Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

Mashing up J.R.R. Tolkien with Philip K. Dick isn’t an idea that feels obvious, even in retrospect. Sure, they both gained their greatest popularity in the 60s and each had at least one prominent middle initial, other than that? Tolkien’s reputation rests on a few long books, Dick’s on a flurry of short ones; Dick was the bard of a quintessentially American brand of paranoia, Tolkien of a quintessentially English brand of heroism. One searches in vain in Tolkien for Dick’s signature themes of identity, surveillance, and the contingent nature of reality, while Dick deals with Tolkienian motifs like the quest, the redemption of the powerful by the weak, and the tragedy of corruption infrequently and ironically.

Hobbiton Recall’s synthesis of these two authors at first, then, seems to work only at the level of plot – per the blurb, the game runs through the narrative of We Can Remember it for you Wholesale/Total Recall, except with the Martian espionage angle swapped for adventure in Middle-Earth – rather than any substantive connection. But sadly it swiftly becomes clear that it’s working in one tradition common to both of them: being fucking terrible at writing women. Dick’s women are either ball-cutting shrews or naïve sexpots, while Tolkien’s of course are mostly just nonexistent, but Hobbiton Recall opts for its own particular blend of misogyny by having the protagonist constantly condescend to and belittle his wife, when he isn’t behaving like a helpless baby reliant on her for his basic needs. It’s a blatantly obvious element of the game’s writing, and I suppose it’s possible that it’s part of a game-long arc that eventually sees the main character eat some crow. But if so, the game plays it very straight for at least its first hour, meaning that when I hit a progress-breaking bug, I couldn’t be bothered to try to find a workaround.

I suppose I should say that that’s a shame. It is nice to see a GrueScript game in the Comp, and part of me admires the fact that the game appears to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, since in that first hour I solved a bunch of my dumb apartment puzzles to get out of the house, and then wound up stuck in some unrelated busywork having to do with a urine sample, before finally getting a chance to try out the memory-implanting technology – but instead of landing me in Hobbiton, it just sent me to the hospital where I ran into the fatal bug (I believe that bug has been fixed since I wrote this review). Again, I can’t say for sure whether keeping the player so far away from the actual premise of the game for so long is an accidental design weakness or an intentional provocation, but I admit I was a bit disappointed when I checked the source code and saw that there does appear to be a substantial Middle Earth segment eventually. There are one or two funny jokes (when perusing the memory packages, you respond negatively to the option of remembering a life as an assembly-line worker, because you already are one, only for the sales rep to ask “Yes, but have you ever been an assembly line worker in Kettering?”) and one or two reasonably-satisfying puzzles, like the one where you chase away some hooligans with a stick.

But my god, the whole thing is just so sour. Here’s the introduction of the protagonist’s wife:

"Her tongue was hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a warm patch of drool was forming on her chin. Dave smiled; she looked just like she did when they had met in a crowded bar all those years ago."

What the fuck, game. Right after that, you wake her up in the middle of the night – by pinching her nose closed while she’s sleeping! – to send her to the kitchen to get you a warm glass of milk and a cookie, at which point you’re treated to this I-see-your-what-the-fuck-game-and-raise-you-one-more bit of prose:

"Just the one biscuit, mind, too much sugar at this time of night was liable to turn Dave a bit frisky—and she didn’t want that!

"Dave lay back on his pillow, his hands fumbling down the front of his pyjama pants."

Some other bits from the game’s opening section:

"Mavis has been decorating the landing for the last 3 weeks. You should get on at her to speed things up!"

"It’s the first room guests see when they enter the house, so you are very strict with Mavis about always keeping it nicely hoovered."

"'Would you mind not yawning?' you ask politely. 'Not only is it unbecoming of a lady to yawn at the breakfast table, but I also find it extremely sexually unappealing. And what’s more, you’re putting me off my Coco Pops.'"

"This is where Mavis comes to have a little cry when she’s having one of her ‘episodes’."

It’s not just Mavis – there’s a “joke” later where the death of another worker’s wife is played entirely for laughs, and at the factory there’s a woman who’s hunchbacked and deformed and hideous, and the “joke” here is that nobody talks to her. I suppose it’s not just women who have a bad time of it, as the ill-natured puzzles also include things like playing a screeching tune on the bagpipes to wake up a sleeping cat for no earthly reason. But yeah, it’s definitely mostly about women. At least there is one attractive female character – a sexy nurse who’s having an affair with a married doctor (this is where I hit the bug; I was clearly supposed to use my knowledge of the affair to blackmail the doctor into letting me leave the hospital, but the option never appeared).

If I were trying to be balanced, at this point I’d try to scrape together a few more positive points about the game to offset additional critiques I haven’t yet gotten to (there are more bugs, like a teleporting pen and a urine sample whose description doesn’t update even after you accidentally spill it; several puzzles, like replacing the aforementioned urine with pond water, are underclued or nonsensical, and the “walkthrough” that comes with the game just provides hints and stops about a third of the way in; and the genAI pixel art throughout added one more source of omnipresent irritation to the proceedings). But I can’t find it in me to muster up the energy. I’ll say one thing for Hobbiton Recall – at least next time I read some Tolkien or Dick and roll my eyes at their bad treatment of women, I can think to myself “well, could be worse.”

