Reviews by Mike Russo

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

There’ve been a goodly number of short Texture games this Comp and last, and call me jaded but by now I’ve got a pretty solid sense of what to expect when I see one coming up next: a personal narrative with a reasonable albeit clunky metaphor, confusing use of the drag-and-drop interface, interestingly flawed writing, and minimal branching. Leave it for the last such game in my queue to leave me spluttering and unsure of what I’ve just seen: All Hands is, I swear to y’all, a limited-parser game in Texture form. I didn’t know you could do such a thing, but now that I have, I think the system might be almost perfect for it?

In retrospect, this maybe should have been obvious to me. The drag-verbs-onto-nouns interface is quite similar to how classic graphic adventures were set up, but since most games tend to change the verbs on offer with each passage, the resemblance is typically obscured. Here, the player gets a consistent trio that map cleanly to traditional IF actions – reflect/examine, take, and approach/go – and the author’s also set things up so that after an introductory section, you’re able to wander around different areas of a ship and even revisit places you’ve been before. And while I wasn’t even aware Texture could do much in the way of state-tracking, there are obstacles that are clearly puzzles, and which respond in different ways if you’ve acquired the right tool or piece of information. I wouldn’t say any of them are challenging – this is very much an exploration-focused game – but this is a sturdy formula to drive player engagement, and it’s well-realized here.

Uncharacteristically, I’m three paragraphs in and I haven’t said anything about the game’s plot or themes; it’s time to remedy that, but take the omission as an indication of just how much the structure bowled me over. So you’re a young person living in a fantasy version of the real world who’s always been fascinated by the sea, and as part of your backstory, your sister killed by sea monsters, so this fascination has a dark, obsessive element to it too. One night while wandering the coast, you come across an unearthly vessel that plays host to a strange, ocean-going carnival. The ringmistress invites you aboard and gives you a chance to explore before the show begins, and as you poke around belowdecks, you can uncover the ship’s secrets, some of which are uncannily personal…

The premise is over the top, in other words, and the writing sometimes doesn’t sell it as effectively as it could – as you climb the ladder onto the ship, for example, you’re told that there’s a bunch of dust on each rung, indicating that it’s been a long time since there’ve been any visitors coming aboard. It’s presumably meant to be a spooky touch, but it’s rendered ridiculous by the fact that you’re scaling the ladder in the middle of a storm, a detail that this very passage takes pains to remind you of. But there are some authentically eerie notes too, like the observation that the ship’s larder seems to stock only root vegetables, which is bizarre and oddly specific. Overall, despite its moments of weakness, I liked the prose; unfortunately, you’ll need to trust me on that because I played the game on mobile which meant that whenever I tried to copy and paste any excerpts into my notes, it crashed (Texture gonna Texture).

The game’s climax is a nice capstone too, snapping into focus some thematic elements whose presence earlier in the narrative seemed slightly off. It seems like there were several different endings the player can choose between, based on how deeply they plumbed the ship’s mysteries, which was a pleasant way to make the parserlike gameplay relevant to the story, though once again one of Texture’s foibles reduced my enjoyment; I wanted to go back and try out some of the other options, but without an undo or save/load option, that would have meant replaying the whole game from the beginning.

I guess I can’t help banging on about Texture even when reviewing a game I enjoyed; it’s a frustrating piece of technology. But for a change, I can actually see how it supports what a game is trying to accomplish, and the tweaks I’d want to see to make the system work better are just tweaks, not fundamental reimaginings. That’s an exciting place to leave my journey with Texture for the year, so nice work, All Hands; your weirdo creepy circus and this weirdo creepy engine are a surprisingly good fit.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I’ve found myself increasingly interested in non-fictional IF over the past few years, and not just because of a love for lexical paradoxes; the gotcha of pointing out that “interactive fiction” is underbroad as well as overbroad has long since grown stale, after all. No, what’s unique about these games is that they’re the logical end point of quite visible, longstanding trends – I’m thinking here of the decades-long shift towards more personal IF, which was of course turbo-charged by the rise of choice-based games but does have roots that predate it, as well as the significant increase in the prominence and respectability of the memoir in the broader culture – but by this sensible extrapolation, they wind up putting revelatory pressure on the “interactive” part of IF.

If a game is telling a true story, after all inviting a player to interact with it, allowing interactivity to directly change the narrative would be self-undermining (…though it occurs to me that could be a viable strategy; we’re still waiting for the IF equivalent of Adaption). But there are other approaches available; You Couldn’t Have Done That, an almost-memoir with an autistic protagonist from a couple years ago, offers multiple choices at key decision points but redirects the narrative onto the critical path if the player strays from what’s possible for the player, providing a concrete but frustrating look at unrealized alternatives. And my own game Sting from a couple of years ago lets the player act in the gaps in my memories, where I don’t fully recall the order that things happened or the exact details of conversations I had. One could argue these are bits of sleight of hand, and I suppose that’s true. But at the same time, it’s also the case that regular fictional IF very rarely allows for anything like true player agency. The illusions provided by nonfictional IF may put these tactics on more obvious display, but to my mind that’s a virtue, not a vice – part of what I enjoy about games in this subgenre is that they require authors to think more creatively about interaction, and help me better understand what’s going on when I engage with an author’s mind via a piece of IF.

I’m writing this overlong, probably over-theorized, introduction because I think it would be easy to write a review of My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition that focuses just on the content, because it is searing and intense: the game chronicles the author’s year in several treatment facilities as they worked to survive a severe mental health crisis that, among other impacts, dramatically reduced their cognitive function. That crisis by itself would be more than enough to carry the game’s weight, but the author also experienced – and writes about – parental abuse, transphobia and misgendering, suicidal thoughts, and the bureaucratic nightmares of America’s heath care, insurance, and housing systems. But the narrative isn’t misery tourism by any stretch of the imagination, as the author throughout highlights the things that helped them hold on and survive, the art they continued to create despite the incredible limitations they faced, and the authentic moments of connection and joy they found along the way.

