Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

Some blurbs directly transmit what the game is going to be about, but others a little more challenging to decode. So it is with The Triskelion Affair, which starts out by saying you’ll be playing a “medieval detective”, implying a historical whodunnit; the genre tag, on the other hand, says it’s swords and sorcery, which put me in mind of mighty thews, dark sorcery, and greed. As I went through the game’s opening, going through an oddly-vague mission briefing that didn’t tell me what my mission was, courtesy of a martinet straight out of a British operetta, I looked for details that would clue me into the historical era of the setting, or indications that I’d soon be departing from my orders to engage in a bit of freebooting. This sense of uncertainty persisted until I finished the half hour or so prologue and entered into the game proper, which involves exploring a pillaged church to find a powerful magical artifact: in the backstory I was finally given before the adventure started in earnest, I learned that “a cleric, rogue, and two fighters traveled to St Cuthbert’s last week” bent on the same task as I was. So yeah, turns out I needn’t have worried, it’s just Dungeons and Dragons (specifically Grayhawk, I think, given that mention of St. Cuthbert), and the game features both the ropey implementation as well as the naïve but infectious enthusiasm you’d expect from a neophyte author motivated to produce a medium-sized game based on such a hoary premise.

Just to get the negatives out of the way first: this is an almost completely traditional game in terms of plot and gameplay, centering on an old-school dungeon crawl in search of a potent magic item of unexplained powers, which is also sought by some bad guys whose nature and motivations go completely unmentioned. The opening section adds a tiny bit of interest, allowing you to ride out from the headquarters of the army you’re apparently part of and stay a night in an inn before setting forth on your adventure, but it’s entirely on rails, and sticks so squarely to a generic DnD vibe that it doesn’t wind up providing much flavor.

The implementation is also pretty sloppy. Almost the first prompt in the game is “What is your full name, solider?”; there’s lots of unimplemented scenery, and examining certain object just gives a blank response rather than the default “you see nothing special” line; and there are mimesis-breaking touches like the sign in the stables reading “ask Hiram about Boarding”. Of course there’s an inventory limit, and odd touches like a lantern remaining the “south lantern” even after I’d picked it up from its perch on the wall. There’s nothing exactly game-breaking, but my progress was frequently blocked by a lack of clarity about what objects were around, wrestling with synonyms, or otherwise fighting the parser.

For all these criticisms, though, I can’t say I had a bad time with the Triskelion Affair. The puzzles are straightforward DnD stuff, with a bell-book-candle ritual livening up the plethora of locked doors with hidden keys, but sometimes you just want comfort food – similarly, the church cum dungeon is absolutely something you’ve seen before, but the attention to detail in terms of church architecture still made it fun to explore. And while it adds to the general slapdashery, I liked that there are a lot of red herrings and puzzle chains that don’t appear to go anywhere – I solved some puzzles to find a hidden pair of magical glasses, which didn’t do anything so far as I can tell. These optional bits ease the difficulty while making the game seem deeper than it is.

I can’t say in good conscience that the game design is strong throughout, mind: there are a couple read the author’s mind puzzles, and a few places where the game, annoyingly, seems to be actively trying to mislead the player (I’m thinking especially of getting the key from the fireplace in the hunting lodge, where the fact that X GRATE will give a different result than X FIREPLACE isn’t telegraphed, and the description saying that the fireplace was recently cleaned seems to indicate to the player that there’s nothing else to be found by poking around). And there’s a pointless yet annoying combat system that’s used for a single fight against a zombie, which you’re foreordained to win but which will see you drop a couple of inventory items you’ll later need to retrieve. Still, if you’ve got a soft spot in your heart for generic DnD adventure and a high tolerance for design and implementation issues that were old hat even in the 90s, the Triskelion Affair has a certain disheveled charm.

(Some unmarked spoilers here, it’s that kind of game).

Rarely has a game’s opening left me with more whiplash than 198BREW’s. After a cryptic couple of paragraphs telling me that my soul is suffering eternal and well-deserved torment, which smash-cuts to a fantasy-ish vignette where a queen urges her consort to kill and cannibalize her, control is handed to the player – only to find that you’re in a My Dumb Apartment game and need to get some coffee because you’re all out. It’s two different lazy late-90s parser IF tropes in one!

Well no, not really. While 198BREW does end once you finally get some sweet, sweet caffeine down your gullet, this is no wacky slice-of-life comedy; and while the first couple of locations are a mostly-nondescript flat with unnecessarily detailed fixtures, it quickly opens up, and that “mostly” is covering for some real eye-poppers. As the prologue indicates, neither the player character nor the world they inhabit are quite like our own, and the gameplay as well isn’t typical parser fare. Sure, getting to the end requires surmounting a series of obstacles laid out as a daisy-chain of fetch quests and medium-dry-goods puzzles, but while your next step is generally obvious, the context for what you’re doing is often left deliberately incomplete, and the outcomes of each action are surreally divorced from the traditional logic of cause and effect. Midway through the game, you’ll stab a woman because a painting asked you to and receive three quarters for your trouble, and that’s only the weirdest puzzle by like 20%.

This is the game’s greatest success, I think – it commits to its enigmatic, downbeat theme, successfully infusing it across the prose, plot, and gameplay. This is the kind of world where just about everybody is trapped in a private hell, mostly of their own making, and their external circumstances match their internal torment. 198BREW’s subtitle – The Age of Orpheus – seems to conceal, but actually reveals, the thematic focus: we’re concerned here less with the best-known portion of the myth, where Orpheus journeys to Hades to rescue his lover, and more with the messy aftermath, where after having lost Eurydice through his own mistakes, he’s torn limb from limb and his still-living head floats down the river, singing lamentations all the while. The player character, you see, like many of the other significant characters, is cursed with a vicious sort of immortality, which means that they displace the mind and soul of anyone who eats their flesh and drinks their blood (in fact, this Dumb Apartment isn’t quite your own; it belonged to your now-dead lover, whose body you now inhabit after she willingly butchered and consumed you). Others are doomed to remain breathing even as cancer wracks their systems beyond what once were the limits of human endurance, while some fall victim to time-loops making a single day an endless, repeating ocean. And then there’s the Evangelion-style ruined mecha crashed in the public park, with a perhaps-still-living pilot deathlessly entombed within.

