Reviews by Mike Russo

Last night my wife and I had one of our all-too-infrequent dates (we’re parents of a toddler, the struggle is real), and I made the questionable decision to use some of that precious time telling her about the drama surrounding NaNoWriMo endorsing LLM tools. She was gobsmacked: the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel, so what possible point could there be to having an “AI” write part of it for you? I didn’t have any great answers; the best I could come up with is that there are people who really want to have written a book, but either can’t or don’t want to do the work to actually write it.

Comes now Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe to assert that yes, there definitely are people like that, and to imagine what they might do if they had to make a deal with an entity darker still than ChatGPT to get their way. Oh, there’s plenty going on in this impressively-put-together TADS game – beyond the main thread involving investigations in an evocatively-presented 19th-Century Baltimore, there’s also a terrorist thriller, and even a brief Renaissance interlude – but the heart of it is a meditation on artistic ambition; trying to uncover exactly what caused Poe’s death provides impetus to the plot, and he enigmatically haunts proceedings as inspiration, cautionary tale, or victim, but the story is ultimately concerned with others who lack his talent and perseverance while feeling no less entitled to success.

Speaking of ambitions, this is a lot for a parser game to bite off, but UCEAP manages it all with aplomb. There’s a modern-day framing story for the main action in Poe’s Baltimore, as well as one or two other nested flashbacks, but everything except the 19th Century stuff is presented in a compact, guided fashion that ensures the player doesn’t flounder even as they’re put in situations without enough context to understand them, or asked to make thematically-charged decisions via a parser interface that doesn’t allow for much nuance. The tools used here include a fair amount of prompting, via a (optional, but enabled by default) system that provides hints about possible conversational topics, or the reduction of complex dilemmas to binary choices represented by physical actions easily fitting the medium-dry-goods paradigm. It’d be churlish to complain about this kind of thing, though, since these sequences are clearly ancillary to the main event, where the player is afforded far more freedom; keeping the necessarily-less-engaging side-stories moving is the right decision.

And oh, what fun there is to be had in Charm City! As an admirer of Poe’s who has heard news of his troubles, you rush to his hospital bed and vow to discover who or what brought him to such dire straits. The whole sequence is rendered in enjoyably melodramatic prose that brings the milieu to life, like this description of the harbor:

"Eagerly I pass through the doors of the ferry building, columned on both sides by the sails and smoke rising from the ferries gliding over the glassy Patapsco River."

Or this later one of a damaged mechanism:

"A great iron pot-bellied engine sits mounted into one wall, with a webwork of contraption and gears sprouting from its head. Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate."

It’s impressively-wrought apery, conjuring ambiance while avoiding mentioning too many nouns that would need to be implemented, and if there are anachronisms or infelicities, I didn’t notice them. A lot of research has clearly gone into this, but the game avoids the pitfall of ploddingly reciting Wikipedia summaries; historical tidbits like how voting frauds were perpetrated or what medical care looked like at the time are given life and made plot-relevant instead.

The puzzles are also woven into the narrative with care and skill. There are barriers to your investigations – you’ll need to retrace his steps before the attack that felled him, wheedle key information out of a wino, er, toper, and even decode some cryptograms that could have come straight out of a Poe story. But they all arise, and are surmounted, in organic fashion; there’s nothing that comes off as a gamey contrivance to pad out the running time, and the puzzles all reward logical thinking and period knowledge (in fact I managed to sequence-break by guessing a cipher keyword well before I was supposed to based on knowing some things about 19th-Century medicine). And even for folks less well-positioned to grapple with its challenges, the game offers hints and a walkthrough.

For all that they’re well done, though, the puzzles aren’t what UCEAP is most interested in. Nor, in the end, is Poe – the game does engage with the historical circumstances of his death with impressive depth and fidelity, and it’s generously larded both with specific references to his work, as well as with tropes that invoke the mysterious, haunted atmosphere of his writings, from uncanny doubles to ominous codes to insoluble murders. But we don’t get much of a sense of his subjectivity: the active characters are people who look up to him, or are jealous of him, or find themselves enmeshed in situations that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his tales. Indeed, there’s even a clever feint that led me to expect that Poe would be revealed as his own worst enemy, only to find that something else entirely was going on.

No, it’s the protagonist and villain, and their echoes in the modern-day story, who are most thematically central to the game. It posits a series of dualities within literary identity: the desire for broad success as well as critical acclaim, for bourgeois respectability as well as demimondaine extravagance, and above all for the trappings of fame without the effort required to master a craft. Much like the puzzles, this theme is well-put together and cleverly integrated into the game as a whole, but here’s my major complaint about UCEAP: I’m not convinced it winds up with as much to say about literary production in general, or Poe in specific, as I’d have hoped.

Most authors, I think, really are trying as hard as they can to produce good work; if they’re taking shortcuts, they’re shortcuts imposed by the exigencies of artistic production under late capitalism rather than moral failings. ChatGPT and its ilk pretend they offer the equivalent of a deal with the devil – have your masterworks handed to you on a platter rather than forging them with the sweat of your brow – but it’s nonetheless clear that this Mephistopheles has not a golden fiddle but an out-of-tune ukulele. And as for Poe, UCEAP convincingly demolishes the character-assassination portrait of him as a depraved alcoholic brought low by his inability to control his vices, but it doesn’t dwell much on the positive vision we should have of him instead. I don’t disagree with anything the game is saying, by any means, but I do wish it had found a way to penetrate a little more deeply, engage more directly with the questions it raises about how we sinful mortals can create undying art.

