Reviews by Mike Russo

Usually when I have to review a game I really didn’t get on with, I try to avoid being excessively mean by doing some comedy, maybe going high-concept with a song parody or police blotter or what have you. I’m not doing that here, however, because despite finding Return to Claymorgue’s Castle quite unpleasant to play, I feel like I did get something out of the experience, and explaining what and why requires going into a fair bit of detail about all the things that didn’t work for me.

The game is an authorized sequel to one of Scott Adams’s lesser-played adventures – at least, 1984’s Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle doesn’t have any reviews or ratings on IFDB – taking what appears to have been a fantasy collect-a-thon and giving it the Scooby Doo treatment. You play a journalist who rolls up at the gates of the eponymous fortress with the rest of your crew – a researcher, a hacker, and an athlete – bent on uncovering… well, something or other, the game isn’t really big on motivation beyond exploration for its own sake. So far, so old-school, and the approach to puzzles is likewise quite traditional: outside of a spot of device-manipulation to crack a computer password, you’ll be walking through gimmick-free mazes, digging for secrets, making a grappling hook, and using MacGuffin A to unlock MacGuffin B. The one mechanical twist is that often, you’ll need to enlist the aid of your comrades to get through a puzzle: like, the hacker obviously is the one who can unlock the computer, the athlete is thee only one who can successfully throw the grappling hook, etc.

Now, I must confess that the Scott Adams style of two-word parser games is not a subgenre I find particularly appealing. I never played them back in the day, so there’s no nostalgia value, and the terse prose, primitive interface, and sometimes-unfair puzzles are just not what I come to IF for. As to the last of these, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle lives down to its lineage: the puzzles are severely underclued, with most near-misses, like trying to throw that grappling hook yourself, generating default “that won’t work” messages that don’t provide a push to the intended answer, not to mention a few places where I’m not sure how anyone could progress without going to the walkthrough. For example, pretty much the first challenge of the game requires you to go through the maze to a nondescript area, and then examine a patch of weeds twice, with the first just resulting in another generic failure message.

Admittedly, many of the more traditional lock-and-key puzzles were at least more straightforward, but that brings me to the game’s first point of departure from its inspirations: instead of the traditional two-word parser, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is implemented as a parserlike choice game in Twine. Now, this is a subgenre I tend to enjoy, but the interface here is about the most literal, cumbersome interpretation of the concept you can imagine. In theory, this shouldn’t be that bad – you’ve got the list of characters and their inventories in the left-hand sidebar, the room description and contents in the middle one, and the verb list in the right. But the verb list is long and somewhat fiddly, and you need to manually select yourself as the person doing the action even if you’re alone – plus if you accidentally click object-verb instead of verb-object, the action queue gets reset. As a result, constructing the simplest command requires at least four clicks, and possibly scrolling up and down three separate sub-windows, with more complex actions being more click-happy still.

It’s tortuously slow, and made worse by the low contrast provided by the pixel-art backgrounds and the frequent guess-the-verb issues – sometimes examining would work to reveal what a piece of writing said, sometimes only reading it, and sometimes, as with the leaflet you start out carrying, neither will. Similarly, I could never figure out how to actually talk to any of the other characters, though they do occasionally interject with their thoughts (often when you’re in the middle of clicking to make a command, which means you miss these bits of dialogue unless you notice that the main window’s changed in time). And since the game mechanics require a lot of clue-free trial-and-error where you need to attempt every action you can think of, and then try the exact same actions again with the other members of your group, anyone susceptible to RSI will be a whimpering mess by the halfway mark.

Beyond the interface, the game’s other major difference from its 1980s antecedents is the prose. Afficionados of the era often say they enjoyed the minimalism that early microcomputers’ memory constraints imposed: with the games only able to fit a few words per location, item, or character, players’ imaginations could run wild. Return to Claymorgue’s Castle, by way of contrast, adopts a style that can be charitably described as logorrhetic. Even the emptiest of locations gets hundreds of words of description long on telling me exactly what I was meant to be feeling and short on the actual details that would evoke those feelings. The prose is weighted down by excessive adjectives and adverbs, and frequently talks itself in circles, repeating words or even whole ideas from one sentence to the next. Like, here’s the drawbridge:
"
The drawbridge is old and rusty, with wooden planks that creak and crack. The chains that hold it are thick and heavy, but also worn and corroded. The drawbridge spans over the moat, which is deep and murky. The water is stagnant and foul, with patches of algae and slime. I can’t see the bottom of the moat, but I imagine it is full of bones and debris. The moat surrounds the castle, which is imposing and gloomy. The walls are high and thick, with towers and battlements. The entrance is a large archway, with a portcullis and a gate. The entrance is dark and ominous, with no signs of welcome or warmth."

And here’s a door:

"A sturdy wooden door, its entrance barred by a hefty bolt, conceals untold enigmas. This ancient milieu, rich with history, murmurs the chronicles of eras past. The wooden door, its secrets kept by the heavy bolt."

(There was not even a single enigma here, let alone untold ones – I’d already been around to the other side of the door, it led from a kitchen to a courtyard).

My eyes glazed over early, and I found myself skimming the text desperately looking for the few pieces of concrete information or game-relevant objects amid the flavorless tide of oatmeal. The author’s native language doesn’t appear to be English, so I certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on their language skills, and perhaps there’s something about the translation process that led to this muck (my sense is that an LLM let loose on perfectly fine foreign-language text could certainly generate sludge of the quality here on display). But regardless, the game would have been far better served by a dramatically simpler syntax and vocabulary.

