Reviews by Mike Russo

(I beta tested this game)

Pretty much every geek of a certain age, I will confidently assert, had their hearts broken by the X-Files. For a respectable chunk that’s because of the way they botched the Mulder/Scully relationship in the later seasons, but for the larger portion it’s because of the way the originally-compelling “mythology” story arc that spanned the show’s full run, which promised revelations about alien colonization, high-level government conspiracies, a mysterious mind-controlling oil, UFO abductions, and more, eventually petered out with the saddest of sad trombones as it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing and were forced to make up more and more stuff whole cloth as the show somehow kept failing to get canceled (admittedly, I haven’t watched the latest revival seasons, so maybe they actually fixed all this and it did reach a satisfying ending? [googles] yeah looks like that’s a no).

Points, then, to BOSH, for being an X-Files homage that’s unapologetically and intentionally built as a shaggy-dog story. Soon after Agent Larch Faraji reports to their paranormal-investigation-unit’s new strip-mall headquarters, they realize that their new cell phone is ringing; unfortunately, said phone is in a desk whose key has been lost, and while the desk is one of those IKEA numbers that should be easy to disassemble, the only Allen wrench around fell down an air-conditioning vent… in most other puzzley parser games, unearthing the screwdriver to pop open the vent to pop open the desk to answer the phone would be a simple puzzle marking the close of the first act and getting you the infodump necessary to start the plot in earnest. But despite a few tantalizing teases – surely the pawn shop next door has a screwdriver? Or scraping together enough money to buy the one in the convenience store shouldn’t be hard, should it? – that drawer is going to remain inviolate through the game’s fourish hour running time, with Faraji successively having to engage in some light breaking and entering, master interdimensional hypergeometry, conduct an eldritch ritual, and out-fight a band of lizardman assassins (lizardmen assassins? The Chicago Manual of Style is less helpful on this point than I’d like it to be) on a cross-time rescue mission that’s important in its own right, I guess, but mainly just serves to get you that $#%@ screwdriver.

I admire the chutzpah of this structural joke, though I hasten to add that BOSH isn’t all metatextual shenanigans at the player’s expense: while the opening runaround section is maybe a bit too long and involves a few too many challenging puzzles to fit comfortably into the Comp’s time limit, the meat of the game is a reasonably traditional and well-designed IF experience that delivers a large serving of satisfying puzzling, with some neat surprises courtesy of the aforementioned hypergeometry gimmick. And this is a lavish production beyond just its length; there’s an extended, interactive tutorial, robust hints, multiple characters with plenty to talk about, and very solid implementation that means you can poke and prod into every corner of the large, detailed locations without fear of breaking something. Meanwhile, the every-conspiracy-theory-you-can-think-of-is-true setting provides a lot of laughs, courtesy of the wry authorial voice, while still staying sufficiently focused that you can figure out how the particular subset of weirdness this game is concerned with is supposed to work.

Make no mistake, this can be a tricky game – though again, the hints are there – and I suppose I can see how for folks who are less enamored of shaggy-dog stories than I am, the opening hour’s hiding of the ball might be frustrating, so BOSH probably belongs on the list of Comp games better enjoyed once the Comp is over and the two hour time limit and FOMO about 66 other games has receded. But hey, we’re less than 72 hours away from the voting deadline, so there’s good news on that front – and even in its short-form, two hour version, it’s still more satisfying than the X-Files…

It’s a commonplace, I think, for those of us in the mainline IF tradition to look over at the (far bigger and far more successful by any metric you care to name) Choice of Games community and goggle comically at the Brobdingnagian word counts. 110,000 words! 470,000 words! 1,140,000 words! What on earth could they possibly need all that space for, we muse – well, I muse, let’s drop this not-fooling-anybody first-person-plural conceit – and possibly crack a joke about that game a year or two back where character creation involved deciding on the color of your favorite mug. Well, comes a time when I’ve got to eat some crow, because while I’m not sure Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People needs to be twice as long as War and Peace, it sure would work better at three or four times its current length.

There is a lot going on here, but I’ll do my best to hit the high points. So this is a ChoiceScript magic-school game except in place of Hogwarts you’ve got a flying castle hovering far above the Indian Ocean, and there are additional dystopic-YA-novel tropes layered in because magical beings in this world are hated and feared by the general population and the world’s governments fund jack-booted thugs to drag magical teenagers off to the grimly authoritarian Miss Duckworthy’s once their powers begin to pop off. The game includes all the stuff you’d expect to play out given this premise – you wind up part of a plucky group of friends trying to get to the bottom of the school’s mysteries and fight the man, with optional romances on the side and a time-management minigame where you can balance building your various magical skills against exploration, investigation, and relationship-building – and a bunch of extras besides, most notably the four bespoke “origins” for the main character, which involve substantial vignettes that allow you to meet some characters early or otherwise have a reasonably significant impact on the main storyline.

I opted for playing a respectable Dutchman, admittedly as much through a process of elimination as anything else – “artsy Canadian car thief” is not an archetype I feel at all confident at being able to embody, and the Australian and Indonesian origins require you to be athletic and industrious, respectably, so no thanks to those too – but I wound up fairly excited the more I thought about it, since typically I struggle with how to approach ChoiceScript games as anything other than a self-insert of my boring, middle-aged self, and this prompt gave me the idea that this time I could play as @VictorGijsbers instead!

Alas, it was not to be, because Miss Duckworthy’s doesn’t provide much scope for roleplaying, largely due to the rocket-boosted pacing. The opening vignette feels like it lasts an appropriate amount of time, long enough to establish your mundane life and bring a bit of oddness and dread into things as your magical nature manifests and the baddies show up. But after that, all the stuff I mentioned above – meeting your three or four new besties, learning to control your abilities, engaging with student politics, learning secrets about the school, the tentative stirrings of teenaged romance – plays out over maybe half an hour in real time, and seventy-two hours or so in the fiction.