Let me be clear that I’m just talking about the difference between a great game and an incredible one, though – I found UCEAP a joy to play, with best-of-class prose, design, worldbuilding, and narrative structure (I haven’t gotten a chance to mention how scene transitions are often accomplished via seamless match-cuts, like jumping from a 2024 hospital to an 1849 one). It also boasts the most hilarious way to get out of a bad contract I’ve read in quite some time. And if it doesn’t completely transcend its origins as a sensational tale of depraved and desperate ambition, well, Poe wrote a bunch like that himself and many of them have survived the test of time nonetheless.

Deliquescence is an emotionally charged game presenting one of the most painful experiences possible – being with someone you love in the minutes before they die – so of course instead of engaging with any of that I’m going to start off by talking about the interface.

This is of course a choice-based game, but the presentation of those choices is almost unique in IF – rather than a typical set of inline links or radio buttons, the options available are offered via nested menus. Talk, Touch, and Do are the initial three, each with a little + next to them indicating that they can expand to offer a further set of choices, which of course can expand in turn to offer additional refinements another layer down, ultimately reaching three or four levels deep in some cases; you might select Talk, then About her, then Tell me a story, then finally About your grandmother to trigger a short reminiscence. Even something as comparatively simple as touching her hand is actually Touch, Her, Hand – and the way the nesting works, you don’t know what options are available until you click to fan them out.

I suspect that this choice of interface was partially a practical accommodation to allow for quite a lot of choices – there are something like thirty different courses you can pursue – to be displayed at once, without requiring the player to fumble with the back button or locking in any path-dependence (the game does shunt you into one of several different endings based on what you do, but each interaction works the same way every time). But it’s also a perfect fit for the game’s subject matter: in such a high-stress situation, with seconds ticking down to the inevitable (yes, the game does have a real-time limit hurrying things along if you dither), I think your brain really does work like this: I should say something, what should I say, maybe a question, what was a story she told me, oh the one about her Grandmother. And there’s so much you might want to do, but the likelihood that it will be the right thing is so low given the stakes, that you do find yourself considering action after action, jumping around in the list, all the time knowing you can’t get through even a fraction of what you’d like to do or say before the end, and actually by searching for something perfect you’re frittering away the little time that’s left.

The setup is so neat that the specifics and the writing are almost besides the point; happily, they’re quite good, though I inevitably have a quibble or two. The main one of these is that Deliquescence is not nearly as emotionally devastating as it could be. For one thing, as the title indicates your friend is dying because their body is turning into water; this can be read as a metaphor for all sorts of things, and could be rendered as a terrifying bit of body horror, but in the event the author succeeds in giving the friend’s physical decay an odd, terribly beauty; her death will make you sad, but it’s a wistful kind of sad, and a sadness leavened by the invitation to restart and experience it again. For another, neither the friend nor the protagonist are especially characterized, nor does their relationship have much flavor to it; there are a couple of nice anecdotes, and from the fact that they’re in this situation together the player understands that the ties that bind them together must be tight ones, but I felt an intellectual rather than a visceral understanding.

The endings also pull some punches. There aren’t any good ones where you say exactly the right thing to make you and her feel OK about what’s happening – because of course there aren’t – but nor are there ones where you say the wrong thing, or one or the other of you breaks down irretrievably (er, emotionally, that is). If you futz around with the interface so much that you never actually do anything, she says the important thing was for you just to be there; if ask her to tell you stories, she tells you she was happy with her life. One ending that threatened to become a bummer ended with her saying “My death is not for anyone but me. It’s just another thing that is happening. Don’t make it a burden.” I’m not saying that’s unrealistic – in fact my sister told me something not unlike this a few weeks before she died – but it is a pretty direct instruction to the player not to feel too bad about things.

This all seems to be a matter of choice rather than mistake on the part of the author, though – based on the quality of the writing, I have little doubt they could have gone all-in for melodrama had that been their goal. Instead Deliquescence allows the player to get their toes wet exploring an awful moment, experiencing all the ways it can feel overwhelming and go wrong while still having a safety net that blunts the worst excesses of emotion and reassures them that it’s going to be OK no matter what. That’s an admirable thing to offer, with impressive artistry going into the design, even if the situations it’s emulating are nowhere near as domesticated in practice.

The thing about metaphors is, they can’t be too metaphorical. Similes are anchored by that “like”, they can do anything they want: there’s a Mountain Goats song, International Small Arms Traffic Blues, with the line “my love is like the border between Greece and Albania”, and it completely works, you understand exactly what it means. But metaphors lack any automatic grounding in reality, and so they’re liable to float away if you let them. Case in point: I am pretty sure that when the parents in House of Wolves make the protagonist eat meat for dinner, the game doesn’t (or at doesn’t just) have vegetarianism on its mind, but I couldn’t tell you what it does. Reactionary politics? Sexual orientation or gender identity? Academic success/meritocracy as a cloak for the Hobbesian war of all against all? The fact that this is about “wolves” and “meat” indicates there’s violence at the heart of whatever’s going on, but whatever’s going on is too gestured-at to be visceral.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing powerful in the writing here. Part of the protagonist’s three-part daily ritual is studying (bracketed by ablutions and the aforementioned meal sequences): they appear to be taking a computer-science course under remote-learning conditions, possibly due to COVID, and at one point there’s a description of the technical concepts of encapsulation and abstraction in the context of programming languages, but it’s clear the description could equally apply to avoidance strategies. I also liked that the protagonist’s dream of escape isn’t that their parents will stop trying to make them eat meat, no, it’s that they’ll just enjoy eating it: their imagination doesn’t extend to freedom, just to no longer experiencing the pain of conformity.

