Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

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

It’s probably the dream of most IF authors to be a prolific writer of high-quality games, but contemplating the oeuvre of Arthur DiBianca, who’s perhaps comes as close to that ideal as anybody currently working, I wonder whether there’s a downside to such consistency. Does there ever come a point where the audience starts to take you for granted, and greet each new work with a simple “ho hum, here’s yet another really fun Arthur DiBianca game”? I hope that’s not the case, but I have to say, I was not the slightest bit surprised to find that Vambrance of Destiny is pretty great.

Like pretty much all of his work, this is a limited parser game, one that specifically feels like an iteration on last year’s IFComp entry, Trouble in Sector 471. Like in that game, here we’ve got a nicely-realized minimap, a metroidvania explore-to-upgrade-to-explore-more structure, and a main objective that’s largely advanced by using your abilities to beat baddies. Here, though, the robot-topia of Section 471 is swapped for the aesthetics of dungeon-crawling fantasy; plotwise, you’ve got to delve into an ancient ruin to beat up a rogue wizard and reclaim his stolen staff of power, and ability-wise, you’ve got the eponymous arm-armor, which evinces various spell-like abilities as you fill its various receptacles with magical gems. There’s also a cool tech upgrade this time out, which is that the game is played with single keypresses – no need to type out full commands or even hit enter – which is a nice convenience (the tilde key allows access to SAVE, LOAD, and other systems commands, though).

The story and writing are relatively minimal – the Foozle shows up a couple times to taunt you, but otherwise this is a simple get-to-the-end-to-beat-the-boss affair, while the absence of an EXAMINE action helps keep the location descriptions tight and focused. They work well for what they are, don’t get me wrong, but like most of DiBianca’s games, VoD lives and dies by its puzzles. And unsurprisingly, they’re really quite well done.

The process of getting new capabilities via gem upgrades is always fun, of course, and you get to master a fun set of spells over the course of the game, from elemental attacks to teleports to summoning spells. Having spent a bunch of time recently assessing the design of limited-parser games, I’m increasingly of the mind that the key challenge is to avoid the lawnmowering problem – that is, making it too tempting for the player to make progress simply by running through all the different options at their disposal whenever they hit an obstacle, rather than engaging with the puzzle and trying to solve it. Vambrance avoids this pitfall handily; the challenges progress nicely as you go, with straightforward one-spell-required obstacles soon giving way to more complex ones that require an extended sequence of different spells, or have timing elements that require you to wait or otherwise pay attention before spamming different actions. This variety of strategies keeps things fresh, and means that spamming all the spells in turn eventually becomes tedious and unproductive.

Of course, there’s also a risk of making challenges too complex – which is just that a game becomes too hard. VoD generally stays on the right side of this line, too. I struggled a bit with some of the multi-step solutions in Sector 471, but generally had an easier time here, I think because the game does a great job providing feedback for when you’re on the right track or have come up with a partial solution. As with most of DiBianca’s games, the most esoteric puzzles are mostly saved for optional side-objectives (here, there are a dozen bonus treasures to collect along the way to the big boss, in keeping with the dungeon crawl theme). That said, while I did complete all the puzzles, both the critical path and the optional ones, I did wind up going to the hints more than a few times towards the end – ultimately, you wind up accumulating over a dozen different ability-gems, some of which are fairly involved to use (like the one that enables you to temporarily teleport in one of a half-dozen different objects), which feels like it starts to strain at the borders of how limited a limited-parser game can be.

Still, even the puzzles I got hints on were well-clued in retrospect, and fun to solve. The climactic fight with the rogue wizard is also a really good time. It maybe doesn’t play completely fair, I have to admit -- (Spoiler - click to show)you need to beat him in a spell duel, and after a warm-up round where he throws things with obvious counters at you, and then starts mixing in ones that require extrapolation from puzzles you’ve previously solved, to a final set that actively mislead you, telegraphing one vulnerability only to reveal a different, hidden one after you fail to stop it. This means that victory will almost certainly require an initial loss or two so you can memorize how to respond to these tricky ones, albeit trying again just takes half a dozen turns -- but since the whole sequence winds up being an enjoyable set piece, this notional violation of good game design principles winding up eminently forgivable.

All of which is to say: ho hum, here’s another really fun Arthur DiBianca game. Yawn. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next year!

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

The randomizer, ever playful, gave me two short Texture games in a row. Like Lonehouse, this one’s also a deeply interior portrait of a person in the throes of powerful feelings, and also boasts a fair bit of awkward writing. It does have a clarity of purpose, though, and some arresting images, as it tells a story of one old man’s obsession with completing his sculptural masterpiece, while it manages to use the sometimes-awkward drag-verbs-onto-nouns Texture interface fairly intuitively; for all that it does have real merits, though, it seems to endorse a rather narrow understanding of the role of art, which limited the effectiveness of its climax.

