Reviews by Mike Russo

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the borderline-compulsive way that I can only either review zero or all games in an IF competition to learn that I can get oddly obsessive in how I approach other games too. Take immersive sims: the best ones, like Thief or Dishonored, offer a broad panoply of tools for engaging with multiple deeply-implemented systems, and are at their best when you improvise, roll with the punches, and enjoy the complex way all these interactions lead to emergent gameplay. Me? I prefer to hoard every consumable I come across instead of using a single one, and ignore just about every weapon or supernatural ability in favor of just hitting each baddy in the back of the head with a sock full of quarters. Since of these games aren’t designed assuming that you’re only using 5% of your options, this can often be quite hard, so I often wind up abusing the quickload key, running through particularly tricky setups again and again: maybe if I throw a crate over there to create a distraction, I can nab guard number one when he comes to investigate and create a hole in the patrol pattern to get the others? No, OK, so what about climbing the wall over here and getting the drop on guard number two when he briefly pokes his head into the alley? No, so maybe next time…

Playing Dark Communion is kind of like that – it’s a supercompressed horror scenario that sees you and another girl investigating an abandoned church, at which point things quickly go wrong and you’ve got to face a gauntlet of lightning-fast decision points to try to make it out. It’s clearly designed for multiple replays, inasmuch as it tracks your successes as well as your failures (plus some bonus achievements) so you can see how much of the possibility-space you’ve plumbed, and for me it evoked that same rhythm of repeating a familiar gameplay loop but intentionally introducing small deviations – maybe wait an extra beat before investigating the choir loft this time? – to see if I could get an optimal result.

Where the metaphor breaks down is that the choices you have aren’t purely about guiding your character through the scenario. In fact the very first one you’re offered asks you define your relationship with Lianna, the other girl: is she your sister, someone you’ve got a crush on, or just some acquaintance you wound up going on an adventure with? At first I was bit nonplussed by this choice, because of course the emotional connection you’ve got with Jane rando will be much weaker than the one you’ve got with a sibling, which feels like it should have a significant impact on the story. And it does! These different choices of relationship significantly alter Lianna’s motivations, and the options available to you at particularly high-stress moments. It’s a neat bit of design because the fundamentals of the narrative remain the same, which maintains the loop-y, accretive nature of the gameplay, but they get remixed and stay fresh by virtue of their new configuration.

As for what those elements are – well, they are fairly generic horror beats, though they’re worked through efficiently and effectively. The church is properly spooky, with the descriptions sprinkling in a light theme of alienation:

"A space that was made to hold throngs of people, voices joined in song, speaking and kneeling in unison, eating ceremonial bread and drinking ceremonial wine. Communion. Now it’s dead and silent, and you, who never even believed in God—you’re the last person who belongs."

The terrible thing, once it gets on-screen, doesn’t get much by way of explanation, which is usually something I dislike in horror – you can definitely take the lore-dumping too far, but one gribbly monster is much the same as another, so give me the tortured backstory and scraps of worldbuilding dripping with implications – but it works fine here since it means the replays aren’t burdened by the need to run around collecting information that the player already knows. The scope of the variation in the potential scenarios means that the thematic connection between the horror and the interpersonal stuff going on with you and Lianna is sometimes tighter and sometimes looser – because of this, I felt like the playthrough where Lianna was a potential romantic partner felt more canonical than the others – but the tropes being invoked are all sturdy ones for the supernatural horror genre, so there’s never too much of a mismatch.

It all adds up to a compelling experience that maybe doesn’t have that much power in any given playthrough, but winds up more than the sum of its parts as you experiment with all the different things you can build with this Girls in Spooky Church Lego set. Even if you’re not moved to exhaust every single possibility – I confess I didn’t get two of the bonus achievements – and the set of tools you’ve got to confront the monster isn’t that broad in any iteration, there’s still more than enough here to make for a satisfying half-hour of playing and replaying. It’s just a shame there are no smoke bombs to collect and never use…

I believe a lot of things that might not have as much hard evidence as some people might prefer. I believe the White Album is the best one the Beatles ever recorded. I believe a good dark beer is far superior to any IPA. I believe it’s worth getting involved in politics. But no matter what receipts you show me, I don’t think I will ever be able to truly believe that Labyrinthine Library of Xleksixnrewix (I will not type that correctly ever again) was written in four hours. I’m by no means accusing the authors of fraud, let me be clear, and I can see that it leverages a bunch of pre-written extensions so I can even see how the trick must have been done. And yet, when I contemplate what’s here – a remappable maze a la the best bit of Enchanter, an intuitive automap, thirty different library sections each with their own in-jokes, and a tightly-designed Dungeon-Keeper style metapuzzle bringing all of these pieces together – I am just in awe that this was entered into an EctoComp’s Petit Mort category (there’s a cool feelie too, though I believe those don’t count against the time limit at least).