The writing tells this story in direct and affecting prose that’s confident in its power; it knows that a specific, well-chosen detail evokes far more emotion than purplishly exaggerated language. I have a lot of these in my notes, but here are a few examples from the early parts of the game:

"[The pseudo-dementia] even affected how I could eat food: because of the high executive dysfunction that was now in my brain, I could only eat food that was simple in texture, simple to prepare, and easy to eat. I ate a lot of cups of Kraft Mac and cheese at that time.

"When I was in the ER, they couldn’t give me access to a pen due to my suicidal ideations—they were scared I would hurt myself. But I was desperate for a writing utensil, and they were able to give me a little crayon pack: one that you would give to children, with the colors yellow, red, blue, and green. I was very grateful to receive it."

There are also some wry bits that made me laugh – a quartet of paintings depicting the author, their twin, and their parents is titled “Leo Tolstoy Was Right About Families.”

So yes, the narrative here deals with very weighty subject matter, and is very well-told. But I was just as impressed by the structure the game uses for the story. The “exhibition” referred to in the title is entirely literal, as you’re positioned as a visitor to a museum that houses a collection of concrete artifacts from the author’s odyssey. A lovely dual-window view displays text in the right window, and images in the left – the interface elegantly recreates the quintessential museum-going experience of moving your eyes back and forth between an object and its informational label. The game goes even further by embodying the player; rather than flicking through a catalogue of items, you’re given a map of each wing of the show, and use directional navigation controls to decide where you want to go. This means the player can decide to go back to look at a previously-visited object if a later one recontextualizes it, or choose when they feel ready to move on to the next collection. And critically, there’s a small bit of friction at every step – walking around is quick but not instantaneous, and the sound of footsteps imposes a short but noticeable delay when moving from wing to wing.

The effect of all these choices is to create distance, but it’s not the kind of distance that keeps the player at arm’s length; rather, it’s a reflective distance that invites the player to engage with what they’re seeing and reading, and then think about it. There are certainly moments when the exhibition is overwhelming, like long screeds of journal entries written in the throes of crisis, or when a piece of art that depicts a source of chaos in the author’s life fills the screen. But these are balanced by moments of peace and isolation, which I found made the moments of intensity even more impactful since they had time to land. It also helps draw attention to some of the subtler aspects of the game’s design, like the clearly-intentional way that a positive COVID test kit is tucked away in its own isolated niche.

The way the presentation focuses on a selected set of the impedimenta of the author’s journey is also a smart way of acknowledging that the full experience can never be communicated to someone who hasn’t gone through something like this: this approach provides concrete, tangible examples and then leaves space for the player’s mind to fill in the gaps. Sure, some examples had more personal resonance for me than others – the author’s practice of writing themself a letter on an important anniversary date is one I’ve used myself, for example, whereas I’m pretty sure I would dislike all the anime series that get mentioned – but that’s not the point, because the game’s methods of fostering engagement don’t rest on anything so flimsy as relatability.

I find it can often be challenging to write good criticism of works like this that engage – often uncomfortably – with intense, personal trauma. Beyond the obvious tendency to softpedal critiques (“your suffering was insufficiently entertaining” is not a sentence anyone ever wants to write), I think it’s also often the case that reviewers overemphasize the bravery of the author for sharing their story, without acknowledging that bravery all by itself doesn’t make for a good work of art. So while I do think the author is brave and have intense empathy for what they’ve gone through, I also wanted to spell out very clearly that I was very impressed too by the craft that went into this game, both as to writing and as to design; I’ve written down a 9 for it in my rating spreadsheet, which is as high as anything else I’ve rated this year, and I might adjust it upwards when I do my final scoring. This one’s not to be missed.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Would it be braggy to say that I don’t think I’ve ever had the showing-up-for-a-test-and-you-haven’t-studied dream? When I was in school, I had the Lisa-Simpsonish trait common to many people-pleasing nerds of kind of enjoying tests for the opportunities they offered for external validation, and I guess as a result tests, even when they were hard, never generated the same intense apprehension that makes them the stuff of literal nightmares for many (to this day I do still have anxiety dreams about the time in college that I failed to drop a PE class that I couldn’t attend since it clashed with my course schedule – make of that what you will). So it was something of a revelation to me when I entered the endgame of Last Vestiges and suddenly realized I was wildly unprepared for what this locked-room mystery required of me if I wanted to solve it.

After Mayor McFreeze and Death on the Stormrider, this is the third mystery in the comp that decouples the puzzles required to trigger the end of the game and the steps needed to actually solve the mystery – I continue to like this structure, though its recurrence is making me wonder if this is a well-settled design approach that I’m only belatedly catching on to? – but here, instead of Mayor McFreeze’s medium-dry-goods puzzles and Death on the Stormrider’s NPC-manipulation challenges, progress involves solving a series of escape-room style puzzles. It took me a minute to get into the swing of this, since it felt somewhat at odds with fairly-grounded vibe established by the game’s narration, and I felt another moment of dissonance once I reached the end of the chain, since it turned out that the reward for solving all the puzzles was finding the victim’s hidden will – protip from someone who knows a bit of inheritance law, you generally want to make it super easy for the authorities to find your will, not conceal it behind a set of arbitrary barriers. But judged on their own terms the puzzles are solid enough, offering a bit of variety without too much challenge (though one picross puzzle was a bit annoying solve since it displayed oddly on my interpreter – fortunately it was pretty easy to intuit the answer).

The implementation has some nice touches, with the various characters having a robust set of conversational topics, and an integrated tutorial helps get new players up to speed. And while I wouldn’t formally count it as a limited-parser game, it’s aggressive about pruning out unused commands to avoid potentially confusing or unexpected interactions. There are some odd choices (the game’s single location doesn’t appear to have a description, just a list of its contents) and an awkward moment here or there (when I wanted to check whether there was anything behind the clothes in the wardrobe, MOVE CLOTHES and TAKE CLOTHES didn’t work, with the less-intuitive X RACK being the right answer), but I found the game generally quite solid.

