Reviews by Mike Russo

Oh, what a lovely way to wrap up the main festival (I beta tested the remaining quartet of games)! After a rewarding but, I have to admit, somewhat grueling month of playing and reviewing, getting sucked into the Bones of Rosalinda is like sinking into a warm bath. This is another in a line of games from the author that import parser-y touches like an inventory, compass navigation, and a world model into a choice-based framework, and the resulting gameplay is something like the early-90s graphic adventures of my youth, with lots of scope to explore and experiment but no guess-the-verb flailing required. The game’s comedic chops make the comparison even more apt, with a high joke density that anticipates that you’ll try to hide a needle in a haystack for no reason and character names that left me smiling (the fact that the necromancer’s assistant is named Albert makes me laugh for reasons that I don’t feel capable of explaining) – but where some of the LucasArts classics could be too cool for school, TBR has an appealing cast of characters, from resolute hero skeleton Rosalinda to your brave-despite-himself mouse sidekick Piecrust, to the ogre chef who always thinks the best of people. Add in a clever set of puzzle mechanics hinging on Rosalinda’s ability to detach her limbs, and you’ve got something here for just about any lover of IF.

Admittedly, the quest you’re given from the off is relatively conventional – in a fuzzily-defined medieval fantasy world, you’ve got to stop a necromancer bent on no good by navigating his dungeon and bearding him in his lair – but the twist that he’s a newbie who hasn’t quite got the hang of the gig, and you play the first skeleton he’s managed to animate without managing to bend to his will, lends more than enough freshness to proceedings. The relatively straightforward opening also helps ease the player into the game, alongside the tutorial-like was the first set of challenges teach you about the game’s basic mechanics – by solving a gradually-escalating sequence of puzzles you get walked through how the inventory works, the different things you can accomplish by sending your limbs or skull off separately from your body (I feel like I’ve played other games where the player character has similar abilities, but I can’t think of any that have implemented it as smoothly and systematically as TBR), and how to switch perspectives to Piecrust. The game then opens up a bit, presenting some more complex puzzles and a larger set of rooms to explore, though not in an overwhelming way – a trick the game pulls repeatedly to keep the pacing tight and limit the number of objects and objectives at play at any point in time.

Since so much of the gameplay is puzzle-driven, it’s good that the quality here is very high. There’s a strong variety, since between Rosalinda’s multi-competent anatomy and Piecrust’s mousely attributes, you have a lot of potential tools to bring to bear, and the game doesn’t hit any one specific approach too heavily. There’s also a mix of funny object-based puzzles, as well as a couple that require thinking through your conversational approaches with some of the other denizens of the dungeon. One puzzle did strike me as a bit hard (Spoiler - click to show)(making one of your arms into an impromptu candlestick holder) though this might be down to the solution requiring you to use the inventory interface in a way I hadn’t previously tried, even though it’s clearly signposted. And I wished there was an automatic way to tell one of the main characters to follow the other, especially in the maze (don’t worry, it’s not that bad!) But overall the puzzles hit a satisfying level of difficulty, and nothing requires too much clicking around.

And as mentioned, the world and characters are just delightful. I laughed at the puffed-up demon who’s nonplussed when his decapitation of you doesn’t lead to very satisfying results (seeing you hop after your skull, he remarks “I thought only chickens could do that”). I gave out a little cheer when Piecrust dug deep to stand up for his friend, and another when I read the heartwarming ending. The game is a real treat, and I’m hoping the epilogue’s promise of more adventures to come for the dynamic due of Rosalinda and Piecrust comes true.

On paper, externoon should be the kind of thing I dig. It’s a grounded look at a woman trying to externalize her feeling of being adrift by traveling across the country by bus, having low-key encounters with fellow travelers and musing on her dysfunctional relationship with her sister. I would 100% pick up a novel with this summary on the back cover, so I was excited to see where this journey was going to take me. Unfortunately I found that the aimlessness wasn’t just confined to the protagonist; while there’s some good writing here and well-observed detail, I thought the author’s decisions about where to focus attention wound up neglecting character development and thematic progression, and the increasing number of errors and typos as the game went on suggested this is isn’t quite a final draft. I can see how the pieces could come together with a bit more time in development, but externoon isn’t there yet.

Admittedly, it opens strong. A major thread running through the game is the letters to her sister the protagonist composes in her head to apologize for leaving their shared apartment without saying goodbye. There’s a plain, direct quality to her voice that makes these letters compelling:

Dear Angie,

I woke up this morning at three o’clock. I know. I can hear Mom saying “that’s yesterday” in my head, too.

I couldn’t really sleep.

Remember when I told you I’d travel someday? That day is today. Please. Try not to worry. I’m OK. I think.

I’m sorry.

Kicking off the action with a trip to the liminal space of a bus terminal is also an effective choice; the protagonist is in motion, but it’s clear that the process of getting where she’s going will be time-consuming and provide plenty of time for reflection. And there’s a solid texture to the details, which rang true for me (I don’t have a driver’s license so I’ve spent some time traveling via long-distance bus).

