Reviews by Mike Russo

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

The thing about Groundhog Day is that it’s a horror premise dressed up as a rom-com. Like of course there’s the sheer existential terror of the way the time loop cuts you off from the rest of the world, shipwrecked on an isolated outcrop of temporality. But beyond that, God or fate or kismet or whatever taking a direct hand and saying you are meant to be with this one specific person, and will keep you stuck in a timey-wimey rut until you perform just the right steps to unlock the prison? That’s the part that kicks things over into nightmare territory. Even if there’s a spark and connection, life is long and relationships are hard; once time’s arrow is flying forward again, who’s to say what’ll happen next Groundhog Day, or the one after that? If you get in a fight, or decide you want a divorce, will the world stop again until you take it back? Every minute of every day would be torture as your subjectivity is annihilated.

As per usual I am perhaps overthinking things. But Last Valentine’s Day remix of the classic formula comes up with what I think is a better alignment of themes and narrative: if the story is trapping the protagonist in a loop, shouldn’t the resolution also hinge on an internal emancipation? Certainly the main character doesn’t start out the story in any obvious need of a personality adjustment: walking through an unseasonably-warm February afternoon with a spring in their step, they seem to have it all figured out, with their biggest dilemma deciding whether to get orchids or roses for their partner. Given the framing of the game, it’s not much of a surprise when they get home only to be blindsided by a Dear John letter, nor that you quickly get sent back to the beginning of a day that’s suddenly a little colder, reflecting on a relationship that suddenly seems to have some cracks in its façade.

The challenge of a time-loop game is that it can get boring for the player to run down the same track time and again, and in its second iteration, I was worried Last Valentine’s Day was going to fall into that trap; the situations, and even the specific sentences you read, are quite similar to the initial sequence. The modifications are well-chosen to clearly but subtly shift the mood, but I still felt my eyes starting to skim over seemingly-familiar bits of prose. Fortunately, subsequent trips through the loop see even clearer variations, focusing on new characters or situations, or zooming in to focus more on things that were bottom-lined the previous time out. As a result, while the palette of narrative elements stays limited throughout, I found the game remained fresh through its running time.

These narrative elements are decidedly low-key, but effectively play with the central theme of a curdling relationship. You have encounters that foreground the potentially transactional nature of love, highlight the possibility of heartbreak due to betrayal or tragedy, or just provide a light thematic throughline based on the legend of Orpheus (I was disappointed that telling a character that yes, I was familiar with the story, wound up terminating that branch of the conversation rather than leading to a dialogue about what it means). There are plenty of choices available throughout, and while I never got the sense that any particular decision I made was going to have much of an impact – the protagonist’s escape from the loop isn’t a puzzle the player needs to solve by doing everything exactly right, thankfully – these frequent interjections of interactivity succeeded in keeping me engaged as I decided how sympathetic to be to each of the views of love being offered up.

For all that there’s a lot of external incident, though, the game is quite solipsistic, with the reality of the protagonist’s partner never coming through in any concrete way. Instead the focus is all on the protagonist’s feelings and reflections about love. I think this is a reasonable choice for a game that’s so internal, but it does contribute to an impression that the work is intended to speak for and to younger people entering into some of their first relationships (also adding to this impression: the fact that the florist, who I think is described as being in her very early thirties, is referred to as middle-aged, and who, after suffering a romantic setback of her own, bemoans the difficulty of starting all over and worries that she’s far too old to find love again. For the record, I am 42 and only like halfway crumbled into dust). The writing, while generally strong, also occasionally hits a clunky or callow note, like this bit of one of the breakup notes:

"Life with you has been an adventure. There is no other word to describe it. The clouds parted and I started anew. There was so much excitement. And so much angst. I ceased to live in a pit, I ceased to walk on a plateau. I was on a roller coaster, and you were there right beside me, laughing and screaming and crying, all at once."

While I would have enjoyed the game more if its take on love had been a little more grounded and, dare I say, mature, I’ll admit that this is a game with a naïve protagonist who is a little too much in their own head. As I read the game, it gradually makes clear that what’s trapped you in the loop isn’t so much any external force, it’s your own desire to cling to the past and escape heartbreak, and your tendency to catastrophize what’s after all an ordinary and expected part of life, however painful. The prose in the ending is slightly overdone for my tastes, but it hits a properly resonant thematic note: it’s not that you finally move on by jumping through the proper set of hoops, but rather that you move on by moving on. And having gotten the knack, one hopes, there’s no sword of Damocles hanging overhead waiting to strike if you ever again stray from the straight and narrow.

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

I really like riddles. What’s more fun than wordplay, engaging with some cryptic poetry and turning it over and over until it lines up at precisely the right angle and you see the obvious solution that’s been staring you in the face the whole time? I’ve got good memories of a car trip I took with some friends twenty years ago where we killed four or five hours just swapping riddles – somehow I almost stumped everybody with the hoariest of old chestnuts, you know, the whole “a rich man needs it, the poor have more of it than they know what to do with” one, except after fifteen minutes one of my friends looked out the window at a storm-cloud and said “that looks like the Nothing” (you know, from Neverending Story – I told you this was a long time ago) and that shook the answer loose.

That’s the rub, though. Riddles are a good way to pass the time with friends, so you’ve got someone to bounce ideas off of and nothing better to be doing – plus it’s also no big deal if you can’t guess one right, since that just gives someone bragging rights and you can move on to the next one (assuming you’re not going to be a sore loser, skulk after them in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim their prize, then ultimately bite off the finger of their second cousin once removed). In a piece of IF, they’re a high-stakes design element because these forgiving bits of scaffolding disappear: sure, they can go gangbusters, but a distressingly large percentage of the time, if the player doesn’t immediately figure it out, they’re going to grimly stare at it, fail to get any good ideas, try a couple more options, then dispiritedly have recourse to the walkthrough and feel bad about the whole process.

