Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

I couldn’t tell you where I was when Y2K clicked over. For New Year’s Eve 1998, I’m pretty sure I was at a high-school friend’s house in New Jersey, a bunch of us hanging out and catching up now that we’d been at college for a few months. Two years after that is I think when my college gaming group’s tradition of getting together to game on New Year’s Eve kicked off, so we were playing Changeling: the Dreaming in Pasadena. The big, endlessly-hyped party-like-it’s-1999 New Years, though? By process of elimination I guess I must have just been at home with my mom and sister, and if I try hard I can perhaps summon up a ghost of a memory of feeling relief that the many Y2K Bug worst-case scenarios hadn’t come to pass (I’d read a couple articles about how our nuclear reactors mostly still ran COBOL).

Fin and Jo, a pair of down-on-their-luck twentysomethings trying to hold onto their dreams, and each other, under the weight of dead-end jobs and familial disapproval, are likewise looking forward to the end of the millennium – they’ve got plans to meet up outside the supermarket where Jo works and celebrate together. But unlike my anticlimactic experience, they’re in for a life-changing evening after which things will never be the same again, at least if they can both make it to midnight.

That description, I fear, might not communicate much about what the game is like. When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves is an odd duck, which is no bad thing, but it is hard to sum up. I squinted in confusion when I saw that the blurb on the Comp page listed its genres as slice of life, crime, and time travel, as those aren’t typically tastes that go together, but actually they mesh in a simple way: the grounded setting of your council flat and its environs, along with the quotidian struggles of the main characters, take care of the first element, and the crime that interrupts their New Year’s plans is a plausible enough addition. As for the time travel, well, this is that parser-game standby, the loop game, where failure to ring in the year 2000 as you’d intended somehow leads to the clock rewinding and the day starting over.

While this supernatural contrivance isn’t explained, or at least if it is I missed it, it does make for a relatively straightforward plot: each run through the loop allows you to get a new item or two that in turn can potentially alter how the next loop starts, until after two or three properly-executed redos you wind up with one or more of the items needed to solve the climactic puzzle and keep some robbers from ruining your evening (there are several different ways to accomplish this, leading to distinct endings). The map is small, and there aren’t that many possible things to try, so while the clueing can sometimes feel a little light, it doesn’t take too much effort to hit on at least one of the options. Meanwhile, at the start of each run-through you get a short except of a conversation between Fin and Jo, often talking about their hopes for the future or fears about the present, which present you (as Fin) with several different dialogue options – the prevailing emotional tenor of your choices apparently winds up affecting the mood, if not the actual events, of whichever of the main endings you get.

Thematically, though, there’s a lot going on, and I’m not sure it all worked seamlessly for me. The relationship feels like it’s meant to be the central element of the piece, but the emotional drama of those sections have to sit alongside the standard medium-dry-goods puzzle-based gameplay, and the often-slapstick time-loop conceit (sometimes the reset happens after violence has been visited on you and/or Jo, which led me to experience some desensitization). While I found the leads appealing and was pulling for them to get to a better situation, the out-of-context dialogues felt like they weren’t well integrated into the meat of the game – when you meet Jo while wandering around, she, like most of the NPCs, doesn’t respond to too many dialogue options, and is understandably focused on getting away from the crime scene – and somehow often struck me as abstract, despite there being some solid details included about the lovers’ lifestyle and class. Or maybe fuzziness is a better word? Like, here’s one of the first ones:

“I’m so excited! what do you think the new year’ll bring us?” She quirked an eyebrow. Of course, I knew what she was pondering on right now. In her voice was the well-known trace of uncertainty.

1 – You asked me about a million times, but still I don’t know.
2 – There are a lot of conspiracy theories out, but most tales are based on facts, Jo.
3 – One thing I know for sure is, Jo, that I truly love you with all my heart.
4 – I know what you mean, Jo, but I don’t believe we’ll have any serious problem tomorrow.

There’s a lot that’s underexplained here, which can sometimes be an effective strategy, but here it stood in the way of my investment. The vagueness I felt about the tenor of the dialogues made the relationship mechanics hard for me to parse: per the game’s help menu, there are four different moods you can pick in each dialogue menu, always consistently mapped to the same numbers, meaning that dialogue option number 1 is meant to be consoling, number 2 is inflaming, 3 is objecting, and 4 is insisting. The differences between these categories are muddy, I think, and I had a hard time figuring out how my choices were going to be interpreted by the game.

This weakness in the prose isn’t restricted to just these sequences. While it’s perfectly adequate for the puzzle-based sections of the game – albeit a bit too ready to drop immersion-breaking Easter Eggs, like having the criminals quote Pulp Fiction – there are occasional tense or other grammar errors, and it sometimes struggles to convey the emotional heft of the relationship, landing firmly on the tell vs. show side of the dichotomy:

Most of the time I called her Jo. We’d fallen in love with each other since the graduating class. We both left school at sixteen, then we decided to live together, mostly because Jo had increasing troubles with her father. Jo’s father didn’t like me, and he had other plans for her future, including whom she would have to love and whom not. Though we each earned quite good certification at school, we didn’t manage to get good apprenticeship positions… No matter, I truly love her with all my heart and I was sure she’s the woman of my life.

So this quirky game didn’t quite win my heart, despite having a unique premise and fairly solid implementation (the scenery is a little thin in a few places and as mentioned the number of dialogue topics could be expanded, but the only real bug I ran into was (Spoiler - click to show)the game letting me light a firecracker without having a lighter on me). The challenge inherent in that premise, though, and the originality with which the game pursues it, certainly is memorable, though – far more so than my Y2K, at least.

I firmly believe that ideas are a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to IF: it’s not too hard to come up with a clever, compelling premise, just as it’s very easy to completely flub a promising concept with weak implementation, half-baked design, and boring prose. Execution is all, I’ve been known to say, stroking my chin and self-satisfied at my hard-won wisdom. And yet, for all that I believe that’s true when assessing the fundamental quality of a game (whatever that means), there are practical issues that arise when trying to writeup up said assessment in a review: for a game that trades on innovative mechanics or complex, heady themes, it makes sense to spend reviewing real-estate describing and interpreting these novelties without deigning to pass judgment. For a regular-degular game, though, that at a high level is similar to a dozen others I, and basically everyone, has played before, it’s hard to avoid a review turning into a straightforward, largely uninteresting evaluation of whether it’s any good or not, because there’s not much else of interest to talk about.

The Master’s Lair has a few aspects that help it stand out from the crowd, for good or ill (smaller examples for good: the player character is cheerfully amoral, a wizard’s apprentice upset at his treatment and therefore bent on stealing his erstwhile teacher’s prized artifact. Now ill: the game’s offered exclusively as a download from the Microsoft Store, which I think I previously hadn’t known existed). It’s also written in a custom parser engine that can in theory toggle without interruption into choice-based mode, where you click on object names and use a multiple-choice interface to build a command instead of just typing it.

