Reviews by Mike Russo

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

I've played a lot of Andrew Schultz games, and while there are definite themes and sub-series, he’s a wide-ranging author and about the only thing that applies across the board to his work is that he’s always doing something other than regular parser stuff, be it anthropomorphized chess puzzles, an inverted tic-tac-toe game where losing is winning (and vice versa), or the extended wordplay riffs of Bright Brave Knight Knave, which I already played in this Comp. To my knowledge, though, outside of a few short jam entries, he’s typically stuck to parser engines for his more robust games, so I was curious to see what he’d gotten up to with Twine.

Trail Stash is actually not that far off from Schultz's other entry in the '23 Comp, Bright Brave Knight Knave, in that it hinges on Spoonerisms, a kind of wordplay the initial sounds of two words swap – like, you’ll win twaddle if you make a twin waddle (I don’t even know what the term is, if there is one, for the more complex stuff in BBKK and its ilk). The game’s replete with them – every location is a Spoonerism, and so are all the items you pick up along the way, because yes, this is a parser-like choice game with a persistent inventory and a navigation system that enables you to revisit places you’ve already been. And in fact you’ll have to, because each location contains one, and only one, item, and requires you to use one, and only one, other item to solve it (and thereby obtain one of a dozen pieces of a treasure map).

There is a story here, but it’s pretty vestigial even compared to the sometimes-sketchier frames for Schultz’s other wordplay games; it basically reduces to “you’re a guy who likes treasure, go find the map.” Likewise, if there’s any theme that unites the various situations and problems you face, it felt pretty light to me. Nothing wrong with that since it lets the player concentrate on the gameplay, and that suited me just fine. I often find the wordplay games a bit tricky, but shifting to a choice-based engine makes proceedings much simpler, since you just need to click the item you want to use; no need to sound things out and decide whether you want to write a word with an f vs. a ph, for example. Of course, that risks making things too simple and turning the game into a lawnmowering exercise, but I thought the game mostly managed to hit the sweet spot in between; with 16 total locations, comprising a training-wheel set of four and the meat of the game in four additional sets of three, the set of possibilities is manageable while still making trial-and-error unrewarding unless you’re really feeling stuck.

I also thought the hit rate for the jokes was pretty good. Plaid base is a good gag, as is funk pail. And I had to stop and think for a second when I found the one-word item to figure out how that one could work. And Trail Stash trusts the player enough not to belabor its point – it usually avoids spelling out the Spoonerism so that you can get the pleasure of feeling the click in your brain. I liked this description that came after figuring out how to solve the “weedy nerds” area:

"The weedy nerds are quickly very interested in the wee freights, be they ships or trains. The process of moving and organizing said freights gets longer. They analyze the structure of the freights and build bigger ones. All this is a good workout—something the weedy nerds once avoided."

Sure, not all of the puzzles are so clean, and I was definitely reduced to mechanically clicking through my options a few times, or left scratching my head after somehow landing on the right answer. But for the most part, I felt like I got the logic of which object I should use when. I’m sure this is partially because of the shorter running time of Trail Stash, so despite its name, it’s able to stick to the cream of possible Spoonerisms rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel. Likewise, this fresh twist on the Schultz wordplay formula would probably feel restrictive if it went on too long. But as an experiment in taking a tried and tested parser approach into new, choice-based territory, I’d rate the game a solid success.

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

I have by now played a reasonable number of Larry Horsfield games – three just in this year’s ParserComp – so when I see his name on IFComp entry, I approach it with a certain amount of respect leavened by an also-certain amount of fear. He writes big, old-school games that fall into the traditional genres, but has an eye for appealing worldbuilding and an engaging, almost homey level of detail. But the puzzles he writes are almost always way harder than I’m able to solve, most often due to my own lack of brain-power, but occasionally also due to the idiosyncrasies of the ADRIFT system and parser; he’s also parsimonious with hints and typically doesn’t post a walkthrough. My quintessential experience with one of his games is to bumble my way to about a quarter of the points before giving up in despair, feeling like I’d missed out on something that could be really good if I was just more in tune with the intended gameplay.

This feeling, as it turns out, is right on, because Magor Investigates… is a sidequel to one of those aforementioned ParserComp entries, Xanix-Xixon Recurrence (yes, I looked that up), and the introductory text allows you to get a summary of what happened in that game to its two heroes (Duke Alaric Blackmoon, who’s the protagonist of many of the previous games in this series, and his buddy the king, whose name I’ve forgotten, and look, I’ve already looked one thing up in this paragraph so I don’t know what you expect). I left them flailing about in an abandoned city after a sandstorm, but apparently they had some cool adventures after that as they fought the titular lizardmen (they’re the Xanix, I think?) including a giant scary hybrid. It definitely sounds pretty neat, and there’s even a closing plot twist: Duke Blackmoon is able to use a special ability of the king’s magic axe, except only someone with royal blood should be able to activate that magic!

