Ratings and Reviews by EJ

Where Nothing Is Ever Named is a very short parser game taking place in a mysterious space where… well, see title. There are two things in the space with you, and the game’s one puzzle consists of interacting with the things enough to figure out what they are, whereupon what you need to do becomes clear. It took me five minutes.

I see how this conceit could rapidly become unwieldy from a disambiguation perspective, but I did wish there were a little more to the game. What’s there is well-implemented and enjoyable, though, and the game gets some bonus points from me for (Spoiler - click to show)letting me pet not one but two animals.

The one-way street I live on dead-ends at a busy four-lane road onto which I frequently have to turn left (the US equivalent of the game’s UK right turn). Often, as I’m sitting there waiting for this to be possible, some jerk in an unnecessarily large vehicle will get impatient and try to go around me, although the street is not really designed for that. Of course, the reason I’m just sitting there is because there are no openings, so the overly large vehicle will just sit there for a while blocking my view of traffic, and then take the first opening that comes along before I can get to it, even though I was there first!!!

When a similar incident happened in Turn Right, I may have started yelling out loud. Just a little.

This short parser game simulates the experience of attempting to turn right onto a busy road. I’ve been vocal over the years about my dislike of games that simulate boring and/or frustrating experiences, but Turn Right’s spot-on observational humor makes it work. At first, out of some sort of contrarian instinct, I tried everything I could think of besides what the game wanted me to do, but while it was all implemented, the responses were terse enough that I gave in and committed to my fate of repeatedly trying TURN RIGHT. I was then rewarded with a surprisingly varied set of exasperating events, related in wry tones. (Although I am glad I tried (Spoiler - click to show)examining the car park and saw that the van responsible for the aforementioned incident was taking up two parking spaces, foreshadowing that the driver was an asshole.)

I did experience a touch of cultural dissonance; you see, I’m from Boston, and to get anywhere in this godforsaken city, you have to drive aggressively. So on one of the several occasions when someone in the near lane stopped to try to let the PC through, I would have just barged on out there on the assumption that someone on the far lane would let me through sooner rather than later once I was conspicuously blocking traffic. But I understand that in most of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, people are too polite for that sort of thing.

Turn Right is probably not nearly as funny to people who don’t drive, but I would recommend it to anyone who does.

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, “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” (much less funny, I know), 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.

In this game, the PC leads a team of specialists to explore a mysterious castle. It’s a choice-based game that tries to emulate a parser experience, having the player click to select a subject, verb, and object before submitting the action.

The concept of gameplay that revolves around figuring out not just what action should be taken, but who should be taking it, is unusual and intriguing. In practice, however, I found this game's implementation of it unwieldy. It just takes so many clicks to complete any action (except for moving around the map). Having the subject default to “me” unless otherwise specified would have helped, I think, though that still leaves a lot of clicking and I’m not really sure what else could be done to streamline this interface.

Between this and the white text that contrasts poorly with the busy pixel backdrops and lacks paragraph spacing, I have to say that I experienced so much friction in the process of trying to play the game that I wasn’t really able to appreciate the content. I’m sure there’s a lot to like here if you’re less frustrated by the interface, but I didn’t have a good time. That said, I do have to give it some respect for its success in bending Twine into a pretzel without breaking it—which is to say, it’s a highly technically ambitious game that clearly has had a lot of care and attention put into ensuring that it’s bug-free.

Redjackets is a paranormal thriller about a sort of vampire bounty hunting agency, which is to say that they hunt vampires and also some of them are vampires. I will confess: there was a time in my life when this was my shit. But I delved too greedily and too deep in the vampire fiction mines and unleashed the terrible spectre of vampire burnout, so I am not the ideal audience for this game. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to give it a fair review.

So, the game starts by having you choose one of the characters to play as: the naive one, the cynical one, or the brave one. (This is pretty much all you get to know about them in advance.) I picked the cynical one, who turned out to be seasoned vampire hunter Lynette (who is a vampire). Her version of events opens with a few lines about Lynette trying to find someone (unspecified at this point), and then it hits you with this:

“And it looked like the database was frozen to boot. If someone forgot to renew the license again, you were going to lose it. You always wondered if you'd snap one of these days. You just didn't know that a licensing agreement to a database would be the thing that did it.”

Honestly, I loved this as an opening move. It’s so specific! So unexpected! So real! There is a long list of reasons why work might make me snap one of these days, but people not renewing the fucking license on the fucking software I need to do my fucking job is definitely on that list. Vampires: they’re just like us!

