Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

There’s a running joke about the classic sci-fi tabletop RPG Traveller, which is that it’s the only game where you can die before getting out of chargen. It uses a “lifepath” system, you see, where a series of tables let you roll year by year for events in your military career before you decide to muster out, at which point the game proper begins. But buried in those tables are some options that will just kill you, and send you back to the drawing board before your poor character even gets a chance to start a campaign. The other running joke is that chargen is the best part of the game, and A Mouse Speaks With Death shows that actually there might be something to that: it uses a card-based storylet system rather than dice as you recall each of the events of your life, and per the title no matter how well you do there’s no way to get out alive. But just like Traveller, it’s compelling stuff that positively demands you try it at least a couple of times, just to see how differently things can turn out.

The other similarity with Traveller is that the game is based on the author’s own tabletop setting, a Watership-Down-style place where heroic mice scrounge, travel, and protect what’s theirs in the shadow of the overwhelming and arcane world of humankind. I was worried at first that this connection might wind up overburdening the game – there’s a very robust glossary running down in-world terminology, much of which felt unnecessary: did we really need to know that “thief” means someone “who steals from their own nestmates, a term of opprobrium” or that “trouble” is “something dangerous”? I presume that in the RPG some of these terms have mechanics attached to them, but in the context of this game, they’re superfluous.

Fortunately the game quickly proved that it’s a fleeter thing than that first impression might have suggested. Part of that is the lovely art: you’re greeted with a well-realized mouse skeleton wearing a robe and perched on a spool of thread, a near-perfect blend of dread and cute (this is the eponymous Death, to whom you’re reciting your memories before he moves you on to your final destination). Part of it is the no-nonsense interface: at each life-stage, you’re given a hand of three cards and can pick one to play, at which point you’re whisked into a storylet that offers more traditional choice-based gameplay (past the first choice, you can also use one of a limited stock of redraws to swap out your options). But mostly it’s just down to the writing, which efficiently delivers all the pleasures of this genre: the mice are doughty and resourceful, the mysterious human artifacts they encounter induce awe as well as a thrill of recognition, and there’s a lovely concreteness to it all. Here’s a bit from one of the opening vignettes:

"Our nest was tissue paper chewed into strips. When I first opened my eyes, the world was white and red in the gloom, the colour of the paper. We — me and my brothers and sisters — were all heaped up together. Those were wonderful days. We had full bellies; each other."

While you’re to a certain degree at the mercy of the cards, and no matter how well you play you can only make it through at most eight rounds, the game still feels generous and provides plenty of player agency. It helps that the framing lets you know that you’re going to die no matter what so you might as well enjoy yourself, but the storylets are also designed to let you coauthor many of the outcomes; if you feel like inflicting setbacks on your mouse, you’re free to, but for the most part you can also just decide to live a relatively charmed life before the inevitable happens.

While there isn’t any visible stat tracking or explicit connections between the cards, it’s clear that some storylets unlock others, like the way I saw cards enabling me to start a family after playing one that introduced me to my partner (I was a little disappointed, though, that the Red Beast storylet, which saw me boldly stride out to defend the nest, didn’t acknowledge that a previously one had seen me named the nest’s official Champion – this was actually just my job). The end of the game also shows you a little animated word-cloud based on how you played your mouse and what you accomplished; in my most eventful playthrough, I wound up with something like 17 tags, which maybe made the animation drag, but it makes for a nice incentive to try again and explore the possibility-space. The space around Death also fills up with cute bits of art representing possessions you accumulate or key events in your life, which similarly winds up rewarding experimentation.

Also contributing to A Mouse Speaks to Deaths’ grabbiness is the suggestion of a metaplot. Certain cards are marked with a special triangle symbol, and by playing as many of those as you can, you can learn scraps of lore about a fabled city whose inhabitants managed to obtain immortality. I’m not sure if the likelihood of getting these triangle cards increases in subsequent playthroughs, but in my fourth go-round I was able to find out the truth of these legends after some nerve-wracking derring-do; it’s maybe less climactic than I was expecting, and I still had three rounds left so this heroic mouse still wound up going out on a relatively simple note, but that fits the game’s unpretentious, wistful vibe better than allowing an epic fantasy theme to suddenly dominate.

I should mention some elements that are flaws, not just design choices: I noticed a few bugs in the Wind storylet, where several passages threw up angry red “bad conditional expression” errors, and the chronology of the different storylets sometimes got muddled (a few seem to take multiple years, whereas others are clearly over in a matter of hours or days and seem like they should certainly overlap with a few of the longer-term ones). One time I also died at my fourth or fifth card play without being sure what exactly had happened – I suppose that’s delivering the classic Traveller experience, but I definitely wanted a bit more closure. And I’m not sure the pool of different events is broad enough to keep each playthrough fresh after the third of fourth. Still, that’s more than enough to make for a meaty, satisfying experience; the well-judged game design structure and winsome prose were enough to induce me to see 23 of the 46 available stories, over the course of an hour or so, and I enjoyed every single one at least a little. The one downside is that I’m left with no desire at all to check out the tie-in RPG: I’m satisfied just rolling up and killing characters, thanks.