So yeah, if you’re going to have your game hinge on riddles, it’s good to be mindful of the dangers. And also, for the love of God, don’t make the text entry boxes case-sensitive.

Right, now that that’s off my chest we can talk about Paper Magician. This is a short choice-based game where you play a test subject bent on escaping from the lab where they’re confined so they can finally see the things they’ve only read about in books, like the sky. It’s a premise that could be played many different ways, and the game opts for a fairy-tale take. It opens with an extended sequence where you meet a disembodied spirit in a dream who promises to help you escape if you can make them a body – for you have the power to conjure the things you draw or write about into reality. This is a neat idea, and when the writing stays grounded in the protagonist’s perspective, it can be compelling, like this bit where you fantasize about what escape could mean:

"The sensation of placing my hand against a river’s current, running across a field, petting a griffin’s fur. I’ve only truly experienced breathing, the touch of a cold wall, the brush of paper, and the thin solid form of a pencil in my hand."

I like that it’s unclear whether griffins are real in this world, or if, since you only know about what you’ve read in your few books, you just don’t know that they’re mythological. On the other hand, the prose can also feel muddled and vague. Like, it took me a longer time to come to grips with the actually-fairly-simple map of the compound because of stuff like this:

"I see two doors, each one on opposite walls, marked West and South."

Wait, west and south are opposite?

This became a bigger issue as I started to dig into the meat of the game, which involves investigating a few rooms in the lab for clues about the experiments being conducted on you. Like, I’m pretty familiar with video game tropes, but I struggled to make sense of stuff like this:

"As the source of all magic in this world, the Dragon of Origins is omnipresent in different forms. However, it has a core form, within the depths of this world. If we can draw out the core and then implant it into Subject 0013, then it can become our personal reserve of magic."

If it was just a matter of digging into optional ~lore~, I’d have shrugged and moved on, but actually the player needs to understand this stuff to reach the endgame. The final area of the lab is sealed with four locks, each of which poses a particular question about what the scientists are up to and requires an answer to be typed into the waiting text box. So yeah, they’re riddles. While two of the questions were straightforward to figure out, the other two felt substantially more open-ended, and susceptible to several different legitimate answers. For example, one asks what the subject is going to become, which seems to refer to this extract from one of the documents I found (spoiler-blocked since this reveals one of the twists):

(Spoiler - click to show)"Raise and control the subject as our new god. Harness its power as it becomes our own new reserve of magic. A living reservoir."

Another document also uses the phrase (Spoiler - click to show)"figurehead god” to refer to this idea. So I tried that, as well as (Spoiler - click to show)”new god”, “living reservoir”, “reserve of magic” and permutations of all of these. Turns out the answer was just (Spoiler - click to show)"god", but either the hint needed to be much clearer, or alternate solutions should have been accepted. And here’s where the case-sensitivity comes in, because actually that doesn’t work either; it needs to be capitalized. This is the point where I went scurrying for the walkthrough with a frown on my face. It didn’t need to be this way – I’d actually gotten all of the riddles mostly right – but this overly-strict design turned what could have been an engaging, albeit diegetically unjustified, opportunity for the player to demonstrate their understanding of the backstory before entering the endgame into a frustrating exercise in reading the author’s mind.

Said endgame does pick up a bit; the scenario as a whole is fairly underdeveloped (I would have liked to see more uses for the protagonist’s cool magic abilities, and better integration of the backstory elements into the narrative once they figure out what’s going on), and the story just goes exactly where you think it’s going to go given the setup, but it still finishes on a nice note of catharsis. Still, my opinion on riddles remains unchanged: a lovely game to play among friends, but outside of that, they’re a dangerous business.

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

An awesome thing about well-crafted video games is that they can conjure up seamless new worlds for the player to explore. An awesome thing about poorly-crafted video games is that by inadvertently breaking the illusion of mimesis, they can conjure up hallucinatory terrain that dislocates and disorients the player in a way that wind up perversely enjoyable. So it goes with Into the Lion’s Mouth, which combines a strange loop born (I assume!) of a weird bug with some odd writing choices to convey a discordant, postmodern experience where the player’s more Theseus adrift in a maze than Heracles bearding a lion.

The opening is deceptively simple: this choice-based game starts in medias res, as the protagonist suffers a vehicle break-down in the middle of the Serengeti and is immediately menaced by lions. The player is primed for a tale of survival as you need to make the right choices to escape hostile animals and unforgiving wilderness to make it back alive, but the reality is more discombobulating. For one thing, if you try to deal with the lion, your only options are to yell at it and draw attention to yourself (bad idea, duh) or to… try to hypnotize it, which the game illustrates with an inline YouTube video of a young girl “hypnotizing” various small animals like a frog and an iguana. Shockingly, this also doesn’t work, sending you back to the opening menu where you can select the remaining, incongruous option: “Lucky I prepped with the lion taming simulator.”

Clicking on that takes you to what seems to be an unrelated vignette, where you (is this the same you? In this story you apparently work as a park ranger, whereas the main-timeline you seems to be unfamiliar with the Serengeti) encounter an abandoned lion cub and nurse it back to health. There’s another odd fourth-wall breaking bit here, where you get sent to an unrelated website that lays out a DIY recipe for approximating lion’s milk that you then need to pick out of a set of choices in order to successfully feed the cub. But other than that things progress as you’d imagine: you bond with him, you help him learn to hunt, you reach the moment when you realize he belongs in the wild, and you tearfully leave him there and drive away…

At which point you’re sent back to the game’s opening yet again, I guess to hope that hypnosis will work better this time out (it doesn’t).

