Reviews by Mike Russo

There was a year when I was in middle school that the Redwall series were my favorite books. As with so many artifacts of one’s youth, I’ve no idea how they hold up today, but I remember them as King Arthur meets Brambly Hedge: action-packed medievalish adventure, with sieges and abbeys and ancient swords, and a cast of animal characters that followed what in retrospect is slightly uncomfortable species-based determinism. Like, the vicious, untrustworthy baddies were stoats and weasels, badgers were all strong and kinda prickly, and the main characters were mice – humble, clever, kind, and always underestimated by those around them. They were a lot of fun, but I have to say, there’s something profoundly un-mouse-like about an epic, isn’t there? Like, the metaphors all work well enough, but those were stories that had mice in them, not mouse-shaped stories.

A Quiet Scurry illustrates the difference: this choice-based look at the nightly gauntlet a British mouse must run to survive until its next morning is wholly concerned with rodent business, and beyond that its small, focused size make the choice of subjects entirely apropos. Short, near-poetic bursts of text introduce each of your basic needs in turn: first, satiating your hunger, next, finding something to drink, and lastly, scouting out a safe place to rest. So far so cozy, but mice are vulnerable, and danger is always near, whether from hungry predators or the uncaring human world. While you’re not overwhelmed with choices, the game does a good job of presenting three or four plausible-sounding alternatives at each juncture; while careful thought got me to a good ending on my first playthrough, I replayed Quiet Scurry a few times (it only takes about five minutes) and confirmed that even small lapses of judgment can have deadly consequences.

The prose does a good job of situating you in a mouse’s-eye view of the world, neither needlessly obfuscating what’s happening nor giving the player-mouse more understanding than seems reasonable. It’s all conveyed through quick, concrete details:

"Now safe within the roots of the hedgerow your thirst tugs at your mouth, the dryness of the oats worsening the need."

The one place where the writing gets less precise is the various bad ends; here, the merciful veils of indirection and metaphor conceal the violence that the player intuits must have happened, but isn’t forced to confront. I suppose this means Quiet Scurry shies away from the full nature-documentary experience, but I was glad of it – along with the game, I’d prefer to dwell on the plucky, indomitable spirit of the mouse that succeeds than the violence that befalls those who fail.

I don’t have much more to say about the game than this – it has modest ambitions, it realizes them well, and its form follows its function. Part of me wonders what a more robust take on the subject matter would look like, perhaps digging into the social world of mice, or expanding the timeline to examine their different stages of life. But that risks getting us back to the oxymoronic mouse epic: part of what’s appealing about mice is that they seem small and contented, so let us be contented that Quiet Scurry is small.

Local government is weird. In my career I’ve done advocacy at the federal level as well as the state level in California, working on bills that would raise and spend billions of dollars or make substantial changes to major sectors of the economy. But I’ve also done work in cities, counties, and other local governments, and while a lot of the dynamics are exactly the same, just with smaller numbers, I’ve also come across irruptions of pure chaos that are impossible to explain without just saying “man, this is weird.”

Like, one time I was supporting a community group that was pushing for expanded weekend burial hours in a rural public cemetery district – they were Hmong, and had a tradition of doing Sunday funerals – which seemed pretty straightforward. They’d gone to the district superintendent, who was an old guy who didn’t much like changing the way things were done, and he’d said he wouldn’t do it, so they went to a sympathetic board member who said he’d be willing to push for it if he could get a sense of what it would cost. The superintendent wasn’t going to be helpful, so I worked with a colleague to analyze the district’s budget, made some estimates, and concluded it would cost maybe a couple thousand bucks wouldn’t really impact the bottom line. We were feeling good about things when my colleague went out to one of the district’s board meetings to share the analysis – except instead of greeting her presentation with a “huh, cool, glad this won’t be a big deal after all,” the superintendent freaked out at the idea that someone else was looking at the (publicly available) books. Even more unlikely, it turned out that one of the attendees at the meeting was a woman who’d decided to spend her retirement going to every single cemetery district meeting, and she tracked down my colleague’s phone number so she could leave a rambling three-minute voicemail in which she expressed how upset she was about… something, it was very hard to tell. Everyone got angry at everyone else, the county supervisor had to pull some strings to get people removed from the board, and the superintendent eventually decided this was all too stressful for him and retired. It was an enormous mess that took hours and hours to deal with, a gigantic fight over the smallest imaginable iota of policy. Like I said: weird!

But not as weird as what’s going on in the Missing City Council (ha, managed to get around to it before we hit the 500 word mark!) The premise of this debut parser game is that you’re a Finn at City Hall for a hearing about a zoning dispute, but when you arrive, the building is almost deserted: nobody’s in any of the offices or meeting rooms, except for a pair of British guards inexplicably hanging out in the basement. So your task is to explore the building, get through some locked doors, and solve a multi-step puzzle to find out what’s happened to the misplaced aldermen so they can rule in your favor.

At least, that’s what I think is going on, based on the title and blurb; the game itself doesn’t provide any direct context or motivation, so this is really one of those fumble-around-with-everything-that-looks-like-a-puzzle-until-you-win affairs. And fumble I did, because Missing City Council makes a bunch of idiosyncratic interface decisions, like eschewing compass directions in favor of having you ENTER or go IN various doors and passages. The contents of rooms are also often listed in a jumble at the end of the sparse location descriptions, which lends a bizarre air to proceedings:

"You can see a staircase up, a door to the lift, a left guard, a right guard, a door to the toilet, a door to the shelter and a door to the garage here."