The conceit here is that you’re a kobold-librarian midway up the totem-pole at the eponymous archive, which in addition to orderly daytime visits from scholars, is also subject to nightly raids by uncouth adventurers hell-bent on pillaging the place for lost artifacts and recondite secrets. Tonight, it’s your section’s turn in the barrel, so it’s up to you to construct a deathtrap that will rebuff the intruders and leave you well-positioned for advancement to Second Assistant Librarian. The most important thing to say about this premise is that it is delightful beyond all belief; the protagonist’s doughty self-importance, and their fancy little hat, are immediately winning, for one thing. The library is also an amazing character all its own; it’s laid out in a thematic grid, with alphabetically-incrementing nouns running along the east-west axis and a series of adjectives similarly running north-south. That means you start out in archaic languages, while going south sees you visit bio-languages, which in turn is west of bio-music and then bio-numerology. Libraries with unique layouts are among my interests (…why yes, I do love Name of the Rose, thanks for asking), and this is a great one, not least because the gags are good – archaic numerology was my favorite:

"Numerology ranks among the oldest fields of magical science—these tomes date back millennia! They contain more than a dash of unnecessary mysticism, although experiments done centuries later proved that avoiding beans really was necessary for good numerological work."

(I’ll just say it, Pythagoras was wrong, fava beans are delicious. Wait, unless that’s because the souls give them extra tastiness?)

All that is just flavor for the puzzle, of course – you don’t need to read a single book or pay attention to any of the room descriptions to solve the game – but they still make the process anything but dry. That’s helpful because the opening is a little intimidating; the instructions do step you through what you’re meant to be doing, but there are a lot of moving pieces so I was glad to have some solid jokes to enjoy while I was trial-and-erroring my way through the setup. The key mechanic here is that unlike in a tower defense game (or Lock and Key, this game’s clearest antecedent), you can’t set traps before the adventurers arrive: you’ve got a magic gong that opens up the secure chest where they’re kept, but that also is the signal for the baddies to start marching in. Instead, the setup phase is about preparing the layout, since you’ve go the magic ability to open and close passages between the various rooms (though only twenty rooms can be part of the maze at a time, which helps keep things manageable – an especially thoughtful limitation, actually, as I only just now remembered that the map is 3-D, since each section has a possible “above” and “below” location, too!)

This means that dealing with the adventurers isn’t just a waiting game, where you stab the Z key over and over and wait five minutes to find out whether you’ve already won – once they’re in the maze, you need to run to the area where the traps are kept, and then scramble deploy them even as those vicious miscreants are marauding through the passageways, ready to shoot you down if they catch the merest sight of you. This lends a pleasant dynamism to proceedings; even though the puzzle is pretty simple once you understand all the rules for how the traps work, and how the adventurers behave, implementing the solution still requires active thought to come up with and carry out your plan without getting skewered, and the details will vary based on how exactly you’ve constructed your maze. I wouldn’t say this gives the game replay value, exactly – there are only three traps at your disposal, and I’m pretty sure they need to be deployed in a specific way and in a specific order to attain victory – but it does mean that my playthrough felt like it was uniquely mine; I brought the adventuring party down in demonic oikology (which is to say, the interior decoration that most appeals to the mephitic taste), which seemed the appropriate place to do it.

All told, this is a heck of a clever game, marrying a lovely theme with engaging writing and a puzzle that made me feel smart. Most authors could spend 40 hours and still barely succeed at one of these pillars; to accomplish all in a tenth of that time is something miraculous – just as miraculous as me being able to spell the game’s name from memory: folks, believe me when I say you should drop everything and go play Labyrinthine Library of Xacklexendrewxixix!

Okay, I was close. Kinda.

The Faust legend is an old one – Marlowe’s take goes back to the early 17th Century, and of course there are many medieval and classical antecedents similarly featuring deals with the devil. But it’s one that’s got many modern incarnations, too: Thomas Mann reworked the story to juxtapose Mephistopheles with the Nazi regime, The Master and Margarita does the same with the Soviets, but there are lots of other more or less elastic adaptations. The mere fact of reinterpretation perhaps doesn’t mean that much in our current reboot-heavy culture, but Dr. Faust has a couple hundred years even on Spider Man, so it’s worth considering what’s responsible for the myth’s longevity. Beyond the obvious vicarious pleasure of seeing all the joys that a life of sin can offer (portrayed inside of a moralizing frame offering plausible deniability, of course), the fun of a capering, too-clever-by-half devil, and the compelling image of a scholar who’ll stop at nothing for knowledge – surely there are more than a few literary critics who flatter their egos by seeing something of Faust in themselves – it also satisfies a primitive desire for punishment: Faust makes a rash deal, promises something he shouldn’t, and has to face the consequences. Even if he is sometimes saved in the end, he earns his redemption, and the story as a whole reifies the idea that a moral order exists, which is comforting even if the details of said order may or may not be defensible.