What do vampires have in common with the X-Men? The glib answer is “Vampire: the Masquerade” – yes, we all played it as superheroes with fangs, no, there’s nothing wrong with that – but the one I had in mind is the racism-analogy problem. See, in any genre fiction where you’ve got a distinct and insular minority who are set apart from the ordinary mass of humanity, like because they’re mutants or they drink blood, it’s tempting to lean into the subtext and start telling stories about how the ways they’re set apart resemble real-world discrimination. There can be some rich vines of pathos and thematic weight to mine here, and it can be a solid on-ramp into political awareness (I can’t definitively claim that various 80s comic books where religious reactionaries whip up vicious mobs had no impact on my current views), so I don’t mean to knock the practice by any means. But it runs into difficulties when you try to take the metaphor too literally, because at the end of the day the people who hate and fear vampires or mutants? They, uh, kind of have a point, given the extreme danger they pose to ordinary people, outside the techniques of control we accept as part of a liberal democracy. It’s not crazy to not want to live next door to a bloodthirsty creature of the night or someone who can turn your curtain rod into a deadly weapon, after all, but this gets awkward when curtain-rod guy is a stand-in for Black people or trans folks or what have you.

There are various strategies for dealing with this, of course, from steering into the skid (I haven’t read it, but I understand there’s a recent X-Men run where mutants basically set up their own nation-state, with an implicit threat of global annihilation keeping the jealous superpowers at bay) to the one Conversation in a Dark Room employs, which is to neuter the threat. Again, I understand the impulse, since the vampires in this game are clearly meant to evoke real-world marginalized groups (the bit of dialogue saying “[y]ou may even have vampire coworkers, you know. It’s not as easy as you think to spot us these days” is a bit on the nose, as is the bit about how the label “vampire” is applied as a blanket term despite the fact that most of them are “mixed”, with varying degrees of human-ness), and part of the point of the game appears to be to put the protagonist’s unexamined group-hatred of vampires under the microscope, so this wouldn’t work the same way if vampires were draining people dry willy-nilly. But there’s part of me that rebels at seeing horror’s ur-predators defanged as comprehensively as they are here: we’re told that rather than drinking human blood, they’ve created a network of humane farms that sustainably harvest non-life-threatening amounts of animal blood, as well as invented synthetic blood alternatives; oh, and they mostly don’t even reproduce, having decided that subjecting other people to their immortal curse would be mean. And as far as we’re told, vampires are a monolithic block who agree with these Jain-style precepts – given that they also don’t burst into flames in the sunlight, they come off as especially long-lived, super nice goths.

This is a shame, because with real menace on the table, Conversation in a Dark Room could be have been a nail-biter. A two-hander where a vampire and the human he’s hired to kill him chit-chat before getting down to the deed is a great premise, and there’s some queasily compelling writing in the dialogue, especially the bits that make it look like what’s happening here is a seduction:

He asks you, “Have you ever done something like this before?”

“No…No, I haven’t. Not like this. But…”

It’s also played for comedic effect – like, this is a very different kind of date:

So what do you do, anyway?" His voice broke your trance.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What do you do? You know, for work?”

And while the vampire’s motives for choosing annihilation aren’t spelled out, and don’t seem to go too far beyond the traditional tropes of the modern vampire mythos, the author knows how to play the hits:

"He sighs. 'When you live a long time, you…experience a great array of things. You’d think the world would be full of endless opportunities and feelings and experiences, but the truth is, much of it is the same. And at the same time, some of it is impossible to replicate, and you’ll spend your whole life chasing it.'"

So the ingredients are here for a tense yet melancholy battle of wits, but some of the narrative and design choices sap the setup of its power. Again, the major issue is that the vampire just doesn’t seem scary; it’s certainly possible that he’s just gaslighting the protagonist about how woke the modern vamp is, but there’s no indication that’s the case, which makes it feel like the protagonist’s vendetta against the undead is just a thoughtless prejudice rather than anything to take seriously (at least in the two run-throughs I played, these feelings don’t stem from a specific grievance or incident that would make them feel more reasonable or psychologically grounded). Further undercutting my identification with the protagonist, they appear to be the worst journalist ever: despite their job being all about asking questions, and an apparently longstanding distaste for vampires, they seem to have never pondered, much less done research to resolve, various important matters about how vampires live and feed. For a blank-slate whose ignorance is meant to provide an excuse for world-building exposition, this would be easier to overlook, but instead, as mentioned their animus towards vampires is positioned as a major reason why they’ve taken on this assignment in the first place.

Below the narrative layer, the mechanics also make proceedings more ho-hum than they could have been. There are multiple different endings you can achieve, with your path through the story largely determined by your scores along three axes: wallow in your aggression, and you can get Hatred points, while asking lots of questions gains Intrigue and commiserating with the vampire earns Empathy. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gain these points, meaning I found it hard to proactively think about trying to shape the character along different extremes; instead I clicked around and hoped for the best, which led to a balanced score along the three gauges, but also an ending that paid off the setup without adding much in the way of surprises – it’s possible to overstate the value of novelty, of course, but again, this game feels to me like it wants to be structured as a thriller, which requires at least one good twist or gear-shift.

