Reviews by Mike Russo

My old gaming group was very into the old World of Darkness tabletop RPGs, but we never played much Vampire – our tastes tended more towards the heroic and optimistic, and we were mostly on the “nerd” side of the nerd vs. goth side of the WoD fandom spectrum. So when I finally had an idea for a one-shot and the rest of the group bit on the pitch, I came up with a house rule to try to prod folks into the right headspace to play one of the damned, which was simply that creating a new vampire wasn’t deterministic: even if you follow all the steps that would lead to someone joining the ranks of the undead, it wouldn’t work for everyone. The ones who did survive the process were the ones who, when faced with the choice between oblivion and life, even a harshly limited form of life centered on predation, in their heart of hearts – or heck, we’re talking about vampire fiction, we can say “soul” here – decided to take the deal. It was a simple tweak, but I thought a fairly idiosyncratic one, given that it was aimed at the specific foibles of my players. So I was completely flummoxed when, upon playing oxblood, I saw this discussion of the kinds of individuals who can become vampires:

"There are people who are… predisposed. They’ve got that sense of perpetual unfulfillment. They float by. They don’t remember much. Essentially, their lives seem to be nothing and they feel themselves as being nothing. They’re a time bomb but they don’t know it yet. One day, something will happen to them — something that will make them feel for the first time. It’s always either profoundly beautiful or profoundly destructive. The outcome is always the same: the thirst for life."

That’s not the game’s other departure from the standard Dracula line: these vamps can walk around in the sunlight, can easily get enough blood without killing anybody, and don’t mind running water so long as it comes from plumbing. Sure, they avoid looking in the mirror, but that’s not because they can’t see their reflections, it’s because they don’t like what they’ll see, due to the tendency of their bodies to seem a bit corpse-like and identity-dissociation most tend to develop over the centuries.

I’m often wary when vampire fiction messes with the traditional formula, not due to a slavish adherence to dogma but just because it tends to undercut the drama – I get it, vampires are fun and they’re a more comfortable vector for exploring difference (especially queerness) if they’re not all mass murderers. But those changes can also mean a story is borrowing the trappings of angst without the actual danger; the human prejudice against vampires is often portrayed as irrational in these kinds of stories, a thoughtless hatred directed at a harmless minority. That’s a fine approach, but as I said, personally, I like my vampires to have more bite.

Fortunately for me, this is another place where oxblood is on my wavelength, because the point of these changes isn’t to let vampires off the hook: just the opposite. Again and again, it’s made clear that vampires don’t have to be monsters who are a threat to anyone who gets close to them. So when they are – and Ethel, the game’s protagonist, definitely is – that’s a choice they’re making, not something they can blame on an impersonal undead condition.

One part of what makes Ethel so compelling is that she goes through incredible mental and moral gymnastics to do exactly that, though. Here’s her Catholic-inflected thought process after she’s accidentally (“accidentally”) harmed her human lover, Erin:

"Of course, she thought she didn’t deserve forgiveness from Erin but it was the only thing she wanted in that moment. It would feel so good to have all of her sins absolved; she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, after all, and biting is just her nature, so how could it be held against her?"

But this doesn’t work out for her, because absolution requires sincere contrition, and Ethel is wallowing in bad faith:

"It wasn’t and she knew it but admitting what it really was would be an admission of guilt. She couldn’t have that, no, she had to pretend to forget until she thought she forgot, until she led enough new lives to bury all her faults beneath them so she doesn’t have to confront herself."

This is the primary conflict of the game – almost everything Ethel does is aimed at escaping herself and sublimating her past. The title is even a reference to her tic of referring to blood as “(ink)” instead, an evasion one of the humans she feeds on even calls her out over. Much of the plot of the game also concerns itself with the process of her creating these “new lives” – we get flashbacks to a much earlier life, when she went be “Ethedread” and did something that appears to be unforgiveable, but also see her abandon being Ethel as she flees from the fallout with Erin, and adopts “Adele” as her new name.

This narrative business is compelling, especially as a psycho-moral menage a trois develops between Adele, the aforementioned willing-blood-source, and another vampire named Virgil, who’s unique among his kind because he has faith that there’s a purpose to life. But ultimately it’s Ethel/Etheldread/Adele’s interior dynamics that make oxblood so successful. Much of the story is told via dialogue between several of her internal voices, with their lines often appearing as links you can click through to get more detail or background (this is where much of the lore is delivered). There’s one voice that’s perennially making excuses or trying to appeal to the audience to sympathize with poor Ethel – but there’s another that doggedly reiterates the rules, refusing to let her off the hook and making clear that at every moment Ethel is making choices. The possibility of accountability is the same thing as the possibility of grace, and it’s always, always present.

oxblood is the kind of choice-based game where I’m happy there’s no branching. It feels quite engaging, don’t get me wrong – if nothing else, there are lots of those optional links to explore – but the story is the story, and the last link on the page will lead you to the next one until you reach the end. That’s the right call, because this is a game about choices: but they’re Ethel’s choices, not yours.

I’m a big book person, so go figure, some of my earliest memories involve my mom reading to me at bedtime. It’s mostly the favorites that stand out – I was small even as a toddler, so I couldn’t get enough of The Little Engine That Could – but there was one that I didn’t really like, but my mom insisted on reading it to me anyway. It’s called The Runaway Bunny, by the same author and illustrator who did Goodnight Moon (another banger), and the story is incredibly simple: a baby bunny tells his mommy bunny that he wants to run away, naming the different things he’s going to magically transform into to escape – a sailboat on the waves, a flower in a garden – but every time she tells him that she’ll follow, turning herself into the wind or a gardener, until finally he gives up and goes to sleep. I liked the pictures, which whimsically depict the rabbits’ transformations, but the plot offended my child’s sense of logic: why would the baby want to run away from the snug burrow where he lives with his mommy?