Despite the vagaries of software access, Lynette and Declan (the brave one, not a vampire) soon succeed in capturing Fiia (the naive one, a vampire); this turns out to be because they want to recruit her to go after her sire, Rosco Jeppson, an art-loving mob boss. (As vampire baddies go, he seemed a little tame from Lynette’s perspective, but I understand Fiia’s route contains more gory details.) The Redjackets’ scheme to take Rosco down proceeds from there, mostly unfolding as dynamic fiction with the occasional choice. In most cases, these choices’ effects, if any, were unclear, although the choice of who to place in which role for the assassination clearly does change things considerably (enough that one combination in Lynette’s route causes a game-breaking bug, or did when I played).

On the whole, though, what I found myself most invested in was not the action and intrigue, but the low-key moments of vampiric slice-of-life, as Lynette deals with red tape and gives young vampires printouts on how to control their hunger. The romance between Lynette and Declan also has some nice writing around it, although I was a little surprised that the interspecies aspect was treated as a total nonissue. I mean, on the one hand there’s not much new ground to be broken in the area of human/vampire relationship angst, so it’s almost refreshing to just skip the whole thing, but on the other hand, it does seem a bit odd for the characters not to feel some kind of way about it (at least the “one of you is immortal and the other is not” aspect, since the game makes a point of saying that Lynette isn’t tempted by Declan’s blood).

Most of the prose is pretty transparent—casual, modern, not too fancy. This works fine. Every now and then, though, it tries to get ornate, and out of nowhere you get a description like: “An unnatural dysphoria winds its way into the many emaciated oxbow bends of your insides.” I would say I enjoy ornate prose more than the average person, but I think you’ve got to commit to it more than this. If you just drop it in one sentence in twenty, it’s jarring.

The aesthetic is slick, with the obligatory red-and-black color scheme and attractive character portraits (mainly to help you remember whose POV you’re in, I think), but the portraits were a little buggy. Sometimes they covered the text; at least once I got Fiia’s while the POV character was still supposed to be Lynette; on another occasion I got two portraits (both Lynette) next to each other for some reason. If this were cleaned up, though, I’d have no complaints about the visual design.

There were also polish issues with the writing, mainly tense slippage between past and present. Initially the dialogue punctuation was also consistently wrong (in ways I don’t often see combined—it’s rare for the same work to have both dialogue ending in a period followed by a capitalized dialogue tag and dialogue ending in a comma followed by an uncapitalized stage direction, but Redjackets manages to get the rules exactly backwards on this front for a while). It does get cleaner after the introduction, although the errors never totally disappear.

But although Redjackets’ reach exceeds its grasp in various ways, I did enjoy a lot about it, and I would probably check out more works with these characters and/or in this setting—especially if they focused less on the hunt and more on the downtime and the vampire office work.

In this game, the protagonist finds her favorite teacup missing, and embarks upon a quest to retrieve it—a quest that will take her into a spooky forest, a poison swamp, a wizard’s tower, and maybe even the depths of hell. The game was created in RPGMaker to achieve the correct aesthetic (which it does in charming and attractive fashion), but functions as a gauntlet in which one choice will progress the main plot and the other(s) will lead to a bad end.

This is all in service of a parody of RPG tropes, which is not exactly untrodden ground. Observations about RPG characters breaking into people’s houses and taking their stuff have been made before. Commentary on the lengths to which a PC will go, risking life and limb, for relatively inconsequential sidequests is not new either (and in fact this isn’t a million miles away from the same author’s Elftor and the Quest of the Screaming King, although the main focus there was more on the also-much-mocked convention of messing around with sidequests while the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance and you’re supposed to be saving it).

The wizard tower was my favorite bit: (Spoiler - click to show)he has a fake teleport pad at the base of his tower that actually vaporizes intruders hoping for an easy way up, and when you prove your worth by taking the stairs, he offers you a perfect magical teacup that will never chip or allow its contents to go cold. (You can accept, but this is a Bad End because you didn’t get your teacup.) This is still in the territory of “RPG protagonists are thieving murderhobos and also have bizarre priorities,” but the wizard’s involvement (less as a straight-man comedic partner than a different kind of weirdo) adds an entertaining extra layer. The two of them are both baffled to minorly horrified at aspects of each other’s behavior, and they simultaneously are correct and really don’t have room to criticize.

I’m also a sucker for a “we’re going to make you deal with this legendarily annoying game mechanic—haha just kidding” gag, so I enjoyed the poison swamp ((Spoiler - click to show)it just insta-kills you, and the PC has an “I don’t know what I expected” moment).

If RPG parodies are the kind of thing you can’t get enough of, Quest for the Teacup is a well-executed entry in the genre and you’ll probably have a great time. In its best moments, it entertained me too—and it’s a half-hour game with a concentration of good moments that’s fairly high, so I would say I enjoyed it more than I didn’t. But I did always have that nagging sense of deja vu.