Still, all this puts Conversation in a Dark Room at “well-written vampire game with solid politics and themes,” which isn’t a bad place to be, and I haven’t even mentioned the neat visual presentation and interface bells and whistles, like a customized note-taking tool. It’s a testament to its promise that I can’t help but imagine a game that leans into, rather than away from, its darker moments, and mines richer emotions than just world-weary pathos from a premise that, again, seems very well-chosen – and it’s not like I think anyone’s actually ever solved the racism-analogy problem, it’s just that it can be more fun to read the more spectacular failures. Conversation in a Dark Room isn’t a failure by any means, but it could have stood to take a few more risks.

Despite its short play-time, Errand Run engages with a number of different themes, but there’s one I keep coming back to, possibly because it’s increasingly salient of late: how do you tolerate the intolerable? It’s no spoiler, I think, to reveal that what initially appears to be a simple trip to the grocery store with twenty bucks in your pocket is concealing something darker than just dealing with the impacts of inflation; the first passage glancingly averts to wrongness by mentioning in passing that all the shopping baskets are scattered around upside-down, but the second passage leaves subtlety behind:

"THEYRE JUST ONIONS FOR GODSSAKE but your mind is a bullet a knife slicing splitting s u n d e r i n g each precious layer ghostprickleof tears in your eyes"

(The last four words are blurred).

The text effects calm down after that, save for an ominous red-shift as you near the ending, but the intimations of exactly how much has gone wrong keep escalating; often you’ll see a potentially disturbing phrase that, when clicked, turns anodyne: “the fly died” becomes “the fly flew all the way back to home to make little fly babies,” for example (though depending on how you feel about flies, it occurs to me, maybe the latter is worse than the former). The gameplay loop remains consistent throughout, with each new aisle peeling back a layer of the protagonist’s denial, and providing more clues about the enormity of what’s happened – there aren’t any real choices to make, but fortunately, at ten minutes, this simple structure doesn’t wear out its welcome, and when the last band-aid is ripped off, what we’re presented with is memorable in its details, and appropriately grand guignol, even if it’s not especially novel (I seem to recall a Comp game from four or five years ago with a largely similar take on (Spoiler - click to show)the Rapture).

So Errand Run is an effective little horror story, sounding in delusion and religious mania and post-apocalyptic nihilism, but as I said up top, the reading I’m finding most resonant right now focuses on the protagonist’s actions as a form of coping. While there’s an implication that their perceptions may sometimes be confused by trauma, I think it’s more frequently the case that they’re trying to recontextualize and ignore the evidence of their senses, rather than suffering full-bore hallucination. That is, the protagonist knows that things have gone to hell, but just continues to engage in quotidian rituals like grocery-shopping to propitiate the devils of despair. At a time when the aspirations that gave our lives meaning seem increasingly questionable, and our own devils of despair seem not just real, but in charge of major government agencies (this store’s take on food safety has nothing on RFK Jr’s), Errand Run feels as much of a political story as a supernatural one. Just going through the motions can keep the hounds at bay, but for how long? We’re down to a rotting back of onions and two packs of cinnamon gum; eventually something will have to give.

Is there anything more talismanic than last words? There are fictional characters – and real people too! – defined completely by the all-time great way they went out: who knows anything about Nathan Hale, or that guy from Tale of Two Cities, other than their eminently quotable exits? And “badass” is only one viable strategy, like, imagine how much time humanity has collectively spent trying to figure out what the heck Socrates meant about that chicken. In fact you can get a lot of mileage out of enigma – “Rosebud” is the engine that powers Citizen Kane, after all. They even have a special power in the law: dying declarations are exempted from the rules against hearsay evidence because of their gravitas. So kudos to Your Very Last Words for zeroing in on a perfect scenario for interactive fiction; we’re all head-over-heels for words already, so how can we resist the chance to author a sentence written in lightning whose thunder will reverberate down the ages?

Of course, in reality last words usually don’t live up to their billing. People who are close to death are often confused by pain and medication, and there can sometimes be disagreement about what a person’s last words actually were. Plus, most of us aren’t Socrates, or being written by Charles Dickens – for all that it can be morbidly fun to fantasize about the words of wisdom we’ll bequeath to our loved ones as we leave them for the last time, don’t we also nurse a secret fear that they’ll lean forward, pens at the ready to note down our valedictory phrase, only to shoot each other guilty looks once we’ve departed, disappointed at how banal our dying thoughts proved to be? And if that’s the case, kudos I suppose too to Your Very Last Words for being a bit muddled in its implementation and less than piercing in its prose.