While The Sculptor doesn’t offer a lot of biographical details about the main character, it does give you enough to understand his situation. His aspirations towards artistry have been frustrated for decades, first by an unsupportive father and then his lack of money. After a lifetime of menial labor, though, he’s finally been able to save up enough money to purchase a block of marble, so that he can have one last chance to create a magnum opus. Complicating matters, he’s also deep in medical debt due to a hernia surgery – the collections agency representative, though, seems intrigued by your work, and might accept your masterpiece to discharge the debt, and their display of such a remarkable piece might even help make your name famous…

This is a straightforward plot, but it’s enough to support the game’s short runtime. And there are a few places where the game offers some optional social engagement with your old boss, or lets you contemplate what you’re trying to achieve, which enriches the otherwise-straightforward narrative. Mechanically, you’re usually given one or two more passive or reflective verbs, and one that’s more active, so it was typically clear which options would deepen the current scene and which would move on to the next bit of the story. On the flip side, the prose is often wonky, but does mix in some moments of real power. Here’s a bit where you consider the sacrifices you made for art that shows off both these aspects of the writing:

"The days you scavenged your intact pockets, counting what to spend so you could put the rest away. The nights you slept in hunger’s bed, the winters of wet socks and tattered shoes you wore with pride, and the dear family you loved — children and wife you chose not to have lest they too would choose to put the rest away."

There are also a few images that just land, with no caveats needed, like this description of the marble block you’ve paid for with your life’s wages:

"That is your whole life, you explain. Where every little coin you saved went. You struggle to admit that every chip you break from it is a year thrown away."

I did find the game tottered a bit at the finish line, though. After you complete the masterpiece, the collections agency people return, and you’re confronted with a climactic choice, which are literally labeled as either “Sullied and Impure” – you let them have the sculpture, clearing your debt and bringing you worldly fame – or “Refined and Preserved”, where you take a hammer and smash the sculpture to bits before their disbelieving eyes. This is not an especially nuanced look at how artists are cross-pressured between commerce and integrity!

This could work, I suppose, as an allegory of various artistic dilemmas, but the rest of the game has too many specific details – like the whole hernia surgery/medical debt plotline that sets up the choice – for it to easily function as a pure philosophical statement. At the same time, it isn’t sufficiently grounded to really engage with the questions of artistic production under capitalism; like, if he has the medical debt because he was uninsured pre-Obamacare, that lands differently than if he lives in a state that’s stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid for obscure reasons of political fealty. Similarly, the game seems to posit collections agencies as well-funded, classy operations akin to Fortune 500 corporations or law firms, able to shell out big bucks for art and promote it in such a way as to ensure your reputation.

This matters because throughout human history, artistic production has been embedded in webs of economic exchange and patronage – especially capital-intensive forms like marble sculpture – so the simple art-for-art’s-sake philosophy the game endorses seems about as substantive as someone yelling “no sellouts” at a Jawbreaker show. Like, creating a great work of art is rewarding in and of itself, sure, but quarrying rock is not an especially fun job, and the people who cut it into regular blocks often die of silicosis. The myth of the lone, tortured artist creating at the margins of society is largely an invention of the Romantic era, but it’s telling that the people actually doing the creating back then were primarily white male aristocrats or members of the haute-bourgeoisie. The Sculptor seems to interrogate that myth by seeing how it applies to someone with dramatically less economic privilege – but it can’t quite bring itself to reject this inherited narrative.

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

My wife has a sweatshirt that used to belong to my sister. We live in California, and she lived in Maryland, so one September when we were visiting and it got cold, she noticed that my wife was shivering in her SoCal-appropriate outfit, and lent her a hoody. I forgot to give it back before we left, and a month later we found out Liz’s cancer had come back, so returning a sweatshirt wasn’t ever a priority in the time we had left. And now that sweatshirt isn’t just a sweatshirt.

There can be an unbearable poignancy to the artifacts our loved ones leave behind when they die; the books they read and wrote in, the glasses that let them see, the tchotchkes they’d look at and smile. Trivial, everyday objects that were barely worth a second of thought are transmuted to relics, bearing the last impress of someone’s now-finished time in the world.

Lonehouse engages with that poignancy, in ways that were occasionally quite arresting for me to encounter – the protagonist is visiting the apartment of her recently-deceased sister, named Liv, to help clean it out and take away some keepsakes. As you explore using Texture’s drag-verbs-to-nouns interface, you get snatches of the history between them – it’s not fully explained, but it seems like the sisters hadn’t been in touch, and perhaps there’d been a falling out – and identify the things that seem to have the most Liv-ness to them: a jacket, a favored plushie, a photo.

Despite the strong personal resonance of the premise, though, I didn’t wind up feeling like Lonehouse was truly compelling. Partially this is because the writing is often awkward. The style is generally unadorned and matter-of-fact, which I think is appropriate to communicating grief, but some of the author’s word choices undermine the simple power of this approach. Partially though it’s because the writing never gets especially specific. The general experience of death is one we’ve all had or will have, of course, but it’s unique details that turn this from a vague sense of loss to heart-rending tragedy, and Lonehouse doesn’t usually try to work in this register. Upon seeing that Liv saved an old Christmas gift that the protagonist made her, for example, we’re told that “[a] complicated feeling stirs in you” – but what feeling is that? Again, we aren’t given much detail of the prior relationship between the two, so it’s hard to place this in context.

