Reviews by Mike Russo

As my review of Dream of Silence indicates, I’m maybe not especially good at evaluating fan-fiction riffing on stuff I lack much direct experience with. Unlike with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve at least seen a bit of Dr. Who – I watched the Christopher Eccleston season of the rebooted show, and like three or four stories an ex showed me from the classic show – but it’s still a trivial percentage of a media franchise that’s been around for more than half a century at this point; if I’d seen only one season of Voyager and like three episodes of the original series, I’d feel on uncertain ground assessing how well a fan-game captured the Star Trek experience, and I’m in worse shape here since classic Dr. Who is also a quintessentially British phenomenon.

With that said, Dr. Who and the Dalek Super-Brain certainly seems like an authentic tribute to the show. The Daleks are presented lovingly, for one thing, with attractive 3D models and an endearing combination of ruthlessness and Self-Defeating Evil Overlord behavior. And the scenario, with its series of cliffhanger death-traps and fuzzily-explained time travel techno-babble, seems of a piece with what I know of the old series: after finding your time-ship blown off course, you’re kidnapped by the Daleks and your companion Bex is threatened with extermination if you don’t cough up the secrets of time travel to these tinpot Hitlers, after which you’ve got a chance to turn the tables through judicious application of the sonic screwdriver, logical paradoxes, and jury-rigged explosives.

This is all good clean fun, and if neither the narrative nor the prose ever rise above being workmanlike, well, I’m sure there were lots of weeks when Dr. Who was just phoning it in too. I did like the paradox bit – it’s set up as one of those classic 50s/60s scenarios where the protagonist tries to overload an android’s brain by spouting something nonsensical or self-contradictory, but here, after making the Dalek supercomputer consider one of the many paradoxes of time travel, the result isn’t to make it explode but rather to second-guess whether it truly understands time travel enough to build a working time machine from the info you’ve provided. But other than that, the companion is here to be rescued, the jaded leader of oppressed slaves is here to be inspired, and the Daleks are here to go down like punks – it all plays out exactly as you’d expect, which is the sign of a successful pastiche just as much as of a less-ambitious game.

The interface also contributes to the sense that there’s not much to do here. Things are purely choice-based, but with an opportunity to do a bit of navigation between different locations. While a nice bit of freedom in theory, in practice only one of the three or so rooms available at any given time will have anything you can usefully interact with, which makes the game feel emptier than it would if the choices were more restricted. Meanwhile, the visuals are pleasant but also led to a challenge or two, like the way a passage with various clickable links explaining potential upgrades for my screwdriver kept scrolling up and until I couldn’t actually reach the links anymore (this is the one real puzzle in the game, but fortunately it’s trivially solvable if you read at all carefully).

Speaking of the visuals, we need to address the elephant in the room, or rather the cantaloupes. From my admittedly small sample size, my sense is that Dr. Who is a relatively sexless show. So I experienced a bit of ludonarrative dissonance from the fact that almost the first graphic the game presented to me was a slightly-zoomed in shot of Bex’s chest, with most of her head cropped out of the frame and her zipper pulled down to reveal quite a lot of cleavage. The text itself doesn’t sexualize Bex, beyond the patriarchy-mandated trope of restricting her role to being menaced by aliens and having the plot explained to her, so I don’t think this is an intentional decision to try to make horny Dr. Who. The cleavage could just be because the author was looking for free or low-cost 3D models of sci-fi looking women, and maybe the cast from an off-brand Fallout sex game was all that was on offer; meanwhile, I think the cropping-out of her face was just due to how I had my browser window set up. Still, it made for an off-putting and in-your-face combination; if the first thing a game thrusts at me is boobs, I kinda expect it to be about boobs, and it’s a nice bonus if the person the boobs are attached to has a personality.

There are certain kinds of criticism that, while well-intentioned, nevertheless always bug me, and high on that list is I-wish-this-parser-game-had-been-a-choice-based-one. It can certainly be a legitimate reaction to a game that doesn’t leverage the unique affordances of the text parser, or has a clumsy interface that would be much smoother if the player could just click their way through it, but it sometimes can also just reflect essentialized views of what the two houses of contemporary IF, both alike in dignity, are all about: if a game is about feelings and relationships and people other than straight white men, well, wouldn’t it be more comfortable with the choice-based crowd, not stuck over here with all the medium-dry-goods puzzles? Well, perhaps, but perhaps shifting our expectations of what goes where is worth a bit of discomfort.

With all that as context, it hopefully conveys the power of my reaction to The Garbage of the Future to say that I really wished this choice game had been a parser one.

The minimalist, creepy premise isn’t the issue: the protagonist is a working stiff who’s driven a tanker trunk jammed full of supernaturally potent waste out to the woods to empty the tank where nobody else is around. This is a simple task that’s obviously replete with danger and vague, ominous implications, and the game’s prose does a good job playing up the nerve-wracking details of your errand, from the flickering of your temperamental flashlight to the sound of a threatening figure skittering through the mist. The exact nature of the toxin you’re dumping is never explained, nor are the motivations of whoever’s paying you, but my brain had no trouble filling in the blanks with horrifying possibilities.