And that’s my little revelation: while I don’t like the simple parser, terse writing, and barely-clued puzzles of this particular tradition, in fact those elements all fit together quite snugly, if not elegantly. If your puzzles are going to demand exhaustive testing of possibilities without much feedback, you need a fast, straightforward interface to make that bearable, and clean prose that focuses on the stuff you actually need to interact with to win. Or turn it around: if you’ve got a relatively simpler parser, you might need harder puzzles to keep the gameplay from likewise feeling too simplistic, and a writing style that’s clear enough that the player won’t try to type stuff the game can’t recognize.

So by sticking to this particular flavor of puzzle design, while unsuccessfully trying new things on the interface and stylistic sides of things, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle wound up giving me a backhanded appreciation for how they used to do things in the old days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m going to be running out to play all the Scott Adams classics as a result – but I suspect if I did I’d have far more appreciation for them than I did before.

“Slice of life” is a funny name for a genre, if you spend too much time thinking about it (I suspect this is true of most genre names). These kinds of games tend to have relatively low stakes; there might be romances kindled or breakups endured, sure, but there likely won’t be melodrama, nothing dramatically out of the ordinary or unexpected. At the same time, they typically have an arc to them: at least some characters finish the story in a different place than where they started, with some event or incident having made some kind of impression. So the “slice” part of the genre label is apt: the selection of what to include, where to begin and where to conclude, is usually artfully curated to present something tidy and appetizing, a lovely triangle of carrot cake with the iced-on carrot just so at the center of the arc.

String Theory defies expectations by not doing that; this is less a slice and more a core sample of life, a series of incidents that sometimes feel like they’ve been thrown together by blind forces rather than authorial design. The opening made me expect that the game would be confined to a single climactic Thanksgiving dinner, but in fact there are a few nested flashbacks, some of which have only glancing relevance to what I take to be the main plot. There’s also a series of short epilogues that leave the narrative lurching past its logical end-point, and the game’s attitude towards tying together its various plot and thematic strands is desultory at best: I finished the game nonplussed, unsure how everything I’d just read was meant to come together.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy some of my time with String Theory, though. The protagonist, Jay, doesn’t have a strong personality but he’s appealing enough – a mostly-closeted Caltech student visiting his Kentucky relatives for Thanksgiving, he undergoes the slings and arrows of a right-wing uncle, a closed-off father, and the time difference and familial obligations separating him from his boyfriend. He’s dealing with self-image issues, too (he’s trying to be vegan so he can lose a little weight), and worried about too-hard classes and too-expensive tuition.

He’s plausibly beleaguered, in other words, and the game is good at deploying bits of interactivity to wryly underline his predicament. When someone asks how college is going, your dialogue options include “I’m going to fail Ph 229,” “I’m in so much debt”, and “am I wasting my life?”, but clicking on any them just redirects to a terse “fine”, for example. And the while the writing doesn’t ever reach for spectacle, there are some good comic set-pieces, like this struggle with your aunt’s well-intentioned attempt at a vegan pie:

"You reach over with a butter knife and poke it. Your first attempt fails to pierce the skin. With some effort, you plunge the knife through the crunchy white tufts into a wobbly lake of yellow, and fight your way down to an alluvial graham cracker deposit from the middle Devonian."

The prose also establishes a nice wintry mood, leaving me missing the cold-weather Thanksgivings I used to have when I was still visiting the northeast on my breaks. But that brings me to some of the weaker elements of String Theory, because despite going to Caltech myself, there weren’t any details of Jay’s experience at the school that felt especially lived-in or resonated particularly strongly, beyond the title of one topology textbook being repeated a few times. Similarly, the plot and characters are very archetypal: dealing with a racist uncle, furtively texting a friend from the bathroom, entering a food coma, bonding with a supportive aunt, and watching football are all prominent on the big board of Thanksgiving tropes. Heck, from context I think this sequence is supposed to be set in Kentucky, but it could be Iowa or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania just as easily – as with the setting as with everything else, the player isn’t given much to attach this story and the people in it to a particular, specific context (admittedly, I did enjoy that one of the things the uncle rants about is California’s push for reparations for slavery – I’m peripherally involved in that campaign!)

The plot is also somewhat perplexing. There’s a fair bit of incident, but at least in my game, the closest there was to a Jay-focused climax was the moment when the uncle awkwardly tried to reach out and tell me that my dead mom loved me very much. It’s not a moment that landed especially heavily – it’s short, stereotypical, and it’s established that Jay’s mom died when he was a baby so his emotional engagement with her memory isn’t exactly clearly, all the more so since he doesn’t really respond directly to the overture. Then there’s another climax where a flashback allows you to relive the car crash that killed your mother, from the perspective of some EMTs, but of course you already generally know the outcome and the gameplay here is odd, with a light time-loop structure resetting things if you make the wrong choices in a couple of coin-flip situations. And then the game keeps going for a couple more scenes after that, before ultimately ending with a visit to your boyfriend’s warm, effusive grandmother who provides a non-uncliched contrast with Jay’s emotionally constipated family.

It just doesn’t feel to me like it adds up to much: why is the game about this Thanksgiving instead of the one before or the one after, say? What makes this particular collection of events – particularly the not-always-intuitively-integrated flashbacks – a single narrative? Admittedly, there are plot points I missed, based on a late-game conversation with some crossed-out options that I think corresponded to options I didn’t take earlier in the story, but this isn’t really the kind of game that invites replay through engaging mechanics or dramatic plot branching (the last screen indicates that instead of the ending I got, where Jay spends winter break house-sitting with his boyfriend in Venice Beach, there’s another one where they go on vacation to Mexico, which seems comparably fine?)

The game’s title, and the mechanic by which progress slowly fills out a graphic of a family tree, seems to indicate that it’s engaging with ideas around connection, but that’s a very broad idea, more a vibe than a theme – I felt like the game needed more of a defined central spine to anchor its disparate pieces. As a result, while I liked some of the ingredients, in the end for me String Theory didn’t serve up a nicely-cut piece of cake; more a haphazardly-chosen lump of frosted dessert that could have used more defined layers and a cleaner presentation.

