Reviews by Mike Russo

It’s not often that I’m stymied by a piece of IF – especially not one as slight and apparently straightforward as Return to Home. This short parser game starts with your car blocked by an unexpected detour on your way back from work; rather than drive around to find another route, you decide to cut through the countryside and walk home. This isn’t a perilous adventure where you need to cross raging rivers or make your way through a forbidding forest – there’s a hill, sure, but the weather is fine and the danger is non-existent. Nor is it a set of brain-teaser, with no puzzles to speak of beyond a couple of Easter eggs to be found if you stray slightly off the short path home (the whole game is about a dozen rooms). Structurally, it resembles a so-called “walking simulator”, but where games in that genre balance their mechanical simplicity with detailed backstory and lush environments, Return to Home is matter-of-fact; most descriptions have a sentence or two of simple prose, without much in the way of scenery, and there’s no lore or hidden trauma to pick up on (or if there is, wow did I miss it!)

So it’s hard for me to evaluate the game’s success according to its design goals, since I have a hard time articulating what I think those are – it seems content to just be a low-key experience, not in a hurry to impress anything in particular on the player. There are some small grammar and spelling issues in the prose, but English isn’t the author’s first language, and since the writing isn’t reaching for the stars I didn’t find these minor slips had much impact on my enjoyment. The one thing I can say about Return to Home is that I think it’s a game that enjoys that it’s IF. Most of the Easter eggs point to classic-era games (I picked up references to Curses and Once and Future/Avalon, though there were a couple I know I missed), and beyond that, by stripping the parser game down to its bare essentials, it made me slow down and be more mindful of what I was experiencing: moving through a map, reading a few sentences of narration, enjoying the way that a minimum of effort would frequently turn up a new bauble, without needing to worry about what I was supposed to do with it. Playing Return to Home was a gentle way to spend five minutes connecting with as unpretentious a piece of IF as you can imagine, and I guess that might just be the entire point of the thing.

It’s a truism that RPG sessions are often way more fun to experience than they sound when you describe them to people who weren’t at the table. And it’s a truism because it’s true – even I, gentle reader, have seen an interlocutor’s eyes glaze over while telling them some totally awesome story about the Satyr I played in this Changeling game back in undergrad. Descriptions that sound great when improvised come off flat when it’s part of a presumably-rehearsed narration. Out-of-character friendships liven up the banter that can feel lame shorn of that context. The drama of uncertainty, of not knowing which way the dice are going to fall or what lurks behind that nondescript door, is way more intense to experience first-hand than hear about second-hand.

(Seriously, though, Harry Dedalus was the coolest fae in the San Jose Court, the stories are great).

The Sword of Voldiir is a choice-based game that touts its origin in a tabletop DnD campaign, and it’s a case in point. It’s definitely got some shaggy charm, with a cast of NPCs who seem to enjoy hanging out and razzing each other, and solid pacing that keeps the narrative ticking along. But the fantasy world and quest plot are mostly generic, the RPG-inflected mechanics aren’t that engaging, and the whole thing, especially the prose, is in need of some polish – I only played the free demo rather than shell out for the full version, so perhaps there’s a significant uptick past the parts that I was able to play, of course. But while I definitely would believe all the original participants of the tabletop game had a great time, on this evidence you kind of had to be there.

I’ll take my first and third critiques together, since they wind up reinforcing each other. While there are some flashes of originality in the character creation section – the races on offer are human, half-elf, and siren – the setup is one you’ve definitely seen before, with your character hired on to accompany three NPCs on a mission to recover the titular artifacts: the reasons, and its powers, are underexplained, as are the personalities of your crew (there’s a sidebar with some biographical info: the first one’s “quick-witted, smart, and conniving,” while the second is “intelligent, rather quiet, and alert”. The poor fighter, meanwhile, just gets some middling backstory, with no actual characterization listed. The story does go through some twists and turns, but there’s little narrative groundwork laid, so it can came off feeling like just one thing happening after another, and each incident is a trope you’ve definitely seen before (the one exception is the bit where you’re able to track down a bandit because she gave her real name, and declared the magic items she was carrying to customs, upon entering a city).

The classics are classics for a reason, of course, but making them sing is down to execution, and here’s where the omnipresent typos, eyestrain-inducing dark-red-on-black color scheme for links, and leaden prose prevent Sword of Voldiir from going down as indulgent IF junk-food. There’s just a little too much friction, a few too many details that jar – like the party members setting up a fire in the middle of an enclosed cave without worrying about smoke inhalation – and a few too many scenes that seem to be included out of a sense of obligation rather than because there’s anything compelling about them. Here’s a sequence where you check in on a companion after arriving at an inn:

“What have you been up to?”

