Reviews by Mike Russo

(Spoilers ahoy; this is one to play blind, I think, and it may be worth trying even if the old-school presentation might initially put you off since the game is shorter, easier, and stranger than you think).

So here’s a Rorschach test for you: get a friend – or actually just an acquaintance is fine – get a TV, get a Battlestar Galactica boxed set, then plop the one down in front of the other while you put on the last and make them watch all the way through the first three seasons (these aren’t your sleek modern 8-episode seasons, mind, we’re talking 50-odd 42 minute episodes so hopefully you’ve built in some bathroom breaks). At the close of the third-season finale, I guarantee that they will turn to you and say “what the hell did I just watch?” – but some of them will say that with incomprehension and disgust, and others with giddy wonder (Spoiler - click to show)(the specific moment I’m thinking of here is of course the part where five characters who obviously can’t be Cylons turn out to be Cylons and start singing All Along the Watchtower, despite none of that making any fucking sense).

I am team giddy wonder so I think I love the Curse, despite being fully aware that this opinion is probably indefensible. The first three quarters of my notes for the game consist of multiple variations of the question “what the hell am I playing here”: this is an 80s-throwback parser game that disorients the player with multiple pop-up windows that are meant to be read in a specific order, a parser that asks a bunch of rhetorical questions except for the ones that aren’t rhetorical, awkwardly timed text, and a backstory that sounds like your stoned friend fell asleep during an Indiana Jones movie, half-awoke during a James Bond marathon, and then attempted to reconstruct the dream they had for you: seriously, you’re a superspy who’s been made redundant by the end of the Cold War, so now you do freelance work and you’ve been called in to rescue a kidnapped woman, who’s been taken to a pyramid by a sorcerer named Shamir, except he died during the abduction attempt, but not before putting a curse on a village, though there’s no village around…

One plane crash later, you’re dumped into a trackless desert and turned loose to explore. This part of the game presents itself as a reasonably straightforward throwback text adventure – there aren’t many objects implemented, nor are there a ton of locations, so moving from place to place trying to few available actions feels natural enough. There are some neat touches, like attractive graphics and Easter Eggs referencing classic rock, and some frustrations, notably a parser that frequently seems to just break. Witness this exchange:

> unlock panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

> open panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

Oh, and I got a parser error the first time I tried to push the button on the panel, but was able to try to activate it the second time I made the attempt.

Frustration mounted as I realized I couldn’t figure out how to get into the door-free pyramid, or get through a fog-clouded maze section, or what to do at a mysterious altar in the middle of the dunes. Fortunately, there’s a HINT function that prodded me in the right direction: I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)PRAY by the altar, which has a certain sense to it now that I type it out but sure felt like a reach at the time. That led to a new sequence with a couple once-again-buggy objects that I couldn’t quite figure out how to interact with, but as I was flailing around with the parser again I noticed some confounding new text showing up whenever I tried anything:

Will and Pat have never met.

What now Nobody?

Events progress linearly from there, I think regardless of what you do (I certainly didn’t feel like I accomplished much from that point on), and when I realized what was happening my jaw dropped just like it did when I watched that episode of Galactica more years ago than I care to count: (Spoiler - click to show)as best I can tell, the ghost of Shamir escapes you by going back in time and preventing Will Crowther from ever meeting his wife, so that he never spelunks, gets depressed during his divorce, and writes Adventure to try to connect with his kids – meaning that there’s never any such thing as a text adventure, and you, as a text adventure protagonist, go poof.

I’ve been reduced to giving the play by play here because I’m not sure how else to communicate the sheer bonkers-ness of the scenario; there are no shortage of metafictional joke games in IF, of course – heck, I’ve already hit at least one in this year’s Comp – but the ambition of this gag, and the way it’s slow-played by hiding under a reasonable-sized chunk of an authentically kinda-broken custom parser game, really make it stand out as something special. I’m not sure it really stands up to scrutiny; the logic behind the twist is paper-thin and requires some reconstruction even to minimally make sense, and surely the process of getting to the good part could have been made slightly less painful. But look, a thing can be too ridiculous to work and then somehow at least kinda work regardless, and in this case my only possible response is to applaud the audacity (and think about a Galactica rewatch…)

Postscript: when I first posted this review to the IntFic forum, it had a caveat where I said something like “maybe this is just a bad end and I missed the whole game”, but I deleted that before finalizing because how could an author include a twist like this without it being the point of the game? Then I read other reviews, and was delighted to learn that I was wrong and this isn’t actually meant as an Infidel-style deconstruction of IF, but actually is just the retro puzzle adventure it appears to be with a throwaway gag midway through. This makes the whole thing even funnier to me; everyone else is welcome to their flute and their mirror and their Anubis and whatever other stuff they got hung up on; I am content with my memories of the time I retroactively destroyed IF.

(Another review with unmarked spoilers here, due to the brevity of the piece and the centrality of the way the plot develops to assessing the game).

