Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

There are few constants in this storm-tossed age, but it is nonetheless an iron law of IF that you will never have a bad time in an Agnieszka Trzaska game. The roguelike 4x4 series, the skeleton-and-mouse buddy act of the Rosalinda games, one-offs like the sci-fi shenanigans of Chuk and the Arena – for all the differences in setting and gameplay, you can expect a charming story with plucky characters and laugh-out-loud humor, undergirded by solid, satisfying mechanics. Universal Robot is no exception, and if the puzzles are a little less complex than usual, the almost sandbox-style climax and righteous social comment provide more than enough of a counterbalance.

The “Hex” of the title is the player-character – you’re a put-upon alien wage-slaving it up on a space-station owned by a megacorporation that’s figured out how to use tax loopholes to make pointless widget-production profitable regardless of the fact that they don’t get sold, and in fact get dumped out into space. Not content with this money-for-nothing scheme, they’re putting on pressure to cut costs further, which is where your manager gets the idea of replacing you with a robot. Adding insult to injury, you’re tasked with assembling and training the thing, and adding injury to the insult to the injury, you’re not so much going be laid off as jettisoned out the airlock alongside the station’s other refuse. Fortunately, you’ve got a tool-belt, a buddy who works in the station’s kitchens, and no compunctions whatsoever about using every shrink-ray, inversion module, and rubber snake you can lay your hands on to claw out a better ending to this story.

As the list of inventory items there suggests, we’re very clearly in comedy-point-and-click-game territory. The game revolves around a series of inventory puzzles, which are supported by a clean interface – there’s an always-accessible subscreen where you can examine, combine, or use the stuff you’re carrying on the items in the room you’re in, combined with a simple navigation system and simple dialogue trees. But for the graphics, it’s a pitch-perfect implementation of a late-period LucasArts game, and as with the best of those classics, puzzle solutions are logical without feeling too straightforward, prompting plenty of “wait I think this should work” moments.

In further keeping with that tradition, there are also jokes a-plenty. That manager scheming to replace you? He’s called Mr. Green, but as the game is quick to emphasize, “new”, not “old” Mr. Green, because he’s actually a giant red monster who ate your former, human boss, but absorbed some of his memories and expertise and therefore inherited the manager’s position because the company decided it would be a pain to train someone else up from scratch. And I guess it’s a dumb joke, but I laughed at the earnest prediction that adoption of robots “could lead to unemployment rates reaching 160% by the end of the decade, with some workers being forced to be unemployed at two or more companies at once.” The tragedy!

Per these examples, there’s definitely an anti-corporate, anti-LLM thread that runs through the game, but it’s largely used for jokes and to evoke sympathy for the working-class characters, so stays relatively restrained; as someone who can get annoyed if it feels like a game is getting too didactic even when I agree with the points it’s making, so I appreciated the light touch. And it does serve to add a note of dignity to proceedings that can often get quite slapstick.

The endings, in fact, are where things can become somewhat serious. The puzzles along the critical path are generally quite straightforward: see, the robot is missing a couple pieces, so you need to collect those before you can finish assembling it, and the obstacles to doing so are clearly flagged and don’t require too much brainpower to surmount. But if you just run through that path of least resistance, you’ll find yourself having created a perfectly-functioning robot trained to do everything you can do, which given the ruthlessness of your corporate overlords, is not a great idea.

But there are many, many ways you can undermine or subvert the robot, leading to radically different results; there are a dozen endings to find, and even after coming up with a variety of plans, I still missed almost half of them. Despite the small map and limited number of objects, there are lots of opportunities to mess about, and I was delighted to realize that I could implement just about every silly thought I had, from sabotaging the robot’s physical capacities to messing with its programming (I’ll drop into spoilers to relate my favorite ending: (Spoiler - click to show)it’s the one where you get yourself hopped up on a giant chocolate-chip cookie, cocoa being an intoxicant to your variety of alien, just before donning the training helmet, which leads to a drunkenly incompetent robot slurring its way through the initial interview with management). I was a little disappointed that it appears it’s possible to lock yourself out of some endings based on a decision that isn’t flagged as irrevocable (I’m talking about (Spoiler - click to show)downloading the finance podcasts to your terminal), but it feels churlish to complain based on how much fun I had with the ones I did find.

I’m not sure Universal Robot will wind up at the absolute top tier of Trzaska’s gameography – for all that I enjoyed the characters, there isn’t a relationship quite as winning as the one between Rosalinda and Piecrust, and the mechanics aren’t as intrinsically compelling as those in the more systems-driven games. But this is praising with faint damnation indeed; this is a fun, fleet game with something to say, solid gags, and an enjoyably farcical climax. What more could one want, or expect?

