Reviews by Mike Russo

The legends surrounding King Arthur loomed large to the medieval mind: as the so-called “matter of Britain”, they made up one of the three primary literary canons of the Christian world, using an idealized world of chivalry to reflect on humanity’s weaknesses and the pursuit of the divine. Today, of course, the social milieu of the original stories is quite foreign to us, but there’s still a fascination in the tragic fall of Camelot, a mythic frisson from coming close to a strand of culture that’s so old, and meant so much. So I was excited to learn that the eponymous blade in Return of the Sword is Excalibur; your nameless protagonist is tasked with recovering it and returning it to the Lady of the Lake, tying off a loose end in (some versions of) the myths and participating in the cycle of death and renewal to which they allude.

I was less excited that I didn’t learn this from the blurb or intro text of the game, though, but rather by reading an unprepossessing letter that was in my starting inventory; you need to check out the optional lore documents to reveal that the artifact you’d been commissioned to find for the batty coot who hired you is fricking Excalibur! Said coot, the memorably-named Jedediah Strangeblossom, gives you the job because you did a solid for his friend, who’s got the still more implausible name Ezekial Throgmeister: this, I think, is a reference to the author’s 2022 IF Comp entry, The Alchemist, and in fact Return of the Sword shares more than a few similarities to that and other games he’s made. It’s written in the author’s custom system, for one thing – it’s retro-looking but fairly solid, with a robust parser, some nice though unnecessary bells and whistles like custom macros, and one longstanding foible which is that you need to take items out of containers before you can examine or otherwise interact with them. For another, it boasts a magic system that seems a close cousin of the one from 2023’s Have Orb, Will Travel, aping not just the memorize-from-spellbook-then-cast system but even the names of particular spells. The structure also echoes the hub-and-spokes designs of those other games – here there’s an underground chamber with a dial that allows you to pick one of five different standard adventure-game settings to teleport to (a castle, a cave, a church…) once you unlock each with a different plot-token coin. And the puzzles, which are a mix of codes, object manipulation, and spell-casting, are all old-school in design but vary from bluntly telegraphed to fiendishly recondite, just as in those previous entries in the loose series.

While I generally had a good time with the Alchemist, and thought there were some high points in Have Orb, Will Travel, Return of the Sword worked less well for me. Some of this, I think, could just be familiarity breeding contempt – there’s a charm in the author’s sensibility, but it’s not my favorite aesthetic, and even for those who enjoy this stuff more, surely just referencing Adventure’s Witt’s End without an accompanying joke or subversion feels pretty stale. Some of it could be the puzzle design, which wrong-footed me enough times – as with the pin that’s clearly meant to attach two wheels, but which won’t work unless you use trial and error to rotate the wheel into the single configuration where it’ll fit, with no clues provided or even an indication of what exactly is going wrong – that I probably wound up overusing the hint system even for solvable conundrums. And some of it is surely due to the game’s general unpolished and loosely-designed vibe: there are unmarked exits, parser oddities I don’t remember in the author’s previous games (UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY indicates it doesn’t fit, but simply UNLOCK DOOR opens it up in a jiffy), two of the four spells in your spellbook appear to be useless, and there’s a room that includes an “escritore” as part of its furnishings but of course no such thing is implemented, it’s just a typo for “escritoire.”

The biggest issue I had with it, though, is the way it squanders what could have been a compelling, elegiac premise. The cavalierness indicated by putting the backstory in a missable infodump continues to the game’s kitchen-sink fantasy milieu: besides the aforementioned Colossal Cave easter egg, you find a complex electronic scale system in a clergyman’s vestry, solve a riddle straight out of Tolkein, and have as your key nemesis not Mordred or Morgana, but instead a Hammer Films vampire. Far from being an Arthurian game, that’s just one of a dozen flavors sprinkled over the staid gameplay, with little concern for cohesion apparent anywhere. The overall effect is of an overcaffeinated teenager running a marathon DnD game for their friends – they’ve long since outpaced their prep, so now they’re just throwing any nerdy stuff they can think of into the pot. In fairness, that’s not too far off of how the Arthur stories got their start, with a variety of authors taking the basic story framework and adding various bits of previously-independent legends to create enough unmotivated crossovers, dubious retcons, and long-delayed sequels to rival the MCU. But even at their bouillabaissiest, effective writers in that tradition stuck to the key themes: this is just a mishmash, and the puzzles aren’t enough to save such a muddled narrative.

Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably . But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed. But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed.

I am, generally speaking, an optimist. Some of that’s just the fruit of being born with a lot of privilege and a brain that knows what to do with serotonin, I suppose, but it’s also by choice: many years ago I came across a bit of Karl Popper arguing that nobody knows what the future will bring, or what will move it one direction rather than another, so we have an obligation to hope for a better world and act as though the little things each of us can do might bring that hope a bit closer to reality. That was persuasive to me and so I try to live into it, but I’ll confess that some days it’s harder than others, like for example the end of Supreme Court terms and when I play a Perplexity game.