Kubla Khan is a deceptive poem; for one thing, even though I should know better, I always need to catch myself to remember that the title isn’t Xanadu. But more importantly, the mythology Coleridge built up around it – that the idea came to him in a dream, and he had a flash all at once of hundreds of lines that he raced to scrawl down, until that famous person from Porlock knocked on his door, deranging his train of thought and dooming the poem to be a fragment forevermore – is self-evidently bollocks. I don’t have any special insight here, or done any deep examination of Coleridge scholarship, but come on, just read the poem: we get like a dozen lines on Xanadu and Kubla Khan, as advertised, then an overlong digression about a fountain, then a little more about Kubla, before a swerve to first-person section where suddenly we’re talking about an “Abyssinian maid” (Abyssinia being Ethiopia, quite far from China as a polymath like Coleridge would well know), and our narrator starts talking about how if he could conjure up the image of Xanadu in a song, everybody would think he was divinely inspired, if not mad. So yeah: there’s padding, a false swerve, and then a meta turn – this isn’t interrupted genius, it’s a guy desperately trying to spin out those first awesome ten or twelve lines and not quite succeeding.

So it’s appropriate that KING OF XANADU is likewise a deceptive little thing. The title is at least a bit more on point here: you do play the eponymous monarch of the eponymous utopia (though here an empire rather than a city-palace), making judicious choices of how to order your royal gardens, arrange the imperial armies, and perform your religious responsibilities so as to best please your refined sensibilities. The language too is worthy of its inspiration – it’s very easy for attempts at this poetic kind of prose to wind up as claggy high-fantasy treacle, but the writing remains fleet as it picks out one lovely detail after another to highlight:

"The people perform the usual celebrations. Red cloth is hung from balconies. Young children paint bouys the colours of daydreams and set them out to sea. Elders with lit candles parade through the capital, singing the old songs, winding through the streets like ancient snakes. And, lastly, arithmaticians take out tablets and chalk, ready to count and divy the grain of the harvest."

The author’s not afraid to take big swings for pretty much every at-bat – here’s another early bit:

"The fields surge with life. Rivers twirl through the tumbling hills like veins in a grand muscle, unwinding into your harbours, which throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities."

“Holy lichen” is perhaps a bit too much of a reach for my taste, but the missteps are rare, and better by far to reach for something surprising than let caution keep things boring, in this kind of story.

But this is not a fantastic story about an enlightened, Orientalist despot. No, twist the first is that no matter how you try to play him, my man is an awful ruler, like “80% as bad as Donald Trump” awful. After being presented with a new elm grove for the palace grounds, I ventured the opinion that a water feature might improve things; His Eminence took this to mean the trees should be razed and replaced with an artificially-created salt-water (!) stream. Later on, when confronted with a famine, I attempted to heed the wise counsel of one of our scholars who suggested we “watch closely the simple animals of the world and preserve the ecological balance" before making any rash moves, and of course Kubla Mao issued edicts to kill all the wildlife that might be eating the crops.

Speaking of that famine, another feint is that the game takes as much inspiration from another poem in the Romantic canon, Shelley’s Ozymandias, as it does Kubla Khan. Despite how Xanadu is built up as a perfect, powerful state, it only takes a few years of failing crops – and the king’s increasingly unhinged ukases – to bring it to its knees. The exterior catastrophe mirrors the protagonist’s mental degradation; even as food riots are flaring up outside the palace, you wind up enacting purges, engaging in the kind of mad caprices that enliven the biographies of some of your more outré Roman emperors, and coming up with big ideas that would put the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to shame (Spoiler - click to show)( “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun” I scrawled down in my notes halfway through, and giggled) – look on my works ye mighty, indeed.

I don’t want to accuse the game of striking false notes, let me be clear – it’s very obvious that these subverted expectations are part of the design, and in fact each of these strands intersect cannily to deliver the desired effect. Having a protagonist who willfully misinterprets the player’s choices can be played for comedy once or twice, but quickly becomes frustrating, for example, but since the game telegraphs that doom is the only possible outcome, it’s possible to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if either the internal spiral of the king’s faculties or the external collapse of the state’s institutions were at all realistic, it’d risk the other half of the game feeling unrealistic; instead, they slide into extreme satire in tandem.

No, for all its deceptiveness, beyond the unfortunate accumulation of typos as the game wears on the only true bit of fakery I picked up on was the ending; after seeing everything come to ruin, you’re given a chance to tack a moral onto the proceedings, choosing to reflect either on the inevitability with which hubris is punished, or the fragility of social cohesion, or the importance of staying true to one’s dreams. But come on: there are no lessons to be learnt here (besides, maybe, “don’t put assholes in charge” – good advice to anyone who can vote in the US this November), and attempts to gesture at one feel unnecessary, like Coleridge grasping for his Abyssinian maid: just stick with Xanadu, no need to go any further.

