Reviews by Mike Russo

I see that there are a number of audio-focused games in this year’s Comp, so I suspect I’ll be issuing this disclaimer several more times before this thread is through: since my time playing IF is typically snatched between taking care of my kid, doing bedtime, work-breaks, chores, and so on, I usually have my computer muted while doing so – being able to sit for long stretches and quietly contemplate voice acting or a soundscape just isn’t how things work for me these days. Dear Anna bills itself as an “audio-first narrative” boasting the cool gimmick that it’s playable entirely via headphones, with various ear-taps allowing you to select between the two choices that are occasionally offered up, but these focal aspects of its design were entirely lost on me – thoughtfully, the author’s made sure the game is playable without sound, via transcripts and a more traditional click-to-continue interface. I played through and am reviewing this version, but let me emphatically flag that that’s not the experience as intended and as hopefully most players will experience it.

Right, that’s out of the way, so let’s talk about Manic Pixie Dream Girls. It’s a trope that’s non-undeservedly come in for a kicking since it was first identified in the mid-aughts – one certainly rolls one’s eyes at the gender politics of a quirky, invariably beautiful woman who sweeps into a sad-sack man’s life in order to utterly transform it, while apparently lacking much in the way of interiority of her own. Yet I sometimes feel like it sometimes the label can be applied too broadly, or it gets more of a kicking than it’s due: it really is the case that there are people who can meaningfully shift our understanding of ourselves or how we’re living our lives, and often we actually have no idea what’s going through their heads as they do so.

This is the precarious terrain Dear Anna stakes out: it takes the form of a project the lead character, Sam, pulls together in the wake of the death of his partner, the eponymous Anna. His own narration and reminiscences form the glue, but there are excerpts from her audio diary, interviews with former roommates, and other ephemera. But whether my art or by accident, this is a memorial to the impact she had on others, not to who she was as a person: almost everyone she came into contact with directly states that she helped them realize something about themselves, or crystallize a decision they’d been wrestling with, but comparatively little of Anna’s actual character comes through, even in the parts where she’s speaking on her own behalf.

As to the other characters, this is plausible enough – people like to talk about themselves, film at eleven, and the game’s dialogue is definitely written for the ear and not the eye, with lots of meandering and long, somewhat saggy sentences. But there’s also a frustrating lack of detail. Like, one of several turning points Sam cites is a time in college when he reconnected with Anna, who he’d known since he was young but drifted out of touch with after graduation. She messages him out of the blue, while he’s feeling aimless and adrift, and he decides to fly from Florida to New York to visit her:

So of course I booked a flight. I emailed her back, expressing my feelings — because I wasn’t doing too hot then, either. The world was opening up before me in ways I hadn’t considered, and it felt more and more like there was a canyon opening up inside of me. Or something.

That flight was when I started reading for real. So in a sense, I guess Anna made me a reader. Another one of her gifts.

Given that Sam eventually makes a career as a writer, this is legitimately a big deal! But we’re given very little to go on: what was the book? Why did he pick it up? How did it make him feel? Did he talk about it with Anna? Had he never previously had a chance to have a couple hours of enforced downtime to make him appreciate reading?

It’s the same with the other characters, who are good at describing changes in their lives but vague on what exactly Anna had to do with it besides being there (I still don’t think I really follow the ex-roommate who credits Anna with the inspiration to quit her job and follow her dream of opening a Russian restaurant, because they went clubbing together and made out one night – the roommate just says “she helped me realize what I’d been missing”).

If the parts where others are speaking are overly bottom-lined and conversational, the Anna segments do make for a change of pace. These bits feel writerly, and in a way that I think captures the self-seriousness of someone early in their life who wants to live the life of letters but is still doing the work needed to develop their chops. Here’s an email she writes to Sam while she’s working at a publishing house:

The work is intense. So is hanging out with these people. They seem to expend no effort and yet get things done. They’re publishing things and hosting readings and writing chapbooks; there is an industriousness here that I find compelling. But the parties, man. Everyone out of their minds on cocaine and whiskey.

Later, she says – not writes, says – that someone’s face “betrayed no human emotion”, and in another conversation she says she’s considering taking up religion because she found God “in a disused shed”, and woo boy, putting “disused” there sure takes me back to some of the more pretentious moments of my mid-20s.

But the Anna sections also feel writerly in that she’s very clearly inhabiting a pre-ordained plot arc that’s more about narrative convenience than deep fidelity to character. She starts getting sucked into the parties, abusing substances, and dropping out of the world, to predictably bad effect. Then she gets clean, finally hooks up with Sam and lives with him for a year, and mends fences with her parents, before the inevitable relapse leads to her death by overdose. We’re not given enough granularity to feel a person beneath the melodrama, so Anna ultimately doesn’t come to life here, either, though there is an understandable poignancy to witnessing her sad end and seeing how it impacts those around her.

The strength of the climax is undercut by some frankly confusing structural decisions, though – I’m not sure whether they’re an indication of the game still being a work in progress (a disclaimer it issues in a few passages when it says some audio is being rerecorded), or are working as intended, but after the story comes to its natural conclusion, you’re given the option to either proceed to the credits, or keep things moving ahead. If you choose the latter, you get a short vignette of Anna’s last days from her dealer, who was with her when she died, and then the same question repeats. This time, you get what seems to be an abbreviated Sliding-Doors style alternate take on the plot, where instead of overdosing Anna comes down with cancer immediately after a life-changing first night with Sam, and then there’s one more, also short, but this time from the point of view of a new character named Elliot. It’s an odds-and-sods miscellany that doesn’t add much to what came before – perhaps the idea is to flesh these pieces out and then interpolate them into the main section of the story, which I think could work, but in their present placement they’re just baffling.

As for the gameplay elements, given the constraints of the format they’re fairly light. There’s one backstory-establishing choice early on but other than that and the ending-related ones mentioned above, they’re largely just “would you like a one-passage digression Y/N.” That’s probably the right call given how the player is intended to experience the game, but it does mean that there’s not much in the way of interactivity to engage the player.