Let me be clear: The Warren isn’t an adaptation of The Runaway Bunny – in fact it was an entry in this year’s Shufflecomp, based on two songs I’ve never heard of. You’re not a baby bunny here, but one who seems on the cusp of young adulthood, and you’ve got a rationale for wanting to leave your overprotective mother, who locks you in your tunnel every night behind a grating made from a lattice of hunters’ discarded arrows: you want to explore, to experience life outside the tunnels, to meet someone who might be unlike any other bunny you’ve ever known before – or just to be seen as an adult, an individual worthy of respect in the eyes of others.

The game presents itself in two short quartets of links, each of which reveals a possible consequence of slipping out one night in search of freedom – a warren of forking paths. And the rewards for your boldness are sweet:

"You’ve never been able to take time to appreciate the trees in full blossom, to savor ripe berries warmed by the sun, to simply exist and breathe the fresh air."

Or at least, they can be – for down another path:

"You know that a rabbit can never let their guard down, that you always have to have one ear fixed on any hint of possible danger. But you forget this just long enough for a cat’s jaws to clamp down on your leg."

For every positive future, there’s at least one other where your brashness brings you to ruin, all narrated in compact, evocative prose. You have no control about any of this, there are no clues in any of the links to prompt you about which lead to happiness and which to disaster, you just need to take your chances until you reach the final choice, wiser now about why your mother does what she does, but facing the same dilemma: play it safe, or take a risk? Stay home, or run away?

When my son was born, The Runaway Bunny was one of the first books we bought. It’s not one of his favorites, either, but I inflict it on him anyway. I think about my mom, who lives almost 3,000 miles away from me now, on the opposite side of the country; I wonder what she was hoping for when she read me that book, and I wonder what I’m hoping for, too.

Maybe it’s because I played All That Shimmers… hot (er) on the heels of Lewd Mod: No Butts, but the thing my brain keeps coming back to is that the witch is a babe. The game makes no bones about the fact that this woman who’s recently arrived in your town is up to no good – in fact she’s casting a spell to obtain world domination, so the business of the game is thwarting her – but even from the first time she’s mentioned, it’s emphasized that she’s a young witch, not one of those shriveled-up hags. When you finally track her down in her lair, all the cauldron-stirring has left her “quite hot and bothered”, and sure enough, tempting fate by hanging around long enough to tempt fate by examining her confirms that “you find her surprisingly attractive.” Heck, if you do manage to annoy her she zaps you with a spell, and the game-over text laments “this witch really was evil”, the protagonist seemingly as sad to not get a date as at the prospect of spending the rest of his life shapechanged into a duck.

The mystical femme fatale is of course an ancient archetype – paging Morgan Le Fay – but what’s distinctive about this whole setup is that (spoiler) the witch isn’t just a buxom co-ed trying on the dark arts for a lark: turns out she’s really a frog who was shapeshifted into her human form by a fellow witch. This is quite the twist, and raises questions like 1) wait, did the other witch cast a spell specifically to turn the frog into a hottie?; 2) have we been cheated of a prequel telling how these cross-species lesbian enchantresses tracked down the spell of doom that acts as a MacGuffin in this game; and 3) how dire is the protagonist’s dating life that, upon finding out that the lady he’s been lusting after is an amphibian, he doesn’t have the slightest reaction?

The other reason I’m hung up on this detail is that All That Shimmers… is the kind of debut any first-time author should be proud of: it’s of a manageable scope, with a straightforward plot well-suited to parser IF, with puzzles that don’t strain the basic action affordances of PunyInform but are well-implemented with a Goldilocks level of clueing, and plentiful dad jokes that mostly land. That means my review notes are basically just a list of things I enjoyed – groaning at the Garfield and Father Brown references, admiring the restraint in not spelling out the punch-line to the gag about the dog’s name, or pointing out the coincidence that there’s a puzzle here that’s exactly the same as one in ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, which I'd just played. It’s like listening to a jazz band play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – you know exactly where the melody is going, so it’s all about the grace notes and the vamping, the way they put their own spin on an old, old formula.

And yeah, one part of that spin is the sexy frog lady, but there’s also the fact that you get the call to adventure twice, once in passive form when you read a newspaper article about the witch being up to no good, then again when the ghost of your grandmother shows up to order you to do something about this (if the witch has something to do with the dead rising, the game doesn’t feel bothered to explain the connection). While some of the puzzles are as straightforward as giving an old coin to the lady who’s reading a coin-collecting magazine, there are a couple that rely on logical but non-obvious actions, which makes for a pleasantly-paced set of challenges. And the jokes really did make me smile, like this one poking fun at the awkwardness inherent in some parser conventions:

"To the west you see the enticing foliage of the local park, and opposite the park is the local shop. To the north is the local church, and following the street south will lead to even more local stuff belonging to this locality."

All That Shimmers… is emphatically not a game that breaks the mold or does something ground-breaking or unique with its format; it’s not going to generate heated debate or in-depth craft discussions. But it’s a very solid and entertaining example of its genre, and a heck of a debut. If the author does decide to try something more adventurous for a sophomore outing, I’d definitely be excited to play it – but more of the same sure seems like it would be perfectly enjoyable, too.

The Antediluvian Weapon, by Daniel M. Stelzer

An interesting thing about the Review-a-Thon is the way it recontextualizes its entries. The IF scene being what it is, just about every game is made as an entry in some particular event, jam, or competition, each with its own design constraints, thematic points of departure, and intended audience. And while this is all generally happening under the umbrella of the larger IF community, plucking games out from their points of origin and plopping them down in the new RAT context necessarily involves some flattening and some reconfiguration, and potentially also some fuzziness of purpose – like, the emphasis here is of course on evaluation, but how much should said evaluation incorporate a rubric proper to a game’s original home?

