Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

There’s not much to say about Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights – as its charmingly awkward, late-period-Planet-of-the-Apes-sequel-ish title suggests, this is an author’s first parser game set in a generic deserted dungeon that doesn’t do more or less than you’d imagine it would. After playing the first couple of rooms I thought to myself that the prose was cleaner than I’d expected, and then immediately ran into a series of capitalization errors and an its/it’s typo soon thereafter. There’s a little bit of spooky atmosphere conjured by a statue of the eponymous knights that conspicuously doesn’t reveal what, if anything, is under their armor, which is undercut by all the rest of the tomb’s décor consisting of variations of that one statue (well, except for the parts that are skulls or coffins, both generic). There’s a gimmickless maze, but it’s basically fine; of course there’s no plot to speak of but that’s as much a relief as a negative. When playing online there’s a noticeable lag (there’s no local download option), the parser’s a bit finicky, and I couldn’t get the transcript to work, but this is a Quest game so it’s hard to hold all of that against the author.

It’s understandable why you’d take this kind of approach for your initial foray into writing a text adventure: the simple, sturdy setting and gameplay make it maximally likely that you’ll be able to complete the hardest step of the game design process, which is to say, finishing something. But it also puts a ceiling on what you can achieve – even if all the little niggles I mentioned above had been resolved, so that rather than dichotomies each sentence was unalloyed praise, it’d still be faint praise indeed. It’s in theory possible to implement this generic scenario with such quality that it’s nonetheless memorable, I suppose – as I write this, I’m recalling a game from maybe a couple years back that had a similar start-at-the-bottom-of-the-dungeon setup and was also a first-time effort, but had some interesting ornamentation and dressed up the puzzles fairly well? Ah yes, The Hidden King’s Tomb: but the fact that I had to struggle to come up with the name (this took a solid ten minutes of scrolling through my old reviews to find), and that it turns out I rated it only a 2 out of 5, perhaps makes this less of an exception than I thought when I began this anecdote.

Sadly, I doubt Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights will have much more staying power – besides the funny-ish title, my main takeaway is that I continue to really struggle with even simple puzzles in games with two-word parsers where USE is the main action you’re meant to use. Still, this is a first game, and it is entered into the Back Garden, so it’s probably unfair to set expectations too high. I’ll wrap up by paraphrasing what I said in that Hidden King’s Tomb review: this isn’t the kind of first game that’d be of much interest to anyone but the author, but it is the kind of first game that the author might have had to write in order to write a much better, much more interesting second game – and I look forward to playing that second game.

I throw around the term “old school” a fair bit when discussing IF, but it’s worth remembering that the scene has never been a monolith. For all that the term conjures up the bad old days of hunger daemons and time-limited light sources, it’s also now been a full quarter-decade since the launch the IF Art Show, a series of BREASTS events that aimed to explore the boundaries of parser IF by asking authors to eschew complex puzzles or melodramatic narratives and instead, by analogy with a museum’s offerings, present still lives, landscapes, or portraits – which is to say deeply-implemented single objects, locations, or characters. For all that there are some celebrated works that came out of this tradition, most notably Galatea, a portrait entry that unsurprisingly won best in show in 2000, it represents something BOSOMS of a road not traveled; the events themselves petered out in the mid-aughts, and while modern IF certainly prioritizes deep implementation, it’s almost always in service of plot or gameplay rather than the more reserved, intellection engagement that the very name “Art Show” evokes.

It’s notable, then, that the Portrait explicitly situates itself within that moribund tradition, down to including the actual guidelines from the original 1999 event in an “extras” folder accompanying the download. It’s certainly DECOLLETAGE the case that there’s a story visible in the margins – the game is a small, self-contained excerpt of a forthcoming game titled “Isekai” which, per the eponymous genre, will presumably involve a person from the real world being sucked into and engaging in adventures in a fantasy world – but this nondiegetic framing, and the parsimonious amount of plot available in the excerpt, push the player to engage with the game in a less-directed, contemplative manner. The four BOOBS rooms that constitute the game have a fair amount of scenery to explore, but not much in the way of items to pick up or obstacles to overcome. Instead you’re encouraged to just wander around and examine as many details as you can – especially the details of the painting that gives the game its title.

This is a style of gameplay that I enjoy, since I think it leverages the exploratory strengths of the parser game while making a virtue of its often-pokey pacing and issues creating UNDERBREAST plausible, interactive characters. I’m more than happy to just stroll around an environment or cast my virtual gaze on each element of a scene in turn, even without much extrinsic motivation. But the thing about eschewing those more atavistic drivers of engagement is that it puts a lot of pressure on what exactly you’re asking the player to spend so much time on. And here, while I admire the PELVIC MOUND Portrait’s formal approach, I have to admit that I found the content somewhat lacking.

The portrait itself makes a reasonable first impression: it’s a picture of three women native to the fantasy world that the protagonist has found himself in, namely a demonic-looking one, an angelic-looking one, and one who seems to be an elf. And there’s an element of personal relevance, because once you find a mirror the protagonist realizes that although he’s a he in the real world, in this fantasy milieu he’s somehow taken on the shape of the elven woman who’s center stage in the portrait. So trying to learn more about her and BIG AND GORGEOUS D CUP BREASTS her world by closely studying the portrait is an understandable step. But I found there wasn’t much payoff to this setup: it doesn’t take much observational acuity to realize that the trio are a throuple, which isn’t very interesting since the player never makes their acquaintance, and the hints of personality given off by the visual detail are as bland as the fantasy world seems to be, from this short preview: would you believe the demon girl is a brunette and seems passionate, while the blonde angel is full of strong will to protect the other two?

