Reviews by Mike Russo

A story I am astonished to discover I haven’t yet related in an IF review is the time I married my twin sister – she was wearing my mother’s wedding dress, it was a Freudian nightmare. And did I mention I was twelve? Such are the wages of having gone to a small elementary school, where the limited number of students meant that the teachers doing the casting for the eighth-grade production of Fiddler on the Roof wound up making some perverse choices. Despite this slight embarrassment, I really enjoyed the play, and wound up renting the movie version a bunch of times. I was kind of a rigid kid, so beyond the catchy tunes there was something especially appealing about the story of a shtetl milkman who discovers exactly how far he can, and can’t, bend as his daughters begin pairing off. The other thing that made it especially compelling was the ending: unlike the stereotypically happy closings of much musical theater, Fiddler’s last scene has everyone fleeing the village because the Tsar has decided to seize their land and give it to Christians, with a pogrom coming for anyone foolhardy enough to stay.

This is about the moment where Escape the Pale picks up; despite a few in-jokey references, it’s not of course a direct sequel, but the setup has you dusting yourself off after being ejected from your ancestral home, forced to hustle around an economic simulation of Eastern Europe in hopes of accumulating enough money to reach the hopefully-more-than-temporary safety of Istanbul, Austria, or America. That’s a potentially rich premise, but the operative aesthetic here is very stripped-down, from the minimal narrative to the simple gameplay to the bare-bones presentation (we’re talking black-text-on-a-white-background-with-numbered-menus). There are some neatly-designed places where the mechanics create specific story beats in what’s otherwise an open-ended simulation, but despite the impassioned author’s note at the end, I’m not sure there’s enough meat on these bones for the game to make a significant impact on anyone already familiar with the basics of the history.

Let’s start with the economy, since that’s what you spend the great majority of your time in Escape the Pale engaging with. The basic gameplay loop involves arriving at a city, selling any of your wares you might be carrying, deciding whether to buy the single good that city produces (after reviewing a table with the rumored prices of said good in the region’s dozen other cities), and then paying a small amount of money to travel to one of the 2-5 other cities you can reach from where you’re at. Every once in a while a random event will occur – maybe a customs official will ask for a bribe, or your cousin will run afoul of the authorities, they’re never anything positive – and on your first playthrough it’s worth keeping a spreadsheet to track which cities connect to which other ones, and where you can take a train to Vienna or a boat to New York, but the simulation isn’t really robust enough to support anything but the most basic strategy: prices do fluctuate a bit from what the rumors say, but with travel costs imposing friction and no ability to check on the sale price of your goods once you arrive in a new city, the only real strategy appears to be spot-checking whether the good on sale in a city seems to have a good profit margin in any of the places you can reach in one or two hops, then filling your cart with as much as you can afford and hoping you get lucky.

Standing in the way of simple accumulation are a half dozen or so narrative set-pieces, some of which are purely for flavor while others shift the rules of the game. They all play out in only a few bottom-lined sentences, but since they almost all depict the casual inhumanity with which the region’s governments treat Jews, some of them can be chilling if you’ve got the imagination to fill in the gaps. The most impactful is running across some distant family members who beg you to take a young cousin with you when you leave for someplace safer; carrying her around increases your travel costs, and also increases the dangers some of the events pose.

There are other places where the mechanics shape the narrative in a particular way, and again, most of these are unpleasant and unfair. The most galling of these is the way that the price tables always show that the best resale value for any item can always be found in Bucharest. If you do manage to figure out how to travel through the node-web to reach it, though, joke is on you: your papers don’t allow you to enter Romania, so you get an automatic game over (there’s no save function, of course). Similarly, to get to America you need to leave from Vilno, but you can almost never get a good value for your goods there, and if you try to carry in a lot of cash, a corrupt official will invariably steal half of your money, so you’d better make sure you have more than you need for your ticket – although, not too much, because if you ever accumulate an especially significant nest egg the game also arbitrarily imposes a bad end. This obviously helps reinforce the ways that Jews were unjustly victimized, but the blunt approach here risks making it feel like the author, rather than the governments, is the one out to get you.

Ironically then, the part of the game that evoked the greatest feelings in me was the author’s postscript, which has two main themes: first, the way that this game, alone among others, seemed to create controversy among the circle of friends and family to whom the author habitually circulated them, and second, their decision to leave their position at a university and leave the U.S. There’s very little that’s stated directly, but reading between the lines, I’m guessing that the controversy had to do with Israel’s genocide in Gaza – there’s a sentence in one of the endings about how the Jews suffer without a homeland, which is an understandable statement to articulate in 1905 but lands differently in the context of 2025 – and that leaving the country has something to do with Trump’s authoritarianism and targeting of academics (apropos of the author, it’s worth noting that the pseudonym recalls Nabokov’s novel Pnin, about a Russian émigré academic who’s wound up teaching in the US after fleeing the Russian revolution and losing a Jewish lover to the camps).

This is clearly a significant game to the author, but I found this cri de coeur frustratingly vague given how reticent Escape the Pale is to say beyond pointing out the ways the Jews have suffered – fleshing it out to make clear what modern echoes the author would certainly have risked pissing people off, but shorn of the passion animating something like Fiddler, the game doesn’t amount to much more than an arid gesture at some heart-rending history.