I have questions. For one thing, in what sense was this vignette a “simulator”? It’s framed as something that actually happened. But are we to assume it was just a Twine game that the protagonist of this other, less-successful Twine game played prior to going on safari (the lion-cub bit is far and away the best part of the game, seeming to indicate that some bit of research went into it, plus as mentioned it has a narrative arc rather than allowing time to become a flat endless circle)? If that’s the case, and you’re the kind of person who is so psychotically prone to overpreparation that before a trip to a wildlife preserve you research exactly what you should do if you happen to come across a lost lion cub and need to raise it into adulthood, shouldn’t you also know how to jump-start or a car? Or at least know not to engage with potentially dangerous animals instead of shouting “yoo-hoo, over here!” or trying, I repeat, to hypnotize them?

I had plenty of time to contemplate the answers to these queries as I confirmed that yes, everything remains the same in this second iteration, including the possibility of jumping back into the simulator again and rebooting things yet a third time. Into the Lion’s Mouth is a misnomer of a title: play this one, and you’re crawling into an endless matryoshka doll with infinite narratives nested inside each other, never resolving; I’m half tempted to play it until I’ve set free so many rehabilitated lions that they’re no longer endangered. Surely this can’t have been what the author intended, but from a quick nose at the Twine code, I can’t see a more definitive ending. And honestly I’m glad for that, since absent this bug or whatever it is the game would be a forgettable snack that doesn’t do much with a unique premise. Instead, I get this picture of the future: a man, hypnotizing a lion – forever.

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

I think most people who’ve lost someone close to them have played some version of the bargaining game: imagining what you’d be willing to give up to get one more day, one more conversation, one more hug, with your loved one. It’s a ghoulish pastime, beyond being quite futile – perhaps for the best, there’s no interlocutor out there ready to take up the opposite side of the bet – but it’s nonetheless a positive fantasy; knowing that it’s impossible to obtain something so devoutly to be wished, or at least not for free, our lex-talionis-addled brains heap up sacrifices to make the vision plausible.

Careful what you wish for: in the grim world of My Brother; the Parasite (dig that semicolon), they’ve discovered a microorganism that delivers the unthinkable: once it colonizes a person’s brain, it will spring into action after they die, sending electricity into the brain and reanimating a corpse for four or five days. The person’s still dead, but their corpse lingers on, a talking thing that’s kept around out a vain hope that it can offer closure.

That hope is especially vain for Inez, the protagonist of the game. Her brother has died – choked on his own vomit after one bender too many – but as he luckily was afflicted by the parasite, she’s offered the chance for a series of one-on-one interviews to unpack the many, many layers of trauma he’s inflicted on her over the years. There are some details given, and others withheld, but it’s dark, dark stuff (Spoiler - click to show)(while it doesn’t spell things out, I read the game to imply that he sexually assaulted her at least once), and Inez can’t help but pick her scabs, verbally jousting with the body that used to be her brother in search of something she knows he can’t give.

The writing here is queasy and authentically muddled, and often describes abuse that was inflicted so frequently that it seems to have become almost commonplace:

"You knocked the wind out of me. I collapsed onto the floor, gasping, in tears, trying my hardest to force air back into my lungs. You brought me half a mango as an apology and begged me not to tell Mom."

"My mind, though… There are a hundred, million reminders that set it aflame. There are sounds that make me jump. Phrases that make me sick. Parts I can no longer touch."

The visual presentation matches this dour tone. The graphics – a mixture of portraits and heavily-modified photographs, with some limited, disorienting animation – occupy a range from moody to actively unsettling. There are occasional choices that prioritize vibe over readability, like the use of dark-gray text over a black background, and a few instances of timed text, but I think these are legitimate decisions that work to make the player uncomfortable, giving them the smallest taste of what it’s like to live as Inez does.

The game’s perspective in fact is locked very close into her subjectivity; this is a hothouse-flower of a game, focused overwhelmingly and obsessively on the trauma her brother has inflicted on her. If anything, I found that when the game tries to broaden out from this theme, it hits its few false notes: there’s a repeated suggestion that part of the ill will between the siblings came from competing for their mother’s love, and Inez several times repeats that she loves him and will mourn him. But these claims ring hollow in light of the intensity of the brother’s transgressive hatefulness and Inez’s complementary rage; I just didn’t buy these conventional, psychologized elements, and frankly the game doesn’t need them.

I’m hopefully communicating that this is a deeply unpleasant, but also deeply compelling, work to experience. Inez’s experiences are intense, but suggested with enough subtlety that the player can’t push them safely into the realm of melodrama or schlock horror. For all that it’s a very internal work, the author sets up the plot with care; it progresses from one distinct scene to the next with a clear logic of escalation connecting them. Despite the lack of anything resembling a branching choice, there’s some skillfully-deployed interactivity that means clicking through the various bits of text remains engaging throughout. And the conceit of the parasite is brilliant, because instead of a duel between two people, it’s simply a matter of a single person and a thing, meaning Inez is always in the spotlight and on the hook for the decisions she makes, while her brother is a dead but still-animate sparring partner whose incapacity for moral action is no longer blameworthy.

My Brother; the Parasite didn’t resonate very strongly with my personal experiences; my sibling relationship was complicated as all are, but nothing at all like this. And the emotions it evokes most frequently are ones that are generally alien to my personality. If there were too many games like it in the Comp, I think I’d have a hard time playing my way through it – I certainly needed a break after finishing this one. But it’s a haunting and well-crafted work, and for those who enjoy engaging with darker situations and feelings, it’ll be something very special. For my part, I’m glad to have played it, and glad too to be putting it aside.