Similarly, the implementation feels deeper than the substance supports. There are apparently 46 sub-items that can be examined within the painting, and the game provides a score system to help you track your progress, but the level of detail feels excessive. Even after looking at the ODDLY SEXY BAT-WING picture’s background elements, each of the three figures, their clothing and jewelry, and their faces and significant parts of their bodies, I only found 39 of them – but even then, there were many details that gave near-identical descriptions to others when examined, making this feel more like an exercise in box-checking than in discovery. The often-haphazard nature of the game’s prose is likely an understandable consequence of the author’s first language not being English, but it still often winds up coming across as vague and awkward, as in this description of a “stand”:

"the large and prominent stand, clearly a permanent fixture, is elaborately adorned, in a very festive but at the same time solemn manner, giving out that the context depicted in this portrait is of a very significant and joyous ceremony, like a rite of passage."

Or this early glimpse of the portrait itself:

"On the centre of the southern wall, flanked by an arched passage on its left and a larger archway on its right, hangs, an huge life-size painting, so detailed and realistic that you can’t exclude that is actually a photograph, no wonder that has catched your attention."

Some grammar-checking and beta reading could help tighten up the prose, but as it stands the writing isn’t enough to reward the obsessive poking about that would be required to get full points.

In fairness, the game provides an early off-ramp, with an authorial stand-in entering the scene and telling you you can stop at any time after you find SINGLE AND SPECTACULARLY ILL-CONCEIVED REFERENCE TO GENITALS about 15 details – and I think that probably is about the number of actions, and depth of implementation, that would feel right. So the fact that I kept going past that is mostly on me, and to a certain degree on the scoring system that I suspect won’t be the same in the full game. And in the context of the bigger story that’s teased here, this intro might work well enough to give the player a chance to slow down and get their feet under them before being swept away by a grand adventure, like an opening CGI cutscene lending gravitas to an action RPG. But presented on its own, framed as an objet d’art, I’m not sure it’s up to the amount of scrutiny it invites.

I’m a reasonably confident critic of several things: writing, first of all, but also characterization, plot, and puzzle design (whether I’m a good critic of these things is a separate question). But when it comes to things like graphics, movement-based gameplay, and music, I’m anything but, often struggling to feel like I have anything interesting to say – heck, I play most IF, this game included, with the sound off, so I’m especially at sea as to that last bit. As a result, I’ll take a page from this near-wordless micro-length game and try to keep this short, to avoid embarrassing myself with too much aimless flailing.

Bydlo is a second-order bit of ekphrasis – that’s a work of art that describes or deeply comments on a single other work of art, Ode on a Grecian Urn being the canonical example. Here we’re told the game is based on one of the movements from the classical music suite Pictures at an Exhibition – the gimmick of said suite being that each movement was based on a single painting from a posthumous exhibition by a now-obscure Russian artist. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of either the music or the painting (and actually it turns out many of the paintings are now lost, including this particular one so far as I can tell from Wikipedia), so that doesn’t provide much in the way of context for me to grab onto; fortunately, the itch.io 1 page does directly say what the game is about, albeit with a spoiler warning, so I’ll likewise spoiler-ify it here: (Spoiler - click to show)the triumph of art over drudgery.

Does the game incarnate that theme? Maaaybe. This is a Bitsy game with a simple set of mechanics: your little guy starts out in a fenced-in field, with an ox-cart at the other side of the screen. Shiny lights at the exit of the field and then a path leading off-screen indicate destinations towards which you should walk; when you reach the latter, the screen resets, with the field being encumbered with incrementally more obstacles and the cart moving one square over. Over the course of subsequent iterations, the field becomes a maze, clogged with pixel-art squiggles that might be bales of hay, fallen crops, and the bones of other oxen (I think? I have a hard time decoding them); finally, the cart exits stage left. You’re allowed to follow its tracks; a new set of screens open up, empty space filled only by the one track, which is then joined by two others running parallel to it. Musical notes begin to fill the tracks, which have becomes a musical score; you reach a last screen where an orchestra plays, with the word “FIN.” printed across the top.

I can try to venture a few interpretations of all of this – if I’m right about what the graphics represent (and I’m supremely unconfident that I am), perhaps the protagonist is a farmer who’s neglecting their work because of their fixation on music? If one part of the theme is meant to be drudgery, I’m guessing that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy running through the mazes (they weren’t super fun but the worst of them only took five seconds to solve)? I did feel a sense of relief and possibility at finally seeing a new screen after doing the same thing twelve times in a row, though I can’t help but feel that moving to the left four times isn’t substantially less drudgery-y than doing a maze a dozen times. Does the fact that I can run straight through the orchestra members and the “FIN.” at the end indicate that they’re a hallucination? If so, what does it mean that the notes seem to be solid? Was coding this game (Spoiler - click to show)a triumph of art over drudgery, or was it (Spoiler - click to show)drudgery in service of art, and if that’s the case, is composing a symphony or painting a picture any different?