It feels like every Comp and/or Spring Thing, Andrew Schultz enters a big, robustly-implemented wordplay game bursting with bonus points, tutorial modes, hint mechanics, and support commands that together roll out a red carpet to experience a set of puzzles unlike anything anyone else in IF is putting together – and every Comp and/or Spring Thing, after an hour and a half I feel like my brain is leaking out my ears, that considerate hint mechanic is the only thing keeping me moving, and despite the inviting design I’m just too dumb to fully appreciate what’s being so generously offered. This doesn’t keep me from liking them, by any means; I had a really good time with this year’s Spring Thing entry, Beef, Beans, Grief, Greens, which was a little easier than usual because it’s like the fifth game with its particular wordplay gimmick (guessing double-barreled rhymes, as the title indicates) that I’ve played, and also because there was a strong theme unifying the various challenges. But there’s typically that barrier making me feel like I’m not fully getting the intended experience, since things never get completely intuitive.

Well, callooh callay, at long last I’ve broken the streak – the first puzzle here took me long enough to solve that I thought I was in for my typical experience, but somehow from that point on I was in the zone, almost immediately clicking onto Why Pout?’s wavelength and enjoying the heck out of it. I suspect the main reason is that the central challenge here is pretty much baby mode – instead of complex rhymes or pig Latin, all you need to master is dumb puns. The puzzles all center on being presented with (or, in the harder challenges, noticing in a longer description) a short phrase that can be read as a different phrase if you change the breaks between words – for a (dumb) example (that isn’t in the game since I just made it up), if you see “treat op”, you’d type in TREE TOP. It’s a simple enough concept that I always knew what I was doing, but the implementation manages to avoid being too simple, meaning figuring out the right answer was typically satisfying; I even needed to use the hint button two or three times, which felt about right.

Solving the puzzles is also fun because there are some legit great gags here; I ooohed with delight when I realized what I could do with “no notion”. There’s also a mechanic unlocking new capabilities when recruiting new companions, and it made me laugh to get a (Spoiler - click to show)mensch elf as a follower. Why Pout? also has figured out how to make hay out of a sometimes-awkward element in previous games, which is what to do about dirty words; the nature of wordplay games means that sometimes you stumble on one, and feel like you either have to or want to try it, even though that’s at odds with the sweetly innocent vibe the games generally transmit. But here all that stuff is segmented away into a separate bonus area, where you’re straight-up told to start swearing if you want or just leave, with no negative consequences, if you don’t; it’s an elegant way to deal with the issue, and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that I solved just about all these puzzles immediately.

There are some places where the game isn’t fully polished – in particular, I found a couple of places where variant spellings weren’t accepted, making me think I was on the wrong track when I’d actually found the solution (Spoiler - click to show)(MANA for MANNA, MEETING for MEETIN’, WIPEOUT for WIPE OUT). But it’s hard to feel too aggrieved about that given the complexity of implementing this kind of game, to say nothing of the author’s impressive track record of doing mid-Comp and post-Comp updates to fix bugs and add further polish. Similarly, the narrative is entertaining enough, with some solid set-pieces (I liked visiting different islands with a squid, and supporting an alcoholic troll through recovery) and a positive message about self-esteem, but it lacks the unifying through-line boasted by some stronger games in Schultz’s oeuvre, and has a climax that feels like it’s over a bit soon – again, though, the fact that a long game focused so narrowly on one specific kind of wordplay is about to cohere at all is quite the achievement. And I’m not just grading on a curve; I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole time I was playing Why Pout?, and I’m having to exercise quite a lot of willpower to avoid spoiling too many of the jokes that got a laugh. This might be a beginner-level game compared to some of its peers, but it works equally well as a gateway into that larger catalog or as just a delightful stand-alone. The only down-side is that it’s got me directing even more awful puns at my wife than usual…

As a straight white dude, for good or ill I very rarely find myself second-guessing my opinions too intensively. I mean, I like to think that I’m pretty ecumenical in my viewpoints, and when it comes to reviewing it’s frequently the case that I’ll like something but understand why other folks might not, or find something doesn’t have much personal appeal while getting the reasons why it might be generally popular. But every once in a while I hit a game like A Dream of Silence. I really like everything else by Abigail Corfman I’ve ever played; D&D adventures are one of my guilty pleasures; heck, while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 the earlier games in the series are among my all-time favorites. So when I bounced off the first part of this game (which was entered in this year’s Spring Thing) so hard my ears are still ringing, I couldn’t help feeling like there was something off in my judgment – maybe the first third is just slow and I’ll like the other parts better? Maybe if I was more familiar with BG3 in general, or Astarion, the elven vampire who’s the primary character here, in specific, the emotional beats would resonate more? Maybe if I had more experience with and native affinity for fanfiction I’d better vibe with an unabashed fan-game? Maybe I’m just working out sublimated resentment towards the DnD branding people for slapping “Baldur’s Gate 3” on a game whose connections to the first two seem superficial at best?

So I was looking forward to trying to play this culminating part of the game as an opportunity to start with a blank slate, reset my expectations, and try and find the positive elements in the scenario that other reviewers could detect in the first part. But while I definitely enjoyed my time with part three far more than I did with the prologue, my overall take stands: neither the narrative and mechanical elements of Dream of Silence really work for me, and I remain bummed out about that fact.