As the story progressed, though, I found myself less engaged by it, largely because the protagonist’s character and the story’s themes were frustratingly vague. We get a sense of her internal monologue, beyond the aforementioned letter, but not much of this comes through in action. There are a number of set-piece incidents as she travels, where the narration slows down and gets very granular: a disagreement at a bus station water fountain, a conversation after the bus breaks down, an exchange at a coffee shop, and an extended sequence of going to a bar and meeting some folks. Nothing much happens in any of these in terms of plot, which doesn’t bother me much; for a travelogue like this, it’s all about the slow accumulation of events adding up. But nor do they amount to much in terms of the protagonist’s character arc – she’s passive and diffident to a fault, whether she’s witnessing but failing to intervene in an argument, enjoying meeting her seat-mate but also wanting to keep some distance, getting dragged to a bar but sort of enjoying it once she’s there…

To a certain degree this fits the characterization the game has set out, I suppose, which positions the protagonist as someone dissatisfied by the way she’s just drifting through life – despite the fact that she’s taken decisive action by leaving home, it could be that we’re meant to see her nonetheless repeating old patterns. But if that’s the case, it’s undercut by the fact that she makes another significant decision at the end of the game, which felt to me largely unmotivated and disconnected to anything that had previously happened. The high degree of detail given to comparatively in-depth recitals of quotidian events isn’t matched by similar attention paid to what’s going on in the protagonist’s head, so I felt like I’d have to infer a whole lot to be able to construct a coherent mental or emotional journey for the character.

One area where this really hit home for me was race. It plays a significant role in the game – Lucas is from Trinidad, and attention is paid to how he navigates social space as a Black man – but it’s unclear what race the protagonist is meant to be. From the names given to her and her sister (Liliana and Angie) and the fact that they live in Queens, it’s plausible she’s meant to be a Latina – but on the other hand she also seems very naïve about the US immigration system when Lucas shares some of his experiences, and she’s on a trip to rural Oregon which from my understanding can be a pretty unfriendly place for nonwhite folks. It’s certainly not a requirement for a work of IF to specify the race of its main character, but given that the omission makes it hard to make sense of some of her interactions with the other characters, it’s yet another decision that muddles what externoon is trying to say.

(Speaking of things that are muddled, having finished the game, I also have no idea what the title is supposed to mean – that’s a little thing but it bothers me immensely, and seems indicative of the larger point about the thinness of the game’s thematics).

As mentioned, partially this could be a sign of the author running out of time to bring the game in for a landing, as typos proliferate as the story proceeds. The clearest indication of this underdone quality, though, is that the version currently up on the Spring Thing site has a progress-breaking bug midway through – fortunately, Autumn Chen has created a fixed version, available here. There weren’t any other bugs that I came across, but I did find gameplay frequently annoying nonetheless due to the lack of signposting for which hyperlinks provided additional detail or flavor, and which progressed the story to the next passage (I didn’t notice any branching choices). Since it’s impossible to go back to previous passages, playing quickly became an exercise in trying to get the complete story by guessing which link would move the narrative onward and avoiding that one – the logic was sufficiently obscure that I guessed wrong a lot of the time, though.

This is only one reason I found externoon frustrating though. There are interesting conflicts set up, I like the setting, and the author’s clearly got some writing chops. But it doesn’t feel like they were able to clearly identify what they wanted to communicate in the story, and edit it accordingly; it reads like one of those first drafts where the writer is feeling their way towards their themes, occasionally getting lost noodling around in a scene or getting interested in a character without quite knowing how to fit the pieces together into an overall plan, and then not having the chance to fix things up in a second draft.

An arty, experimental piece, The Fall of Asemia engages with timely themes: I wish its melancholy story of an occupying army destroying a city’s way of life didn’t have quite so many contemporary resonances both literal and metaphorical, but here we are. I felt these connections all the more clearly because the game doesn’t wholly position the player as a participant in these events, but rather as a scholar exhausted by the effort of translating these records and bearing witness to the crimes they memorialize. I don’t know when the game was written, and whether the author intended to draw parallels to how Westerners have been following the distant but visceral war in Ukraine – and certainly there’s no way for it to have anticipated the past couple of days, as we Americans have been grappling with how far a self-righteous minority will go to dismantle our rights (this review was written when the Supreme Court's draft opinion striking down all abortion rights was leaked) – but its downbeat vibe definitely met me where I’ve been at.

The mood conjured by the translated fragments is at once dreamlike and violently, even harshly, immediate, and is the main draw here. That’s especially the case when the game turns to depicting the feelings of the conquered population (note the mimesis-enhancing translator’s aside in the first excerpt):

"The language they use here—it tastes like blood from a bit tongue. I tire so easily now. Our ears are tired, too. [… here, the ligatures don’t look Asemic—cf. the Eth ms.] Tell me, is Asemia really dead? It is merely drowning, yes?

…

"The strange vowels of this province flood my mouth like chewing on leather. Someone has painted the sky a different color. The other wives gather in circles like quail, and sometimes I can’t remember how to thread a needle. Those conquerors are fools. Soon enough, Asemia will rupture their hearts until they can’t tell the difference between blood and wine."

You only get a paragraph or two in each passage before moving on to another narrator, who provides another view of the static situation, so there’s no strong sense of narrative development within the records. Instead, progression comes within the frame, as the translator tries on different approaches to understanding the texts and sinking into increasing depression at the tides of history.