No, the trouble is in the implementation. Performing the job requires reading a manual in the darkened truck-cab, picking up and repairing the hose from one compartment and tools from another compartment, as well as exploring your environs for useful equipment and a place to put the waste. The choice-based interface for doing all this is straightforward enough: objects you can interact with are highlighted, and clicking on one of them will usually pop up a sub-menu allowing you to use some standard commands (take, drop, open) or use an inventory item on them or navigate to an exit or some other, bespoke option. But in practice this can be rather overwhelming, like in this early location description (many later ones are even more complex):

Jake opens the glove box. Inside, a faint glow illuminates a flashlight and a manual.

The truck is unnervingly dark.

Bill says, “If you forget what to do, it’s explained in the manual.”

A distant groaning fills the air.

(Exits: Field, Path)

Jake, glove box, flashlight, manual, truck, Bill, field, and path are all highlighted, and in practice I found I was having a hard time keeping up with all my options. Navigation was similarly tricky; not all locations are reachable from all others, and figuring out which areas were connected to which other ones took a long time.

The core puzzle at the center of the game also feels like it leans into the system’s weaknesses. Futzing with the hose feels like it does in a parser game, for example – I definitely got confused trying to remember which end was which – except with more interface friction from all the clicking required, and a half-second screen-refresh delay that began feeling interminable. There’s also a ton of waiting – after I got the tanker draining, I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs while the gauge slowly ticked down, and reaching 0% required five solid minutes of clicking wait, with nothing much of interest happening in the meantime.

As a parser game, I think Garbage of the Future could work quite well – default actions and affordances would suffice for most of the machinery-manipulation portions of the puzzle, and moving round the small map would be much easier (it’s also quicker to repeat-slam the Z key and enter than keep clicking in different places on the screen). The fractal nature of attention in the prototypical parser system, where looking at one object may reveal several more to consider, would also help tier out the level of detail provided. As it is, I found my engagement in this creepy vignette was often undercut by interface woes, which is an awful shame given the creativity on offer; exploring the generous spread of achievements tracked by the game, and checking off the variety of different approaches and endings, would have made for a pleasant second hour with the game, but the thought of once again having to juggle a turn timer and click dozens of times to get through sequences I’d already explored was too daunting to surmount.

Fittingly for a game that’s structured as a series of repeating time loops, I am getting déjà vu writing this review, because I’m sadly going to have to start and end with a point I’ve made many many times before: if you are planning on putting a game in the Comp, especially if it’s a parser game, especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game, and especially especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game relying on a bunch of nonstandard commands and mechanics, you need beta testers to put the thing through its paces. Traffic has some clever ideas and an engaging premise, but as it currently exists I think the only options for experiencing it are “type in the walkthrough” and “tear out a tuft of your own hair every five minutes for two hours, at which point you’ll probably be irrevocably stuck maybe halfway through.” I’d definitely recommend the first experience over the latter – even for those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to be dealing with the incipience of male-pattern baldness – but even better would be playing a hoped-for post-Comp release that improves the clueing and implementation so that its clear potential can be realized.

Part of that potential is the comedy of the setup. Much like Turn Right, this is a game about getting across an intersection; unlike Turn Right, this time you’re a pedestrian (yay), and the risk of being run over is very high (eek – the blurb should probably have a content warning for this), but you’re carrying a weird science gizmo that allows you to rewind the clock and hop into other people’s bodies (er?). With a little experimentation, you learn that by looking at particular people in the short time available to you before you get pasted, you can queue up targets for your Quantum-Leap-y ability, at which point you’ve got a short window to try to change things so as to avoid the accident – prevent the phone-addicted parent from pushing her baby stroller into the road, reset the wonky traffic-light controller system, deescalate a passenger’s mental health crisis that will lead to the bus getting stranded in the middle of the intersection. If you fail, no big deal, you can always try again, albeit at the cost of another bone-crunching death to reset the timeline.

I love this premise; it’s a clever way of making a puzzle of, and lightly skewering, the absurdities of everyday life, while getting around the artificiality of letting the player have infinite time to prevent a traffic accident that clearly has to happen within a few seconds. And making the protagonist be a sad-sack postdoc just adds to the comedy, while the drily understated prose gives the slapstick room to breathe. Unfortunately, to switch transportation metaphors, things quickly go off the rails.

There are two main issues I experienced that undermined the puzzles – and this is an entirely puzzle-focused work. First, you’ve got your implementation challenges. There were many times when I knew what I had to do, but struggled to communicate this knowledge to the parser. Take the bus scenario: to prevent the old lady from melting down, obviously you’d want to let her take your seat rather than being forced to stand. But STAND doesn’t work (someone else takes the seat out from under you), and ASK/TELL WOMAN ABOUT SEAT just gets a generic response indicating the conversational topic isn’t recognized. I had to go to the walkthrough to learn that I had to GIVE SEAT TO WOMAN, which I suppose is idiomatically reasonable but wouldn’t be intuitive to anyone familiar with parser IF conventions; really, if the player types any of these things it’s clear they’ve solved the puzzle and they should be accepted.

Then there are the puzzles that aren’t sufficiently clued. Some of these might just be places where I was being thick: there’s a math puzzle that I feel like might be underdetermined, such that answers other than the one the game is looking for should also be valid, but I admit I could be wrong about that since it’s a long time since I’ve solved this kind of problem. But in the late game, there’s a puzzle that can only be solved by intuiting the presence of an undescribed item (Spoiler - click to show)(the bed, in the sequence with Sarah – adding insult to injury, the stuffed animals, which are mentioned, aren’t implemented), and after you resolve the initial trio of challenges you’re thrown into a second that requires you to maneuver two different cars to block the progress of a police cruiser, which is described so confusingly that even the walkthrough couldn’t get me unstuck, requiring a restart.