The setup for the series is that a random encounter with a nightmare-inducing beastie that feeds on fear has thrown Astarion into a catatonic state where he psychically relives his time in thrall to his vampiric sire; you’re able to exploit a telepathic connection to try to help him escape by joining him in the dream, albeit only showing up as a spirit whose ability to sense, much less impact, the environment is profoundly limited. Act 1 turned on understanding your predicaments and balancing your exploration of the cell where Astarion was trapped with building your nascent Sight, Speech, and Touch skills and maintaining his physical and mental well-being. As Act 3 begins, Astarion has finally managed to get out of the cell after what he’s experienced as several months of solitary confinement, and it’s up to you to help guide him past his vampire siblings in search of a way out.

I’ll come back to the narrative side of things in a bit, but first I need to go into more detail on how the gameplay works. This is an RPG-inflected game, and you need to prioritize the three aforementioned skills – you’ll be pretty good at one, middling at a second, and miserable at a third. As a spirit, your actions are also constrained by a ten-point energy gauge; anything you do of any significance will eat up at least one chunk of energy, and even on the easy “Explorer” difficulty setting, you get pretty much just one recharge per encounter with the quartet of characters who stand between Astarion and freedom. Each scene progresses with dialogue, and potential physical conflict, between your companion and his brothers and sisters; meanwhile, you’re also given the opportunity to explore the environment, rifle through the furniture, check out the paintings, etc. Depending on your decisions, various gauges will fill: Astarion’s trust in you has been a key stat since Act 1, while getting clues and moving past obstacles will increase your progress towards escape, and taking too much time or drawing attention ticks up a gauge tracking his sire’s focus on him.

Spelled out like that, it’s a reasonable set of systems, but in practice I found them pretty enervating. You don’t have nearly enough energy to take even a quarter of the potential actions offered in each scene, so the opportunity cost of deciding to do anything is quite high. What’s worse, this is not a game that embraces a fail-forward ethos; you definitely can waste energy trying stuff that’s completely pointless and uninteresting, and while Explorer difficulty is tuned easy enough that that won’t prevent you from getting to the ending, it’s still pretty dispiriting and wound up discouraging experimentation. It’s also the case that there are significant elements of the game that are walled off from certain characters: I prioritized touch last, which felt like a reasonable choice (given that this is a game about interacting with Astarion, knowing what’s going on and being able to talk to him felt more important), but that meant that I was basically unable to participate in what appears to be a reasonably robust combat system. That’d be all well and good, except a large portion of the exploration rewards are focused on said system; I was especially annoyed when, prior to the final confrontation, I treaded almost all my energy to explore what was clearly flagged as a high-risk, high-reward situation, only to find a weapon that neither I nor Astarion could do anything with.

The other way I found the mechanics undermined the experience is that your explorations are bifurcated from the interactions Astarion is having with the other vampires; their charged pas-de-deux play out in a “watch” tab, while you mess about with the scenery in the “explore” tab. Time generally only passes in the former, thankfully, but at the same time the act of swapping back and forth makes the conversations, and in fact the broader plot, feel disjointed; the fact that I was continually thinking to myself “is this an important enough moment to try to use some of my precious energy?” made this intrusion of the mechanics into the narrative all the more awkward. And the story isn’t sufficiently compelling to power past these points of friction: Astarion clearly has history with the other characters, who’ve all taken different tacks for coping with a sire who’s clearly signposted as an abuser, but in their limited screen-time the best-drawn only manage to inhabit a stereotype, while the others are just forgettable.

Meanwhile, because you and Astarion are so focused on escape, the trust mechanic – and the relationship that it’s meant to model – feels besides the point; the only time I noticed it was when I was told his trust in me wasn’t quite high enough to trigger a bit of bonus dialogue when we were almost free, which hardly felt like an impactful toggle. Sure, you wouldn’t usually expect deep relationship-building in the middle of a long action scene. But remember, this is basically a dream sequence, with all the challenges that entails: none of the dangers, or other characters, really matter at all, it’s only the relationship between the protagonist and Astarion that has any lasting significance, so relegating it to second fiddle is a substantial miss.

The one big grain of salt in all of this is that I did skip past Act 2 – when starting this third piece, you’re given the choice either to replay the series from the beginning, or play a condensed version of the first two parts. I opted for the latter, since as mentioned I wanted a clear break from my earlier impressions and replaying a first act that I’d already found quite slowly-paced seemed like a bad way of accomplishing that. It’s quite possible that in the grand tradition of fantasy trilogies, the middle section is the best part – and I’m not just saying that, I can easily see that the segment of the story before the action has kicked off, but after the setup has been introduced, could be the place where deep character work is happening. But it was Act 3 that was entered into the Comp for evaluation, not 2 and 3 together, and at this point I feel like I’d be doing everyone, myself included, a favor by not playing it and letting myself imagine that that’s where all the great stuff I typically associate with the author’s games resides – it’s either that keep fretting that I’ve somehow completely missed the point again.