A sober-minded critic might accuse Miss Gosling’s Last Case of over-egging the pudding. A cozy mystery that leans into the bucolic-English-village element of the subgenre surely needs at most one gimmick, but here we’ve got both ghost-solves-her-own-murder and cute-animal-sidekick-saves-the-day, as the eponymous sleuth can only make her will known beyond the grave by directing Very Good Boy Watson to the clues that will allow the bumbling bobbies to crack the case. Isn’t it, perhaps, a bit too much?

That sober-minded critic can go soak their head; this game is glorious fun, and I wouldn’t surrender either the acerbic Gosling or the doughty collie for the sake of restraint. They’re a lovely pair of partners, and the mystery they’re up against is no slouch, either.

The setup here is classic Christie – Miss Gosling is very clearly Marple-coded, and her mysterious semi-resurrection hasn’t slowed her brains or dulled her edge. A consulting detective who’s helped put more than her share of criminals behind bars, she’s quite sure that foul play must have been involved in the falling-down-stairs incident that led to her death, but the police are content to write it off as an accident. Of course, all that changes after a short tutorial section that sees Watson presenting clues to the investigators; unfortunately, they subsequently get the stick wrong-way-round once again and decide your modest estate must have provided the motive for the crime, and start investigating your nearest and dearest for the crime of murder. At that point the game proper opens up – you follow four distinct puzzle chains across your house, from the crime lab in the attic to the potentially-poisonous garden to the dark and foreboding root cellar, in search of the evidence that will clear the four key suspects and trigger the endgame.

It’s a traditional approach to a mystery, and one that leans into the strengths of IF as a medium (since you’re controlling a dog, you won’t have occasion to lament a weakly-implemented conversation system – you can bark, and that’s about it). The writing similarly is solidly genre-appropriate:

"You have a long history with Basil Hughes, and it’s in no small part thanks to your investigations that he’s risen through the ranks from Constable to Inspector. He has his eye on Chief Inspector now, but really, well…the man is far too close-minded, far too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion. Large and stout, with an immaculate uniform and an impressive moustache, he tries to look every bit the image of the modern constabulary."

There is novelty on offer here too, however. For one thing, this Dialog game is playable entirely with clickable links – context-sensitive actions appear whenever you address a particular item, beyond a few that are always available, and I found the implementation was spot on. Admittedly, the canine nature of the protagonist means there’s a rationale for not including every action you can possibly think of, which helps constrain the screen real-estate needed for this interface, and I’ll confess that I played by typing in my actions 95% of the time. But it’s still an exemplary implementation that makes it plausible to contemplate playing a big parser game with complex puzzles entirely on mobile or without a keyboard, which is quite the achievement – an even playing on my laptop, I still found it more convenient to click links from time to time, like to avoid having to write out SHOW PHOTO ALBUM TO DAVIS or what have you.

The puzzles are also not ones I’ve seen before. Sure, the elements are straightforward enough – you better believe that this house has a dumbwaiter, and good lord are there a lot of locked doors – but the way the problems are posed, and the ultimate solutions, take full advantage of Watson’s canine nature. Particular obstacles might hinge on your color-blindness or lack of thumbs, while your keen senses and peoples’ tendency to overlook a pet provide an edge. Some of the puzzles do trend a bit hard (there’s one in particular that I don’t think you can begin to solve without engaging in some unmotivated arson), but I almost always knew what I was meant to be doing, and the game did a great job making me feel clever as I worked through them (the objective-listing THINK command and full InvisiClues system also helped on that front, of course). There are a few places where Watson’s abilities seem slightly implausible – especially his ability to manipulate a torch or tape recorder – and there was a place or two where I thought an alternate solution might have been nice to provide (Spoiler - click to show)(I spent a lot of time trying to wedge open the root cellar door, which seems like it should have been possible), but this overall is a great set of puzzles that hold together remarkably well.

If I were to venture a sincere criticism, it’s that I wanted a more robust denouement – the endgame sequence revealed the villain and gave them their comeuppance in a satisfying way, but I would have enjoyed a more worked-out idea of what, if anything, is next for our dynamic duo. And given that the meat of the game is concerned with clearing the four suspects, it would have been lovely to see them on-screen and enjoy having saved the day. But for a game that comes in with such an overstuffed premise to leave the player wanting more is no mean feat, and I definitely do want more: this may be Miss Gosling’s last case, but on the strength of what’s here I’d gladly play some prequels (dare I suggest that given the list of beta testers, a flashback crossover with Lady Thalia might not be out of the question?)

I confess that I don’t really have a clear idea about what’s going on in this cops-and-robbers comic-strip game. Here’s what I now: the central agonist is a truck driver who’s conducting a delivery mission for his uncle, who appears to be some kind of crime boss (so far so good, but things are about to get much worse). The driver’s not just a but the Egocentric, which in this case doesn’t mean that he’s a superhero with solipsism powers (Marvel, call me), I guess explaining why he’s got compulsive urges including rewriting stray graffiti so that it’s about him, but I’m not sure how the player character, an aging policeman, knows that about the driver so that he’s able to use this tic against him, just how I’m not sure whether there’s meant to be an explanation for why the only way to win the game is to learn the driver’s phone number while locking yourself out of victory, then restart and use your out-of-world knowledge from the get-go. Much less do I understand why the blurb and genre tag say this is a satire. Are we making fun of self-centered truck drivers? Are they a thing? Or is it just a linear concept of time that’s in for a kicking?