That’s where you – Magor, the court wizard – come in. Once the duo are back and rested from their journey, they charge you with doing some genealogical research to investigate Blackmoon’s connection to the royal family. I loved this premise – you will never go wrong pitching me a game about reading old documents – and the author’s worldbuilding strengths are very much on display. While the absent-minded wizard is a hoary old archetype, Magor is a great incarnation of the concept, and has his own idiosyncrasies: I laughed at his industrial-sized home distillery he’s got tucked right off his sitting room, because the guy loves his whiskey. So I embarked on this adventure hoping I’d get a little farther than usual.

And, er, I did; I managed to win, in fact. Magor Investigates…, it turns out, is an appetizer of a game; you have a ten-element task list laying out what you need to do to win, but some of them are optional (I forgot to water the plant, oops!), many of them are well-nigh automatic, like meeting with the king, and the few puzzles, which largely revolve around curing the royal archivist’s tummy-ache, are quite straightforward, though not without their pleasures (fussing about with the kettle and herbs to make an herbal infusion was just the right amount of busywork).

I was a bit disappointed the game was this slight. Partially this is just because it’s fairly easy, but also because of the way the difficulty is managed: there aren’t any conversational commands in the game, for example, with dialogue just happening automatically in cutscenes. Some puzzles also take care of themselves, in ways that actually sometimes wrong-footed me: I couldn’t figure out how to give the infusion to the archivist, because you’re not supposed to do that yourself – it’s all taken care of once you walk into the bedroom carrying the mug, but since I poured the kettle into the mug once I was already in the room, this “convenience” wound up being frustrating. And I was likewise momentarily stymied when I failed to notice that putting one herb in the kettle automatically put the other one in, too.

This is the second of Horsfield’s games that I’ve finished; I made my way through another of his ParserComp entries, Bug Hunt on Menelaus, this summer. It likewise was fairly short and consisted mostly of simple puzzles, though it was subject to a very tight time-limit that required frequent reloads; there’s nothing like that this time out, and if anything the challenges were even simpler. In both cases, I enjoyed myself, but definitely wanted something a little meatier than what I got. I know, I know, I am being a jerk, like Goldilocks saying “this one’s too long and hard,” “this one’s too short and easy,” when I am just freeloading on the hard work of others. Still, I do hope that sometime, I’ll get to play a Larry Horsfield game that’s just right – and for all my bellyaching, Magor Investigates… is certainly a fun way to pass the time until then.

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

There are several ways to interpret Assembly – a short parser game about using your IKEA-honed furniture-construction skills to foil an incursion of Lovecraftian gribblies – but the most natural, I think, is to read it as a riposte to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. That seminal essay, of course, argued that the rise of technologies that allowed for the unlimited copying and display of objets d’art – photography, printing, the moving image, to say nothing of developments Benjamin couldn’t have dreamed of in 1935 – would sap them of their aura, the unique quiddity that gives it its authority by placing it in space and in time. Benjamin traces the concept of aura back to an imagined origin where the primary purpose of art was to create images of deities for religious purposes; thus, mechanical reproduction reduces or even eliminates the so-called cult value of the work of art.

Against this, Kirwin posits a thought-experiment by which a singular monument like Stonehenge can be crammed into an infinitely-replicable flat-pack:

Then, finally, a new age: an age of infinite repetition, of unbounded mechanical reproduction, of forms iterated out beyond imagination. These gods, and the few who remember them, have found their chance — for a ritual copied blindly from an instruction booklet, or a sacred ratio embodied in fibreboard instead of stone, still holds the same power.

This is a bold claim, and demands us to expand our understanding of what can constitute “cult value”. For Benjamin, it is axiomatic that while ordinary worshippers may not have access to the work of art and be fundamentally ignorant about it – think of the divine statues sequestered in the rear of Greek temples, or, less representationally, the placement of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies – the priest does engage directly, physically, and intentionally with the image, and through their role as intercessor connects the veneration of the non-present worshipper with the aura of the artwork. Kirwin elegantly reverses this exclusive formulation – the worshipper remains ignorant of the higher mysteries, but is granted access to a mass-produced replica of the objet that nonetheless retains its cultic nous. What complicates this picture is the role played by the protagonist –

OK OK I’m dropping the bit. I’m reduced to comedy-art-history because for a change I don’t have a ton to say about Assembly; it’s got a killer premise that it executes with elegance, and my only complaint is that it left me wanting more; despite the blurb promising an hour and a half, it only took me half an hour to get through (my experience with estimated construction times for furniture is very much the opposite).

Really, it’s all very well done. The loopiness of taking something so workaday and familiar as IKEA and mashing it up with cosmic horror is inspired, but actually makes an odd amount of sense. And the jokes are spot-on – sure, making up punny IKEA-style names for different pieces of furniture is a common pastime (…we all do this, right?) but I got a good chuckle out of several of these, especially the way that the name of the table you start out building presages what’s to come.

