Reviews by Mike Russo

It sounds like the very definition of damning with faint praise to say that my favorite thing about The Woodcutter’s Quest is the wood. But actually I quite enjoyed my time with the game! It’s just that it’s intentionally rather straightforward, an implementation of a pedagogical example used in a how-to-design-adventure-games book – a book entitled, in fact, How to Design Adventure Games (by Shaun McClure) just to be clear how straightforward we’re being here. It’s charmingly simple to my taste, boasting Classic Text Adventure Premise #17: a wizard has kidnapped the rest of your village, so it’s up to you to journey through the forest to his castle and save them. There are several puzzles that involve giving food to animals, the descriptions are terse but communicative, and provide solid clues about to overcome obstacles, and the implementation is of the high standard I’ve come to expect from the author. And per the ABOUT text, there are even some bonus puzzles and extra bells and whistles belted onto McClure’s chassis.

All that makes for a solid game but one with few surprises, so like I said, the wood-forward nature of the adventure really stood out. I mean, sure, it’s right there on the tin, but I figured the whole “you’re a woodcutter” thing was just an excuse for having you be out in the forest when the wizard comes calling, and maybe start you off with an axe already in your inventory. But actually said axe can be used to chop a surprisingly large number of objects into kindling – sometimes usefully, sometimes just for stress-relief – there are plentiful opportunities to search around in wooden objects or furniture, a key early puzzle revolves around making a fire from wood… heck, the background of the game’s itch.io page is even a tessellated mosaic of sawn-through logs! It’s commitment to the bit, and also makes the game feel more simulationist without making any of its puzzles too complex, since one bit of wood can generally be substituted for another. So yeah, I was a fan of the wood.

As for things I wasn’t as much a fan of, well, that’s a shorter list. I was sad not to have found an alternate way past the goblin, though there might well be one and I was jut too thick to notice. Beyond that, I had to look up the full answer to the puzzle I mentioned above involving fire, because it relies on some pyrodynamic assumptions that I think aren’t right (Spoiler - click to show) (surely in most cases throwing a jugfull of water on a moderately-sized fire will just produce some steam and maybe put out the fire, rather than producing smoke? For smoke you need wet wood, but burning the rotten wood didn’t get me smoke, and despite wrestling with the parser for quite a while I couldn’t convince it that I wanted to put any of my large pile of wood into the easily-accessible river to get it damp).

The fact that I just spent so much time quibbling about one small aspect of a puzzle is an indication of just how tight the game is overall – it’s a textbook example of the small-fantasy-text-adventure genre, and if along with praise for the effectiveness of the execution, that also suggests a cap on how exciting it can be, well, so it goes. I was more than happy to enjoy Woodcutter’s Quest for what it is – but also because if I squint at it, I can see the outline of a much weirder game that really goes whole hog on the woodworking angle. Maybe some newcomer turned onto IF by this game, or the book it’s riffing on, will take up the gauntlet? Stranger things have happened.

Towards the western end of the Forum Romanum, the ancient heart of the Eternal City, tucked below the still-majestic ruins of temples, arches, and courthouses, lies the Lacus Curtius. It’s incredibly unassuming today – a random assortment of paving stones scattered around some divot-filled turf – but it wouldn’t have been much more imposing at the height of the Republic either; for the Lacus Curtius wasn’t a great edifice, but rather a sort of basin or wet pit, one of the last remaining bits of fen when the swamplands below the Capitoline Hill was drained. What makes it special? Even the Romans themselves weren’t quite sure. One story is that the spot was made sacred after it had been hit by lightning. Another, more involved, says that a great sinkhole once appeared at the site, threatening to swallow some of the most important buildings in the city, when an oracle said that the rift could be closed only if Rome’s greatest strength were sacrificed to it; a brave young soldier decided this must mean the bravery of a soldier (perhaps unsurprisingly) and jumped into the abyss, saving the day.

The last story is that some guy named Curtius got his horse stuck in the mud there one time.
There’s nothing especially special about the Lacus Curtius, all of this is to say, except for the fact that some people who lived a very long time ago thought it was special too. So in some ways, A Quest in Time, which is a game made almost entirely out of Lacus Curtiuses (I know that’s bad Latin, Daniel, sorry!), should be right up my alley (you will be unsurprised to learn that when I visited Rome on my honeymoon, I befuddled my wife by making a beeline for the aforementioned sump). This time-traveling adventure takes you to Rome in the last decades of the Republic, but also Athens as it catches its breath between flare-ups of the Peloponnesian War, London during the Plague Year, and more eras besides. But you’ll find no lovingly-described Acropolis or a version of the pre-Great Fire St. Paul’s conjured up with historical fidelity; there are temples and churches and marketplaces and all that, but the spaces are general rather than specific, workaday spaces that provide a bit of color to the puzzles, most of which involve decoding ciphers left behind for you by a rogue time-agent in order to figure out the spatio-temporal coordinates for your next destination.

Rather than offering a view of regular life in the past, a sort of quotidian temporal tourism, though, the effect is often just vague. Here’s a lawyer’s office in Restoration England, for example:

"The room is arranged with a careful sense of order, its atmosphere one of a quiet formality. Everything appears to be kept in its proper place, just as if governed by rules not immediately visible. There’s a stillness here that suggests deliberation rather than neglect, and you get the impression that matters of consequence are conducted within these walls."