“People watching.” She nods to the people sitting all across the dining room. “Interest folk who come here. I always enjoy watching them.”

“That’s fair enough. Have you seen anything interesting?”

“Plently.” She lets the conversation die there.

(There’s a pick-which-NPC-to-spend-time-with mechanic that appears that it eventually leads to a romance – I played the field to try to get to know all of them a bit, so in fairness it’s possible that if I’d stuck with one they’d start opening up a bit more).

As for the second item on the bill of particulars – I like RPG-style mechanics in IF, but Sword of Voldiir’s implementation doesn’t leave much room for the player. You do get randomly-rolled stats for your character, which I dig, and they do influence how some of your decisions play out, as well as coming to the fore in a couple of combat sequences. But their impact is obfuscated, as dice are only rolled behind the scenes, and your role in fighting is just to pick whether to use magic or weapons at the outset, with no information given about the options, and then click through turn by turn to see whether you die. There are various ways to make these kinds of mechanics legible to the player, from the simple expedient of showing the results of die-rolls, to graying-out options that aren’t available to you due to your build, or signposting where you’re getting more information because of a skill or background – and the RPG elements of the game would be stronger if some of these strategies were pursued. Heck, even the non-RPG bits suffer from a lack of player agency, with many choices literally coming down to picking which of three doors or passageways to go down, sans any context to make this anything but a stab in the dark.

Like I’ve said, all of this is stuff that would be eminently forgivable if it came up around the gaming table on a Thursday night – all the players would know what was going on at the system level, the low-key world building and action-oriented plot could make for a fun beer-and-pretzels experience, and the fact that the characters all talk about being “stoked” and curse a lot would just be an indication that the group is unwinding after a long day at work. Even the choose-a-door-any-door bits would indicate someone is about to have fun doing some graph-paper mapping! But it’s hard to make a tabletop campaign work as IF without deeper-seated changes than what Sword of Voldiir has to offer; adaptation, rather than direct translation, is what can breathe life into old grognard stories, and there’s not quite enough of that on offer here.

For all that we are changeable creatures, most of the poignancy of our temporary lives comes from their implacable, irrevocable permanence. As the poet says:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

One of the pleasures of games is the escape-hatch they offer from the tyranny of causality: feel free to move that Moving Finger back a ways, thanks to omnipresent save/load functionality, no tears – much less piety or wit! – required. The ability to explore what might have been is incredibly potent, but the tradeoff is that it’s also inhuman; there’s nothing in anyone’s lived experience remotely like thinking “nah, I didn’t like how that played out” and pushing rewind. So it’s perhaps no surprise that some designers perversely constrain the play of contingency in their games, in search of immediacy or meaning. Permadeath is one key strategy these folks pursue, forcing a player to slow down and consider the consequences of their actions – but this approach isn’t as powerful in narrative-focused games, as most stories don’t hinge on the extended moment-by-moment drama of “is the main character going to die now? How about now? How about now?” No, for narrative games the mechanic of choice is the Game You Can Only Play Once: by forcing you to live with your choices, removing easy options like reload and undo, and sometimes even preventing the player from restarting from a blank slate, you create a game that’s like, well, life: no do-overs.

Thousand Lives takes things one step further: this biographical game about a woman navigating the ebbs and flows of life in postwar Poland plays out in real time, forcing you to wait a day to see the consequences of your actions. Structurally, it hearkens back play-by-post games of the 80s and 90s (heck, the game’s main visual motif is a series of historical postage stamps); after you sign up to play, you get an email each day, laying out a bit of story and then prompting you for a choice that determines which bit of narrative you’ll get on the morrow. If you get buyer’s remorse half a second after clicking submit – which happened to me more than once in the week it took me to play – well, that’s just how it is, presumably you can relate!

There are dangers to this approach – most notably, each of the vignettes is relatively short, perhaps a thousand words or so, and a day in 2025 can feel very, very long. Fortunately, Thousand Lives does a good job of recapping the previous day’s action at the top of each email, re-grounding the player in the story before pushing it ahead.

And it’s a story I was very interested in. I’m by no means deeply versed in this era, but as a child in the 80s, I knew about the Polish pope, heard dockworkers chanting “Lech Walesa!” on the TV – I learned the word “solidarity” from the name of the union. I’m a sucker for a historical game, and the history Thousand Lives has to relate, of Poland’s suffering under and then emergence from the Iron Curtain, is dramatic – plus, it’s got a unique viewpoint character. The protagonist is a woman based on the author’s grandmother, and while her biography will vary depending on your decisions, she’s got a compelling personality: smart, caring, and willing to make tough choices to protect her dreams and her family (though of course she might not be able to do both).