The elephant in the room is that it’s obvious what’s meant to engage the player – it’s the audio, and the performances! Indeed, going back to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, when the trope works I think it’s rarely because of anything the script is doing, but because an actor is able to imbue the archetype with a sense of subjectivity, while projecting the charisma that the other characters are meant to be feeling. So let me just end this review by saying all that could well be in evidence here, sweeping aside most of my critiques (save for the structural ones) aside – I’m looking forward to checking out other reviews to see what those able to come to Dear Anna on its own terms thought.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about it, but we are all living in the post-postmodern age. We’re all fluent in the may tongues of genre, reared on media that’s completely unselfconscious about the way it self-consciously displays its tropes and conventions. And as polyglots, it’s no surprise that we barely blink at the most outre of mash-ups – if everything is a signifier, why shouldn’t we lawnmower through the combinations until we happen across something that works? Thus it is that in space-year 2026, in the 32nd year of the Interactive Fiction Competition, we’ve got a [spins wheel] parser adventure mixing [spins wheel] absurdist workplace satire with [spins wheel]liminal-spaces horror.

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea or even one that’s especially off the wall, mind. As anyone who’s ever suffered under a bad boss knows, a work situation sufficiently messed up to evoke black humor can also readily be abusive, and whether you respond to any particular setback by helplessly giggling or helplessly sobbing can sometimes be a coin-flip. Meet the timesheet starts out on the former side of the genre lines, as the beaten-down protagonist is forced to duck out from a holiday party they’re not especially enjoying – though at leas it’s better than work – when they remember that they haven’t finished entering their hours for the pay period, and their supervisor is on the prowl. Once you’re in the cube farm, though, the stakes go higher: if the inhuman manager catches you, you’re literally dead meat, and the maze of identical office-cubbies takes on non-Euclidean dimensions.

It’s a cute conceit, and the gameplay cleverly realizes both parts of the theme: it’s split between the game of cat-and-mouse you play to evade the monster and find the few working computers you can use to update your timesheet, and the ridiculous magical-realist challenges you need to go through to keep each computer from booting you off due to a mandatory update or wake up a recalcitrant screen-saver or what have you.

The prose keeps up that theme of duality, but here I think there’s a clear winner. Compare this fine but uninspired horror bit:

From the west, they run and jump at you. You smell their garlic-flavoured breath as they fix their glasses on their nose. <You know, it is not personal,> they start slowly, <I know sometimes bureaucracy may look like useless extra work, but it is very important in reality.> It seems to go on forever, with a pedantic voice, explaining how it is the only way to analyse how you spend working time. As if an analysis on “easily fakeable” data could ever be more relevant than results and actual work. You are finally drained, but they go on and on, explaining the same concepts again and again.

To this comedy one, which to my ear has some awkward syntax that maybe suggests the author isn’t a native speaker of English, but which is energetic and entertaining all the same:

Your eyes are swollen, tired, and your sight blurs. You feel like the protagonist of an eye drops commercial. You close your eyes, and when you open them back, instead of the lifesaving claim of a brand, you realise you have overwritten the wrong cells.

On the puzzles, my judgment is more mixed. Both pieces have their virtues: figuring out how the map is laid out is satisfying, and the stalking mechanics are well-tuned, pushing you to keep moving without being too punishing or hard to read. There’s also a clever stakes-raising moment midway through that requires you to think creatively about how to keep track of the baddie when you can’t see him. Meanwhile, the computer-hacking (in the sense of “messing around”, not “running malware scripts”) bits are surreal in a good way, serving up distinctive weirdness that requires a lot of experimentation and outside-the-box thinking to progress. Some of the leaps of logic might go a little far for my taste – a bit clearer prompting to start trying to directly mess with the contents of the screen without worrying about the interface wouldn’t have gone amiss – but there’s a solid hint function that took the edge off these concerns.

This is an area where the two sides of the game do finally come into conflict, though. The part where you sneak from cube to cube is tense and pacey, relying on simple commands and a sense of danger. The part where you type seemingly-silly stuff into the parser until you hit on the command that, against all odds, logs you into a terminal requires an open, playful mind unafraid of making mistakes, and plenty of time to work through all your wacky ideas. Having to toggle between the two modes created a lot of mental tension for me – it’s frustrating to pause your trial-and-error explorations at a computer just because you see the manager coming, leading me to frequently push my luck and rely on UNDO draining the deaths of all impact (while the distraction would still lead me to lose my train of thought and get frustrated at the impenetrability of the computer-puzzle side of things). Each piece of Meet the timesheet works fine on its own terms – more than fine, in places – but despite the inarguable fact that this is a really fun set of concepts to throw together into a blender, the author probably would have been better off picking a lane and sticking to it.

Creating NPCs who can be interacted with in relatively-freeform conversation has long been one of the white whales of parser IF. That’s partially because of the importance of characters to most pieces of fiction, but also because of the beguilement of open-ended text entry. Sure, we all know that promise is a lie, but when it comes to physical manipulation of the world, most games offer a wide range of stuff you can try whenever you want, offering quite a lot of player agency and expressiveness. ASK MAN ABOUT HAT. ASK MAN ABOUT WATCH. is better than nothing, I suppose, but still very constrained, and while menu-based conversation can make NPC interaction feel less mechanical, it surrenders all the power of the parser.

Galatea proved you can make some solid progress in this area if the author is just prepared to constrain their game to one NPC, one location, and one topic, while putting in an incredible amount of work, but experiments have of course continued. And it’s unsurprising that the increased sophistication of various AI approaches has perked up the ears of many authors – sticking with Emily Short, the Versu experiments described in 50 Years of Text Games seem intriguing as heck, though they’re unfortunately inaccessible now. But of course it’s LLMs that have been getting the most attention lately, given their omnipresence. I’m not aware of every effort in this area, but I admit to being pretty jaundiced from seeing a couple examples: sure, they allow the “type anything you want!” promise of parser IF to finally be fulfilled, but even leaving aside the broader issues many folks have with LLMs, the lack of authorial control of the substance or voice of what comes out of characters’ mouths is a very big hurdle to overcome if a game aspires to be anything other than a clever toy.

