Reviews by Mike Russo

Out of Scope tells a story of twin siblings brought into deadly conflict. Reared by a prominent military family, their parents try to push them apart for fear of an obsessive love between them that might border on the romantic; the son is trained to be a soldier, despite his disinclination to violence, while the far-more-vicious daughter is shunted into peaceable work. Their domestic psychodrama is soon caught up in great-power politicking, in a world that may differ from ours in the details – all of the country names are imagined – but is otherwise quite similar – there’s colonialism, a military propaganda machine, and Shakespeare has somehow persisted – and the story is all too likely to end in tragedy.

The only literary precedent this mélange brings to mind is Ada, or Ardor, with its too-close sibling bond, aristocratic milieu, and alternate-history setting of Anti-Terra, and if you are aping Nabokov, you are flying close to the sun. It’s a high-wire act, in other words, but sadly, one that I don’t think succeeds, as the ambition of the premise is let down by a terrible UI, inconsistent writing, weak pacing, and at least one game-stopping bug. For a game that set its sights lower, maybe none of these issues would be fatal, but given that the themes Out of Scope puts on the table are extraordinarily freighted – again, the player is asked to invest in a quasi-incestuous relationship between young twins – these are deadly flaws.

(As a point of disclosure, I should probably acknowledge that since I’m a twin – or rather, was a twin, since my sister passed away a few years ago – the whole twincest angle would at best be facing a steep uphill climb with me. For all that, I did like Ada, or Ardor, but I’m struggling to think of a second story about sibling incest that doesn’t want to make me throw up. Still, I think the problems I experienced with Out of Scope aren’t purely down to personal idiosyncrasy).

I’ll start with the UI, because it’s impossible to ignore. Out of Scope is a Unity game (available in downloadable form as well as a browser option), and it offers a bespoke text-based interface; in each sequence, you’ll see a gray background onto which are scattered several small text boxes. Those with gray outlines just provide a bit of flavor text; those with black borders can be clicked on, which will often lead to further text, or possibly a yes-or-no choice that pops up as a thought balloon below the window. Choosing no might then lead to a different question popping up, allowing you to cycle through different options, though it’s never clear how many you might have, and in some cases considering all of your choices means you forfeit the chance to do anything at all. Oh, and these different boxes are often not visible from the start, requiring you to repeatedly drag around to search them out – sometimes moving to a new scene will lead you to an entirely blank screen, in fact, with the actual interactive bits of the passage scattered to the four winds. At least there are arrows that occasionally show up at the edges of the screen to point you towards boxes you can’t currently see, though I found they sometimes didn’t work. Plus the various buttons aren’t especially responsive, at least on my track pad, requiring double-clicking that sometimes speeds through text before you’re ready.

Oh oh oh, and it’s all animated so there are delays before text loads and the option-bubbles pop up.

Let me be very clear: playing this game was torture. Maybe it’s more manageable on a mouse, but the interface still adds a huge amount of friction to every interaction. In a tight, linear game where this was thematically appropriate, perhaps that would be forgivable, but Out of Scope goes for at least two hours, has long stretches where it wants you to explore a large map, and doesn’t try to create any resonance between the extra-diegetic abuse inflicted by the UI and the diegetic events of the game. There are moments when it is aesthetically pleasing, like a dinner party where each guest’s bit of dialogue shows up on overlapping text boxes that denote their places at the table – but even then, there would have been a million other ways to get a similar effect without inflicting such needless annoyance.

Contrarily, the writing does provide some high points, but doesn’t manage to sustain them throughout the wide-ranging plot. Some of the interactions between the twins have a sort of poetry to them:

"When two people are silent together, it’s like a song."

(This reminds me of one more interface complaint – highlighting text isn’t allowed, so I had to manually copy down any passage I wanted to quote).

The house that forms the main backdrop for the game is also often evocatively drawn, alternately imposing and pathetic depending on where you are in the timeline (the game’s chronology jumps around a fair bit). Here’s a bit noting an aftereffect of the fire that ruined the estate:

"The fire was intense here, warping and twisting metal cans of fruit and soup into little bombs."

On the other hand, there’s stuff like this:

"A south-easterly tor watches and chills and wets you from its prominence, irrespective of yours."

Huh? There are lots of head-scratchers like this, like saying of some fallen leaves “crisp winds divide them. Crisp thoughts too.” The game is full of malapropisms, from a moon likened to a “scrambled egg, white-yolked and runny in the pan” (….have you cooked an egg?) to a reference to “the twisted logic of a rubber sock.” And there are frequent dangling participles, confused pronouns, and verb-noun agreement issues. I feel like a bit of a jerk harping on this stuff, but again, Out of Scope is attempting some seriously challenging things – the stakes are very high for many of its set pieces, especially the highly-charged encounters between the twins, and when the prose gets weak or unclear, everything lurches towards comedy.

As to that relationship, though, the game’s structure does it no favors. The whole logic of the plot depends on there being a preternatural connection between the two siblings, but the game starts with a flash-forward where they’re already trying to kill each other – though the drama of this setup is blunted by requiring the player to explore a large area mostly devoid of points of interest before they can interact – and then flashes back to a sequence where they only have one short interaction before they get separated. By the time the game lets them meet again, as late teenagers, a lot of time has passed both in the plot and for the player – there’s an extended military-training sequence for the brother, then an even longer one where the sister wanders around the house before the aforementioned party – and by that point things are already weird and strained between them. It’s just not enough to establish the bond in any resonant way, all the more so because what the author is trying to set up isn’t just ordinary love between siblings, but something weirder and more intense that might not be incest but isn’t exactly not incest.