The parodic sendup of CRPG tropes is such a hoary old subgenre that I think I’ve already written two or three different intros discussing the microgenre in previous reviews just over the last couple years. Rather than attempting to rehash them – or, heavens forfend, actually tracking them down, reading what I’d previously written, and trying to synthesize them or even speak a new word – let’s just take as read that I find CRPGs lots of fun but yes, of course, they’re sufficiently ridiculous that without more satire can feel just like shooting fish in a barrel. Merely pointing out that RPG protagonists will go off to challenge immortal evil wizard-kings with only the flimsiest of provocations might provoke faint amusement, but not anything more than that sitting here 50 years on from the creation of DnD.

QftToMSV is certainly the kind of game that you think of when you think of this kind of game – the jumping off point is that you, the proprietor of a tea room, seem to have misplaced a teacup you had before you started your business and therefore feel a slight bit of attachment to, and as a result you’re willing to ransack your neighbors’ houses, stare down an incarnation of supernatural evil, and scale a mysterious, forbidding tower as you try to reclaim it – but happily the level of execution is high. For one thing, it’s quite streamlined so that you don’t need to put in a lot of busywork to get to the next joke; it’s implemented in RPG Maker, but navigation is taken care of for you, and combat is generally a quickly-finished indication that something’s gone wrong, so it winds up running almost as quick as a pure choice-based game. It also doesn’t play coy about how to reach the “best” ending; at almost every decision node, you’re offered a choice of doing things the easy, common-sense way, or escalating them absurdly, and off course taking the off-ramps leads to a “bad end” while steering into the skid keeps the shaggy dog story going (the author also helpfully autosaves the game quite frequently, so there’s little risk to exploring losing paths).

But this sort of thing lives or dies by the quality of its gags, and happily they’re quite good. “Ha ha, look a the CRPG protagonist rummaging around their neighbors’ possessions” is a dull commonplace, but following it up by having the rummagee respond to your assertion that it’s totally OK to steal everything that isn’t nailed down with "I was a juror in a court case a few years back, and that was very much not the view the judge took” was unexpected enough to provoke a laugh. Similarly, “the evil overlord calls you mean for assuming he’s bad just because he looks and acts just like an evil overlord” is a one-note joke, but the game hits it hard and repeatedly, so it reaches Sideshow-Bob-stepping-on-a-rake-fifteen-times levels of funniness. And the sly use of endings encourages messing around; the first BAD END is self-evidently a totally fine outcome, and what’s even funnier, (Spoiler - click to show) I’m pretty sure it’s only like 5% different from the hard-won GOOD END.

Is all this enough to make QftToMSV anything other than an ephemeral amusement? I don’t think so; it’s a well-executed example of its genre, but it never manages to transcend said genre’s limitations (not that I get the sense it was trying to). It’s worth a play to enjoy the well-paced jokes, but I guarantee you absolutely will look at CRPG sidequests in exactly the same way ever again.

There are few design challenges more vexing than the hacking minigame. They’re a nearly unavoidable necessity in anything cyberpunk: sure, you can let the player succeed with just a simple HACK COMPUTER, but that makes a skill that should be exciting and narratively significant just a big “I win” button, or you can go the other direction and implement a full emulation of running cracking programs and installing rootkits and what-not, but that’s incredibly high-overhead and likely to limit your audience. So the minigame is the least-worst option, as proved by such notable triumphs of game design as the PipeMania clone in Bioshock, the node-capturing abstraction of Deus Ex, and the flying-around-shooting-giant-shapes of System Shock.

So it’s to be expected that Focal Shift, a cyberpunk heist unembarrassed to be playing the genre’s hits (you’re a freelancer working for a shady client, with a job to raid a corporate databank and an experimental implant giving you an edge…) has not one but two hacking minigames; what’s more, pretty much all the puzzles bar one or two run through these systems, blurring the line between “minigame” and “actually just the game.”

It’s a bold move, but to its credit the game has the chops to back it up. It’s based on the GameFic engine, which I recently encountered in this year’s ParserComp entry Project Postmortem; I found it a solid platform for that demo-length game, and it confirms that impression in this full-sized experience. It does just about everything you want a modern parser system to do, down to seamless choice-based gameplay integration for dialogue, with no bugs that I ran across. As for the design of the minigames, the first is a Wordle-alike with a twist, and the second is a wandering-around-cyberspace-messing-with-a-keycode riff that escalates nicely; they also interact interestingly with the real-world layer, most notably with the option to solve a small puzzle in meatspace to upgrade your abilities in the first of the games.