Literary hypertext is like a fractal miniature of the IF scene: compared to the larger world of video games, IF is a tiny, un-commercial niche more focused on quality writing than fancy gameplay or bells and whistles, whereas in comparison to mainline IF, literary hypertext is a tiny, un-commercial niche etc. etc. While I haven’t dug into the classics of the subgenre, I’ve appreciated reading about them in places like Jimmy Maher’s blog, and where I’ve come across their few latter-day inheritors, most notably kaemi’s oeuvre, I’ve often found myself bowled over – their distinctive features are self-consciously literary prose and a dreamlike, nonlinear use of links to connect a story’s component parts, so done right, these pieces can feel like the best video games James Joyce never wrote.

So I was excited to see Cyclic Fruition Number One pop up in the festival, as from the first click it’s clear that it’s working in the literary hypertext tradition. Structurally, there are static passages telling a story with no particular character identified as a singular protagonist, with inline hyperlinks on words that obliquely point towards an action or change of location. Interestingly, these links are echoed in the page footer, where they connect to the same destination passages but boast new, abstract titles – the one link in the first passage is a character saying “I’d like to wander around first”, which is picked up at the bottom of the page as “Proposal”, for example.

As for the content, it’s also giving Modernism, as the kids say. We follow a trio of agents of some ineffable bureaucracy as they visit a midcentury-vibed railroad station, before exploring the neighborhood in pursuit of a rogue word that’s invaded our pre-existing linguistic consensus:

"He cocks his head up to listen. A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals. Each one declared under management of Reciprocus."

Per the above excerpt, the prose is controlled, complex, drily amused. I enjoyed this description of Chalgrove, the last of our abecedarian three, so forgive the long quote:

"His mind exists, even downright persists, by virtue of regular routine. It is laid out in a grid pattern, and castellated in certain critical ratios. A measure of seven splits into a two and a five. Where precision is required (and Chalgrove does enjoy precision) twenty-four is employed as the divisor.

"This cerebral containment resembles, perhaps, the rear garden of a modern family dwelling. Never quite embracing nature; the planters positioned according to policy, and the greenery only from certain Approved Suppliers.

"There is likely to be a mild disagreement very soon. Appleby always wants to go his own way, whereas Broadstairs will demand a clear objective. Chalgrove is the man to schedule this dispute for later."

As for where they’re going, well, it’s mostly in a circle. The game is fairly short, and as the title indicates, while a few of the passages do have multiple exits, they all eventually lead back to the railroad station, at which point you can keep playing to explore alternate trajectories. It’s workable enough, though I confess I found it a bit unsatisfying, possibly because I found the “true path” – which explicitly calls out the loop and links to an external blog post that explains a little more about the structure undergirding the thing – on my first go-round; unsurprisingly, later iterations felt like exercises in diminishing returns, simply piling up more incident without adding much to the picture, albeit the prose remains a draw throughout.

The about text on the festival page indicates this is a “demo piece”, though I’m not sure whether that means there may be more of this story to come, or just that it’s a shakedown for the system it’s written in, the new-to-me Spiki (my hot take: looks a lot like Twine’s Chapbook story format, seems fine). If this is a preview, then sure, I’d definitely play the next bit. As a work unto itself, though, it feels quite slight. But either way, I’m left wanting more – bring on the literary hypertext renaissance, we have nothing to lose but our attachment to causality.

“The House is one of those games that lives or dies by vibes. While the setup calls to mind Maniac Mansion – you need to assemble a four-person team of stereotypes to explore and escape a spooky house – we’re actually in manic territory here. Those stereotypes aren’t ‘jock’, ‘nerd’, or ‘cheerleader,’ but ‘Lassie with a catnip habit’, ‘extra-dimensional time wizard’, or ‘Actually Dracula’, for one thing. And this straightforwardly-presented Twine game doesn’t involve any puzzle-solving – you just start out talking to each of the four characters in your party to get the first half of their backstories, then lawnmower through the rooms, each of which will prompt one character to infodump the other half of their pop-culture-reference-hammed background and then find a key. Once you bring all four keys to the attic, you win.

“The eight characters on offer are distinctive, but there aren’t many interactions between them – there’s like one short passage that varies based on who you’ve chosen as your main character, which also provides some customized narration, but each character is associated with a different room, and just spews out their spiel the same way every time, regardless of who’s listening. As a result the game supports two full playthroughs to see everyone’s plots, since almost all of the game’s text will be different if you choose the first four characters and then the last four, but after that diminishing returns set in pretty quickly.

“So with limited gameplay and a ten-minute or so runtime, as I said The House’s success really comes down to vibes, and the good news here is that while there’s a range in how well the game’s lolrandom humor landed for me, there are definitely some strong points. Some of the characters are a bit humdrum – that time wizard was kind of a dud – but I loved the Terminator pastiche, who per the movie is a robot who’s been sent back in time to assassinate the future leader of the human resistance, but has somehow adopted the identity, mannerisms, and accents of a Brooklyn cabbie from the 60s, and whose story winds up going even farther afield from those already-zany beginnings to involve babies, lava, and moral dilemmas. Similarly, I laughed at the fact that the alien-pretending-to-be-a-human’s cover story is instantly unbelievable, not because of the way it keeps accidentally mentioned being birthed in an extrasolar hatchery, but because it says it was raised in a middle-income household, when per the game ‘there hasn’t been a middle income since 1971’ (I’d date it later, to the oil shock, but that’s a nitpick).