So everything was going well, until I found the will and the game told me I could trigger the endgame at any time, and I realized I only had a very vague idea of what had happened and no obvious outstanding leads still to investigate. There were a few small clues I’d picked up along the way by asking my superior officer about various bits of forensic analysis that had already been done, and noting a few suggestive details about the objects I’d turned up, but certainly nothing conclusive. And then when I figured I’d just see if I could bluff my way through the game’s concluding quiz – which works similarly to Antony and Cleopatra, where you need to select your theory via a multiple-choice menu – I was reasonably confident about my guess of suspects, maybe fifty-fifty on my guess about the general cause of death… and then was confronted with this set of choices for the final question on what specifically killed the victim:

1 - drug overdose

2 - self-inflicted cut injury

3 - adverse side effect of propranolol

4 - adverse side effect of antidepressants

5 - drug interaction

6 - gunshot wound

7 - stroke

8 - heart attack

9 - ruptured esophageal varices

10 - stomach ulcers

11 - intractable vomiting

12 - diverticular bleeding

13 – tuberculosis

Thus the anxiety – as far as I can tell, there’s nothing you can do in the game to get a primer on what diverticular bleeding is, or an NPC you can consult to fill you in on the specific side effects or interactions of drugs. So for me the game ended in a decidedly un-Sherlockian fit of panicked trial-and-error guessing; after four or five tries I eventually got there by process of elimination, but rarely have I felt a less sleuthy sleuth.

The game’s postscript explains what I was missing: apparently the author wrote it as a proof of concept for potentially using IF as a teaching tool for people studying forensics or medical examination. Used as part of a course of study where players would have outside resources to consult and a sense of what questions to ask, this final challenge could actually work really well. This focus on pedagogy also makes sense of some aspects of the game that feel underbaked (I haven’t mentioned the plot or characters that much in this review since there isn’t much to talk about on either head), as well as the rationale for the easy escape-room style puzzles, which I suspect are meant to be there as a pleasant bit of sugar to make the lesson more fun.

But with all that said – yes, this is exactly showing up at the test without having studied, and without even knowing you should have studied and there was going to be this kind of a test at all. So as a Comp entry offered up without more warning or context for the player, I can’t judge Last Vestiges as that successful; nonetheless, I’m intrigued by this approach, and could easily see myself enjoying a future game along the same lines that offers lay people an opportunity to access the information they’d need to be successful, and maybe learn something along the way (I told you I’m a nerd, turns out I want IF Comp to be more like school).

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I keep turning the title over in my head. “Artful Deceit” works on a literal level, sure, for a mystery centering on the death of an art magnate that at first appears to be an accident but ultimately proves to be murder most foul. But zoom out a step and it’s still got some apt resonance, since the game’s a retro artifact, packaged as a Commodore 64 disk image that requires an emulator to access. The two-tone blue startup screen, the noticeable delay when typing commands, the feelies that offload long text-dumps to pdfs to reduce the game’s memory footprint – all of these are integral parts of the experience that wouldn’t be replicable if the game were just another .blorb file. But where once these elements were the inevitable consequences of then-cutting-edge hardware, now they’re limitations affirmatively chosen to evoke a specific response: an artful deceit, you might say.

I don’t mean that to be a slam on retro gaming as a category, or this game in particular; heck, you could safely argue that “artful deceit” is redundant inasmuch as all art involves an artist creating an illusion that may make gestures towards realism but is nothing of the sort. But if the medium is the message, I always wonder why an author chooses to introduce the level of friction that comes with a game that’s an intentional throwback to a 40-year-old experience of playing a game: is it just nostalgia, or is it something more that explains why the player’s expected to wait over a minute for the game to load, or put up with typing LOOK INTERIOR GARAGE DOOR instead of X INTERIOR?

Artful Deceit isn’t an exercise in throwback annoyance for its own sake, I should admit. There are some notable player-friendly touches, like a means/motive/opportunity system that signposts to the player when they’ve gathered enough evidence to solve (and prove) an aspect of the case, and unlike many self-consciously old-school puzzlers, there are robust hints and a complete walkthrough. Meanwhile, if the lack of implemented scenery grates on someone used to more modern IF, and the NPCs aren’t especially interactive, that’s both authentic to the 80s experience and also helps keep the player focused on the core gameplay needed to solve the puzzles and reach the ending.

At the same time, elements of the design did start to grate, over and above the lack of the conveniences offered by a modern parser. Progress requires knowing that at some point you’ll need to leave the scene of the crime to drive to the victim’s workplace, despite the absence of any specific clueing that this is possible, for example; and a bug meant that I wasn’t able to complete the game despite having all the necessary evidence in hand (Spoiler - click to show)(I happened to search the corner of the sculpture that had the magenta button first, and when I pushed it, the hidden compartment popped open even though I hadn’t realized there were other buttons – much less that the correct combination was hidden in several paintings in an overly-literal interpretation of art having a message – which meant the game didn’t recognize that I’d fully solved this puzzle chain). Modern games have issues like this, too, but what feels like a forgivable oversight there can sometimes come off as deliberate obtuseness in a retro context, through no fault of the author.

The details of the plot also sometimes made me happy to have left the 80s far back in the past. The resolution of the mystery hinges on some fairly retrograde thriller tropes that struck me as insufficiently motivated, and left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth – it’s the kind of plot that could be palatable if viewed through a revisionist lens, but in my opinion isn’t much fun anymore when played straight.

All these pros and cons might just add up to the same thing, which is that Artful Deceit is successful at its aesthetic endeavor of recreating a long-gone moment in time. When writing these reviews, I generally try to be sympathetic to authorial aims and judge a game according to how well it meets its brief, so I suppose I should end things there. But – cards on the table – I was one in 1982, and didn’t really get into IF until I was almost 20, so in this instance the nostalgia of imagined time travel is lost on me, and I’m left going back to the question with which I opened the review: what’s the point of all this effort, really? If Artful Deceit is content to be a view back to the early 80s, but as far as I could tell it doesn’t use the perspective granted by age to say anything distinctive about the era, either in terms of the culture depicted, the experience created by then-current gameplay aesthetics, or the ludonarrative implications of contemporary hardware. Let me repeat: that’s not necessarily a failing, but in this case I was left wanting something more.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Is there a name for the genre of games that are structured around collecting all the endings? Insomnia, in this year’s Spring Thing, comes to mind (still need to review that one) but I feel like I’ve played a bunch of others; they tend to be choice-based, with strong Time-Cave-style branching leading to a variety of equally-ridiculous endings, each playthrough is typically pretty short, they have absurdist premises and/or senses of humor, and the only gameplay challenge is typically how much lawnmowering the player wants to do before calling it a day? If not, there really should be, if only because the most interesting thing about All the Troubles Come My Way is the way that it is but also isn’t an Insomnia-like (look, we’ll workshop the name later, let me just get through this review).

