

“If you live with friends or with a partner, and something goes wrong, there is a relationship, a history, a memory to cushion you: the knowledge that, overall, this person is actually okay.

“But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it.”

The house in Thin Walls is continuously growing of its own accord; it increases in size every time two tenants have a spat, but somehow never provides them enough room to get out of each other’s hair. The number of bedrooms may be endless – allowing ever more tenants to move in and exacerbate the existing problems – but there are still the pitfalls of shared kitchens and bathrooms, and of course there’s the issue of noise (see title). We see these problems through the eyes of a kaleidoscopic array of tenants, each with their own worries and frustrations, their own reasons for being here and for not being able to leave. (Some don’t in fact want to leave – but most do.)

However, while it may at first look like the game’s thesis is that hell is other people (a bookshelf that appears at one point contains a copy of No Exit, alongside House of Leaves and other relevant titles), as you progress it becomes clear that the real horror is the conditions that get people stuck in this situation to begin with: ever-rising rents, lack of opportunity, and, of course, unscrupulous landlords.

Eddie, the landlord of the uncanny house in Thin Walls, never appears onscreen, but his shadow looms large over its residents all the same (Waiting for Godot is also on the bookshelf). Tenants report sightings of him as if he were some sort of cryptid. His leather jacket appears by the door and then disappears again, but no one sees him enter or leave. (The game doesn’t get much into this, but I imagine his elusive nature would make it difficult to get in touch with him if you ever needed something repaired.) Nevertheless, somehow rooms keep on getting rented out, and someone’s collecting the rent money.

Many unscrupulous landlords I’ve had were doing things that were probably or definitely illegal, but they were essentially untouchable because anyone with the resources to get them in trouble for it wouldn’t be renting from them in the first place. Eddie, it seems, doesn’t even have a license to rent out rooms, but he is literally untouchable – how can the borough council do anything about the transgressions of a phantom?

Though the title page uses default Twine CSS, the game itself does not; the design is simple, but very readable, and makes good use of changing background colors to indicate different points of view.

My only complaint is that, while it’s obvious when a new chapter has opened up, it’s not always obvious what you need to do to trigger one, and generally just involved going into every available room until I found the one where something had changed. But that’s a minor quibble – overall, Thin Walls is a well-written piece of surreal (but also, very real) horror that resonated deeply with me.

I tend to find IF with animal player characters very charming, especially if the author really sells the idea that the character’s perception of the world is different from that of a human. The Bright Blue Ball does a good job here – I like that the PC experiences the world mostly through smells, as many dog breeds do. The descriptions of scents were simple, but well chosen, and since smell is a sense that IF usually does not do much with, it gave the game a fresh feeling. Parlaying this into a game mechanic of tracking objects by scent was also a fun and unusual idea, if a little under-used here. I also appreciated the hint system – something a lot of first-time authors don’t think to include.

(On a side note, I was delighted that “bark” was a recognized command, but my childhood dog would have been disappointed that “chew [noun]” was not.)

Unfortunately the game does have a lot of the problems common to first-time parser authors, such as under-implementation, missing descriptions, and accidentally unlisted exits, the latter of which led to a few instances where I had to figure out how to progress by repeatedly bumping into walls (which, to be fair, is not out of character for many Golden Retrievers I have known). But these things are fixable, and I think the fun concept and endearing writing speak to the author’s potential.