Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.

There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.

Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.

Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).

But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:

"Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk."

So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?

Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.

Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: (Spoiler - click to show) I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.

I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.

When the Republican Party inevitably moves on from having Trump as its standard-bearer (soon may the day come), there’s a chance they’ll land on Hubert Janus next. Sure, he’s fictional, and probably British, to boot, but he’s clearly devoted to inverting Marx: for in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, Europe is haunting a spectre.

No, wait, I mean: in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, history repeats itself, first as farce, second as tragedy. ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG is of course the sequel to last year’s DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, which was precision-engineered to win the Golden Banana of discord (seriously. There was math). It offered two separate paths to potential players, determined randomly and irrevocably upon startup; while I believe both elaborated upon the scenario teased in its title one, apparently, was surprisingly robust and engaging, designed to elicit a middling score, while the second was an intentionally-awful congeries of timed text, GeoCities-era flashing text and overbusy design, completely linear gameplay, and a conga line of cameos from Darth Vader to Adolf Hitler. I got the second version, and finding its goofily over-the-top effort to be the worst game in the Comp sublimely ridiculous, gave it the 1/10 it was angling for.

To say DICK MCBUTTS is a tough act to follow is an understatement (and possibly a butt joke in itself). But ROD MCSCHLONG makes a manful go at providing more of the same, but different. In particular, whereas the comedy in the former came from the dizzying variety of ways that the titular act was perpetrated, here DONG-PUNCHING is a fail state; the groin of our hero is ever-threatened, but the player has the agency to guide ROD through the gauntlet and escape the ever-thrusting fists of, in turn, a swole leprechaun, a passel of mutated Sciuridae, alien overlords with more limbs than a Hindu god, and more besides. You’re only offered at most two options at any time, and the Twine game allows you to freely undo, so a bad end just means enduring a gif depicting shocking stick-figure violence and then a replay, but for a joke game, ROD MCSCHLONG does a good job of playing fair; more often than not, logical deduction, careful attention to detail, and a cautious regard for the importance of safeguarding your “baloney pony” will see you through. There’s an engaging sense of escalation throughout, too – it’s hopefully no spoiler to reveal that ultimately the very multiverse is put into the balance, meaning that you’re not just protecting one dong, but innumerable dongs across countless realities.

The tragedy is – well, there are two tragedies (see how elegantly Hubert rebuts Karl: everything repeats, not just history!) For one thing, while the game is structured around a dream of escape, the title exerts a remorseless pull: no matter how you try, no matter what you do, ROD MCSCHLONG will GET PUNCHED IN THE DOG, with each near-miss serving to raise the tension before the inevitable. Heck, you need to get out your classical-tragedy bingo card, because here we’ve got both character-is-destiny (the piece opens with ROD’s hubristic boast that no one will ever PUNCH him in the DONG) and trying-to-escape-fate-makes-it-happen (ROD’s efforts to evade PUNCHES are themselves what eventually put his DONG right in the line of fire).

The second tragedy is, well, of course it’s not quite as funny as DICK MCBUTTS. There are some great one-off gags, don’t get me wrong – I don’t exactly know what it means to say performing the eponymous assault would be “[l]ike going to the Cumberland Pencil Museum and trying to beat up the world’s largest coloured pencil,” but it makes me laugh anyway – but inevitably the second time around, the jokes don’t have quite the anarchic zing they once did. There’s an extended sequence involving an athletic supporter and cup that’s played a little too straight, and the easy way failure can be undoing means that ROD MCSCHLONG actually GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG quite a lot, with no lasting consequences. Despite a glee-inducing late-game cameo and quite a lot of craftsmanship, sadly the game ultimately can’t help but disappoint.

That’s OK though, since as stated it’s all in service of inverting Marx’s dialectics and endearing Hubert Janus to the GOP’s movers and shakers – at least until next Comp’s inevitable DONNIE MCTRUMP GETS THRASHED ON THE RUMP.