Then there’s the bug I mentioned. After I finished chapter 7 (of 10), I had to step away from my computer for an hour or so. When I came back to the game, the text boxes had all vanished and I was facing a blank yellow screen; scrolling around, or restarting the game and resuming my save, did nothing. I was about at the two hour mark, and the prospect of braving the interface to redo everything I’d done defeated me. Fortunately, the author provides a walkthrough that includes a basic plot summary, so I was able to learn how the game ends. Unfortunately, here’s where I learned that there was a whole additional layer of political intrigue that had been completely lost on me. Admittedly, some of this is stuff that appears to only come into play in the final few chapters, but the political maneuvering that I’d seen felt to me like it was meant to provide a backdrop for the family drama, rather than being robust enough to support major chunks of the narrative on its own. But there’s apparently a major twist that makes the twins’ relationship decidedly secondary to a wide-ranging espionage plot aimed at reconfiguring domestic politics in the family’s home country, which are only lightly sketched in the portions I saw; I suspect this swerve would be pretty unsatisfying to those who experience it. Also, this plot point hinges on understanding that this family, where the patriarch is part of a naval dynasty and keeps trophies of a country he helped conquer in his study and the mother runs a propaganda outlet selling a Thatcherite brew of social conservatism and militarism, are moderates, which is uh not how I experienced them.

Again, I can’t fault Out of Scope’s lofty goals – despite my hesitance about some of its themes, I really wanted it to succeed. But in every way, its reach exceeds its grasp. Reading the plot summary and thematic discussion contained in the walkthrough file, I can see how the game is meant to work in the author’s eyes, but it’s not there yet. With that said, God knows I’d be excited to see more smart, political IF that deals with complex sibling relationships, so I’m really hoping for a robustly-improved post-Comp release for this one.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

A game with a title like this isn’t exactly crying out for another reference to throw into the mix, but nonetheless, I have to do it: the figure out what the game is doing, we shouldn’t look to Shakespeare or The Godfather, but to Sherlock Holmes. That’s because this multiplayer whodunnit, where the titular couple team up to solve the murder of Raytheon CEO Marlon Brando in an alternate-reality Washington DC, is largely reimplementing the classic board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. This is no bad thing, let me hasten to add! I’ve been obsessed with the game ever since we had a copy of the video-enhanced original from back in the 80s (a part of the VHS-board game boom that is wholly regrettable save for the fact that it brought us Dragonstrike), since it’s such a unique concept in the boardgame arena: unlike other games in the subgenre like Clue, which abstract mystery-solving into abstract logic puzzles or deduction games, the cases in Consulting Detective are actual cases.

A few pages of read-aloud text introduce a crime, and then the players, working together, decide which leads to follow up on, picking suspects to interview, crime scenes to investigate, or contacts to visit. At each, another few paragraphs of text may reveal further clues, or indicate a dead end or red herring. And then, after time’s elapsed, the players are confronted with a quiz laying out the key questions for the mystery, and once they agree on their answers, there’s a final bit of story that tells them the actual solution and allows them to see how they did.
From that description it’s pretty clear that this is a species of analog IF, so it makes all the sense in the world to adapt the model to a digital incarnation. And implementing it as a multiplayer title is similarly a no-brainer: while other recent works of multiplayer IF have set up the players as directly or implicitly antagonistic, or given them asymmetric information to encourage cooperation, the player interaction here is purely about talking through the clues, developing theories of the case, and working together to solve the mystery. As a single player game, the relative mechanical simplicity would risk things getting dull; as a multiplayer game, it sings.

Antony & Cleopatra implements the model faithfully. The main investigative tool you’re given is a calendar that allows you to schedule suspect interviews or visits to key locations, with two slots available for each of the seven days you’ve got to solve the crime (the set of possible leads expands as you go, of course, and there are tools in the sidebar to remind you of who or what each is). Once a scene begins, you may just be given the relevant information or be told there’s nothing much to learn, but more frequently, there’ll be a list of questions or investigative avenues to pursue; these can typically be lawnmowered, but it does break up the wall-of-text issue that the board game sometimes runs into. There doesn’t appear to be state tracking – at one point, we noticed that a character had just told us something that contracted what someone else had said, but there was no option to call them on it – which is a little odd, but does mean that the players, rather than just the characters, need to be alert about the clues they’re gathering.

The game also departs from its inspiration by offering a few minor multiplayer-specific mechanics. The two players need to agree on which leads to follow, and that they’re finished with an investigative visit, before the game will move on; similarly, you of course need to reach unanimity on the end-of-game questionnaire laying out your ultimate theory of the case. The most game-like mechanic is the dialogue options specific to each character; while it doesn’t matter who clicks on most topics, a few are marked with an A or a C to indicate that it’s available only to Antony or Cleopatra respectively. It appears that these always are offered in analogous pairs, and the choice of which character should take lead seems to roughly correspond to a good cop/bad cop split, with Antony generally taking a more direct approach than Cleo. It also appears this is largely a cosmetic difference rather than one leading to dramatically different clues being revealed, but even if it’s largely superficial, it’s still a pleasant reminder that there are two distinct characters here, not a single blob being jointly piloted by the two players (although since they are always accompanied by an FBI agent sidekick as well as a half-dozen royal bodyguards, actually there is more than a little blobbiness). Impressively, as far as I could tell there’s actually quite a lot of variation between the text the two players see; while key clues seem to show up in both, Cleo tends to be more perceptive about interpersonal dynamics, while Antony (who’s the Vice President of the US, by the way – don’t think I mentioned that!) has a deeper understanding of everyone’s social and political positioning. As a result, comparing notes on impressions and theories is richer than it would otherwise be.

So much for the systems – what about the setting and story? As to the former, it’s a fun mash-up of 50s Hollywood with Ancient Rome, and serves as an enjoyable romp through the sights and sounds of DC, but I couldn’t help but wish it went a little deeper. If there’s some underlying logic connecting these various inspirations, it’s not foregrounded, and while this odd juxtaposition could make for some wackiness, the game generally plays things straight; there are a few good jokes here and there, but when Cleo doesn’t even make a comment about visiting Alexandria, VA, it feels like a missed opportunity. Similarly, it sure seems like a game that puts President-for-Life Julius Caeser in charge of the US and then has a plot hinging on the murder of a defense contractor should have something to say about the military-industrial complex. It also doesn’t really go into the alternate-history aspects; if Napoleon is the French Ambassador to the US in 2021, I’m guessing that the early parts of the Long 19th Century must have been very different in this world, but we don’t get even a whiff of that. I got the sense that the pop-culture stuff was mainly just used to make the names of the characters more memorable – it’s way easier to recall that Audrey Hepburn is the new Raytheon CEO than if it were some rando, to be fair – but the game’s refusal to play out the implications of its choices sometimes frustrated me. The depiction of DC, meanwhile, is generally quite good, though there are a couple details that suggest it wasn’t written by a native (despite being the home of a university, Georgetown sadly doesn’t really have the boho vibe it’s given in the game, and rich neighborhoods not having sidewalks is far more of a California phenomenon than an East Coast one).