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

While I’ve generally read far fewer books by non-Anglophone writers than I would like, to the extent that there’s an exception it’s Russian novelists: while I don’t speak the language and I’ve thus relied on translations, I’ve made my way through a pretty high percentage of the 19th-Century canon as well as a smattering of more recent authors. Probably this is partially down to subject matter: I like political and philosophical novels, so given the preoccupations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, et. al. this is a rewarding furrow to plow. But more than that, even in translation there’s something about the quality of the language that’s unique and engaging to me, some blunt poetry and non-Western meter to the writing that forms something of a common thread even for authors with very different styles.

I got something of the same vibe from Kaboom, which is similarly translated from Russian, and which has a premise that’s seemingly as off-kilter as its prose: in this parser-like Twine game, you play a stuffed hare who has to try to help its person (a five-year-old girl) after a bad dream that seems to turn the whole world topsy-turvy. Like, here’s the description of the anthropomorphized sun that floats above the strange dreamscape that opens the game:

The sun gazes directly at you, jokingly wagging his scalding rays. He has a clean-shaven, balding elderly face with somewhat lumpy cheeks and small eyes slightly turned towards the nasal bridge. In spite of his countenance being noble and a little weary, it also gives away an immense inner tension - looks like it takes him quite an effort not to blow up altogether, taking this whole world into oblivion with him.

That’s not a paragraph most native speakers of English would write, I don’t think – that use of “altogether” is a little archaic, the image of wagging rays of sunlight probably wouldn’t occur to me but might make more sense in the original Russian, and the repetition of “somewhat” and “slightly” and “a little” I think reflects diminutives that English lacks. But for all that the writing is grammatically correct, and I found this an arresting image, rendered in a distinctive, engaging way.

I definitely experienced some disorientation from a combination of the odd premise and the unintuitive prose, though. This sometimes made solving the game’s puzzles more challenging: I often had a hard time visualizing the space I was moving through, and while there are usually good hints or cues pushing the player towards what they should be doing, I was often unclear on what broader goal I was serving by pushing a pillow around or getting glue on my paws, even though I could tell that the game wanted me to do these things.

The interface also could be cleaner: there’s an inventory menu in the upper right corner that is mostly limited to your cute little hare-y arms and jumpy hare-y legs, with options for grabbing or kicking showing up when you click to open the menu. But most of the time the choices presented in the main window include things like pushing or picking up objects, so the logic of when and why I’d need to go to the inventory remained opaque throughout my playthrough. There’s also some unneeded friction that comes of the game’s decision to return back to a location’s top menu after you take most actions. There were sequences that require multiple connected steps, like pushing a toy crane truck, turning its crank, connecting its hook to something, then turning the crank again to lift the object into the air, and it was a little annoying to have to manually click “look around” then on the crane truck each time I wanted to perform the next step; the annoyance was increased by the realization that the game appears to have a time limit, though I got to the end before time ran out.

The consequence of all this, though, is that it took me way longer than it should to figure out what Kaboom is actually doing. Full spoilers after one last evocative but confusingly vague passage:

"Full of thoughts, you slowly turn towards the house and suddenly hold still, thunderstruck: only a small part of the wall at the corner you came from is visible, the rest of the building is covered by a huge messy heap of unidentifiable something! What’s happening? What crazy giant gambolled here? And how can you, an ordinary toy hare, withstand this giant?"

(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, what’s going on is that you’re in Ukraine, and your house has just been hit by a bomb; it’s pretty clearly implied that your owner’s parents were both killed, and you have to draw attention to her predicament so that she can be rescued before she bleeds to death. It’s possible to fail at this task, though mercifully the game doesn’t go into details, but even success comes at a cost: your poor hare winds up doused in ash, covered in glue, and finally half burned away by the end of the game, and since your owner is unconscious when she’s pulled from the ruin of your house, it’s pretty clear that you’re going to be abandoned and lost forever.

This twist hit me like a ton of bricks. Some of that is of course just seeing the horrors I’ve been reading about in the newspapers for a year and a half unexpectedly brought home; some of that is the sentimental fact that I tuck my two-year-old son into bed every night with his favorite toy cat beside him; and some it’s the simple and heartfelt closing message from the game’s anonymous Russian author. This is a game with some infelicities, as I pointed out above, but it got more of an emotional response from me than anything else in the Comp so far, and I think partially it’s those very points of friction that make it so effective. I wish to God we didn’t need to have games like this – much less that there’d be another recently-ignited conflict to which Kaboom could equally apply – but I found this game a very effective use of interactive fiction to create some much-needed empathy and connection; it’s trite to say that art is what will eventually end war, but however small it is, in my heart of heart I believe games like Kaboom are making some difference.

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

I’m not generally one for “old-school” IF. The text adventures of the 80s don’t tickle my nostalgia receptors – I played a few at the time, and many more since then, but I got into IF via the late 90s/early aughts indie scene so when I think of The Games of My Youth, it’s Photopia and Slouching Towards Bedlam that come to mind. Many of them also tend to take the two-word parser approach, which fundamentally doesn’t jibe with how my brain approaches IF interfaces. And while I enjoy a good puzzle as much as the next person, I tend to place a high value on literary prose, thematic depth, and engaging characters; it’s not so much that most old-school IF is bad at those things as that it politely declines to even attempt such things in favor challenging gameplay in the medium-dry-goods model. I can enjoy this style of gameplay but I’m very aware that when I bounce off an old-school piece, the fault’s more likely to be on my side than the game’s.