I’ve gone to the Star Trek well several times through this year's Comp reviews, so now that we’re nearing the end of the Comp, let’s do so one last time by recalling the objections leveled against Deep Space Nine when it was announced. The fourth series in the franchise (you didn’t forget the animated series, did you?), it departed from tradition not just by failing to be centered on a ship called the Enterprise, but by failing to be centered on a ship at all. I recall all sorts of naysayers arguing that Star Trek was all about discovery, “seeking out new life and new civilizations” (admittedly, the naysayers had some textual support in their favor), so having a show where nobody went anywhere and they just sat around on a space station waiting for the new life to come to them wouldn’t be that interesting. As it turns out, though, they were wrong – after the inevitable season one growing pains that’ve plagued every show in the franchise save the original series, DS9 turned out to be great, by the simple expedient of the writers putting the station in an interesting place that interesting people kept on visiting.

A Rock’s Tale is a fantasy choice-based game rather than a sci-fi television spinoff, but save for that small detail, it’s basically DS9: the game, and succeeds on the same terms. The setup is bizarre but compelling: you’ve been teleported into a new world and transformed into a talking rock, and escaping your predicament will require you to meet, befriend, and problem-solve for a variety of colorful characters who wander across the forest path where you’ve wound up. Given how high the concept is, everybody is remarkably down to earth, and the robust cast is a major highlight of the game: there’s an artistic lumberjack, an anxious florist, a lovelorn cobbler, a fisherman too young to have fully twigged to his family’s poverty, and more. Meeting them is fun in of itself – you can jump-scare most of them, because who expects a rock to talk? – and it’s even more fun to peel back the layers of the game’s onionskin design: befriending them will give you a sense of what they need and what they can do, and allow you to call for them at any time rather than just wait for them to stumble across you at random, which then allows you to start tagging them in to solve problems for each other or otherwise figure out how their lives can be made to intersect.

Gameplay-wise, this is all carried out through a simple set of dialogue menus, but structurally, this is an ending-chase game; there are 20 distinct outcomes, and you’re meant to collect them all in order to unlock a final resolution. But that makes the game seem more intense than it is; you can immediately rewind to the previous decision point upon reaching an ending, so while there are some endings that are mutually exclusive, to see everything you’re looking at probably three of four replays rather than 20. For another, the “true ending” didn’t feel, to me, that much more satisfying than any of the others. I enjoy being a completionist, but I think A Rock’s Tale would work just as well for a player who felt like they’d had enough after seeing ten endings – in fact, possibly more so, as there are a bunch of branches that require you to be motivelessly mean to the characters, which I didn’t really enjoy.

What I did enjoy was the way that each ending wound up in the same place. In some you’re brought home by a cherished friend or are given a new job appropriate to your talents as a rock, while there are a few that seemingly put you in danger of life and er, non-limbs. But in every case, it works out fine after all, and the last line is always “you decide this is not so bad.” Now that’s positive thinking! In fact, the writing throughout is pleasant and grounded, without feeling overly twee. The forest is a generic fantasy forest, but there are still some nice details to savor:

"As you sit alone the sky above you begins to darken. A couple precursory droplets hit your head before thick raindrops descend in droves. You realize that getting stuck in a rainstorm is not so bad for a rock. Through the cacophony you start to discern what sound the rain makes when it collides with certain objects. Before long you have your own personal percussion section, playing to an arbitrary rhythm."

The characters similarly each have their own manner of speaking, and are all sympathetic in their own ways, too – with the possible exception of the overly-mercenary Ringmaster. I admit I did start clicking through their dialogue on repeat play-throughs, but the conversation trees aren’t especially broad, so it didn’t feel especially onerous. Getting the full suite of endings is likewise made easier by two levels of hints for each one, with the first giving some vague direction and the second directly telling you what to do; I did enjoy my time with the game but was getting a bit tired of lawnmowering by the time I got to about ending 14, so I appreciated the touch.

Rocks may be hard and unyielding by way of stereotype, but contrary to all that I found A Rock’s Tale a gentle, upbeat experience. It’s more of a pleasant hangout than a directed experience – to stick with the DS9 comparison, definitely think of the seasons before the Dominion War metaplot kicked in – but stopping to smell the flowers can be lots of fun when they give off such an inviting aroma.

Earlier in one of the reviews in this thread – I confess I don’t remember which one, I’ve written like 75 of them over the last month and a bit – I cited the X-Men as an example of how things like superpowers can be used as a metaphor for race, queerness, or other traits that set a group of people apart from quote-unquote mainstream society. Marvel’s mutants have a long track record of this sort of thing, with plot-lines through the decades echoing segregation, genocide, religious discrimination, and the AIDS epidemic; some more recent stories have leaned hard into socio-political themes by having the X-Men and their allies reject the long-standing idea of integration in regular-human society and set up their own independent nation state – backed by high-level super-powers as a deterrent against aggression – instead. Sure, it’s all people in spandex zapping each other, but there can be big ideas too.

Murderworld, an epic piece of X-Men fan-fiction in parser form, is fine with all that but would rather stick to the spandex and zapping, thanks. There are a few places where the broader social context is touched on – mostly through the backstories of some newly-created students at Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters, who are a bit more diverse and notably queerer than their canonical teachers – but aside from a smattering of non-grawlixed cursing, that’s about the only element that wouldn’t seamlessly fit into a late-80s issue of Uncanny X-Men. Or better yet, a late-80s spin-off video game, since the plot (hitman supervillain Arcade kidnaps the team and subjects them to funhouse-style deathtraps) and lineup (Storm, Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Dazzler, and Wolverine) map pretty directly to those of 1988’s Madness in Murderworld.
Where that was a wonky action-adventure hybrid, though, this Murderworld is a smoothly-implemented romp that just leans into the puzzling. There are three distinct acts on offer across the game’s generous runtime – after a quick introduction to the characters and the setup, you pick your favorite X-Man to guide around the mansion in the aftermath of an attack, repairing the damage and rescuing the aforementioned students from a variety of predicaments, before the Murderworld proper bit kicks in and you control each mutant, round-robin style, as they escape their individual scenarios, with things culminating in a fun endgame that takes a swerve into the unexpected.