Continuing the review-a-thon run through the highlights of other events, we come to Not Just Once, which was intended as an entry in last year’s ShuffleComp revival, but missed the deadline. The conceit of ShuffleComp is that participants submit a couple of songs, the organizers shuffle them around, and then they hand a new selection back to the authors, who make a game based on some or all of the songs on their customized mini-mix-tape. Sadly for my ability to evaluate Not Just Once according to the rules of the Comp, I didn’t listen to the playlist listed by the author, which contained three songs from bands I’d never heard of, a Radiohead track that’s unfamiliar to me, and a Genesis song whose title meant nothing to me at the time though now that I go back and look at it again, I realize was on the adult contemporary station all the time when I was a kid.

Fortunately, Not Just Once stands on its own well enough. A Twine game gussied up with a stylish blue header and footer, it also boasts a customized interface where selecting a choice reveals a few new paragraphs and then scrolls down to the next set of options, making it play something like an Ink game with a better color palette. It also impresses with how quickly it establishes its downmarket UK setting:

"This is your local high street, although it barely deserves the title. Fully half the shop fronts are boarded up or to let. There’s a corner shop with overpriced groceries - that you’ve just come out of - an off-license, a phone repair kiosk, and a couple of charity shops (they closed mid-afternoon, though).

"Overhead, Christmas lighting flashes desultorily - alternating stylised LED gifts and trees, strung across the street. The local council’s festive offering, still in place."

There are a few small infelicities here (the “that you’ve just come out of” interjection is a little clumsy, and “desultorily” is always a mistake) but they’re drowned out by the evocatively sardonic turns of phrase and nicely-chosen details. The prose remains strong as the plot kicks in: a pay phone is ringing in its booth as you walk by, and after you feel drawn to pick it up, you unexpectedly find yourself thrust into a disorienting and intense conversation with a women who’s alluring as she is threatening, and who says she knows you though you’d swear you’ve never met her before in your life.

While the direction the story goes isn’t too hard to guess, the writing is effective at communicating your warring curiosity and wariness, and early choices that seemed merely incidental see call-backs that make the game feel responsive. Despite drawing on five different songs, it struck me as fairly one-note – modulo a bit of a twist in the ending and those couple minutes of setup before it shows its hand, Not Just Once is content to stick with a slow ratcheting up of its I-want-to-make-out-with-you-but-also-you-might-kill-me tension. But hey, that’s a fun note, and it’s well played here.

There are a few missed opportunities: many of the choices do feel like they reduce to “do you want the plot to keep happening Y/N”, which isn’t very interesting, and I was surprised the ending didn’t twist in the way I was expecting (Spoiler - click to show)(wouldn’t it have been more fun, and neater, if it had been the girl who answered the phone call at the end, except this time she’s the one with no memory of you?). And I think the pacing is perhaps five to ten percent slower than would be ideal; this is still a nervy little thriller, don’t get me wrong, but a little bit of tightening would pay significant dividends. But that’s often the way with mix-tapes: they can be a bit shaggy, but an enthusiastic mix of disparate elements will take you far.

We’ve now reached the first of a couple Goncharov games in the thon. I’m dimly aware of the provenance here; there was a social-media meme a couple years ago where folks conjured up the existence of a “lost” Scorsese film focusing on the namesake Russian gangster, and then a game jam dedicated to games fleshing out the mythos. I’m not sure how much of the core concepts were set by the organizers, or the meme – I’m assuming at least some of the details of setting and a few of the characters – but suspect that the jam will take the “interpretation of the Odyssey by someone who’s never read the Odyssey” thing I mentioned a couple reviews up to heretofore-unplumbed, kaleidoscopic extremes.

Someone Else’s Story is a short Twine game, and zooms in on one moment that surely must come early in the film: you play Sofia, a woman with some connection to the Italian mob who’s given the task of weaseling into the good graces of Goncharov’s wife Katya at a cocktail party to see what she knows about what the Russians are up to. I found the backstory here somewhat confusing – there are a lot of different characters name-checked, and the details of who you are and what kind of move is being made are left vague – but this isn’t a mystery or thriller where you need to carefully sift through information and make high-stakes deductions. No, all of that setup is basically just there to create background vibes for a flirtation-with-intent pas des deux with Goncharova.

Sexually-charged conversations with an undercurrent of danger are a staple of mob movies, of course, even if the details here would strain credulity if one took the meme seriously (forget the lesbian subtext, has Scorsese ever shot a scene that’s just two women talking?) The game does a good job of playing this trope; the descriptions convey Katya’s sexiness, and the player’s given a couple of satisfying opportunities to take a risk and make their interest known. Meanwhile, while the men’s criminal business is never openly spelled out, the writing conveys the possibility of violence and its potential to swallow you up, too, if you’re not careful:

"'Most people don’t want to get on the wrong side of my husband,' she says. 'But you—you don’t care. I like that.'

"You wonder if perhaps it would have been wise to care."

