Reviews by Mike Russo

Last month my wife and I celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary – it’s been an eventful decade, but still, it kinda snuck up on us! And we were together for a few years before we got married, so it’s a bit over thirteen years, all told. Before that, I was in another relationship that lasted for just about ten years, though it definitely had gone one past the point where it was good for either of us, so between that and the fact that that was breakup before my wife and I started seeing each other, I can’t say that I’m especially torn up about the way things ended. So doing the math, to get to the point in my life when breakups were a thing that caused existential-level angst and regret you need to rewind the clock just under a quarter-century – far enough back that I actually have some nostalgia for the crappy Star Wars movies and right-wing president that in retrospect were so much better than the ones we have now.

I’m not, like, incapable of empathy, though, so this quirk of biography doesn’t mean I automatically don’t vibe with stories about relationships ending tragically – far from it! But despite its name the Breakup Game isn’t actually a story like that. It’s not fiction at all, when you get down to it, more of a therapy-adjacent journaling tool that prompts you to reflect on a breakup and learn to feel better about it, with questions inviting you to characterize the other person, the ups and downs of the relationships, how you’re feeling now, and so on, with the game invariably responding with upbeat pep-talks (and even a cavalcade of achievements!) and before coming to close with a series of interactive affirmations.

It feels presumptuous to assess how well this would work for someone who’s in need of some help working through their feelings about the end of a relationship, since I’m so far removed from that situation. Still, I did make a sincere effort to call to mind the details of my most recent breakup and re-inhabit that mental space to the best of my ability as I navigated through the prompts. Personally I can’t say the game felt like it was a useful tool for engaging with my feelings, whether because they were too distant to access with the requisite immediacy or just because we were coming at things from a different angle. See, Breakup Game is written in a very positive way, with almost every sentence working to buck you up and help you move on. It also necessarily reaches for abstractions, because the choices it offers almost inevitably don’t allow a player to communicate much of the specificity of why a relationship was good, and what happened to bring it to an end. An extended excerpt gives a solid flavor of the thing:

"Ah. The void. Some try to ignore it while soldiering onwards. Others try and dull it with any means they find. There are those who try to fill it with other people entirely, only to discover their shape doesn’t quite fit, and that the void slowly leaks in through the gaps.

"Whatever your choices are in the events that follow in your life, know this:
It is you who will outlive the void. Not the other way around. Its size will shrink, its shape will lose its contour, and whether it disappears completely or finds a permanent home in your heart is not the point.

"The point is this: it will lose its relevance."

As slightly-New-Agey lectures about eventually you’ll be able to move on, it’s not bad, but I’m not sure how many people find that kind of approach convincing (it just puts me in mind of that Robyn song where she’s coming up with a vapid way for her new boy-toy to let down his soon-to-be-ex: “the only way your heart will mend/is when you learn to love again”, etc.)

The other place where I felt like the game’s assumptions deviated from my experience is how it treats feelings of regret. See, when I’ve had relationships fail, my negative feelings generally haven’t focused on missing the other person – there’s inevitably some of that, but things falling apart has tended to take most of the bloom off the rose – but rather been ones of guilt, berating myself for being selfish, thoughtless, a bad communicator, etc. Those are unpleasant things to think about, but there’s also a positive aspect to them too, as having made those mistakes and felt bad about them has helped me be at least less-bad with other partners. But the Breakup Game doesn’t have any truck with the idea that you should stew over your mistakes:

"Whether it was your best or your worst is meaningless. The way you tried was the only way you could have. Learn from it, but leave your blame behind you."

Game, I was raised Catholic, that’s just not how we do things.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Breakup Game isn’t for me in the slightest. That’s certainly fine – the nature of the Comp is that games with more idiosyncratic target audiences get played by people they aren’t intended for, and while I think I have fairly ecumenical tastes, those certainly have their limits (see also: all my recent review of anime-ish games). I do think there’s probably a version of this game that could have broader appeal by trying to offer a wider but also more specific range of choices to allow the player to see their circumstances more clearly in the mirror the game offers; making the prose more grounded would probably also help on that front.

But that might not be a tradeoff worth making, as it could risk the game not working as well for the people it does speak to (a cool feature I haven’t mentioned is that after playing, you can submit your own note for future players, and reading the couple that had been posted as of this writing, it’s clear some folks have vibed with the current approach). In other words: it’s not you, it’s me, I think we’ll both be happier if we see other people.

Friends, we are just a week out from the end of the second-biggest Comp in history, and while I’m on pace to complete my reviews just before voting closes (with the main question mark being exactly how much longer than two hours Murderworld winds up being), let me level with you: it’s been a fairly intense experience maintaining an average of just over two reviews every single day. On a physical level I’m getting tired, and mentally, having all those stories – and my critical reaction to those stories – sloshing around in my brain at once for over a month means that I fear I’m not a sharp as I was when September dawned bright and clear. Case in point: when I try to pen a basic summary of Retrograding, just a couple sentences on the plot and themes, I feel myself spiraling into uncertainty. Sure, the game employs a maximalist version of some of the anime-style storytelling tropes that I’ve previously mentioned don’t resonate as well for me, but I can’t help feeling like my internal fuzziness is to blame. So, let’s give it a shot:

Retrograding is a visual novel where you play an interstellar garbagewoman, tasked with traveling to the ruined husks of abandoned colonies in search of refuse you can feed into the incinerator-engines that power your civilization. You get to choose a partner to help you on your latest sortie – I picked Zinnia, a woman who’d previously been a high-up in the corporation we work for but who went rogue before being recaptured and reprogrammed back to loyalty – and then the game settles into a fixed rhythm of alternating scenes where you engage in scavenging, examining various bits of detritus before picking one of three possibilities for disposal, with interludes featuring an intense dialogue with an AI that you’re somehow linked to and which seems to be having delusions of grandeur. And then you and your assistant fall in love, though maybe that’s the AI’s doing and it all feels pretty sinister.