The Comp welcomes all kinds of IF, but it’s also an awkward place to enter a teaser. As the most, well, competitive of the community’s various events, it tends to be where long, polished games by seasoned authors tend to wind up, so an incomplete effort will look even slighter by way of comparison. But beyond that, the audience simply expects complete experiences: while the Comp’s been home to multi-part series, like the Earth and Sky superhero trilogy that dominated the winner’s circle in the early aughts, or the game I’m going to be reviewing next for that matter, those games had full beginnings, middles, and ends, with linkages to future installments being akin to Marvel-movie postcredit sequences. Well, I say “the audience” but I mean “me” – for all that the blurb clearly discloses that we’ve got here is “simply the prologue” to The Lost Artist, I was still disgruntled to reach the end well before I expected to, all the more so since there’s no indication of when and where the continuation might show up.

But admitting that putting a teaser in IFComp is probably not a good idea, is this prologue nonetheless an effective one? I’d have to say no. For a preview to make me excited to check out the full experience, I think it has to establish the premise and end on a moment of drama, when things are opening up and you’re left on the edge of your seat, half-imagining what might happen next but sure that there’ll be plenty of surprises beyond what you can think up. Think about the Lord of the Rings: you could cut things off after the hobbits take the Buckleberry Ferry just ahead of the Ringwraiths, say, and have a solid teaser. If that’s too much movie to give away for free, you could push back to the moment where Frodo tells Sam that he’s about to go farther from home than he’s ever been before: we don’t get the excitement of the Black Riders or the other hobbits yet, but we know what’s at stake, and that the journey’s about to begin in earnest.

The Lost Artist: Prologue, by way of contrast, basically decides to cut off just as Bilbo slips the ring on at his party, and excises the opening historical flashback besides: we have a disconnected set of characters who’ve barely interacted with each other, some kind of inciting incident that seems like it’s going somewhere, but no real idea of the shape of the story, what the themes or conflicts to come will be, and little reason to care about anything we’ve just seen. Here, instead of hobbits we’ve got a pair of bird-sanctuary-keepers turned bank robbers, an artist trapped against her will and losing her creativity, and the world’s most generic detective; instead of the dark lord Sauron we’ve got an ominous megacorporation with decidedly odd ideas about profitability (we’re told that at least one part of their business is making corporate logos, and they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?), and instead of magic rings we’ve got low-context invocations of time travel and a mystical raven. Possibly there are rules and thematic linkages that unify all of this, but the vibe is that anything could happen, and not necessarily in a good way:

Balding picks up the envelope but notices that his name is misspelled.

“Damn.” The Detective whimpers to himself, looking off to somewhere else.

The letters of his name are floating in the center of his view. The letters continuously disassemble and reassemble into hallucinated shapes.

He gets all weird about that.

Better to find something else to focus on.

Hey! What’s over there?

Let’s just say that the word “huh?” recurs a lot in my notes.

There are one or two possibly-intriguing images here – I liked the bit where the captive artist, who’s stuck working on the aforementioned logos, has a moment of clarity after she clumsily spills maté tea powder on one of her doodles and is arrested by the “depth and texture” it lends to her work – and just at the end, it indicates that the detective is being brought in to investigate something to do with the artist’s predicament. But there’s just not enough here to make me care about what happens next, even without the wacky tone, barely-there characters, and underexplained worldbuilding. It could be that after another act or two, the Lost Artist brings its disparate parts together, establishes compelling themes, and creates an engaging narrative – or it could be that it doesn’t. But either way, this prologue doesn’t allow the player to give it a fair shake.

I was recently reading a review of the DnD 3rd Edition version of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting – sometimes I make questionable choices about what to do with my spare time – and the author teased out a distinction between “generic” fantasy and “vanilla” fantasy: there’s some fantasy that’s too specific, too flavorful, to count as generic, and yet lacks the sort of twist or high concept or especially-novel distinguishing feature that would admit it to a subgenre. Thus: vanilla.

(You might be pooh-poohing this whole idea, but try a spoonful of regular plain yogurt, and then vanilla. They’re different!)

(You might prefer the plain, of course. That’s fine too).