Doppelgangers lays out its design goals clearly in its about text: this is a run at that white whale of creating parser dialogue with responsive, conversational NPCs. There is an optional LLM plugin, but it’s optional – most dialogue is run through chatscript, which is a non-LLM, more hand-authored AI tool, but there are occasional “persuasion checks”, and a related section where the mental-asylum-patient protagonist undergoes a Rorschach test, where a plugged-in LLM can decide whether you’ve sufficiently met the NPC’s expectations, and returns a judgment of success or failure to the machinery of the game proper (if you choose not to use an LLM, you just always fail these checks, but the about text offers reassurance that winning the game is still possible).

All things being equal, this seems to me like a promising approach – I’ve had some positive experiences with chatscript games in the past (notably Thanataphobia and Cheree), using the reasoning abilities of an LLM while keeping it far away from actually producing text leverages the strengths and avoids the weakness of the technology, and making that part optional allows those who have strong objections to any LLM use at all to still play the game (or, who, in my case, have medium-strong objections to any LLM use at all and who are just really not excited about jumping through a bunch of hoops to give a new tech company more of my personal information just to make a piece of IF go).

So I went into Doppelgangers cautiously optimistic and interested to see how this would all play out, very curious about what the back-and-forth dialogue with other characters would look like. But – in an ironic twist worthy of the cosmic horror genre Doppelgangers appears to inhabit – actually the rest of this review is only going to glancingly mention all that, and focus much more on the regular-degular practices of parser design. There’s a whole lot to the game that doesn’t have much to do with conversation, as it turns out – you’re a mental patient who’s trying to escape an asylum, beleaguered by ambiguously-sinister staff, your fellow not-especially-sensitively-portrayed patients, and a convenient bout of amnesia, and there are a bevy of locked doors, hidden items, and fetch quests standing in the way of freedom. And weaknesses in those parts of the game mean I unfortunately didn’t feel like I was able to engage with the more interesting elements of Doppelgangers as much as I would have liked.

As to the parser qua parser, things are a mixed bag. I was pleased to see that shorthands like “X DOOR” work, because often experimental “just use natural language!” games disallow abbreviations, and indeed most typical IF commands work fine. But some default responses are confusing (TAKE BLANKET results in “you cannot take that”), and despite one of the strong points of the descriptions being their use of senses other than sight, SMELLand LISTEN never did anything for me, even when location text indicates there should be. I also ran into some gnarly disambiguation/guess the verb issues, like this blackly comedic attempt to open the door to cell number 2:

>unlock 2

You cannot do that.

>unlock door

Specify a direction. You can type OPEN NORTH DOOR.

>unlock east door

The door is locked.

>unlock east door with lock pick

The door is locked.

>pick east door

The door is locked.

>pick east door with lock pick

Pick lock on which door? You can type PICK LOCK ON WEST DOOR.

>pick lock on east door

You used Lock Pick.

Do you wish to pick the lock?

Gee, what do you think, game?

The most challenging idiosyncracy of the system, though, is the way that location descriptions are dramatically simplified after you’ve seen them once. Exits are usually – but not always – redescribed, at least, but important bits of scenery, up to and including puzzle-critical NPCs, can be dropped from the description, and even manually LOOKing won’t draw your attention to them. They’re still there and can be interacted with, but in a big game with a lot of confusing map connections, it’s very easy to miss a detail and never be in a position to notice it again.

The puzzle design is also fairly obfuscated. Admittedly, many challenges appear to have LLM-dependent persuasion solutions, meaning I was forced into the fallback medium-dry-goods pathways, which might have received less testing. But I don’t think this is actually much of a factor, as a large part of the trouble I faced was not realizing that I was even meant to be talking to some NPCs. Like, as mentioned, the asylum has quite a lot of other patients suffering from a variety of Hollywood-style mental illness, and the game makes very clear that they’re largely background and you’re not meant to interact with them, unlike the doctor who engages you in conversation as soon as he sees you. One patient tries to bite you, there’s another who just looks at you blankly no matter what you do or say, and there’s a woman who just doesn’t respond to anything you say, as if she couldn’t hear you. But actually it turns out the latter two have puzzles associated with them – you’re supposed to intuit that the second one is faking his illness and threaten to expose him, while the woman is actually deaf and will make a request of you if you mess with the pile of thread she’s made by unraveling the seams of clothing (better mess with it with MOVE THREAD, though, TAKE THREAD doesn’t do anything).

Just exploring the often-sprawling asylum also throws up a lot of friction. I ran across at least one one-way passage whose geometry was so confusing I didn’t understand it after walking through and around it several times, and wandering into the wrong location will have the orderlies accuse you of attempting to sneak into the staff-only areas, with no warning to the player whatsoever. What’s worse, they’ll bundle you into a compulsory mental health evaluation, and if you fail – which you will, without an LLM – you get a bout of electroshock therapy and lose your inventory. Possibly it’s findable again, but I couldn’t discover where my stuff wound up, necessitating a restart.

So there’s a lot here besides the marquee NPC system. Like, I haven’t even mentioned the RPG-style skill system that got introduced out of the blue an hour in, once I got my hands on some lockpicks and started trying them out (leaving aside the merits of this kitchen-sink inclusion, surely a persuasion skill surely could have allowed for these checks to be resolved with some die-rolling for those not running an LLM), or the way DnD alignment also gets introduced out of the blue – engaging in a lot of totally normal IF protagonist behavior led to an announcement that I’d shifted towards being chaotic neutral, which is fair enough. I didn’t find anything that shifted me to any other alignment, mind. It makes for an experience that feels unfocused and overstuffed, with most of the additional elements adding little to the experience besides friction.

When I finally did get a chance to chat with an NPC – interrogating the aforementioned doctor about my predicament – the chatscript system did at least throw up some positive results to some naturally-phrased questions. But even with this more sophisticated engine under the hood, the edges of the simulation were readily apparent:

>say what is this place

“You are in the McPatton State Hospital. This is where the mentally afflicted are brought to be treated or just kept safe from themselves.”