Judged just on its mechanics, this is a very odd duck, and an underexplained one, if a duck can be underexplained. The way it works is that you’re facing a firing squad, and the sergeant derisively gives you a few minutes to think of something to say before he orders the bullets to fly. Your character says a sentence or two, reminiscing about the revolution that brought them to this awful end, their grieving family, or the fate of their country, and then the player gets to choose one of three phrases with which to complete the thought – though you’re given the unexplained option to choose and remember, or choose without remembering, for whichever one you pick. It turns out that phrases you remember are recorded in a running list tucked under a dialogue bubble in the upper left corner, but these aren’t your actual last words – instead, at the moment before you’re killed, you can choose three of the phrases in your list and slot them together, Mad Libs style, to complete your self-written epitaph. Oh, and at any time you can press E to open your eyes, at which point the game’s black backdrop irises out to reveal a black-and-white 3D rendering of the firing squad and the fellow prisoners being executed alongside you, which you can explore via mouselook.

It’s confusing and awkward, all the more so because some controls are mapped to the keyboard (opening the eyes, advancing to the next bit of dialogue) and some to the mouse (looking around, picking a dialogue option, opening up the list of phrases you’ve recorded). Beyond the interface, I also found the particulars of the protagonist’s predicament hard to come to grips with. This isn’t an abstracted, Platonic ideal of an execution – instead you’ve been caught up in the violence of Mexico’s Ten Tragic Days, when rival generals who’d launched a coup against the incumbent president unleashed terror against supporters of the regime. This is a historical period that I must admit I know vanishingly little about, and while the game provides some proper nouns, it doesn’t give much more so unless you’ve got a solid grounding in Mexican history you’d better hit Wikipedia if you want some context. And this isn’t just a matter of idle curiosity – it was hard for me to have a handle on which dialogue options I wanted to pick when the protagonist was lamenting the loss of freedom and the fate of his country, without knowing whether he was likely a right-wing or left-wing paramilitary! Meanwhile, the personal side of the monologue often felt melodramatic, which I suppose is as much due to the structure as anything else – when the screen only displays a dozen words at a time, the main way to make brevity have an impact is to get histrionic. And likewise, there’s not really enough detail for a personality to emerge; in a longer work, there could be poignancy in the way the protagonist mourns for the loss of his lover and unborn child, only to reflect on the many, many other lovers and many, many other illegitimate children he’s sired, but as it is I found it injected a presumably-unwanted comic note.

The nail in the coffin is that I found it really hard to string my list of isolated phrases together into a coherent, much less powerful, set of last words. Because they’re not drawn from consecutive sentences, it was challenging to create syntactical connections between the three phrases, much less substantive or thematic ones. Plus, trying to bridge the personal and the political felt too challenging since there’s so little real estate to work with – but choosing one over the other felt like giving short shrift to the game’s full set of themes.

I admire what Your Very Last Words is trying to do – I like idiosyncratic games, personal games, and historical games very much, and it certainly checks all three boxes. But as with the fetishization of last words, it tries to pack too much into too few phrases, and as a result it buckles under its own weight. After all, last words carry the most weight when we can see how they’re a capstone for a full life: without that broader background, they might as well be written in water.

There have been a lot of lessons to be drawn from the explosive growth of superhero movies over the last decade and a half, one of the more positive of which is the way they can escalate. You introduce a hero, maybe a half-sketched-in sidekick, they mostly fight mooks before the last set-piece kicks things up a notch – nothing wrong with that! But then soon enough you’ve got a team of dozens, with factions, betrayals, time travel, multiverses, romances, deaths, MacGuffins upon MacGuffins…

A Smörgåsbord of Pain is a sequel to 2022’s A Matter of Heist Urgency, and if it doesn’t quite speedrun the entire Iron-Man-to-Endgame progression, it’s dramatically more ambitious. The first game was largely an exercise in trying out some ideas for designing fight scene in a parser game, with a memorably off-kilter premise (anthropomorphic super-hero pony fights pirate llamas) and a final scene where you could leaven the simple punching and kicking with some environmental swashbuckling. But Anastasia the Power Pony’s second adventure is no mere proof-of-concept – we get to see her in her secret identity, there’s a chase, a much more assured combat sequence, some investigation and infiltration, revelations, and a gonzo climax featuring half a dozen combatants, an optional sidekick, and more buffet-based mayhem than you can shake a hoof at. I haven’t gotten to Murderworld yet, so I suppose it’s got competition in the best-superhero-adventure category, but it’s definitely an impressive showing.

The humor is a big part of what makes the game so enjoyable. Smörgåsbord makes the genius choice to play its bonkers setup completely straight, never acknowledging that there’s anything inherently funny about a pony with an office job and super-strength. Instead, jokes are made at the expense of overly-pretentious martial arts (“Many martial arts emphasize ‘philosophy,’ ‘understanding,’ or even ‘learning how to fight so one does not have to fight.’ Such ideas betray a true lack of enlightenment and deserve no attention…. Remember, we are here to learn how to beat people up.”), default Inform responses (“When you conclude that violence is the answer, simply >ATTACK, >PUNCH, >KICK, >WHAP, or even >CLONK the source of your problems”), Scandinavian cuisine (there is a lot of lutefisk at the titular buffet), and banal chit-chat with coworkers you despise (the opening dialogue about whether there are usually waiters and menus at buffets could work as a scene from The Office). I laughed very hard when Anastasia’s sensei noted that “wordplay is almost 89% of swordplay” (yes, there’s a pun-based fighting style), and harder at the dialogue options when I stormed into the eponymous restaurant bent on justice:

“D-Do you have reservations?” [the host] inquires, trying to maintain his composure.