As for the mystery itself (he says, a thousand words in), it’s pretty good, neither too simple nor too complex. Industrial espionage, national security, and sordid personal affairs are all in the mix, and while the time limit is relatively forgiving and it’s not too challenging to suss out the basics of what’s going on, the story’s sufficiently twisty to make for fun conversations between the partners. The case is faithful to most of the ones I’ve played from Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective by having at least one element of the solution feel like it requires a big leap of intuition to get right, but that’s probably the right balance to strike; getting ¾ of the details right is in some ways more satisfying than either being completely ahead of the game, or floundering.

I’ve been a little down on the game here, as is my wont, but that’s largely because I think this approach has a lot of potential that’s only been partially realized in this particular case. If there is a Case V, I hope it marries the setting more deeply into the mystery, and perhaps takes a bit more advantage of the digital medium to offer some more involved mechanics – I actually missed the vintage newspapers, London map, and telephone directory that in the board game offer some additional avenues of finding leads beyond just picking who to interview next. All that’s forgivable in a first instalment, though; Antony and Cleopatra’s unique and enjoyable, and well deserves a follow-up.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Graham Nelson’s adage about a work of IF being a crossword puzzle at war with a narrative has been rattling around for decades at this point, so it’s perhaps surprising that so few authors have steered into the crossword side of things. By this I don’t mean puzzles at the expense of narrative – there are still plenty of puzzlefests out there, of course – or even literal crosswords – shout-out to 2000’s Letters From Home! – but adopting the crossword puzzle model. Like, most authors (myself included) tend to conceptualize their games as distinct, requiring bespoke narratives and mechanics , or if they’re part of a series, adopting a traditional narrative throughline connecting installments. And yet, for all that, I have cheerfully played the New York Time crossword every day for – [checks statistics on phone] – actually, let’s not get into details, but suffice to say, a whole long time, and the fact that the framework is almost entirely static isn’t at all a barrier to my enjoyment, because the variety in clues and theming is enough to make each one feel unique.

Andrew Schultz is one of the few authors who’s exploring this territory, notably with his series of rhyming wordplay games, of which the present instalment is the sixth. As with a crossword, the basics are the same each time – the player navigates a somewhat-absurdist space, and when prompted with the two-word name of a location or significant object, needs to come up with a rhyming phrase that substitutes a different letter or sound at the beginning, as in the game’s title (we’re miles away from the traditional medium-dry-goods model). The games don’t tend to have very involved narratives, as often-idiosyncratic circumstances required to support the baroque wordplay aren’t really consistent with the Aristotelian unities, but they do have cross-cutting themes that animate some of the more memorable set-pieces and serve to distinguish them from each other. They also all boast incredibly robust quality of life features, from a hint function that tells you whether a guess is partially right and how far off you might be, to a THINK command that memorializes guesses that match the wordplay constraints but require some change in the world model to be effective, to a handy list of the most common English phonemes if you’re reduced to lawnmowering (reader, while I enjoy them, I am not very good at these games and am always reduced to lawnmowering).

It’s a unique puzzle system, and it’s still engaging even this far into the series; you’d think the list of rhyming phrases would eventually run dry, but Schultz is able to keep filling his quiver with clever prompts that make for memorable visuals and fun gameplay. Sure, there’s an occasional clunker (Spoiler - click to show)– HID HUM felt like a reach – but look, you don’t have to do many crosswords before you realize that sometimes some junk in the fill is the price to be paid for a construction that’s elegant overall. The theming on this one is also interesting; it’s more social than the others, with the protagonist suffering a crisis of faith that requires them to find and help other people to reclaim their prior (metaphorical) status as a knight. This idea is present in the introductory text, but also through the gameplay, as several puzzles involve finding different companion characters who can help solve certain puzzles when the right pair are present. I also felt like Bright Brave Knight Knave had a bit more focus on the world model – you’re still not INSERTING X INTO Y, or anything, but there are more puzzles about finding objects which in turn unlock new possibilities elsewhere this time out (BBKK isn’t quite a Metroidvania, but it is a sequel and there’s a boat, so yes, it’s a 2023 Comp entry all right).

I liked these new features, but they did lead to some hiccups, too. In particular, having to decide which pair of followers to bring along when solving specific problems felt like one more axis of complexity than my brain could handle, and exacerbating the challenge, I couldn’t quite get the syntax for swapping them to work (characteristically, there’s a difficulty setting that should automate this process if you don’t want to bother with it, but I likewise had trouble activating it). At about the two hour mark, I hit a point where this meant I got stuck, but I definitely felt satisfied with the portion I was able to play; I’m sure there’s a cool set-piece ending, but I’ll probably wait for the post-Comp release to check it out. In the meantime, it’s almost midnight, so tomorrow’s crossword will be up soon…

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. Some spoilers in this one, though the concept of spoilers is a little odd as applied to this game!)

If you are the kind of nerd who likes Greek words, poetry, and/or Greek words about poetry, you’ve probably come across the rhetorical device “ekphrasis”, which is piece of writing about a work of (usually visual, I think?) art. It’s a hoary enough trope in poetry and prose, the most famous example probably being Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, though there are more modern practitioners too – A.S. Byatt’s novel Still Life talks about Van Gogh’s art in smart, richly-descriptive prose that made me appreciate his work far more than I had before I read the book. I can’t offhand say that I’d applied the label to a piece of IF before coming across the rich, enigmatic Gestures Towards Divinity.

The blurb says that the game isn’t about Francis Bacon but his work – violent and frankly unpleasant – and biography – likewise violent and frankly unpleasant – are certainly the main elements of the piece. As an anonymous museum-goer, you have the opportunity to explore a small exhibition of his paintings, looking at three triptychs exemplifying different eras of his career. You can also enter each of them and carry out deep conversations with their central subjects: an imagined, misshapen Fury; Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer; and Dyer’s corpse, after he’s committed suicide. Or you can go to the café, which is much more pleasant (there’s no gift shop).