“Sure, many of the pop-culture references seem unnecessary, and as I said, the characters are hit and miss. But the ratio is solid enough, and the time commitment low enough, that The House more than justifies its existence.”

So.

That’s the review I’d prefer to have written about The House. But we need to talk about Jessica.

In that roster of eight characters, only two are female, and actually one of them is a male-coded extradimensional demon bound into a doll, so that just leaves Jessica. Here’s her blurb on the character-select screen:

"Jessica is an aspiring writer who could never really get off the ground after college. She is a little plain and no one would call her unattractive, but her only serious relationship recently ended in a bad way. Now she is thirty-something, living with her parents again, and left asking herself: 'Is it too late for love?'"

Her internal narration is presented in a flowery script, she’s a big fan of romance novels, her dialogue is broken up by stammers and stutters to convey her low self-esteem, and her “relationship” ended because she wanted a baby and her commitment-phobe partner-only-by-a-technicality immediately dumped her when he found out. What’s worse, while the jokes for most of the other characters are designed to make you laugh at what they say, many of Jessica’s invite you to laugh at what a pathetic girl she is, like this bit of dialogue: “I-I love this house, don’t you? I can… imagine me cleaning it for you.”

“Lady with romance-addled brain” isn’t necessarily a terrible idea for a comedy character, let me say, and there are some gags that gesture towards how this could have actually worked: I giggled at the absurdity of a description that said “Mirrors line the walls, like in a romance drama set in a hardware store.” But again, she’s the only female character, the majority of the jokes are unfunny and at her expense, and nothing kills the good-natured buzz of a silly comedy game like lazy stereotypes. I wish I didn’t have to write this addendum, because most of the game is an inoffensive fun time with occasional moments of inspired wackiness – but here we are.

I was halfway into Strings when I realized that there was a certain repetitiveness to its puzzle structure. In this substantially cozier spin-off from last Ectocomp’s bug-horror Warden, you play an insectoid musician bent on forming a band by convincing four legendary musicians to play with you. Each is conveniently located in one of the four cardinal compass directions, which admittedly is a common coincidence in parser games, but more to the point, convincing them plays out in a predictable sequence: after getting the lay of the land, there’s a traversal puzzle before you can press your case with one of the musicians, then after a bit of dialogue you solve another puzzle that leads to playing a tune for them that’s so great that it makes them want to jam with you.

This observation wasn’t meant as a gotcha by any means – I actually like it when a game creates a structure that helps the player understand what’s expected of them, and just as I noted the common threads between the first two vignettes, I hit a third that hewed to broadly the same pattern, but changed things up by making the traversal puzzle a much more involved process, with higher stakes than just getting to the relevant bug (I’m talking about the (Spoiler - click to show)underground tunnel echolocation bit, to be clear), showing that the game leaves more than enough room for variation to keep things fresh. But beyond that, as I got through the last of the four sequences and headed into the endgame, I realized that despite my oh-so-clever pattern-spotting I’d heretofore failed to understand the true reason for this structure: it’s right there in the title, this is a folk tale rendered in song, so what’s more natural than verse chorus verse chorus etc.?

Indeed, everything in Strings revolves around its musical theme – well, everything besides its adorable entomological trappings. The game’s paratext establishes it as a legend and thus it takes more liberties than did Warden’s comparatively-grounded setting, so while the protagonist, a cricket-like mandolin player, is familiar from the former game, this time out there’s a wider menagerie of allies and threats, from an irritating sparrow to a winning worm to sapient insects of all descriptions (as well as a parasitic mite that evokes some of the creepier bits of Warden…) The lush prose conjures a magical world that’s familiar in its broad contours, but transformed by its zoomed-in perspective:

"South of the stage the soil becomes spongy, the grasses and herbs become reeds and tangled jewelweed. A vast pond stretches to the south, surface still and glinting in the sun, bordered just offshore by towering reeds. It would be peaceful if it weren’t so loud with frogsong; the frogs themselves are hiding at the base of the reeds or in the water, invisible."

It’s a lovely place to spend time, but your musical quest is an urgent one, as you’re bent on performing a triumphant concert for the love of your life, which just happens to be the moon. And performance isn’t just your goal, it’s also your major puzzle-solving tool: there are plenty of obstacles in your way, from hostile wildlife to inaccessible pathways, and almost all of them save a few optional tasks are resolved via your bugdolin. It’s an impressively versatile instrument, capable of being tuned into high or low pitches, and you’re able to find new strings that can totally transform the sound it generates; then, once you’re ready to play, beyond playing a song you can pluck a single note or strum a chord, or even pitch a performance to an audience of one in order to sway them in a particular direction.

