Ratings and Reviews by EJ

Final Call is the tale of a small-time crook who gets kidnapped and chucked into something that resembles a cross between an escape room and a Saw trap. It’s a solid premise; not groundbreaking, but there’s definitely an audience (one that includes me!) that will happily take several dozen of this kind of thing as long as it’s well-executed.

The game, which took me about a half hour to complete, is ambitious and very unpolished. There are a lot of rooms, but most of them don’t serve any actual purpose. The puzzles are entirely lawnmower-able, which is just as well because the logic can be shaky. Sometimes sentences are capitalized and sometimes they aren’t; sometimes they have punctuation and sometimes they don’t. There’s timed text. There are intimations of backstory, but nothing is ever really explained. The ending comes abruptly and is somewhat confusing. (At least, that was true of the ending I got. I did wonder if things might have wrapped up more sensibly if I’d made a different choice, but the timed text dissuaded me from trying again.)

Final Call is aiming for a little more emotional depth than your average “what if escape room but lethal” tale via the PC’s relationships with his girlfriend Roxy and partner-in-crime Mike, but none of the characters quite gets enough development to rise above stereotype status. As such, I wasn’t sufficiently invested for the crime-doesn’t-pay message to hit home in the way it was obviously meant to. (So I will be blithely carrying on robbing casinos IRL—sorry, authors!)

That said, the authors of Final Call do have excellent instincts for quality-of-life features (timed text notwithstanding). I was initially disheartened to encounter a list of links to “Door #1”, “Door #2”, et cetera, but once each passage has been visited, the link text is replaced with a more descriptive phrase. Every clue you come across and every puzzle you encounter is listed in the sidebar for easy reference, which was great. There’s a text entry bit that’s case-sensitive, and the game specifically tells you it’s case-sensitive—which may seem like damning with faint praise, but a lot of newbie Twine authors don’t think to do that. (My personal preference is for these things to not be case-sensitive in the first place, but you do have to dig into JS a little to figure out how to do that, so I don’t blame people for not realizing you can.)

And despite the issues with the writing and game design, on a technical level, Final Call was a very smooth experience for me—I didn’t encounter any bugs. Which is pretty good for a first outing, especially considering that the game is doing some things I would consider at least advanced-beginner-level, SugarCube-wise.

All things considered, while Final Call was overall rough, I did come away with the feeling that the authors had promise and might someday make an escape room thriller I would really enjoy. They just need some practice—and maybe a proofreader.

This is a murder mystery game in which you play as an FBI agent who’s been called in to investigate a string of murders (possibly the work of a serial killer, possibly not) in a small town in Washington. Over the course of several days, the player must choose how to spend their investigation time, and at the end they are asked a series of questions to see how much they’ve managed to figure out.

The Killings in Wasacona clearly takes heavy inspiration from tabletop games, starting out by making you distribute your character’s stats and then having skill checks done via a link that says “Roll a d20.” The simulated dice were kind to me in my playthrough and I passed most checks for skills that I didn’t have penalties to, so my experience wasn’t frustrating in this regard, but I still didn’t love this as a design choice. I found it made me feel like, rather than playing a game that was simulating solving a murder, I was playing a game that was simulating playing another game that was simulating solving a murder, which had a distancing effect that kept me from ever truly getting invested. The many spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and occasional clunky attempts at poetic language in high-drama scenes also distracted me, although as an editor I’m aware that I notice these things more than most people do.

I was also kind of uneasy at the way that it used the possibility of a racist cop committing violence against people of color as a red herring, and at the way that procedural red tape that exists to protect people’s rights, such as the need to obtain warrants, was treated as an annoying and unfair imposition. (The latter is of course very common in the genre, but that doesn’t mean I like to see it, and the fact that the game doesn’t even give you the option to actually do this stuff—you can either circumvent it via intimidation or give up—doesn’t help. I gather there are negatives to taking the intimidation route, but there are also negatives to just not getting the information, so it doesn’t quite feel like a “giving the player enough rope to hang themself” situation.)

Also, I don’t like picking on this kind of thing because in real life people can have all kinds of names, but when you have one singular Latina character in your game, naming her “Jamal” gives the unfortunate impression that the writer reached for a name that seemed “exotic” without bothering to check which cultures it’s commonly used in or which gender it’s commonly used for. The Somali refugee siblings also have the somewhat unlikely surname "Brown", and the country they come from is referred to as “Somali” instead of Somalia. Individually all of this seems like nitpicking, but it adds up to a sense that not a lot of care is being taken.

On the positive side, I liked the built-in graphical map, and I think the mystery was well-constructed (I managed to solve all the pieces of it and didn’t feel like I was wildly guessing on any of them). I liked the way the game laid out your evidence for each possible culprit before asking you to answer questions at the end, although I did wish it had used the suspects’ names (titles like "the drifter" may be clear enough, but there are a bunch of suspects who are professors at a local college, and they’re listed in this end-of-game evidence rundown as “the $subject professor”, which I had trouble keeping straight). And I enjoyed seeing the statistics at the end that showed what percentage of players had gotten various outcomes.

So the game does have a number of good aspects, and as far as I can tell most players liked it substantially more than I did and my opinion is not terribly representative of most people’s experiences. But I thought these points were worth raising, in case anyone else is particularly bothered by any of these things.

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.

The Fall of Asemia is a game about language, or a game about history and culture and the fact that these are necessarily mediated through language, which is something that can be lost. I suspect Asemia’s name comes from Greek: the negative prefix a- and the root sema, or “sign,” as in semantikos, “significance,” whence the English word “semantic.”

Asemia is not without signs, and those signs are not without meaning, but those signs are no longer legible to most people in the world in which the game takes place. The PC is charged with translating them, but seems unsatisfied with her ability to do so. Translation is always a challenge, but beyond that, the protagonist seems to be dragged down by the weight of the responsibility of serving as a conduit for the lost voices of the Asemians. Or perhaps not – we only see her in a few brief exchanges in between the translated journal entries that make up the bulk of the game, and though her stress and feelings of inadequacy are clear, the reasons for them are open to interpretation. But I did feel like there was a lot going on in between the lines.

The game is mainly played by clicking on glyphs to change them and reading the journal entries that result. The glyphs are lovely, aesthetically, and I was impressed by the fact that those of the five Asemian journal-writers managed to look like the same language in different handwriting, while those of the soldier of the invading force were immediately recognizable as a different language. I did find it somewhat hard to remember which glyphs I had chosen before and which I hadn’t, and I’m not entirely sure whether the texts I saw were sometimes quite similar because I was accidentally selecting glyphs I’d already seen or because changing glyphs doesn’t necessarily change sentences in the way I initially assumed it did.

I also have to admit that it bothers me a little that, although the conceit is that the player character is translating the glyphs, what the player is doing seems not to be interpreting, but rather changing the source text. Unless we’re supposed to take it that the player character has fragments that she’s trying to arrange in the correct order? Regardless, I would have liked a little more clear connection between what I was doing in the game and what the PC was supposed to be doing in-universe.

Regardless, the translated texts convey the Asemians’ sense of loss and displacement with painful clarity. They are often poetic (“The strange vowels of this province flood my mouth like chewing on leather. Someone has painted the sky a different color”), and even the blunter and more straightforward passages, mostly courtesy of a child diarist, sometimes contain surprising and effective imagery (“I don't even know the name of this town, but the clouds here make me want to punch them in the face”). The banal brutality of the invaders is also starkly apparent; one passage, after talking about mass executions, concludes with a complaint about the music tastes of the original residents of the writer’s stolen apartment (“The records are mostly jazz. Who likes jazz?”).

Ultimately, despite my complaints about the relationship of the interactivity to the narrative, I did find The Fall of Asemia to be an intriguing and memorable experience, and though the short length of the game meant that its exploration of the intertwining of language, culture, and history did not have room to be very in-depth, it was well-executed.