That sounds plausible enough when you write it all out, but I’m pretty sure at least 10% of the above is wrong, and I was still in the dark about much of what I am sure about until pretty late in my playthrough. Like, when I was choosing my partner, I actually thought I was a sort of bounty hunter and I was choosing a target to go after, since the dialogue kept talking about “reclaiming” and the various bad things the potential-partners had done (I think the other option is some kind of terrorist?) I’m also not sure whether “Maria”, the AI, is the same as the helper-robot who assists you in recovering debris or an entirely separate character, and really, her whole deal is extremely [citation needed] to me.

Partially this confusion is an intentional result of the game’s decision to forego conventional exposition, but I do get the sense that I wasn’t meant to be quite as in the dark as I wound up feeling. There’s a database of “records” you unlock as you go, which I presume is intended to provide some of the context the main narrative elides, but instead of clear lore-dumps, you get more of the same elliptical writing and cross-cut dialogue that characterizes the central thread. Always, there are a lot of words to read, but I found them very difficult to parse. Here’s some background on one of the worlds you can explore:

"Prox-3 has been razed down by time and a constant beratement of stars."

And a description of Zinnia:

"She looks to the world bringing life to the phrase ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’ when the only treasure should be the credits left across the table. But she isn’t motivated by silly things like profits."

There’s no copy and paste function that I could find, so this is all transcribed and might have typos that make it less clear than it actually was, I admit, but still, these are opaque statements. I often do enjoy more oblique prose, but in this case the writing didn’t do much for me – I think when this style works for me, it’s because the author’s choosing words that are evocative of specific heightened moods or have particular historical or cultural associations that add enough flavor to infuse the tangled syntax with meaning. But Retrograde just often felt vague to me, and the flavor I picked up on was generally sour: the protagonist isn’t a happy person, the banter with Zinnia at least started off pretty aggressive, and so the vibe was pretty disaffected, and since the game is much more vibe- than plot- or gameplay-driven, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged.

Retrograding’s approach to player agency also undermined my engagement. You do have choices, but the game doesn’t feel very responsive to them – the main thing you have to do is pick what to recycle, but you’re not given much information about the various objects, and your ultimate choice doesn’t seem to have narrative consequences (it does unlock a different “record” entry, but these just depict the protagonist and sidekick talking to each other in their well-established, kinda-snipey communications patterns). The choice of sidekicks does seem to make a big difference to the story, but as I mentioned I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I was making my pick. And the climax pushed me and Zinnia into a doom-inflected romance that felt like it wasn’t especially responsive to anything I’d done to that point. I don’t mind a game that’s light on branching, don’t get me wrong, but since there are choices, I did wish I had more context to make them intentionally, and more clarity and what if anything they meant.

So yeah, my experience of the game was that a lot of stuff was happening but I didn’t really understand or click with most of it; words kept washing over me without finding much purchase, and even when I did start to understand something of what was going on, Retrograding was eager to move on to the next bit of obfuscation. Possibly if you’re more in turn with the storytelling style deployed here, or if you play repeatedly to see all the potential angles of the narrative, it feels more coherent, but unfortunately I was just too frazzled to get much out of the game.

This is maybe just an example of I-wouldn’t-want-to-belong-to-a-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member preciousness, but despite playing a lot of old games, I don’t consider myself a retro-gamer. Like, I will happily play Gold Box RPGs until the cows come home, and not just the later ones when they finally adopted VGA, since 1988’s Pool of Radiance is obviously the best: I sincerely find it more fun than just about any other game released this millennium, and still run through it every couple years. But I don’t think that’s born of nostalgia, since my main memory of playing that game back in the day is that it was too hard for me and I always got frustrated trying to push too far into the slums of New Phlan and then getting slaughtered before I could make my way back to safety to rest. Similarly, I don’t have much attachment to the trappings of old games – I know there are DOSBox settings to get period-authentic audio and apply CRT-aping filters so the pixels don’t look quite so sharp, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in exploring any of them.

I don’t think this reflects any inherent virtue – we’re just talking about the aesthetics of entertainment products, and besides, I definitely do fetishize stuff like old books so who am I to judge? But it does mean that when I come across an artifact like Not So Happy Easter 2025, which despite its up-to-the-minute title is presented as a game file for the ZX Spectrum (a UK microcomputer whose popularity was already on the wane by the time Pool of Radiance came out), it leaves me somewhat nonplussed. I’m certainly capable of firing up an emulator and adapting myself to an old-school design, but the text delay and chunky yellow font, which I’m sure stir the heart-strings of some players who suddenly remember being eight years old again, just make me sigh and wish I could just be playing this thing in a modern interpreter.

