Reviews by Mike Russo

Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably . But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed. But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed.

I am, generally speaking, an optimist. Some of that’s just the fruit of being born with a lot of privilege and a brain that knows what to do with serotonin, I suppose, but it’s also by choice: many years ago I came across a bit of Karl Popper arguing that nobody knows what the future will bring, or what will move it one direction rather than another, so we have an obligation to hope for a better world and act as though the little things each of us can do might bring that hope a bit closer to reality. That was persuasive to me and so I try to live into it, but I’ll confess that some days it’s harder than others, like for example the end of Supreme Court terms and when I play a Perplexity game.

I’ve been reviewing games using this engine since 2021 – this is the fourth, by my count – and while the pitch for a parser system that allows the player to use natural language input remains compelling, the reality is still so stubbornly far from the promise that reader, I begin to despair. Like you’re told your goal here is to order lunch at a diner for you and your vegetarian son, but when you say to the maître d’ “I would like to get some lunch,” the game butts in to say “I don’t know the words: lunch.” That’s small beans compared to this exchange with the waiter, though (the question marks are the prompts for player input):

?:my son is vegetarian

my son is not veggie

?:my son is veggie

I don’t know the words: veggie

?:my son does not eat meat

I don’t know the words: eat

Trying to couch your input as regular English sentences simply does not work – even as simple a phrase as ORDER TOMATO SOUP makes the parser throw up its hands in despair. What does work is single-word input: typing TABLE, MENU, SOUP to indicate what you want, which of course any existing parser engine under the sun can manage. It’s hard to hold this against the system, truly – natural language processing is quite difficult, from what I understand! But still, pushing the player to try to use complete sentences sets expectations the game can’t come close to living up to, while the blurb’s promise that it’s a good way for English learners to practice their language skills feels frankly irresponsible. Judged as a game, meanwhile, there’s basically nothing here – the only thing resembling interest is that you have a terrible waiter who needs too be reminded to hand you a menu and then prompted to tell you the specials – with no details to speak of and the world’s most basic prose.

In my previous reviews of Perplexity games, I’ve generally wrapped up saying some variation of “hopefully the system’s authors will keep fine-tuning things so it works the way it’s advertised to do,” but after three years, it’s hard for me to see any improvement on this front (at least the lag that I remember afflicting the earlier games appears to be a thing of the past). Perhaps it might be time to bring this experiment to an end? That’s maybe an unfair sentiment – and one certainly biased by the fact that the game doesn’t appear to end, so I spent a final ten minutes frustratedly typing BYE and LEAVE and I’M GOING and EXIT to the maître d’ who kept asking how he could help me today over and over like a robot – and I’d love to be proved wrong! But I’m not optimistic.

Oh, and the cover image is an AI-generated picture with myriad issues – beyond the standard-issue nightmare fingers, there are light fixtures hanging off of others, a double-handled coffee mug, an olive oil bottle standing in for wine, and a robot with only one eyebrow – and no attribution. Can we please stop doing this?

Quick, close your eyes. Now imagine the most prototypical adventure game puzzle you can think of – not any specific iconic one from the classics of yesteryear, nor the dreary ones you’ve done a million times like the get-the-key-out-of-the-keyhole bit, just the Platonic ideal of a classic text adventure puzzle. Once you’ve got it, you can open those eyes (how have you been reading this?)

This exercise doesn’t admit of wrong answers, of course, but I’d submit that there’s a single most-right one: there’s a monkey, and you need to give him a banana so he’ll give you his wrench. I don’t think I’ve encountered this specific scenario presented quite so baldly before, but when I ran across it in Mystery Isles, I recognized its totemic power. And in fact the whole game is like this, in its stripped-down, old-school-yet-friendly glory: you could call it Text Adventure: the Text Adventure and wouldn’t be far off. You’re marooned on a desert island, you see, and to escape you’ll need to construct a makeshift torch, unearth pirate treasure, climb a tree, and offer up multiple food items as bribes (it’s not just the monkey); it’s all presented in breezy, unadorned prose and will either take you forever – because there are a couple of puzzles that are real head-scratchers – or ten minutes, and fortunately there’s a hint function included so you can choose your own adventure on that front.

Much as I enjoy ParserComp as a space for experimentation, it’s also clearly a place to play the hits. Even given its limited ambitions, though, Mystery Isles could have stood for several additional rounds of polish, because the implementation is fairly rough. Beyond the aforementioned underclued puzzles – there’s a bit where hitting a big rock with a little rock turns the little one into a makeshift axe, which is not how flint-knapping works, and the business of how exactly you’re meant to get the banana out of its tree doesn’t give much for the player to go on, not even confirming the existence of actual bananas in said tree – there are plenty of niggles and small bugs. Items don’t always disappear from the inventory once used, once you solve a puzzle to obtain an object you might need to resolve it to pick them up again should you drop them, there’s a spurious north exit mentioned in the jungle description, and the hint function is welcome but gets a bit confused towards the end (Spoiler - click to show)(it kept wanting me to relight the torch after I’d already obtained the map, which I believe at that point was both useless and impossible).

This is a short game, so even game-breaking bugs are quick to recover from, at least, but the lack of any credited testers really shows: there is no parser game so simple that it can be credibly released without independent beta testing, in my experience. There’s a lighthearted simplicity to Mystery Isles, and a certain ramshackleness can be part of the charm of such things – only as I’m writing this am I wondering about the plural in the title, since there’s just the one as far as I could see – but classic premises and design don’t need to be matched by creaky implementation.