While there are clearly mechanics that track how much you’re leaning into seduction vs. fishing for information vs. playing it safe and building a rapport to exploit later on, the choices never feel mechanical; the fiction effectively pushes you to try to balance your disparate goals, and it makes sense that there’s rarely a conversational gambit without tradeoffs or opportunity costs. My one complaint about the implementation of the battle of wits is that on my first go-round, it was over surprisingly quickly – the main conversation is just a sequence of four or five choices, so while I thought I was starting out with a cautiously considered opening to feel Katya out, in fact I was just frittering away my scarce opportunities to push forward. But on the flip side, the game’s brevity means it was easy to replay, armed with the knowledge of the ticking clock, and even that ambivalent, premature ending works well on its own terms.

Of course, partially that’s because this is, as mentioned, an early establishing scene: it sets up the relationship between two characters and clarifies the stakes for when they next come together. Whether Katya will be eager to pursue an assignation with an enticing stranger, or will find herself trying to shield a nosy interloper from the consequences of her own curiosity, the consequences will all play out off-screen. So too are we not privy to how Sofia will navigate the conference with the boss who assigned her her task, though notably in none of the game’s endings does she get any definitive information from Katya. This range of potential outcomes combined with the lack of narrative resolution mean that the game is essentially ambiguous – but that’s not a flaw so much as further confirmation that, as Katya says, this is fundamentally someone else’s story: Scorsese’s camera will lock onto the husbands and capos, while the struggles, loves, and hazards of the women are confined to the margin.

While at 43 I often find myself feeling like a bit of a graybeard, my contemporary experience with vintage-era IF is actually fairly limited – I played a few Infocom games that I was a bit too young for, and outside of a few low-rent BASIC adventures that was pretty much it until Photopia got me into the amateur scene. I’ve managed to go back and patch up several of my biggest lacunae, but I’ve never felt especially tempted to check out the Scott Adams two-word parser games; I understand their historical relevance in cramming an adventure game experience onto the earliest microcomputers, but by reputation and upon first inspection they seem to have bare prose, a primitive parser, and obtuse puzzles, which aren’t exactly a cocktail that gets me excited.

Thus, I groaned when I saw that Sunburst Contamination was a Scott Adams homage from 1988, then given an update into Inform in 2007. And indeed at first blush it mostly lived down to my preconceptions: there’s the simple moon-logic plot overcomplicated with dream logic, for one thing, in which you’ve taken your employer’s spaceship on an unauthorized joyride to visit your girlfriend and now need to get back to base, except there are hungry toads who’ve gotten loose, and you need to run around the ship finding inexplicably-hidden ration packets to prevent the toads from eating them while in transit. There are the frequent typos, the unimplemented scenery (one of the first locations is named “Fountain,” with a description that spotlights the eponymous water feature – guess what response X FOUNTAIN gives?), the inevitable inventory limit, a nonsensical title, and then there’s the stuff that’s really baroquely terrible, like the “insignificant button” that can only be interacted with by calling it INSIGNIFICANT, rather than BUTTON, or the switched-off flashlight I spent a solid ten minutes guess-the-verb-ing in an ultimately futile attempt to activate.

I managed to struggle through the first half hour or so, by sheer force of will solving the initial couple of puzzles that gated access to the ship and collecting one or two of the seven ration packs, but pretty quickly hit a wall. There’s no included walkthrough, so I scoured the IFDB page and saw that the BASIC source code was available. I was bent on finishing the game – let it never be said that you don’t get value for money in a Mike Russo review-a-thon – but I figured I’d glance at the other reviews while I girded my loins to start back-tracing GOTO statements to discover what I was missing. And lo and behold, what did I see but a SPAG review from 2008 crowing about what a funny parody of Scott Adams style games the authors had pulled off.

Reader, the light dawned, and my good mood was further strengthened by the realization that CASA had a full walkthrough available and I didn’t need to go source diving after all.

Having played the game to completion, I can say I now kinda get the joke and see how it could be enjoyable? The flashlight bit is legit pretty funny, I have to say, and it is notable that the game is mostly merciful (I hit an issue where fumbling around with the cargo-crane controls got me in an unwinnable position, but I think that was due to a bug rather than intentional design); likewise careful trial and error, paying close attention to the verbs the ABOUT text tells you are implemented, will get you through most of the puzzles, even though the game’s humor extends to messing with the verb list. I think this is an attempt to make a game that sends up the extreme difficulty of those Scott Adams games, while still providing enough modern conveniences to be player-friendly.

Except, well, this is a game from 1988, so player-friendly by those standards still winds up feeling pretty forbidding today; meanwhile, the tropes being parodied have sufficiently receded that I suspect it’d be hard for most modern players to tell the difference between a sincere and a satirical implementation. The overall effect is like one of those jokes in Chaucer you need the footnotes to understand; now that I get what Sunburst Contamination is up to I appreciate what it’s doing, but I’m too far away from the target audience for the gag to truly land.