My one small knock against Strings is that there isn’t always a lot of in-game prompting for all of these verbs; you really need to type HELP and COMMANDS at the beginning to make sure you know what you can do. But once you’ve internalized the vocabulary, the puzzles are well constructed to make use of your capabilities – I was never at a loss for what to do, and even my further-out ideas were often rewarded by unlocking an optional achievement (in fact the game boasts quite a lot of pleasing bells and whistles along these lines, including a nicely-drawn map that situates all your peregrinations in space). Combined with the clear, clean structure, it all makes for a nicely-paced sense of progression, as solving puzzles feels satisfying without ever being too hard, and each step tangibly moves you closer to your goal.

And that goal, when it arrives, is a magical-realist set-piece that effectively crowns everything that’s come before, boasting an emotionally-resonant choice as well as more lovely bug-puns (“probos-kiss” is some all-time great wordplay). For all that Strings is a companion piece to Warden, it’s got a vibe all its own, with writing and puzzle design that precisely advance its design goals (and while there are bugs all over this thing, none of them are of the software-error variety). It all makes for a winning package; if it were a folk song, it’d be the kind you catch yourself humming for days after you first hear it.

My son was home from preschool for six straight days last week – a combination of the weekend, Easter holidays, and a bout of strep throat we both got – and as a result we wound up watching a bunch of kids’ movies (and doing Lego. So much Lego). On back to back nights we did Ratatouille and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and I was intrigued to discover that despite their wildly different plots, i.e. up and coming rat proving himself in the realm of haute cuisine vs. lovable mad scientist trying to save the world from a plague of giant raining food he accidentally unleashed, their emotional spines were completely identical: in both, a comedian plays a young man (well, rat) with a special gift (good taste/off-the-wall inventing) that places him at odds with the expectations of his society, and especially with his father, an emotionally-distant patriarch played by a respected actor of yesteryear slumming for a paycheck, until at a climactic moment the son proves his independence and worth, and his incommunicative father is finally able to express his love.

It’s maybe not surprising that people who write and make movies specifically have some unresolved feelings about feeling less supported by their primary male role model, but this is not peculiar to the field of children’s animation – as a society, we have daddy issues, look around (the first draft of this intro included more geopolitics and was a much bigger downer). So 23 Minutes, an extended Twine narrative-poem about the anxieties of being a new father that unfurls across a sleep-deprived walk to work, has a claim to a broader zeitgeist, even as its signifiers (Tesco, newly-creaking knees, Nigel Farage) anchor it to a particular older-British-Zoomer milieu.

It’s less these particulars and more the presentation that stand out at first impression, though. The commute is rendered as a long series of moments, with each click revealing a handful of new words and updating the blurred background photo to a view a few feet further down the London streets. While I often find excessive clicking an annoying way to navigate a game, 23 Minutes’ approach worked for me, since lingering on each cluster of words in turn feels like an appropriate way to read poetry, and the progression of the photos communicates a sense of motion (as well as a sense of danger: there’s one bit where a van hops onto the sidewalk and comes towards that camera that left me worried for both the protagonist and the author!)

Keeping the player feeling like they’re always moving also fits well with the protagonist’s lapidary thoughts – since for all that fatherhood is the central theme, his narrative stream jumps around quite a lot. Early grumbles at sleep deprivation and regret at snapping at his wife over a trivial household chore give way to frustration at the seeming meaninglessness of his work (he’s a teacher), then deepen into more anxious ruminations about whether he’s emotionally connecting with his new baby and finally digging into a major conflict with his own dad, with diversions into his musical preferences and how he met his wife along the way.

Having been a new father myself, I can testify to the way your sleep-deprived brain can flit from topic to topic at the slightest provocation, and the connections between these leaps are usually clear. And the writing is dense with memorable details, like this early bit where the somnambulant protagonist:

Wipe[s] the debris from my eye / crunchy / like the tips / of oven-baked broccoli

(The crunchy broccoli even gets a callback when he reflects on those cracking noises his knees have started to make)

The author also uses the trajectory of words on the screen to mirror the protagonist’s distraction-prone consciousness; the word yesterday on the right-hand side of the screen calls to mind apposite Beatles lyrics on the right.