But for the most part, this is a Zorkian-in-the-zany-sense romp around a wizard’s lab, collecting spell components and artifacts in order to circumvent a series of medium-dry-goods puzzles and lift Foozle’s folderol. There’s a maze with a gimmick. There are safe combinations to be guessed. There are rituals to be studied in books and performed at a workbench, with the appropriate ingredients to hand. It’s classic stuff that can certainly be appealing, but it doesn’t really win much goodwill just from its setup, given how generic it appears. And so my brain inevitably starts turning over the question of whether it’s a good version of these tropes, for lack of anything else to analyze.

To jump ahead to the end, I think it does fine, but there are a few questionable decisions in its design and interface that wind up making the Master’s Lair less engaging than it could have been. Starting out with the narrative level, it fritters away its antihero framing more or less immediately; the PC makes snide comments about the eponymous Master throughout the game, and does succeed in stealing his most powerful magical item, but this is just a thin patina of flavor sprinkled across a very standard adventure: the “bad guy stealing stuff” angle only lasts maybe ten minutes, at which point you could be swapped for the Zork guy with no real difference in behavior. The twist at the halfway mark further undermines any ambiguity you could read into the piece, with the Master’s vices expanding from being gross with the female students he teaches (bad enough as that is), to grand-guignol horrors that indicate that he’s taken inspiration from the seminal Mountain Goats/John Vanderslice EP Moon Colony Bloodbath (Spoiler - click to show)(yeah he’s running an organ-harvesting colony on the moon). It’s a tonal left turn that left me with whiplash, and also flattens out any sense that the protagonist was anything out of the ordinary.

At the implementation level, the variety of interface options is impressive – after struggling through Sidekick, this click-to-build-a-command approach felt much more intuitive to me, and there’s apparently even a voice-activated mode that I didn’t get a chance to test out. But while my preference would have been to stick with the classic parser approach, I ultimately found myself using the link-based interface due to bugs and design oversights. For example, an early scene listed a “low building” as being present, and highlighted the words to indicate I could interact with it, but X LOW, X BUILDING, and X LOW BUILDING all let to confusing errors. Clicking on it eventually revealed that this was just an incompletely-implemented synonym for the hut that’s also in that area, so I could have saved myself some trouble. Similarly, there’s a “high platform” that’s really an “ornate platform”, not that you’d know from the room description, among many other examples, some of which extend to not being sure which verbs would work until I checked out what the interaction menus were suggesting (there’s a switch that gives a deeply unhelpful you-can’t-do-that response when you PUSH it, since only PRESS will work). These tendencies were so pronounced that by the halfway mark I was only using the parser for commands I knew the game would accept, like navigation, using the multiple-choice interface as the most honest guide to what I was seeing and what I could do with it.

Admittedly, some of these implementation hiccups might reflect incomplete translation; Master’s Lair was originally a German game so it’s great to see it available in English, but it still throws up the occasional awkward phrase or untranslated chunk of text. These are no big deal in of themselves, but do suggest that there’s something of a mismatch between the modeled world and the text used to describe it. There were also a few times when I had to go to the hints because the language led me to create a mental picture entirely at odds with what the game thought it was saying – I had no idea what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show) tiny sugar tongs because their operation has to do with the big gem you’re tying to steal, and I hadn’t thought the gem was that small (I’m also not sure whether there are in-game cues about what you’re supposed to do with the gem once you steal it).

With that said, the puzzle design is generally good and has some fresh elements – as the blurb says, a number of the challenges involve talking with, and leveraging the talents of, some magically-reanimated stuffed animals, and I had a fun time with all of these. The scavenger hunts to get the reagents you need for the various plot-advancing spells also pass the time in an entertaining way, although the instructions for how to actually cast the spells once you’ve got the goods could stand to be spelled out (that also meant walkthrough time for me, admittedly also because I think the ritual-critical mortar and pestle aren’t actually mentioned in the room where they’re found). But there are some read-the-authors’ mind moments too, like how exactly you’re supposed to use the milky-glass box or what the math clue the rustling shadow gives you decodes to. The in-game hint menu provides some guidance, and there’s a separate walkthrough too, though, so at least I was rarely completely stuck for long. But again, it’s a mixed bag.

I have a bunch of additional specific examples of everything I’ve mentioned above, but nothing else I noted down that would fundamentally shift how you view a game like this – again, it’s pretty much exactly the game it appears to be, modulo that ill-advised twist that winds up mostly just shunting you into a slightly different flavor of the kind of story you’re already experiencing. If that’s your jam, good news, Master’s Lair will scratch the itch, but if not, you might find your critical faculties getting overly-judgey about its real but not especially major flaws, if only to have something new to think about.

Spoilers).

I am having trouble figuring out how to start this review. Verse is a prototypical quote-unquote challenging work, you see, set in a uniquely-dystopic future with minimal infodumping to provide the player much in the way of orientation, featuring enigmatic gameplay that equates translating Romanian poetry with grokking alien civilizations (I deploy that gerund with intent; see below), and is written in prose that’s simultaneously intensely concrete and absolutely unhinged. It all emerges from an ideological stew encompassing Marxism, Christianity, Kristevan abjection, and maybe even New England Transcendentalism, if you squint (that’s a transparent eye-ball joke). The opening lines put me in mind of Neuromancer (“…cathode green on dead pixel gray…”); the first location could be a riff on Zork (“You are standing in an open field east of an office building and west of a pier”), and there’s a later incident that could be a wry inversion of the climax of Eco’s Name of the Rose.

So yeah, this is a polysemous work, overloaded with meaning, and the difficulty isn’t that I don’t have the first idea of what it’s trying to do – it’s that I’ve got a dozen different ideas all vying for primacy. Verses is a game that begs to be interpreted, generously offering itself up to the player, but also manages the neat trick of remaining inexhaustible; it wants to be read, not solved.

To see what I mean, let’s pick a strand at random. It’s hard to go wrong with Christianity [citation needed] so why not start there? In the main section of the game, your character, an analyst who uses a text-based terminal to interface with unknown objects and artifacts to plumb their secrets, does their work at the transept of an abandoned church. This is the point where the axes of the church intersect, adjacent to the altar to the east, with the nave, where the laity worship, to the west, and chapels devoted to particular patron saints to the north and south. Before each session, one of your colleagues brings you a specially-prepared biscuit, flat and rounded – though late in the game, the process breaks down somewhat and you consume raw meat instead. And there’s a mysterious mutant who dispenses wisdom, and she’s marked by a wound: “a rivulet of dark green fluid pulses from a stoma in her side,” echoing and palette-swapping Christ’s stigmata.