But again, we don’t really get a sense of what the protagonist is trying to avoid, or what costs conformity actually would impose. Nor are we given any climax or catharsis. We just get these same concepts repeated in various forms:

"You’ve almost forgotten what it’s like not to have that pressure bearing down on you. Separated from your friends, separated from any form of escape, you’ve buckled under its weight. Let them stamp you down into the cracks till there’s nothing left to break. You pretend it makes it easier. That it makes it hurt any less."

This seems unpleasant, and abstractly, I want things to go better for the protagonist. But I didn’t feel like my choices as a player had anything to do with that – you can acquiesce to eating eat, or be force-fed it, but external and internal end results felt the same – nor was there any poignancy to these scenes, any sense that an actual human being had anything concrete at stake. I’m not saying House of Wolves needed to make its allegories clanglingly explicit; heck, I’m a vegetarian, even if the game is just about eating meat I think that still could work. But right now all there is is the metaphor, and it’s not bloody enough to connect.

Early on in LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (hereinafter “Sextuple L”, per the subtitle – yes, I know that’s only five, I have some theories but we’ll get to those later), L, the game’s early-20s British transmasc protagonist, watches an ASMR video. It depicts a lemon being poked at in a way that’s meant to evoke a lobotomy – this is one of many sequences in the game that are sufficiently far outside my experience that they seem bizarre but also facially plausible given the way people are on the internet – and at one point, the YouTuber pokes a hypodermic under the fruit’s rind and injects some water to ape anesthetization, except the lemon already being quite full of liquid, the pressure of the plunger just makes the needle shoot back out of the rind. This strikes L as funny, since he did almost the same thing when he practiced on an orange before starting injecting himself with testosterone:

"Who would have thought my [transgender] experiences would connect with this one random guy, who absolutely is cis, even though I have no real way of knowing that, over something so stupid…"

This is a process that absolutely works in reverse: despite this being a game that’s heavily immersed in the subjectivity of L as a trans man, with a supporting cast that’s also entirely trans folks, and almost everybody is a 20-something Brit to boot, I found it incredibly relatable and emotionally engaging despite being a cishet American in my 40s. This isn’t because it’s especially meant for people like me, I don’t think – at least I hope it’s not, God knows there’s more than enough stuff out there catering to my demographic – but precisely because it does such a good job communicating the specificity of what L is seeing, thinking, and feeling. I’m very aware that my own experiences feeling awkward in a nightclub or adrift after graduation, to pluck two examples among many, don’t directly translate to L’s situation – beyond dealing with systemic transphobia and near-crippling confidence issues, he’s also got to grapple with a crush on someone way out of his league, moving back in with parents he’s not yet out to, and how to integrate a powerful rubber fetish into his romantic life, and more besides – but nonetheless I found the game a master-class in empathy: L feels like a flesh and blood person whose happiness I was deeply invested in.

I worry I just made Sextuple L sound kind of weepy and Very Serious, but it’s nothing of the sort – or, well, it sometimes is, but part of what makes the game so special is the authors’ bravura ability to shift tones and pivot on a dime while carrying you with them. L is an amazing narrator and very funny, incapable of letting a moment to wryly note the absurdity of a situation go by no matter what awful thing might be happening, and he’s sharply observant to boot. Despite the game disabling copy-and-poste (boo) my notes file is littered with lines I loved so much I was willing to type them in manually, like this early reflection L makes on his, er, reflection as he hides in the aforementioned club’s bathroom:

"He doesn’t look like a he. He looks like what a 13 year old girl would draw as her fictional boyfriend before she has an understanding of boys or friends… ugly in a way that he’s not ugly enough. There’s beauty in the beautiful and beauty in the grotesque. He’s neither… not woman enough to be an object; not man enough to be a threat."

The first bit elicits sympathy, the last an “oof” at what a reductive, yet sadly accurate, understanding of gender norms it conveys. And then smash cut from that self-loathing introspection to suddenly “someone with a full gasmask, catsuit sans-arms, and a harness of ropes knotted into a pentagram walks in” (it’s rubber night).

A bit later, when L rabbits out of the club and is waiting at the bus stop, he’s surprised to feel his latex-gloved hands immediately getting cold, due to the way rubber passes on heat – “I need gloves for my gloves”, he laments – and then he meets-cute with another trans guy, Val, who’s also waiting for the bus: “there is a quiet, but unmistakable, squelch of lube sliding under latex as we shake.” And I’ve got a million more examples; the narrative voice is brilliant at bringing out the texture of everything that’s happening and making it come alive, while being very very funny to boot.

…I should get on to actually reviewing the game, rather than just listing off the best bits, but I have to share a couple more. Eventually L hooks up with Val and his friend Artemis, a trans woman (let me just interject here to say that the sex scenes are really well done – there’s always a risk that sex will seem ridiculous when you write about it, and I think that risk is heightened when you’re dealing with fetish material that will be unfamiliar to many readers, but man, these work), and as they’re smoking during the comedown this exchange left me howling:

“Maybe I’ll get into piss,” she narrows her eyes, and taps the end of the cigarette, ash falling to the floor. “I haven’t done anything with piss.”

“Ugh, don’t. Everyone’s getting into piss.”

[banter about not-hot stuff people getting into piss say, culminating with] “Give me swimmer’s ear with your dick!”

Oh god, this is reminding me that just before that, as the sex scene was really getting going, you’re given a choice of having L remain silent or “vocalize”, and choosing that option has him blurt out “I t-think I have covid” – he doesn’t, he’s just overwhelmed and his brain is malfunctioning at the idea of losing his virginity, but good lord that made me laugh.