Welcome to the Universe is an homage to/parody of Alter Ego, a 1986 choice-based game. Alter Ego was created by, I believe, a psychologist, and purported to be able to accurately model the player’s personality and life up to that point and show them what the outcome of their life choices might be, as well as allowing them to experiment with other life paths and identities. Alter Ego’s claim that it would “change your life” was a little tongue-in-cheek (because you can model the outcomes of making different choices, get it?), but it was earnestly meant to be thought-provoking and somewhat educational, claimed to be rooted in a deep understanding of human psychology, and was perhaps even intended to provoke empathy for others in bad situations, in a “there but for fortune” kind of way. A contemporary review called it “consciousness-raising.” Of course, it also made a number of normative assumptions about the player, and in a game that’s supposed to be so all-encompassing of the human experience, there’s a particular kind of discomfort that that causes for a player who finds that the array of choices on offer hasn’t taken into account the possible existence of a person like them.

You may wonder why I’ve spent a whole paragraph of this review talking about an entirely different game, but I think if I had not already been familiar with Alter Ego—not only the game itself, but the way it was marketed and received—I would have been pretty baffled by Welcome to the Universe. The latter game is framed as the creation of a fictional academic, Dr. Balamer, who believes in the importance of “life-changing video games” and their ability to provoke empathy by drawing on universal human experiences. His earnest ambition to connect humans by creating a universally relatable game produces something that is both obviously filtered through the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white American man (witness, for example, the schoolchildren arguing about the merits of their hometown based on the presence or absence of particular chain restaurants—can a town really be said to be good if it doesn’t have an Applebee’s???) and frequently absurd (featuring heated arguments about Parisian dentistry and a placeholder for an incident involving “goop” that somehow leads to you declaring yourself the “goop master” or “goop servant”). I won’t spoil where exactly this goes, but my read is that Welcome to the Universe affectionately mocks some of Alter Ego’s grand ambitions and gestures towards universality while ultimately affirming the impulse towards human connection that underlies it.

I found this pretty entertaining (the high point for me was probably (Spoiler - click to show)the mid-game survey that asked you if you thought the game should add an incident involving a stranger in an unmarked van and then asked you if you thought it would be fair if your character died if they interacted with the stranger in any way, a reference to an infamously jarring episode in the childhood section of Alter Ego where your character can be kidnapped and murdered). But at the same time, I’m not quite sure if there’s much of a point to this mockery of a specific aspect of a specific game that didn’t exactly spawn a host of imitators. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a monument to someone’s complicated feelings about an ambitious but flawed game, and maybe that’s all it needs to be.

There is one aspect that I felt might rise to the level of a commentary on choice games in general rather than Alter Ego in particular. Alter Ego was a game that gave you choices of actions and determined your (or rather, the PC’s) qualities based on what you did, and that has remained a popular model for choice IF (see the whole Choice of Games oeuvre—in fact, Alter Ego’s latest incarnation seems to be in Choicescript). Welcome to the Universe, on the other hand, allows you to choose what you are (a traveller or a homebody? Cool or uncool?), and determines your actions based on those qualities. It inverts the usual framework, perhaps calling into question how much choice we really have in what we do versus how much our actions are the inevitable result of who we are as people. (Of course, this has particular relevance to Alter Ego’s claim that you can create a perfect replica of yourself but then see what happens if you make different life choices, and a little less relevance to the majority of choice games, in which you’re not supposed to be playing a character who’s Literally You. But on the other hand, I’ve often heard people lament that they replayed a game planning to make different choices this time, but couldn’t bring themselves to do it….)

There’s also something there about the inadequacy of binary choices to really capture the range of human experience, but this falls a little flat when you consider that most games don’t have purely binary choices, including Alter Ego itself.

All Alter Ego considerations aside, I didn’t consistently love the experience of Welcome to the Universe; the humor was a little hit or miss for me, and also I don’t really like playing as Literally Me in any game and so I didn’t and then I felt like I’d undermined the intended experience of the ending. (This is a me problem, I know.) But it’s definitely unique, and it gave me some ideas to chew on, and I appreciate that.

(This review was originally posted as part of the 2012 Semi-Official Xyzzy Reviews series, and focuses on the game's nomination in the Best Story category.)

It’s not all that common to see alternate-universe or secondary-world fantasy stories that deal primarily with small-scale personal dramas. Plots centered around a woman dealing with a troubled marriage and learning to stand up for herself are not very often found in worlds that also have tensions between magic-using aristocrats and generally non-magical commoners about to erupt into revolution. First Draft, however, combines these elements very deftly. The family drama is interwoven with the larger political goings-on of the setting in a way that feels believable. Rather than trying to tell a sweeping story about the whole of society, it focuses on one incident in a way that hints at the underlying broader issues: the protagonist, Juliette, is the low-born, non-magical wife of a magic-using nobleman, and one of her husband’s youthful by-blows has just turned up in the company of a charismatic friar with heretical ideas about the magic-using class’s supposed God-given right to dominate everyone else. Juliette is drawn to the friar, but he, it transpires, has ulterior motives for getting close to her. In recounting Juliette’s interactions with the friar and the boy, the game never goes into any depth about what kind of movement or organization the friar might be involved with, why exactly they might want to assassinate Juliette’s husband, and what their larger plans are, but it’s clear that the friar is not some lone maniac; there’s some unrest here that goes far beyond that.

Juliette’s story has a climax and a resolution: she decides of her own accord to get her husband’s illegitimate child away from the radical friar by forging a letter the boy from her husband, and then writes her husband to tell him what she’s done, and what she expects him to do now, in terms that brook no argument. It’s satisfying to see a character who at the beginning seemed to feel powerless to do anything about her own situation find the courage to take that kind of risk to protect her family, standing up to her somewhat domineering husband in the process. It adds a positive note to the ending, which is otherwise rather ominous (for Juliette and her family, at any rate): the boy seems to still have radical sympathies, and the friar has gotten away to continue fomenting revolution elsewhere.

The political situation, on the other hand, never really comes to a head, but having it loom threateningly in the background works well, and was probably the best decision for a story of this length. The story builds a convincing sense of inevitability, so that even though the setting is fictional, it has the feel of one of those stories set on the eve of a world-changing historical event, like World War I or, well, the actual French Revolution. One gets the impression that the revolution will happen sooner or later; it’s just a question of when.

The story’s epistolary format works well for it, and its handling of the climax. These can be tricky to do in epistolary works, since the constraints of the form usually demand that any big decisive action must take place “offscreen” and be reported after the fact in a way that can feel anticlimactic. First Draft neatly sidesteps this by having Juliette’s decisive action be the actual act of letter-writing. The game’s “editing” mechanic, which gives the impression of the player peering over her shoulder as she writes, adds to the effectiveness as well.

It’s a short and linear game, but in twenty-odd short pages it accomplishes a lot, and the gameplay mechanic and epistolary format both serve the story–the unique format never feels like a gimmick. It’s a well-crafted thing, and my only real complaint is that there isn’t more of it.

You Can’t Save Her is a short piece about two friends raised in a monastery in a fantasy setting. One friend finds a forbidden tome that reveals the existence of a different god and becomes a heretic, gaining strange powers in the process. The other remains loyal, and when the heretic becomes a threat, the church sends the loyalist to kill her.

The most interesting part of this piece, to me, is the way it deals with faith. The loyalist, it is suggested, also has her doubts about the god she was raised to believe in; her refusal to follow her friend into apostasy isn’t due to an unwavering commitment to the worldview the monastery espouses. Rather, it’s because she’s also skeptical of the new god her friend has found. To overcome the inertia of her upbringing, it’s not enough to no longer believe in her original faith; she has to find something else she believes in more. (Spoiler - click to show)(Which she does, ultimately, though it’s not a god at all.)

Leaving a highly dogmatic faith that has been a large part of one’s life to that point is something I don’t have personal experience of, so I can’t say if this rings true. But it is an interesting contention, and a somewhat unusual angle on this type of narrative.

The prose is fairly laconic, but there are moments of striking imagery—a cathedral that “pierces the sky like a stalagmite”, moonlight through stained glass “painting a rose of rainbows on the floor”, a rift in space that “closes like a wound”. It adds up to an atmosphere that’s beautiful, nearly empty, and uncanny, enhanced by a droning industrial soundtrack. The sparseness of the words on the screen (most of the time) also feels appropriate to a story that’s largely about two women alone in a vast desert.