None of this is especially obscure – the game is more or less jumping up and down to draw attention to the ways that these analysis sessions are sacraments of communion, standing between the sacred and the profane, and signpost that that mutant lady is trustworthy and knows what she’s talking about. Similarly, when one of your fellows, labeled “the apostate”, says of your work “[it] happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues,” you don’t need graduate-level study of Marx to see that he’s talking about the alienation of labor, with all that entails, and intuit one of the many reasons he’s on the outs with the power structure.

This is not a dig! Verses doesn’t try to resist interpretation, but rewards it, and if these particular hooks don’t land with a specific player, well, there are plenty more where that came from. The most sensually pleasing must be the set-piece translations. Once you’re strapped into your terminal, you’re confronted with the text, in Romanian, of a poem, all highlighted (the poems are all attributed to their authors). Clicking will reveal a literal translation of each word or phrase, and then often a compete line will offer up one more click to become idiomatic: “măreşte şi mai tare taina nopţii” becomes “magnifies even more mystery of the night” becomes “multiplying the night’s mystery.” And sometimes this transformation is even more magical: that final click turns “and everything that is not understood” to a gnomic “-”.

In a few special cases, the player has agency, and can choose which particular emphasis to put on ambiguous words – one that has to do with production can be code, or progeny, or shit (there is a lot of shit in this game, though it’s described more decorously than that). More usually these are choices the protagonist is making without specific input from the player, but I still found these sequences enormously engaging. For one thing, I wasn’t previously familiar with Romanian and still don’t really know what it sounds like, but it’s an uncanny language on the page: I’ve got a fair bit of French and a smattering of Latin, so I could often sense the gist of some of the words even before I clicked on them and was usually right. But that just meant that the moments of surprise, or of having the rug yanked out from under me when a false-friend led me astray, hit harder: my mind was actively working, dancing with the meaning of the text, and the missed steps are as much a part of that as the successes (there’s one optional poem in Hungarian that didn’t work quite as well for me, reinforcing that there’s something special about Romanian).

The poems themselves are also, almost without exception, spectacular. At their most beautiful, they’re haunting:

Understanding erodes
beneath my eyes-
because of my love
for flowers and eyes and lips and graves.

But more typically they’re brutal. My notes for one read “mud, blood, dead chickens for slaughter, ‘I lived in a house that made no sense’.” And here’s an extended excerpt from one whose title I’m pretty sure translates as “Carnage”:

Descending fog
of crows
to ingest
the meat
broken
I watch with
sinister
blind eyes
they jump
jaws clicking
the swarm
fluttering
hurried
wandering
rows,
rows,

This all sounds unbearably grim and serious, and it kind of is, don’t get me wrong – the fact that this is the story the author needed to construct as an armature for the poems at the heart of the game forces me to mentally revisit what little I know of Romanian history (they were pretty much the only post-Soviet country to have a bloody revolution and execute their dictator after the Iron Curtain fell, which is certainly a data point). But there are jokes! Pretty good ones! Like, there’s an early bit where the word-clicking is still yielding scientific-sounding elaboration, and in the definition of peta-FLOPS you’re teased with the existence of something called “yFLOPS”, but looking for further clarity there just tells you “you think it would be one of those numbers that looks silly written out.” Then there’s a bit where you come across a pond of liquid mercury:

Before you sits the still, strange pond. Diegetic and profane.

Clicking that standout word produces a reassuring etymology:

diegetic: from the Dacian “diegis:” burning, shining.

See, this use of diegetic is diegetic, it’s fine.

There’s also a poem eulogizing a Romanian revolutionary, which starts out undergoing the same transformation from half-recognizable Romanian text to disordered but pregnant-with-meaning literal translation before collapsing into melodrama:

Tender tears build in those who loved you,
Overflowing out onto your grave,
We follow your ascending virtue.
With resounding song, and love renewed,
On to Elysium.

Oof.

It’s perhaps worth pausing here, though, since this isn’t just a gag. If there’s this much similarity between how the translation process works when it’s using actually-good poetry, like “Carnage”, to invoke the aftermath of war, and jingoistic slop like “At the Grave of Aron Pumnel,” perhaps that’s a sign that it’s the process rather than the substance that’s important after all, and all the rigmarole about mutants, aliens, military intelligence, and tungsten is so much entertaining balderdash (I haven’t touched on the plot-qua-plot in this review, since I need to finish it sometime, but there’s definitely a lot of it, and the emphasis should be put on “entertaining” in the previous phrase).

Instead, it’s specifically the act of translation, with all that means and entails, that’s Verse’s true subject (well, plus the act of perception that precedes and is incorporated into translation, but appearances to the contrary I actually do intend to finish this review before the heat death of the universe). Again, it’s saying a lot – about the role of context, with the main character’s bosses obsessed with the possibility of a virgin translation, unburdened by outside knowledge (I’m pretty sure they’re villains), while the protagonist “[struggles] to distinguish between the emptiness of something untouched and something destroyed, flattened, cleared”; about the difference between “the living God, who can be interrogated [and] the dead God can only be interpreted; it has ceased to speak” (God is the text, duh); about the sterile language we mistake for cleanliness and the degenerate language we mistake for confusion and rot.

With that said, we should probably also translate the idea of translation. I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand every ingredient in Verses: I’m not sure about the color yellow. I have a guess about why the only word whose gender is mentioned is “năruită: ruined” (it’s feminine, unsurprisingly). I enthusiastically love the “cells”, “eight hundred meters tall and lighter than air”, and want a whole game centering on them, but will need a lot more than one delightful paragraph to have the faintest idea of how they work. But I’m pretty sure that the game doesn’t want to leave its readers just thinking about the movement from one language to another, but rather how all meaning is mediated through text – an especially apt concern for a piece of text-based IF, because what is the fifty-year history of our genre but an extended study of the possibility that one mind can encounter another, through playing with words?

Well, it’s also an extended set of examples about how incredibly challenging, and commercially unrewarding, that goal can be, and looking to the tradition of IF by queer creators that clearly informs the work, how especially fraught the attempt can be when the circle of communication is widened beyond middle-class cishet white men. To circle back to two points I made (aaaaaall the way up) at the beginning of this review, Verses is not a game that’s reducible to a single thesis, but nor is it a subtle game – so our ears should probably prick up when we come across its title in the wild. This fragment of a poem I think is called “Flowers of Rot” isn’t a keystone, I don’t think, but it may serve as an epigram:

verses from time lost
writing from the pit
thirsty and arid,
of hunger and ash
the verses of –

(Can we dare to hope that there’s something that can fill the blank?)