There is a fair amount of gameplay here – seventeen achievements are available to mark various accomplishments, surprisingly including some medium-dry-goods stuff that makes for a nice change of pace. There’s also basic information about Bacon and his art available in the museum’s placards, while the written descriptions of the paintings are quite good, conveying more than a flat narration of the objects in view by communicating something of the effects of the piece, without imposing too much of a prejudged interpretation that would crowd out the player’s imaginative faculties. But these are just enough to prime you with questions and a basic orientation towards the Bacon’s themes; the heart of the game is the three set-piece dialogues where you learn about Bacon’s upbringing and evolution as an artist, as well as Dyer’s life and relationship with Bacon.

These conversations are richly-textured, engaging directly with challenging material without sanitizing or dumbing it down in the slightest. Bacon had a domineering, abusive father, and as a gay man, his earliest sexual experiences were inextricably linked with violence and shame. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps just because he was the way he was, he grew into a man with deep obsessions around religion, death, and suffering, which were reflected in his art – and with a deep masochistic kink that saw him push others, Dyer included, into becoming sadists, regardless of whether they were comfortable with the role.

Each of your interlocutors provides a distinct perspective on these dynamics, and there’s plenty of straight biography and art criticism, but the game isn’t afraid to take on larger questions. There’s an additional swirl of other themes around luck, karma, divinity, and the afterlife – in addition to these being common conversation options that appear for all of the key characters, (Spoiler - click to show) there are indications that the player is dead, though whether they’re meant to be the ghost of any particular person or character in the story is left open-ended so far as I can tell. And Dyer pinches Jesus’s last words.

These elements didn’t really cohere all that strongly for me, though. The bits of dialogue are interesting enough on their own, but unlike the themes related to relationship dynamics, I felt like they had only a loose connection to the main narrative, and as a result didn’t seem as connected to the main thrust of the game, even if I can see how they’re clearly important elements of Bacon’s art (I mentioned these are all triptychs, right, which is the standard format for altarpieces?). It’s intellectually rich, but it just feels a bit abstract compared to stuff like this:

He grimaces. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, after all. I don’t know. My stomach hurts.” He falls silent for a moment, then says “why do we fall in love with bad men? Why do we stay in love with them? Why do we deny and make excuses and protect them? Who protects us?”

While I very much admire (I can’t really say “enjoy”, given the subject matter) the content and prose style of these conversations, the mechanics can occasionally be slightly awkward. GTD is a parser game, and uses the ASK ABOUT/TELL ABOUT system with an ever-updating topics list to help keep the dialogue on track. It’s quite well paced too, with new topics being added to the list as they come up in conversation, and whole tranches of new ones being unlocked when you start to exhaust an earlier set. The game also rewards exploration; I found quite a lot of subjects that weren’t listed in the topic catalogue but which led to robust, interesting responses. Unfortunately, the topic names are often quite complex – you can ask the Fury about “its relationship with Bacon” – or seem to overlap – Dyer has different responses when asked about “his life” and “life in general” – and the parser sometimes struggles to keep up unless you type things in exactly as they’re written in the topic list, which detracts from the otherwise-organic give and take of the dialogues.

In these conversations and in the museum sequences, GTD is a game of nearly pure exploration. The player doesn’t have any external goals to accomplish – the names of the achievements are hidden until you get them, and there’s nothing stopping you from walking out the museum’s door without looking at any of the art – and the “puzzles”, such as they are, aren’t especially meaningful in and of themselves. Instead, most of my engagement with the game came from trying to decide what I thought about Bacon, and the vexed question of whether his artistic accomplishments in some sense justify his actions (often quite horrifying, I haven’t come close to mentioning the worst parts).

It’d be understandable for a game so fully engaged with an artist’s work to ultimately take his side, but just as GTD doesn’t impose its interpretation of Bacon’s art on the player, so too it maintains a studied reticence. If anything, in the places where it offers a glimpse of its hand, its sympathies seem to come down against Bacon. There’s an oblique resonance to Dyer’s choice of reading material in the second triptych, for example – it’s a newspaper story about the kidnapping and murder of an ordinary woman who the criminals have mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife. She’s an ordinary person who’s come to great harm by getting mixed up with a rich, famous person, in other words. So if she’s the analogue for Dyer, that means Bacon plays the Murdoch role…

The barista working the museum’s café offers another hint; she’s trans and has a girlfriend, but except for one note about some uncomfortable relationship dynamics before she transitioned, she’s notably trauma free, thinks Bacon’s art is unpleasant and his personal history is worse, and mostly seems to care about cleaning up litter and playing D&D – a regular, functional person with what sounds like a functional relationship, serving as a notable counterpoint to Bacon and Dyer’s tragic queerness. True, the barista is also there to balance out the museum guard, an amateur painter who’s enthusiastic about Bacon’s paintings – but even she is clear-eyed about his human failings, and uses Bacon as fuel for her own work.

And then there’s the climax that greets the ordinarily-diligent player. If you work through the conversation with the guard, she lets you into her locked office, which contains one final Bacon painting, this one a self-portrait (it also contains a computer with some draft placard text which enables the player to learn exactly which self-portrait this is – thanks to playing Hand Me Down earlier in the Comp, I thought to try MOVE MOUSE to wake up the screen). You can’t enter this one, nor engage it in dialogue, since this representation of Bacon ignores whatever you say, simply spewing out bon mot after bon mot, witty observation after witty observation, a never-ending and exhausting charm offensive from someone convinced (not undeservedly) of his own cleverness.

If you check your topics list, though, you will see that you do have one additional option: you can tell him that you know who he is – and once you do, the urbane litany ends, and Bacon begins to howl, keen, and gibber, giving voice to sheer terror and self-loathing. It’s hard not to interpret this as a judgment; having plumbed his dark secrets by studying his art and talking to the man he victimized and ruined, you have the power to cast aside his self-protecting delusions and expose him. This is a rhetorically neat solution, too; if you go back to the Greek, ekphrasis means to speak out, or more poetically, to call something by its name. So by understanding Bacon, by naming him, you cast him down in act of karmic, retributive justice.