I’ve been reviewing games using this engine since 2021 – this is the fourth, by my count – and while the pitch for a parser system that allows the player to use natural language input remains compelling, the reality is still so stubbornly far from the promise that reader, I begin to despair. Like you’re told your goal here is to order lunch at a diner for you and your vegetarian son, but when you say to the maître d’ “I would like to get some lunch,” the game butts in to say “I don’t know the words: lunch.” That’s small beans compared to this exchange with the waiter, though (the question marks are the prompts for player input):

?:my son is vegetarian

my son is not veggie

?:my son is veggie

I don’t know the words: veggie

?:my son does not eat meat

I don’t know the words: eat

Trying to couch your input as regular English sentences simply does not work – even as simple a phrase as ORDER TOMATO SOUP makes the parser throw up its hands in despair. What does work is single-word input: typing TABLE, MENU, SOUP to indicate what you want, which of course any existing parser engine under the sun can manage. It’s hard to hold this against the system, truly – natural language processing is quite difficult, from what I understand! But still, pushing the player to try to use complete sentences sets expectations the game can’t come close to living up to, while the blurb’s promise that it’s a good way for English learners to practice their language skills feels frankly irresponsible. Judged as a game, meanwhile, there’s basically nothing here – the only thing resembling interest is that you have a terrible waiter who needs too be reminded to hand you a menu and then prompted to tell you the specials – with no details to speak of and the world’s most basic prose.

In my previous reviews of Perplexity games, I’ve generally wrapped up saying some variation of “hopefully the system’s authors will keep fine-tuning things so it works the way it’s advertised to do,” but after three years, it’s hard for me to see any improvement on this front (at least the lag that I remember afflicting the earlier games appears to be a thing of the past). Perhaps it might be time to bring this experiment to an end? That’s maybe an unfair sentiment – and one certainly biased by the fact that the game doesn’t appear to end, so I spent a final ten minutes frustratedly typing BYE and LEAVE and I’M GOING and EXIT to the maître d’ who kept asking how he could help me today over and over like a robot – and I’d love to be proved wrong! But I’m not optimistic.

Oh, and the cover image is an AI-generated picture with myriad issues – beyond the standard-issue nightmare fingers, there are light fixtures hanging off of others, a double-handled coffee mug, an olive oil bottle standing in for wine, and a robot with only one eyebrow – and no attribution. Can we please stop doing this?

Quick, close your eyes. Now imagine the most prototypical adventure game puzzle you can think of – not any specific iconic one from the classics of yesteryear, nor the dreary ones you’ve done a million times like the get-the-key-out-of-the-keyhole bit, just the Platonic ideal of a classic text adventure puzzle. Once you’ve got it, you can open those eyes (how have you been reading this?)

This exercise doesn’t admit of wrong answers, of course, but I’d submit that there’s a single most-right one: there’s a monkey, and you need to give him a banana so he’ll give you his wrench. I don’t think I’ve encountered this specific scenario presented quite so baldly before, but when I ran across it in Mystery Isles, I recognized its totemic power. And in fact the whole game is like this, in its stripped-down, old-school-yet-friendly glory: you could call it Text Adventure: the Text Adventure and wouldn’t be far off. You’re marooned on a desert island, you see, and to escape you’ll need to construct a makeshift torch, unearth pirate treasure, climb a tree, and offer up multiple food items as bribes (it’s not just the monkey); it’s all presented in breezy, unadorned prose and will either take you forever – because there are a couple of puzzles that are real head-scratchers – or ten minutes, and fortunately there’s a hint function included so you can choose your own adventure on that front.

Much as I enjoy ParserComp as a space for experimentation, it’s also clearly a place to play the hits. Even given its limited ambitions, though, Mystery Isles could have stood for several additional rounds of polish, because the implementation is fairly rough. Beyond the aforementioned underclued puzzles – there’s a bit where hitting a big rock with a little rock turns the little one into a makeshift axe, which is not how flint-knapping works, and the business of how exactly you’re meant to get the banana out of its tree doesn’t give much for the player to go on, not even confirming the existence of actual bananas in said tree – there are plenty of niggles and small bugs. Items don’t always disappear from the inventory once used, once you solve a puzzle to obtain an object you might need to resolve it to pick them up again should you drop them, there’s a spurious north exit mentioned in the jungle description, and the hint function is welcome but gets a bit confused towards the end (Spoiler - click to show)(it kept wanting me to relight the torch after I’d already obtained the map, which I believe at that point was both useless and impossible).