Fortunately, while the substance of the game left me cold, I found the form sublime. I mentioned that it’s presented as a comic strip, but rather than having the player click through each panel in turn as they take actions, instead you always have a view of the four panels that make up the full row. Your options are listed under the panel where the protagonist is currently located, while the driver makes his way from left to right, taking actions as you do. This does a good job of keeping the suite of possibilities manageable, while ensuring that you don’t miss the driver’s activities – which is important since the game’s single puzzle hinges on manipulating his behavior. It’s also a really clever conceit for visualizing a series of complex spatiotemporal relationships: your moves left and right simply shift your location, whereas the driver is always moving forward in time.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of IF by any means, so possibly someone somewhere has previously attempted an interface like this, but even if it’s not wholly unique it’s still well out of the ordinary and makes for a compelling interplay between words and pictures – and I say that as someone who’s generally profoundly unsold on the importance of graphics in IF. The juxtaposition of this richly-interactive presentation with a flashback, which shows up as a traditional click-to-advance-to-the-next-panel sequence, just underlines how much more freedom this almost parserlike (or, dare I say, point-and-click like) approach affords. So yeah, the puzzle breaks some of the rules of good puzzle design, and the plot and characters are a bit inscrutable – admittedly, there’s apparently a prequel game or games that might provide needed context, but real talk, there’s a week left in the Comp and between this event, the Review-a-Thon, and ParserComp, I’ve been on the review train pretty much without stop since the beginning of July so this is not really a moment where I’m doing the extra credit – but A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is very much worth the couple minutes it takes to play just to experience the possibilities of its interface.

(Some spoilers)

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be,” muses a WWII-era American spy, who worked under such deep cover he might have just been a Nazi, in Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Welcome to the Universe isn’t masquerading as anything nearly so horrible – it presents itself as a slightly tarted-up version of ahead-of-its-time 1980s life sim Alter Ego, intercut with excerpts from a fictional sociology textbook – but it might have profited from this hard-won wisdom all the same, since for all that I’m pretty sure the author wanted me to find the meat of the game irritatingly superficial, spending half an hour gritting my teeth at the irritating superficiality on display didn’t prove the best on-ramp to the actual point the game’s trying to make.

The flip side of all this is that Welcome to the Universe gets points for verisimilitude. The conceit here is that the game is the brain-child of a Professor Balamer, a one-time sociological wunderkind whose groundbreaking theories have come under increasing criticism, and who has thus decided to take his arguments to the masses via the medium of electronic entertainment. The game-within-a-game steps you through an archetypal life vignette by vignette, starting from experiencing the loneliness of a baby being sleep-trained through playground philosophizing, from education to puberty to young adulthood, and then eventually on to maturity, potential parenthood, and senescence and death. Occasionally you’re given a binary choice that can help define your personality, like are you a homebody or traveler, someone who’s cool or lame, who’s content in your small town or anxious to enter a bigger world.

I’d characterize the prose here as ambitious – it’s trying to create a lot of context, philosophical resonance, and importance around what are ultimately just a handful of short scenes, the better to make them constitute a life in full, as well as work in some jokes. It’s occasionally successful, and always readable – here’s an early bit I liked, laying out the downsides of life in the crib:

"for some undeterminable reason, you have been left in this cold, damp room alone. Your face begins to sour. Loneliness is not fun. Loneliness is not what you signed up for."

Things get away from the author occasionally, though. Soon after the above, we get this:

"You lean into your mother’s embrace, her body a gentle fortress of claret and peel."

And beyond specific missteps like this, the overall effect can be alienating – seeing six-year-olds debating whether their small town is better than another based on the availability of fast food restaurants through an authorial voice that’s constantly cracking wise with e.g. Thornton Wilder references can’t help place the action at a remove. And sometimes that voice is much less clever than it thinks it is. Here’s a bit about puberty:

"Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don’t get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)"

The swerve in what “don’t get discouraged” means is a good joke, but come on, the New York Times doesn’t itself do studies.

I can’t rule out that these infelicities are diegetic, however. As mentioned above, after every couple of life-sim segments you get a page or so telling you more about the game’s author and his theories. The prose style here is very different, a note-perfect imitation of academic jargon complete with dated citations – it’s an enjoyable parody, but parody it is because the actual ideas being conveyed in this dressed-up language are very stupid. Balamer was obsessed with quantifying existence via standardized, binary properties that he alleges are universal across the human experience and can therefore lead to common understanding and mutual respect across difference, which depending on how you understand it is either banal or false – there are also some supernumerary elements to his thinking that appear to be warmed-over Durkheim or Mead, who were writing at the dawn of sociology’s creation as a field of study. Balamer, meanwhile, is meant to have been heralded as a great genius after his first major publication in 1999 – apparently it “shaped early postmodern research by merging New Journalism techniques with traditional quantitative methodology” so I guess add time travel to his list of talents – so yeah, it’s hard to take this stuff seriously.

Welcome to the Universe appears to be in on the joke that Balamer’s a blowhard; there are some late-game metafictional twists that suggest that he’s having second thoughts about his idea that everybody is reducible to a small number of data points, and the fact the life-sim that purports to reflect universal human experiences, and therefore point to the futility of conflict and the need for brotherhood, is very clearly recounting the life of a straight middle-class suburban white guy, seems like an intentional choice.

So yeah, this is a satire that spends most of its running time playing things straight, meaning that my notes are primarily ejaculations of frustration at how obviously incorrect its purported thesis is (admittedly, intercut with admiring comments about some of the nicer turns of phrase). I can see how some players might find it to be redeemed by its twist, and to the game’s credit it’s open-minded enough to give Balamer a bit of grace, allowing that his intuitions about the need for human connection and the inherent worth of life are correct even while making clear that he was going about all of this the wrong way. But, well, my experience of the game was primarily of it going that wrong way, and I can’t say that I felt the satirical project was sufficiently well-aimed to justify the annoyance: of the major bad ideologies currently out there in the world, “maybe the personality is reducible to a relatively small number of knowable variables” is probably not in the top 50 or 100. Even though Welcome to the Universe isn’t a bad game, it often does a very good job pretending to be one, and that’s a dangerous business.