These are not questions posed for rhetorical effect: I really don’t have a strong take on Bydlo. It seems like a unified aesthetic object that’s aimed at questions I find important and interesting, so I will say I’m happy it exists – in fact I think it’s kind of neat to engage with something that’s coming at these themes from an entirely different frame of reference than those I’m more used to. And I think it’s meant to be open-ended and unbothered by whether or not I “got” anything out of it – like a placid ox tilling its furrow, I suppose, though I still can’t help but feel it deserves a better critic than me.

My wife recently decided she wanted to get into gardening, and as a result we’ve started to slowly make some improvements to our back yard, which heretofore was evenly divided between tufts of fake grass (don’t judge, we live in Southern California where we’re just getting out of a yearslong drought with more to come) and a dirt patch overgrown by snarls of weeds and a tree that keeps sending off a fusillade of saplings as though it’s overheard us speculating about chopping it down (again, don’t judge, it’s really tall and close to the house so we’re paranoid it could fall down in a wind storm). We’ve now mostly pruned that whole mess back, and gotten a couple pots of flowers and vegetables to prop up by the fence, and while it’s not much to look out we’re proud of the progress. It’s a bit sobering when we consult the source of her horticultural impulse, though, which was born of watching a British reality show: in that, people are always acting all ashamed about the state of their rear allotments, which boast lush flowers, well-tended herb beds, and a well-judged mix of different plants; it’s on a whole different level from our meager efforts.

All of which is to say that opinions differ about what standard “Back Garden” implies, and I’ll confess to being a bit mystified about why Nonverbal Communication isn’t in the main festival; it’s a bit short, sure, but it’s got a neat premise that combines real-world resonance with a clever riff on standard fantasy tropes, some clever puzzles with multiple solutions, and in my view the best joke of Spring Thing to date (I won’t spoil it, but it’s the death banner when you try something obviously and spectacularly stupid – nothing quick UNDO doesn’t fix).

The setup here is that you’re a wizard whose power comes from their mastery of words, but in your haste to prepare for an attack from a dragon, a mishap occurs that throws your magics all out of whack. I’ll quote the game’s description of the result, since it’s emblematic of the elegant yet approachable prose:

But verbs are independent, fickle things, and although you feel the presence of some of your most beloved verbs within the tower, you doubt you’ll be able to compel them directly.

What this means is that you don’t have access to verbs: a set of the most common Inform actions, from the humble EXAMINE to the workhorse OPEN to the disfavored ATTACK to the how-am-I-supposed-to-live-without-this GO have flown out of your head and become incarnated in various automatons scattered throughout your tower (WAIT, THINK – a hint command – and various out-of-world activities like SAVE and TRANSCRIPT are still available). Interaction therefore hinges on your nouns – by typing in the name of a thing, you can focus the automatons’ attention on it and prompt them to target each of their actions at that one object.

That’s simple enough in theory, but in practice this makes for some tricky puzzle-solving, as well as some slapstick comedy. There’s always at least two or three automatons firing off at one time, and with no ability to tell the automatons that OPEN is needed here, so having CLOSE execute immediately thereafter is counterproductive, you need to get creative – while none of the puzzles are too too hard, I definitely did some floundering, and picturing all the different gizmos faffing about and working at cross-purposes definitely elicited a giggle. The flip side is that cracking each conundrum left me with a strong sense of satisfaction.

The narrative was also satisfying; there are multiple endings, tied to which of several significantly-different tacks you take to solving the game’s puzzles, and the one I found tied a neat bow on the themes implicit in centering a protagonist who struggles with the sometimes-destructive results of their careless words. This turn towards the serious isn’t enough to bring down Nonverbal Communication’s lighthearted vibe, but it definitely lends the game more heft than the average hey-look-I-came-up-with-a-cool-mechanic-for-my-half-hour-puzzle-game puzzle game.

All told this is a polished game that checks all the boxes it should – my only points of critique are that the convenience of bolding significant nouns when they show up in room descriptions meant it took longer than it should to realize that other nouns might also be available, and in common with other limited-parser games that get rid of access to the EXAMINE command, room descriptions could sometimes get a little long. It occurs to me that one reason the author could have nonetheless picked the Back Garden is that they’re considering this a proof-of-concept for a longer game, because yeah, it is a little on the short side – if that’s the case, I’d definitely be interested in seeing more of both this world and this approach to puzzles, since I think there’s plenty more room to explore here!

You’ll probably go into this death-of-the-Weimar-Republic simulator expecting a titanic struggle against Hitler, pouring all your wits and intelligence into a duel against one of history’s greatest monsters. But it’s emblematic of the intelligence with which Social Democracy is made that Hitler’s only present in the game as a mostly-ineluctable fail state; no, if there’s anyone the game teaches you to hate, it’s Hjalmer fucking Schacht, the central banker who uses the credibility gained from his admittedly-impressive achievement of ending hyperinflation to take a meat-axe to any plans to fight the Great Depression with Keynesian stimulus. Doesn’t matter that your party, the Social Democrats, has the chancellorship and plays the leading role in the grand coalition governing Germany at the dawn of the thirties: this hidebound, reactionary asshole is here to prevent you from doing the obviously-right thing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

(On reflection, maybe Schacht isn’t the most emblematic villain here, since if you’re up on history, or have your internal security forces dig into just the right scandals, you know he actually wanted the Nazis to win. But for purposes of the above paragraph let’s pretend he was just an asshole).