To say that this is break-neck speed is overestimating the resilience of the spine; indeed, the game feels like it’s in so much hurry that it routinely gets way way ahead of itself. My first hint of this was when, on the plane to the school, a troll named Jack introduced himself – he came on a bit strong, maybe, but he seemed like an interesting character, whose backstory had him helping run a magical Underground Railroad for a year before being caught. Seems like a potentially interesting character, I thought to myself, only for my cat familiar to immediately tell me “this guy is consumed with rage and is going to try to dominate everybody,” which in addition to playing out what feel like not-great stereotypes (trolls are people too!) also flattened out any sense of ambiguity about him, bottom-lining what could have been an extended subplot of learning about the ways Jack uses idealistic rhetoric to cloak naked ambition into literally one line of dialogue.

Similarly, the game just sort of assumes that you’ll be down with the fascists. The main plot of the game turns on the fact that Jack decides within two hours of the school to mount a coup and knock off the student who’s sort of the queen trusty of the place (and takes two and a half more days to actually attempt it), and rather than deciding to join him because this whole system sucks and said student appears to have one of the newcomers killed because he sassed her your only options are to ignore the plot, tattle on it, or try to get close to Jack to learn enough to betray him to the authorities.

Now, there’s a reason for this – in my playthrough, I learned that the student capo wasn’t actually that bad, and just pretended to kill that dude so that she’d seem hardcore and no one would mess with her (this is pretty stupid IMO, but we are dealing with teenagers…) But I think that’s missable, and pretty much all the plot-lines are like this, overly-accelerated and assuming you’ll have certain knowledge you might not actually get. There’s also some sloppiness to the game knowledge that means continuity errors were rampant. Within one second of meeting one of the other students, Hannah, she told me that she was a reporter just pretending to be a troll, which seemed like a ridiculously risky thing to disclose to someone you don’t know – and I guess the game agreed because a day and a half later, after gaining her trust, there’s an emotional scene where she told me the exact same information again, with no indication that she was repeating herself. Meanwhile one member of the friend group just sort of showed up in our shared bedroom with no indication of how he’d gotten there; there’s a fun subplot where we successfully conspired to help him escape back to his home in Indonesia, but this didn’t prevent him from still being around during the climax. The game never directly told me that I’d turned into an elf in the opening, either, which seems like a heck of a thing to have to intuit from context.

I have many, many more examples of this stuff, I think a combination of trying to cram too many characters and plot twists into too small a word-count, and a lack of adequate testing for all the many possible permutations (I got rescued by a troll named Rock and had a bunch of banter with him afterwards, the game not seeming to acknowledge that I had never even heard of this guy before in my life). It’s pervasive, and it winds up having a substantial impact on the gameplay mechanics, because I never felt like my choices really mattered; the game is on the clock to get through the story that it’s telling, and I was just along for the ride (as is typical for ChoiceScript, there are like a billion stats, but I feel like maybe only one of them ever made a difference). And the impact on tone and theme is even worse: seriously, are the fascists fascist or are they cool? That’s kind of a big deal!

This is a real shame because I think there’d be a lot to enjoy in a less-hyper version of Miss Duckworthy’s. The characters and situations are broad, sure, but they’re fun, engaging archetypes, and the writing’s quite good at moving quickly while providing enough detail to anchor you and fire the imagination. I really love the disparate-origins approach to the game, which is a lovely mechanic that can make the player’s decisions feel really meaningful. With the action spread out over maybe a month or two rather than just three days, more granular choices allowing the player to actually make decisions, and better testing to make sure all the pieces fit, this game could be really very good – unfortunately that’s not the version of it that’s currently available to play.

What if the world ended and everything more or less went on just as it did before? Yancy at the End of the World puts a unique spin on the zombie apocalypse story, starting with a stereotypical oh-no-the-dead-are-rising premise and then seemingly not doing much with it: characters worry about their anxiety and overall mental health, get annoyed by slanted news coverage of the disaster, and gripe about having to come back into the office when there are packs of the walking dead still roving around out there, but don’t seem especially worried about getting their faces eaten off or anything. Still, there are some things that change, even if they’re small: Yancy finally takes up photography, against their mom’s advice, and reconnects with some old friends. And then just when the apocalypse feels like an anticlimax, it turns out Yancy’s world does end after all – which might actually be a good thing, though they’ll still mourn it.

The game can be disorienting for reasons that go beyond the undead plague and the nonstandard narrative emphases, too. About ten minutes in, it nonchalantly revealed that the couple I was talking to were “a colorful snow leopard” and “a literal cat-fish” (the “literal” doesn’t really help, I can still think of like three different things that could mean); while still digesting that, I went into my apartment and was greeted by my adorable pet, who’s a sort of cyclops-fox-cat kinda thing. And indeed when you take photos of the other characters, it’s clear that most of them are anthropomorphic animals of one sort or another.

There’s a clear gameplay structure that helped me maintain my bearings even as I was getting to grips with the world, though. After an introductory sequence that briskly establishes the zombie threat, reintroduces Yancy to their childhood best friend, and sees them deciding to buy a camera and take some photos while the world is still a going concern, each day runs on a pleasingly predictable rhythm. First, you choose someplace to go – visiting friends or family, heading to the café or bookstore, going for a walk in nature – which leads to a small vignette where you might encounter a member of the game’s medium-sized supporting cast, have a few conversational choices, and then take a picture. In the evening, you check in with some friends on a chat server, which is usually where the game catches you up on the state of the world; at that point, you’ve got an opportunity to DM with one of the online characters, and then head into a voice chat with the aforementioned best friend, Nekoni. Then you go to bed and the pattern repeats.