1. “Not about using violence.”

The production values are also absurdly high. There are great feelies, two maps and a martial-arts how-to that contains some of the best jokes in the game. The implementation also feels deluxe, with social interaction feeling especially rich – there’s a menu-based conversation system, but you can also interrupt that to ASK/TELL about an impressive array of topics; I don’t recall getting a single generic response, though admittedly this is more a game about action than talking. And there’s a newscast sequence midway through that’s one of the most impressive visuals I’ve ever seen in an Inform game; I think I can kind of guess at how it’s put together, but I can only applaud the audacity to even attempt such a thing, much less the chops to pull it off so well.

It’s not entirely rainbows and unicorns, though. Another lesson of superhero cinema – and one it shares with buffets – is that that’s possible to have too much of a good thing. While I was initially delighted at the prospect of a throwdown in the restaurant, since I was looking forward to a food fight from the first scene where the location appeared, in practice I found this sequence way too involved and fiddly to be as fun as I wanted it to be. It’s set in a big, 5x5 region, with half a dozen enemies across multiple waves of reinforcements moving around to pursue you, so I found it very difficult to keep track of where everyone was, even when referencing the included map. There’s also a high degree of randomness that governs when your attacks, and those of your enemies, land, which meant that some of my attempts petered out much quicker than others. Meanwhile, success largely depends on coming up with pun-based uses for the buffet’s food, which is a great idea, but in practice slowed things down as I tried to come up with the appropriate joke, which was often frustrating: it’s great fun to WAYLAY an enemy WITH HAY, but I couldn’t TICKLE with PICKLES, or ROUT with SPROUTS, HARRASS with GLASS, or NAIL WITH SNAILS… given the significant number of food items in the buffet, and the large number of dumb jokes you can make with the English language, it’d be unreasonable to ask that all of this stuff work, I suppose, but the difficulty of this sequence is tuned hard enough that I felt like I’d have needed to figure out a lot of the trickier puns, not just the obvious ones, in order to win, not to mention getting lucky with the RNG.

Fortunately, the game lets you proceed even if a sequence proves too hard, and the actual final bit is much more forgiving, and wound up playing to my strengths (let me just say that as the parent to a science-oriented almost-four-year-old, my practice making baking-soda volcanos stood me in good stead). And everything up too that point had a well-judged curve of escalation, especially the stealthy bit at the end of act 2, which has some really good puzzles. If Smörgåsbord gets a little top-heavy towards the end, well, at least it’s never anywhere near as ponderous as the MCU’s worst excesses. For all that I’m definitely suffering from superhero fatigue at the movie theater, I’m definitely down for more Anastasia – maybe just don’t demand such rigor from a silly food fight next time?

One of the vanishingly few advantages of the current political environment in the US is that it’s largely put to bed the tedious “is MAGA really fascism, or just sparkling authoritarianism?” debates. Scan the headlines – or hell, go outside, I live in LA and used to live in DC – and it’s clear that fascism is the air that we breathe, the water in which we swim. It’s everywhere around us, it’s totalizing in its ambition to reduce all of society to the coddled in-group, licensed to glut on violence and graft to try in vain to satisfy their sociopathy and daddy issues, and the abject out-group, stripped of rights and property and dignity. Fascism, sad to say, is pretty much always on-topic these days.

Except, famously, for that recent forum topic spun off a thread on the itch.io de-indexing of NSFW content, after some sea-lioning led to one more of those “but are they really fascists?” conversations I thought we were well quit of. Yes, pity the poor player coming to this one fresh, Fascism – Off-Topic is a forum in-joke come to life. But come back! It’s actually pretty fun!

Well, fun is maybe not le mot juste for a game that sticks you in a moving subway car opposite a couple having a yeah-they’re-definitely-breaking-up-after-this argument. Around this central conflict is arranged a well-realized suite of furniture, both plastic and human – there are some tourists, a guy playing chess on his phone, a lady listening to loud music on her headphones, but they’re all minding their own business, or at least pretending to do so while eavesdropping on the fight, just like you are. This is a parser game, so you’re free to check out the surroundings as things between the couple escalate, but since you’re in a subway car there’s no place you can go, and nothing you can do.

Well, actually, there’s one thing you can do. You see, you’ve just read an article about fascism (note the singular there), and you’re raring to share your opinions about it (well, again, it’s more like an opinion). As a result, my heart sank when I saw the response to X ME: “Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic.” In fairness, I also more or less meet that description, and the protagonist’s thoughts about fascism are a bit in the weeds but not that bad, thankfully, but waiting to see what he’ll say adds an additional layer of anticipatory squirming as you watch the blowout escalate.