The way the minigames communicate their rules to the player is inconsistent, however – because in neither case are you given the rules of the road. The second one seems linked to your new implant, and only comes into play towards the end of the game; I’ll keep the details vague since it is pretty clearly set up as a twist, but for all that I found it pretty easy to suss out via trial and error, and since the first time you experience it time pressure is light, there’s no penalty to replaying things, and the interface helps cue you towards what a correct solution will look like. The first minigame is a different kettle of fish, however. It’s recognizable a Wordle/Mastermind game – you type in guesses for six-letter passwords, and you get feedback based on how close you were to the right answer – but while I figured out that if the response shows you a letter in one of the blank spaces, that means you got it right, I was completely flummoxed about what the +s and -s that otherwise would appear, since they didn’t correspond to the “letter not present in solution” and “letter is in the solution but now in the right place” options that I was expecting. After finishing the game I checked the walkthrough, so now I understand that it’s doing something distinct, but at the time I worried I had just run into some bugs, so I wound up brute-forcing all of these puzzles. It was less than fun, and worse, it felt needlessly obfuscated because unlike the second minigame, which seemed like a surprise to the protagonist, there’s no indication that this first one is anything other than routine; surely there should be a manual, or quick flashback, explaining how the rules work, since there’s no diegetic reason for the main character to be flailing.

There’s not much to Focal Shift outside of these minigames beyond cyberpunk tropes, as I mentioned before, but I still found its specific take enjoyable. There’s a jaded-but-still-idealistic street doc, a double-cross, all the stuff that you want to see. Making the target of the job a financial tech company focused on the blockchain is also a decision that feels novel but completely natural for this kind of story. And there’s a sly humor to some of the writing; I especially enjoyed this dig from the client (who’s monitoring everything through the implant) when I stopped to watch TV so I could check out the worldbuilding being done by the news chyrons:

“You get your fill of world events, Brokaw? Chop chop. Let’s get this over with.”

Focal Shift isn’t a game that will stick with you long after finishing it, admittedly – it’s telling a story you’ve heard before, with a mechanical approach that’s its own but recognizably of a piece with a million other implementations of these ideas. But the level of execution is nonetheless high, modulo the decision not to tutorialize the main hacking minigame in order to non-diegetically increase the difficulty.

(Spoilers in this one; a lot of what I have to say about this game has to do with the ending. It’s relatively short and well worth playing, so definitely do that before reading this review if you’re at all interested).

I like going to art museums, but even more than that I really like reading about art. Yes, yes, I know the old saw about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and presumably that can be extended to painting, but at the same time, I find my appreciation of art is often much deepened when I come to it after seeing what a perceptive critic has to say about a particular work (I love reading A.S. Byatt for this kind of thing, for example); they can share historical context, sure, but also just an analysis of how it functions, what choices the artist made, how it does (or at least is intended to) impact the viewer. Some of this is surely an artifact of not being an artist myself – I often need things explained to me slowly – but I think there also can be something magical about the way prose can complement a picture, teasing out the purpose behind fine details, zooming out to engage with the emotions, and reversing the alchemy by which an artist incarnates the spiritual into the concrete.

So I am entirely on board with Imprimatura’s project, as I understand it. This Twine game is built around two twinned tracks: in the first, you visit the studio of a deceased relative (you can define the exact relation) to pick out the seven paintings that’ve been left to you in your will, while in the second you recall memories of your relationship with them. The first track wholly depends on short prose descriptions of the pieces being able to sell the talent, and psychological considerations, your relative brought to their art, and I found it entirely successful, so much so that my first time through the game I chose to keep the first septet of paintings I encountered since they all seemed so engaging. Here’s one that could stand for many others:

"The painting you choose is called ‘Photosynthesis.’ A massive tropical plant is rendered in green blocks, styled in a geometric pattern like a stained glass window. At the top is a teal bloom just beginning to open. Looking at the painting makes you feel optimistic, like a door has just opened inside you."

Admittedly, I don’t always love it when authors tell the player how they feel (the protagonist is lightly characterized, so they don’t serve as much of a filter), but it seems appropriate here because it helps efficiently communicate the emotional valence of each piece without larding up the more descriptive bits with heavy-handed adjectives, and it also helps make the game’s mechanics more legible. This isn’t just an open-ended exercise; the paintings you pick influence the ending, with the artistic movements, color palettes, and general vibe of your chose collection being carefully tracked.

The second half of the game, the memories, are less mechanically engaging – there are no choices to be made or narrative implications so far as I could tell – but still work well enough on their own terms. There’s a large variety of them (at least I didn’t see any repeats after two full playthroughs) and different players will walk away with a different sense of the relative, and their relationship to the protagonist, depending on which they see and in which order they’re presented. Each vignette is quite condensed, requiring you to fill in some blanks to piece together a full view of things, but regardless the picture is credibly complex; your relative was a very successful artist who had warm feelings for you, but struggled in many areas, clearly dealing with undigested trauma, envy, and isolation. As a result, your painting choices feel something like going through a Rorschach test, deciding which of these mutable colors should predominate.