Those choices are a high point of the game, as well they should be. They all feel impactful, and I agonized over most of them. Reflecting societal constraints under Communism (and capitalism, once it arrives!), only a few are about expressing a preference for what the protagonist wants their life to look like – most are about trade-offs, asking you what you’re willing to give up for one thing you want. I think you can play the game to create a version of the protagonist who’s completely uncompromising, but while I can see the temptations of that path, I wasn’t confident enough to take it, instead tacking back and forth with circumstances, sometimes pushing for my ambitions, sometimes settling for less when the cost to me or my loved ones felt like it would be too dear.

So this is a successful game, I think, but I admit my admiration is a bit chillier than I’d prefer. Partially this is because of how zoomed-out it is – Thousand Lives covers 75 years in the course of six chapters, none of which are especially long. Trying to cover a decade in a thousand words inevitably means that there’s not much texture; situations are described, but not events, trends, but not moments. While the writing successfully conveys some of the personality of the various people in the protagonist’s family, they never truly came alive for me. As a result, while the dilemmas the game regularly threw up were intellectually engaging – I didn’t want any of my loved ones to be imprisoned by the army! – they lacked the emotional heft that comes with specificity.

Paradoxically, the time lag and no-backsies mechanics might have also drained some of my choices of their impact. Given that it took some time and effort to get myself back in the cultural space of Communist Poland each time I got one of the game’s emails, I can’t help wondering whether longer, more intense engagement would have made it more memorable. But more significantly, in a game like this, there are no right answers, no wizard at the bottom of the dungeon who throws up a “you won!” sign upon his death. Navigating this kind of story isn’t a puzzle, it’s a journey, and I think I would have better appreciated my decisions if I’d had the opportunity to see the alternatives, and commit to my story. Life is one damned thing after another, as they say; if art lets us see all the different places that Moving Finger could move, before finally coming to rest in the place it does, well, there’s a poignancy in that, too.

There’s a distinct and robust subgenre of IF that’s devoted to the subjective portrayal of mental illness, braiding description and mechanics together to try to communicate the lived reality of conditions like OCD, social anxiety, autism, depression, and many more (like I said – it’s a robust subgenre, and one I think is a great example of what IF can do well). But Method in My Madness, despite appearances, isn’t actually part of this subgenre – while it effectively uses chaotic typography and text effects to make its scant word-count disorient and oppress the player (this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry), the mode here feels more focused on artifice than confession, more a lurid thriller with a twist than an attempt at verisimilitude.

Oh, what a twist, though! The game’s bag of tricks aren’t that novel, I suppose, or too hard to tease apart if you analyze them piece by piece, but they add up to an overwhelming assault on the senses. Words are splayed across the screen at odd angles, splashing in or fading out, their upsetting content secondary to the still-more-upsetting presentation. At first, appropriately, things don’t quite cohere – the name Cauchy (or is it a word? “Cauchemar” is French for nightmare…) is repeated like a mantra, “Fix me” is the only clickable link (though of course clicking it won’t) – but something resembling a plot does emerge: the protagonist is obsessed with a neighbor, contriving excuses to bump into him early in the morning when taking out the trash for pickup.

The narrator, with the player’s complicity, eventually engineers a meet-cute that leads to something further, a potentially sweet moment made terrifying by the disjunction between the reasonable-seeming dialogue, representing the protagonist desperately trying to hold things together, and the explosion of intrusive thoughts and mania leaking out at the margin. And then things take another turn…

Stripped of its House-of-Leaves aesthetics, Method in My Madness admittedly wouldn’t land quite as hard, but the prose works hand in hand with the formatting. I copied and pasted a bunch of sentence-fragments into my notes to jot down memorable phrases, and if the game’s styling hijinks meant that sometimes what got CTRL-V’d was a bit jumbled up, well, that’s all the more on point:

"Cauchyburn us all, our bodies fed to the spirits in the same way we were born: by the fairies
nothings mumbled in a restless, cold ear"

And while there are only a few choices, the use of interactivity is well-judged, making the player feel like they’ve got a say in where things go and pushing you to engage with the riot of text and appreciate the details, rather than just letting it wash over you. Again, I don’t think this game has much to say about real mental illness, rather than the Hollywood kind, since spectacle and plot are the first priorities here. Admittedly, sometimes that can trivialize important issues – Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitivity! But Method to my Madness doesn’t pretend to be something different than it is, and on its own terms, I think it delivers (and if you’re in the mood for something more substantive, there is that whole robust subgenre filled with great games to explore).

