Reviews by Mike Russo

The parodic sendup of CRPG tropes is such a hoary old subgenre that I think I’ve already written two or three different intros discussing the microgenre in previous reviews just over the last couple years. Rather than attempting to rehash them – or, heavens forfend, actually tracking them down, reading what I’d previously written, and trying to synthesize them or even speak a new word – let’s just take as read that I find CRPGs lots of fun but yes, of course, they’re sufficiently ridiculous that without more satire can feel just like shooting fish in a barrel. Merely pointing out that RPG protagonists will go off to challenge immortal evil wizard-kings with only the flimsiest of provocations might provoke faint amusement, but not anything more than that sitting here 50 years on from the creation of DnD.

QftToMSV is certainly the kind of game that you think of when you think of this kind of game – the jumping off point is that you, the proprietor of a tea room, seem to have misplaced a teacup you had before you started your business and therefore feel a slight bit of attachment to, and as a result you’re willing to ransack your neighbors’ houses, stare down an incarnation of supernatural evil, and scale a mysterious, forbidding tower as you try to reclaim it – but happily the level of execution is high. For one thing, it’s quite streamlined so that you don’t need to put in a lot of busywork to get to the next joke; it’s implemented in RPG Maker, but navigation is taken care of for you, and combat is generally a quickly-finished indication that something’s gone wrong, so it winds up running almost as quick as a pure choice-based game. It also doesn’t play coy about how to reach the “best” ending; at almost every decision node, you’re offered a choice of doing things the easy, common-sense way, or escalating them absurdly, and off course taking the off-ramps leads to a “bad end” while steering into the skid keeps the shaggy dog story going (the author also helpfully autosaves the game quite frequently, so there’s little risk to exploring losing paths).

But this sort of thing lives or dies by the quality of its gags, and happily they’re quite good. “Ha ha, look a the CRPG protagonist rummaging around their neighbors’ possessions” is a dull commonplace, but following it up by having the rummagee respond to your assertion that it’s totally OK to steal everything that isn’t nailed down with "I was a juror in a court case a few years back, and that was very much not the view the judge took” was unexpected enough to provoke a laugh. Similarly, “the evil overlord calls you mean for assuming he’s bad just because he looks and acts just like an evil overlord” is a one-note joke, but the game hits it hard and repeatedly, so it reaches Sideshow-Bob-stepping-on-a-rake-fifteen-times levels of funniness. And the sly use of endings encourages messing around; the first BAD END is self-evidently a totally fine outcome, and what’s even funnier, (Spoiler - click to show) I’m pretty sure it’s only like 5% different from the hard-won GOOD END.

Is all this enough to make QftToMSV anything other than an ephemeral amusement? I don’t think so; it’s a well-executed example of its genre, but it never manages to transcend said genre’s limitations (not that I get the sense it was trying to). It’s worth a play to enjoy the well-paced jokes, but I guarantee you absolutely will look at CRPG sidequests in exactly the same way ever again.

There are few design challenges more vexing than the hacking minigame. They’re a nearly unavoidable necessity in anything cyberpunk: sure, you can let the player succeed with just a simple HACK COMPUTER, but that makes a skill that should be exciting and narratively significant just a big “I win” button, or you can go the other direction and implement a full emulation of running cracking programs and installing rootkits and what-not, but that’s incredibly high-overhead and likely to limit your audience. So the minigame is the least-worst option, as proved by such notable triumphs of game design as the PipeMania clone in Bioshock, the node-capturing abstraction of Deus Ex, and the flying-around-shooting-giant-shapes of System Shock.

So it’s to be expected that Focal Shift, a cyberpunk heist unembarrassed to be playing the genre’s hits (you’re a freelancer working for a shady client, with a job to raid a corporate databank and an experimental implant giving you an edge…) has not one but two hacking minigames; what’s more, pretty much all the puzzles bar one or two run through these systems, blurring the line between “minigame” and “actually just the game.”

It’s a bold move, but to its credit the game has the chops to back it up. It’s based on the GameFic engine, which I recently encountered in this year’s ParserComp entry Project Postmortem; I found it a solid platform for that demo-length game, and it confirms that impression in this full-sized experience. It does just about everything you want a modern parser system to do, down to seamless choice-based gameplay integration for dialogue, with no bugs that I ran across. As for the design of the minigames, the first is a Wordle-alike with a twist, and the second is a wandering-around-cyberspace-messing-with-a-keycode riff that escalates nicely; they also interact interestingly with the real-world layer, most notably with the option to solve a small puzzle in meatspace to upgrade your abilities in the first of the games.