The interactivity was the work’s weak point for me; I found that the choices felt largely cosmetic (does it matter if you’re trudging off to kill your best friend with a saber or a broadsword?). This was thematically appropriate to the earlier parts of the game, in which the loyalist’s perceived lack of choice figures prominently, but later on it might have been fitting to let the loyalist’s belated rebellion be something the player had more of an active hand in. (This not being the case then makes the earlier lack of meaningful choice feel less like a thematic decision, also.) Failing that, I think it would also have been an improvement to stick to the use of cycling links that probe a little deeper into the character’s psyche with each click, and just get rid of the choices that change a bit of text in the next passage but don’t really carry any weight. But it is an enjoyable piece of writing nonetheless.

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.)

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.

Last Valentine’s Day represents the experience and aftermath of a breakup as a time loop in which the PC relives the last day of the relationship over and over, passing from shock and disbelief through despair before finally reaching the point where he’s able to move on with his life. The world around him reflects his mental state—the weather, the condition of the park he passes through, and the lives of the people around him go from pleasant to miserable, then gradually improve again.

This externalization of the PC’s feelings serves as somewhat of a substitute for actual interiority—there's little specific detail to be found here, so I don’t have a strong grasp of who the PC is, who his partner was, or why their relationship fell apart. The most we get is a letter from the ex describing their relationship as "like a roller coaster," which, in addition to being a cliche, has a whole range of possible meanings, some of which would make the PC a rather unsympathetic figure. But the evocative descriptions of the environment and the predicaments of the somewhat more distinctively drawn side characters help to ensure that the game sounds the emotional notes that it means to, for the most part.

The game effectively captures the post-breakup emotional arc of a person who has been dumped; choosing to represent this as a Groundhog Day loop emphasizes how difficult it can be to move past this experience, and the fact that choices don’t matter much makes sense inasmuch as this kind of post-relationship grief is, to a degree, something you have to just wait out. (Others have suggested that this passage-of-time aspect makes the time loop framing a bad fit, but to me the emotional logic of it made sense—the PC is obsessively retreading the breakup in his mind, but with each cycle he comes a little closer to being able to actually put it behind him.) But without any distinctive characterization for the main ex-couple or insight into how things got to this point, it all feels a little hollow in the end.

In Three Things, the player character is translating a poem for a college class on Russian-English translation while ruminating on their disintegrating relationship with their boyfriend.

The poem is by Anna Akhmatova, whose work I find fascinating because it's often laconic and ambiguous--clearly freighted with emotion, but what that emotion is can be hard to identify. The poem central to Three Things is no exception; it describes a man who's hard to please and especially disdainful of "hysterical" women, and concludes with the speaker's statement that she was his wife. Should we read pride into this last statement? Bitterness? Weary resignation? It's hard to say.

The translation aspect of the game is very much grounded in reality. This isn't Emily Short's Endure, where the possible "translations" you can select from are more loose interpretations of the overall situations in the poem. All of your options are plausible translations; the differences come down to nuance, the way the emphasis and tone can shift depending on the minutiae of word choice. As a sometime translator, I deeply appreciated this more realistic take on the process, because I think it can be a fascinating experience in and of itself; when you jazz it up to provide an artificially wide array of interpretations, that might make it more appealing to the layperson in some ways, but to me the art of translation exists primarily in navigating those tiny shades of meaning, and I'd love for more people to get to see how that works.

And of course, each possible word comes with associations for the PC, a different lens into their own failing relationship. Before making your choice, you can click on each option to see the PC's musings as prompted by that word; through these fragmentary but evocative lines, Three Things conveys the character of the PC's partner and the problems in their relationship. The PC is more of a cipher--but then, so is the speaker in the Akhmatova poem, so that's fitting. The sense of finality given to submitting your translation at the end of the game does suggest that perhaps, through this exercise, the PC has come to some conclusions about their relationship as well.

But while I appreciated many aspects of Three Things, the actual act of playing it was an exercise in frustration for me. I honestly do not understand why the game has the options come up on mouseover, instead of on click as is the usual way of things. I'll admit that this might be a me problem; I do have fine motor control issues, so I handle a mouse more clumsily than the average person. But the experience of playing through the game for me was one of accidentally mousing over a word I'd already selected a translation for, having the dialogue with the choices pop up, having to move my mouse to close the dialogue, then trying to move my mouse over to the next untranslated word, whereupon I would accidentally mouse over a word I'd already translated, and then...

Having the words that don't bring up a list of options be translated on mouseover is fine; I did keep getting them out of order due to the aforementioned clumsy mouse handling, but most people would probably find it clunkier to have that be on click. But I would dearly love for there to at least be a selectable setting to have the translation dialogue choices come up on click instead, because the interface as it is now made my time with Three Things much more frustrating than it had to be and distracted me from appreciating its artistry, which I very much wanted to do.

In Chinese Family Dinner Moment, the PC, a closeted AMAB trans person who has been away at college in the US, reunites with their Chinese Indonesian family for a Lunar New Year dinner. (Whether the character is a woman or nonbinary is not stated.) On one side is an auntie who wants to chatter inanely about family members the PC barely knows; on the other an uncle with unsavory intentions. The PC can't eat the food (they're a vegetarian), can't reveal too much about themself, can't stomach engaging with their family's conservative political opinions and general bigotry. In such a situation, what can you do? As anyone who's been through this kind of family dinner might guess, not much...

This is a very quick game, but it works perfectly at the length that it is, because it zooms in on this single moment and really makes the player feel the PC's acute discomfort and sense of being trapped, (Spoiler - click to show)as well as their self-disgust when they finally cave and starts parroting what their family wants to hear. Much of this is accomplished through the use of a strictly limited parser--a great illustration of how "interactivity" doesn't have to mean "making choices" or "solving puzzles." A static short story of a similar word count would not have nearly the impact that this has.

This short visual novel takes place in a dystopian future where an all-seeing AI, VIGIL, rules the earth. The AI's consciousness is distributed among multiple datacenters (or "nerve clusters") around the world, making it nigh-impossible to destroy it, or even strike a serious blow. If you can't hit all the nerve centers at once, its consciousness will remain mostly intact; it will regroup and rebuild, its dominance not seriously weakened.

The resistance movement, once large, is now down to three people. The PC and their two compatriots are locked in a bunker, dealing with all the interpersonal tensions and jealousies that are bound to come from being in close quarters with a small number of people for an extended time. But one point of conflict is of greater import to the world at large: They've gotten their hands on a weapon that can take out VIGIL, but the group's leader, Sleep, seems to have become oddly reluctant to use it. Why is she backing down now? And is she right to do so?

The Good Weapon's science-fictional concerns aren't new, but they're well-executed. In particular, the moody black-white-and-red art and the terse, sometimes fragmentary prose combine to create a palpably tense and oppressive atmosphere. It's not unremittingly grim, though; here and there, moments of hope and connection can be found--and these moments nag at the PC as they race towards their destructive goal, casting doubt on whether it's all worth it.

It's hard to talk about the way choices are used here without spoiling the game's central twist, but although I don't believe they lead to any branching, they do serve a narrative purpose and I found them effective. Another choice at the end might not have gone amiss, but I think the sparingly-used interactivity worked well as it was.

It's a shame that the game is download-only, since I know that a lack of browser playability puts people off, but if you don't mind that, I feel that this atmospheric and thoughtful little game is well worth your time.

One Does Not Simply Fry is a short ChoiceScript game laden with Lord of the Rings puns and jokes about cooking competitions. Possibly also jokes about ChoiceScript games—I’m not sure whether the bit where the PC is exasperated at having to fill out endless forms about their identity, preferences, and motivation before they can start the cooking competition is a friendly dig at the usual Choice of Games style, but if it is, it amused me.

Rather than actually filling out those forms, you select a premade character—essentially either Legolas, Eowyn, or Frodo—and then get frying. In effect, you’re skipping the part of the CoG game where you decide how to build your various skills and going straight to the part where you figure out how to apply them to your best advantage. I’m a bit impatient, at least when it comes to this style of gameplay, so I appreciated this.

