Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

After more than 30 years, the Comp has accumulated a body of folk wisdom, tips and tricks, and helpful pointers about how authors can best position their work for a successful reception. Sadly, this store of knowledge is built atop the broken debris of promising games that demonstrated what not to do, and sadder still, Horse Whisperer, which boasts an engagingly oddball premise (you’re a horse psychologist trying to fix a race for the mob) and more than its share of solid gags, must join this host of fallen exemplars, offering an illustration of the lesson that if the phrase “untested alpha build” appears anywhere in your game or blurb in a non-diegetic context, you should withdraw and resubmit next year (or to Spring Thing! There’s always Spring Thing!)

It would feel mean to catalogue all the errors I ran into trying to play Horse Whisperer, but there are a lot and they’re obvious – none more so than the dialogue options currently marked with asterisks, which when you click them take you to a “sorry, coming soon” passage. The logic linking the results of your actions to an ending appears either broken or absent, since the outcome of the race ignored that I’d psyched up one horse, demoralized another, and disqualified a third (the disqualified horse came in second place). Oh, and the race happened a day after it was supposed to.

Again, this is a shame, since this dark, absurdist take on Mr. Ed has some comedic potential that’s occasionally well-realized, and the author clearly has a lot of fun ideas for how to elaborate on the premise. But it’s not spitting-distance to done, even for a horse. Hopefully in addition to being a warning sign to others on the dangers of submitting an incomplete game to the Comp, Horse Whisperer will also be fodder for the author to come back next year (or again, this coming spring!) with something that lives up to the promise that’s on display here. Until then, the game isn’t stable enough to… be able to make much hay? These horse puns are harder than they look!

Cart is a choice-based game where you play a night-soil man (baldly: someone who collects human excreta and sells it for fertilizer) trying to eke out an existence at the margins of a brutal society rife with classism, racism, and brutality. The most impactful choices hinge on how far you’re willing to stick your neck out for a Roma boy who, at least in my playthrough never exchanged a single word with me. And it’s all rendered in ornate prose that takes a bunch of big swings that hit much more often than they miss. Yes, everything about Cart appeals to me, except for one tiny word in the blurb: the genre is listed as “allegory.”

It’s not that I’m completely allergic to them. Sure, when done lazily they can be witless exercises in matching a thin fictionalization to its real-world counterpart, with nothing to offer but a mildly-enjoyable recognition. But there are plenty of richer examples, too, where translating an aspect of everyday experience, heightening and recontextualizing it, helps us see more clearly: think of Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, or the cannibalistic Stalinism of Animal Farm. No, the trouble is that right now, allegory feels besides the point, since whatever you can say about the current omnicrises roiling the globe – of governance, of the environment, of simple human decency – lack of clarity isn’t a complaint you can levy; we all know exactly what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what horrifying consequences it will have, it’s all spelled out for us every day in pellucid detail. What could allegory possibly add to this picture?

Fortunately, while per the above summary Cart clearly has plenty of present-day resonance, there’s more to it than simple this-for-that transposition of current events. First off, there’s something appealingly mythical about the protagonist. A victim of circumstance, he actually takes on the night-soil man’s trappings and identity when his predecessor is killed by a crackdown on some “undesirables”; that this degraded job is his by choice underscores his previous desperation, and takes him more to the realm of folklore than allegory. Then there’s the prose, which is written in a complex, convoluted style that serves to conceal what it’s doing until just before the whip cracks:

"They cannot in their own conscience pay you enough to forget that you aren’t servicing the arse end of society. Perhaps this is why your predecessor was a gambler rather than a drunk —- this amount of coin can merely buy hope, not ignorance."

Or:

"Around the corner you hear the confederated slap of guard boots against the road. Probably two guards, judging from the banter. You do not open your eyes. You do not move. While you lack many things, chief among them is the need to invite attention."

It’s not all aphorism, though – the dialogue of your chief tormentor’s henchmen is positive Deadwood-y (says the guy who’s never seen Deadwood, but I know it by reputation). Here’s one reminiscing about a particularly enthusiastic session of keeping the hoi polloi in their place:

"It was a bountiful feast for a hungry truncheon!"

Inevitably, there are some stumbles – at one point, the game informed me that “a dark rumination descends upon you” – but they’re easy to overlook when the average is as good as it is.

The game doesn’t immerse you too much in the abject routine of your profession – though the occasional reference to “the warm, variegated latrine slurry” is enough to evoke a shudder – which is perhaps part of the allegory we’re warned about; it’s enough to establish that the protagonist is a pariah, but that’s not what Cart is about. The set pieces where you must navigate a series of choices are where its interest truly lies, and these are presented as moral dilemmas without pat answers: do you defile the dead to help the living, how far will you go to deflect attention from that Romany boy without drawing too much to yourself? It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the very first choice is about whether to eat an apple…

Cart is at its rawest in the climax. Partially that’s because the pacing feels a bit abrupt; I was settling into the game’s rhythms and enjoying seeing its world slowly expand, so while I understood this story would have a violent end, I didn’t want or expect it to come so soon. Partially that’s because when the antagonist is a nativist orator ranting about racialized others eating pets, we’re straying into the ponderous sort of allegory. But the ending sticks the landing: you’re confronted with another tense choice with unclear but high stakes and then get crushed down by despair, before the epilogue offers a tiny sliver of light by presenting a flat-eyed view of what the end of fascism actually usually looks like.