I wish I could report that things are better on the Left. Alas, the Communists are intransigent as all get out too – despite agreeing that the working class and unemployed need to come first, they’re not willing to look past your failure to kowtow to Moscow (and plus, any loss of support the Social Democrats experience will likely translate into direct gains for them). With plenty of wooing, they’ll at least go along with a truce between your respective paramilitary arms, but since they’re not willing to participate in bourgeois parliamentary government, you can’t work with them to form a coalition even if you do manage to eke out a Reichstag majority between the two parties (or at least, if you can, it’s well beyond my skills, even when notching the difficulty down to easy).

So yeah, as you ping-pong between inflation-spooked centrists and blinkered tankies, with election after election failing to produce a stable government, Hitler doesn’t need to do much: the Nazis just lurk in the middle distance, making greater and greater gains as this frantic, useless politicking discredits the idea of democracy in the eyes of a growing share of the populace. All historical games build an argument into how they frame their simulations, of course, and I think Chen has struck on one that’s insightful in historical terms, while also providing for engaging gameplay: Hitler’s rise was only possible because of the choices made by a whole host of people who nominally opposed fascism, and even 20/20 hindsight doesn’t make this an easily-solvable problem due to the strictures of politics. Even those with lots of power were tossed about by the whims of chance and the force of outside interruptions, limiting their ability to play out their intended strategies – which is why it’s apt that Social Democracy’s simulation is built as a card game.

The touch-point here is probably Fallen London, whose storylet-based design inspired the construction of the DendryNexus platform that powers Social Democracy. Rather than assuming the mantle of a specific character, the player is the animating spirit of the party as a whole (don’t call it a Zeitgeist….) A turn takes a month, in which you can choose to play one of three cards from your hand, each of which represents an opportunity or threat to respond to via a simple choice-based interface. You might be given the chance to invest your precious party resources in outreach to one of a choice of key constituencies, or weigh whether to make overtures to another party to improve relations, or have to decide whether to issue arms and military training to your citizen’s auxiliary; if you’re part of the governing coalition, you can also draw from a deck that contains cards allowing you to set policy on labor issues or address women’s rights. Most of the time, the presence of grayed-out options allows you to see the way that your choices are constrained, due to limited resources or inadequate party relationships or lack of support within your own party’s internal factions (briefly: tankies, squishes, teamsters, and lanyards) – a nice mirror of the way that those working in practical politics can see the path to a better outcome even if they can’t manage to take it. There’s some limited scope for proactive action – in particular, you pick a trio of core advisors who each have one or more special powers you can deploy at any time, though there’s a six-month cooldown that’s shared by all three – but the limited hand size and the pace of play means you’re always somewhat at the mercy of events.

This is never more obvious than at election time. As the game opens, you’re informed that the polls will open in only a few months’ time, lending the beginning turns a campaign rhythm that’s familiar enough to American players (the game also provides a nice hit of dopamine by setting starting conditions that mean you’re almost certain to have the plurality once the votes are counted). At that point, the next scheduled elections are four years away – again, so far so familiar – but once the ravages of the Depression begin to fray the bonds that allow coalitions to function, elections can come whenever a restive partner decides to call for a no-confidence vote. If you’re in the government, you’ve got some room to maneuver to fend these off, from offering policy concessions to straight-up bribes, but as the lines harden and resources become scarce, it’s easy to wind up in a Blitzkrieg of repeated elections, none of which deliver a decisive result and each of which drains you still further, as the Nazis make greater and greater inroads.

The systems make for nervy, engaging play, and with only a few concessions to the board-game logic running things (that limited hand of possible actions, the artificial constraint on advisor actions) it often feels more like a simplified version of history than a mechanical simulation. It’s possible, if not mandatory for any degree of success, to pursue an intentional strategy. Appropriately, the game’s difficulty isn’t tuned to make a total victory for democracy simple to achieve, even on the easiest setting. My first time out, I tried a no-enemies-to-the-left strategy that saw me punted out of the government early on but maintaining my base among the proletariat through staunch advocacy for welfare and stimulus; I was also able to work out a modus vivendi with the Communists (and came within one resource-spend of installing one of them into the presidency!) The endemic lack of a governing coalition meant that the Nazis were quickly ascendant, however, and while I was able to pivot to arming and training my auxiliaries while creating a united defense front with the Reds, that just meant we were able to give as good as we got in the devastating civil war that followed. The opposite path of sticking around in the government and avoiding snap elections by going along with austerity was even less successful – the workers flocked to the Communists as welfare cuts stifled the already-struggling economy, and after four years the Nazis once again sewed things up handily, except this time I didn’t even have enough of a base to launch any sort of armed struggle.