Admittedly, there are practical reasons why I had those thoughts. NSHE lacks conveniences like being able to press up to recall the previously-typed command, and instead of L being a shortcut for LOOK, it instead reloads a pre-configured save game, which meant I lost all my progress half a dozen times before I retrained my muscle memory (PSA: you can actually save and load the game with RS and RL, respectively, and if you do that sufficiently often it’s much easier to recover from the occasional mis-typed L). And I found that even with the emulator speed cranked up a bit, typing too fast would lead to some letters getting dropped from my commands, adding an annoying bit of friction to every single interaction in the game. Again, I understand that some people might dig this; friction isn’t always bad! But in this case, I’m not “some people.”

Fortunately the game itself is idiosyncratic enough that the format isn’t the most interesting thing about it. It appears to be set in Czechia, for one thing, but more than that, the setup swerves from slice of life to thriller in a way that more grounded, modern games are typically loath to attempt. See, you start out looking for some kids who got lost doing an Easter egg hunt you designed, before getting a call from a deranged weirdo who tells you he’s kidnapped them and will only release them if you find and hand over several allegedly-magical Easter-themed MacGuffins (the plot has one more twist in store, too). This is overlaid on what are admittedly pretty standard medium-dry goods puzzles, but the novel context does add something to the proceedings, and the game’s gonzo approach did make me grin when a Tesla model called “the Swasticar, [which] goes from 0 to 1939 in three seconds” (you can get it towed, which made the grin bigger).

Unfortunately the puzzle design is as spiky as the interface. There are times when you need to repeat the same action multiple times to progress, with no indication that that would lead to a different result the second time. The stripped-down approach to narration means that some puzzles are harder for the player than they should be, since for example the protagonist would be able to tell that the giant rain-barrel is currently empty just by looking at it (and therefore filling it would help you retrieve what’s inside it). And in an attempt to prevent players from inadvertently solving puzzles before they’re supposed to, some commands only work if you’ve followed a prescribed set of previous steps, which stymied me a couple of times because I’d hit on the correct course of action but the parser was stopping me without any adequate explanation. Oh, and the game uses USE, which as always is a can of worms – I tried to get the Tesla towed by PUTting a ticket on it, which seemed the intuitive approach, and had to run to the walkthrough to realize I’d been thinking too specifically.

That walkthrough does exist, though, which is a nice concession to modern sensibilities, and as a result I was eventually able to get to the surprisingly-happy ending, and I’m satisfied about having done so. Not So Happy Easter 2025 doesn’t exactly make a case for the unvarnished glories of the 80s for those who missed out on them – I still would have had more fun if it was a bog-standard Inform game – but even the thoroughly modern can have some fun here (just remember that walkthrough!)

Exploring a mysterious island from whose bourn no traveler has returned is an appealing trope with deep roots in the pulps and Victorian adventure literature, but the problem is that, unlike the protagonists of these stories, this genre has lots of baggage. One issue is that, obviously, that “no traveler” bit has an implicit “white” in the middle; there are always indigenous folks who’ve been living there and the fact that they’re undiscovered would be news to them. Said indigenous folks are also nearly always portrayed as savages, unsophisticated cannibals ruled by superstition who turn childlike at the doughty hero’s displays of scientific know-how and manly courage. This kind of thing is a turn-off because of the real-world connection between these kinds of stories and the ideologies used to justify colonialism, slavery, and racism, but also because it’s boring – not only is it played out, it also tends to flatten all the characters involved into the world’s stalest archetypes. I’m not saying I write off any game with this premise, to be clear, just that there are some pitfalls here; with sufficient authorial attention to detail and intentionally avoiding slipping into the easiest, default ways of doing things, it’s usually fine!

Er, hang on, I’m getting an update here on the wireless – there’s ultra-generic, low-effort AI cover art? Oh, that doesn’t bode well…

Alas, this is a book one can judge by its cover: Island of Rhynin steers straight into every lazy jungle-island stereotype you can think of, with a story and gameplay that struggle to distinguish themselves from the million other times you’ve seen this sort of thing. There are no details given about why you’re exploring this place or what’s so interesting about it, so the setting never manages to be anything other than a series of cliches: the rickety rope bridge, the altar where heinous sacrifices are made to graven idols, the caverns where the natives lurk in outer darkness that mirrors their spiritual ignorance, ruled by the white man who saved them when they were too dumb to figure out how not to starve. So too do the plot beats fail to cohere into anything unique, with the discovery of secret passages, the revelation of the identity of the natives’ king, and the betrayal of your weaselly (and dark-skinned) sidekick likewise eliciting yawns. The ending is a little surprising, at least, but mostly because it comes out of nowhere – (Spoiler - click to show)there’s nothing about this place that seems appealing, why are we fighting to the death to be the new king?

On the plus side, the writing is pacey and moves through the tropes without getting bogged down, and the gameplay systems seem like they could be engaging: you have a continually-updating series of stats, ranging from raw health to more metaphysical matters like your competence, confidence, and “trust”, which I think has to do with the aforementioned sidekick. As you confront various challenges, these go up and down, but the impact is muted by the fact that the right answer is usually very straightforward to intuit, and there’s no branching – failure just dings some of your stats while success builds them up. It does appear that too-low numbers can lock you out some of the choices available in the endgame, but that sequence isn’t especially reactive anyway, and the perfunctory nature of the epilogues (we’re talking a couple sentences each) means that this can all feel like much ado about nothing. Meanwhile, what feels like a very consequential choice at the beginning of the game – whether you’ll take a spear, pistol, or hatchet with you – was revealed to be less significant than it seems upon replay, as it doesn’t change the choices available to you by nearly as much as you’d think: like, testing the planks in a rope bridge with your spear to make sure you can cross safely makes sense, but apparently shooting them with a gun(!) works just as well.