This, I think, is where the allegory is successful: it’s not about showing us anything new or unique about the villains, because we know all about them already and they’re banal, empty figures. Instead, Cart explores the way that our actions in a time of oppression at the same time matter very little, but also matter enormously; the dream of escaping degradation and overturning an unjust order with the power of words or the revelation of elite corruption in a single redemptive moment is just a dream, after all, and it’s important to recognize that, just as it’s important to know that not everyone will survive persecution. But it’s just as important to know that evil does come to an end, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad, and the decisions we make can determine who’s there to greet that new day, and what they’re carrying forward to meet it – and that’s an allegory that helps us look beyond to the horrors of the news cycle to bigger, true things.

Everyone knows that the worst part of parser-based IF is guess-the-verb puzzles. What Imperial Throne presupposes is – maybe it’s the best?

Admittedly, the setup here is fairly unique, and far afield from wrestling with medium dry-goods in an eccentric relative’s mansion. The game plops you down on the eponymous seat, placing you in command of a fantasy empire boasting rich provinces, inconsistently-competent generals, restive peasants, impious priests, and more rival powers than you can shake a stick at. From your exalted perch, you can examine all of the above and more, and ask your advisor to provide a bit of color commentary on them, but that’s about it in terms of traditional IF commands; trying to move about or take stuff just tells you that these things are unbecoming to and unnecessary for an emperor. There’s no ABOUT text to provide any direction, so what can you do? Just type stuff in and see if it’ll work.

And, thrillingly, there’s a lot of stuff that works. I cooed with happiness half a dozen times at seeing my ideas for governance accepted by the parser – I’m having to restrain myself from listing off half a dozen examples, but since this is a case where spoilers really do undercut the enjoyment the game offers, I’ll just note that one of my early priorities was establishing sumptuary taxes to support a shipbuilding program that I think made my foreign trade more lucrative. Yes, you can just type TAX SILK, and Imperial Throne will make that happen. At its best, the game manages to recapture the I-can-do-anything feeling experienced by the earliest players of parser games – I’m too young to have experienced that first-hand, but now I have a far greater appreciation for how impactful that must have been. Like, you can intervene in the capital’s culture, respond to crimes with punishments lenient and severe, balance class interests, and of course shuffle around troops to engage in great-power adventurism! And OK, I can’t help adding one more, though I’ll spoiler-block it: (Spoiler - click to show)BUILD BRIDGE ON LOCANUS will give a military advantage to your soldiers when they need to cross that river to retaliate against a neighboring kingdom’s raids!

The impact of all these decisions isn’t always clear – you’ll note that I only had a guess about what all those ships were accomplishing for me. While your emperor-o-vision lets you see the troops, leaders, and resources at your command, it provides only vague information about foreign policy or domestic unrest. Where a Civilization or Paradox strategy game would give you dials, charts, and numbers galore, Imperial Throne just gives you a sentence or two. This feels restrictive, but in a way that more authentically captures the experience of pre-modern rulership: this is a fantasy kingdom, but one without magic or other shortcuts that would allow a state to see or know things that historically required a significant bureaucracy and educational infrastructure. You get told that opening up the granaries to starving peasants softened a famine’s impacts and reduced unrest, but not that you lost 3 farmer populations and unrest notched own by 2, which helps keep the game’s mechanical underpinnings from showing through too baldly.

There are some rough edges and limitations, of course. The game’s opacity is a critical part of what makes it work, but it did lead to frustration when I couldn’t figure out the syntax to incorporate potatoes into my subsistence agriculture, and I was surprised that I couldn’t imprison a particular troublemaker, only execute him (all the more so when I saw that the walkthrough seemed to think that should have been possible, too). Keeping track of all the different made-up names of people, provinces, and kingdoms, is really difficult, since they’re all so much fantasy gobbledygook, and there are no built-in help features tracking this stuff, so you’d better have been taking good notes if you want to move a specific general to a specific place. And there are some minor bugs and a lack of polish; besides the aforementioned issues with imprisonment, X LABORERS got me a “runtime error: invalid comparison”, and a fair number of things just give the default “you see nothing unusual about them” response (even the potatoes, which had been brought back by an explorer returning from a far-off land!)

The biggest issue, though, is just that once the thrill of discovery wears off, there’s not much to keep the player engaged. After about 150 turns, I’d pretty much figured out what I could do, and while different events kept happening, they were mostly variations on what had come before, and the thing is playing a simple strategy game with a parser interface isn’t that intrinsically enjoyable. So when an ally I’d carefully cultivated suddenly turned on me after some domestic upheaval, I checked the walkthrough, saw that I’d uncovered like 90% of the possibility space, and decided I couldn’t be bothered laboriously shuffling troops around to fight off the invasion; I just hammered Z until the end game (joke’s on the betrayers, though, actually one of my generals took advantage of the chaos to get declared Emperor and toppled me after a brief civil war). But there’s no way to avoid that kind of come-down in a game built around experimentation – inevitably, you eventually run out of new stuff. But until that point arrives, Imperial Throne is a lovely little toy to mess around with, and I’m looking forward to reading other reviews to see what I might have missed.