This is where the game’s interactivity comes in, because before each passage you’re given a choice of four to six abstract glyphs, each of which you can toggle between one of three different versions with a click. The set of glyphs you choose impact how the passage is translated, and since you loop through the same set of records three times over the course of the game, you can see how these selections change the text. It’s an interesting mechanic, but it didn’t wind up working that well for me as a model for how translation works. For one thing, since the glyphs are completely nonrepresentational, the player has to choose blindly, which seems in tension with the way a translator has to weigh the choice of reducing an ambiguous word to just one specific correlate. For another, the shifts in the texts feel like they go beyond differences of interpretation or emphasis and into straight-out different meaning. Here, for example, are the three distinct possible ways the first record can be translated (with the caveat that they can be mixed and matched if you don’t click each glyph the same number of times):

"In the city after the war, there were flowers made of shrapnel. They stank like the smoke from the bombed buildings. I tried to pick up loose stars from the shards of city glass.

"In the city after the war, there were women who danced on blood. They swayed like the sausages left hanging in the butcher’s window. I fought to save our dog until my husband, spitting bile, grabbed my arm.

"In the city after the war, there were men who sang like bones. They forgot about the river with its bloated bodies. I could barely walk away from the library’s books, open and dead in the street, like shot doves."

These are all arresting images, but it’s hard to reverse-engineer a plausible language where the difference between “men”, “women”, and “flowers” is hard to resolve, much less the highly-divergent last sentence. I don’t want to harp on this too much, since the game is clearly focused on communicating its mood and themes, rather than providing a simulation of what it’s like to translate a dead language – but it did feel like a misalignment between the game’s fiction and its ludic elements.

Beyond this fairly abstract niggle, though, I for once don’t have much to complain about here; I didn’t exactly enjoy my time spent wallowing in the bitter, fading memories of the citizens of now-vanished Asemia, but by displacing some of the stressful things going on in real life right now into a fictional context, it was very much cathartic for me. Recommended, but maybe don’t go doomscrolling on Twitter right after you finish.

Has an IF sub-genre ever gone from the ridiculous to the sublime to the ridiculous as efficiently as the one-move game? To my knowledge Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die inaugurated it, efficiently combining its title, walkthrough, and single joke into one. There things could have languished but for Sam Barlow’ Aisle, which crammed a short story into its compact runtime, letting the player explore radically different aspects of a quotidian situation depending on where they directed their attention and efforts. The baton was quickly picked up – by Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle, which doubled down on the in-jokes.

This focus on comedy makes sense, though – with only one move there’s not much space to create character arcs or a deep, well-realized world, so a gag-generating jack-in-the-box is a worthy structure. And this is the structure Hinterlands: Marooned adopts. After a well-done intro bottom-lines your predicament – you’re an alien astronaut crash-landed on a wild planet and washed up on an isolated island – you have the leisure to examine your nearly-bare surroundings, which consist primarily of something with a made-up sci-fi name with an apostrophe. Then once you do pretty much anything other than look or examine, the game ends and you can try something different.

I’m being vague here since this is a one-joke game and spoiling the joke means spoiling the game. Before I retreat behind fuzzy-text, though, I’ll say that I think Marooned pretty much does what it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do doesn’t fully leverage the format. One part of success at a one-move game is deep implementation, which the game does well on – beyond most objects having parts and subparts and a large number of game-ending actions being recognized, the bits that made me laugh the most weren’t the main joke but the responses to more random commands:

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Crazy, Daddy-O!"

The other part, though, is presenting a candy-box of variety, delighting the player with unexpected outcomes and novel responses to their one-and-done actions. Here, everything pretty much plays out as a slight variation on a single note, and while the different endings are inventive and well-written (albeit less PG-rated than I would have preferred), they’re much of a muchness. So depending on the degree to which you wind up enjoying the single flavor on offer, this might be more of a five-minute game than a twenty minute one.

OK, spoilers to wrap up:

(Spoiler - click to show)So the unpronounceable thing on the island with you is a monster (happily, the parser allows you to refer to it as such rather than typing out the full thing each time). It’s an impressively-detailed and ghoulishly-described monster, with all sorts of ways to fold, spindle, and mutilate your hapless spaceman as you try to escape and/or fight back. There’s an impressive array of stuff you can try – beyond simply attacking the creature, you can try to tie its tentacles into knots, pry under its exoskeletal armor, poke at its eye, and seal closed its acid-snorting snout, to say nothing of various more friendly and/or amorous approaches you can make to the thing, or attempting to flee. But of course all that ever happens is you got spattered like a blood-filled water balloon.

I can see the right kind of player getting a charge of anarchic glee at ticking off all the different ways to die, as they’re as lovingly described as a gore-filled Heavy Metal cartoon. I have to admit this isn’t me, though, and beyond that I felt like there was a dearth of non-attacking stuff to try, so after the first fifteen minutes I felt less like I was joyfully experimenting and more that I was lawnmowering through all the different parts of the monster to try to thwack. That’s mostly on me for letting the joke outstay its welcome, though.

Baby on Board’s blurb foregrounds what sounds like a cool idea – its Perplexity engine aims to create parser games playable entirely via a voice interface, which could be a step forward on accessibility for visually-impaired folks and others for whom manual entry of text isn’t easy. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, though, right now my circumstances are such that typing is way easier than listening to audio and/or talking to my computer, meaning I played it entirely in the traditional way. And experienced as a regular piece of parser IF, unfortunately there’s not a lot that feels new or interesting about the game, both because of awkwardness in its implementation and sketchiness in its design.