The way the minigames communicate their rules to the player is inconsistent, however – because in neither case are you given the rules of the road. The second one seems linked to your new implant, and only comes into play towards the end of the game; I’ll keep the details vague since it is pretty clearly set up as a twist, but for all that I found it pretty easy to suss out via trial and error, and since the first time you experience it time pressure is light, there’s no penalty to replaying things, and the interface helps cue you towards what a correct solution will look like. The first minigame is a different kettle of fish, however. It’s recognizable a Wordle/Mastermind game – you type in guesses for six-letter passwords, and you get feedback based on how close you were to the right answer – but while I figured out that if the response shows you a letter in one of the blank spaces, that means you got it right, I was completely flummoxed about what the +s and -s that otherwise would appear, since they didn’t correspond to the “letter not present in solution” and “letter is in the solution but now in the right place” options that I was expecting. After finishing the game I checked the walkthrough, so now I understand that it’s doing something distinct, but at the time I worried I had just run into some bugs, so I wound up brute-forcing all of these puzzles. It was less than fun, and worse, it felt needlessly obfuscated because unlike the second minigame, which seemed like a surprise to the protagonist, there’s no indication that this first one is anything other than routine; surely there should be a manual, or quick flashback, explaining how the rules work, since there’s no diegetic reason for the main character to be flailing.

There’s not much to Focal Shift outside of these minigames beyond cyberpunk tropes, as I mentioned before, but I still found its specific take enjoyable. There’s a jaded-but-still-idealistic street doc, a double-cross, all the stuff that you want to see. Making the target of the job a financial tech company focused on the blockchain is also a decision that feels novel but completely natural for this kind of story. And there’s a sly humor to some of the writing; I especially enjoyed this dig from the client (who’s monitoring everything through the implant) when I stopped to watch TV so I could check out the worldbuilding being done by the news chyrons:

“You get your fill of world events, Brokaw? Chop chop. Let’s get this over with.”

Focal Shift isn’t a game that will stick with you long after finishing it, admittedly – it’s telling a story you’ve heard before, with a mechanical approach that’s its own but recognizably of a piece with a million other implementations of these ideas. But the level of execution is nonetheless high, modulo the decision not to tutorialize the main hacking minigame in order to non-diegetically increase the difficulty.

(Spoilers in this one; a lot of what I have to say about this game has to do with the ending. It’s relatively short and well worth playing, so definitely do that before reading this review if you’re at all interested).

I like going to art museums, but even more than that I really like reading about art. Yes, yes, I know the old saw about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and presumably that can be extended to painting, but at the same time, I find my appreciation of art is often much deepened when I come to it after seeing what a perceptive critic has to say about a particular work (I love reading A.S. Byatt for this kind of thing, for example); they can share historical context, sure, but also just an analysis of how it functions, what choices the artist made, how it does (or at least is intended to) impact the viewer. Some of this is surely an artifact of not being an artist myself – I often need things explained to me slowly – but I think there also can be something magical about the way prose can complement a picture, teasing out the purpose behind fine details, zooming out to engage with the emotions, and reversing the alchemy by which an artist incarnates the spiritual into the concrete.

So I am entirely on board with Imprimatura’s project, as I understand it. This Twine game is built around two twinned tracks: in the first, you visit the studio of a deceased relative (you can define the exact relation) to pick out the seven paintings that’ve been left to you in your will, while in the second you recall memories of your relationship with them. The first track wholly depends on short prose descriptions of the pieces being able to sell the talent, and psychological considerations, your relative brought to their art, and I found it entirely successful, so much so that my first time through the game I chose to keep the first septet of paintings I encountered since they all seemed so engaging. Here’s one that could stand for many others:

"The painting you choose is called ‘Photosynthesis.’ A massive tropical plant is rendered in green blocks, styled in a geometric pattern like a stained glass window. At the top is a teal bloom just beginning to open. Looking at the painting makes you feel optimistic, like a door has just opened inside you."

Admittedly, I don’t always love it when authors tell the player how they feel (the protagonist is lightly characterized, so they don’t serve as much of a filter), but it seems appropriate here because it helps efficiently communicate the emotional valence of each piece without larding up the more descriptive bits with heavy-handed adjectives, and it also helps make the game’s mechanics more legible. This isn’t just an open-ended exercise; the paintings you pick influence the ending, with the artistic movements, color palettes, and general vibe of your chose collection being carefully tracked.