There’s a fair bit of complicated worldbuilding to establish, in other worlds, and while the approach is a little idiosyncratic – examining prominent objects often prompts multi-paragraph exposition that ranges far beyond describing what you see – it’s well managed, doling out enough details to help you understand what’s going on while avoiding didactically spelling things out. I can’t say I have my head fully wrapped around every detail of the setting, with some questions remaining about that aforementioned sentient painting and those mechs, but I much prefer that to having the mood ruined with dry lore, and I did get the sense that everything here does connect, even if those connections aren’t fully visible to the player.

Beyond over-detailed infodumping, this story is also the kind of thing that would easily be ruined by inadequate prose; happily, it’s largely up to the task, remaining engaging even when there’s not much to directly narrate, as in this near-abandoned train station:

"It’s quiet. Not even the storm’s wailing can breach this place. The only sounds are the echoes of your own footsteps. With every click-clack, the station feels like it grows in size — the ceiling grows higher, the steps further away. The longer you look around, the more convinced you are time itself is somehow expanding, too; the grand clock above the ticket booths seems to move slower and slower as you stare at it."

On the gameplay side of things, well, things are a bit thinner. As mentioned above, your coffee quest ultimately requires you to jump through an increasingly-absurd set of hoops. Each step is generally signposted quite directly, with whichever NPC whose desires you currently need to assuage spelling out what you should do next, even where their ability and desire to provide this direction is a bit unclear. With that said, I sometimes ran into challenges due to the game’s less-than-robust implementation. There’s lots of scenery missing, important NPCs don’t appear to actually be people under the Inform world model, a cat bowl is “hardly portable”, the player has a default “as good looking as ever” description, and as for actions, well, that assassination unwittingly provided one of the few bits of levity to crack the game’s bleak surface:

> hit woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to hit the strange woman.

> hit woman

Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

> cut woman

Cutting him up would achieve little.

> cut woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to cut the strange woman.

> use knife

You can’t use that.

> use knife on woman

You probably shouldn’t go around stabbing things for no reason.

In principle I am right there with you, game, yet here we are (KILL WOMAN did the business, so that brought the mood right back down again).

With that said, these are all typical first-time-author issues – nothing a bit of experience won’t improve, and nothing that substantively reduced the effectiveness of the game. For all that I admire 198BREW’s commitment to subverting expectations and leaning hard into a mournful, uncomfortable vibe, though, I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I have other similarly bleak, well-written works. Partially that’s because a preoccupation with the downsides of eternal life is theoretically interesting but by itself isn’t that viscerally engaging to me – when it’s clear this is a fictional way of talking about survivor’s guilt or depression or what have you, I think it’s a trope that can work, but this game is so defined by negative emotions and negative space that it doesn’t really communicate what positive things the player character, or most of the others for that matter, has lost. And the game’s themes seem to mirror these subjective experiences, basically just saying that life sure is a bummer.

The one potential exception is a minor character: a cameraman who’s filming the rally of a doomed political candidate who rails against the corrupt status quo, and who hands you a ticket when you feed him a keyword. The cameraman is a member of the orthodox church that upholds said status quo, but some of the things the politician is saying make sense to him. He’s listening, he’s feeling torn, he’s questioning things – he seems like a person whose fate isn’t sealed and whose mind could still be changed, someone who still has things he cares about (heck, he even makes a pass at the player character before they make their lack of interest plain). Let the world as a whole be just as fucked, but I wouldn’t mind playing a sequel about that guy.

I’ve said before that I like the aesthetics of horror, but can sometimes be put off by the gore, suffering, bad actions, and trauma that true afficionados of the genre enjoy. So while “investigate spooky goings-on at an old British pub” is sufficiently tame of a premise that the hardcore fans would sniff at it, it’s very much up my alley. The vibe is sufficiently cozy that it took me a while to realize that the setting was contemporary, since the sixty-something landlord has old-fashioned patterns of speech, the bar fittings are timeless, and the names of the beers could go either way – Stinky Ferret is either the brand of some terminally-ironic hipsters, or a Victorian concern proudly upholding a local tradition about the time a sick mustelid crawled into one of the fermentation vats and died.

Apparently said beer is supposed to be good, though, so the fact that it’s gone sour is the low-key inciting incident for this decidedly low-key adventure. After confirming that the barman’s taste buds aren’t misfiring, you can poke around through the pub and come across a bit more evidence of strange goings-on – I won’t spoil them since they’re one of the main pleasures of a short game, but it’s all stuff that would be right at home in a self-published book of local legends you pick up at a small town’s visitor’s center. The implementation in this section is very solid: there aren’t a lot of different scenery items described, but those that are there are nicely detailed, and I never wrong-footed the parser by trying to look under the bed or open the windows. Similarly, there’s a fair bit of social interaction with Jack, the landlord, as well as his wife, the barmaid, and eventually (inevitably) the vicar. Conversations are conducted via the sometimes-tricky ASK/TELL system, but between a handy TOPIC command that orients you to potential avenues to pursue without simply spelling out the options, and the characteristically-thoughtful anticipation of questions the player might ask, it all felt quite smooth.

There’s eventually a shift to a shorter, more dramatic section, which involves the game’s one true puzzle; this has at least two solutions, though I hit a small snag that meant I missed one of them when first playing the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I tried to X STAIRS from the bottom, not the top, since I’d missed the subtlety that Will tripped before actually starting to climb down). Still, the alternate solution is logical enough, and Bad Beer is forgiving here too – should you fail to solve the puzzle and get the worse ending, the post-game options let you rewind and try again even if you didn’t think to make a save.

So Bad Beer is an efficient game that sets a pleasantly chilling mood, elaborates on its premise, throws in a small twist, and then wraps up while leaving the audience wanting more. I think there would have been room to lean in to the drama a little more while still maintaining its family-friendly vibe, and possibly provide a bit more of a rationale for some of the game’s events (Spoiler - click to show)(in particular, I’m still confused about why the player character is able to change the past, rather than just witnessing it, and how the paradox of preventing the haunting that instigated the time-travel in the first place is meant to be resolved). But sometimes a short game that doesn’t belabor itself is just the palette-cleanser one is after; this late in the Comp especially, I can’t complain on that score.

Is there a better setting for anything than Antarctica? It’s obviously aces for horror: the isolation and existential precariousness of the Ice ramps up the social-paranoia body horror of the Thing and the cosmic vertigo of At the Mountains of Madness. It’s just as obviously the ne plus ultra for wilderness adventure, from Shackleton’s thrilling journey of survival to Scott’s dramatic narrative of, er, not survival. Now Winter-Over demonstrates that the South Pole works just as well for a psychologically-driven whodunnit. What’s next – sitcoms? Reality shows? Infomercials?