I am, as I think basically everyone in the world not on the OpenAI or NVIDIA payroll must be, heartily sick of LLMs. Substantively I think they suck when employed for anything resembling creative work; environmentally, turns out the companies have been lying and things are even worse than the already-quite-bad picture that’s been painted; economically, they represent yet another attempt to consolidate wealth and power with the owners of capital at all of our expense. But more than that, the discourse around them is wearying – having to think about this stuff and engage with those conversations even in leisure activities is pretty frustrating. So I should disclose that I went into Hebe, which bills itself as a puzzley adventure through Greek mythology, and also commendably acknowledges that ChatGPT wrote some of the text, with some trepidation, both about what I would find in the game and what I’d need to write about it.

There’s good news and bad news, I suppose. The bad news is that those Hebe-jeebies were justified (Hebe’s the Greek goddess of youth, so her name rhymes with Phoebe – geddit?). All of the game’s room descriptions are overlong and mention lots of unimplemented objects, the prose glops about, weighing everything down like oatmeal laced with lead, and by the end my eye would start twitching whenever I read the words “flickering” or “serene.”

The good news, such as it is, is that I didn’t find it too hard to ignore most of that. The game is clogged with empty locations that are just there to pad out the half-dozen places boasting self-contained puzzles, and so it’s relatively easy to just glide through them and concentrate on the interactions that seem like they were written by a human being, just as I skimmed the overlong cutscenes. Similarly, the author’s offered a helpful INVESTIGATE verb that tells you what items actually exist to be interacted with, so you don’t need to play the guess-the-hallucination game with ChatGPT if you don’t want to. And turns out that under all the AI cruft is – well, a perfectly ordinary undertested, wonkily implemented game that manages to boast a bit of charm, the kind of thing that would be a perfectly respectable starting point for a new author who didn’t yet understand the level of polish a parser game requires, but for the LLM use.

Let’s start with that bit of charm, as I’ve given Hebe a bit of a hard time so far. It’s clear that the author took the theme seriously, bringing in a lot of fringe detail from Greek mythology including but not ending with the choice of protagonist – Hebe’s both the second-most-famous cupbearer to the gods and the second-most-famous wife of Heracles, so I appreciated her underdog energy. The game proper involves visiting various sanctuaries and temples across northern Greece to find the Olympian Gods, who’ve been defeated after a surprise attack by the Titans and left depowered and chained behind various puzzley barriers – and then venturing into the underworld to find Heracles and bring the fight to the Titans. Again, there’s a fair bit of attention to detail, with numerous cities and ports implemented, a visit to the Pytheia, minor naiads given a supporting role, and plenty of obscure bits of myth getting a name-check.

The thin implementation means that the names are often all that you get, however – “you see nothing special about the Charon’s boat” is an enthusiasm-killing phrase to read. And the seams between the LLM stuff and the chattier human-written propose are sometimes comically sharp:

> x aigle
Aigle radiates with a golden glow, her hair like cascading sunlight, and her eyes shimmering like the first light of dawn. She is the embodiment of brightness and warmth, her presence illuminating the garden with a serene, golden aura.

> talk to aigle
“I’m so relieved you’re safe! Now go show them what you’re made of, Hebe! Just like old times!”

A game written entirely in the latter style might feel a little silly, but could have some zip to it; the juxtaposition with ChatGPT’s overwrought descriptions just creates bathos.

As for the substance of the adventure, the puzzles are largely old chestnuts. There are a couple of codes, a put-the-right-object-in-the-right-place one with a poem providing the hints, a guess-how-heavy-the-unmarked-weights one… None of them break new ground, but the classic are classics for a reason and they could be fun to work through. Unfortunately bugs and incomplete implementation make many of them way harder than I think they’re intended to be – the weight one stymied me for a long time due to the fact that I wasn’t clear that there were two scales, not one, and I couldn’t directly interact with the first one (“which do you mean, the scale or the small scale?”); the object-placement will softlock you unless you get it right first try, because the game incorrectly thinks one of the slots stays full even after you remove an item from it; and the endgame seems to have gotten especially little testing, as accessing it requires going through an unmarked exit (tip to other players: try IN/ENTER when you’re near the Necromanteion) and then the climactic conversation with Heracles is made awkward by a YES/NO are-you-ready-to-proceed choice that doesn’t work (to continue with the service journalism: say YES and then manually type DOWN afterwards). And there’s a lot more besides; see the transcript for the gory details.

But again, pretty much all of these issues are familiar ones – heck, I’ve committed some of these sins myself, and but for lucking into experienced testers for my first game could have wound up with similar egg on my face at my debut. And as I’ve said, I do think Hebe comes from a place of real authorial excitement, some of which occasionally comes through. So it would be easy enough to just wrap up with my typical remark in these cases, about how I hope to play a much better second game from this author. Which I do!

My weariness at LLM discourse can’t prevent me from adding, though, that I think use of ChatGPT was an especial disservice to the game. Beyond weighing down the enthusiasm that’s often one of the best elements of a debut game, the use of AI I think might have created some bad habits that contributed to the overall weak implementation. As I mentioned, the long location descriptions include a fair bit of (bland) scenery detail, and call out sounds and smells, so it’d be easy enough for an author to review what ChatGPT spit out and feel like their bases were covered – but none of the scenery is implemented, and LISTEN and SMELL return their default responses throughout. The difference between the prose styles also makes it really obvious to the player where there’s stuff they should be paying attention to and what they can safely tune out – as an author, though, I don’t think you ever want the player shutting off their brain. I don’t think I can say with a straight face that the version of Hebe that didn’t use an LLM would have been significantly higher-quality, but it would have been a clearer reflection of the author’s vision, and probably a much much better learning experience to boot.

So, remember two reviews ago, when I was playing The Bat? Remember how I said that it was so smoothly-put together, “I found myself craving a bit of friction”? Well, guess who else remembered: the gods, who decided to punish me for my hubris. Sidekick is our second Old West game of the Comp, taking a more overtly comedic approach to the theme by having you be the unheralded number-two to a swaggering, useless “hero” who relies on you to get the actual work of villain-foiling done. But while that premise offers some thematic resonance with The Bat, the implementation is exactly the opposite: not only is this game Cruel in the Zarfian sense (it ostensibly offers an optional warning system that renders it Polite, except the feature is buggy so if anything it’s Extra-Cruel), it’s also a Dialog game that relies exclusively on clickable links for its interface while still relying on parser-standard conventions for interactivity. The result is a game with some cleverly designed puzzles and engagingly witty writing, in a package that nonetheless did a real number of my rapidly-thinning, rapidly-graying hair.