So yes, The Saltcast Adventure is the kind of fantasy where you can’t get two paragraphs in before the narrator informs you that you’re now the farthest you’ve ever been from home (those of you reading these reviews in order will note that I mentioned this scene in Fellowship of the Ring two games ago), and where one paragraph after that we’re told, in solid but Tolkien-invoking prose:

"The trees here look different; they’re taller, with canopies that reach high into the autumn air, grasping at the pale sun. There are huge boulders scattered across the landscape, glittering stone that looks nothing like the occasional flint pebbles that fleck the paths long behind you. The smell in the air is sweet, unflavored by human industry."

The protagonist is of course an unassuming peasant who’ll have to tap into heretofore-unguessed reserves of strength to succeed in their quest, which is to delve deep into a subterranean world of monsters and stop their attacks on humanity and get a reward from the king. She (yes, she’s a she, and a mother, so that’s a nice departure from the norm though hardly that interesting in itself) starts off with some water, some rope, a knife, and a lantern with a small enchantment placed on it. The lore infodump is woven skillfully through the opening, but it’s there, and the setting’s major distinctive element – magic gone awry can create different kinds of the eponymous Saltcasts, mutated or spirit-ridden creatures with supernatural powers whose lives are bound up in tiny mirrors – is a specific, but not exactly revisionist, take on fantasy worldbuilding.

And yet, the game leans into its meat-and-potatoes conceits with admirable consistency. The Saltcast are the only unnatural creatures in the setting, for example, and while the exact mechanics of the magics that create and sustain them are laid out with the detail of an RPG monster manual, they’re all presented as individuals, both as to their powers and their personalities, and not all are hostile. Madelaine, meanwhile, while the very model of the plucky hero’s journey protagonist, is drawn with conviction – her grit and perseverance feel well-earned, her devotion to her struggling family rendered with poignancy:

"You close your eyes, see your children’s faces. Thin, wan, smiling. Mattias’s teeth have started falling out because he does not eat well enough."

She seems like an individual, not an archetype, and the same is true of the central antagonist, who is recognizably a load-bearing Foozle of the type that has clogged CRPGs since time immemorial, but whose uniqueness extends beyond a perhaps-overcomplex backstory and cool special effects – not to mention the plucky supporting cast.

There’s a risk that all I’m doing here is inferring a qualitative difference based just on quality. It is true that Saltcast Adventure is a well-executed example of its form; as noted above, the prose largely avoids Generic Fantasy Bollocks, with descriptions that leverage all the senses, and while the piece is long it’s well-paced, with act breaks coming just as I was feeling like the plot structure could use a change-up. Meanwhile, the choice mechanics are nicely done too – besides a few pick-a-door false choices that shunt you to the same scene regardless and could have been excised, you’re given options to try to build connections or prioritize efficiency, with stakes that feel high even though the mechanics are reasonably forgiving (you can accumulate wounds, but the game doesn’t visibly track them, and if you die you’re able to immediately undo, so I think it’s hard to lock yourself out of good outcomes).

But I’ve played tightly-made stories like this before, and this one does do things a little bit differently. There’s a big twist right at the end of Act 2 that I legitimately failed to predict, for example, and if the final section can’t fully pay it off, that’s probably just because the author would have needed to add an extra hour to this three-hour game to make it land. And while each decision the author made about how to construct the Saltcast, their origins, and their society comes straight out of the fantasy playbook, the gestalt still winds up being memorable. Moreover, the game has the discipline to stick with its intentionally-picked elements rather than watering them down with the exact same stuff you’ve seen a million times before. So yeah, if the only kind of yogurt you like is peach or blueberry or, god help you, chocolate raspberry, you’ll probably want to give Saltcast a miss, but it remains a great example of why vanilla keeps selling too.

Last night my wife and I had one of our all-too-infrequent dates (we’re parents of a toddler, the struggle is real), and I made the questionable decision to use some of that precious time telling her about the drama surrounding NaNoWriMo endorsing LLM tools. She was gobsmacked: the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel, so what possible point could there be to having an “AI” write part of it for you? I didn’t have any great answers; the best I could come up with is that there are people who really want to have written a book, but either can’t or don’t want to do the work to actually write it.