These wooly maunderings brought to you courtesy of The Antediluvian Weapon, an entry in this year’s Text Adventure Literacy Jam, which as I understand it is an event focused on creating games that can provide an entry point to parser IF for those unconversant with its interface and foibles. Judged on its own merits, it’s quite good, a small-scale limited-parser game in all but name with some clever uses of its core mechanic and a fun, breezily-established setting with an early-modern vibe and supernatural elements focusing on magical use of, er, the elements. As an intro to parser IF, though, I’m not convinced it’s a great fit. Admittedly, this is a tough remit, but the puzzles can be rather tricky, as a limited-parser game it barely touches on the majority of standard interactions, and the tutorializing is pretty light, primarily focusing on how Dialog’s (admittedly slick) hyperlink interface works – the ABOUT text does promise a series of accompanying articles to come, but I think those are meant to be more about the process of writing the game than support in playing it, and at any rate though don’t appear to be yet in evidence.

I’m just going to leave all that aside though, because the THON isn’t the place for such critiques, and as an increasingly-grizzled veteran of the scene I’m not best suited to judge what makes for an easy intro, anyway. Antediluvian Weapon is great! I often find Stelzer’s games contain elements that I find especially appealing, and the same is true here, from the title (I am pretty sure we both picked up “antediluvian” as a cool-sounding word from being exposed to Vampire: the Masquerade at a tender age) to the Renaissance magicpunk espionage setup, which recalls Jon Ingold’s All Roads (I should really replay that one of these days…) But even if you’re a tradfantasy or sci-fi type, I think you’ll have fun here: the worldbuilding is very efficiently sketched, conveyed in a short scene of dialogue and environmental storytelling through a couple of frescos – it’s enough to sketch out the history and provide some gaps your brain can worry away at if that’s your thing, but if it’s not the mission is clear, and doesn’t require engaging with the lore if you don’t want to.

Said mission is a rescue and recovery operation, with the emphasis on the latter: another agent located the eponymous device in the fortress of a rival power before going dark, so you’re inserted via teleportation to steal the weapon, get out, and if possible help your predecessor escape. You purloin the weapon as soon as the introduction is over, so the game is entirely structured around learning what it does and deploying it in slightly different ways to overcome a series of obstacles. I won’t spoil the details, but I think it works well – the weapon’s function is relatively simple, but figuring out how to leverage it to evade the guards out to catch you requires a bit of lateral thinking, meaning the puzzles are satisfying to solve and largely hit a sweet spot in terms of difficulty.

Rescuing the other agent is a bit trickier, and turns on realizing that there’s something slightly unintuitive about how the weapon works – I think there probably would have been a way to create a smaller puzzle prompting the player to make this leap, but as it is this is an optional puzzle, with InvisiClues hints to boot, so it’s hard to complain. Meanwhile, the climactic puzzle is great, one of those set-pieces that requires you to act quickly and think outside the box, but with enough cueing and foreclosing of alternate actions to ensure that it clicks with a minimum of frustration. And while the writing is clearly in service to the puzzles – prose is generally terse and there’s a minimum of decoration, with an emphasis on clearly communicating to the player details about their environment and movement that are needed to overcome the obstacles – it manages to accomplish that goal while still being evocative and engaging.

So all told this is a great game, and I’d gladly play more with the same protagonist or the same setting; it seems a sturdy premise for unique-magic-device based IF, which can be a lot of fun. I’m not sure I’d rank it as highly as I do were I encountering it in the TALJ, but I’m not, so I do, and I’m doubly glad for playing it in the THON instead!

This is my third year of review-a-thoning, which means I’ve now played five different entries in the Lewd Mod series – though I believe several of these demo versions have been pulled from the same mainline (paid) game, while others are discrete, and the titles of these excerpts don’t provide much clarity about any of this, meaning there’s a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about how the various games relate to each other. And there’s also a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about what the heck the series title is supposed to mean; the “lewd” part is clear enough, inasmuch as the throughline is clearly the hand-drawn no-eyes, no-nose porn, but as for the other bit, is the conceit that these are like a XXX mod to some other, entirely innocent choice-based game about avoiding heat-stroke when the office AC is on the fritz? Beats me, but heck, I watched my law school roommate play through the second Kingdom Hearts game with no context, I know how to roll with a punch.

Comes now Lewd Mod: No Butts, though, and finally we have an explanation! This fundamental (er) text for the series establishes that the protagonist has just been hired as a content moderator for a social media site, responsible for ensuring that only innocent selfies, and not detestable smut, hits the feeds of its innocent users. This is of course a job that exists in real life, one that inflicts such terrible horrors that it drives even LLMs into psychosis, but there must be a super intense pre-screening process before people are allowed to register accounts on this particular network, like early Facebook’s creepy Ivy-League-only rule, except for hot babes obsessed with showing off their butts and sometimes their feet (there’s the occasional boob shot, but they’re conspicuously rare). Interaction primarily consists of reviewing a series of pictures and either letting them go through if they comply with the rules, or blocking them if they’re too hot to handle. In between batches, there are short choice-based dialogue exchanges with your supervisor, who starts sexually harassing you within about two minutes (she can dish it out but can’t take it – if you give her a compliment after she, mid-Zoom-call, shows off and fingers her example of the only symbol on the numpad naturally occurring on the human body, she gets demurely self-conscious).

This is silly and, if you took it the slightest bit seriously, deplorable, but I think Stockholm Syndrome has set in for me – No Butts is too goofy to be mad at. Like, during your orientation, your boss explains that a selfie has to contain a face to be OK to post, clarifying that means “it must show lips or eyebrow”, because of course, there’s nothing else that goes on a face, right? And maybe I’m judging on a curve, but the details of the rules, including the way they change mid-game to allow more risque pics (there is a lot of po-faced belaboring of the precise definition of “buttcrack”), strikes me as an entertaining satire on the absurdist moderation policies of actual social media companies, even as it’s clearly just a mechanic to make sure you need to shell out for the full game before you get the spiciest stuff.