Throughout, your mutant powers and super skills are the primary means of getting through challenges: Nightcrawler teleports and swashbuckles, Colossus turns into metal and smashes stuff, Cyclops has his signature optic blasts, Storm can control the weather and fly, Wolvie’s got claws, his healing factor, and preternatural smell (er, he’s got a very powerful nose, I mean), and Dazzler can turn sound into light and is good at roller-skating, look, disco was still a thing when they came up with her. Obviously some of these are more versatile packages than others, but the game comes up with unique challenges for all the characters that require you to get creative with your powers.

Sure, the funhouse nature of Murderworld means that some of the scenarios can get a little contrived, but realism was never the X-Men’s forte. And there’s a pleasing variety on offer – Nightcrawler’s vignette requires careful attention to space and how you can use your teleportation abilities to get around (while featuring a perfectly in-character pirate theme), while Storm’s is a logic puzzle that requires a little bit of lateral thinking, and Dazzler plays against type by doing some math before breaking out the tunes. Colossus’s and Cyclop’s scenarios are a bit more de rigueur, standard-issue deathtraps that just happen to be vulnerable to their particular powers, but it’s only Wolverine’s that feels like a dud. I wound up running around a robot-staffed food court investigating the death of one of their own, which didn’t feel especially in-character and was laborious enough that, unlike in the other vignettes, I kept running afoul of Arcade’s countdown and having to restart. Possibly that was my own fault, though, since checking the walkthrough after I finished revealed that I could have just started slashing everything in sight, an alternate path perhaps more in keeping with that particular hero’s approach.

The mansion segment, meanwhile, is an even tighter bit of design; I played it as Nightcrawler, and found that my teleportation abilities were perfectly suited to getting past barriers or bypassing fallen stairwells. But with only slight tweaks, any other character can go through the scenario and find their powers are the ones that just happen to come in handy to save the kids, which must have been an astonishing amount of work to get right. As for the endgame – I won’t spoil the surprises there, but I’ll just say it’s a wonderful reward for getting through all the torture Arcade subjects you to.

In a game of this length, there are inevitably some puzzles that are a bit weaker than the rest – one puzzle in Colossus’s section seems pretty close to impossible until time starts running down and you’re given a direct hint on how to solve it, and there was a bit where the default font in the Gargoyle interpreter wound up making a clue very misleading (Spoiler - click to show) (the “g” looks like an upside-down 8, not an upside-down 6) – but the average is quite high, with most feeling satisfying and fair to solve.

The writing is similarly good, though not without its wobbles. Most of the character’s voices come through clearly, in a reasonable facsimile of the comics, save for Cyclops – admittedly, he doesn’t have a particular accent or catchphrase to rely on, but sometimes I found his dialogue awkward, like this bit where he reflects on potential uses for the head of a Sentinel robot:

“I wonder if we can turn it into some sort of art piece for the lawn. Though, that would probably create a too-militaristic, ’head-on-a-pike’ kind of aesthetic that I’m not sure a school for children should be dressed in.”

When it comes to the implementation, though, I can’t even muster up minor complaints. Besides the odd extra line-break and a few errant periods, I didn’t run into any bugs, and there are a lot of smart touches, like the way location descriptions automatically shorten after you’ve visited someplace once and the diegetic hints that kick in after you’ve been dawdling for a bit. There’s also a convenient VERBS command that spells out how to use each character’s powers, which was a godsend given how complex some of them could be.

All told Murderworld might not be the most novel of games, and might not have the deepest take on the human condition, but if you’re at all a fan of superheroes in general, and especially if you like the X-Men in specific, playing it is a real treat – games of this scope, depth, and quality don’t come along too often, and are worth savoring when they do.

Mischief at the Masquerade, per the tagline, is a game where music plays an absolutely central role: the crime you’re trying to prevent is going to go down in an opera house, all the suspects and witnesses are musicians or conductors or theater-managers or patrons, and arcane knowledge about obscure musical tunings or the characteristics of obscure instruments can provide surprising insights into the plot. So I appreciate the game’s generosity in letting me play a character who, like me, is absolutely pants at this music wheeze.

See, unlike the other Lamp Post Productions games, this one’s an adventure/RPG hybrid, where you can customize the statistics of the detective protagonist: in addition to prioritizing your mental, physical, or social attributes, you can also decide on theater, society, or music theory as your key skills. Actually, they’re all useful, and the dice-rolling system is generous enough (you roll 1d4 plus your relevant stat against a difficulty that typically ranges from 3-5) that even your secondary priorities will likely succeed more often than not – the game’s interested in letting you inhabit whatever investigative archetype most appeals to you, not punishing you for inferior buildcraft (the fact that the dice rolls appear to be based off a seed, so reloading a saved game to try again always leads to the same result, also counter-intuitively reinforces this low-key vibe: it communicates that you’re expected to fail sometimes, it’s no big deal).

The system isn’t the game’s only nod to RPGs, because the “fantasy” of the title specifically refers to DnD – the setting is a version of Renaissance Venice peopled by half-orcs, gnomes, tieflings… I’ll admit, I found this matter-of-fact juxtaposition sometimes flirted with comedy:

"A bell rings with the opening door, which summons a distinguished-looking dragonborn from a back room. Her mature face is covered with bronze scales. She wears a pair of glasses and an elegant umber gown with satin bodice.

"'Good evening. I’m Chiara Canaletto. May I help you?'"