The second half of the game, the memories, are less mechanically engaging – there are no choices to be made or narrative implications so far as I could tell – but still work well enough on their own terms. There’s a large variety of them (at least I didn’t see any repeats after two full playthroughs) and different players will walk away with a different sense of the relative, and their relationship to the protagonist, depending on which they see and in which order they’re presented. Each vignette is quite condensed, requiring you to fill in some blanks to piece together a full view of things, but regardless the picture is credibly complex; your relative was a very successful artist who had warm feelings for you, but struggled in many areas, clearly dealing with undigested trauma, envy, and isolation. As a result, your painting choices feel something like going through a Rorschach test, deciding which of these mutable colors should predominate.

I didn’t find that the culminating moment of the game was as effective as what led up to it, though differently so in each of my playthroughs. The last sequence involves finding the outline of a last painting, which you finish yourself; unlike the rest of the game, this sequence is presented via graphics. You decide you want to adopt elements of your relative’s style in completing their work, which is where the consequences of your choices come in – or at least where they can come in. My first time through, since I was accepting paintings more or less at random, the game seemed to struggle to assess what style most resonated with me, which led it to pepper me with questions about how I wanted to approach the painting. It’s a reasonable design solution, but it made me feel like the finale was disconnected from what had come before, since I was just making all the important decisions at the end. My second time through, by contrast, I took a more aesthetically coherent approach to my choices, which led to a host of automatic decisions being made in the endgame; the price of this aesthetic consistency, though, is that I felt like I didn’t have much to do.

Beyond these mechanical issues, the finale also felt like it departed from what had been effective in the earlier part of the game. I liked the prose describing the works of art, and while the game continues to narrate what you’re trying to do as you finish the last painting, I found the writing was less rather than more impactful when paired with graphics that were inevitably different from, and flatter than, what I was imagining based on the words. The ending’s catharsis also feels like it relies on a key element of the backstory that’s revealed through memories – namely, that the protagonist was once the relative’s protégé, but decided to quit painting to get an office job. Returning to the art that united you with your mentor should be a poignant moment, but I found that the decision to make the protagonist weakly characterized dramatically undercut its effectiveness: in neither playthrough did I feel like I had a handle on why the protagonist made that decision in the first place, so revisiting and possibly reversing it didn’t fully land.

When Imprimatura sticks to its knitting, though – words over visuals, the relative as the central character rather than the notional protagonist – I found it effective indeed, and a relatively weaker ending can’t undermine that too badly. After all, nobody expects an artist’s retrospective to come to a narratively satisfying climax; it’s all about walking through, tarrying with a particular piece that strikes your fancy, trying to make sense of a particular motif or color scheme that seems to haunt several of the works, psychoanalyzing the artist based on what you think you see, or yes, if you’re me, maybe trying to crib an explanation from the writing on the placards or an exhibit catalog you pick up at the end. And on those criteria, Imprimatura delivers.

Sometimes a game’s title tells you exactly what you’re going to get. And so it is in this choice-based nature simulator, as you take a gentle stroll through nature to look for noteworthy avians while your tongue gently caresses Leo the Great.

If I wasn’t out of the Church before, that gag would earn an excommunication – sorry not sorry, as the kids say. No, as best I can tell from a bit of wiki-diving, the place got its name because some guy in Louisville named Pope had some salt licks on his riverside property. What the park loses in nominative exoticism it gains in natural beauty, at least according to the copious pictures (the author’s own) illustrating the game. It’s nothing fancy – there’s a bridge, some water, soccer fields, paths, grass, and trees – but I found it a pleasant place to make a virtual visit, especially since I’ve been living under a 105-degree heat dome for the past week. Oh, and there are birds, which are the whole point of the exercise!

The protagonist isn’t characterized by anything other than their love of birdwatching, which means the game presupposes that when you wander the park, you won’t want to spend time striking up conversations or kicking a ball around or getting exercise, and instead will have eyes and ears alert for feathered friends. I confess that this isn’t a hobby that’s ever appealed to me, but the author does a good job articulating why one might enjoy it. In each location you visit, you’ll get a sprinkling of flavor text setting the scene, an attractive photo (with thoughtfully-provided alt text), and a prompt to look closer and possibly spot a new bird. If you do, you’re rewarded with another nice pic of the avian in question, and a compact description of what’s uniquely interesting about this one in particular. Here’s one I liked:

"Looking through your binoculars, maybe 50 feet away you spot a bird walking head-first down a tree trunk…. A White-breasted Nuthatch. You love these goofy birds. You listen closely and hear the quiet “ha ha” sound it makes as it searches for bugs living in the bark. It flies from tree to tree, sometimes going up, sometimes upside down on the bottom of a horizontal branch."