On the “way it is” side, we can firmly tick the absurdist premise and/or sense of humor box: you play Johnny Montana, a cowboy from Texas who’s somehow (if you think this “somehow” is ever explained, or at all important, you are in the wrong genre) been transported to modern-day New York City, but instead of the game being about that strange, fish-out-of-water experience, it picks up an indeterminate amount of time later where your biggest challenge is finding your misplaced hat after a bender. The writing also wrests some humor from the clash between your old-fashioned personality and your new, incongruous surroundings:

“No, ma’am, that just wouldn’t be just,” you say. You try to finish the sentence dramatically by looking wistfully in the distance, but being in a bathroom, the distance is limited. You end up just squinting somewhat suspiciously at a toothbrush resting on the sink.

Playthroughs are also pretty short; I counted three major ways to win the game (by getting a, not necessarily your, hat), and not counting the prologue section, which is skippable on replays, the shortest probably takes about two minutes and the longest maybe ten. And as the blurb says, the game is clearly meant to be replayable, with engagement coming from how deeply you explore the possibility space.

Turning to the “way it isn’t” side of the ledger, though, the possibility space isn’t strictly branching; instead, it’s hub-and-spoke-y, with three major locations you can eventually move between, each of which offers at least a few sub-areas you can investigate or different ways you can engage. Relatedly, there’s also a mechanical system that impacts your ability to move between different branches: you have a quartet of RPG-style stats, with evocative yet vague names like Southern Charm and Rodeo, that sometimes increase when you make decisions and which gate certain actions. It’s an interesting idea but I found it an awkward fit: for one thing the player generally doesn’t have enough information to consciously decide how to build their character (at one point, questioning whether dirt is still brown in the future gets you a point of Cowboy Justice) or weigh whether a less-optimal-sounding choice that checks a strong stat is better than a more-appealing one that relies on a dump stat. Making things harder, unless you take notes you can’t even see how your build has evolved in a particular playthrough – I think this might be a limitation of the default implementation of Ink, since I couldn’t help thinking that a Twine sidebar or ChoiceScript stats page would have come in handy.

The system also seems overengineered for such a short game, like it needed more space to feel worthwhile. This is especially the case due to the game’s last major departure from the Insomnia-like template: all the endings are emphatically not created equal, since in only one of them do you find your own hat. And inverting my narrative intuition, that ending is the easiest, quickest one to get – in fact, I got it first time out, just as I was starting to feel like I understood the game’s vibe and systems. I replayed a few times and saw that it’s got a fair bit more to offer, and there are some fun vignettes in this portion of the game – I liked the verbal duel with the Indiana Jones impersonator and chatting with the costume shop clerk about 12 Angry Men – but since those other endings seemed manifestly worse (you mostly wind up with various hats that don’t belong to you and might only be cowboy-hat-adjacent rather than the genuine article), all this felt too much pointless padding; after all, I’d already gotten the “real” ending.

I should note that I’m no exponent of slavish adherence to a formula, and in theory, the attempt to expand out the Insomnia-like approach to include more robust gameplay systems is one I could see working. And the writing does a good job of being funny without becoming too annoyingly zany. But some of the specific choices made by All the Troubles Come My Way undercut the benefits of the new tack it’s taken; either make the RPG system lighter and more of a joke, or more important and legible to the player, and put the good ending at the far side of the content rather than right at the start, and I think you’d be on to something.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Joey Acrimonious has written some of the best recent IF that includes graphically-depicted sex – the blurb here refers to its genre as “erotica” rather than “AIF”, and I think that’s an appropriate distinction as to the author’s previous work too. Turbo Chest Hair Massacre is a farce that culminates in the world’s most debauched description of a robot changing her cooling fan, while Digit is a sweet romance that takes its time getting to the moment when its well-drawn characters take their flirtation to the next level. Both mostly progressed as standard parser games with maybe a few lewd touches before climaxing with set-piece sex scenes; Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest breaks the mold, though, because this one starts out with a bang. Specifically, the eponymous heroine is enjoying a bout of vigorous, lovingly-described lovemaking with her barbarian lover – the sex is so good that when he casually mentions that his birthday is coming up, she rejects his suggestion for a casual hang in favor of knocking over a small country and giving it to him as a gift. This sweet gesture is somewhat complicated when her main contact turns up dead and a mysterious assassin starts chasing her down. Hijinks – and lots of interstitial sexy bits – ensue.

The game wrings a lot of comedy out of playing its absurd premise so straight it ends up way over the top, which is to say, it’s very very camp. The prose is written in an exaggerated sword-and-sorcery style that left me chortling. Even the tiny bit of narration when you open your journal (which handily tracks your progress and your to-do list) is an opportunity for a gag:

Zorklang checked her scriven notes, for all great despoilers keep a journal of their deeds and intentions.

Oh, did I not mention that the bat lady is named “Zorklang the Despoiler”? And that she has a catchphrase she intones whenever she meets anyone, warning them that she is “bound by the laws of neither gods nor men”? She also has wings and a cool cape, making her a sexy distaff Batman, plus she has mind control powers she can invoke via the eponymous DESPOIL command? She has more authentically chiropteran powers too, like echolocatory hearing and an impressive sense of smell (OK, it’s less impressive than the whole DESPOILing thing, but still pretty good).