This choice-based game wastes little time on setup or backstory laying out your life before coming to Antarctica – all that matters is that you’re something of a veteran and used some of your connections to bring your brother, who’s a bit of a screw-up, along on your latest expedition. So when he turns up dead one evening with an unexplained head-wound, of course you’re not going to take the base administrator’s advice and just wait ten days until an investigative team can fly in from New Zealand – despite the fact that the mental pressures of spending a whole winter at the bottom of the world were already starting to get to you, you launch your own search for the killer.

This makes for a classic setup, but the polar milieu helps justify many of the genre’s conventions. Nobody’s cell phones are connected to the Internet, for one thing, cutting out a whole lot of needed contrivances, and the isolation of the facility means that the cast of suspects can be kept manageable and close to hand once the progress of your investigation drives the murderer to take a more active role. The paranoid, desperate vibe that comes from knowing you’re sleeping mere feet from whoever killed your brother also helps increase the urgency, and justifies the game’s light self-care mechanics – an always-visible bit of the interface tells you your current stress level, which you can manage by sleeping or doing some non-investigative activities; I never let it get too high, so I’m not sure if a game-ending breakdown is actually possible, but a lot of the descriptions do shift based on elevated stress to underline how ragged you’ve become, which feels like an elegant way to incorporate the mental toll of the investigation. Contrarily, there are a few times when you need to build rapport with a suspect before they’ll trust you with a clue. It’s a logical enough turn to take the plot, but the relationship-building mechanics felt a little too bare and transactional to me – if you were always choosing who to hang out with, it might come off more natural, but since that stuff takes time away from the investigation I pretty much only made a gardening date or shared a stock-room shift with someone when I was intending to pump them for information.

Outside of those few exceptions, though, most of what you do during your time on the base is talk. There are a dozen or so people around, but many of them have verifiable alibis, so your investigation quickly comes to focus on five key suspects. Interviewing them to find out about their whereabouts on the night of the murder, and probing for any hidden motives or animosity they might be harboring, takes up the first few days of the game and opens up a bunch of new leads – going to the non-suspect personnel to verify the things they’ve said. There are a few puzzles involving computers or physical evidence, but even these are resolved through social means, since you’re typically forced to ask for the assistance of characters with the relevant skills to progress. There are points in the game where the amount of information all this talking turned up was a little hard to hold in my head; fortunately, there’s a handy sidebar that summarizes everything you’ve learned, including breaking down the names and schedules of all of the characters. I didn’t need to use it much, but I appreciated having the security blanket there in case I did.

As for the characters, they’re a nicely-rounded lot. The dialogue trees aren’t especially sprawling, and a few of them definitely are just playing bit parts, but the authors do a lot with a little, efficiently communicating Christian’s slight awkwardness or Victor’s incipient mania without laying things on too thick. I especially enjoyed the grounded humor the doctor, Matt, brought to the table:

“Everything was okay between the two of you?” you press. “You hadn’t fought recently or anything?”
“No,” he says. “What about you?”
“Me?” you say (sounding kind of stupid even to yourself). “What do you mean?”
“I’m just asking you the same thing you asked me,” he says.
“Yeah, but why?” you say, unable to keep the frustration from your tone.
He shrugs. “I don’t know, why did you ask?”
You sigh. “You know what, forget it.”

And yeah, there are jokes. While the plot and overall mood is grim, Winter-Over isn’t too heavy; the death of your brother is even slightly underplayed, I suspect intentionally because depicting it with all the shades of psychological realism would make for an intense, unfun experience at odds with the Miss Marple gameplay on offer. Still, there are moments of real threat, especially in a few gripping scenes where the murder tries to turn the tables on you, and the ending, where the protagonist finally opens themself back up to feeling the entirety of what they’ve gone through. I wouldn’t have minded a few more opportunities for the game to play up its brooding setting – there are one or two memorable set pieces that take advantage of being in Antarctica, but locations like the observation deck go mostly unused in the main gameplay, meaning you spend most of your time wandering around corridors that could as easily be on a spaceship or under the sea as at the pole.

The mystery itself, meanwhile, is a good one, with methodical investigation yielding up secrets as well as red herrings; it plays fair, too, with a solution that doesn’t change based on your actions. It’s perhaps tuned a bit easy, since I cracked the case halfway through the ten-day time limit, but I did get slightly lucky in the order I attempted things (Spoiler - click to show)(look, if you introduce one of the scientists by saying they hang out with the boss a bunch because “fiftysomething white guys need other fiftysomething white guys with whom to discuss football or how weird it is that their young relations aren’t buying houses or whatever,” of course I’m going to suspect one or both of them of being the baddie), and spending the remaining time running down other leads remained engaging. The ultimate motive is perhaps a little deflating, and the fact that the killer seems reticent to directly harm you at first when they’ve just brutally murdered your brother feels a bit strange, but it’s all put together reasonably enough to reward logical deduction (the only goof I noticed is that (Spoiler - click to show)even after I’d twigged that Jack was the killer by showing him the threatening note, the narration still gave him the benefit of the doubt when he lied about the ruler piece used to wedge my door closed).

All told this is a smooth, satisfying whodunnit. Sure, some of its mechanics might be more robust than others, but it executes the tricky feats of plate-spinning the genre requires with aplomb; similarly, while possibly more could have been done to leverage the polar setting, what’s here is more than enough to make for a memorably claustrophobic investigation. Now, will the streamers pick up the baton, with Death Comes to McMurdo launching on Netflix soon? Only time will tell.

(Oh, and let me close this review with bonus appreciation to the included bibliography, especially the article about the 100-year old “almost edible” fruitcake; call me old-fashioned but in my book something can be “almost edible” about as easily as someone can be “almost pregnant”).

If I were feeling cheeky, I would say that the biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn. But look, I take the Reviewer’s Code seriously, and while it’s nice to have a laugh every now and again it would be wrong to mislead you like this: no, the biggest problem is the prose. It’s awkward and flabby, incapable of expressing an idea without larding it up with extraneous commas, asides, and Big Fantasy Nouns, and frequently employing jarring vocabulary that confuses things further. Like, good luck getting through this sentence:

"A bloody past redeemed through the decision of the last Commander-Trainer, Grinhul the Wisest, who in the 22th year before the Great Peace, choose to surrender the Hall to a Great Flight instead of a brave but sterile last stand, saving the life and future of the hundreds of trainees, and the buildings where, in the 8th year since the Great Peace, the Arcanorum was founded."