I found this approach struck a good balance between novelty and familiarity; the number of choices doesn’t feel overwhelming, but the game runs for only nine days, and you’ve generally got about half a dozen options for places to visit or friends to DM, which means that it’s hard to get too deep into any particular story or relationship strand but it’s also hard to feel like any of them have worn out their welcomes. And while the overall vibe is pretty chill – most of the people you encounter are supportive as you explore your new hobby and try to weather the zombie threat together – there are some sequences that effectively raise the stakes, and where your choices feel significant, like a scene where your best friend reacts badly to you coming out as aromantic and asexual.

Working through issues like this is where the game’s heart really lies, with the zombie stuff quickly revealing itself as a close-to-the-surface allegory for issues around queer identity and acceptance rather than an excuse for action-horror or anything like that. And in keeping with that, even when members of the friend group put their feet wrong or get wrapped up in themselves, the game keeps the focus on healing and working together; Yancy isn’t required to always forgive people, but does always keep talking and providing an opportunity for others to prove that they’ve changed after they’ve made a mistake, which makes for a nice, positive vibe while still making clear that their life isn’t always a bed of roses.

The one character who sticks out from this generally well-meaning love-fest is Yancy’s mom. She’s the one person who’s definitively human rather than a furry, and though she insists she love’s Yancy, she’s also invariably misgendering them, and spends most of her time watching the Fox News analogue and letting its misinformation erode her mental and physical health. On the flip side, while Yancy finds spending time with her actively painful, and is increasingly clear on the ways that her expectations and prejudices have created challenges for them, still feels a connection to her beyond a mere sense of familial obligation.

There are a lot of different strands here, in other words, but I feel like Yancy at the End of the World cohered for me in a way that something like String Theory didn’t. There is a clear narrative climax, for one thing, and even though it’s a bit of a swerve from what the opening seems to set up, it nonetheless is an entirely reasonable place for the story to go, and one that’s got strong thematic resonance with everything else that’s going on. And there’s a strong sense of how humanly messy relationships can get, even when you tax sex and romance out of the equation, with lived-in prose and gently funny dialogue keeping things grounded. This is a game that didn’t play out as I expected it would based on the first twenty minutes and my knowledge of genre tropes, but the surprises here were good ones.

Y’all probably know by now that I’m the kind of reviewer who likes to go outside the four corners of a work and look for connections to other games, or books or movies or whatever, that might be touch-points or inspirations or just share a vibe – it has the potential to illuminate the ways a piece of writing is in dialogue with other parts of the scene, or trace intellectual influence to see how a particular author is putting their own spin on a set of ideas, though of course I’ll confess that it can reduce to an unedifying spot-the-reference exercise.

Another problem with this approach is that I have my blind spots, which is how I wound up gobsmacked by the end of You Can’t Save Her. The game is a short former-friends-confront-each-other-in-a-melodramatic-duel story that felt to me like a dark riff on magical-girl anime series like Utena (confession time, Utena is one of only like three anime series I’ve actually seen, so I am LARPing the “getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this” meme here). But per the credits, in fact the project was conceived as an homage to … Porpentine?

We’ll circle back to that in a minute, but in the meantime let’s talk a bit more about what You Can’t Save Her is in itself. The setting here isn’t exhaustively specified, but it’s the kind of science-fantasy world where a character prepares their blade by “anodiz[ing] it in dreams of martyrdom” or opting instead to “machine it with sigils of faith” – one of the most metal choices I’ve ever had in a game, kudos to the author for that – and then brings a laser-gun to the fight to boot. The religious overtones aren’t accidental, either, as both main characters were raised together in the same oppressive convent, before an encounter with a heretical book sowed seeds of doubt and led to one of them renouncing their faith and fleeing, and then the other to be sent to kill her erstwhile friend for her thought-crimes.

The storytelling is straightforward but assured, alternating depictions of the pair’s battle with flashbacks establishing the backstory I bottom-lined above. Across the game’s various acts, viewpoints shift and the rules of the game change slightly, which maintains interest across the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play You Can’t Save Her. There’s an especially effective change-up in Act III, which inverts the mechanics established in earlier sections – one cycling link allowing you to vary your choice of weapon or combat move or dialogue line or what have you, a second at the bottom of the passage locking in your decision and moving to the next one – due to various auguries having found the optimal plan of attack, so that the upper cycling link now just displays the single, proper choice. There are time loops, and portentous drama, and the talismanic repetition of the phrase “She is to the north” as you seek your quarry, effectively setting these events in a mytho-poetic register.

So yeah, I very much had fun with this tale of messy warrior-nuns torn between killing each other and making out, related in overheated, angst-friendly language. But like I said, the credits drew me up short. Because I wasn’t that engaged in the IF scene during the 2010’s, and since then have largely been focused on keeping up with new stuff, I’ve only played a smattering of Porpentine’s stuff – I think a bit of howling dogs, but honestly that’s probably about it? But just from general osmosis and reading other reviews and criticism, I have a pretty clear (though possibly incorrect!) stereotype of her style: intense, visceral physicality; unique, indelible imagery; catharsis through abjection.