There are also a lot of the usual infelicities of a minimally-implemented game that didn’t receive any outside testing – many objects (including the player) have default descriptions, there are locked doors that open only by PUSHING and items mentioned in descriptions that aren’t implemented, and so on. The puzzles also seem like they must only make sense to the author – while I dimly intuited that I needed to make some tea to distract the British guards (points for knowing national stereotypes), the steps required are so Byzantine that I can’t see how a player would make progress without going to the walkthrough. Like, the first step major step is to intuit that an avant-guard art piece described as being made of boiled sweets would dislodge some of its hard candies if you hit it, then hitting it enough times to get a lemon drop to pop off so that you can put it in the tea to make lemon Earl Grey.

Usually try to say at least something nice about authors’ first games, no matter how much I’ve complained about their rookie mistakes, and that’s actually easy to do here: this is a charmingly zany premise, some of the scene-setting, like the art collection crammed into the upstairs sauna, is memorably silly, and the ultimate explanation as to what’s going on made me laugh. So this is an author with a unique comedic angle, and we could always use more farce in parser IF – hopefully their next game will get some more testing, and sand down the weirdness so that it’s quirky rather than completely impenetrable.

(Oh, and there’s a happy ending to the cemetery district story: a new superintendent took over, and confirmed that yeah, they could extend the hours for just a couple thousand bucks, no big deal. I’m not sure whether that lady kept going to the board meetings, but I like to think she does, and finds something new to get incredibly upset about every month).

One of the blessings of middle age is that I’ve arrived at a stage of life where I’m neither especially good at video games, nor especially bothered by not being especially good at video games. I can bumble my way through an immersive sim with plenty of save-scumming, have an adequate enough understanding of roguelike strategy that I can usually eke out a lowest-difficulty win eventually, and have the wisdom to give anything that advertises itself as a Soulslike a wide berth (no, wider). But IF is a relatively sedate pasture, where fading reflexes and blurred vision don’t exact much of a toll, and by this point I’ve played more than enough of it to have a solid feeling for the common tricks and tropes, so it’s usually not too much of a challenge to get to a good ending (especially since some of the wisdom time brings is a lack of compunction about consulting the walkthrough).

Nonetheless, I’m forced to confess to y’all that I absolutely suck at Cryptid Hunter.

It doesn’t seem like it should be that fiendish of an experience – in fact, its first impression is almost cozy, drawing you into a heartwarming story where an aspirational hunter after obscure creatures is gifted the tools they need to make their avocation their vocation (well, actually that’s the second impression; my first impression was chagrin that the very first word of the blurb is a typo’d “your” in place of a “you’re”, which thankfully isn’t reflective of the mostly-solid editing in the game proper, but is still worth correcting). Your mysterious benefactor also gives you a list of three specific cryptids they’d like you to nab, each characterized by a trio of vague traits like “near water” or “elongated.” After a quick trip to the library to read up on the spooooky background of the town’s six creepy locations, and a glance over the thoughtfully provided notebook where you can scribble observations and guidebook that memorializes your quarries, it’s off to the field.

Investigations follow a consistent pattern: after a few introductory passages where you explore the chosen location, you come across evidence of a cryptid or the thing itself, at which point you have a few choices, which always includes taking general observations, snapping a photo, capturing it, or leaving it alone, at least for now (sometimes there are additional bespoke interactions, too). Usually a casual perusal will establish one of the creature’s traits with clarity, but often there’s a fair bit of ambiguity, so you need to think carefully about what the game is presenting to you. You’ll also need to pay close attention to the photos, which are rendered in-game, not just described in the text, and are impressively surreal and creepy.

Indeed, the cryptids are a real highlight; we’re not just talking about Bigfoot here, these are unique beasties I don’t recall coming across before. And while the prose is a bit too informal to be really scary, it nonetheless lifts up well-chosen details to set the mood:

"Actually determining the lake from its banks is harder than you thought. The lake is filmed over with dense, slimy algae matching the muddied moss that you’ve been schlepping through. Pieces of trash float around the sides of the dock."

So all the elements are in place for a satisfying deduction game, the more so because the creatures you’re searching for are randomized each time you play. After you capture your third cryptid, an endgame sequence triggers that sees you bring your prey to your employer, unlocking a climactic encounter if you’ve gotten them all correct. Sadly, as I mentioned, it turns out I was quite bad at this! I felt confident enough in deciding whether a particular beast let out a scream or had a smell, but some of the traits are far more obscure – does a monster that goes on all fours but sometimes rears up have “two ways of moving”? If water is rippling in all directions around a sea creature, is that an indication that it’s got “elemental manipulation” or is it just thrashing around?

I’m sure smarter, more observant people than me would play carefully, take careful notes, rule certain monsters in and out, and only begin capturing once they were sure they had the solution. I, on the other hand, preferred to squint uncomprehendingly at the guidebook, shrug and make a gut decision, and trust random chance to deliver me to the true ending.

