Reviews by Mike Russo

Unreal People is a vexing game that isn’t easy to come to grips with; it’s also set in “early mediaeval India”, so with Hindu deities in mind, let’s grant ourselves more than the standard duo of hands to work with.

So on the first hand, the game is a slightly-janky shaggy dog story. You play a spirit, a deva, who’s bound to serve a charlatan of a fortune-teller; you’re tasked with uncovering the secrets of both the humble and the exalted in a small kingdom, using your gifts to possess objects, animals, and eventually people in your quest for gossip. You’ve only got limited opportunities to jump from one vessel to the next, so most of your choices come down to when to stay and when to go (and if you go, who’s going to be the target of your next leap). The effect is of riding a rushing river, becoming privy to snatches of low-context conversation, brief excerpts of domestic drama, and unconnected vignettes that seem like they’re adding up to a bigger picture before the game suddenly ends because you chose the wrong branch and it instakilled you – fortunately, there’s an undo available to let you make forward progress again, but unfortunately, even if you evade all these hazards the game ultimately peters out without bringing any of its myriad plot threads into coherence or showing you the payoff for your secret-gathering.

As for the jank, there are a lot of typos – much like signage at a small business, apostrophes often appear just to mark that a word ends in an S – and the occasional sign of incomplete development, like the way that I learned that my increasing powers now allowed me to make conversational decisions on behalf of my hosts from the all-caps exhortation to “!!EXPLAIN U CAN MAKE DIALOGUE CHOICES!!” Beyond these technical faults, the story’s structure is also decidedly odd; after half an hour or so of flitting around a dozen or so characters on the night of a feast, the game suddenly had me decide to contact the fortune-teller and call it a night, which started a new sequence sometime in the future with a smaller cast of partially-overlapping characters, which terminated in the above-mentioned anticlimax after about a further fifteen minutes. And but for the blurb and some of the names, I’d have had a hard time telling you where or when the game is meant to be set – admittedly, this isn’t one of my stronger areas, but things like the presence of light bulbs, and the drunkard princess’s habit of handing out high fives to passersby, undercut the verisimilitude of the milieu. And ugh, there’s AI cover-art (it’s not immediately bad, but just look at the reflections in the water and try to make sense of them).

On the second hand, I’m noticing some interesting resonances here. While I’m pretty weak on the history of the pre-Mughal subcontinent, I’ve got at least a little grounding in the contemporary religion and philosophy, so I definitely raised my eyebrows at details like the way that the spirit’s ability to possess starts with the lower orders of matter, like rocks, plants, and birds, before progressing to a cow, then to human beings in the throes of emotion or unreason, and then to calmer, more controlled people: squint and this isn’t far afield from some Hindu conceptions of how a virtuous soul can advance up the chain of being through reincarnation. Or consider that we’re not in any historical polity, but the kingdom of Chaitanya, Sanskrit for “consciousness”. More fundamentally, the way that you’re able to inhabit all the living beings (and some of the scenery) in the kingdom nods towards the Brahman-Atman belief that individual souls nondualistically partake together in the ultimate, unified reality of existence. And then the ending – well, spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)in the final sequence, you somehow possess everyone and everything at once, leading to a Mad Libs segment where you can type in dialogue for each of two characters, with the narrative voice needling you by saying this is super unsatisfying, huh? Which puts me in mind of lila, the idea that the divine unity created the world’s multifarious forms, and divided consciousness, in order to experience and enjoy itself: “god’s play”.

Well, so what? Does all this talk of unity and differentiation add up to anything? My judgment here is a qualified ……maaaaaybe. On the third hand, I’m personally fond of shaggy dog stories myself, and swerving from a tawdry story about a grasping gossip-monger to contemplation of divine mysteries is just the kind of bold move I admire. And even if the social reality of Chaitanya leaves something to be desired, there are individual memorable characters – like princess Gauri, unable to express her crush on the knight Mazboot (who, awkwardly, might be her half-brother, except by berating him, or the peasants squabbling over a stolen chicken – who together present a kaleidoscopic view of the human pageant, and allowing each of them a voice and a viewpoint is appealingly democratic.

On the fourth hand, though, it’s still the case that it sure feels like the author eventually just got bored with the story and decided to stop it, and for every entertaining bit of anachronism, there’s a clanger like Gauri saying superficial things about feudalism and post-barter economies. The quick shifts from one character to the next also meant that there were certain conflicts and storylines that I didn’t really have time or space to care about before I was on to the next one.

On the fifth hand – well, the number four is a big one in Hinduism (four primary social classes, four stages of life, four types of yoga), so let’s leave things here. Suffice to say Unreal People didn’t make me feel very much, so if that was its goal I can’t count it as very successful – but it did make me think.