At the same time, though, I sometimes wonder whether this attitude has become something of a crutch for my critical faculties. Like, it’s easy to say “I guess this thing I didn’t like is just a matter of taste”, and it makes one feel like a broad-minded, ecumenical sort of person who can look beyond their own prejudices. It’s much harder to try to be more rigorous and nail down questions like a) what exactly do we mean by “old school”, anyway, given that there were plenty of early 80s games that aimed to integrate gameplay, plot, and theme and had literary pretensions; b) what particular design elements are necessary or at least helpful to creating an “old school” vibe; and c) are those elements implemented well or poorly in a particular work?

That sounds like a lot of work that I’m not going to attempt now – maybe post-Comp fodder for the Rosebush – but having had these thoughts, I’ve decided to try to provide a slightly more critical look at Have Orb, Will Travel than I was first inclined to do. Because despite having enjoyed the author’s previous two games, this is another old-school puzzlethon that I didn’t quite get on with, but upon reflection I think that’s due to some particular design choices that deserve to be engaged with rather than just chalked up to de gustibus non est disputandum.

Start with the curious decision to play coy with the plot. It’s a hallmark of this style of game that the story isn’t a primary draw, but even by those standards what we’ve got here is curiously thin. The game’s blurb, its opening text, and the letter you start out with in your inventory all gesture towards your character having been given some sort of charge by a Council of Elders, which can be inferred to be to obtain the titular orb, but despite several hundred words being dedicated to this setup, it never comes out and says what the orb is, what it does, how it got lost, why you’re looking for it where you are, and why finding it will matter. Sure, it’s a MacGuffin, but this is uninspiring and even a little confusing, so much so that when I found a magical “sphere” I thought I’d just about hit the end of the game, even though I was only halfway through.

Speaking of magic, HOWT features a Vancian spellcasting system where you can learn spells from a spellbook and then cast them. I’ve liked this kind of system in games like Enchanter, but it’s again oddly vestigial here. There are only three spells in the book and you never accumulate more through play, there are only two places in the course of several dozen obstacles where spellcasting comes into play (meaning that yes, one of the spells appears to be useless), and the system is needlessly baroque, requiring the player to intuit that they need to manually LEARN each spell, which can only be done when you flip through the book page by page until you get to the appropriate one.

The puzzles are generally solid, though after a couple gimmes (there’s an early maze with a fun but straightforward gimmick that’s satisfying to solve) they quickly ramp up in difficulty. This is genre-appropriate – and kudos to the author for providing a full hint system as well as a walkthrough – but some design decisions around traversal made experimenting with them much more tortuous than it needed to be. The map is riddled with one-way passages whose existence isn’t disclosed in advance, and it’s easy to blunder into one before you’ve completed exploring a new area. It’s always possible to retrace your steps, but for much of the game, doing so typically requires either solving the maze again – which quickly grows tedious – or enduring a medium-length section with timed text, which similarly wears out its welcome almost instantly. Further, many puzzles involve interacting with some kind of mechanism that has an impact somewhere else in the map, often without a direct cue about what sort of changes you should be looking for. As a result, the puzzle design presupposes that the player will be making frequent laps around the map, while the navigation design contrives to make that approach pretty annoying.

I hasten to point out (er, 900 words into the review) that there are definitely strong elements here. The author’s homebrewed parser continues to be a highlight, feeling almost as seamless as the tried-and-true Inform or TADS ones (the only foible is that taking items from containers requires a little extra typing, but this is well signposted in the documentation, and a shortcut is provided). There are also a lot of little riddles and clues that help lead you through many of the puzzles, which is a style that I like and which is generally well-executed. And while the setting could be a bit more exciting – when you wend your way through a magically-confusing wood and discover a secret cottage hidden away at its center, it’s deflating to be told that it’s “totally uninteresting” in its features and décor – the prose is efficient at communicating what you need to solve the puzzles, and even manages to be fairly evocative. I think I found one bug (the game crashed when I tried to walk W into the lake rather than type SWIM) but otherwise it was completely smooth.

It’s these very positive pieces that make me want to beg off from any sharper critical judgment: this is a well-made game with a cheerful vibe, and its design choices feel intentional rather than being oversights, so if those design decisions frustrated me, again, maybe I should just blame myself. But thinking about them some more, I’m increasingly of the mind that actually some of those decisions were bad ones, and that HOWT could have been just as old-school but decidedly more engaging if it had paid a little more attention to its plot, or made the magic system a more integral part of its challenges, or reduced the friction of navigating its map. A game like this was never going to be my favorite in the Comp – again, this isn’t my subgenre of choice – but there’s no reason I couldn’t have liked it a lot more than I did.

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

There are a lot of things I enjoyed about Finders Commission, a parser-like choice game where you carry out a museum heist — like, for example, everything in that clause I just wrote – but my favorite was the breezy way it lays out its premise:

"Bastet is a beautiful cat.
She believes she is an ancient deity who should be worshipped by all.
Her Aegis, or breastplate armor, has been missing for centuries.
She read online that it was sold at auction to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities."

Each line of is wackier than then next, but it’s delivered with such supreme nonchalance that you almost don’t notice how off the wall it is – to say nothing of the way the brilliantly impossible-to-argue-with first line just slips by. The game largely delivers on this promise, offering an entertaining set of puzzles and a straightforwardly pleasant story; it’s a bit rough in places, and I think it had room to lean more into the silliness of its setup, but I found it an engaging way to while away half an hour.

The planning is an integral part of any heist, and here Finder’s Commission offers just enough to whet the appetite. You get to choose your protagonist from a menu of gender-ambiguous options, each of whom boasts a special talent or two (I opted for Nat, “strong and compassionate”), and then negotiate your fee with Bastet (to no real end, as far as I could tell, but it’s still a fun touch) before heading to the museum to reclaim the unjustly-stolen antiquity. This phase did seem to have a peculiarly large number of empty, useless locations, and that feeling persisted once I got to the main gameplay space; fortunately, it doesn’t take long to find a map to make the compass navigation more intuitive, but there’s still way more real estate in the museum than seems necessary to support the handful of puzzles on offer. I’m guessing that this is partially in service to the character-selection portion of the game – there was at least one interaction I found that I’m pretty sure was available because of Nat’s strength, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the useless places I encountered play host to bespoke options for other protagonists – but there might have been a more elegant way to accomplish this.