I’ve said before that generic fantasy is already a genre that I find less than engaging, and this is about the least-engaging way to deliver it. But even when First Contact isn’t plastering exposition over every available surface, the prose lets it down – it smothers the few moments of drama or characterization with its syntactically snarled style.

OK, with that out of the way we can let our hair down. The second-biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core… No, wait, sorry, I’m wrong again. Actually the second-biggest problem is the content warning. “Depiction of breastfeeding” is like, a tired mom feeding her newborn, but what we’ve got here is very very different, and prospective players should know that going in.

Right, for real this time: the third-biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn. This is not a global judgment I apply to all works of art, mind; I did not set down Middlemarch and say to myself “that was good, but it would have been even better if there was a scene of Dorothea tenderly sucking at Mary Garth’s breast” (I’m not saying it wouldn’t be even better; it’s just that I’ve never really considered the question). But in the present context, the breastfeeding is by far the most interesting stuff in the game and seems to be the whole raison d’etre for the work – while I’m not personally in the market for sexy throuple shenanigans kicked off by a transparent “oh no, we all forgot dinner, let’s shove our boobs in each others’ mouths and drink” plot, I’m guessing that’s an underserved audience in IF and they have as much claim to get their rocks off as anyone else. I just feel bad that there’s only like two and a half scenes relevant to their interests in First Contact, and they’re reasonably tame to boot.

In fairness, this is partially a default judgment because I felt like the other elements of the game didn’t do much to justify its existence. There’s no gameplay to speak of, with choices at most letting you pick what order you’d like the ~worldbuilding~ to be shoved down your throat. The plot is likewise quite thin – the narrator, an elf with super special magic powers, goes to wizard school, meets and is immediately attracted to a demon-girl and an angel-girl through the power of authorial fiat, gets subjected to several interminable infodumps about stuff that happened 10,000 years ago, has an interminable conversation about the aforesaid infodumps once she’s able to escape, which is mercifully interrupted by a gauzily-described threeway, and then there’s a fourteen-year time jump and she graduates. Meanwhile, characterization-wise, the elf is an elf; the demon is a demon; the angel is an angel; there’s a dwarf who’s a dwarf and a dragon who’s a dragon, too. It’s the kind of lore-heavy, personality-free backstory that you see overeager 13-year-olds generate for their the DnD characters, full of incident but with no real conflict or reason to care about any of it.

The porny stuff is occasionally interesting though. The legendary event that ended the time of war and ushered in the Great Peace was a feast where all the female participants from every different race contributed their breast milk into a giant ewer, and then they all drank from it, for example – and then the dragon headmistress has everybody re-enact that in the school’s opening assembly (this is a fantasy world where everyone is always lactating, even the reptiles). One of links you can click on is titled “About Lasonthe’s Bosom”! Magical powers are apparently linked to (biologically determinate?) gender, a concept memorably introduced by the phrase “what matters is my relationship and feelings towards the natural force lying raw and untapped behind my pubes.”

Sure, the weakness of the writing means it’s hard to take the world or the characters seriously, but look, everyone’s enthusiastically consenting to everything that’s happening even if I as a reader would prefer that things slow down – it’s fine, and like I said, if you pushed it further, fixed the prose, added a clearer content warning, and didn’t make readers wade through all the gobbleydegook about the Gift of the Subtle and the Arcanorum Senate and the “around 170 Nests and houses” of Rym Iylem and the precise uniform insignias worn by the fourteen different class-years and a 10,000-year-old teddy bear (I guess Theodore Roosevelt exists in this world, but Title IX definitely doesn’t), you’d wind up with something respectable to offer soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn enthusiasts.

It’s been more than twenty years since my very first IF Comp – it was 2002, I was just out of college, and characteristically I played and reviewed all the games though that was a lot easier when there were fewer than 40 games and I didn’t have a kid. A couple days ago I was trying to explain how the Comp was different back then, and beyond the rules changes and the rise of choice games, I found myself struggling to communicate that beyond the classics people still go back and play, even the parser puzzle games just had a different vibe, were riffing on different things, than the ones you see now. Well, I wish I’d waited a bit to have that conversation, because it would have been easier to just point to Awakened Deeply, as accurate a time capsule from the early-aughts IF scene as you could imagine.

So yeah, this is a game where you wake from cryosleep to find that your spaceship is in peril; where there are no on-screen NPCs you interact with; where the main gameplay mechanic is getting through locked doors, and the cool stuff the PC does happens automatically in cutscenes; and where there’s absolutely no introductory text setting the scene or suggesting you type ABOUT. To its credit, there are no inventory limits or hunger timers or ways to make the game unwinnable – maybe it’s more progressive than the average 2002 game, now that I think about it – but this is a series of traditional sci-fi puzzles in a traditional sci-fi plot (there’s a small twist – what if the Federation from Star Trek were evil? – but it’s telegraphed so early and heavily I don’t feel bad mentioning it), with competent but slightly clumsy execution meaning that occasionally-evocative descriptions underlining the isolation of space terminate in blunt infodumps like:

"You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here."

(There are a lot of notes in this game – finding hastily-scribbled missives or prematurely-terminated audio diaries that recorded the attack that eliminated all other life on the ship is the game’s main storytelling technique).

Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but I think for all this Awakened Deeply does have some charm. It is an utterly sincere, guileless game whose author’s enthusiasm is visible in every description. Of course one of your dead friends is named Riker, since what’s more fun than a Star Trek reference? Of course there’s a climactic, barely-justified moral dilemma toggling between a good ending and a bad ending. Of course there are gratuitous, trivially-reversable deaths. Of course the map is laid out with four symmetric branches leading off from a main hub. This is basic basic IFing, but put together by someone who sure seems tickled pink at the idea of being able to make something like this, and you know, it makes a difference.

Don’t get me wrong – my memory’s already starting to sand off the details in order to deposit Awakened Deeply into the Big Bin O Space Games I never think about. And there are some implementation weaknesses (using a keycard to unlock a door was a bit awkward, I suspect partially due to an overreliance on Instead rules) and typos, though nothing too major on either front. One or two puzzles also could be much better clued, at least as to the syntax required (Spoiler - click to show)(X DIRECTION is not a frequently-used command). The limited nature of the game’s ambition is also impossible to ignore – the ABOUT text even explicitly says the author was inspired by Star Trek and Planetfall, and it’s pretty clear the idea is to just make a game that scratches some of those same itches. So I definitely prefer the way we live now, but for all its flaws Awakened Deeply provided an opportunity for me to check in with how things used to be.