I don’t want to harp too much on the ways Island of Rhynin fails to make a major impression; it feels like the effort of a neophyte excited by the possibilities of IF, and god knows we were all there once. But thoughtlessly regurgitating a slurry of already-digested tropes doesn’t make for a memorable game, all the more so when a moment of thought would reveal that the tropes aren’t just played-out, they’re harmful – just a bit of mindfulness about this stuff when conceptualizing the game could have made a very big difference indeed.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, they say, before blushing in shame from having wasted their first impression on such a cliché. Dead Sea could stood to listen though, as it had two strikes against it five minutes after I started it up: one, the silly genAI cover art, which just looks insipid upon first glance but seems sillier and sillier the more you try to work out what the waves, clouds, and light are doing, and two, the initial puzzle, which has you make a Fanta for a gravedigger by zapping a sapient monster-orange with a freeze ray and then dismembering it until it fits in a bottle. After those first five minutes, it’s clear that some actual care did go into making the game and it settles down to tell a dark-fantasy story with an occasional hint of whimsy rather than the wearying zaniness that opening challenge seemed to presage – so that’s all good news, but it’s still frustrating to see an author start off in a ditch due to such avoidable missteps.

What we’ve got here is a parser-like choice game that tasks you with uncovering the secrets of the ruler of the island called Necropolis – there’s Bluebeard-y backstory, Moby Dick references, souls being harvested and used to animate golems… The vibes are dour, though the compressed prose style largely gestures at mood rather than wallowing in it, in service of keeping things moving. That isn’t to say there aren’t any good images – I liked the use of color here, for example:

Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.

No way up found.

An injured White Whale is beached, reddening nearby water.

But as you can see, it’s nothing too fancy, it makes its points and then shuts up. This relative terseness puts the focus on the puzzles, and I’d say they’re serviceable. Most are inventory-based and fairly well signposted, with a few boasting multiple solutions. It’s clear that some of the systems are a bit hacked together – in particular, the inventory system doesn’t allow you to drop things, picking up something new will often just mean replacing what you previously carried, which silently goes back to where you first found it in case you need it again – but this winds up being intuitive enough, and I can’t complain too much since it does reduce the amount of inventory-juggling you might need to engage in. The other mechanic I wasn’t sure how to engage with were the small statues you run into every few minutes – you’re told that praying at one will “reset chapter parameters”, which seemed like it could potentially mean losing progress, so I steered clear. At any rate, what you’re called upon to do is typically straightforward, and you typically just have a small segment of the gameworld unlocked at any point in time, which means I found it hard to get too stuck; again, the pacing is enjoyably quick.

As for the plot, once you uncover enough secrets to understand the main conflict that’s playing out on the island, it’s reasonably engaging; there are a few nicely-observed elements, like how the girl betrothed to the dark, melancholy Duke dreads the arranged marriage but is still looking forward to the wedding. And while it’s clear how this will all be resolved, the option to make suboptimal choices to get premature game-overs makes the player’s input feel more impactful. On the flip side, there’s some bonus content you can access just as you win the game which slathers the functional story with a thick coating of proper-noun fantasy bollocks:

That was before the God fell.

Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here.

This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt.

Even angels fell because of it.

Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’

I suppose that means that Dead Sea’s last impression is just as dodgy as its first, but at least the stuff in the middle goes down easy!

In the very first IF review I wrote after coming back from a 15-year hiatus, I talked about the alienating associations anime tends to have for me – I know, this is a me thing, it’s obviously an incredibly successful medium with aesthetic resonance for untold millions of people! But nonetheless, while I can recognize the reasons why over-busy narratives involving sexy people with nonstandard eye and hair colors and histrionic science-fantasy apocalpyses can be lots of fun, I confess the appeal is somewhat lost on me; less “anime BS (laudatory)” than “anime BS (derogatory)”, to adopt a kids-these-days idiom I do enjoy.

Mooncrash!,if you couldn’t tell from that intro, is very much working in this tradition. In a world due to end any minute, you’re a second-tier hero who gets to team up with the A-listers due to the fact that the world is ending any minute now. The mechanics of this are initially obfuscated, but by exploring the four paths the game offers (each corresponding to one of the four superheroes you can work alongside) it’s clear it involves armies of demons and dragons, and the plans to forestall it involve constructing magitech devices to allow some people to survive the end of the world, stealing a biological WMD from an infernal vault, or possibly just creating a magical simulation into which to escape. And after you run through each of them (there’s a death-and-rebirth thing going on that enables you to toggle between branches, as well as retain your combat skills and achievements across lives) there’s a culminating vignette where you can choose which strategy to save the day you want to throw your weight behind.

It’s a relatively simple setup, but Mooncrash! is maximalist in its storytelling – most actions you take produce long passages of text, dense with proper nouns and action and exposition. When the conflicts it describes are straightforward, this lends a pleasant over-the-topness to proceedings:

"The wind whips around you as you soar through the air, and you grip the red scales of the dragon below you for dear life. Below you, a battle rages on a bridge made of solid hard-light. Your allies, The Dawn Legion of Leont, do battle against the forces of Izalith, The Dread Horde. Twisted forms, demonic and devilish alike, clash against the shining armor of your brethren."