Last year, I was disappointed when the premise of this author’s previous game, Warm Reception, didn’t turn out to much survive the prologue: the idea of a medieval gossip columnist covering a royal wedding is all sorts of fun, so I couldn’t help pine for what might have been when the game quickly revealed itself as a puzzlefest where you romped across a wacky, uninhabited castle. But that means this year I was happy to see that the protagonist’s notional job as a reality-TV producer fell just as quickly by the wayside, as Willy’s Manor is similarly a puzzlefest where you romp across a wacky, uninhabited mansion.

Warm Reception wasn’t especially sophisticated but it had enthusiasm and charm, and that’s another thing it has in common with Willy’s Manor. Structurally, you need to solve a series of clues (notionally, this is a test a novelty-company magnate has set for you before he’ll agree to being featured on your show, which is at least a new one) by depositing the answer to a riddle into a box in order to get the next clue, and occasionally a key opening up a new area of the house. Most of the riddles are pretty straightforward, both because the game isn’t especially large, and because they tend to the hoary – the old “what do the poor have but the rich lack” one gets trotted out. And that final coat of polish is conspicuously absent: beyond a fair number of typos, items are sometimes still mentioned in descriptions after you take them, there are a lot of default responses that don’t fit the tone of the game, and some obvious synonyms remain unimplemented.

Still, I didn’t come across any flat-out bugs, and there is that charm I mentioned. The eponymous Willy is a devotee of slapstick and awful puns, and while none of them are laugh-out-loud funny, the corniness of the “full moon” you see above a skylight is easy to enjoy. It also turns out that there is an actual connection between the answers to all the riddles, one that’s surprisingly sweet – though of course that sweetness has only a few moments to linger before hitting a final silly joke. The game also gets a little less simple towards the end; the last major location you unlock has a reasonably sophisticated gimmick to it, and plays host to some more satisfying puzzles that take a little bit of thinking to solve (though admittedly one of these, involving (Spoiler - click to show)entering a pond with no indication that that’s possible or desirable, is under-clued). And the late-game “liebrary” is legitimately clever without being overly complicated.

Am I over-estimating the game’s virtues out of relief that I didn’t actually have to think about reality TV during its running time? Possibly, but while Willy’s Manor is doing things a million small comedy-parser games have done before, it does them with a sincere smile, and that’s worth something – and so too is the fact that it’s a clear improvement over its predecessor. Let’s see, maybe next time out the protagonist can be an investment banker, and we might be entering modern-classic territory.

So I know there’s a plethora of successful Sherlock Holmes games, from Infocom’s run at the great detective to those more recent 3D ones where he goes up against like Lupin or Cthulhu, but I’m not going to let that fact get in the way of my sweeping opinion: there’s no way to make a truly satisfying Holmes game, because you need to either make him too smart or too dumb. That is, either you limit the player’s agency and have him solve the case for you, because of course he’s a genius, or you subject Holmes to every one of the player’s idiotic flailings, making it a wonder he manages to tie his shoes let alone reveal the secret of the speckled band.

The way to dodge this conundrum is to have the protagonist be someone other than Holmes – typically Watson, sometimes, I am informed, a dog – and feed him information, so that once he has the data he needs he can make the great deductive leaps his fictional reputation requires. The Transformations of Dr. Watson takes this approach, putting the player in the shoes of Watson, at least initially, but forgets that this means Holmes doesn’t have to swap his deerstalker for a dunce-cap; sadly, this is the dimmest Sherlock has been since those Robert Downey Jr. movies where he mostly just got in fist-fights.

Making matters worse, the mystery here at issue would barely keep a single Hardy Boy busy for an hour. As the game opens, you as Watson are called to the house of a recently-deceased toff to pronounce him dead, though the game doesn’t exactly play things close to the chest when introducing the setup:

"His nervous smile and damp palm upon shaking hands betrayed his tension. “My father… passed away. Heart, I suppose,” he said hastily.

“'Sir Silas never complained of his heart,' the butler, Cavendish, retorted dryly, casting a quick glance at Alister. My medical intuition screamed an alarm."

The only thing that could make things more suspicious would be – well, Alister’s name oscillating to “Alistair” with no explanation, but I assume that’s just simple typos rather than further evidence of fraud. But the teacup with an oddly-bitter odor right next to the body sure does gild the lily.

In fairness, Watson doesn’t get the odor clue right away; first, his soul needs to transmigrate into the body of a cat so he can take advantage of its enhanced senses. Yes, there’s a gimmick here, and not one that was at all explained in my playthrough: after the treacherous Alister/Alistair bashes his head in with a cane, Watson’s consciousness shifts to inhabit a variety of other creatures, and he uses his newfound lease on life to draw Holmes’ attention to the clues once he arrives to check up on his missing friend.