Among my bad habits is my tendency, upon first visiting the house of an acquaintance, to ignore my host and make a beeline for the bookshelves to see what’s on offer. Of course I’m even less restrained when no actual people are involved, so I love nothing more than to look at book after book in a game’s library, the author’s dedication typically wearing out well before my interest wanes (er, my incomplete exploration of Forbidden Lore’s obfuscated stacks notwithstanding). So believe me when I say that I think An Account of Your Visit… gave me the most pleasure I’ve ever derived from an IF book-browse.

First off, the shelf in question is depicted in delightful ASCII art; there are fat books and thin books, interchangeable ones and unique ones, volumes lined up ramrod-straight and others tilted at a careless angle, making for an aesthetically pleasing invitation to click on all the titles to see what they are. And oh, what a smorgasbord! There are creepy classics like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with older antecedents like Machen and Dunsany, but by no means is this a hair-raising collection or even one restricted to real-world texts: there are books by Threepwood comma Guybrush as well as Threepwood comma Clarence, a deep-cut Quest for Glory reference in Healing Herbs by Erana, and to top it all off, you can even find the Joy of Cooking (well, a Joy, it’s got some recipes Julia Child never contemplated).

I don’t mention this admirable collation just for its own sake, though, but because it’s also something of a synecdoche for the game as a whole. While the framing is pure haunted-house – you get an invitation from a mysterious benefactor who’s mysteriously absent once you roll up to the eponymous manor, and of course no sooner has the door locked behind you than you’re waylaid by a talking cat, with a lively skull just one room over – the vibe is far more cozy than horrific, with characters like the fussy librarian Basil Fink-Nottle explicitly invoking Wodehouse and easygoing puzzles that would be at home in one of the friendlier 90s point-and-click adventures.

The game’s older-school inspirations are also visible in how it motivates the player – or rather, how it doesn’t; you don’t have any particular agenda in mind when you arrive and it takes a while for broader objectives to become clear. So at first you pretty much need to explore the house just because it’s the only thing to do. Fortunately, the gregarious characters and sprightly prose are all the draw I needed. The writing is peppered with risky but ultimately successful imagery, like the description of the driver who drops you off as a man “whose drawn down features bear the characteristics of wilting lettuce”, or saying of the building that “[i]t stretches toward the sky unevenly, like a cat arching its shoulders - cordial, but cautious.” And the already-fun cast I mentioned above is shortly joined by an adorable octopus, a raucous gang of furniture, and a raven, who seems to be the only one taking the proceedings even slightly seriously.

All of them, of course, either have something you need or are standing in your way until you’ve procured something they want. The main business of the game is thus just the standard IF loop of going to a new room, rifling through all the scenery, exhausting the conversation topics, and then moving to the next room to do it again, until you hit the limits of where you can explore and loop back to see what the knowledge and/or items you’ve gained in the meantime will unlock.

Structurally, An Account… is a parser-like choice game, but a very streamlined one. There’s an inventory but you rarely have more than four or five objects at a time, and almost always all you need to do with them is give them to somebody. The game also helpfully eliminates already-clicked options when you’ve exhausted them, which is a nice convenience but also means that revisiting locations to see if there’s anything new to do is a very quick and easy process. The result is a quick-playing game whose puzzles more or less solve themselves – it’s the kind of system ill-informed critics have in mind when they say you can’t do hard puzzles in Twine. They’re of course wrong about that – witness the work of Abigail Corfman and Agnieszka Trzaska, among many others – but also, sometimes easy and amusing fetch-quests perfectly fit a game’s vibe, as is the case here, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

There is a serious note introduced towards the end, as well as some long-deferred answers as to what exactly is going on, but the author avoids treacle and schmaltz. It helps that underneath their surface wackiness, the supporting characters are all loveable in their own way, and the literary antecedents the game isn’t shy about invoking primed me to look for some heart under the light comedy. It’s not an emotionally-effecting climax by any means, but it winds up tying a neat bow around the experience, adding just enough depth to make the hijinx stick in the memory. Sure, this is a game that’s content not to innovate and wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but it picks good inspirations, and integrates them with an impressive deftness of touch, like a jumble of exciting, enticing books crammed into an IKEA Expedit. I repeat: nothing wrong with any of that.

Some blurbs directly transmit what the game is going to be about, but others a little more challenging to decode. So it is with The Triskelion Affair, which starts out by saying you’ll be playing a “medieval detective”, implying a historical whodunnit; the genre tag, on the other hand, says it’s swords and sorcery, which put me in mind of mighty thews, dark sorcery, and greed. As I went through the game’s opening, going through an oddly-vague mission briefing that didn’t tell me what my mission was, courtesy of a martinet straight out of a British operetta, I looked for details that would clue me into the historical era of the setting, or indications that I’d soon be departing from my orders to engage in a bit of freebooting. This sense of uncertainty persisted until I finished the half hour or so prologue and entered into the game proper, which involves exploring a pillaged church to find a powerful magical artifact: in the backstory I was finally given before the adventure started in earnest, I learned that “a cleric, rogue, and two fighters traveled to St Cuthbert’s last week” bent on the same task as I was. So yeah, turns out I needn’t have worried, it’s just Dungeons and Dragons (specifically Grayhawk, I think, given that mention of St. Cuthbert), and the game features both the ropey implementation as well as the naïve but infectious enthusiasm you’d expect from a neophyte author motivated to produce a medium-sized game based on such a hoary premise.