You can practically hear the death metal!

The prose can get bogged down when the action quiets down, though. One of the four branches is an extended conversation with the wizard who’s created the magical simulation I mentioned above – this involves them going into their overcomplicated backstory (they’re a refugee from another reality that collapsed in a crisis similar to the one yours is currently undergoing), their romantic entanglements, the reasons why they created their tower headquarters where and how they did, the nature of the alternate world they’ve built, how it could be used as a cheat code to escape the apocalypse… Again, I can see how those with a taste for this stuff would lap it up, but I found it dragged.

Other sections have more involved gameplay, though. The combat one is straightforward and does require some repetition to grind your skills to the necessary level, but it’s hard to go wrong skewering monsters. There’s a medium-dry-goods one where you solve some very simple object-based puzzles to prepare the ingredients for a sorcerous construction project. And the last involves either a conversation puzzle or a maze, before the endgame puts all the pieces together. They’re mostly pretty basic in terms of challenge, but they all have some time pressure to keep the player on their toes, and can be repeated as many times as needed (plus even failed attempts will typically give you an achievement, which is a motivating touch).

I’m unconvinced that a parser-based interface was the best fit for this game, though. Many sections play out in a primarily or exclusively choice-based mode, with the game prompting you to type CHOOSE (keyword) at some important points; I’d have rather just been able to click on an appropriate link, and a choice-based interface would have made some of the longer chunks of text go down smoother, too. Mooncrash! also doesn’t do much to take advantage of the affordances the parser offers – the object manipulation section spells out exactly what you need to do, for example, and the game is generally underimplemented, leading to unintentional comedy like this:

DANGEROUS PATHOGEN - DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ALPHA-PLAN AUTHORIZATION

CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE - DO NOT REMOVE FROM CONTAINMENT FIELD BEFORE DEPLOYMENT

REPENT, YE WHO WOULD SEEK THE POWER OF THE BAD BLOOD

Staring at the pitch black vial sends a shiver down your spine. You look away on instinct. You get the sense that a single drop of this vile liquid could kill you instantly. Thankfully, the vial is sealed shut, and not a single smudge of the stuff has reached the outside.

x blood

You see nothing special about Bad Blood.

For all these complaints, though, there are definitely clever touches to Mooncrash! – I particularly liked the way a particular endgame challenge manipulated the choices available to you to mirror a mental assault, and the game is chock full of nonstandard, ambitious elements like this (I haven’t even mentioned the extended personality test that opens the game – it’s kind of pointless since the protagonist is a cipher, and while it shunts you to one of the four branches, you eventually need to play all of them. But I kind of love the ridiculous juxtaposition of a melodramatic Götterdämmerung with an OKCupid quiz, as well as the fact that the answers to “what kind of a person are you?” are basically three flavors of “I’m kind of a jerk” plus “I’m a jerk but I hide it”). Mooncrash! is identifiably a first parser game, with some of the lack of polish that implies, but it’s clearly been well-tested to smooth out bugs, and includes a bunch of customized systems that go way beyond what most rookie authors dare to bite off. And while as I said the specific subgenre it inhabits isn’t one I have much native affinity for, I think its emulation of said subgenre’s aesthetics is spot on, reflecting careful, intentional writing and design. So this is definitely an author to watch; even if Mooncrash! isn’t especially my speed, it’s still an impressive debut.

I’ve been in the tank for the Lady Thalia games pretty much from the minute I first encountered them: I love a heist and a period piece, so add on a flirty enemies-to-lovers dynamic between the lady thief and her policewoman antagonist and I’m more than sold, but the nimble pacing and tightly-designed puzzles take things to the next level. But I’m in an odd situation with this fourth installment: you see, I still haven’t played the third one, since it was released in Spring Thing 2023, and some life events interrupted by reviews of the festival that year. I still want to get back and finish those, and Lady Thalia and the Masterpiece of Moldavia is a reward I’ve set myself for doing so. But that means that I’m coming to this one having missed an episode.

This used to happen all the time, of course – when I went off to high school, I remember being frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep up with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, doubly so because on the odd occasions I could catch an episode suddenly Worf was there – but in this age of on-demand streaming everything, it’s an unfamiliar sensation, and actually not necessarily a bad one? If anything, I’m now even more excited to go back and learn how Thalia and Mel struck a truce that saw the latter leaving the Yard and then the pair going into business together as consulting private detectives. I’m also curious whether Thalia’s heretofore-offscreen husband made his first appearance in that installment, or if the supporting role he places here is his actual introduction (he’s a gay bank robber married to a lesbian cat burglar, you’re each others’ beards, it’s cute). There’s also a distaff Sherlock Holmes analogue who I don’t remember from the first or second game but definitely makes an impression.

But though there’s a lot to catch up on, the game gives you the context you need, and the characters are as always drawn with such bright colors that you feel you know all about them from the moment they come on screen – actually, now that I think about it, Lady Thali4’s handling of Mel on this front is especially deft, since she hasn’t had that much screen time to date, even including her role as deuteragonist in the second game; nonetheless, her dogged approach to investigation and clumsy approach to romance were exactly what I expected based on her prior experiences.