The Texture engine also makes experiencing the story less engaging than I would have liked. I ran into what appears to be a bug with the system, since I came across it in another game too, where the buttons holding each scene’s verbs displayed their text in a tiny font – that’s not the author’s fault, but it did mean that I was often taken out of the story as I tried to decode my options. The interface also made it challenging to figure out which actions would allow me to explore or get more detail, and which would progress to the next sequence; several times in this short game, I wound up accidentally speeding through rooms I’m not sure I was finished with.

This is a short game that takes on some compelling issues; I’m not sure whether it’s the author’s debut, but if so I think it’s a more than respectable start. My key feedback for next time (and hopefully there’ll be a next time!) is to lean into the concrete, grounded style displayed here, but not to sacrifice the particular in the vain hope of making a piece of writing universal: otherwise, a sweatshirt will remain just a sweatshirt.

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

For all that Bali B&B lives up to its billing as a cozy domestic simulator, this ChoiceScript game inspired more stomach-churning dread than any other game in this year's Comp – just as I was settling into my week-long stint of temporarily managing my grandparents’ eponymous business, I was terrified to learn that the proprietor of a B&B is expected to play host over breakfast, talking to all the different guests at once, making sure the conversation doesn’t lag, and generally engaging in an extended personal interaction with people who are involved in a purely economic transaction with you. I can see how people with less social anxiety than me would enjoy this as an opportunity to get to know new people and learn more about the world, but ye gods – this is one career I can definitely cross off the list when I need to figure out what to do post-retirement.

Other than that one shocking moment, though, this really is a warm duvet of a game. As a quarter-Indonesian Australian, you’ve grown used to coming back to Bali for vacations and spending time with your grandparents, so when they surprise you on your latest trip by telling you that they’re off to Paris and you’re in charge, at least you know many of the locals and most of what needs to be done. The week progresses in an agreeable series of vignettes; you’re always jumping from one crisis to another, but buoyed by a charming supporting cast, nothing ever feels insurmountable. A litter of cats in the oven when the health inspector comes calling? Guests who don’t speak any language you know? Another who insists on eating bacon over the religious objections of the cook? I dealt with some of these better than others (I charmed the health inspector and tamed the cats; I gave the Chinese guests some mild food poisoning but they overall seemed to have an OK time; and I’m a vegetarian so I told bacon-guy to fuck right off) but the game was happy to keep things moving without excoriating me for my mistakes.

The problems and confusions that arise as you attempt to keep the B&B running are the main focus of gameplay, but the true star is the setting. I’ve never been to Bali – though since there was an Indonesian restaurant a couple blocks from my college dorm, I can confirm the food is absolutely delicious – but this game is a great advertisement for a stay there. The scenery is described in lush detail, there’s an attention to the cultural and religious diversity that feels authentic and respectful, and overall there’s a lovely, laid-back vibe to the proceedings. A game with this premise could easily fall into the trap of demonizing the guests or stereotyping the staff, but even when someone’s being a jerk, the author manages to convey their humanity (and even the ones who behave badly have an opportunity to at least partially redeem themselves). There’s also an adorable yet mischievous monkey, what’s not to like.

If anything, my only complaint is that I felt like the game went too easy on me. It has the usual overwhelming flurry of ChoiceScript stats, which I promptly ignored, but regardless, almost everything I tried seemed to succeed. Late in the game, there was a moment where it said that because I took good care of my health, I was able to accomplish a challenging task, but I had no memory of ever prioritizing health or even having the option of doing so. And the health inspector felt like a Chekhov’s gun that didn’t go off – after an initial encounter where she finds some violations, she says she’s going to come back, but since she returns after your grandparents do, you don’t get to see whether the consequences of your decisions have saved the B&B from a shutdown. Given the general gentle vibe of the game, this isn’t a real threat, of course – and again, this is comfort gaming, I didn’t need it to be overly punishing – but at the end of the week, I did feel like there were some times that I’d made mistakes, and it maybe felt a little patronizing that the game didn’t call me on them.

That’s mostly me finding something to criticize, though. I had a lot of fun with this one, from the well-drawn characters to the intelligent approach to choice-based gameplay (there are times when you’re asked big-picture questions, for example, but if you feel like you don’t have enough information you can sensibly just punt on them with no penalty). And I didn’t even talk much about the kittens! It almost was enough to make me think that B&B life could be worth the awkward breakfast table chit-chat. Almost.