Is No Butts worth playing? No, but it answered questions about Lewd Mod lore I didn’t know I had, so at least that’s something – we’ll just have to see if this year’s second installment in the series, which I’ll get to in about fifteen more reviews, manages to justify its existence.

I work in policy advocacy and one of the big no-nos in that corner of the world is Christmas trees. That doesn’t mean actual Christmas trees, of course – the forces of godless heathendom haven’t advanced that far yet; it’s just a term of art for campaign platforms that amount to a bunch of disparate issues and policy ideas with only the thinnest of connective tissue explaining how these things are related or why they’d work well together, much as a gawker looking at a really first-rate Christmas display finds their eye drawn to one bauble after another, barely paying attention to the timber and fir-needles providing the scaffolding.

There are sound reasons to deplore these things in politics (ideally your platform should tell a cohesive story, and bring people who support one piece of it to endorse the others too). But in real life? Christmas trees are great, they’re super pretty and there’s no inherent reason why it’s bad to be drawn to one ornament after another rather than come to a considered and mature appreciation for the branches upon which they hang.

Turns out the same is true in IF! requiescat, spruced up from its original showing in last year’s Ectocomp, doesn’t have an especially unique spine. It’s a choice-based relationship drama that relies more on sudden dramatic escalation than deep character work or originality of plot to generate interest – the core story is fine enough, but it’s a bit too abstract to be memorable. Similarly, the prose is unexceptionable but unexceptional, and I can’t point to any particular thing the game does to put its own spin on the premise.

And yet, there are a bunch of nice flourishes, interesting ideas, and clever pieces of implementation which don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts, but still add quite a lot to the experience. For one thing, there’s a slight element of comedy threaded throughout the game, especially in the excited, slightly-defensive bits of dialogue that close each passage and provide a clue that the great romance depicted in the early parts of the story is a bit of a pretense. For another, the game does occasionally slow down to provide some specific details that provide color to the sweep of the game’s arc, like a karaoke night that proved a turning point in the central relationship. And I liked the use of text-expansion links: on most pages there are several places where you can click to get an additional sentence or two of context or elaboration, which occasionally are daisy-chained one after another and take the reader to quite a number of different places in a short paragraph or two – it’s an accumulation of effect that left me enjoyably bewildered. The thing that I liked the most was the way the game turns back on itself to recast some of its earliest scenes in light of the final revelations, which helps them sink in and lends some needed depth to what at first seems like simple puppy love.

Admittedly, there are some issues here that do drag these high points down – in particular, the way the game skips over a decade of the main characters’ married life only to have a completely mundane incident trigger a shocking act of violence, with no apparent warning signs or buildup, makes it very hard to see the characters as anything but playing pieces being moved around, semi-arbitrarily, to reach a preordained end (either that or one of them is incredibly thick). That kind of thing is hard to completely avoid in a five-minute game, though, and again, the central story elements aren’t the major draw here: the nice thing about being distracted by a Christmas tree’s lights and tinsel is that the luster of the trunk is neither here nor there.

This is unavoidably going to sound like damning with faint praise, but Unseelie is really good for an untested parser game made in a week. Like, there is a reason this is not how anyone writes parser games these days, outside of speed IF and other such contexts where having even a minimally-playable game at the end counts as an achievement – beyond the fact that it’s unfinished, with a plot that ends just when things are starting to get interesting and a solid quarter of game’s puzzle paraphernalia going unused, there are bumps in the road a-plenty, from underclueing to a frustratingly-invisible disambiguation issue that almost prevented me from getting through the final set of challenges. But! While presenting a reasonably old-school puzzle-dungeon, the design is generally welcoming and engaging, with fairly robust implementation, a couple of distinctive setting elements living up proceedings, and unpretentious, confident prose that knows how to lift up an evocative detail. Even if it’s hard to exactly recommend in its current state, Unseelie can already be a lot of fun if you go into it with the proper mindset, and if it’s ever finished, it could well be something great.

As mentioned, this is a slightly old-fashioned kind of game where you wander around an underground world featuring magic – largely mushrooms with various unearthly powers, plus I suppose the woman whose portal-spell transports you into the aforementioned catacombs to begin with, though that’s more of a plot device than an element in the game as such – and anachronistic technology (plumbing, key cards, pressure plates). You’re not given much direction beyond a general desire to explore and hopefully escape back to your own reality, but there are enough obvious barriers and things to poke at that I found myself getting into the swing of things soon enough.

The writing definitely helps. It focuses attention on gameplay-relevant elements while not neglecting to set the mood, like this location description:

"The corridor ends here to the west in a metal gate beyond which you can see the outdoors—though a part of the outdoors apparently teeming with giant mushrooms and wickedly thorned plants. The sky outside is an odd shade of lavender that skies should definitely not be. A single thorny bramble extends through the gate into the corridor, winding along the stone floor."

It hits a deceptively hard-to-nail sweet spot, I think – these kinds of games work best when they don’t feel like bare mechanical challenges, but also can get frustrating if overly-elaborate language obfuscates the interactive bits you use to solve the puzzles.

Speaking of, the puzzle structure is rewarding, with new areas opening up as you explore and overcome obstacles, and a couple of moments when previously confusing or useless things come into focus, most notably when you reach the sole real NPC, who’s implemented fairly deeply and can tell you what all the fungi you’ve been finding can do. There’s also a fairly broad variety of things to do for what’s a relatively small game, from straightforward fetch quests and use-x-on-y puzzles to some that involve slightly more complex object manipulation and others that focus on the aforementioned NPC (a prisoner who promises to help you if you free him) or shifting the behavior of an animalistic native of this strange place. There’s nothing that made me slap my head in novelty and surprise, but equally, none felt illogical or like busywork, albeit there were a few where the clueing was noticeably thin – just the sort of thing that testing is good at smoothing out.