Pornography is not a genre known for its narrative inventiveness. This, frankly, is probably for the best (whoever decided to replace hoary old pizzaboy scenarios with the incest-baiting stepfamily thing: thanks I hate it), but it does mean that Office Temptation, which is another in the long line of Lewd Mod demos, excerpts, and previews, wrong-footed me for a minute since the setup is almost exactly the same as that of Hot in the Office, which I played for last year’s THON. Once again, you’re chatting with a sexy coworker (who you may not have previously met or recognize as a coworker, depending on which dialogue options you pick?) via a phone-based interface as she engages in some light flirtation and texts you the occasional risque selfie. The game’s clever enough to nod at the similarity – the previous game hinged on a faulty air-conditioning unit that led to stripteases to beat the heat, whereas this time the AC is on full blast so perky nipples are the order of the day – but this is still very much retreading some of same ground.

As a result, even on its own terms Office Temptation suffers in comparison to Lewd Mod: Noir, its companion entry in the THON. That had some pretensions towards a larger plot, more stylish visuals, and rudimentary gameplay; there’s nothing of the sort in this one, and without the shine of novelty I wound up fixating one the specifics, which I think was detrimental to the experience. Like, at one point there’s a long section where Maddie (your interlocutor) tells you about a time she wore some fishnet stockings in to work, but got written up for violating the dress code, which seems like it should be a prompt for some suggesting pictures or at least loving descriptions of how hot her legs looked in the fishnets – but no, it’s just an extended digression about an unpleasant interaction with HR, which feels like an idiosyncratic fetish (speaking of: there are still no eyes in the pictures).

Then there’s the fact that the central branch-point of the game hinges on the uncomfortable topic of Maddie’s body issues. See, she loves donuts, and there’s a big box of them in the break room, and she’s worried that if she eats one she won’t have the self-control to stop there, at which point she might not fit into the new lingerie she just bought and is eager to show you. This is awkward enough to begin with, but then it also turns out that Maddie has a boyfriend who calls her a fat pig and has made her internalize his body-shaming. So she asks you to berate her to prevent her from gorging on the donuts. You’ve got the choice of doing as she asks, or encouraging her to go to town on the sugary treats, which again I guess is somebody’s fetish, but the whole thing was pretty off-putting to me, lending credence to my these-people-are-trying-to-roleplay-a-sexy-scenario-but-intensely-bad-ad-it theory of these games (also, maybe once you bring mention the boyfriend throw in a “but it’s cool, we’re poly” or something?)

Where Office Temptation succeeds, though, is in dialing the loopiness of the dialogue, and especially the player’s options, up to 11. When Maddie says she’s wearing a thin vest and suggestively asks whether we know what happens to her when it gets cold (these people have the subtlety of a brick to the face), you can answer YOU DIE?; similarly, after the lingerie photo-shoot is aborted following an unfortunate incident with hot cocoa, you can swoop in with a desperate ARE YOUR TITS OK? Maddie isn’t much better; another long (oh god it feels so long) bit has her look for a hot drink because the AC is making her so chilly, leading her to seductively croon that she’s gong to “get a nice hot coffee to warm up my cold nipples.” So yeah: if you like coffee, boobs, donuts, body-shaming, and lingerie, and hate eyes and naturalistic dialogue, boy howdy does HHRichards have your number – others might want to steer clear.

There’s something recursive about the Single Choice Jam: because the jam’s constraint requires the player to have only a single moment when they can make a choice, the author’s choice of where that choice should go likewise takes on disproportionate weight. The obvious way to play things is to put it right at the end, so that the player is confronted with a dramatic climax after a comparatively longer build-up, but while this orthodox answer is hard to argue with, it’s also a little bit conventional. So I admit to feeling a bit underwhelmed when I realized that’s probably where Lazarrien: A Love Story was heading – the more so because the central dilemma the game was clearly setting up (try to end the curse on the Dark-Souls-esque fantasy land, or turn away from my quest in favor of the sexy demon with whom the main character has an immediate if underdeveloped rapport) also seemed like one I’d seen before. Happily, though, that meant that I was not at all expecting the way things actually played out, with a late-story twist that reconfigures everything that’s come before while sneakily getting an extra choice into the game while still obeying all the rules.

Admittedly, Lazarrien doesn’t put its best foot forward: stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but an amnesiac knight wakes up in an abandoned crypt, only to find the world is a blasted hellscape and the few survivors tell him he needs to climb to the castle on top of the mountain to set things to rights? Meanwhile, the adjective-heavy prose in the opening section sets a mood, but with visible effort:

"He traced the contours of the dusty shrine, taking in details that seemed familiar in a way he couldn’t place. A painting of a storm-battered mountain. A vase of withered flowers. A blackened ring set with a raw, gnarled garnet. Across the room, a strange statue stood on a plinth. Carved with uncanny precision from dark stone, a fearsome horned man reaching, his claws outstretched.