An annoying thing that I can’t stop my brain from doing when I’m reading escapist, pulp stuff is think about money. Take this game’s eponymous organization of vampire hunters, an elite crew with offices and safehouses across the globe, dozens if not hundreds of skilled humans as well as the higher-minded sort of undead on staff, killer custom-tailored leather uniforms, a web of high-powered informants and contacts, and an idealistic mission of promoting peace among the vampiric underworld by resolving conflicts via mediation and negotiated truces before escalating things to assassination. It’s a cool secret-society fantasy, but seriously: are we meant to believe that there are enough super-rich elders of the night who want their rivals offed, but only after a rigorous restorative-justice process, to pay for all of these wonderful toys?

It’s unfair to hold Redjackets to such rigorous worldbuilding standards, I admit. This is clearly character-first urban fantasy, with the always-visible character portraits and romance subplots to prove it, and the author’s effort has clearly been focused on things like offering a choice of three different protagonists and fleshing out their angsty backstories rather than diving deep into the setting. And it’s an appealing, diverse crew: you’ve got Fiia, a fledgling vampire on the run from her crime-boss sire, and then the pair of Redjacket agents she turns to for help, vampiric detective Lynette and her human partner, a professor of folklore named Declan. The assassination plot they’re forced into enacting gives them all an opportunity to settle old scores and come to terms with their natures, while giving the author an opportunity to purple up some prose:

"He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. “I’ve seen people die - I’ve seen-” you start, fumbling over your own tongue limp with panic, with flashing memories of sunset-red tissue, cavernous wounds, and joints bent at wrong angles."

What it doesn’t provide is an opportunity for much in the way of meaningful choices. While picking which of the trio to make the viewpoint character unsurprisingly has a significant impact on the story, there are comparatively few once the game actually starts up, to the extent that I was often surprised to find myself confronted with one after ten or fifteen minutes of just clicking to the advance from one passage to the next – and often these are low-key ones, like picking what order to ask a set of dialogue options that I’d have to exhaust before moving on. I’ve got nothing against dynamic fiction, but I did occasionally feel like the game wound up undercutting itself, for example by offering Fiia a choice of whether to enthusiastically join the Redjackets or recoil in fear of the consequences should her sire find out, but then railroading her into being a happy recruit regardless of the option selected.

Beyond the gameplay mechanics, I often found myself feeling like the author was more focused on telling their story than they were on the audience reading it. The “handbook” feely provided with the game goes into a lot of detail on the Redjacket organization, but it – and many of the quotidian sequences peppered through the narrative – sometimes felt like they presupposed an unearned level of interest in the nuts and bolts of their operations. What’s worse, there are quite a few pieces of the story that are asserted rather than demonstrated, reducing their effectiveness: we’re told that the Redjackets are hypercompetent investigators, for example, but they fail to distinguish paint from blood, find it annoying that an underground arms dealer only takes cash, and land on a plan to kill the baddie not too much more sophisticated than “run up to him at a crowded party and shoot him.” What’s worse, the bad guy’s evil is very much in tell-not-show territory; everyone talks about him like he’s a creep, and admittedly he does overreact to the failure of one of his minions, but what we see of his behavior just involves restoring paintings to sell them for a lot of money, doting on his lover and being dismayed when he’s injured, and being instinctually protective of Fiia even after he knows she’s betrayed him.

There are also some technical issues here that make it hard to enjoy Redjackets as much as I wanted to. Beyond a few typos, I experienced some issues with how the three branches of the story were integrated, with pronouns shifting in some sequences as the game seemed to get confused about who I’d picked to be “you.” Further, while the game indicates that if you replay it, choices you made as another character will be remembered and happen in the same way, I found that this wasn’t the case. And worst of all, after making it through Fiia’s and Lynette’s paths, I wound up hitting a dead end shortly after starting Declan’s, with all the choices available to me leading to a blank passage (the game has a single save slot and no undo, so I couldn’t recover from this bug without restarting).

There’s definitely promise here; this is an ambitious game that often delivers on its character-first goals. But unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to an even slightly skeptical player who wants to know why the bad guy is the bad guy, what choices they’re actually allowed to make, why these cool folks are the heroes, and yes, how they’re getting paid for this hit. Compared to the amount of work the author’s already put in, it wouldn’t take too much more to address these kinds of questions (or, hopefully, fix the bug borking Declan’s part of the story), which would make Redjackets the enjoyable kind of pulp adventure where I could turn my brain off.

The brain is a pattern-making machine, and so while it’s of course ridiculous to assign any particular weight to the first game that the randomizer coughs up in any year’s Comp, I can’t help but feel that it’s appropriate Where Nothing is Ever Named led off my 2024 lineup – because what better way to inaugurate the thirtieth year of an event dedicated to games that were considered obsolete even when the contest first began, than with a piece that absolutely, positively, could only work in a text-only format?