>say what am I being treated for

He makes no response to this. He simply marks some words in his book.

>say who are the other patients

“No one that I have talked to.”

Is this really better than good old ASK and TELL? Even if it is, Doppelgangers is a poor proving ground for the argument, possibly because all the time building a big, full-featured, but lackluster conventional piece of puzzle IF detracted from the time the author had to devote to the notional killer feature of the game. To be clear, I think experimental IF is great, and I think Doppelgangers correctly identifies an area where trying new approaches could be useful while proposing a potentially-fruitful course of action. But maybe that one-room, one-NPC, one-topic model would have been a better place to start than what’s actually on offer.

At this late date, is there juice left to squeeze out of the Verdeterre-like? A baker’s-dozen years one from the inaugural entry in the subgenre, we’ve seen at least five or six other runs at the collect-treasures-under-time-pressure premise, from swapping out the pirate milieu for sci-fi (Dark Star) or Egyptology (Curse of the Scarab), making the map much bigger and more complex (Sugarlawn) or smaller and more manageable (Museum Heist). I don’t think we’ve seen a limited-parser take, though, so it makes sense that Arthur DiBianca would throw his hat in the ring.

The signature elements of the author’s recent games are all on offer here: there’s a slick map to make navigation a breeze; actions are limited to movement, observation, a general “use” verb, and various meta commands; and there’s a post-game achievement system that kicks once you’ve managed a basic win and encourages you to take on trickier challenges. It makes for a slick, easy-to-get-into experience, and the setup – you’re on a scavenger hunt in a spooky manor – likewise is immediately intuitive. Since this is an optimization game, your eyes will glaze over after the fourth or fifth time you read the same bit of prose, but the writing is certainly fun enough when you first encounter it (I liked the wry note, upon checking out the dilapidated surroundings, that “it would be nice if ‘dead plant’ were an item on your scavenger list, because it would be so easy to get”), and unobtrusive enough to get out of the way thereafter.

And there’s a whole lot of thereafter, as even getting to the basic winning condition requires a good amount of iteration. There are ten categories on your to-collect list, some of which can be satisfied by more than one item you can find in the mansion, but you need to collect all ten and leave the mansion before midnight. The game starts at 7, but time goes fast since working through the house’s various challenges – picking locks, untying knots, cracking a safe the old-fashioned way – can make 15 or 20 minute elapse in a single action. It quickly becomes clear that many of these barriers have workarounds: there are keys and tools that can make a task that otherwise would eat up 17 minutes take only 2 instead. But with something like a dozen keys and 7 or 8 tools to keep track of on top of stuff you need to collect, it takes a bunch of resets to run down all the permutations and figure out whether the lubricant, the paint remover, the grabber, or the magnet on a string would help you speedrun any particular “puzzle.” The game does offer some support – that map is super helpful, and there’s a RECALL command that gives you an instant download on everything you’ve learned about a room and its contents – but you definitely will need to take a bunch of notes, and might even want to consider a spreadsheet.

Now, I’m the kind of sicko who usually gets excited when I get to fire up Excel alongside a piece of IF, and have generally gotten most of not all of the challenge-mode achievements in the author’s previous games (even the sokoban one!) but I confess that while the bones of the design here are good, I wasn’t sure I’d have the motivation to power through to even the basic ending. Partially this is because the difficulty curve is steep: blundering your way through the house sufficiently fast to check off six or seven categories isn’t too hard, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades, not haunted houses. I don’t think getting to eight or nine, much less all ten, is possible without wrapping your brain around a fairly complex web of dependencies and choices: you need tool X to get treasure Y quickly, but that means finding key Z which is all the way on the other floor; or maybe you could go for treasure A for that category instead, which requires tool B which you know you’ll already need to get treasure C, so it might wind up being faster even though you’ll need two different keys to get to A. Or actually might it be the case that all this rigmarole is more trouble than it’s worth, and grabbing treasure Y the slow, no-tool-or-key way, will wind up being faster at the end of the day than jumping through all these hoops?

But the overall challenge level wasn’t the only factor for me – there’s also a real dearth of dopamine-hits along the way. In a typical Verdeterre-like, as you go through runs, you’ll find new treasures, solve traditional IF puzzles to get them, and unlock shortcuts. There’s a regular drip of discovery with your increasing knowledge opening up new options and opportunities: progress is usually binary (did you solve the puzzle, yes or no), with the impact on your score more granular (maybe the new treasure is worth $10, but maybe it’s worth $100!) – and at the end of that process, you sit down to chart the optimal path.

Here, by contrast, you can brute-force every puzzle the first time you encounter it; you’ll see everything there is to see in a room on your initial visit. Sure, much of the middle-game does involve tracking puzzle-like interactions like seeing which tool works on which barrier, but you’ll always know what’s on the other side of the barrier in advance: there’s no narrative reward, just the knowledge of how much time you can now save. And because you need to get one of each category of item, with all of them counting exactly the same, there’s no thrill from finding something especially exciting: it’s the reverse of the usual Verdeterre approach, with progress entirely granular (+24 to the timer to get an item rather than +41) and results completely binary (do you have one of these treasures Y/N).

For all these complaints, after a good night’s sleep I did put on my big-boy pants and despite the comparatively-arid mid-game, I compiled a full set of notes, charted out a plan of attack, and implemented it sufficiently well that I also wound up with the bonus achievement for winning extra-fast. Optimization is fun, and it’s satisfying to gain mastery of the complex web Out by Midnight offers up! But I don’t think I’m feeling up to going for any other achievements; for all that this is a heavily-mechanical subgenre, part of what made the original Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure so successful was its demented energy, with the onrushing waters and the abusive rat providing some narrative adrenaline to the bean-counting and the aforementioned regular unveiling of new stuff promising that doing the work would lead to even more fun. Out by Midnight is cleanly designed (and so far as I can tell, completely bug-free), but a bit too staid to reach my personal Verdeterre-like pantheon.