And that’s it, that’s the game. You’re using a birding app – the game provides an external link to it if you’d like to download it yourself – which allows you to track what you’ve seen, and the game provides a quick summary once you decide you’ve had enough and leave the park, but there’s no checklist, no goals beyond the intrinsic ones of enjoying a walk and looking at as many different birds as you can find. There are a whole lot of them, from swallows to hawks to cardinals to vultures, and even as a layman I was impressed by the variety. The game’s also designed to be non-deterministic; sometimes you’ll revisit an area you’d been to previously and see that some new birds have taken up residence, which makes things feel less like an exercise in lawn-mowering. The often-confusing layout of the park also reduces any perceived gaminess – I found it hard to keep track of where I’d already been, and how different paths connected, which was frustrating at first but eventually I unclenched my jaw and just went with the flow.

So yeah, there’s nothing here that isn’t said on the tin. And unfortunately this isn’t a game that plays nicely on mobile – the bird pictures displayed for me at a super high resolution that drastically reduced the zoom and somehow blanked out most of the links. But if you’re at all interested in what birders see in their objects of obsession, you could do a lot worse than spending a few minutes with this grounded, low-key experience.

I was all set to rate this troll game a 1. Look, the question of what does and doesn’t count as interactive fiction is almost as old as I am at this point (that is to say, it’s old), and I at least find it singularly uninteresting; likewise, the questions of “what if the player’s desire to see all the game’s content is at odds with the diegetic incentives of the characters” and “does choice-based IF actually need choices” are pretty hoary. There’s room to say something interesting about them, I’m sure, but at this stage in the development of the medium, that takes some actual engagement and analysis of how these issues come up and play out, and how different kinds of players may experience them; lazily gesturing in their direction and calling it a day, which is the limit of UF’s ambitions, doesn’t cut it. Even “Leah Thargic” is low energy as transparent pseudonyms go (“Anna Apathy” was right there).

But then I saw from some forum discussion that there’s an aural component to the game, and went back and replayed with the sound on. I’m not one to be overly swayed by multimedia, but I gotta admit, the bathos the sound effects add to the narrative is enough to indicate at least some care went into this thing: take your 2 out of 10 and get out of here.

It’s no secret that I’m very interested by the ways limited parser games share design DNA with certain kinds of puzzley choice-based games as well as hearken back to the golden age of point-and-click graphic adventures – here’s the long version of the argument, if you’re interested – so it’s likewise unsurprising that I’m very interested in the games of Arthur DiBianca, who much be one of the acknowledged masters of the subgenre whether you’re judging on quality or quantity. While an analysis of his full oeuvre is well beyond the scope of a single review, I’d argue there’s a divide between his cornucopia games, which are overstuffed with unlockable gameplay options and often bring in ideas from other kinds of games – I’m thinking of Skies Above and its myriad clicker-inspired minigames, or Sage Sanctum Scramble and its potpourri of word puzzles, or the complex, roguelike systems of Black Knife Dungeon – and his cooler, minimalist games, which succeed by stripping the player’s tools way down and wringing every single puzzle idea out of this restricted palette – Inside the Facility’s mapquesting, or Temple of Shorgil’s statue-swapping.

A Very Strong Gland is of this latter school. You’re nobody special this time out – just a schlub abducted by a trio of aliens so they can run tests on you to assess your intelligence – and since their translation software only works one way, you can’t even talk back: all you’re able to do is walk around, look at stuff, and poke stuff (oh, and wait – there are lots of timing puzzles). Fortunately for the aliens, you’re a resourceful sort and that limited action set is more than enough to save the day once things go wrong with their little experiments. Their spaceship is small but dense, with a host of locked doors, helpful robots, capability-enhancing auras, and even more mysterious devices to master as you fix its broken systems. Even this description undersells how streamlined the game is, because its interface employs the single-keypress approach previously used in Vambrace of Destiny. There’s no need to press enter or type the full name of objects; the game automatically translates X T into EXAMINE TULIP or T O to TOUCH OUTLINE.