With that said, 23 Minutes isn’t just trying to dig into the subjective experience of being an exhausted parent trying to keep their head together while they go through their day; it becomes clear that there’s a progression to the topics the protagonist’s brain keeps bringing up, with all of it ultimately being rooted in that pivotal conflict with his father. While he’s prey to a whole host of worries – that he’s too irresponsible yet to be a good dad, that he’s not able to answer his students’ questions about the really important things in life, that he’s too emotionally detached to bond with the baby, and that he’s being childish and churlish with his wife under the pressure of their new status quo – there’s a particular abscess at the root of all this: the dad, you see, has turned to Reform’s anti-immigrant politics as an emotional salve in the wake of a late-in-life layoff, and when he lashed out at the protagonist’s immigrant wife, the protagonist bumbled along trying to keep the peace rather than sticking up for her. The game makes of this incident a big reveal, building up to it and adverting to its significance even as it works through the protagonist’s subsidiary issues, making clear the connection between this primal emasculation and all his other concerns.

It’s a choice that admittedly lends some drama to proceedings, but one that I have to admit left me somewhat cold. One doesn’t need such a Freudian origin-story to explain why you’re not your best self with your spouse in the heat of the feed-the-baby-every-two-hours crucible, and I think pretty much everyone second-guesses themself about what kind of parent they’ll be. I found myself far more invested in the protagonist’s relationship with his wife and child, and was disappointed that the latter part of the game refracted them through the lens of his more stereotypical daddy issues. In fairness, 23 Minutes does soften this blow by toggling to a more upbeat mode for the ending, with hope represented by self-acceptance and a dedication to change for the better, rather than suggesting that everything would be fixed if the protagonist got in a screaming match with his dad. And there are a few other scenes with the dad, set before he gets sucked down into the black hole of right-wing politics, that prevent him from being a complete caricature.

Still, it’s a bit tidier than I wanted it to be. It’s notable that as the bad-dad plot comes to the fore, the writing feels prosier, more like narration. But the game works best, I think, at it’s most specific, when it’s using the tools of poetry to embed the player in the mind of a lost soul hyperfixating on tiny details in a blurry landscape while he tries to figure out this radical change in his life – I wouldn’t have minded 23 full minutes of that.

My wife is a fan of all things British, and I’m usually happy to go along for the ride, so when she started getting into TV adaptations of UK-set cozy mysteries, I gladly watched them alongside her. I could definitely see the attraction – one of her favorites was set in the Cotswolds and added to its bucolic setting wacky hijinks and endearing side-characters, while ensuring that the murders were handled with discretion and indeed, a hint of whimsy, which kept the quantity of ugly brutality required to set the mechanism of mystery into motion to a minimum (see, you start writing about these things and the twee wordplay is infectious). So it was all a good time, save for one rather large fly in the ointment: none of the aforementioned mysteries made a lick of sense.

See, when I watch a murder mystery, I like to play along and guess at whodunnit (not to mention why and how), and while my hit rate is generally pretty solid, I wound up completely stymied when watching these. Reliably, the investigation in the first three quarters of the show would serve only to chase down red herrings and false leads, the blundering policemen would get in the way just when the detectives were about to figure something out, and pretty much all the cases were “solved” when one of the lead characters inadvertently put themselves into the power of a heretofore-innocuous supporting player who would suddenly reveal an unguessed and unguessable motive that had only benefited from the lightest of foreshadowing in the course of trying to cover their tracks through one final (inevitably foiled) act of violence.

For all my complaining, there’s a method to the madness – a cozy mystery wouldn’t be very cozy if the reader/viewer were tensed up on high alert the whole time, scanning for the scantest clue and obsessively weighing and reweighing competing theories. That’s good for a high-tension Christie novel, but here, it’s all about the vibes, and once I realized that they’d intentionally removed the solve-it-at-home aspect, I was able to relax and enjoy the ride.

Anyway, that’s my theory of cozy mysteries, and while I hesitate to tar the entire genre with this critique, since I’ve by no means assessed a representative sample, I will say that The Coffee Cake Caper didn’t disabuse me of my stereotypes. Setting-wise, we’re clearly in cozy territory: the protagonist, a neophyte sleuth, is called to a British carnival where a longstanding baking competition has been thrown into chaos by the disappearance of one contestant’s dough during an overnight proof (shades of Bingate). While the stakes eventually do rise slightly (groan), there isn’t even the slightest flavor of danger to proceedings, and the characters are an enjoyable cast who, if anything, could have been a bit more eccentric: you get two bakers (one uptight, one flashy), a somewhat diffident judge, a stolid night-watchman… It’s a fun world to inhabit, and is fleshed out to a reasonable degree, with the carnival’s environs enlivened with just the right amount of detail. There’s a fair bit of exposition and characters giving their alibis, but it’s all written with a light touch and moves along at a good clip.