One of the things that I really look forward to in ParserComp is seeing games that try to come up with different gameplay mechanics for the hoary old parser interface, because even almost 50 years on from Adventure, there’s still plenty of fertile ground to be plowed. PARANOIA’s twist is so clever yet so well-suited to its format that it feels like someone must have tried it before, but as far as I know this is a real innovation: taking the meticulous investigation of a fractally-detailed environment and making it into the core gameplay, rather than just a means to the end of solving medium-dry-good puzzles, by challenging the player to notice small (and not-so-small) discrepancies – it’s an interactive version of those puzzles where you’re supposed to find three differences in a pair of seemingly-identical images, livened up with impeccably-timed comedy bits. If there’s not much plot to speak of and the instructions could use some sharpening, those are minor blips indeed compared to what it gets right.

Might as well start with the plot, so we can get that out of the way: it’s your basic Portal setup, as you’re participating in an experimental scenario whose contours are at first unclear. After you’re given a chance to poke and prod at your sparse surroundings – a vase of flowers, some wall art, a couple pieces of simple furniture – you’re instructed to push a particular button, and then the fun begins. The lights go out, the scientist’s flunkies scatter around changing some key detail about the room – or perhaps they don’t. And you need to use your five senses and your memory (there’s no undo or transcript feature available, and the scrollback window clears for each round) to suss out what, if anything, is now different.

Sometimes it’s very easy, obvious just from seeing the updated room description print out, but sometimes it takes close, careful investigation to identify the change, and the game does a great job of milking the disjunction between those two modes for comedy: a couple of times, I got a couple of rounds in a row where nothing changed, which of course occasions the most thorough poking and prodding, and self-doubt before you hit the all-clear button, only to be greeted with a ridiculously over-the-top shift that had me burst out laughing. I won’t spoil any of them, but there are some great gags here that go beyond just changing the physical layout of the room and mess with the player’s expectations in really entertaining ways. Being funny is rewarding on its own, of course, but these eruptions of hilarity also help with the pacing, since they usually provide an easy win – you need to get 14 guesses in a row right to achieve victory – or at least switch up the steps required to solve the round, and help motivate the player to press on to see what might happen next.

My only real quibble here is that it took me a little while to get into a groove with the game, which I think could be streamlined. In particular, I found the opening instructions ambiguous about whether I was meant to be comparing each round with the original state of the room, or to how the room looked in the round that came before. It’s the former, which for good or ill keeps the madness from escalating too far, but I wasn’t sure at first, and combined with the counterintuitive way the buttons are labeled – the green button means there is a change and the red one means there isn’t, which makes sense from a yes/no perspective, but my brain interpreted green as “everything’s fine” and red as “watch out, something’s changed.” After a couple of restarts it all became second nature, but slightly clearer framing might have helped me get to the good stuff quicker. Oh, and the winning menu asks if you want to UNDO, like always, but of course UNDO is disabled. But those are my only bits of feedback – this is a unique, engaging piece of IF unlike anything you’ve played before, and well worth the fifteen minutes or half hour it takes to win. So long as ParserComp keeps turning up these kinds of gems, long may it continue.

I’ve talked before about the culture shock that ParserComp can sometimes engender, sitting awkwardly as it does between the IF community’s norms of polished games made with an expectation of substantive feedback, and a more laissez-faire itch.io jam vibe where hacking something together in a couple of days is a praiseworthy act of solidarity and an opportunity to develop some new technical and design skills. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about either of these approaches, of course, but it can make the job of a reviewer somewhat awkward, especially since I’m very much of the write-a-couple-hundred-words-minimum school. Alphabet City’s blurb makes no bones about the fact that it represents its author’s very first steps with Inform, with some of its features included more to provide programming practice than for design reasons. In its favor, it boasts a gritty, underexplored setting (the early-80s NYC demimonde) and an endearing ambition, but it’s also got a long, long way to go before it could even be considered an alpha.

I assume the author is aware that there are a myriad of issues that would need to be addressed before the game could be considered ready for release – if indeed that’s the goal, and this isn’t meant to just be a learning exercise (nothing wrong with that!) So I won’t belabor the negatives; some are flagged in the attached transcript, but in brief, the combat and scoring systems both feel superfluous and arbitrary; scenery objects are often under-implemented, completely missing, and/or incorrectly marked as takeable (my inventory by the end included “the air in the Mudd Club”, “a motorcycle throttle”, “a pile of puke”, “a folding fixed in place three legged stool”, and “a Squeegee kid” as well as “a panhandler”); many conversations and other interactions are triggered bottom-lined when you simply examine a person or item; the game’s senses of place (a George Washington Bridge overpass is immediate adjacent to your Alphabet City apartment, which is in the Lower East Side; going south from the Fort Lee area somehow gets you to the Triboro Bridge) and time (despite being set in 1982, there’s a “thanks, Giuliani!” joke) are often loosey-goosey; there are omnipresent disambiguation issues; and the final (and only) puzzle is of the read-the-author’s-mind variety (Spoiler - click to show)(you have to LOVE JAYNE; more concrete attempts to HUG or KISS her, much less talking to her first to establish consent, go unacknowledged). And the fact that this is notionally a story about addiction, dependence, and relationship trauma makes the jank even more farcical, because Alphabet City in its current form is nowhere near up to the task of engaging with such weighty themes.