There’s nothing much in the way of incidental scenery here, and everything you find in the ship is mostly incomprehensible and abstract; most of the puzzles involve figuring out controls that are described as a thimble or a funnel or a scallop, but whose function is entirely divorced from those forms. And while the aliens can speak to you and occasionally give helpful hints about what to do next, their advice also requires quite a lot of interpretation. They’re charming little weirdos – I picture them talking like Andy Kaufman’s character in Taxi – but rather than provide much in the way of context or character engagement, they mostly just blurble on about their oblu or complaining that the shouter is broken.

I’ll confess that this combination of parsimonious mechanics and abstract theme made my playthrough of A Very Strong Gland an arid affair. The setting feels like an artificial test-bed for intellectual challenges, because diegetically that’s what it’s supposed to be, but this means I didn’t experience exploration as intrinsically rewarding separate from solving the puzzles. Those puzzles, meanwhile, often rely on trial-and-error experimentation with devices whose functions are intentionally obfuscated, which likewise felt less than engaging. This describes most puzzle-based games, I suppose, and I enjoy many of them, but I especially like it when solving a challenge gets me a new bit of story or character development, or when I’m able to quickly get through an obstacle because I’ve intuited a logical solution; here, both of those payoffs are mostly off the table.

I get that with such a restricted action set, you need to design puzzles not to be susceptible to trial-and-error, and I admit that the solutions on display here are clever ones – but I unfortunately found them dry and occasionally annoying, requiring great leaps in logic that often rely on paying attention to tiny, unexciting details, as well as being fiddly to implement (again, there a lot of timing puzzles, and the single-keystroke thing plus the lack of undo meant I made a bunch of mistakes shifting my aura and had to restart the relevant sequences). There are some puzzles here I did enjoy – helping one of the aliens conduct an EVA repair job built on stuff I’d previously learned in a reasonably intuitive way, for example – but I confess that I got through a bunch of them just looking at another player’s transcript for hints since the experimentation required to make progress sometimes felt exhausting.

This is a negative-sounding review of a game that’s solidly designed and implemented, and will I’m sure spark joy in a certain kind of player. But to me it’s primarily interesting as a case study in how far you can push the limited-parser approach before I lose interest: I’ve realized I much prefer those games of abundance, where simplifying the interface allows for new ideas and new kinds of gameplay to be put into effect, so that the restrictions feel additive rather than just jettisoning standard parser-game affordances without replacing them with something else.

Let us imagine that puzzley choice games can be separated into two categories – yes, yes, this is an oversimplification even on its own terms, and requires arbitrarily saying that stat-based things like the Choice of Games offerings or Fallen London-style quality-based narratives present “challenges” rather than “puzzles”, but come on, let’s just go with it, two categories: you have your parserlike games that, well, mimic parser games by adopting granular, often compass-based navigation through a modeled world, usually with a persistent inventory and a point-and-click style “choose the verb, then choose the noun” interface; and then you have your escape-room-y games that rely on things like solving codes to reveal combinations that unlock doors or abstract minigames that ape classic puzzles.

There’s a lot that’s well done about the Den, but one of the things that’s most interesting to me is the way it deftly hybridizes these two approaches and winds up with a best-of-both-worlds situation. As you guide a pair of teenagers through their exploration of the high-tech bunker where a mysterious figure is protecting or perhaps imprisoning them, you’ll hoover up every portable item you can find and get very familiar with deactivating fans to enable you to crawl through ventilation ducts, but you’ll also largely do so via a fast travel system putting the whole expansive map at your fingertips, and for every USE X ON Y puzzle, you’ll find yourself doing a round of a streamlined Wordle variant. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything especially innovative, but this cannily designed interface makes what could have felt like a dauntingly large, tricky game a breeze to play.

Not that this is a lighthearted story by any means. The situation both inside and outside the bunker appears to be bad, with a series of earthquakes threatening the Den’s systems while the hints of backstory you come across via computer hacking suggesting that life on the surface isn’t a picnic any longer either. Fortunately, the two leads aren’t the type to sink into a funk; early on, you gain the ability to switch at will between Aiden, a practical whiz who occasionally breaks the rules from being a bit irresponsible, but might not be ready for larger rebellion against the system that’s raised him, and Vee, his driven yet compassionate counterpart. They’re both broadly drawn, but these are YA archetypes for a reason – the functional yet effective writing does a good job of getting across their distinct, appealingly-plucky personalities:

"He eventually smashed into the base of the shaft, leaving a large dent in the metal floor. Incredibly, apart from a few scrapes and bruises, he survived unscathed. He took great gulps of air and tried to calm the rush of adrenaline. He started to giggle, which seemed to him the strangest of reactions. He felt giddy. This was stupid, and terrifying, but hadn’t he wanted an adventure?"