This suite of abilities is used to largely good effect in the game’s puzzles. There are a few that involve inventory items, fiddling with mechanical contraptions, or solving a navigation challenge, but for the most part the player winds up searching out hidden ways, recruiting weak-minded confederates, and leaning into her unique abilities. There are some implementation hiccups that meant some puzzles weren’t as smooth as they could have been – one stymied for a while because I hadn’t noticed that GIVE OBJECT defaulted to making an offering to my pet cat, rather than the NPC who needed an object, making me thing I’d tried the solution and it hadn’t worked. And there’s a late-game sequence that’s only kicked off once you notice that one detail in a single previously-visited locale in the largeish map has changed; the player’s given a light hint pointing them in the right direction, in fairness, but the detail in question is just tacked onto the end of the location’s description without being broken out into a new line or anything, so I found it very easy to overlook.

As long as I’m segueing into complaints – don’t worry, I’ll get back to praise soon enough – I also wasn’t entirely sold on the lewd bits that came (yes, yes, I know) in the middle parts of the game. The opening sex scene is necessary to motivate the game’s plot, and is silly and sweet in equal measure, while the closing one (of course there’s a closing one) is likewise a nice capstone reinforcing what a great time the sexy main couple have with each other; they’re the kind of sex scenes you could take home to meet your parents. But the sex in the rest of the game doesn’t feel nearly as organic; often you’ll just be running around doing your regular parser-game stuff and then run across people making out, or the game will pause and drop not-at-all-subtle hints that you should relax, nudge nudge wink wink. It largely avoids the creepiness of the typical exploitation-film approach – you do use your mind control powers to kick off a small orgy at one point, but it’s pretty clear the characters were just looking for an excuse – but these sequences do feel somewhat shoe-horned in, and without of the emotional connection that animates the lovemaking between Zorklang and her boy toy, the florid language risks just seeming silly:

Gasps and sighs of fleshly pleasure answered the salacious squelch and gurgle of her hotly slathered loins. Arching her back and rocking her hips in an ancient, primal rhythm, she painted the bedsheets with sweat and slick passion.

And speaking of potentially unnecessary elements, there’s a treasure-collection mechanic that gives you a score post-endgame based on how much loot you’ve been able to plunder along the way. It’s right there in the title, I suppose, and the system is entirely optional, but its inclusion still struck me as bizarre – anyone who can try to steal a whole country as a token of affection probably doesn’t need to steal minor valuables along the way.

There, now my critical duties are fulfilled and I can close by giving some more examples of how Bat Lady Plunder Quest’s genre self-awareness made me laugh. There’s an absolutely savage skewering here of the kind of DnD player who won’t shut up about their tortured and completely plot-irrelevant backstory, as well as a blurb laying out the in-game lore for the setting’s dog-furry race that gets increasingly shamefaced as it goes:

The two were of dog-person lineage, a race of beast-people: half-human, and half-dog. Well, more like 90% human and 10% dog. Well, more like humans, but just with cute dog ears and silly dog tails.

The ways other characters respond to your introductory catchphrase also never fail to charm:

“I am Severskidim the Crime Lord,” replied the rather bemused man lounging on a plush chaise longue. “My brothels, gambling-dens, tobacconists, and other illicit enterprises payeth no tax, and I do pass the savings on to me.

A few dodgy puzzles and some unnecessary sex didn’t do much to reduce my enjoyment of the game, in other words. I do wish there’d been a full walkthrough uploaded, rather than the helpful but incomplete hints we’ve got now, since there is more friction than I’d like, but Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest is funny and charming, and lives up to its predecessors as a strangely wholesome and wholly entertaining romp.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

2023's had a lot of boatiness, but it was also murderier than usual, with a solid number of mysteries represented in the entries. Death on the Stormrider crosses the streams, being a murder-mystery on a boat – on a steampunk airship, no less, which makes the protagonist’s isolation and vulnerability even more intense. As a foreigner trying to work their way home on a ship where only one crewmember spoke their language, things were already parlous enough, but when that one crewmember is found murdered – with your brother fingered as the only suspect and thrown in the brig – you’ve got to do everything you can to find the true culprit. Of course, you can’t interview suspects or read any incriminating documents, and you start out locked out in your cabin, though it seems like that wasn’t intentional. At least the rest of the crew is busy getting ready for landing, and will mostly ignore you.

The setup here is compelling in narrative terms, but is also cannily contrived to avoid the typical weaknesses of parser-IF mysteries. The language barrier means there’s no fussing about with a clearly-inadequate conversation system, and also explains why everyone else mostly leaves you to your own devices as you wander around and taking everything that isn’t nailed down: they’re busy, and it’s too much trouble to tell you to stop unless you seem to be messing with something important. In fact, though their vibes are wildly different, I was reminded of Mayor McFreeze’s analogous approach – in both games, you’re mostly solving navigation puzzles to thoroughly explore the map, with the investigation part of the gameplay largely reducing to simply examining the stuff you find along the way.

A difference is that in place of the medium-dry-goods puzzles of Mayor McFreeze, in Death on the Stormrider almost all the puzzles involves engaging with the various NPCs – who are in fact quite active, wandering about the ship bent on their own tasks. And just because you can’t talk to them doesn’t mean you can’t interact with them, or they with you. As expected, if you poke your head into some especially important areas, they’ll quickly eject you, and there are also many locked doors that can only be opened by a crewmember who has reason to pass through them. As a result, the primary gameplay involves observing the NPCs’ movement patterns, scoping out hiding places, and creating distractions to get them to go where you want them to. It’s nonstandard, but the optional tutorial that takes the player through the first major puzzle does an admirable job of demonstrating the game’s systems; likewise, the included map makes navigation significantly easier.

The prose isn’t called upon to do anything fancy – it has enough to do to situate the player, alert them to exits, highlight the activity of crewmembers in the immediate or nearby locations, while noting any interactable objects. Still, I found it nonetheless communicated a strong sense of place in just a few words, like this early segment that has you forced to the perimeter of the ship:

"The maintenance passage (forward) ends, sharply, terrifyingly, with a narrow metal platform—and then nothing but the great expanse of the air behind you, the ground so far below that you can barely make it out. A hatch to port leads back to the safety of your cabin."