The protagonist of The Revenant’s Lament, John Cassidy King (who winds up going by a variety of names and pronouns over the course of the game, so I’m going to stick with King and they/them pronouns for ease of discussion) certainly seems to believe in the reality of punishment, and even crave it to a certain extent. This is an EctoComp entry so tortured protagonists are de rigueur, but the details here are compellingly specific: King is an Old West cowboy, born as a girl but living now as a man, who escaped a domineering, vicious father though not without committing some crimes in return. They ride their father’s stolen horse but expect it to turn on them at any moment, and it’s not surprising that that guilty conscience seems to hover over the conversation they have when a white-clad stranger shows up at their campfire, offering any wish King pleases just for a song and the warmth of the flames – the narration is close-third on King throughout, but it still judgmentally notes that King is being selfish when asking what the visitor can offer as a gift. And when it appears that the stranger can make good on his extravagant promise, what does King wish for but to live forever, to forestall the day of reckoning as long as they can. And when that decision has consequences – because of course it does – King fights mightily against their fate, but still seems half to believe they deserve what’s coming to them.

Tragedies can’t hold the player in suspense as to their outcomes, so they need a solid dose of pathos to really deliver, and this Revenant’s Lament has in spades. The prose here is very good, propulsive and showing equal facility with drawing characters and displaying well-turned images. Here’s an early bit of scene-setting:

"The trading post is just across the street from the post office, the hitches outside occupied by tall, painted horses who graze on sparse grass, shuffle and snort and wait for their riders to return. The type of creature to make John nervous, beasts so assured of their own existence that fear becomes an afterthought."

And here’s the devil himself:

"The lonesome stranger doesn’t look old. For the briefest of seconds, he looks like John’s father, smiles in the same crooked way, his thin lips curling back into a snarl or sneer, nothing real in the expression. A coyote grin; knowing something John doesn’t. And then he’s a stranger again, one with short, slicked back salt and pepper hair and the shadow of a beard across his jaw, one with eyes black as a clouded night, empty, dull, filled with flame."

Every once in a while it does tack on one clause too many after a comma, or get a small detail wrong (the dead man’s hand was a pair of aces and a pair of eights, not a full house), but that’s only the kind of thing that you’d notice if you were taking notes for a review (er.). The themes here are relatively straightforward ones – identity, sin, all that stuff – but they’re played with a lovely richness of tone, elevating what could have been merely pulp material in lesser hands.

The interactivity is also nicely handled. King is something of a passive character, often deferring their choices to what others wish, and this is nicely mirrored in choices that wind up channeled into a single outcome (either through narrating abortive attempts that turn out futile, or graying out seemingly-valid options to make clear that there’s only one path forward). There is one significant moment of choice at the end, leading to substantially different denouements; by that point events have progressed so far that the outcome is always tragic, but it is an engaging moment of agency by way of contrast with the rest of the game. And this approach does mean that the moments when King does take the reins and articulate what they want for themselves stand out, and land with some force.

The one thing holding the Revenant’s Lament back is its pacing. The plot here is compelling, with a lot of incident – I was very invested in following King’s story to its end – and the characters and prose also help sustain interest. But nonetheless there are a few sequences that felt quite slow to me, notably an extended series of vignettes towards the middle of the story that went on a bit too long, and ill-judged timed text at both the opening and closing of the game which undercut the moments that should have been the most powerful – I know the intention was to slow down and emphasize the significance of what’s happening, but the reality is that I alt-tabbed to check my email until I could actually read the story again.

If I wound up spending a bit longer with King as a result, though, that’s hardly something to lament. The game offers a compelling character study, with a meditation on guilt and violence that’s entirely in line with what the Western genre does best while interjecting unique themes and story beats I’d never exactly seen before – it’s a worthy addition to the deal-with-the-devil canon, even if the reader does wish King had been able to be better at forgiving themself.

I mentioned in my review of Remembrance that a straightforward structure for Single Choice Jam games is to reserve the choice for the final bit of the game, using the opening and middle to establish stakes and build up to the drama of the one place where there’s player agency, and then ramify the endings according to the path the player opts to take. There’s nothing wrong with that approach at all, but it’s also interesting to see another entry in the jam subvert that structure and call into question whatever this “agency” thing it is we think we’re talking about. Chinese Family Dinner Moment also stands out from its peers in the jam by being a parser game; the very concept of “choices” fits awkwardly into the standard parser game format, inasmuch as typically they offer quite a large range of potential inputs (you can type anything you want, and might get a customized response) but also often constrain the player to a stultifyingly-linear plot. So what, exactly, counts as a choice and what doesn’t?

Let’s put in a pin in that; don’t worry, we’ll be circling back soon enough.

Shifting from structure to themes, CFDM makes no bones about the fact that it’s about alienation. The protagonist is a young Chinese person who’s recently come back from studying abroad in the U.S., which their parents have used as an occasion to throw a bigger Lunar New Year party than usual. And on every level they feel disconnected: from the casually racist attitudes of their family and family friends, from their narrowly-materialist view of what matters, from their choice of food to serve (they’ve gone vegan), even from the plausibly-deniable sexual assault they endure and from their own physical reality:

">X ME

"You don’t like your body."