The writing also feels a bit perfunctory once the heist proper kicks off. There are a few vignettes that have some charm – I liked the sequence where you can do some light flirting with a cute docent – but for the most part the descriptions are quite functional. This isn’t the kind of game that should provide reams of historical context for each inessential artifact displayed in the museum, nor should there be long dialogue trees with NPCs when you’re trying to keep a low profile, but I couldn’t help think of the way the Lady Thalia games get a lot of mileage out of a few well-chosen period details and a couple lines of witty banter.

The actual process of making off with the aegis doesn’t have too many steps, but some do require some timing and forethought, which pushed me to scout out the scene, and try to come up with a plan before making my move, all of which felt in-genre. Each puzzle is relatively simple on its own, but the game does have time limits in a few sequences, and the inventory system requires manually selecting an item when you want to use it in a location, which discourages lawnmowering, so accomplishing the goal felt satisfying even though it was ultimately fairly straightforward.

I wound up with 87 points out of 100, though I characteristically want to try to argue my way to a better score – for example, I got dinged for leaving a security camera pointing at the aegis, but while I had figured out how to move it, the game didn’t do a good job of explaining which direction it needed to be pointed so it couldn’t see the case I was breaking into. I also got dinged for not charging my phone, when the last time I checked it it had 162% battery power, and for not tipping a barista when I’d never actually ordered a coffee. So I think we can all agree I deserved to get 100%.

Beyond these small oddities, I think I ran into a couple of other bugs – in particular, an important box-shaped gizmo seemed to go missing most of the way through the game, though I was able to undo back until it popped up again. These weren’t a very big deal, but hopefully they can be cleaned up for a post-Comp release.

Still, even when I was thinking of ways the game could be improved, I was still smiling as I played Finder’s Commission. I believe it’s the author’s first piece of IF, and it appears they’ve taken the oft-given advice that new authors start out with a short, manageable first game; if that’s the case, perhaps there’ll be a future, more robust Finders Commission game to come (this one is labelled as Episode One), which I’d certainly look forward to!

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

The girl whose two moms were a mermaid and a pirate did most of the job, but it was the Prana Yurt that broke me.

I know it sounds like I’m saying that to make fun of Lake Starlight’s world’s-wokest-wiccans premise, but I think – or at least hope – I have some substantive critiques beyond just being a hopeless geriatric reactionary. This choice-based game is the first part of what promises to be a much longer YA-style story, following the tween protagonist as she leaves her home in a polluted, dystopian city and attends a sleepaway camp where she’ll make friends, learn about her magical heritage and, from the cues in the game’s ending, eventually take on the greedy companies that have ruined the land. The game is resolutely BIPOC-centered; the protagonist is a Latina (though oddly, the game has you choose a name before letting you know that), and a major part of her journey is connecting with her family roots and encountering other characters who are likewise empowered by their respective traditions. And it’s also staking out a clearly environmental-justice-oriented stance in laying out who’s made the world as bad as it is, and who needs to be stopped to begin to heal it.

This is all fine, I think – it’s as subtle as a brick to the face, but it seems to be pitched to younger players so that’s forgivable. Similarly, the worldbuilding is fairly thin, since there are lots of details making clear this is basically our world (the man character speaks Spanish, another one is named “Marie Bayou” and is from “Orlenze”) while the major departures, like the swarms of blood flies and the mind-control cults, are never explained, but I’m not sure heavy helpings of lore would have improved the experience. The writing had a number of typos, but generally struck me as in-genre for a YA work; it’s fairly simple and frequently made me feel like I was crumbling into dust:

Together, all of you yell out, “Yessss!” Then Stella shouts for everybody to jump up and she teaches you a super-fun cheer routine that involves lots of booty shaking and kicking and jumping and spinning around while shouting: “Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up! Oak Grove cabin, Pump it up!”

There are some 13 year olds who would find this cringe, but others for whom it would work, I suspect.

So all of that is to just say this is very much not for me, but that’s completely OK! Not everything has to be, and in fact I think the IF scene is stronger when there are more games not pitched at nerdy middle-aged white guys as the key audience.

I do think there are some issues here that go beyond mere preference, though. For one thing, the player isn’t given very much to do – there are sections of the game where ten minutes will pass in between choices – which I generally don’t mind too much, but I confess I did get annoyed when Lake Starlight felt like it was actively undermining my choices. Like, there’s a segment where you get to choose which of your cabin-mates to pair up with for task, except when I clicked on the one I opted for, I got told she’d already teamed up with someone else and I got automatically assigned to another girl. Previous to that, there’s a bit where you need to choose your strategy for introducing yourself to the other campers, and I decided to focus on my self-assurance – only for that to completely fail as I turned into a bundle of nerves. Making matters worse, I made that decision because I’d previously chosen for the protagonist to be born under the Fire Moon, which was supposed to make me brash and strong-spirited, so it felt like the author was doubly-negating my input. If a game has a specific story it really wants to tell without the player getting in the way, great, but in that case I think it’s much better not to present false choices.