There’s been a lot of discussion of adaptation in the discourse recently: what, if anything, is owed to source material? Does that answer change depending on whether the author is still around, or if they’re long since gone? Is using an existing work as a lens on your own preoccupations a bracing way of demonstrating contemporary relevance, or an act of literary plunder? Both? Neither?

There probably aren’t any Shakespeare scholars waiting to charge into the discussion of Ass in the Woods the way that Emily Wilson went after Nolan’s Odyssey, but the dynamics aren’t actually that far apart. Despite initially thinking the title was previewing an entirely different experience, this choice-based work is a riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, placing the player as a nameless witness to some of the comedy’s key sequences. But much like a sirens-and-cyclops-only adaptation of Homer, only the flashiest bits of the plot are kept: there’s a bit of fairy king Oberon and fairy queen Titania squabbling, a lot of Bottom hogging the spotlight after he’s been transformed into his half-donkey shape, and the sprite Puck’s mischief-making sprinkled throughout, but the lovers whose travails are the central but arguably least-novel element of the original play are nowhere in evidence.

There’s a case to be made for the all killer no filler adaptation, especially since this is a sprightly bit of IF that says its piece and gets off-stage in twenty minutes or so – I can’t say that I genuinely missed Hermia and Helena or the noxious Demetrius, not when Ass in the Woods offers set-pieces like Bottom capering about to the delight of an audience of screaming fairies (I’m not usually one who overvalues graphics in IF, but the intentionally-clumsy photoshop of a dude with a giant donkey pasted over his face dancing on stage while fairies pasted next to spotlights hover overhead is hilarious) or gives you an opportunity to tell Oberon the home truth that he’s a crappy husband.

It’s not even theme-park Shakespeare, but there’s definitely fun to be had, even if the writing is a bit more typo-laden and pedestrian than I’d prefer. Like, here’s Puck’s introductory speech:

"How did I miss you? This is why I say, “All for one prank, one prank for all”. Now, you’ll ask “Who I am? - I’m Puck” and “Why am I here? - Pranks”. Questions done and sorted. Now, we can have fun."

Hopefully it’s not too snobbish to note that that’s not exactly improving upon “I am that merry wanderer of the night…”

More broadly, though, Ass in the Wood’s orientation towards Midsummer Night’s Dream strikes me as a bit confused. I don’t think it works well as an attempt to tell an independent story with these characters – my sense is that it would be mostly incomprehensible to those not familiar with the basic setup – but the game also doesn’t seem especially interested in engaging with Shakespeare’s play, either. Like, the plot here ultimately comes down to the effect Bottom’s ego trip is having on the other members of his troupe, and where most of the choices in the earlier bits are purely expressive or cosmetic, here your decisions about what to say can either lead to a bad ending where they go their separate ways, or a happy one where he tames his prima-donna tendencies and they all hit the road together. But beyond being an uncharacteristically maudlin note given what’s come before, this changes Shakespeare’s setup quite drastically – it’s a reasonable riff on Bottom’s behavior in the play, but a big part of the joke there is that he and the rest of the actors are terrible, moonlighting tradesmen whose po-faced attempts at tragedy leave the other characters reeling with laughter.

Is playing the conflict here straight an attempt to reclaim dignity for these working-class amateurs that the original play holds up as objects of ridicule? Umm, maybe, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the abbreviated conflict between Titania and Oberon, which is likewise significantly shifted (there’s no Indian page in sight, thankfully). And Bottom still comes off like a conceited jerk, just one who in some endings can get over himself – plus the whole crew sure seem like professional actors in Ass in the Woods, which undercuts some elements of the critique, if critique it is.

All told I’m not sure that the game is an updating of Midsummer Night’s Dream or a reimagining of it or an examination of its contradictions or oversights: it just feels like a bunch of funny stuff that uses some of the same characters and some of the same plot bits for its jokes without worrying too much about what it’s saying about what’s come before. And you know, maybe that’s fine – not every adaptation needs to launch a thousand think-pieces.

Liberals like to complain about the current administration’s purge of funding for research and higher education, arguing that a pretended crackdown on “D.E.I.” is actually threatening progress on cures for cancer, new battery and clean-energy technology, programs to help kids read and write, and understanding the history of fascism and how to fight it, not to mention surrendering one of America’s most potent tools for recruiting the best and brightest from across the globe and defunding the public universities that are among the crown jewels of our country to boot. But that’s a small price to pay to stop the deplorable goings-on in Forensic Necromancy, where a shiftless grad student is using research grant money to travel to ancient archeological sites and get so high they think they can see the past – Russ Vought knows “entheogens” are just drugs, he’s <s>read Huxley’s Doors of Perception</s> fed it into an LLM.

Er, more seriously, the record will show that I’m a sucker for Stelzer’s trademarked blend of Bronze-Age history nerdery and sophisticated Dialog features, with last year’s Wise Woman’s Dog being a highlight of the Comp for me. A Murder in Ninevah shares a lot of back-end DNA with its predecessor, with slick quality-of-life touches like an interactive map, hyperlinks for those who don’t want to mess with the parser, an integrated tutorial, and a THINK feature orienting the player towards unsolved puzzles all making it easy to get into and play. But the milieu is fairly distinct – not only does the history here focus on the Neo-Assyrians rather than the Hittites, the aforementioned framing device creates more of a remove: you’re not an active participant in past events, but an observer using your unique techniques to better understand them (and hopefully get a publication out of it).

This could have just been a short prologue helping ease the player into the where and when of the meat of the story, but instead the forensic necromancy conceit is woven throughout proceedings. You explore the past by finding specific human remains and doing a form of psychometry that arranges some of their key memories in your mind palace, a bit of New Age argle-bargle that opens up some fun avenues for puzzles, like seeing someone die in the past and using that to locate their remains in the present which in turn allows you to uncover new memories. Presenting a handful of set-piece memories in spatially-distinct locations also plays to the strengths while avoiding the weaknesses of the parser format – you can wander around and explore them at your leisure, digging into the details, but since each is presented as a frozen moment you can’t engage in conversation or take direct action that would change what happened.