There are only two troubles with this reading. The first is that the player’s action of revealing Bacon to himself is entirely unnecessary. Even if you never decide to use that conversational topic and let him continue his babblelogue uninterrupted, he’ll also eventually begin his unending scream. You aren’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know, in other words. The second is, well, did we forget that he’s a masochist?

No, the blurb didn’t lie; this game isn’t about Francis Bacon and whether he gets his just or unjust deserts – even in this imagined space, that’s far beyond our power to accomplish. And it’s only incidentally about his art as such, or about the people he loved and hurt along the way, or about whether he’s a monster or an inspiration or just (“just”) a flawed, talented man. No, GTD is a simple game, or at least only as complex as the player wants to make it: all it does is ask how all this makes us feel or think, and, like the best museum pieces, makes us consider whether we’ll take anything away with us when the time inevitably comes to leave the exhibition.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I’ve never had a dream of falling, or at least not that I can remember, and I’m kind of bummed that I’ve missed out. The feeling of flying through the air seems like it must be exhilarating to me, and without the real-life risk of splatting against the ground, wouldn’t that be an amazing sensation to experience? We All Fall Together takes a different view, however, imagining a Limbo of ever-plummeting bodies caught between a terrifying cyclone that claims those who dive too low and shadowy predators who snatch those who try to slow their fall and drift too far up. It’s a situation that can be read to have a number of different real-life analogues, but it’s not so one-note as to be too simple of an allegory, so it’s interesting enough to support the game’s ten-minute runtime – and while my streak of being annoyed by the Texture engine continues with this game, at least it has a better showing than most.

As in medias res openings go, “you’re falling endlessly” is a great one, so the game makes a solid first impression, and throws in enough incident to keep the story moving – after starting to get oriented towards the situation, you get a chance to engage with several other inhabitants of this strange netherworld, most notably a black-clad figure you call “the Rock Star.” They’re a great source of exposition, and the dialogue efficiently sets up the metaphysical stakes, establishing that there’s a risky but rewarding path that may allow you to escape your fate and return to your loved ones.

Granted, it’s not an especially sharp dilemma, but it’s reasonably engaging and the opportunity to give the Rock Star a pep talk is nice; similarly, while the writing occasionally overreaches and has some errors, for the most part it hits a solid balance between action, dialogue, and jokes. What works less well is the attempt to impose a backstory on you and your interlocutor. You each talk about partners who are devoid of names, genders, personalities, or histories, landing at precisely the least-effective position between specific enough to be affecting, and general enough to be archetypal. The ending still feels rewarding, though, and again, this is a very short game so the offending bits only amounted to a minute or so of reading.

As for the Texture-ness of it all, I thought the author did a good job of picking verbs that were clearly distinguished from each other, and signposting what actions would do. Oh, and I played this one on my phone, and good news, the tiny-text-on-buttons bug I’ve experienced in other Texture games went away! …bad news, I experienced a new bug where switching to my Notes app to paste in excepts or jot down thoughts caused the buttons to stop work. Texture, you take delight in vexing me and have no compassion for my poor nerves – but despite that, I’d still say this is among my favorite games using this engine.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, and for all that even at the time I recognized its corniness, I still have a big soft spot for that kind of thing. As a result, while I can’t tell whether or not the opening of The Enigma of Solaris is intentionally camp, I loved it all the same:

”Agent Grey,” the colonel announced, his voice carrying the weight of gravitas that only a military man of his rank could muster, “we have a situation on Solaris.”

Grey leaned in, her senses alert to every word. “The Solaris, sir?”

(The use of “muster” so close to “colonel” is an argument for intentional silliness, it occurs to me).

If you guessed that this is immediately followed by some exposition where the characters explain to each other things they already know perfectly well, points to you. It’s a formula, but it’s one that’s not presently overused in IF, and like I said I’ve got some affection for it, so after the briefing established the situation (research station mysteriously losing power, go investigate and save the day), I was ready for adventure.

Things get a bit more serious when you arrive at the station, and the early sequence of poking around to gather clues is pretty engaging. But this turns out to be quite a short game, and what initially seemed like it was going to be a high-tech investigation quickly turned into an extended NPC interaction sequence with few if any choices for the player to make. Said NPC is another sci-fi caricature – he’s a scientist who’s lost perspective on the risks of his research – but trying to reason with someone like that isn’t particularly fun, and the eventual reveal of what’s going on on the station struck me as a bit underwhelming.

While the prose never loses its over-the-top charm, I couldn’t help but wish that the plot matched that tone rather than staying relatively grounded, and I wished too that there was a little more for the player to do. This partially could be due to the extreme concision of the game – it’s really maybe 10 minutes at most – so I could understand it if the author didn’t feel like it was worth fleshing out too much. A game that took this same basic approach but which had more robust gameplay and leaned further into the far-out elements of its inspirations could be a lot of fun, but as it stands, there’s just not that much to the Enigma of Solaris.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I don’t know where a two-year-old picks up these things, but my son has learned that pirates say “yarr!” The other night we were reading a book about animals dressing up for Halloween, and when he saw the chicken with a peg-leg, he swung his arm in a little Pirates-of-the-Caribbean move and said “yarr!” I can’t think of any other book or show he’s seen that involves pirates, so like I said, I’m somewhat at a loss – is there some kid at day care who pontificates about this stuff during outdoor play period, confidently explaining in a toddler’s burble how you pretend to be a pirate? – but I guess the cultural knowledge that this is how pirates talk is just that strong.

The kicker, of course, is that so far as I understand pirates didn’t talk like that; your stereotypical Golden Age of Piracy buccaneers probably spoke like the 18th Century Englishmen they were, albeit with more lexical flights of fancy than would be typical given their outré experiences and dearth of formal education. They likely sounded, in other words, like Captain Booby, the deuteragonist and comic centerpiece of To Sea in a Sieve:

“That’s it, boy — bail, an’ lively ho!” says the Captain. “’Twill all ha’ been worthwhile when we’m rescued, ye’ll see!”

“Not me snuffbox too,” wails the Captain. “Well, here’s lubberly manners! That snuffbox was o’ great sentimental value to me, I’ll have ’ee know. The man I killed fer it were a dear an’ loyal friend!”

“Arr, not me pineapple!” says the Captain, woefully. “I had me a fancy to make a lovely canapé — pineapple and hunks o’ cheese, served up on the spines of a porpentine. Ye’ve set haute cuisine back centuries, damn ye!”