Once you intuit the command to talk about fascism, you can do so at any time – but the game’s central, nay only, mechanic is that most of the time, this comes off as a non-sequitur. So your challenge, if you are a bad enough dude to accept it, is to pick your moment so that you can make fascism on-topic. It’s a cleverer conceit than an in-joke game needs, as it forces the player to think about the ways that this couple are berating each other might mirror the larger patterns of abuse fascists inflict on subject populations. That’s of course a big, depressing topic, and this is a small, mostly-funny game, so I wouldn’t say the insight is life-changingly trenchant or anything. But it does get at some intersections of politics, gender, and control that are worth slowing down and examining.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Fascism – Off Topic is super serious, though. While the argument is downer, the rest of the cast are engaging in funny little bits of ambient business to lighten the mood, none more so than the unobtrusive old guy who (Spoiler - click to show)surreptitiously eats a raw onion – I completely lost it when, upon finishing, he pulled out a second . And it’s not just this patter that indicates a solid level of polish; the implementation is generally quite strong, with thoughtful synonyms helping avoid the multiple men and women in the car sending the player to disambiguation hell, and good cueing helping signal the verb you’ll use to trigger your fascistic monologue.

There are a few places where things are a bit rough – it might have been nice to have some alternatives to that custom verb for folks more familiar with Inform’s traditional ASK/TELL conversation system, and I think the timing on the ending banners is off by one, since I saw the “winning” version fire the turn before the one where the fascism-talk provokes a response from the couple. But these are minor niggles, and this isn’t exactly the kind of game where a months-long beta testing process is a reasonable expectation. And at the end of the day, I don’t think we actually need to worry about players who come to the game knowing nothing about forum spats and thread splits: Fascism – Off Topic stands well enough on its own, pushing us to consider the ways totalitarianism has its roots in everyday interpersonal relationships, and also to consider knowing more than one thing about it because again, fascism is unfortunately kind of a big deal right now.

• I should probably disclose that I believe a joke I made when discussing the forum contretemps is incorporated into the game. But as I barely remember the joke, and anyway ideas matter far less than implementation, I think I can rate and review in good faith

Have you ever taken a personality test for work?

A: No.

B: Yes, once.

C: Yes, more than once.

D: My work is administering personality tests.

If B or C, did the exercise seem worthwhile?

A: No, because it didn’t tell me or my managers anything we didn’t already know.

B: No, because I lied on all the answers.

C: Yes, because the insights I gleaned helped me increase my performance and

D: Yes, because if I hadn’t taken it they would have fired me.

Are work-administered personality tests a good topic for comedy?

A: …I admit it’s not one I would have ever thought of on my own.

B: I suppose it’s an experience that a reasonable number of folks have shared?

C: This game is funny, so I guess my answer has to be yes.

D: All of the above.

What about a multiple-choice test, is that a good format for comedy?

A: No.

B: No.

C: Yes?

D: Well, I’m writing this review, what do you think.

What line in the game made you laugh the hardest?

A: “Ready to learn a little more about yourself and not hold Burger Meme™ responsible for any trauma this required voluntary test may cause?”

B: “Social Skills: BRACE FOR IMPACT, HR.”

C: “Liberal Arts majors don’t historically become productive members of the Burger Meme™ family. They become ‘whistleblowers’ who ‘believe in the dignity of workers’ and ‘try to start unions’ so that employees can ‘take profits from parasitic shareholders and redistribute them to employees.’”

D: “It would be like trying to work at Disney and being afraid of lawsuits.”

From that answer, I’m wondering whether this comedy game is actually more of a satire of bad corporate behavior?

A: Yes, though Burger Meme is so cartoonishly evil and short-sighted that the critique doesn’t seem like it could possibly apply to any actual corporation.

B: Yes, and now that I think about it, it’s almost certainly the case that corporations really are using AI chatbots to interrogate prospective hires and using the results to make decisions, and good lord that’s bleak.

C: No, because the test gets so zany, so quickly, that the occasional bits of trenchant social commentary don’t have time to breathe.

D: No, of course not (please don’t fire me).

Why do you think the Burger Meme test-administrator-bot tracks answers that it doesn’t like as “Sins”?

A: It’s a statement about the ways that corporations try to moralize simple questions of efficiency, in to exploit human beings’ natural pro-social instincts.

B: It’s a mechanic that unlocks a unique ending if you finish the game with exactly seven sins.

C: It’s an acronym for “Situationally INapposite Solution.”

D: None of the above.

What was the first ending you got, and why was it a failure?

A: I got too belligerent with the AI.

B: I got too friendly with the AI.

C: I admitted I was also an AI.

D: I admitted I was a vegetarian.

Final assessment:

Analytic acumen: 63%

Comedic chops: 24%

Overall employability: 17%

Potential role in the Burger Meme™ family:

A: High-concept corporate-retreat designer.

B: Customer experience technician.

C: Ingredients.

After more than 30 years, the Comp has accumulated a body of folk wisdom, tips and tricks, and helpful pointers about how authors can best position their work for a successful reception. Sadly, this store of knowledge is built atop the broken debris of promising games that demonstrated what not to do, and sadder still, Horse Whisperer, which boasts an engagingly oddball premise (you’re a horse psychologist trying to fix a race for the mob) and more than its share of solid gags, must join this host of fallen exemplars, offering an illustration of the lesson that if the phrase “untested alpha build” appears anywhere in your game or blurb in a non-diegetic context, you should withdraw and resubmit next year (or to Spring Thing! There’s always Spring Thing!)