I found the story being uncovered very engaging too. The present-day protagonist’s point of departure is a real-world historical mystery about an assassination plot targeting a Neo-Assyrian king that played out in Ninevah (modern-day Mosul, in Iraq), with a dispossessed son the prime suspect. As you work through the game’s puzzles, you see events proceed both forward and backwards from a few key points, and also get to occupy the perspectives of a few different characters, which leads to some entertaining twists and reversals. Unsurprisingly, the period details are great, with the occasional dry bit of humor helping liven things up:

“His Majesty Siin-ahhe-eriba, Great King, Mighty King, King of the World, King of Assyria, King of the Four Quarters, the capable shepherd, favorite of the Great Gods, guardian of truth, he who loves justice, renders assistance, offers aid to the weak, and strives after good deeds, the Perfect Man, the virile warrior, foremost of all rulers, the bridle that tames the rebellious, the one who strikes his enemies with lightning—”

[The messenger] cuts off abruptly, glancing around. The tone of the crowd has become decidedly hostile.

Situating the action in an imagined mindscape also frees the game from plodding literalism – here’s one of my favorite bits of description:

"The architecture here looks Assyrian—it must be Nineveh, the same place your body is in the real world. But the lamassu are taller than a three-story building, the ceilings so high they’re lost in the clouds. This is Nineveh as remembered by its enemies, majestic and imposing, larger than life.

"Bits and pieces of a dozen rooms meet at odd angles, columns blocking doorways, hallways slicing through walls. The doorway to the north is grand and richly decorated, while the one to the east is too dark to see."

As for what you do in this fantastic setting – well, it’s largely medium dry goods puzzles. There are locked doors, areas of darkness that need to be illuminated before you can traverse them, mechanisms to fiddle with… they’re nothing you haven’t seen before, and despite the overall smoothness of the experience there were a couple that felt like they could have used another bit of polish to add synonyms and alternate syntax (details in transcript, but (Spoiler - click to show)LIFT BAR WITH SPEAR and (Spoiler - click to show)LIGHT LAMP WITH TORCH feel like they should have worked without requiring additional hoop-jumping) and one traversal puzzle where I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and after a fair bit of trial and error eventually managed it, but I’m still not quite sure exactly what I did differently the third time that finally made things work.

Those are pretty minor implementation complaints, though – I’m sure future updates will address those rough patches, and in the meantime there are copious clues to help if a player does get temporarily stymied. And given the originality of everything else on display, having puzzles that serve primarily to pace things out and don’t try to steal the spotlight from the exposition and narrative beats is a reasonable choice, even if it is less exciting than the complex magic system of Wise-Woman’s Dog. Forensic Necromancy was a great way to start out the Comp, and heck, I’d be ecstatic about paying my taxes if this was the kind of stuff they funded.

Exciting news, folks – it’s time for our third and final (at least for now) installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

Yes! Just a month or two ago, so I actually remember doing so fairly well! God is in his Heaven and all is right in the world, nice work chaps, we’re all done here.

…

Oh right, the review. Knew I was forgetting something!

The Most Valuable Card in the World is a big comedy parser-puzzle adventure that’s at once highly traditional – like, read that description again and tell me if it reminds you of one or two other games you’ve played – and novel, incorporating some unique mechanics and centering on series of swaps that sees you upgrade, step by step, from what’s basically the worst Pokemon card imaginable to the eponymous treasure. It’s cavalier about killing off the player, especially in the opening, which can occasionally threatens to feel annoying – except those death messages are written with such good humor, the ways to avoid them are eminently logical, and a quick UNDO will get you back on the right track in a jiffy. There are some tricky puzzles – you’re going to need to push items from one location to another, and a simple X OBJECT won’t always tell you everything you need to know – but the clueing is very well tuned (and the hints are clear and always available), making them satisfying to solve.

For all the above seeming-contradictions, I was able to get a handle on Most Valuable Card in the World rather quickly. The chain of trades provides a clear, compelling structure to proceedings, and actually helps orient you towards what puzzles in the medium-sized map you should be solving next by providing a rough dollar value for each card you find – typically you need to be moving up step by step rather than leapfrogging. The authorial voice is also consistent and confident, managing to cram something funny into basically every sentence without seeming like it’s giving off flopsweat. Like, here’s a quotidian description of pushing a shopping cart around:

"Screeeee! Screeee! One of the wheels on this cart is so non-functional that it might as well be a cube of rock. You power through at the expense of the already damaged floor."

That made me smile, and it’s just the baseline of enjoyment that the big-swing jokes and set pieces push still further. Some of the more traditional puzzles are lampshaded, the supporting cast are an endearing set of weirdos, and the descriptions of what happens once you actually start throwing down in the ersatz Pokemon game are lots of fun. Most Valuable Card in the World isn’t my favorite story about a wildly-improbable sequence of escalating barter – the laurel goes to Gamma World RPG session I played in where I was able to parley an irradiated can of baked beans into part-ownership of the bombed-out remains of Powell’s bookstore – but it’s a heck of a close second, a real gem from this partnership between an enthusiastic neophyte author and one of the most seasoned implementers in the business.

The conspiracy theories around the secret treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau are incredibly well-trodden ground in pop culture in general due to the eye-popping (and occasionally head-scratching) success of the Da Vinci Code, but this potboiling tale of Templar riches and esoteric secrets also got a definitive workout in gaming, via the third Gabriel Knight game, though it’s largely remembered these days for the dumb cat-hair mustache puzzle rather than its take on the whole lost-bloodline-of-Jesus (plus there are vampires) thing. Heck, the topic is even relatively top of mind for me at the moment since Jimmy Maher recently wrapped up his five-part look at the conspiracy theories and the tawdry men behind the hoax.

So a threshold question for a new game offering yet another run at good ol’ Fr. Sauniere, his mysteriously-acquired riches, and the various cults and heresies of the region, is whether there’s sufficient juice to be worth the squeeze after all this time. I think The Priest and the Rennes Alignment manages to clear this bar, albeit it’s a close-run thing. Wisely I think, the game doesn’t harp on the traditional trappings of the conspiracy: we get the church and the villa that the eponymous priest built, with their creepiest elements intact, and the geographic alignments that are a significant strand of the more bonkers side of the hoax are an important part of gameplay, but besides some brief gestures towards the end, we don’t get into any of the Church history stuff, there are no secrets encoded in paintings, and the only coded message is entirely optional, and it uses the world’s simplest Caesar cipher.