But! Judged as a couple days of work by someone brand new to Inform, what’s here is by no means bad. Lots of these issues are things that bedevil experienced authors, or would be smoothed out with a modicum of testing, and there’s even a certain charm to a few places where the game’s reach exceeds its grasp (there’s a subway ride that progresses by moving from one location to the next, rather than by waiting for time to pass, which is clearly just the fruit of not knowing how the rules for that work but made me smile regardless). And I’m all for more games with grounded milieus; okay, sometimes the grunginess here is a little much, but give me an incompletely-renamed Max’s Kansas City over a generic spaceship any day. The writing, even in its rough form, is also sometimes cleverer than it appears, like X ME telling the player that you’re “young, dumb, and full of romantic aspirations.” So as I’ve said before about similar games: as a competition entry, this is a disaster, as a thrown-together jam entry, it’s potentially promising, and while I can’t recommend playing it in its current form, I’m definitely curious to see where the author might be going next.

In his writings on so-called “entheogens” – hallucinogenic drugs used for religious purposes – scholar Huston Smith proposed a three-part model for analyzing the experience of those using them: set, setting, and drug. “Set” is more or less shorthand for mindset, the expectations and beliefs a particular person brings with them, which obviously enough shape how things play out, while the specific characteristics of the precise hallucinogen on offer similarly has a clear impact on what the experience will be. “Setting” here signifies the ephemeral details of the particular context in which the drug is taken: is it night or morning? What nearby objects might attract the user’s attention? Who is the friend or friends there to keep an eye on things? For whatever reason, this last element always struck me as the most elusive – while the first and last factor are reducible to psychology and chemistry, the middle one partakes of alchemy: the same exact person could try the same exact drug, but have a radically different experience from one time to the next based on something as small as the color of the drapes.

I’m not necessarily saying that playing IF is like taking psychedelics, but the model comes to mind because I suspect my response to The Fountain would have been entirely different had its cover art been different. The blurb, which is surely a central part of the setting, nicely conveys what the game offers: a low-key fantastical environment through which the player can wander while soaking up the peaceful atmosphere. But the art conveys how that’s going to be done, presenting an aesthetic that’s Thomas Kinkade by way of Midjourney – for the former, see the garish, over-saturated colors, for the latter, see the dinghy that’s tied up to the underwater part of a piling or the chaotic pattern of ripples on the lake. Without that visual prompt, I suspect I would have enjoyed this well-meaning game a lot more; with it, though, I found myself getting undeservingly irritated by its sometimes-schmaltzy prose and thin implementation.

The writing issue is the biggest one because the game is more or less a walking simulator: over the ten minute or so run-time, by far the thing you spend the most time doing is looking at scenery. There are a few actions required of the player – you need to cross a lake on a boat, there’s some limited interactivity allowing you to bottle some water from the eponymous fountain, and at one point progression is blocked until you realize one location has an unmentioned exit, though I wasn’t sure whether this was a puzzle or an oversight. And beyond looking around, you can better appreciate the atmosphere via LISTEN, BREATHE, and MEDITATE. But there’s not much to the gameplay, and as far as I can tell the responses to these latter verbs are identical no matter where you go.

So looking at stuff is where the game is at, which is fine by me: I’ve played plenty of similarly-structured games, and it’s an approach well suited to the parser format. But this is a structure that lives or dies by the quality of the writing; absent deep lore or a characterized protagonist with a backstory to peel back, the only reward the game has to offer is descriptive prose, and sadly I found it just wasn’t up to snuff. Here’s X ME, for example:

"You see yourself as a tranquil traveler, immersed in the serene beauty around you. Your presence here feels harmonious, a perfect blend with nature’s calm and gentle rhythm."

Here’s X SKY:

"The sky stretches wide, a vast canvas of soft azure blue. Wisps of white clouds drift lazily, their edges kissed by the golden sun. Birds soar gracefully, their calls echoing in the serene expanse. The air is fresh and crisp, carrying the faint scent of pine and wildflowers. Sunlight bathes the world in a warm glow, casting a gentle radiance that touches everything below. As you gaze upward, the endless sky fills you with a sense of peace and boundless possibility, inviting you to lose yourself in its tranquil beauty."

And one final excerpt, from when you make landfall on the island:

"You arrive at the island shore, it welcomes you with a blend of soft, golden sand and cool, green grass. Tall, shady trees line the edge, their leaves whispering in the gentle breeze. The water, clear and inviting, laps softly against the shore, creating a soothing rhythm. Sunlight filters through the branches, casting dappled patterns on the ground. Colorful wildflowers dot the landscape, their delicate fragrance mingling with the fresh scent of the lake. The shore invites quiet reflection, its beauty a tranquil retreat. Here, surrounded by nature’s serenity, you feel a deep sense of peace and connection to the world around you."

I can see what each of these excerpts is trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t think any of them work. Adjectivitis is the first problem, with the overuse of descriptive words undercutting the power of the prose and reducing the power of any individual image. It doesn’t help that the palette here is an extraordinarily limited one, too – “serene”, “tranquil”, “peace”, “harmony” are words that recur again and again, flattened by repetition, and even particular details, like sun dappling across a surface, are overused. The descriptions also commit the cardinal sin of commandeering the player to tell you exactly what you feel and think, which is risky enough with a characterized protagonist; with a main character who’s an empty vessel, this feels like a lack of respect for the player combined with a lack of confidence that the prose is accomplishing what it should. Taken together, these flaws make the writing aggressively kitschy, which doesn’t convey the restful vibe the game’s going for – and its wordy blandness kept me wondering whether the prose was also a product of an LLM tool.