But Mischief is so earnest that I found myself getting into the swing of things quickly. It helps that the mystery is engagingly designed – the setup is that the city’s premier opera house has gotten wind that criminals might be targeting the opening of their new production, so they’ve hired you to investigate. This mostly involves talking to the cast and crew, snooping around the theater, and following up a few leads in the city; once you’ve got a workable theory of the case, that triggers a more action-oriented endgame. The various people you talk to are appealingly characterized, and beyond the who-what-where-when-how they provide in response to your questions, they also get across one or two personality traits: the vivacious star, the erudite conductor, the frazzled manager, the thoughtful costumer… it all plays out over the course of a day and a half, and there are close to a dozen characters you engage with, so none of them come off as especially deep, but as stereotypes go they’re certainly workable.

Solving the mystery involves creating a “hypothesis” – basically, you’re offered a choice of ten or so options for the suspect, the crime, the means, and the motive, and once you’ve got all those right you can try to stop the bad guys. The clues are parceled out efficiently and fit together in a satisfying way, with your character’s choice of focus areas feeling like an impactful way of determining which bits of info you’re most likely to come across. fI did take a couple of tries to crack the case, because I’d mixed up the primary and secondary motives for the crime, but there are in-game hints to prod you onto the right track with a minimum of fuss. The climax is nicely designed to allow any character to succeed, too – so long as you’ve figured everything out, your success is guaranteed, though more physically adept characters will catch the baddies with less of a commotion, which is a reasonable reward. And the attention to detail throughout is a lot of fun – I especially enjoyed that in the final interrogation scene, the preening mastermind monologues about all their plans, while the savvier minions lawyer up.

The last major element of the game worth mentioning is the romance angle. In some ways this doesn’t play out especially differently from how it’s handled in the author’s other games this Comp: you have a choice of six rather than four paramours this time out, but they’re similarly a pleasant, queer-friendly assortment of musicians and other opera hangers-on, with engaging but not too traumatic backstories. Sure, progress with them is gated by dice-rolls, but if you’re being polite and paying a modicum of attention to the kinds of things they like, you get enough bonuses that even bad luck can’t keep you from getting lucky.

I did find the pacing of the relationships pretty odd, though: as mentioned, the investigation plays out relatively quickly, and there are a lot of romanceable NPCs, so by the time you foil the bad guys you might have only had one or two short conversations with any of them, with discussion mostly focused on details of clues, alibis, and so on rather than anything personal. The romance actually kicks off after the detective plot is over; you can decide to dance with an NPC at the post-premiere ball, with successful flirting leading to a longer date in the subsequent scene, at which point the game ends. This makes for an odd structure, I thought, since it feels like the romances are tacked on after the story has pretty much reached its climax; what’s here is well-written and fun, don’t get me wrong, but it does wind up slightly distorting the narrative harmony.

Still, having a pleasant coda after all the banging and crashing is done is an appropriate way to wrap up a story about an opera – or so I assume, see the disclaimer about how little I know about classical music – and besides, I could have just declined to dance with anyone if I’d felt like playing a just-the-facts-m’aam Joe-Friday-alike. The bones here are solid, and Mischief at the Masquerade is a very good time even if you don’t know your andante from your largo.

Last month my wife and I celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary – it’s been an eventful decade, but still, it kinda snuck up on us! And we were together for a few years before we got married, so it’s a bit over thirteen years, all told. Before that, I was in another relationship that lasted for just about ten years, though it definitely had gone one past the point where it was good for either of us, so between that and the fact that that was breakup before my wife and I started seeing each other, I can’t say that I’m especially torn up about the way things ended. So doing the math, to get to the point in my life when breakups were a thing that caused existential-level angst and regret you need to rewind the clock just under a quarter-century – far enough back that I actually have some nostalgia for the crappy Star Wars movies and right-wing president that in retrospect were so much better than the ones we have now.

I’m not, like, incapable of empathy, though, so this quirk of biography doesn’t mean I automatically don’t vibe with stories about relationships ending tragically – far from it! But despite its name the Breakup Game isn’t actually a story like that. It’s not fiction at all, when you get down to it, more of a therapy-adjacent journaling tool that prompts you to reflect on a breakup and learn to feel better about it, with questions inviting you to characterize the other person, the ups and downs of the relationships, how you’re feeling now, and so on, with the game invariably responding with upbeat pep-talks (and even a cavalcade of achievements!) and before coming to close with a series of interactive affirmations.

It feels presumptuous to assess how well this would work for someone who’s in need of some help working through their feelings about the end of a relationship, since I’m so far removed from that situation. Still, I did make a sincere effort to call to mind the details of my most recent breakup and re-inhabit that mental space to the best of my ability as I navigated through the prompts. Personally I can’t say the game felt like it was a useful tool for engaging with my feelings, whether because they were too distant to access with the requisite immediacy or just because we were coming at things from a different angle. See, Breakup Game is written in a very positive way, with almost every sentence working to buck you up and help you move on. It also necessarily reaches for abstractions, because the choices it offers almost inevitably don’t allow a player to communicate much of the specificity of why a relationship was good, and what happened to bring it to an end. An extended excerpt gives a solid flavor of the thing:

"Ah. The void. Some try to ignore it while soldiering onwards. Others try and dull it with any means they find. There are those who try to fill it with other people entirely, only to discover their shape doesn’t quite fit, and that the void slowly leaks in through the gaps.

"Whatever your choices are in the events that follow in your life, know this:
It is you who will outlive the void. Not the other way around. Its size will shrink, its shape will lose its contour, and whether it disappears completely or finds a permanent home in your heart is not the point.