One cool thing about the review-a-thon is that it seems like a lot of the games were entries in jams or events that passed me by, so it functions as an anthology of sorts, providing a little taste of a wide range of flavors. Your World is from 2023’s Bare Bones Jam, whose operating constraint was that entries had to stick to their system of choice’s default visual styling. This is obviously far more interesting for choice games than parser ones, so fortunately that’s what we’ve got here, a Twine game in that glorious black-background-white-text-blue-links palette we all know and love.

I’m not sure whether many other entries in the jam justified their minimalist presentation diegetically, but Your World does, and with a doozy of a concept: the game presents itself as written by a sentient word, who swapped places with the author for a month, in order to communicate its experiences and reflections after leaving its text-based world for our own. With the clock ticking on its sojourn, and after an abortive attempt to learn Inform, it makes sense that the word wouldn’t be wasting time with fripperies.

There’s a certain irony to that choice, however. You see, one of the central things the word wants to share is exactly how much better rich sensory experiences are than mere text. The early section of the game, where the word explores the author’s apartment, is dominated by an overwhelming intensity of sensation:

"The noise from the AC was blaring, the brown light coming from the bulbs in the room hurt me, and the smell of the carpet – god, it must smell normal to you, but I could smell the mustiness. I tried to breathe for the first time and the dust in the air choked me."

The word is eager for all of this: there’s an entertaining bit where it opens the author’s dresser and lists each and every garment there, focusing on the color and texture of every one (there’s also a fun running joke where it keeps expecting green things to smell like grass – capped off by a heck of a punchline when the word eventually does make it outside). But despite the clear pleasure it takes in all this, the word is no mere sybarite; no, it has philosophical and ideological reasons for rejecting its textual origins, riffing on Wittgenstein to critique the naïve idea that words have distinct meanings, and continually arguing that mere text is too imprecise and too abstract to full communicate the quiddity of experience. Images, especially moving images and moving images with sound, are the word’s beau ideal:

"I want to be free from words. I want to be the gestalt that captures all the sights and sounds of everything around me. I want to live up to my ideals, not just be a word association game."

I mentioned that the choice to present this ode to splendor in the ugliest imaginable format is an ironic choice, but to an extent the whole game undercuts itself. Look at its structure: it opens with an incredibly zoomed-in look at a single room, with hyper-realized, fractal detail, then skips over a whole romantic relationship in only a few sentences. And almost every single sequence features description that foregrounds smell, taste, and a subjectivity around color and sound that would be near-impossible to communicate in film, at least without near-constant, plodding narration. The bit where the word stumbles across the IF Top Fifty and is horrified is just the cherry on top – what better way to prompt an IF audience to view the word as an unreliable narrator?

It’d be easy to dismiss Your World as a self-satisfied joke about the superiority of text-only IF, in other words – all the more so because there really are some great bits here that only work in text, like the word feeling “like serifs [are] coming out of me” when it starts sweating from a fever, or accuses the color gray of being “like a half-assed word… something like ‘implicative’.” The final reveal of what the word actually is also earned a guffaw. But I think there’s more going on here. For one thing, the word is self-aware enough to anticipate the most obvious objections to its position:

"I know what you’re thinking: I’m just some word that’s in love with anything that isn’t text; anything that is reminds me of my own weaknesses."

And is capable of acknowledging the ways that words alone can be effective:

"I think there’s something to be gained by trying to communicate – even within this broken and flawed system.

"At the very least, it’s easy to write something in text."

This combination of sincerity and irony is very contemporary, of course, but I think it’s also apposite to what the game seems to me to be getting at: all the different media at our fingertips have their limitations and their glories, and though the specifics of our experience may make one more appealing than another – indeed, just as the word rejects the markers of the textstream where it came from, by negative inference perhaps many of us are so drawn to text precisely because we live in a culture so saturated with audiovisual noise! – the possibility of connection, however achieved, is the important thing. And a rejection of artifice can ultimately wind up being just as artificial as what it purports to oppose, if it departs from that goal.

There’s a story I remember hearing about O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ The-Odyssey-by-way-of-Appalachia musical, which is that as they translated each of the famous elements from the source material into the 1930s context – the cyclops, the suitors, some dude named Menelaus – they intentionally did not refer back to Homer or reread the poem, the better to lock in on the pieces of the story that are archetypal and have fully entered the cultural zeitgeist.

(No, I haven’t gone back to verify whether or not this is true; that would go against the point of the anecdote, wouldn’t it?)

Anyway, if the Coen Brothers can make a movie about the Odyssey without reading the Odyssey, hopefully I can get away with reviewing a game about City of Secrets without playing City of Secrets. Tribute, you see, was an entry in 2020’s Emily Short Anniversary Contest (said anniversary being Galatea hitting the 20 year mark), and it directly riffs on CoS by borrowing its map and many of its scenery descriptions and then plopping a scavenger hunt on top of the geography. My dim sense of the original game is that it’s got a lot of conversation with a bunch of different characters, with an espionage kind of vibe, but little of that carries over into Tribute: there’s one character who contacts you via a telepathy-enabling pendant to say deeply un-Shortian things like “we really need your help. Evil is once again threatening our city. This time the enemy is in the form of dark magic.” I also suspect that the gameplay for CoS is more involved than just finding ten haphazardly-hidden gems in a nearly-empty map.