A certain degree of vibes-focused description can be a virtue in parser games, inasmuch as it conveys mood without creating a whole bunch of distracting scenery that takes a long time to implement and risks sending the player down blind alleys. And there are other locations that have a bit more concrete detail to them. But it’s not just the location descriptions, a similar sort of fogginess infects NPCs and their dialogue, and actually interactable objects and scenery. Too many parts of the game, especially in the latter half, fall prey to fuzziness, which dramatically undercuts the fun of hopping through history.

But back to the puzzles, which are the main focus of the game – though there is a reasonably robustly-written opening, it pretty much just boils down to “you’re a rookie time agent, someone’s gone missing and could be playing out their own agenda, so it’s up to you to track him down.” They’re a pretty classic lot, with a fair number of swap-item-X-to-NPC-Y-to-get-item-Z chains there mostly for pacing, and the aforementioned encoded-coordinates puzzles being the set-pieces. I found those to be a mixed bag; several work well enough, providing just enough resistance before you can figure out how to turn a bit of ASCII art or a scrawled message that appears to be about something entirely different into a six-digit number. But I had to go to the walkthrough to solve the first of them, and even seeing the steps required to solve it I still don’t understand what was going on. The sometimes-finicky parser also made a couple puzzles harder than they were probably intended to be – there are a lot of clues written in dead languages, which is fun, but the availability of the TRANSLATE verb really should have been better signposted, and getting the time machine to work took me way too long, largely because the keypad can’t be TYPEd on, nor can its buttons be PUSHED – only PRESSED.

While the environmental storytelling gets weaker as the game progresses, however, the puzzles get easier, and the throwaway plot from the intro starts to come back into play, leading to a late-game twist that recalls a major work in the IF canon for its climax. It’s a bold move, though not one I’m wholly convinced by (Spoiler - click to show)y (inviting comparisons with Trinity is probably a fool’s errand in general, and the specific method of sabotage contemplated here – stopping the Trinity test by blowing up a particular piece of equipment with a hand grenade – doesn’t seem like it would actually accomplish much, though in fairness there are indications that there’s some other timey-wimey stuff in play and it’s that, rather than the secrets of nuclear fission, that you’re trying to keep bottled up). There’s fun to be had with A Quest in Time, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help wishing it had committed to being the clearest, most compelling version of itself, rather than the decidedly thinner and more spread-out iteration we got.

For decades, one of the standard critiques of adventure game puzzles is that they can operate on cartoon logic. It’s a brave move by Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl, then, to steer into the skid: one the one hand, having a game that’s literally in a Looney-Toons style cartoon means that slapstick doesn’t create tonal clashes with the rest of the game, but on the other hand, there’s a very real risk of frustration if players aren’t thinking outside the box in exactly the right way. Fortunately, the game nails its premise, offering up clever twists on classic scenarios that prompt you towards solutions while maintaining a healthy level of difficulty, and make plenty of room for funny gags along the way.

The precise setup here is one of the oldest in video-game-dom – someone nefarious has kidnapped your girlfriend for underspecified reasons – but what you’re really doing is wandering around looking for anything shaped like a puzzle, in the confidence that that will eventually get you where you’re going. The early stages are more directed, as you’re confined to a small area of the map until you figure out how to reach the city where your paramour disappeared, but once things open up there are pretty long puzzle chains to be traversed before you pick up the thread of the plot again. And that works fine, since in a cartoon short the mayhem in the middle is the point.

Again, it helps that the scenarios are nicely chosen to prompt the player to act – if you see a safe dangling in the middle of the street, hanging by only a fraying rope, or a parasol next to a near-bottomless pit, you don’t need to have mainlined cartoons to guess what you should be doing. While there are maybe one or two that could fit in just about any parser game (I don’t remember Bugs Bunny doing anything so straightforward as prying up a grate with a crowbar), they’re very much the exceptions from the inspired set of challenges on offer. You can die – though nothing a couple UNDOs won’t solve – and I think there’s at least one way to get yourself into an unwinnable situation, albeit it’s near the start and you need to do something that’s fairly obviously unwise. But I didn’t mind this flirtation with cruelty, because it’s part of how the game balances approachability with challenge: there are some tricky puzzles (I actually needed a hint to figure out exactly how to deal with that cliff, though it was reasonably clued in retrospect) so the game wants to make sure you’re thinking about what you’re doing.

As I also mentioned, Slappy Squirrel actually is funny, too. I really enjoyed the name of one of your neighbors, which is an off-brand riff on Pepe LePew, and the game never misses a chance to indulge in a cartoon trope, like emphasizing how background scenery keeps getting reused or how the world disappears as you get near the horizon past which the artists haven’t drawn anything. It’s also well implemented, with the only tiny bug I ran into setting up the biggest laugh of the game. Here was how the ending text was displayed:

"Congratulations, you have saved the girl and joined the ranks of the greatest romantic couples in toon history.
(first dropping the vacuum cleaner hose)"

That kind of intrusion of chaos into narrative is characteristic of both cartoons and IF – and Slappy Squirrel Gets the Girl what good things can happen when that convergence isn’t run from, but embraced.