The puzzles are likewise unsurprisingly satisfying. By now the series structure, of alternating case-the-joint sequences where you learn about a target through some light social-engineering mechanics with the actual heists, where you might need to pick some locks, crack a code, or engage in a chase is well established, and even though you’ve gone straight, the rhythm hasn’t changed: it’s just that this time out you’re trying to catch a copycat thief who’s appropriated your name in the act, and investigating their potential targets before they strike. This doppleganger plot is a great way of continuing to play to Thalia’s strengths even as she’s shifted to the side of the angels, and the set-pieces continue to be great fun, with a break-in at the headquarters of an off-brand Golden Dawn a particular highlight. None of the individual challenges are that challenging – you’ll get to the end regardless – but you are graded on the verve and brio you bring to your role, with top marks reserved for those who manage to balance the need to hide your tracks with the urgency of keeping up with your rival. The other fun addition to the series’ systems is interrogation sequences where you play as both Thalia and Mel simultaneously; in the stratified world of Edwardian (I think?) England, what you say might not matter as much as who says it, after all.

“Much as it was, but with some fun new twists” is also my take on the writing. The prose has always been alternately zippy and wry, which kept a smile on my face throughout:

"He chuckles. 'Scandalous of me, I know! To come to an art gallery—making an appointment, no less—with no interest in the current exhibition and no intention of buying anything!'

"You probably do six things more scandalous than that before breakfast each day, but you want to know where he’s going with this, so you laugh along."

I also enjoyed the running joke where Thalia keeps workshopping different nicknames for Mel, which is all the funnier for not drawing undue attention to itself. But the focus on these two characters’ relationship also creates space for things to get more serious at times, including a nicely understated scene where Thalia and her ex talk around their breakup. The central romance is of course the main event, and through the inevitable ups and downs, there’s no getting away from the sweetness of the two falling in love:

"She looks like she hasn’t slept properly in several days, and some of her hair has escaped its bun and is falling in her face, and there’s still a yellowing bruise around her left eye, and of course she’s also currently angry with you. Nevertheless, some part of you is still convinced that she’s the most attractive woman you’ve ever seen, simply because she’s Mel."

I’m not sure whether this fourth installment is my absolute favorite, as there were some minor blemishes to my enjoyment on the mechanical side – I found navigating through the gallery backrooms was a bit more confusing than I wanted it to be (since on my first visit, I had to choose between which door to try, whereas during the subsequent one you need to pick which room to go to), and while an Arts and Crafts exhibit is a cool backdrop, I think the final heist felt like it was over a bit quicker than the prior ones; the titular artifact also feels like it’s underdeveloped. But the story here could well be the best it’s been – all the more reason for me to circle back to the third installment to find out for sure!

Reviewing a chunk of games all at once through the course of the Comp can be a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, there can be synchronicities that help you look at a game through an unexpected angle. On the down side, though, sometimes it’s hard to avoid feeling like past-you is stepping on your toes. Case in point: the best jumping-off point for My creation is Frankenstein, since the game excerpts it at length and is clearly in dialogue with Shelley’s classic. But having already reviewed Frankenfingers, and done a little tap-dance about the not-so-good doctor in my INPUT PROCESS review, it feels awkward to go back for a threepeat.

So let’s go with what’s arguably the second-best jumping-off point: parenthood, specifically those first few days when you’re back from the hospital with your first kid and you are sleep-deprived and your life has changed and you don’t know how anything works. It’s a terrifying, disorienting experience, and so in some respects it’s a perfect fit for a somewhat wonkily-implemented parser game: the sense that moving around is harder than it should be, you’re either seeing double or things that should be there are nowhere to be found…

My creation does communicate the claustrophobic vertigo of those moments quite well via its writing, too. The game starts with your days-old baby screaming and crying while your headache gets worse; you don’t know what to do to quiet the kid down, and as the blurb indicates, you don’t have another parent or any other family member providing any help. Small wonder that even moving from one side of the bed to the other involves “dragg[ing] yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers,” and that there’s a clumsy tactility to your physical interactions with the baby:

The unevenness of the floor and the speed of your movements shake the basket, and the child within it, more than either of you expected. The moan has become a cry. You shift your hand on the floor and grab the baby’s wrapper with the other. In one swift movement, the child is on the bed. With wide, tearful eyes, the child watches you groan and sigh, your face scrunched up in pain.

Thankfully, this isn’t an extended experience – My creation is a short game – but it’s an authentically horrifying experience, knowing you’re responsible for another life but not sure how to do that while also needing to take care of yourself, too. There’s only a single challenge to overcome, but it’s a doozy: get the kid to stop crying, with nary a formula bottle or white-noise machine in sight. As mentioned, the game really could have used more testing, because there are rough patches everywhere: moving from one corner of the bed to another absurdly uses compass directions (and UP and OUT and EXIT won’t let you stand up), you can get told that there’s a basket and a baby where you are but trying to interact with them reveals that they’re actually somewhere else, and Inform’s default responses are jarring when they intrude, both because of their voice – Graham Nelson’s studied disinterest has rarely felt less apposite – and their content, with SLEEP throwing up a totally-not-true “you aren’t feeling especially drowsy” and FEED BABY horrifyingly generating a “(to yourself)” implicit action (thankfully, it fails). The gameplay wouldn’t work in a choice-based interface, since the desperation of typing anything you can think of into the parser, with most of it not working, is 100% the way to marry form and substance when depicting the existential despair at not being able to quiet a crying infant. But the same effect could have been achieved without quite so much clunkiness – heck, the game doesn’t actually end, it just throws a “(the end)” after the wall of text following the correct move.