"…

"As he approached, the music grew louder, richer. He peered around the doorway. In the middle of the cobbled road stood a short woman dressed in an impossibly vibrant array of quilted patchwork, frayed paisley that defied the bleakness of its sky."

Happily, things quickly settle down. The game is structured around a series of encounters with four characters – as well as the aforementioned sexy demon, who’s pursuing you as you climb – and all of them have distinctive voices that nicely break up the more portentous narrative voice. And as the landscape gets more outre, the writing doesn’t feel like it needs to do quite so much work to get its point across – this bit is much more understated, and the more effective for it.

"The city gave way to a field of bramble, scorched rose vines that wove a thicket higher than three men. Thorns scraped against his armor and flesh alike as he rushed past. Crisp gray blossoms crumbled to ash in his wake."

Meanwhile, as the confrontations along the way get away from exposition and more into action, I likewise found the story more compelling. Lazarrien has big-time daddy issues that are familiar in broad strokes, but having a candle-wax effigy of his father shout his disapproval at his fleeing son is an effective way to make them more engaging, and while the inevitable sex scene with the demon may feel like it cuts to the chase oddly quickly, there’s an in-story reason for that.

So as I said, my opinion was trending positive when I hit the decision-point and the twist that immediately follows it. I won’t spoil that, but I’ll just say that if you think you’ve played a version of this game before, think again – it’s definitely worth following this journey to its destination at least once. More spoilery thoughts – largely gushing – are in the blurry-text below.

(Spoiler - click to show)So having the big choice of whether to be a loser and kill Agramith, or spare him and try to escape the curse some other way, wind up completely irrelevant to the actual nature of the trial is inspired – it made me literally cackle aloud, and I adored the fast-talking demoness who rolls her eyes at how dense you’ve been on this, your umpteenth time failing the challenge. Admittedly, I’m not sure this late turn into comedy fits completely smoothly with what comes before (in retrospect, it makes Agramith’s slide into the abyss feel even more slapstick – and also, Lazarrien, buddy, if you get told you need to bring the demon, your sword, and a ring to the castle, and you’ve screwed up a million times before, and there’s a giant pile of swords but not a single ring to be found, maybe put the ring first on the list of stuff you’re trying to remember, not last???) There’s still some pathos in Lazarrien’s plight, however, especially since the twist of course made me curious to replay and see how things differ when you encounter the characters in a different order – or see if there’s an invisible link that allows you to actually take the ring when you find it. Going through the same steps time after time, always hoping to find a better ending but always returning to the same place, put me in the shoes of the protagonist in a way a lot of eternal-recurrence stories struggle to achieve. The timed text does make replays a little slower than I’d like, but there is a satisfying level of variation, making the choice of whether to start over as, if not more, significant than whether you kill Agramith or allow him to fall to his doom, which is a clever subversion of the Jam’s constraints.

Last year’s THON was my introduction to the Lewd Mod extended universe – as of this writing, IFDB lists 13 different games, demos, and excerpts, the relationship and interconnections between which are obscure to unpack. They appear to all share some curious idiosyncrasies, though. The most obvious is that they’re pornographic games that present images pandering to an exceedingly specific demographic: people turned on by naked ladies drawn with MS-Paint-style graphics and no eyes. The fact that they have no eyes is never diegetically commented on, to my knowledge (in fact, Noir, which will get to in a moment, has two separate times when a character draws attention to eyes, one mentioning her “angry glare” in one picture or another drawing attention to a character’s “shifty eyes”. This feels like some kind of lampshading, but I don’t get it).

The structure is also fundamentally the same: the interface looks like a phone, you chat with a sexy lady, choosing dialogue options to move the conversation along in between the sexy pics. And they all seem to act as free teasers for full, paid games (the author’s Patreon is prominently mentioned) where, presumably, the really hot stuff lies.

Noir changes things up in adding an additional layer of gameplay. Here, you’ve been recruited by a spy agency to help them catch whoever’s surveilling their agents; you do this by reviewing a bunch of photos and flagging whichever depict one of their spies. How, you might ask, are you to identify these mistresses of the unknown? Well, these are special spies who always wear red hats. So if there’s a red hat in the picture you push the right-hand button, otherwise you push the one on the left (how finding the red-hat people, and not the people spying on the red-hat people, is supposed to help, is not explained).