In place of all that hoary rigmarole, we get a bit a bit more of an Indiana Jones plot – the protagonist is an older treasure hunter whose academic colleague goes missing, while another, more mercenary tomb robber flits menacingly around the background. Meanwhile, most of the puzzles are largely agnostic about their broader context, medium-dry-goods stuff involving locked doors, magnetism, digging in the dirt, and so on. The exception is the sequence of puzzles alluded to by the title – unlocking the endgame requires using surveying tools to take sightings from a series of important landmarks around the village in order to identify a major geomantic axis.

It’s a cool idea – speaking of Indiana Jones, I’ve loved these kinds of puzzles since I encountered them in Fate of Atlantis – but I found it a bit anticlimactic because, while all the individual steps were fun to work through, at the end I think all it does is point the way to a locked door I’d identified near the beginning of the game by examining a suspicious bit of scenery. It’s a symptom of the way the game sometimes suffers from brushing past the more esoteric edges of the Rennes conspiracy and as a result stretches a relatively small quantity of esoteric hoo-ha across too broad a swathe of gameplay. There are tons of documents to recover from nooks and crannies across the village, and I enjoyed uncovering them, but after the first one or two they pretty much just all restate the same hints about geographic alignments, crystals, and light – it gets repetitive, and none of it actually provides any hints or knowledge you need to progress through the endgame (at least said endgame does ramp things up into an appropriately-silly Grand Guignol finale).

The implementation is similarly a mixed bag. The game is coded in the ThinBASIC Adventure Builder, which has a solid-enough parser but suffers from the inability to recall previous commands with the up key. Character interaction is also mostly solid but occasionally finicky, with attempts to TELL them about important subjects often not working – sometimes I realized that’s because SHOWing a relevant object was the intended path, but sometimes reasonable-seeming interactions didn’t seem to be implemented.

The prose is well-judged, keeping things moving at a thriller’s cadence while throwing in some lurid details at appropriate moments:

"You examine the famous carved devil. The figure is grotesque yet strangely compelling - a hunched, demonic Asmodeus. His expression is one of grim resignation, as though he has been forced to serve a higher purpose against his will."

The puzzle design sometimes did bring me up short, though. While most of them are reasonably clued and fun to work through, there are a couple that are a bit obtuse: there’s one that can only be solved by examining a particular object twice, without any specific prompting that I noticed, and I was stuck for a long time on the penultimate puzzle because I kept trying to remove an obstacle to progress when all I was supposed to do was to keep trying to move past it, which leads to it being automatically removed. The biggest issue I ran into, though, was that after solving all the puzzles I could find the game prevented me from entering the endgame area, based on a general vibe that there was more to be done. I went back over the full map and found one or two optional locations I hadn’t previously explored, but they contained no additional items or relevant information, at which point I was allowed it, but it was still an annoying roadblock.

I don’t want to overly harp on these complaints – the game is pretty well put together, and I generally enjoyed my time working through it, even if there are some places where some more polishing or rethinking of the approach could have made things smoother and more engaging. As a matter of personal preference, I do like my supernatural archaeology mysteries to be deep and abstruse, so the streamlined approach the game takes isn’t as much to my taste, but it’s a perfectly reasonable one that will probably resonate better with other players, and given how much of a punch-line Rennes-le-Chateau is these days, in objective terms it probably was the right call. Still, I find myself with a hankering to replay Gabriel Knight 3 – the deep-down-the-rabbit-hole puzzles charting landmarks and doodling lines over oil paintings really do hit the spot for me…

Criticism, I firmly believe, is most valuable when it’s sympathetic to the specific goals of a work. “This apple is no sort of orange” is about as helpful as complaining that you can’t talk to the monsters in Doom, or that there aren’t enough puzzles in a kinetic novel. Articulating what a game is trying to accomplish, then analyzing what pieces of the design and implementation either support or undermine those aims, is what I try to take as my guiding ethos for reviewing – if I allow myself some leeway to nerd out about themes or influences or personal resonance, I like to think that’s OK so long as that foundational work of criticism is there.

By those lights, I can only judge Help! I am Locked in a Fortune Cookie Factory a resounding success. The game’s itch page explains that the goal was to make the smallest piece of IF ever, with size measured not by word count or file size but the physical dimensions of the screen displaying the game. And by implementing a miniature text adventure in Thumby, a platform that emulates what’s basically an even smaller-than-real-life version of the Nintendo Gameboy with a screen about the size of a stamp, I think the author must have done it. Mission accomplished!

…and if I were consistent in my critical methods, that’s where the case would rest, I suspect, but I can’t help assessing the game’s quality qua text adventure, and also what kind of experience the unique interface provides. So let’s proceed with those inquiries, with the disclaimer that these are just bonus sections because the game clearly did what it set out to do.

On the former question, I’d say it’s completely fine. I’ll give it points for the overall structure, which is basically an extended shaggy-dog story: you’ve messed up your shift schedule and gotten stuck in the eponymous factory right when it’s scheduled for demolition, so you need to scramble around trying to get out. There are five different potential avenues of escape you need to attempt before the final course of action unlocks, which leads to a groan-worthy and entirely predictable punch-line (I mean this in the most complimentary way possible). None of the five are especially challenging to figure out – the parser is pretty stripped-down, so most of them involve just typing USE [OBVIOUS OBJECT] in the relevant room, with the few exceptions just requiring straightforward, logical item usage. The writing is serviceable, light-hearted without ever being funny as such, and the only real quibble I had with the scenario is that at one point you try to wriggle out a vent, and the game notes that your head and shoulders fit just fine, but your rib cage can’t make it through, and I can’t help pointing out that that’s not how bodies work.

As to the second question:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!! FHHFGGGGFHNNNNNGGGGGGGHHHH!!! YUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGGKLKLKLKLKLK!!!

[pant,pant]

I am having a hard time coming up with comparisons for what the experience of actually playing HILFCF is like that do not involve trivializing actual real-world atrocities. So I won’t make the attempt, and simply describe how the game works.

Let’s start with that tiny display. It fits about 12 characters at a time, so anything longer than that slowly scrolls across, with each sentence repeating until you push a button and it moves on to the next one. I guess that’s pretty much the only way to manage things, but when I tell you that the description of an object is often around 100 characters, and the results of one of the five futile escape attempts can be more like 250, you can start to see the problem. Imagine every complaint you’ve ever heard about timed text in IF, then raise it to the power of please god make it stop.

So much for output – there’s also the input side of things. Thumby takes inspiration from the Gameboy here too, so by default you have a directional pad and two buttons. The default, recommended interface option is to use the directions (mapped to the arrows) to scroll through the letters of the alphabet one by one, with the buttons allowing you to select a letter or delete one. This mode also boasts an autocomplete feature, but it still took me like fifteen seconds to enter TAKE BAR. That was the last command I attempted with the default control scheme; fortunately, there’s also a QWERTY option where you can just use your keyboard as normal, except, whimsically, the m key doesn’t work. Oh, and while the two-word parser is generally pretty straightforward, many map connections aren’t two-way, requiring you to type BACK rather than the relevant direction to retrace your steps, which makes the game’s geometry far more confusing than it needs to be.

Put all this together, and the fifteen minutes I spent playing the game are among the most physically unpleasant of my IF career, leaving me squirming, impatient, and frustrated. Admittedly some of these issues were unavoidable given the aim of cramming a full text game into such a small container, but more could have been done to match the content to the game’s affordances, like writing highly-condensed descriptions that wouldn’t require so much waiting (I’m reminded of After-Words in the 2021 Comp, which made every single bit of text in the game exactly two words). And the weird map connections, and the inability to type m, just feel like bizarrely gratuitous obstacles to engagement.

I don’t want to be too negative here – I do find the ridiculousness of the game’s goal delightful, and the actual words and design are more than good enough given the remit (I am very partial to a shaggy-dog story). It’s just that HILFCF is way, way easier to enjoy by someone telling you all about it than by girding your loins and playing it. And whatever a game’s stated objectives, that sure seems like a shame.

In every event where I use a randomizer, I feel like there are at least one or two coincidences that prove that God does in fact play dice with the universe, and this time out the cosmic joke is that out of the combined list of 40 ParserComp and Review-a-Thon games, I wound up playing Garry Francis’s pair of ParserComp entries one after the other. What are the odds of that? Well, like 3 or 4 percent, I think, depending on the math I’m too lazy to attempt for the edge case where one of them is first or last on the list so it’s only got a single neighbor, rather than one on each side – which explains why when you’re randomizing 30-70 games stuff like this is bound to happen, I suppose.

But if Dead Man’s Chest and Woodcutter’s Quest were going to wind up back to back, I’m happy this is the order they landed in, rather than putting Woodcutter’s Quest second. Per my review, I enjoyed playing the earlier game, but it’s by design a simpler game, and adapted from another author’s initial plot and puzzle framework. So I was glad to get to chase it with a shot of the uncut stuff. Oh, the premise is still a classic one – it’s a treasure hunt through the abandoned manor of an old pirate captain (in fact the same captain from one of the author’s earlier games, in a nice bit of mythos-building) with all the secret passages, shipwrecks, and sandy coves that implied. But everything here is just a bit more robust and fleshed out – it’s specified that the mansion is empty because the captain’s last descendent died intestate, which for some obscure reason is a word I always love to hear deployed. For one example, careful attention has been paid to the geography and interconnections of what’s a reasonably large map, with a few optional puzzles providing a sense of how the pieces all fit together. For another, even small incidental descriptions are written to highlight what your character, a treasure-hunter on the make, would notice and do. Like, here’s the response to X PANELLING in an early room:

"The panels are chipped and faded with age. You tap on them to check for any hollows where treasure could be hidden, but everything sounds solid."

For a game like this, though, all that stuff is secondary to the puzzles, and they’re a solid lot. There’s nothing that stands out especially, as the kind of thing you get up to is exactly the kind of thing you get up to in a pirate-themed text adventure: you push and prod the furniture to reveal the aforementioned secret passages, there’s business with ropes and locked roll-top desks, and even a (appropriately easy) riddle at the end. For all that they’re workmanlike, they reward careful observation, which made them often satisfying to solve.

That “often” covers up the one thing I’d critique about the game, which is the few occasions when I think Dead Man’s Chest prioritizes challenge over narrative coherence. The primary offender is the puzzle that opens up the secret passage I’ve mentioned a couple of times – I knew it was there, having noticed tell-tale grooves on the floor, but thought it opened from the other side as attempting to PUSH or PULL the relevant piece of furniture was an exercise in futility. After consulting a hint, though, I discovered that actually I was on the right track, but I’d needed to use the verb SLIDE instead of the more familiar alternatives I chose. This is arguably overly precious as a matter of general implementation, but also faintly ridiculous as applied to the actual situation – having seen the grooves the protagonist knew exactly which direction the wall was supposed to swing open, so what, they were just pushing perpendicular to that without deigning to mention that’s what they were doing? I ran into a similar issue with one of those optional puzzles mentioned above, where neither opening a curtain, re-checking the room description once it was open, or even explicitly typing LOOK BEHIND CURTAIN revealed that there was in a fact a new piece of scenery available (I was supposed to examine the wall instead). There’s a thin line between “puzzles that reward careful observation” and “mimesis-breaking pixelbitching,” I suppose, but these are a couple of places where Dead Man’s Chest runs afoul of it.

Still, I mention these issues largely just to flag them for potential tweaks in future releases, and to acknowledge them as exceptions to the rule. This is one of the best-designed and best-implemented iterations of one of the comfort-food IT setups, and even when I struggled with problems both of my own making and not, the helpful contextual hints quickly got me back on track. If you’re at all interested in old-school puzzlefests, this one’s a treat.