Some implementation stumbles also took me out of the world. Beyond the unmarked exit, I ran into some trouble with the bottle (once I dropped it, trying to pick it back up triggered two messages saying I didn’t want to get it again), and in the second half of the game, I noticed a fair number of mentioned scenery items that weren’t actually implemented. It’s nothing too awful, but in a small game that’s aiming to create a meditative mood, the impact of snarls like these is magnified.

I’m aware I’m probably being too hard on an inoffensive game, and it’s important to acknowledge that this puzzleless, plotless structure is a high-wire act that makes small flaws more visible. And god knows we could all use more peace and a place of refuge these days. So if the cover art hadn’t pushed me to be on alert for the prose getting purple or robot-y, possibly I would have judged The Fountain to be anodyne enough – and I suppose there’s someone out there who might have had the opposite reaction (Thomas Kinkade sold a lot of paintings). Using the IF medium to present short, meditative experiences seems like a promising approach to me, so I’d definitely be up for more efforts in this vein in the future – I just hope I like the drapes better next time.

[This review was written and originally posted on the raif newsgroups at the conclusion of the 2002 IFComp]

A year or so ago, Electronic Arts launched an online game called Majestic; the premise was that players stumbled across some kind of conspiracy, and gathered clues by visiting web pages and talking to chat-bots. Sun and Moon is very much in the same mold, although it thankfully refrains from many of Majestic's excesses, which included leaving threatening messages on player's answering machines and presenting clues in awful full-motion video. Rather, Sun and Moon presents a traditional work of IF, involving such genre staples as a scavenger hunt and navigating a maze, without the intermediary of a parser. Instead, everything is spread across half a dozen web pages, with a few prompts for passwords the only time any typing is required.

As an attempt to push the boundaries of the medium, it works quite well, although, having run into the idea before, I didn't feel the same sense of novelty the author apparently did. Judged merely on the content of the game and not its format, however, Sun and Moon is less than original. There's a maze with a twist, a crossword puzzle, and a word-game; these three puzzles make up the bulk of the game. Now, I tend to dislike mazes and crosswords, and the word-game, which requires the player to guess a name based on a sentence (e.g. a testament makes me = William), had me gnashing my teeth in frustration. Granted, there were clever twists to the puzzles - the maze and the crossword ultimately give you two passwords, but you don't actually need to make it to the end of the maze or solve the crossword to figure them out. I gladly took the easy way out and did only the minimum required to finish the crossword (which basically consisted of looking up lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest), and felt an overwhelming sense of relief at not having to slog through the name word-game, which it turns out was optional. The most enjoyable gameplay moment I had was jumping around in the maze until I found the end by typing URLs in directly rather than following the links. With that said, it's my own fault I didn't enjoy the game much - for players with different sensibilities, Sun and Moon provides some devious fun in an original package. But a maze by any other name has me scrambling for the walkthrough just as quick.

(This is a review of the Twine version of The Kuolema, as entered in Spring Thing 2024, followed by a review of the Spring Thing 2023 Google Forms version)

A year and three weeks ago, I said:

"even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking '[the Kuolema] would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine'."

It works just as well, and is smoother, in Twine!






…okay, the work the author has put into updating the game deserves a little more than that, but unlike my takeaway from One King to Loot Them All, where choosing between the Inform or Twine versions came down to a matter of taste, this is a clear upgrade all around. The Google Forms original pulled out some clever tricks to deal with the fact that that system was never designed for games – including not having any state tracking – but the Twine version is unencumbered by those awkward contrivances: the full game is all in one file, rather than being split between three password-gated ones, inventory and notes are easily available in a sidebar, along with a save-and-load feature, and the presentation has gotten an across-the-board upgrade including some attractive typography and graphic design. Puzzles do still require you to type the name of the object you’re using, the password you’re trying, or what you’re looking for into a text box, but I enjoyed this hold-over: the sidebar allows you to easily refer back to items and info you’ve collected to date, and the type-in requirement means you have to think a bit about what you’re trying to do, rather than just lawnmower through links.

There’ve also been some improvements to the meat of the story. The general shape of the narrative remains the same, but while I didn’t go back to compare things line by line, I remembered seeing some typos and clumsy phrases in the original prose that I didn’t pick up on this time out (I just saw one misspelling: “metalic” for “metallic”). There’ve been a couple of alternate solutions added to puzzles that perhaps felt a bit out-of-context in the initial iteration, and the endgame has seen some expansion – my sense was that the climactic conversation has been substantially fleshed out, and takes advantage of the game’s newfound ability to remember actions you took earlier in the story, while the set of factions you can potentially ally with has been expanded, with accompanying options seeded earlier in the game to set up those possibilities. It’s still recognizably the same pulp sci-fi thriller, but it’s got a bit more heft to it and the central character of Dr. Vrieman has some more psychological plausibility.