It’s a bizarre if not unpromising gimmick, but there’s less here than meets the eye. Even once the prologue ends, the game is largely linear, with the few choices almost all having clear right and wrong answers – and again, since the mystery is so obvious, the fact that Holmes needs help at all just makes him look exceptionally slow on the uptake. At least there’s a bit of bathos to be wrung from the way the heir is able to intuit that he’s somehow managed to anger a menagerie that’s now bent on his undoing, leading him to seemingly-unmotivated reprisals that surely only incriminate him further. But unexceptional prose that’s a bit too adjective-happy combined with overly-slick AI art mean that there are few flowers to stop and sniff along the way to Holmes’ preordained triumph. It’s all laid on a bit too thick, we’re denied the conventional pleasures of a Holmes tale, and sadly neither gameplay or presentation are up to much. It’s enough to drive a man to cocaine.

Lately I’ve been getting back into Star Trek. There’s an element of nostalgia to it, certainly, that gets increasingly appealing as my age keeps ticking ever-upwards, and its optimistic vision of humanity makes for a nice change of pace from the evil currently consuming America. But actually the thing that I find most soothing about it is what’s been dubbed the “competence porn” angle: The Next Generation especially is a show where a bunch of high-functioning professionals confront challenging problems, hold meetings to brainstorm ideas and develop a plan of action, then despite whatever twists and turns the galaxy throws at them, save the day in 43, or at worst, 86 minutes (until DS9 came along and ruined things with its three-parters and seasons-long arcs). In this time of chaos, seeing people be good at their jobs is basically my ASMR.

The Tempest of Baraqiel cites golden-age sci-fi as its immediate inspirations, and its setting is far more militarized than the Federation: here, humanity is locked in a losing war against an implacable and cryptic race of crab aliens. But it definitely occupies adjacent territory. As a young exolinguist, you’re assigned to a warship and given a secret mission to decode enough of the aliens’ language to operate one of their weapons. Through a well-paced adventure that’s only a bit longer than a Star Trek episode’s running time, you’ll motivate your team, look for inspiration to get through blocks in your research, and yes, have a bunch of meetings with your superiors (in fairness, you can also get into a fistfight in a knock-off of the Enterprise’s Ten Forward bar, if you want). Kal Shem, the protagonist, is young and has some anxiety to living up to the example of his war-hero mom, but at least as I played him, he’s really good at sweating the details and playing the bureaucratic game – at least until things went off the rails in the endgame.

The game definitely puts its best foot forward, though. The custom choice-based interface is clunkily sleek in that 80s-sci-fi way, with low-poly 3D renders in the corner illustrating the ship and its locations (admittedly, I mostly stopped noticing it after the first scene – likewise, there’s a custom music system that I can’t offer an opinion on since I didn’t listen to it). There’s a fair bit of world-building to get through, but it’s managed with a deft hand, and if there are few sequences where characters explain things they both already now to each other, that’s part of the charm of old-school sci-fi – mostly the infodumping comes with some character backstory or a reasonable explanation for why someone needs seemingly-basic context. Some of these circumstances can feel a bit contrived, most notably the fact that Shem isn’t a specialist in this particular alien language, so he seems an odd choice for team leader. But his family’s military background means he’s seen as more reliable for an assignment that requires discretion, so I was willing to go with it.

Baraqiel’s approach to interactivity is also nothing fancy, but well done. There’s a high density of choice – there are very few passages where you just click “next”, and there are both a reasonable number of what seem like significant branch points where you can take a different strategy on your research assignment, and more low-key choices that are either cosmetic, or might have a mild impact on your team’s opinion of you. Interestingly, you’re not restricted to making choices for Shem alone; from time to time you can pick actions for another character, sometimes even an antagonistic one. I was typically too gun-shy to lean into creating conflict in these situations – like I said, that’s not what I go to Star Trek for – but it’s a nice option for players more interested in orchestrating an engaging story than getting by with a minimum of fuss.

As for the prose – well, would you be surprised to learn that it’s largely straight-ahead, but well-crafted? The one distinctive note is that many of the characters use Yiddish slang, like dybbuk or macher; I’m not sure whether a passage I missed laid out the in-universe reasons for it, but it’s a touch I enjoyed (I also know enough Hebrew to understand that “Shem” means something like “name”, which is apropos enough for a game centered on linguistics).

There were a few small flies in the ointment as I played – most notably, the save/load system bugged out, recording only the first time I pushed the save button and not any of the others, meaning that when I tried to rewind a late-game choice to explore other options, I got sent nearly back to the beginning. Meanwhile, only one of Shem’s teammates gets much in the way of characterization. Still, I was having quite a good time as I headed into the game’s third act, which serves as the endgame – but unfortunately that’s when things started to fall apart. The methodically-paced research process suddenly leaped ahead with one flash of insight after another, not all of which made much sense, including a final revelation that seemed hard to swallow <spoiler((surely if the alien language was crafted to be comprehensible over the static of interstellar communications, the humans would have already had to understand and craft a similar solution to this problem when they encountered it over their centuries among the stars?))</spoiler). The climax also forces a conflict with one of Shem’s superior officers who I’d managed to cultivate a solid relationship with; I was deeply confused by why Shem suddenly seemed to be edging right up against mutiny for what appeared to be no good reason, regardless of trying to pick the more conciliatory options. And the ending passage I got was exceedingly compressed and anticlimactic – while the game seemed to be building up to a moment when you’d actually communicate with the aliens, or at least operate their weapon, neither of those came to pass, and the scant few paragraphs that tie off the game were also sufficiently ambiguous that I wasn’t sure what was meant to have happened, or why.