The game both does and doesn’t provide much in the way of context: upon launching the story file, you’re simply told that you’re in the eponymous place where etc. and then that “you can see something and the other thing here”, before being turned loose to use your parser skills to suss out what’s going on and what you’re meant to be doing. The blurb, more merciful, does inform the player that the third chapter of Through the Looking Glass is the major inspiration, which I went back and reread; it’s not a section that I remember well, mostly having to do with a strange train whence Alice is ejected for lack of a ticket, and a large gnat who’s reticent (with good reason) to start a career in comedy. But there is a short episode towards the end where Alice is lost in a wood where everything loses track of what it’s called and what to call anything else – and there’s none of your “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet” nonsense here, as in a Hermetic turn ignorance of names means ignorance of substance, as Alice doesn’t know what anything is when she sees it.

So what we’ve got here is a language puzzle, not miles distant from the Gostak or Suveh Nux; if you figure out what the “other thing” is and what to do with it, you’ll win the game, and if you also figure out what the “something” is you’ll get a happier ending. It’s a lovely setup for a text game, since visuals would of course kill the thing (as would audio, actually); all the Ubisoft studios in the world would struggle in vain to render this ten-minute metaphysical riff. And it’s quite satisfying to trial-and-error your way through two paired games of twenty questions, matching the default parser actions to the responses you elicit from the things in order to narrow down their identities.

In practice the metapuzzle is a little too simple to make this philosophically-charged premise really sing, however, and some implementation quirks add some unneeded frustration. I suspect most players will uncover the identity of one of the things in a half-dozen moves at most, and the other one possibly even quick, though in my case it took me longer because I was referring to the two objects as THING and OTHER THING; turns out this was just two different synonyms for the other thing, and I had to type SOMETHING to interact with the first. Similarly, I would have finished Where Nothing is Ever Named a few minutes earlier but for a reasonably-game-winning action generating a facially-bizarre and unhelpful response (Spoiler - click to show) (in retrospect I can reconstruct why “you can’t ride unmounted” is a plausible response to RIDE THING, since it’s indicating you’re supposed to MOUNT or CLIMB ON the thing first, but this is slicing the salami awfully thin).

These implementation niggles are quite small-scale, though, worth mentioning only because the game is so compact and they interact confusingly with the guess-who gameplay – really, my main critique is just that I wanted a more robust incarnation of this concept, one that really teased my brain and addressed the existential question of what’s in a name head on. That’s not Where Nothing is Ever Named, but that’s not its fault; on its own merits it’s a winsome little piece, and a worthy justification for the existence of text-only games at the opening of the Comp.

Now that the post-Twine revolution is well and truly settled, it feels natural to survey the different choice-based subgenres – branching CYOA-style narratives, RPG-lite quality-based narratives, puzzle-y parserlike hybrids – and think yes, of course this is how it had to be. But if you went back to 2000 to tell a reasonably-cosmopolitan member of the parser-focused amateur IF community that in 25 years choice-based games would be a big part of the scene, I’d bet that they’d think you primarily meant hypertext fiction. While many folks back then thought CYOA and gamebook approaches were overly simplistic, literary hypertext had serious ambitions and academic cred that matched the arty aspirations of the IF scene, so it might not have seemed like that big a gap to bridge. Of course that’s not the path events wound up taking, and I’m not sure of any contemporary authors mainline-IF working in that tradition other than Kaemi Velatet. But I still sometimes wonder what our Comps and Festivals would look like if the hypertext model was a major influence on our games: we might see narrative choices decentered in favor of allusive linkages, characters deemphasized in favor of linguistic play, and thematic coherence seen as a greater virtue than a satisfying plot. We might have better tools, in short, to create, present, and engage with games like SALTWATER.

Recapping the premise and the way it’s elaborated here might start to get at what I mean. The game plays out over three acts that are more like cycles, with each one moving an ensemble of half a dozen or so main characters (and maybe a dozen more supporting ones) through a sequence of set-pieces and flashbacks that see as much variation and elaboration as straight repetition, before ending in a climactic scene that brings everyone together in a collapsing church just as the world might be ending. The emotions are pitched fever-high, and the roles each character plays progresses over time: there are always people being lost, and people looking for them, but the identity of who plays any particular role is always in flux. There are different subgenres at work, largely divvied up between the different viewpoints the game provides: one character is drawn back to a past they’d tried to flee by the death of their parents, and is haunted by one of the people they left behind; another is running a sort of Lord of the Flies apocalypse-cult, squatting in the ruins of an old slaughterhouse to listen to the prophetic whispers of long-dead pigs. Much of this is compelling, but none of it is especially naturalistic, and besides a shared juxtaposition of externally-mediated catastrophe against salvation through connection, the strands aren’t woven together especially tightly.