Make no mistake, this is a downbeat game; there’s some humor, but it’s almost all dark and derives from how unselfconsciously awful the other characters are. Here’s some dating advice from an aunt:

“You better not get a white woman since white women can’t cook. And you definitely don’t want to get a black woman because they’re criminals … or an Indian because their cooking smells.

“Between you and me,” she continues, whispering in your ear, “Chinese women are a bit better, but have you read the news? That lady tricked her husband into giving up his cash. That’s why you shouldn’t trust us devious Chinese women. Get a Japanese woman. They are polite and deferential to their husbands — unlike me!”

The picture being painted here is very specific to a particular socioeconomic cultural stratum, of course, but I have a friend who was subject to almost this same tirade, word for word, except he got it from a Persian woman warning him off of other Iranian-Americans. So while the details are all well-chosen to root the game in its milieu, I think it also succeeds in creating resonance with anyone who’s ever chafed at the chauvinistic, greedy, blinkered principles of friends and family after starting to be exposed to a broader understanding of the world, and questioning what received wisdom tells them is their place in it (Chinese people, of course, don’t have a monopoly on either side of this equation).

I use “picture” advisedly here, since the player’s role in CFDM is largely a passive one, but one that requires the player’s active complicity. There are conversations that play out, uncomfortable situations that occur, and an unsuccessful attempt to take refuge by retreating to social media (if you thought your relatives were shallow and transactional…), but while you might expect these to be implemented as events that occur according to a timer system that ticks onward regardless of what you do, in fact by default scenes are mostly static. Instead, time generally advances only when you type LISTEN; this is a canny design decision, because of course your silence means that your interlocutors feel free to fill the air with their discriminatory nonsense or otherwise play out their anti-human pathologies. But since you’re allowing them, if not inviting them, to do so, can you say that you’re so much better? There’s even a late-game sequence that makes this explicit, as LISTEN leads to you actually speaking up, though not for yourself, as it leads you to repeat your relatives’ prejudices about poor people and black folks and trans people right back to them, validating and reifying their biases.

This is of course deeply unpleasant, but as I said above, I played through the game expecting that it was building to a point where I’d finally have a choice to rebel. As it came close to the end, I thought I’d spotted the moment: there’s a family picture to wrap up the evening, and as everyone prompted me to say cheese, I saw the opportunity for a gesture of quiet dissent, at least FROWNing to create some visible distance. But no, I was surprised to see, that wasn’t an option: again, all there was to do was LISTEN, and go along with the crowd.

Is CFDM a zero-choice game instead of a single-choice one, then? Well, no; after finishing I checked out the source code and saw that there’s one other option that’s always available: the out-of-world command QUIT is altered to have diegetic effect here, and you can invoke it at any time. It doesn’t exactly let you achieve catharsis, though – instead of a self-righteous denunciation of your family’s reactionary values that validates your identity and maybe starts to change their minds, you get a response indicating that running out of the restaurant caused a small scandal that impacts both you and the rest of your family. No matter what, you’re in this together.

What are we to make of the moral universe thus established? Per the implementation of LISTEN, allowing yourself to be a victim makes you culpable in the small-minded bigotries of your family; per the implementation of QUIT, refusing to be culpable makes you a victim and tars your family with guilt by association. Some might say this is no choice at all, since both ends are so bad, but are choices just about outcomes? And does the possibility of even an unguessable choice that doesn’t wind up changing anything somehow still bestow freedom? For all that Chinese Family Dinner Moment is studiously anchored to its context, it’s nonetheless one of the most Existentialist pieces of IF I’ve encountered – we can hope that material circumstances will change and liberate the protagonist from their subaltern status, but even that won’t blunt the horns of the dilemma that’s depicted here.

One of the things I like best about IF is its austerity. Mainstream video games have had decades to develop the sensory delights they offer, from photorealistic graphics to pleasingly responsive interfaces to viscerally satisfying sound affects, but I often find the humblest piece of interactive fiction more impressive because it’s living and dying just by its text. Sure, there can be various bells and whistles on both the parser and choice-based side of things – integrated music, some attractive pixel art, that sort of thing – but to be honest I find that stuff rarely makes much difference to me when I’m reflecting on my response to a game: it’s all about the words, and how they’re used. So it’s hopefully a marker of DOL-OS’s aesthetic achievement that the main thing I keep coming back to is how pretty it is.

The game presents itself as a sort of found-object piece: the conceit is that it’s far in the future and you discover an old but still functional computer, so you decide to undertake some digital archaeology. It seems as though it dates from some time at least a few years on from our present, so strictly speaking it doesn’t make sense that the presentation relies on 80s-era markers – a yellow-green palette, graphics broken up by scan lines, chunky, pixelated icons – but this is what my brain, at least, thinks a computing artifact should look like, so I think it’s an inspired choice. And it commits hard to the conceit; every font, image, and glitched-out display is note-perfect. Similarly, I don’t know what kind of work was needed to torture Twine to create an interface that functions exactly like I remember the old Apple II ones working, but it’s similarly an impressive achievement – navigating the file system is immediately intuitive, and there are myriad extras all the way up to interactive implementations of hangman and sudoku. Truly, it’s a triumph – if, instead of a self-contained piece of IF, it was embedded in a AAA game like one of the later Fallouts, it would inspire excited PC Gamer blog pieces about this awesome Easter Egg everyone should check out.