Comes now Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe to assert that yes, there definitely are people like that, and to imagine what they might do if they had to make a deal with an entity darker still than ChatGPT to get their way. Oh, there’s plenty going on in this impressively-put-together TADS game – beyond the main thread involving investigations in an evocatively-presented 19th-Century Baltimore, there’s also a terrorist thriller, and even a brief Renaissance interlude – but the heart of it is a meditation on artistic ambition; trying to uncover exactly what caused Poe’s death provides impetus to the plot, and he enigmatically haunts proceedings as inspiration, cautionary tale, or victim, but the story is ultimately concerned with others who lack his talent and perseverance while feeling no less entitled to success.

Speaking of ambitions, this is a lot for a parser game to bite off, but UCEAP manages it all with aplomb. There’s a modern-day framing story for the main action in Poe’s Baltimore, as well as one or two other nested flashbacks, but everything except the 19th Century stuff is presented in a compact, guided fashion that ensures the player doesn’t flounder even as they’re put in situations without enough context to understand them, or asked to make thematically-charged decisions via a parser interface that doesn’t allow for much nuance. The tools used here include a fair amount of prompting, via a (optional, but enabled by default) system that provides hints about possible conversational topics, or the reduction of complex dilemmas to binary choices represented by physical actions easily fitting the medium-dry-goods paradigm. It’d be churlish to complain about this kind of thing, though, since these sequences are clearly ancillary to the main event, where the player is afforded far more freedom; keeping the necessarily-less-engaging side-stories moving is the right decision.

And oh, what fun there is to be had in Charm City! As an admirer of Poe’s who has heard news of his troubles, you rush to his hospital bed and vow to discover who or what brought him to such dire straits. The whole sequence is rendered in enjoyably melodramatic prose that brings the milieu to life, like this description of the harbor:

"Eagerly I pass through the doors of the ferry building, columned on both sides by the sails and smoke rising from the ferries gliding over the glassy Patapsco River."

Or this later one of a damaged mechanism:

"A great iron pot-bellied engine sits mounted into one wall, with a webwork of contraption and gears sprouting from its head. Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate."

It’s impressively-wrought apery, conjuring ambiance while avoiding mentioning too many nouns that would need to be implemented, and if there are anachronisms or infelicities, I didn’t notice them. A lot of research has clearly gone into this, but the game avoids the pitfall of ploddingly reciting Wikipedia summaries; historical tidbits like how voting frauds were perpetrated or what medical care looked like at the time are given life and made plot-relevant instead.

The puzzles are also woven into the narrative with care and skill. There are barriers to your investigations – you’ll need to retrace his steps before the attack that felled him, wheedle key information out of a wino, er, toper, and even decode some cryptograms that could have come straight out of a Poe story. But they all arise, and are surmounted, in organic fashion; there’s nothing that comes off as a gamey contrivance to pad out the running time, and the puzzles all reward logical thinking and period knowledge (in fact I managed to sequence-break by guessing a cipher keyword well before I was supposed to based on knowing some things about 19th-Century medicine). And even for folks less well-positioned to grapple with its challenges, the game offers hints and a walkthrough.

For all that they’re well done, though, the puzzles aren’t what UCEAP is most interested in. Nor, in the end, is Poe – the game does engage with the historical circumstances of his death with impressive depth and fidelity, and it’s generously larded both with specific references to his work, as well as with tropes that invoke the mysterious, haunted atmosphere of his writings, from uncanny doubles to ominous codes to insoluble murders. But we don’t get much of a sense of his subjectivity: the active characters are people who look up to him, or are jealous of him, or find themselves enmeshed in situations that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his tales. Indeed, there’s even a clever feint that led me to expect that Poe would be revealed as his own worst enemy, only to find that something else entirely was going on.

No, it’s the protagonist and villain, and their echoes in the modern-day story, who are most thematically central to the game. It posits a series of dualities within literary identity: the desire for broad success as well as critical acclaim, for bourgeois respectability as well as demimondaine extravagance, and above all for the trappings of fame without the effort required to master a craft. Much like the puzzles, this theme is well-put together and cleverly integrated into the game as a whole, but here’s my major complaint about UCEAP: I’m not convinced it winds up with as much to say about literary production in general, or Poe in specific, as I’d have hoped.