So yeah, playing Tribute doesn’t seem like it much resembles playing CoS, despite the fact that it seems like a large majority of the words here come from the original game. But writing prose as good as Emily Short’s is a high bar, to say nothing of designing challenges as tightly as she does, so I think there’s limited value in comparing the games directly. Really what the author is doing here is akin to doodling on a bunch of Caravaggios to create a hidden object game; the cartoons aren’t going to display quite the same mastery of chiaroscuro, but hey, you get to enjoy some great art while playing find-the-widget, what’s not to like?

Viewed in those terms, Tribute is… okay. I like Short’s descriptions as much as the next IF veteran, and there are some solid ones here that do entice me to play the full game so I can see what they look like in their intended context:

"The bottom of the hill, outside the train station, with its trolley tracks and the dulled statue of an ancient queen, hemmed on the east by the hotel and on the west by the health office."

But I couldn’t help notice that the map, denuded of characters and stripped of plot-relevant objects, is a bit sparse. Short often does the thing where you carefully mention as few nouns as possible in your area descriptions in order to convey the idea of a place without having to spend days implementing scenery; it’s is a canny technique to effectively create a backdrop, but it works less well when you take away the foreground. It also seems like the author hasn’t translated over everything that was in the original game, since I ran into far more unimplemented objects than I’d expect to see in a game from the same person who wrote Metamorphoses.

This art-appreciation side of Tribute is also undercut by the Where’s-Waldo side’s choice not to engage much with the original setting. In a map of 30ish locations, only ten feature a hidden gem, and only a handful more are involved with any of the puzzles. The pendant the player character starts with gives a warning when you’re in one of the rooms with a gem, as well as when you’ve found one of the plot-critical objects. This does avoid the tedium of aimlessly fiddling about with every unpromising bit of impedimenta, but unavoidably does make it easy to play on autopilot when you don’t get a bolded alert telling you to pay attention. It also means that I was stymied for a while when I hit the one or two puzzles that didn’t announce themselves (these largely had to do with unlocking exits that are mentioned in the text but don’t show up on the convenient automap – it makes sense that only currently-valid connections are shown, but I didn’t realize that was the rule so once again a helpful feature wound up being an obstacle).

The puzzles themselves are generally fine; they’re nothing to write home about, but I found it pleasing to poke and prod around until I found each gem. Many of them do involve that very Shortesque dynamic of fractally unveiling more and more details of an object by looking at successive pieces in turn, and a bit of messing around with the standard verb set is enough to solve nearly all (though I thought (Spoiler - click to show)SHAKE TREE was a bit underclued). Unfortunately I did run into a couple of bugs that rendered the game harder than it should be: there’s one object that should reveal a gem once you take it, but I was able to tote it around and pick it up and down a couple of times before the appropriate trigger fired, and I had to replay because the game didn’t register the first gem I found (they’re supposed to vanish once you touch them, but this one stuck around in my inventory after I grabbed it).

This is a lot of caviling, though, since I think Tribute did succeed in its most important goal: it made me want to play City of Secrets. Viewed through this imperfect reflection, CoS seems elusive yet enticing, filled with sweetshop robots, a surprisingly-large academic district, and a nightclub where I’m sure there’s at least one or two people I’d enjoy chatting up. If Tribute doesn’t stand on its own two feet as well as something like O Brother Where Art Thou, perhaps that’s partially because it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own identity – but then, this is a tribute, not a reinterpretation.

German is one of those languages which, if it didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent: it offers up an essential myriad of agglomerated noun-piles that somehow always communicate images or ideas more neatly than a circumlocutorious English phrase can manage. Thus Zugzwgang, combining words for “move” and “compulsion” to mean a circumstance where you need to do something, but anything you do is wrong (this is almost exclusively used in a chess context, though I find its ambit can be usefully expanded: take figuring out what the Democrats should do about Biden’s age, for example).

What does Zugzwang the game have to do with Zugzwang the concept? Er. Let me get back to you. Maybe it’s that your protagonist – dubbed “the pawn”, one of several elements that gives off a sort of Dark Souls-y vibe – spends most of their time shuttling from the scene of one battle to another, generally unable to make progress? You start at a hub caught between a quartet of vicious foes: an obdurate rock, a twisted ent, a spiteful dragon-rider, with only a limited palette of initial actions available. Visiting each monster quickly sees you learning from their attacks, however – the rock teaches you how to use a fortification move to endure damage, and dodging a burst of dragon-fire unlocks a flame attack. Obviously each baddie is immune to a taste of their own medicine, but mixing and matching your targets Mega Man style allows you to progress.

There’s no danger here – it’s impossible to perish, so far ass I can tell – and there’s no timing element to the combat puzzles, so the gameplay does reduce to just visiting each battlefield in turn and spamming different attacks to gain new abilities and eventually conquer the local baddy, which propels all your abilities up to a new tier of puissance. But the prose manages to bring the requisite drama:

"Shards of smoking trees jut up about the Ebony King like the leaning columns of a time-lost temple. Between these verdant ruins, the black liege sends forth a shock of flowers, sprouting, bursting, encroaching."