(Now that I’ve typed that out, both in presentation and plot I realize that DOL-OS would perfectly fit as one of those terminals you occasionally run across in Fallout – I’m curious if there was any direct inspiration there?)

As for that plot, there’s a fair bit of it. DOL-OS proceeds in three distinct layers, with the game’s two puzzles gating progression between each act. The first act is a collage, with a variety of different documents painting a picture of a repressive, authoritarian society. The files on offer include news stories about public executions, official histories, annotated literary texts, official documents… it’s a real mélange, and while there are a few connections between the various small stories on offer, those function more as bonus insights; the point is just to experience the many different ways a society like this commits violence against its citizens. The writing here is often stilted, reflecting the way that fascist states manage to use language bluntly while still avoiding saying what they mean:

"We encourage still that anyone having had contact with The Gendarme to deliver to the nearest police station any information that might to help recover these documents or in relation to the young woman and her connections."

(I should note that the game was translated from French – it won last year’s French Comp – so some of these stylistic tics might be a result of that process. It still works well, though).

There’s room for a bit of humor, though – the story implied in the terse notation that one criminal was punished for “[stealing] a goose thrice (same goose)” is marvelous.

The second section is more focused; now the documents are following a young researcher who’s been brought on board a mysterious project, that involves both digitizing historical documents and developing an AI. This part of the game proceeds fairly linearly, as you read his diary and his involvement in the project gets deeper and deeper. The final section sees you engage with the research project directly and shifts from the document-review gameplay of the first two-thirds of the game to a more traditional choice-based interface, which effectively raises the stakes and indicates that the focus has moved from understanding what’s on this old computer to deciding what to do with it.

It’s a nicely-paced progression, and as a result I’ll reserve in-depth discussion of where the game winds up going for a spoiler section; suffice to say that that I think the plot works well, though perhaps takes a slightly more tropey and bloodless approach to an issue that could have been rendered with a bit more social realism. And while I’m being slightly critical, I’ll also say that the puzzles are rather desultory; there’s a guess-the-password bit that’s got some very blunt clueing, and a jigsaw-puzzle captcha where the main challenge was avoiding getting a headache from squinting at a bunch of yellowish smudges. They’re by no means bad, but at the same time I can’t help but think I’d have enjoyed the game more if they’d either been made more demanding, or dropped entirely so that progress just depended on reaching certain milestones in the document-review process. These are especially niggly niggles even by my standards, though – DOL-OS stands as a really impressive game that deservedly won the laurel in its Francophone version, and us English speakers are lucky to get another bite at the apple.

(Spoiler - click to show)Right, so the revelations: it turns out that the authoritarian era is well in the past by the time the researcher starts up his work, and in fact at first his job is just to digitize the records you find in the first chunk so they can be used as AI training data. The judicial system is overburdened in his time, you see, so the project is all about creating to a tool to speed up the slow business of deciding guilt and punishment; the previous project lead gets chewed up by the stress and ethical compromises, so the researcher gets thrust into the limelight, at which point it becomes clear that the bosses don’t care that the AI is bloodthirsty in the extreme. The story breaks off somewhat at this point, but when the third act kicks off and you’re able to engage the AI in direct conversation, it becomes clear that it was in fact deployed and wound up passing judgment on a whole lot of folks. This final tete a tete makes clear a lot of the stuff that’s established by implication in the first two sequences before building to a climactic choice of either consigning the AI to its doom on the failing terminal hardware, or copying it over in a fresh install.

This all works well enough, and I have to give the game kudos for creating a “save the AI y/n” moral dilemma where I was all in on letting the thing die, but I did feel like it could have played things with a bit more nuance. These kind of systems are being implemented in real life – most notably, a lot of jurisdictions have experimented with algorithms to make recommendations for who should be offered bail after being charged with crimes. You can see how this might be a good idea in theory, but in practice mostly they just wind up laundering racist decision-making via a Big Data disguise; there are well-known cases where first-time Black offenders aren’t recommended bail, while white career criminals get every benefit of the doubt, because that’s what the algorithms learned to do from the training data. Beyond these instances of straight bias, there’s also a ideological element of horror here; in the Anglo-American criminal system, at least, decisions of guilt are consigned to a jury of ordinary people, and taking a social judgment and turning it into a data-driven one is a radical shift, and I wish more hay was made of it. But DOL-OS mostly refrains from plumbing direct real-life analogues or self-consciously putting big ideas into play; the second section sticks to the well-worn Frankenstein-y scientists-create-monster-that-escapes-their-control plot beats, and the third section doesn’t create much nuance or ambiguity. All told that means I found DOL-OS an effective bit of sci-fi horror – and again, a gorgeous example of the form – but I was disappointed it didn’t try to do a bit more in the way of social comment.