The game does include “AI” generated art, alongside hand-made graphics for the puzzle-relevant visuals and documents. As I’ve mentioned before, I am generally down on such things, but kudos to to the author for handling this well: using such tools wasn’t such a hot-button in 2022, when the game began its gestation, and their use is fully disclosed, with a post-victory survey even enabling players to weigh in on how they felt about their presence in the game. I still don’t like seeing them – and I personally don’t think they add much to the game, it would work just as well with the gameplay-relevant graphics being the only ones – but this helped take the sting out.

I suppose the Google Forms version does still retain some novelty value, and future players might enjoy checking it out just to see how far one can torture the system, but the Twine version is very much the definitive edition of what, per my 2023 review, was already a heck of a good time. Nice job, year-ago-Mike, you were spot on!

------Review of Spring Thing 2023 Google Forms version------

Ah, dilemmas! The overwhelming temptation I’m facing here is to open this review by talking about the novelty of the format, since The Kuolema is a choice-based game implemented in Google Forms – but I’m going to resist that temptation, if only because I’m a lapsed Catholic who’s belatedly realized Lent is almost over and I haven’t done anything to mark the occasion. So what would my first paragraph be if it were just another Twine game? Let’s see…

What is it that makes a ghost ship so compelling? The idea of a derelict vessel, devoid of life and presenting an enigma equally intriguing and fatal to investigate, is a freak occurrence here in real life – there’s what, the Mary Celeste? – but beyond literary antecedents like Dracula’s Demeter, it’s become a common motif in gaming, from historical takes like Obra Dinn to yer sci-fi Dead Space-alikes, and has launched a million direct-to-SyFy Bermuda Triangle movies. From a production point of view, this is understandable enough – you get spooky atmosphere, isolated protagonists, and a built-in reason you don’t need too many speaking parts. For an audience, though, the appeal is a bit less obvious. After noodling on it a bit, I think part of the answer is that a ship is both a place and a machine – the empty spaces on an abandoned vessel aren’t just rendered forlorn by the lack of people, they become purposeless and useless, adding poignancy, sure, but also danger (what if part of the machine malfunctions?)

The eponymous ship in The Kuolema fits this model twice over – because it’s not built just for travel, but also to perform novel experiments in clean energy. It was on the verge of some great breakthrough when it suddenly went dark, before popping up again, adrift and on the edge of Chinese territorial waters. As the representative of some unnamed agency, it’s up to you to keep it in international waters, figure out what disaster led to its abandonment, and discover the secrets its crew were keeping from each other.

A story like this could lean a couple different ways, and despite a few technothriller touches, we’re firmly in pulp territory – there’s a mysterious antagonist in a gas mask, the scientific genius has delusions of grandeur, an inevitably spy is working for the Russians, and you’ll probably work out what the deal is with your mysterious contact within five minutes of meeting him. All of which is to say the story beats feel very familiar, but when I stop to think about it I can’t remember anything that deploys exactly the same tropes The Kuolema does, which speaks to how effectively it inhabits its genre.

The prose is of a piece with this unpretentious approach. Here are some excerpts of descriptions from a few early locations:

"The top deck (Deck 4) is open to the elements and the rain-slick deck reflects the glinting lights as they shine and flicker through the downpour. The wind is howling and the white crests of the sea are visible out in the darkness.

…

"The stairs are awash with water and the ship continues to sway and lurch. You concentrate on keeping your footing as you cautiously step down into the darkness. There are a few dim lights still on below deck, just enough for you to make out your surroundings.

…

"It’s pitch black, with the only light coming from the corridor behind you. You move towards one of the windows to see the foaming waves outside. Suddenly the room is lit by a flash of lightning - giving you a brief imprint of the space you’re in. There are several tables and faux-leather seats spread around the room, along with a canteen serving area and a separate bar. Glasses and bottles litter the area – some rolling across the floor casting long, dark shadows – making it seem like creatures scuttling away from the flashes of light."

This effectively conveys a vibe, and that vibe, clearly, is “dark”. Sure, it’d be stronger with some more synonyms (and fewer comma splices), but given the kind of game this is it’d be easy to tip into ridiculousness by banging on about the tenebrous murk of the gloaming, so there’s nothing wrong with taking the safer path. Also, the writing isn’t stuck doing the heavy lifting all on its lonesome, since the game’s well illustrated with various 3d renders, documents, and diagrams that all fit the menacing mood. And once the game moves into its final acts, the one-note chiaroscuro gets replaced with some surprisingly-punchy action sequences.

The gameplay also doesn’t make waves. The Kuolema is one of those parser-aping choice game, with map-based navigation and puzzles that primarily involve getting through locked doors, figuring out computer passwords or safe combinations, and collecting three parts of an important device. It’s all stuff you’ve seen before – heck, you even need to solve a crossword to get one key clue! – but it’s workmanlike, with the various bits of gating making exploration feel rewarding, and the barriers putting up enough of a fight to seem satisfying without being too tough (with the possible exception of that crossword, which does rely on knowing some nautical slang).

And now, finally, we have to get to the Google Form-ness of it all, because the process of moving around and solving these puzzles is heavily influenced by the game’s format. Google Forms, for those of y’all not familiar, is Alphabet’s answer to Survey Monkey*, allowing for radio-button style selection of choices as well as text input. Interface-wise, then, it seems like it would offer the best of both the choice-based and parser worlds – but the wrinkle is that it doesn’t track world state. That means that the game doesn’t know what you have in your inventory, or what you’ve already talked to an NPC about.