Most authors, I think, really are trying as hard as they can to produce good work; if they’re taking shortcuts, they’re shortcuts imposed by the exigencies of artistic production under late capitalism rather than moral failings. ChatGPT and its ilk pretend they offer the equivalent of a deal with the devil – have your masterworks handed to you on a platter rather than forging them with the sweat of your brow – but it’s nonetheless clear that this Mephistopheles has not a golden fiddle but an out-of-tune ukulele. And as for Poe, UCEAP convincingly demolishes the character-assassination portrait of him as a depraved alcoholic brought low by his inability to control his vices, but it doesn’t dwell much on the positive vision we should have of him instead. I don’t disagree with anything the game is saying, by any means, but I do wish it had found a way to penetrate a little more deeply, engage more directly with the questions it raises about how we sinful mortals can create undying art.

Let me be clear that I’m just talking about the difference between a great game and an incredible one, though – I found UCEAP a joy to play, with best-of-class prose, design, worldbuilding, and narrative structure (I haven’t gotten a chance to mention how scene transitions are often accomplished via seamless match-cuts, like jumping from a 2024 hospital to an 1849 one). It also boasts the most hilarious way to get out of a bad contract I’ve read in quite some time. And if it doesn’t completely transcend its origins as a sensational tale of depraved and desperate ambition, well, Poe wrote a bunch like that himself and many of them have survived the test of time nonetheless.

Deliquescence is an emotionally charged game presenting one of the most painful experiences possible – being with someone you love in the minutes before they die – so of course instead of engaging with any of that I’m going to start off by talking about the interface.

This is of course a choice-based game, but the presentation of those choices is almost unique in IF – rather than a typical set of inline links or radio buttons, the options available are offered via nested menus. Talk, Touch, and Do are the initial three, each with a little + next to them indicating that they can expand to offer a further set of choices, which of course can expand in turn to offer additional refinements another layer down, ultimately reaching three or four levels deep in some cases; you might select Talk, then About her, then Tell me a story, then finally About your grandmother to trigger a short reminiscence. Even something as comparatively simple as touching her hand is actually Touch, Her, Hand – and the way the nesting works, you don’t know what options are available until you click to fan them out.

I suspect that this choice of interface was partially a practical accommodation to allow for quite a lot of choices – there are something like thirty different courses you can pursue – to be displayed at once, without requiring the player to fumble with the back button or locking in any path-dependence (the game does shunt you into one of several different endings based on what you do, but each interaction works the same way every time). But it’s also a perfect fit for the game’s subject matter: in such a high-stress situation, with seconds ticking down to the inevitable (yes, the game does have a real-time limit hurrying things along if you dither), I think your brain really does work like this: I should say something, what should I say, maybe a question, what was a story she told me, oh the one about her Grandmother. And there’s so much you might want to do, but the likelihood that it will be the right thing is so low given the stakes, that you do find yourself considering action after action, jumping around in the list, all the time knowing you can’t get through even a fraction of what you’d like to do or say before the end, and actually by searching for something perfect you’re frittering away the little time that’s left.

The setup is so neat that the specifics and the writing are almost besides the point; happily, they’re quite good, though I inevitably have a quibble or two. The main one of these is that Deliquescence is not nearly as emotionally devastating as it could be. For one thing, as the title indicates your friend is dying because their body is turning into water; this can be read as a metaphor for all sorts of things, and could be rendered as a terrifying bit of body horror, but in the event the author succeeds in giving the friend’s physical decay an odd, terribly beauty; her death will make you sad, but it’s a wistful kind of sad, and a sadness leavened by the invitation to restart and experience it again. For another, neither the friend nor the protagonist are especially characterized, nor does their relationship have much flavor to it; there are a couple of nice anecdotes, and from the fact that they’re in this situation together the player understands that the ties that bind them together must be tight ones, but I felt an intellectual rather than a visceral understanding.

The endings also pull some punches. There aren’t any good ones where you say exactly the right thing to make you and her feel OK about what’s happening – because of course there aren’t – but nor are there ones where you say the wrong thing, or one or the other of you breaks down irretrievably (er, emotionally, that is). If you futz around with the interface so much that you never actually do anything, she says the important thing was for you just to be there; if ask her to tell you stories, she tells you she was happy with her life. One ending that threatened to become a bummer ended with her saying “My death is not for anyone but me. It’s just another thing that is happening. Don’t make it a burden.” I’m not saying that’s unrealistic – in fact my sister told me something not unlike this a few weeks before she died – but it is a pretty direct instruction to the player not to feel too bad about things.

