Reviews by Mike Russo

Theme and variation is a solid approach for an anthology, and Deep Dark Wood – a collation of seven small Twine games written by Slovakian students ranging from six to thirteen years old – picks a classic for its hook: as the title says, each of the heptad sees the player lost in a spooky forest and facing a variety of dangers. There are structural similarities too, as they all implement Time Cave or gauntlet structures with plenty of deaths and bad endings lurking to claim the unwary; generally there’s not much by way of cluing to differentiate the safe from the dangerous paths, but fortunately the always-available undo button and the games’ short lengths make exploration painless (in fact some of the bad endings are as much if not more fun than the successful ones).

The fact that there are so many similarities here, though, helps throw into sharper relief the differences in approach taken by the various authors – which largely turn on writing style and implementation of the choice framework. So I’ll provide some quick thoughts on each of the seven in turn, focusing on those elements:

Back to the City, by David (8)

The most immediately engaging thing about Back to the City is its enthusiasm: almost every choice ends with an exclamation point. This upbeat vibe extends to the narrative as well, as this is the rare Deep Dark Wood that doesn’t threaten the player with peril. Per the title, all roads eventually lead back home, but the player’s able to explore as they desire, perhaps having fun at a Christmas Eve party or helping a lost horse get back to the farm. None of these incidents are sketched in too much detail, but they effectively move the story along and are introduced and resolved in a satisfying fashion, lending the longest playthrough a bit of a picaresque vibe (the shortest playthrough traverses only three links and isn’t nearly as satisfying). It’s a gentle, slight game, and I can’t help but suspect that it was put first in the collection to ease the player into the more dangerous woods to come… (OK, it’s also first alphabetically).

Dark Dream, by Baily’s Sisters (11)

Dark Dream shares the exclamation-point-at-the-end-of-the-choices trick with Back to the City, but is a much more challenging story to navigate. Per the dream theme, the forest-and-cabin setting this time boasts surreal touches – you can find your headlong flight through the wood interrupted by running straight into a fox’s mouth, and there’s one branch that leans into the way absurd details can pile up in dreams:

"Finally, you find a doctor that is also a dog. He gives you pills and you take them.

"You feel great but you are lost. The dog asks you if you have money. You have some."

Structurally, Dark Dream is more of a Time Cave, with different decisions in the opening leading to distinct, nonoverlapping episodes that all quickly lead to an ending. Again the game leans into its themes, because in each ending you’ll eventually wake up – but per the conventions of the horror genre, there’s always a twist where whatever happened to you in the dream will recur when you’re awake. Sometimes this can be as subtle as a bad taste in your mouth if you finished the dream gorging yourself on bear meat, but it can also go in hilariously metaphysical directions too, as in the various endings where you wake up only to find yourself dead. Another nice bit of craft is that the final passage is always introduced with an ellipsis, creating drama about what exactly is going to happen when you find yourself in your bed, which adds to the punch-line nature of the endings and makes the bad ones just as much fun as the good ones.

Halloween, by Hailey and Milka (11)

Halloween also leans into the surreal, though doesn’t adopt anything as straightforward as the “it was all a dream” explanation from the previous game. Instead, you might enter a creepy cabin, get bitten by an evil doll, and then find yourself whisked to the bottom of a lake. As a result, it plays like a roller-coaster ride – you don’t know where you’re going to go, but you can trust that it will be entertaining. My favorite vignette is the one where you wake up from a dream (okay, some of the bizarre branches do use this cliché, but not all of them) only to find that your fingers have vanished, and your only choices are to pray to Jesus or try to go back to sleep. There’s also one where you find a duck and then get abducted by aliens – it’s zany, in other words, though there’s another branch that mixes in a note of social realism by telling you that your parents have recently gotten divorced, which is “a usual thing in Halloween stories”.

Once again the approach to endings is a highlight – the authors are aware that much of the draw of a game like this is collecting the different endings, so they judge each as good or bad, let you know whether you’ve been awarded any trophies (these are numbered, but no explanation of the numbering is provided, which paradoxically made me more excited to try to collect them all), and then let you click one final link for good measure – though that just confirms that the story is over and you can stop clicking.