Just to get the negatives out of the way first: this is an almost completely traditional game in terms of plot and gameplay, centering on an old-school dungeon crawl in search of a potent magic item of unexplained powers, which is also sought by some bad guys whose nature and motivations go completely unmentioned. The opening section adds a tiny bit of interest, allowing you to ride out from the headquarters of the army you’re apparently part of and stay a night in an inn before setting forth on your adventure, but it’s entirely on rails, and sticks so squarely to a generic DnD vibe that it doesn’t wind up providing much flavor.

The implementation is also pretty sloppy. Almost the first prompt in the game is “What is your full name, solider?”; there’s lots of unimplemented scenery, and examining certain object just gives a blank response rather than the default “you see nothing special” line; and there are mimesis-breaking touches like the sign in the stables reading “ask Hiram about Boarding”. Of course there’s an inventory limit, and odd touches like a lantern remaining the “south lantern” even after I’d picked it up from its perch on the wall. There’s nothing exactly game-breaking, but my progress was frequently blocked by a lack of clarity about what objects were around, wrestling with synonyms, or otherwise fighting the parser.

For all these criticisms, though, I can’t say I had a bad time with the Triskelion Affair. The puzzles are straightforward DnD stuff, with a bell-book-candle ritual livening up the plethora of locked doors with hidden keys, but sometimes you just want comfort food – similarly, the church cum dungeon is absolutely something you’ve seen before, but the attention to detail in terms of church architecture still made it fun to explore. And while it adds to the general slapdashery, I liked that there are a lot of red herrings and puzzle chains that don’t appear to go anywhere – I solved some puzzles to find a hidden pair of magical glasses, which didn’t do anything so far as I can tell. These optional bits ease the difficulty while making the game seem deeper than it is.

I can’t say in good conscience that the game design is strong throughout, mind: there are a couple read the author’s mind puzzles, and a few places where the game, annoyingly, seems to be actively trying to mislead the player (I’m thinking especially of getting the key from the fireplace in the hunting lodge, where the fact that X GRATE will give a different result than X FIREPLACE isn’t telegraphed, and the description saying that the fireplace was recently cleaned seems to indicate to the player that there’s nothing else to be found by poking around). And there’s a pointless yet annoying combat system that’s used for a single fight against a zombie, which you’re foreordained to win but which will see you drop a couple of inventory items you’ll later need to retrieve. Still, if you’ve got a soft spot in your heart for generic DnD adventure and a high tolerance for design and implementation issues that were old hat even in the 90s, the Triskelion Affair has a certain disheveled charm.

(Some unmarked spoilers here, it’s that kind of game).

Rarely has a game’s opening left me with more whiplash than 198BREW’s. After a cryptic couple of paragraphs telling me that my soul is suffering eternal and well-deserved torment, which smash-cuts to a fantasy-ish vignette where a queen urges her consort to kill and cannibalize her, control is handed to the player – only to find that you’re in a My Dumb Apartment game and need to get some coffee because you’re all out. It’s two different lazy late-90s parser IF tropes in one!

Well no, not really. While 198BREW does end once you finally get some sweet, sweet caffeine down your gullet, this is no wacky slice-of-life comedy; and while the first couple of locations are a mostly-nondescript flat with unnecessarily detailed fixtures, it quickly opens up, and that “mostly” is covering for some real eye-poppers. As the prologue indicates, neither the player character nor the world they inhabit are quite like our own, and the gameplay as well isn’t typical parser fare. Sure, getting to the end requires surmounting a series of obstacles laid out as a daisy-chain of fetch quests and medium-dry-goods puzzles, but while your next step is generally obvious, the context for what you’re doing is often left deliberately incomplete, and the outcomes of each action are surreally divorced from the traditional logic of cause and effect. Midway through the game, you’ll stab a woman because a painting asked you to and receive three quarters for your trouble, and that’s only the weirdest puzzle by like 20%.

This is the game’s greatest success, I think – it commits to its enigmatic, downbeat theme, successfully infusing it across the prose, plot, and gameplay. This is the kind of world where just about everybody is trapped in a private hell, mostly of their own making, and their external circumstances match their internal torment. 198BREW’s subtitle – The Age of Orpheus – seems to conceal, but actually reveals, the thematic focus: we’re concerned here less with the best-known portion of the myth, where Orpheus journeys to Hades to rescue his lover, and more with the messy aftermath, where after having lost Eurydice through his own mistakes, he’s torn limb from limb and his still-living head floats down the river, singing lamentations all the while. The player character, you see, like many of the other significant characters, is cursed with a vicious sort of immortality, which means that they displace the mind and soul of anyone who eats their flesh and drinks their blood (in fact, this Dumb Apartment isn’t quite your own; it belonged to your now-dead lover, whose body you now inhabit after she willingly butchered and consumed you). Others are doomed to remain breathing even as cancer wracks their systems beyond what once were the limits of human endurance, while some fall victim to time-loops making a single day an endless, repeating ocean. And then there’s the Evangelion-style ruined mecha crashed in the public park, with a perhaps-still-living pilot deathlessly entombed within.

There’s a fair bit of complicated worldbuilding to establish, in other worlds, and while the approach is a little idiosyncratic – examining prominent objects often prompts multi-paragraph exposition that ranges far beyond describing what you see – it’s well managed, doling out enough details to help you understand what’s going on while avoiding didactically spelling things out. I can’t say I have my head fully wrapped around every detail of the setting, with some questions remaining about that aforementioned sentient painting and those mechs, but I much prefer that to having the mood ruined with dry lore, and I did get the sense that everything here does connect, even if those connections aren’t fully visible to the player.

Beyond over-detailed infodumping, this story is also the kind of thing that would easily be ruined by inadequate prose; happily, it’s largely up to the task, remaining engaging even when there’s not much to directly narrate, as in this near-abandoned train station:

"It’s quiet. Not even the storm’s wailing can breach this place. The only sounds are the echoes of your own footsteps. With every click-clack, the station feels like it grows in size — the ceiling grows higher, the steps further away. The longer you look around, the more convinced you are time itself is somehow expanding, too; the grand clock above the ticket booths seems to move slower and slower as you stare at it."