This is a short game, so even game-breaking bugs are quick to recover from, at least, but the lack of any credited testers really shows: there is no parser game so simple that it can be credibly released without independent beta testing, in my experience. There’s a lighthearted simplicity to Mystery Isles, and a certain ramshackleness can be part of the charm of such things – only as I’m writing this am I wondering about the plural in the title, since there’s just the one as far as I could see – but classic premises and design don’t need to be matched by creaky implementation.

One of the things that I really look forward to in ParserComp is seeing games that try to come up with different gameplay mechanics for the hoary old parser interface, because even almost 50 years on from Adventure, there’s still plenty of fertile ground to be plowed. PARANOIA’s twist is so clever yet so well-suited to its format that it feels like someone must have tried it before, but as far as I know this is a real innovation: taking the meticulous investigation of a fractally-detailed environment and making it into the core gameplay, rather than just a means to the end of solving medium-dry-good puzzles, by challenging the player to notice small (and not-so-small) discrepancies – it’s an interactive version of those puzzles where you’re supposed to find three differences in a pair of seemingly-identical images, livened up with impeccably-timed comedy bits. If there’s not much plot to speak of and the instructions could use some sharpening, those are minor blips indeed compared to what it gets right.

Might as well start with the plot, so we can get that out of the way: it’s your basic Portal setup, as you’re participating in an experimental scenario whose contours are at first unclear. After you’re given a chance to poke and prod at your sparse surroundings – a vase of flowers, some wall art, a couple pieces of simple furniture – you’re instructed to push a particular button, and then the fun begins. The lights go out, the scientist’s flunkies scatter around changing some key detail about the room – or perhaps they don’t. And you need to use your five senses and your memory (there’s no undo or transcript feature available, and the scrollback window clears for each round) to suss out what, if anything, is now different.

Sometimes it’s very easy, obvious just from seeing the updated room description print out, but sometimes it takes close, careful investigation to identify the change, and the game does a great job of milking the disjunction between those two modes for comedy: a couple of times, I got a couple of rounds in a row where nothing changed, which of course occasions the most thorough poking and prodding, and self-doubt before you hit the all-clear button, only to be greeted with a ridiculously over-the-top shift that had me burst out laughing. I won’t spoil any of them, but there are some great gags here that go beyond just changing the physical layout of the room and mess with the player’s expectations in really entertaining ways. Being funny is rewarding on its own, of course, but these eruptions of hilarity also help with the pacing, since they usually provide an easy win – you need to get 14 guesses in a row right to achieve victory – or at least switch up the steps required to solve the round, and help motivate the player to press on to see what might happen next.

My only real quibble here is that it took me a little while to get into a groove with the game, which I think could be streamlined. In particular, I found the opening instructions ambiguous about whether I was meant to be comparing each round with the original state of the room, or to how the room looked in the round that came before. It’s the former, which for good or ill keeps the madness from escalating too far, but I wasn’t sure at first, and combined with the counterintuitive way the buttons are labeled – the green button means there is a change and the red one means there isn’t, which makes sense from a yes/no perspective, but my brain interpreted green as “everything’s fine” and red as “watch out, something’s changed.” After a couple of restarts it all became second nature, but slightly clearer framing might have helped me get to the good stuff quicker. Oh, and the winning menu asks if you want to UNDO, like always, but of course UNDO is disabled. But those are my only bits of feedback – this is a unique, engaging piece of IF unlike anything you’ve played before, and well worth the fifteen minutes or half hour it takes to win. So long as ParserComp keeps turning up these kinds of gems, long may it continue.

I’ve talked before about the culture shock that ParserComp can sometimes engender, sitting awkwardly as it does between the IF community’s norms of polished games made with an expectation of substantive feedback, and a more laissez-faire itch.io jam vibe where hacking something together in a couple of days is a praiseworthy act of solidarity and an opportunity to develop some new technical and design skills. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about either of these approaches, of course, but it can make the job of a reviewer somewhat awkward, especially since I’m very much of the write-a-couple-hundred-words-minimum school. Alphabet City’s blurb makes no bones about the fact that it represents its author’s very first steps with Inform, with some of its features included more to provide programming practice than for design reasons. In its favor, it boasts a gritty, underexplored setting (the early-80s NYC demimonde) and an endearing ambition, but it’s also got a long, long way to go before it could even be considered an alpha.