Turning to the gameplay, the various puzzles are all logical, and build on each other in a way that makes the player feel clever; maybe they’re a little too easy, but better that than too hard. The implementation is top-notch, too – with all these flat-packs, instruction manuals, screws, pins, pegs, nuts, screwdrivers, hex keys, &c &c I thought this would be disambiguation hell, but instead everything feels very smooth, with the parser keeping up with even shorthand commands for each step of assembly or deconstruction. If anything, I thought the game could have stood to add more friction here, and make the process of building things more of a challenge (Spoiler - click to show)(I kept waiting for there to be a gag where one of the pieces of furniture had incorrect instructions or holes too small for its screws or something – c’mon, I love IKEA too, but we all know that it happens – and then that triggering a blood sacrifice or something when you inadvertently cut yourself, but that shoe never dropped).

So yeah, I guess I’m hoping for a sequel that just gives us more of all the good stuff here on offer; maybe Walter Benjamin wouldn’t have been so down on mass-production if he knew it’d get us awesome things like Assembly.

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

So here’s a deeply thought-out model for adventure stories that I’ve just thought up this second: imagine a line that says “external conflict” on one end and “internal conflict” on the other, then plot out various stories along the continuum. There’s a range of what works, certainly, but probably most of the really successful stuff lies somewhere around the middle: your Lords of the Ringses, say, where the business of orc-slaying is balanced by Frodo and Gollum undergoing their mirrored crises of self-doubt; or your original-flavor Star Wars, a bit further towards the external side what with all the laser-swords and pew-pew-pew stuff but still slowing down to deal with Luke’s journey towards white-guy Zen enlightenment and Han emerging from his solipsism. If you get really fancy, of course, you set things up so that the external conflicts rhyme with the internal stuff, but that’s not strictly necessary for a satisfying adventure, just gravy that moves you upwards on the orthogonal literary/unpretentious axis.

But shifting too far on the conflict continuum does risk pushing the formula to the point of breakdown: not enough internal conflict and you’ve got bubble-gum pulp that evanesces as soon as it’s consumed; not enough external conflict and you’ve taken the “adventure” part out of the adventure – which is my second-biggest critique of The Ship. This big choice-based game is pitched as a journey into mystery, with two captains charting their respective courses into uncertainty and danger, with only a cryptic poem to guide them, in search of a transcendent experience beyond mere treasure. And that’s a great pitch! But the game doesn’t really sell the high-stakes nature of the voyage; most of the challenges you experience aren’t about testing your wits against a hostile nature or devious foes, but rather getting a recalcitrant ship and querulous crew to keep moving in pursuit of the goal.

These are technically external obstacles, I know – maybe my model is not as ironclad as I thought – but they feel decidedly low-key. The game’s first puzzle involves winning a game of liar’s dice against a crewmember to win back the astrolabe he borrowed from the ship’s navigator, which is fun enough in itself but of course feels like busywork since you’re the captain and could just order him to give it back; others require you to fix damage to your ship (largely inflicted offscreen), investigate a spate of thefts, and fetch some soup for a prisoner. There is a minigame that sees you navigating through a series of treacherous passages, but it plays as a highly mechanical programming puzzle where you input your moves ahead of time and see if they bring you through; it’s reasonably engaging, but fairly bloodless. It’s all stuff that could work well if the game was attempting to provide a low-key simulation of shipboard life in the early 18th Century, but both from the blurb and the structure of the game, it’s clear that it’s aiming at, but failing to reach, a more dynamic, epic feel.

The game’s biggest issue, though, is its inappropriate prose style. Skillful writing could have perhaps bridged the gap between The Ship’s ambitious premise and its quotidian reality, and period-appropriate prose could have livened up the historical tourism aspect of the game. But instead, what’s on offer is informal and contemporary. Here’s a bit of the main character’s journal:

"All my life, I never truly belonged. Never had a family, a job, or something else that would make me a normal person. Hell, fuck normal persons, could not even be a half-decent pirate to earn my living! The sea was too much of a hassle for me."

Modulo the pirate-orphan stuff, this sounds more like a middle-class emo teenager from 1997 than a dashing ship’s captain from 1719. As that awkwardly-inserted f-bomb indicates, there’s also a fair bit of profanity, but it doesn’t sound anything like what I’d imagine someone of the captain’s background would actually say; I couldn’t help but compare the game’s use of language to that of To Sea in a Sieve, and the Ship sadly comes up wanting. And while I’m probably more of a stickler for period detail than most, for a contemporary style to work in this story, it would have to be more engaging, and again, epic – while it does reach for big-picture imagery in a few sequences, the writing is largely content to stick in this low-key dear-diary sort of mode.

So these are the reasons why the game didn’t fully work for me, but I have to admit there’s a lot to like here. The cast of supporting characters are quite one-note, but they’re generally pretty appealing, and the various minigames are skillfully programmed and change up the gameplay, even if they do get a bit repetitive and the navigation one dearly needs a function allowing you to edit your movement queue rather than just delete everything back to where you made a mistake (the biggest of these puzzles is almost fifty moves long! I confess I consulted the walkthrough for a couple of these). It also ends strong, with a climax that unites the two strands of the plot and posits a resolution that would externalize the internal conflicts that came before in a way that could have worked, if the earlier segments had been stronger. And speaking of the second strand of the plot, I haven’t said much about it because it actually functions as a pretty cool reveal. But there isn’t enough ballast to keep The Ship fully afloat.