I am going to reverse my usual order and start with the critiques this time, since I do think there are positives here worth celebrating but they’ll risk getting buried under the cavalcade of annoyances if I start with them. So let’s start with the gripefest, beginning with that major red flag I adverted to in the parenthetical above: authors, I am begging you, if you make a game that can be made unwinnable, and flag that to the player, that’s good; if you then program in an easy mode that informs the player when they’ve messed up, either immediately or after a short delay, that’s even better (coward that I am, I opted for the “tell me right away” option); but if you then don’t have sufficient testing to ensure the feature actually works as advertised, that is worse than if you’d done nothing at all. Three separate times I had to replay significant portions of the game because I hadn’t realized I’d borked things up: I think the issue is that the testing algorithm doesn’t realize that much of the map can be made inaccessible, either temporarily (the first part of the game is built around a series of set-piece encounters with the Black Hat’s henchmen, some of whom block you from exiting the room where you encounter them) or permanently (let’s just say some stuff goes down in the mine), and as I found out, this can make the game unwinnable if you can’t reach items you still need, with no warning given.

Now, I kept multiple saves in different filenames, and replaying in a parser game is usually a pretty quick process, so this shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? Oh my sweet summer child. Sidekick uses one of the cool features of Dialog to increase accessibility by offering a web-friendly, clickable interface: after the description of each location, a compass rose gets printed out, as well as a listing of your inventory and a small set of standard verbs; if you click on an object, you’ll get a further set of options about how to interact with it (if it’s a person, for example, you’ll get examine, and greet, and ask about…), which may then involve an additional click to set an indirect object – so for example, you could click on a burning match in your inventory which will pull up a context-sensitive list of options that includes LIGHT, so you click that which then pops up a further list of everything else in the room so you can choose what to try to set on fire.

It’s a respectable enough interface and I’d been playing on a phone I could see it being a godsend, but the trouble is, it’s not optional, and the sad fact is that it’s much clunkier than just being able to type in commands. Limited parser games or puzzle-light ones would probably not be slowed down too much by this interface awkwardness, but Sidekick is decidedly old-school in the degree of medium-dry-good manipulation it requires, and doesn’t make any allowances for the fact that players are not using an old-school parser. For one thing, there’s a sprawling map that’s a pain to navigate, because you can’t simply type E half a dozen times to go from one end to the other – because each location’s description is a different length, you need to wait for each one to print out, look for where the spacing has pushed the compass, and then click to get to the next one and then repeat the process again. Time also progresses when you’re in the middle of multi-step actions, meaning I got frustrated when trying to tie a rope to a randomly-wandering mule, only to find that she’d left in the time it took me to click ROPE → TIE TO…

That’s not the only fiddly part of Sidekick, either. There’s of course an inventory limit, and one that appears to be based on volume or weight, rather than a simple count of items. Helpfully, you can click the CAPACITY button to be told how many available “units” remain in your hands and your knapsack; less helpfully, there’s no way of telling how many “units” a given item takes up without trial-and-error experimentation, which I generally didn’t attempt given the aforementioned interface clunkiness (…you maybe now are seeing why I wound up leaving so many items lying around in places I couldn’t later find my way back to). And there were a few times where I was stymied because an object offered necessary actions only when I clicked on it when I was standing right next to it, even though it was visible and I could do other things one room away, or when I had to close and re-open a matchbook because I was only allowed to click on the match it contained immediately upon flipping it open.

…I am finally coming to the end of my complaints, but there are a couple of puzzles I can’t let go by unmentioned. Most of them involve getting your hapless boss out of trouble, but he has an annoying habit of wandering off without any indication of where he’s got to and which bad guy he’s run into, meaning that your reward for solving a puzzle is often to comb through the large map to look for any changes. There are also a few that felt completely unmotivated to me – I’d thought I’d made friends with a visiting scientist, and in return he’d lend me his geyser-detecting helmet (…don’t ask), but instead I was apparently supposed to lure him to the saloon and start a punch-up with some random cowboys, which would lead the good doctor to flee the scene but forget to bring his room-key along. The fight against the first henchman is even worse, relying on slapstick cartoon logic that’s at odds with the rest of the game.

But – and here we can finally transition to the praise – there are a lot of really good puzzles here too. There are a series of reasonably challenging ones in the middle part of the game that I nonetheless was able to solve without clues, while being original to boot. Busting your “hero” out of jail and getting rid of the thug who stuffed him in a railroad-side water tower was immensely satisfying, albeit those are both examples of the game’s occasionally-disquieting bloodthirstiness.

The writing as well is often a lot of fun. While the sidekick conceit recedes somewhat in the back half of the game, as your boss gets well and truly kidnapped and you’re left doing standard IF-protagonist stuff on your lonesome, the game wrings some solid comedy out of him while he’s around:

“Well, Mr. Mayor, I eat danger for breakfast and evil for brunch. And that’s a kind of breakfast.”

Pausing awkwardly, the Mayor recovers and again takes Buck’s hand and shakes vigorously.

So this is a game I wanted to enjoy, and often did enjoy, which just made all the time it spent dragging me across a bed of nails hurt all the worse. I know there are a lot of ideas bandied around about how to make parser games more accessible, which is an important conversation to be had, but unfortunately Sidekick stands for the proposition that if you take a clever if old-school game and remove all the typing, you’ll wind up with something worse than what you started with.

It is the mark of a lazy writer to reduce their criticism to “X is just like Y plus Z,” but I’ve tried to rewrite this opening several times now and there’s no way around it: Eikas is Stardew Valley plus cooking, there’s your pull quote. I guess to make it look like I actually put in some effort I can note that Eikas was the name of the ancient Epicureans’ monthly day of community and feasting.

That’s the kind of history-nerd content that’s a value-add for my reviews, right?

Joking aside, cottagecore life sim winds up being a great fit for choice-based IF, and Eikas is a robust and charming implementation of the idea even if it’s not the most original thing in the world. You play a chef recruited to a village to run their community canteen, an institution that by local tradition hosts a meal for all comers every five days; after each, the elders judge you on the quality of the fare you’ve been able to provide and adjust your stipend accordingly, with your performance over the game’s probationary thirty-day period determining whether you’re offered a permanent position. Fortunately, you’ve got assets including a regular infusion of tax revenue, a bat-spirit named Merry-Andrew, and the kind of indefatigable spirit that leads attractive villagers of all gender identities to want to get close to you by revealing their mildly-dramatic backstories to you one pseudo-date at a time.

OK, I’m kidding again, but really, the game implements its recognizable formula faithfully and well. The mechanics are rich enough to stay engaging over six iterations of the socialize-prepare-feast cycle, without being overwhelming. Each day you have four actions, one of which will almost always be to knock together some snacks you can sell in the marketplace to supplement your stipend; the rest can be used to spend time with one of the three primary friends/love interests, go foraging in the outskirts, harvest herbs from your garden, or lend a hand to other villagers in the hopes of getting a reward. Other actions, notably shopping for ingredients and new cookbooks, don’t take any time but do require money. And the game does a good job of feeding its various systems into the set-piece feasts: build enough affection with the busker Orlando and they’ll offer to play fiddle at one of your meals, increasing the number of stars the elders will award you, and helping Merry-Andrew with a series of tasks he’s struggling with will also build your standing with the village as a whole, which is what you’re ultimately judged on.

