Ratings and Reviews by EJ

The conceit of Messages from the Universe Graveyard is that it takes place in a defunct MMO, still accessible but no longer being maintained. The MMO's actual gameplay is no longer available, but you can wander through deserted spaces that are varying levels of glitchy and read messages left by other players, as well as leaving messages yourself.

On the meta level of the game, there is a little bit of exploration-based gameplay; scattered throughout the game are teleporter-like "apparatuses" that will take you to a new location if you type in a number, and both the messages and the environment descriptions sometimes contain references to new numbers to try. There are also story threads to follow within the messages as various characters discuss the lore of the fictional MMO and their own lives, which take some strange and surprising turns.

The locations are atmospheric, with descriptions that are usually short but evocative accompanied by photos with fuzzy filters. Some of these locations seemed familiar from other works of fiction that involve people being trapped in a supernatural place—I spotted a bathhouse and a “red lounge”. I did enjoy exploring them just for the sake of seeing what new weird places I might encounter, but mostly I was thinking about the crumbs of story being doled out to me. In particular, I spent a lot of time wondering which of them came from the original author and which were additions from players. The first few comments in any given location are usually clearly in-universe, and then there usually follows a chunk of comments from usernames I recognize, mostly not trying to uphold the kayfabe of being in a transdimensional MMO. But then, in amid the commenters I know are real people, there are comments from people like “the Pizza Guy,” a fast-food employee who seems to be (Spoiler - click to show)dead and haunting the game. Is that a later addition by the author or a player adding their own story to the setting?

But this is probably missing the point a bit. While Messages from the Universe Graveyard doesn’t offer actual MMO gameplay, it is, in its own way, inviting players to roleplay. As is customary for roleplay, a setting has been provided, and players have the opportunity to imagine their own character for that setting and work them into the existing fabric of the narrative.

Or you can be like me and leave inane comments referencing ancient Tumblr memes. Whatever floats your multiversal boat.

Pageant follows Qiuyi Karen Zhao, a Chinese American teenager deep in the grind of trying to look good on college applications. She's worrying about her grades, her SAT scores, her number of AP classes, her internship with a research scientist, how many medals her Science Olympiad team is going to win. And then her mother announces she's signed her up for a beauty pageant, to make her look more well-rounded. It'll stand out, probably—how many would-be biologists applying to MIT have done beauty pageants? But of course, this is a world that the nerdy Karen is completely unfamiliar with, and prepping for the various facets of the pageant is hard to juggle on top of all the balls she already has in the air.

It's clear even before seeing the list of inspirations at the end that the game is deeply indebted to Emily Short's Bee, but while the premise and gameplay are similar, there's a different tone. While both Karen and the nameless protagonist of Bee are trying to cope with the weight of expectations placed upon them by their parents and community while chafing against the conservative and sexist aspects of that community, the protagonist of Bee seems pretty well-adjusted for all that; her conflicts are mostly external. Karen, however, is her own worst enemy.

Playing Pageant took me very vividly back to the experience of being a closeted queer teenager dealing with undiagnosed/untreated mental illness (and possibly a neurodevelopmental condition as well—or rather, I definitely had one, but while I think the text supports a reading of Karen as autistic, it's not unambiguous). I was in a different family/community situation and the pressures on me were not the same, but there’s a lot in Karen’s dysfunctional thought patterns and negative view of herself that I recognize on a level that makes it hard to talk about in any detail without feeling like I’m massively oversharing.

I think that for people who don’t have this experience, being in Karen’s shoes might be deeply frustrating (which is fair, because actually being that person is often deeply frustrating as well). If you’re the kind of player who hates to look at a set of dialogue options and go “wow, I don’t want to say any of that,” you are unlikely to enjoy this game. But if you’re unbothered by that, this is a well-drawn portrait of a struggling, self-loathing teenager dealing with familial pressures and navigating her identity as a queer member of the Chinese diaspora. And the situation doesn’t feel totally hopeless; it’s clear no amount of success in school, work, or extracurriculars is going to make a dent in the self-loathing, but you can lean on Karen a bit to form some human connections and that seems to help.

The downside of playing Pageant after many of Autumn Chen’s later games is that the lack of polish is pretty evident; there are a fair number of typos, and at a certain point the algorithm calculating your chances of winning the pageant seemed to break for me and it would just say (roughly paraphrased) “According to this algorithm you found on the internet, your chances of winning are ” followed by a line break. And from a game design perspective, while I’m sympathetic to the choice of not having constantly displayed stats like Bee does, I did wish the option to review how you were doing at various things came up a little more often. But then, maybe Karen can’t handle that much introspection.

Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917 starts with a quote from Kropotkin that states that individuals have almost no power to change the course of history, and while political parties have some, it is “far less than is usually thought.” This being the case, I assume the fact that playing the game felt like beating my head fruitlessly against a brick wall was entirely intended.