Less positively, I did feel like the writing sometimes wasn’t up to the task of communicating the key clues needed to solve the puzzles. For example, I was able to figure out that I needed to get through a currently-inaccessible exit, but the description of the situation seemed to point somewhere entirely different from the actual solution (Spoiler - click to show)(trying to move the shelf in the miscellany does say you’re unlikely to succeed with your bare hands, but the rest of the response seems to indicate there’s too much stuff, rather than just one object that’s too heavy to shift unaided). And in one of the final puzzles, the game seemed to go out of its way to provide an anti-clue: (Spoiler - click to show) once you get the wrench, most location descriptions print out an additional line drawing attention to the presence of pipes you can sabotage, but that line is notably omitted in the captain’s cabin so I assumed there weren’t any present. Still, the final puzzle is intuitive and satisfying, requiring the player to synthesize several different strands of information to determine the actual reasons for the death of the murdered crewman.

That synthesis also points to my other criticism, though, which is that when it comes to the mystery side of things, the game leaves an awful lot up to the player. For one thing, while the stakes – your brother’s life and freedom – are effectively conveyed in the opening, they’re left in the background for most of the game’s running time. The player character doesn’t have much subjectivity, and while I kept expecting that there’d be a sequence where I’d come across my brother, or at least the locked door to the brig where he’s held, nothing like that ever happens (oddly, while the brig is noted on the map, its presence isn’t ever mentioned in game, making it seem like it’s sealed off in a parallel dimension or something). And then the ending doesn’t give the player very much: I found what I think is the optimal resolution, and have a pretty solidly worked-out theory of the various intersecting crimes and deceptions that played out aboard the Stormrider, which is reasonably satisfying from a gameplay perspective, but the final text felt strangely perfunctory, declining to dwell on the protagonist’s joyful reunion with their brother or even to explicate the mystery’s solution. The ending of a whodunnit doesn’t need to provide emotional catharsis or spell out the answer to the puzzlebox, I suppose, but it’d be nice if it did something.

All of which is to say that Death on the Stormrider leans more on the crossword than narrative side of the parser-IF dilemma. But it’s generally a good crossword that cleverly matches its novel gameplay to its premise; if a post-Comp release cleans up some of the clueing issues, and a player goes into it wanting to uncover all the game’s secrets for their own sake rather than to earn a story-based payoff, I think there’s a whole lot of fun to be had here.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I’ve read a fair bit of Russian literature, and I tend to like political fiction. The Whisperers, then, is up my alley: it’s an interactive play that is set, and notionally performed, in the USSR in 1938, chronicling the lives of five inhabitants of a communal apartment in Moscow as they make an escalating series of poor decisions that eventually end in catastrophe (but I repeat myself: I already said it’s about the USSR in 1938, when the Great Purge reached its climax).

Before delving into the plot of the play, it’s worth sticking with the framing for a beat. The conceit is that the player is attending a performance of a novel entertainment – at scene breaks, one of the characters in the play will break the fourth wall and ask for the audience to indicate their choice of several narrative options via cheering; whichever one seems to have the greatest enthusiasm behind it will be chosen.

As a way to diegetically explain the mechanics of choice-based fiction, this is smartly done, and I actually wished the game had done more to explore it. At the beginning, you’re given the choice of how literally to take these mechanics; the author recommends a mode where the player’s decisions are given priority, making the game play like any other work of choice-based IF, but there’s also a mode where you just play one audience-member among many, with your voice not necessarily being determinative. I took a risk and picked the latter option, but I was disappointed that there wasn’t more explication of how the audience was responding to the play, and whether my hooting and cheering was making a difference. This is especially the case because some decisions involve resistance to Stalinist orthodoxy; the actor framing the choices swears that they’ve been given special dispensation not to report anyone who evidences signs of deviation, but that struck me as a hollow promise. The audience is already lightly characterized – the player’s given a choice of whether to sit among the proletariat, the party bosses, or those in need of reeducation – so making more explicit the implied social context in which the play is being performed could have enriched proceedings further, I think.

Another interesting aspect of the presentation is the use of stage directions. These are generally a bit more heavy-handed than I’d expect to see in a real theatrical script, but given that a player doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the actors’ interpretations, I think that’s a good choice. But among their idiosyncrasies is the approach to indicating the volume at which dialogue is delivered; the game notes that unless otherwise indicated, all lines are spoken at a whisper. On the one hand, this is both narratively and thematically apt: with five characters crammed into three thin-walled rooms, keeping one’s voice down is both polite and, given the police-state context, prudent. And keeping even extremes of emotion and distress sotto vocce suggests the ways that life in authoritarian states is lived; concealment is the default, rather than an exception. But I found the actual implementation challenging, because of course as I read the game’s text I’d often forget that injunction and assume that un-annotated dialogue was spoken full-volume; again, if the scenes were actually being performed, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the experience of reading the text on the page was different.

The play itself is quite well-written. There’s a certain quality of slightly-awkward effusion that I expect when reading something by a Russian author, and the dialogue captures something of that tone. Here’s a line from one of the two leads, Agnessa, a Trotskeyite idealist, on her feelings about one of her new neighbors:

"No, no it’s nice to see you. I do like you Dariya Yuriivna. I’m not embarrassed that you know it."

Or here’s a bit from the other lead, Nikolai, waxing rhapsodic about his romantic connection with Agnessa:

"Now. I have things now, I love my work, I love my books, I love … things, life! But sometimes, no, all the time; sometime, sometime, a long time ago, when I was a child, something changed. Dreams became safer than life. Yes, there were reasons to wake up. But there were reasons to stay asleep too. As well. I was scared, I guess. And I became bad. But now I wake up, straight up, childishly up, because I know that I might get to be with her."

Sometimes the characters come across as callow, or talk past each other, but that all generally rings true. I do think Whisperers does sometimes presuppose more familiarity with the politics of pre-WWII Russia than the abbreviated pre-game glossary can provide – there’s an extended riff that depends on knowing the context of what “socialism in one country” means, for example – but I think it still works well enough even if you don’t get the nuances. And the themes it engages with are strong: the central couple’s relationship dynamics drive the plot’s main clash, the tension between the political idealism to change an unjust world and the desire to nonetheless live a private, mostly-happy life within it. That conflict is echoed in a lower key by the marriage of the two older characters, as Dariya’s continued attachment to Orthodoxy is part of longstanding worry on the part of her husband Georgy. And then the fifth character, Agnessa’s brother, Sergei, serves primarily to up the stakes, since he’s an NKVD officer.