…I need to stop, but really, last one, here’s a bit where L considers whether to accept his hairdresser’s offer of some product for his hair:

"If I say no I could incur the wrath of someone who in one move could turn me from teenage boy into depressed lesbian."

It is definitely not all fun and games here, though – there are threeish major strands to the plot, and L’s relationship with Val is only one of them. Another has to do with L navigating his still-fairly-recent transition, from dealing with acquaintances who knew him before he was out to enduring the vagaries of interacting with the NHS while trans (it’s not great, though not as bad as you might expect). And then the last has to do with the Internet: like most of us, L is terminally online, and going to uni during COVID has probably exacerbated matters. He’s often checking tumblr or Discord chat while the other events of the game are progressing (these are rendered in Ink with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude), and there are extended sequences as he falls down rabbit-holes, watching interminable arguments about whether only TERFs talk about “bi lesbians” or seeing the control-freak mod of the Discord server, Gerstin, throw their weight around.

I have to admit that I found this last element the least compelling; by its nature, the online stuff largely lacks the grounding in detail that’s so engaging through the rest of the game, and it also goes on fairly long – admittedly, part of the point is that internet stuff in general, and Gerstin in particular, is a whole lot, but that point could have been made in a pacier way, I think. Gerstin’s version of friendship with L also lacks ambiguity; they’re clearly earmarked as toxic from the start, and things only escalate from there (seriously, they wind up endorsing eugenics!), so when you’re finally given the choice to de-friend them it’s cathartic but a very long time coming.

I wasn’t ever frustrated with L for not having kicked them to the kerb long ago, though, because the spine uniting all the disparate elements of this three-or-four-hour game is L’s crisis of confidence. The one bit of mechanics in the game, so far as I can tell, is that your assertiveness is tracked, and eventually slots you into one of two different endings. Early on, L understandably enough is a wallflower’s wallflower, barely able to nod hello or ask people to use his preferred pronouns. But through making real friends, getting laid, and getting a bit of perspective on his life, he (well, you) is given the opportunity to stand up for himself a little more. The choice-density in Sextuple L is fairly low, but almost always when you get one, you’ll see a more-passive and a less-passive option (and just those two). There are times when keeping your head down makes the most sense, but I suspect there’s a reason that the two main branches are labelled in the game files as “conf” and “bad”: almost always, picking the confident approach will make L’s life better, allowing you to cut loose from toxic relationships, assert your right to dignity, and make out with hot people. Perhaps this is a bit of wish-fulfillment – and speaking of, Val, who’s hot and nice and experienced, maybe comes off a bit overly-perfect – but I can’t say this bothered me at all: the way society works, especially for marginalized folks, standing up for yourself usually is going to get better results than just drifting by, and I found the arc of the “confident” ending heartwarming: L undergoes some bad stuff and comes out of it with scars, but also hard-won wisdom and hope. Not every trans story needs to, or should, end like this – but it’s kind of lovely to see one that does.

It’s long past time to bring this in for a landing, and by tradition this is the paragraph where I get to nitpicking. Besides the Discord stuff going on a bit (and Gerstin being the fucking worst), I suppose I have to gripe about the interface, which has you clicking after every couple of paragraphs to get the next bit of text (and if you click too many times, that can trigger a screen-wipe as you transition to the next passage). I loved the prose so much this bothered me much less than it should have, and there are a few places where it helps the punchline of a joke land with that much more force, but really this should probably have been reined in. There’s one sequence – the one that earns the “fatphobia” content warning – that unlike other times where L acts kind of shitty, goes textually unremarked-upon, which doesn’t feel great and could probably be sharpened. Oh, and there’s one typo I found: “right of passage” for “rite of passage”.

Of course, for a game of this length, having only one typo is amazingly clean, and that’s how I feel about Sextuple L’s flaws: sure, they’re there, and I suppose worth pointing out, but they sure didn’t reduce my enjoyment. This is my favorite game of the Comp so far; it’s fleet, human, and funny.

…oh, before I sign off, I said I’d come back to my theory on the sixth L, right? The easy answer is, er, L – as in the protagonist. But I’ve got another idea. Each of the game’s five acts is titled with one of the Ls: the fetish-focused opening is Latex, for example, running through the confrontational scenes in Leather, the consequences of the bloody, ill-advised hookup in Lipstick, engaging with L’s romantic feelings for Val (and the suffocating nature of your relationship with Gerstin) in Love, and in Lust, finally facing the world with open arms. What comes after all that? Life.

As my review of Dream of Silence indicates, I’m maybe not especially good at evaluating fan-fiction riffing on stuff I lack much direct experience with. Unlike with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve at least seen a bit of Dr. Who – I watched the Christopher Eccleston season of the rebooted show, and like three or four stories an ex showed me from the classic show – but it’s still a trivial percentage of a media franchise that’s been around for more than half a century at this point; if I’d seen only one season of Voyager and like three episodes of the original series, I’d feel on uncertain ground assessing how well a fan-game captured the Star Trek experience, and I’m in worse shape here since classic Dr. Who is also a quintessentially British phenomenon.

With that said, Dr. Who and the Dalek Super-Brain certainly seems like an authentic tribute to the show. The Daleks are presented lovingly, for one thing, with attractive 3D models and an endearing combination of ruthlessness and Self-Defeating Evil Overlord behavior. And the scenario, with its series of cliffhanger death-traps and fuzzily-explained time travel techno-babble, seems of a piece with what I know of the old series: after finding your time-ship blown off course, you’re kidnapped by the Daleks and your companion Bex is threatened with extermination if you don’t cough up the secrets of time travel to these tinpot Hitlers, after which you’ve got a chance to turn the tables through judicious application of the sonic screwdriver, logical paradoxes, and jury-rigged explosives.