I couldn’t tell you where I was when Y2K clicked over. For New Year’s Eve 1998, I’m pretty sure I was at a high-school friend’s house in New Jersey, a bunch of us hanging out and catching up now that we’d been at college for a few months. Two years after that is I think when my college gaming group’s tradition of getting together to game on New Year’s Eve kicked off, so we were playing Changeling: the Dreaming in Pasadena. The big, endlessly-hyped party-like-it’s-1999 New Years, though? By process of elimination I guess I must have just been at home with my mom and sister, and if I try hard I can perhaps summon up a ghost of a memory of feeling relief that the many Y2K Bug worst-case scenarios hadn’t come to pass (I’d read a couple articles about how our nuclear reactors mostly still ran COBOL).

Fin and Jo, a pair of down-on-their-luck twentysomethings trying to hold onto their dreams, and each other, under the weight of dead-end jobs and familial disapproval, are likewise looking forward to the end of the millennium – they’ve got plans to meet up outside the supermarket where Jo works and celebrate together. But unlike my anticlimactic experience, they’re in for a life-changing evening after which things will never be the same again, at least if they can both make it to midnight.

That description, I fear, might not communicate much about what the game is like. When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves is an odd duck, which is no bad thing, but it is hard to sum up. I squinted in confusion when I saw that the blurb on the Comp page listed its genres as slice of life, crime, and time travel, as those aren’t typically tastes that go together, but actually they mesh in a simple way: the grounded setting of your council flat and its environs, along with the quotidian struggles of the main characters, take care of the first element, and the crime that interrupts their New Year’s plans is a plausible enough addition. As for the time travel, well, this is that parser-game standby, the loop game, where failure to ring in the year 2000 as you’d intended somehow leads to the clock rewinding and the day starting over.

While this supernatural contrivance isn’t explained, or at least if it is I missed it, it does make for a relatively straightforward plot: each run through the loop allows you to get a new item or two that in turn can potentially alter how the next loop starts, until after two or three properly-executed redos you wind up with one or more of the items needed to solve the climactic puzzle and keep some robbers from ruining your evening (there are several different ways to accomplish this, leading to distinct endings). The map is small, and there aren’t that many possible things to try, so while the clueing can sometimes feel a little light, it doesn’t take too much effort to hit on at least one of the options. Meanwhile, at the start of each run-through you get a short except of a conversation between Fin and Jo, often talking about their hopes for the future or fears about the present, which present you (as Fin) with several different dialogue options – the prevailing emotional tenor of your choices apparently winds up affecting the mood, if not the actual events, of whichever of the main endings you get.

Thematically, though, there’s a lot going on, and I’m not sure it all worked seamlessly for me. The relationship feels like it’s meant to be the central element of the piece, but the emotional drama of those sections have to sit alongside the standard medium-dry-goods puzzle-based gameplay, and the often-slapstick time-loop conceit (sometimes the reset happens after violence has been visited on you and/or Jo, which led me to experience some desensitization). While I found the leads appealing and was pulling for them to get to a better situation, the out-of-context dialogues felt like they weren’t well integrated into the meat of the game – when you meet Jo while wandering around, she, like most of the NPCs, doesn’t respond to too many dialogue options, and is understandably focused on getting away from the crime scene – and somehow often struck me as abstract, despite there being some solid details included about the lovers’ lifestyle and class. Or maybe fuzziness is a better word? Like, here’s one of the first ones:

“I’m so excited! what do you think the new year’ll bring us?” She quirked an eyebrow. Of course, I knew what she was pondering on right now. In her voice was the well-known trace of uncertainty.

1 – You asked me about a million times, but still I don’t know.
2 – There are a lot of conspiracy theories out, but most tales are based on facts, Jo.
3 – One thing I know for sure is, Jo, that I truly love you with all my heart.
4 – I know what you mean, Jo, but I don’t believe we’ll have any serious problem tomorrow.

There’s a lot that’s underexplained here, which can sometimes be an effective strategy, but here it stood in the way of my investment. The vagueness I felt about the tenor of the dialogues made the relationship mechanics hard for me to parse: per the game’s help menu, there are four different moods you can pick in each dialogue menu, always consistently mapped to the same numbers, meaning that dialogue option number 1 is meant to be consoling, number 2 is inflaming, 3 is objecting, and 4 is insisting. The differences between these categories are muddy, I think, and I had a hard time figuring out how my choices were going to be interpreted by the game.

This weakness in the prose isn’t restricted to just these sequences. While it’s perfectly adequate for the puzzle-based sections of the game – albeit a bit too ready to drop immersion-breaking Easter Eggs, like having the criminals quote Pulp Fiction – there are occasional tense or other grammar errors, and it sometimes struggles to convey the emotional heft of the relationship, landing firmly on the tell vs. show side of the dichotomy:

Most of the time I called her Jo. We’d fallen in love with each other since the graduating class. We both left school at sixteen, then we decided to live together, mostly because Jo had increasing troubles with her father. Jo’s father didn’t like me, and he had other plans for her future, including whom she would have to love and whom not. Though we each earned quite good certification at school, we didn’t manage to get good apprenticeship positions… No matter, I truly love her with all my heart and I was sure she’s the woman of my life.

So this quirky game didn’t quite win my heart, despite having a unique premise and fairly solid implementation (the scenery is a little thin in a few places and as mentioned the number of dialogue topics could be expanded, but the only real bug I ran into was (Spoiler - click to show)the game letting me light a firecracker without having a lighter on me). The challenge inherent in that premise, though, and the originality with which the game pursues it, certainly is memorable, though – far more so than my Y2K, at least.

I firmly believe that ideas are a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to IF: it’s not too hard to come up with a clever, compelling premise, just as it’s very easy to completely flub a promising concept with weak implementation, half-baked design, and boring prose. Execution is all, I’ve been known to say, stroking my chin and self-satisfied at my hard-won wisdom. And yet, for all that I believe that’s true when assessing the fundamental quality of a game (whatever that means), there are practical issues that arise when trying to writeup up said assessment in a review: for a game that trades on innovative mechanics or complex, heady themes, it makes sense to spend reviewing real-estate describing and interpreting these novelties without deigning to pass judgment. For a regular-degular game, though, that at a high level is similar to a dozen others I, and basically everyone, has played before, it’s hard to avoid a review turning into a straightforward, largely uninteresting evaluation of whether it’s any good or not, because there’s not much else of interest to talk about.