I was easily able to win the fry-off with every character except poor Leggy Ass (his high stat of “breadcraft magic” simply doesn’t seem to have as many potential applications within the competition as some of the other skills). The game encourages you to play multiple times for the full experience, but I was a bit disappointed at how little changed between playthroughs—the differences are mostly at the beginning and end. This seemed especially glaring with Froyo, who is accompanied by an assistant (Samfool, in a slightly lazy joke) when none of the other characters are; this seemed like it should at least have an impact on flavor text, but Sam apparently didn’t have much to say during the competition. Even the special unlockable character of the Which King (he can’t remember which king he’s supposed to be, you see) mostly gets the same text as the other possible PCs during the competition, although the divergence at the end is more significant.

This is a little unfortunate because the game trades primarily on its humor, and seeing the same jokes over and over again tends to take the shine off them. (Although I was unreasonably amused by “mistainless mithril” every time.) If the style of humor seems like a good time to you, it’s worth a play, but I think the optimal way to go about it might be to do one normal playthrough (probably not as Leggy Ass), then play as the Which King, then call it quits.

The Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective gamebooks have spawned a whole genre of multiplayer games where the players take the role of detectives provided with a number of leads; limited to a certain number of actions per day, they must decide what to follow up on and hope they manage to get enough information to solve the case. These games generally end with a quiz asking not just about who the culprit is, but about a number of other particulars surrounding the case, to see how much the players have discovered or deduced. Antony and Cleopatra is an attempt to bring this genre into the realm of multiplayer IF; it’s an ambitious and interesting attempt, but not, I think, an entirely successful one.

Rather than emulating Sherlock Holmes, Antony and Cleopatra take their cues from Nick and Nora Charles, but the chemistry and charm that have made the Thin Man movies enduring classics are largely absent; the influence is obvious mainly in the staggering amount of drinking on the job that the characters can do. Characterizations for the protagonists are fairly thin and their interactions with each other are minimal. This seems like a missed opportunity—Antony and Cleopatra are colorful figures with well-established pop-cultural personas that seem ripe for some engaging repartee in the interstitial scenes between investigative activities. But the only moment in the game where this comes through is the bit in which Antony has to explain to Cleopatra why a jewelry store being named “Blood Diamonds” might be off-putting, as Cleopatra thinks it’s only natural that diamonds should be paid for in blood. I would have liked to see more moments like this one—more character interaction, more dry humor wrung from the absurdity of these two larger-than-life figures investigating a murder.

Antony and Cleopatra’s innovation with regards to the genre’s traditional gameplay is to add investigation sequences where both players are offered dialogue options to question people connected to the case, but the lack of distinction between the two characters here is disappointing—sometimes you can get the same question worded slightly differently, but only slightly. In combination with the lack of focus on developing the characters and their relationship, the lack of any game-mechanical difference makes the two-protagonist conceit feel somewhat pointless. In fact, since you always have time to ask all possible questions and it makes no difference who asks them, the interactivity isn’t doing much for the investigation scenes in general.

There are a number of different approaches one could take here, any of which I think could have been effective:

1. Dispense with the two-PC conceit entirely and make the whole experience more like playing Consulting Detective with your friends, where you’re not really controlling multiple distinct characters, just trying to hash out among yourselves where you should focus your investigative energies. As in SHCD, make the investigation scenes static passages; have the planning sessions be the bulk of the actual gameplay and rely on discussion between players to keep them engaged otherwise.

2. Conversely, take inspiration from some of Consulting Detective’s successors that were actually designed as multiplayer games (unlike the original) and make the characters mechanically distinct. Give them unique investigative abilities (with limitations on when and how often they can use them); give them actually distinct conversation options; have them notice different things. In IF, this is an opportunity to work in characterization in a way a board game can’t, but honestly, in my experience, if you give players the mechanical distinctions, their imaginations will often fill in the rest.

3. Go the IF sleight-of-hand route and keep the two characters mechanically identical, but give them very distinct personalities. The player may always get the exact same information in the end, but the initial formulation of the questions is so different that it seems like it matters which PC is asking what. The illusion would fall apart on replay, of course, but SHCD-likes (if you will) usually aren’t replayable anyway.

The mystery itself also didn’t quite work for me; maybe there was something I didn’t find, but as far as I can tell, you’re meant to solve it by noticing a single discrepancy that you can’t in any way follow up on and extrapolating the whole situation from there. I understand SHCD cases usually did require some leaps of logic (which I presume is part of the reason that it turned into a multiplayer event when it wasn’t designed as one—more likely that someone in your group will make the right connection), and my preferences here are probably shaped by having spent much more time with recent games like Detective: Modern Crime than with the original. But I would argue that what’s fitting for a game based on the controversial deductive style of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t feel so natural elsewhere, and in an interactive mystery I do prefer having firmer grounds for my conclusions.

On a technical level, the experience is smooth, and that's an impressive feat in itself. But gameplay-wise, this game feels to me like it makes just enough changes to the formula to introduce new problems without fully committing to the strengths of the new medium.

When you think about it, text adventure games are a triumph of phallogocentrism (as originally defined by Jacques Derrida and expanded on by feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray). The world of the parser leaves no room for indeterminacy, for ambiguity, for self-contradictory ideas. What matters is concrete objects, represented by words, able to be manipulated in predictable ways and be used in puzzles with a single solution that can be reached (ideally) through logical reasoning. As this worldview is associated with a Western, patriarchal system of values that tends to set up hierarchical oppositions that define men by what they have and women by what they lack, games like the original Stiffy Makane—which is quite literally phallocentric—can be argued to be the ultimate expression of this tendency, having the player engage in this system with the explicit goal of the subjugation of women. Meanwhile, Citizen Makane demonstrates its commitment to complicating the phallogocentric worldview in its first scene, which requires (and it is key that this is required, not simply allowed) the player character to unequip his penis in order to proceed...

Okay, okay, that’s enough. Citizen Makane is a porn parody deck-building game, and although it has moments of sincerity and some actual commentary to make about masculinity, most of the game is very, very silly.

It is the story of a man who wakes up after centuries of cryosleep to find himself in a world where men have otherwise died out. He has been revived as an experiment in reintroducing men to society, and is also playing host to an AI, Shamhat, whom he is tasked with providing with training data by having sex with as many women as possible.

The sex is represented by a very simple deck-building card game; once you’ve figured out the basics of how it works, it becomes rote, with little variation between encounters. The acts you perform are described with semi-randomized ridiculous similes clearly parodying bad erotica, which keeps things entertaining for a while, but the fun of that wears thin eventually too. This is unfortunate, as the player does have to grind (no pun intended) to advance the plot. But then, maybe the tedium is intentional; as the game goes on, the PC himself obviously begins to tire of the whole thing and long for some real connection.

This is one of a number of ways that Citizen Makane sets up gender-essentialist and heterosexist elements for the purpose of knocking them down. The player must afford the game a certain amount of goodwill for this to work, as much of the knocking-down comes fairly late in a long (by IFComp standards) game, but—all semi-joking attempts at feminist litcrit aside—the opening sequence did serve its purpose of giving me some confidence that these elements weren’t being replicated uncritically.

There is, however, one area in which the game doesn’t try to question the assumptions that undergird the genre that it’s parodying, which is the treatment of sex and gender as strict binaries. Granted, I’m not sure quite what I would have liked to see the game do here, given the “all men have died out” premise; it’s inherently difficult to handle the idea of sex and gender as spectra in that context. I don’t think any recent take on the premise has handled this in a way that I was entirely satisfied with, or that didn’t cause a certain amount of controversy; even the best-regarded example that I’m aware of, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, came in for a decent amount of criticism within the trans community (of which the author is also a part). So I can’t entirely fault Citizen Makane for simply avoiding the issue, but I was still a bit uncomfortable with the lack of acknowledgement that trans, nonbinary, and intersex people exist. Though I did appreciate that the game made a point of showing that some of the women still prefer relationships with each other, even with a man available.

Ultimately, despite these flaws, I did find Citizen Makane a largely effective deconstruction of the toxic machismo of the genre that Stiffy Makane, in its particularly egregious awfulness, has become emblematic of. The opening and ending scenes are particularly strong, and there are plenty of humorous moments to be found along the way. But I’m always a bit on the fence about whether intentionally boring the player is worth it, and while I recognize its thematic import here, it still made the long middle section of the game a bit of a slog.