The deeper critiques I had about the game go back to where I started this review. First, there’s the girl with the pirate mom (the mermaid one is blameless in all this so I’m leaving her aside). She tells the rest of the cabin about her mom’s occupation with a clear sense of pride, and they all nod along like this is a cool, normal job for someone to have. Sure, she does say something about “colonizers” being the target of her mom’s piracy, but given the absence of any active colonial activity being foregrounded in the story and the setting’s resemblance to the real world, this feels like it’s justifying violence against people based on their group identity. It’d be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but the game several times gives a pass to “good”-coded characters recklessly threatening violence against the protagonist. The camp head has a trio of pony-sized attack dogs charge the main character in what’s played as a small welcome-to-camp practical joke but looks way more like hazing to me, and later in that same scene, one of your cabin-mates draws a bow and points a nocked arrow directly at you, seemingly to show what a cool rule-breaking badass she is, but which is entirely equivalent to the decidedly un-cool activity of pointing a loaded gun at somebody.

Maybe I’m being overly-precious about this – and in an empowerment fantasy like this, I totally get that part of the draw is the cathartic idea of unleashing redemptive violence against bad people who share traits with the real-world politicians and oligarchs who’ve inflicted harm against communities of color and the environment. But Lake Starlight seems to me to have a too-cavalier attitude towards violence, and having played it not two weeks after the self-appointed representatives of an oppressed people unleashed horrifying violence against civilians and sparked a confrontation with a vicious government that’s killed thousands more innocents, its juvenile take on these issues grated.

Then there’s the Prana Yurt, which struck me as taking two vaguely non-Western words bespeaking alternative wisdom or lifestyles and mashing them up without any rhyme or reason. There are parts of the game that seem well-observed to me, like the protagonist’s home life and relationship with her family. But there are other parts, like the Prana Yurt, that feel like the result of antiracist mad-libs – I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the pirate-mermaid daughter is named “Lilo Keanu”, which I’m pretty sure is the Hawaiian Kemal Pamuk*. The BIPOC Avengers is a cool concept, but given the hard work that goes into building nonracial solidarity, it again feels like it can trivialize important real-world history to treat things so superficially.

I’m aware as I say all this that I could just be a big old hypocrite (emphasis on the old) – back in the day, I enjoyed the heck out of the tabletop roleplaying game Mage: the Ascension, where various stereotypes, including kung-fu monks, violent neo-pagans, and indigenous spirit-summoners team up to fight an authoritarian technocracy, and it’s definitely guilty of all the sins I’m laying at Lake Starlight’s door. Still, Mage came out in 1993; 30 years on, I think it’s reasonable to expect more.

* I don’t think I’ve recently explained the Kemal Pamuk thing anywhere. See, in the first couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, there’s a sexy Turkish guy who shows up as a guest star, and Julian Fellowes, when deciding what to call him, very clearly just stole the first name of the first political leader who popped into his head (Kemal Ataturk) and the last name of the first writer who popped into his head (Orhan Pamuk). This is extremely racist, but IMO also quite hilarious when you play the parlor game of applying the same logic to Western countries – Abraham Twain, Winston Shakespeare, Louis Hugo, etc. etc. etc.

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

I have played a lot of IF over the years, and as a result – not to brag or anything – I’m kind of a big deal. I’ve rescued crashing spaceships, defeated maniacal supervillains, slain more evil wizards than you can count, and saved humanity, earth, the multiverse more times than I can count; I’ve bearded Lovecraftian horrors in their dens, and performed great acts of perspicacity in ferreting out whodunnit (albeit typically with a lot of restarts). So to play a game where the inciting incident is that you’re missing a couple of ingredients for the dinner party you’re going to throw for your friends, and you rise to the occasion by popping out and grabbing them with little more fuss than it takes to make a Trader Joe’s run… is actually a nice change of pace.

Creative Cooking is a cozy, exploration-focused game that, pace the title, doesn’t require you to do any cooking at all. Instead, it’s got two phases: first, you wander your house and learn a little more about the protagonist and their world – this is a fantasy world and you’re a sort of elf, and there are a lot of proper nouns being thrown around – then you get to the pantry, realize that you’re out of some stuff, and the second, puzzlier portion kicks off. You automatically jot down the three ingredients you’ll need, as well as some notes on how to obtain them, and head out to the elf village proper to find them. Between the three, there’s maybe a puzzle and a half; one is just lying on the ground, you get another just by talking to two NPCs (who have maybe two or three possible topics of conversation apiece), and then the last requires you to take one additional action after you pick it up, which is explicitly cued but I still managed to mess up due to my blind spots when dealing with two-word parsers (Spoiler - click to show) (I tried putting the vine in the pond, and throwing it in the pond, and dropping it, but had to get a hint to land on just THROW VINE). Then you go home, cook the meal, and have a nice time with your friends – actually, an especially nice time with one in particular.

I’m all for this kind of thing; not every game needs to have world-shaking stakes or brow-furrowing challenges, especially this deep in the Comp randomizer list. A simple premise with easy puzzles that just provides an excuse to hang out and explore a setting is a great concept for a game, especially one that, per the blurb, is meant to ease players into a forthcoming longer piece set in the same world. Unfortunately, I don’t think the implementation of the concept worked especially well for me. In large measure this is due to the shallowness of said implementation. Creative Cooking is written in a successor to the very early AGT language, and since I’m not familiar with that, I can’t say how much of this is due to the choice of language, but regardless, the game feels significantly more primitive even than other intentionally old-school games entered into this Comp. Very very few nouns are implemented – room descriptions will routinely mention objects that seem worth investigating, like a table with a drawer, or tools on a workbench, but rarely is any of this stuff even minimally implemented. Seemingly-obvious actions, like COOK, are also disallowed, and see the spoiler above for the parser issues I ran into trying to solve the one real puzzle.