The Master’s Lair has a few aspects that help it stand out from the crowd, for good or ill (smaller examples for good: the player character is cheerfully amoral, a wizard’s apprentice upset at his treatment and therefore bent on stealing his erstwhile teacher’s prized artifact. Now ill: the game’s offered exclusively as a download from the Microsoft Store, which I think I previously hadn’t known existed). It’s also written in a custom parser engine that can in theory toggle without interruption into choice-based mode, where you click on object names and use a multiple-choice interface to build a command instead of just typing it.

But for the most part, this is a Zorkian-in-the-zany-sense romp around a wizard’s lab, collecting spell components and artifacts in order to circumvent a series of medium-dry-goods puzzles and lift Foozle’s folderol. There’s a maze with a gimmick. There are safe combinations to be guessed. There are rituals to be studied in books and performed at a workbench, with the appropriate ingredients to hand. It’s classic stuff that can certainly be appealing, but it doesn’t really win much goodwill just from its setup, given how generic it appears. And so my brain inevitably starts turning over the question of whether it’s a good version of these tropes, for lack of anything else to analyze.

To jump ahead to the end, I think it does fine, but there are a few questionable decisions in its design and interface that wind up making the Master’s Lair less engaging than it could have been. Starting out with the narrative level, it fritters away its antihero framing more or less immediately; the PC makes snide comments about the eponymous Master throughout the game, and does succeed in stealing his most powerful magical item, but this is just a thin patina of flavor sprinkled across a very standard adventure: the “bad guy stealing stuff” angle only lasts maybe ten minutes, at which point you could be swapped for the Zork guy with no real difference in behavior. The twist at the halfway mark further undermines any ambiguity you could read into the piece, with the Master’s vices expanding from being gross with the female students he teaches (bad enough as that is), to grand-guignol horrors that indicate that he’s taken inspiration from the seminal Mountain Goats/John Vanderslice EP Moon Colony Bloodbath (Spoiler - click to show)(yeah he’s running an organ-harvesting colony on the moon). It’s a tonal left turn that left me with whiplash, and also flattens out any sense that the protagonist was anything out of the ordinary.

At the implementation level, the variety of interface options is impressive – after struggling through Sidekick, this click-to-build-a-command approach felt much more intuitive to me, and there’s apparently even a voice-activated mode that I didn’t get a chance to test out. But while my preference would have been to stick with the classic parser approach, I ultimately found myself using the link-based interface due to bugs and design oversights. For example, an early scene listed a “low building” as being present, and highlighted the words to indicate I could interact with it, but X LOW, X BUILDING, and X LOW BUILDING all let to confusing errors. Clicking on it eventually revealed that this was just an incompletely-implemented synonym for the hut that’s also in that area, so I could have saved myself some trouble. Similarly, there’s a “high platform” that’s really an “ornate platform”, not that you’d know from the room description, among many other examples, some of which extend to not being sure which verbs would work until I checked out what the interaction menus were suggesting (there’s a switch that gives a deeply unhelpful you-can’t-do-that response when you PUSH it, since only PRESS will work). These tendencies were so pronounced that by the halfway mark I was only using the parser for commands I knew the game would accept, like navigation, using the multiple-choice interface as the most honest guide to what I was seeing and what I could do with it.

Admittedly, some of these implementation hiccups might reflect incomplete translation; Master’s Lair was originally a German game so it’s great to see it available in English, but it still throws up the occasional awkward phrase or untranslated chunk of text. These are no big deal in of themselves, but do suggest that there’s something of a mismatch between the modeled world and the text used to describe it. There were also a few times when I had to go to the hints because the language led me to create a mental picture entirely at odds with what the game thought it was saying – I had no idea what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show) tiny sugar tongs because their operation has to do with the big gem you’re tying to steal, and I hadn’t thought the gem was that small (I’m also not sure whether there are in-game cues about what you’re supposed to do with the gem once you steal it).

With that said, the puzzle design is generally good and has some fresh elements – as the blurb says, a number of the challenges involve talking with, and leveraging the talents of, some magically-reanimated stuffed animals, and I had a fun time with all of these. The scavenger hunts to get the reagents you need for the various plot-advancing spells also pass the time in an entertaining way, although the instructions for how to actually cast the spells once you’ve got the goods could stand to be spelled out (that also meant walkthrough time for me, admittedly also because I think the ritual-critical mortar and pestle aren’t actually mentioned in the room where they’re found). But there are some read-the-authors’ mind moments too, like how exactly you’re supposed to use the milky-glass box or what the math clue the rustling shadow gives you decodes to. The in-game hint menu provides some guidance, and there’s a separate walkthrough too, though, so at least I was rarely completely stuck for long. But again, it’s a mixed bag.

I have a bunch of additional specific examples of everything I’ve mentioned above, but nothing else I noted down that would fundamentally shift how you view a game like this – again, it’s pretty much exactly the game it appears to be, modulo that ill-advised twist that winds up mostly just shunting you into a slightly different flavor of the kind of story you’re already experiencing. If that’s your jam, good news, Master’s Lair will scratch the itch, but if not, you might find your critical faculties getting overly-judgey about its real but not especially major flaws, if only to have something new to think about.

Spoilers).

I am having trouble figuring out how to start this review. Verse is a prototypical quote-unquote challenging work, you see, set in a uniquely-dystopic future with minimal infodumping to provide the player much in the way of orientation, featuring enigmatic gameplay that equates translating Romanian poetry with grokking alien civilizations (I deploy that gerund with intent; see below), and is written in prose that’s simultaneously intensely concrete and absolutely unhinged. It all emerges from an ideological stew encompassing Marxism, Christianity, Kristevan abjection, and maybe even New England Transcendentalism, if you squint (that’s a transparent eye-ball joke). The opening lines put me in mind of Neuromancer (“…cathode green on dead pixel gray…”); the first location could be a riff on Zork (“You are standing in an open field east of an office building and west of a pier”), and there’s a later incident that could be a wry inversion of the climax of Eco’s Name of the Rose.

So yeah, this is a polysemous work, overloaded with meaning, and the difficulty isn’t that I don’t have the first idea of what it’s trying to do – it’s that I’ve got a dozen different ideas all vying for primacy. Verses is a game that begs to be interpreted, generously offering itself up to the player, but also manages the neat trick of remaining inexhaustible; it wants to be read, not solved.