On the gameplay side of things, well, things are a bit thinner. As mentioned above, your coffee quest ultimately requires you to jump through an increasingly-absurd set of hoops. Each step is generally signposted quite directly, with whichever NPC whose desires you currently need to assuage spelling out what you should do next, even where their ability and desire to provide this direction is a bit unclear. With that said, I sometimes ran into challenges due to the game’s less-than-robust implementation. There’s lots of scenery missing, important NPCs don’t appear to actually be people under the Inform world model, a cat bowl is “hardly portable”, the player has a default “as good looking as ever” description, and as for actions, well, that assassination unwittingly provided one of the few bits of levity to crack the game’s bleak surface:

> hit woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to hit the strange woman.

> hit woman

Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

> cut woman

Cutting him up would achieve little.

> cut woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to cut the strange woman.

> use knife

You can’t use that.

> use knife on woman

You probably shouldn’t go around stabbing things for no reason.

In principle I am right there with you, game, yet here we are (KILL WOMAN did the business, so that brought the mood right back down again).

With that said, these are all typical first-time-author issues – nothing a bit of experience won’t improve, and nothing that substantively reduced the effectiveness of the game. For all that I admire 198BREW’s commitment to subverting expectations and leaning hard into a mournful, uncomfortable vibe, though, I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I have other similarly bleak, well-written works. Partially that’s because a preoccupation with the downsides of eternal life is theoretically interesting but by itself isn’t that viscerally engaging to me – when it’s clear this is a fictional way of talking about survivor’s guilt or depression or what have you, I think it’s a trope that can work, but this game is so defined by negative emotions and negative space that it doesn’t really communicate what positive things the player character, or most of the others for that matter, has lost. And the game’s themes seem to mirror these subjective experiences, basically just saying that life sure is a bummer.

The one potential exception is a minor character: a cameraman who’s filming the rally of a doomed political candidate who rails against the corrupt status quo, and who hands you a ticket when you feed him a keyword. The cameraman is a member of the orthodox church that upholds said status quo, but some of the things the politician is saying make sense to him. He’s listening, he’s feeling torn, he’s questioning things – he seems like a person whose fate isn’t sealed and whose mind could still be changed, someone who still has things he cares about (heck, he even makes a pass at the player character before they make their lack of interest plain). Let the world as a whole be just as fucked, but I wouldn’t mind playing a sequel about that guy.

I’ve said before that I like the aesthetics of horror, but can sometimes be put off by the gore, suffering, bad actions, and trauma that true afficionados of the genre enjoy. So while “investigate spooky goings-on at an old British pub” is sufficiently tame of a premise that the hardcore fans would sniff at it, it’s very much up my alley. The vibe is sufficiently cozy that it took me a while to realize that the setting was contemporary, since the sixty-something landlord has old-fashioned patterns of speech, the bar fittings are timeless, and the names of the beers could go either way – Stinky Ferret is either the brand of some terminally-ironic hipsters, or a Victorian concern proudly upholding a local tradition about the time a sick mustelid crawled into one of the fermentation vats and died.

Apparently said beer is supposed to be good, though, so the fact that it’s gone sour is the low-key inciting incident for this decidedly low-key adventure. After confirming that the barman’s taste buds aren’t misfiring, you can poke around through the pub and come across a bit more evidence of strange goings-on – I won’t spoil them since they’re one of the main pleasures of a short game, but it’s all stuff that would be right at home in a self-published book of local legends you pick up at a small town’s visitor’s center. The implementation in this section is very solid: there aren’t a lot of different scenery items described, but those that are there are nicely detailed, and I never wrong-footed the parser by trying to look under the bed or open the windows. Similarly, there’s a fair bit of social interaction with Jack, the landlord, as well as his wife, the barmaid, and eventually (inevitably) the vicar. Conversations are conducted via the sometimes-tricky ASK/TELL system, but between a handy TOPIC command that orients you to potential avenues to pursue without simply spelling out the options, and the characteristically-thoughtful anticipation of questions the player might ask, it all felt quite smooth.

There’s eventually a shift to a shorter, more dramatic section, which involves the game’s one true puzzle; this has at least two solutions, though I hit a small snag that meant I missed one of them when first playing the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I tried to X STAIRS from the bottom, not the top, since I’d missed the subtlety that Will tripped before actually starting to climb down). Still, the alternate solution is logical enough, and Bad Beer is forgiving here too – should you fail to solve the puzzle and get the worse ending, the post-game options let you rewind and try again even if you didn’t think to make a save.

So Bad Beer is an efficient game that sets a pleasantly chilling mood, elaborates on its premise, throws in a small twist, and then wraps up while leaving the audience wanting more. I think there would have been room to lean in to the drama a little more while still maintaining its family-friendly vibe, and possibly provide a bit more of a rationale for some of the game’s events (Spoiler - click to show)(in particular, I’m still confused about why the player character is able to change the past, rather than just witnessing it, and how the paradox of preventing the haunting that instigated the time-travel in the first place is meant to be resolved). But sometimes a short game that doesn’t belabor itself is just the palette-cleanser one is after; this late in the Comp especially, I can’t complain on that score.

Is there a better setting for anything than Antarctica? It’s obviously aces for horror: the isolation and existential precariousness of the Ice ramps up the social-paranoia body horror of the Thing and the cosmic vertigo of At the Mountains of Madness. It’s just as obviously the ne plus ultra for wilderness adventure, from Shackleton’s thrilling journey of survival to Scott’s dramatic narrative of, er, not survival. Now Winter-Over demonstrates that the South Pole works just as well for a psychologically-driven whodunnit. What’s next – sitcoms? Reality shows? Infomercials?