Indeed, I have to confess that it took me a while to get into SALTWATER. The entire first act – an hour or so of playtime – consists of jumping from one perspective to the next, running through five or six entirely different sets of characters and situations with little time for the often-disorienting plot elements to breathe, much less engender investment in the characters or their world. And the relatively traditionalist choice-based approach to interactivity highlighted my lack of understanding and investment. There are quite a lot of novels I’ve loved while still experiencing pervasive moment-to-moment confusion about what exactly is happening or which character is talking (Ulysses is the obvious touchstone here, so let’s give the shout-out to Gaddis’s The Recognitions just for variety’s sake) – but that confusion lands different when you’re expected to put yourself in someone (whose?) shoes and make choices for them. There’s an early sequence, for example, where I had to decide whether a bartender (who I knew basically nothing about) was going to lie to Molly, a customer he’d just met (who both I and he knew nothing about), about an old woman who’d just collapsed upon entering the bar (who both he and she knew nothing about, though I at least had a small inkling about her deal since she’d featured in one of the earlier vignettes) – trying to figure out what the bartender might do, and why, and why I’d be expected to have any clue about any of that, took me right out of the game.

SALTWATER is also sometimes a bit slapdash about its worldbuilding and characterization. Rye, the aforementioned prodigal child, is introduced receiving a phone call from their sister, who asks them to come to their parents’ funeral to help support her. But then the next time we see them, the funeral’s over, and the last we hear of the sister is when an old friend asks Rye how she’s holding up, and Rye waves the question away with a dismissive “she’ll be fine.” Meanwhile, the societal decay implied by a bunch of children taking up long-term residence in the meatpacking plant is nowhere on display in the other sequences, and I got hung up on the revelation that the aforementioned bar is miles and miles from where people live (it sure doesn’t seem like it’s in a business district either, so who decided to set it up there?) And there’s an overreliance on talismanic images and activities – many of these are individually powerful, but between rising floodwaters, a collapsing church, a flickering lighter, bodies being put into and dug up from graves, people being lost in the snow and warmed back to the land of the living, plus the oracular pigs and maybe-ghost, there’s too much being crammed into the frame to fully cohere.

Yet I did find that I enjoyed the game substantially more when I got to the second act, and SALTWATER shifted from introducing a disorienting panoply of people to fleshing out their motivations, personalities, and the context for their decisions. And on a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is often quite evocative and engaging (the way Ink is customized here meant that copy and paste wasn’t working for me, so you’ll have to trust me on this). By the time the third act came around and it became clear that events were moving into their final configurations, I found myself moved by the plights of some of the characters, hoping for them to find some peace.

All of which is to say there’s a better version of SALTWATER that ruthlessly simplifies it, cutting unneeded viewpoint characters (the bartender and Molly wound up being completely irrelevant so far as I could tell), building more extensive linkages between those that remain, and rigorously providing context so that the player feels empowered to make choices on their behalf. But I think I’d like that less than the other better version of SALTWATER that leans into its messiness, doesn’t impose expectations of agency on the player, jumbles up the characters without worrying so much about where one ends and another starts, shifts the prose to be even more poetic, and presents its various narrative strands not as rigorously-alternating plaits in a braid but as nodes in an ever-expanding, densely-interconnected web: a beautiful sally in a hypertext revolution that never was.

What makes a Verdeterre-like a Verdeterre-like? A design-focused analysis of the subgenre would zero in on key elements of Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure, the game that launched the mini-trend: high-score-chasing gameplay, a time limit, a complex optimization metapuzzle providing a framework around the individual challenges, and an expectation of multiple replays to come to terms with all of the above. Captain Piedaterre’s Blunders, however, has a much simpler answer: just put Captain Verdeterre, the world’s snarkiest rat pirate, in the game.

Mr. Green-dirt only has a glorified cameo at the end, however – instead looting duties fall this time to his cousin, the eponymous Captain Piedaterre. That punny name is one of the one and a half very solid jokes in this short choice-based take on the formula. The half is the Piedaterre takes the adage that one person rat’s trash is another’s treasure a bit too literally; as you run around a treasure-laden pirate ship (not your own), you reject the shiny stuff in favor of everyday dross. There’s a bit of backstory here that explains the source of this curious approach to valuation, and provides a sample of the game’s breezy prose:

"This splintered chair leg lights the corners of my mind. It reminds me of the day when, as a wee rat, I fell off a broken chair and landed on my head. Coincidentally, that was the day I discovered I had exceptional taste in all aesthetic matters."

Despite its choice-based interface, the game is unexpectedly written in Inform, with a convenient set of options enabling you to make choices by clicking hyperlinks a la Twine, typing a number, or both. The system itself works well, but I ran into some broader UI issues when playing via the browser, as “More” prompts kept popping up and requiring me to scroll down to the bottom of the window in order for new keypresses to register; sometimes a simple space bar or page-down would do the trick, but other times I was reduced to using the mouse to manually drag down the scroll bar, which was finicky process – fortunately the clickable links helped avoid this issue when it got too annoying.

For all that there was clearly a lot of time spent on the interface, I did find the substance of the game rather bare. It doesn’t wear out its welcome, to its credit, but as mentioned, it forgoes the dynamism and optimization of the core Verdeterre-like gameplay loop in favor of presenting a static environment with few puzzles; you mostly just walk through the small map grabbing whatever bits of dross you see (and if you don’t see any upon entering a room, you just poke and prod at the scenery until you find it). For a short comedy game, it’s fine, but since it so clearly invokes the original, it can’t help but suffer from the comparison – really, that title is a magnificent gag that deserves at least a little follow-up (I would love to see how Captain Piedaterre’s city apartment is decorated).