And finally there’s the puzzle that gates off the real ending from the premature one, which requires both reading the author’s mind AND wrestling with atypical syntax (Spoiler - click to show)(the game very clearly indicates that looking at people is what triggers the body-hopping, so THINK ABOUT SARAH is completely unmotivated and not a command most parser-players would think to try; and after that we’ve got BREAK PACKAGE rather than OPENing it, which gives a discouraging result, and BARK TWICE being mandatory when BARKing on subsequent turns would be more natural). Admittedly, said “real ending” is still a shaggy dog story, but the game is much more satisfying with it than without it so gating it with the aggressiveness with which you’d conceal an Easter Egg is a bad design choice, to my mind.

But again, I don’t think this was a design choice: like everything else I’ve complained about, I think it’s just a lack of testing – there aren’t any credited that I could see, at least, while the blurb describes these extra-spicy puzzles as “mild”, and many of these issues are ones that I think would be easily corrected if the author had the advantage of seeing how people try to grapple with the game. Again, this is an awful shame because Traffic deserves to be its best self; with its many rough edges thoroughly sanded down, I could easily see myself recommending this game to folks in the mood for a clever yet grounded comedy game, so I very much hope to see a post-Comp release.

I often like IF collaborations quite a lot – Cragne Manor ranks quite high on my all-time favorites list – but they often present a tradeoff: when you’ve got a bunch of authors bringing just their one or two best ideas to the party, the novelty and energy can be infectious, but at the same time, that diversity can fray at the unity of a piece, reducing the impact that any particular element might have on the work as a whole and cramming in too many diverse themes to fully cohere. That’s why reading the blurb for A Death in Hyperspace made me a bit apprehensive: having ten authors work on a game that only lasts about an hour seems like it could be a recipe for chaos. Once I started playing, I was surprised to find that wasn’t at all the case – this tale of a spaceship’s AI investigating the death of its captain maintains a very consistent tone and approach while putting a novel spin on the sci-fi whodunnit genre. If anything, I actually found myself wishing for a bit more of the aforementioned chaos.

After an introduction establishes the murder and lays out the interface, you’re given a roster of about a dozen crew and passengers and access to the various rooms within you where they may be found, and told how investigation proceeds: encountering each character allows to engage in dialogue with them, including asking standardized questions getting to motive, alibi, and anything suspicious they might have seen; the initial conversation also unlocks a piece of evidence that can be found elsewhere on the ship and which, when found, will enable you to further corroborate or undermine the testimony you get in future conversations. Meanwhile, a somewhat-unintuitive “murder board” interface lets you lay out your assessments of how credible each person’s story is, ultimately allowing you to end the game once you’ve made a critical mass of decisions.

It’s easy to see how the structure of the game was created to support collaboration: it appears that the other authors all came up with a character and were responsible for writing the conversations with them, while the organizer or organizers were responsible for the connective tissue. This organizational scheme does allow the various pieces to be stitched together cleanly, but it does mean that there isn’t as much interaction between them as you might expect: often, I’d be having a potentially-incriminating conversation with one suspect while three others were standing right there, with no acknowledgment of the awkward circumstances. It also slowed down an opening that I already found quite slowly-paced: I felt like I had to read the crew roster before jumping into interrogations in order to understand who I was talking to and what they might say about their fellows, but it appears that the roster entries were written to a common format, which made me feel like I was listening to a dozen people tell me about their DnD characters one after another.

Because the thing is, I mostly found the characters dull. They all have one or two interesting sci-fi-y characteristics – there are a couple different kinds of aliens, there’s a cyborg, someone who’s hallucinating while in the throes of hyperspace madness – but given that the only experience of them the game offers is interrogation by a ship’s computer that’s read too many murder-mysteries, there isn’t much room for details of personality to come through in anything but a schematic way. Several of them are also explicitly designated as minimally-interactive red herrings, too, and given that I had a hard time keeping track of a large cast boasting generally-forgettable names (look, I’m not 12 any longer, I’m not going to be able to remember which one is “Until Tomorrow” vs. “Lament Tynes” vs. “Keen Oculus”; at least there are a couple, like “VX2s-K3r BÆSDF”, that are memorably awful) that meant I spent a lot of time clicking on people, finding they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say, and clicking out.

This sense of lassitude is exacerbated by the way the game encourages lawnmowering. You need to loop through every location at least two or three times, since the pieces of “evidence” aren’t findable until you’ve met the appropriate character, at which point you need to loop back for a follow-up conversation, but it’s worse than that because characters can move around. You can track down specific people through the roster feature, but since that means you might miss evidence, it felt like the game was encouraging me to play it by mechanically running through each location and talking to each character over and over until I’d exhausted the content. The conversational structure is also fairly rigid from one character to the next, with few interesting choices to engage the player: many reduce to either behaving normally and asking direct questions, or indulging your murderino streak and wildly leaping to accuse suspects just to see how they’ll react.