Forsaken Denizen is a survival horror game taking place in a far-future space monarchy. An extradimensional investment group has corrupted everyone’s cybernetic implants, and now most people are trapped in the roots of a giant golden tree, while monstrous figures roam the city. Left to stand against the Accretion Group are Doris (the PC), a member of the noncitizen underclass who’s clawed her way up to being a regular working stiff, and her girlfriend, Princess Cathabel X (the narrator). (They met when Dor tried to rob Cath at gunpoint. It’s a long story.)

The gameplay is simple: you shoot at enemies; mostly you hit, sometimes you miss, even more rarely you crit. They attack you; mostly they hit, sometimes they miss (I don’t think they can crit, which is good because you only have three HP). On a first playthrough, at least, you don’t really get any meaningful upgrades or additional options or anything that would change the formula. There’s some strategy involved, but it’s mostly “do I have enough bullets that I feel OK expending them on this enemy or should I move one room over and hit Z until said enemy leaves?” (Of course, this is more or less typical of survival horror, but I think the thing that gets me here is that it’s all RNG-based and there’s no way for the player’s skill to come into the equation the way it usually does in graphical examples of the genre.)

I have to admit that I wished there were a little more dimension to it, but you know what, it doesn’t matter that much, because I loved the vividly weird setting, loved scouring the map for missable tidbits of lore, and, most of all, loved Dor and Cath and the relationship between them. Dor is scrappy and wary and already well accustomed to doing what it takes to survive at all costs, but she still manages a surprising degree of compassion for others. Cath is spoiled and naive and not really used to thinking of the masses as people, but she genuinely loves Dor and that ultimately enables her growth.

And this growth is, really, the core of the story. There’s a lot of sci-fi worldbuilding and some very straightforward sociopolitical allegory (to the tune of “you can’t fix an unjust system by playing by its rules, and you especially cannot do this in a top-down way as someone highly privileged by this system”), but the real meat of the thing is the emotional journey of a young woman who has her general worldview (and the power dynamics of her romantic relationship) first unsettled and eventually upended entirely and has to cope with that.

(And if you tilt your head at a weird angle to try to see outside of Cath’s point of view, it might also be a story about a woman who’s gotten a little complacent about letting her girlfriend take care of things, perhaps because that was a pleasant novelty after years of having no one but herself to rely on, and has to regain a little of that self-reliance and find a better balance in the relationship as well. Since we don’t get to peek at Dor’s thoughts, it’s a lot more ambiguous—it’s entirely possible that she just spends most of the game in shock and eventually snaps out of it—but I do like to think that she has her own arc going on.)

So although I didn’t find the gameplay especially engaging on its own, I quickly became invested enough in the characters and their relationship that I never considered giving up, and I was absolutely satisfied with where their story went and on the whole felt like my time was well spent.

This is a quiet, meditative game about going on a brief camping trip to get in touch with nature and get away from the stresses of everyday life. It’s divided into three sections: shopping, packing, and then the trip itself.

There’s some lovely writing here, and it could be an enjoyable small morsel of a game, but in its current state, typos, punctuation issues, formatting issues, and bugs are pervasive. I actually didn’t finish it; twice I hit a dead end with no links out, and the first time I restarted, but the second time I just gave up.

In real life I don’t have any hobbies that require me to be outdoors, because I’m very allergic to most plants. Sometimes I go to see an outdoor theatre production or concert, and then half an hour in I have a sinus headache and/or my asthma is acting up and I start wondering why I thought this would be fun. So I appreciate the opportunity to experience birding vicariously within my own air-filtered home.

Birding in Pope Lick Park is a low-key trip to the park, clearly written with a lot of love for both the setting and the activity, and supplemented with lovely photos of the park and the birds. I was pretty engaged in the activity of finding all the out-of-the-way corners of the park and felt a bit of excitement whenever I came across a new bird to record. There’s a wide variety of birds to be found; it seemed like quite a lot for one trip, but I don’t know how much of a break from reality this is or isn’t.

At the end, I was a little disappointed that the game didn’t give me any indication of how many of the available birds I had found, but of course that wouldn’t be realistic, so from a simulation perspective I see why it doesn’t, even if it does have the effect of discouraging replays.

My only serious complaint is that the image file sizes are huge, making it somewhat irritating to play the game online as they’re slow to load. I think the image quality could be reduced somewhat without the difference being particularly noticeable to most people, and since to the best of my knowledge the majority of people prefer to play online, especially for Twine games, I feel the tradeoff would be worth it. But otherwise, this was a nice, relaxing medium-length game.

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.)