I was mystified by the first ending I reached in Larvae: for one thing, there’s no clear indication that you’ve reached the final passage, which left me half-expecting that there was timed text still to come or I’d run into a bug. For another, it felt like some horror elements teased in the opening sections (and the genre tag on IFDB) had receded without fanfare, with the story seemingly content to pivot exclusively to low-key teenage melodrama. Wondering if I’d missed something, I backed up and started making different choices – where before I’d picked options having the protagonist I’d chosen, Isla, express contentment with her boyfriend Cam as they spent a month together at an academic summer camp focusing on biology research, I tried to pull back and see if this would provoke a blow-up. But no, this just made the conclusion an understated break-up scene, rather than an I’ll-visit-you-during-all-the-vacations lovefest.

Then I went back to the very first choice I’d made after deciding which of the pair to play as, which bizarrely had me as Isla deciding whether Cam wanted a drink from my water bottle, and this time opted for him to say he’ d already had his own water. This seemingly-innocuous choice was the last one I made, as it put me on an underexplained railroad track to an entirely different kind of ending.

While this kind of non-telegraphed swerve between genres can work – heck, Hanna, We’re Going to School does something not entirely dissimilar – it’s a tricky thing to manage in practice. Ideally, each branch of the story would make sense of what comes before and act as a satisfying resolution of at least the major themes the beginning has put into play. Or if there are less-canonical options that provide a quick off-ramp from the story, that can work if the author signposts where the story is supposed to go, so the player gets a thrill out of bucking their fate for a minute before getting back on the ride. But here, it really does seem like there’s meant to be a “right” option – the horror one – which is less worked-out than the longer set of branches that don’t pay off a key element of the setup, and the contrast between the trivial decision and its fatal consequences lends the game an unintended note of bathos.

True, if you play as Cam you get a bit more perspective on why that choice of potables matters, but why would you? As mentioned, the setup here is that he and Isla are a couple of high school seniors who get an opportunity to attend a prestigious research program bringing together talented students with biologists doing cutting-edge work in a variety of fields. Except it’s Isla who’s the talented student – Cam just gets to come along as her plus one so they can spend some time together before university, and maybe so he can do some livestreaming of anything interesting they see – and if there are any players of IF who are going to pick the bro-y YouTuber over the studious, responsible one, I’ve yet to meet them.

Larvae’s multigenre ambitions are also let down by some weak writing. Neither of the main characters enjoys much in the way of characterization, and the worldbuilding is thin (it’s notionally set in the 2050s, but the world pretty much works the way it does now, except that the only cultural touchstone people tend to reference is 1979’s Alien). The rules of narrative economy are flagrantly violated – there are two different scientific legends who are introduced as potential mentor figures, but who both immediately disappear after the passages when they’re first mentioned. And the prose has the feel of something translated from another language, which sometimes can work to add an unexpected note to a game’s writing, but here is just awkward:

“Come on, you have enjoyed the activities we’ve been doing these weeks, right?” I observe a strawberry, and toss it away as it’s rotten.

“Yeah, yeah I know,” he says, taking my hand as he rises.

“Besides, it does you some good to be away from your truelove the blue-light devices.” I say, taking a look at the beautiful lavender sky. Stars are already sparkling it.

He smiles. “You’re literally my next-door neighbor girl.”

Admittedly, some of the creepier horror elements are effective, especially a viscerally upsetting bit of gore in the worst endings. And even sadder is that I think there’s the germ of an idea here that could have worked really well: when you’re experiencing the last few weeks with your girlfriend before she goes away to school and might forget you forever, it does kinda feel like there’s a monster growing in your guts could explode your heart any minute. But making that work would have required ensuring that all the pieces of the premise come into play in most paths, and sharpening the writing so that we really feel the emotional bond between the core pair, and understand them as distinct, engaging people. Unfortunately in its current version, Larvae is only able to gesture towards the stronger game it could have been.

Sometimes I play a game and it’s like sinking into a warm, familiar bath – I’ve got a history with the genre it’s playing in, the cultural signifiers are familiar, the character dynamics are ones I’ve directly experienced. With Hanna, We’re Going to School, I’m facing the opposite situation, though: while presented as a fairly standard piece of choice-based IF, per the author’s note at the end it’s directly responding to a visual-novel subgenre I’ve at best dimly heard of (and in fact specific games within that tradition). It’s set in a Singaporean high school, though it’s an international school that cleaves more closely to the John Hughes model than you might imagine – though that’s little help to me, since I went to a boarding high school and those traditionalist tropes are just as foreign to me. Meanwhile, the situations the protagonist, Jing, faces turn on gender-based bullying and stereotyping, not to mention navigating her relationship with her best friend’s ghost (I am a straight white dude and am friends with zero ghosts).