Starting with the second part first, the premise here does seem fun, and as the parent of a young kid, relatable – you’re tasked with getting a baby to daycare (you’re sometimes told it’s preschool, but as the tot isn’t talking yet that’s probably not right), and given the tendency of small children to cause chaos, I could see the story proceeding in a farcical direction. From the get-go, though, things are sufficiently vague that I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. For one thing, you start the game outside the house of someone named Rosa, with her car in the driveway; when you go in she greets you, tells you to do a good job with the drop-off, and leaves. Is the baby ours? Is Rosa our current or former partner? Is this even our house? None of this is explained, and while I guess you don’t need that detail, it feels decidedly odd to be missing these basic pieces of context.

I stayed befuddled through the rest of the game’s running time. Rosa appears to be an inventor, so after scooping up the baby (disappointed to learn that I couldn’t KISS BABY), his diaper bag, and his favorite binky, I also made my way into her workshop, and found a mysterious tent that, after I futzed around with it some, turned out to be a teleporter that took me back to the driveway. Figuring I had what I needed, I loaded into the car, but when I started it it told me it couldn’t leave until I locked up the house (it’s some kind of self-driving smartcar).

After dutifully heading back in to close all the doors, I tried again, only to find that the car had somehow gone missing. Guessing this is what the teleporter was supposed to be for, I used the tent again and found the car was now in an empty lot somewhere, with the narration telling me that the thief (what thief?) must have abandoned it. Then I drove to daycare, dropped off the baby, and the game ended. I got a perfect score so I don’t think I missed anything, but as a story this is deeply unsatisfying – there must have been some excitement with that thief, but I missed all of it – and as a puzzle-solving experience, all I had to do was unlock a bunch of doors and figure out how a very simple device worked.

If this had been all there was to Baby on Board, I’d be chalking it up to a simple, inoffensive test-bed that doesn’t make the most of its premise. Unfortunately, technical issue with the game and its parser engine made this whole experience anything but simple. First, the Windows installer took about ten minutes to load, without displaying a status bar or pop-up window indicating that it was still working. Once that hurdle was done, the game started up easily enough, but there was a noticeable lag any time I typed in any input – possibly this was because it was reading out the responses to my actions, but I couldn’t find a way to mute itself and speed things up.

Most annoyingly, the engine purports to implement a natural language approach that eschews the traditional shortcuts of parser IF. At this point I realized that Perplexity was the same engine used in Kidney Kwest in last year’s IF Comp – I’d struggled with its idiosyncrasies then, and while it felt a tiny bit smoother this time, I continue to think this approach is really awkward and likely to be less accessible for newcomers to IF and those trying to play by voice. For one thing, it’s inconsistent about understanding commands where “the” is omitted – sometimes it’ll automatically fill that in, but in the tutorial, UNLOCK DOOR simply failed where UNLOCK THE DOOR allowed me to progress. The system’s rules for providing detail about objects are also incredibly mechanical. I usually type X ME as one of the first things I do in a game, to get a sense of who I’m meant to be playing. Here’s what BOB gave me:

"You is a person, a physical object, a place, a thing, and an animal. It also has a hand, a hand, a backside."

Attempts to learn more about Rosa, the baby, or her house and belongings, were similarly cut short by the parser’s overliteral way of conveying information. There also appear to be some bugs – at one point I tried to leave the tent by typing GET OUT and received an incomprehensible string of letters and punctuation in reply.

Making parser IF easier to get into is God’s work, of course – for this particular genre to survive, it needs to get more accessible. And while there are lots of folks who’ve tried to do that within the confines of the existing authoring tools by adding tutorials or other player-friendly shortcuts, there’s definitely room to think about more outside-the-box approaches like voice interfaces and natural language processing. Sadly though, I don’t think Baby on Board takes any real steps forward on those fronts, and even qua game it’s a pretty bare-bones affair.

What with parenting a teething baby whose sleep schedule is as high-stakes as it is random, my life right now is not especially conducive to planning leisure activities, which made it a close-run thing whether I was going to get to play this multiplayer Twine game before the festival closed (I made a joke in the IntFic matchmaking thread that regardless of the merits of Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by Travis Moy, Trying to Play “Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by Travis Moy” by Travis Moy was unconventionally-paced yet incredibly suspenseful – and yes, I’m reduced to recycling my own jokes).

Happily, I was able to connect with another player and got to enjoy two run-throughs of the game, which isn’t like any other IF I’ve played. It has some similarities with the multiplayer game in last year’s IFComp, Last Night of Alexisgrad, true, including an asymmetric structure that gives you a choice of character up front – you pick which of the eponymous Ma Tiger’s foster children, dutiful son and EMT Jekusheke or prodigal daughter with dark secrets Ebiashe, tickles your fancy. But while that game required swapping codes with your partner after each choice, which could be a little cumbersome, Ma Tiger integrates everything smoothly, so that after one person pastes in a code to join the hosted game, play is seamless with only the occasional “waiting” prompt indicating that your partner needs to make a choice before you can proceed (I only saw these rarely, and just for a short time, indicating a lot of care went into minimizing any differences in length of text between the two perspectives). The game is also pitched cooperatively, which I enjoyed more than Alexisgrad’s competitive approach – sure, the two siblings haven’t seen each other in a long time so there’s the opportunity for some conflict, but mostly I was able to focus on playing my character collaboratively, rather than jockey for advantage.