Indeed, investigation isn’t that satisfying either; I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is one of those quantum mysteries where every suspect potentially did it or maybe no one did. There are few hard clues to go on (there’s no sign of foul play on the body, and you automatically decline the doctor’s offer to do an autopsy), with your interrogations mostly turning up shifty backstory elements rather than actual evidence; meanwhile, the connection between the “clues” you find and their impacts often felt abstract to me (one of them was a teddy bear that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything?) Beyond that, the game’s promise of 11 different endings makes it seem likely that they’re all like the one I saw, which constructed a plausible-seeming case for why the suspect I picked might have done it – unfortunately, because the game’s save feature isn’t included in the sidebar but rather nested underneath a game menu link that I didn’t think to return to after toggling some initial settings, I didn’t make a save allowing me to test this theory, though regardless it does seem like at least one ending requires you to do a full replay of the game.

For all this griping, there were a few specific elements I definitely thought worked; the one character who had a sense of humor was actually quite funny to me (though I’m not sure it was a great idea to have the single Black person in the cast speak with an accent called out with nonstandard spelling and punctuation). Pearl, the ship’s AI, is also appealingly keen to find the captain’s killer. If the game had provided characters whose voices similarly took up more space, and loosened up its structure to allow for deeper subplots or more involved investigative tracks, it would probably have made A Death in Hyperspace a woolier, more awkward beast – but one that I think I would have liked far more than the overly-sterile version that we got.

Mike, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a very common name in the U.S., so much so that in my elementary school class of 25, I was one of four Mikes – even my sister would call me “Russo.” So I suppose I should have been quicker on the uptake when Final Call, a choice-based escape-room-inspired scenario jumping off from a casino heist gone wrong, seemed to be getting confused about who was saying what to whom. The protagonist – whom I’d naturally enough dubbed Mike since one of the first screens in the game asks you to input your name – is a down-on-his-luck con artist getting ready to scam the penny slots via a smuggled-in magnet; he spends the introduction on the phone, going over the details of the plan with his partner in crime to make sure they’re ready to do what needs to be done. Except sometimes instead of my partner telling me “Mike, you need to do XYZ”, it seemed like my internal monologue was referring to myself in the third person, saying stuff like “Mike said it would be easy.” Shamefully, I was well past the game’s first-act twist, which sees the protagonist kidnapped and abandoned in a creepy lock-and-trap-filled asylum, before I realized oh wait, these aren’t bugs, I just inadvertently Fight Clubbed myself.

Er, spoilers.

Unlike with the Curse, though, where something vaguely similar happened to make my experience idiosyncratic, I think I can reconstruct what a more typical playthrough would look like. Such a player would probably enjoy the clean interface, which adds a helpful sidebar keeping track of the inventory items and clues you’ve found to the typical options-presented-in-blue-text of the main window, as well as nicely-chosen photos with a creepy filter illustrating the abandoned facility you’re trying to escape. They’d probably wince slightly at the prose, which gets the job done but is weighed down by omnipresent typos and odd leaps:

"The door creaks open. It’s just dusty and messy room. Looks like it could have belonged to a pair of twins, or maybe close friends."

They’d likely find the puzzles straightforward – there’s only one or two of them, made relatively simple to solve by the aforementioned helpful interface; even if the steps the protagonist takes occasionally seem unmotivated and hard to predict, well, you’re just clicking through all the options available to you. I suspect they’d be rather conflicted about the copious flashbacks – unlike the thin context escape-room games typically provide, Final Call offers a bunch of scenes fleshing out the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend Roxy as well as with other-Mike, and also digs into the pathologies underlying his failures as a partner to both and the pathologies that drive him. But the consistently lackluster writing, lack of direct connection between this material and the main action, and inexplicable plot twists (seriously, who could have possibly paid other-Mike a boatload of money to set us up?) might make our idealized player think the game would be more focused without all this.

So yeah I noticed all of that stuff, but I was more excited about building out my own version of the story where other-Mike was a facet of the protagonist’s personality, an angel or demon on my shoulder given increased reality by the omnipresent “hangovers” and “headaches” that plague the primary identity. As I got to the end, I figured out how to reconcile the various narrative strands that seemed to pull in different directions: other-Mike, you see, had enough separation to recognize that the compulsive way we keep returning to high-risk, low-reward behavior and chronic substance abuse was pushing Roxy away; to salvage matters, he used our meager savings to hire some people to scare us straight, make us think our criminal ways were going to get us killed, and allow us to escape a reformed man ready to walk the straight and narrow. God bless, other-Mike: you’re the very best part of me.

It’s been well said that America and the U.K. are two countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but interestingly, you could make the same observation about our supposedly-common language. Take, for example, “left turn”, a simple phrase we Yanks commonly use to indicate a sudden, veering shift in the way things are going. It’s one I deploy without thinking, but now I’ve realized that it must make no sense at all to our fancier-accented cousins, for whom the left turn is a trivially-executed move while it’s the right turn that’s the stuff of nightmares.

This revelation comes courtesy, of course, of Turn Right, an Adventuron game that is to vehicular paralysis as Dubliners is to the emotional and existential varieties. After a long day, you’ve stopped off to pick up some groceries, and just need to pull out of the parking lot for the short drive home. But as the attractively-illustrated overhead map reveals, that means crossing like four different lanes of traffic (there’s something confusing happening with an off-screen roundabout that means you need to get to the farthest lane), and getting a hole in the rush-hour traffic that wide is akin to winning the jackpot on a slot machine.