To see what I mean, let’s pick a strand at random. It’s hard to go wrong with Christianity [citation needed] so why not start there? In the main section of the game, your character, an analyst who uses a text-based terminal to interface with unknown objects and artifacts to plumb their secrets, does their work at the transept of an abandoned church. This is the point where the axes of the church intersect, adjacent to the altar to the east, with the nave, where the laity worship, to the west, and chapels devoted to particular patron saints to the north and south. Before each session, one of your colleagues brings you a specially-prepared biscuit, flat and rounded – though late in the game, the process breaks down somewhat and you consume raw meat instead. And there’s a mysterious mutant who dispenses wisdom, and she’s marked by a wound: “a rivulet of dark green fluid pulses from a stoma in her side,” echoing and palette-swapping Christ’s stigmata.

None of this is especially obscure – the game is more or less jumping up and down to draw attention to the ways that these analysis sessions are sacraments of communion, standing between the sacred and the profane, and signpost that that mutant lady is trustworthy and knows what she’s talking about. Similarly, when one of your fellows, labeled “the apostate”, says of your work “[it] happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues,” you don’t need graduate-level study of Marx to see that he’s talking about the alienation of labor, with all that entails, and intuit one of the many reasons he’s on the outs with the power structure.

This is not a dig! Verses doesn’t try to resist interpretation, but rewards it, and if these particular hooks don’t land with a specific player, well, there are plenty more where that came from. The most sensually pleasing must be the set-piece translations. Once you’re strapped into your terminal, you’re confronted with the text, in Romanian, of a poem, all highlighted (the poems are all attributed to their authors). Clicking will reveal a literal translation of each word or phrase, and then often a compete line will offer up one more click to become idiomatic: “măreşte şi mai tare taina nopţii” becomes “magnifies even more mystery of the night” becomes “multiplying the night’s mystery.” And sometimes this transformation is even more magical: that final click turns “and everything that is not understood” to a gnomic “-”.

In a few special cases, the player has agency, and can choose which particular emphasis to put on ambiguous words – one that has to do with production can be code, or progeny, or shit (there is a lot of shit in this game, though it’s described more decorously than that). More usually these are choices the protagonist is making without specific input from the player, but I still found these sequences enormously engaging. For one thing, I wasn’t previously familiar with Romanian and still don’t really know what it sounds like, but it’s an uncanny language on the page: I’ve got a fair bit of French and a smattering of Latin, so I could often sense the gist of some of the words even before I clicked on them and was usually right. But that just meant that the moments of surprise, or of having the rug yanked out from under me when a false-friend led me astray, hit harder: my mind was actively working, dancing with the meaning of the text, and the missed steps are as much a part of that as the successes (there’s one optional poem in Hungarian that didn’t work quite as well for me, reinforcing that there’s something special about Romanian).

The poems themselves are also, almost without exception, spectacular. At their most beautiful, they’re haunting:

Understanding erodes
beneath my eyes-
because of my love
for flowers and eyes and lips and graves.

But more typically they’re brutal. My notes for one read “mud, blood, dead chickens for slaughter, ‘I lived in a house that made no sense’.” And here’s an extended excerpt from one whose title I’m pretty sure translates as “Carnage”:

Descending fog
of crows
to ingest
the meat
broken
I watch with
sinister
blind eyes
they jump
jaws clicking
the swarm
fluttering
hurried
wandering
rows,
rows,

This all sounds unbearably grim and serious, and it kind of is, don’t get me wrong – the fact that this is the story the author needed to construct as an armature for the poems at the heart of the game forces me to mentally revisit what little I know of Romanian history (they were pretty much the only post-Soviet country to have a bloody revolution and execute their dictator after the Iron Curtain fell, which is certainly a data point). But there are jokes! Pretty good ones! Like, there’s an early bit where the word-clicking is still yielding scientific-sounding elaboration, and in the definition of peta-FLOPS you’re teased with the existence of something called “yFLOPS”, but looking for further clarity there just tells you “you think it would be one of those numbers that looks silly written out.” Then there’s a bit where you come across a pond of liquid mercury:

Before you sits the still, strange pond. Diegetic and profane.

Clicking that standout word produces a reassuring etymology:

diegetic: from the Dacian “diegis:” burning, shining.

See, this use of diegetic is diegetic, it’s fine.

There’s also a poem eulogizing a Romanian revolutionary, which starts out undergoing the same transformation from half-recognizable Romanian text to disordered but pregnant-with-meaning literal translation before collapsing into melodrama:

Tender tears build in those who loved you,
Overflowing out onto your grave,
We follow your ascending virtue.
With resounding song, and love renewed,
On to Elysium.

Oof.

It’s perhaps worth pausing here, though, since this isn’t just a gag. If there’s this much similarity between how the translation process works when it’s using actually-good poetry, like “Carnage”, to invoke the aftermath of war, and jingoistic slop like “At the Grave of Aron Pumnel,” perhaps that’s a sign that it’s the process rather than the substance that’s important after all, and all the rigmarole about mutants, aliens, military intelligence, and tungsten is so much entertaining balderdash (I haven’t touched on the plot-qua-plot in this review, since I need to finish it sometime, but there’s definitely a lot of it, and the emphasis should be put on “entertaining” in the previous phrase).

Instead, it’s specifically the act of translation, with all that means and entails, that’s Verse’s true subject (well, plus the act of perception that precedes and is incorporated into translation, but appearances to the contrary I actually do intend to finish this review before the heat death of the universe). Again, it’s saying a lot – about the role of context, with the main character’s bosses obsessed with the possibility of a virgin translation, unburdened by outside knowledge (I’m pretty sure they’re villains), while the protagonist “[struggles] to distinguish between the emptiness of something untouched and something destroyed, flattened, cleared”; about the difference between “the living God, who can be interrogated [and] the dead God can only be interpreted; it has ceased to speak” (God is the text, duh); about the sterile language we mistake for cleanliness and the degenerate language we mistake for confusion and rot.

With that said, we should probably also translate the idea of translation. I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand every ingredient in Verses: I’m not sure about the color yellow. I have a guess about why the only word whose gender is mentioned is “năruită: ruined” (it’s feminine, unsurprisingly). I enthusiastically love the “cells”, “eight hundred meters tall and lighter than air”, and want a whole game centering on them, but will need a lot more than one delightful paragraph to have the faintest idea of how they work. But I’m pretty sure that the game doesn’t want to leave its readers just thinking about the movement from one language to another, but rather how all meaning is mediated through text – an especially apt concern for a piece of text-based IF, because what is the fifty-year history of our genre but an extended study of the possibility that one mind can encounter another, through playing with words?