And yes, now that we’re talking of testing we have to come to the critiques, few of which I suspect will come as a surprise to the author given the caveats in the ABOUT text. While the implementation here is fairly robust, in terms of attention to detail, there are also a good number of rough patches – I’ll go into detail on the bug I mentioned above, since while it comes late in the game, spoiling the puzzle solution it pertains to will be a positive good to most players. See, at one point the complex quest chain to free the prisoner requires you to get a hypodermic needle that he’s got in the cell with him, due to some Geneva-Convention-violating stuff his captors got up to. But every attempt I made to take the needle or get him to hand it over ended in failure, with him annoying declaring that the needle couldn’t possibly be useful when I had a very clear understanding of what I needed it for. Turns out, I was on the right track, but the game was confused because there was also a needle-like thorn in the room, and the parser was automatically assuming I meant the latter rather than the former – referring to the HYPODERMIC rather than the NEEDLE cleared things up right away. Again, it’s a small quality of life fix that testing would immediately reveal the need for – but the lack of it wasted half an hour and burned quite a bit of goodwill.

(Oh, while I’m dispensing spoilers, I might as well mention that from glancing at some other reviews at transcripts, many players seem to be missing that (Spoiler - click to show)you need to examine the gap in the control room).

What’s here isn’t at all unplayable, let me be clear, but it’s also clear what we’ve got is a really fun Zork-like reduced to only moderate fun-ness and lacking half or so of the plot by the vagaries of its creation. Given all that, Unseelie’s entry into the Back Garden rather than the main festival makes sense – and if that decision was the author’s desire to test the waters before committing to doing the work to finish the game, hopefully this review counts as clear evidence of the need for, and upside of, that work.

As is now Spring Thing tradition, Senica Thing has contributed an anthology of IF by students (and a few friends), this time all written in Twine and riffing on the eponymous theme. Those three words set up an impressively broad range of experiences, so I’ll write capsule reviews of each in turn:

A Swarm of Spiders, by DiBa

The opening game in my Senica Thing playthrough jumps admirably into the action: you’re awakened in the middle of the night by a strange skittering, and find yourself compelled to investigate. Structurally, it’s a sequence of binary continue the story/back out yes-or-no questions, which I often find a bit underwhelming – why are you asking me if I want to leave the ride early when I’ve already paid for my ticket? But in this case I think it works really well, as it helps align the player’s behavior with the protagonist’s: obviously the counsel of reason would be to just go back to bed and ignore the spiders, but there’s something irrationally pushing you to go outside and follow them… The writing also includes some nicely creepy details, while playing up the combination of fascination and repulsion that gives the story its energy:

"You are pretty scared, but even more curious. You slowly walk up to the window and see plenty of spiders crawling out. They are all moving in one direction, leading to a tree."

It all leads up to a fun twist that nicely illustrates the theme, making A Swarm of Spiders a perfect introduction to the anthology.

Dystopia, by Creator

This time out the theme is take in a more metaphorical direction: the swarm isn’t literal hive-minded insects, but money-chasing video game developers who’ve given up their artistic ambitions to follow the crowd. You play a young indie dev who’s tempted to join a big studio despite some understandable misgivings, and as it turns out there’s more going on than just overly-mercenary suits trying to monetize the latest trends.

While other games in the anthology play up the ambivalent nature of swarm living, Dystopia interprets the premise as straightforward horror. Unsettling text effects, eye-straining color choices, and menacing prose underscore the soul-threatening power that you’re up against:

“You have our gratitude for applying, we shall see you tomorrow at the following address: ▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊▊ st. Nr ▊▊▊▊▊▊. Sleep tight our little gem.”

Compared to the strong use of aesthetics, the interactive elements feel a bit underdeveloped – there’s almost always one right answer and one wrong one, and if you pick the latter you get automatically put back on track after reading about the bad end. And since the video game company is portrayed as unremittingly malicious, I sometimes had a hard time justifying why I was sticking my head in the lion’s mouth. But the game opens up as it reaches its action-filled climax, and doesn’t just rely on style, adding some philosophical notes to the ending: “WHAT, YOU THINK IDEAS SPREAD BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD? NO ,THEY SPREAD BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE THEM”, the prime evil says, and in this our current dystopia, it’s hard to say he’s wrong.

It’s Here, by Chaos

I feel like one of the principles of good writing that I lean on a lot in my reviews is that specificity trumps generality – a well-chosen, evocative detail can make even the most familiar story come alive, while plodding prose can suck the energy out of every novelty. It’s Here tests the limits of that commonplace, though, because while its language is entirely abstract throughout – so abstract that I think different readers could come away with very different interpretations of what, exactly, has occurred – I nonetheless found it compelling. The action, much as it is for the rest of the games in the anthology, turns on whether to meld oneself into a larger collective, and if so, on what terms. But rather than fleshing it out with the typical accoutrements of narrative (protagonists, antagonists, themes), the game focuses on the dynamics of that action, dramatizing motion and play over substance.

"Instead of chaos, there is a flow of deliberate patterns, folding and unfolding like a single, capable organism that he can breathe. There is no roar or violent rush of wings, only a muted tremor in the air, a living current that bends the light and draws every eye upward. As you watch, a subtle rhythm begins to echo behind your thoughts, steady, layered, impossibly complex, yet harmonious."

In keeping with this ultra-refined approach, the simple choices combine in complex interactions; while most of the early choices reflect the familiar join/withdraw dichotomy we’ve seen in other entries in Join the Swarm, this is more of a dance or an exploration than a final commitment, as you can move in or out as the spirit moves you, and eventually the choices turn not on whether you’ll merge with the collective, but whether you feel ambivalent about your decision, and how to respond to unexpected disturbances.

I’m not sure this approach would work in a longer piece – the human mind, or at least mine, will eventually crave some more human-apprehensible elements in its stories. But it very much worked for me in It’s Here – this is an engaging, self-assured piece.