The author’s done a clever job of getting around this limitation, it must be said. For one thing, the game’s broken into three different files, making it easy to jump in and out (a necessity, since the lack of persistence means there’s no save function) and also allowing for the progression of the plot to alter the environment after each major chokepoint is reached. Inventory puzzles are also handled by typing in the name of the object rather than the honor-system approach taken by old gamebooks (“if you have the crowbar, turn to page 58, but please don’t cheat”), and each usually has some nickname or codeword associated with it, so random guessing won’t get you anywhere. There’s still some wonkiness (I saw options about the computer password needed in the security room before I first visited said room and learned there was a computer) but between careful design and careful writing, the game works much better on this score than I expected it to. There are even a few places where the player’s choices can lead to different outcomes, though these all appear to be in the final section, of necessity.

Still, for all that it’s hard for me to imagine a better implementation of IF in Google Forms, I’m not sure The Kuolema justifies its choice of systems. This is a well-done but straightforward piece of IF that doesn’t seem to take advantage of any unique affordances of Google Forms (it could have been fun to see what choices other players made at different parts of the story, for example); as a result, even as I was enjoying myself I kept thinking “this would work just as well, and be smoother, in Twine”. I’m guessing the advantage is that Google Forms doesn’t require any programming chops, but of course that’s immaterial to the player – and considering how complex this thing must have been to orchestrate, learning a standard IF language might have been less work!

Turn that around, though: towards the beginning of this review I talked about how one thing that I like about ghost ship stories is that they present idle machines, inviting the question of how they broke down. If The Kuolema, in a postmodern twist, is itself a mechanism whose workings are clunkier and more exposed than they could be, perhaps that’s just function following form? At any rate, this is a wreck that’s worth investigating, and I hope to see more IF from this author (though I wouldn’t be sad if their next game used a more conventional system).

* I was going to include a crack here about how big tech companies can be threatened by anything, but then I looked up some financial data and learned that Survey Monkey has a $1.5 billion market cap, which I guess is what it is but sure feels like it’ll sit next to pets.com in some future textbook about the ridiculousness of the various turn-of-the-millennium tech bubbles.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp COMBINED WITH a review of the Twine version entered into Spring Thing 2024 -- scroll pas the original review for that).

Without context, One King to Loot Them All would be a weird game. Not so much in its premise – it’s a limited-parser sword and sorcery pastiche set in a funhouse-dungeon that wouldn’t be out of place in an early-80s D&D module, with dracoliches, logic puzzles, and pit traps set cheek-by-jowl without excessive regard for rhyme or reason – but weird in its gameplay, especially the way it provides information and responds to player commands. For one thing, location descriptions are typically quite long and detailed and print out the player’s inventory at the bottom, while examining most objects just unedifyingly reprints the details already included in the location description. For another, it’s extremely solicitous of the player – maybe even sometimes veering to the pushy – in how it prompts you towards the next action. More so than most parser IF, the experience is of being on a ride (uncharitably, one might say a railroad) where doing the one right action gets you a mini-cutscene and moves you on to the next sequence, and anything else is quite unrewarding.

There’s nothing wrong with linear IF in my view, but this is an approach at odds with the traditional strengths of the parser game, where tootling around a map and examining every detail that catches your fancy is typically a big part of the draw. So coming to the game without any context, the player might be scratching their head about why the author took this particular tack. Fortunately, the ABOUT text reveals the secret origin of One King to Loot Them All, which explains quite a lot: the game was originally intended for this year’s Single Choice Jam, where games had to have only one moment where the player could do more than one thing, but missed the deadline.

Viewed in that light, many of its odder features make sense: the descriptions works the way they do, for example, because originally, looking or examining random scenery or even checking inventory would have been disallowed, so all that information needed to be conveyed automatically when entering a new area. Similarly, the limited-parser approach would cut down on the frustration of most commands not doing anything, and since the player could similarly easily get fed up without being able to uncover clues by investigating a scene, these likewise need to be extremely obvious.

One King to Loot Them All, in the form we’ve gotten it, has lifted the most extreme constraints of the jam – commands other than the intended ones are allowed and sometimes marginally useful – but the gimmick is still imprinted deep in the game’s DNA. It has some fun with the concept, too, with a consistent meta joke being the way the protagonist (an off-brand Conan the Barbarian) never met a complex problem he couldn’t solve with immediate violence – when all you’ve got is a hammer… (I kid, but really, the solution to the hoary old “one guard always lies, the other always tells the truth” problem made me snicker).

On the down side, I found the game sort of… lulled me? I’ve played easy games before, of course, but even in an easy parser game there’s typically at least some decision-making incumbent on the player, and again, there’s always the temptation of noodling around (I am an inveterate noodler). Knowing that actually, I should just do the thing I was supposed to do and then move on to the next thing meant that I was acting in as direct a fashion as the protagonist, but also made me feel like my job was just to figure out what the author wanted me to do and then do it – this got me into a flow state of a sort, but it was a sort of inattentive flow state, if that makes sense (it doesn’t).

Of course, you typically don’t just say something “lulled me”, you say it “lulled me into a false sense of security.” And that’s my excuse for why when One King to Loot Them All got to the point where I could make my one choice, I was incredibly slow on the uptake. I’m spoiler-blocking this bit, since it’s the cleverest part of the game:

(Spoiler - click to show)so knowing that there was only one point in the game where more than one action would be productive, I naively assumed it would either come at the beginning or at the end. When the opening half hour was completely linear, I relaxed and, as mentioned in the paragraph above, just played on autopilot, figuring I could turn my brain off until I got to the final scene of the straightforward kill-Foozle story. Even when I went through an odd timey-wimey bit, I still contented myself with doing the most obvious thing at every juncture – and was surprised when it turned out that wasn’t working.