This all seems to be a matter of choice rather than mistake on the part of the author, though – based on the quality of the writing, I have little doubt they could have gone all-in for melodrama had that been their goal. Instead Deliquescence allows the player to get their toes wet exploring an awful moment, experiencing all the ways it can feel overwhelming and go wrong while still having a safety net that blunts the worst excesses of emotion and reassures them that it’s going to be OK no matter what. That’s an admirable thing to offer, with impressive artistry going into the design, even if the situations it’s emulating are nowhere near as domesticated in practice.

The thing about metaphors is, they can’t be too metaphorical. Similes are anchored by that “like”, they can do anything they want: there’s a Mountain Goats song, International Small Arms Traffic Blues, with the line “my love is like the border between Greece and Albania”, and it completely works, you understand exactly what it means. But metaphors lack any automatic grounding in reality, and so they’re liable to float away if you let them. Case in point: I am pretty sure that when the parents in House of Wolves make the protagonist eat meat for dinner, the game doesn’t (or at doesn’t just) have vegetarianism on its mind, but I couldn’t tell you what it does. Reactionary politics? Sexual orientation or gender identity? Academic success/meritocracy as a cloak for the Hobbesian war of all against all? The fact that this is about “wolves” and “meat” indicates there’s violence at the heart of whatever’s going on, but whatever’s going on is too gestured-at to be visceral.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing powerful in the writing here. Part of the protagonist’s three-part daily ritual is studying (bracketed by ablutions and the aforementioned meal sequences): they appear to be taking a computer-science course under remote-learning conditions, possibly due to COVID, and at one point there’s a description of the technical concepts of encapsulation and abstraction in the context of programming languages, but it’s clear the description could equally apply to avoidance strategies. I also liked that the protagonist’s dream of escape isn’t that their parents will stop trying to make them eat meat, no, it’s that they’ll just enjoy eating it: their imagination doesn’t extend to freedom, just to no longer experiencing the pain of conformity.

But again, we don’t really get a sense of what the protagonist is trying to avoid, or what costs conformity actually would impose. Nor are we given any climax or catharsis. We just get these same concepts repeated in various forms:

"You’ve almost forgotten what it’s like not to have that pressure bearing down on you. Separated from your friends, separated from any form of escape, you’ve buckled under its weight. Let them stamp you down into the cracks till there’s nothing left to break. You pretend it makes it easier. That it makes it hurt any less."

This seems unpleasant, and abstractly, I want things to go better for the protagonist. But I didn’t feel like my choices as a player had anything to do with that – you can acquiesce to eating eat, or be force-fed it, but external and internal end results felt the same – nor was there any poignancy to these scenes, any sense that an actual human being had anything concrete at stake. I’m not saying House of Wolves needed to make its allegories clanglingly explicit; heck, I’m a vegetarian, even if the game is just about eating meat I think that still could work. But right now all there is is the metaphor, and it’s not bloody enough to connect.

Early on in LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (hereinafter “Sextuple L”, per the subtitle – yes, I know that’s only five, I have some theories but we’ll get to those later), L, the game’s early-20s British transmasc protagonist, watches an ASMR video. It depicts a lemon being poked at in a way that’s meant to evoke a lobotomy – this is one of many sequences in the game that are sufficiently far outside my experience that they seem bizarre but also facially plausible given the way people are on the internet – and at one point, the YouTuber pokes a hypodermic under the fruit’s rind and injects some water to ape anesthetization, except the lemon already being quite full of liquid, the pressure of the plunger just makes the needle shoot back out of the rind. This strikes L as funny, since he did almost the same thing when he practiced on an orange before starting injecting himself with testosterone:

"Who would have thought my [transgender] experiences would connect with this one random guy, who absolutely is cis, even though I have no real way of knowing that, over something so stupid…"