I hope it’s no criticism of You Can’t Save Her that it does not strike me as particularly Porpentine-y. While there’s emotion here, it’s all heightened to the point of theatricality; the characters perform fear and longing, but as a player I was entertained but unmoved. Likewise, while one character has been scarred by her encounter with the forbidden book, this manifests as scars that glow with lurid pink light, a CGI-friendly mark of badassery but nothing that calls the body’s ugly biochemical reality into question. Per the citations in the post-game credits, it actually incorporates a half dozen or so specific lines from a few of Porpentine’s games, but the context around them is so reconfigured that they didn’t really stand out to me, seamlessly fitting into the action-yuri angstfest on offer – the game is so resolutely PG-rated that I couldn’t even recognize its gestures towards NC-17 stuff for what they were.

Again, I don’t think this is a complaint about the game as such – I had fun with it, and but for the credits I would be writing that it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. And honestly, being inspired by some canonical pieces of IF to write stuff that’s actually significantly different, rather than trying for a slavish imitation, is if anything even more respectable. Plus per my admission above, my lack of direct experience of Porpentine’s work means I could be reading things entirely wrong. But will all those caveats out of the way, You Can’t Save Her is still an odd kind of homage, and I’m looking forward to reading reviews from others who actually know what they’re talking about.

Usually when I have to review a game I really didn’t get on with, I try to avoid being excessively mean by doing some comedy, maybe going high-concept with a song parody or police blotter or what have you. I’m not doing that here, however, because despite finding Return to Claymorgue’s Castle quite unpleasant to play, I feel like I did get something out of the experience, and explaining what and why requires going into a fair bit of detail about all the things that didn’t work for me.

The game is an authorized sequel to one of Scott Adams’s lesser-played adventures – at least, 1984’s Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle doesn’t have any reviews or ratings on IFDB – taking what appears to have been a fantasy collect-a-thon and giving it the Scooby Doo treatment. You play a journalist who rolls up at the gates of the eponymous fortress with the rest of your crew – a researcher, a hacker, and an athlete – bent on uncovering… well, something or other, the game isn’t really big on motivation beyond exploration for its own sake. So far, so old-school, and the approach to puzzles is likewise quite traditional: outside of a spot of device-manipulation to crack a computer password, you’ll be walking through gimmick-free mazes, digging for secrets, making a grappling hook, and using MacGuffin A to unlock MacGuffin B. The one mechanical twist is that often, you’ll need to enlist the aid of your comrades to get through a puzzle: like, the hacker obviously is the one who can unlock the computer, the athlete is thee only one who can successfully throw the grappling hook, etc.

Now, I must confess that the Scott Adams style of two-word parser games is not a subgenre I find particularly appealing. I never played them back in the day, so there’s no nostalgia value, and the terse prose, primitive interface, and sometimes-unfair puzzles are just not what I come to IF for. As to the last of these, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle lives down to its lineage: the puzzles are severely underclued, with most near-misses, like trying to throw that grappling hook yourself, generating default “that won’t work” messages that don’t provide a push to the intended answer, not to mention a few places where I’m not sure how anyone could progress without going to the walkthrough. For example, pretty much the first challenge of the game requires you to go through the maze to a nondescript area, and then examine a patch of weeds twice, with the first just resulting in another generic failure message.

Admittedly, many of the more traditional lock-and-key puzzles were at least more straightforward, but that brings me to the game’s first point of departure from its inspirations: instead of the traditional two-word parser, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is implemented as a parserlike choice game in Twine. Now, this is a subgenre I tend to enjoy, but the interface here is about the most literal, cumbersome interpretation of the concept you can imagine. In theory, this shouldn’t be that bad – you’ve got the list of characters and their inventories in the left-hand sidebar, the room description and contents in the middle one, and the verb list in the right. But the verb list is long and somewhat fiddly, and you need to manually select yourself as the person doing the action even if you’re alone – plus if you accidentally click object-verb instead of verb-object, the action queue gets reset. As a result, constructing the simplest command requires at least four clicks, and possibly scrolling up and down three separate sub-windows, with more complex actions being more click-happy still.

It’s tortuously slow, and made worse by the low contrast provided by the pixel-art backgrounds and the frequent guess-the-verb issues – sometimes examining would work to reveal what a piece of writing said, sometimes only reading it, and sometimes, as with the leaflet you start out carrying, neither will. Similarly, I could never figure out how to actually talk to any of the other characters, though they do occasionally interject with their thoughts (often when you’re in the middle of clicking to make a command, which means you miss these bits of dialogue unless you notice that the main window’s changed in time). And since the game mechanics require a lot of clue-free trial-and-error where you need to attempt every action you can think of, and then try the exact same actions again with the other members of your group, anyone susceptible to RSI will be a whimpering mess by the halfway mark.

Beyond the interface, the game’s other major difference from its 1980s antecedents is the prose. Afficionados of the era often say they enjoyed the minimalism that early microcomputers’ memory constraints imposed: with the games only able to fit a few words per location, item, or character, players’ imaginations could run wild. Return to Claymorgue’s Castle, by way of contrast, adopts a style that can be charitably described as logorrhetic. Even the emptiest of locations gets hundreds of words of description long on telling me exactly what I was meant to be feeling and short on the actual details that would evoke those feelings. The prose is weighted down by excessive adjectives and adverbs, and frequently talks itself in circles, repeating words or even whole ideas from one sentence to the next. Like, here’s the drawbridge:
"
The drawbridge is old and rusty, with wooden planks that creak and crack. The chains that hold it are thick and heavy, but also worn and corroded. The drawbridge spans over the moat, which is deep and murky. The water is stagnant and foul, with patches of algae and slime. I can’t see the bottom of the moat, but I imagine it is full of bones and debris. The moat surrounds the castle, which is imposing and gloomy. The walls are high and thick, with towers and battlements. The entrance is a large archway, with a portcullis and a gate. The entrance is dark and ominous, with no signs of welcome or warmth."