This is all good clean fun, and if neither the narrative nor the prose ever rise above being workmanlike, well, I’m sure there were lots of weeks when Dr. Who was just phoning it in too. I did like the paradox bit – it’s set up as one of those classic 50s/60s scenarios where the protagonist tries to overload an android’s brain by spouting something nonsensical or self-contradictory, but here, after making the Dalek supercomputer consider one of the many paradoxes of time travel, the result isn’t to make it explode but rather to second-guess whether it truly understands time travel enough to build a working time machine from the info you’ve provided. But other than that, the companion is here to be rescued, the jaded leader of oppressed slaves is here to be inspired, and the Daleks are here to go down like punks – it all plays out exactly as you’d expect, which is the sign of a successful pastiche just as much as of a less-ambitious game.

The interface also contributes to the sense that there’s not much to do here. Things are purely choice-based, but with an opportunity to do a bit of navigation between different locations. While a nice bit of freedom in theory, in practice only one of the three or so rooms available at any given time will have anything you can usefully interact with, which makes the game feel emptier than it would if the choices were more restricted. Meanwhile, the visuals are pleasant but also led to a challenge or two, like the way a passage with various clickable links explaining potential upgrades for my screwdriver kept scrolling up and until I couldn’t actually reach the links anymore (this is the one real puzzle in the game, but fortunately it’s trivially solvable if you read at all carefully).

Speaking of the visuals, we need to address the elephant in the room, or rather the cantaloupes. From my admittedly small sample size, my sense is that Dr. Who is a relatively sexless show. So I experienced a bit of ludonarrative dissonance from the fact that almost the first graphic the game presented to me was a slightly-zoomed in shot of Bex’s chest, with most of her head cropped out of the frame and her zipper pulled down to reveal quite a lot of cleavage. The text itself doesn’t sexualize Bex, beyond the patriarchy-mandated trope of restricting her role to being menaced by aliens and having the plot explained to her, so I don’t think this is an intentional decision to try to make horny Dr. Who. The cleavage could just be because the author was looking for free or low-cost 3D models of sci-fi looking women, and maybe the cast from an off-brand Fallout sex game was all that was on offer; meanwhile, I think the cropping-out of her face was just due to how I had my browser window set up. Still, it made for an off-putting and in-your-face combination; if the first thing a game thrusts at me is boobs, I kinda expect it to be about boobs, and it’s a nice bonus if the person the boobs are attached to has a personality.

There are certain kinds of criticism that, while well-intentioned, nevertheless always bug me, and high on that list is I-wish-this-parser-game-had-been-a-choice-based-one. It can certainly be a legitimate reaction to a game that doesn’t leverage the unique affordances of the text parser, or has a clumsy interface that would be much smoother if the player could just click their way through it, but it sometimes can also just reflect essentialized views of what the two houses of contemporary IF, both alike in dignity, are all about: if a game is about feelings and relationships and people other than straight white men, well, wouldn’t it be more comfortable with the choice-based crowd, not stuck over here with all the medium-dry-goods puzzles? Well, perhaps, but perhaps shifting our expectations of what goes where is worth a bit of discomfort.

With all that as context, it hopefully conveys the power of my reaction to The Garbage of the Future to say that I really wished this choice game had been a parser one.

The minimalist, creepy premise isn’t the issue: the protagonist is a working stiff who’s driven a tanker trunk jammed full of supernaturally potent waste out to the woods to empty the tank where nobody else is around. This is a simple task that’s obviously replete with danger and vague, ominous implications, and the game’s prose does a good job playing up the nerve-wracking details of your errand, from the flickering of your temperamental flashlight to the sound of a threatening figure skittering through the mist. The exact nature of the toxin you’re dumping is never explained, nor are the motivations of whoever’s paying you, but my brain had no trouble filling in the blanks with horrifying possibilities.

No, the trouble is in the implementation. Performing the job requires reading a manual in the darkened truck-cab, picking up and repairing the hose from one compartment and tools from another compartment, as well as exploring your environs for useful equipment and a place to put the waste. The choice-based interface for doing all this is straightforward enough: objects you can interact with are highlighted, and clicking on one of them will usually pop up a sub-menu allowing you to use some standard commands (take, drop, open) or use an inventory item on them or navigate to an exit or some other, bespoke option. But in practice this can be rather overwhelming, like in this early location description (many later ones are even more complex):

Jake opens the glove box. Inside, a faint glow illuminates a flashlight and a manual.

The truck is unnervingly dark.

Bill says, “If you forget what to do, it’s explained in the manual.”

A distant groaning fills the air.

(Exits: Field, Path)

Jake, glove box, flashlight, manual, truck, Bill, field, and path are all highlighted, and in practice I found I was having a hard time keeping up with all my options. Navigation was similarly tricky; not all locations are reachable from all others, and figuring out which areas were connected to which other ones took a long time.

The core puzzle at the center of the game also feels like it leans into the system’s weaknesses. Futzing with the hose feels like it does in a parser game, for example – I definitely got confused trying to remember which end was which – except with more interface friction from all the clicking required, and a half-second screen-refresh delay that began feeling interminable. There’s also a ton of waiting – after I got the tanker draining, I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs while the gauge slowly ticked down, and reaching 0% required five solid minutes of clicking wait, with nothing much of interest happening in the meantime.