John the Swan, by Vitalii Blinov

There are a few examples of IF in poetic form, and I’m always impressed when authors make the attempt given that it requires imposing two entirely separate sets of constraints on how you use language: the responsiveness and nonlinearity of IF, and the precision and control of poetry. John the Swan is a good illustration of both the challenges and the opportunities of this kind of thing, I think – the author cannily keeps things short so that the poetry doesn’t drag (there are two choices with two options each), and there are additional text effects further livening up the presentation. And the text employs joking half-rhymes to good effect, undermining the player’s expectations:

Was he a swan?

Was he the John?

Memories gone.

He stays alone.

As that except indicates, the substance of the game is whimsical and doesn’t overly explain itself. While poetry doesn’t of course need to be narrative to be effective, I found myself wanting at least some greater sense of progression, some clearer indication of what conflict the choices were resolving. While the game gestures at some consistent themes – identity, threat – I had often had a hard time decoding the intended impact, or relating this piece to the Join the Swarm theme. Still, it’s a worthy experiment, with some engagingly ambiguous endings.

Jouin Le Swarm, by Neural

This game combines elements of others we’ve seen in the anthology, with an ambiguously-portrayed hive-mind, a variety of endings that feel responsive to your choices, and even an opening that’s eerily reminiscent of that of Swarm of Spiders; there, you were wakened by the swarm’s activity at 2:16 am, whereas here you’re roused by the swarm’s activity at 2:17 am.

While the focus is on how you respond to the part-enticing, part-threatening invitation you receive from the swarm, I appreciated that there were several paths to get to the different endings – in particular, you can choose to bring a friend along with you as you investigate, which can set up a solid late-game twist, though that choice doesn’t actually change the endings.

I also liked the spare way the game communicates the appeal of subsuming your individuality into the swarm, which doesn’t resort to force to bring you along; while I think it’s clear in presenting the paths where you retain your independence as positive ones, it includes some discordant notes that indicate that there’s no way to encounter such a profoundly different way of existence and remain unchanged:

"After a few days, it disappears completely.

"You remain alone.

"But sometimes, in the silence, you almost miss it."

Join the Swarm, by SAT

This most generically-titled entry in the anthology cleverly inverts the theme – and brings in a hoary yet unexpected set of tropes – in a way that I genuinely didn’t see coming (and won’t spoil, given how short it is). It also boasts an impressively open structure in its short runtime: as you’re thrown into a dangerous situation and have to choose how to respond, you navigate challenges both external and internal, with some of your choices looping back around to prior events and others opening up a whole new perspective on how exactly the swarm functions here. While I think all roads lead to the same endgame, you can have substantially different experiences – and substantially different information – as you make the critical decisions.

I’ll repeat that the twist in question is a relatively tropey one, and not an unproblematic trope at that, but I don’t think Join the Swarm is presenting itself as an especially grounded depiction of reality; it certainly counts as a novel way of executing on the theme, and the thriller-style writing keeps things moving towards that revelatory climax.

Swarm of Thieves, by SKIT

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards,” goes the meme, and Swarm of Thieves got the message. This is a Robin Hood allegory where the thief is named TRUTH and the kingdom is called KLEPTOCRACY; any relation to persons living or dead sure seems more than coincidental when reading speeches like this:

"TRUTH replies: 'You must give us the right to decent work for decent pay. Together we can create a more equal society. In KLEPTOCRACY’s budget, prison spending is double that of education and healthcare. You must give us hope of escaping our poverty!'"

The plot is thin but exciting – the king’s guards are close to catching TRUTH, and you get to decide whether they succeed, and if so how the subsequent confrontation goes. Everything’s quite Manichean, which is forgivable for an allegory, but I felt that there was a mismatch between the narrative stakes and the gameplay ones – a notorious thief being nabbed and facing the justice of a corrupt king is a nail-biting situation, but the player’s ability to dictate outcomes via high-level narrative-guiding choices sucks away some of the drama. Heck, even if you pick the option that tells the king to condemn TRUTH, the subjects launch a revolution due to his crimes and usher in a happy ending. It’s a comforting resolution, but one risks turning the game into mere escapism.

The Underground Dungeon, by A.S.M.

One of the highlights of previous Senica Thing entries was coming across stories, usually by young authors, that delighted in messing with player expectations, introducing out-of-nowhere plot shifts that keep things fresh and display a wild imagination. It’s absolutely a technique that works best in short doses, but when it works it’s a lot of fun, and I confess I was a bit disappointed that the previous anthology entries were generally more focused, not to say staid, affairs.

So I was very ready for The Underground Dungeon, a madcap romp of bad behavior through a fantasy kingdom. The first line is “far away from your home is a castle,” which made me think we were maybe going on a quest to rescue the king from the eponymous oubliette, but no, actually the king is our boss, we’re the chef, we just have an absurdly long commute. Before work one day you discover a locked door to the undercroft, and since you don’t have the keys, you come up with a couple of plans and are presented with these two choices:

-Steal the keys

-Poison the king

What?! Why would we poison the king?! Well as it turns out he’s not very nice – depending on how exactly you choose to poison him, he might fall into a frenzy, leading to this vignette:

"The maid enters the room. The king bites her, but she doesn’t find it weird since the king throws a lot of tantrums."

I don’t want to spoil any more of the game, but suffice to say there’s a lot of this sort of thing, and it always made me smile. Navigating to the best ending isn’t too hard, but there’s just as much fun to be had exploring the various dead ends and blind alleys the authors have cooked up. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with joining a swarm, or what the cook thinks they’re going to find down in the dungeon, but when I’m having such a good time, it’s hard to care about any of those details.

WHAT A MESS, by T.H.K.

WHAT A MESS takes a similar approach to Underground Dungeon, which as I’ve just said, really works for me – this is a story that zigs and zags, though with more of a time cave structure that allows for significantly different plots to play out depending on your seemingly-innocuous choices. Here there are two protagonists, the plucky duo of James and Emma, though depending on your choices they might not both make it to the end. Many of their adventures also involve a kingdom of alternately threatening and welcoming bunny rabbits, which, yeah, that seems about right for bunnies, they’re cute but there’s certainly something untrustworthy about them.