I didn’t find that the culminating moment of the game was as effective as what led up to it, though differently so in each of my playthroughs. The last sequence involves finding the outline of a last painting, which you finish yourself; unlike the rest of the game, this sequence is presented via graphics. You decide you want to adopt elements of your relative’s style in completing their work, which is where the consequences of your choices come in – or at least where they can come in. My first time through, since I was accepting paintings more or less at random, the game seemed to struggle to assess what style most resonated with me, which led it to pepper me with questions about how I wanted to approach the painting. It’s a reasonable design solution, but it made me feel like the finale was disconnected from what had come before, since I was just making all the important decisions at the end. My second time through, by contrast, I took a more aesthetically coherent approach to my choices, which led to a host of automatic decisions being made in the endgame; the price of this aesthetic consistency, though, is that I felt like I didn’t have much to do.

Beyond these mechanical issues, the finale also felt like it departed from what had been effective in the earlier part of the game. I liked the prose describing the works of art, and while the game continues to narrate what you’re trying to do as you finish the last painting, I found the writing was less rather than more impactful when paired with graphics that were inevitably different from, and flatter than, what I was imagining based on the words. The ending’s catharsis also feels like it relies on a key element of the backstory that’s revealed through memories – namely, that the protagonist was once the relative’s protégé, but decided to quit painting to get an office job. Returning to the art that united you with your mentor should be a poignant moment, but I found that the decision to make the protagonist weakly characterized dramatically undercut its effectiveness: in neither playthrough did I feel like I had a handle on why the protagonist made that decision in the first place, so revisiting and possibly reversing it didn’t fully land.

When Imprimatura sticks to its knitting, though – words over visuals, the relative as the central character rather than the notional protagonist – I found it effective indeed, and a relatively weaker ending can’t undermine that too badly. After all, nobody expects an artist’s retrospective to come to a narratively satisfying climax; it’s all about walking through, tarrying with a particular piece that strikes your fancy, trying to make sense of a particular motif or color scheme that seems to haunt several of the works, psychoanalyzing the artist based on what you think you see, or yes, if you’re me, maybe trying to crib an explanation from the writing on the placards or an exhibit catalog you pick up at the end. And on those criteria, Imprimatura delivers.

Sometimes a game’s title tells you exactly what you’re going to get. And so it is in this choice-based nature simulator, as you take a gentle stroll through nature to look for noteworthy avians while your tongue gently caresses Leo the Great.

If I wasn’t out of the Church before, that gag would earn an excommunication – sorry not sorry, as the kids say. No, as best I can tell from a bit of wiki-diving, the place got its name because some guy in Louisville named Pope had some salt licks on his riverside property. What the park loses in nominative exoticism it gains in natural beauty, at least according to the copious pictures (the author’s own) illustrating the game. It’s nothing fancy – there’s a bridge, some water, soccer fields, paths, grass, and trees – but I found it a pleasant place to make a virtual visit, especially since I’ve been living under a 105-degree heat dome for the past week. Oh, and there are birds, which are the whole point of the exercise!

The protagonist isn’t characterized by anything other than their love of birdwatching, which means the game presupposes that when you wander the park, you won’t want to spend time striking up conversations or kicking a ball around or getting exercise, and instead will have eyes and ears alert for feathered friends. I confess that this isn’t a hobby that’s ever appealed to me, but the author does a good job articulating why one might enjoy it. In each location you visit, you’ll get a sprinkling of flavor text setting the scene, an attractive photo (with thoughtfully-provided alt text), and a prompt to look closer and possibly spot a new bird. If you do, you’re rewarded with another nice pic of the avian in question, and a compact description of what’s uniquely interesting about this one in particular. Here’s one I liked:

"Looking through your binoculars, maybe 50 feet away you spot a bird walking head-first down a tree trunk…. A White-breasted Nuthatch. You love these goofy birds. You listen closely and hear the quiet “ha ha” sound it makes as it searches for bugs living in the bark. It flies from tree to tree, sometimes going up, sometimes upside down on the bottom of a horizontal branch."

And that’s it, that’s the game. You’re using a birding app – the game provides an external link to it if you’d like to download it yourself – which allows you to track what you’ve seen, and the game provides a quick summary once you decide you’ve had enough and leave the park, but there’s no checklist, no goals beyond the intrinsic ones of enjoying a walk and looking at as many different birds as you can find. There are a whole lot of them, from swallows to hawks to cardinals to vultures, and even as a layman I was impressed by the variety. The game’s also designed to be non-deterministic; sometimes you’ll revisit an area you’d been to previously and see that some new birds have taken up residence, which makes things feel less like an exercise in lawn-mowering. The often-confusing layout of the park also reduces any perceived gaminess – I found it hard to keep track of where I’d already been, and how different paths connected, which was frustrating at first but eventually I unclenched my jaw and just went with the flow.

So yeah, there’s nothing here that isn’t said on the tin. And unfortunately this isn’t a game that plays nicely on mobile – the bird pictures displayed for me at a super high resolution that drastically reduced the zoom and somehow blanked out most of the links. But if you’re at all interested in what birders see in their objects of obsession, you could do a lot worse than spending a few minutes with this grounded, low-key experience.