As a parser game, I think Garbage of the Future could work quite well – default actions and affordances would suffice for most of the machinery-manipulation portions of the puzzle, and moving round the small map would be much easier (it’s also quicker to repeat-slam the Z key and enter than keep clicking in different places on the screen). The fractal nature of attention in the prototypical parser system, where looking at one object may reveal several more to consider, would also help tier out the level of detail provided. As it is, I found my engagement in this creepy vignette was often undercut by interface woes, which is an awful shame given the creativity on offer; exploring the generous spread of achievements tracked by the game, and checking off the variety of different approaches and endings, would have made for a pleasant second hour with the game, but the thought of once again having to juggle a turn timer and click dozens of times to get through sequences I’d already explored was too daunting to surmount.

Fittingly for a game that’s structured as a series of repeating time loops, I am getting déjà vu writing this review, because I’m sadly going to have to start and end with a point I’ve made many many times before: if you are planning on putting a game in the Comp, especially if it’s a parser game, especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game, and especially especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game relying on a bunch of nonstandard commands and mechanics, you need beta testers to put the thing through its paces. Traffic has some clever ideas and an engaging premise, but as it currently exists I think the only options for experiencing it are “type in the walkthrough” and “tear out a tuft of your own hair every five minutes for two hours, at which point you’ll probably be irrevocably stuck maybe halfway through.” I’d definitely recommend the first experience over the latter – even for those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to be dealing with the incipience of male-pattern baldness – but even better would be playing a hoped-for post-Comp release that improves the clueing and implementation so that its clear potential can be realized.

Part of that potential is the comedy of the setup. Much like Turn Right, this is a game about getting across an intersection; unlike Turn Right, this time you’re a pedestrian (yay), and the risk of being run over is very high (eek – the blurb should probably have a content warning for this), but you’re carrying a weird science gizmo that allows you to rewind the clock and hop into other people’s bodies (er?). With a little experimentation, you learn that by looking at particular people in the short time available to you before you get pasted, you can queue up targets for your Quantum-Leap-y ability, at which point you’ve got a short window to try to change things so as to avoid the accident – prevent the phone-addicted parent from pushing her baby stroller into the road, reset the wonky traffic-light controller system, deescalate a passenger’s mental health crisis that will lead to the bus getting stranded in the middle of the intersection. If you fail, no big deal, you can always try again, albeit at the cost of another bone-crunching death to reset the timeline.

I love this premise; it’s a clever way of making a puzzle of, and lightly skewering, the absurdities of everyday life, while getting around the artificiality of letting the player have infinite time to prevent a traffic accident that clearly has to happen within a few seconds. And making the protagonist be a sad-sack postdoc just adds to the comedy, while the drily understated prose gives the slapstick room to breathe. Unfortunately, to switch transportation metaphors, things quickly go off the rails.

There are two main issues I experienced that undermined the puzzles – and this is an entirely puzzle-focused work. First, you’ve got your implementation challenges. There were many times when I knew what I had to do, but struggled to communicate this knowledge to the parser. Take the bus scenario: to prevent the old lady from melting down, obviously you’d want to let her take your seat rather than being forced to stand. But STAND doesn’t work (someone else takes the seat out from under you), and ASK/TELL WOMAN ABOUT SEAT just gets a generic response indicating the conversational topic isn’t recognized. I had to go to the walkthrough to learn that I had to GIVE SEAT TO WOMAN, which I suppose is idiomatically reasonable but wouldn’t be intuitive to anyone familiar with parser IF conventions; really, if the player types any of these things it’s clear they’ve solved the puzzle and they should be accepted.

Then there are the puzzles that aren’t sufficiently clued. Some of these might just be places where I was being thick: there’s a math puzzle that I feel like might be underdetermined, such that answers other than the one the game is looking for should also be valid, but I admit I could be wrong about that since it’s a long time since I’ve solved this kind of problem. But in the late game, there’s a puzzle that can only be solved by intuiting the presence of an undescribed item (Spoiler - click to show)(the bed, in the sequence with Sarah – adding insult to injury, the stuffed animals, which are mentioned, aren’t implemented), and after you resolve the initial trio of challenges you’re thrown into a second that requires you to maneuver two different cars to block the progress of a police cruiser, which is described so confusingly that even the walkthrough couldn’t get me unstuck, requiring a restart.

And finally there’s the puzzle that gates off the real ending from the premature one, which requires both reading the author’s mind AND wrestling with atypical syntax (Spoiler - click to show)(the game very clearly indicates that looking at people is what triggers the body-hopping, so THINK ABOUT SARAH is completely unmotivated and not a command most parser-players would think to try; and after that we’ve got BREAK PACKAGE rather than OPENing it, which gives a discouraging result, and BARK TWICE being mandatory when BARKing on subsequent turns would be more natural). Admittedly, said “real ending” is still a shaggy dog story, but the game is much more satisfying with it than without it so gating it with the aggressiveness with which you’d conceal an Easter Egg is a bad design choice, to my mind.

But again, I don’t think this was a design choice: like everything else I’ve complained about, I think it’s just a lack of testing – there aren’t any credited that I could see, at least, while the blurb describes these extra-spicy puzzles as “mild”, and many of these issues are ones that I think would be easily corrected if the author had the advantage of seeing how people try to grapple with the game. Again, this is an awful shame because Traffic deserves to be its best self; with its many rough edges thoroughly sanded down, I could easily see myself recommending this game to folks in the mood for a clever yet grounded comedy game, so I very much hope to see a post-Comp release.