In The Finders Commission, you play as one of the members of the eponymous group, a euphemistically named band of thieves-for-hire. You’ve been hired by the goddess Bastet (or maybe just a regular talking cat) to steal an artifact belonging to her out of a museum. You navigate the museum exhibits, in the process avoiding police officers, creating distractions, entering various codes, flirting with a guard for information, and so on, all in preparation for the moment when you finally take Bastet’s aegis from its case. There seems to be no way to fail at this, but you receive a score at the end grading how well you pulled it off.

As this description might suggest, in a case of convergent evolution, the gameplay here is rather similar to the heist sections of Lady Thalia, which makes it a bit awkward to comment on due to the bias involved. That is to say, I think it’s a very solid foundation for a heist game, but of course I would think so. In any case, barring a few bugs and one puzzle that was somewhat opaque due to the underdescribed environment, I think the structure was largely implemented well here. Nothing is really that difficult to figure out, but there’s some challenge involved in fully exploring the museum and finding all the things that you can do.

That said, the writing was a little spare for my tastes. The prose consists of terse sentences with minimal variation in structure; many rooms lack sensory detail, and not much characterization comes through either. It’s very much a straightforward recitation of a list of facts. If the gameplay were more complex, that might have been enough to carry the game, but as it is I think it could stand to be punched up a little.

Also—I don’t want to be told that the detective “could be a friend or maybe even a lover” if the two of you were on the same side of the law. I want to see that tension between them; I want to feel the star-crossed chemistry for myself. (I mean, again, of course I would, but.) Even though they don’t interact, this could still be demonstrated through how the PC thinks about the detective and what they notice about him. Obviously this is a trope I enjoy, but I’d like to think this isn’t just about me wanting to see more of it in general; if you’re not going to make the player feel the gulf between the two characters and genuinely regret that it’s impassable, why even bring it up?

You can choose to play any one of a number of different Finders, who apparently have different strengths and interests, but as far as I can tell, the only difference this made in the game was to the three-sentence description of what you do with your morning before heading to the museum. This seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for greater variation in both narration and gameplay actions available.

I could see an expanded version of this game, or a sequel, becoming something I would very much enjoy, but as it is there’s not quite enough there for me to become fully invested.

June 1998, Sydney is a short narrative about a Chinese Indonesian woman living in Australia whose family moves in with her after anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia force them out of their home. Her white girlfriend then dumps her for being unwilling to come out to her family, hurling a racist insult as a parting remark.

Many people seem to have found it resonant and moving, so I'm a bit of an outlier here; my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. But to me, the 500-word limit of the Twiny Jam did this narrative a disservice. You get very little background on the main character, her relationship with her family, or her relationship with her girlfriend; the player is more or less launched straight into a conversation with the girlfriend that escalates from "hello" to total bridge-burning in the space of three or four exchanges. (I also couldn't really tell where on the scale of "blindsided" to "long aware that something like this was coming" the PC was in all this.) Then there's a brief scene with the family watching television coverage of the riots; then it's over.

I can feel bad for the character in the abstract; it is clear that she's dealing with a lot. I can fill in some of the emotional blanks from personal or secondhand experience (and others would be able to fill in even more). But to me, this 500-word vignette doesn't paint a clear picture of a person or a situation or a particular tangle of emotions; it's just a series of events moved through so briskly and with so little detail that it's hard to really feel the emotional punch.

The central conceit of The Whisperers is that the player is an audience member watching a play in Stalin’s USSR. At various points in the show, the audience gets to vote on what the characters should do; the idea is that this is a teaching tool, meant to show, essentially, what happens to people who cross the Party.

The story revolves primarily around the doomed romance of two Trotskyist would-be revolutionaries, Nikolai and Agnessa. Agnessa’s brother Sergei is an NKVD officer, and their neighbors, the older couple Georgy and Dariya, show up occasionally to chat and offer advice. All five characters have things to hide from one another; this is presumably the reason for the game’s other conceit, the idea that the actors are whispering at all times unless otherwise noted. This is an arty touch that sits oddly with the play’s in-universe status as a piece of Soviet agitprop, a genre not really known for metaphor or anything that would open the intended meaning up to interpretation. (Though it may be that while The Whisperers the game intends the whispering to be symbolic, The Whisperers the play intends this entirely literally and the agitprop writer just thought that that was a normal thing for people in an apartment building with thin walls to do?)

Of course, no matter what choices you make, Agnessa and Nikolai’s fates are sealed from the outset. The only question is how much collateral damage will be incurred—making the characters do things the Party wouldn’t approve of naturally leads to worse outcomes for Sergei, Georgy, and Dariya.

The game is well-written in many respects. The setting is clearly well-researched, and the necessary information is communicated deftly to the player without any awkward “as you know” info-dumps (though there is a glossary to help anyone who’s lost). The characters also feel very real; Agnessa’s mindset of being unable to relax or do anything fun because the world is in a horrible state and she could be doing something about it, particularly, was very familiar to me from my experience in activist circles. (If she hadn't (Spoiler - click to show)decided to essentially go out in a blaze of glory, she'd be on the fast track to burnout.) And while some of the choices don’t mean much, at their best they provide a window into the struggles of flawed people trying to live under intolerable circumstances and striving, however vainly, to keep their loved ones safe.

But I’m not sure how to feel about the theatrical framing. It has a distancing effect, especially given that you’re playing as either a faceless audience member or the collective will of the audience. You’re not inhabiting a particular character who can experience any consequences for the choices the player makes, and you’re constantly reminded that the characters who are experiencing consequences are fictional. This encourages the player to hold the whole thing at arm’s length, and I can’t quite figure out what it’s meant to add in return, or, alternatively, why it’s to this story’s advantage to be viewed at a few layers of remove.

The author also provides a link to the script and encourages people to actually perform the show, and as an amateur actor and general theatre enthusiast, I couldn’t resist taking a look with performability in mind. The first two-thirds or so seem quite doable, but toward the end, the combinations of variables to be taken into account become complicated and the text diverges quite significantly, going from changes to a few lines to, in some cases, entirely different scenes. I’ve seen a few pieces of somewhat-interactive theatre in my time; usually there’s only a single point of divergence and it comes fairly late in the show, so that the actors don’t have to keep track of so many things and memorize so many different versions of their scenes. This is considerably more ambitious than anything I’ve seen performed. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but certainly I think you’d need a cast of highly skilled professionals to pull it off. I would be interested to see it done, though!

The Gift of What You Notice More is a puzzle game revolving around a surreal exploration of the dissolution of a couple's relationship. The PC is in the process of separating from their husband, and is going back through dreamlike versions of key moments in their relationship to figure out where it all went wrong.

You go through three rounds of this, at intervals getting items that unlock new areas within each memory (the game calls itself an escape room, but structurally it’s more of a Metroidvania—as funny as either of those descriptors sounds when applied to an introspective game about relationship failures). This is all in the service of digging progressively deeper in the hopes of unearthing the most fundamental problems with the relationship and figuring out what you need to take away from this experience. The problems are all very plausible, and the game struck a nice balance between being relatable and making the characters specific people with a specific relationship that isn’t meant to be a vague stand-in for every soured relationship ever.

I would, honestly, have loved for it to be even more specific, but in a genre/medium that tends to be as blank-slate as possible, I at least appreciated the level of detail that was there -- for example, the stuff about the PC putting their dreams on hold so that their husband could go to grad school could have gone into more detail about what those dreams were (apparently they also stopped playing the violin at that time, but it's unclear if that's related), but at least it didn't stop at the level of a generic "you've been putting your partner first and not considering your own wants and needs."

To the best of my knowledge, this is the author’s first major foray into choice-based IF after releasing a number of well-received parser games. The Gift brings a parser sensibility to Twine in a way that I thought worked very smoothly. You have an inventory of items always displayed on the right side of the screen; if you think you can use a particular item in a particular location, you click on it, and if you’re right, the relevant link appears. This provides a taste of the parser-style puzzle-solving satisfaction that you don’t get in games where the link appears automatically once you’ve got the right thing in your inventory, but only having to worry about the noun makes it feel smoother to me than the choice-based games I've seen that attempt to bring verbs in as well. (YMMV, but it's just too many clicks for me.)