While this does serve to break up the dialogue, everything about this is incredibly dumb, and as with the eyes, the game insists on drawing attention to itself – your main interlocutor this time is named Agent Scarlett, and you can ask her where these photos are coming from, and she has some hand-wave about social media feeds, hacked red-light cameras, and so on. But like, there are pictures of random ladies alone in their showers, I’m pretty sure the red-light cameras aren’t looking at that! Meanwhile, if you ask about the name of the agency you’re working for, you get this deathless prose:

It’s the hats, OK?

We wear Red Hats.

So we call ourselves the Red Hats.

Satisfied?

Anyway, it is easy to make fun of how unrealistic this is, and of course this is not exactly feminist-friendly porn that respect’s women’s bodies and identities; a major plot element is that Agent Scarlett treats you with barely-disguised contempt because her former partner was also her lover, but he slept around on her because her boobs were too small (I’m no expert on bra sizes, but from the nude pics you of course eventually get of her, Scarlett is rocking at least a C cup).

But playing two Lewd Mod games last year clued me in on the secret interpretation that makes these games a lot of fun: you just assume that these people are married thirty-somethings trying out some sexy roleplaying on the one night a month they’ve got babysitting, so while they’re extremely horny they’re also extremely bad at all this. Like, clearly they thought up this spy theme, and thought the red fedora thing seemed sexy (possibly they got spies confused with private detectives) so they Google image-searched “red hats porn” and ran with it, yes-anding the first ideas that popped into their heads and talking like hormone-poisoned teenagers whose tongues are way, way ahead of their brains (when Scarlett – not a girl’s girl – runs down her ex-partners’ paramours, she says they were “full of tits and easy with them.” Meanwhile, the less said about the PC’s dialogue choices, the better).

And so it’s no surprise how my playthrough ended: after a sexy striptease involving Scarlett pouring liquor all over her body – which would have been hotter if she, y’know, had eyes, like a significant majority of the human race – she suddenly realizes this might not have been the best idea:

Look, I gotta go.

I’m suddenly out of booze??

And kind of need a shower.

Godspeed, Agent Scarlett. Better tip the babysitter so you can try again next month.

The art of naming fictional places is a tricky one (and one I’ve never had much facility with), so kudos to take me to the lakes… for nailing it. Lake Dioscuri invokes the twins Castor and Pollux – one a demigod, the other fully human, due to Greek-mythological shenanigans one shouldn’t inquire too closely into – which is a more than apt reference for the game’s themes of reflected identities. But to my ear, in combination with the title it also calls to mind Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley told the story that became Frankenstein to an audience of poets: if there’s a monster in take me to the lakes…, it’s one whose misdeeds can’t be meaningfully separated from its creator’s.

Presentation-wise, this is a Decker kinetic novel – so while the only interactivity is clicking to advance to the next bit of story, the electronic presentation makes perfect sense; Decker’s moody monochrome art is a perfect complement to the text, painted in glistening grayscale stipple-effects like someone put a film noir classic on a mid-80s Mac. Of course this is something you’d play on the computer!

The noir vibe is completely on point given that things open with the trenchcoat-clad protagonist monologuing about a body being found in the lake. We never get outside that subjective POV, even as the story takes some twists and turns, making meaning – much less truth – a slippery thing. The pas de deux (Spoiler - click to show)(or… pas de une?) between the narrator and Elizabeth, a poet who is the object of their obsession, is well realized, with abstract considerations of identity, inspiration, and jealousy grounded in a blunt corporeality:

"You knew the way it breathed, the way it sighed… and it’s all gone now. All gone with her."

(The “it” is Elizabeth’s body).

My one small kick against the writing is that it occasionally undermines its effectiveness with repetition; “all [Elizabeth’s] poems were about one of two things: love and drowning” is a great line, making the unnecessary follow-up (“Elizabeth was obsessed with the vision of sliding down into the lake and disappearing without a trace”) seem limp by comparison. And the ending likewise has a couple sentences that feel like they’re going over already-plowed ground.

But these are minor nits to pick, and the climactic move of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(revealing that the poet wished to be a muse instead) is a unique and satisfying way to bring things to a close. Meanwhile, I’ve got no critique at all of the visuals – I don’t usually spend a lot of time on graphics in IF, but my notes are filled with oohing and aahing at the pictures (there’s one of a hand reaching out from the waves that I especially liked). That great place-name is just one of the well-chosen details that make take me to the lakes… a unified and engaging aesthetic experience.