Just about every moment of each fight could be the world’s coolest black metal album cover, and while that’d be a little one-note in an extended game, the gag doesn’t wear out its welcome over a fleet ten-minute running time. There are also some novel twists on the standard dark fantasy archetypes – the pawn’s ability to learn Blumenkraft is enjoyably over the top. The world and the writing are compelling enough that I kind of wish there was a bit more to it than just endless battling, but it’s still a lot of fun for what it is.

Spoilers now for the endgame:

(Spoiler - click to show)If you check out the ParserComp 2024 entries page, it doesn’t take much perspicacity to notice that the cover art, itch.io blurb, and author names for two games rhyme in peculiar ways: 19 Once and Zugzwang both have a cruciform grid as the central element of their cover images, the author names are anagrams of each other, and the credits blurb listing how the cover art was made are word for word the same. And despite the variation in their genres – post-high-school nostalgia-fest and dark-fantasy action thriller – the gameplay in both involves navigating to a single-room location and gaining keywords you can use to unlock still others if used at a different point of the compass. It’s not shocking to learn, then, that they were both written by the same duo of authors, and that their plots are more connected than they appear: Zugzwang depicts the climactic sequence of the movie that the friends in 19 Once are all going to see. There’s also a series of nested Easter eggs that unlock a secret coda for the pair of games: the end text of 19 Once has a certain phrase bolded, which if you type it into Zugzwang will unlock a new commentary mode, where you can see the 19 Once crew banter as they follow the pawn’s progress. This in turn leads to one more keyphrase that leads to a secret ending for 19 Once (at which point the trail ends, as far as I can tell).

This is a fun way to braid the two games together; it’s perhaps a bit on the simple side, though it probably needs to be given that many people are likely to play one or the other game outside of ParserComp and might not otherwise easily notice the similarities. And bringing the irreverent voices of the 19 Once folks into Zugzwang’s grim world of perilous adventure makes for an entertaining juxtaposition. With that said, while I laughed at many of the extra jokes, I didn’t feel like I learned too much more about the characters than I’d picked up from playing the initial segment of 19 Once; similarly, while I appreciated the secret ending, it doesn’t feel like it culminates the stories of both games so much as it provides a punchy alternative narrative that loses some power inasmuch as it focuses on Esther, who as I mentioned in my 19 Once review I found the dullest of the buddies. But not everything needs to be a narrative puzzle that clicks into place; I think both games work well on their own terms – it’s just better to think of their intersections as a series of DVD extras rather than the narrative climax.

It’s a truism that there’s a lot about being young that only makes sense in retrospect. One can interrogate whether that’s actually, y’know, correct, or if it’s just a way for middle-aged people to feel superior to their past selves, but the lovely thing about truisms is that it doesn’t really matter if their true. Anyway, one can certainly cherry-pick examples – the reasons why you messed things up with your first romantic partner are probably going to be painfully obvious at just a couple of years’ remove – and I think high school graduation also falls into that category: at the time you think it’s a uniquely important change as you embark on your adult life, but the truth is there are very likely to be much bigger pivots waiting in your twenties and even thirties, and most likely you’ll still be cluelessly failing to figure yourself out all through your college years (reader, do I project? I think I do). No, with the benefit of perspective, we can see what’s special about high school graduation is that everybody you know is clumsily trying to change who they are all at the same time, and the tensions of trying to hold old social arrangements together across that maelstrom of becoming can be as poignant as they are doomed.

19 Once sees its protagonist caught by this dilemma, a first-year university student unable or unwilling to turn the page on her old life (is that why she’s called Paige? Almost definitely not, but it might be fun to agree that I’m being insightful rather than just making a dumb pun). Her four closest friends have all gone their separate ways – high-achieving Sofia’s off at a different uni imbibing critical theory, Esther’s repeating a year to try to get into a better school, Nora’s entered the workforce, and Wesley’s moved into the attic and is devoting himself to dank memes. But back in the day they were all fans of a YA book franchise whose final film installment has just come out, so maybe it’d be possible to bring everybody together for one more, or one last, hurrah?

The translation of this social puzzle into parser form involves considerable abstraction, but I found it overall successful. Navigation commands let you initiate a text chat with each friend – going north gets you to Nora, south to Sofia, and so on. This is a limited-parser game, so just about all there is to do once you’re in one of these “rooms” is to engage in conversation, which proceeds via a keyword system that flags when you unlock a new topic. Unsurprisingly, nobody’s initially excited to buy a ticket to the film – Wesley prefers video games now, Nora’s stressed at work, Esther’s skint, and Sofia finds the whole thing a bit bourgeois (Sofia was my favorite). You need to change their minds, but rather than persuading them one at a time, instead you need to hop from conversation to conversation to progress, because the topics unlocked from speaking to one friend will only allow you to make inroads with another friend – talking to Nora reveals that she’s pressed for time because of her job, and then asking Sofia what she’s doing with her time reveals that she’s been journaling, which opens up the memories keyword.