The Simpsons is responsible for so much at this point that it feels hubristic to pick out one thing and call it the Simpsons Effect, but since from the state of the world it sure feels like the Furies have been sending out-of-office autoreplies for a while now, let’s risk some lightning bolts: due to having watched a bunch of the Simpsons when I was relatively tender-aged, there is a whole host of pop culture that I first encountered, and remain primarily if not exclusively familiar with, via Simpsons parodies. I’ve never seen the Shining or Cape Fear or Rear Window, but beyond the broad outlines of the plots I know many of the key setpieces and even how they were shot, based on seeing them played out by a cast of oddly-yellow cartoon characters. On the one hand, the Simpsons Effect really is an efficient way of expanding one’s cultural horizons – I can keep up in a conversation about the psychosexual themes of the Shining so long as I remember Groundskeeper Willie wasn’t actually involved – but on the other, that expansion is based on unstable foundations, an impression of someone else’s impression of a thing.

So anyway This Island is Trying to Kill You unabashedly presents itself as a homage to, specifically, shareware text adventures of the mid-1980s. I was 4 or 5 for most of the mid 80s, so what with not having a computer and not being literate, this isn’t an area where I have any firsthand knowledge, and I don’t even have any years-later experience, either – I’ve gone back to play some Infocom games, but even a quick glance at Island’s garish colors, integrated ASCII mazes, and cheerful use of the nether depths of the character set make clear that we’re a far way afield from A Mind Forever Voyaging. But I have played stuff like And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One (and its companion, Infinite Adventure) that similarly leverage period-appropriate visuals and interface elements to tweak a nostalgia I don’t actually have, but in service to different creative agendas and more modern design sensibilities.

And at least in this case, that’s great! I can’t say with any authority how well Island apes its inspirations, but the vibe definitely matches what I’ve seen in analogous projects – brief but enthusiastic prose, unselfconsciously old-school puzzles, a sprawling, low-density map, a light treasure-hunt premise, and that all-important interface. There’s a blue header with your score and exits listed (of course there’s a score), a dappled-purple footer that occasionally pops up a light hint, your commands get typed in in cyan with error messages colored red, and there are lots of puzzles that bring in wingdings-style symbols to liven things up, not content to stick to the alphanumerics. It makes for a coherent aesthetic that wouldn’t be out of place on someone’s bedroom C64 in the background of a schmaltzy 80’s movie, but it’s also very functional: you have all the information a modern player has come to expect, the parser is fast and boasts some nice features like an optional autocomplete for longer words, and there’s an in-game automap to help make sense of the sometimes-wacky geography (oh, and there are deaths but they’re all reversible with a simple UNDO).

The other more contemporary touch is a dash of roguelike DNA – the ABOUT text indicates that there’s some randomization at play, jumbling up some of the layout and puzzle solutions between runs. I only went through it the once, but can see where things like safe combinations and the location of some items (like the mysterious ship’s wheels) could be changed, though I don’t think this would add much replayability since the basic contours of the solutions seem like they’d be the same – I am curious whether there are a few larger-scale alterations, though, as I ran into at least one obstacle that I never figured out how to circumvent (Spoiler - click to show)(the shark-infested lagoon).

We’re almost 700 words in and I haven’t said what the game is about yet, but the premise is somewhat besides the point: you’re shipwrecked on a desert island and need to collect a bunch of treasures because a talking porpoise (?) tells you you need to buy a ticket off the island (?) from a magic underground vending machine (?) that extends you credit based on the off-screen bank account you’ve accumulated by finding the aforementioned treasures and handing them off to a handy crab who appraises them and whisks them away for safekeeping (???) Basically: solve 17 puzzles, win the game. Some of these are beyond straightforward – unlock the box with a monkey on it using the key with a monkey on it – but there are also a couple simple math puzzles, some combinations to collect, and straightforward object manipulation challenges.

There’s nothing that’s especially tough, but the fact that the clues and items are spread over such a large map makes it satisfying to recognize that now you can go back and solve something you ran into much earlier. The extensive real-estate – which also includes a couple of evocative sub-areas – makes exploration fun, too, as you uncover the island’s secrets and get a sense of how it all fits together. Meanwhile, the prose is zippy and the jokes solid, with the unexpected result of trying to feed a seagull so it’d stop bothering me getting an out-loud laugh. And as mentioned above, despite appearances the interface is smooth enough to remove most friction. I did run into a couple of small bugs (the help text for interacting with characters seems to be missing, and trying to save the game threw an error, though I’ve been having issues with Itch.io in Chrome, so that could be the culprit), but those didn’t affect my enjoyment in the slightest.

I suspect that people who remember the 80s and played innumerable games like this in their formative years will get more out of This Island is Trying to Kill You. But even for those of us for whom it won’t be a madeleine evoking younger days, there’s a lot to enjoy here – actually, this might be a case where the Simpsons Effect second-hand version is way better than the original inspiration.

Apologies for the mass of blurry-text immediately below, but despite its apparently straightforward treasure-hunt-in-a-1930s-bank premise, Grand Island Bank Robbery (even the title couldn’t be more ingenuous!) is one of those games that can’t be discussed without spoilers. It’s very much a good time, though, so I recommend you give it a whirl and then join me for the real review once you’re sure you’ve hit the ending.