I found my best success with what I called my Belgian strategy, developing and pushing a massive public works program to maintain my support, while playing a waiting game on the governmental side of things: after each election I’d join the coalition and work on mending fences, but then I’d quit and trigger new elections whenever a proposal for cuts came down the pike. This somewhat-farcical cycle created just enough stability for me to kick the can down the road long enough for the economy to slowly improve, and temper the fires of crisis (I later attempted to replicate this half-success on the hard difficulty – lack of resources and lack of focus meant I failed once again).

If you are at all interested in history, this is riveting, riveting stuff – a story engine on the level of the Paradox grand strategy games, without the often-wacky left turns they often take. Indeed, while I’m usually a stickler for authenticity in games set in the past, I’ve got vanishingly-few complaints about Social Democracy, most of them simply just places where the game starts to push up against the limits of its implementation: each turn representing a whole month means that several times I’d resolve an election, work to influence the selection of chancellor, and click to start the next turn – only to immediately be told that Hindenberg had already cashiered the new guy and picked someone even worse. It’s frustrating, but might not be all that ahistorical – however, the event where I was told “Hindenburg’s camarilla has turned against Papen, and Hindenburg has dismissed the Chancellor, replacing him with the more reactionary Franz von Papen” seems like it’s probably a bug rather than modeling the long-suffering president entering a fugue state. In a game of this complexity, this is small stuff indeed.

No, my only substantive critique is that I think there are a few places where readability could be improved on the mechanical end, and more context could be provided on the historical side of things. As to the former, I didn’t notice any reminders of when the presidential election was going to happen, which meant I was woefully unprepared the first time it came up, and greater feedback for repeated actions would be helpful in a few areas to better indicate progress (I of course wanted to clean up the police force in Prussia before recruiting more members, but wasn’t sure whether I was having meaningful results in my efforts due to always getting identical feedback). It would be nice to know what the difficulty levels actually do. And perhaps this marks me as a Marxist, but I wanted a bit more visibility into material conditions – that unemployment ticker is arresting, but given that you have real-time polling data whenever you want it, it’s striking that there’s no other way of gauging the health of the German body politic.

As to the latter, much as it pains me to admit that the assholes of the left and center have reasons for their actions, I think the game may assume more player knowledge of the relevant history than is justified. Schacht was being all Schacht-y because of hyper-inflation, and he and his cadre sincerely feared that deficit spending would bring it all back, but the game doesn’t really spell this out. Similarly, there are only a few glancing mentions of the Spartacist Uprising and Rosa Luxemburg scattered through events that happen reasonably far into the game; knowing that within the past decade the Communists launched an armed revolt against the state, and the Social Democrat leaders condoned the extrajudicial murder of the party’s leaders, rationalizes their reluctance to form a coalition of the willing. There are similarly glancing references to the Stabbed in the Back myth that might be hard for some players to decipher, and I can’t help but wish some of the culture of the Weimar Republic could make an occasional appearance (maybe some Otto Dix paintings for particularly grisly event-cards?) I certainly appreciate that there’s a fine line to walk between providing enough information to the player to allow them to make solid decisions, and keeping the amount of text and background reading light enough to stay accessible, and I should emphasize that the game generally does quite a good job of this – there are just a few places where I think it could usefully go into a little more detail.

It’s impossible to review Social Democracy without being aware that it is a miraculously buzzy game – an example of the vanishingly-rare piece of IF that manages to get noticed outside our little community, and get attention from the mainstream gaming press. Sometimes lightning strikes for incomprehensible reasons, but this time the virality is entirely understandable and deserved. This is a masterwork of design by one of the scene’s most exciting authors, which makes the past come alive and feel immediately relevant – having been engaged in politics during the 2008 financial crisis, the failure to adequately respond to it, and the ensuing emboldening of fringe right-wingers, I grimaced at the familiarity of many of the scenarios I encountered. I’ll be returning to this one quite a lot after the festival is over, I think, if only so I can finally get one over on $%@# Hjalmer.

(This is one of those games that can’t meaningfully be reviewed without spoiling a particular narrative and gameplay twist, so it might be best to go in blind – though if you’ve read the content warnings you probably have some sense of where things are headed…)

I am really eager to read the postmortem on this one. Studio takes the my-dumb-apartment setting of many authors’ first parser game and uses it as the canvas for a violent, nervy thriller, and I’m very curious whether this was meant from the beginning as an intentional subversion of the subgenre, or if the deeply-implemented setting came first and the plot was added as a way to leverage it. Either way, its confident storytelling and sandbox approach make Studio a standout; it’s a bravura performance in an under-explored gameplay paradigm.

The key insight here is that a stealth-focused immersive sim – think Thief, or playing a sneaky build in Deus Ex – can work really well in parser form. There’s logic here; parser games are generally good at modelling detailed environments that reward exploration, and their turn-based nature can heighten the drama of an alert enemy slowly drawing near to your hiding place. There’s also precedent, as last Spring Thing’s I Am Prey was a solid proof of concept that stealth can work in IF (I promise I will get around to reviewing that soon…)

A narrative certainly exists, and it’s deftly rolled out via the introductory tutorial section: as you finish unpacking in your new apartment, which takes you to its various corners and establishes the key features and actions that will be important in the game’s second half, the hints that things aren’t quite as innocent as they seem escalate. A mention of a mysterious contact, a casually-stored taser, a safe whose combination is keyed to the made-up birthday of an assumed identity – the details aren’t fully spelled out, even when you’re prompted with a REMEMBER command that fills in some specific backstory, but they don’t need to be. You’re on the lam, running from dangerous people, and you’re something of a dangerous person yourself, which is all the setup that’s required to make the home invasion that kicks off after the prologue concludes feel motivated and intense.