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

Everyone remembers the first time they truly understood death, I suspect – the moment when it toggled from a frightening but abstract notion, one of a million things about being grown-up that kids have to accept but don’t really get, to the viscera; and frankly terrifying revelation that anyone, anytime can be taken, with no exceptions or escapes or ways back. I was a sheltered kid, so for me that didn’t happen until just after I turned nine, when one morning on the way to school the radio said that Jim Henson had died. Of course I knew who he was: the Muppets and Sesame Street loomed large in my childhood. I tried to hold myself together, but then they played Kermit the Frog singing Rainbow Connection, and I lost it, blubbering as my harried mom dropped me off.

As a result, while it took me a while to figure out what Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head was doing, once I twigged to it I immediately was on board. It’s a Twine game built around a recently-deceased puppeteer who’s clearly modeled on Henson, albeit with significant differences in biography (Malcolm Newsome is a Black millennial from Lancaster, CA); there’s a Disney-style megacorporation threatening to buy out and bulldoze his studio and a tabloid narrative saying that Newsome died of a drug overdose threatening to undermine his reputation. The player character is a former member of Newsome’s troupe who’s snuck back into the studio to try to figure out what really happened, fight back against his enemies, and reclaim his legacy.

It’s a great premise, and like I said, one that resonates with me. But the reason it took me a while to realize that was what was going on is that the game initially presents itself as a heist – actually, you’ve been hired to try to steal back as many of Nesome’s puppets as you can before the compound is demolished. And once you enter the first of four buildings on the lot, the set-up is quickly complicated by a pair of twists that come in quick succession: 1) once you grab the first puppet you find, you’re compelled to put it on your hand and it starts talking to you, and 2) there are monsters, bastardized puppets who now patrol the compound on behalf of the company that’s coming to bulldoze everything. Despite the game’s blurb claiming that its genre is horror (well, “mascot horror”, whatever that is) this isn’t played for as many scares as it could be – in particular, while it’s weird that the puppets appear to be sapient, they’re friendly, and actually quite helpful, as the most important ones each have a special power that can help you navigate through the maze-like interiors of the studio’s buildings, find your way around the various locks and obstacles, and evade or defeat the monsters.

Gameplay-wise, then, we’ve got a sort of Muppetvania, as you gather keys and new puppet powers enabling you to traverse more of the game’s world and in turn obtain yet more keys and puppets. It’s a pretty big game, and while you don’t need to recover all 14 puppets to get the best ending, I found the gameplay loop compelling enough to find all but one (and my failure to go the distance might have been due to a bug rather than a lack of commitment: (Spoiler - click to show) the puppet-detecting puppet kept telling me there was another to be found in the sink of the dishwashing area, but when I searched there I couldn’t find anything). Each dive into a building makes for a tense game of push-your-luck, as you attempt to explore and search every room, identify obstacles and hidden exits, try to work out the pattern of the monsters’ movements (there’s a different one in each building, and they all have bespoke movement strategies), and then flee so you can come back with the puppet or puppets you need to make progress. It’s fun stuff, even if I defaulted to undo-scumming more often than I like to admit.

I’m not sure it fits well with the broader ambitions of the game, though. For one thing, you’re limited to carrying at most two puppets at a time (and if you’re full up on puppets, you won’t have a hand free to pick up keys), so to speed up the process of recovering puppets from the buildings, I tended to eschew the ones with utility powers in favor of the ones that were strictly necessary to solve puzzles. Because the author’s coded in a bunch of neat interactions where puppets give commentary on the workshops and soundstages you encounter, as well as putting in unique dialogue between each pair of puppets if you wear two at the same time – but I know I missed out on a lot of that. This is a shame because I really did like the cast; all the characters seem like plausible members of a Muppet-like ensemble, and had winning personalities in their own right. And missing out on their commentary in the studio areas meant that they felt more like monster mazes than opportunities for environmental storytelling that enriched the game’s overall themes.

The other disconnect is that it turns out that the real villain of the piece isn’t Disney-branded monsters, it’s systemic racism. I’m going to spoiler-block the rest of this discussion because this is a big late-game revelation, but I can’t help discussing it in some depth. (Spoiler - click to show)Turns out there’s one particular puppet who has a camera built into her, and she recorded Newsome’s death, which is different from the vague “maybe it was a drug overdose” story you hear hinted at in the early game. Actually, he was pulled over by some LAPD cops who got angry that he wasn’t sufficiently deferential, so they murdered him and planted drugs on his body to cover up their crime. I’m deeply conflicted about this plot point; on the one hand, I liked the way the game foregrounds Newsome’s experience as a Black man in the entertainment industry, and God knows we’ve all seen enough examples of police violence and even killings of Black folks in recent years. But at the same time, this is an exaggerated, if not cartoonish, take on how these incidents play out. I’m maybe especially sensitive to this because I work for an LA-based civil rights organization and know some of the groups and people who helped reform the LAPD post-Rodney King; they still do a bunch of racially-biased stuff and much of my day job involves working to shift funding from policing to community-based alternatives, but for all that the story as conveyed by the game didn’t feel plausible. And again, the struggle against the monsters and the company that made them turns out not to be all that on point with what actually killed Newsome.

Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head does end strong, with a lovely epilogue where you explore a museum exhibit that’s been built around the puppets you recovered, encountering Newsome’s family and colleagues to explore the impact he had, and, at least in my ending, seeing his legacy vindicated. It’s really well done, and gives the player a strong sense of accomplishment as they end their time with the game. But again, its elegiac tone and more grounded themes (race is again a major factor) are at odds with the maze-y horror bits that make up the innards of the game. Again, I think those innards are good, but I’m left with the feeling that this is a game whose components are all quite strong, but which don’t necessarily reinforce each other all that well – it’d take a master puppeteer like Mal Newsome to stitch these disparate parts together into a unified whole.

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

Beat Witch is something I haven’t seen before: a parser game imagined as a series of high-octane action set pieces. It makes for a propulsive, pacey experience that’s easy to imagine seeing as a blockbuster movie, with sudden reversals, twists, and explosive climaxes coming one after the other. This approach isn’t without its downsides – the traditional parser pleasures of exploring an environment at one’s leisure and carefully thinking through the solutions to a smorgasbord of puzzles are completely absent, as the game pushes you from one adrenaline-fueled sequence to the next – but it makes for a unique change of pace.

Unsurprisingly given the game’s design ethos, Beat Witch starts in medias res, as you jostle your way into a safehouse alongside a bunch of hazmat-suit clad rescue workers dealing with a deadly plague. And just as you start to sort out what’s going on, you’re in for further rug-pulls; as it turns out, you’re not actually part of the team, and there isn’t actually a plague. The ABOUT menu fills you in on the situation through a neat bit of worldbuilding – it offers you the table of contents of a book about the eponymous “beat witches”, dangerous women who have the supernatural ability to siphon off and invest life energy, as well as a fatal vulnerability to music. Just giving the title of each chapter establishes the setting with admirable concision; I was way engaged contemplating “The Choral Uprising and why it failed” or “The phonograph, the radio, and the Great Extermination” than I would have been by a traditional lore-dump.

It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re one of the eponymous witches – but you’re a good witch, not a bad witch, with an angsty backstory from having accidentally hurt members of your family and striving for redemption by taking out the especially evil beat witch who’s made the city her hunting grounds. Of course, once the rest of the hazmat team realizes what you are, they aren’t going to take any chances or ask any questions before trying to kill you – in only a few turns, you’re faced with deadly danger, and once you solve that puzzle, there’s only a fleeting moment to catch your breath before you make it to the bad witch’s skyscraper lair and find the next desperate situation from which you need to extricate yourself.

The game never really stops, shunting you from one well-implemented sequence to the next – sometimes literally, as if you dawdle too long other characters might force you to move on. In pretty much all of Beat Witch’s scenes, you’re at the brink of death and struggling just to survive; there’s little extraneous scenery to explore, and in a convenient bit of worldbuilding, beat witches like you are mute, so there’s no real conversation system to slow things down. And while you’re powerful, your abilities are relatively straightforward, so you only have a few options in any given situation. As a result, things move quick; the puzzles aren’t especially hard, but it feels good to solve them because they have such high stakes.

Beat Witch does run on action-movie logic; if it explains how you knew about the bad witch you’re trying to stop, I didn’t notice that being established. You zip up, down, and around the skyscraper without being especially bound by the laws of physics (there’s an internal monologue and flashback as you fall from the roof that goes so long it almost becomes funny). And your nemesis is a classic motormouthed villain, cartoonishly evil and incapable of shutting up: when, late in the game, she taunted me by saying “think how much you goofed while I squeeze you like a juicy fart”, I imagined the protagonist was as tired of her BS as I was.

But these are all in keeping with the genre the game is trying to emulate, and may be the price to be paid for some really compelling moments like – I’m going to spoiler-block this one so as not to ruin the surprise – (Spoiler - click to show) sky-bridge of semi-animated bodies connecting the roofs of neighboring skyscrapers, or the LIVE command overwriting the after-death menu and heralding your resurrection. The game does have some unforced missteps, though: having an antagonist named “Dr Steve” is a little too goofy for the mood, and while I understand the intended thematic resonance of the final encounter, I think it comes off a bit anticlimactic. But these are easy to look past.

Reading between the lines of this review, it’s probably not a surprise for me to reveal that I admired Beat Witch more than I enjoyed it. I am an increasingly-old fuddy-duddy who likes to potter around when I play a parser game, and I tend to prioritize things like literary prose, thematic depth, and well-realized characters – none of which Beat Witch has much interest in. But I’m pretty sure that for some folks out there, this will be their favorite game of the Comp, and I can completely understand why; it delivers an experience most parser games don’t even attempt, and does so with elan.