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

For its first ten minutes, I was pretty convinced that Fix Your Mother’s Printer just wasn’t going to work for me. The title and blurb instantly convey a compelling comedic premise – troubleshooting printers is annoying enough, much less with someone who’s probably a little out of step with modern technology, much much less via Zoom – but the initial exchanges with my mom seemed to indicate that it was also going to wring some jokes out of not-so-friendly banter and maybe even some passive-aggression; she reproached me for never calling, while most of my dialogue options contained some barb or other to throw in return.

That’s fine so far as it goes, but look, unless I’m prompted to play a specific character, I usually play IF as if I were myself – I mean, I am myself, but you know what I mean. And my mom is pretty great! She likes wine, NPR, and the New York Times games app, and though she lives on the opposite coast she comes out to visit for a couple of weeks every few months to offer free babysitting and cook delicious dinners. So I was already pretty disinclined to be mean to my game-mom, all the more so since she’s drawn to look not too different from my real one.

I was resigning myself to not enjoying this one as much as I hoped I would as I embarked on the tech-support odyssey, trying to at least pick the least-prickly options – when I realized the game was actually following my lead and the dialogue on both sides appeared to soften. I actually wrote in my notes file “seems like she’s getting less acerbic”, and then alt-tabbed back to see that the next line of dialogue involved the mom saying she was glad I was being nice, since “sometimes you can be a little bit acerbic.” Turns out I was on the same wavelength as this game after all! And from there I settled in to have a positive, lovely time.

That is, a positive, lovely time with my mom; the printer was an obstreperous beast throughout. You have to work through checking the power, the print que, the drivers, the toner, the firmware… I’m no longer an expert at this kind of thing, I should admit – I’ve long since experienced the transition that prompts soul-searching for so many middle-aged geeks, going from “I know how to write my own autoexec.bat and himem.sys files” to “can someone please tell me how to turn off the Apple TV?” (that isn’t a randomly chosen example; if any of y’all know, please do drop me a line) – but I thought the troubleshooting bits worked well, hitting the right balance between frustration and at least narrowing down the possible problems. And with me and my mom firmly on the same side, the increasingly-ridiculous lengths we had to go to to try to fix things provided grist for our double act; it was more good-natured than laugh-out-loud funny, but it was still really enjoyably written, and I did giggle when some joint of hers let out a loud crack when she bent down to move the printer, and she told me “you have no idea what’s coming to you, physically.”

The rat-a-tat comedic timing meant that I often was clicking through so fast that I missed changes in the game’s graphics, but that’s my own fault. The interface is nicely set up to mimic a video call while keeping ample screen real estate for the all-important text, and the charming, hand-drawn image of your mom updates as her expression changes, she ducks out of frame to mess with the printer, or Very Good Boy Pawford pops in for a cameo (even though it’s accomplished vicariously, petting Pawford was the best bit of doggie tummy-rubbing I’ve seen in a piece of IF in quite some time). They’re never overbearing, and as my experience indicates, you can pretty much ignore the visual elements if you want, but they do add a really pleasant vibe to the proceedings.

So all was well that ended well; we did manage to fix the printer, and despite what seemed at the beginning of the call like a threat to discuss your dating life once the tech support was done, actually that part was really sweet too – as was another sequence involving talking to her about her in-progress divorce or separation from your dad. I was not expecting Fix Your Mother’s Printer to be gently emotional, but turns out that was my major takeaway vibe. What’s even more impressive is that there seems to be significant branching – from reading other folks’ experiences with the game, it’s possible to fail to fix the printer, to have a way more conflict-oriented conversation with your mom, and generally have a completely different experience. Still, I’m quite satisfied with the ending I got; how can you expect a printer to play nice if you aren’t going to?

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

Dysfluent is part of a subgenre of IF that foregrounds the experience of living with a disability. I’ve played a number of such games, focusing on autism, OCD, social anxiety, and I’m sure there are many others I’ve forgotten, and beyond the subject matter they tend to have common threads: they’re most often short, choice-based, and allow the player to engage with the disability via a central game or interface mechanic. I’d also say that much of the time, their focus on the subjective experience of a particular challenge understandably gets prioritized over traditional IF elements like narrative, character development, or gameplay; they tend to be immersive and dramatize short, intensive events that don’t leave much room for such things. There’s nothing wrong with making those choices, in my view – I’ve found many of these games effective and memorable – but I think I’d internalized the necessity of this tradeoff to such a degree that it felt deeply surprising to me when Dysfluent demonstrated that it’s eminently possible to depict a disability in an informed, sensitive way, while still including a plot arc, impactful choices, and a well-characterized protagonist, without any significant compromises required.