I also enjoyed the way that the story tips its hand, using an early unexpected POV shift to foreshadow that the truth behind the Den is more nuanced than just the standard authoritarian dystopia. The backstory you uncover winds up being surprisingly grounded, and even involves some low-key social comment.

For all that the narrative elements are solid, this is first and foremost a puzzle game, and the set of challenges on offer here are quite good. The aforementioned Wordle riff is just as fun as its inspiration, and right as I was starting to get a little impatient with playing it over and over, the game offered a shortcut enabling me to skip past it when it came up in subsequent challenges. The inventory puzzles are all logical without feeling trivial – the extended set of actions you need to take to recover your lost screwdriver are especially satisfying. The parceling out of gameplay between the two leads is also well paced; you can ping-pong back and forth to run down a particular puzzle chain, or decide instead to bear down with a single character and work through a substantial chunk of progress before having to swap back. And the game escalates its challenges alongside its narrative: the climactic sequence creates a real feeling of mastery, as it prompts you to use what you’ve learned to allow Aiden and Vee to collaborate (albeit in occasionally implausible ways that had me wondering whether they had an ESP connection) and escape the Den at last – or indeed, not, as rather than a linear sequence of puzzles there are actually story-based decisions to make along the way, too.

This commitment to engaging the player and making sure they’re having a good time is all over this thoughtfully-designed game; the only real misstep I can point to is the decision to implement conversations between the two leads as a diegetic hint system, which meant I felt like I had to forego fun character interaction to avoid spoiling the enjoyable puzzles. The Den is scrupulous about making sure most players will find something to like, and smoothing away the edges that might create undue friction – it’s also quite generous, culminating in a wealth of fun post-game extras that put a lovely cap on proceedings. The ending also includes a request not to spoil the plot, which is why I’ve stuck to describing the situation in general terms; suffice to say the story is of a piece with the rest of the Den, executing standard tropes at a very high level while throwing in a few bonus grace notes. This is a real gem, and a game I wouldn’t be surprised to see launch imitations, perhaps eventually even a mini-genre, of its own.

One of the things I love about IF is its plasticity: there are great games in nearly every genre you can think of, from literary character studies to pulp adventure or romantic melodrama. But there are a couple of categories where the IFDB tags are conspicuously bare, and “action” must be chief among them. Partially this is because the things text is good at – detail, interiority, allusion – aren’t especially needed for an action story, while the things text tends to be weaker at – showing exactly how characters are moving through space and time, depicting simultaneous action, communicating urgency – are. Partially I suspect it’s because action-movie buffs are underrepresented amongst the ranks of IF authors (we’re kind of a bunch of nerds). But whatever the reason, divisive experiments like the real-time Border Zone are a case of the exception proving the rule: IF and action just don’t mix well.

Faced with this unmistakable historical trend, The Deserter just shrugs and gets on with things. This tale of a mech pilot deciding he’s had enough of being a cog in the war machine doesn’t just lean into action-adventure tropes – it also seems aggressively unconcerned with playing outside that sandbox. For example, while we’re clearly meant to view the army the pilot, Joad, is fleeing as the baddies, the game eschews specificity in favor of the broadest imaginable strokes, as in this bit where an old man explains why he’s in hiding:

“To stay in the city means prison, at best. Our thoughts, beliefs, appearances are a threat to those in power.” He looks at you. “I think you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

I mean I do, but laying it out this way doesn’t make me feel any sort of way about it.

Similarly, while Joad has something he’s running to, not just from, in the shape of a wife and daughter, the game plays its cards here so close to the chest that you’re not given a single flashback or memory to make them anything other than names. Heck, an early sequence even lets you catch sight of their trail without letting on who they are or why you’re following them.

In place of fripperies like characterization and context, The Deserter doubles down on action set pieces. And you know what, it’s not actually bad? The scenarios are relatively standard – scaling high cliffs or crossing raging rivers, exploring a cave, and of course nervy mech-to-mech combat – but they’re quite varied over the game’s twenty minute or so runtime (the two hour play time listed in the blurb maybe applies to exhausting its content through repeated plays, but a single run-through is much shorter, and satisfying enough in its own right). The writing has some technical errors, but manages some effective mood-setting in between the exciting bits:

"You plough along through the desolate canyon, listening to your mechs engine and the booming echo of it’s [sic] heavy steps. The sun occasionally peeks through gaps in the rock and cuts sinister shapes around you."