And here’s a door:

"A sturdy wooden door, its entrance barred by a hefty bolt, conceals untold enigmas. This ancient milieu, rich with history, murmurs the chronicles of eras past. The wooden door, its secrets kept by the heavy bolt."

(There was not even a single enigma here, let alone untold ones – I’d already been around to the other side of the door, it led from a kitchen to a courtyard).

My eyes glazed over early, and I found myself skimming the text desperately looking for the few pieces of concrete information or game-relevant objects amid the flavorless tide of oatmeal. The author’s native language doesn’t appear to be English, so I certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on their language skills, and perhaps there’s something about the translation process that led to this muck (my sense is that an LLM let loose on perfectly fine foreign-language text could certainly generate sludge of the quality here on display). But regardless, the game would have been far better served by a dramatically simpler syntax and vocabulary.

And that’s my little revelation: while I don’t like the simple parser, terse writing, and barely-clued puzzles of this particular tradition, in fact those elements all fit together quite snugly, if not elegantly. If your puzzles are going to demand exhaustive testing of possibilities without much feedback, you need a fast, straightforward interface to make that bearable, and clean prose that focuses on the stuff you actually need to interact with to win. Or turn it around: if you’ve got a relatively simpler parser, you might need harder puzzles to keep the gameplay from likewise feeling too simplistic, and a writing style that’s clear enough that the player won’t try to type stuff the game can’t recognize.

So by sticking to this particular flavor of puzzle design, while unsuccessfully trying new things on the interface and stylistic sides of things, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle wound up giving me a backhanded appreciation for how they used to do things in the old days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m going to be running out to play all the Scott Adams classics as a result – but I suspect if I did I’d have far more appreciation for them than I did before.

“Slice of life” is a funny name for a genre, if you spend too much time thinking about it (I suspect this is true of most genre names). These kinds of games tend to have relatively low stakes; there might be romances kindled or breakups endured, sure, but there likely won’t be melodrama, nothing dramatically out of the ordinary or unexpected. At the same time, they typically have an arc to them: at least some characters finish the story in a different place than where they started, with some event or incident having made some kind of impression. So the “slice” part of the genre label is apt: the selection of what to include, where to begin and where to conclude, is usually artfully curated to present something tidy and appetizing, a lovely triangle of carrot cake with the iced-on carrot just so at the center of the arc.

String Theory defies expectations by not doing that; this is less a slice and more a core sample of life, a series of incidents that sometimes feel like they’ve been thrown together by blind forces rather than authorial design. The opening made me expect that the game would be confined to a single climactic Thanksgiving dinner, but in fact there are a few nested flashbacks, some of which have only glancing relevance to what I take to be the main plot. There’s also a series of short epilogues that leave the narrative lurching past its logical end-point, and the game’s attitude towards tying together its various plot and thematic strands is desultory at best: I finished the game nonplussed, unsure how everything I’d just read was meant to come together.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy some of my time with String Theory, though. The protagonist, Jay, doesn’t have a strong personality but he’s appealing enough – a mostly-closeted Caltech student visiting his Kentucky relatives for Thanksgiving, he undergoes the slings and arrows of a right-wing uncle, a closed-off father, and the time difference and familial obligations separating him from his boyfriend. He’s dealing with self-image issues, too (he’s trying to be vegan so he can lose a little weight), and worried about too-hard classes and too-expensive tuition.

He’s plausibly beleaguered, in other words, and the game is good at deploying bits of interactivity to wryly underline his predicament. When someone asks how college is going, your dialogue options include “I’m going to fail Ph 229,” “I’m in so much debt”, and “am I wasting my life?”, but clicking on any them just redirects to a terse “fine”, for example. And the while the writing doesn’t ever reach for spectacle, there are some good comic set-pieces, like this struggle with your aunt’s well-intentioned attempt at a vegan pie:

"You reach over with a butter knife and poke it. Your first attempt fails to pierce the skin. With some effort, you plunge the knife through the crunchy white tufts into a wobbly lake of yellow, and fight your way down to an alluvial graham cracker deposit from the middle Devonian."

The prose also establishes a nice wintry mood, leaving me missing the cold-weather Thanksgivings I used to have when I was still visiting the northeast on my breaks. But that brings me to some of the weaker elements of String Theory, because despite going to Caltech myself, there weren’t any details of Jay’s experience at the school that felt especially lived-in or resonated particularly strongly, beyond the title of one topology textbook being repeated a few times. Similarly, the plot and characters are very archetypal: dealing with a racist uncle, furtively texting a friend from the bathroom, entering a food coma, bonding with a supportive aunt, and watching football are all prominent on the big board of Thanksgiving tropes. Heck, from context I think this sequence is supposed to be set in Kentucky, but it could be Iowa or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania just as easily – as with the setting as with everything else, the player isn’t given much to attach this story and the people in it to a particular, specific context (admittedly, I did enjoy that one of the things the uncle rants about is California’s push for reparations for slavery – I’m peripherally involved in that campaign!)

The plot is also somewhat perplexing. There’s a fair bit of incident, but at least in my game, the closest there was to a Jay-focused climax was the moment when the uncle awkwardly tried to reach out and tell me that my dead mom loved me very much. It’s not a moment that landed especially heavily – it’s short, stereotypical, and it’s established that Jay’s mom died when he was a baby so his emotional engagement with her memory isn’t exactly clearly, all the more so since he doesn’t really respond directly to the overture. Then there’s another climax where a flashback allows you to relive the car crash that killed your mother, from the perspective of some EMTs, but of course you already generally know the outcome and the gameplay here is odd, with a light time-loop structure resetting things if you make the wrong choices in a couple of coin-flip situations. And then the game keeps going for a couple more scenes after that, before ultimately ending with a visit to your boyfriend’s warm, effusive grandmother who provides a non-uncliched contrast with Jay’s emotionally constipated family.