I assume the author is aware that there are a myriad of issues that would need to be addressed before the game could be considered ready for release – if indeed that’s the goal, and this isn’t meant to just be a learning exercise (nothing wrong with that!) So I won’t belabor the negatives; some are flagged in the attached transcript, but in brief, the combat and scoring systems both feel superfluous and arbitrary; scenery objects are often under-implemented, completely missing, and/or incorrectly marked as takeable (my inventory by the end included “the air in the Mudd Club”, “a motorcycle throttle”, “a pile of puke”, “a folding fixed in place three legged stool”, and “a Squeegee kid” as well as “a panhandler”); many conversations and other interactions are triggered bottom-lined when you simply examine a person or item; the game’s senses of place (a George Washington Bridge overpass is immediate adjacent to your Alphabet City apartment, which is in the Lower East Side; going south from the Fort Lee area somehow gets you to the Triboro Bridge) and time (despite being set in 1982, there’s a “thanks, Giuliani!” joke) are often loosey-goosey; there are omnipresent disambiguation issues; and the final (and only) puzzle is of the read-the-author’s-mind variety (Spoiler - click to show)(you have to LOVE JAYNE; more concrete attempts to HUG or KISS her, much less talking to her first to establish consent, go unacknowledged). And the fact that this is notionally a story about addiction, dependence, and relationship trauma makes the jank even more farcical, because Alphabet City in its current form is nowhere near up to the task of engaging with such weighty themes.

But! Judged as a couple days of work by someone brand new to Inform, what’s here is by no means bad. Lots of these issues are things that bedevil experienced authors, or would be smoothed out with a modicum of testing, and there’s even a certain charm to a few places where the game’s reach exceeds its grasp (there’s a subway ride that progresses by moving from one location to the next, rather than by waiting for time to pass, which is clearly just the fruit of not knowing how the rules for that work but made me smile regardless). And I’m all for more games with grounded milieus; okay, sometimes the grunginess here is a little much, but give me an incompletely-renamed Max’s Kansas City over a generic spaceship any day. The writing, even in its rough form, is also sometimes cleverer than it appears, like X ME telling the player that you’re “young, dumb, and full of romantic aspirations.” So as I’ve said before about similar games: as a competition entry, this is a disaster, as a thrown-together jam entry, it’s potentially promising, and while I can’t recommend playing it in its current form, I’m definitely curious to see where the author might be going next.

In his writings on so-called “entheogens” – hallucinogenic drugs used for religious purposes – scholar Huston Smith proposed a three-part model for analyzing the experience of those using them: set, setting, and drug. “Set” is more or less shorthand for mindset, the expectations and beliefs a particular person brings with them, which obviously enough shape how things play out, while the specific characteristics of the precise hallucinogen on offer similarly has a clear impact on what the experience will be. “Setting” here signifies the ephemeral details of the particular context in which the drug is taken: is it night or morning? What nearby objects might attract the user’s attention? Who is the friend or friends there to keep an eye on things? For whatever reason, this last element always struck me as the most elusive – while the first and last factor are reducible to psychology and chemistry, the middle one partakes of alchemy: the same exact person could try the same exact drug, but have a radically different experience from one time to the next based on something as small as the color of the drapes.

I’m not necessarily saying that playing IF is like taking psychedelics, but the model comes to mind because I suspect my response to The Fountain would have been entirely different had its cover art been different. The blurb, which is surely a central part of the setting, nicely conveys what the game offers: a low-key fantastical environment through which the player can wander while soaking up the peaceful atmosphere. But the art conveys how that’s going to be done, presenting an aesthetic that’s Thomas Kinkade by way of Midjourney – for the former, see the garish, over-saturated colors, for the latter, see the dinghy that’s tied up to the underwater part of a piling or the chaotic pattern of ripples on the lake. Without that visual prompt, I suspect I would have enjoyed this well-meaning game a lot more; with it, though, I found myself getting undeservingly irritated by its sometimes-schmaltzy prose and thin implementation.

The writing issue is the biggest one because the game is more or less a walking simulator: over the ten minute or so run-time, by far the thing you spend the most time doing is looking at scenery. There are a few actions required of the player – you need to cross a lake on a boat, there’s some limited interactivity allowing you to bottle some water from the eponymous fountain, and at one point progression is blocked until you realize one location has an unmentioned exit, though I wasn’t sure whether this was a puzzle or an oversight. And beyond looking around, you can better appreciate the atmosphere via LISTEN, BREATHE, and MEDITATE. But there’s not much to the gameplay, and as far as I can tell the responses to these latter verbs are identical no matter where you go.

So looking at stuff is where the game is at, which is fine by me: I’ve played plenty of similarly-structured games, and it’s an approach well suited to the parser format. But this is a structure that lives or dies by the quality of the writing; absent deep lore or a characterized protagonist with a backstory to peel back, the only reward the game has to offer is descriptive prose, and sadly I found it just wasn’t up to snuff. Here’s X ME, for example:

"You see yourself as a tranquil traveler, immersed in the serene beauty around you. Your presence here feels harmonious, a perfect blend with nature’s calm and gentle rhythm."