But although I liked the mechanics of the puzzle-solving, the design of the puzzles themselves didn’t always work quite as well, largely owing to the dream logic that the game operates on. When the internal logic of it worked for me, it felt really rewarding! But there were puzzles where I could figure out each individual step based on the tools I had available but had no idea what my end goal was (e.g. all the elephant business—yes, I get the “elephant in the room” metaphor, but it wasn’t really clear to me what I was trying to do with the elephant), and others where I had no idea where to start (e.g. the moving van scene with the sticks). This is fairly subjective and I suspect that if you polled players you wouldn’t get very strong consensus on what clicked and what didn’t, but there must be some way to give the player a bit more of a nudge in the right direction now and then.

Another minor complaint is that each round involves coming up with three possible sources for the relationship’s issues and then picking one as the issue; this is clearly a reflective choice meant to encourage the player to engage with the story, with no gameplay implications. The thing is, the options didn’t seem mutually exclusive, and there was at least one round in which two of the options felt like facets of the same underlying problem. So it didn’t feel like there was strong in-universe motivation to be choosing just one thing to focus on, and I didn’t feel like I was guiding the character down a significantly different path into their future based on which thing I chose. It felt like the PC realizing where the problems were and what they could do differently in the future was what was really important for their growth, and picking one was a formality that ultimately fell a little flat.

But these complaints aside, I did enjoy The Gift. I like when introspective, issue-focused games have a little bit of whimsy and/or a fantastical edge to them, and this was a lovely example of that, with some smart ideas about gameplay design on top.

Beat Witch is a parser game that takes place in a world where some girls, at puberty, suddenly turn into Beat Witches, a sort of energy vampire for whom music takes the place of garlic or holy water. The PC is one of these witches—the well-meaning “reluctant monster” type, who tries not to kill when she feeds—and her goal in the game is to take down another witch, one who has no such compunctions.

The game is fairly linear, not just in the sense that it lacks plot branching, but in the sense that it doesn’t often let you wander and poke around. There’s generally one specific command the game wants you to type at any given time and it won’t recognize much else, other than examining things. And even going that far off-script can be risky; sometimes if you don’t do the thing the game wants you to do immediately, you die.

When you type the right thing, the next bit of the story will be delivered to you in a large multi-paragraph chunk of text. Even on my gaming laptop, which has a large screen by laptop standards, this was almost always more than one screen’s worth of text, and sometimes more than two screens, so I was constantly scrolling back, trying to find where the new text started. This was a bit of a hassle, and to be honest, if I’d been playing on a smaller screen I don’t know if I would have had the patience to make it to the end.

I have to admit that as the game went on, I wondered more and more why the author had chosen to make it a parser game. It isn’t really taking advantage of the strengths of the medium (the sense of space, the object manipulation) or doing anything that hypertext couldn’t do, and I think I would have had a much smoother reading experience had it been a choice-based/hypertext game. The constant back-scrolling was frustrating and undermined the sense of propulsive forward motion that Beat Witch seems to be going for. Besides, if I’m going to be discouraged from interacting with the environment, I’d prefer to just get rid of the illusion that I can do so. It’s distracting to be constantly wondering if maybe this time there might be something interesting off the beaten path. I’d rather be put on some visible rails and know for a fact I can’t deviate from them. (Plus, the game’s recurring problems with unlisted exits couldn’t have existed in a choice-based game, but that at least is relatively easily fixed.)

In a work without much gameplay, the writing has to do most of the heavy lifting; Beat Witch has mixed success on this front. It has an atmospheric depiction of a mostly-abandoned city and some effectively gross horror imagery, and the loosely-sketched worldbuilding was intriguing. The emotional beats, however, didn’t quite land for me; you get too much of the PC’s backstory and motivation in a single infodump, and it feels a little inorganic. I would have loved to get that information parceled out over the first half of the game via the PC’s own memory so that her brother’s recording didn’t have to cover so much ground. I also feel it would have worked better for me if I had actually seen some of her idyllic childhood before everything went wrong. I think that would have made finding out what happened to her more immediately, viscerally painful, which then would have made the ending more satisfying.

There’s some interesting stuff in Beat Witch, but in the end it felt to me like a story that was constantly fighting against its format, and between that and the uneven handling of the main emotional arc, I was never as fully immersed as I wanted to be.

In Lunium, you are a detective who awakes to find yourself chained up by the killer you have been pursuing. You must both discover the killer’s identity and escape the room you are locked in before they strike again.

The game has been widely compared to an escape room, and with its plethora of combination-lock puzzles, it’s easy to see why. But Lunium does take advantage of its medium to have a player character with a distinct identity, allowing it to do things that an actual escape room would be unable to do. This gives the game a bit of individuality that I enjoyed, and makes it feel like it has a reason to be a Twine game beyond the fact that most people don’t have the opportunity to make their own actual escape room.

As is typical for this style of game, most of the puzzles that you will have to solve are immediately in front of you once you’ve gotten out of being handcuffed to the wall. A common issue with this structure is that if you have too many puzzles requiring number combinations (or any other single format of answer, but it’s usually number combinations), it can become hard to tell whether you have what you need to solve a given puzzle yet. Lunium does fall into this a little, but luckily it has a “hint mode” that you can enable that will give you this information when you look at a puzzle, which I appreciated. There are also more granular hints available, but I didn’t end up using those.

The puzzles largely walked the line of being challenging enough to be satisfying without being too terribly difficult. The only place I really got hung up was the point early on when I didn’t realize that I needed to search my right pocket again after getting uncuffed, and I eventually got past that just by trying every action that was available to me. I did find it a little annoying to have to repeatedly light matches and I’m not sure the light source management added much in the way of legitimate, interesting challenge, but otherwise the gameplay experience was smooth and I moved through the game at a good clip.

The game has a slick visual design that makes good use of images to create atmosphere; the images also have clear and concise alt text for those that need it. The prose largely stays out of its own way, and the plot does what it needs to do to provide an excuse for the puzzles. (It’s all a little improbable when you get right down to it, but puzzle games tend to be.) One aspect of the final twist became apparent to me fairly quickly, but the other did require a little thought and a careful reading of the in-game documents.

I enjoyed the hour I spent playing Lunium, and if I wanted to introduce my escape room friends to IF, I think this would be an excellent place to start.

Excalibur takes the form of a fan wiki for a fictional ’70s science fiction TV show. The show itself is now completely lost to the BBC’s tape-erasing practices, but the fans have come together to assemble what information they can from their own memories and whatever ancillary materials they can get their hands on, documenting the content of the show and the behind-the-scenes dramas of the cast and crew.

I found this premise intriguing, given my own experiences with fandom. The relationship of a fandom to its source material is often less straightforward than one might think (especially if that fandom has been going for decades). Theories about a show or interpretations of ambiguous elements can become widely agreed upon as fact even though the actual contents of the show support multiple possibilities, and the popular theory/interpretation may not even be the best supported. Small details are given disproportionate importance—a joke that appeared two or three times becomes, in the minds of the fans, a running joke in practically every episode; something a character does or mentions once becomes a prominent character trait. Popular fan writers invent characterization and worldbuilding details that other fan writers adopt, and eventually everyone forgets those details weren’t in the show. In a very real sense, a fandom is not so much about the actual source material as it is about a version of it that lives in the collective imagination of the fans.

The concept of a fandom whose source material doesn’t exist anymore provides a great opportunity to explore this phenomenon: the fans are trying to reconstruct the show as accurately as possible, but does it really matter what was or wasn’t actually in there? Are these fans sticking around due to love of the show, as they profess, or is it more that they’re getting something out of the social aspects of the fandom? If Excalibur had been more focused on the dynamics between a work of fiction, its creators, and its audience (and among that audience), I would have loved it. Instead, however, it was trying for some grander themes (Do we place undue importance on memorializing things—or people—that are gone? At what point does “remembering” turn into “being stuck in the past”?), which didn’t quite work for me.