This, as it turned out, was an amazingly effective strategy at getting me two out of three of the right monsters, which I managed to do six times running before the gods of the random number generator finally took pity on me. And while the climax was worth it – it has a fun twist and some choice-based gameplay that feels like it allows for some satisfying variation in endings – playing Cryptid Hunter that many times unfortunately did take some of the bloom off of it. The location descriptions, the monsters, and the places where you find them are exactly the same in each playthrough – it’s only the list of targets that changes – meaning that almost all of the text is exactly the same every time; if you didn’t quite grok a creature’s traits last time, well, good luck, you’ll be reading through the same fuzzy description next time. The game also presents itself in a lot of shorter passages, meaning that even if you know exactly where to find a monster you want to capture, you need to do a lot of brainless clicking to get to that point.

As a result, I’m not sure Cryptid Hunter is as replayable as its blurb claims, but it’s very much a good time over the first playthrough or two. So if I didn’t have quite as fun of a time with it as I would have liked, well, I guess that’s just down to my failure to Git Gud.

The pantheon of great murder-mystery settings surely has a niche of honor set aside for the medieval monastery. Partially this is just aesthetics, and a lingering anti-Papism that’s long haunted anglophone culture: cloaked figures skulking in the shadows of great stone buildings, great artworks of gold and stained glass bearing witness to bloody deeds, men who say they’re pledged to God but who nonetheless commit the darkest of sins… Partially too it’s the fortuitous result of some exemplary takes on the premise, none looming larger than Eco’s Name of the Rose, which is of course name-checked by Our Lady of Thorns’ ABOUT text.

But partially, I think, it’s because the monastery and the murder plot share a dual nature. A monastery is a clockwork thing, with everyone dwelling in it assigned a particular role and duties, and the passage of time creating an orderly, coordinated motion from work to devotions and back. So too is murder a thing of intricate design, at least in murder mysteries: the killer’s design is obscured and complex, but subject to logic, it can be rationalized, dissected – so a murder is a devilish machine playing out within, and against, the holy machine on the monastery. And yes, monasteries are of course not purely mechanical, the point of all this activity is that it enables exactly that holiness, and for a modern audience, being confronted with this alien excess of devotion raises spiritual questions: does man have a higher nature? What does the soul consist in? And again, the murder mystery comes at these questions widdershins, as it provides an opportunity to see what will make a person stoop to the most infernal depths of crime.

OLT is a wonderfully realized illustration of the monkish-murder genre, leaning very strongly into the former element of its nature (in fact, to the extent that it’s a game simulating a monastery murder, here we have a machine inside a machine inside a machine…) A whole priory – a smaller-scale monastic community, as these things go, but still quite large by the standards of contemporary parser IF – is available for exploration, from the central cloister to the gardens, the dormitories, and the inevitable crypt, nearly a dozen Brothers carry out their duties and regularly come together to pray at the canonical hours.

The research that’s gone into the game is more than adequate to lend a pleasing aura of historicity – the priory layout is familiar if you’ve visited one in real life (or played Pentiment), the narrowness of monastic life is neatly portrayed through the regular offices and each monk’s particular role in the priory, and the only anachronism I noticed is that when I looked up the real-life Our Lady of the Thorns, it turns out she’s a Marian apparition that occurred a few decades after the game’s fourteenth-century timeframe. The prose is very nicely judged, too, avoiding throwing in excessive ornamental detail that might get in the way of the puzzles while still providing the appropriate sensual thrill:

"Centuries of incense have worked themselves into the very stone here. The smell is deep and resinous, threaded with beeswax. It is a smell that seems to belong to God rather than to men."

But as much fun as I had simply wandering through the halls, there’s serious business afoot: the player character is a novice apprenticed to the garden-keeper, and when your mentor dies in mysterious circumstances, you need to plumb every depth of the priority and unearth the monks’ hidden secrets to determine the who, how, and why of the murder. The game proceeds on a timer, but the passage of time is as much an opportunity as it is a threat: because while of course the game ends if you haven’t found the culprit by the end of the day, every few hours the other monks gather for their religious duties, from which you’re excused due to your youth and the horrific events, allowing you to poke into places where you’re not allowed.

Time isn’t the only system at play in Our Lady of Thorns; there’s an inventory limit and concealment mechanics to prevent you from waltzing around the priory with a giant pile of illicit material, and the monks do move around a bit, ready to prevent you from engaging in any unauthorized mischief if they see you (save for the few you might be able to convince to turn a blind eye…) Many of the puzzles also have multiple solutions. All of this means that there’s a high level of player engagement and advocacy, as you refer to the nicely-drawn map to plot out a path where you won’t be seen, track the clock to ensure your movements are well-timed, and furiously improvise when you’ve made a miscalculation. As far as I can tell, there are consequences to messing up, but they’re generally relatively mild – the game seems to track how many times you’ve drawn undue attention to yourself, and while eventually that can lead to a premature game-over, you’re afforded a generous amount of leeway (unless, of course, the monk whose attention you’ve drawn happens to be the murderer…)

The puzzles themselves are generally conventional ones, but that’s a good decision, I think, given that often getting to the puzzles undetected, with enough time to solve them, and with the right items in your inventory is already half the challenge. There are some predictable ways to befriend or hoodwink some of the monks, the architect of the priory had a convenient love for riddles and secret passages, and a few books offer important clues if you consult them about the right topics. They work well enough and are well integrated into the plot and setting, albeit there are a few that require an old-school specificity of interaction that’s at odds with the game’s generally friendly presentation – this is a game where you need to be very thorough, despite the time limit, or be comfortable consulting the hints. To cite an early example, it’s easy to miss an important object when examining the dead body:

x aelred’s habit

You see nothing unusual about his habit, and don’t see the things he was picking at.

search aelred

In an inner pocket of his robe, you find an iron key. You take it.