My guess is that the author ran out of time as they got to the end of what’s by any measure a big, responsive, and high-production-value game – it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to a first-time Comp entrant, and it certainly won’t be the last. So even if Tempest of Baraqiel’s final act lets it down somewhat, there’s still more than enough competence on display in the majority of its runtime to scratch that meetings-and-science-and-space-adventure itch.

Readers, a confession: I fear I was not a very fun child. Case in point, even when I was little I never much liked cotton candy. Sure, it looks pretty and it’s good enough on first bite. But there’s just so much of it, and every bite is exactly the same – the same unidimensional sweetness, the same airy-yet-claggy texture, with nothing to liven up the monotony of the march to the soggy cardboard at the end.

OVER is much more enjoyable than a stick of cotton candy, so this is an unfair simile with which to open this review. It’s got some characters who eventually grew on me, a nicely-granular look at the enervating logistics of a big family vacation, and entertaining period details. But I also found it way too long for what’s ultimately a simple story whose themes, characterizations, and gameplay don’t have much depth; at half the length, they wouldn’t wear out their welcome, but at over two hours, the candyfloss has time to turn to a gummy paste in the mouth.

Here’s the short version: a 19-person family goes on vacation to an unnamed theme park that is 100% Disneyworld, and over the course of five days, the two main characters – both queer women, one a 20-year old whose name the player supplies, the other a maybe-late-thirties aunt named Lou – come to grips with the ways they’ve allowed the demands of their big, homophobic family to push aside their need for autonomy and love, against a backdrop of low-key child-mediated mayhem and ubiquitous walkie-talkie use serving as a metaphor for garbled communication and the possibility of surprising connections. Everybody gets on each others’ nerves, everyone’s trying to convince themselves they’re having fun when there’s little authentic pleasure on offer, and just as Disneyland is a pleasant but generic façade over a grim capitalist reality, so too do the rituals of a loving family cloak disapproval, sharp elbows, and bigotry. Fortunately, both the 20-year-old and Lou happen across idealized love interests who offer an escape (though you can’t see how both of their stories resolve, since you have to choose just one to follow into the climactic sequence, which retroactively renders much of the slow buildup of the path not taken superfluous).

That’s not a bad story, but it’s not an especially complex or novel one to support a game that ran me well over two hours to get through. Characters are almost all slotted into a one-dimensional good vs. bad continuum, except for the children who are such non-entities they’re not even allowed names (this is a game with a lot to say about parenting and nothing to say about parenthood). There are a few small choices the player can make to affect the story, but they come infrequently and late – I mostly just remember them being of the form KISS LOVE INTEREST/DON’T KISS LOVE INTEREST. Instead, most of the gameplay consists of deciding which of the characters to follow for the next piece of narration, which always left me feeling like I was missing out on the full story (a feeling exacerbated by the game occasionally calling back to events that I hadn’t seen happen, or even been mentioned). And as for the plot, there’s not much that happens for the first three or so days of the five-day running time, besides the slow establishment of the character dynamics, low-key introductions to the love interests, and (in fairness) a kid puking on the awful grandma’s shoes – and things only pick up slightly in days four and five.

All that means that playing OVER can feel enervating, something the prose definitely contributes to – it’s wordy, and intentionally evades detail:

"The lines were long and dark, most line games were rendered inoperable, and tiredness made them all skirt around conversation. The kids talked about their plans for the coming days, which rides were high priority repeaters and which they barely felt the need to do once. The mom’s, Marian, and Lou talked about the weather, how poorly they had all packed, how nice it was to get away from home for a little while. Charlotte asked her mom about work, and they discussed some previously relayed story’s newest developments. Lou hadn’t heard that story, and didn’t feel like listening to a saga start to finish at the moment, so she asked Margot if she’d read any good books lately. It was a thing they had bonded over in the past, though their tastes weren’t similar, by any means, they both appreciated texts that were unusual, that you wouldn’t necessarily find on any of Oprah’s lists."

There’s a reason the author adopted this style, I suspect – with its busy-ness, its focus on logistics, and its monomaniacal fixation on form and allergy to substance, it clearly has some resonance with the Disneyworld experience it depicts. That same logic applies to OVER’s length, too – the brutality of long exposure to this place, and this family, is precisely what’s ground down Lou, and what the 20-year-old eventually comes to see as an existential threat. So subjecting the player to this very much furthers the work’s artistic aims. And it’s clear the author is writing from experience, and can include some wry or winsome detail when desired:

"A dramatic sobriety falls over her, so dramatic that it almost feels like she’s actually drunk, and she clenches her fists together tight enough to make crescent-moons in her palms with her fingernails, matching the sliver of moon in the sky."