This is a process that absolutely works in reverse: despite this being a game that’s heavily immersed in the subjectivity of L as a trans man, with a supporting cast that’s also entirely trans folks, and almost everybody is a 20-something Brit to boot, I found it incredibly relatable and emotionally engaging despite being a cishet American in my 40s. This isn’t because it’s especially meant for people like me, I don’t think – at least I hope it’s not, God knows there’s more than enough stuff out there catering to my demographic – but precisely because it does such a good job communicating the specificity of what L is seeing, thinking, and feeling. I’m very aware that my own experiences feeling awkward in a nightclub or adrift after graduation, to pluck two examples among many, don’t directly translate to L’s situation – beyond dealing with systemic transphobia and near-crippling confidence issues, he’s also got to grapple with a crush on someone way out of his league, moving back in with parents he’s not yet out to, and how to integrate a powerful rubber fetish into his romantic life, and more besides – but nonetheless I found the game a master-class in empathy: L feels like a flesh and blood person whose happiness I was deeply invested in.

I worry I just made Sextuple L sound kind of weepy and Very Serious, but it’s nothing of the sort – or, well, it sometimes is, but part of what makes the game so special is the authors’ bravura ability to shift tones and pivot on a dime while carrying you with them. L is an amazing narrator and very funny, incapable of letting a moment to wryly note the absurdity of a situation go by no matter what awful thing might be happening, and he’s sharply observant to boot. Despite the game disabling copy-and-poste (boo) my notes file is littered with lines I loved so much I was willing to type them in manually, like this early reflection L makes on his, er, reflection as he hides in the aforementioned club’s bathroom:

"He doesn’t look like a he. He looks like what a 13 year old girl would draw as her fictional boyfriend before she has an understanding of boys or friends… ugly in a way that he’s not ugly enough. There’s beauty in the beautiful and beauty in the grotesque. He’s neither… not woman enough to be an object; not man enough to be a threat."

The first bit elicits sympathy, the last an “oof” at what a reductive, yet sadly accurate, understanding of gender norms it conveys. And then smash cut from that self-loathing introspection to suddenly “someone with a full gasmask, catsuit sans-arms, and a harness of ropes knotted into a pentagram walks in” (it’s rubber night).

A bit later, when L rabbits out of the club and is waiting at the bus stop, he’s surprised to feel his latex-gloved hands immediately getting cold, due to the way rubber passes on heat – “I need gloves for my gloves”, he laments – and then he meets-cute with another trans guy, Val, who’s also waiting for the bus: “there is a quiet, but unmistakable, squelch of lube sliding under latex as we shake.” And I’ve got a million more examples; the narrative voice is brilliant at bringing out the texture of everything that’s happening and making it come alive, while being very very funny to boot.

…I should get on to actually reviewing the game, rather than just listing off the best bits, but I have to share a couple more. Eventually L hooks up with Val and his friend Artemis, a trans woman (let me just interject here to say that the sex scenes are really well done – there’s always a risk that sex will seem ridiculous when you write about it, and I think that risk is heightened when you’re dealing with fetish material that will be unfamiliar to many readers, but man, these work), and as they’re smoking during the comedown this exchange left me howling:

“Maybe I’ll get into piss,” she narrows her eyes, and taps the end of the cigarette, ash falling to the floor. “I haven’t done anything with piss.”

“Ugh, don’t. Everyone’s getting into piss.”

[banter about not-hot stuff people getting into piss say, culminating with] “Give me swimmer’s ear with your dick!”

Oh god, this is reminding me that just before that, as the sex scene was really getting going, you’re given a choice of having L remain silent or “vocalize”, and choosing that option has him blurt out “I t-think I have covid” – he doesn’t, he’s just overwhelmed and his brain is malfunctioning at the idea of losing his virginity, but good lord that made me laugh.

…I need to stop, but really, last one, here’s a bit where L considers whether to accept his hairdresser’s offer of some product for his hair:

"If I say no I could incur the wrath of someone who in one move could turn me from teenage boy into depressed lesbian."