Gameplay-wise, you’re given just enough choices to feel a sense of urgency and agency, as you’re rarely given enough time or information to calculate the best decision, and the outcomes made me feel like I was skating through by the skin of my teeth. I suspect the author’s got their thumbs on the scales here, since upon replaying I found even making intentionally sub-optimal choices was still enough to get me through to the end, albeit with more stress along the way, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and while certain key events appear to fire no matter what you do, there are still a number of encounters that are missable depending on your actions (making the aforementioned “bad” choices led to an angsty fight against a former comrade lying in wait for you atop a bridge, which was an adrenaline-pumping highlight).

The Deserter’s a narrowly-focused piece, eschewing a lot of what I tend to most enjoy in IF, but I’d rate it successful nonetheless. High-octane set-pieces and war movie cliches might wear out their welcome in a longer game – and there’s definitely room for some polish, between the aforementioned writing issues and a few small technical faults, like the way a late-game passage talked about me piloting my mech immediately after telling me I had to eject after it foundered in a river – but at this scale, and with this focus, it all works.

After raking Breakfast in the Dolomites over the coals for gesturing towards, but not actually providing, a grounded trip into nature, I was surprised to see that the randomizer picked another run at a similar concept for my next game. There are certainly differences – Campfire’s an altogether lonely, more rugged experience – but I’d say it largely delivers on the promise. While it’s been decades since I’ve gone camping, the game’s careful, low-key presentation of the simple joys of roughing it brought back long-buried memories, and made me want to go again. There are bugs and writing errors that mar the process, unfortunately, but the core of the experience still resonates.

There’s also more depth to the game than may at first appear. The opening that depicts you experiencing some minor crises at work as you count down the minutes until you can go on your trip, for example, appears to be randomized, with at least two entirely different sequences playing out if you restart. Similarly, rather than jumping straight to the camping, you first visit some stores to pick up your supplies, which requires carefully counting your money and deciding how to prioritize food vs. gear vs. entertainment (admittedly, I played the protagonist as a self-insert, and since I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t like starting forest fires, I passed up the expensive meats and fireworks, leaving me with plenty of cash left over when I picked up everything else). There’s a packing sequence that’s dull, but serves to build anticipation, and then the trip itself plays out in brief vignettes told in unadorned prose that’s perhaps a bit generic, but boasts a solid, simple cadence:

"The soft grass gives slightly under my feet as I walk the trail. A soft breeze rustles the leaves of the trees that blanket both sides of the trail.

"The fresh autumn air fills my lungs with each breath. Bringing a feeling of peace and relaxation over me.

"After a while of walking the trail starts to become hilly. I walk up a particularly steep hill and have to catch my breath.

"From the top of the hill I spot a small clearing in the distance. Two deer graze on the grass in the clearing."

Nothing that happens is especially revelatory; the game makes clear that you’re a veteran camper who loves the experience and finds a special kind of meaning in the freedom of being on your own in the woods, but this particular trip is just one of many. You can go on pleasant hike, make tasty food, catch a few fish (happily, the game stipulates that you immediately throw them back), and return to your weekday live rejuvenated, but this is a slice of life rather than a drama. That’s a fine idea in the abstract, and in its particulars it makes for an apt fit with the unpretentious gameplay and shortish structure.

As mentioned, though, some rough patches made it harder for me to drift away like the game was inviting me to. I know about the alternate beginnings because I had to restart several times: once after I bought everything in the camping store and got to a passage with no further choices, and then again after hitting a similar bug when popping some popcorn – and then a third time when I tried to reload a saved game, which instead brought me to an entirely blank screen. There are also a few times when lines repeat oddly, instances where the game seemed confused about what I’d bought or failed to buy, and a large number of misspellings and typos (some of which I’ve put behind a details tag, below). It’s all forgivable for a first-time author, though, and while each of these issues did momentarily bring me out of the meditative fantasy the game conjured, I was always willing to make my way back there; given my current life circumstances it’ll be a while before I’m able to go camping again, but in the meantime this is the next best thing.

I’ve vacationed in Italy a few times, and when people ask me my favorite part of those trips, it’s usually something about some ancient site or other that comes to mind – often I’ll name my visit to the Castel Sant’Angelo, a set of Renaissance-era papal apartments built atop a medieval fortification built atop the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, or the time I had a beer on a patio overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, or winding my way down St. Patrick’s Well in Orvieto, a shaft dug two hundred feet into a hill-town’s rock to reach the water that would allow the town to outlast a siege. My wife, though, will usually talk about the hotel breakfast buffets: pillowy bread, unlimited Nutella, fresh-squeezed juices, eggs that had been inside a chicken just a day or two previous, and (I am told) high-quality coffee and cured meats worth risking heart disease for.