This choice-based game wastes little time on setup or backstory laying out your life before coming to Antarctica – all that matters is that you’re something of a veteran and used some of your connections to bring your brother, who’s a bit of a screw-up, along on your latest expedition. So when he turns up dead one evening with an unexplained head-wound, of course you’re not going to take the base administrator’s advice and just wait ten days until an investigative team can fly in from New Zealand – despite the fact that the mental pressures of spending a whole winter at the bottom of the world were already starting to get to you, you launch your own search for the killer.

This makes for a classic setup, but the polar milieu helps justify many of the genre’s conventions. Nobody’s cell phones are connected to the Internet, for one thing, cutting out a whole lot of needed contrivances, and the isolation of the facility means that the cast of suspects can be kept manageable and close to hand once the progress of your investigation drives the murderer to take a more active role. The paranoid, desperate vibe that comes from knowing you’re sleeping mere feet from whoever killed your brother also helps increase the urgency, and justifies the game’s light self-care mechanics – an always-visible bit of the interface tells you your current stress level, which you can manage by sleeping or doing some non-investigative activities; I never let it get too high, so I’m not sure if a game-ending breakdown is actually possible, but a lot of the descriptions do shift based on elevated stress to underline how ragged you’ve become, which feels like an elegant way to incorporate the mental toll of the investigation. Contrarily, there are a few times when you need to build rapport with a suspect before they’ll trust you with a clue. It’s a logical enough turn to take the plot, but the relationship-building mechanics felt a little too bare and transactional to me – if you were always choosing who to hang out with, it might come off more natural, but since that stuff takes time away from the investigation I pretty much only made a gardening date or shared a stock-room shift with someone when I was intending to pump them for information.

Outside of those few exceptions, though, most of what you do during your time on the base is talk. There are a dozen or so people around, but many of them have verifiable alibis, so your investigation quickly comes to focus on five key suspects. Interviewing them to find out about their whereabouts on the night of the murder, and probing for any hidden motives or animosity they might be harboring, takes up the first few days of the game and opens up a bunch of new leads – going to the non-suspect personnel to verify the things they’ve said. There are a few puzzles involving computers or physical evidence, but even these are resolved through social means, since you’re typically forced to ask for the assistance of characters with the relevant skills to progress. There are points in the game where the amount of information all this talking turned up was a little hard to hold in my head; fortunately, there’s a handy sidebar that summarizes everything you’ve learned, including breaking down the names and schedules of all of the characters. I didn’t need to use it much, but I appreciated having the security blanket there in case I did.

As for the characters, they’re a nicely-rounded lot. The dialogue trees aren’t especially sprawling, and a few of them definitely are just playing bit parts, but the authors do a lot with a little, efficiently communicating Christian’s slight awkwardness or Victor’s incipient mania without laying things on too thick. I especially enjoyed the grounded humor the doctor, Matt, brought to the table:

“Everything was okay between the two of you?” you press. “You hadn’t fought recently or anything?”
“No,” he says. “What about you?”
“Me?” you say (sounding kind of stupid even to yourself). “What do you mean?”
“I’m just asking you the same thing you asked me,” he says.
“Yeah, but why?” you say, unable to keep the frustration from your tone.
He shrugs. “I don’t know, why did you ask?”
You sigh. “You know what, forget it.”

And yeah, there are jokes. While the plot and overall mood is grim, Winter-Over isn’t too heavy; the death of your brother is even slightly underplayed, I suspect intentionally because depicting it with all the shades of psychological realism would make for an intense, unfun experience at odds with the Miss Marple gameplay on offer. Still, there are moments of real threat, especially in a few gripping scenes where the murder tries to turn the tables on you, and the ending, where the protagonist finally opens themself back up to feeling the entirety of what they’ve gone through. I wouldn’t have minded a few more opportunities for the game to play up its brooding setting – there are one or two memorable set pieces that take advantage of being in Antarctica, but locations like the observation deck go mostly unused in the main gameplay, meaning you spend most of your time wandering around corridors that could as easily be on a spaceship or under the sea as at the pole.

The mystery itself, meanwhile, is a good one, with methodical investigation yielding up secrets as well as red herrings; it plays fair, too, with a solution that doesn’t change based on your actions. It’s perhaps tuned a bit easy, since I cracked the case halfway through the ten-day time limit, but I did get slightly lucky in the order I attempted things (Spoiler - click to show)(look, if you introduce one of the scientists by saying they hang out with the boss a bunch because “fiftysomething white guys need other fiftysomething white guys with whom to discuss football or how weird it is that their young relations aren’t buying houses or whatever,” of course I’m going to suspect one or both of them of being the baddie), and spending the remaining time running down other leads remained engaging. The ultimate motive is perhaps a little deflating, and the fact that the killer seems reticent to directly harm you at first when they’ve just brutally murdered your brother feels a bit strange, but it’s all put together reasonably enough to reward logical deduction (the only goof I noticed is that (Spoiler - click to show)even after I’d twigged that Jack was the killer by showing him the threatening note, the narration still gave him the benefit of the doubt when he lied about the ruler piece used to wedge my door closed).

All told this is a smooth, satisfying whodunnit. Sure, some of its mechanics might be more robust than others, but it executes the tricky feats of plate-spinning the genre requires with aplomb; similarly, while possibly more could have been done to leverage the polar setting, what’s here is more than enough to make for a memorably claustrophobic investigation. Now, will the streamers pick up the baton, with Death Comes to McMurdo launching on Netflix soon? Only time will tell.

(Oh, and let me close this review with bonus appreciation to the included bibliography, especially the article about the 100-year old “almost edible” fruitcake; call me old-fashioned but in my book something can be “almost edible” about as easily as someone can be “almost pregnant”).