(Okay, maybe that last one undermines my point, but technically it’s an arr, not a yarr).

There have been some very funny games so far in the Comp, and I know there are more ahead, but I have rarely laughed so hard at anything as I did at Captain Booby. This is fortunate because for the game to work, he has to work, since he’s the only thing standing in the way of this being the shortest parser puzzler ever: you play the cabin-boy he’s dragooned into helping him flee with his ill-gotten plunder when the authorities put an end to his piratical career. But since an errant cannonball has holed the lifeboat, you need to dump the loot before you sink. If the good Captain were capable of balancing risk and reward, he’d obviously stand aside and let you do it – but if he were capable of that, presumably he wouldn’t have gone into piracy, and so he opposes you at every turn, so that you need to outwit, outmaneuver, and outsnuff him in order to commit his treasures to the briny deep.

As a result, in less skillful hands Booby could have become a deeply annoying character, continually frustrating the player and providing handy, punchable characterization for the frustration of failing to solve puzzles in a parser game. But this hardly ever happens, as Booby is as pathetic as he is bombastic: I mean, if you can read the line “’Od’s blood, fire and thunder, my sinuses!” without a) feeling a little bad for the fellow, and b) giggling so hard you almost go into a fit, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Even when I was stymied on a particular challenge, sharing a lifeboat with Booby was never anything less than delightful.

Not that I was stymied that often or that long, since this is a well-designed set of puzzles. A few of the Captain’s treasures can simply be heaved over the side, but most require some work to obtain and drown, and all the while water is seeping into the boat, lending an air of farce to proceedings as you pause in your efforts to desperately bail. To make progress you’ll need to relieve the Captain of some of his effects, match wits with a carnivorous plant, and prevent an overzealous beaver from sending you to Davy Jones’s Locker. Even as the boat’s load lessens, the comedic frenzy heightens, with new complications lending increased energy to the situation and preventing it from getting dull over the game’s one-hour running time.

While many of the puzzles do require relatively specific syntax, I found for the most part that To Sea in a Sieve did an excellent job cueing the appropriate action, which made me feel very clever indeed but is actually just good game design. There were a few challenges towards the end of the game where it felt like this broke down somewhat and some additional clues might not have gone amiss (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking of looking at the tea caddy through the quizzing-glass, and the precise language required to use the brocade), but it’s got a well-implemented hint system so I can’t complain too much (and I have to admit that I was having so much fun that I stayed up way past my bedtime playing this one, so my brain probably wasn’t working so well by the end).

The only thing better than finishing To Sea in a Sieve was seeing in the ending text that it’s part of a planned trilogy – the middle part, To Hell in a Hamper, was released 20 years ago so this technically checks both the “boaty” and “sequel/prequel” boxes for Comp ’23 bingo – so there’ll be another iteration of the concept to look forward to. And even if it takes another 20 years to get the final instalment, based on the success of To Sea in a Sieve it’ll be worth the wait.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Please Sign Here is a deceptively complex game. Superficially, it’s a slice of life mystery; as the framing story establishes, the main character, Jackie, has just been in a car crash that’s claimed the life of her best friend Casey. But the police have other things in mind as they interrogate her, since she’s also potentially linked to the murder of a number of delivery drivers whose last stop before their deaths was the coffeeshop where Jackie works. The meat of the story involves flashing back to the events of the last week, when torrential rains and a vacationing boss left her isolated during a series of night shifts, and she repeatedly encountered three customers who each seemed like they could be hiding something…

This moody mystery is more than it appears, however, and that’s not just down to the attractive art. I don’t think it’s fully successful at the tricky moves it pulls – heck, I’m not 100% sure it’s aware of exactly how tricky they are – but I’ve been turning it over and over in my brain ever since I finished it, which I’d certainly count as an accomplishment. Talking about why involves digging into the plot, though, and since this is a mystery it’s poor form to just spoil said plot without warning. So you might want to give the game a play-through before joining me in the spoiler-text below – and if you have and aren’t sure what tricky things I’m talking about, let me just say that you might want to replay and remember your Miranda rights.

(Spoiler - click to show)

Hi there! I’ve got to do a little bit more plot summarizing before we can get to the good stuff. So as mentioned after the in-medias-res police-interrogation opening, you flash back to your shifts at the coffeehouse, with the game progressing day-by-day through the week leading up to the opening car crash. Jackie’s the daughter of a cop, but she’s quite jumpy, starting out suspicious of the three recurring customers: Quan, an elderly recent-immigrant from Vietnam; Aaron, a young Black man who’s juggling a job and his studies; and Marta, a Latina mother with a demanding and thankless job. In fairness, this might be because something odd seems to be happening in the shop; even thought Jackie’s supposed to be alone, the back door keeps getting mysteriously unlocked and opened…

Despite the sense of dread the game’s trying to establish, I actually found the meat of the game surprisingly cozy. In part this is down to the art, which has a warm webcomic-y vibe; there are a few illustrations that are creepy, like the one depicting the fateful pre-crash car ride, but the coffeeshop sections seem to depict a warm, dry haven on a stormy day, with the visiting customers looking friendly and appealing. Intentionally or not, the writing also signally fails to establish any of the three “suspects” as remotely threatening; as far as I can tell, the major details that are supposed to make them potentially dangerous are the fact that Quan drives a black car that might be the same as one Jackie’s seen loitering around, Aaron brings in a big package one day, and Marta’s job occasionally requires her to pick up documents from city hall. You can practically hear the duh-duh-DUH when these details are revealed, since the game frames them as significant, but they’re such obvious red herrings that Jackie’s reactions just mark her out as a paranoid fussbudget – she’s also a real stickler for the rules, not even letting a wet and bedraggled Marta wait for her bus inside the near-empty coffeeshop unless she buys something.

The writing is also, bluntly, not that great, which undercuts the game’s attempts to set a mood. Like, here’s Jackie’s reflections on why she’s friends with Casey, who’s kind of the worst:

>[I]f her dad wants to keep his high chances for donations to become Police Chief next year, Jackie has to keep up playing friendly with one of the richest families in town. The Wintons might only be a truck service company, but they’re the reasons semi-trucks even exist in the first place."