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

The 2023 Com doesn't have an entry more high-concept than One Does Not Simply Fry: I’m sure I’ve seen mash-ups weirder than the Great British Bake Off meets Lord of the Rings, but I can’t think of them offhand. But for all that I’m deeply curious about precisely where the idea came from, it’s a match made in, if not heaven, at least one of the higher tiers of purgatory: the bake-off formula provides a sturdy framework for a ChoiceScript style game, with cooking skill, sucking up to the judges, and engaging with the other contestants providing distinct areas of endeavor, while the Tolkien stuff allows for a wide cast of familiar characters and works as a font for a million bad jokes and worse puns. It makes for engaging gameplay – and it’s quite replayable, with three distinct characters (plus a bonus unlockable one), multiple endings, and a host of potentially-viable strategies – even if the humor sometimes feels a bit forced.

Starting up the game, my first impression was that it was overstuffed with content. There are the aforementioned multiple characters, each of which is a knock-off of a member of the Fellowship: ersatz Legolas, faux Frodo, and a version of Éowyn who’s mysteriously called “Avis Barb” (is that like “has a beard” in schoolboy Latin? Anyway, I played as her my first time out). As per usual in ChoiceScript, they each have a distinct array of strengths and weakness, encompassing cooking ability, martial skill, speechcraft, and magical powers denoted as “breadomancy”. You’ve got the trio of judges: lead judge Tira Masu, grumpypants Gorgon Ramsayer, and the Doldrums/Seagull double act. There are optional vegetarian and vegan modes if you’d prefer not to be confronted with certain ingredients (a touch I appreciated!) Then there are the competitors you’re up against, including the certainly-not-going-to-turn-out-to-be-the-baddy “Sour Ron”, and a loaf of bread. And once the competition kicks off, you find out that your goal is not just to make the best onion ring, but to fry up the On(e)ion Ring which may or many not reawaken the Dark Lord resting uneasily under Mount Boom.

It’s a lot, but fortunately once the game kicks off, it’s reasonably manageable. Play proceeds in phases, from buying ingredients to preparing your frying setup to jostling with the competition and completing the challenge, before transitioning into a high-stakes endgame. Since each of the characters have distinct skills, it was usually straightforward to figure out which actions would make the most sense to attempt. I wound up winning the competition and making the On(e)ion Ring my first time out, but it felt excitingly touch-and-go throughout, and I was eager to start over to try out to the hidden character. At a gameplay level, then, I’d judge One Does Not Fry a success.

The humor, though, wound up being a slight net negative for me. There are some good jokes in here, don’t get me wrong – not-Éowyn makes brutal fun of the Witch King for being overconfident about that “no man can slay me” prophecy in a world that’s 50% women and also has hobbits, elves, dwarves, ents… And there’s an extended bit where you can decide to get potatoes rather than onions from the store, which rather scotches your chances of wining the onion ring challenge, but does set up a lovely line where you attempt to explain potatoes to the ancient Elven ghost who lives in your copy of the rulebook – don’t ask, I told you it’s a lot – and get the following nonplussed response:

"Back in the Worst Age, we didn’t have any weird eldritch ground tubes with self-replicating eyes that would try to convince you to plant them so they could poison you."

But as that “Worst Age” (First Age, geddit?) and all the punny names I mention above indicate, there are a lot of clunkers here too. The game subscribes to the view that everything has to be a pun, and go figure, many of them seem forced. It’s not Edoras, it’s Fedoras; it’s not the Witch King, it’s the Which King?; and I already mentioned Doldrums, who besides boasting a really forced name also for some reason has a Cockney accent. I regret to have to report that there’s a “Riders of Lohan” joke. Look, I don’t want to come off like a humorless scold, and I think my appetite for silly Tolkien stuff is pretty high, up to and including having a favorite LotR-themed rap band. But still, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if it’d had more restraint; the authors clearly came up with a bunch of really good Tolkien jokes, but unfortunately felt like they had to crank out like double or triple that amount to meet their quota.

After a first playthrough it’s easy enough to skim over that stuff, and the bones here are solid; I’m tempted to give the game another spin to check out how the classic Frodo and Sam team would fare. And there are a couple of achievements I failed to get in my two playthroughs (oh yeah, forgot to mention, there are achievements too). One Does Not Simply Fry really is an embarrassment of riches, even if you do need to take the bitter along with the sweet.

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

I really enjoyed SV Linwood’s entry in last year’s Comp, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, but dinged it for having a generic title and forgettable blurb. Fortunately, there are no worries on that front this year – I already had a smile on my face when I booted this parser game up, looking forward to the promised mad science, demonological deal-making, and (most exciting of all) legal research. And that smile stayed there for the hour and a half it took me to work through all its puzzles – this is a delight, funny and satisfying in the way of the best comedy puzzlefests.

The setup here is a good one – brainy-yet-hubristic mortal treats with the devil for forbidden knowledge, desperately hoping to keep his soul – and could be played straight for a seasonally-appropriate note of gothic horror. That’s not what we’ve got here, though; Dr Ludwig goes for the laugh every time, and every time nails it – like, it took me five minutes to realize that it wasn’t the case that literally every description in the game started with a sentence with an exclamation point, just most of them. It’s the kind of thing that could wear out its welcome, but the game never comes close to that line, deftly slinging joke after joke. Like, here’s what you get when you examine your trusty mad-scientist’s coat:

"My favorite lab coat! After that accident while experimenting with pocket dimensions, I could carry so much stuff in it. And the bloodstains were very fashionable, too!"