EDIT: my wife, having read the above paragraph, wishes it to be known that 1) she liked many things about Italy much more than the breakfasts; 2) most days she just had half a croissant since breakfast isn’t her favorite meal anyway; and 3) I am exaggerating for the bit, which, guilty as charged.

The author of Breakfast in the Dolomites thinks my wife has the better of this difference in priorities. While the blurb promises a fizzy romantic comedy on a romantic hiking trip to the mountains (and the AI-created cover art suggests slightly-melted plastic versions of Emma Stone and David Duchovny will be playing the leading roles), the title is actually a more accurate guide: while there’s a bit of prefatory matter and a brief lavatory-based denouement, obtaining and eating breakfast is the main course.

There can be a meditative kind of charm to playing a game whose subject matter is so relentlessly quotidian, but rather than the parser equivalent of those European art films that just follow someone doing their everyday chores in real time, Breakfast in the Dolomites has more in common with slapstick games like Octodad or QWOP where the joke is that a weird bendy alien is trying to act like a regular human and flailing badly. While the game uses your girlfriend, Monica, to prompt you as to the next required course of action, and I didn’t run into any significant bugs despite an impressively deep implementation, my transcript still reads like a comedy of errors. When the desk clerk at the hotel asked for my ID card, for example, I checked my inventory to confirm that I didn’t have my wallet; after Monica prodded me again I thought it might be in my pocket. I was on the right track, but typing X POCKET spat out the kind of response that gives parser-phobes nightmares:

"Which do you mean, the left back pocket, the right back pocket, the left front pocket, the right front pocket, the left leg pocket or the right leg pocket?"

Fortunately I found the wallet on the third try, and thought I had things sorted, except then I ran afoul of the inventory limits that objected to me trying to carry my wallet, ID card, and two keys all at once. This minor inconvenience was as nothing to the hijinks that ensued when I reached the buffet the next morning, though: look, in my IF career I’ve stared down mad scientists thousands of meters deep beneath alien seas, used the last of my strength to perform rituals of banishment abjuring abhorrent gods, and endured painfully-immersive narratives of abuse, but rarely have I felt as stressed as I did juggling a bread plate and a scrambled egg while trying to work a juicer.

> put carrot in container

The juicer bowl is closed.

> open juicer

You open the juicer bowl.

> put carrot in container

“You cannot put a whole carrot in the machine, you have to chop it first.” — Emma suggests you.

> chop carrot

You should specify what you cut it with.

> chop carrot with knife

It is better to lean on a chopping board.

The level of granularity here is frankly incredible; there are easily a dozen different kinds of food, many with different options like choosing lemon for your tea or different kinds of jam for your toast; meanwhile the waiter, waitress, and cook are flitting about, and your girlfriend is making up her own plate. It’s impressive stuff, but I’m at a loss to explain why the author went to this much effort for such a mundane series of set pieces. It’d be one thing if deep conversation or sparkling banter were playing out alongside the banal action, but the hotel staff are blandly efficient, and Monica is too focused on giving you instructions with the patience and level of detail you’d typically associate with a preschool teacher catechizing a bunch of distractible toddlers to have much of a personality. Meanwhile, the charm of what seems like it must be a beautiful setting is smothered under goopy prose that reads like ChatGPT ate a real estate agent:

"This charming little hotel welcomes guests with its cosy reception area: the inviting atmosphere is immediately apparent, with a blend of rustic elegance and modern comfort. The reception of this little hotel in the Dolomites serves as the perfect introduction to the unique blend of comfort and authenticity that awaits guests throughout their stay, promising a memorable and rejuvenating experience in this picturesque mountain retreat."

For all that, I was disappointed when the game ended so prematurely – the technical chops and attention to detail on display made me feel like the author could have implemented a very special nature hike, or a nicely open-ended conversation with Monica that would get me invested in their relationship. I’m not sure if this small slice of narrative was always the plan, or if the effort of coding up these early sequences with such fidelity wound up eating all the development time allotted for what would have been a larger story. Either way Breakfast in the Dolomites doesn’t quite live up to its billing, whether you’re in the mood for seeing the sights or just a rich meal – but here’s hoping the author takes that impressive ambition and level of effort and turns them to different ends next time.