It’s also the case that quantity can have a quality all its own, and by the end I did have some fondness for the sympathetic members of the cast. While Lou is a straightforward character not drawn with as much specificity as I’d have liked (I don’t need a ton of backstory, but there are a couple sentences towards the end that imply that she’s never actually been in a relationship, and if that’s true that should probably have been mentioned earlier), I still wish I’d been able to see how her story turned out, since after long exposure to her travails I couldn’t help but root for her. A fling with a hot, understanding bartender, which seemed to be where she was heading, won’t cure all ills but it certainly wouldn’t hurt, and it would have been a fun note to end on.

So there’s definitely enjoyment to be had in OVER, but it can’t overcome the fundamental mismatch of scope and richness: as the game itself argues, a week is way too long to spend in someplace as simple and cloying as Disneyworld, so better to make it a day trip or go to Rome instead.

The surrealist IF game about trauma is a sufficiently well-represented subgenre that by this point I have a standard bit of patter I trot out for my reviews: these pieces often have spikily compelling writing and can be engaging on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but they also run the risk of being too idiosyncratic to resonate with the audience, as it’s very easy for an author to present snatches of imagery, language, and events that are incredibly personally meaningful, but which lack enough context to ground them in lived experience. No matter how great your prose or vivid your imagination, if the player can’t connect to what they’re reading, there’s a limit to how much impact your game can have.

Slated for Demolition is a very good Twine game in this vein, and as if to prove how little I know, one of the two things holding it back from being really great is that at a climactic moment, it reaches for universality rather than staying rooted in the subjective. At least the other thing is the more conventional challenge of underexplaining a key metaphor.

Before circling back to those issues, though, it’s worth dwelling on the ways that Slated for Demolition really works. While the subject-matter here is pretty familiar – early-20s anomie interrupted by sexual assault – the authorial voice is immediately confident, equally at ease describing the bleakness of a late-night suburb, the degrading consequences of alcohol dependence, and magical-realist irruptions of beauty and terror. The sentences have rhythm, the anecdotes have enlivening details, and the tone never stays stuck too long in one place, preventing the player from being desensitized through repetition. An example, more or less at random:

"Once when you were 18, you went to a party and drank your entire personality away all night long. You managed a few passed-out hours of sleep, and then you had to wake up and go to work for the early shift.

"It was your turn to stock the freezers. You knelt on the hard concrete floor, gingerly placing TGI Fridays-brand meals and trying your hardest not to vomit absolutely everywhere."

The gameplay also knows how to change things up. The overall structure is that of a quest, or a shaggy dog story – you leave your house in search of a Slurpee, but compulsions keep dragging you into more errands, and memory drags you back into reveries, leading to distinct set-pieces as you pass a long dark night of the soul. Some of these involve straightforward choice-based branching, but others require the player to move through or explore a persistent space; a stand-out vignette is more or less an extended puzzle, as you try to figure out which apartment an acquaintance lives in when all you know is the building’s address.

This kind of variety could risk undermining the game’s sense of progression, but one of its conceits is that in each scene, you’re collecting items to satisfy an obscure shopping list you find in your pocket. While the significance of each is typically unclear, wanting to complete the collection kept me engaged in the details of what was happening even in the strangest of the sequences, and provided a sense of pacing across the game’s almost-two-hour running time (the list is also rather forgiving – even if you miss something, just before the endgame you’re given a chance to zoom back to pick up the items you lost).

That endgame is where Slated for Demolition attempts something surprising and audacious, which I can’t help admire even though it didn’t quite work for me (I admire it enough to spoiler-block it, in fact, but the short version is that it makes a move for the universal rather than the particular, when the particular had previously served it very well indeed). (Spoiler - click to show)After doing a lot of work to situate the player in the protagonist’s subjectivity and revealing the details of the traumatic event exerting its gravitational pull throughout the rest of the game, the protagonist begins a ritual to attain closure – except before performing it, the player is invited to think about some pain they’ve experienced and use the ritual structure to fill in details for their own exorcism. It’s a lovely idea for bridging the gap between author and player, and I made a good-faith effort to engage with it, but I found the exercise deeply uncomfortable, because it felt like I was overwriting the protagonist’s, and perhaps the author’s, experiences with my own. Trauma is trauma, to a certain degree, but as the rest of the game demonstrates, the specific details of what was done by whom, to whom, and how, make an enormous difference – and that’s especially the case when dealing with sexual assault, given the role gender and power dynamics play. For some players, I’m sure, the details of the ritual would resonate deeply and the memories it evokes would be congruent with the game’s themes. But for me, even making the attempt felt like overstepping.

My other complaint is that the strongest image in the game didn’t cohere in a satisfying way. I also don’t want to spoil this too much, but the blurb and cover art give away that every once in a while, the protagonist feels like she’s dissolving into pasta and red sauce, and while that sounds silly, in fact it’s written to be the most upsetting piece of body horror I’ve come across in years. I was delighted by how much these sequences made me squirm, but while there are a few hints for how they connect to the game’s broader concerns, the hints are rather thin and ultimately the metaphor doesn’t connect very neatly with the title and framing idea about a house fated for destruction. It’s a textbook example of surrealism that needs a bit more connective tissue, so while Slated for Demolition definitely challenges my theory for what makes these kinds of games succeed, at least I don’t need to throw it out entirely.

