Reviews by EJ

Ataraxia is a small-town life simulation game that takes cues from “cozy” games like Stardew Valley while having a more melancholy tone and some horror elements. As a recent arrival to a wooded island, you must make friends in the community and make money by crafting with found materials while learning about the island’s sometimes bloody history and investigating something strange in the woods.

The daily gameplay loop of waking up, tending your garden (once you have plants to tend), crafting, and visiting various locations is satisfying; the only fly in the ointment is that the game obscures how much energy you start with and how much each action takes, so it’s hard to plan out how much exactly to do. But as there are no hard deadlines here, it doesn’t matter especially much. And with the helpful to-do list, I never lost track of what my goals were.

The prose is lovely, especially in the more surreal scenes, and the atmosphere is strong. The characters are delicately drawn, a little more grounded than usual for the genre; that they're a bit older and have loves and losses and career changes behind them is a nice change of pace. The island’s history of beasts and pirates and missing children is intriguing to uncover, doled out piece by piece to propel you through the game.

Sometimes the game genre and the horror trappings sit awkwardly alongside each other. When I realized the cryptic utterances of the oracle in the forest were just to tell you what kind of gift each potential love interest likes best, that was jarring, and the resolution of the plotline with the strange presence in the forest being just an artifact you can put in your museum was a bit anticlimactic.

But this is a minor complaint. I enjoyed playing Ataraxia, all the more so for its sharp edges and dark mood. I romanced an ex-sailor, adopted a cat, grew various fruits and veg, opened a museum, and maybe got possessed a little bit. I had a good time.

I would recommend Ataraxia to anyone who has ever looked at a cute farming sim and gone “okay, the idea of this is somewhat appealing, but what I would really like is if it had some eldritch forest deities and a sense of quiet tragedy, and if all the love interests seemed like they were probably at least 30.”

Making a satisfying piece of IF in under 500 words is hard. Though I’m a vocal short-fiction aficionado, I find a lot of Neo-Twiny Jam works miss the mark for me; they often tackle concepts that are too big for the word count to handle in a way that feels complete, especially if there’s branching.

The Moon’s Knight deals with this by zooming in on a single moment in a toxic relationship, a moment when one lover chooses whether to trust the other or not. It lets poetic language and a sort of allegorical approach (the fickle beloved is literally the Moon) carry the emotional weight instead of trying to establish two realistic, well-rounded characters and sell the player on caring about them in so short a time, which I think is a good move. The language is rhythmic and alliteration-focused, which, in combination with the subject matter of knights riding into battle, is strongly reminiscent of Old English/Middle English poetry. I mention this because I enjoy that kind of thing, but also because it suggests we’re also drawing on the medieval framework of courtly love here, with its treatment of a knight longing for an unattainable lady and laying down their life for her as an ideal to be aspired to. (The Moon’s Knight takes a darker view of this, of course.)

My only criticism is that I feel the import of the game’s one choice isn’t particularly clear before you make it, depriving me as the player of the ability to feel a faint echo of the player character’s agony at deciding whether to risk her life to trust a lover who has been known to be inconstant, or whether to blatantly demonstrate her distrust. Instead my feeling on the first go-round was “I guess I’ll just pick something and see what happens?” which seems like perhaps not what the piece is aiming for. Making it clearer ahead of the choice that the Moon has promised the knight her protection (probably when first mentioning/describing the ampoule?) would have given the choice more impact the first time for me.

But other than that, it’s a striking piece that does a good job of making its emotional point in an economical number of words.

Resurrection Gate is a demo for a choice-based dark fantasy work with RPG elements. It seems that in the full game one will be able to choose from different characters to play as, but in this version the player is limited to the point of view of Yasha, a traumatized soldier searching for a comrade who is probably dead.

The game throws a lot of worldbuilding and a lot of characters, both present and referred to in absentia, at the player in this short preview, and just when I felt I was getting to grips with Yasha’s story, that section of the demo ended and I got a brief interlude featuring a mysterious woman and then a longer one featuring a lich-duke. Baccaris’s writing is vivid as always, but with all the hopping around in the demo I’m not sure I got my teeth into anything in a way that made me go “oh, I have to come back for the full game.” But that could just be me—I know some people are thrilled by the beginnings of secondary-world fantasy novels where you have a lot of proper nouns flung at you all at once and have to figure out from context what they are, but I don’t really start having fun until I get my bearings.

As is usual for this author, the game has art, elaborate styling, and music. The art is stylish and the low-key ambient soundtrack is atmospheric, but I had some issues with the styling. At this point in my life I pretty much need to play things on light mode to avoid eyestrain, and while I appreciate that the demo includes light mode, it seems like an afterthought that was not tested thoroughly. Parts of the character information screen (or “mirror”) are illegible in light mode, as are the credits at the end, and some links don’t seem to have changed the way they should.