There are at least two other places where the player has to use very particular syntax, beyond simply examining the objects the game mentions, in order to progress, and while it’s not too hard to deduce the need to do so if you stop and think carefully, in a game this big, it’s easy to assume that if you’re not making progress on a puzzle, it’s because the solution is in one of the locked-away areas you haven’t been to yet, rather than because you missed something in a place you thought you’d already explored thoroughly.

The game’s other blemish is the characters, few of whom have much of a personality. The lovely exception is the librarian, Wilfred, who used to be the prior but who has retired to a life filled with books (and a cute orange cat) in his dotage. He’s a friendly presence – and also a puzzle element, because of course you need to get into those books – and responds to a variety of conversational topics. Most of his brethren aren’t so lucky, though; many of them have taken vows of silence or are otherwise uninterested in communicating, and few of them play a direct role in the gameplay. That’s all realistic enough, but it does mean that the revelation of the murderer was a fairly muted affair, based on gathering physical evidence and reading between the lines in a few documents; sussing out the culprit didn’t take much brain power, but struggling to recall whether I’d exchanged more than a single greeting with him certainly did.

More active characters probably wouldn’t have fit the setting, and the intended gameplay, quite so well, though – as I said, I enjoyed poking around the priory quite a lot, and having to trail half a dozen monks this way and that while interrogating them about all the other suspects, Infocom-mystery style, would be a far more stressful, and far less meditative, experience than what Our Lady of Thorns offers. That solitary vibe is very much in keeping with the subject matter, and makes the final dilemma – because once you’ve solved the mystery, you can choose whether to prioritize justice or mercy – one that plays out at a higher level, responsive more to universal principles than the concrete particularity of one person’s squalid motives and worse actions. So while it takes a while to get there, the game does ultimately touch on spiritual as well as mechanical concerns, a fitting capstone to a game that’s one of the standouts in this year’s Festival.

I’ve mentioned before that my wife is a fan of the notionally-set-in-the-Regency-but-people-talk-about-closure romance Bridgerton, so we’ve been working our way through the recently-released season, but finding it a bit of a slog. Partially this is because the writing seems to have suffered from those Netflix notes about making sure every character is spelling out the plot for the people not paying attention in the back. Partially it’s because the male lead spent the previous three seasons mired in dull subplots that didn’t go anywhere and which – since their consequences all need to be cancelled out so he can be a blank slate when meeting the female lead – made him seem rather callow. But mostly it’s because the show barreled through the process of the two leads falling in love as though it were running late for a train: there’s barely half an episode of them getting to know each other before the plot starts throwing obstacles in the way of what by now the viewers assuredly feel must be their destined union. And look, I know whose pictures are on the posters, and the tropes of forbidden love are always entertaining to work through, but it’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm because I’m not especially invested – the show is telling me these people are deeply in love, but it hasn’t shown me how they got there.

Before the Snow Melts is a visual novel that takes a broadly similar approach: from the jump, we’re told that the protagonist is deeply and secretly in love with their best friend Clover, and has seven days to tell her – or not – before she leaves the town where they grew up together. It’s a familiar but promising setup, and I liked the straightforward but nonetheless compelling metaphors the author employs to communicate the protagonist’s hidden yearning:

"I don’t know when that started. It feels like it’s always been there. Like snow, quietly piling up. Layer by layer, until everything was covered. Still. Preserved. Untouched."

The seasonal imagery in the prose is a highlight throughout, in fact – here’s another bit I liked:

"A light breeze moved through the trees, carrying that damp, thawed scent of early spring. Somewhere deeper in the forest, water dripped steadily, like the season was slowly unfreezing itself."

The visual presentation isn’t quite so understated. The anime-style characters are expressive, but maybe too much so – Clover is appealingly spunky but she’s only drawn with a few rather extreme variations, so that she goes from smilingly chatting over coffee, to being depicted as crying in the time it takes her to meditatively run her finger around the rim of the cup and say “hey.”

Perhaps that level of emotional whiplash is appropriate to these characters, though, since while the game doesn’t divulge specific ages or even their overall life circumstances, they’re heavily teenaged-coded, with Clover’s mysterious departure seeming to me like an impending departure for college and the light bickering that characterizes her dialogue likewise coming up sophomoric. So while the protagonist’s refusal to tell their crush about their feelings until literally the last second is definitely a bit frustrating, I remember what I was like as a teenager and can’t say that it’s unrealistic. Whether it’s compelling is a different matter, though; I didn’t agonize over most of the game’s choices because it was clear that the only important one would come on day seven, which means that by midweek some of the pseudo-dates had a harder time holding my interest. Here, the game’s refusal to offer specifics is to its detriment; the line by line dialogue is solid enough, but being told that the characters go to see “a drama” is less compelling than if it had been, I dunno, Oppenheimer, and a lot of the conversation topics are quite abstract and philosophical, so they could have benefitted from additional grounded.