What makes Studio so fun is the wide field of possibility open before you when you wake panicked in the middle of the night and hear suspicious scratching at your door. There’s obvious stuff to do to prepare (hide under the bed, grab the paring knife from the knife block). There are obvious points of vulnerability (do you really want to let the intruder grab your wallet, or break into your laptop?) There are obvious courses of action that are probably a bad idea (is it smart to get the cops to alerted to whatever your deal is?) There are obvious repercussions to your choices (just booking it and running away poses some risks; so does trying to subdue or kill him). And with only few exceptions, this all works seamlessly, turning this tiny apartment something of a playground.

I found seven different endings, most with variations depending on exactly how I reached them, and found it fun to collect them not because they implied drastically different narrative outcomes – in fact many of them are pretty similar, and the denouement is generally left to the imagination in each case, with just a few ambiguous sentences providing a hint of where things might go before asking the player if they’d like to try again. No, it’s just that seeing the simulation respond and react is delightful. If anything, despite the horror-movie premise I found Studio something of a power fantasy; the protagonist knows how to handle herself and UNDO and SAVE will correct for any misstep, so it was enjoyable rather than stressful to set myself challenges like ghosting my way around the apartment until the intruder got bored and left empty-handed.

The implementation supporting all of this is truly a gold standard for my-dumb-apartment games. Usually such things founder at the kitchen or the bathroom, as implementing all the fixtures is an annoying pain, but here they’re all present and accounted for and work exactly as you’d think. Beyond that, there’s a dishwasher, a laptop, a phone (with charger), a radio, and everything is fully interactive without being excessively fiddly. This attention to detail continues when the stealth section kicks off; in particular, it feels like the intruder has a coherent plan in mind and improvises based on what he finds or doesn’t find, rather than behaving like a robot.

There are a few places where small bugs or moments of friction creep in – the unlocking action retains an implicit take, which leads to odd response messages when you refuse to take a key off its keyring, and sometimes I experienced momentary confusion about how to properly interact with the phone’s various submenus. But these are niggles on what’s otherwise a very polished experience. If I have an actual complaint, it’s that the game is maybe a hair too straightforward – one decisive action is usually enough to trigger an ending, and I get the sense that there are a bunch of esoteric interactions that I didn’t get a chance to uncover because it was so easy to just hide behind some boxes and either stab or smash a vase over the head of the baddie. Pacing and escalation in stealth games can be tricky in general, though – they lend themselves to binary success and failure states – so it’s hard to hold that against Studio. Still, I can’t help but be curious to see what an expanded version of this concept might look like, with a bigger environment and additional affordances like, say, being able to throw stuff around to distract the intruder’s attention.

All of which is to say that despite being rooted in one of the hoariest of IF tropes, Studio breaks new ground for future exploration while being perfectly enjoyable in itself. The purity of the concept and the depth of the programming that support it are equally praiseworthy, so like I said, I’m anxious to read the postmortem to get a better sense of where exactly the ideas came from, and maybe a clue to where they could be further elaborated, too.

(I beta-tested this game)

In my first review of this year’s Thing, I lifted up Potato Peace as an example of a game that has the trappings of a game about politics but isn’t actually a game about politics. Part of the reason that concept struck me the way it did is that I’d only recently tested Pass a Bill, which despite its Schoolhouse Rock-baiting name likewise resolutely avoids having anything to say about the actual exercise of legislative powers in this or any country. For all that the protagonist – a newly-elected representative who’s either well- or terribly-positioned for success by virtue of being the only independent in a two-party legislature – has their heart set on getting a bill enacted into law, much like the game they’re profoundly indifferent to the actual substance of said bill, and the process of doing so requires not a single iota of politicking or parliamentary maneuvering.

And despite the fact that it took me a little while to readjust my expectations, that’s OK! Pass a Bill is slapstick, not satire. Yes, it makes no sense at all that the majority whip won’t talk to you about moving your bill until you check in with the minority leader and let her lard up your draft with poison pills, but it does make for a silly bit of shuttle diplomacy. No, I don’t know why said whip is a violent weirdo bent on getting your personal oath of loyalty (Spoiler - click to show)(nor how he’s managed to get elected to two separate seats for two different parties). And the game’s eventual climax is impossible to take seriously but good-natured nonetheless.

In terms of presentation, Pass a Bill is an appealing mix of primitive and sophisticated. The black background, white text, and blue links put us firmly in Default Twine territory, but there’s an inventory and hints sidebar that provides helpful information throughout, and the MS-Paint-style illustrations similarly have more than their share of rough charm. And for all that there’s a clear spine through the game, there are a fair number of branch points, easily-rewindable deaths, and Easter Eggs to reward poking around a bit.