My party (the Mensheviks) had no money. The Provisional Government had no money. The people were starving and constantly on the verge of rioting about it. I raised taxes on businesses, then on everything else. I enacted austerity like three times because I kept getting in trouble for being in debt, which of course only made everyone angrier. I managed to get considerable sway in the Provisional Government, but I didn’t have the resources to actually do anything with it. Meanwhile, I had thrown my lot in with the internationalists, but never had any real opportunity to stop the war, which dragged on as my armies were continuously beaten to a pulp despite being nominally on the winning side. Which, to be fair, is how World War I went for original-timeline Russia.

I’ve never been of the impression that the October Revolution could have been easily avoided, but if I had been, this game would certainly have disabused me of it. I did feel like it was perhaps a bit more repetitive than I remember the original Social Democracy game being, but maybe that’s just because I was too broke all the time to see most of what it had to offer. Nevertheless, I do feel like the two games have very different vibes. In Social Democracy, you start out in a deceptively good position; it feels so feasible to stop the Nazis, until party infighting and rising unemployment take their toll. In Petrograd 1917, you start out in the pit and vainly try to scrabble your way out of it. Being consigned to the dustbin of history always feels more likely than not.

Maybe I’ll play as the Bolsheviks next time—although if there’s a way to stop the almost-inevitable revolution, maybe having me at the helm is it.

Amateur sleuth Miss Gosling has been murdered, and the incompetent police are looking in all the wrong places--so it's up to the ghostly detective to figure out who really dunnit, as usual. Investigating your own death is a surprisingly robust subgenre of mystery IF, but this is the only one I know of where the deceased protagonist must act by instructing her pet dog, the aptly named Watson.

This makes it stand out a bit, not just among mystery games but among the kind of medium-dry-goods parser puzzler that it is (this is a "solve the puzzles, automatically solve the mystery" type of deal similar to Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?) because you have to think about how you can communicate with a dog and what a dog is capable of doing. Watson is, of course, unusually intelligent (even for a collie!) but there are still limitations.

At first I missed the integrated ASCII map that The Wise-Woman's Dog had--not that the house is very big, but I get turned around easily and all the similar garden locations were hard for me to keep track of--but I soon realized that I could use GO TO [location] and FIND [person/object] to make navigation quick and easy, and I appreciated that.

The writing lightly pastiches Agatha Christie and does a good job hitting the tone of a Miss Marple book, but Miss Gosling does feel like her own specific character, not a discount Marple. I appreciate all the little characterization notes that contribute to that effect, such as her colorblindness leading to interior decoration choices others find tacky, and that she has a sort of home health aide and feels a little awkward about it even as she appreciates the necessity, and that she has a sort of mentorlike fondness for one of the police officers, Davis, but wishes Davis would be a little more proactive in her career. And, of course, there's her relationship with Watson, which is very endearing.

The game is very friendly to a parser newbie, both due to the overall design and the way that Dialog allows for link-based interaction. (Sometimes it might have been a little too beginner-friendly for me--I was mildly irritated by a tutorial trying to walk me through starting the first puzzle when I was already halfway through solving it.) A couple of puzzles were a little more finicky than I would have liked, but overall it plays smoothly and is a lot of fun, and some objects and features of the house are cleverly reused for several puzzles. It's well-paced and substantial without being a huge time commitment. It's a great way to spend a few hours of your evening, especially if you're a fan of Golden Age mystery fiction.

(A final note: People were often surprised when I mentioned, previously, that I hadn't played this game, because I participated in a metapuzzle in IFComp 2024 in which clues to solving the game's optional bonus puzzle were hidden in other games, one of which was mine. I really did want to play it, but every year IFComp ends without me getting to any number of well-regarded games that I was very interested in. As for the puzzle itself, well, I still haven't played BOSH or The Den, so the only step I was able to complete was the one that was hinted in my own game. My apologies to everyone whose awesome IFComp game I have not played yet!)

Reflections is a brief and charming game in which you play as the grandchild of a sorceress trying to awaken your magical powers, which are connected to mirrors. Your grandmother is, in fact, the Evil Queen from Snow White, but other than the mirrors there isn't much connection to the story, and the PC's family doesn't come off as particularly evil, even in an aesthetic sort of way. I admit I half-expected an Addams Family type vibe, but save for the references to the Evil Queen, you might as well be a regular fairytale hero/ine, albeit a twenty-first-century one with a smartphone.

Because this game was made for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam and the tutorial is an important part of the goal there, I played with tutorial mode on even though I didn't strictly need it. The tutorial mode seemed well-constructed, starting by explicitly giving you the commands to progress in the first room and then falling into a more hint-like role. The game also seemed like a solid introduction to the kinds of tasks one might have to accomplish in a standard text adventure--examining the environment to find hidden objects, finding a light source to go in a dark cave, getting past hostile NPCs.