Fortunately, the game does get a mid-stream dose of energy when a third character is introduced into their tiny menage; Iris, a mutual childhood friend, is a bundle of chaos who drinks too much and speaks too bluntly, and in her frustration that these two people haven’t just started kissing already is an effective proxy for the player. Her attempts to move things along are necessarily unsuccessful (and for anyone tempted to roll their eyes at the way that the two main characters just completely ignore the way Iris all but tells them “you guys are super into each other!”, I can testify almost this exact same thing happened to me when I was this age, again, this is gritty realism), but her presence is a highlight and helps ease the process of getting to the ending, which is the other highlight.

The climactic conversation is, I suppose, just as high-level as the rest of them, and edges closer to melodrama, but that’s fitting for the stakes. And it finally pays off some of the seeds sown in earlier sequences: very often the protagonist talks about things feeling or being “easy” in those previous conversations, which provides a counterpoint when Clover, justifying her decision to leave, says “I’m afraid of choosing something smaller than I wanted, not because I had to, but because it was easier”. You really do have choices here, and while all the endings work well enough, I found myself most drawn to the one where you can let Clover know about your feelings without initiating a relationship – there’s a grounded poignancy to acknowledging, at a time of transition, that something could have happened but now it’s too late.

It would have landed harder, though, if I’d come to this scene with a clearer sense of what, exactly, the protagonist saw in Clover, and what Clover saw in them. They both seem like nice people, and as a player, I felt the vague benevolence of wanting them both to be happy. Before the Snow Melts didn’t sell me on the idea that they could only be happy together; it’s vague, perhaps intentionally, about whether this is star-crossed destiny or just youthful hormones bubbling over. I suppose this, too, is realistic, since God knows it’s hard to have that perspective when you’re in it, but fairly or not, the standards for fiction are different.

Sometimes you can tell a lot from a font, and the one visual novel Crier uses for its protagonist’s dialogue is a clear statement of purpose: an all-caps, heavily bolded gothic excrudescence, its chunky letters more concerned with straining to escape the narrow strip of screen real estate into which they’re claustrophobically crammed than anything as pedestrian as legibility. What typeface could more aptly give voice to a mad prophet so monomaniacally bent on predicting grotesquely baroque curses upon the reigning sovran that being thrown into the endless oubliette under the palace barely slows down their doom-saying?

This is a game that revels in the aesthetics of its transgressions, turning every available dial up to 11: the character and background art is a well-executed attempt to do Geiger with fewer genitals and way more goo, while the more restrained prose, meanwhile, delivers precisely-limned descriptions of horrors, its clinical tone dwelling on the diverse ways to experience organic rot:

"Feeling your way along the wall, you encounter a textured patch on the stone: it smells fungal, ozonic, wetly metallic."

The dungeon has more to offer than just decomposing bodily fluids, though – the ecosystem down here is grasping its way towards a higher purpose, like an artificial but biologically-mediated neural net. In the chatty words of the sidekick who eventually accretes on to you, who’s an oddly adorable sort of giant dendrite:

"lots of things survive down here… biotech stuff, variously sapient/sentient, outfolding like ancient dungeon tunnels into villi, 2 extract info from the miasma"

The aforementioned Phenol Red is a mensch, but there’s royalty down here too, queens and duchesses of decay, whose domains you’re forced to navigate in your quest to escape back to the surface so you can tell those jerks that no seriously, y’all are turbo-doomed. Most of the game’s choices revolve around set-piece encounters with these figures, as you must give them something of what they want in order to progress, but giving too much can cost you more than you can bear.

But, interestingly, it probably won’t. For all that Crier’s presentation is relentlessly grim, its actual mechanics are pretty low-key. From a bit of experimentation, most choices only change a bit of the following line of dialogue, so are far lower-stakes than they appear, and while there are ways of getting to a premature bad ending, it takes intentionality to swerve into them: pretty much every character will give you direct instructions about how to handle the next one in line, and the game usually provides plenty of warning if you’re on the wrong track. As a result, I experienced a not-unpleasant clash of vibes as I played: the text was telling me I was a degraded churl wallowing in filth for all eternity, while the gameplay structure was telling me I was on a jolly dungeon crawl adventure that just happened to boast some naughtily outré décor.

I wouldn’t say that’s wholly a bad thing. Crier really does have some compelling writing, dense with allusion and gesturing towards ideas that are more fun to contemplate than have spelled out. There’s an engaging section where you’re trying to use your prophetic talents to decode the messages coming down a sort of fungal sigint network, and the choices are enticing – my favorite was interpreting one splotch of lichen as “a dragon encircling a sun while eating its own tail and buttocks[, d]rawn in fluorescent blue kohl.” There’s a later bit of worldbuilding that reflects on the methods of the above-ground tyrant: “The sovran’s men take to the sea for new markets. They bring lenses, automata, small marvels. Whalebone dice. Thaumaturgy husks. Severed thumbs. Those who will not trade will be cut down.” I dug all this stuff, and I doubt fighting the game tooth and claw to progress would have made me enjoy this imagery more.