I’ve been at the IF-reviewing game for a while now: over twenty years stem to stern, and even if you discount the interregnums it still comes to about a decade. There’s been a lot of opportunity over all that time to interrogate my methods and their foibles, so I feel like I’m generally pretty self-aware about how I approach reviews. But there remain a couple of black holes that still lurk within this otherwise-well-surveyed galaxy, jealously guarding the secrets yet concealed within their Schwarzschild radii (forgive the tortured metaphor, my son’s been into space stuff lately so it’s all been top of mind). The one apposite to this, my final review of the Thon, is the mysterious ability some games have to make me stick to my first ending rather than replay them.

It’ll shock no one who’s followed my reviews that I have a bit of a completionist streak – OK, I’ve exhausted literally bit of content for every Assassin’s Creed game that came out before my son was born, down to finding all those stupid feathers that were floating over Venice in AC2 and clearing every map icon, however mundane, in Origins and Odyssey, so perhaps “a bit” is a misnomer. So it’s probably unsurprising that if a piece of IF advertises itself as having multiple endings, or significant branch points, my natural inclination is to check those out, and that inclination is even stronger when I’ve decided to review something; obviously an analysis informed by an understanding of a game’s structure and the full range of its narrative possibilities is going to be more incisive! Of course, I’m not slavish about this, if a game is super long or there are options that I’m just deeply uninterested in (see, e.g., “evil” paths), I’m more likely to be one and done. But when playing a short game that clearly signposts that it changes quite a lot based on player choice, and that maintains a minimum level of quality such that a replay feels like it would be reasonably rewarding, I’m typically happy to do so. Except every once in a while I just don’t feel like it, for reasons that I think aren’t *just* laziness but remain frustratingly hard to pin down.

Whew, we’ve finally circled around to Blood and Sunlight. This is a short Ink game that’s part of a series (I haven’t played any of the others) focusing on Zach, the vampire PC, and Lyle, his lover. This installment sees them firmly coupled up, but seemingly still in the early stages of the relationship, facing a milestone: there’s a party at Lyle’s place where Zach is meeting their family, it gets late, and Lyle asks Zach to stay the night, which he’s never done before. The dilemma isn’t about sex, to be clear – Lyle conks out a little too early for that to be on the table – but about Zach’s vampiric nature: Lyle doesn’t (yet?) have blackout curtains or any of the other niceties the discerning Nosferatu arranges for their lair. Fortunately, Zach isn’t the kind of vampire who’ll burst into ash if they catch a stray ray, but sunlight is enough to cause discomfort and nausea, so there are reasons beyond potentially-fraught interpersonal dynamics to hesitate to sleep over.

All of this is well explained within the game, even for a newcomer to the series – I felt like I had a solid handle on the characters’ respective personalities (Zach is a bundle of anxiety, Lyle is gentle and solicitous; Lyle’s family members are very much secondary but still manage to be appealing) and a clear view of the situation. Details of their backstory don’t really come on-screen, but given that those are probably the purview of the other two games, that’s fair enough. I will admit that I wanted a bit more worldbuilding on how exactly vampirism is meant to work, especially given that the treatment of sunlight is idiosyncratic – in particular, I wasn’t sure whether feeding generally entailed some form of predation or if ethical vamping was a thing, since that would have helped me get a better handle on how much of Zach’s angst is due to his personality rather than his situation – but all things being equal I feel like a lighter touch is better than a heavier one on this score.

Speaking of things that are light or heavy, there are a lot of choice points in what’s a reasonably slight vignette: beyond narratively important ones like deciding whether or not to accede to Lyle’s entreaties, you’re given quite a lot of scope to define Zach’s attitude and mood. These tend to range from more self-loathing ones, where you draw back from others’ attempts to reach out to you, to happier choices where you disbelievingly accept the love and care that you’re offered (as I said, Zach is angsty, you understandably don’t get completely low-key options).

It’s all well-presented, in prose that’s unshowy but evidences a good eye for detail and foregrounds emotion:

"You both get up, and Lyle laughs when they notice your pajamas, informing you they were a gag gift from Daph. You let them hit the bathroom first, and you pull on yesterday’s clothes, glancing yourself over in Lyle’s mirror afterward; that whole no-reflection thing is as much a lie as the burn-up-in-the-sun shit. Your eyes are a little hollow, the corners of your mouth drooping. You put on a smile, grinning so hard it becomes macabre, and when your face goes slack again you look a little less dour. Then, too antsy to just sit and wait, you crack the door."

It all adds up to a satisfying, nicely made game, albeit in my first playthrough it felt a bit slight – I generally stuck to the choices that saw Zach accepting Lyle’s overtures and making a reciprocal effort to connect with them, and while that course did have some bumps along the way, notably some barfing and a need to push down feelings of inadequacy, it felt decidedly low-drama both in terms of conflict and outcomes; by no means was Zach and Lyle’s relationship transformed by these events, it just took a solid but small step forward.