But this isn’t just an explore-and-chat-em-up, this is a mystery, and that’s where Coffee Cake Caper’s troubles begin. First, the interface is not well suited to the gameplay on offer. The main interactivity is a series of mad-libs deductions where you must poke holes in the stories of each of the suspects, before transitioning to the finale where you solve the case once and for all (there are a handful of places where the game feints at providing some branching options, but these are invariably but-thou-must Hobson’s choices). The mechanics are simple enough – you fill out the contents of an accusation, then list the three or four pieces of evidence that that support your contention – but the implementation left me flailing. For one thing, despite the fact that the text frequently mentions that you’re taking notes about the clues you discover, there are no handy player aids keeping track of what you discovered; hopefully you were doing that on your own, or enjoy scrolling back through thousands of words of infodumps, in order to review the case file. For another, sometimes the grammar required is strained – at one point I wanted to accuse someone of lying about when they went home, but I had to render it as lying about “when you took the car” – and the fiddliness of getting everything exactly right can lead to farce, as when it took me five tries to figure out how to call out a carnie for eating some of the missing dough, when I’d caught him red-handed with some of it in his waste basket and on his collar (my problem – shared by the walkthrough – is that I called his clothes a uniform rather than a costume). And making everything much more annoying, the order of clues within each drop-down menu is randomized, I suppose to punish lawnmowering, which means hunting for the five or six specific items you’re looking for is always a pain.

Beyond these mechanics, the mystery itself relies on soaring leaps of logic and frequently calls back to small details mentioned at most in passing long before the player knows they should be relevant. Admittedly there are a few places where this is done elegantly – there’s an early bit in the parking lot where the descriptions of two cars sets up a later chain of logical reasoning that I felt clever for figuring out. But for the most part it’s intensely frustrating and had me running to the walkthrough, with the most egregious example being an endgame deduction that requires the player to work out that a character’s brand-new outfit indicates they’d had to change out of a soiled one – except as far as I can tell from the transcript of my session, the only indication they were wearing new clothes is that when they were first introduced, at the very beginning of the game, their outfit is described as “sharp.”

For a passively-consumed cozy mystery, this wouldn’t raise an eyebrow – you’re here for Diffany and Cornie’s ridiculous rivalry and more-ridiculous names, not to play Sherlock Holmes. But enlisting the player in a mystery constructed this opaquely is no fun, even if you were going into it expecting to exercise your little gray cells to their utmost. With a system that didn’t demand quite so much specificity of the player, and that highlighted important clues so you could spend more time testing theories and less hunting through walls of text, it would all go down a lot easier. So, for that matter, would quashing the bugs that twice required me to start over when clicking a link grayed it out but didn’t display any new text – fortunately that only happened in Chrome, and I was able to reach the end in Firefox. The mystery could also use fewer red herrings, and more logically-clued deductions, to truly sing (some testers could really help with ironing such things out; none are currently listed in the credits, but the difficulty of an investigation is very hard for an author to gauge, meaning their feedback is especially important in this kind of game). There’s a lot that’s appealing about the Coffee Cake Caper, from the solid prose to the appealing characters, but as is so often the case in a competition, it would benefit from a bit more time in the oven and some outside perspective – here’s hoping for a post-festival release that smooths out the rough patches and makes for a more enjoyable ride!

(I beta-tested this game).

“Where do you get your ideas?” is surely the most vapid question you can ask a writer, but spare a thought for how much worse it must land when the writer in question is a poet. Poetry isn’t so much a what as a how, “ideas” are at best the jumping-off point that has as much to do with rhythm, an image, a sense of a word’s full freight, as anything else. So spare more than a thought for the protagonist of you are an ancient chinese poet…, child of a disgraced courtier who amuses himself with anonymously-circulated verse but is suddenly summoned to the Emperor’s court to take part in a poetry competition. You have a couple of hours to circulate amongst the great and the good, observing their foibles and possibly being recruited into their intrigues, but you’d better hope you catch a spark somewhere along the way because given the cut-throat nature of court politics, “sorry, I just wasn’t feeling it tonight” probably isn’t going to go over well.

I haven’t exhaustively plumbed the game’s many, many endings, but at least in the ones I’ve tried, the protagonist does manage to rise to the challenge. Admittedly, there’s quite a lot here to stimulate composition: after a prologue that efficiently sets the scene, you’re set loose to wander the garden, where you’ll meet cliques of other poets pursuing their particular passions, and maybe have an opportunity for a tete a tete with the princess and general bent on agendas of their own. They’re a colorful bunch – I was partial to the gang trying to escape the moral burden of choice by embracing extremist fruitarianism, but they’re all in thrall to some decadence or other, even the ones espousing moderation obviously taking things too far. There’s more than a hint of contemporary social comment to all this, which can likewise feel like it tips just over the line of plausibility on occasion, like the voyeurs whose activities are an analog analogue of prurient pursuits that more often play out digitally. But even these moments when the fourth wall strains, the game’s understated prose and its structural imperative to somehow make a poem of all of this helps bring the player along.