IXI in the Forest, by Leontine (6)

IXI in the Forest distinguishes itself less by its plot – once again there’s a child lost in the woods, who can try to befriend and/or flee from a variety of animals, with a gauntlet structure funneling the player to the best ending, where IXI, a bird, and a rabbit enjoy a picnic together – than its approach to choices. Rather than playing as IXI, you function as a co-narrator, deciding what outcome for each particular small vignette to pursue: for example, when IXI meets a doe who turns out to be dangerous, your choices are either “let IXI escape” or “let IXI not escape.” This adds a bit of distance to the player’s engagement with IXI – who isn’t characterized in any notable way – but also pushes the player to think about the choices differently, looking not for the most advantageous strategy but for which option might lead to the most interesting narrative.

Little Frogie, by Natalie (12)

Little Frogie is the game in the anthology that departs the most from the walk-through-the-spooky-forest vibe – there’s one branch where the eponymous frog gets restless and decides to leave their cabin, with a trip to the woods being one of the options, but other than that they’re just going about their froggy business: making a meal, drawing a picture, taking a bath. Despite this, Little Frogie has a strict gauntlet structure, with only one correct path allowing you to make it through each episode in turn and get to the best ending. As with other the other games, though, it takes the sting out of the bad endings with a bit of humor: starving to death will elicit a wry “a sad moment”, while more successful ones might be judged “most adventurous moments”. It also provides some judicious hints to help the player navigate some of the trickier choices, like reminding you that it’s a hot day outside when you’re picking the temperature for your bath. The final set of choices – those ones allowing you to leave the cabin – feel like a bit of a shift from the rest of the game; beyond leaving the cozy setting of the frog’s hidey-hole, they also amp up the danger, which makes for some heightened drama in a story that could have otherwise petered out in a low-key fashion.

Survive or Die, by Unicorn Sisters (13)

Survive or Die takes us back to the core of the Deep Dark Wood theme by modeling itself on a horror movie: you’re lost in the forest in the middle of a storm, in need of shelter, when you stumble across an old house… There’s of course a monster, and danger lurking everywhere, but what’s clever about Survive or Die is that succeeding requires you to embrace genre tropes. You can pick whether you’re by yourself or with friends, for example, and of course the movie is more fun with other people around. Similarly, when there’s a loud noise you’re prodded to ask whether they heard the scary sound too. It all leads up to an entertaining twist ending, a perfect capstone for this self-aware genre exercise.

The Dark One, by Mushroom (13)

The anthology closes as it began, with a relatively friendlier entry. There’s still quite a lot of danger, don’t get me wrong – structurally, this is a combination gauntlet and Time Cave so there are quite a lot of ways to reach a bad end, including monsters and poison. But in addition to the welcome return of choices mostly punctuated with exclamation points, the narrative voice is also companionable, providing positive reassurance like “I like your way of thinking” when you make a wise decision and commiserating with you when things don’t quite go your way. After the often-solitary escapades of the prior six games, it’s nice to have a friend along on the adventure, and the game recognizes that this is one of its key draws: one of the ways to fail is to refuse to trust the narrator. And being told “I’m so happy for you, my dear friend!” brings an extra warmth to the best ending.

(This is a review of the incomplete version of the game entered into 2024's Spring Thing Festival)

I’ve got a conundrum: what’s the opposite of a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation? I’m a big fan of Abigail Corfman’s mechanically-engaging Twine games, and while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m sufficiently into Bioware-style RPGs with relationship drama to make the prospect of melding these two things into a fangame where you need to help a BG3 companion explore and escape a traumatic dream-prison via judicious stat-juggling and trust-enhancing conversation immediately appealing. But instead of a delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I feel like I’ve just bitten into – I dunno, a Swedish Fish Oreo? Onion-ring mints? I’m just goggling weird candies now, somebody help me out.

I should say up front that this is an incomplete chunk of what will eventually be a larger game – it consists just of a prologue that sets up the main action, and then a first act that ends just as there’s a glimmer of hope of rescue. Per some notes from the author, it sounds like there’ll also be some beefed-up options for specific kinds of characters to flesh out the interactions. And I think I am at a disadvantage from not having much pre-existing familiarity with Astarion, the game’s central character – I’m dimly aware from the BG3 discourse that he’s a popular character, and Dream of Silence provides an efficient summary both of the larger game’s plot, and Astarion’s basic deal as an elven vampire, that I understood the plot, but I didn’t have any feelings about him one way or the other going into things. So it’s possible my current reactions won’t make as much sense once the full game is out, or for a player who’s already Team Astarion.