"The point is this: it will lose its relevance."

As slightly-New-Agey lectures about eventually you’ll be able to move on, it’s not bad, but I’m not sure how many people find that kind of approach convincing (it just puts me in mind of that Robyn song where she’s coming up with a vapid way for her new boy-toy to let down his soon-to-be-ex: “the only way your heart will mend/is when you learn to love again”, etc.)

The other place where I felt like the game’s assumptions deviated from my experience is how it treats feelings of regret. See, when I’ve had relationships fail, my negative feelings generally haven’t focused on missing the other person – there’s inevitably some of that, but things falling apart has tended to take most of the bloom off the rose – but rather been ones of guilt, berating myself for being selfish, thoughtless, a bad communicator, etc. Those are unpleasant things to think about, but there’s also a positive aspect to them too, as having made those mistakes and felt bad about them has helped me be at least less-bad with other partners. But the Breakup Game doesn’t have any truck with the idea that you should stew over your mistakes:

"Whether it was your best or your worst is meaningless. The way you tried was the only way you could have. Learn from it, but leave your blame behind you."

Game, I was raised Catholic, that’s just not how we do things.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Breakup Game isn’t for me in the slightest. That’s certainly fine – the nature of the Comp is that games with more idiosyncratic target audiences get played by people they aren’t intended for, and while I think I have fairly ecumenical tastes, those certainly have their limits (see also: all my recent review of anime-ish games). I do think there’s probably a version of this game that could have broader appeal by trying to offer a wider but also more specific range of choices to allow the player to see their circumstances more clearly in the mirror the game offers; making the prose more grounded would probably also help on that front.

But that might not be a tradeoff worth making, as it could risk the game not working as well for the people it does speak to (a cool feature I haven’t mentioned is that after playing, you can submit your own note for future players, and reading the couple that had been posted as of this writing, it’s clear some folks have vibed with the current approach). In other words: it’s not you, it’s me, I think we’ll both be happier if we see other people.

Friends, we are just a week out from the end of the second-biggest Comp in history, and while I’m on pace to complete my reviews just before voting closes (with the main question mark being exactly how much longer than two hours Murderworld winds up being), let me level with you: it’s been a fairly intense experience maintaining an average of just over two reviews every single day. On a physical level I’m getting tired, and mentally, having all those stories – and my critical reaction to those stories – sloshing around in my brain at once for over a month means that I fear I’m not a sharp as I was when September dawned bright and clear. Case in point: when I try to pen a basic summary of Retrograding, just a couple sentences on the plot and themes, I feel myself spiraling into uncertainty. Sure, the game employs a maximalist version of some of the anime-style storytelling tropes that I’ve previously mentioned don’t resonate as well for me, but I can’t help feeling like my internal fuzziness is to blame. So, let’s give it a shot:

Retrograding is a visual novel where you play an interstellar garbagewoman, tasked with traveling to the ruined husks of abandoned colonies in search of refuse you can feed into the incinerator-engines that power your civilization. You get to choose a partner to help you on your latest sortie – I picked Zinnia, a woman who’d previously been a high-up in the corporation we work for but who went rogue before being recaptured and reprogrammed back to loyalty – and then the game settles into a fixed rhythm of alternating scenes where you engage in scavenging, examining various bits of detritus before picking one of three possibilities for disposal, with interludes featuring an intense dialogue with an AI that you’re somehow linked to and which seems to be having delusions of grandeur. And then you and your assistant fall in love, though maybe that’s the AI’s doing and it all feels pretty sinister.

That sounds plausible enough when you write it all out, but I’m pretty sure at least 10% of the above is wrong, and I was still in the dark about much of what I am sure about until pretty late in my playthrough. Like, when I was choosing my partner, I actually thought I was a sort of bounty hunter and I was choosing a target to go after, since the dialogue kept talking about “reclaiming” and the various bad things the potential-partners had done (I think the other option is some kind of terrorist?) I’m also not sure whether “Maria”, the AI, is the same as the helper-robot who assists you in recovering debris or an entirely separate character, and really, her whole deal is extremely [citation needed] to me.

Partially this confusion is an intentional result of the game’s decision to forego conventional exposition, but I do get the sense that I wasn’t meant to be quite as in the dark as I wound up feeling. There’s a database of “records” you unlock as you go, which I presume is intended to provide some of the context the main narrative elides, but instead of clear lore-dumps, you get more of the same elliptical writing and cross-cut dialogue that characterizes the central thread. Always, there are a lot of words to read, but I found them very difficult to parse. Here’s some background on one of the worlds you can explore:

"Prox-3 has been razed down by time and a constant beratement of stars."

And a description of Zinnia:

"She looks to the world bringing life to the phrase ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’ when the only treasure should be the credits left across the table. But she isn’t motivated by silly things like profits."

There’s no copy and paste function that I could find, so this is all transcribed and might have typos that make it less clear than it actually was, I admit, but still, these are opaque statements. I often do enjoy more oblique prose, but in this case the writing didn’t do much for me – I think when this style works for me, it’s because the author’s choosing words that are evocative of specific heightened moods or have particular historical or cultural associations that add enough flavor to infuse the tangled syntax with meaning. But Retrograde just often felt vague to me, and the flavor I picked up on was generally sour: the protagonist isn’t a happy person, the banter with Zinnia at least started off pretty aggressive, and so the vibe was pretty disaffected, and since the game is much more vibe- than plot- or gameplay-driven, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged.

