Reviews by EJ

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.

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.