As a result, though, I’m not sure Crier goes as far towards celebrating the fecund and horrifying vitality of the abjected as it seems; player-empowerment sits awkwardly alongside these themes. IF boasts plenty of examples of games with similar subject matter that either through gameplay mechanics (like say, howling dogs) or downbeat narrative progression (hat tip here to Accelerate) feel like more unified aesthetic objects. It’s probably not wholly positive that I quite enjoyed my time with Crier; for all that it’s a very well-put together piece of misery tourism, I can’t help wishing it imposed more of a toll.

can’t fully decode the wordplay that gives rise to meminerimus’s title, but I think “minimum” or “minimus” has to be somewhere in the blender, because this parser game seems an exercise in creating the smallest possible unit of story: the critical-path transcript barely cracks 500 words. So as a result it’s hard to discuss the game without getting into the ending, and since there is a plot here to be spoiled, fair warning that the rest of this review does so.

To pad out the text a bit so readers deciding to nope out after that warning aren’t immediately confronted by unwanted story details in the following line, before they have a change to hit the back button, let me do some throat-clearing and note that the brevity of the text doesn’t indicate that the game is a low-effort production by any means; there are a bunch of testers listed, and there’s a nicely-styled online version of the game that features intuitive hyperlinks for potential actions.

So the restraint here certainly feels intentional, which makes for an interesting contrast with the density of the premise. See, what’s going on here is that the player-character is a digital simulacrum, reconstituted and placed into a virtual shrine featuring the effects of a real-world person who, we learn through examining each of the four items in turn – and examining is all you can do, this is a limited-parser game – has died of suicide. The person who commissioned the replica is the dead person’s parent, who, through misguided attempts to change them “for their own good”, wound up hounding them into their desperate act of self-harm. That parent acts as the game’s narrator, providing commentary as you look at a gift the dead child received from a boyfriend, an award they won at school, and so on, providing a small anecdote for each before eventually triggering the endgame text which spells out the above summary.

This is a fine story, albeit a sadly familiar one, so what I found notable were the ways the game deviated from my expectations. The main divergence is that while the parent is clearly a terrible person who did terrible things, the game’s presentation is nonetheless at least a bit ambivalent. At a micro level, this is done by having one of the four items represent what appears to a wholly positive memory, a board game the two of them enjoyed playing together, which serves to indicate that the relationship wasn’t completely one-dimensionally negative. But zooming out, the reason the parent’s gone to the trouble of creating this “virtual resurrection” is that they’re baffled by what they did wrong – they’re aware that the things they did exacted a toll upon their child, and from the questions they ask in the finale (“Why did you have to do that to yourself? Why did you have to go so soon? Where I did I go wrong? Am I to blame for this?”) it’s clear at least part of them understands their guilt. But for all that the game makes the parent’s passive-aggression, low expectations, and abusive behavior pellucidly clear, this incomprehension seems to be sincere.

This is an intriguing dynamic! An AI looking at the detritus of the person it’s aping, looked at by the person who knows that they caused their death but due to some flaw in their humanity unable to grasp exactly how or why – it’s an existential hall of mirrors that caused me some vertigo when I thought it through. But it’s also one would probably be more impactful if the game had spent more time elaborating upon it. The AI, for one thing, has no subjectivity beyond providing a vector for the player to make the arbitrary choice of which object to examine, and with the dead child provided no real character traits beyond a few generalities adverted to by the obviously-biased narrator, their suicide lacks some impact.

Sure, there would be challenges to expanding this piece of micro-fiction too much: more robust gameplay systems would probably be required, which can be tricky in a character-first game like this, and it might be hard to sustain the narrator’s lack of understanding across a more worked-out plot without things feeling absurd. Still, I think it would have been worth the attempt; meminerimus raises some interesting questions, but doesn’t do much to elaborate upon them. That’s not a bad position for what appears to be a debut work of IF to leave the player, though, as that means I’m game to see what the author does next.

Back in the mid-90s when Doom was all the rage, I was in high school and had dreams of video-game-writing glory, so one afternoon I cracked open the game’s level editor to see what I could make of it. Confronted by the blank grid, I was momentarily at a loss for what to create, and defaulted to trying to map out the dorm I was sitting in. This was fun while it lasted, but unfortunately the building’s defining features were its two high stairwells, which were impossible to so much as gesture at in Doom’s 2.5-dimensional-on-a-good-day engine, so thus my dreams were dashed. But I always think of that when I come across a my-dumb-apartment game or something similar, because for all that it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at the lack of inspiration, and be frustrated by the way real-world places feel like they’re full of redundant rooms, illogical connections, and gratuitous empty space when experienced in a virtual context, it’s also worth trying to get back in touch with the impulse that gave birth to them: the wonder at being able to conjure up something from nothing, the impulse to domesticate a strange new digital world by recreating someplace familiar, the thrill of recognition when hard work finally makes it real.

Latinorum makes it easy to dwell on the positive side of that dichotomy. Per the author’s note, this is a rewritten version of a game he wrote when he was likewise in high school, updated and rewritten but still very much of a piece with that early era of IF (like, it requires a C64 emulator to play, for one thing). The real-world origins would be obvious even without this paratext, though – the school you explore has a bunch of near-identical classrooms, features like blackboards and closets that are scrupulously implemented but rarely have anything plot-related to offer, and a confusing map with exits that don’t always make sense, all of which means it feels too idiosyncratic to be made up.