Here’s X SKY:

"The sky stretches wide, a vast canvas of soft azure blue. Wisps of white clouds drift lazily, their edges kissed by the golden sun. Birds soar gracefully, their calls echoing in the serene expanse. The air is fresh and crisp, carrying the faint scent of pine and wildflowers. Sunlight bathes the world in a warm glow, casting a gentle radiance that touches everything below. As you gaze upward, the endless sky fills you with a sense of peace and boundless possibility, inviting you to lose yourself in its tranquil beauty."

And one final excerpt, from when you make landfall on the island:

"You arrive at the island shore, it welcomes you with a blend of soft, golden sand and cool, green grass. Tall, shady trees line the edge, their leaves whispering in the gentle breeze. The water, clear and inviting, laps softly against the shore, creating a soothing rhythm. Sunlight filters through the branches, casting dappled patterns on the ground. Colorful wildflowers dot the landscape, their delicate fragrance mingling with the fresh scent of the lake. The shore invites quiet reflection, its beauty a tranquil retreat. Here, surrounded by nature’s serenity, you feel a deep sense of peace and connection to the world around you."

I can see what each of these excerpts is trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t think any of them work. Adjectivitis is the first problem, with the overuse of descriptive words undercutting the power of the prose and reducing the power of any individual image. It doesn’t help that the palette here is an extraordinarily limited one, too – “serene”, “tranquil”, “peace”, “harmony” are words that recur again and again, flattened by repetition, and even particular details, like sun dappling across a surface, are overused. The descriptions also commit the cardinal sin of commandeering the player to tell you exactly what you feel and think, which is risky enough with a characterized protagonist; with a main character who’s an empty vessel, this feels like a lack of respect for the player combined with a lack of confidence that the prose is accomplishing what it should. Taken together, these flaws make the writing aggressively kitschy, which doesn’t convey the restful vibe the game’s going for – and its wordy blandness kept me wondering whether the prose was also a product of an LLM tool.

Some implementation stumbles also took me out of the world. Beyond the unmarked exit, I ran into some trouble with the bottle (once I dropped it, trying to pick it back up triggered two messages saying I didn’t want to get it again), and in the second half of the game, I noticed a fair number of mentioned scenery items that weren’t actually implemented. It’s nothing too awful, but in a small game that’s aiming to create a meditative mood, the impact of snarls like these is magnified.

I’m aware I’m probably being too hard on an inoffensive game, and it’s important to acknowledge that this puzzleless, plotless structure is a high-wire act that makes small flaws more visible. And god knows we could all use more peace and a place of refuge these days. So if the cover art hadn’t pushed me to be on alert for the prose getting purple or robot-y, possibly I would have judged The Fountain to be anodyne enough – and I suppose there’s someone out there who might have had the opposite reaction (Thomas Kinkade sold a lot of paintings). Using the IF medium to present short, meditative experiences seems like a promising approach to me, so I’d definitely be up for more efforts in this vein in the future – I just hope I like the drapes better next time.

[This review was written and originally posted on the raif newsgroups at the conclusion of the 2002 IFComp]

A year or so ago, Electronic Arts launched an online game called Majestic; the premise was that players stumbled across some kind of conspiracy, and gathered clues by visiting web pages and talking to chat-bots. Sun and Moon is very much in the same mold, although it thankfully refrains from many of Majestic's excesses, which included leaving threatening messages on player's answering machines and presenting clues in awful full-motion video. Rather, Sun and Moon presents a traditional work of IF, involving such genre staples as a scavenger hunt and navigating a maze, without the intermediary of a parser. Instead, everything is spread across half a dozen web pages, with a few prompts for passwords the only time any typing is required.

As an attempt to push the boundaries of the medium, it works quite well, although, having run into the idea before, I didn't feel the same sense of novelty the author apparently did. Judged merely on the content of the game and not its format, however, Sun and Moon is less than original. There's a maze with a twist, a crossword puzzle, and a word-game; these three puzzles make up the bulk of the game. Now, I tend to dislike mazes and crosswords, and the word-game, which requires the player to guess a name based on a sentence (e.g. a testament makes me = William), had me gnashing my teeth in frustration. Granted, there were clever twists to the puzzles - the maze and the crossword ultimately give you two passwords, but you don't actually need to make it to the end of the maze or solve the crossword to figure them out. I gladly took the easy way out and did only the minimum required to finish the crossword (which basically consisted of looking up lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest), and felt an overwhelming sense of relief at not having to slog through the name word-game, which it turns out was optional. The most enjoyable gameplay moment I had was jumping around in the maze until I found the end by typing URLs in directly rather than following the links. With that said, it's my own fault I didn't enjoy the game much - for players with different sensibilities, Sun and Moon provides some devious fun in an original package. But a maze by any other name has me scrambling for the walkthrough just as quick.