It took me astonishingly long to realize the game’s twist – the choice isn’t so much a choice as a puzzle, and it’s embedded in the middle of the game, not the end. It’s an impressive bit of misdirection that left me clapping my hands, but it also left me a bit frustrated. There’s a fair bit of drudgery involved in experimenting, since I wound up replaying the whole game to that point to confirm that what I’d tried didn’t work, and the logic of the puzzle still doesn’t fully make sense to me: you meet a mysterious sage who blesses your axe, then tells you you need to rewind time to change something that happened before the game starts. So after a bunch of UNDOs you can actually slingshot your way beyond the opening scene and try to change history – but crucially, the axe remains blessed even though you’ve turned back the clock to hours before you met the sage. It’s fair enough, I suppose, since who knows how a diegetic UNDO should work, but in my fugue state, I wasn’t quick enough to figure out the trick, and I didn’t notice any clues (like a telltale new sparkle about the axe, say) that would have helped me out, and I had to use the walkthrough.

To briefly summarize all that blurry text: there’s a really cool twist, but I was too dull to appreciate it, which is mostly my fault though I think some elements of the design could have mitigated the risk of the player being a big old dum-dum like me. I also think the game could have cut itself freer of its single-choice origins while retaining its impact. In particular, making the descriptions more conventional would have made the gameplay a bit more engaging by rewarding player investigation, and kept certain sequences, like the multi-part puzzle to get across the river, from feeling overly constrained.

While I’m picking nits, I also felt like the writing could have been a little zestier. It’s technically solid and hits the genre tropes in a satisfying fashion, but I like my sword-and-sorcery prose to be more over the top, with extravagant superlatives and overly-baroque locutions, as in Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest; One King to Loot Them All is more workmanlike. Similarly, sometimes the barbarian-y synonyms chosen for the limited-parser actions were strained; OPEN being remapped to LOOT made good sense when I was pillaging a chest, but less so when I had to LOOT a wineskin already in my possession to drink it. But these really are nits, and my complaint above might just reflect that I was a bit tired when I played the game and not sufficiently with it to appreciate its uniqueness and smarts.

------Twine version review starts here ----

This is a remake in Twine of an Inform game entered into last year’s Comp; it was originally intended for the One Choice Jam, whose requirements called for games that only had one moment where the player had any options. One King, in its original incarnation, had a clever interpretation of the theme, and its essential linearity was disguised by its nature as a parser game – having a whole bunch of potential options, only one of which is productive at any particular point in time, can be de rigueur for such things, after all. The plot, characters, puzzles, and text all seemed unchanged to me, so on all those points I’ll just refer back to my review of the original game; the short version is that this is an entertaining Conan pastiche with straightforward but satisfying challenges and solid prose. So how has it been changed by its new choice-based interface?

Some things that I found frustrating in the game’s first iteration have definitely been streamlined; the sometimes-cryptic limited-parser verbs are no longer a barrier, for one thing, since you just need to click on stuff to interact with it. The use of an inventory sidebar also helps make one of the harder puzzles fairer by making obvious an option that previously required a bit of a leap of intuition. While navigation links aren’t highlighted, leading to some potential confusion – the opening scene has two separate “broad dark stain” links, one of which provides additional detail text, the other of which advances the plot – the game’s linear nature (and the always-available undo button) means this is no big deal.

There are some places where the interface does get a little awkward – trying to open a chest can require clicking two or three times, which is a few too many in the abstract and also creates challenges if the player’s also trying to use an inventory item to break it open and isn’t sure when they’re supposed to do that. And while it’s nice that there’s a new achievements feature, it’d be nice if the game told you when you’d unlocked one, or told you the names of ones you haven’t found yet, since as is I just looked at them at the end of the game, went “huh”, and closed it down.

All of which is to say that this is a clean and faithful translation of the parser game: that trick with the one meaningful choice is still really smart, the puzzles and story seem to work just as well as they did in the original, and that one puzzle at the end about heading off a “circling” enemy still makes my head hurt. If you’ve played the game already, there’s probably not much need to revisit it unless you’re interested in doing comparative analysis on the different interface schemes (which is totally legit, I actually enjoyed doing that!) But if you’ve hesitated to take the plunge, this is version hits all the same high points and is more accessible to the parser-averse to boot.

(Note: this is a review of the Spring Thing 2024 version of The Time Machine, followed by my original review of its ParserComp 2021 incarnation).

(I beta tested this game).

Unlike the other New Game Plus entries, this updated version of The Time Machine sticks to the same system as its original ParserComp 2021 release, and retains the same plot – you’re a friend of H.G. Wells who’s attempting to prove him sane by showing that he really did travel through time and isn’t suffering from a delusion. But where that was mostly a standard Inform affair, version 2.0 has gotten quite the coat of paint: the status bar tells you where (and when) you are while providing a small map of exits; subwindows offer character portraits, an inventory list, and a character interaction area telling you which NPCs are present and suggesting some topics of conversation (there are also graphics for each location; while I’m not sure of their provenance, they’ve unfortunately got a bit of an AI vibe to them, and regardless it would be nice to note where they came from in the ABOUT text). It’s about as slick a presentation as a parser game can offer, down to the scroll-bars that make it easy to navigate long menus or go back to earlier sections of your playthrough.