Retrograding’s approach to player agency also undermined my engagement. You do have choices, but the game doesn’t feel very responsive to them – the main thing you have to do is pick what to recycle, but you’re not given much information about the various objects, and your ultimate choice doesn’t seem to have narrative consequences (it does unlock a different “record” entry, but these just depict the protagonist and sidekick talking to each other in their well-established, kinda-snipey communications patterns). The choice of sidekicks does seem to make a big difference to the story, but as I mentioned I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I was making my pick. And the climax pushed me and Zinnia into a doom-inflected romance that felt like it wasn’t especially responsive to anything I’d done to that point. I don’t mind a game that’s light on branching, don’t get me wrong, but since there are choices, I did wish I had more context to make them intentionally, and more clarity and what if anything they meant.

So yeah, my experience of the game was that a lot of stuff was happening but I didn’t really understand or click with most of it; words kept washing over me without finding much purchase, and even when I did start to understand something of what was going on, Retrograding was eager to move on to the next bit of obfuscation. Possibly if you’re more in turn with the storytelling style deployed here, or if you play repeatedly to see all the potential angles of the narrative, it feels more coherent, but unfortunately I was just too frazzled to get much out of the game.

This is maybe just an example of I-wouldn’t-want-to-belong-to-a-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member preciousness, but despite playing a lot of old games, I don’t consider myself a retro-gamer. Like, I will happily play Gold Box RPGs until the cows come home, and not just the later ones when they finally adopted VGA, since 1988’s Pool of Radiance is obviously the best: I sincerely find it more fun than just about any other game released this millennium, and still run through it every couple years. But I don’t think that’s born of nostalgia, since my main memory of playing that game back in the day is that it was too hard for me and I always got frustrated trying to push too far into the slums of New Phlan and then getting slaughtered before I could make my way back to safety to rest. Similarly, I don’t have much attachment to the trappings of old games – I know there are DOSBox settings to get period-authentic audio and apply CRT-aping filters so the pixels don’t look quite so sharp, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in exploring any of them.

I don’t think this reflects any inherent virtue – we’re just talking about the aesthetics of entertainment products, and besides, I definitely do fetishize stuff like old books so who am I to judge? But it does mean that when I come across an artifact like Not So Happy Easter 2025, which despite its up-to-the-minute title is presented as a game file for the ZX Spectrum (a UK microcomputer whose popularity was already on the wane by the time Pool of Radiance came out), it leaves me somewhat nonplussed. I’m certainly capable of firing up an emulator and adapting myself to an old-school design, but the text delay and chunky yellow font, which I’m sure stir the heart-strings of some players who suddenly remember being eight years old again, just make me sigh and wish I could just be playing this thing in a modern interpreter.

Admittedly, there are practical reasons why I had those thoughts. NSHE lacks conveniences like being able to press up to recall the previously-typed command, and instead of L being a shortcut for LOOK, it instead reloads a pre-configured save game, which meant I lost all my progress half a dozen times before I retrained my muscle memory (PSA: you can actually save and load the game with RS and RL, respectively, and if you do that sufficiently often it’s much easier to recover from the occasional mis-typed L). And I found that even with the emulator speed cranked up a bit, typing too fast would lead to some letters getting dropped from my commands, adding an annoying bit of friction to every single interaction in the game. Again, I understand that some people might dig this; friction isn’t always bad! But in this case, I’m not “some people.”

Fortunately the game itself is idiosyncratic enough that the format isn’t the most interesting thing about it. It appears to be set in Czechia, for one thing, but more than that, the setup swerves from slice of life to thriller in a way that more grounded, modern games are typically loath to attempt. See, you start out looking for some kids who got lost doing an Easter egg hunt you designed, before getting a call from a deranged weirdo who tells you he’s kidnapped them and will only release them if you find and hand over several allegedly-magical Easter-themed MacGuffins (the plot has one more twist in store, too). This is overlaid on what are admittedly pretty standard medium-dry goods puzzles, but the novel context does add something to the proceedings, and the game’s gonzo approach did make me grin when a Tesla model called “the Swasticar, [which] goes from 0 to 1939 in three seconds” (you can get it towed, which made the grin bigger).

Unfortunately the puzzle design is as spiky as the interface. There are times when you need to repeat the same action multiple times to progress, with no indication that that would lead to a different result the second time. The stripped-down approach to narration means that some puzzles are harder for the player than they should be, since for example the protagonist would be able to tell that the giant rain-barrel is currently empty just by looking at it (and therefore filling it would help you retrieve what’s inside it). And in an attempt to prevent players from inadvertently solving puzzles before they’re supposed to, some commands only work if you’ve followed a prescribed set of previous steps, which stymied me a couple of times because I’d hit on the correct course of action but the parser was stopping me without any adequate explanation. Oh, and the game uses USE, which as always is a can of worms – I tried to get the Tesla towed by PUTting a ticket on it, which seemed the intuitive approach, and had to run to the walkthrough to realize I’d been thinking too specifically.

That walkthrough does exist, though, which is a nice concession to modern sensibilities, and as a result I was eventually able to get to the surprisingly-happy ending, and I’m satisfied about having done so. Not So Happy Easter 2025 doesn’t exactly make a case for the unvarnished glories of the 80s for those who missed out on them – I still would have had more fun if it was a bog-standard Inform game – but even the thoroughly modern can have some fun here (just remember that walkthrough!)