It just doesn’t feel to me like it adds up to much: why is the game about this Thanksgiving instead of the one before or the one after, say? What makes this particular collection of events – particularly the not-always-intuitively-integrated flashbacks – a single narrative? Admittedly, there are plot points I missed, based on a late-game conversation with some crossed-out options that I think corresponded to options I didn’t take earlier in the story, but this isn’t really the kind of game that invites replay through engaging mechanics or dramatic plot branching (the last screen indicates that instead of the ending I got, where Jay spends winter break house-sitting with his boyfriend in Venice Beach, there’s another one where they go on vacation to Mexico, which seems comparably fine?)

The game’s title, and the mechanic by which progress slowly fills out a graphic of a family tree, seems to indicate that it’s engaging with ideas around connection, but that’s a very broad idea, more a vibe than a theme – I felt like the game needed more of a defined central spine to anchor its disparate pieces. As a result, while I liked some of the ingredients, in the end for me String Theory didn’t serve up a nicely-cut piece of cake; more a haphazardly-chosen lump of frosted dessert that could have used more defined layers and a cleaner presentation.

A sober-minded critic might accuse Miss Gosling’s Last Case of over-egging the pudding. A cozy mystery that leans into the bucolic-English-village element of the subgenre surely needs at most one gimmick, but here we’ve got both ghost-solves-her-own-murder and cute-animal-sidekick-saves-the-day, as the eponymous sleuth can only make her will known beyond the grave by directing Very Good Boy Watson to the clues that will allow the bumbling bobbies to crack the case. Isn’t it, perhaps, a bit too much?

That sober-minded critic can go soak their head; this game is glorious fun, and I wouldn’t surrender either the acerbic Gosling or the doughty collie for the sake of restraint. They’re a lovely pair of partners, and the mystery they’re up against is no slouch, either.

The setup here is classic Christie – Miss Gosling is very clearly Marple-coded, and her mysterious semi-resurrection hasn’t slowed her brains or dulled her edge. A consulting detective who’s helped put more than her share of criminals behind bars, she’s quite sure that foul play must have been involved in the falling-down-stairs incident that led to her death, but the police are content to write it off as an accident. Of course, all that changes after a short tutorial section that sees Watson presenting clues to the investigators; unfortunately, they subsequently get the stick wrong-way-round once again and decide your modest estate must have provided the motive for the crime, and start investigating your nearest and dearest for the crime of murder. At that point the game proper opens up – you follow four distinct puzzle chains across your house, from the crime lab in the attic to the potentially-poisonous garden to the dark and foreboding root cellar, in search of the evidence that will clear the four key suspects and trigger the endgame.

It’s a traditional approach to a mystery, and one that leans into the strengths of IF as a medium (since you’re controlling a dog, you won’t have occasion to lament a weakly-implemented conversation system – you can bark, and that’s about it). The writing similarly is solidly genre-appropriate:

"You have a long history with Basil Hughes, and it’s in no small part thanks to your investigations that he’s risen through the ranks from Constable to Inspector. He has his eye on Chief Inspector now, but really, well…the man is far too close-minded, far too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion. Large and stout, with an immaculate uniform and an impressive moustache, he tries to look every bit the image of the modern constabulary."

There is novelty on offer here too, however. For one thing, this Dialog game is playable entirely with clickable links – context-sensitive actions appear whenever you address a particular item, beyond a few that are always available, and I found the implementation was spot on. Admittedly, the canine nature of the protagonist means there’s a rationale for not including every action you can possibly think of, which helps constrain the screen real-estate needed for this interface, and I’ll confess that I played by typing in my actions 95% of the time. But it’s still an exemplary implementation that makes it plausible to contemplate playing a big parser game with complex puzzles entirely on mobile or without a keyboard, which is quite the achievement – an even playing on my laptop, I still found it more convenient to click links from time to time, like to avoid having to write out SHOW PHOTO ALBUM TO DAVIS or what have you.

The puzzles are also not ones I’ve seen before. Sure, the elements are straightforward enough – you better believe that this house has a dumbwaiter, and good lord are there a lot of locked doors – but the way the problems are posed, and the ultimate solutions, take full advantage of Watson’s canine nature. Particular obstacles might hinge on your color-blindness or lack of thumbs, while your keen senses and peoples’ tendency to overlook a pet provide an edge. Some of the puzzles do trend a bit hard (there’s one in particular that I don’t think you can begin to solve without engaging in some unmotivated arson), but I almost always knew what I was meant to be doing, and the game did a great job making me feel clever as I worked through them (the objective-listing THINK command and full InvisiClues system also helped on that front, of course). There are a few places where Watson’s abilities seem slightly implausible – especially his ability to manipulate a torch or tape recorder – and there was a place or two where I thought an alternate solution might have been nice to provide (Spoiler - click to show)(I spent a lot of time trying to wedge open the root cellar door, which seems like it should have been possible), but this overall is a great set of puzzles that hold together remarkably well.

If I were to venture a sincere criticism, it’s that I wanted a more robust denouement – the endgame sequence revealed the villain and gave them their comeuppance in a satisfying way, but I would have enjoyed a more worked-out idea of what, if anything, is next for our dynamic duo. And given that the meat of the game is concerned with clearing the four suspects, it would have been lovely to see them on-screen and enjoy having saved the day. But for a game that comes in with such an overstuffed premise to leave the player wanting more is no mean feat, and I definitely do want more: this may be Miss Gosling’s last case, but on the strength of what’s here I’d gladly play some prequels (dare I suggest that given the list of beta testers, a flashback crossover with Lady Thalia might not be out of the question?)