As the title suggests, Dysfluent’s main character lives with a stutter, which makes the quotidian tasks that make up game’s plot – picking up a gift for a friend, attending a celebratory lunch, and interviewing for a new job – a bit of a minefield, and one with a lot of minute-to-minute uncertainty. While sometimes your speech impediment manifests in very intense ways, other times it’s relatively minor, and you’ve developed a host of workarounds and other strategies to help manage it. This means that the player’s actually given a fair degree of agency, since the interface allows you to see the likely difficulty level of the various dialogue options you’re given; you can decide that in a particular situation it’s more important to be understood quickly than to take the time needed to get out exactly what you intended to say, or just wave at someone rather than say hi to avoid the dilemma entirely.

I never felt like there was a single right approach, as the different contexts the game offered for these interactions shifted my sense of the tradeoffs. Dysfluent also does a good job of making these decisions important both internally and externally. The protagonist appear to have had their stutter since childhood – and per some flashbacks, are carrying around some trauma from some callous and clueless behavior from parents, friends, and teachers – and feels a lot of pressure to avoid discussion of, or calling attention to, it. As a result, the choices aren’t simply cold-blooded exercises in optimization; they also impact how authentic the protagonist is able to be, both with themself and with their friends.

It’s nice that the game doesn’t make this too one-dimensional on the other side, either; I didn’t feel judged when I decided to give a fake but easier-to-say name when picking up coffee because I just wanted to push the easy button. Dysfluent also isn’t a total misery-fest – I certainly respect games that lean into that approach, but it’s also nice to see protagonists in these sorts of games get a win. Despite a little bit of difficulty communicating, I was able to get exactly the right present for my friend’s birthday, which helped get the game off on the right foot and reassured me that my choices could have an impact. And while some of the other interactions didn’t go so well, I was OK with that; when bad things happened, it generally seemed like a logical consequence rather than the game trying too hard to make a point.

The elephant in the room is the omnipresent use of timed text. This is unavoidable given Dysfluent’s subject matter; it’s the obvious mechanic to represent the stutter, and it definitely helps the player experience the frustration of not being able to get out what they want to say. Still, there’s no two ways around the fact that this design choice does mean intentionally frustrating the player, and I do think the annoyance factor could have been tuned slightly down without harming the marriage of gameplay with theme – in particular, timed text is sometimes used when it doesn’t seem necessary, like delaying your internal thought processes or dialogue from other characters.

On the positive side, the game does allow you to turn off the delay after finishing it, if you want to go back and try to make different choices or gather some of the achievements you missed your first time through – again, it appears that there’s a lot of branching, and that achievement section is quite robust. So those “new game plus” options are a nice convenience, but also an indication that the author’s thought about who Dysfluent works as a game, not just as an experience, and it’s all the better for it.

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

Adapting a piece of static fiction into IF is a vexed challenge that could bedevil even the wily Odysseus. On one side, there’s the risk of hewing so closely to the original story that a player who’s familiar with it gets bored, knowing all the plot twists in advance – call that Scylla. On the other side lurks the danger of changing things so much that the coherence of the story falls apart, and it deviates so much from its inspiration that it no longer functions as an adaptation – call that Charybdis. Of course, this dilemma doesn’t cut so deeply if a player hasn’t read the original, though this creates its own problems: “come play my adaptation of the Odyssey, except if you like the Odyssey, this isn’t for you” is a rough marketing line. Detective Osiris proposes another way out of the bind, though, by adapting a myth – myths, after all, having a certain margin of error, being endlessly retold and reinterpreted in ways that occasionally differ from each other in quite radical ways. It nonetheless sails a wobbly course – at first I thought it tacked too close to Scylla, then at the end I was worried Charybdis was going to get it – but ultimately it does make it through.

This Ink retelling of the story of Osiris starts out with many of the traditional plot points: you wake up in Duat, the Egyptian underworld, having been hewn apart and then painstakingly reassembled and resurrected as a god through the good offices of your wife Isis. Rather than immediately taking up your new divine duties, however, the other gods of the pantheon encourage you to investigate your murder so you can bring justice to the unknown perpetrator. This plays out largely through interviewing suspects, both divine and mortal, as you wander through a small but pleasing recreation of Ancient Egypt and its imagined afterlife, with a few puzzles tacked on towards the end of the case.
These conversations aren’t anything special in gameplay terms; there are typically only a few dialogue options in each, and you don’t need to work too hard to figure out who’s lying or choose an approach, as simple lawnmowering will work just fine. I did enjoy getting to know the various characters, though, especially the gods, who are given a recognizably modern slant: Geb is imagined as a TV addict who views the lives of mortals as “content”, while Anubis and Ammit are pets of Ma’at and Thoth (they’re both pettable: Anubis is a good doggy and clearly enjoys it, while Ammit doesn’t acknowledge the gesture in the slightest, which Ma’at says is a sign that she likes you). Sometimes this perhaps goes a bit too far – Ma’at’s dialogue skews a bit too informal for my taste, and Ra saying “wow. I love that” does undercut the majesty of the sun god – the game’s casual attitude towards anachronism occasionally leads to an inadvertent howler, like the mention of Alexandria at a time thousands of years before its founding, but on balance I found this more interesting than a more traditional, wooden approach would have been.