Exploring a mysterious island from whose bourn no traveler has returned is an appealing trope with deep roots in the pulps and Victorian adventure literature, but the problem is that, unlike the protagonists of these stories, this genre has lots of baggage. One issue is that, obviously, that “no traveler” bit has an implicit “white” in the middle; there are always indigenous folks who’ve been living there and the fact that they’re undiscovered would be news to them. Said indigenous folks are also nearly always portrayed as savages, unsophisticated cannibals ruled by superstition who turn childlike at the doughty hero’s displays of scientific know-how and manly courage. This kind of thing is a turn-off because of the real-world connection between these kinds of stories and the ideologies used to justify colonialism, slavery, and racism, but also because it’s boring – not only is it played out, it also tends to flatten all the characters involved into the world’s stalest archetypes. I’m not saying I write off any game with this premise, to be clear, just that there are some pitfalls here; with sufficient authorial attention to detail and intentionally avoiding slipping into the easiest, default ways of doing things, it’s usually fine!

Er, hang on, I’m getting an update here on the wireless – there’s ultra-generic, low-effort AI cover art? Oh, that doesn’t bode well…

Alas, this is a book one can judge by its cover: Island of Rhynin steers straight into every lazy jungle-island stereotype you can think of, with a story and gameplay that struggle to distinguish themselves from the million other times you’ve seen this sort of thing. There are no details given about why you’re exploring this place or what’s so interesting about it, so the setting never manages to be anything other than a series of cliches: the rickety rope bridge, the altar where heinous sacrifices are made to graven idols, the caverns where the natives lurk in outer darkness that mirrors their spiritual ignorance, ruled by the white man who saved them when they were too dumb to figure out how not to starve. So too do the plot beats fail to cohere into anything unique, with the discovery of secret passages, the revelation of the identity of the natives’ king, and the betrayal of your weaselly (and dark-skinned) sidekick likewise eliciting yawns. The ending is a little surprising, at least, but mostly because it comes out of nowhere – (Spoiler - click to show)there’s nothing about this place that seems appealing, why are we fighting to the death to be the new king?

On the plus side, the writing is pacey and moves through the tropes without getting bogged down, and the gameplay systems seem like they could be engaging: you have a continually-updating series of stats, ranging from raw health to more metaphysical matters like your competence, confidence, and “trust”, which I think has to do with the aforementioned sidekick. As you confront various challenges, these go up and down, but the impact is muted by the fact that the right answer is usually very straightforward to intuit, and there’s no branching – failure just dings some of your stats while success builds them up. It does appear that too-low numbers can lock you out some of the choices available in the endgame, but that sequence isn’t especially reactive anyway, and the perfunctory nature of the epilogues (we’re talking a couple sentences each) means that this can all feel like much ado about nothing. Meanwhile, what feels like a very consequential choice at the beginning of the game – whether you’ll take a spear, pistol, or hatchet with you – was revealed to be less significant than it seems upon replay, as it doesn’t change the choices available to you by nearly as much as you’d think: like, testing the planks in a rope bridge with your spear to make sure you can cross safely makes sense, but apparently shooting them with a gun(!) works just as well.

I don’t want to harp too much on the ways Island of Rhynin fails to make a major impression; it feels like the effort of a neophyte excited by the possibilities of IF, and god knows we were all there once. But thoughtlessly regurgitating a slurry of already-digested tropes doesn’t make for a memorable game, all the more so when a moment of thought would reveal that the tropes aren’t just played-out, they’re harmful – just a bit of mindfulness about this stuff when conceptualizing the game could have made a very big difference indeed.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, they say, before blushing in shame from having wasted their first impression on such a cliché. Dead Sea could stood to listen though, as it had two strikes against it five minutes after I started it up: one, the silly genAI cover art, which just looks insipid upon first glance but seems sillier and sillier the more you try to work out what the waves, clouds, and light are doing, and two, the initial puzzle, which has you make a Fanta for a gravedigger by zapping a sapient monster-orange with a freeze ray and then dismembering it until it fits in a bottle. After those first five minutes, it’s clear that some actual care did go into making the game and it settles down to tell a dark-fantasy story with an occasional hint of whimsy rather than the wearying zaniness that opening challenge seemed to presage – so that’s all good news, but it’s still frustrating to see an author start off in a ditch due to such avoidable missteps.

What we’ve got here is a parser-like choice game that tasks you with uncovering the secrets of the ruler of the island called Necropolis – there’s Bluebeard-y backstory, Moby Dick references, souls being harvested and used to animate golems… The vibes are dour, though the compressed prose style largely gestures at mood rather than wallowing in it, in service of keeping things moving. That isn’t to say there aren’t any good images – I liked the use of color here, for example:

Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.

No way up found.

An injured White Whale is beached, reddening nearby water.

But as you can see, it’s nothing too fancy, it makes its points and then shuts up. This relative terseness puts the focus on the puzzles, and I’d say they’re serviceable. Most are inventory-based and fairly well signposted, with a few boasting multiple solutions. It’s clear that some of the systems are a bit hacked together – in particular, the inventory system doesn’t allow you to drop things, picking up something new will often just mean replacing what you previously carried, which silently goes back to where you first found it in case you need it again – but this winds up being intuitive enough, and I can’t complain too much since it does reduce the amount of inventory-juggling you might need to engage in. The other mechanic I wasn’t sure how to engage with were the small statues you run into every few minutes – you’re told that praying at one will “reset chapter parameters”, which seemed like it could potentially mean losing progress, so I steered clear. At any rate, what you’re called upon to do is typically straightforward, and you typically just have a small segment of the gameworld unlocked at any point in time, which means I found it hard to get too stuck; again, the pacing is enjoyably quick.

As for the plot, once you uncover enough secrets to understand the main conflict that’s playing out on the island, it’s reasonably engaging; there are a few nicely-observed elements, like how the girl betrothed to the dark, melancholy Duke dreads the arranged marriage but is still looking forward to the wedding. And while it’s clear how this will all be resolved, the option to make suboptimal choices to get premature game-overs makes the player’s input feel more impactful. On the flip side, there’s some bonus content you can access just as you win the game which slathers the functional story with a thick coating of proper-noun fantasy bollocks:

That was before the God fell.

Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here.

This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt.

Even angels fell because of it.

Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’

I suppose that means that Dead Sea’s last impression is just as dodgy as its first, but at least the stuff in the middle goes down easy!

In the very first IF review I wrote after coming back from a 15-year hiatus, I talked about the alienating associations anime tends to have for me – I know, this is a me thing, it’s obviously an incredibly successful medium with aesthetic resonance for untold millions of people! But nonetheless, while I can recognize the reasons why over-busy narratives involving sexy people with nonstandard eye and hair colors and histrionic science-fantasy apocalpyses can be lots of fun, I confess the appeal is somewhat lost on me; less “anime BS (laudatory)” than “anime BS (derogatory)”, to adopt a kids-these-days idiom I do enjoy.

Mooncrash!,if you couldn’t tell from that intro, is very much working in this tradition. In a world due to end any minute, you’re a second-tier hero who gets to team up with the A-listers due to the fact that the world is ending any minute now. The mechanics of this are initially obfuscated, but by exploring the four paths the game offers (each corresponding to one of the four superheroes you can work alongside) it’s clear it involves armies of demons and dragons, and the plans to forestall it involve constructing magitech devices to allow some people to survive the end of the world, stealing a biological WMD from an infernal vault, or possibly just creating a magical simulation into which to escape. And after you run through each of them (there’s a death-and-rebirth thing going on that enables you to toggle between branches, as well as retain your combat skills and achievements across lives) there’s a culminating vignette where you can choose which strategy to save the day you want to throw your weight behind.

It’s a relatively simple setup, but Mooncrash! is maximalist in its storytelling – most actions you take produce long passages of text, dense with proper nouns and action and exposition. When the conflicts it describes are straightforward, this lends a pleasant over-the-topness to proceedings:

"The wind whips around you as you soar through the air, and you grip the red scales of the dragon below you for dear life. Below you, a battle rages on a bridge made of solid hard-light. Your allies, The Dawn Legion of Leont, do battle against the forces of Izalith, The Dread Horde. Twisted forms, demonic and devilish alike, clash against the shining armor of your brethren."

You can practically hear the death metal!

The prose can get bogged down when the action quiets down, though. One of the four branches is an extended conversation with the wizard who’s created the magical simulation I mentioned above – this involves them going into their overcomplicated backstory (they’re a refugee from another reality that collapsed in a crisis similar to the one yours is currently undergoing), their romantic entanglements, the reasons why they created their tower headquarters where and how they did, the nature of the alternate world they’ve built, how it could be used as a cheat code to escape the apocalypse… Again, I can see how those with a taste for this stuff would lap it up, but I found it dragged.

Other sections have more involved gameplay, though. The combat one is straightforward and does require some repetition to grind your skills to the necessary level, but it’s hard to go wrong skewering monsters. There’s a medium-dry-goods one where you solve some very simple object-based puzzles to prepare the ingredients for a sorcerous construction project. And the last involves either a conversation puzzle or a maze, before the endgame puts all the pieces together. They’re mostly pretty basic in terms of challenge, but they all have some time pressure to keep the player on their toes, and can be repeated as many times as needed (plus even failed attempts will typically give you an achievement, which is a motivating touch).

I’m unconvinced that a parser-based interface was the best fit for this game, though. Many sections play out in a primarily or exclusively choice-based mode, with the game prompting you to type CHOOSE (keyword) at some important points; I’d have rather just been able to click on an appropriate link, and a choice-based interface would have made some of the longer chunks of text go down smoother, too. Mooncrash! also doesn’t do much to take advantage of the affordances the parser offers – the object manipulation section spells out exactly what you need to do, for example, and the game is generally underimplemented, leading to unintentional comedy like this:

DANGEROUS PATHOGEN - DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ALPHA-PLAN AUTHORIZATION

CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE - DO NOT REMOVE FROM CONTAINMENT FIELD BEFORE DEPLOYMENT

REPENT, YE WHO WOULD SEEK THE POWER OF THE BAD BLOOD

Staring at the pitch black vial sends a shiver down your spine. You look away on instinct. You get the sense that a single drop of this vile liquid could kill you instantly. Thankfully, the vial is sealed shut, and not a single smudge of the stuff has reached the outside.

x blood

You see nothing special about Bad Blood.

For all these complaints, though, there are definitely clever touches to Mooncrash! – I particularly liked the way a particular endgame challenge manipulated the choices available to you to mirror a mental assault, and the game is chock full of nonstandard, ambitious elements like this (I haven’t even mentioned the extended personality test that opens the game – it’s kind of pointless since the protagonist is a cipher, and while it shunts you to one of the four branches, you eventually need to play all of them. But I kind of love the ridiculous juxtaposition of a melodramatic Götterdämmerung with an OKCupid quiz, as well as the fact that the answers to “what kind of a person are you?” are basically three flavors of “I’m kind of a jerk” plus “I’m a jerk but I hide it”). Mooncrash! is identifiably a first parser game, with some of the lack of polish that implies, but it’s clearly been well-tested to smooth out bugs, and includes a bunch of customized systems that go way beyond what most rookie authors dare to bite off. And while as I said the specific subgenre it inhabits isn’t one I have much native affinity for, I think its emulation of said subgenre’s aesthetics is spot on, reflecting careful, intentional writing and design. So this is definitely an author to watch; even if Mooncrash! isn’t especially my speed, it’s still an impressive debut.