Ratings and Reviews by EJ
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An uncomfortable moment, April 20, 2024In 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.
The Good Weapon review, February 2, 2024This 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.
Well-written game, frustrating interface, February 2, 2024In 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.
One Does Not Simply Fry review, February 2, 2024One 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.
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