Alienation is maybe not the worst standpoint from which to approach Hanna, We’re Going to School, though. Beyond creating a perverse sense of identification with the uncomfortable-in-her-skin Jing, it’s also clear that the game is more interested in providing a critical take than serving up warmed-over tropes as comfort food. The most hilarious example of this is too good to spoil, but I’ll just say that while you’re given plenty of options as you help Jing navigate her teenage wasteland, there are only two choices that determine which ending you get: the tack you take when you finally confront your bully, which is appropriately dramatized as a high-stakes encounter, and another completely unheralded moment that you or I might experience every morning (Spoiler - click to show)(well, more so those of you who live in places where it rains, I suppose). It’s hard not to read this as cheeky commentary on the most fundamental premise of choice-and-consequence gameplay, lifting up the absurd triviality of the decisions on which whole lives can turn.

Not that this is a cynical game. Jing is a hesitant protagonist, riven by self-doubt and perennially unsure of what she wants, much less how to get it, but she’s utterly sincere in her emotional responses, feeling compassion for a victim of cool-kid teasing, passion for the idea that there can be some justice somewhere, and deeply connected to her best friend. Hanna’s a unique character in her own right – a trans girl who killed herself because of the rejection of her family and most of her peers, including Clara, the school’s queen bee, she failed to move on to the afterlife and is now tied to Jing. They make for an appealing double-act, Hanna mothering Jing and trying to look out for her, Jing honoring her memory and struggling to accept the world that threw her away. Seeing Jing navigate the high-school hellscape while Hanna tries her best to act as a guardian angel – though she’s just as young and occasionally clueless – is endearing.

It’s also often quite funny, since for all the dark themes the writing here crackles with wit. When you first meet your classmate Harold, his name is highlighted, indicating you can click it to expand some new text explaining something about who he is: when you do, you learn he’s “a guy who really likes to draw tanks during math class.” When you go down your building’s elevator, there’s an impressively large store of random gags that can fire as Hanna struggles to time her levitation appropriately. And I loved this little excerpt, which describes the entry to the school and makes clear that this is a turn-of-the-millennium period piece:

"…preschoolers crying, elementary students playing their Gameboys, middle schoolers tittle-tattling about their crushes, and angsty high schoolers listening to Linkin Park through their cracked earphones all in one bus."

So yes, there’s angst here, but it’s presented with heart and perspective – and it helps that Jing isn’t just struggling with the typical no-one-understands-me blues. A lesbian, she’s acutely aware of the ways that social pressures are pushing her to conform, especially the ostensibly well-meaning overtures Clara makes to improve her dating life. And she’s also got a sneaking suspicion that she won’t fit into the grown-up world school is theoretically helping to prepare her for, anyway – this is especially foregrounded through sequences showing the strong holding up the weak to ridicule, or asserting stereotypes about submissive Asian women. The character work makes these themes land, too – heck, even Clara, who’s a bit of a monster, appears to sincerely understand and appreciate poetry, and is given surprising depth in some of the endings.

Hanna’s portrayal, interestingly, is a bit flatter; for all the horror of her death, there are very few moments where we see her reflect on her struggles, or the existential precariousness of her current position. While she’s an active character who’s constantly talking to Jing, we get the clearest view of her subjectivity in flashbacks filtered through Jing and Clara’s imaginings of her experience. To an extent this makes her slightly flat, but then, she is a ghost; a reminder, perhaps, that there’s a sort of privilege in even the terrible parts of life being reserved to the living.

This review is, I know, a bit of a cop-out; “look at all the interesting things going on here,” I say, without landing on a particular core for my critical reading. This may just be a consequence of the fact that I’m a bit of a stranger in a strange land here, ignorant of the dialogue into which I’ve blundered, or that this is a rich text that resists oversimplistic reductions. But it’s also, I think, emblematic of the confusion of your teenaged years and school experience: a lot happens, the choices you make may matter but the way it all adds up is elusive, until you grow out of it and impose a narrative on it in retrospect. Unless you don’t grow out of it.

Starting up My Girl I was initially overwhelmed by a swarm of dubious associations. No one of my generation can read that title without thinking first of the lively Motown standard and second of a dying Macaulay Culkin, and then when I started the game and saw that the protagonist’s husband was named Santiago and spent most of his time out at sea, Hemingway shouldered his way in there too. But it didn’t take long to realize that none of these were authentic influences: this is Bluebeard, and a Bluebeard played shockingly straight, with no dramatic twists to the premise or gimmicky gameplay to distract (indeed, this is dynamic fiction – the only interactivity is clicking forward to the next passage).

This means that the game’s prose has nothing to hide behind – which is good news, since you wouldn’t want it to even make the attempt. Some early excerpts will stand for many more that I saved in my notes file, with their precise mastery of detail and portentous allusion:

“You know that I love you, don’t you, Carmilla?” he asks. His eyes are doleful, focused intently on your own: pinning you beneath the weight of his gaze like a butterfly skewered for a collector’s pleasure. “Thank you for listening to me. You know that I only want what’s best for you,” Santiago says. He brushes aside a curl of your dark hair, smudging his thumb against your forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. You close your eyes. You don’t want to see his mouth slanting closer.