I suspect that players who leaned into other versions of Zach would find their experience quite different, however: a vampire who slinks home alone or awkwardly runs out first thing in the morning would likely see this night as more of a turning point, potentially threatening this promising relationship or just offering a poignant reminder of the ineluctable curse of undeath. If I felt like my playthrough was low-drama because the main takeaway was that Zach just needs to relax a little, well, those other playthroughs are presumably right there.

And yet that’s all speculation, since I left things there. Objectively, there’s no real reason I can give for not exploring my options: I sincerely think the game would change a bunch, and my opinions would be more well-rounded, if I gave it another whirl, and I enjoyed my first go-round so I’m pretty sure I’d like a second, too, even if I’d be spending more of it wincing at Zach’s refusal to get out of his own head. But, well, see above – after hovering my cursor over the “restart” button a couple of times, I didn’t wind up clicking. I guess even if you’re usually a pretty responsible person, there are times when just going with the flow still somehow feels like the right thing even when you know objectively it’s not. And if I can’t figure out why that is for myself, it’s easy to sympathize with Zach for being in the same boat.

I have an odd relationship to floods, which is to say, I don’t actually have one. I’ve experienced earthquakes and hurricanes, seen a tornado, had to evacuate my home because of a wildfire, missed my wedding rehearsal due to mudslides, and hunkered down through more blizzards than I can remember before I decamped to Southern California (they’re way better than the fires). There are more exotic natural disasters beyond these, of course, but I’ve seen movies depicting avalanches and tsunamis and volcanos so there I at least have some second-hand associations of terror. But floods? I’ve never actually been in one, and they don’t present an especially cinematic prospect, unless a dam breaks or something. As a result, while I intellectually know they’re awful – witness all the recent deaths in Texas – I don’t have much of a visceral response to them. If anything I think the images of flooded towns can seem oddly peaceful, the ordinary landscape of roads and buildings transfigured.

So I vibed with The Deluge’s take on the theme: the nameless protagonist is forced by a flood to leave their home, but leaving everything and everyone behind doesn’t seem entirely unwelcome. This is a meditative game, the danger universally acknowledged but never actually approaching, allowing plenty of space to contemplate mistakes and paths not taken and consider what might come next. This choice-based game isn’t exactly parser-like – there are no compass directions, no inventory you can check, and no puzzles besides some order-of-operations stuff and one unique challenge I’ll circle back to later in this review – but you do have freedom to explore, ranging from your apartment to your old haunts to the outskirts to which you’ll eventually have to escape. There aren’t many direct conversations or anything you’d think of as an action sequence, but there is a lot of environmental storytelling, effectively narrated in a voice that focuses more on conveying sharp, concrete detail than providing a complete backstory for your character:

"The bed is unmade. You imagine yourself half-asleep, safe, warm, and as perfectly content as a stretching cat. You imagine the body beside you, reaching out instinctively for you without fully waking up."

This extends to the effects of the flood, too:

"You’re only halfway down the least-used of three stairwells when you realize the extent of the damage. Puddles slosh at your feet; a vaguely riparian odor drifts up from the basement below you."

There were times when this studied fuzziness of plot did present a slight obstacle; it seems like the protagonist has complex history with a lot of former lovers, friends, and family members, and since none of them are given names I sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight. But obfuscating the details helps reinforce the central vibe, of a mountain of regrets and guilty relief at being forced to leave them behind. It also means that when something does snap into focus, it gains additional power: there’s a charged conversation with an ex that really stands out, for example.

The gameplay, meanwhile, also meshes nicely with the theme. You can’t get everywhere from everywhere, and there are interactions that are only available on repeat visits or after you’ve gone someplace else first, which means that you spend a lot of time circling around the same ground, slowly building up to making your escape. There’s a list of things you need to accumulate before you’re able to finally go, some physical, some more nebulous, though I didn’t find a way to check these other than trying to leave, which made the transition to the endgame feel bit more abrupt than I would have liked (on the plus side, it was exactly as enigmatic as I liked). There’s also that odd gameplay mechanic I mentioned above – let’s spoiler this: (Spoiler - click to show)when I tried to find the key to my uncle’s boat, at first I thought I was stuck due to a bug that only let me toggle between two passages, rather than allowing me to retreat back to town when it didn’t turn up. I actually alt-tabbed for a minute to jot down some notes in frustration – but then when I alt-tabbed back, suddenly I’d found the key! I think this is a real-time mechanic that reveals the key after you’ve let the page stay up for a certain amount of time, which is formally interesting, but felt like an odd choice to me – the game doesn’t otherwise use timed text, I don’t think, and without that telegraphing I almost got annoyed and restarted the game! It’s something that I think is neat in isolation, but I’m not sure is a great fit for this game in particular.

That’s really the only discordant note I found in The Deluge, though – it’s otherwise a very coherent work, embedding some universally-relatable emotions in a distinct, and distinctly-presented package. It didn’t make me afraid of floods, but it did help me inhabit their aftermath with more clarity than I had before, making a case for rising waters as a pregnant metaphor worth dwelling on, regardless of their real-world dangers.