Here’s our next entry in the review-a-thon as a jam of jams: Remembrance was originally entered in the Single Choice Jam, which, as it says on the tin, required authors to construct games with only one moment where the player has multiple options. There are several potential structures that satisfy this constraint, and Remembrance opts for what’s probably the most straightforward: the game consists of an initial linear section that previews and builds up the significance of the choice, then shunts the player into one of four short, somewhat-different endings based on what they pick.

The flesh that goes on those bones is anything but straightforward, though. The protagonist is a young woman – maybe in your early twenties – who lives on the world’s first asteroid-mining station, and whose mother has recently died; you’re going back to Earth to inter her ashes, and have to decide which of a quartet of objects to bring along to leave by her urn as a memorial. As the game tells the story of your relationship with her through each of the potential offerings, you get a sense of the challenges you both faced relating to each other: the gifts that pushed you to be someone you’re not, the art pieces that she didn’t know what to make of. It’s narrated in a compellingly wry voice that lets the grief show by its absence, and which combines worldbuilding and character work with impressive economy:

"It’s been about a year since she died; the trip can only be made within a narrow window every 370 days or so, and your mother’s heart attack happened right after the last shuttle left. Punctuality was never her strong suit."

The game also succeeds at making its situations relatable by leaning into specificity: I’m not a tomboy who isn’t into jewelry, but I’ve definitely had interests that diverged from my parents’ expectations; I’m not a Jew who can’t cook the family recipes because there’s no honey on the space station, but there are certainly a lot of traditions my family hasn’t been able to keep up due to time and distance. And there was one moment where the specificity was, in fact, my specificity: the worn wooden box the mother stored her recipe cards in seems on its face identical to the wooden box my mom stores her recipe cards in.

The endings are finely-tooled as well. The temptation with this structure would be to have the choice be a Bioware-style BIG CHOICE, with each of the objects directly corresponding to some specific aspect of your relationship with your mom that would then take primacy in the final sequence – leaning into rebellion, or acceptance, or spirituality, or what-not. Remembrance resists this temptation, to its credit; there’s clearly a particular cluster of associations and emotions bound up in each object, but they’re not simple to unpack, and while the ending text does change in ways that feel satisfyingly responsive to the choice you make, there’s no radical branching or splintering of outcomes. Everything goes just as you expect it to, it’s just that the details are different.

With that said, I do think I would have liked the game better if there was a broader set of objects to choose from – I don’t mean that four is necessarily too few, but it was notable to me that all of the objects are ones that are as much, if not more, about you as they are about your mother. Two of them are gifts she gave you, one is something you made, and the last is something of hers that it seems like she wanted you to have after she died. As a result, no matter what choice you make, the remembrance-offering winds up presenting your mother through the memory-prism of her daughter; for many parents, that might well be what they’d want, but I think it would have been interesting to have at least one choice that was more clearly focused on how she understood herself, and how she’d want posterity to remember her. I can see the argument that that might have weakened the game’s focus on the mother/daughter relationship, but who we are when we’re alone determines who we are when we’re with someone else, after all. Perhaps the stronger reason against such an option is that Remembrance doesn’t really strike me as being about mourning as such; the stories it tells are more about how we understand ourselves in the light of the people who helped us become who we are, intentionally or not. And yes, that understanding is a choice, but it’s not a clean one.

Everyone knows a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but for all that, there is something in a name – and is there an author’s name more likely to strike terror in a player’s heart than “lazygamedesigner82”? Whether they’re intentionally hearkening back to the text adventures of 1982, or they were just born back then, it’s definitely a warning that the game they’ve produced is going to lack modern conveniences. Similarly, especially for a parser game, a good author has to be the very opposite of lazy, making sure that there’s sufficient depth of implementation, and enough proactive clueing, to make a game anything other than an exercise in frustration. Combined with the fact that Quest for the Serpent’s Eye is a Quest 5 game written as late as 2020, that the blurb winks at all the old-school tropes that to my taste were stale before Infocom shut down, and that the instructions tell you you might need both LOOK IN and LOOK UNDER, I went into this one bracing myself against the pain that was inevitably going to make this experience a torture.

Reader, I was as wrong as I’ve ever been. Low-plot-1980s-throwback-puzzle-fest is by no means my IF subgenre of choice – to put it mildly – so I am as shocked as anyone to relate that I had a really fun time with this.

In one sense, it’s exactly what it looks like. You’re off on a lightly-motivated treasure hunt for the eponymous gem – your old professor went missing trying to find it, so of course you decide to track down both her and it – in a jungle / cave / temple setting that couldn’t be more cliched if it featured in an Indiana Jones movie. The puzzles are a mix of straightforward medium-dry-goods stuff – cutting vines with a machete, that sort of thing – and escape-the-deathtrap gameplay. There’s even a maze. And as advertised, there are monochrome graphics with almost no straight lines, lending everything a wibbly-wobbly vibe.