It is definitely not all fun and games here, though – there are threeish major strands to the plot, and L’s relationship with Val is only one of them. Another has to do with L navigating his still-fairly-recent transition, from dealing with acquaintances who knew him before he was out to enduring the vagaries of interacting with the NHS while trans (it’s not great, though not as bad as you might expect). And then the last has to do with the Internet: like most of us, L is terminally online, and going to uni during COVID has probably exacerbated matters. He’s often checking tumblr or Discord chat while the other events of the game are progressing (these are rendered in Ink with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude), and there are extended sequences as he falls down rabbit-holes, watching interminable arguments about whether only TERFs talk about “bi lesbians” or seeing the control-freak mod of the Discord server, Gerstin, throw their weight around.

I have to admit that I found this last element the least compelling; by its nature, the online stuff largely lacks the grounding in detail that’s so engaging through the rest of the game, and it also goes on fairly long – admittedly, part of the point is that internet stuff in general, and Gerstin in particular, is a whole lot, but that point could have been made in a pacier way, I think. Gerstin’s version of friendship with L also lacks ambiguity; they’re clearly earmarked as toxic from the start, and things only escalate from there (seriously, they wind up endorsing eugenics!), so when you’re finally given the choice to de-friend them it’s cathartic but a very long time coming.

I wasn’t ever frustrated with L for not having kicked them to the kerb long ago, though, because the spine uniting all the disparate elements of this three-or-four-hour game is L’s crisis of confidence. The one bit of mechanics in the game, so far as I can tell, is that your assertiveness is tracked, and eventually slots you into one of two different endings. Early on, L understandably enough is a wallflower’s wallflower, barely able to nod hello or ask people to use his preferred pronouns. But through making real friends, getting laid, and getting a bit of perspective on his life, he (well, you) is given the opportunity to stand up for himself a little more. The choice-density in Sextuple L is fairly low, but almost always when you get one, you’ll see a more-passive and a less-passive option (and just those two). There are times when keeping your head down makes the most sense, but I suspect there’s a reason that the two main branches are labelled in the game files as “conf” and “bad”: almost always, picking the confident approach will make L’s life better, allowing you to cut loose from toxic relationships, assert your right to dignity, and make out with hot people. Perhaps this is a bit of wish-fulfillment – and speaking of, Val, who’s hot and nice and experienced, maybe comes off a bit overly-perfect – but I can’t say this bothered me at all: the way society works, especially for marginalized folks, standing up for yourself usually is going to get better results than just drifting by, and I found the arc of the “confident” ending heartwarming: L undergoes some bad stuff and comes out of it with scars, but also hard-won wisdom and hope. Not every trans story needs to, or should, end like this – but it’s kind of lovely to see one that does.

It’s long past time to bring this in for a landing, and by tradition this is the paragraph where I get to nitpicking. Besides the Discord stuff going on a bit (and Gerstin being the fucking worst), I suppose I have to gripe about the interface, which has you clicking after every couple of paragraphs to get the next bit of text (and if you click too many times, that can trigger a screen-wipe as you transition to the next passage). I loved the prose so much this bothered me much less than it should have, and there are a few places where it helps the punchline of a joke land with that much more force, but really this should probably have been reined in. There’s one sequence – the one that earns the “fatphobia” content warning – that unlike other times where L acts kind of shitty, goes textually unremarked-upon, which doesn’t feel great and could probably be sharpened. Oh, and there’s one typo I found: “right of passage” for “rite of passage”.

Of course, for a game of this length, having only one typo is amazingly clean, and that’s how I feel about Sextuple L’s flaws: sure, they’re there, and I suppose worth pointing out, but they sure didn’t reduce my enjoyment. This is my favorite game of the Comp so far; it’s fleet, human, and funny.

…oh, before I sign off, I said I’d come back to my theory on the sixth L, right? The easy answer is, er, L – as in the protagonist. But I’ve got another idea. Each of the game’s five acts is titled with one of the Ls: the fetish-focused opening is Latex, for example, running through the confrontational scenes in Leather, the consequences of the bloody, ill-advised hookup in Lipstick, engaging with L’s romantic feelings for Val (and the suffocating nature of your relationship with Gerstin) in Love, and in Lust, finally facing the world with open arms. What comes after all that? Life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truck is unnervingly dark.

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

A distant groaning fills the air.

(Exits: Field, Path)

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

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

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