Looking back at my review of the original game 1, I spent a lot of time harping on niggles of implementation – missing synonyms, unwinnable states, endemic typos, objects that you couldn’t pick up again after you’d dropped them – but I found the updated version smoothed out all of these issues and more besides. It also addresses my other major complaint, which was a faint whiff of anticlimax: the author’s added a final act involving an escape from the Morlock’s tunnels, which creates some excitement before the end and ensures all the iconic elements of Wells’ novel are brought on-screen.

This is still a comparatively small game, though – there are only three or so puzzles, and neither the characters, the plot, nor the themes are especially deep. Ordinarily I’d say there’s nothing wrong with that – better to get in and out while you have something to say – and The Time Machine, in its current form, feels neither over-short nor padded. Still, I do find the 2.0 release’s robust package of interface features and implementation improvements risks coming across as overengineered compared to what, in context, may seem a relatively slight story; three years is a long time to add polish, after all. But that’s not really a critique, and if anything, the issue may just be that my standards for parser game presentation are too low. There are always lots of forum conversations about how to make these kinds of games more appealing to new players, and while that task certainly has gameplay and narrative elements too, in addition to its own solid merits it’s worth checking out the Time Machine if only to see just how modern an Inform game can feel.

-------Review of 2021 version--------

The Time Machine by Bill Maya is an Inform follow-up to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a confusing state of affairs that highlights the challenges of writing an unplanned sequel. If the initial work was conceived of as part of a series, that’s an easy enough situation – presumably there are enough hanging plot threads and unresolved conflicts lying about to let you to whip up a plausible plot. But where a story’s been resolved, the protagonist’s journey completed, where is there to go? Sure, a Hamlet sequel would have to be a spin-off, given that everyone north of Horatio in the dramatis personae snuffs it before the final curtain, but even murder-light fare runs into this problem: count ourselves lucky we’ve been spared such enormities as 2 Secret 2 Garden, or Catch 23 (actually, there is a sequel to Catch 22. It’s not great!)

The author’s solution to the dilemma is elegantly done in the present case: there’s a switch of protagonists, from the time machine’s inventor to his friend and lawyer (like, the friend is a lawyer), and the task at hand is to prove Wells’s rantings about Eloi, Morlocks, &c. shouldn’t get him hauled off to a late-Victorian sanitarium by retracing his travels through time. It’s a good setup, allowing the player to re-experience the highlights of the novel without forcing you to go through the remembered steps of a familiar story.

Sadly, the game still requires the player to adhere to a script, though this isn’t always communicated well. My first full playthrough ended in an unwinnable state because immediately upon activating the time machine and finding myself in the Edenic surroundings Wells had related before being hauled off in an ambulance, my first instinct was to return to safety and tell the censorious alienist he’d gotten it all wrong. But when I got back to 1890 and related my wild story, the doctor only listened, “with an accepting look on his face.” That was admirably open-minded of him after he’d stuffed Wells into a strait-jacket for telling much the same story, but that was as far as things went – and since the fuse on the machine burned out after that trip, there was no opportunity to return and bring back more definitive proof. In fairness, the game does signpost that he’s looking for a particular piece of physical evidence – a flower to match the unique petal Wells had shown him right before the game opened – but it would have been polite to fire off a losing ending to bring the story to a close, rather than leaving it to peter out.

Being on rails wouldn’t be so bad if the story the game was out to tell was a gripping one, but despite solid prose, the plot is sadly rather pedestrian. First, most of the game’s playtime is spent in the present day, trying to get into Wells’ workshop and get the machine up and running by solving a few desultory puzzles. Once in the far future, you can explore a single two-location building and have a brief interaction with some Eloi, but it’s all functional at best, and only recapitulates more exciting incidents from the book. If you want to explore off the beaten path and solve a mildly-annoying guess the verb puzzle (to get through a rusty grate, (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE GRATE will work but PULL GRATE and BREAK GRATE won’t), you can have a run-in with Morlocks, but it’s likewise abbreviated and completely optional.

The puzzles are fine, though with the exception of the first (figuring out where Wells’s workshop key has gotten to, which requires a bit of deduction) they’re very straightforward – putting a machine part in a machine, showing an interesting object to an interested NPC, that sort of thing. I had more trouble with them than was probably warranted, though, because there are some infelicities in the implementation. Prior to the nobody-cares-about-your-time-travel-story restart, I’d actually already had to restart because I’d put a watch down on a desk – after being prompted to do so by an NPC – but then was told “it’s hardly portable” when I attempted to retrieve it. And when I grew frustrated at my inability to find the workshop key and considered resorting to violence, BREAK WINDOW WITH POKER just elicited an empty command prompt, with no acknowledgment or rejection of the command. And there are a good number of typos throughout (including a missing period in the opening sequence).

I still had a good time with the game, because the writing is solid, the premise enjoyable, and the setting a pleasant place to spend time (well, modulo the tunnels where blind inbred cannibals live, I suppose). But it felt quite dry, and I was left wanting a little more there there – a little more interactivity, a little more story, a little more puzzling, just something more to create emotional engagement and make The Time Machine feel like a real sequel and not just a retread.