But contrary to that “lazy” sobriquet, tremendous care has been taken with every aspect of the thing. The puzzles are actually carefully considered, with a relatively small map and relatively small number of objects helping attune the player to the clues that are there to help you progress. Death can come frequently, but it instantly warps you back to where you were so you can try again. The game makes the obvious jokes and references – the shopkeeper is named Stanley – but also goes a step beyond to make the non-obvious ones, too – the ship you arrive on is called the S.S. Fawcett. There’s an infectious enthusiasm to the prose that feels distinctive while staying perfectly in-genre, plus some one-liners that made me laugh out loud (the list of example commands in the HELP text includes “SHOW DRIVERS LICENSE TO HORSE”). The traditional ASK ABOUT conversational system is implemented with an impressive depth of topics. The graphics started to grow on me after a while, and somehow, there’s even a cool twist in the ultra-generic plot that’s well-telegraphed but still took me by surprise.

Quest for the Serpent’s Eye of course isn’t a perfect game – there are a couple of later puzzles that I think are a bit underclued, especially a speak-friend-and-enter riff that feels like it’s taking unfair advantage of a player’s likely assumptions, and it suffers from some of the weaknesses of the Quest 5 platform (notably, you can’t save if you play online, and I wound up losing my progress after alt-tabbing for a bit. Definitely download this one and play it in the interpreter!) But the strong design, robust implementation, assiduous polish, and genial good humor – not to mention the fact that the author puts themself very clearly on the player’s side, rather than an adversarial position – makes this one of the very few games that communicates to a modern player why this style of adventure built a following back in the day, and still has something to offer to a contemporary audience. Typically when I review games in this genre, I wrap up by saying some variation of “if you like this kind of thing, you’ll probably like this.” But for a change I can just say hey, I think you’ll probably like this.

Thread Unlocked is another Neo-Twiny Jam entry like Idle Hands, but instead of using its scant 500 words to communicate an entire, but linear, self-contained experience, it allows the player to construct one of a myriad of one- or two-line forum posts, which gain power from your ability to imagine all that’s come before and all that will come after. The game’s opening wrings as much dread as any horror movie out of just four words: “Thread unlocked. Slowmode off.” We don’t know where we are, or what exactly was being discussed before the modhammer came down (though c’mon, it was probably AI) – all that matters is that we now have a renewed outlet for our feelings, which the mandatory cooling-off period has done nothing to quench.

You build your responses one word at a time, from a choice of two or three, until you’ve picked four, at which point the game extrapolates out a full, short post. This filling out of the prompts provides the game’s energetic kick, because the pieces that are in your control are pretty much just throat-clearing – “well now there’s another,” “you are not being”, “can I just say”. Seeing these banal introductions turned into discourse-interventions that are sure to wind up escalating things is gleefully groan-worthy; after running through the mechanic a couple of times, I started to feel the same exuberant anticipatory outrage I experience when seeing that there’ve been new posts to a contentious thread.

The responses are all there is to the game, while they vary, it’s not over a wide range. Still, they’re not all just flame-bait. Some are passive-aggressive:

"You are not being very thoughtful with your words. Can you delete what you just said, or I’ll have to flag you."

Some are vain attempts to tamp down the disagreement:

"Well now there’s another thread on sensitive topics. Leave it alone, I tell you."

And there’s at least one that’s actually nice:

"Can I just say that really means a lot to me! Thank you. I can’t express my gratefulness!"

(I stopped after getting this one, figuring I’d quit while I was ahead).

Again, you never see what prompted these posts, or what comes after them, which helps the purity of the gag stand out in sharp relief: it’s notable that there’s no option not to post, you always have to say something and that something will almost always be calculated to keep the bad feelings going until the thread is inevitably re-locked. Part of me wishes that the writing was a bit less generic, that there were more specific jokes or different voices woven into the responses, because I did find that they got a little same-y after a while. But I think that would have wound up undercutting the structuralist point the game is making: Internet arguments are all alike, and however much we might like to think of ourselves as above the fray, even the most anodyne point is likely to feed the flames. The way to win Thread Unlocked is not to play, but where’s the fun in that?

I recently contributed to a game with a dozen or so different authors (Mathbrush’s Untitled Relationship Project 1); the various excerpts are all mixed together without attribution, so part of the fun of playing is trying to figure out who wrote which bits. And while I felt reasonably confident in a number of guesses, the ones I was surest of were those by Sophia de Augustine. While their oeuvre has a bunch of recurring motifs – religious imagery, flawed dads, queer love – even when those elements are dialed down, there’s still something instantly recognizable about their prose, and that something is adjectives. Adjectivitis is a curse, of course – I’ve spent a lot of time groaning at fledgling writers’ attempts to pad their prose by making sure every noun has at least one modifier attacked to it – and often it’s good advice to use them sparingly. Sophia’s writing rejects these counsels of caution, however, and winds up distinctively effective by picking exactly the right words, over and over.