I often like IF collaborations quite a lot – Cragne Manor ranks quite high on my all-time favorites list – but they often present a tradeoff: when you’ve got a bunch of authors bringing just their one or two best ideas to the party, the novelty and energy can be infectious, but at the same time, that diversity can fray at the unity of a piece, reducing the impact that any particular element might have on the work as a whole and cramming in too many diverse themes to fully cohere. That’s why reading the blurb for A Death in Hyperspace made me a bit apprehensive: having ten authors work on a game that only lasts about an hour seems like it could be a recipe for chaos. Once I started playing, I was surprised to find that wasn’t at all the case – this tale of a spaceship’s AI investigating the death of its captain maintains a very consistent tone and approach while putting a novel spin on the sci-fi whodunnit genre. If anything, I actually found myself wishing for a bit more of the aforementioned chaos.

After an introduction establishes the murder and lays out the interface, you’re given a roster of about a dozen crew and passengers and access to the various rooms within you where they may be found, and told how investigation proceeds: encountering each character allows to engage in dialogue with them, including asking standardized questions getting to motive, alibi, and anything suspicious they might have seen; the initial conversation also unlocks a piece of evidence that can be found elsewhere on the ship and which, when found, will enable you to further corroborate or undermine the testimony you get in future conversations. Meanwhile, a somewhat-unintuitive “murder board” interface lets you lay out your assessments of how credible each person’s story is, ultimately allowing you to end the game once you’ve made a critical mass of decisions.

It’s easy to see how the structure of the game was created to support collaboration: it appears that the other authors all came up with a character and were responsible for writing the conversations with them, while the organizer or organizers were responsible for the connective tissue. This organizational scheme does allow the various pieces to be stitched together cleanly, but it does mean that there isn’t as much interaction between them as you might expect: often, I’d be having a potentially-incriminating conversation with one suspect while three others were standing right there, with no acknowledgment of the awkward circumstances. It also slowed down an opening that I already found quite slowly-paced: I felt like I had to read the crew roster before jumping into interrogations in order to understand who I was talking to and what they might say about their fellows, but it appears that the roster entries were written to a common format, which made me feel like I was listening to a dozen people tell me about their DnD characters one after another.

Because the thing is, I mostly found the characters dull. They all have one or two interesting sci-fi-y characteristics – there are a couple different kinds of aliens, there’s a cyborg, someone who’s hallucinating while in the throes of hyperspace madness – but given that the only experience of them the game offers is interrogation by a ship’s computer that’s read too many murder-mysteries, there isn’t much room for details of personality to come through in anything but a schematic way. Several of them are also explicitly designated as minimally-interactive red herrings, too, and given that I had a hard time keeping track of a large cast boasting generally-forgettable names (look, I’m not 12 any longer, I’m not going to be able to remember which one is “Until Tomorrow” vs. “Lament Tynes” vs. “Keen Oculus”; at least there are a couple, like “VX2s-K3r BÆSDF”, that are memorably awful) that meant I spent a lot of time clicking on people, finding they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say, and clicking out.

This sense of lassitude is exacerbated by the way the game encourages lawnmowering. You need to loop through every location at least two or three times, since the pieces of “evidence” aren’t findable until you’ve met the appropriate character, at which point you need to loop back for a follow-up conversation, but it’s worse than that because characters can move around. You can track down specific people through the roster feature, but since that means you might miss evidence, it felt like the game was encouraging me to play it by mechanically running through each location and talking to each character over and over until I’d exhausted the content. The conversational structure is also fairly rigid from one character to the next, with few interesting choices to engage the player: many reduce to either behaving normally and asking direct questions, or indulging your murderino streak and wildly leaping to accuse suspects just to see how they’ll react.

Indeed, investigation isn’t that satisfying either; I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is one of those quantum mysteries where every suspect potentially did it or maybe no one did. There are few hard clues to go on (there’s no sign of foul play on the body, and you automatically decline the doctor’s offer to do an autopsy), with your interrogations mostly turning up shifty backstory elements rather than actual evidence; meanwhile, the connection between the “clues” you find and their impacts often felt abstract to me (one of them was a teddy bear that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything?) Beyond that, the game’s promise of 11 different endings makes it seem likely that they’re all like the one I saw, which constructed a plausible-seeming case for why the suspect I picked might have done it – unfortunately, because the game’s save feature isn’t included in the sidebar but rather nested underneath a game menu link that I didn’t think to return to after toggling some initial settings, I didn’t make a save allowing me to test this theory, though regardless it does seem like at least one ending requires you to do a full replay of the game.

For all this griping, there were a few specific elements I definitely thought worked; the one character who had a sense of humor was actually quite funny to me (though I’m not sure it was a great idea to have the single Black person in the cast speak with an accent called out with nonstandard spelling and punctuation). Pearl, the ship’s AI, is also appealingly keen to find the captain’s killer. If the game had provided characters whose voices similarly took up more space, and loosened up its structure to allow for deeper subplots or more involved investigative tracks, it would probably have made A Death in Hyperspace a woolier, more awkward beast – but one that I think I would have liked far more than the overly-sterile version that we got.