I confess that I don’t really have a clear idea about what’s going on in this cops-and-robbers comic-strip game. Here’s what I now: the central agonist is a truck driver who’s conducting a delivery mission for his uncle, who appears to be some kind of crime boss (so far so good, but things are about to get much worse). The driver’s not just a but the Egocentric, which in this case doesn’t mean that he’s a superhero with solipsism powers (Marvel, call me), I guess explaining why he’s got compulsive urges including rewriting stray graffiti so that it’s about him, but I’m not sure how the player character, an aging policeman, knows that about the driver so that he’s able to use this tic against him, just how I’m not sure whether there’s meant to be an explanation for why the only way to win the game is to learn the driver’s phone number while locking yourself out of victory, then restart and use your out-of-world knowledge from the get-go. Much less do I understand why the blurb and genre tag say this is a satire. Are we making fun of self-centered truck drivers? Are they a thing? Or is it just a linear concept of time that’s in for a kicking?

Fortunately, while the substance of the game left me cold, I found the form sublime. I mentioned that it’s presented as a comic strip, but rather than having the player click through each panel in turn as they take actions, instead you always have a view of the four panels that make up the full row. Your options are listed under the panel where the protagonist is currently located, while the driver makes his way from left to right, taking actions as you do. This does a good job of keeping the suite of possibilities manageable, while ensuring that you don’t miss the driver’s activities – which is important since the game’s single puzzle hinges on manipulating his behavior. It’s also a really clever conceit for visualizing a series of complex spatiotemporal relationships: your moves left and right simply shift your location, whereas the driver is always moving forward in time.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of IF by any means, so possibly someone somewhere has previously attempted an interface like this, but even if it’s not wholly unique it’s still well out of the ordinary and makes for a compelling interplay between words and pictures – and I say that as someone who’s generally profoundly unsold on the importance of graphics in IF. The juxtaposition of this richly-interactive presentation with a flashback, which shows up as a traditional click-to-advance-to-the-next-panel sequence, just underlines how much more freedom this almost parserlike (or, dare I say, point-and-click like) approach affords. So yeah, the puzzle breaks some of the rules of good puzzle design, and the plot and characters are a bit inscrutable – admittedly, there’s apparently a prequel game or games that might provide needed context, but real talk, there’s a week left in the Comp and between this event, the Review-a-Thon, and ParserComp, I’ve been on the review train pretty much without stop since the beginning of July so this is not really a moment where I’m doing the extra credit – but A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is very much worth the couple minutes it takes to play just to experience the possibilities of its interface.

(Some spoilers)

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be,” muses a WWII-era American spy, who worked under such deep cover he might have just been a Nazi, in Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Welcome to the Universe isn’t masquerading as anything nearly so horrible – it presents itself as a slightly tarted-up version of ahead-of-its-time 1980s life sim Alter Ego, intercut with excerpts from a fictional sociology textbook – but it might have profited from this hard-won wisdom all the same, since for all that I’m pretty sure the author wanted me to find the meat of the game irritatingly superficial, spending half an hour gritting my teeth at the irritating superficiality on display didn’t prove the best on-ramp to the actual point the game’s trying to make.

The flip side of all this is that Welcome to the Universe gets points for verisimilitude. The conceit here is that the game is the brain-child of a Professor Balamer, a one-time sociological wunderkind whose groundbreaking theories have come under increasing criticism, and who has thus decided to take his arguments to the masses via the medium of electronic entertainment. The game-within-a-game steps you through an archetypal life vignette by vignette, starting from experiencing the loneliness of a baby being sleep-trained through playground philosophizing, from education to puberty to young adulthood, and then eventually on to maturity, potential parenthood, and senescence and death. Occasionally you’re given a binary choice that can help define your personality, like are you a homebody or traveler, someone who’s cool or lame, who’s content in your small town or anxious to enter a bigger world.

I’d characterize the prose here as ambitious – it’s trying to create a lot of context, philosophical resonance, and importance around what are ultimately just a handful of short scenes, the better to make them constitute a life in full, as well as work in some jokes. It’s occasionally successful, and always readable – here’s an early bit I liked, laying out the downsides of life in the crib:

"for some undeterminable reason, you have been left in this cold, damp room alone. Your face begins to sour. Loneliness is not fun. Loneliness is not what you signed up for."

Things get away from the author occasionally, though. Soon after the above, we get this:

"You lean into your mother’s embrace, her body a gentle fortress of claret and peel."

And beyond specific missteps like this, the overall effect can be alienating – seeing six-year-olds debating whether their small town is better than another based on the availability of fast food restaurants through an authorial voice that’s constantly cracking wise with e.g. Thornton Wilder references can’t help place the action at a remove. And sometimes that voice is much less clever than it thinks it is. Here’s a bit about puberty:

"Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don’t get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)"

The swerve in what “don’t get discouraged” means is a good joke, but come on, the New York Times doesn’t itself do studies.

I can’t rule out that these infelicities are diegetic, however. As mentioned above, after every couple of life-sim segments you get a page or so telling you more about the game’s author and his theories. The prose style here is very different, a note-perfect imitation of academic jargon complete with dated citations – it’s an enjoyable parody, but parody it is because the actual ideas being conveyed in this dressed-up language are very stupid. Balamer was obsessed with quantifying existence via standardized, binary properties that he alleges are universal across the human experience and can therefore lead to common understanding and mutual respect across difference, which depending on how you understand it is either banal or false – there are also some supernumerary elements to his thinking that appear to be warmed-over Durkheim or Mead, who were writing at the dawn of sociology’s creation as a field of study. Balamer, meanwhile, is meant to have been heralded as a great genius after his first major publication in 1999 – apparently it “shaped early postmodern research by merging New Journalism techniques with traditional quantitative methodology” so I guess add time travel to his list of talents – so yeah, it’s hard to take this stuff seriously.