That gift is at the heart of what makes Idle Hands successful. A bit of dynamic fiction entered into last year’s Neo-Twiny Jam – which limited games to 500 words or fewer – it recounts the before, during, and after of a bout of love-making with a demonic partner (the timeline shifts around a bit, and also this is the kind of sex where you have more than one go). The focus is on communicating an overwhelming sensory experience, not plot or narrative; you get a bit of a sense of his personality, but this is an element of flavor rather than anything resembling a character study. As dynamic fiction, there’s also nothing by way of player agency or choice – there are a few highlighted phrases that reveal a bit of additional text when moused-over, which serve to engage the player and provide an opportunity for them to feel complicit in opting into the sex, but otherwise you’re just clicking the forward arrow to reach the next passage.

Given the necessary privity of the piece, these are the right choices – constructing context for what brought these people together and what their coupling means, or allowing for different paths through the text, might seem fine enough goals in isolation, but efforts in those directions would come at the immediate expense of the game’s throbbing, fiery heart. So this is a piece set up to live or die by its prose, and fortunately it delivers, a marvel of evocative economy:

"He is all forked silver-tongue and razor-sharp teeth, biting off the rounded, purring edge to his voice with a cessation droning like fruit-drunk wasps at summerly height."

I could write a couple of paragraphs just on why I like this one sentence so much, but I think the strengths are obvious: its descriptions are playfully haunted by the traditional attributes of the devil, makes sure even seemingly-innocuous details like the timbre of a voice have a seductive tinge, and confines itself to just one idiosyncratic bit of vocabulary to make the reader slow down and feel the emphasis proper to the final simile. It’s a dense style, and in a long game might wind up feeling like too much, but the game also does a good job alternating its purplest transports with sacrilegious gags or winking references to boning; it also doesn’t rely on any one trick for too long, opening with a bunch of alliteration before wisely putting that back in the quiver for the rest of the game.

Admittedly there are a few moments where I felt like the writing was so heavily freighted that it threatened to topple over, but only a few, and it always reined things back in: this is a controlled, writerly piece that creates a singular aesthetic experience through well-chosen words (and also through well-chosen colors and visual theming, though as always I feel less qualified to comment on those elements). I can see how some potential players might find schtupping Satan to be an off-putting premise, but those interested in giving it a try will find lots here to enjoy.

[I should acknowledge that Sophia provided a cool banner for my Review-a-Thon thread on the IntFic forum. But a) I’d played the game and formed my opinion of it before I learned that, and b) I think everyone knows that if you want me to write a positive review of your game, bribery is a far less efficient approach than just slathering crypto-Catholic themes all over it, so Sophia’s bases were covered either way]

Two games after playing an entry planned for 2023’s ShuffleComp revival, the randomizer gave me an entry in 2014’s OG ShuffleComp – I am really enjoying how wide-ranging the thon feels! Once again, this is inspired by a song I’ve never heard before and didn’t get around to listening to, but hey, this isn’t actually a ShuffleComp, so I’m telling myself this is a reasonable approach to reviewing (I’m also telling myself that it’s totally understandable that I spent ten minutes flailing around trying to get the game to work – turns out that the first file listed on the IFDB page is an HTML TADS one that doesn’t work in modern interpreters or web browsers, but fortunately the second one listed plays just fine in QTADS).

There are probably two basic ways to make a game inspired by music. The first, taken by Not Just Once, is to assemble a linear narrative out of the lyrics and bits of plot implied by the songs, filtering a mélange of story-content through the Aristotelian unities. Look Around the Corner takes the more dangerous course, and tries to capture something of the experience of listening to a song while sticking to a largely-traditional IF approach. In particular, it deploys repetition and novelty to mirror the verse-chorus-verse structure familiar from music. This is a time loop game, in each of which the player must perform the same sequence of events: getting up out of bed, leaving their room, catching sight of a ray of light coming around the hallway’s corner, and then experiencing one of five wildly-disparate visions – the only bit of text that changes from iteration to iteration – before the whole thing resets.

The focus is clearly on the set-piece visions, and they range over an intriguingly broad territory, alternately invoking the primum mobile, Sumerian myth, the fractal structures of nature. Here’s that last one:

"The light of the dawn filters through an enormous tree, whose trunk divides into branches, whose branches divide into twigs, whose twigs carry leaves. Each leaf has veins that branch into smaller and smaller veins, bringing water and minerals to every chlorophyllic cell."

The writing is fine enough to communicate the ideas, but I did wish the author had leaned even more into poetry; five different sequences of two sentences isn’t a lot of time to make an impression, and getting a little less linear, a little more allusive, would have made these pieces more memorable and helped the player intuit connections between what felt to me a bit of a random grab-bag of themes. I also found the ending a bit of an anticlimax – there’s a fun little puzzle, clued with increasing obviousness as visions start to repeat, but your reward for untangling it is little more than “and then she woke up.” Again, perhaps listening to the song would mean that all these choices would make sense, as I’d see how the music provides a unifying ground to the whole experience, but I can’t but feel that there was a missed opportunity here to make a song-like game that doesn’t rely on anything else for its impact.