The gameplay of course isn’t what carries a piece like this – typing TURN RIGHT over and over isn’t intrinsically engaging – but fortunately the author’s got comedy chops to spare. The jokes come in two distinct registers: there’s dry understatement, like the opening screen’s declaration that “this game is about a driving manoeuvre made in the UK,” which left me howling, or the surely-intentional way that the helpful here’s-everything-you-Americans-need-to-know-about-driving-in-Britain glossary casually drops the phrase “multi-carriageway” into the one of the definition as though that’s a meaningful sequence of words. Or, perhaps best of all, take this description of one of the traffic lanes:

The far lane on the opposite side of the road is the one you take if you want to take either the first or second exit from the first roundabout, or the third exit from the first roundabout onto the second roundabout and then the first exit from the second roundabout. The last of these options is your route home, and so you want to turn into that lane.

If your brains aren’t melting out your ears at the end of that, you’re made of sterner stuff than me.

Then there’s the more slapstick flavor of humor, as exasperating event after exasperating event prevent you from getting into gear, achieving “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake fifteen times” levels of sublimity. I won’t spoil the best gags here, since there are some great ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I particularly liked the sequence with the grocery store manager), but suffice to say they substantially enliven what could have been a dully repetitive scenario.

Also helping relieve potential tedium is the game’s deep implementation; I thought of a bunch of logical and not-so-logical commands, from turning on the radio to waving at oncoming cars, and the game handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. The author even anticipated my attempts to nope right out of Turn Right’s Kobayashi Maru scenario by abandoning my car and walking home, or just stopping off at the neighboring pub for a couple of hours until traffic lightened up. Sure, this isn’t a game that will change your life or make you see things differently than before you played it – unless for some reason you’re unaware that driving is awful – and there are one or two small dud notes (the disappearing clown was a bit too silly for me, especially the second time he showed up) but I am always happy to see a solid gag executed at such an impressive level.

(Speaking of, the joke with which I opened this review was lifted wholesale from Eddie Izzard.)

(Spoilers ahoy; this is one to play blind, I think, and it may be worth trying even if the old-school presentation might initially put you off since the game is shorter, easier, and stranger than you think).

So here’s a Rorschach test for you: get a friend – or actually just an acquaintance is fine – get a TV, get a Battlestar Galactica boxed set, then plop the one down in front of the other while you put on the last and make them watch all the way through the first three seasons (these aren’t your sleek modern 8-episode seasons, mind, we’re talking 50-odd 42 minute episodes so hopefully you’ve built in some bathroom breaks). At the close of the third-season finale, I guarantee that they will turn to you and say “what the hell did I just watch?” – but some of them will say that with incomprehension and disgust, and others with giddy wonder (Spoiler - click to show)(the specific moment I’m thinking of here is of course the part where five characters who obviously can’t be Cylons turn out to be Cylons and start singing All Along the Watchtower, despite none of that making any fucking sense).

I am team giddy wonder so I think I love the Curse, despite being fully aware that this opinion is probably indefensible. The first three quarters of my notes for the game consist of multiple variations of the question “what the hell am I playing here”: this is an 80s-throwback parser game that disorients the player with multiple pop-up windows that are meant to be read in a specific order, a parser that asks a bunch of rhetorical questions except for the ones that aren’t rhetorical, awkwardly timed text, and a backstory that sounds like your stoned friend fell asleep during an Indiana Jones movie, half-awoke during a James Bond marathon, and then attempted to reconstruct the dream they had for you: seriously, you’re a superspy who’s been made redundant by the end of the Cold War, so now you do freelance work and you’ve been called in to rescue a kidnapped woman, who’s been taken to a pyramid by a sorcerer named Shamir, except he died during the abduction attempt, but not before putting a curse on a village, though there’s no village around…

One plane crash later, you’re dumped into a trackless desert and turned loose to explore. This part of the game presents itself as a reasonably straightforward throwback text adventure – there aren’t many objects implemented, nor are there a ton of locations, so moving from place to place trying to few available actions feels natural enough. There are some neat touches, like attractive graphics and Easter Eggs referencing classic rock, and some frustrations, notably a parser that frequently seems to just break. Witness this exchange:

> unlock panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

> open panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

Oh, and I got a parser error the first time I tried to push the button on the panel, but was able to try to activate it the second time I made the attempt.

Frustration mounted as I realized I couldn’t figure out how to get into the door-free pyramid, or get through a fog-clouded maze section, or what to do at a mysterious altar in the middle of the dunes. Fortunately, there’s a HINT function that prodded me in the right direction: I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)PRAY by the altar, which has a certain sense to it now that I type it out but sure felt like a reach at the time. That led to a new sequence with a couple once-again-buggy objects that I couldn’t quite figure out how to interact with, but as I was flailing around with the parser again I noticed some confounding new text showing up whenever I tried anything:

Will and Pat have never met.

What now Nobody?

Events progress linearly from there, I think regardless of what you do (I certainly didn’t feel like I accomplished much from that point on), and when I realized what was happening my jaw dropped just like it did when I watched that episode of Galactica more years ago than I care to count: (Spoiler - click to show)as best I can tell, the ghost of Shamir escapes you by going back in time and preventing Will Crowther from ever meeting his wife, so that he never spelunks, gets depressed during his divorce, and writes Adventure to try to connect with his kids – meaning that there’s never any such thing as a text adventure, and you, as a text adventure protagonist, go poof.