All right, I think we can circle back to Frankenstein now. The protagonist has a copy of the book right by their bed, and examining it displays an extended passage near the middle of the novel, as the reanimated-and-abandoned monster reflects on his miserable condition by comparing himself, and what he’s been able to intuit about his nature, to the lives lived by a seemingly-happy peasant family. This also prompts him to ponder his origins: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to answer them.”

Dr. Frankenstein is undoubtedly one of the worst parents in all of literature, so it’s understandable that an anxious, frightened father worried about how bad a job they might wind up doing would think of Frankenstein, though there’s a more direct reason why the protagonist would find the monster’s situation resonant too (despite copious clues about where the game is headed with this, it treats this as a reveal, so I’m not going to spoil it). Babies can feel so fragile, and the psychology of child-rearing is presented as requiring such specialized knowledge and attention, is it any wonder that a parent who doesn’t have their whole life already figured out would be terrified that they’ll make a child as broken as they are? Even for those of us who faced parenthood with plenty of supports My creation’s protagonist lacks can find these fears relatable, I think, which is why I appreciate where the game ends: you can stop the kid crying, and hopefully start to get a handle on your anxieties by articulating them, but they don’t go away, and the baby doesn’t stay quiet forever. Taking care of someone else is something you do hour after hour, day after day, never knowing where you’ll both wind up at the end of it – hopefully not locked in an Arctic death-hunt, at least! – but dragging yourself out of bed, searching for creativity even at your wits’ end, nonetheless.

When I’m playing video games as a civilian – i.e., when I’m not blasting through IF so I can meet the review quota before a deadline – I actually tend to prefer games robust systemic elements on top of engaging stories, rather than just pure narrative games. As a result, immersive sims are among my favorite genres, and Prey, a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, is one of the best of recent years, directly bringing in many elements from its inspiration while adding some new ones. And like the best immersive sims, much of the fun is in the way these systems interact in unexpected ways: for example, in both Prey and Shock, the skill points you use to gain character abilities aren’t an abstracted currency, but physical items you acquire in the game world. Something Shock doesn’t have but Prey does is a 3D-printing system that allows you to break down random junk in the world into its constituent parts, and then use the raw materials to build anything you’ve got the specs for. And – you see where this is going, if you hack the right systems or explore in the right areas, you can find a blueprint for the XP items, enabling you to cross the streams of the game’s different sub-economies. It doesn’t quite break the progression wide open, but discovering this obviously-intended exploit made me cackle with glee.

Detritus is a traditional adventure rather than an immersive sim, but the whole thing is built around a similar recycle/fabricate gameplay loop – and, impressively, it manages to come up with a twist on the system’s capabilities even more impactful than the one in Prey. Admittedly, this isn’t obvious for most of the game’s running time. It starts out as a minor riff on the very traditional spaceship-disaster subgenre of IF: a meteor’s hit your courier ship, causing an explosive decompression and the deaths of everyone on board, but since part of the emergency protocol involves having a backup of one of the crew loaded into the fabricator just in case, you get a second lease on life as a 3D-printed clone with your predecessor’s memories, and a mandate to save the ship. This involves traditional fare like reading datapads to find passwords, fooling biometric locks, and hacking electronic systems via a math-based minigame.

You’ll have done all of this before, and to its credit Detritus doesn’t pretend otherwise; each of these puzzles are implemented smoothly, with a clean choice-based interface and high production values, but they’re not harped on. What is harped on is the fabricator. Almost all of the conventional challenges require some piece of kit that you can manufacture on the spot, or unlock upgrades or raw materials allowing you to make more, different stuff to solve more, different puzzles… It makes for a compelling gameplay loop, as you start out bobbling a few pieces of space-junk back to the fabricator at a time in order to fuel your first, tentative explorations, before increasing upgrades, confidence, and knowledge see you hauling much bigger loads into the recycler and creating ever-more-useful tools. There’s also a gentle survival element to the gameplay – your need for food, water, and oxygen is always ticking up with everything you do, and you have to scavenge, or use your limited stock of fabricator resources, to meet those needs.

This does mean things are a bit more fiddly than in similarly kinds of stories, but again, there’s a robust interface that makes the inventory-juggling quite manageable and at least on the default difficulty, the various timers serve to ground the player in the protagonist’s predicament without ever becoming too much of a nuisance (in a nice touch, if, like me, you neglect to eat or drink while pushing to get to the endgame, Detritus ensures you can get a final meal and gulp of water to allow you to reach the finish line). The logistics-focused gameplay is also often interrupted, sometimes for exposition that fills in the backstory and raises questions about just what you were up to when the accident happened, and action-focused set-pieces like an EVA sequence that sees you explore the breach in the hull. The writing here isn’t flashy, but it sells the space adventure theme with more than adequate panache:

"I look up… through. The distant stars shine with the utter clarity you only get when looking at them directly, and distant nebulae glow with an almost iridescent colour. The hole is large enough for me to fit through. If I were crazy, I’d actually consider it. Am I crazy?"