That took me a while to parse, and it’s par for course with much of the game’s prose. The choice-based elements of the narrative also aren’t especially engaging, as there aren’t many decision points and not enough effort is put into making them seem meaningful; there’s one moment where you hear something in the back and go to investigation, and you’re given the choice of grabbing either a broom or a “group handle” (?) as a weapon, but after selecting one the next passage begins “It doesn’t matter.” For the love of god, game, I know this is mostly on rails, but you don’t need to draw attention to it!

Things get much more interesting when the timeline catches up to the framing story, though. After recounting your memories, the cops ask you to pick which of the three “suspects” you think they should prioritize in their investigation. I clammed up and refused to finger any of them, both on general principles – public service announcement, if cops are ever asking you anything, shut up until you’ve got a lawyer present – and because I was quite sure none of them murdered the delivery drivers or was responsible for the car crash. And in that ending, which the epilogue text deemed the “main” ending, the third-person narration shifted from referring to the main character as Jackie to Casey, instead – she’s Jackie’s notional best friend, remember – and mentioned her recent hair-dye job.

The clear implication is that Casey has gone all Single White Female (or Talented Mr. Ripley, if you prefer) and killed Jackie in service of trying to switch identities with her. There are some seeds of foreshadowing throughout the earlier section that point in this direction; Casey seems envious of Jackie’s life in their earlier interactions, and right before the car crash, the flashback sequence ends with Casey asking whether Jackie thinks people deserve second chances – a macabre question when you realize that Jackie is herself the second chance in question. So it could be an inspired twist.

There are two flies in the ointment, though, one more interesting than the other. To get the boring one out of the way: of course this makes no ^%$^ sense. There’s no indication that Casey’s done anything more than the dye-job to make herself look like Jackie, nor that she had much time or expertise post-accident to make Jackie look like her. The twist has nothing to do with the much-belabored deaths of the delivery-men, and in fact Casey killing all of them – as the ending implies – would do nothing but invite further scrutiny of the switcheroo. And did we forget that Jackie’s dad is a cop, and presumably knows what his daughter looks like? So take as read that this is all completely ridiculous.

The more interesting inconsistency in the twist, though, is the fact that you only see it by refusing to try to set the cops on some innocent person to throw them off the scent (this is where the racism/police corruption themes mentioned in the blurb come into play, by the by – the implication is that they’re happy to go after one of the POC “suspects” and ignore the possibility that the white girl is a baddie). You can conceptualize this as a reward for the player – by successfully realizing that none of them is the killer, the player gets a hint of what’s really going on – or as an in-character decision by Jackie, who’s gotten to know these people. But for Casey to make this choice is counterproductive; again, she’s inviting more scrutiny for no reason!

This isn’t a just a plot hole like the ones I mention above, though; it calls into question who exactly is making choices and how those choices are being resolved. Instead of the conventional IF triangle of identities – player, protagonist, and narrator – here we have the traditional player and narrator joined by a competing dyad of protagonists, whose methods and motivations are diametrically opposed, and who, unless you happen to pick just the right options, seamlessly substitute for each other with the player and narrator none the wiser. And now that we think about it some more, the flashback depicts events in Jackie’s life, but it’s being recounted by Casey to the cops as though it’s about her, so this doubling is even more complex than we thought (oh, and this also means the narrator is completely unreliable too and we presumably can’t trust anything we’ve read)! Please Sign Here thus becomes narrative collapse: the game – nothing that comes after the twist makes sense, and it throws into question everything that comes before the twist, too.

I wish I could say the game does something compelling with this move, but per my long-ago, pre-spoiler-text note, I’m unconvinced that it knows how radical it’s being – possibly this is me just being judgmental and overgeneralizing from the weak prose to assuming that the game has weak writing overall, I suppose, but it’s inarguable that the game doesn’t explore the implications of its scenario, seeming satisfied with using it as a noirish capstone to a conventional whodunnit, not one of postmodern dislocation. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even what may seem an often-clumsy mystery can dislocate its player into acute postmodern vertigo.

I used to work with some environmental advocates, from whom I learned a mouthful of a Greco-Roman phrase: charismatic marine megafauna, or, in normal-personal language, cool big ocean creatures. All the organisms that live in the sea, as well as general environmental features like pollution, oxygenation, and (gulp) temperature, are critical to keeping oceanic ecosystems stable. But “save the krill!” is a rallying cry for precisely nobody, so in order to persuade people to adopt the kind of laws and regulations that are needed to mitigate the impact we’re having on the marine environment, you’d better trot out a dolphin or sea turtle or something big and sympathetic like that. And of course marine fauna don’t come any more charismatic, or any more mega, than the whale: warm-blooded and communicative like us, but massive and as comfortable at the depths as on the surface, it’s no wonder they’re an object of fascination, back to the story of Jonah and the whale. So it’s perhaps just understandable that the cetologist protagonist of The Whale’s Keeper appears to have purposely arranged to get himself swallowed by one.

This choice-based game’s obviously set out a magic-realist scenario, but it does credit to both sides of that equation. As to the latter, the pressure increases as the whale dives down give rise to a memorable set piece, for example, and there’s some lovely prose describing what it’s like to be inside it as it sings:

"You are at ground zero and for a moment you wonder if this vibratory wonder might thrum you into oblivion. It overwhelms you with its grandness. It is the most perfect, all-encompassing thing you’ve ever experienced, every molecule of you sings in response."

The mechanics also reflect the precarity of your situation; you’re given a 10-click “sanity” clock, which decreases as especially frightening things happen; presumably once it hits zero, you get a bad ending, though I never had that happen since the system is fairly forgiving. This is especially the case because there are opportunities for your sanity to go up, primarily as you encounter the elements that fall more on the “magic” side of things. In particular, the game quickly establishes that you’ve got company in this particular gullet; figuring out how to engage with the hermit you quickly nickname “Jonah”, interacting with him and learning how he’s managed to eke out his existence, is a highlight of the first part of the game, even if some of these details strain credulity past the snapping point.