The cooking is of course the centerpiece of gameplay. You start out with a few cookbooks, each containing a half dozen or so main courses and side dishes requiring perhaps one or two common ingredients, rated in quality from average to deluxe. You also have another book that provides some broad hints about how to approach the feasts: making sure the three dishes you offer are from the same culture might boost your rating, for example, as will sticking to the classic main plus side plus dessert structure. There are many more cookbooks you can buy, and a few additional ingredients you can unlock through various means, meaning I was never short of new recipes to try, even as I felt perpetually short of time and cash until I hit the last few days of the month. And in general fancier dishes take more and/or rarer ingredients, but will give you more stars at the feast, which in turn gives you more resources for the next go-round, which makes for a pleasing progression.

The food itself, happily for me, is almost entirely vegetarian (I think there are like two fish dishes?) It also ranges across an enticing variety of origins, though the constraints of gameplay inevitably lead to some questionable choices (naan is only “average”? Fight me). It’s well-described too, and in fact the prose is solid throughout the game; this isn’t the kind of story that ever indulges in stylistic flourishes, but it rarely puts a foot wrong. Here’s a bit of dialogue from Antonia, a painter who went to the big city to make it big but who’s since come back:

“I don’t know if I’d call it home,” she says, shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. “I’ve always thought of myself as a city girl, really. Hardly know what possessed me to come back here of all places. Fancied it would be a good place to paint, I suppose.”

She lapses into silence, and you let it string out. You have the sense that Antonia is more likely to speak if you leave space for it, rather than prompting her.

“It hasn’t even been that,” she says after a moment. “Nothing I do comes out right. I’m not a landscape artist, not really. I’ve always painted people. But change is supposed to be good, isn’t it? Refreshing. I mean, why did you decide to come here? To do this job?”

For all that the text is earnest to the point of being po-faced, though, there are some sly touches here and there – did I mention that the character who uses they/them pronouns is named Orlando? And among the want-ads on the notice-board is tucked this gem: “for sale: adult shoes, worn a bit.”

While the interface does provide almost all the information you need to plan meals and decide how to balance all the different objectives you can pursue, there are a few places where I felt a bit at sea. For example I was never able to get that same-culture bonus despite trying to cluster all the Asian-origin dishes together; this is especially awkward since Eikas is set in a fantasy world so I was never sure if, like, India existed, or just onion bhajis and carrot halwa. Beyond that, I never fully sussed out what advantages you gain from fulfilling requests on the notice-board, or why you’d want to replace one of your three precious feast dishes with a sauce. And there’s a sequence where you have to collect three different objects for Merry-Andrew, but searching for each takes an action and relies on a random die-roll to determine whether you succeed or fail, which I found an irresistible temptation to save-scumming.

I probably didn’t need to have bothered, though – I finished the game with hundreds of unneeded coins in the bank, with the strongest-possible affection with all the named characters, and four or five more stars than I needed to max out the village’s approval. Just as in Eikas’ fiction, nothing can ever really go wrong, the mechanics are also tuned to provide a gentle, cozy experience. I can understand an objection to this on an aesthetic level – if you thrive on stories of drama and conflict, there are only slim pickings here – but if the objective was to provide a bit of low-stakes feel-good solace, as in yes, Stardew Valley, Eikas more than achieves the brief.

There are, of course, two iconic master/valet pairs in fiction (well, three I suppose if you the Remains of the Day guy and his Nazi boss), and the Bat’s name, cover art, and listed genre will likely prompt you to think of the more famous one. But the “superhero” in this limited-parser game isn’t Master Bryce of stately Wyatt Manor – instead it’s you, his valet, tasked with preparing the mansion for a charity concert, seeing to the needs of the demanding guests who each have their own agenda, and steering your master through it all while minimizing harm to reputation, limb, and life, in that order, inasmuch as he’s come down with some kind of disorder that’s left him thinking he’s a bat (fortunately, he’s rich enough that everyone else pretends he’s just slightly eccentric).

Yes, what we have here is a farce, in the grand Jeeves and Wooster tradition, with you playing the Jeeves role. This is a tricky genre to realize in IF form, since it turns almost entirely on pacing, which is a fickle thing for an author to stage-manage when players get involved. To smooth the process, the limited-parser approach is pared to the bone, as besides movement verbs, looking, and examining, the only action-verb available is ATTEND TO, which will serve equally well for mixing drinks, opening doors, manipulating machinery, and putting out fires both metaphorical and literal. It also serves to pick up and drop the myriad inventory items, which you’ll be spending a lot of time doing – besides a few small objects like a matchbox and keys, you can only hold as many things as you have hands (sometimes fewer if something’s especially big). This juggling isn’t too annoying, thankfully, both because the map is relatively compact so you won’t have to go far to track down what you need, and because it’s a reasonable compromise to make the puzzles work – most hinge on the fact that the result of ATTENDing depends on what you’re carrying, with a mess of broken glass for example giving a “better not touch that” response unless you’re holding the broom, in which case you can sweep it discreetly away. A bottomless inventory would trivialize things, so the limit is a small price to pay.

If the mechanics are well set up to support the comedy, the prose plays a starring role. The protagonist’s voice is hilariously understated, even as he weathers indignities Wodehouse could never have dreamed of. The use of dry asides left me giggling:

"All the fortunes amassed by the Wyatt Dynasty can be traced to a single magneto-polonium mine, which the late Tomas Wyatt acquired (along with radiation poisoning) in the last century."

And while a gentleman’s gentleman would never directly criticize their said gentleman, there’s still plenty of room to read between certain lines:

>X MASTER

You are careful not to see what might be indiscreet, especially when you can see it very clearly. Master Bryce has such a difficulty keeping himself dressed when he is in these moods.

Just about every description and event has something that’s chuckle-worthy at a minimum, with a few of the edgier developments eliciting a delighted shudder (Spoiler - click to show)(the prongs, oh god, the prongs). The other fertile source of comedy is the donations meter – as the guests’ moods fluctuate according to whether they’re pleased that you’ve recently refreshed their drink, say, or miffed that Master Bryce is trying to eat the dragonfly-clips that are keeping up their hairdo, you’ll get a notification that their expected gifts to the widows-and-orphans fund you’re stumping for have shifted accordingly. It’s a simple gag, I suppose, and not one that appears to vary based on your performance – I think all players wind up with the same final result – but it still helps establish the magnitude of certain beats, like exactly how grateful a noblewoman is for your help arranging a surreptitious tryst, or precisely how far you’ve sunk when another dignitary notices that her jewelry has gone missing in the chaos (it also allows for a great running bit about how the Bishop – a prince of the church! – is a gigantic cheapskate, kicking at most $40 or $50 into the kitty).