There’s also a timed mechanic on offer – at the climax of the story, you’re thrust into a quick-moving situation where you only have thirty or sixty seconds to make a choice. This adds some nice pressure to proceedings and underlines the gravity of the situation, without being overly-taxing on the reflexes (I was usually able to pick a solid choice after four or five seconds, so even though I’m a fast reader I think most players should do fine).

For all its gameplay innovations, though – and to be clear, they’re real and they’re compelling – MTTT does play like a proof of concept. Don’t get me wrong, the writing is good, setting a fun cyberpunk-noir vibe from the get-go:

"Her car is ancient, one of the models from before electronics crept into every nook and cranny… She’s ditched her phone, too, left it with a friend back home. If she dozes off and wheels off the road, drives into a ditch or overturns herself on a rock, nobody will know and nobody will come. No. It’s not dangerous; the roads are straight and empty, and the terror of isolation only that, terror. Soon she’ll have real danger to deal with. The problems of running from your past. Or, perhaps, the problems of facing up to it."

There’s also some nicely understated world- and character-building, with moused-over phrases providing a bit of perspective or context from your chosen viewpoint character. And the initial segment of verbal jousting is well-realized; while it seems to more or less wind up in the same place every time, and you need to stick to the overall personality of the character you’re playing, there are interesting choices that feel impactful along the way, like how much to share when catching up with your long-lost sibling.

But after this sequence, you’re thrust into the timed bit, where it feels like the asymmetry between the two characters leaves one with much more interesting stuff to do, and more impactful choices to make, than the other (that character also has more going on in their backstory, and better insight into the mystery of what’s going on with Ma). The denouement also feels a bit rushed, with all the big plot revelations bottom-lined into two paragraphs rather than coming out in dialogue, and one of the big variables in that timed section (Spoiler - click to show)(whether or not you’re able to save Ma’s dog, King) not even mentioned in either of my playthroughs.

Those critiques boil down to saying I wanted more, though – per the author’s note, this was all pulled together in a month, which is seriously impressive for pioneering a brand-new model of IF and having some solid character and gameplay work in there besides. As it stands, MTTT’s formal innovations are its most engaging features, but I can see the technical and design framework it showcases becoming a launchpad for more robust, fleshed-out games to come, which is an exciting prospect indeed.

I’ve always thought that it must be really tricky to write in the gothic mode. Play it too straight, and you get a standard horror story where everybody’s wearing a costume for some reason. Steer too much the other way, and you get Gary Oldman vamping “I never drink… vine” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (let me be clear: this movie is completely dumb and I love it to pieces). Success means keeping the balance between the extremes, but a plodding, boring stability won’t work: to truly be gothic, a work needs to go all out, constantly teetering at the edge of going too far.

Sweetpea takes on this challenge, though, and makes it look easy – its lush, hothouse prose is deliciously creepy and deliciously engaging, keeping me at the edge of my seat from the story’s grabby beginning through its many twists and turns. The plot is fun, and interactivity is cannily deployed to heighten player engagement through what eventually reveals itself to be a linear story. But it’s the writing that’s the real star of the show. Consider that opening, as the teenaged protagonist looks down at the figure – possibly her father, possibly an uncanny doppelganger – suing for entrance into her home in the middle of the night:

"You aren’t too high off of the ground, and with the full moon smiling above clouds scudding lowly over the rolling hills, there should be enough light to catch off of his hair, to illuminate his face."

Then upon considering opening the window to call out:

"Should you? The glass squeaks beneath your touch, dribbles of icy condensation slicking the inside of your wrist as the pane warms with your body heat. If you yell loudly enough, he should be able to hear you."

This just works – there are lots of adjectives and lots of clauses, stretching the sentences to a languorous span, and each is chosen with a careful eye to its sensual appeal. The plot tropes also hit the right notes: the protagonist is a sheltered adolescent, used to being left alone in a genre-appropriate big house by her often-absent, eccentric father (who, we’re told “doesn’t talk to you about his experiments”, and by the way, happens to do a lot of laundry).

There’s a lot that’s only alluded to, or conveyed only by implication – the creepiest bit of the game is how casually the narrator begins mentioning her friend Michael (Spoiler - click to show)(while apparently friendly, he’s an archangel portrayed with some fidelity to medieval traditions, with multiple shifting eyes and rainbow coloring, which is eerie as all get-out). There are some flat-out scary set-pieces too, like the two encounters with the maybe-father, which I won’t spoil in detail.

The player has a good number of choices throughout, whether through inline links that allow you to dig deeper into the protagonist’s perceptions or memories, or end-of-passage boxed options that allow you to pick dialogue, or decide which parts of the house to visit. You don’t have total freedom, and some of the protagonist’s choices felt off-kilter to me – she seems to rush into thinking there’s something wrong with her maybe-father very quickly, but at the same time thinks nothing of taking a nap with his identity still unresolved – but this helps underline that she’s probably not traditionally sane.

There was one place, though, where it seemed like game’s logic got a little tripped up – my second visit to the father’s study had a description that didn’t seem to acknowledge I’d already been there and knew it was empty. I also wound up thinking the story could have been either slightly tightened or slightly extended; after a long sequence wrapping up the initial situation, there’s a short, hallucinatory interlude before a quick finale. The interlude felt like it ended just as I was starting to settle into, though, so I think the pacing would have worked better if it had either had room to establish a new status quo, or had been bottom-lined in order to get to the final conflict more quickly.