(See, I told you about the exclamation points).

Crucially, the humor is almost all character-driven rather than embracing wackiness for its own sake; between Dr Ludwig’s crazed ambitions, the Devil’s sly insinuations, and the leader of the pitchfork-bearing mob’s punctilious adherence to the legal niceties, everyone’s got a slightly different schtick, and an in-world justification for being funny.

And actually, as with A Long Way to the Nearest Star, character interaction is a highlight. Beyond their comedy potential, the whole cast is winning, making you solicitous of their love lives and unfair work conditions even as you’re digging up their ancestors and plotting to violate all God’s laws. And the process of engaging with them is very smooth: Dr Ludwig is an Inform game, but it uses a TADS-style conversation interface where after greeting a character, you can ask them about a constantly-updating list of topics. This hits a nice sweet spot between the freeform ASK/TELL system and more-prescriptive choice-based menus, and you’re able to ask everyone about a wide variety of subjects. The devil is especially impressive; as the game starts, you’ve just summoned and bound him, meaning you can give him commands via the traditional DEVIL, DO ACTION syntax. I confess that I often struggle with these kinds of puzzles, but here the process was well-cued and impressively well implemented: I tried to catch the game out by attempting DEVIL, ABOUT, but was told “As powerful as the Devil is, even he cannot access meta commands” (I was able to get him to take inventory and maybe learned some stuff I shouldn’t have that way, but I can’t help but think the author left that in on purpose).

In fact implementation is a major strength throughout. I did find a single Inform-standard response that had been left in; everything’s rewritten in Dr Ludwig’s bombastic voice. TOUCH attempts fail, for example, because “I am a man of science! I am above such physical labor as touching things without purpose!” (again, see what I mean about the exclamation points?) And you’d better believe that you can LAUGH or CACKLE whenever you want.

The puzzles are similarly of a high standard. They’re mostly traditional object-manipulation challenges, save for the aforementioned get-the-Devil-to-do-your-bidding bits, but they’re well signposted via a dynamic (and funny) to-do list, and they almost all involve engaging with that entertaining supporting cast. Most of the game is fairly open, too, with multiple puzzles available at any one time, so it’s hard to get too stuck. There are two that gave me some trouble, one that could have used better clueing (Spoiler - click to show)(I hadn’t realized that I’d basically solved the shopkeeper’s puzzle by dropping the flyer, because I didn’t understand that the “someone” she was worried would see her reading it was me), and one that was harder than it should have been due to the single bit of awkward implementation I found (Spoiler - click to show)(you need to examine the unsuccessfully-made monster to find your scalpel, but the game refers to it as a “disappointment”, but it doesn’t accept that – or either BODY or MONSTER – to refer to it, requiring you to guess that it’s implemented as EXPERIMENT).

Those are quite minor complaints, though, and just the sort of thing that would be easy to clean up for a post-Comp release. And even in its current form this is an early highlight of the Comp – if you’re adamantly against comedy parser puzzle games, Dr Ludwig won’t change your mind, I suppose, but just about everyone else will have a great time with this one.

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

(Spoilers in this one)

What I like most about The Long Kill is its harshness. Oh, as always, I brought it on myself – there’s a trio of difficulty options at the beginning of this nicely-presented Twine game about a British sniper deployed in the Afghan War (the just-concluded one, that is), including story mode and a conventional “pick whatever choice you want” one. But no, I opted for “Sniper Mode”, where you have to do math and dice are rolled behind the scenes, so you can miss your shots even if you do everything right. And it’s not just the violence: the game has flashbacks and flashforwards to civilian life, and I fucked up my one chance to have a girlfriend because after winning her an elephant at a carnival shooting game, I thought she wanted me to show off and go double or nothing, but actually she was cold and wanted me to go home. Some of this may feel unfair, but who says a game about sudden, explosive death coming before you even have a chance to blink should embrace fairness as an ethos?

(OK, there’s an undo button, and I did use it once or twice, but I felt bad about it).

What I like second-best about The Long Kill is its obsessive focus on shooting. Again, this goes beyond the scenes set during the war. The protagonist – he’s given the uninspiring nom de guerre “Mister” – bonds with his father only through shooting targets and rabbits; as mentioned above, he tries to impress his not-girlfriend by shooting; when he interviews for a job, he talks about how shooting gave him great math skills; even when he takes on a home improvement project, the scene ends with him leveling a power saw and pulling the trigger. Mister is very, very good at shooting; it’s not so much that he’s bad at everything else as that there isn’t anything else.

What I like third-best about The Long Kill is the prose. There are some typos, but it manages to be evocative while sticking to a terse, militaristic style. This sentence is about 2/3 of what the game shares about Mister’s relationship with his father, but it communicates just about everything the player needs to know:

"Even without looking though you can picture the little non-smile, that happy frown he does when you do or say something he likes."