I have been married for going on eleven years now, and in that time my wife and I have developed our own little habits for certain things. For example, here’s how we celebrate our anniversaries: each year, without fail, we’ll decide what day we want to go out and do something, then I’ll do some research to come up with two or three options that I think would be fun or romantic, present them to my wife, who’ll deliberate for a couple of minutes before making a pick – and then each year, a day or two later, she’ll tell me that she did a little bit of her own digging and came up with an idea that is obviously and objectively way, way better than what I came up with, so we do that instead. Unsurprisingly, that means that over the years, even as we’ve stuck to the exact same formalities, the amount of effort I put into coming up with those initial choices has ratcheted down, because even though part of me has to believe that it’s meaningful effort, the greater part of me knows that it’s really just putting on a show before the inevitable happens.

I’ve got something of the same learned helplessness when it comes to Larry Horsfield’s old-school ADRIFT parser puzzlers (yes, that’s the kind of segue you can only get from a Mike Russo review, at least for another two or three generations of LLMs). Every time I read the preview, get excited at the idea of testing my wits against a long, fiendishly-tricky fantasy adventure, read through the extensive instructions and pre-game material while psyching myself up for the challenge, explore the opening area and pat myself on the back for successfully deploying a LOOK BEHIND or LOOK UNDER or two – then get stuck, realize there are no hints, allow my low-level social anxiety to prevent me from taking the author up on the invitation to email them for the walkthrough, and quit in shame. Once or twice, with especially short and easy games, I’ve managed to break the pattern and make substantial progress or even win the thing, but friends, I think this was my worst showing yet, akin to asking my wife if she wants to just spend our anniversary at the second-closest McDonalds (it’s marginally nicer than the closest one!)

I’m disappointed, since until I hit a brick wall I was having a good time. The inciting incident is ridiculous – the village elder sends your village into high alert because someone has stolen the pipe of the evil warlock Rummikum Rummkub, and dragoons you into a quest to recover it – but the other villagers also think it’s a bit much, and there’s a similar amount of just-getting-on-with-it charm to the game’s extremely white-bread fantasy world. Sure, it’s a mismash, with the village boasting a longhouse, a roundhouse, a yort (sic?), and a church complete with stained glass and a nave, but the matter-of-fact prose and just-detailed-enough implementation successfully evoke a classic adventuring vibe. And it was satisfying to run around gathering supplies for the adventure, finding food and water, retrieving your dagger, and so on – that kind of low-key grounding makes the grand fantasy bits stand out all the more.

I never actually got to any of those grand fantasy bits, though, since when I tried to leave the village in pursuit of the thief, an out of character voice told me I needed something from the church. That’s a better approach than letting the player get into a walking dead state, I suppose, but the problem was there was no in-game reason why I would expect there to be anything hidden in the church, nor any clue as to what I was supposed to do there – I messed around with the pews, fumbled around with some carved decorations, tried to steal the god’s statue from the altar (at some point my score went from 10/650 to 5/650, and in retrospect this might have been where I made my blunder), and admitted defeat some 15 minutes later.

Before fully giving up on the game, I made a half-hearted attempt at the other puzzle I was aware of, prompted by reading a book indicating that I’d need some ashes in case I ran into a giant spider later (it’s somehow supposed to confuse them). I’d found a dirty fireplace but couldn’t get a container to scrape the ash into. The miller at the edge of town has a giant pile of empty sacks, which seemed promising, but he wouldn’t let me borrow one or even try to buy one, and realizing that I couldn’t swap gold for an empty burlap sack made me realize that progress in this game was going to depend more on lawnmowering through the command list than thinking up reasonable solutions to obstacles, and I just couldn’t muster up the requisite enthusiasm, since I was sure that even if I did eventually figure these two puzzles out, I’d inevitably come a cropper on some future challenge. Farewell, Alyas of Star – sorry, ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, we barely knew ye, you put in a lot of effort and I barely made any, but that’s just the pattern we’ve settled into after all these years.

UPDATE: Upon getting a in-retrospect-kinda-obvious-though-still-unmotivated hint from the author in the thread below, I was able to get through my ecclesiastical blockage, and after some comedic back and forth where I was prevented from venturing forth on my grand adventure until I’d secured that most critical piece of a hero’s equipage, a tea towel, finally made it to the game proper. I actually started making some solid progress, working through some solidly-clued puzzles to get rid of a pack of wild dogs, explore a deserted village, and uncover some secrets hidden in an enchanted forest. Then I ran out of steam trying to get down from a hundreds-of-feet-high escarpment – I’m worried I might have released a genie too early – but still, with a respectable 150/650 points, and having enjoyed some solid adventure-gaming, I’m much more satisfied both with myself and with the game than I was yesterday.