(This is a review of the Spring Thing version of the game; I understand it's since been updated to address some of the implementation issues raised below)

Having just written a review of a Back Garden game that could have just as easily been entered into the Main Festival, I turn now to one that clearly belongs where it was entered. In some respects that’s simply an acknowledgment of what’s on offer here, which is a self-contained tutorial or demo section of a larger game targeted for release next year – and in many ways it’s an effective teaser, with the Taoism-inflected magic academy setting hitting a nice balance point between familiarity and novelty, and a backstory involving a dead parent and their mysterious former paramour that I’m curious to further unravel. In other respects, though, in its current incarnation Luna Gardens is recognizably a clumsy first draft in need of further refinement.

The game’s central mechanic is emblematic of this duality. Appropriately for the setting, you’re required to perform an act of divination to successfully complete the opening section, and the basic outline for how this is done is solid: first you identify particular mystically-significant symbols by exploring the eponymous grounds and finding especially resonant objects, at which point you can try to guess which are most relevant to your present circumstances and construct an oracular reading from combining the correct set of three. That’s a nice way of embedding a magic system in behavior that’s well-suited to a parser game – wandering around and examining everything you can see – and leveraging a game-y but reasonable enough structure to lend narrative weight to what’s mechanically speaking a basic combination-lock puzzle.

The difficulty is that every step of this process has significantly more friction than it should. Start with exploration: getting around the garden is a little tricky, I found, since neither of the two navigation options on offer is completely intuitive. Traditional compass navigation works well enough, but exits aren’t always clearly marked, and the frequent use of ordinal directions made it hard to build a mental map. There’s an alternative keyword-based system that allows you to simply jump to neighboring locations, but I also found it occasionally leading to strange results. For example, each location tends to list adjacent landmarks in a final paragraph at the end of the description, but upon being told “farther away, you see a dark gate rising in the air and a rusted light pole” I was surprised that EXPLORE GATE just resulted in the game saying “You can’t see The gate.” I’m pretty sure that capitalization means you knew what I was talking about! Admittedly, this is partly to do with the barriers cutting off the demo area from the larger game’s map, but it can still make for a frustrating experience.

Finding the symbols also had its speed-bumps. I like taking my time checking out scenery, and Luna Gardens does a good job of making the process rewarding by sprinkling hints of backstory and worldbuilding into object descriptions. But there are some rough patches in the implementation that sometimes led to me tearing out my hair:

> x trees

…You notice a carving someone made on one of the trees.

> x carving

You can’t see any such thing.

> x tree

You can’t see any such thing.

I was eventually able to guess that the right answer was X INITIALS, which isn’t totally unreasonable but still, the protagonist obviously knows what they’re looking at so why make life hard for the player? At least this is just an incidental detail; I needed a hint to complete the game because X OCEAN at a cliffside overlook was insufficient to reveal the relevant symbol, with X WAVES being required to progress (X WATER just got my “you can’t see any such thing).

As for the actual divination process itself, the syntax is a little under-clued – I thought at first I had to type DIVINE [SYMBOL 1] [SYMBOL 2] [SYMBOL 3], but actually you just enter DIVINE and then get a follow-up prompt where you pick the symbols you’d like to try. Further complicating matters, you don’t actually slot in the short-form name of a symbol – there’s a FIND command that tells you that, say, the connection symbol translates into “a link between two poles”, and that longer formulation is the one you need to write in, magnifying the scope for typos and confusion. Meanwhile, the actual answer of which symbols are the “right” ones that trigger the end of the game is underclued – there’s a FORECAST hint command that gives you a strong prod in the right direction, but there aren’t really any diegetic prompts to help you avoid simple trial-and-error, so far as I could tell.

The good news is that the author’s indicated that the final game will be redone and written in Gruescript, rather than Inform, which strikes me as a smart idea – using that choice-based interface will remove some of the ambiguities and confusions around navigation and identifying relevant nouns, while giving more space for the prose’s wry mix of mysticism and observational humor.

(I haven’t mentioned the writing yet, but while it’s occasionally a bit convoluted due to complex syntax and the use of the passive voice, I generally liked it! Here’s a matter-of-fact bit of landscape description:

"A grove of trees forms a circle in the middle of this garden and shield from the outside world the bench you like to nap on in-between classes."

Or a later bit:

"In fact, the only things resting around here are students reaching the end of their wits as they journey through textbooks, dry lectures, and someone’s bright idea of putting everything on campus far away from each other.")

A clickable interface would also make the divination system more manageable, and generally reduce friction across the board. Hopefully the feedback from this and other reviews will help inform the future, final release of Luna Gardens, since there’s definitely enough promising elements here to make me look forward to it.