The art was simple, colorful, and appealing, and the onscreen map was helpful (my main struggle as a parser player is that I have no sense of direction or ability to remember what is where). I also appreciated the opportunity to interact with various cute animals.

I did have some issues with the parser; the game says it accepts only two-word commands, but in practice more complex commands (PUT thing IN thing or GIVE thing TO NPC) are understood just often enough to trip you up when they're not. I also had some guess-the-verb issues unrelated to that, notably with the dirt piles, and struggled with (Spoiler - click to show)having to refer to the crystals as a unit in order to get a disambiguation menu to interact with a specific crystal, despite the fact that they're called out individually in the room description. But it's possible that my parser experience and learned habits are working against me here and the game's target audience would actually have less trouble than I did.

Speaking of target audience, though, I wonder if the story and aesthetics are pitched a little young relative to the age of a child who would be able to comfortably play a typing-heavy game and read some of the bigger words used. My feeling (as someone who works in an education-adjacent field and does sometimes have to vet texts for reading level appropriateness) is that the content says ages 7-9 to me but the reading and typing aspects say 10-12. I do think it would be a great game for a child and adult to play collaboratively, though.

His Majesty's Royal Space Navy Service Handbook is a dystopian work-com. The setting is the military of an evil space empire led by Smurg IV (whom I'm afraid I couldn't help picturing as Emperor Zurg from Toy Story, but that's neither here nor there), but the protagonist, Sheryl, isn't as interested in fighting the rebel forces as she is in the minutiae of bureaucracy and finding out who's been microwaving fish in the break room.

Gameplay is very smooth; the game has a limited verb list, and in a handy little quality-of-life feature, it even tells you when you no longer need a particular verb to make progress in the game (though in some cases you can still use these verbs to get optional extra flavor). Once you get into the flow of the game, it really carries you along, which is great for a parser-curious newbie or an occasional parser player who finds the possibility space of a more open parser intimidating (as well as for someone who might, hypothetically, be way behind on their Great Play Marathon game list because they were busy attending their sister's college graduation).

The writing's biggest flaw is that it can be a little obvious; if I told you to imagine Office Space in the setting of Star Wars you could probably make a pretty solid guess as to the plot points and jokes it covers. But what really stood out to me was the character of Sheryl. At first, she seemed like a caricature of a petty tyrant middle manager, judgmental and focused on all the wrong things, but the game has more sympathy for her than that would suggest, especially if you chase down some of that optional flavor I mentioned earlier. And it makes great use of her (limited third person) POV on her environment. I've always maintained that one of the secrets of creating a memorable PC in IF is that no item description is too mundane to be a vehicle for characterization, and this game really runs with that philosophy. Here's what you get when you examine the office coffee maker:

A basic osmosis coffee machine that's as old as Sheryl, but it still does its duty diligently without complaint or delay despite other, younger coffee makers being promoted past it because this coffee maker still believes that faith and loyalty are qualities worth believing in even if Senior Command, in their otherwise perfect leadership, are overly-dazzled by supposed innovation that only serves to mock the old ways without actually improving anything.

You can just hear her saying this, with increasingly heightened emotion and a worrying lack of pauses for breath.

And as the game went on, I increasingly felt the pathos of her efforts to metaphorically rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Haven't we all been there, trying to focus on the petty things we can control and shut out the sneaking suspicion that they don't really matter much in the face of the explosions happening outside the window?

Upon reading that this was "[t]he most realistic and verismilitudinous text-based simulation of petting a cat ever written", I thought that might be meant sarcastically; I thought there might be something zany going on here. But as it turns out, it

Sorry, where was I? My cat sat down next to me and I started petting him and then he rolled over onto my hand, which he doesn't seem to realize makes it harder for me to continue petting him. But I'm free now, so back to the review.

Anyway, it really is just a very realistic slice-of-life game about petting a cat, with every moment of the petting session described in loving detail. I'm a bit impressed by this; I don't think I could get this many words out of the topic. It's absolutely adorable.

Admittedly, it won't be for everyone; if you're not a cat lover, there's nothing else for you here, and it's unlikely to appeal if you prefer games that are strong on plot. There is some measure of gameplay, though, with the game silently tracking how pleased your feline companion is with you and presenting you with a score at the end. (I got a lukewarm 11/18, probably in part because I did not stop to pet the cat before getting my fries out of the oven as I was afraid my fries would burn if I did.) It also has multiple endings, although the differences are of course not too consequential.

For those who are fond of cats and slice-of-life works, though, it's a very pleasant way to spend a little time, and I would certainly recommend it. But now, if you'll excuse me, my cat feels strongly that I should be petting him again.