It would feel mean to catalogue all the errors I ran into trying to play Horse Whisperer, but there are a lot and they’re obvious – none more so than the dialogue options currently marked with asterisks, which when you click them take you to a “sorry, coming soon” passage. The logic linking the results of your actions to an ending appears either broken or absent, since the outcome of the race ignored that I’d psyched up one horse, demoralized another, and disqualified a third (the disqualified horse came in second place). Oh, and the race happened a day after it was supposed to.

Again, this is a shame, since this dark, absurdist take on Mr. Ed has some comedic potential that’s occasionally well-realized, and the author clearly has a lot of fun ideas for how to elaborate on the premise. But it’s not spitting-distance to done, even for a horse. Hopefully in addition to being a warning sign to others on the dangers of submitting an incomplete game to the Comp, Horse Whisperer will also be fodder for the author to come back next year (or again, this coming spring!) with something that lives up to the promise that’s on display here. Until then, the game isn’t stable enough to… be able to make much hay? These horse puns are harder than they look!

Cart is a choice-based game where you play a night-soil man (baldly: someone who collects human excreta and sells it for fertilizer) trying to eke out an existence at the margins of a brutal society rife with classism, racism, and brutality. The most impactful choices hinge on how far you’re willing to stick your neck out for a Roma boy who, at least in my playthrough never exchanged a single word with me. And it’s all rendered in ornate prose that takes a bunch of big swings that hit much more often than they miss. Yes, everything about Cart appeals to me, except for one tiny word in the blurb: the genre is listed as “allegory.”

It’s not that I’m completely allergic to them. Sure, when done lazily they can be witless exercises in matching a thin fictionalization to its real-world counterpart, with nothing to offer but a mildly-enjoyable recognition. But there are plenty of richer examples, too, where translating an aspect of everyday experience, heightening and recontextualizing it, helps us see more clearly: think of Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, or the cannibalistic Stalinism of Animal Farm. No, the trouble is that right now, allegory feels besides the point, since whatever you can say about the current omnicrises roiling the globe – of governance, of the environment, of simple human decency – lack of clarity isn’t a complaint you can levy; we all know exactly what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what horrifying consequences it will have, it’s all spelled out for us every day in pellucid detail. What could allegory possibly add to this picture?

Fortunately, while per the above summary Cart clearly has plenty of present-day resonance, there’s more to it than simple this-for-that transposition of current events. First off, there’s something appealingly mythical about the protagonist. A victim of circumstance, he actually takes on the night-soil man’s trappings and identity when his predecessor is killed by a crackdown on some “undesirables”; that this degraded job is his by choice underscores his previous desperation, and takes him more to the realm of folklore than allegory. Then there’s the prose, which is written in a complex, convoluted style that serves to conceal what it’s doing until just before the whip cracks:

"They cannot in their own conscience pay you enough to forget that you aren’t servicing the arse end of society. Perhaps this is why your predecessor was a gambler rather than a drunk —- this amount of coin can merely buy hope, not ignorance."

Or:

"Around the corner you hear the confederated slap of guard boots against the road. Probably two guards, judging from the banter. You do not open your eyes. You do not move. While you lack many things, chief among them is the need to invite attention."

It’s not all aphorism, though – the dialogue of your chief tormentor’s henchmen is positive Deadwood-y (says the guy who’s never seen Deadwood, but I know it by reputation). Here’s one reminiscing about a particularly enthusiastic session of keeping the hoi polloi in their place:

"It was a bountiful feast for a hungry truncheon!"

Inevitably, there are some stumbles – at one point, the game informed me that “a dark rumination descends upon you” – but they’re easy to overlook when the average is as good as it is.

The game doesn’t immerse you too much in the abject routine of your profession – though the occasional reference to “the warm, variegated latrine slurry” is enough to evoke a shudder – which is perhaps part of the allegory we’re warned about; it’s enough to establish that the protagonist is a pariah, but that’s not what Cart is about. The set pieces where you must navigate a series of choices are where its interest truly lies, and these are presented as moral dilemmas without pat answers: do you defile the dead to help the living, how far will you go to deflect attention from that Romany boy without drawing too much to yourself? It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the very first choice is about whether to eat an apple…

Cart is at its rawest in the climax. Partially that’s because the pacing feels a bit abrupt; I was settling into the game’s rhythms and enjoying seeing its world slowly expand, so while I understood this story would have a violent end, I didn’t want or expect it to come so soon. Partially that’s because when the antagonist is a nativist orator ranting about racialized others eating pets, we’re straying into the ponderous sort of allegory. But the ending sticks the landing: you’re confronted with another tense choice with unclear but high stakes and then get crushed down by despair, before the epilogue offers a tiny sliver of light by presenting a flat-eyed view of what the end of fascism actually usually looks like.