The game’s jokes largely rely on misdirection, and I thought they generally landed:

"When they got up, there was a rainbow cake with a unicorn on the top. Emma and James were surprised. They cut the cake into many pieces and each of them ate one piece of the cake and then they died."

Though seemingly-ominous choices sometimes lead to better outcomes:

"The bats were flying arund them for a long time. At first they were scared, but then they figured out that it was actually very romantic. James and Emma fell in love and got married."

(I love that it’s unclear whether the “they” who were scared and then felt romantic are James and Emma, or actually the bats).

Too much of this sort of thing can of course wear one out, but WHAT A MESS isn’t something to take too seriously; it’s short and light-hearted, and perfectly enjoyable on those terms.

The Yellow Swarm, by HOT

I’ve gotten used to Senica Thing games being way more about content than styling – sure, Swarm of Thieves had a background image and Dystopia a couple of illustrations and text effects, but for the most part they stick to basic Twine aesthetics, which is fine in my book. Still, I gotta admit that the slick visuals of Yellow Swarm made for an arresting, and very pleasant, surprise. There are bright yellow/orange colors making a bold contrast with the black background, scan-lines and terminal fonts that recall Aliens, and an intense, military sci-fi vibe that demands attention.

Fortunately, this isn’t at all a case of style over substance. The prose is dead on, alternating between po-faced special-ops speak:

"The facility went dark six days ago. Meridian Biotech, sublevel research station, built into a hillside in rural Romania. Forty-two personnel. They were developing something called Apis-7: a neural synchronization compound derived from insect pheromone chains."

…and effectively creepy body-horror when you get into the facility and see what’s become of the people:

"It used to be a person. It walks in a straight line toward the far wall, stops, turns, walks back. Three more behind it do the same. Their skin has gone yellow-grey and the surface of it shifts slightly, like something pressing from inside. Their eyes are white, opaque."

The story is straight-ahead, but it’s well-paced and hits all the beats it aims for. The choices similarly avoid over-complication – your mission is clear, so you’re typically just offered binary options about how best to infiltrate and destroy the incipient hive. It’s more of a roller-coaster ride than a tactical challenge, with the player needing to really try to get a suboptimal ending, but it’s hard to complain when the ride is this thrilling and good-looking.

I’ve made some significant choices in my IF career: doomed planets and saved them, redeemed villains and romanced companions, started wars, delved into forbidden knowledge, risked everything to save just one innocent. And yet little did I know, upon starting Exchange, that opting for “Vrnnt” over “Tink” would be so weighty!

See, this short excerpt from an in-progress sci-fi game – this is the first act of an eventual three, per the blurb – places you in the shoes of one Aloysious Menfer (I love that name), a business magnate who’s on the verge of two life-changing events at once. Though the game plays coy with the details, the first is that he’s apparently taken some step in his professional life that will galvanize his former colleagues against him once it comes out, while the second is that he’s about to have a medical procedure done that will apparently swap his body for one that’s slightly more immortal. The excerpt on offer is mostly devoted to nicely-allusive worldbuilding while developing anticipation: you sit in the doctor’s waiting room, answering the secretary’s questions and watching TV news as both revelations grow closer and closer.

The prose is solid and proceedings are well paced, with the choices not providing much branching but offering an opportunity to dig into the protagonist’s past and behavior as his nerves are drawn tighter and tighter – with the final reveal, that his enemies may have bribed the doctor just before he’s about to head in for the procedure, providing a nicely dramatic teaser for the remainder of the game (although I found it kind of amusing that even after this bombshell, I couldn’t find an option to prevent Menfer from going through with things, apparently based solely on the fact that it would be socially awkward to duck out after the practice’s secretary has called his name. Like, my guy, you are potentially going under the knife of a paid assassin here, just say you gotta pee again and run).

Except! That’s just what happens if you go for the onomatopoeia that sounds sorta like a cell phone on vibrate – if, instead, you opt for the one that sounds sorta like a fluorescent light flickering on, the protagonist isn’t the client but the doctor! This branch runs through a similar slice of time, as you get reflect on your family and career travails before getting a mysterious call from someone who wants to give you some money if an unfortunate accident just happens to befall your next patient…

Admittedly, the game’s blurb does encourage playing more than once, but still, if the intended experience is to go through both halves of the story, I think a bit more – or really any – signposting would be helpful, all the more so because the two protagonists seem drawn from two different styles of story. The doctor feels like an everywoman about to be swept up into a thriller, while the businessman feels like a spy-novel protagonist playing out a grand design and keeping one step ahead of his foes. Giving the player an opportunity to knowingly opt into one or the other of those narratives might be a nice upgrade for the final version. I also think the doctor’s branch could use a bit of punching up, as it felt comparatively less dramatic. Partially this is because I played it second and knew where the plot beats were headed, I think, but also, the stakes for her felt lower – she doesn’t seem to have urgent money troubles and her family drama is ho-hum rather than anything that would motivate a drastic break from her routine, so I had a hard time believing that she’d respond at all positively to the invitation to murder.

But regardless, what’s here of Exchange does pique my interest in the remainder, even if it mostly goes on as it’s begun – Philip K Dick-style confused-identity sci-fi is always a good time, and the game seems well set up to deliver it, with, I’m sure, even more dramatic choices to come.

Three games into the Social Democracy franchise, I think we’re now past the point where reviews need to assess the quality of the latest installment – unsurprisingly, it really really is, if you like strategy, history, or things that are good, you should play it – and into the realm where it’s most interesting to talk about how it differs from the others, and what that winds up saying about the particular era it focuses on, and our own.