Sometimes I worry that, for all that I try to have recourse to some consistent albeit subjective standards as I write these reviews, actually that’s all just post-hoc justification and the reasons why I like something or don’t click with it are just ineffable and inexpressible. This worry is especially sharp when I play a game soon after another that’s superficially similar, but which lands entirely differently despite all that. So it is with A Garden of Impossible Objects, a short kinetic novel that boasts atmospheric visuals and a compelling premise, but doesn’t provide a ton of in-depth exploration or plot development. So far so my baby needs blood, but while I thought that game really could have been stronger if it had elaborated upon its setup, I’m perfectly content with the glimpses Impossible Objects offers.

If it is just elephants all the way down, there’s not much point either to writing or reading these things, so we might as well assume that there’s a reason for that. One reason for the difference might be that Impossible Objects’ palette is reasonably broad – that applies literally, as rather than being uniformly a chilly blue, the visuals here provide a varied feast. The game opens with the arresting image of an annular eclipse, and each chapter is interspersed with hyperdetailed images of constellations, but most of the graphics illustrate the eponymous garden (and attached house), where the protagonist’s recently-deceased aunt carefully nurtured plants of all kinds until they ran riot, blooming and fecund. There are pseudo-3d effects (achieved I think through parallax scrolling) and subtle touches of animation, that make the lush visuals even more engaging.

The writing is also very impressive – and I don’t just mean the prose and dialogue are evocative and ring true (though they are, and they do), but that very careful attention has been paid to match the words to the format. I often find visual novels a little frustrating because you need to do so much clicking to advance through the story a sentence or two at a time, but here, almost every short bit of text provides a compelling detail, a nugget of characterization, or an enticing development of the narrative, or both, rather than depending for their impact on something you might not get to for two or three more clicks.

Like, here’s a relatively simple bit where your mom (she’s the reason you’re there, looking for some stuff of hers your aunt didn’t return before her death) opens up the house:

I remember standing next to Mom as she fiddled with the key to unlock the front door.

Carmen didn’t do locks, but following her death someone had put one there.

I’m not entirely sure who.

For nearly a whole day before leaving, Mom was on the phone.

I don’t know who she was talking to.

I didn’t listen in.

As to the substance here, I didn’t find that those enticing details cohered into a single interpretation of what, exactly, the aunt’s deal was, where, if anywhere, the mom’s stuff had been hidden, and what the heck was going on with that eerie basement. And the game does just kind of end, rather than building to a conventional narrative payoff. Here, again, though, I’m eager to give Impossible Objects a pass. The major theme here is grief, and the truth is that most of the time grief is just about alienating vibes – the death of a loved one means that you’re not going to get answers or resolution to any outstanding questions or business you had with them, it’s all just over, and that feels bad and weird. Also, the grief is really a second-order affair – the protagonist didn’t have a close relationship with the aunt, so they’re mostly observing their mom, trying in vain to understand what she’s feeling and why. This displacement of mediated emotions also resonates with the subject-matter of the story, which sees you looking through the physical detritus of the aunt’s life, using the lens of a few scant memories to try (largely in vain) to understand what these scattered objects have to say about her. Filling in the details or creating a too-neat wrap-up to the story would betray the whole theme.

So yeah, those are my reasons, though I’m not sure how convincingly they distinguish A Garden of Impossible Objects from similarly-elliptical games I’ve bounced off. Maybe it is all irrational, my judgments simply downstream of how much sleep I got the night before I played a game, or whether I was hungry or thirsty or reminded of something else, good or bad. Or maybe it’s that there are no firm, fixed rules in IF: implementation and inspiration will always trump rules of thumb, and even stuff that doesn’t immediately appeal to me can nonetheless grab me by the heart-strings once I get into it. That’s a big part of what I love about IF, and a good note too, I think, on which to close the book on this year’s review-a-thon!

After I finished Bael’s Rock, I turned to the walkthrough – a document with which I’d become well-acquainted – to see if I could solve a multi-step Easter Egg that requires finding a series of clues across the game’s eight chapters. The walkthrough didn’t spell out the answers, only providing a series of hints, and the one for clue number 4 says it is “the most obscure one, requiring a code that is commonly used.” Ah, the contemporary IF player says, just gotta type XYZZY, doesn’t get much clearer than that, right? But it isn’t, because the full hint is actually “…commonly used in immersive-sim games.” I was able to solve the puzzle nonetheless – Thief and System Shock are some of my all-time favorites, so I knew exactly what it was getting it – but it’s symptomatic of a game that’s full of enthusiasm, but to its detriment feels cut off from the past several decades of parser-game development.

I don’t mean to overstate the case, here – heck, the completed Easter Egg is an Infocom reference (Spoiler - click to show)(you get some grue repellant). And I hate to come off parochial or a gatekeeper, I can think of numerous instances of authors who, because they were largely unburdened by expectations and preconceptions, have brought new, exciting ideas to the scene. And there are definitely glimmers of that in Bael’s Rock; there’s an extended riddle-duel that puts a clever spin on a hoary scenario, for example. But for the most part this is a collection of fantasy-themed medium dry goods puzzles of the sort seasoned players will have seen many times before, and the author’s seeming lack of familiarity with the state of the art makes proceedings feel significantly rougher than they needed to.