The puzzles, on the other hand, feel somewhat vestigial. There are only two, and the multiple-choice format combined with the lack of any penalty for failure means they’re trivial to brute-force. Even if you try to solve them honestly, one is far too easy, and the second (a math puzzle) is maybe a bit too tough. I appreciated the attempt to change up the gameplay, but I think the author would have been better off either leaning in by having more, more robust puzzles, or simply dropping them and focusing on the character interactions exclusively.

As for the prose with which all of this is rendered, I found it rather inconsistent. It starts out quite nicely, with this description of your experience of revival:

"When I wake up, I can taste the river in my throat. I’m laying in a glade, which seems unkissed by the sun and yet somehow still lit. The trees have cobalt leaves and the thicket is so dense that it obscures any kind of sky."

That’s quite nice! There’s also a sex scene which, impressively, isn’t terrible or cringe-inducing (though it does seem to indicate a major departure from the original myth, given that Isis famously couldn’t find one specific bit when she was stitching Osiris back together…) But there are some bits where the attempt to bring in a slight noir tone leads to comedy:

"I can scarcely believe it. Dead? And chopped into pieces? It didn’t exactly sound like an accident."

The text also boasts a fair number of typos and spelling errors, most of which are forgivable (it’s for its, that sort of thing), but there were still enough of them to occasionally take me out of the story.

So it’s all solid enough and engaging on its own terms, but I still found myself slightly checked out for the first three-quarters or so of the game. The trouble is that per the myth, I knew perfectly well who the perpetrator was, and the game doesn’t work very hard to hide the ball. So while running around and ticking the boxes on my investigative checklist was all well and good, none of the conversations really told me anything I didn’t already know, and again, Detective Osiris doesn’t make you jump through any hoops to obtain these somewhat-underwhelming clues. On the one hand, it was nice that the game didn’t require me to play dumb; on the other hand, that means this murder-mystery isn’t very mysterious.

But then the game did something unexpected, throwing in a twist I didn’t see coming at all. I’m not convinced it fully holds together – and it’s certainly not very well seeded in the previous section of the game, further undermining any claim Osiris has to being a detective – but it is reasonably clever and reinterprets the myth in a new way. It’s not going to replace the original, of course, and I do think the game maybe skews too faithful in the early going before getting too radical in the end, where a more consistent approach would have worked better. Even so, Detective Osiris still averages out to a novel-but-not-too-novel take that makes it through adaptation’s peril-filled strait only a bit worse for wear.

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

My wife and I visited Venice a few years ago, on a trip that had a lot of conventional highlights – the Arsenale! The Bridge of Sighs! That quadriga they stole from Constantinople! – and one that was quite unconventional. We went in late October, as the tourist season was starting to ebb, and though the city was still flooded with people during the day, many of them were cruise people who went back to their ships in the evenings, so once the sun was down it was surprisingly thinly populated. In fact one night as we walked back after dinner, the campo in front of our hotel was completely deserted, and as we marveled at the romantic ambiance, we suddenly spied a flickering light off at the other side of the square, in a heretofore-unnoticed breezeway leading around the side of a decaying building. We crept closer and saw that, oddly, small candles had been placed at intervals at the sides of the passage, leading us down and down the arcade into a night that suddenly felt quite black and cold, though still just as absent of human life. As we considered whether to keep going, I felt near-certain that either a ghost was going to appear, or we were going to be murdered, but either way it was going to be stylish.

From its movie-aping cover image to its multilingual-pun title (“yellow” is “giallo” in Italian, of course), Barcarolle in Yellow is similarly enticing, promising lurid thrills in a memorable setting. As an actress specializing in Italian B-movies, you’re summoned to Venice with the promise of work, but soon find yourself teetering at the edge of madness as plot points from the film – like a mask-clad stalker and a depraved cult – become all too real. Have you just been popping too many pills, or are the brutish director and sinister psychoanalyst in on the plot? And are you just the victim, or something else entirely?

This is a lovely lovely premise, but sadly for me the game didn’t quite live up to it, for two main reasons. First, the setting is surprisingly underutilized, and in fact Barcarolle in Yellow overall doesn’t provide much in the way of striking imagery. There’s something charming about entire districts of Venice being rendered as single locations, but the effect is to make an already-small city even more cramped. The general absence of implemented scenery – or even mentioned scenery – also drains the setting of some charm. Like, here’s the description for Piazza San Marco, omitting only the listing of exits:

"The best-known square of Venice, perhaps of Italy, featuring the church of San Marco, the iconic Campanile and the Doge’s Palace, as well as a grand view of the lagoon to the south and the island-monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore on the other side of the water."