"Later, Santiago is fiddling around with a length of rope, restlessly tying and untying knots in turn. The fires crackle in the distance, the thick stone walls slow to warm. Santiago loves the sea, is bound to die by its hand someday - to be swallowed by the arctic depths, bones plunging to the bottom of the sea: whale-fall, to return from whence he came. Sea foam and salt, smooth bone and corrugated shell. When you view your husband at just the right angle, in the fast falling light, he is nothing but the blue afterimage that burns after bearing witness to the sea."

Visible too in these passages are some of the grace-notes the game does introduce to the folktale. First, rather than doom standing over Bluebeard’s wife, here it’s the sailor himself who seems destined an early grave; second, despite her material dependence upon him, his need for her love and approval goes some way to balancing or even reversing the traditional power dynamics. For all that Santiago carelessly constrains Carmilla to the same straitened horizons as her literary precedents, fulfilling his role as an instrument of the patriarchy, this is a softened Bluebeard: there’s no confrontation scene after she disobeys his instruction, as he meekly accepts her lies and slinks off-stage to be murdered. Indeed, the discovery of the Bloody Chamber is underplayed, so much so that I could almost believe Carmilla decides to kill him as much out of jealousy for his love of the sea as out of desperation to save her own life – indeed, the happy ending crows that “the sea will haunt [her] no more,” as though the ocean was the target of her vengeance, with Santiago simply the unfortunate vessel.

Of course it’s not as simple as all that; the patriarchy is ultimately what sets women against each other in competition, and the sea’s not immune to that, and Santiago’s very blindness to his wife’s needs and emotions justifies his demise. Beyond being a lush and lovely retelling of one of the great stories, I also enjoyed My Girl for the way it denies the ideas that a threatened wife needs to be only a victim, or that a monstrous husband can’t suffer.

It’s appropriate that VESPERTINE comes from the Goncharov jam, since more so than the classic techniques of interactive fiction the primary structural approach is the montage. We’re given hints of context, allusions to background, a looming presentiment of violence that will become the plot, but mainly what we see is two men coming together: the eponymous Russian mobster and his chameleon lover, Andrey. It’s clear that theirs is a long-standing affair, but the game isn’t overly fussed with sectioning time and space to keep their illicit encounters distinct: they might be tangled together in bed and a footnote will see them encountering each other in the street, but who’s to say whether that’s a memory from five years or five minutes ago, or even a glimpse of things to come? Indeed, as the evocative prose ranges over the territory of their bodies and the territory of their relationship, the boundaries between the two sometimes dissolve: at the level of language, in the way any given “he” might refer to either or both of them, at the level of metaphor, in the way Goncharov writes secret missives in the black book Andrey keeps as a journal.

The writing is dreamlike yet holds nothing back in exalting these characters in each others’ eyes. This early bit about Andrey’s penchant for hair-dye as an element of disguise is emblematic of the way a facility with the tools of violence and crime become sexy:

"But I’d want you all the same as a blonde - like the wheat fields we painted portraits of each other in, summer sun baking over our shoulders. Alla prima: all at once. You and I know something about that. I’d have eyes only for you as a brunet: church mouse brown, a shy, faltering touch over communion. Such a devoted man. And as a redhead - you captivate the room, eyes drawn to the flame, to the way you liven up a room."

Color recurs – there’s that link to film again:

"I love you the way the dead sea loves: caustic, catastrophic, and still- halophilic archaea persist in those blue, blue waters. The way a lighthouse throws its light over the ocean waves: a beacon of warning, to stay away- refuge is not in sight. Those craggy corals and rough rocks will tear into your hull, until there’s nothing left of you."

It’s heady stuff, straining at the very edges of the sublime but never tipping over into the ridiculous. The disorienting way the prose is delivered also makes the player vulnerable to sudden, unexpected imagery: the main thrust of the progression spools out linearly, through end-of-passage links that move onward, but each page boasts several superscripted end-notes as well as a single highlighted word or phrase that will reveal new vignettes, some short flashbacks, others discursions into the first person, and yet others perhaps indicating hoped-for futures that may or may not come. It’s an effective delivery mechanism, though I found it perhaps a bit baroque, with the many different ways and places to click drawing more attention to themselves than I needed them to (I wonder how this piece would work as literary hypertext?)

Beyond the slightly over-engineered interface, the only other thing that left me less than enraptured was a fleeting reluctance to believe that these hyperaesthetes truly lived the lives the story was telling me they did: none of the violence they inflict here is brutal, it’s just as heartbreakingly beautiful and painful as their lovemaking. Perhaps having more familiarity with the Goncharov meme would help with that, though – or perhaps it’s just another nod to the game’s filmic origin, as the camera’s got a long history of making killing look like art.