The most obvious place I felt this friction was the parser. This is a custom-built game, and it’s cool to see such things out there in the wild, especially released on Steam! But in a world where the major parser systems offer incredibly robust, well-tested gameplay, custom parsers are inevitably held to a high bar. In terms of features, Bael’s Rock generally does OK – most common abbreviations work, the up arrow key retrieves previous commands, you can get a history of the last couple of turns of output, and it seems to be able to handle sentences of comparable complexity to Inform, TADS, and Dialog.

But there are some notable omissions, like nonexistent handling of adjectives – I got very bored with having to type PUSH RED LEVER over and over instead of just PUSH RED. And the error messages are very frequently misleading, failing to clearly tell the player whether what they’re doing won’t work, or if the parser just wasn’t able to translate typed input into action: “you can’t examine that” and “you can’t take that” are very unhelpful responses when the player’s typo means the “that” just wasn’t recognized, and the fact that ILLUMINATE ITEM WITH TORCH spits out “you can’t use this item to do that” unless you’ve picked the exact right ITEM is actively misleading. Similarly, I had to go to the walkthrough for almost the first real puzzle of the game because PUT AMULET IN LION STATUE says “you can’t put it there”, rather than prompting you to be more specific about where exactly you want to place it.

The interface also provides more of that friction. Layout-wise, outside of cutscenes most locations have two main text boxes – the first being a largely-static description of the room, the second responding to player input, plus a command line below. It’s a reasonable enough approach, but many actions lead to output that won’t fit in that second box, meaning I very frequently had to hit enter to advance through two or three pages of text responding to a seemingly-innocuous command. I also experienced a slight delay when new text was displayed, either in response to actions or moving to a new room, which made certain sequences, like the maze – spoiler alert, there’s a maze, and you map it by dropping superfluous inventory items to track where you’ve been – feel molasses-slow. That’s a shame, especially because of the way it undermined a made a couple of puzzles that I enjoyed, but required a bit of trial and error by design, like the climactic sequence of the game.

Speaking of design, the puzzles here are very traditional, with every chapter requiring you to progress past a set-piece barrier of some kind. While there are a few exceptions, most of these involve simple object manipulation, fiddling with the occasional complex device, decoding abstruse hints, and the odd bit of magic. This is a classic formula, and again, in the abstract there are some solid brain-teasers here. But unfortunately in addition to the weak parser, there are some guess-the-verb issues that quickly taught me to run to the walkthrough rather than waste time trying to figure out what I’d missed – the most egregious offender here is an early hurdle where after you’ve collected three pieces of a cube-shaped key, I was nonplussed about how to actually use them. COMBINE KEY is, I suppose, a reasonable approach, but abstract, goal-driven verbs like that aren’t typically a part of the modern IF vocabulary, and there’s nothing in the game’s help text that indicated it’d be a reasonable thing to try, nor were comparably reasonable attempts like PUT FRAGMENT ON FRAGMENT successful.

The last place where the game could have benefitted from familiarity with post-80s IF design philosophies is the story. There is one, but it’s pretty thin: you’re abducted and abandoned in the middle of the desert, forced to find shelter in a mountain crammed stem to stern with a-wizard-did-it obstacles. There is a reasonably well-done, only somewhat telegraphed, twist at the end, but there are plenty of satisfying works of IF that have similar story structures. However, where most modern players would expect that a game like this would do some environmental storytelling, weaving some backstory into passing descriptions and otherwise creating a cohesive world that rewards exploration, Bael’s Rock mostly sticks to just the puzzles, ma’am – late in the day, you do find the journal of a previous adventurer, which I was hoping would provide an opportunity for just this kind of exposition, but it mostly just lampshaded the arbitrariness and implausibility of everything that had come before.

I am being hard on Bael’s Rock here, I recognize, perhaps out of proportion to its faults – there’s nothing wrong with its bones, even if it isn’t the kind of thing that sets my world on fire. But it’s really a shame to see what’s so clearly a passion project stumble repeatedly on problems that have been solved for decades (including the lack of a transcript feature, which is one reason I’ve been more specific about stuff like parser errors than usual). The good news is that the changelog indicates that the author’s been making upgrades, and the game ends with a blatant sequel tease. So even though I got as much frustration as enjoyment out of this game, by taking feedback on board, and hopefully building experience with contemporary IF approaches, I’ve no doubt the author could make something really special in the future.

I would like to say that it is my decades of IF experience that allowed me to suss out the subtle gradations of influence that gave rise to A Train to Piccadilly. But after you get through the linear prologue, you’re given a choice of three objects that will whisk you to different times and places, one of which plays host to a conspicuously-placed jigsaw puzzle. And if that’s somehow too recondite a reference, the third of those objects is straight-up just a copy of Trinity.

So what we’ve got here is an entry in the canonical-but-rarely-attempted genre of romp-through-puzzle-filled-historical-and-allegorical-vignettes. Despite the idyllic title, the story starts in a post-apocalyptic past, with the triumph first of Hitler and then of Stalin has cast all of Europe under a totalitarian pall far worse than the historical Iron Curtain (…don’t even ask about the U.S.). You play a member of a resistance movement, whose mission is to collect far-flung artifacts in hopes of somehow correcting the moment when the timeline got out of joint.