It’s a mechanical approach, I suppose, but it works to mimic the structure of online conversation – rather than unfolding as a linear discussion, instead you’re hopping between windows, always with your head half-stuck in the previous topic as you broach a new one with someone else (this also functions as another metaphor for Paige’s ambiguously-post-graduation mindset, perhaps). It also winds up dulling the danger of lawnmowering, since you can never brainlessly plug through the topic list with a single character; you need to rotate through, building out new keywords as you go. With that said, this admittedly-simple gameplay model puts pressure on the writing to deliver, which happily it does. It’s all jokey, of course, swerving pleasantly from highbrow to low humor:

"Sofia, she went to uni too, we haven’t spoke much since school. She was always very intense, always had a paperback sociology book in her back pocket. Pelicans. Wesley called her pelibutt."

There’s also the odd moment of pathos:

"WESLEY: I’m a neet, what do you think?
PAIGE: You’re not neat.
WESLEY: not in education or training. you know, not like you or Nora or Sofe"

I’ll admit that Esther didn’t make much of an impression on me, but the other three characters are drawn with verve, boasting distinct voices and grappling with prosaic but engaging dilemmas. 19 Once is a slight game (it’s over in perhaps fifteen minutes), and the stakes are low because of course we know that whether or not this quintet manages a fun night at the cinema, none of them will be hanging out when they’re 20. But part of the perspective that comes with age is realizing that moments still matter even if they don’t actually change anything, and 19 Once is a winning, wistful collection of such moments.

Spoilers now for the endgame:

(Spoiler - click to show)If you check out the ParserComp 2024 entries page, it doesn’t take much perspicacity to notice that the cover art, itch.io blurb, and author names for two games rhyme in peculiar ways: 19 Once and Zugzwang both have a cruciform grid as the central element of their cover images, the author names are anagrams of each other, and the credits blurb listing how the cover art was made are word for word the same. And despite the variation in their genres – post-high-school nostalgia-fest and dark-fantasy action thriller – the gameplay in both involves navigating to a single-room location and gaining keywords you can use to unlock still others if used at a different point of the compass. It’s not shocking to learn, then, that they were both written by the same duo of authors, and that their plots are more connected than they appear: Zugzwang depicts the climactic sequence of the movie that the friends in 19 Once are all going to see. There’s also a series of nested Easter eggs that unlock a secret coda for the pair of games: the end text of 19 Once has a certain phrase bolded, which if you type it into Zugzwang will unlock a new commentary mode, where you can see the 19 Once crew banter as they follow the pawn’s progress. This in turn leads to one more keyphrase that leads to a secret ending for 19 Once (at which point the trail ends, as far as I can tell).

(Spoiler - click to show)This is a fun way to braid the two games together; it’s perhaps a bit on the simple side, though it probably needs to be given that many people are likely to play one or the other game outside of ParserComp and might not otherwise easily notice the similarities. And bringing the irreverent voices of the 19 Once folks into Zugzwang’s grim world of perilous adventure makes for an entertaining juxtaposition. With that said, while I laughed at many of the extra jokes, I didn’t feel like I learned too much more about the characters than I’d picked up from playing the initial segment of 19 Once; similarly, while I appreciated the secret ending, it doesn’t feel like it culminates the stories of both games so much as it provides a punchy alternative narrative that loses some power inasmuch as it focuses on Esther, who as I mentioned in my 19 Once review I found the dullest of the buddies. But not everything needs to be a narrative puzzle that clicks into place; I think both games work well on their own terms – it’s just better to think of their intersections as a series of DVD extras rather than the narrative climax.

When I was a kid I went through a phase where Howard Pyle was one of my favorite authors. A turn-of-the-century writer and illustrator, he wrote charmingly old-fashioned books about Robin Hood and King Arthur that delighted eleven year old me with their ornate prose and classic narratives. My tastes have since moved on, but The Moon-house Technician confirms that I still get the appeal; it’s based on one of his stories that I never read, about a boy who spends a year on the moon getting into various fairy-tale adventures, and while I’m not sure if any of the writing comes directly from Pyle or if it’s just inspired by him, either way I enjoyed it quite a lot. Here’s a bit where the game’s main character – who’s similarly taken to the moon-house after the plot of the original story has wrapped up – helps earn his keep by polishing stars and setting them back in the sky:

"You sit on the wooden bench and pick up the first star, rubbing it with the lamb’s-wool. As you rub the star it grows brighter and brighter until it throbs with light as if alive. You repeat this process with the remaining stars before casting them into the sky."

Everything about the game has this sort of Victorian Stardew Valley vibe; your companions, for example, are an initially taciturn but eventually simpatico moon-angel, the man in the moon himself, who’s got a beardy raconteur vibe, and a beautiful lady who teaches you alongside some other children every Saturday. And the major progression tracker involves obtaining illustrated playing cards from this trio; the ASCII art is more 1980s than 1880s but it’s a wholesome pastime nonetheless, and each gives you a short excerpt from the original Pyle story too.