So yes, every element has been polished to a sheen to provide a lovely time, and a lovely time I had. Oh, there were a few small elements that provided tiny hiccups, but really, we’re talking tiny – there’s a flashback at the midpoint of proceedings that’s fine on its own merits but I though disrupted the energetic buildup into the second half, and I had a hard time visualizing the geography of the climactic sequence, though I was able to bungle through just fine following the game’s copious prompts about what I might want to do next.

But that right there is my one substantive, and admittedly supremely churlish, critique of The Bat: it’s so smooth, so finely-tooled, that I found myself craving a bit of friction. Just about every time you run across an obstacle or crisis, just examining or attempting to attend to it will provide a substantial hint about what you should be doing, and if you don’t get it at first, repeated attempts will likely provoke an onlooker to prod you further in the right direction. And more broadly, I rarely felt like I was coming up with exciting plans to try to manage the party’s multiple escalating catastrophes as I was following someone else’s script.

Again, this is jolly good fun, but for me at their best parser games feel like a pas des deux between player and author, while in the Bat I just didn’t always feel like my creativity was required. Part of this is the nature of the valet’s job, I suppose – you’re always at someone else’s beck and call, fetching whatever they require or dropping everything to be dragooned into their schemes. But what makes Jeeves an incomparable servant is his skill of anticipation, of seeing how his master’s failings will get him in trouble and allowing things to proceed just up to the edge of disaster before revealing how his foresight has actually saved the day; by comparison the Bat’s man comes off a rather more ordinary servant.

I suppose it’s my fault for not starting earlier, but I wished I’d seen more of the rat. He(?)'s the familiar of the eponymous apothecary, and my first shift working at the store involved helping out with the stockroom; the little fellow(?) was quite a lovable and useful assistant’s assistant, tracking down inventory and speeding up the process so much that I was looking forward to spending more time with him(?) But he hasn’t turned up after ten more days of playing the game, which is why the details are beginning to fade (I think his(?) name started with a D but don’t quote me on it) – given that the game’s events are tied to the real-world calendar and clock, I suspect the cute rat was front-loaded into the first week or two of the Comp to help bring in the lookie-lous.

At the risk of over-interpreting an anecdote, my rodent-related forgetfulness maybe stands for the broader way the real-time element of The Apothecary’s Assistant often overshadows its cozy, cottagecore vibe. Whenever you first launch it, I believe you get the same vignette where you stumble through the woods into Aïssatou’s shop of balms and curiosities, and quickly agree to help from time to time in return for a payment of acorns (you also trip over a sheet of cryptic-crossword clues on your way out; more on those later). But then you’re told to come back tomorrow to start a shift, and tomorrow is tomorrow – until your patch of ground rotates around the earth’s axis to greet the sun once more, all there is to do is ask a single question of Aïssatou or noodle over the cryptics (we’ll get there). You can also use your accumulated acorns to purchase one of several beads, each of which is linked to a particular real-world charity; in a generous touch, the author’s planning to make actual donations out of their Colossal Prize winnings from last year’s Comp, with each player-selected acorn translating to an additional $1.

The main interest of the game is thus in the daily shifts (though turns out some days you can get up to three of them, depending on the shop’s schedule). While each vignette is unique, there are several kinds that recur: you’ll be tasked to find a creature or plant for Aïssatou, which requires matching the description you’ve gotten with one of a pair of drawings; or pick out which of chartreuse, burgundy, or mustard is a shade of red for a befuddled customer; or a Mad Libs bit where you read a story to entertain a customer’s kid – making sure all the words you plug in start with the letter “v” is entirely optional, but I enjoyed that self-set challenge.

There are plenty of one-offs, too (though of course some of them might ultimately prove to have sequels), but they all hit that same low-key, comforting vibe: they set a mood, present the smallest imaginable quantum of challenge, then after a few hundred words they send you on your way, 60 acorns richer (you get 50 just for showing up, and a bonus 10 if you get things right, which so far I’ve accomplished 100% of the time). But if you’re feeling like you want something more robust to chew on, well, that’s where the cryptics have you covered. You ultimately stumble across more than half a dozen clues to work through, and while the average individual difficulty is perhaps a bit lower than what you’d see in a professional cryptic crossword, the fact that they’re given individually, rather than interlocking in a grid, means that you can’t rely on the easier clues filling in letters for the harder ones. Still, they’re eminently fair, and the slow pace of the rest of the game meant I was able to nibble at them a little at a time, only needing to consult the forum hint thread for one I’d gotten my head wrapped the wrong way around.

Your reward for solving them all is a bonanza of acorns, and the most dramatic scene in the game – several of Aïssatou’s former assistants, who had some kind of falling out with her, reveal that they’ve been behind the clues as part of a scheme to get her to reconsider her actions. It’s well-written, but I have to confess that if there were earlier hints seeding that something like this had happened, I didn’t pick up on them, and I have to further confess that since the gimmick of this review has me writing this sentence like two weeks on, most of what I now remember about the scene is not remembering its context.

All of which is to say that while I quite like each element of the Apothecary’s Apprentice – the cozy shopkeeping, the gentle challenges, the fairytale cast, the charity element, and the cryptic crossword – and think the real-time structure is a neat thing to play with in the context of a Comp that’s running over a specified number of real-world days, for me it wound up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. A low-stakes magic-shop simulator that you could binge all at once would work gangbusters, I think, as would a slow-paced real-time game that presented a high-intensity plot and dramatic, engaging characters. But the combination of low-key hangout vibes and short play sessions with big gaps between them made for an awkward combination that’s left me with positive feelings but not many real stand-out moments. And as with this review, which I’ve written a single sentence at a time over the course of two weeks without looking back at anything I previously wrote besides the last few words of the previous one to guide me, there’s a slight wooliness and lack of momentum to the whole, even as each individual piece is pleasant and well put together.

For all that, I’ve still been going back each day to earn some supernumerary acorns (I’ve long since purchased all the beads), and I’ll be interested to see whether the long-teased arrival of the Hunter’s Moon will bring the story to a climax that might reconfigure how I’ve felt about it to date. I also can’t help but wonder whether the exact same structure and approach would have worked much better if I hadn’t played it in the middle of the Comp, with dozens of other stories and characters jostling the gentle Apothecary’s Assistant crew out of my brain’s limited attention span. As experiments go, then, it’s certainly a worthwhile one, and one I’ve definitely enjoyed, even as I wish more of it had stuck with me.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t really believe in “so bad it’s good” art – my experience is that even stuff that notionally seems like it would be campy fun winds up, if realized by sufficiently unskilled hands, leaden, poorly-paced, and dull. Sure, there’s definitely trashy stuff that’s executed well out there, but I’d argue that’s not really “bad”; likewise there are some things that people enjoy laughing at rather than with, but that usually feels too mean for me to enjoy, and regardless surely mocking something doesn’t magically transmute it into being good.