This isn’t laid out in po-faced infodumps, thankfully – the game throws you into a deadly situation from the get-go (there are a lot of action sequences, many of them quite tricky, but UNDO will get you through them), and then dispenses worldbuilding sparingly, relying on the player to put the pieces together from isolated documents, strange encounters with people who know more than they’re saying, and the odd cutscene. Sure, there is one bit where a superior provides something resembling a briefing, but it’s got more in common with a Dostoevsky novel than a traditional pre-mission psych-up:

"Confused, I ask: '…and where are we?' In the Berlin underground doesn’t seem to be the right answer.

"'Nowhere, and at no time. Or, perhaps, in all places and at all times. A question of splitting hairs.'"

The writing is really good throughout, actually, not encumbering the puzzles with excessive ornamentation but providing plenty of evocative details. Here’s a bit of scenery for the opening scene, which underlined the physical misery of living in this world:

"Tents and curtains stretched between buildings, forming a series of overlapping levels—I imagine they were once used to dampen the rain. Unfortunately, now, while good for hiding, they are useless for the purpose for which they were erected. Water cascades in torrents from one tent to the next, amplifying the downpours on the ground."

It quickly becomes clear that this is a puzzle-forward game, however. Each of the three main branches has a distinctly different area of focus: one is a single multi-step puzzle-hunt style conundrum involving exotic methods of decoding and recoding information, one is a set of musical variations on a theme, and the last requires traversing a series of environmental puzzles to make progress through a hostile area. I don’t want to go into too many details because they’re almost all very good, with the puzzle-hunt one especially impressing me with its elegance. I did find it the toughest, however, and was glad for the existence of invisiclues linked off the game’s IFDB page.

While they’re uniformly well-designed, though, they’re not always integrated into the story. The hostile-environment branch I think does the best job of grounding its challenges in diegetic reality (and perhaps as a result, I managed to get through it without any hints, even a tricky-in-retrospect password-guessing bit). The music one is more equivocal, with some implausible elements like a song-generating staircase running through a castle being used as a torture prison, though this branch does have some neat thematic elements, like the way your reuse of apples in multiple solutions echoes the theme-and-variation mode of musical composition. And for all that I admire the elegant way the strands of the puzzle hunt come together, I have not the foggiest idea how any of it can be justified in narrative terms – it feels like a really well-done crossword crashing into the narrative and daring the player to say boo.

As for that narrative, while I found it ran decidedly second-place to the puzzles, it’s pretty fun in its own right. The nonlinear, mystery-box storytelling and effectively dystopian picture of a triumphant Soviet empire make each plot point feel urgent and compelling when it comes. I confess that I didn’t find the last revelation especially plausible – (Spoiler - click to show)come on, Churchill is cool and all but there’s no way assassinating him before he became PM would let Hitler win – but I suppose it’s the nature of the genre to focus on key, personalized turning points in history. Even if it’s a more correct take, “Allied victory in WWII was guaranteed given the inability of the Axis to target the U.S.’s overwhelmingly large industrial base” doesn’t really lend itself to dramatic scenarios where one person can suddenly shunt the future into an entirely different track. That’s only one of the many reasons why this subgenre is so tricky to get right, and, I suspect, why we’ve seen so few authors make a run at it in recent decades. Kudos, then, to Train to Piccadilly for calling its shot, and for nailing so much of the follow-through.

The greatest gift God ever bestowed on writers was editors (I could certainly use one). And while I’m not one to venerate the old days, this is one area where I think the 80s have us beat: the peer-review and testing regimen of Infocom (and its competitors, to a lesser degree), combined with the discipline imposed by brutal memory limits, means that at least some games of that era had a critical eye cast upon every single word they offered up to a player’s delectation. Now, however, the profligacy of functionally-unlimited storage and bandwidth, combined with an IF-scene development culture that sees the role of early players more as testers for errors than partners in sharpening a work, mean that most authors are mostly flying solo on the key questions of what they’re trying to do with a game, and whether they’ve written the right words, and the right number of words, to accomplish it.

This intro is (now that I think about it, somewhat ironically) my attempt to soften my critique of Saintsridge Angels by identifying its primary fault as something structural rather than idiosyncratic – but while it’s certainly not alone in this, rarely have I played a game where I’ve spent so much time wishing there was less of it. There are definitely some high points here, as well as some other flaws, but all of them are drowned under a torrent of text, with the narrative loath to skip over any but the most quotidian event, and unsure why you’d write just one sentence when you could add two or three more on top of them. Like, here’s an excerpt from the game’s opening, the moment when it should be working hardest to hook the player:

"After washing up, I walk downstairs and go to the kitchen, swinging open the pantry and untwisting the half-empty loaf of bread inside. I take out a slice, and put it in the toaster, pushing it down with a struggling click.

"I twist the loaf’s wrapper back up and toss it on the counter, then I kneel down and open my mini-fridge. Damn it, I’m out of butter. Okay, I guess this works.

"I sit on the counter, and stare at the wall while I wait for the toast to cook.
…
…
"…Did I forget to lock the door last night?"