There is a downside, though, which is that Moon-house Technician is Stardew Valleyish in more ways than one. There are no puzzles to speak of here; the gameplay is just a menu-based time-allocation simulator, as you step through a full year on the moon one day at a time with your only goal to collect all of the aforementioned cards. Admittedly, each month is only a week, but what is there to do over those 96 days? Well, you earn $5 a day polishing the stars, which always gives you the same text quoted above, along with a little tune that takes five seconds or so to play to completion (the delay ceases being charming and starts being painful at about day four). You can talk to the moon-angel to try to win him over, though it only takes five months before he thaws and gives you a free card, and isn’t ever a voluble conversationalist. You can visit the main in the moon, giving you a couple sentences of rotating flavor text and the opportunity to buy a card, though I’d bought him out by month nine. You can look out a window at the stars, though that again just leads to a single bit of unchanging text and also regularly would crash the game for me. And every Saturday you can have a lesson with the beautiful lady; those only start repeating at month ten.

The gameplay is very grindy, in other words, with most of the interesting bits feeling like they’re references to the fun things that happened to the protagonist of the original story rather than anything that you get to experience yourself. Mostly you’re just doing the same thing over and over again, with a couple of sentences of new flavor text and maybe some fine but unspectacular ASCII art the only rewards on offer. The game does end with a nice coda allowing you to reflect on your time on the moon, but getting to that point is the definition of drudgery: Moon-house Technician is ten minutes of lovely writing stretched across forty-five minutes of dreary incrementalist gameplay, with not much in the way of narrative motivation and a frankly ugly presentation (it’s a Pythonesque text window that lacks word-wrapping). I’d rather just read Pyle’s lush prose and look at his Pre-Raphaelite illustrations; I appreciate the game for reminding me of how much I enjoy him, but any shine it’s got is from his reflected light.

I have to give Postage Code massive points for what seems like a simple thing: it starts when you double-click it. It’s a Python game, you see, and while I’m used to those requiring some command-line incantations to get running – witness Free Bird, from this Comp – so this level of ease of use is definitely an improvement. Its pixel-art graphics also help it make a positive first impression, as does the cozy premise that tasks you with making mail-delivery rounds to get the quirky inhabitants of a small village their packages. Admittedly, my virus-checker did throw up a false positive on the executable, and it loses some points for the title – wouldn’t the postage code be setting out how much you charge for shipping, rather than governing your responsibilities as a mail carrier? – but still, I went into this one with high hopes.

The fact that I just did a paragraph transition probably flags that those high hopes, alas, were quickly dashed. I can see a core gameplay loop here that could work – you deliver packages, earn money, and use that money to buy stuff you need to deliver more packages, with a couple of different entertaining Easter Eggs and more nice pixel art carrying you through to the end. But unfortunately Postage Code’s spotty implementation of basic parser mechanics combined with cruel design choices make it a pain to play; I persevered through to the end, but this really isn’t the kind of game that should require grim, Dark-Souls-style stamina to play.

Let’s start with the parser, since this is ParserComp, after all. Postage Code doesn’t contain any instructions, or respond to ABOUT or any similar commands, but it does have a quick rundown of accepted commands on its itch.io page. Unfortunately, some of the listed commands don’t seem to work – I was never able to successfully TALK to any of the character I met – and at least one critical command isn’t listed at all. That command is GO, and it’s what you need to type to get out of the very first screen; I spent a solid five minutes trying to look at stuff or use the directional commands to progress before I lucked out on the solution. The parser also lacks most helpful abbreviations as far as I can tell; I suppose that’s not the biggest deal in the world, but having to type out ordinal directions is quite the pain (thankfully, TAKE ALL is implemented). Oh, and DROPPING a package causes it to disappear from the world, meaning you’ll fail the game (there’s no save or undo, of course).

As to the design, as mentioned the basics of the puzzles are fine. There are a couple of completely straightforward deliveries, one that requires making a fairly intuitive purchase to complete, and finishing the first three unlocks a final tier that are more challenging. These last challenges aren’t particularly fun, though, inasmuch as two of them are impossible-to-predict gotchas that are trivial to solve once you know they’re coming, but first time out will cause you to instantly fail and have to restart (again: no saves). The last one, meanwhile, is a maze you can only solve with knowledge of an old-school video game reference (Spoiler - click to show)(the infamous Konami code); it’s clued in the game, at least, but by the time you’re stuck in the maze you’re not able to go back and reference the clue, so that’s another restart. And while we’re talking about restarts, I had to do one more because trying to microwave some shrimp crashed the game – though I have to confess that I’m a vegetarian so I don’t know whether that last was something no one in their right mind would ever attempt.

Put it all together and you get a frustrating game that’s all the more annoying for its missed potential; I did like the variety of people and places I got to visit in this little village, and a gentle mail carrier simulation seems a perfect premise for a piece of chilled-out IF – heck, I swear I can see what this game would look like if it was implemented in Adventuron. But punishing gameplay, an underbaked parser, and an inability to interact with the world by talking to folks or examining its finer points takes the Postage Code out of the idyllic realm of Postman Pat and into the era of 90s postal workers on the edge.