But first a paragraph of throat-clearing, for those who somehow have managed to miss what’s probably the biggest thing to come out of IF in at least the last half-decade: the Social Democracy games are storylet-based simulations of interwar European politics, where you play not a nation but a particular left-of-center party as you attempt to deliver economic growth and freedom by any means necessary. What distinguishes the games from the traditional Grand Strategy approach is the focus on party politics: you’re almost always attempting to manage a coalition, keeping fractious interest groups on-side and doing just enough to pander to public prejudice to eke out enough power to implement the reforms that will, hopefully, create lasting material change. Gameplay-wise, the storylets are delivered via cards – you can draw from different decks representing internal party affairs, or, if you’re in the government, the particular ministries you control, with each card representing an opportunity to shift policy, or an event or dilemma to which you must react. Since you can typically only have a hand of three cards at a time, this winds up being an elegant system to manage the games’ staggering-when-you-thing-about-it complexity, and put you more in the shoes of a contemporaneous leader, subject to the whims of fate and forced to grapple with transient opportunities, than a deathless spirit-of-the-nation able to advance your strategy regardless of what might be happening.

The other commonality is that there’s always a wolf at the door. In the first game, you played as the German SPD, desperately trying to maintain a truce with Russian-aligned leftists as Nazis and their paramilitaries attempt to overthrown the Weimar republic. In the second, you can play a variety of Russian parties during the interregnum between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, though by default you’re the Mensheviks, waiting to be outmaneuvered by the more hardline Bolsheviks. In this third game, you guide the French Popular Front, a coalition of left-leaning parties that takes power in the late 1930s, so we’re back to the Nazis again – but this time it’s not street violence and idiot conservatives handing them the chancellorship you need to worry about, but tanks. So many tanks.

One thing to admit up front is that while I went into the other two games with a dim sense of the time periods and their politics, this is not an era of French history with which I’d previously had any familiarity. So while I was excited to learn, I was also worried that my ignorance would leave me just hitting my two default buttons (1) vulgar Keynesianism, 2) no enemies to the left unless they’re authoritarians) without any understanding of where I was getting myself into trouble. Fortunately, I needn’t have worried, since I think Popular Front is the easiest of the trio to get up to speed with. See, the game starts just as a wave of popular unrest carries your coalition into power, and unlike previous games, where regular elections producing splintered results made forming a government an agonizing, repeated part of gameplay, here you come in with a strong majority and no elections scheduled until after the Nazis invade (I at least knew that much off the top of my head). You’re also handed a program of agreed-upon policies for the Front to pursue, which acts as a relatively simple framework pushing you towards short-term goals you should be pursuing.

You’re also much less dependent on the luck of the draw this time out. You have enough juice to snap up half a dozen important ministries from the get-go – the rest go to your coalition partners – and cabinet members show up as always-available cards in addition to the trio in your hand, meaning that if you’ve got the finance ministry, you can use an action to tweak tax rates or mess with tariffs (or devalue the currency) any time you want. You also get more than one action per turn if your coalition is strong enough, though they start to decrease if your partners get fractious or the Senate gets restive at the pace of progress (though I was a little surprised their disapproval had as much impact as it seemed to, since almost my first course of action every time I’ve played is to remove their veto and kneecap their prerogatives – I’m no idiot, I know what to do to Senates).

As a result, Popular Front can play more like a traditional strategy game, where you can play out a proactive strategy and take action on your own terms, and marshal almost the whole powers of the state rather than a single formation within it. It makes for an empowering change of pace, but there are of course reminders that you’re still subject to the whims of history, most notably the events that play out at the end of many turns: in the early stages many are entirely domestic, highlighting the agency of players outside your control, like union leaders or other parties, but as time goes on they increasingly have to do with foreign relations. The Spanish Civil War kicks off early, and you have some ability to influence it via arms sales; similarly, German rearmament and adventurism create a constant, escalating drumbeat to which diplomacy can only offer so much of a response.

Thus, the central dilemma of the game reveals itself to be the question of when to pivot from domestic considerations to a military buildup. In my first game, I didn’t have the War Ministry included in my portfolio by default, and I figured that was OK – I spent three years leading France out of the Depression via judicious public-works programs and pro-labor reforms, giving women the vote, encouraging immigration, and accomplishing various other liberal priorities along the way, all while keeping the budget more or less balanced, inflation under control, and the government unified. As German saber-rattling about the Sudetenland increased, I figured it was time to reshuffle the cabinet and run a crash-investment program to get the military up to snuff. But I was horrified to see what my complacent coalition partner had been up to when I took over the War Ministry, as a few dozen armored divisions and an anemic air force didn’t seem likely to give the Wehrmacht much of a pause. Nine months of maxed-out deficit spending, alas, wasn’t nearly enough to get things back on track, and I had cause to regret erring so far on the butter side of the guns-or-butter debate (while still appreciating how awesome it was to have all that butter) as the tanks rolled into Paris.

My second time out, I made the opposite mistake, rushing defense production too early which meant the economic recovery never really took and some of my allies got a bit cranky (especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant the pro-Soviet tankies didn’t like my antifascist propaganda any more). Still, I was able to keep the plates spinning long enough to get an impressive army pulled together, and with some judicious save-scumming to explore the set of strategies control of the military allows you to adopt, this time it was French troops entering Berlin in 1940.

All of which is to say that while Popular Front may be a bit easier and more conventional than other games in the series, it very much works gangbusters as a story-creation engine, and it once again helped me see history in a more direct, participatory way. And not just history – this is a small thing, but as I played the card that allowed me to organize a mass rally and picked as the theme, as always, “against fascism, at home and abroad!”, I found myself comparing this attempt to educate the party’s voters about their interests, and form a public around these ideas, to our current, cramped debates about how best to sacrifice vulnerable minorities to public opinion for maximum electoral benefit. Perhaps more so than any other game in the series, Popular Front reminds us that politics is not just the pursuit of economic growth and a 50%+1 electoral margin: there are larger things at stake, then as well as now.