In partial defense of this passage, it’s at least establishing that the protagonist is kind of careless – but by this point the game’s already noted that he forgot to do his laundry, and upon realizing he was running late for class, he shrugged and decided to have a leisurely breakfast instead of booking it. And this molasses-slow intro is hardly the worst offender: there’s a sequence where the protagonist and his new roommates are playing a board game that goes into exhausting detail, down to loving descriptions of individual pieces, then another where they’re attending a dance recital where the writeups of the five warmup dances go on so long that they completely undercut the impact of what should the climactic, final one – I was just desperate for the sequence to end by the time it arrived. Oh, and the protagonist takes like five pages struggling to solve the chicken-grain-fox brainteaser. If the text were tighter and more inventive, this IF-equivalent of slow cinema could be a risky but rewarding choice, I suppose, but the writing here is generally workmanlike; the author does a reasonable job investing the six main NPCs with their own voices, and there are a few memorable images scattered here and there as the plot gets into more overtly supernatural territory, but I confess it wasn’t enough to keep me from skim-reading my way through many of the longer sequences (this is maybe a relevant point to note that I played the “demo” version of the game – based on the plot progression, I’m guessing that the final version will be at least twice as long).

I’m now almost 700 words into the review and haven’t actually gotten into the aforesaid plot (now you know how it feels!) About the only thing I know about harem anime is the basic setup – one dude who’s living with several attractive ladies with color-coded hair and personalities – but that’s still enough to identify the tropes being leveraged here. You’re a college guy who bumps into an old friend he hasn’t seen in a couple of months one day on campus, at which point she says her sorority sisters are looking for a guy to live with them, and lucky you, you’ve got the nod. While there’s at least one reasonably-explicit sex scene, this isn’t a pornographic game by any means – you’d need to work your way through a looooot of other stuff to get your rocks off – but there’s an unreality to the premise that I found I struggled to shake off, made harder by the fact that there are a lot of details that don’t ring true. There’s an early mention of “California’s notoriously erratic weather patterns”, for example, and the protagonist makes a point of emphasizing that this highly-selective school, one of the best in the state, has professors who are repetitive and “incredible noise machines. I guess I can’t blame them, there’s only so much you can say when you’re no more passionate about your syllabus than your students are.”

Well, you might reasonably object, maybe these aren’t so much inconstancies as intentional signs that the protagonist is an inattentive asshole. Maybe! He’s certainly got a lot of unappealing qualities, like a tendency to call his new roommates “bitch” at the drop of a hat, or one of his first conversation options with one of them being literally either “flirt” or “talk down to her” (the “flirt” options ends with you saying “fuck you” to her). He also flat-out asks another “is your family poor”. In fairness, most of the NPCs are pretty bad on this score too – it’s established early-on that one of them hates the nickname “Peppermint”, but almost all the rest of them use it, on top of using the b-word for each other and smacking each other pretty much continually.

The game does eventually provide a rationale for some of this bad behavior, though. The protagonist is anemic, and spent much of his childhood subject to attacks of weakness that left him depending on the aforementioned old friend. In addition to creating some dependency and sublimated resentment, my take is that it also left him feeling like he has to preemptively push others away before his disability makes them feel pity or revulsion. That’s not an especially novel dynamic – the first Thomas Covenant book came out like fifty years ago – but it’s a reasonable one, and if it’s not explored much in what I played, well, maybe that’s part of what the yet-unreleased back half of the game will get into, but at least the latter stages of the current installment started to see the protagonist lower his off-putting defense mechanisms a bit.

Those sections of the game also brought the supernatural elements to the fore. So as it turns out, each of your roommates is haunted by a demon, and the main action of the game involves saving them from these personifications of grief or addiction or guilt. Much like the rest of the game, these sequences go on far too long while simultaneously jumping around without much logic, but they do provide some much-needed action as well as offering a bit of depth to flesh out the initially-caricatured NPCs. There’s also a bit of gameplay inasmuch as some of your choices will lead you to a bad ending, though there’s always an undo button to take you back before you doomed yourself (there are some choices in the “regular” parts of the game, too, but they largely just allow you to pick which of the girls you want to hang out and strengthen your “bond” with).

What’s also interesting is that all these sequences involve you suffering horrific violence, and in at least two out of the three included in the demo, end with you martyring yourself on behalf of the girl you’re trying to save, exposing yourself to stabbings, dismemberments, and even shooting yourself under dream-logic rules that allow you to eventually recover. Adding in the dependent dynamic he had with his childhood friend made me sit up and take more notice, and the there’s a telling detail in the sex scene – which involves the sorority’s queen bee taking control, shoving you on the bed, and grinding on your lap – that gave the game away:

"As I revel in her plush, maternal figure…"

(This lady is like 22, and per the art about the waifiest anime waifu you’ve ever seen, for the record).

So yeah, our hero is a masochistic sub who’s super into dommy mommies, which to be honest is kind of a cool, unique concept for a protagonist who gets to save the day and be in these big action scenes, though it does somewhat reinforce the impression that Saintsridge Angels is a porn game without the porn.

I’ve banged on for more than long enough here, but having spent two days bingeing the game, would I sign up for more once it’s finished? Actually, the cast did wind up growing on me, I am curious where the protagonist’s arc is eventually going, and since it is the case that the last couple of chapters were noticeably leaner (though not actually lean by any objective measure), so despite all the critiques I’ve levied above, yeah, I think I might. But I sure wish the author could find an editor in the meantime.