Between last year’s THON and this one, I’ve played a bunch of super-short games, which has been a novel experience for me – since I mostly just play things I’m going to review, I don’t typically seek out jam entries as my sense is the typical entrant isn’t necessarily looking for a nitpicky review longer than their game was. It’s been illuminating to see different theories about craft play out – or fail – on the unforgiving stage of a game whose text could fit on one or two pages, and Habeas Corpus is no different. This 1,000 word Twine game has cool visual design reminiscent of the early 90s, all pixelated fonts and chunky buttons, and some parser-like gameplay elements allowing you to visit different areas and solve a (simple) inventory puzzle. It’s also got some individual moments of arresting imagery. But the lesson it teaches is the importance of focus: without a strong central spine around which these pieces can cohere, I was left feeling like the game is less than the sum of its (each quite cool) parts.

Start with the title: the great writ of habeas corpus is one of the foundational legal protections against tyranny, as allows the sovereign to be brought to court to confirm whether it’s detaining someone, and if so, what authority justifies their incarceration and where they can be found – the Latin literally means “you have the body”. It’s a title pregnant with possibility, but any relation to the game is hard to suss out: rather than a crusading lawyer, you play a (amnesiac?) cipher exploring a mostly-deserted base. One ending allows you to rescue a harpy-phoenix whose torment seems to provide power to the facility, so I suppose there’s kind of a thematic link there if you squint, but the other ending sees you go to sleep forever in a bunk next to a dying man, which feels farther afield. Meanwhile, the blurb reveals that the theme for the jam that produced this game was “ENVIRONMENT”, so I guess the harpy is actually a fossil-fuels allegory? And who knows what this has to do with the 90s, or the subtitle of “abandoned spaces, perpetual motion.”

A really strong prose style could do a lot to knit things together, but while there are some individually memorable phrases, there’s frequently an indeterminacy to the writing that’s frustrating in a piece that’s in need of nailing down. Like, here’s a line from the opening:

"The room around you feels still as a held breath despite the ceaseless motion of the structure itself."

That’s an interesting idea, but it’s sure self-contradictory, and the implications of what it says about the PC or the situation aren’t explored. There are similar oppositions embedded in this description of the facility’s doors:

"The remaining doors each bear plaques beaten from dark, glittering alloys. Light seems to drip from their deeply engraved words."

The puzzle, meanwhile, is about as stripped-down as it can be (there’s exactly one takeable object in the game, and exactly one situation in which you’re prompted to use it), and of the five room you can visit, one seems to exist just to hold the aforementioned object, while enough doesn’t even have that much going on. Thin gameplay in a short game is no big deal, of course, but in the absence of compelling characters or a dramatic plot or electric writing, it’s one more opportunity to provide a strong central element that the game passes up.

The counterargument here would be to argue that sometimes heterogeneity has a charm all its own – some acknowledged IF classics are more or less pieces of bricolage, going back to the crazy-quilt that is Zork. And that can work, I agree, but even in those cases I think there’s typically some unifying vibe structuring the experience, and, crucially, enough time for the player to settle in while they consider which elements resonate for them. In a short game, the need to grab the player is commensurately higher – my main complaint about Habeas Corpus is that it ended before I had a chance to decide what I think it’s about, which isn’t an issue I’ve run into even with Neo-Twiny Jam entries that have half the word-count. Maybe 1,000 words is just a tough length to work from, since it’s too much for a sharp spike of a punk song, but too short for a prog epic; still, I can’t help feel that a catchier hook could have made the disparate pieces of this game sing.

Rarely has a theory been as tempting, and as wrong, as the Whig view of history – which is to say, history that views the past through the lens of the present, imposing a progressive, if not teleological, interpretation on all that’s come before. It’s an easy habit of mind for us moderns to slip into, because so much of our experience does tend to fit this frame (it’s no coincidence that this approach gained ascendency in 19th-Century Britain, when evolution, technological development, and the shrugging off of the vestiges of feudal oppression really did make it seem as though it was an iron law that previous developments would lead to an ever-better future). But of course it’s not true: things happen for their own reasons, on their own terms, and the chains that connect them to their consequences are often nebulous, contingent, and far easier to see in retrospect than they ever were at the time. As for the idea that all forward motion is upward-striving progress – well, at least the 21st century has mostly disabused us of that notion.

Sadly, identifying the trap is a far different thing from evading the trap, so while I know it’d be a far better critical practice to view Ataraxia as a player first engaging with it in 2022 would have, I can’t help seeing it as a spiritual ancestor to Eikas, the author’s two-years-later cook-for-a-community-kitchen Comp entry. This isn’t pure error on my part, since the games have quite a lot in common – they’re both farming/crafting sim-ish Twine games with a long runtime, and a handful of appealingly-drawn NPCs to woo or just hang out with, set in an isolated, vaguely-British area of rural splendor. The central gameplay loop is often quite similar, too, with the day starting by popping out to your garden to harvest some produce, then a trip to town to sell your goods and pick up a few bits and bobs for your crafting projects, before wandering in the woods and perhaps visiting the lighthouse-keeper or innkeeper for tea and some light flirting.