This, I think, is where the allegory is successful: it’s not about showing us anything new or unique about the villains, because we know all about them already and they’re banal, empty figures. Instead, Cart explores the way that our actions in a time of oppression at the same time matter very little, but also matter enormously; the dream of escaping degradation and overturning an unjust order with the power of words or the revelation of elite corruption in a single redemptive moment is just a dream, after all, and it’s important to recognize that, just as it’s important to know that not everyone will survive persecution. But it’s just as important to know that evil does come to an end, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad, and the decisions we make can determine who’s there to greet that new day, and what they’re carrying forward to meet it – and that’s an allegory that helps us look beyond to the horrors of the news cycle to bigger, true things.

Everyone knows that the worst part of parser-based IF is guess-the-verb puzzles. What Imperial Throne presupposes is – maybe it’s the best?

Admittedly, the setup here is fairly unique, and far afield from wrestling with medium dry-goods in an eccentric relative’s mansion. The game plops you down on the eponymous seat, placing you in command of a fantasy empire boasting rich provinces, inconsistently-competent generals, restive peasants, impious priests, and more rival powers than you can shake a stick at. From your exalted perch, you can examine all of the above and more, and ask your advisor to provide a bit of color commentary on them, but that’s about it in terms of traditional IF commands; trying to move about or take stuff just tells you that these things are unbecoming to and unnecessary for an emperor. There’s no ABOUT text to provide any direction, so what can you do? Just type stuff in and see if it’ll work.

And, thrillingly, there’s a lot of stuff that works. I cooed with happiness half a dozen times at seeing my ideas for governance accepted by the parser – I’m having to restrain myself from listing off half a dozen examples, but since this is a case where spoilers really do undercut the enjoyment the game offers, I’ll just note that one of my early priorities was establishing sumptuary taxes to support a shipbuilding program that I think made my foreign trade more lucrative. Yes, you can just type TAX SILK, and Imperial Throne will make that happen. At its best, the game manages to recapture the I-can-do-anything feeling experienced by the earliest players of parser games – I’m too young to have experienced that first-hand, but now I have a far greater appreciation for how impactful that must have been. Like, you can intervene in the capital’s culture, respond to crimes with punishments lenient and severe, balance class interests, and of course shuffle around troops to engage in great-power adventurism! And OK, I can’t help adding one more, though I’ll spoiler-block it: (Spoiler - click to show)BUILD BRIDGE ON LOCANUS will give a military advantage to your soldiers when they need to cross that river to retaliate against a neighboring kingdom’s raids!

The impact of all these decisions isn’t always clear – you’ll note that I only had a guess about what all those ships were accomplishing for me. While your emperor-o-vision lets you see the troops, leaders, and resources at your command, it provides only vague information about foreign policy or domestic unrest. Where a Civilization or Paradox strategy game would give you dials, charts, and numbers galore, Imperial Throne just gives you a sentence or two. This feels restrictive, but in a way that more authentically captures the experience of pre-modern rulership: this is a fantasy kingdom, but one without magic or other shortcuts that would allow a state to see or know things that historically required a significant bureaucracy and educational infrastructure. You get told that opening up the granaries to starving peasants softened a famine’s impacts and reduced unrest, but not that you lost 3 farmer populations and unrest notched own by 2, which helps keep the game’s mechanical underpinnings from showing through too baldly.

There are some rough edges and limitations, of course. The game’s opacity is a critical part of what makes it work, but it did lead to frustration when I couldn’t figure out the syntax to incorporate potatoes into my subsistence agriculture, and I was surprised that I couldn’t imprison a particular troublemaker, only execute him (all the more so when I saw that the walkthrough seemed to think that should have been possible, too). Keeping track of all the different made-up names of people, provinces, and kingdoms, is really difficult, since they’re all so much fantasy gobbledygook, and there are no built-in help features tracking this stuff, so you’d better have been taking good notes if you want to move a specific general to a specific place. And there are some minor bugs and a lack of polish; besides the aforementioned issues with imprisonment, X LABORERS got me a “runtime error: invalid comparison”, and a fair number of things just give the default “you see nothing unusual about them” response (even the potatoes, which had been brought back by an explorer returning from a far-off land!)

The biggest issue, though, is just that once the thrill of discovery wears off, there’s not much to keep the player engaged. After about 150 turns, I’d pretty much figured out what I could do, and while different events kept happening, they were mostly variations on what had come before, and the thing is playing a simple strategy game with a parser interface isn’t that intrinsically enjoyable. So when an ally I’d carefully cultivated suddenly turned on me after some domestic upheaval, I checked the walkthrough, saw that I’d uncovered like 90% of the possibility space, and decided I couldn’t be bothered laboriously shuffling troops around to fight off the invasion; I just hammered Z until the end game (joke’s on the betrayers, though, actually one of my generals took advantage of the chaos to get declared Emperor and toppled me after a brief civil war). But there’s no way to avoid that kind of come-down in a game built around experimentation – inevitably, you eventually run out of new stuff. But until that point arrives, Imperial Throne is a lovely little toy to mess around with, and I’m looking forward to reading other reviews to see what I might have missed.