I’ve been reduced to giving the play by play here because I’m not sure how else to communicate the sheer bonkers-ness of the scenario; there are no shortage of metafictional joke games in IF, of course – heck, I’ve already hit at least one in this year’s Comp – but the ambition of this gag, and the way it’s slow-played by hiding under a reasonable-sized chunk of an authentically kinda-broken custom parser game, really make it stand out as something special. I’m not sure it really stands up to scrutiny; the logic behind the twist is paper-thin and requires some reconstruction even to minimally make sense, and surely the process of getting to the good part could have been made slightly less painful. But look, a thing can be too ridiculous to work and then somehow at least kinda work regardless, and in this case my only possible response is to applaud the audacity (and think about a Galactica rewatch…)

Postscript: when I first posted this review to the IntFic forum, it had a caveat where I said something like “maybe this is just a bad end and I missed the whole game”, but I deleted that before finalizing because how could an author include a twist like this without it being the point of the game? Then I read other reviews, and was delighted to learn that I was wrong and this isn’t actually meant as an Infidel-style deconstruction of IF, but actually is just the retro puzzle adventure it appears to be with a throwaway gag midway through. This makes the whole thing even funnier to me; everyone else is welcome to their flute and their mirror and their Anubis and whatever other stuff they got hung up on; I am content with my memories of the time I retroactively destroyed IF.

(Another review with unmarked spoilers here, due to the brevity of the piece and the centrality of the way the plot develops to assessing the game).

Kubla Khan is a deceptive poem; for one thing, even though I should know better, I always need to catch myself to remember that the title isn’t Xanadu. But more importantly, the mythology Coleridge built up around it – that the idea came to him in a dream, and he had a flash all at once of hundreds of lines that he raced to scrawl down, until that famous person from Porlock knocked on his door, deranging his train of thought and dooming the poem to be a fragment forevermore – is self-evidently bollocks. I don’t have any special insight here, or done any deep examination of Coleridge scholarship, but come on, just read the poem: we get like a dozen lines on Xanadu and Kubla Khan, as advertised, then an overlong digression about a fountain, then a little more about Kubla, before a swerve to first-person section where suddenly we’re talking about an “Abyssinian maid” (Abyssinia being Ethiopia, quite far from China as a polymath like Coleridge would well know), and our narrator starts talking about how if he could conjure up the image of Xanadu in a song, everybody would think he was divinely inspired, if not mad. So yeah: there’s padding, a false swerve, and then a meta turn – this isn’t interrupted genius, it’s a guy desperately trying to spin out those first awesome ten or twelve lines and not quite succeeding.

So it’s appropriate that KING OF XANADU is likewise a deceptive little thing. The title is at least a bit more on point here: you do play the eponymous monarch of the eponymous utopia (though here an empire rather than a city-palace), making judicious choices of how to order your royal gardens, arrange the imperial armies, and perform your religious responsibilities so as to best please your refined sensibilities. The language too is worthy of its inspiration – it’s very easy for attempts at this poetic kind of prose to wind up as claggy high-fantasy treacle, but the writing remains fleet as it picks out one lovely detail after another to highlight:

"The people perform the usual celebrations. Red cloth is hung from balconies. Young children paint bouys the colours of daydreams and set them out to sea. Elders with lit candles parade through the capital, singing the old songs, winding through the streets like ancient snakes. And, lastly, arithmaticians take out tablets and chalk, ready to count and divy the grain of the harvest."

The author’s not afraid to take big swings for pretty much every at-bat – here’s another early bit:

"The fields surge with life. Rivers twirl through the tumbling hills like veins in a grand muscle, unwinding into your harbours, which throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities."

“Holy lichen” is perhaps a bit too much of a reach for my taste, but the missteps are rare, and better by far to reach for something surprising than let caution keep things boring, in this kind of story.

But this is not a fantastic story about an enlightened, Orientalist despot. No, twist the first is that no matter how you try to play him, my man is an awful ruler, like “80% as bad as Donald Trump” awful. After being presented with a new elm grove for the palace grounds, I ventured the opinion that a water feature might improve things; His Eminence took this to mean the trees should be razed and replaced with an artificially-created salt-water (!) stream. Later on, when confronted with a famine, I attempted to heed the wise counsel of one of our scholars who suggested we “watch closely the simple animals of the world and preserve the ecological balance" before making any rash moves, and of course Kubla Mao issued edicts to kill all the wildlife that might be eating the crops.

Speaking of that famine, another feint is that the game takes as much inspiration from another poem in the Romantic canon, Shelley’s Ozymandias, as it does Kubla Khan. Despite how Xanadu is built up as a perfect, powerful state, it only takes a few years of failing crops – and the king’s increasingly unhinged ukases – to bring it to its knees. The exterior catastrophe mirrors the protagonist’s mental degradation; even as food riots are flaring up outside the palace, you wind up enacting purges, engaging in the kind of mad caprices that enliven the biographies of some of your more outré Roman emperors, and coming up with big ideas that would put the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to shame (Spoiler - click to show)( “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun” I scrawled down in my notes halfway through, and giggled) – look on my works ye mighty, indeed.

I don’t want to accuse the game of striking false notes, let me be clear – it’s very obvious that these subverted expectations are part of the design, and in fact each of these strands intersect cannily to deliver the desired effect. Having a protagonist who willfully misinterprets the player’s choices can be played for comedy once or twice, but quickly becomes frustrating, for example, but since the game telegraphs that doom is the only possible outcome, it’s possible to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if either the internal spiral of the king’s faculties or the external collapse of the state’s institutions were at all realistic, it’d risk the other half of the game feeling unrealistic; instead, they slide into extreme satire in tandem.