This is all grand, let me be clear! I love that one of the main engines of progress is buying new books, since they teach you recipes or help you learn more about the island where you’ve arrived to settle (I dig how grounded the history is, literally in the case of the discussion of the economics of coal-mining). Meanwhile, being able to buy a pet helps make your home that much homier, and the ability to play the field with the four NPCs is lovely since they’re all a great, cozy hang (albeit perhaps not the most passion-inspiring partners), and it’s nice that very few interactions with them are gated behind the romance Y/N toggle. And the writing richly evokes an Atlantic idyll that I just want to snuggle into, even when it’s a bit forbidding:

"The sky hasn’t made its mind up about what colour it wishes to be, and the pale vastness of it is mottled in slate-grey, cobalt, lilac. Gulls wheel in the briny air, squawking impatiently at one another. The wind is cooler than you are used to."

There’s a painterly eye for detail, and a naturalist’s for the evocative use of names:

"The island is at its most pastoral here; grass speckled with cowslips and gentian, black-tailed sheep grazing on the distant slopes, light reflecting off the surface of the water. As you round a bend you see an old red-painted windmill, its sails unmoving."

While the nature of Ataraxia’s gameplay does mean that there’s a lot of repeated text as you once again comb the beach for seaglass or visit the bookseller for one more fix for your reading habit, this lovely prose meant I was always alert to any new words I might get to enjoy. There are also a few – well, I was going to call them “quests” or “adventures”, but that gives too intense of a vibe; let’s go with “diversions”, maybe? – that nicely break up your quotidian routine. Some of these are one-offs, like the island’s regular series of festivals where you can observe some local customs, catch up with one of your neighbors, and maybe do some gambling. Others kick off longer investigations, where a mutilated sheep or distant shipwreck will prompt you to poke your nose into other people’s business, learn more of the island’s history, and choose how much you want to drag the past into the present.

So Ataraxia is grand, and I had a lot of fun! …but here lurk the Whigs, because I also couldn’t help seeing at as step along the way towards Eikas. Crafting here can sometimes either feel pointless or overdetermined: at first you’re building things just to make money, but there are more efficient ways to do that, and later, you’ll need to build specific things to complete events, but you know the exact recipe so it’s just a matter of spamming the gather-ingredients task in the appropriate place until you get what you need. There’s also not much sense of time pressure, which also means there’s not any need to prioritize or focus your actions; as a result, I wound up bouncing around between different plot threads. Eikas’ cooking-focused structure resolves a lot of these issues; planning a meal means you’re looking for synergies between different recipes, and the wide variety of ingredients means the crafting system has more constraints, and more room for improvisation and creativity. Meanwhile, the regular schedule of feasts adds shape to the days, and gives you lots of short-term goals to work towards.

Some of the systems here can also feel slightly underbaked by comparison with the later game. Money stops being useful about a third of the way in, since you can’t buy most ingredients, until suddenly you need to spend a bunch of money to unlock the endgame. Taking an idle stroll around the island’s biomes is also separated from ingredient-gathering, where they were linked in Eikas – which means I almost never took in the scenery except when I had a task that specifically prompted me to do so.

And then there are a few notes that seem slightly out of place with the general vibe. Why are the achievements named for tarot cards when nothing else in the game does much with that imagery? What’s with the somewhat-thin four-humours-based personality system, which doesn’t seem to do much except gray out the occasional dialogue option? Since the game’s title comes from a philosophy of equanimity in Stoicism or Epicurianism, maybe you’re supposed to keep them balanced, but I never figured out how that would be possible, as it seems to shunt you two a couple main ones and then doesn’t let you revisit those choices (for that matter, the title and concept don’t feel like they’ve got a strong connection to the game’s themes as a whole – unlike Eikas, an also-Epicurean community celebration).

This comparison with Eikas is deeply unfair, since as I said, Ataraxia is a great game that’s easy to recommend to anyone who’s remotely interested by the pitch; prose that conjures up a real sense of place, engaging characters, gameplay that throws up just enough friction to be enjoyable, but not enough to stall things out. And having the later game in mind did make me appreciate the places where the earlier one does something different – in particular, there’s a vein of folk-horror that runs through much of the story, lending some welcome spikiness to proceedings (the forest-spirits sequence has some genuinely unsettling imagery!) even though it never wholly undermines the island’s appeal. So if you’ve played Eikas, stuff your inner Whig into a closet and you’ll have a grand old time. And if you haven’t, well, you’re even luckier since now you’ve got two things to look forward to.