Hopefully it’s clear these are very minor critiques of a self-assured, effective debut game. Sweetpea sets and sustains a goosebumping, creepy-crawly mood, and leaves enough mysteries enticingly unplumbed – how does the protagonist know Michael? What’s the deal with the paintings? What happened to her mother? – to keep it running through my head even a couple of days after I played it. It’s a tense, well-written pleasure.

Confession time: I recognize that there’s some real heft to the complaint, stated forcefully by A Single Ouroboros Scale and by many other games and folks too, that the IF community is too enamored of jokey puzzley medium-dry-goods parser games, and there’s more thematic, literary, and even systemic development happening in other parts of the scene. But – of course there was a but coming – I’d humbly submit that the proper level of enamor-ness for such things is definitely nonzero, because when I come across a game like The Legend of Horse Girl, part of my brain recognizes that this is all just USE OBJECT A ON BARRIER B stuff wrapped up in joke-a-minute delivery, but the rest of said brain is having enough fun not to care.

It helps that the setting here is a weird west that takes advantage of the familiar tropes to deliver some clever satire while also putting a distinctively gothic, genderpunk twist on proceedings. My notes file is filled up with little copy-and-pasted bon mots, from the way you go up against twin baddies, Butch McCreedy and his sibling Femme McCreedy, to the snake-oil salesman’s patter noting that his product is sovereign against ills including “juggler’s despair”, to the just-slipped-in-there detail that the bartender is “a tall slender woman with hands like enormous spiders.” The numerous characters are a joy to interact with, and while a simple TALK TO command gives you everything you need to know, they’ve got lots of additional fun dialogue if you try to ASK ABOUT different stuff. Add in a big-bad who’s got enough legally savvy to ensure his “can’t be killed by any man of woman born” deal-with-the-devil has a definitions clause to take care of women and non-binary people too, and you have a funny, self-aware game that kept me smiling through its one hour playtime.

The puzzles are also calculated to delight. There’s a reasonable degree of openness to explore the medium-sized setting and poke at the various puzzles, though they’re mostly arranged in a chain. At any point in time you’ll only have a few options for things to do and a modestly-sized inventory of one-use items, which means that the momentum generally stays high. Some of the challenges are reasonably familiar – you’ll need to gather three ingredients for a noxious, alcoholic brew in order to win a drinking contest, which makes for a straightforward scavenger hunt – while others are more esoteric (it’s heavily clued that you need a bezoar to win said contest, but the process for getting one is pretty obscure). While I did get stuck on that last puzzle, which I think did need better signposting, for the most part the game really nails the balance between being easy enough to allow for quick progress, but tricky enough that the player feels clever for figuring out what to do next.

The one thing holding LHG back is that it could use just a bit more tightening and bug-fixing. While I didn’t hit any game-breakers, there were enough things in need of polishing to make me hope for a post-festival release. Sometimes commands didn’t lead to any response, just spitting out a blank command prompt (LISTENing in the plaza, DRINK CACTUS); a significant weapon was missing a description, and some parser fussiness led to this who’s-on-first moment:

SAW BOARDS
What do you want to saw the boarded-up door with?

SAW
What do you want to saw?

BOARDS
What do you want to saw the boarded-up door with?

And one last nitpick: my Californian pride requires me to note that the town should probably be San Diablo, not Santa. But while these niggles made my playthrough a little rougher than I wanted it to be, they didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the heck out of this game – sure, it’s relatively straightforward IF, but there’s nothing plain-vanilla about Legend of Horse Girl.

Folks remember Indigo Prophecy, right? It was Quantic Dream’s breakthrough game, a studio which later gained even more attention for Heavy Rain, Detroit: Become Human, and Being a Complete Garbage Fire of a Workplace. But going back to the beginning, Indigo Prophecy was cool because it immersed the player in an immediately-gripping mystery, with your protagonist waking up from a dissociative event to realize they’d just murdered someone; starting from your desperate attempts to cover your tracks, the story allowed you to slowly peel back the layers of a sinister conspiracy, with clues to the true nature of what was going on always remaining elusively out of reach.

Then you got to the midpoint of the game, the developers ran out of money and/or ideas, and the back half of the narrative saw your everyman protagonist develop superpowers and win a three-way kung-fu struggle against a Mayan human-sacrifice cult and the physical personification of the internet.

Even leaving aside the let’s-just-say-problematic elements here, a fundamental problem is that nobody who enjoyed the low-key, street-level mystery the opening promised wanted what the second half of the game was offering. Frustrating player’s expectations can lead to exciting twists if it’s done right, but yank the rug too much, and folks will check out even if the individual elements are sound, is the lesson.

The connection here is that while Super Mega Tournament Arc! seems to promise one kind of story, from its blurb, NES-style graphics, and enthusiastic title, it winds up delivering something quite different – actually, two or three things. And while there’s some good writing and individually engaging pieces, I felt like the whole was less than the sum of its parts; as the ending kept escalating and throwing more and more narrative shocks, I found myself wishing to rewind time and go back to when this was just the story of a simple gladiator-cyborg fighting their way to the top.