What I like least about The Long Kill is its fantasy of victimization. After an opening sequence where you support a house-raid that bags an important Taliban leader, Mister’s convoy gets hit by an IED and he’s captured alongside his unit. They’re subject to torture, and he’s given an ultimatum of teaching the enemy soldiers to be better shots, or his companions will be executed. It’s a queasily compelling sequence, even if it ends rather abruptly, and by making Mister weak and frightened, it finally renders him something close to human. But this was still a bad authorial choice. We know that in the flashforward, Mister has PTSD and a discharge, but there’s no need for a period of abjection to connect the precise, effective wartime operator with the haunted shell of a man; that’s just what war does. More damningly, this sequence creates an underdog narrative that inverts the far more common reality of the war – the number of Western POWs and casualties was miniscule compared to the Afghans captured, maimed, and slain (many, of course, were innocent, and many, of course, were not). To elide this reality, and instead opt for a shell game that seems to swap the positions of the players: that’s kid glove stuff. Not at all harsh.

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

Oof. Despite being a sucker for libraries, knowledge, and (presumably) libraries of knowledge, I did not get on well with this one. The pitch is compelling: you’ve found a magical shrine that plays host to an all-knowing spirit, a collection of all the world’s wisdom, and a masked library attendant with a secret, and now you can ask to read any book you want. Wow! That is a lovely idea, and if the realities of implementation mean that of course the promise of “any book” can’t come close to being delivered, at least it’s a compelling illusion.

Sadly, after establishing the setup, the game quickly began to lose me. Partially this is because there are only three books on offer – specifically, two short-ish ones that establish the background lore of this fantasy world’s two major nations, delivered in DnD-manual style, and one long one that’s just the story of how your character came to the library, which of course you already would know and wouldn’t bother wasting time on. Partially this is because the prose doesn’t really live up to the fantastical premise:

"Your breath catches sharply in your chest as the last of the incantations die on the biting wind that whips around you. Streams of pale moonlight flicker in past the broken beams overhead, sending a cascade of sprawling patterns through the old, fractured glass. Ancient words scrawled onto a faded scroll bleed off the edges of their crumbling paper, spilling a black mist onto the cold stone floors which slips and slides into the dark corners of this dilapidated temple."

Adjectivitis, unvarying sentence structure, small grammar errors; it’s not awful but it’s not a high point either, and since the game is almost entirely walls of text – there are some engaging choices towards the endgame, but for the most part you’re either picking “turn to next page” or “turn to next section” – I really found myself wishing for better prose.

As for the content, I found the DnD manuals competent but rather uninspired. One nation is fantasy China, with the serial numbers not even filed off – the provinces are literally just real-world Chinese provinces. It’s got a whiff of Orientalism to it (did you know the lands of the East are ruled by “an ancient and magical dynasty”, that the people are “deeply spiritual and honor their ancestors above all else”, that they “practice martial arts as a way of harnessing [chi] energy”, and are ruled from a capital that is “a place of intrigue”?) but I think this is innocent; the country’s multiculturalism and openness to immigration are held up as a strength, and contrasted with the xenophobia of the western nation (which is Europe-flavored but not a direct insert of anyplace in particular; it’s just general fantasy bollocks).

It’s all serviceable enough, but unexciting to slog through, all the more so when the author occasionally loses track of the lore (there’s a bad-guy cult alternately called the “Band of the Dark Sun” and “Band of the Black Sun”) or draws too-direct inspiration from pop culture (there were a bunch of killings at a recent marriage, which has become known as the “Crimson Union”). And none of it actually winds up being all that relevant to the main part of the game, which is your character’s autobiography – the setting details are sufficiently straightforward that they could have easily been explained in the course of the story.

This bit does have some zip to it; it’s maybe paced a little slowly, and sometimes drops to bottom-line narration when writing out a scene would have been more effective. It also isn’t self-aware of how funny the premise sounds (you go on a world-shaking quest to find a cure for the ailing goat that’s your last link to your family); it’s offbeat enough to work well, but I think needed more time establishing the stakes and emotional connection between the main character and the goat. But once it gets moving, it executes YA-style fantasy novel tropes solidly enough; this isn’t my genre of choice, but even I got a kick out of the various double-crosses in the pirate section. Then things kicked up again after the story wraps, as the protagonist does face an actually-challenging set of decisions without a clear moral compass to make their choices easy.

As a result, my view of the game improved as it went on, but it’s still hard to recommend this one. The author’s got enthusiasm and some talent, but the game we’ve got feels too much like a first draft – there’s a lot of unnecessary cruft and an awkward frame that doesn’t cleanly mesh with the main substance of the story, along with prose that needs some polishing. Of course, every great game started out as a terrible first draft, so this is no bad thing by itself – but hopefully for their next game, the author will be able to spend more time figuring out what they need to say and what they don’t need to say, and revising their work to foreground the most compelling parts.