(This is a review of the Twine version of The Kuolema, as entered in Spring Thing 2024, followed by a review of the Spring Thing 2023 Google Forms version)

A year and three weeks ago, I said:

"even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking '[the Kuolema] would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine'."

It works just as well, and is smoother, in Twine!






…okay, the work the author has put into updating the game deserves a little more than that, but unlike my takeaway from One King to Loot Them All, where choosing between the Inform or Twine versions came down to a matter of taste, this is a clear upgrade all around. The Google Forms original pulled out some clever tricks to deal with the fact that that system was never designed for games – including not having any state tracking – but the Twine version is unencumbered by those awkward contrivances: the full game is all in one file, rather than being split between three password-gated ones, inventory and notes are easily available in a sidebar, along with a save-and-load feature, and the presentation has gotten an across-the-board upgrade including some attractive typography and graphic design. Puzzles do still require you to type the name of the object you’re using, the password you’re trying, or what you’re looking for into a text box, but I enjoyed this hold-over: the sidebar allows you to easily refer back to items and info you’ve collected to date, and the type-in requirement means you have to think a bit about what you’re trying to do, rather than just lawnmower through links.

There’ve also been some improvements to the meat of the story. The general shape of the narrative remains the same, but while I didn’t go back to compare things line by line, I remembered seeing some typos and clumsy phrases in the original prose that I didn’t pick up on this time out (I just saw one misspelling: “metalic” for “metallic”). There’ve been a couple of alternate solutions added to puzzles that perhaps felt a bit out-of-context in the initial iteration, and the endgame has seen some expansion – my sense was that the climactic conversation has been substantially fleshed out, and takes advantage of the game’s newfound ability to remember actions you took earlier in the story, while the set of factions you can potentially ally with has been expanded, with accompanying options seeded earlier in the game to set up those possibilities. It’s still recognizably the same pulp sci-fi thriller, but it’s got a bit more heft to it and the central character of Dr. Vrieman has some more psychological plausibility.

The game does include “AI” generated art, alongside hand-made graphics for the puzzle-relevant visuals and documents. As I’ve mentioned before, I am generally down on such things, but kudos to to the author for handling this well: using such tools wasn’t such a hot-button in 2022, when the game began its gestation, and their use is fully disclosed, with a post-victory survey even enabling players to weigh in on how they felt about their presence in the game. I still don’t like seeing them – and I personally don’t think they add much to the game, it would work just as well with the gameplay-relevant graphics being the only ones – but this helped take the sting out.

I suppose the Google Forms version does still retain some novelty value, and future players might enjoy checking it out just to see how far one can torture the system, but the Twine version is very much the definitive edition of what, per my 2023 review, was already a heck of a good time. Nice job, year-ago-Mike, you were spot on!

------Review of Spring Thing 2023 Google Forms version------

Ah, dilemmas! The overwhelming temptation I’m facing here is to open this review by talking about the novelty of the format, since The Kuolema is a choice-based game implemented in Google Forms – but I’m going to resist that temptation, if only because I’m a lapsed Catholic who’s belatedly realized Lent is almost over and I haven’t done anything to mark the occasion. So what would my first paragraph be if it were just another Twine game? Let’s see…

What is it that makes a ghost ship so compelling? The idea of a derelict vessel, devoid of life and presenting an enigma equally intriguing and fatal to investigate, is a freak occurrence here in real life – there’s what, the Mary Celeste? – but beyond literary antecedents like Dracula’s Demeter, it’s become a common motif in gaming, from historical takes like Obra Dinn to yer sci-fi Dead Space-alikes, and has launched a million direct-to-SyFy Bermuda Triangle movies. From a production point of view, this is understandable enough – you get spooky atmosphere, isolated protagonists, and a built-in reason you don’t need too many speaking parts. For an audience, though, the appeal is a bit less obvious. After noodling on it a bit, I think part of the answer is that a ship is both a place and a machine – the empty spaces on an abandoned vessel aren’t just rendered forlorn by the lack of people, they become purposeless and useless, adding poignancy, sure, but also danger (what if part of the machine malfunctions?)

The eponymous ship in The Kuolema fits this model twice over – because it’s not built just for travel, but also to perform novel experiments in clean energy. It was on the verge of some great breakthrough when it suddenly went dark, before popping up again, adrift and on the edge of Chinese territorial waters. As the representative of some unnamed agency, it’s up to you to keep it in international waters, figure out what disaster led to its abandonment, and discover the secrets its crew were keeping from each other.

A story like this could lean a couple different ways, and despite a few technothriller touches, we’re firmly in pulp territory – there’s a mysterious antagonist in a gas mask, the scientific genius has delusions of grandeur, an inevitably spy is working for the Russians, and you’ll probably work out what the deal is with your mysterious contact within five minutes of meeting him. All of which is to say the story beats feel very familiar, but when I stop to think about it I can’t remember anything that deploys exactly the same tropes The Kuolema does, which speaks to how effectively it inhabits its genre.