This is a singularly underwhelming rendering of one of the most beautiful places on earth, and what’s worse, trying to examine any of the landmarks gets a terse reminder that you’re here “to work, not to see the sights.” Where a screenwriter might be able to get away with simply writing “EXT – LIDO – NIGHT” on faith that the director will add the details and ambiance, this works less well in IF form; again, I could fill in the blanks a bit from my own experience, but I still found myself wishing that the prose provided a more evocative jumping-off point for my imagination – all the more so since this is nominally a giallo, which thrive on atmosphere. Sure, things do get more evocative and intense in the interstitial cut-scene sequences, and there is the occasional exception, like a psychiatrist’s office that’s described with well-chosen details, but this can’t really substitute for the relative thinness of the interactive sections.

And speaking of interaction, that’s the other place where I thought the game fell a bit short. You’ve definitely got some interesting things to do, from escaping a violent mob to trying to catch the killer on film, but I never felt like an equal partner in proceedings; instead, like an actor working for a domineering director, I felt henpecked, pushed to do whatever specific thing the game had in mind with no tolerance, much less reward, for trying to explore off the beaten path. As mentioned above, the authorial voice even hurries the player past examining things it doesn’t want you to look at, but beyond that, the puzzle design is actively discouraging of experimentation – your introduction to Venice is a chase sequence with not even a single turn to spare, the movie-filming sequences adhere to a rigid set of requirements (you’re not even allowed to scream when someone gets gunned down in the Western you’re filming in the prologue), and in general I just felt like I was somewhat surplus to requirements. This reached a nadir in the ending, where the final text seemed to assume I’d accomplished something I’d spent many turns unsuccessfully wrestling with the parser to attempt (Spoiler - click to show)(shooting either my double or myself – the game kept insisting the gun was unloaded, even though I’d opened it and seen the bullet in the chamber). There are some decision points that seem to determine which of several endings you receive, but these are similarly curated, coming as yes/no decisions that break into the normal flow of parser gameplay, so I found they didn’t add much in the way of engagement.

Admittedly, the game’s thin implementation and occasional bugginess also meant that in the back half of the game I hewed closer to the critical path. When I took an action necessary to solve the first puzzle, for example, the opening sequence where the director of the Western yelled cut and a boy ran up with a telegram inviting me to Venice suddenly replayed, despite already being in the Venice train station. And an action sequence involving falling off the Ponte Rialto was somewhat undermined by the ability to enter a souvenir shop mid-descent, and pick up a passing motorboat along the way.

For all that, once I just gave up and went with the game’s direction, I did have a reasonably fun time. While this isn’t a story for the ages, it hits some fun beats, and gets many points for novelty (is there a second parser giallo?) And it’s occasionally quite skillful in how it mixes artifice with reality, with the protagonist’s real life sometimes seeming to be a movie, and vice versa. Still, I wish I hadn’t had to work so hard to meet the game halfway; this one needed a little more time in pre-production and a director who’s a little less of a control freak, though I could still see it gaining a cult following.

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

Points to The Witch for delivering when it comes to terror – guessing that in an old-school game like this the SCORE command might be useful, I was chilled to read the phrase “the game is winnable from this point” after it duly recited that I’d garnered 0 of 150 points. That positive statement, reassuring on its face, gives rise to what we fancy JDs call a negative inference: it wouldn’t be there unless at some point the game becomes unwinnable.

I don’t necessarily have a philosophical objection to games that are cruel in the Zarfian sense, I don’t think; in some cases, requiring restarts to optimize a puzzle solution or having certain especially significant or bone-headed choices lock a player out of victory might be defensible. No, my issue is a practical one, which is that cruel games, especially those of the old-school persuasion, are often tedious – there’s often a lot of retracing of one’s steps, resolving of puzzles one has tried before, and just generally faffing about in an uninteresting way. Sadly, The Witch already has a tedium problem, with a mostly-generic setting, a yawn-worthy premise, and fiddly features like an inventory limit. Add to this a generally high level of difficulty that seems to require authorial ESP to progress, and hair-trigger failure states that punish the player for the slightest deviation from the walkthrough, and I have to confess I couldn’t motivate myself to finish, even though I only put slightly more than an hour into it.

Let me start out by saying there were some elements I like. The player character is an elf with a mead hangover who missed the titular witch’s abduction of his village-mates because he was off on the aforementioned bender. I like this premise both because it’s implied that these aren’t like Noldor-type elves but rather Keebler ones, and also because I find the mead hangover thing very relatable; I’ve only had mead twice in my life, and each time I woke up the next morning praying for death. So me and this elf were sympatico. And while the prose is generally quite terse as per the usual style for this sort of throwback puzzlefest, there were some neat set-pieces, like an encounter with a giant owl, and some places where the writing went to some extra effort:

“This cottage belongs to Widow Elf, the matriarch of the village. The air is thick and still, smelling vaguely of lavender. Sunlit dust motes dance in the faint light. The cottage is warm, the air oppressive.”

That’s one more clause about the air than is needed, and Gloria Steinem could have a field day on how this lady’s identity is literally subsumed by that of her dead husband, but the passage is still way more lyrical than I expected.