The other factor distancing me from the game was the prose style. English isn’t the author’s first language, and several native-speaking testers/proofreaders are listed in the credits, so I don’t want to harp on this element too much, but there are still quite a lot of typos and confusing syntax, compounded by dense worldbuilding that lacks an immediate hook, a chatty approach that bombards the player with gossip without much context, and a reluctance to present text as anything but a single overlong paragraph (this might be a limitation of the engine). Like, when you examine yourself, the game notes that you’re an elf with a “kirune” body, so when I found a book in my library about kirune physiology I was hoping to learn more about what that meant. But here’s what you get when reading the book:

"This book on kirune physiology is the gift from Senpai Miryarai; when I unwrapped it, I was perplexed of the choice, Miryarai is a very accomplished healer, and for me is a really trusted friend and senpai. And she knows it. Noticing my perplexity, she says, with all her proverbial phlegm and calmness, a strange phrase: “a page a day keeps the healer away”. I never heard something like. Seeing my increasing perplexity, she coquettishly looks toward Etuye Alasne, hugging her with her right white wing. “it’s a saying from another world, far in the past and space”. Her matter-of-fact, objective explanation makes sense, Etuye is an exceptionally well-versed Soulmancer, and her soulmancy led to the first Soulmating till the end of Time in more than 10,000 years, the one between Miryarai, Etuye Alasne and Atuzejiki, but I still felt something off in her manifestation of love towards Etuye. Sometime later, I asked Miyai about this, and she explained, but it’s another and long story, to be narrated elsewhere, later…"

It’s interesting to see a game implemented in an older IF language that does something other than bog-standard collect-the-treasures gameplay, and I admit that I’m probably more down on fantasy worldbuilding bollocks than I should be, so I don’t want to judge Creative Cooking too harshly – and again, I really did like the setup. But with gameplay that’s so simplified, and the fruits of exploration so baroque and unrewarding, I didn’t find much here that clicked with me.

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

There’s a longstanding tradition in parser IF that authors should eschew the generic USE verb. The conventional wisdom, which I ascribe to, is that there are two major reasons for this: on the player’s side, it removes much of the fun of playing a parser game if you can just mindlessly spam USE X or USE X ON Y without actually thinking through a potential solution, and on the author’s side, you wind up with one mega-verb that can function radically differently in different contexts, which can make debugging really tricky, and can paradoxically make implementation even more work, as the player might expect USE to work as well as whatever more bespoke actions might be needed to resolve a challenge. After playing CODENAME OBSCURA, a spy-themed Adventuron game that’s an intentional 80s throwback, I can adduce a third rationale for avoiding USE: I, specifically, am very bad at figuring out when to try it, such that I had to go to the walkthrough three separate times to figure out what I was missing, and each time it was because I’d attempted everything but USE.

Admittedly, I expect the Adventuron parser to be a bit picky in the best of circumstances, and in each case, it was immediately obvious what to do once I got unstuck, so I shouldn’t pretend my repeated oversights about USE were that much of a barrier to enjoying the game. It makes a winning first impression, efficiently setting up a silly James Bond plot (you’re a secret agent working for an organization called TURTLE, visiting a town in Northern Italy to foil the plans of a German Count who’s stolen a diamond from England and is in league with the Sicilian mafia) and charming with lovely, colorful pixel art. The picturesque opening quickly segues into an action set-piece and then a simple escape puzzle, before setting the player loose to tackle the meat of the game.

There’s a lot to do, from visiting a witch to infiltrating a costume party to breaking into the compound where the Count is building a doomsday weapon. The map is reasonably open, but there’s typically only one or two puzzles where you can make progress at any point in time, which could be frustrating if the game world was much bigger, but CODENAME OBSCURA just about gets away with it. Speaking of the puzzles, they’re typical medium-dry-goods affairs; there’s perhaps a bit too much repetition, with three different blocked-off areas requiring you to WEAR something and/or SHOW something to gain entry, and one sequence where you solve a puzzle to find a password which allows you to find a combination which allows you to find a code, but they’re generally straightforward enough – save for a computer puzzle that combines unclear instructions with a bit of timed text to make for a fairly irritating barrier.

Speaking of annoyance, that USE issue is a real one, however, and bespeaks a game that has a very particular idea of how it wants you to interact with it. There are relatively few actions implemented – despite sound being important at several points, the player can’t ever LISTEN – American spellings for common commands aren’t accepted (PET vs. PAT, PUSH vs. PRESS), there are lots of items that you can’t examine until you pick them up, and it wasn’t just the USE case where I had to play guess-the-verb (the worst offender was a bit where you have to manipulate a part of a statue, and only one very precise syntax will work). CODENAME OBSCURA also does the default-Adventuron thing of bluffing when you try to interact with or examine an object that’s not actually implemented – it just says “you notice nothing special” rather than admit it doesn’t know what you’re talking about – and then makes the problem worse by retaining that same “you notice nothing special” default description for several game-critical items. I suppose that thinness of implementation is part of the game’s intentionally retro vibe, but a bit more testing could have helped the author strike a better balance between that lo-fi feel and player convenience. Likewise, I twice ran into a bug that led to the game hanging and not accepting input; fortunately, I was able to simply reload the webpage and seamlessly pick up from where things went off-track, but it was nevertheless kind of a pain (that’s why I’m attaching three transcripts).

For all these complaints, I did enjoy my time with CODENAME OBSCURA; it’s a far friendlier old-school puzzler than The Witch, and it’s got more meat on its bones than Magor Investigates…, so it did scratch an itch – and I say that as someone who doesn’t have any nostalgic attachment to the old two-word parser games that it mimics. I’d say it needed a bit more time in the oven, but from the blurb it sounds like the author’s been working on the game off and on since 1987, which is quite the gestation period; still, a little more testing and refinement to sand off some of the unintentionally rough edges – and provide alternatives for the USE-allergic among us – would be quite worthwhile.