(I wrote two reviews for this one, here are both)

Naughty in the Library, like its companion piece Hot in the Office, is largely an exercise in satisfying expectations: once again we’ve got a pornographic Twine game presenting a specific-yet-generic sexy scenario. The latter game, per my review, managed to delight with a completely loopy take on the premise, including a partner hell-bent on sending you sexy pictures no matter how discouraging the dialogue options you pick and an inexplicable eroticization of office chairs (alert J.D. Vance). Naughty in the Library plays out almost beat-for-beat the same – a woman you barely know starts texting you emoji-filled updates about her daily activities, then her exhibitionist tendencies start coming out once she finds herself alone – so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of formula the author uses to Mad-Libs out the different sequences. But there’s nothing as deranged here as in Hot in the Office, save for the fact that the scene kicks off with your interlocutor firing off flirty texts while sprinting across campus to avoid being late for class (my ears pricked up upon learning the subject is ancient history, but alas no details were forthcoming no matter how much I pried) – other than that, things proceed exactly as you’d think they would, down to wet-blanket dialogue options succeeding in killing the mood this time out.

On the plus side, the art style is still the same, so if you like MS Paint and dislike eyes, boy howdy do I have a game for you.

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A library is an alchemical machine: fittingly, it was Sumerian priests who first took the quicksilver knowledge coursing through their minds and transformed it into dull clay, a Philosopher’s Stone in reverse. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of what at first were merely storehouses of commercial transactions, allowing proto-bureaucracies to ensure that taxes were paid and contracts satisfied – but information is information, and transformation transformation: despite all Gilgamesh’s literary striving for immortality, Ea-nāṣir has precisely the same share of it. And we can run the metaphor in reverse if we like – after his death, Ashurbanipal’s capital of Nineveh was razed as his empire crumbled, but the fires baked the tablets in his great library, preserving them for millennia to kindle the scholarship of those who came after. That’s a miraculous exception, though, we all know the library at Alexandria only burned to ash; it was well past its prime, so who can say what was lost.

A library is a mirage of justice. Late in his life, Andrew Carnegie endowed thousands of libraries to enable young people, starting out in life as impoverished as he had bit, to educate and better themselves; if any of these eager students were able to similarly catapult themselves to the apex of plutocracy, I’m unaware of it, just as I’m unaware of any sums he donated to trust-busters. A hundred years later, public libraries in Los Angeles are a refuge of last resort for the homeless, with librarians struggling to provide them the services they need while still making the space safe and accessible for other patrons who need a place to study, or get online to submit a job application or benefits paperwork (California’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps crowd succeeded in slashing our property taxes in 1978 – library staffing levels dropped by a third overnight and have never recovered).

A library is a pivot point. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was 7, I would have said paleontologist, and at 17 I would have said cosmologist. Bush v. Gore and the War on Terror made me wonder whether there were more pressing problems in the here and now, but my first taste of real activism was trying to save my university’s library: my senior year, we caught wind of a plan to turn the central library building into offices for fund-raising and administration (if there’s an apter found-metaphor for the ways American higher education has gone astray in the past quarter-century, I haven’t seen it), leaving each department to cram a few books into whatever rooms they could spare and archive the rest off-site. The building was an unlovely steel tower, and named after a former professor infamous at the time for dry-labbing the results that won him the Nobel Prize and infamous later for his support of eugenics; still, a library’s a library. I organized a petition that a tenth of the student body signed, conducted a notably hostile interview with the dean who’d masterminded the plan, and wrote fiery editorials in the school paper. I graduated that summer, eventually to wend my way to law school; the books lasted on campus only a few months longer.

A library is an act of hubris. Borges connects the universal library with the upward-yearning tower of Babel, Eco’s labyrinth of books conceals a truth that might make us laugh at the divine. Why do the thoughts of particularly metafictional authors incline towards the library when they want to overthrow the heavens? Because it’s possible to imagine a library unfettered by constraints of time and space, freed to pursue its telos of bringing together all knowledge that exists, all knowledge that could exist – more than anything else human-made, libraries gesture towards omniscience, that divine perquisite. Or are we to think it a coincidence that Diderot, first among the Encyclopédistes, ruminated about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest?

A library is a place of honor. Forget the vexed, restrictive arguments about the cultural canon, which are all about exclusion; what’s important here is the way the collection of a public library signals inclusion, asserting that at least some people will find at least some value in everything on its shelves. No wonder then that right-wingers have turned our libraries into warzones: the defining characteristic of the reactionary mind is the psychic harm it suffers at the idea that people different from them are equal in dignity, and so what greater insult is there than seeing literature of, for, and by those you hate given a place? You can enforce hierarchy on bodies, exalt some spaces at the expense of others, and you can try to do the same with books – there’s that pesky canon again. But books are stubborn things, and short of burning them (oh, do the reactionaries dream of burning them) there’s no way of shutting them up.

A library is also a place where you can bone; if that thought occurred to you before any of the ones above, and ideally you like MS Paint and dislike eyes, boy howdy do I have a game for you.