I do believe that there are games that can be so bad they’re interesting, though, and my notes for Big Fish are littered with pop-eyed what-the-absolute-fuck-am-I-looking-at-here moments. The framing of this mechanically simple (you go to some places and pick up a couple of items) Twine game led me to expect something true crime-ish: you get a letter from your favorite uncle, telling you that he’s sending it on the eve of being executed for a murder he was convicted of committing a year ago. He protests his innocence, though of course by the time you get the message it’s too late for him, but you nonetheless decide to posthumously vindicate him by investigating exactly what happened in the lakeside village where the girl lost her life. But the actual story Big Fish has to tell is far wilder than that, and by the time you’ve uncovered the truth you’ll have encountered crocodile cults, a crocodile Jesus, and genetic experiments with crocodile DNA (crocodiles are a pretty big deal here, is what I’m saying – your uncle was even executed by being thrown into the water for crocodiles to eat).

That’s all pretty weird, but the way the story is told is weirder still. Like, what’s going on with the protagonist? Here’s one of the very first things that happens in the game:

"You pick up your toothbrush and start brushing your teeth.

"The repetitive in-and-out motions bring some lewd thoughts to your mind."

Look, people are horny perverts, I get it, but find me someone who gets turned on by brushing their teeth, I dare you. Later on too I think the game indicates that you find some pornography(?) under the bed of one of the people you’re investigating, which seems to trigger an elliptically-described episode of some kind:

"You found a few things that shouldn’t be here under the bed.

"This led you to some despicable thoughts."

It plays coy about the protagonist in other ways too: the opening segment indicates that you’ve taken a leave of absence from the publishing house where you work to look into the killing, but here’s how you convince a policeman to give you access to his files:

"He only becomes slightly more respectful after you show your reporter ID.

"After showing another credential, he becomes very respectful."

So actually we’re a reporter? Or… something else?

Then there’s the bizarre stuff that seems like it might reflect bugs or incomplete edits? Like one of the first places you can visit in town is the hospital, where you’re told:

"Here we met the victim’s sister, Sarah… When I was in the archives, I saw a photo of her just after she was admitted a year ago. Her hair wasn’t as long then."

But I came to the hospital right after exploring the police archives, and not only wasn’t there a photo of Sarah, the fact that the victim had a sister wasn’t even mentioned! There’s also a medium-length sequence where the name of your uncle changes from Fleur to Fuller, and then back again.

There are whiplashes in tone, too – there’s an old woman who starts talking in oracular mumbo-jumbo that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantasy novel, and the game often veers wildly between goofy fun and e.g. clumsy speculation about sex crimes (one of many, many nonsensical twists is the game asserting that your uncle couldn’t have raped anybody because he’d been impotent since the death of his family which, uh, is not how any of this works and also ew).

There is an attempt to create a mystery that “plays fair” – at the end you’re given a choice of which culprit to finger, and it does seem like there are right and wrong answers, with the clues you’ve found helping you find the best outcome. But the game’s plot to that point is crammed with so many arbitrary assertions and illogical deductions that the process feels like playing darts while drunk and blindfolded.

With all that said, I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t enjoy some of the time I spent playing Big Fish with my jaw agape, utterly gobsmacked about where it might be going next. It’s definitely not a good game; it definitely needs content warnings more assertive than “maybe violence, gore, or sexual themes”; and its vision of a crocodile nailed to a cross is definitely implausible given the stubbiness of their arms. But it’s the memorable kind of bad, and at least that counts for something.

I’m pretty ecumenical in my IF tastes, I think, but I admit I sometimes stifle a groan when I see an entry in that most challenging of genres, the allegorical game, coming up in the queue. Possibly that’s just down to personal preference, but I do think it’s a hard nut to crack: how do you come up with a scenario that’s comprehensible to the player, but obscure enough not to be obvious? How do you engender connection to the material when the plot might not be happening in a literal sense? How do you take advantage of the freedom allegory offers while retaining enough cause-and-effect logic to establish stakes?

Well. You know that saying about how every hard problem, there’s a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong? At the risk of running afoul of the adage, let me speculate a way to resolve the many issues raised by this vexed genre: don’t worry about being too simple or too obvious, pick something nice and straightforward, and concentrate on building enough texture into your allegory so that it doesn’t feel glib.

If that’s not a fully generalizable answer, don’t blame me, blame You, because that’s the tack it takes and it’s an entirely successful one. It doesn’t take much chin-scratching to understand what the game is getting at – you leave school only to find yourself lost in an unfamiliar forest, and finding that you feel curiously alien to yourself, a sense of disconnection that’s tied to the pronouns you use for yourself not feeling right. This could apply to many an adolescent identity crisis, but the conflict here clearly has a lot to do with gender, which is reinforced by the central action of the game: casting about for a way home, you come across a crow and goat who offer to help you if you assist them with gathering the items they need for the wedding (something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…)

This is all accomplished via a light parserlike interface; there’s compass navigation around a small map, all handled with inline links, and a modest inventory available through a backpack link in the sidebar. There’s pretty much just a general “use” verb, but You has an additional cool narrative-mechanical gimmick up its sleeve: many of the actions you take or items you use alter your pronouns. You’re always “you”, but the font can be bigger or smaller, or boast an underline or an accent, or be subject to other transformations, and while some of the puzzles involve straightforward inventory manipulation, most of them require mastering these typographical manipulations, and understanding how they’ll translate narratively. I won’t spoil the specifics, since I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises given the game’s short running time, but there are at least two or three puzzles that I found both entirely intuitive, and entirely delightful.

I also found the writing as satisfying as the design. The fantasy world isn’t especially memorable by itself, but again, it’s got neat little details that lend it just enough weight – the aforementioned crow/goat couple are especially charming:

“Not feeling quite yourself lately?” One nods. “One understands. It was barely a month ago that one’s own self was lost down a waterfall.”

Zhe laughs at the memory. “It’s true,” zhe adds. “Had to go down to the mud flats with a net. But it got back where it needed to be in short order.” Zhe taps a talon against zher chin thoughtfully. “THEY helped greatly with the task. THEY might be able to help you too, if you ask THEM.”

THEY do indeed wind up helping, once you’re able to get the pair what they need, in a climactic sequence that does a lovely job of presenting the player with a no-wrong-answers choice that nonetheless has real weight – I wound up stopping to think for two or three minutes before I finally selected how I wanted to go about creating my new self.

So yes, as allegories go, this one is quite straightforward but that doesn’t make it any less effective. You presents a dilemma that’s admittedly not especially novel in IF these days, even for a boring old cis guy like myself, but uses its fantastical conceit to present the situation from a bit of an angle, which somehow makes it come through more clearly. That’s the power of allegory when done well, and You does it well enough that I really do think it’s something of a blueprint.