That opening part of the game is I think the most effective. It’s a little slow-paced, as the first-act training sequence stretches on for a while, but the storytelling is effective, as the backstory for your plucky fighter is gradually revealed, you pick practice options to determine your style in the ring (choosing between lawful, entrepreneurial, and individualistic – more or less relying on discipline, scrappiness, and defiance, respectively), and your lovable-stereotype trainer helps you figure out what’s what. True, there’s a jarring moment where a white-cloaked patron shows up and drops some mystery on you, as well as gifting you a weird death mask, but on the whole the sports-movie cliches hit their beats well. The prose here, and throughout the game, is solid, though never quite as over the top as the exclamation-marked title made me expect – I think it’s down to personal taste whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though I thought it fit the unexpectedly low-key vibe.

The second act sees you thrust into the arena, running through a series of fights against colorfully-costumed competitors. I don’t think it’s possible to lose, but each bout is dramatic, and escalates the challenge and the stakes; the exact approach you take to win also depends heavily on the choices you make during training, which gives the first act a pleasing retrospective weight. Again, it’s maybe a little long – six fights is a lot – but I was jazzed to see where the climax was headed.

The third act is where things went off the rails for me, though. I’m going to spoiler-block the specifics, but suffice to say the story makes a hard left into a very different genre. (Spoiler - click to show)Rather than a cyberpunk sports movie, it turns out you’re in a Norse-themed superhero one, as the patron uses magical artifacts of the Aesir to defeat the mob boss who organized the tournament, take their ring which is literally Draupnir from Norse myth, and then threatens to use it to bring about Ragnarok. The issues here aren’t confined to genre coherence, though: the mysterious patron also takes over the narrative, in the way that an annoying GMPC can sideline the player characters in a tabletop RPG session. There are also some fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans that similarly feel like they come out of nowhere in a game that hadn’t been especially meta to that point.

Eventually the good guys win, and the story gets around to circling back to the personal stakes that motivated your character to enter the arena at the first place, but by that point I had a hard time feeling engaged; I felt like the protagonist’s struggles, their relationship with their family, and the close dynamic they’d built with their trainer had been too thoroughly revealed as unimportant to what the story was actually about, so this was too little, too late. I’d definitely play enough game by this author because the fundamentals of each act are strong – to say nothing of the cool pixel art – I just hope they tone down their imagination next time and recognize when less is more!

Immediately after playing Hypercubic Time-Warp All-go-rhythmic Synchrony, I came across another game with challenging bleed-through between art and artist: A Single Ouroboros Scale is primarily an archive of the Jots (lightly-fictionalized tweets) of IF author Algie Freyir, who has many overt similarities to IF author Naomi Norbez (who goes by Bez), who wrote SOS. Fittingly for a protagonist named after the eponymous mouse in Flowers for Algernon, Algie’s latest Jots show him struggling with rapidly-decaying mental faculties, including a failing memory; per the author’s notes, this affliction is also affecting Bez, meaning that Algie’s desperate attempts to assess and even safeguard his legacy take on a terrifying, poignant power, since none of this is theoretical.

The frame here is reminiscent of that used in one of Bez’s previous games, the Dead Account – the protagonist is a nameless volunteer trying out for a place with an archiving project that’s maintaining a backup of the IF community’s Jots since the main site has closed down. Rather than preserving information, though, the project director – your potential boss – seems more intent on destroying it by imposing a significance test on posters, and deleting the Jots of those who fail it. The business of the game, then, has you reviewing 8 years of Algie’s Jots and then facing the binary choice of whether or not his account, which is framed as being low-rated, should be deleted.

This of course doesn’t make much logical sense – how does someone who believes in restrictive curation wind up in charge of an archiving project, especially when the deletion can save at most a few thousand words of text (he also misgenders Algie in the final sequence, cementing his status as a villain)? The stakes of this decision for the notional protagonist are also quite low – there’s a suggestion that joining the project will somewhat enhance their standing in the IF community, but that’s pretty thin gruel. But this setup is very effective as to Algie, as this record of his participation in the community is threatened with oblivion – and while in theory his games would survive on whatever the fictional IFDB analogue is, of course all we see of him are his Jots meaning the stakes feel total. And while it’s hard to imagine any good-faith player sincerely picking the “delete” option at the end, putting the player in a position to make such a decision works very well to implicate them in the processes by which the IF community determines who is and isn’t worthy of remembrance.

Overall though this layer is relatively thin, and the main action of the game involves reading, and reacting to, Algie’s Jots. And on these terms the game definitely needs to be judged a success, because I think most players will have many, strong reactions to the Jots. Many of them are very personal, charting Algie’s journey towards understanding and embracing his trans identity and falling away from his Christian faith. Descriptions of the games he’s working on, his influences, and artistic aspirations are also really compelling, enlivened by repeated allusions to two poems – an Emily Dickinson one about the miraculous and weighty responsibilities of being a flower, and one by Rebecca Elson about dark matter but also touching on death and the possibility of resurrection. And of course there are the heart-rending final ones charting Algie’s despair as his mind disintegrates. There are some good funny bits along the way, too, despite the darkness of the game’s progression – Algie’s response to folks telling him to stop talking about personal stuff so much is that he’s “gonna complain about parsers SO much and SO many of you are gonna be pissed,” which made me laugh.