In true immersive-sim style, there are also lots of flashbacks, unlocked either as your memories come back over time, or when you gain access to various computer logs and terminals. On the plus side, even though the other members of the crew are all dead, they get some solid characterization through these scenes, which makes exploring the ship that became their tomb all the heavier. On the other hand, the backstory you uncover is relatively straightforward, and boasts a reveal that did significant damage to my suspension of disbelief ()

While I’m complaining, I might as well dole out the last of my criticisms now: the twists of Detritus’s plot do somewhat outlast the interest its systems provide. Despite the last couple of upgrades I unlocked in the fabricator seeming useful in theory (one notably expands your inventory limit, another obviates the hunger/thirst timers, and a third allows you to combine a bunch of tools you otherwise need to juggle into a single item), the number of resources they required was sufficiently high that I preferred the annoying grind of forgoing them to the annoying grind of obtaining them. The last major puzzle also feels like it relies on a cartoon logic at odds with the otherwise grounded, often-dark vibe of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I assume it’s just part of the genre rules that we’re ignoring how cost-prohibitive it would be to blast a colony’s trash into space – but even with that hand-wave, what sense could it possibly make to ship it to another planet rather than just dumping it and letting it drift into the star or an asteroid field?).

But I’ll close on a justified positive note, which is to return to that final reveal about the fabricator I mentioned up top. Without spelling it out, I’ll just say that it was the one development in the plot I didn’t see coming from a mile away, while it also made sense of some inconsistencies that I’d written off as just part of the game’s modeling of how immersive sims work. Beyond all this, it takes the creepiness inherent in Star Trek’s transporters and dials it way up, then uses that as the jumping off point for a closing moral dilemma that I legitimately don’t think has an easy answer. It’s a great way to wrap up the game, and some of the questions about consciousness it raises pair nicely, albeit in an understated way, with some of the more standard plot elements having to do with AI possibly replacing ships’ crews. It’s these kinds of juxtapositions that make immersive sims so much fun, so Detritus deserves some kudos for crossing the streams with such gusto.

Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer has comfortably the most bizarre setup of any game I’ve played so far in this year’s Comp – and that includes the explicitly surreal ones like the game where your body occasionally disintegrates into spaghetti. As it says on the tin, it opens with you and your brother raiding a Tokyo office building to perform the eponymous deed, resorting to violence in order to get human-being-who-actually-existed Kenji Eno to surrender his in-development game to your employers. But the gameplay, thankfully, doesn’t involve directly participating in the interrogation: rather, your brother’s browbeating of Eno, which involves running through a potted history of his bad-boy career making PS1- and 2-era survival horror games, is repeatedly interrupted by his (Eno’s) turtle going missing, which triggers him (your brother) to freak out and scream at you to find the animal, so you do that by solving an escalating series of puzzles as he (the turtle) climbs his way into more and more unlikely places.

So yeah, I was pretty lost here, though I was having fun with the anecdotes about the 90s Japanese development scene and the enjoyably over-the-top dialogue – until finally, well after I should have caught on, the game clicked and I realized why every bit of that premise is completely perfect. I won’t spoil what’s going on except to say I laughed quite a lot once I twigged to the twist, and found it added an additional fun layer through which to interpret the main action. But that main action works pretty well on its own, too. The narrative voice is lots of fun, with your brother’s frequent profanity obscured by stars, and entertainingly out-of-context gags. I liked this early bit, right after you restrain Eno:

"Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions."

The game also makes a convincing case for Eno as an under-appreciated (at least in the West) artist. The best story is the one where he outfoxes the console approval process to get an uncensored version of one of his games onto store shelves without anyone the wiser, but even in the quieter bits of the history, as well as his interactions with you and your brother (which per the credits are drawn from actual interviews) he comes across as a thoughtful humanist trying to do something different from the mainstream, not just to shock but because he had something idiosyncratic to communicate – I can easily see how he’s become a cult figure.

As for the puzzles, they’re good examples of how to make such things work in Twine without going whole-hog into designing a parser-like interface. Most of the action plays out in a single combined kitchen/office (though there are occasional forays into other locations once you hit the midgame, including a maze that I think you’re guaranteed to solve just in the nick of time) with a bunch of different interactive features: a fridge, a stove, a cabinet. You can click on each one to interact with it, and for objects you can manipulate, like a stool you can shove around to different locations to help you climb when needed, the appropriate link cycles through to show where you’ve currently pushed it to. There’s perhaps a bit of fiddliness in the way you need to back out of examining stuff to try to climb around (most of the turtle-finding puzzles involve clambering around atop the furniture), and the final challenge maybe involves a slight bit too much busywork, but overall it’s a solid package that kept me engaged while I waited for the next bit of Eno’s career retrospective.

And that’s really where the heart of the game lies, I think. The twist I’m talking around gestures towards some contemporary questions about censorship and what counts as “age-appropriate” material, as does a slightly-didactic epilogue. The points raised are important ones, I think, and the way the game gets at them is unique. And possibly if I were one of the people unable to access a number of the Comp games due to the UK geoblock, that part of the story would be the one that resonated the most strongly. But since I’m American, it feels to me like the reason we don’t get as many video games with the artistry and sensitivity Eno appears to have brought to his stuff isn’t censorship (whether governmental or corporate), but because the mainstream industry has largely decided not to pursue those ends. That being the case, I’m walking away from Kidnapping thinking mostly about the ways he was able to get his games made in the face of a corporate culture no more welcoming to that kind of thing than the one we have now; I’m glad to have learned about his example.