There are also a lot of decisions to make, because there isn’t enough time to go everywhere in the pavilion, and each vignette puts you on the spot. The others are keen enough to have noticed that the Emperor’s recruited you as an outside observer, here to render judgment on what you see, so they try to get out ahead of the game by pushing you to preview your reactions, issuing an approval or disapproval of their ideology and behavior. And while it’s not too difficult to map each faction to their real-world inspirations, the game does a good job of complicating the picture so that either response can be justified – the proponent of free speech correctly identifies the need to speak truth outside of systems of constraint, but he’s also a rich kid slumming for clout, and his crew seem more interested in getting sloshed and feeling self-righteous than actually trying to change things. Things get more complicated still when you’re pulled into a conference with one of the Emperor’s would-be successors (you get either the princess or the general, not both); these are not nice people, but they’re powerful ones, and compelling too, so I definitely felt put on the spot.

The prose is restrained throughout, zooming in on tell-tale details that communicate that the Emperor made a good choice when he tapped you as his eyes, and the writing appropriately reaches a climax when it’s time to recite. Your choices in the rest of the game unlock the choices available to you in the final composition – each of the five lines can be cycled through to emphasize a different take on what you’ve experienced in the different vignettes; it’s a happy medium between a pre-baked result and pure Mad Libs, and while it’s possible to make something awkward if you really try, I was impressed at how easy it was to come up with a coherent and compelling poem. Appropriately enough, your words can have significant consequences indeed, or at least, they can for the empire as a whole, because in all the endings I’ve experienced, the protagonist simply returns home to an exile that now might be as much self-imposed as enforced from outside – having seen what it takes to write high-stakes poetry, perhaps you’ve decided from now on to get your ideas closer to home.

(I beta tested this game)

3XXX is not a subtle game. From the moment you enter its hyperrepressed world, where tough-as-nails cops clean up the pieces after infantilized, sex-starved people literally combust when their lust inevitably boils over, it’s clear that the agenda here is to take an axe to the censors and bullies currently trying to enforce heteronormativity and sexual continence at the barrel of a gun. But while it absolutely telegraphs its concerns, it still very much retains the capacity to surprise: I congratulated myself on twigging to where the story was going early on, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when what I’d clocked as the final twist actually happened before the end of Act One. And that same dynamic played out twice more, because while each segment of the game is very clear in its themes and they all mesh together quite neatly, the narrative manages to swerve as much as it escalates, broadening and complicating its dialectics at the same time it keeps its high cards for last.

Indeed, what makes 3XXX more interesting than a latter-day Stiffy Makane game is that it doesn’t simply counterpose fascist repression against libertine indulgence. Sure, the cop protagonist inevitably crosses to the over side of the law, and the community of people trying to imagine a different future understand that a healthier relationship to sex is a key part of the puzzle. But this isn’t a wish-fulfillment fantasy – although they can see the ways the society in which they were brought up has harmed them, the scars linger, and it takes concerted effort to learn to speak without self-censorship, much less act on their desires. For that matter, those desires are by no means identikit; some characters are farther along in one aspect of their liberation than others, and the sensitively-drawn give and take of who’s teaching and who’s learning shifts from scene to scene.

As a game, 3XXX is assured enough to know where it’s headed. There are choices, but they’re mostly there to keep the player engaged and push you to think about what you’re reading instead of mindlessly lawnmowering on – this isn’t a game that needs branching though, no one is thinking “hey, what if I could keep working for the Nazis instead?” And there’s a lot to think about, as this is a provocation that resists supplying easy answers to the dilemmas it creates. This extends to the prose, which is direct enough on a sentence by sentence basis but preserves its ambiguity; there are jokes (funny ones!) but even the winks to the camera can’t always be taken at face value. It all adds up to a compelling experience that’s as personal as it is political, as outrageous as it is empathetic.

I beta-tested this game)

I always question my objectivity when I’ve beta-tested a game – it’s hard to figure out an appropriate critical approach when you’ve spent a bunch of time with a version of the game that’s not the same as the one the mass of players will experience, and on top of that it can be hard to untangle the inevitable feelings of investment that come with helping an author improve their game (at least, I hope that’s what my suggestions are doing!) But even leaving all that aside, there’s no way I wouldn’t be in the tank for a rich, robustly-implemented game that lets you explore the waning days of the Hittite Empire (with footnotes, no less!) and boasts a complex, systems-driven magic system and lets you play as a dog (I like cats just fine, but I’m definitely outside of the IF mainstream in agreeing that canines are man’s best friend).

Starting with the setting, like most I’m by no means super au courant with Bronze Age Anatolia, but it’s a region and era that’s adjacent to a lot of other history that is more accessible: the Homeric epics are notionally happening right next door and Egyptian civilization was reaching one of its period peaks, while there was plenty of confusing back-and-forth warring with the Assyrians and other contemporary powers of Mesopotamia. The Hittites feature in all these stories as antagonists, so it’s fascinating to see something from their perspective; hints of the political situation do leak in from snatches of overheard conversation, and the concomitant footnotes providing needed context, but the dog’s eye view of first an agricultural village, and then a major trading city, do far more to provide a window into this long-lost world. There are relatively crowd-pleasing gags like a tip of the hat to the famously corrupt copper merchant Ea-nāṣir, and what must be an intentional reference to the way a major fire in the Library of Ashurbanipal fired the clay tablets it stored and better preserved them for future archaeological study, but that’s just the surface-level stuff: if you’re a nerd for irrigation practices, religious taboos, and ancient tax policy, Wise-Woman’s Dog is a cornucopia of delights, and if you’re not, man, I’m sorry for you. It’s all delivered with a lightness of touch – at least so long as you don’t binge on the footnotes – with the world-building in service to the puzzles, but I found exploration a joy.