Pass a Bill is still a sillier game than I tend to enjoy – nothing wrong with comedy, but I tend to prefer stuff that either has more bite, or goes even farther to dress up dumb jokes with a veneer of sophistication. But it’s got some appeal nonetheless: I ultimately wound up thinking of it as a kind of extreme version of a yes-and improv session where an initial, politics-heavy setup gets quickly and entertainingly pushed into absurdity, leaving only a rough framework and handful of NPC descriptions in its wake. If it’s more Mr. Bean Goes to Washington than Mr. Smith, there’s nothing wrong with that.

OK, anecdote time: when I was in high school, my summer job for a couple years was as a busboy at a country club. This was less exciting than it sounds – and believe me, I’m under no illusions as to how exciting it sounds – but one fun thing was that there was a team-building day where we saw Rent on Broadway (the club was on Long Island). This necessitated a bus trip, and whether or not said bus was formally licensed as a party bus – I rather suspect not – my coworkers decided it would be prudent to avoid inflated NYC liquor prices by getting blasted on the way in, and further decided it would be amusing to peer-pressure the 17-year-old into having a couple of beers (reader, I’d like to say I put up a fight, but I was nerdy and was moved that they cared enough to make the attempt). I only had two drinks, but I was an inexperienced drinker and weighed like 120 pounds, so that was enough to throw me off-kilter for the remainder of the trip as well as – and here we’re finally getting to the point of the anecdote – the entire first act of Rent.

There’s a whole lot of incident that plays out over that initial hour or so, and I’m sure a more sober critic of theater would have found a lot to unpack, but I have to confess that all the relationship melodrama and demimondaine cris de coeurs were lost on me, because in the flush of my first drunkenness, I’d decided that actually the most important thing on that stage was this one particular chair. All the frenetic dancing and singing happening all around it, I was sure, was just meant to provide a counterpoint to the stolid immanent quiddity of this humble chair; people sat in it, gripped it from behind, leaped over it in impressive jetes, but rather than see the chair as providing a backdrop to their actions, the musical’s author clearly wanted the audience to see the cast as a backdrop to the furniture.

I dried out over intermission so thankfully my impressions of Act Two are much more normal, but that experience of fixating on something that in retrospect was clearly of at-best tertiary importance persists; obviously I was totally off base, but maybe I was chasing some elusive insight that could unlock the greater meaning of the piece?

All of which is an excessively long intro to explain why throughout To Beseech Old Sin’s Sturm-und-Drang space opera, I was only half paying attention to the narrative and wondering how sexual harassment laws worked in the far future.

See, the story has the trappings of a Halo or a Warhammer 40k – there’s this squad of giant armored supersoldiers, who are ordered to make a desperate assault on an enemy capital ship – but the shooty-shooty business is largely underplayed, while the setting, as well as the personal and ideological stakes of the game’s main conflicts, are underexplained. I’m typically allergic to extended infodumps laying out a game’s premise in unnecessary detail, don’t get me wrong, but here I missed them, because it’s both the case that the elided details were necessary to build investment in a generic, and ultimately low-key, shootout, as well as seeming intriguing in their own right (the supersoldiers are referred to as golems, and seem to have alchemical script tattooed onto their bodies, which is part of what empowers them as sets them apart from ordinary humans? Yeah, I’d like to hear more about that).

That vagueness extended to the trio of main characters, consisting of the protagonist plus two squadmates – none of them felt like they had especially distinct personalities or voices, and making their names Greek letters fuels the genericism. And the game’s choices don’t feel especially impactful; mostly links either provide more detail or just move the story forward, and this is a low-risk mission that seems impossible to mess up too badly, so while it’s pleasant enough to click through the attractively-presented text, there isn’t grabby gameplay or any moments of high drama to liven things up.

So in the absence of more traditional engagement points to latch onto, the thing that mostly stood out to me was the contextually-inappropriate cuddling. You and your squadmates aren’t just a trio, you’re also a throuple, and seem to spend most of your downtime half-naked and spooning. And that’s fine! Office relationships can be challenging to navigate, but everybody seems into it and I’m sure space combat is super stressful so this seems like a nice, healthy way to blow off steam. Except the three of you keep up said canoodling even when the admiral commanding the squadron comes down to give you your mission briefing, which isn’t just an accident but a deliberate provocation as it’s made clear you knew she was coming but decided not to put pants on nonetheless. Sure, the admiral is presented as a romantic interest – she blushes yet seems intrigued, and your dialogue options with her range from double entendres to point five entendres – but c’mon, this is her workplace, and almost the exact same scenario plays out a second time towards the end of the game. If you really think you’re vibing ask her out for a drink once she’s off-duty, but right now this is textbook hostile work environment sexual harassment.

To stop kidding for a minute, I do get the sense that there is meant to be more depth here; the author’s note indicates that these are recurring characters, and there’s an “other stories in the anthology” link on the festival page. So I’m guessing that some other game provides more in the way of backstory for the characters, establishes deeper themes for the milieu, and otherwise offers more in the way of on-ramps for uninitiated players. Indeed, the author’s note positions To Beseech Old Sins as a lighter interlude from an overarching story that trends grim; in that context, and with more investment in the characters, I’d probably have more to focus on than the state of employment law in this imagined world. So okay, it’s still mostly my fault that I fixated on a mostly-irrelevant detail this time out, but unlike with Rent, I do think the author could have given me a little more help.