(Er, I just realized I’m doing the thing I dinged the game for at the beginning of the last paragraph: the NKVD was one incarnation of the Soviet secret police, part of the alphabet-soup sandwich between the Cheka and the KBG).

(Yes, that’s a terrible mixed metaphor).

It’s all solid and resonant – especially now, given the war of aggression the USSR’s succession state is currently waging – but I have to confess that I didn’t find The Whisperers quite as compelling as I expected. All the themes make sense, they’re played in a smart, historically-grounded way, the writing is strong, and the use of interactivity is well-considered. But I suspect the character work isn’t quite up to the same standard. The core due of Agnessa and Nikolai especially sometimes veer into caricature – she’s a true believer who at one point directly says that she doesn’t see a difference between fiction and real life, and he’s so feckless he seems to make decisions purely on impulse. I liked them, but they felt more like types than people. Sergei, meanwhile, is likewise mostly just a plot device, and while Georgy and Dariya have a world-weary charm, they get by far the least spotlight time (I also came across what I think is a bug that undercut the impact of their strand of the story; in my playthrough, I didn’t have Georgy burn Dariya’s idols, but the NKVD still couldn’t turn up anything untoward when they searched the apartment. From looking over the full text of the game via the included script mode, though, it seems like the bad consequences you’d expect to happen should, in fact, happen).

The related issue is that I suspect I didn’t invest myself too heavily in Agnessa and Nikolai’s relationship because it was clear from the jump that they were doomed. The fact that a story telegraphs that it’s a tragedy doesn’t mean it can’t work, of course. But I did feel like the latter stages of the plot hinged too much on, well, plot-y stuff like whether they would get away with their acts of defiance and if they’d have any broader impact – but of course they don’t, and of course they don’t. This is very old history at this point, and besides, I’ve read all three volumes of Gulag Archipelago, there aren’t really any portrayals of Stalinist brutality that can surprise me at this point. Focusing in on the emotions, conveying what it might be like to live in this horrible situation, could have worked, but here’s where I think the archetypal nature of the characters wound up being a flaw. Admittedly, there’s a plot branch that didn’t show up in my playthrough that I suspect might recast the emphasis of the final scenes (Spoiler - click to show) (my audience opted not to have Agenssa tell Nikolai that she was pregnant, which would presumably up the soap-opera quotient) so maybe one point of feedback would be to prioritize that choice in the mode where the player doesn’t get to make all the decisions.

The thing is, when I consider all the issues I’ve raised, it occurs to me that they all boil down to the same actually-kind-of-vapid critique: this is a play that I’m reading rather than seeing performed. With actors bringing life to the characters, and the immersive engagement that theater provides, I think these downsides would melt away, and the work’s very real strengths would be even more apparent. Of course, this is also a piece of IF that’s been entered into an IF competition; it’s entirely appropriate to judge it on the form in which I encountered it. But heck, I enjoy reading Shakespeare, even knowing that that’s far from the ideal way to experience his plays – if anyone ever puts on a production of The Whisperers, I’d be eager to see it, but in the meantime I’m glad it was entered into the Comp.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

ARREST/CHARGE INFORMATION

SEPTEMBER 20, 2006
NAME: 20 EXCHANGE PLACE AKA “SOL FC” AKA “HAYES”
PLACE OF ARREST: 20 EXCHANGE PLACE
ARRESTING AGENCY: NYCPD PCT001

ARREST CHARGES:

CRIMINAL IMPERSONATION (PL 190.26): suspect entered the scene of a hostage situation outside a Financial District bank at 20 Exchange Place. He put himself out as an NYPD officer and engaged in various law enforcement activities, but his level of professionalism and effectiveness was so indescribably low that suspect obviously was nothing of the sort.

AGGRAVATED ASSAULT UPON A POLICE OFFICER (PL 120.11): suspect claims that upon arriving at the scene and asking his notional colleague, Officer CORTEZ, for a briefing, CORTEZ responded with unreasoning hostility and initiated a physical altercation (Office CORTEZ has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into his actions).

ASSAULT IN THE FIRST DEGREE (PL 120.05): suspect, noting that a crowd had gathered around the crime scene, attempted to clear the surroundings. Subsequently, a reporter for the New York Post identified him as a police officer and approached suspect to ask for an update; suspect, apparently incapable of delivering a simple “no comment”, responded with hostility and escalated the situation and eventually initiated a brawl with the journalist (NOTE: eyewitness indicated the Post reporter carried a live mic and was accompanied by a video camera crew; potential credibility issues if we put them on the stand?)

CRIMINAL USE OF A FIREARM (PL 265.09): after the aforementioned physical altercation appeared not to be going his way, suspect fired three “warning shots” in an attempt to stop the brawl, and then aimed his loaded firearm at one of the journalists. Suspect argues that this was a conservative choice, as his only other option was to “go off book”, though he did not elaborate on what that would have entailed.

AGGRAVATED ASSAULT UPON A POLICE OFFICER (PL 120.11) (yes, again): subsequent to the above altercation, Deputy Inspector PASH arrived and attempted to deescalate. Suspect once again initiated a fistfight (NOTE: several eyewitnesses swear that the fight lead to HAYES being shot dead, which is clearly impossible. Did the bank robbers release a hallucinogen or something?)

OBSCENITY (PL 235.05): despite claiming to be a police officer, suspect appears to have an aversion to even as mild an oath as “pissed off”, somehow managing to pronounce it as “p***** off”.

SMOKING (NYCAC 17.503): before initiating planning on how to breach the bank and rescue the 17 hostages, suspect paused to smoke a cigarette within 50 feet of the bank’s entrance. Suspect claims that he had no choice, as he is sufficiently addicted to nicotine that without said cigarette, he would have been so nervous that he would have been forced to blurt out confidential information when engaged in negotiations with the robbers.

EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION – HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT (NYCR A.2.7): suspect seems to harbor a bizarre grudge against Irish-Americans, including claiming not to understand the accent of a decorated member of the NYPD bomb squad (NOTE: see charge under PL 190.26. Who the hell does this guy think makes up the force, anyway?)

AIDING AND ABETTING ROBBERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE (PL 160.15): while suspect purported to be trying to rescue the hostages and apprehend the robbers, his advice and actions were so error-prone as to indicate that he was likely in collusion with the criminals. At every stage, even the most anodyne of his suggestions would lead to disorder within the ranks (see charges under PL 120.05, PL 12.11 x2), assistance to the criminals (see charge under NYCAC 17.503), or catastrophic failure and loss of life (three separate suggestions about how to infiltrate the building, plausible on their face, led to unexpected explosions and death of hostages). One initially-promising sortie via a side door was even brought to a halt when suspect appeared to have some form of seizure, requiring resetting planning from the beginning.

CRIMES AGAINST MIMESIS (IFTR 1-25): please just make them stop.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I feel like there are a larger-than-usual number of sequels in this year’s Comp, and this is probably the most unexpected of them. Last year’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear? was an fun but slight whodunnit that mashed up hard-boiled narration with hard-candy characters; it wrung some solid laughs out of its off-the-wall premise, but gave every sign of being a one-off joke. So when I saw that Bubble Gumshoe had another case, part of me wondered whether the gag would have gone stale. Fortunately the answer is no; Mayor McFreeze still entertains by leaning into its Candyland-gone-bad setting, and changes up the gameplay formula by swapping more traditional IF puzzles for Gum E. Bear’s focus on interviewing suspects.

The plot this time out is a mystery cliché, but a different one from the straightforward who-killed-the-dead-guy hook of the previous installment: the mayor’s femme-fatale wife walks through the door of your office and asks you to check in on him, as she learned he was lured to a meeting with a notorious crime-boss at an abandoned factory on the wrong side of town. But when you go to investigate, you get locked in, and turns out the factory is due for demolition in the morning – you’ve got to escape, and hopefully solve the crime along the way.

My memory of the previous game is that the comedy came largely from one-liners and delicious puns, and those are still in evidence this time out, but I got the most enjoyment from the places where the author really leaned into the absurdity of the game’s world, piling joke upon joke without once cracking a smile:

"The docks once saw fleets of ships coming in full of raw sugar, and leaving full of premium saltwater taffy. But the pollution from Sugar City’s industrial district has given the cola here an extra kick: the extra maintenance costs involved in shoring up the ships’ dissolving hulls put the factory into the red, and when the Good Ship Lollipop foundered right in the middle of the channel - blocking access to all other vessels - that was the final marshmallow in the s’more."

This kind of scene-setting calms down a bit once you reach the main part of the gameplay, but there are still plenty of good lines slipped in even once things get serious, and the endling features a delightful escalation of noir cliches and dessert-based investigative techniques, again all played entirely straight.

I also thought the gameplay structure here was cleverly done. There are basically two tracks the player needs to work through: to escape the factory, you need to solve a series of fairly conventional medium-dry-goods puzzles that are primarily about traversal. But along the way, you’ll also have the opportunity to find and investigate some clues about the titular crime; these aren’t puzzles per se, but the game tracks which ones you’ve found, and then changes the ending based on the information you’ve gathered. This is an elegant way of representing a mystery in IF form – conversing with NPCs is obviously challenging to do in a satisfying way, and requiring the player to demonstrate they’ve figured out the solution can often be tricky, since it’s easy to make things either too easy (most genre-aware players will guess the identity of the bad guy pretty quickly) or too hard (since spelling out the exact way all the clues fit together represents an interface challenge, and may require information the protagonist has but the player doesn’t). And allowing the player to get to the end without solving the mystery helps provide a hint about what they missed, so they can go back and try to do better.

The implementation sadly lets the comedic tone and elegant structure down, though. There aren’t a lot of alternate syntaxes provided, and Inform’s default responses largely haven’t been changed, so I spent a lot of time fighting with the parser and hearing Graham Nelson’s drily amused voice chastising me, which took me out of the world (tip to authors: it only takes fifteen minutes or so to customize the most commonly-used responses, and this goes a very long way to making your game feel polished and unique). There’s a point where I needed to untie a piece of cord from a door, and TAKE CORD, UNTIE CORD, and DETACH CORD were all unsuccessful, with only TAKE DOOR working – which was odd, since I needed the cord, not the door! There are also several things that look like containers that you can’t put anything in, a fair number of disambiguation issues, and long location descriptions that are presented as single unbroken blocks of text.

Beyond the technical aspects of implementation, I also found a fair number of the puzzles required a higher amount of authorial-ESP than I’d like, and solutions sometimes relied on what felt to me like dodgy logic. Like speaking of that guess-the-verb issue I mentioned above, one puzzle requires you to rip a metal door off its hinges using detonator cord, which from my understanding is made of plastic and quite thin, so I wouldn’t have thought it would be up to the challenge. Conversely, I had to go to the hints because I wasn’t sure how to get through this door:

"A cheap, stained wooden door, badly warped by damp. There’s a small keyhole just beneath the brass handle."

Turns out it’s sufficiently fragile that throwing a heavy object into it will break it, but I don’t think that description adequately signposted that brute force would be a solution here (the fact that the keyhole is a separately-implemented object also seems designed to mislead the player).

The investigative track I think is a bit more intuitive than the puzzle track, though again there were places where a bit more hand-holding would have been appreciated, especially where world-building details that might be lost on the player are at issue ([spoiler]I’m thinking here mostly of the need to TASTE various objects, most importantly the dead body, which feels like an egregious violation of crime scene protocol as well as slightly cannibalistic).

As is my wont, I’m harping on details, but it really just is the details that are the issue here; the writing, story, and general design are quite strong, unlike the funny but sometimes-dodgy Gum E. Bear (I solved that one by accusing suspects at random, which I think was a common experience for players). Despite its sometimes-thin implementation and inadequate clueing, Mayor McFreeze represents a real progression; dare I wonder whether we’ll see a completed trilogy next year?