If the idea of RPG-flavored IF in a world beset by various types of undead described in vividly nasty detail, featuring beleaguered protagonists who have been through some rough times (and who sometimes also are the undead), sounds like something you’d enjoy, Resurrection Gate is worth a look. Just be prepared to come out of the demo feeling somewhat confused.

It’s a common human foible to spend a lot of time contemplating the past decision points in one’s life and thinking about how differently things could have gone, and accordingly it’s a common theme in fiction—even more so in interactive fiction, where the audience can actually play out the experience of making different choices and seeing how things go. I would go so far as to call this a staple of interactive fiction, going back to the days of Alter Ego.

Thousand Lives, as its title suggests, revolves partly around this thematic concern; the rest of its core focus is Polish history, from the post-WWII era to the 2010s. It offers five sets of binary choices with simple branching—it doesn’t seem to have state-tracking more sophisticated than what you could accomplish by saying “turn to page 40.” But its gameplay does have a unique twist, which is that the installments are delivered to the player by email, once a day. After making a choice, the player must wait 24 hours to see the results.

This is an intriguing design choice that has the opportunity to make the player slow down and really engage with the story, and think over their choices carefully in a way they may not be inclined to do if they can easily start over and choose differently. Pulling against this, however, is the fact that the pace of the narrative itself is quite breezy, covering a decade or more per installment in just a few hundred words.

This does give a sense of the tumult of this period of Polish history; things are happening fast, changing sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, and often leaving ordinary people like the PC feeling like they have little control over their situations. (Or perhaps I’m just projecting the way I often feel about living through politically interesting times.) The game also seems to have educational aims, and this broad overview serves to get a lot of events in and give players a lot of keywords to use for their own research should they wish to look further into recent Polish history.

On the other hand, the all-summary, no-scene style is somewhat detrimental to emotional investment and the ability to really inhabit the PC. After completing a playthrough, I still don’t have a very strong sense of her as a person, much less any of the other characters that dip in and out of the story. But then again, many players probably wouldn’t appreciate longer and/or more granular installments in what seems to be a game designed to be played in bite-sized chunks in moments of downtime, so this is ultimately a matter of preference.

I played through once, choosing to move to the city and go into politics (among other things), and did find it interesting from a historical perspective. From discussion I’ve seen, it seems there are many other strongly divergent paths the PC’s life can take, touching on other corners of the 20th-/early 21st-century Polish experience. I might play again, but the desire to see what other lives the PC could have lived is more rooted in historical curiosity than attachment to her as a character. Still, I would absolutely say Thousand Lives is worth playing through at least once—and it won’t take very much time out of your day.

(I played the demo version of this game.)

The Sword of Voldiir is an entry in the venerable category of computer games that are trying to emulate Dungeons & Dragons. It is a choice-based game in which you are a member of a group of adventurers which is tasked with finding the titular sword, only for the journey to go unexpectedly awry. As is customary for this type of game, your PC is heavily customizable, and you can choose to romance any of your fellow party members.

While I don’t shy away from giving negative feedback, I do usually try to be a bit more lenient with IF reviews than I would with, say, a published book or a commercial game (even an indie one). This is a hobby community and we’re all having fun and sharing our works for free. But the free version of Sword of Voldiir is a demo for a full game that costs money, and as such I’m inclined to hold it to a slightly higher standard, since the question the review is addressing is no longer simply “is it worth your time?” but “is it worth your time and money?” All of which is to say, this review is harsher than I’m inclined to be for free IF, and I apologize for that in advance.

The bones of Sword of Voldiir, as it were, are perfectly fine. There’s an audience out there that absolutely cannot get enough of this type of game. But without any notably unique concepts behind the story or gameplay, the whole thing lives or dies by the execution, and right now the execution is messy. I do understand that this is still one person’s passion project, but if you want me to pay for your passion project then I do expect some polish, and there are many free works that are in better shape than this one, so I don’t think what I’m asking for is out of reach.

There are frequent errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, along with malapropisms like “through” for “throw” and “waterskein” for “waterskin.” Some sentences don’t quite make sense—the PC, for example, attempts to comfort their unhappy horse by saying “I know you, we’re almost there,” which reads like the writer got distracted halfway through writing “I know you can do it” or maybe “I know you’re tired, but…”.

Combat is quite buggy, even though the only thing you can do is choose at the beginning whether you want to use your weapon or cast spells. Under some circumstances (I’m not quite sure what triggers this), after your character attacks, you’re taken to a passage with a broken “if” macro that gives you three “next round” links. Display of the enemy’s remaining hit points also doesn’t always work quite right.