I’ve made the point before (even in another review for this festival, I think?) that dreams are typically more meaningful to experience than relate. Like, just a few weeks I had one where I was in airport, trying to get rebooked after my flight was cancelled, and then after I’d managed to wrangle a replacement ticket, upon takeoff my seat was somehow flung forward and got lodged in the cockpit window, which didn’t hurt me(?), except I uncharacteristically hadn’t fastened my seatbelt so the only thing keeping me in my now-open-air perch as we climbed and climbed was a death-grip on my armrests, which obviously wasn’t going to be sustainable, so I reached down to try to buckle myself in but wasn’t quick enough so I found myself falling, for long enough to think well this is it, all my hopes and dreams and loves are ending in just a few seconds, I’m not ready and I never got to say goodbye – and then I woke up. It shook me pretty hard, and I’m still processing some of the aftershocks, but it doesn’t at all hold together as a story; it’s just a boring dream of falling with some implausible details, and if I add in that this happened almost to the day of the fourth anniversary of my sister’s death, well, the armchair psychologizing writes itself.

You Can Only Turn Left, as you might have guessed from this intro, has to do with dreams, though it carves out some space for itself by concerning itself with overall sleep practices and sets of dream patterns, rather than just expanding one particular dream into game length. This approach means that there are some grounded sequences threaded through the narrative, which let you catch a glimpse of the protagonist’s changing life circumstances and discern something of an arc. Their very mundanity is even sort of appealing: in amidst trippy visions, engaging with the way a new job forces you to wake up super early feels like a breath of fresh air (it does make me question why the main character seems so bent on never getting a good night’s sleep, or thinks that given all this dropping acid is still a good life choice).

Breaking up the dreams like this also means there’s less need to shoehorn narrative weight where it doesn’t truly belong, instead presenting them as a series of arresting images. And the writing on a few of these does feel like it conveys something of the immanence of the original experience:

"The air was electric and the veins of your eyes became ghosts of hot pink lightning. The static shock grounded your body into the abyss and you clenched your jaw."

The title image also is one that will stick with me – it’s drawn from a science-class experiment where deformed tadpoles birth frogs with spinal issues that prevent them from swimming in more than one direction, which lends some power to what’s otherwise a clangingly obvious metaphor. The game’s presentation also deepen its impact; there’s blurry, shifting text, eyestrain-inducing background images, quick pans and flashes, that aim to alienate the player from what they’re reading.

For all that, though, I didn’t find You Can Only Turn Left escaped the oneiric trap. Like, I played the game the day before yesterday, and while the vibe was memorable, before I reviewed my notes I don’t think I could have told you a single thing that actually happens in the game; shorn of the context and structure that gives incidents their heft, you’re just left with a lot of stuff. There is some gameplay here – there are a host of choices that mostly boil down to “try to stay awake”/”try to go to sleep”, albeit without much clarity about the implications those decisions wound up having – and something of an arc, with the protagonist exiting the story seemingly better actualized and having reclaimed their ability to break out of patterns, though I couldn’t even make a retroactive guess at what led to that shift. As a result the game is I think a success as an aesthetic experience, but not so compelling as a narrative one; perhaps that’s the most that can be done with such stuff as dreams are made on.

I’m not quite sure how folks decided Bitsy should become an IF platform – from its Gameboy aesthetic, I’d imagine it’s mostly used for throwback action games? – but I’m glad that they did. Sure, its affordances seem to encourage the use of graphics and keyboard-based (but non-parser) interfaces, which I suppose aren’t the best fit for IF, but the plucky, lo-fi vibe is dead on, and every piece of Bitsy IF I’ve played has stood out from the crowd. The Truth About PRIDE! is no exception, with gameplay based on navigating a black-and-white sprite through a series of top-down labyrinths. That could describe any number of puzzle games, but here, text is clearly the central element, so yeah, it’s unique but fits comfortably into the IF tradition.

The experience on offer here is simple, as befits the presentation: you’re given a choice of six mini-mazes, each corresponding to a character in “PRIDE!” When you bump into certain icons within each of these smaller areas, you get a few sentences that aim the concept of pride, which is interpreted as a flexible acronym – the author’s chosen a few resonant words that start with each letter, like posture and professionalism, and relates them to the central concept of having confidence in and valuing yourself. You have the option of bringing the experience to a close after finishing each maze, or restarting again, and if you complete all six, you’ll pick up clues to a puzzle that unlocks a final area and a couple more small challenges.

I’ve already used the words “small” and “simple” a fair number of times in this small, simple review, but I don’t think those are critiques; the author’s kept their ambitions aligned with their design, and I spend a satisfying fifteen minutes working through it. I will say that the game’s exhortations to positivity struck me as pleasant, but not especially impactful – they’re pitched at a high level of generality so I assume just about everybody can nod along, but that means they lack the specificity that can make a moral or philosophical point linger. At the same time, I suspect part of the reason these affirmations didn’t register that strongly for me is that I’m a straight white middle-aged guy: pretty much all of Western civilization is designed to tell me that I’m important and my life and thoughts are valuable 24/7. There’s a reason why capital-p Pride was started by non-straight people, after all, and while it’s nice that the author made a game that speaks equally to more or less everyone, I think grounding it in a more particular set of experiences or perspectives could have given it more resonance.