This may be a matter of taste; in general, I prefer exploring themes like this through characters rather than as philosophical abstracts. In this case, I would have liked to see either different characters grappling with the comforts of memory versus the benefits of moving on, with different results, or one particularly richly textured, well-drawn character’s personal journey. Instead, Excalibur mostly offers philosophical musings alongside characters who are caricatures of common fan types—including the central character, Ian, who is that guy who loves being a big fish in a small pond, and is perhaps so high on his own self-importance that he’s forgotten how small the pond actually is. The caricatures are well-done, and in a game that was more parodic in tone I would have no faults to find with them, but they sit somewhat oddly alongside the game's high-minded thematic concerns.

One section of the story that did work for me was the portion of the game focusing on VerdantKnight and HandOfBedivere, who, having met through Excalibur fandom, are working together to make a fan documentary and are also in a long-distance relationship. Then, after a visit to the main filming location, Bedi disappears from the internet. Did he fall victim to the show’s supposed curse, or has VK just been ghosted? Either way, it’s a tale of an obsession with the past that is at best relationship-destroying and at worst deadly, and VK, in his grief, reacts by clinging even harder to that obsession, insisting that he will finish the documentary on his own. And in that moment, I cared about how destructive that obsession was, because VK felt like a real person, not A Certain Type of Fan.

But then, “felt like a real person” is a slightly ironic thing to say here. On several occasions, Excalibur brings up the idea that the show never existed and no one involved in creating it ever existed. That’s all very well and good, but then it suggests that (Spoiler - click to show)the fans never existed, or at least that many/most of them are sockpuppets (that is, fake accounts) made by Ian. So if the show isn’t real, and the people making the show aren’t real, and their on-set drama and the mysteries surrounding the making of the show aren’t real, and the fans aren’t real, and their interpersonal dramas aren’t real… what’s the point of any of this? (You might, if you were being a smart aleck, point out that this game is fiction, so of course none of it is real. But emotional investment in a work of fiction requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, so it’s hard to make that investment in a work that doesn’t believe in many aspects of its own created world and doesn’t want the player to get too comfortable doing so either.)

The point, in fact, seems to largely be Ian’s personal psychodrama—can he bring himself to let go of this fandom, or will he be stuck in a spiral of unhealthy obsession forever?—(Spoiler - click to show)but then, that actually makes less sense to me under the “sockpuppeting” interpretation, too. If the other fans are real, then the reasons for his attachment to the fandom are obvious, but if this is all a one-man puppet show, then he’s not actually getting any attention or respect, so what is he getting? But perhaps the bigger problem here is that I don’t quite care enough to come up with interpretations of his motivations, because for most of the game he’s presented as an exaggerated, two-dimensional stereotype, which was funny, but didn’t really prime me to be interested in dissecting his psychology.

Despite this wall of text, I really did like Excalibur overall; the reason I’ve written this whole long review of it is that I almost loved it, but the “is this fake? Is that fake? Is it all fake?” kept distracting me from (what I felt was) the good stuff.

The visual design of the game is fantastic, and it does a mostly good job of wrangling Twine into the shape of a wiki despite Twine’s protests (although I did feel the lack of a proper back button). And I did think that the first two layers of the narrative, the descriptions of the show and the mysterious goings-on behind the scenes, were well-executed, with a nicely unsettling atmosphere, when leaving aside the repeated suggestions that they might never have existed. But with those suggestions in place, these two layers rely on the third layer, the goings-on in the fandom, to give them meaning, and Ian’s story didn’t do that for me.

This game follows Dr. Ludwig, a Dr. Faust/Victor Frankenstein mashup, as he tries to make a deal with the Devil for godlike powers of creation without actually giving up his soul. Meanwhile, there’s an angry mob at his doorstep—though its leader is quite handsome….

Dr. Ludwig (the game) is entirely narrated in the Mad Scientist Classic™ voice of Dr. Ludwig (the character). Whenever you take an item, for example, the response is “The [noun] was mine! All mine!” You can practically hear the evil laughter that must follow. The tone this sets is a large part of the game’s charm. It may be a little too much for some—Ludwig is a rather excitable fellow with a great love for exclamation points—but I enjoyed it.

The game delights in its cheesy genre tropes, and in juxtaposing them with the boring minutiae of real life. The torch-and-pitchfork mob just wants Ludwig to sign a neighborhood charter to agree to avoid experimentation on weekends and holidays (“with the exception of Hallowe’en for historical reasons”) and stop making loud noises after 8 PM. The woman who works at the mysteriously appearing and disappearing magic shop is thinking of forming a union because she doesn’t get enough vacation days. There’s a Terry Pratchett-esque sensibility to it, also evidenced in its approach to deities—the magic shopkeeper, for example, knows that God and the Devil exist, but she doesn’t believe in them, because “there’s really no reason to go about encouraging them, is there?"

The puzzles are well done, but mostly pretty typical medium-dry-goods fare (though the ones that incorporate ordering the Devil to do your bidding have some unique flair). Where the game really shines is in the character interactions—with the shopkeeper, with the Devil, and with the aforementioned handsome pitchfork-waver Hans. These interactions take place via an ask/tell conversation system with topic listing, which is my favorite kind of ask/tell conversation system. (Although it might have been nice to have some indication, in the list, of whether I’d asked about the topic yet or not—I did, at least once, miss out on asking about something puzzle-critical because I lost track.)

It’s easy, in comedy, to make characters that are one-note, or who behave in whatever way they need to in order to serve the joke of the moment. Here, the characters are humorous, but the humor is grounded in characterization that is consistent and recognizably human (if somewhat heightened), which also drives how each character interacts with the puzzles and the plot. (For example, Hans’s mention that (Spoiler - click to show)he doesn’t really mind if you dig up the remains of his ancestors—they’re dead, what do they care?—presages his admission that he (Spoiler - click to show)doesn’t believe in God, both of which are key bits of information needed to solve puzzles. And the former, at least, is also pretty funny.) Ultimately, I found them all quite endearing (and was pleased that Ludwig had the opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)ask Hans out on a date).

Dr. Ludwig has humor, heart, and a high level of polish, and I had a great time playing it. I would happily follow the good(?) doctor’s further adventures if that was something the author was interested in pursuing.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Bubble Gumshoe’s first outing, Who Killed Gum E. Bear; it hinges entirely on noticing a single aspect of the central gag and most of the investigating you do is utterly pointless. It’s an approach to detective IF that’s bound to be hit or miss, and for me it was a miss, even if the candy-coated noir setting was delightful. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Who Iced Mayor McFreeze. I didn’t doubt that it would be funny, but would it be enjoyable as a game?

Fortunately, the answer was yes. Rather than having you guess the identity of the culprit like its predecessor, Mayor McFreeze traps Bubble Gumshoe in an abandoned factory that is also a crime scene. She must both search for clues and find a way out, giving the player quite a bit more to sink their teeth into than Gum E. Bear provided.

The puzzle design worked well and made clever use of a smallish inventory of objects. The implementation was a little rough, though, and after figuring out what I needed to do I occasionally experienced some friction trying to communicate that to the game. (You’ve heard of “guess the verb,” now get ready for “guess the preposition”!) But I was having a good time in general, so I didn’t mind too much.

All of the clues are technically missable—that is, you can escape the factory without finding any of them—but most of them are wildly unlikely to be missed by a player with enough adventure game experience to instinctively poke into every nook and cranny. The clue that incontrovertibly proves the killer’s identity may elude some players, though; it relies on a mechanic that I remember being emphasized in the previous game, but that isn’t highlighted here. It is covered in the handy list of verbs the game provides, though, so those who didn’t play Gum E. Bear should still be able to figure it out; it just requires a little extra thought/insight compared to the other clues.

The summation at the end is handled by Bubble Gumshoe without input from the player, but varies depending on how many of the clues were found, which I thought worked well. Some players might prefer to have a quiz here, but to me it felt like the real challenge was in solving the puzzles, and once the clues were in hand, interpreting them was fairly straightforward, so I didn’t mind letting the PC do it for me.

In Robbery Reverie, you play as a thief who has realized that their target is a witch. The one choice is what to steal—and of course, in a witch’s house, none of the objects are quite as they seem.

The conceit is fun, but the endings are a little uneven; some are funny, some a bit bland. The small potion, for example, was enjoyably chaotic, whereas the amulet felt like a stock fantasy trope without much specific weird detail to liven it up. My favorite was the large potion; the awkward confrontation between the thief and the witch was delightful. The endings I enjoyed I generally wished there were just a little bit more of, and I would happily play a game that expanded more on these characters.