But while I don’t have any nostalgia for this vintage of IF, much less this particular Italian secondary school, the game still manages to be worth the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play through it. For one thing, you’re given a clear goal that rationalizes why you’re exploring this particular deserted place – you’re trying to steal an exam paper the night before the test so you can get a good grade, which is cheating, sure, but a fun enough jumping-off point for a short adventure. For another, the game keeps things short and easy enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. There’s some light object-manipulation puzzles and some locked doors, but the two-word parser makes solving most of these straightforward, and the game is free of hunger timers and unwinnable states; the only old-school touch I noticed was one puzzle near the end where I had to manually OPEN a BOOK despite EXAMINING it seeming to indicate that I had already flipped through it, which is a little annoying but nothing a trip to the thoughtfully-provided walkthrough couldn’t solve.

Beyond that, the game leans into its scholastic setting with some fun, gentle gags: I like that it opens with a cheery “alea iacta est”, and this bit of description when you check out a paper airplane made from folding up a page from one of Kant’s books made me laugh very hard:

"The legendary Critique of Pure Reason. The aircraft, made from a sheet of notebook paper, took off from an unidentified bench, but due to a malfunction in the control systems, landed at the feet of the Philosophy professor who was explaining (so to speak) Kant."

That “(so to speak)” is 10/10, no notes.

Is Latinorum one for the ages? No, it’s a slight thing, but there are worse jaunts to take down memory lane, and it makes me positively disposed towards the games the high school students of today are even now making, recording their experiences for future generations yet to come.

There are a lot of crimes to be laid at the door of postmodernism, from academic texts that use up three quarters of their word count twisting themselves into knots at the violence inherent in any act of analysis to the brainwave that led to an unremarkable margarine being marketed as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, but credit it with this: the idea that every particular narrative voice, in nonfiction as well as in fiction, is an artificial construct, rather than a direct and unmediated expression of the writer’s identity, is these days pretty universally understood. So it’s no great revelation to confess that the Mike Russo who’s offered his opinions on some 700-odd works of IF to date diverges in many respects from the actually-existing fellow currently putting fingers to keys. In most respects, these differences are banal: I doubt any of y’all would be surprised to learn that reviewing-me is much more discursive, nor that intensive joke-workshopping means he comes across as far more clever than the genuine article. But beyond these matters of degree, there are also areas that don’t come up, either because they’re not typically that relevant to talking about IF – like my work in the nonprofit industrial complex – or because they’re not part of what I tend to prioritize when assessing a game.

Puzzle design is a good example of this latter category. When I talk about puzzles in my reviews, I usually focus on how well-integrated they are into a game’s story and how they advance its themes, how they affect the pacing, whether the clueing is fair and if solving them feels like it moves the player ahead, since I think those are the most broadly-applicable ways to evaluate them. But this high-minded focus on design goals and literary function typically pre-empts me from talking about how much of a nerd I am for puzzles, especially of the wordplay variety. Every day I do the Wordle, both Squardles, Bracket City, and several crosswords – so many that I’ve had to intentionally drop some from my quotidian rounds because it was notably eating into my free time. I love a rebus and a not-too-hard anagram, and I especially love a game that’s a collection of brainteasers: your Fool’s Errands, your Professors Layton, your Sage Sanctums Scramble.

As a result, while part of me has to acknowledge that there’s a way in which Enigmart is a bit perfunctory – it’s a collection of the puzzles the author wrote for the monthlong Enigmarch event, gathered together with a couple pages of absurdist story providing connective tissue – a much bigger part of me just squeals in delight at getting to dig into a variety-box of 26 different bite-sized puzzles. There’s a consistent food theme that provides a bit of humor and some gentle prompting in some of the puzzles, but no particular idea is repeated: there are some familiar ones like anagrams and logic puzzles, but also more esoteric challenges involving mixing-and-matching pairs of letters to create words, a Venn-diagram-based puzzle unlike anything I’ve seen before that’s nonetheless immediately intuitive, and even a tricky reverse-Wordle.

The difficulty is generally pitched just right; most range from easy to moderate, with only a few that take more than a couple minutes of thought or require you to stare at the thing until your brain suddenly clicks and gets the solution (though I will say that familiarity with the pop culture of the 80s and 90s is definitely helpful for a few of them). And for the trickier ones, there’s a hint function to help you get over the hump, though it’s only unlocked pretty far into the game – still, I think that’s a reasonable choice since it ensures it’s just there to help you finish up those last couple puzzles you’re not quite getting, rather than pushing people who just don’t get along with these kinds of brainteasers to power through nonetheless.

The implementation is also top-notch – there are all kinds of pictures, drop-down menus, and checklists incorporated which helps keep the puzzles fresh, and I didn’t come across any bugs or interface infelicities. As for that framing story, it’s enjoyably daft but winds up having more layers than it needed to; the conceit is that you’re shopping at a new supermarket where you can get discounts on particular products by solving puzzles in the store’s proprietary app, which is of course silly, but the game surprised me by taking this premise seriously, engaging with questions of privacy and capitalist exploitation while introducing a couple of honest-to-god characters into what’s otherwise a straightforward puzzlefest. As far as I can tell there’s no metapuzzle or branching choices here, which is perhaps a missed opportunity – did I mention how much I adore Fool’s Errand – but it’s still a nice bonus that doesn’t draw too much attention from the puzzle-y main event.