Mike, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a very common name in the U.S., so much so that in my elementary school class of 25, I was one of four Mikes – even my sister would call me “Russo.” So I suppose I should have been quicker on the uptake when Final Call, a choice-based escape-room-inspired scenario jumping off from a casino heist gone wrong, seemed to be getting confused about who was saying what to whom. The protagonist – whom I’d naturally enough dubbed Mike since one of the first screens in the game asks you to input your name – is a down-on-his-luck con artist getting ready to scam the penny slots via a smuggled-in magnet; he spends the introduction on the phone, going over the details of the plan with his partner in crime to make sure they’re ready to do what needs to be done. Except sometimes instead of my partner telling me “Mike, you need to do XYZ”, it seemed like my internal monologue was referring to myself in the third person, saying stuff like “Mike said it would be easy.” Shamefully, I was well past the game’s first-act twist, which sees the protagonist kidnapped and abandoned in a creepy lock-and-trap-filled asylum, before I realized oh wait, these aren’t bugs, I just inadvertently Fight Clubbed myself.

Er, spoilers.

Unlike with the Curse, though, where something vaguely similar happened to make my experience idiosyncratic, I think I can reconstruct what a more typical playthrough would look like. Such a player would probably enjoy the clean interface, which adds a helpful sidebar keeping track of the inventory items and clues you’ve found to the typical options-presented-in-blue-text of the main window, as well as nicely-chosen photos with a creepy filter illustrating the abandoned facility you’re trying to escape. They’d probably wince slightly at the prose, which gets the job done but is weighed down by omnipresent typos and odd leaps:

"The door creaks open. It’s just dusty and messy room. Looks like it could have belonged to a pair of twins, or maybe close friends."

They’d likely find the puzzles straightforward – there’s only one or two of them, made relatively simple to solve by the aforementioned helpful interface; even if the steps the protagonist takes occasionally seem unmotivated and hard to predict, well, you’re just clicking through all the options available to you. I suspect they’d be rather conflicted about the copious flashbacks – unlike the thin context escape-room games typically provide, Final Call offers a bunch of scenes fleshing out the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend Roxy as well as with other-Mike, and also digs into the pathologies underlying his failures as a partner to both and the pathologies that drive him. But the consistently lackluster writing, lack of direct connection between this material and the main action, and inexplicable plot twists (seriously, who could have possibly paid other-Mike a boatload of money to set us up?) might make our idealized player think the game would be more focused without all this.

So yeah I noticed all of that stuff, but I was more excited about building out my own version of the story where other-Mike was a facet of the protagonist’s personality, an angel or demon on my shoulder given increased reality by the omnipresent “hangovers” and “headaches” that plague the primary identity. As I got to the end, I figured out how to reconcile the various narrative strands that seemed to pull in different directions: other-Mike, you see, had enough separation to recognize that the compulsive way we keep returning to high-risk, low-reward behavior and chronic substance abuse was pushing Roxy away; to salvage matters, he used our meager savings to hire some people to scare us straight, make us think our criminal ways were going to get us killed, and allow us to escape a reformed man ready to walk the straight and narrow. God bless, other-Mike: you’re the very best part of me.

It’s been well said that America and the U.K. are two countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but interestingly, you could make the same observation about our supposedly-common language. Take, for example, “left turn”, a simple phrase we Yanks commonly use to indicate a sudden, veering shift in the way things are going. It’s one I deploy without thinking, but now I’ve realized that it must make no sense at all to our fancier-accented cousins, for whom the left turn is a trivially-executed move while it’s the right turn that’s the stuff of nightmares.

This revelation comes courtesy, of course, of Turn Right, an Adventuron game that is to vehicular paralysis as Dubliners is to the emotional and existential varieties. After a long day, you’ve stopped off to pick up some groceries, and just need to pull out of the parking lot for the short drive home. But as the attractively-illustrated overhead map reveals, that means crossing like four different lanes of traffic (there’s something confusing happening with an off-screen roundabout that means you need to get to the farthest lane), and getting a hole in the rush-hour traffic that wide is akin to winning the jackpot on a slot machine.

The gameplay of course isn’t what carries a piece like this – typing TURN RIGHT over and over isn’t intrinsically engaging – but fortunately the author’s got comedy chops to spare. The jokes come in two distinct registers: there’s dry understatement, like the opening screen’s declaration that “this game is about a driving manoeuvre made in the UK,” which left me howling, or the surely-intentional way that the helpful here’s-everything-you-Americans-need-to-know-about-driving-in-Britain glossary casually drops the phrase “multi-carriageway” into the one of the definition as though that’s a meaningful sequence of words. Or, perhaps best of all, take this description of one of the traffic lanes:

The far lane on the opposite side of the road is the one you take if you want to take either the first or second exit from the first roundabout, or the third exit from the first roundabout onto the second roundabout and then the first exit from the second roundabout. The last of these options is your route home, and so you want to turn into that lane.

If your brains aren’t melting out your ears at the end of that, you’re made of sterner stuff than me.

Then there’s the more slapstick flavor of humor, as exasperating event after exasperating event prevent you from getting into gear, achieving “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake fifteen times” levels of sublimity. I won’t spoil the best gags here, since there are some great ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I particularly liked the sequence with the grocery store manager), but suffice to say they substantially enliven what could have been a dully repetitive scenario.

Also helping relieve potential tedium is the game’s deep implementation; I thought of a bunch of logical and not-so-logical commands, from turning on the radio to waving at oncoming cars, and the game handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. The author even anticipated my attempts to nope right out of Turn Right’s Kobayashi Maru scenario by abandoning my car and walking home, or just stopping off at the neighboring pub for a couple of hours until traffic lightened up. Sure, this isn’t a game that will change your life or make you see things differently than before you played it – unless for some reason you’re unaware that driving is awful – and there are one or two small dud notes (the disappearing clown was a bit too silly for me, especially the second time he showed up) but I am always happy to see a solid gag executed at such an impressive level.

(Speaking of, the joke with which I opened this review was lifted wholesale from Eddie Izzard.)