The prose is of a piece with this unpretentious approach. Here are some excerpts of descriptions from a few early locations:

"The top deck (Deck 4) is open to the elements and the rain-slick deck reflects the glinting lights as they shine and flicker through the downpour. The wind is howling and the white crests of the sea are visible out in the darkness.

…

"The stairs are awash with water and the ship continues to sway and lurch. You concentrate on keeping your footing as you cautiously step down into the darkness. There are a few dim lights still on below deck, just enough for you to make out your surroundings.

…

"It’s pitch black, with the only light coming from the corridor behind you. You move towards one of the windows to see the foaming waves outside. Suddenly the room is lit by a flash of lightning - giving you a brief imprint of the space you’re in. There are several tables and faux-leather seats spread around the room, along with a canteen serving area and a separate bar. Glasses and bottles litter the area – some rolling across the floor casting long, dark shadows – making it seem like creatures scuttling away from the flashes of light."

This effectively conveys a vibe, and that vibe, clearly, is “dark”. Sure, it’d be stronger with some more synonyms (and fewer comma splices), but given the kind of game this is it’d be easy to tip into ridiculousness by banging on about the tenebrous murk of the gloaming, so there’s nothing wrong with taking the safer path. Also, the writing isn’t stuck doing the heavy lifting all on its lonesome, since the game’s well illustrated with various 3d renders, documents, and diagrams that all fit the menacing mood. And once the game moves into its final acts, the one-note chiaroscuro gets replaced with some surprisingly-punchy action sequences.

The gameplay also doesn’t make waves. The Kuolema is one of those parser-aping choice game, with map-based navigation and puzzles that primarily involve getting through locked doors, figuring out computer passwords or safe combinations, and collecting three parts of an important device. It’s all stuff you’ve seen before – heck, you even need to solve a crossword to get one key clue! – but it’s workmanlike, with the various bits of gating making exploration feel rewarding, and the barriers putting up enough of a fight to seem satisfying without being too tough (with the possible exception of that crossword, which does rely on knowing some nautical slang).

And now, finally, we have to get to the Google Form-ness of it all, because the process of moving around and solving these puzzles is heavily influenced by the game’s format. Google Forms, for those of y’all not familiar, is Alphabet’s answer to Survey Monkey*, allowing for radio-button style selection of choices as well as text input. Interface-wise, then, it seems like it would offer the best of both the choice-based and parser worlds – but the wrinkle is that it doesn’t track world state. That means that the game doesn’t know what you have in your inventory, or what you’ve already talked to an NPC about.

The author’s done a clever job of getting around this limitation, it must be said. For one thing, the game’s broken into three different files, making it easy to jump in and out (a necessity, since the lack of persistence means there’s no save function) and also allowing for the progression of the plot to alter the environment after each major chokepoint is reached. Inventory puzzles are also handled by typing in the name of the object rather than the honor-system approach taken by old gamebooks (“if you have the crowbar, turn to page 58, but please don’t cheat”), and each usually has some nickname or codeword associated with it, so random guessing won’t get you anywhere. There’s still some wonkiness (I saw options about the computer password needed in the security room before I first visited said room and learned there was a computer) but between careful design and careful writing, the game works much better on this score than I expected it to. There are even a few places where the player’s choices can lead to different outcomes, though these all appear to be in the final section, of necessity.

Still, for all that it’s hard for me to imagine a better implementation of IF in Google Forms, I’m not sure The Kuolema justifies its choice of systems. This is a well-done but straightforward piece of IF that doesn’t seem to take advantage of any unique affordances of Google Forms (it could have been fun to see what choices other players made at different parts of the story, for example); as a result, even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking “this would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine”. I’m guessing the advantage is that Google Forms doesn’t require any programming chops, but of course that’s immaterial to the player – and considering how complex this thing must have been to orchestrate, learning a standard IF language might have been less work!

Turn that around, though: towards the beginning of this review I talked about how one thing that I like about ghost ship stories is that they present idle machines, inviting the question of how they broke down. If The Kuolema, in a postmodern twist, is itself a mechanism whose workings are clunkier and more exposed than they could be, perhaps that’s just function following form? At any rate, this is a wreck that’s worth investigating, and I hope to see more IF from this author (though I wouldn’t be sad if their next game used a more conventional system).

* I was going to include a crack here about how big tech companies can be threatened by anything, but then I looked up some financial data and learned that Survey Monkey has a $1.5 billion market cap, which I guess is what it is but sure feels like it’ll sit next to pets.com in some future textbook about the ridiculousness of the various turn-of-the-millennium tech bubbles.