If you’re only interested in IF for its potential to tell a rich story, or if you only like inventory puzzles deeply rooted in a coherent narrative, Enigmart is unlikely to change your preferences. But if you likewise have a suite of puzzle websites you visit every morning as soon as you wake up, I think you’ll also have a great time putting it through its paces. But I do have to levy one complaint: March has 31 days but there are only 26 puzzles in the game, so come on, there has to be a post-festival release with the left-over five, right? I’ll be waiting!

There are few constants in this storm-tossed age, but it is nonetheless an iron law of IF that you will never have a bad time in an Agnieszka Trzaska game. The roguelike 4x4 series, the skeleton-and-mouse buddy act of the Rosalinda games, one-offs like the sci-fi shenanigans of Chuk and the Arena – for all the differences in setting and gameplay, you can expect a charming story with plucky characters and laugh-out-loud humor, undergirded by solid, satisfying mechanics. Universal Robot is no exception, and if the puzzles are a little less complex than usual, the almost sandbox-style climax and righteous social comment provide more than enough of a counterbalance.

The “Hex” of the title is the player-character – you’re a put-upon alien wage-slaving it up on a space-station owned by a megacorporation that’s figured out how to use tax loopholes to make pointless widget-production profitable regardless of the fact that they don’t get sold, and in fact get dumped out into space. Not content with this money-for-nothing scheme, they’re putting on pressure to cut costs further, which is where your manager gets the idea of replacing you with a robot. Adding insult to injury, you’re tasked with assembling and training the thing, and adding injury to the insult to the injury, you’re not so much going be laid off as jettisoned out the airlock alongside the station’s other refuse. Fortunately, you’ve got a tool-belt, a buddy who works in the station’s kitchens, and no compunctions whatsoever about using every shrink-ray, inversion module, and rubber snake you can lay your hands on to claw out a better ending to this story.

As the list of inventory items there suggests, we’re very clearly in comedy-point-and-click-game territory. The game revolves around a series of inventory puzzles, which are supported by a clean interface – there’s an always-accessible subscreen where you can examine, combine, or use the stuff you’re carrying on the items in the room you’re in, combined with a simple navigation system and simple dialogue trees. But for the graphics, it’s a pitch-perfect implementation of a late-period LucasArts game, and as with the best of those classics, puzzle solutions are logical without feeling too straightforward, prompting plenty of “wait I think this should work” moments.

In further keeping with that tradition, there are also jokes a-plenty. That manager scheming to replace you? He’s called Mr. Green, but as the game is quick to emphasize, “new”, not “old” Mr. Green, because he’s actually a giant red monster who ate your former, human boss, but absorbed some of his memories and expertise and therefore inherited the manager’s position because the company decided it would be a pain to train someone else up from scratch. And I guess it’s a dumb joke, but I laughed at the earnest prediction that adoption of robots “could lead to unemployment rates reaching 160% by the end of the decade, with some workers being forced to be unemployed at two or more companies at once.” The tragedy!

Per these examples, there’s definitely an anti-corporate, anti-LLM thread that runs through the game, but it’s largely used for jokes and to evoke sympathy for the working-class characters, so stays relatively restrained; as someone who can get annoyed if it feels like a game is getting too didactic even when I agree with the points it’s making, so I appreciated the light touch. And it does serve to add a note of dignity to proceedings that can often get quite slapstick.

The endings, in fact, are where things can become somewhat serious. The puzzles along the critical path are generally quite straightforward: see, the robot is missing a couple pieces, so you need to collect those before you can finish assembling it, and the obstacles to doing so are clearly flagged and don’t require too much brainpower to surmount. But if you just run through that path of least resistance, you’ll find yourself having created a perfectly-functioning robot trained to do everything you can do, which given the ruthlessness of your corporate overlords, is not a great idea.

But there are many, many ways you can undermine or subvert the robot, leading to radically different results; there are a dozen endings to find, and even after coming up with a variety of plans, I still missed almost half of them. Despite the small map and limited number of objects, there are lots of opportunities to mess about, and I was delighted to realize that I could implement just about every silly thought I had, from sabotaging the robot’s physical capacities to messing with its programming (I’ll drop into spoilers to relate my favorite ending: (Spoiler - click to show)it’s the one where you get yourself hopped up on a giant chocolate-chip cookie, cocoa being an intoxicant to your variety of alien, just before donning the training helmet, which leads to a drunkenly incompetent robot slurring its way through the initial interview with management). I was a little disappointed that it appears it’s possible to lock yourself out of some endings based on a decision that isn’t flagged as irrevocable (I’m talking about (Spoiler - click to show)downloading the finance podcasts to your terminal), but it feels churlish to complain based on how much fun I had with the ones I did find.

I’m not sure Universal Robot will wind up at the absolute top tier of Trzaska’s gameography – for all that I enjoyed the characters, there isn’t a relationship quite as winning as the one between Rosalinda and Piecrust, and the mechanics aren’t as intrinsically compelling as those in the more systems-driven games. But this is praising with faint damnation indeed; this is a fun, fleet game with something to say, solid gags, and an enjoyably farcical climax. What more could one want, or expect?