The main subject, though, is the IF community, and the trajectory of Algie’s attitude towards it shifting from one of bright-eyed excitement at finding a set of fellow-artists and a potential audience for his writing, through gradual disillusionment as his games are ignored or met with patronizing uninterest from most of the community, through desperate, vituperative anger at the prospect that his work will be forgotten and these years of engagement will produce no legacy. From the specificity here, as well as the out-of-game author’s notes, it’s clear we’re meant to engage with these critiques not just according to the fictional frame where they chart out a tragic character arc, but also reflect on what they say about the real-world, Jot-free IF community.

This is an important goal, and I do think many of the criticisms land – and probably would land with even more force if I’d been around during the bad old days of the Twine Wars. Still, I think embedding them in the fictional construct of SOS undercuts the power of many of these arguments, and can make them sometimes frustrating. We’re only able to see one side of the conversations, and Algie’s complaints are sometimes vague and hard to connect with real-world people, incidents, and behaviors – this is understandable given the fictionalized, in-character nature of the Jots, as well as by a laudable desire not to call out specific people, but I found it put the arguments in something of an uncanny valley, too real to appreciate solely within the game’s made-up world but too far afield from reality to be conducive to concrete, specific action. For example, the project director’s dismissal of Algie, and folks working in hypertext in general, is really slippery:

"You know, keeping creators whose work are more relevant to the growth of the IF scene. Offshoots are ok, too experimental not as much. We’re also leaning more towards parsers, considering how important they are to the community, compared to the hypertext stuff going on outside of the main IF circles. Nothing against hypertext obviously, but I just haven’t seen much development there compared to parsers, and neither has the community."

“Growth”, “offshoots”, “too experimental”, “important”, “development” – these important words aren’t elaborated on or defined, nor am I finding it easy to map them to critical conversations I’ve personally seen. There’s also a Manichean view of the community as either “parser” or “hypertext/Twine”, which doesn’t take account of a contemporary scene where many players, and even authors, move between them – though much of this seems to me as about importing parser sensibilities into choice-based frameworks, which per SOS’s values might be seen as a colonizing or at least tokenizing development. And similarly, it’s hard not to see Algie’s blunt dismissal of parser games (“I don’t get it but you do you I guess? Like I said, never liked them very much… But you do you and I’ll do me”) as symmetric with the disinterest with which others greet his work – of course there’s nothing unfair about saying responsibilities look different for less marginalized vs. more marginalized members of a community, but this subtlety isn’t pulled out in the game.

Again, for a fictionalized polemic, this is completely understandable, even notwithstanding the constraining circumstances Bez’s medical condition has had on the game’s composition. And he’s also clear that these arguments can be taken in different ways, and is primarily focused on generating, rather than resolving, discussion – in the final notes, he says:

"The JAVP and Robert Evans’s vision/execution could be an “IF dystopia” as one beta tester put it, or an alternate future closer to our reality—up to you, but I do want to raise the question of how IF history is remembered/recorded."

I have to say, even after all these caveats, sometimes I did feel annoyed and thought SOS was taking some cheap shots. It’s hard to ignore the fact that I’m one of the cisgendered, straight, white, middle-aged, male parser authors who are the clearly-signposted bad guys here, so it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that rather than being a completely disinterested and fair reader, my feeling that these critiques aren’t fully relevant and persuasive are biased by some defensiveness. I haven’t seen too many reviews of SOS out in the wild and the ones I have are generally from folks with backgrounds apparently similar to my own; I’m very eager to see what others coming at it from a different perspective might think of the game.

Wrapping up by going back to Algie, though, there’s definitely self-awareness and clarity on some of the tensions inherent to his desires, especially in the really well-written final sequence of Jots. Here he reflects on the contradiction that gives SOS its title:

"Does anybody ever die satisfied? I’m pretty sure no matter how successful you are or big you get, you got loose ends SOMEWHERE. And that’s kinda reassuring? But I also feel like I gotta die “right”/“well”, y’know? Which means seeking satisfaction there. But I won’t be satisfied. But I keep trying. Endless ouroboros.

"And I’lll be replaced. I know that. Once I stop making stuff or die somebody’s gonna pick up where I left off and take over. The internet’s full of people clamoring for attention on their work, including me. And I’m replaceable by any of them."

Both pieces of this are true; we all want to be remembered, and we’ll all be forgotten (though given society’s biases, some of us will have an easier time lasting longer in the memory than others). Finishing SOS, I thought about my twin sister, who died two years ago. Afterwards, the Department of Defense named a reasonably significant award after her (she helped run the military’s sexual assault prevention and response programs), and I felt pride that her memory will live on this way. But of course, in another ten years odds are nobody involved will have any idea who she is, and her name on the award won’t have any real meaning. And in another twenty, odds are that they’ll rename it again.

I also thought about a poll conducted in the UK 1929, about which authors would still be read a century hence, in 2029. Number one went to John Galsworthy, who’s now a footnote to history[1]; Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, and James Joyce were absent or near the bottom of the list.

What counts as enough of a legacy to be satisfied? And if the worm can eventually turn, who are the ones who are turning it? SOS doesn’t provide answers to any of this, but I’ll certainly remember it asking the questions.

1: He wrote the Forstye Saga, which as a person who’s read a lot of dead white males I only know because of a middling Masterpiece Theater adaptation from the early aughts.