I was all set to rate this troll game a 1. Look, the question of what does and doesn’t count as interactive fiction is almost as old as I am at this point (that is to say, it’s old), and I at least find it singularly uninteresting; likewise, the questions of “what if the player’s desire to see all the game’s content is at odds with the diegetic incentives of the characters” and “does choice-based IF actually need choices” are pretty hoary. There’s room to say something interesting about them, I’m sure, but at this stage in the development of the medium, that takes some actual engagement and analysis of how these issues come up and play out, and how different kinds of players may experience them; lazily gesturing in their direction and calling it a day, which is the limit of UF’s ambitions, doesn’t cut it. Even “Leah Thargic” is low energy as transparent pseudonyms go (“Anna Apathy” was right there).

But then I saw from some forum discussion that there’s an aural component to the game, and went back and replayed with the sound on. I’m not one to be overly swayed by multimedia, but I gotta admit, the bathos the sound effects add to the narrative is enough to indicate at least some care went into this thing: take your 2 out of 10 and get out of here.

It’s no secret that I’m very interested by the ways limited parser games share design DNA with certain kinds of puzzley choice-based games as well as hearken back to the golden age of point-and-click graphic adventures – here’s the long version of the argument, if you’re interested – so it’s likewise unsurprising that I’m very interested in the games of Arthur DiBianca, who much be one of the acknowledged masters of the subgenre whether you’re judging on quality or quantity. While an analysis of his full oeuvre is well beyond the scope of a single review, I’d argue there’s a divide between his cornucopia games, which are overstuffed with unlockable gameplay options and often bring in ideas from other kinds of games – I’m thinking of Skies Above and its myriad clicker-inspired minigames, or Sage Sanctum Scramble and its potpourri of word puzzles, or the complex, roguelike systems of Black Knife Dungeon – and his cooler, minimalist games, which succeed by stripping the player’s tools way down and wringing every single puzzle idea out of this restricted palette – Inside the Facility’s mapquesting, or Temple of Shorgil’s statue-swapping.

A Very Strong Gland is of this latter school. You’re nobody special this time out – just a schlub abducted by a trio of aliens so they can run tests on you to assess your intelligence – and since their translation software only works one way, you can’t even talk back: all you’re able to do is walk around, look at stuff, and poke stuff (oh, and wait – there are lots of timing puzzles). Fortunately for the aliens, you’re a resourceful sort and that limited action set is more than enough to save the day once things go wrong with their little experiments. Their spaceship is small but dense, with a host of locked doors, helpful robots, capability-enhancing auras, and even more mysterious devices to master as you fix its broken systems. Even this description undersells how streamlined the game is, because its interface employs the single-keypress approach previously used in Vambrace of Destiny. There’s no need to press enter or type the full name of objects; the game automatically translates X T into EXAMINE TULIP or T O to TOUCH OUTLINE.

There’s nothing much in the way of incidental scenery here, and everything you find in the ship is mostly incomprehensible and abstract; most of the puzzles involve figuring out controls that are described as a thimble or a funnel or a scallop, but whose function is entirely divorced from those forms. And while the aliens can speak to you and occasionally give helpful hints about what to do next, their advice also requires quite a lot of interpretation. They’re charming little weirdos – I picture them talking like Andy Kaufman’s character in Taxi – but rather than provide much in the way of context or character engagement, they mostly just blurble on about their oblu or complaining that the shouter is broken.

I’ll confess that this combination of parsimonious mechanics and abstract theme made my playthrough of A Very Strong Gland an arid affair. The setting feels like an artificial test-bed for intellectual challenges, because diegetically that’s what it’s supposed to be, but this means I didn’t experience exploration as intrinsically rewarding separate from solving the puzzles. Those puzzles, meanwhile, often rely on trial-and-error experimentation with devices whose functions are intentionally obfuscated, which likewise felt less than engaging. This describes most puzzle-based games, I suppose, and I enjoy many of them, but I especially like it when solving a challenge gets me a new bit of story or character development, or when I’m able to quickly get through an obstacle because I’ve intuited a logical solution; here, both of those payoffs are mostly off the table.

I get that with such a restricted action set, you need to design puzzles not to be susceptible to trial-and-error, and I admit that the solutions on display here are clever ones – but I unfortunately found them dry and occasionally annoying, requiring great leaps in logic that often rely on paying attention to tiny, unexciting details, as well as being fiddly to implement (again, there a lot of timing puzzles, and the single-keystroke thing plus the lack of undo meant I made a bunch of mistakes shifting my aura and had to restart the relevant sequences). There are some puzzles here I did enjoy – helping one of the aliens conduct an EVA repair job built on stuff I’d previously learned in a reasonably intuitive way, for example – but I confess that I got through a bunch of them just looking at another player’s transcript for hints since the experimentation required to make progress sometimes felt exhausting.

This is a negative-sounding review of a game that’s solidly designed and implemented, and will I’m sure spark joy in a certain kind of player. But to me it’s primarily interesting as a case study in how far you can push the limited-parser approach before I lose interest: I’ve realized I much prefer those games of abundance, where simplifying the interface allows for new ideas and new kinds of gameplay to be put into effect, so that the restrictions feel additive rather than just jettisoning standard parser-game affordances without replacing them with something else.