Based on the cover image, I was hoping this was going to be an entry in the rarefied genre of “surreal public transit comedy”, but alas, the subway-station setting is incidental here. Well, no matter: as a surreal non-public-transit-related comedy, it still packs a lot of fun into its short run time.

This is a one-move game with a central puzzle, in which each cycle hopefully gives you some information that suggests more actions that weren’t immediately obvious, gradually moving you closer to figuring out the one winning action. I can say from personal experience that designing this type of game to be challenging but not unfair is a lot harder than you’d think; the sweet spot is small and the fields of “trivial, provides no satisfaction” and “requires the player to read your mind” on either side are huge. But Boing! mostly lands in the right place.

The conceit, if I can attempt to describe it without revealing too much, is that someone is trying to guide the PC through dreams to accomplish a certain goal. The PC can take one action, and if it doesn’t accomplish that goal, they experience a dream sequence that attempts to nudge them in the right direction and then are yanked back in time to the start of the game.

Mostly these nudges worked, and I moved through the game at a good clip without getting too hung up on anything; the only stumbling block for me was the final command. (Spoiler - click to show)Clearly there’s an instead rule at play here, but under normal circumstances, trying to throw the sandwich would trigger an attempt to take the sandwich. And since you only get one move, any action that first triggers an implicit “take” action has the same result as simply trying to take the sandwich—you can’t, say, “give sandwich to mouse” because first you have to take the sandwich and then you’re yoinked. Once I’d failed at giving the sandwich, it didn’t occur to me to try throwing the sandwich because I figured the same thing would happen. So I spun my wheels for a while before stumbling across what I remember as a fairly direct hint about what to do (I don’t remember what I did to get it).

The bulk of the actual story comes after that final command, and I enjoyed the matter-of-fact tone in which the bizarre events were relayed. This level of random silliness is sometimes a little much for me, but for a bite-size game I think it works perfectly—it’s fun and memorable and doesn’t wear out its welcome.

This game offers brief windows into the minds of Lady Highchester, her daughter and ostensible heir Chelle, and Ara, a commoner who has been brought in as a possible alternate heir.

The choice the player gets is which order to read the three characters’ POVs in. I read Lady H’s last, and it did feel like that was the way it was supposed to be, since while the two younger women are only concealing their feelings for each other, Lady H’s secrets change the player’s view of the situation considerably.

Despite the brevity of each segment, the game gives a good sense of the personalities of the three women and how they relate to each other; Chelle and Ara are endearing, and Lady H an interesting figure with understandable, if unsympathetic, motivations. I'm definitely cheering for Chelle and Ara to run away together!

In this short visual novel, a time traveler resolves to leave her partner because she is distracting him from his true calling as a successful game developer—from her experience of alternate timelines, she knows that his career would have taken off by now if he hadn’t met her, and thus, for his own good, she must go. (He gets no say in the matter; the game does at least acknowledge that it might be selfishness on the PC’s part to make this decision unilaterally.)

This is the creator’s first release, and they created every aspect of the game except the music, which is impressive. The art is lovely and well suited to the fantasy-romance focus, and the prose has a nice flow, although it returns to the same metaphors a little often. The soundtrack’s melancholy music-box tune fits the mood well.

However, Threads of Snow’s single choice is a glorified “restart or quit?” and I was unclear on whether it was meant to have any in-universe implications. If it was, they didn’t really work for me—the PC might be tempted to loop through this short moment again and again rather than move on, but the player has little incentive to do so.

I also think that I would feel the dilemma more keenly if the partner’s potential illustrious career was something that brought more concrete good to the world than game development, or even if it were an artistic career in a field that wasn’t so notoriously grueling. The partner’s relationship with the PC really might bring him more happiness in the long run than a game dev career would, I suspect.

[Pyg]malion* stars a deity who has been murdered and temporarily reanimated in order to find their murderer. The suspects are all embodiments of various societal forces—politics, celebrity culture, Big Data, capitalism—and despite your divinity, it rapidly becomes clear that you are the underdog here. (Presumably the allegory is that one or more of these forces has supplanted religion in modern society.)

The game’s visual presentation is very slick; I was impressed by the graphics, and I deeply appreciated the ability to swap out the retro game font for a regular sans-serif. The descriptions of the strange dimension the game takes place in and its denizens are inventive and striking.

But, all right, let’s cut to the chase, here: you can’t solve the mystery. The crime scene has been cleaned up before you get there, so there’s no physical evidence to find, and the suspects give a handful of pat responses about where they were and what they were doing that are impossible to verify. And ultimately it doesn’t matter anyway, because all of the suspects are above the law.

You could debate the merits of subverting audience expectations versus the disappointment of breaking the implicit promises set up at the start of the story; you could discuss how much value there is in upending the expectations of the rather conservative mystery genre, specifically. You could argue about whether undermining player agency in an interactive medium is a good way to make a statement or whether it’s more likely to annoy players enough that they’re not inclined to listen to what you have to say.

But I think the most salient point is this: such a narrative just isn’t very interesting. Once the player realizes that the mystery is unsolvable, which happens fairly quickly, there’s nothing else to be gotten out of the game. There’s no other plot, the PC is a cipher, and the social commentary is not deep. The interactivity only exacerbates this issue. By the time the night is halfway over, the player has probably seen all the dialogue, and not much really changes, so the only thing to do is to wander from mostly-empty location to mostly-empty location, running down the clock.

In its unusual concept, memorable descriptive writing, and appealing retro visuals, the game shows a lot of promise, and I would be interested to see the writer’s future works. But it’s unfortunately too static and too repetitive to be satisfying as a game or as a story.

In Cygnet Committee, the player navigates an abandoned military compound and learns the story of an AI based on Joan of Arc. The opening scene, swimming to a beach and then avoiding mines on your way to the compound, seems like pretty standard spy stuff. Then I reached the compound and found the beanstalks growing ears, and I realized this game was going to be much weirder than I first thought.

In general, the world of the game is strange, and some things are definitely meant to be humorous, but it’s not a farce. It strikes a tricky balance between the objective strangeness—ridiculousness, even—of the situation and the sense that this is all deadly serious within the universe of the game, managing to be thought-provoking and elicit some empathy for the Joan AI even though a bare-bones summary of the plot would seem like a joke.

The gameplay is innovative: you have four audio tracks, visually represented on the screen, that play when you mouse over them, and you have to select the one that plays the correct sound (listening for a “click” when you’re picking a lock, for example)—or sometimes no sound at all (as when you’re navigating a minefield and need to avoid the tracks where your detector is beeping to indicate the presence of a mine). Sound-centric gameplay like this is rare even in video games, and in IF, to the best of my knowledge, it’s never been done before. It’s certainly unique and memorable.

The problem is that, for me, it wasn’t actually fun. With a few exceptions (about which more later), every single puzzle is the same “listen to these four tracks and select the one that’s different” task, which offers little opportunity for increasing difficulty or complexity over the course of the game. I got some enjoyment out of figuring out the gimmick on the very first puzzle, but after that it got repetitive very quickly, especially as the player has to redo previous tasks every time they want to revisit an area.

It’s not that I require complicated puzzles in order to enjoy something. I frequently enjoy works of IF and video games that have no gameplay to speak of. I’m happy to play a walking simulator or click links to advance a linear Twine story, as long as it feels like interactivity is serving some purpose in the game. But when a game has gameplay elements that are nominally challenges, but are so easy that completing them gives no real sense of satisfaction, it ends up feeling like busywork to me.

The timed segments are, I think, a bit more challenging; I was extremely bad at them, because I have poor reflexes/fine motor skills, so I feel a little weird saying that I think the game would have been better if there were more of them, but I do think that a game focused more around the timed segments would have felt more rewarding. (Although these segments would have benefited greatly from having a timer on-screen, I think.)

I can see how much work this must have been on the technical end of things, and it seems very polished, without bugs or places where the essentially-custom system gets noticeably wonky. But in the end, while I appreciate it as a technical feat and admire the delicate tonal balance that the writing achieves, I didn’t really enjoy the game.