While the game starts out with you (er) in the middle of things, it does eventually sketch out a few elements of your character’s backstory and try to explain why you’d do something as crazy as this, I wasn’t as sold on this piece of the game, both for the specifics (there’s a particular detail about the death of your child that probably could have merited a content warning) and just the general concept of the attempt (look, I don’t care how terrible things have been going for you, there’s no way to logically justify jumping down a whale’s throat). The game really only works when it keeps its focus on the present, and the player of necessity has to run with the off-kilter reality being presented.

The elephant in the room is the format. For all that the game I’ve just described would work just fine in a conventional engine like Twine, The Whale’s Keeper runs on its author’s bespoke chat-based IF platform; you have an option of playing it via Telegram or just, as I did, via the web. So while each passage ends with a series of choices, instead of clicking on the appropriate one, you need to type in the indicated work or two to select your preferred option. While I can see some games taking advantage of the chat-based interface, this one doesn’t gain anything by it – and since I played on my phone, tapping out the required words felt like it added unnecessary friction to the experience. And despite a fair bit of fiddling, I couldn’t adjust the text speed to a comfortable pace; many of the passages are long, but each is delivered in short speech-bubble chunks, so I wound up either tapping my foot waiting for the next one to load, or having the view window prematurely yanked down as one arrived while I was still finishing the previous one.

These quibbles didn’t do much to take me out of the game, though, and the game’s strengths are unique enough that it’s worth putting up with these idiosyncrasies. It communicates a real sense of wonder by immersing the player in a compellingly-imagined environment, and while it dances on an absurd tightrope between reality and fantasy, it’s over quickly enough that it never topples to one side or the other. One of its most impactful sequences, in fact, marries the two: Jonah guides you down to the acid pools that he scavenges for sustenance, and in amidst the potential food you fish up clumps of garbage and plastic bottles, too. For all the power that this leviathan has over you, it’s subject to the same human-made pollution that’s destroying the rest of the oceans; save the whales, save yourself.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

One Knight Stand reminds me of a peacock. This hefty ChoiceScript game is impressive but also absurd, hyperspecialized after taking evolutionary logic way past its logical endpoint. I know, for example, that the Choice of Games audience tends to really like player-customization options, but when it took me four separate choices to establish the length, texture, and color of my character’s hair, I thought something had gone awry; when, five minutes later, I picked out the color of my favorite mug and laid out my habits when shopping for a cell phone, I half suspected this thing was actually a parody or maybe a marketing survey in disguise. Similarly, CoG games tend to use length as a selling point, but having slogged through what I’m pretty sure was a short novel’s worth of prose to get through just four simple scenes and introduce only two significant characters, I can only imagine the fortitude needed to persist through the Middle of the End and the End of the End. There are some promising modern fantasy flourishes here, and I can’t fault the author’s work ethic, but sadly this is one of those games that I suspect will elate its intended audience while leaving those outside that group bewildered.

In its outlines, the story here is pretty solid. The main character lives in an alternate future where COVID gave way to a series of other plagues and pandemics, though as the game opens they’re more focused on practice with their surprisingly-intense polo club. But the city’s been threatened by a series of gruesome murders, and after seeing some strange things around your apartment, you get swept up in a supernatural world that involves demons, reformed incubi, the reincarnations of the Arthurian Knights, and a best friend who’s harboring some kind of secret…

It’s all fun enough – I could see the setting being a lost World of Darkness RPG from the late 90s – and the bits involving the polo team have some zip to them (I wouldn’t be surprised if the author has a bunch of real-life experience with horses), but the game’s glacial pacing does it no favors. I had to get through half a dozen see-something-weird-out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye-but-there’s-nothing-there-when-you-check “scares” before the first sequence was over, so that the creepiness had long since worn off, and the game’s written in an incredibly granular style that completely undermines any sense of pacing; I was similarly bored of most the action scenes by the time I was two-thirds done with them because they just took too long. And the transitional sequences are just as bad, as you’re forced to play through the dull bits between the set pieces at a similarly high level of detail; it’s like reading the first draft of someone’s first novel, before they’ve figured out how to move characters around in time and space.

The other element undermining what could be a fun pop-fantasy romp is the tonal whiplash. While the world is generally fairly grounded, and the game’s blurb says its genre is “dark urban fantasy”, a large portion of the game’s choices have some ZaNy options. Like, here are the player’s choices in one of the action scenes:

-Here goes nothing.
-Easier said than done.
-I don’t get paid enough for this.
-Da da da da da… Batmaaaaaaan!

The monster you’re trying to run away from here is actually kind of creepy, but this kind of thing drastically undercuts any sense of realism or fear the game is trying to convey. And I’ve picked a mild example; there are lots of pop culture quotes and bewilderingly over-the-top choices that seem to show up more and more as time goes on (though even the first sequence suffers from a news broadcast where April O’Neil and Peter Parker are highlighted as featured reporters).

One Knight Stand also gets way too dark sometimes given its omnipresent refusal to take itself seriously. You (of course) have a tragic backstory, and without thinking too much about it I went for the one where my family died in a car-crash (the others are comparably bleak). I was not prepared for how this was narrated (putting the details behind a spoiler-block; CW for violence and just general terrible things):

(Spoiler - click to show)Your father had turned the car at the last moment so that the driver’s seat took the full brunt of the crash. He’d been killed instantly. At the trial that followed, lawyers had argued that the people in the backseats — your brother, your sister, your mother — could have survived if the car’s side airbags had deployed as they were supposed to.

In the end, both your siblings had died before rescuers could prise them out of the wreckage of the car. You know your little sister, at least, had been alive directly after the crash. She had cried, gurgled, and half-screamed for several minutes afterwards. Your mother in the seat directly behind you had lingered the longest. She never regained consciousness in those last few days and finally passed on after a bloody miscarriage.

What the fuck, game.

I’ve said before that to my mind, the one thing that most amateur IF needs to feel professional is an editor, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glaring proof of that. If someone had helped the author smooth out the drastic tonal shifts, cut down 2/3 of the word count to focus on the engaging parts, and highlight places where going deeper really would be helpful (the main romance interest is so bland that even after three and a half hours of gameplay, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about his personality), this could be really promising. As it is, while I suspect the hardcore CoG-heads will lap this up, I didn’t get much enjoyment out of One Knight Stand. Which is a shame: peacock feathers may only turn on peahens, but at least they’re still pretty to the rest of us.