Now that we’ve reached the inevitable pivot, though, I have to rattle off the stuff that wasn’t so nice. For one thing, the implementation is quite thin, with a lot of objects mentioned in location descriptions either not available to interact with, or brushed off with a “you don’t need to refer to the X”. Said locations are also pretty repetitive, with a lot of empty paths and elf cottages with only one or two salient features; combined, these two issues mean that exploration of the reasonably-sized map is a drag. Speaking of, there are at least two mazes; I made my way through one with a bit of trial and error, which wasn’t too bad, but come on, gimmick-less mazes in 2023 – in a game with a time limit – are a hard pill to swallow.

And oh, speaking of hard, the puzzles. Some of them aren’t bad in concept, but seem quite fiddly in implementation (Spoiler - click to show)(I’d come up with the idea of using the birdseed to get the key from the owl, but he attacked me every time I brought the seed out of the contained I’d hidden it in; from the walkthrough, it seems like you have to make use of Inform’s implicit take function to solve this puzzle, which is a really high bar); others just don’t seem to make any sense (Spoiler - click to show)(is there a clue anywhere that indicates that you should show the teddy bear to the catatonic elf?). And then, as mentioned above, there are the fail states; there are a couple of traditional puzzles that I would have enjoyed muddling through, one involving finding the correct combination for a series of levers, the other involving using a cart to explore a mine, but for the fact that they actively discourage experimentation. If you try a single incorrect combination for the levers, the machinery permanently stops working (this is especially egregious because the most logical way to read the one clue you get points to the inverse of the correct combination, not the one the game actually accepts), and the mine cart zooms off without you if you neglect a single step in what becomes a rather involved trial-by-error process, plus you need to do the whole sequence before your lamp burns down, which is on a ridiculously short timer.

I know there are folks who like this sort of thing, either out of nostalgia or sheer bloody-mindedness (hey, Francis Bacon, over here! Have I got a game for you!) But I got into IF through Photopia, not Zork or Adventure, and such as they are, my kinks top out at quite liking brunettes. God bless you people who will like The Witch, but I am not one of you (hell, you folks probably like mead, too).

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

Thing of Wretchedness bills itself as sandbox horror, which is a phrase I read in the blurb then promptly forgot about; now, though, as I turn over which parts of the game worked and which didn’t work for me, I’m realizing that label is key to the whole experience. The horror elements are clear enough: you play an older woman, living in an isolated, snow-bound cottage, who’s desperately writing away for help dealing with a big, awful thing too terrible to describe that’s taken up residence with her – while they coexist uneasily at first, the threat of future violence is omnipresent. The sandbox elements are well-defined, too – there are several different paths you can pursue, each flagged with greater or lesser obviousness, from attempting to deal with the thing yourself to looking for external aid to trying to plumb the mystery of its existence. And the major gameplay challenge isn’t so much the simple puzzles as it is solving said puzzles while managing the thing’s semi-random behavior; ToW feels more open-ended than the typical parser game as a result since no static walkthrough will guide you to the end.

While each of these elements is well-done, I’m not sure they fit together all that well, though. In particular, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation of Lovecraftian tropes, I didn’t find it the least bit creepy. Partially this is down to the decision not to describe the thing’s appearance or behavior in any detail, but I think that’s partially motivated by a desire not to have the thing’s repetitive, system-driven actions clash with a more literary prose style. And of course the tension in horror depends almost entirely on pacing, which is hard for an author to manage when so much of what happens and what order it happens in is out of their control. Sure, there are other horror video games that use semi-emergent behavior to get scares, like your Amnesias and what all, but I’m not sure these techniques translate well to the text-based context, without audio and visuals. Lastly, I didn’t get much sense of the protagonist’s subjectivity; I think this was intentionally done to try to conceal a twist that she presumably knows about but the player doesn’t, but the downside is that because she rarely felt all that concerned about the thing, neither did I (it also doesn’t help that I guessed the twist about thirty seconds into the game).

Meanwhile, the sandbox-y gameplay is pretty engaging – while I was several steps ahead of the plot, it was a fun reveal when I started to understand the rules for how the thing worked and figured out how that would help me achieve some of my goals. But in practice, the player’s tools for manipulating these systems are limited, so I wound up spending a bunch of time banging the Z key to wait for the thing to do exactly what I wanted; that’s no big deal in of itself, but again, slight boredom is antithetical to any mood of real horror.

The game’s endings are fortunately among its best elements, so while the middle section did sometimes drag a bit, it finished strong. The actions you need to take in several of them are bleak and intense, making up for the slacker pieces that came before. I also enjoyed the crossover with the author’s previous (and excellent) Ascension of Limbs – it’s not anything that a new player will miss, just a slight bit of added context to a small frame-story, but it puts a cute button on the game while hinting at the events that happen after the formal action of the game is done. So while A Thing of Wretchedness definitely feels like a minor game, it very much has its pleasures, even as it demonstrates that marrying a horror story with sandbox gameplay is a hard nut to crack in IF.