Welcome to the Universe appears to be in on the joke that Balamer’s a blowhard; there are some late-game metafictional twists that suggest that he’s having second thoughts about his idea that everybody is reducible to a small number of data points, and the fact the life-sim that purports to reflect universal human experiences, and therefore point to the futility of conflict and the need for brotherhood, is very clearly recounting the life of a straight middle-class suburban white guy, seems like an intentional choice.

So yeah, this is a satire that spends most of its running time playing things straight, meaning that my notes are primarily ejaculations of frustration at how obviously incorrect its purported thesis is (admittedly, intercut with admiring comments about some of the nicer turns of phrase). I can see how some players might find it to be redeemed by its twist, and to the game’s credit it’s open-minded enough to give Balamer a bit of grace, allowing that his intuitions about the need for human connection and the inherent worth of life are correct even while making clear that he was going about all of this the wrong way. But, well, my experience of the game was primarily of it going that wrong way, and I can’t say that I felt the satirical project was sufficiently well-aimed to justify the annoyance: of the major bad ideologies currently out there in the world, “maybe the personality is reducible to a relatively small number of knowable variables” is probably not in the top 50 or 100. Even though Welcome to the Universe isn’t a bad game, it often does a very good job pretending to be one, and that’s a dangerous business.

Among my bad habits is my tendency, upon first visiting the house of an acquaintance, to ignore my host and make a beeline for the bookshelves to see what’s on offer. Of course I’m even less restrained when no actual people are involved, so I love nothing more than to look at book after book in a game’s library, the author’s dedication typically wearing out well before my interest wanes (er, my incomplete exploration of Forbidden Lore’s obfuscated stacks notwithstanding). So believe me when I say that I think An Account of Your Visit… gave me the most pleasure I’ve ever derived from an IF book-browse.

First off, the shelf in question is depicted in delightful ASCII art; there are fat books and thin books, interchangeable ones and unique ones, volumes lined up ramrod-straight and others tilted at a careless angle, making for an aesthetically pleasing invitation to click on all the titles to see what they are. And oh, what a smorgasbord! There are creepy classics like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with older antecedents like Machen and Dunsany, but by no means is this a hair-raising collection or even one restricted to real-world texts: there are books by Threepwood comma Guybrush as well as Threepwood comma Clarence, a deep-cut Quest for Glory reference in Healing Herbs by Erana, and to top it all off, you can even find the Joy of Cooking (well, a Joy, it’s got some recipes Julia Child never contemplated).

I don’t mention this admirable collation just for its own sake, though, but because it’s also something of a synecdoche for the game as a whole. While the framing is pure haunted-house – you get an invitation from a mysterious benefactor who’s mysteriously absent once you roll up to the eponymous manor, and of course no sooner has the door locked behind you than you’re waylaid by a talking cat, with a lively skull just one room over – the vibe is far more cozy than horrific, with characters like the fussy librarian Basil Fink-Nottle explicitly invoking Wodehouse and easygoing puzzles that would be at home in one of the friendlier 90s point-and-click adventures.

The game’s older-school inspirations are also visible in how it motivates the player – or rather, how it doesn’t; you don’t have any particular agenda in mind when you arrive and it takes a while for broader objectives to become clear. So at first you pretty much need to explore the house just because it’s the only thing to do. Fortunately, the gregarious characters and sprightly prose are all the draw I needed. The writing is peppered with risky but ultimately successful imagery, like the description of the driver who drops you off as a man “whose drawn down features bear the characteristics of wilting lettuce”, or saying of the building that “[i]t stretches toward the sky unevenly, like a cat arching its shoulders - cordial, but cautious.” And the already-fun cast I mentioned above is shortly joined by an adorable octopus, a raucous gang of furniture, and a raven, who seems to be the only one taking the proceedings even slightly seriously.

All of them, of course, either have something you need or are standing in your way until you’ve procured something they want. The main business of the game is thus just the standard IF loop of going to a new room, rifling through all the scenery, exhausting the conversation topics, and then moving to the next room to do it again, until you hit the limits of where you can explore and loop back to see what the knowledge and/or items you’ve gained in the meantime will unlock.

Structurally, An Account… is a parser-like choice game, but a very streamlined one. There’s an inventory but you rarely have more than four or five objects at a time, and almost always all you need to do with them is give them to somebody. The game also helpfully eliminates already-clicked options when you’ve exhausted them, which is a nice convenience but also means that revisiting locations to see if there’s anything new to do is a very quick and easy process. The result is a quick-playing game whose puzzles more or less solve themselves – it’s the kind of system ill-informed critics have in mind when they say you can’t do hard puzzles in Twine. They’re of course wrong about that – witness the work of Abigail Corfman and Agnieszka Trzaska, among many others – but also, sometimes easy and amusing fetch-quests perfectly fit a game’s vibe, as is the case here, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

There is a serious note introduced towards the end, as well as some long-deferred answers as to what exactly is going on, but the author avoids treacle and schmaltz. It helps that underneath their surface wackiness, the supporting characters are all loveable in their own way, and the literary antecedents the game isn’t shy about invoking primed me to look for some heart under the light comedy. It’s not an emotionally-effecting climax by any means, but it winds up tying a neat bow around the experience, adding just enough depth to make the hijinx stick in the memory. Sure, this is a game that’s content not to innovate and wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but it picks good inspirations, and integrates them with an impressive deftness of touch, like a jumble of exciting, enticing books crammed into an IKEA Expedit. I repeat: nothing wrong with any of that.