The combat is also an area where I have some quibbles with the underlying game design (I think). It doesn’t seem well-balanced for different PC builds, for starters. I originally rolled up a squishy magic-user, as is my wont. But it was absolutely impossible to make it through the first battle with that build, as you have no option to try to stay out of range of the enemy and are constantly taking hits. I ended up having to restart and create a character with a high Constitution stat to see the rest of the demo. Making one choice and then clicking through a bunch more screens to find out whether you die or not also isn’t very compelling. Surely one of the key aspects of a D&D-inspired game is the ability to strategize turn by turn?

As for the romanceable party members, their character introductions are offloaded to a “relationships” screen accessible from the sidebar that I didn’t look at until halfway through the demo. I think that’s likely to be the case for many people (why look at the “relationships” screen before you’ve made a few choices that are likely to affect relationships?), so I would recommend working this information into the game proper. Also, the one time I chose a flirty option, the game said absolutely nothing about how the character being flirted with responded—the entire resulting passage was just a restatement of what my character had said, an added line or two of my character’s thoughts, and the link to the next passage. I can’t tell if that’s a writing issue or a technical one where text should have appeared and didn’t, but either way it discouraged me from trying more flirty options, since seeing the other character’s reactions is pretty much the whole point of a romance with a blank-slate PC.

I don’t think Sword of Voldiir is a fundamentally bad game—the problems it has are the problems that pretty much every IF work has when it hasn’t been through proper beta-testing (which IME in this sphere usually includes writing feedback along with bug-spotting and feedback on game balance). I think a few rounds of thorough testing and feedback from maybe 4-5 people who aren’t the author could really make this sparkle. But as it is, the game feels not ready for primetime.

Quotient is a game in which you are a new recruit to a secret superspy organization and have to fulfill various missions to increase your agent ranking and maybe incidentally save the world. It starts with a gratuitous homage to Zork that concludes by earnestly explaining to you that it is an homage to Zork, which is a signal of what you’re in for on various levels: first, that this is an old-school throwback game with treasures to collect, mazes, sometimes wonky puzzle logic, and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink wacky worldbuilding; second, that it is packed with references to all the media the author enjoys; and third, that it is not in any way subtle.

It’s also got all the polish issues common to first parser games—underimplementation, lack of synonyms, minimally responsive NPCs, and so on—and puzzles tend to be underclued. It has a tendency to intercept you doing X to tell you you need to do Y first instead of just making Y an implicit action, which was often frustrating. It’s also very wide-open after the first big puzzle, with little direction as far as where you should be going and what you should be doing in what order. I relied a lot on the helpful puzzle dependency chart that the author has supplied, but I frequently yearned for a proper walkthrough (or better yet, a little more signposting within the game). I didn't have a strong sense of my overall goals and spent a lot of time just wandering around looking for puzzles that I was currently able to complete.

Part of the problem is that it uses a slightly unorthodox approach to NPC conversation, in which ask/tell is implemented, but so is just plain TALK TO [NPC]; not only that, but sometimes TALK TO [NPC] will get you different information if you enter it multiple times, something I didn't really try because I did not expect it to be useful. There is a certain amount of redundancy between what different NPCs will tell you, however, which is ultimately what allowed me to get through the game despite never figuring out that sometimes the intended solution is for the player to just TALK TO [NPC] three times in a row.

I did appreciate that interactable objects are usually in boldface, while examinable scenery is usually italicized. (Though there are a few exceptions, which may or may not have been intended.) An “exits” command also makes up for the occasional unlisted exit and makes the mazes much more tolerable. Having an old-school feel doesn’t have to mean eschewing any quality-of-life features that the original Zork didn’t have, and I appreciate that Quotient understands this.

And in general, for all that Quotient is unpolished and the play experience can be chaotic, a massive enthusiasm consistently shines through—enthusiasm for Ohio chili restaurants and tourist spots around the world, for classic text adventures, for most of the major sci-fi and fantasy properties of the 20th and 21st centuries, and for the author’s own creations. While playing the game, I kept thinking of a bit from Susan Sontag’s journals (is this a hideously pretentious reference to make in a review of a game that says things like “It’s a maize maze… get it”? Probably). Sontag wrote that a writer, ideally, should be four people: “the nut” whose obsessions provide the material for the work, “the moron” who lets those obsessions flow onto the page (or screen), “the stylist” who makes the material artful, and “the critic” who supplies intelligence. But, she argued, you only really need the first two. Polish and style are nice, but that enthusiasm is irreplaceable; without it, a work feels soulless. And when it’s there, it’s hard to keep from getting swept up in it, at least a little.