Well, it’s also an extended set of examples about how incredibly challenging, and commercially unrewarding, that goal can be, and looking to the tradition of IF by queer creators that clearly informs the work, how especially fraught the attempt can be when the circle of communication is widened beyond middle-class cishet white men. To circle back to two points I made (aaaaaall the way up) at the beginning of this review, Verses is not a game that’s reducible to a single thesis, but nor is it a subtle game – so our ears should probably prick up when we come across its title in the wild. This fragment of a poem I think is called “Flowers of Rot” isn’t a keystone, I don’t think, but it may serve as an epigram:

verses from time lost
writing from the pit
thirsty and arid,
of hunger and ash
the verses of –

(Can we dare to hope that there’s something that can fill the blank?)

I am, as I think basically everyone in the world not on the OpenAI or NVIDIA payroll must be, heartily sick of LLMs. Substantively I think they suck when employed for anything resembling creative work; environmentally, turns out the companies have been lying and things are even worse than the already-quite-bad picture that’s been painted; economically, they represent yet another attempt to consolidate wealth and power with the owners of capital at all of our expense. But more than that, the discourse around them is wearying – having to think about this stuff and engage with those conversations even in leisure activities is pretty frustrating. So I should disclose that I went into Hebe, which bills itself as a puzzley adventure through Greek mythology, and also commendably acknowledges that ChatGPT wrote some of the text, with some trepidation, both about what I would find in the game and what I’d need to write about it.

There’s good news and bad news, I suppose. The bad news is that those Hebe-jeebies were justified (Hebe’s the Greek goddess of youth, so her name rhymes with Phoebe – geddit?). All of the game’s room descriptions are overlong and mention lots of unimplemented objects, the prose glops about, weighing everything down like oatmeal laced with lead, and by the end my eye would start twitching whenever I read the words “flickering” or “serene.”

The good news, such as it is, is that I didn’t find it too hard to ignore most of that. The game is clogged with empty locations that are just there to pad out the half-dozen places boasting self-contained puzzles, and so it’s relatively easy to just glide through them and concentrate on the interactions that seem like they were written by a human being, just as I skimmed the overlong cutscenes. Similarly, the author’s offered a helpful INVESTIGATE verb that tells you what items actually exist to be interacted with, so you don’t need to play the guess-the-hallucination game with ChatGPT if you don’t want to. And turns out that under all the AI cruft is – well, a perfectly ordinary undertested, wonkily implemented game that manages to boast a bit of charm, the kind of thing that would be a perfectly respectable starting point for a new author who didn’t yet understand the level of polish a parser game requires, but for the LLM use.

Let’s start with that bit of charm, as I’ve given Hebe a bit of a hard time so far. It’s clear that the author took the theme seriously, bringing in a lot of fringe detail from Greek mythology including but not ending with the choice of protagonist – Hebe’s both the second-most-famous cupbearer to the gods and the second-most-famous wife of Heracles, so I appreciated her underdog energy. The game proper involves visiting various sanctuaries and temples across northern Greece to find the Olympian Gods, who’ve been defeated after a surprise attack by the Titans and left depowered and chained behind various puzzley barriers – and then venturing into the underworld to find Heracles and bring the fight to the Titans. Again, there’s a fair bit of attention to detail, with numerous cities and ports implemented, a visit to the Pytheia, minor naiads given a supporting role, and plenty of obscure bits of myth getting a name-check.

The thin implementation means that the names are often all that you get, however – “you see nothing special about the Charon’s boat” is an enthusiasm-killing phrase to read. And the seams between the LLM stuff and the chattier human-written propose are sometimes comically sharp:

> x aigle
Aigle radiates with a golden glow, her hair like cascading sunlight, and her eyes shimmering like the first light of dawn. She is the embodiment of brightness and warmth, her presence illuminating the garden with a serene, golden aura.

> talk to aigle
“I’m so relieved you’re safe! Now go show them what you’re made of, Hebe! Just like old times!”

A game written entirely in the latter style might feel a little silly, but could have some zip to it; the juxtaposition with ChatGPT’s overwrought descriptions just creates bathos.

As for the substance of the adventure, the puzzles are largely old chestnuts. There are a couple of codes, a put-the-right-object-in-the-right-place one with a poem providing the hints, a guess-how-heavy-the-unmarked-weights one… None of them break new ground, but the classic are classics for a reason and they could be fun to work through. Unfortunately bugs and incomplete implementation make many of them way harder than I think they’re intended to be – the weight one stymied me for a long time due to the fact that I wasn’t clear that there were two scales, not one, and I couldn’t directly interact with the first one (“which do you mean, the scale or the small scale?”); the object-placement will softlock you unless you get it right first try, because the game incorrectly thinks one of the slots stays full even after you remove an item from it; and the endgame seems to have gotten especially little testing, as accessing it requires going through an unmarked exit (tip to other players: try IN/ENTER when you’re near the Necromanteion) and then the climactic conversation with Heracles is made awkward by a YES/NO are-you-ready-to-proceed choice that doesn’t work (to continue with the service journalism: say YES and then manually type DOWN afterwards). And there’s a lot more besides; see the transcript for the gory details.

But again, pretty much all of these issues are familiar ones – heck, I’ve committed some of these sins myself, and but for lucking into experienced testers for my first game could have wound up with similar egg on my face at my debut. And as I’ve said, I do think Hebe comes from a place of real authorial excitement, some of which occasionally comes through. So it would be easy enough to just wrap up with my typical remark in these cases, about how I hope to play a much better second game from this author. Which I do!

My weariness at LLM discourse can’t prevent me from adding, though, that I think use of ChatGPT was an especial disservice to the game. Beyond weighing down the enthusiasm that’s often one of the best elements of a debut game, the use of AI I think might have created some bad habits that contributed to the overall weak implementation. As I mentioned, the long location descriptions include a fair bit of (bland) scenery detail, and call out sounds and smells, so it’d be easy enough for an author to review what ChatGPT spit out and feel like their bases were covered – but none of the scenery is implemented, and LISTEN and SMELL return their default responses throughout. The difference between the prose styles also makes it really obvious to the player where there’s stuff they should be paying attention to and what they can safely tune out – as an author, though, I don’t think you ever want the player shutting off their brain. I don’t think I can say with a straight face that the version of Hebe that didn’t use an LLM would have been significantly higher-quality, but it would have been a clearer reflection of the author’s vision, and probably a much much better learning experience to boot.