No, for all its deceptiveness, beyond the unfortunate accumulation of typos as the game wears on the only true bit of fakery I picked up on was the ending; after seeing everything come to ruin, you’re given a chance to tack a moral onto the proceedings, choosing to reflect either on the inevitability with which hubris is punished, or the fragility of social cohesion, or the importance of staying true to one’s dreams. But come on: there are no lessons to be learnt here (besides, maybe, “don’t put assholes in charge” – good advice to anyone who can vote in the US this November), and attempts to gesture at one feel unnecessary, like Coleridge grasping for his Abyssinian maid: just stick with Xanadu, no need to go any further.

It feels like every Comp and/or Spring Thing, Andrew Schultz enters a big, robustly-implemented wordplay game bursting with bonus points, tutorial modes, hint mechanics, and support commands that together roll out a red carpet to experience a set of puzzles unlike anything anyone else in IF is putting together – and every Comp and/or Spring Thing, after an hour and a half I feel like my brain is leaking out my ears, that considerate hint mechanic is the only thing keeping me moving, and despite the inviting design I’m just too dumb to fully appreciate what’s being so generously offered. This doesn’t keep me from liking them, by any means; I had a really good time with this year’s Spring Thing entry, Beef, Beans, Grief, Greens, which was a little easier than usual because it’s like the fifth game with its particular wordplay gimmick (guessing double-barreled rhymes, as the title indicates) that I’ve played, and also because there was a strong theme unifying the various challenges. But there’s typically that barrier making me feel like I’m not fully getting the intended experience, since things never get completely intuitive.

Well, callooh callay, at long last I’ve broken the streak – the first puzzle here took me long enough to solve that I thought I was in for my typical experience, but somehow from that point on I was in the zone, almost immediately clicking onto Why Pout?’s wavelength and enjoying the heck out of it. I suspect the main reason is that the central challenge here is pretty much baby mode – instead of complex rhymes or pig Latin, all you need to master is dumb puns. The puzzles all center on being presented with (or, in the harder challenges, noticing in a longer description) a short phrase that can be read as a different phrase if you change the breaks between words – for a (dumb) example (that isn’t in the game since I just made it up), if you see “treat op”, you’d type in TREE TOP. It’s a simple enough concept that I always knew what I was doing, but the implementation manages to avoid being too simple, meaning figuring out the right answer was typically satisfying; I even needed to use the hint button two or three times, which felt about right.

Solving the puzzles is also fun because there are some legit great gags here; I ooohed with delight when I realized what I could do with “no notion”. There’s also a mechanic unlocking new capabilities when recruiting new companions, and it made me laugh to get a (Spoiler - click to show)mensch elf as a follower. Why Pout? also has figured out how to make hay out of a sometimes-awkward element in previous games, which is what to do about dirty words; the nature of wordplay games means that sometimes you stumble on one, and feel like you either have to or want to try it, even though that’s at odds with the sweetly innocent vibe the games generally transmit. But here all that stuff is segmented away into a separate bonus area, where you’re straight-up told to start swearing if you want or just leave, with no negative consequences, if you don’t; it’s an elegant way to deal with the issue, and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that I solved just about all these puzzles immediately.

There are some places where the game isn’t fully polished – in particular, I found a couple of places where variant spellings weren’t accepted, making me think I was on the wrong track when I’d actually found the solution (Spoiler - click to show)(MANA for MANNA, MEETING for MEETIN’, WIPEOUT for WIPE OUT). But it’s hard to feel too aggrieved about that given the complexity of implementing this kind of game, to say nothing of the author’s impressive track record of doing mid-Comp and post-Comp updates to fix bugs and add further polish. Similarly, the narrative is entertaining enough, with some solid set-pieces (I liked visiting different islands with a squid, and supporting an alcoholic troll through recovery) and a positive message about self-esteem, but it lacks the unifying through-line boasted by some stronger games in Schultz’s oeuvre, and has a climax that feels like it’s over a bit soon – again, though, the fact that a long game focused so narrowly on one specific kind of wordplay is about to cohere at all is quite the achievement. And I’m not just grading on a curve; I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole time I was playing Why Pout?, and I’m having to exercise quite a lot of willpower to avoid spoiling too many of the jokes that got a laugh. This might be a beginner-level game compared to some of its peers, but it works equally well as a gateway into that larger catalog or as just a delightful stand-alone. The only down-side is that it’s got me directing even more awful puns at my wife than usual…

As a straight white dude, for good or ill I very rarely find myself second-guessing my opinions too intensively. I mean, I like to think that I’m pretty ecumenical in my viewpoints, and when it comes to reviewing it’s frequently the case that I’ll like something but understand why other folks might not, or find something doesn’t have much personal appeal while getting the reasons why it might be generally popular. But every once in a while I hit a game like A Dream of Silence. I really like everything else by Abigail Corfman I’ve ever played; D&D adventures are one of my guilty pleasures; heck, while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 the earlier games in the series are among my all-time favorites. So when I bounced off the first part of this game (which was entered in this year’s Spring Thing) so hard my ears are still ringing, I couldn’t help feeling like there was something off in my judgment – maybe the first third is just slow and I’ll like the other parts better? Maybe if I was more familiar with BG3 in general, or Astarion, the elven vampire who’s the primary character here, in specific, the emotional beats would resonate more? Maybe if I had more experience with and native affinity for fanfiction I’d better vibe with an unabashed fan-game? Maybe I’m just working out sublimated resentment towards the DnD branding people for slapping “Baldur’s Gate 3” on a game whose connections to the first two seem superficial at best?