Speaking of those puzzles, they’re another highlight, both complicated and organically embedded into the world. See, you’re not just any dog, but the familiar of a village wise-woman who’s fallen afoul of a rival’s curse. To save her, you need to search out some new, powerful magic, which involves first helping the inhabitants of your city prepare their yearly tax payments, and then, once the raft to the provincial capital departs, gather treasures in the big city in order to amass enough money to purchase what you need. As a dog, your ability to directly intervene in human affairs is modest, but you have a secret weapon up your sleeve: as a “magic sponge”, you can absorb curses and blessings, and move them from one object to another. There are only a modest number of “spells” to find and use, but they’re versatile – one’s related to temperature, another makes things lighter, a third keeps things locked up tight – and it’s very satisfying to figure out how to use them to solve the various challenges thrown in your way.

The system here recalls similar frameworks like Hadean Land’s alchemy or Savoir Faire’s sympathetic magic; they’re satisfying not just because they’re complex, but because their consistent rules enable a player to deduce solutions rather than resorting to trial and error. And without spoiling things too much, things get even more engaging – albeit complicated – once you gain the ability to break some of the rules the first half of the game’s established. The flip side of all of this is that there definitely are some very challenging puzzles, even accounting for the various hints and playing aids, but happily you’re not forced to 100% everything if you don’t want to; in both of the game’s main sections, you can move on once you solve most of the puzzles rather than having to pursue all of them to the bitter end.

Speaking of the hints and playing aids, the game’s implementation also deserves some praise. Beyond taking advantage of Dialog’s ability to seamlessly mesh parser input and hyperlinks, Wise-Woman’s Dog has a built-in map, commands that will nudge you in the right direction by highlighting puzzles you’ve yet to solve, and a variety of shortcut actions that make the business of juggling spells (you can only carry one blessing and item at a time, since of course you’re a dog) and moving from one part of the reasonably-sized play area to another much less painful. This does mean that, combined with the rich location descriptions and active NPCs, there are a few places where the player can get overwhelmed with information, but I found it didn’t take too long to get up to speed, and the upsides of all this support are clear.

Taken together, it’s an impressive package: players who like history, deeply-worked-out magic systems, and deluxe parser-game experiences will all find a lot to enjoy – and if, like me, you check all three boxes and are a dog person to boot? That’s a blessing indeed.

(I beta-tested this game)

As late-period capitalism slouches its way to the trash-heap of history, to be replaced by something that’s almost inevitably going to be worse, the scope for systematic revolt narrows, and the stakes for individual acts of rebellion rise in parallel. The getting-comeuppance-on-a-crappy-boss plot perhaps peaked in the late 90s, with Office Space and the retroactively-incredibly-creepy American Beauty, but there’s something evergreen about an unjustly-terminated employee wreaking their righteous revenge.

Fired offers that fantasy in spades – and actually, you don’t need to do too much of the hard work; you’ve already accumulated hard copies of the evidence that will bring your corrupt old boss down, but now that you’ve been fired and stripped of access to the office where all that stuff has been moved, you need to break in and get it back. In addition to this narrative catharsis, it also offers closure for sinned-against employees by containing a litany of invective, imprecation, and swearing that would make Captain Haddock blush:

"this boogystained breakfast director, this pukebag of a dumbass, this sleepyhead, this freshwater sailor, this pedantic cretin"

This revenge-fantasy is definitely funny, but it’s also nicely designed; there aren’t too many puzzles and too many hoops to jump through as you pursue your vengeance, but they’re cleanly designed so each leads on to the next, and there’s a bit of a sandbox vibe to proceedings: rather than pursue your quest to the bitter end, you can declare partial victory at almost any time, and there are various actions you can take that can wreak extra havoc on the company at risk of having an arrow pointing to you as the culprit. These mostly just reduce to optional, incomplete endings, but they’re logically and entertainingly narrated, and make final victory all the sweeter. There are also a fair number of bonus points available to careful players who go beyond the jokes to examine their surroundings carefully, so while Fired works well as an angrily satirical take on workplace abuse, it’s got more than enough substance to be satisfying to play on its own merits, even if you’ve never personally writhed under the thumb of a supervisor who’s venal, stupid, smelling of bilgewater and pink mold, a scabrous sphincter on the face of the earth…