So I was looking forward to trying to play this culminating part of the game as an opportunity to start with a blank slate, reset my expectations, and try and find the positive elements in the scenario that other reviewers could detect in the first part. But while I definitely enjoyed my time with part three far more than I did with the prologue, my overall take stands: neither the narrative and mechanical elements of Dream of Silence really work for me, and I remain bummed out about that fact.

The setup for the series is that a random encounter with a nightmare-inducing beastie that feeds on fear has thrown Astarion into a catatonic state where he psychically relives his time in thrall to his vampiric sire; you’re able to exploit a telepathic connection to try to help him escape by joining him in the dream, albeit only showing up as a spirit whose ability to sense, much less impact, the environment is profoundly limited. Act 1 turned on understanding your predicaments and balancing your exploration of the cell where Astarion was trapped with building your nascent Sight, Speech, and Touch skills and maintaining his physical and mental well-being. As Act 3 begins, Astarion has finally managed to get out of the cell after what he’s experienced as several months of solitary confinement, and it’s up to you to help guide him past his vampire siblings in search of a way out.

I’ll come back to the narrative side of things in a bit, but first I need to go into more detail on how the gameplay works. This is an RPG-inflected game, and you need to prioritize the three aforementioned skills – you’ll be pretty good at one, middling at a second, and miserable at a third. As a spirit, your actions are also constrained by a ten-point energy gauge; anything you do of any significance will eat up at least one chunk of energy, and even on the easy “Explorer” difficulty setting, you get pretty much just one recharge per encounter with the quartet of characters who stand between Astarion and freedom. Each scene progresses with dialogue, and potential physical conflict, between your companion and his brothers and sisters; meanwhile, you’re also given the opportunity to explore the environment, rifle through the furniture, check out the paintings, etc. Depending on your decisions, various gauges will fill: Astarion’s trust in you has been a key stat since Act 1, while getting clues and moving past obstacles will increase your progress towards escape, and taking too much time or drawing attention ticks up a gauge tracking his sire’s focus on him.

Spelled out like that, it’s a reasonable set of systems, but in practice I found them pretty enervating. You don’t have nearly enough energy to take even a quarter of the potential actions offered in each scene, so the opportunity cost of deciding to do anything is quite high. What’s worse, this is not a game that embraces a fail-forward ethos; you definitely can waste energy trying stuff that’s completely pointless and uninteresting, and while Explorer difficulty is tuned easy enough that that won’t prevent you from getting to the ending, it’s still pretty dispiriting and wound up discouraging experimentation. It’s also the case that there are significant elements of the game that are walled off from certain characters: I prioritized touch last, which felt like a reasonable choice (given that this is a game about interacting with Astarion, knowing what’s going on and being able to talk to him felt more important), but that meant that I was basically unable to participate in what appears to be a reasonably robust combat system. That’d be all well and good, except a large portion of the exploration rewards are focused on said system; I was especially annoyed when, prior to the final confrontation, I treaded almost all my energy to explore what was clearly flagged as a high-risk, high-reward situation, only to find a weapon that neither I nor Astarion could do anything with.

The other way I found the mechanics undermined the experience is that your explorations are bifurcated from the interactions Astarion is having with the other vampires; their charged pas-de-deux play out in a “watch” tab, while you mess about with the scenery in the “explore” tab. Time generally only passes in the former, thankfully, but at the same time the act of swapping back and forth makes the conversations, and in fact the broader plot, feel disjointed; the fact that I was continually thinking to myself “is this an important enough moment to try to use some of my precious energy?” made this intrusion of the mechanics into the narrative all the more awkward. And the story isn’t sufficiently compelling to power past these points of friction: Astarion clearly has history with the other characters, who’ve all taken different tacks for coping with a sire who’s clearly signposted as an abuser, but in their limited screen-time the best-drawn only manage to inhabit a stereotype, while the others are just forgettable.

Meanwhile, because you and Astarion are so focused on escape, the trust mechanic – and the relationship that it’s meant to model – feels besides the point; the only time I noticed it was when I was told his trust in me wasn’t quite high enough to trigger a bit of bonus dialogue when we were almost free, which hardly felt like an impactful toggle. Sure, you wouldn’t usually expect deep relationship-building in the middle of a long action scene. But remember, this is basically a dream sequence, with all the challenges that entails: none of the dangers, or other characters, really matter at all, it’s only the relationship between the protagonist and Astarion that has any lasting significance, so relegating it to second fiddle is a substantial miss.

The one big grain of salt in all of this is that I did skip past Act 2 – when starting this third piece, you’re given the choice either to replay the series from the beginning, or play a condensed version of the first two parts. I opted for the latter, since as mentioned I wanted a clear break from my earlier impressions and replaying a first act that I’d already found quite slowly-paced seemed like a bad way of accomplishing that. It’s quite possible that in the grand tradition of fantasy trilogies, the middle section is the best part – and I’m not just saying that, I can easily see that the segment of the story before the action has kicked off, but after the setup has been introduced, could be the place where deep character work is happening. But it was Act 3 that was entered into the Comp for evaluation, not 2 and 3 together, and at this point I feel like I’d be doing everyone, myself included, a favor by not playing it and letting myself imagine that that’s where all the great stuff I typically associate with the author’s games resides – it’s either that keep fretting that I’ve somehow completely missed the point again.