With that said, I think there are some interrelated design and narrative decisions here that wind up yucking what should be a yum. On the story side, after an intense, confusing opening that again probably works much better if you’ve played BG3 and know who the various name-checked characters are, things slow way down. See, your party is under attack from a dream-eating monster, which has lead to Astarion being trapped in what appears to be a nightmare based on memories of when he was enslaved by the vampire who turned him. Said nightmare is one of isolated captivity: he’s stuck in a small, near-featureless crypt, slowly starving to death while his mind frays. You’re able to project yourself into the dream to try to rescue him, but only appear as a sort of wraith, with limited ability to interact with Astarion or the environment. While there are a few events that liven things up to a certain degree, for the most part all that happens for the game’s half-hour-ish playtime is fiddling around, unable to accomplish much or have much by way of conversation, while hopefully finding some way to put off his seemingly-inevitable demise.

This is all accomplished via a parser-like interface where you can zoom in on different sub-areas of the crypt and engage with the objects and characters there to the extent of your abilities, which are quite restricted. While you can pick a Dungeons and Dragons class at the outset, as far as I can tell this only provides a very few rare one-off options. For the most part, your capabilities are restricted according to an energy gauge (you get ten points at a time; resting replenishes them, but also reduces Astarion’s HP and sometimes his mental health) and how much you’ve levelled the three core skills of sight, touch, and speech. Speech 1 only lets you produce a vague susurrus of whispers, while higher levels allow you to say single words or even a few at a time; similarly, higher levels of sight give you more insight into your surroundings (and Astarion) while touch helps you interact with your surroundings.

That’s a reasonable enough framework, but the I found the implementation really drags. Partially this is because you need to level up the skills a fair bit to be able to do much, and at the default “balanced” difficulty level, it can take multiple rests to get some skills even up to level two or three (you choose how to prioritize the skills so that there’s one that’s relatively cheap to level, one that’s fairly punishing, and one in the middle). The game does provide you with specific targets to aim for by graying-out options you can’t yet access, but telling you what skill level you’ll need to unlock it. The nature of the tiny playing area, though, is that each level-up only opens up one or two new things, and as far as I can tell it’s not really possible to specialize just in one or two – you’ll eventually need all three to a certain extent. So that leads to a lot of thumb-twiddling gameplay just to move the ball forward a small amount, mechanically speaking.

What’s worse, the narrative impact of your abilities is often quite disappointing. For example, I was excited to get Touch 2, since that would let me pass through walls. But exiting the crypt just revealed that I was tied to Astarion and couldn’t go far, and unlatching the door to make it easier for him to escape required Touch 3. The only other thing I could do was enter a particular, prominent sarcophagus – but popping in just revealed that there were two items there that required Touch 5 to retrieve. This wasn’t a one-off anticlimax, either – once I got Touch 3 and opened up those latches, a skeleton immediately came and re-locked them, with no positive impact. It’s possible that if I’d had my speech skill leveled up further I would have been able to tell Astarion to try something with the door (though I didn’t see even a grayed-out option for that when I checked), but again, levelling up multiple skills is a time-consuming slog.

The nadir probably hit when I tried to use my special paladin power. There was a monster who showed up to menace Astarion, and I was excited to see that I could try to SMITE it – except I needed at least Touch 3 to unlock that option, and in my first playthrough I’d made that my lowest-priority skill and therefore was nowhere near being able to use it. On a subsequent playthrough, I made the appropriate investment so that I could try out the shiny, exciting choice – only to find that smiting the monster didn’t hurt it in the slightest, but drew its attention to me so I lost all my energy for the day and faced ongoing penalties even after resting, which is a far worse result than what you can get by just mumbling “hide” with no class powers and Speech 2.

It could be that these mechanical choices are the game trying to push you to worry less about the environment and more about the NPC, but sadly I didn’t find Astarion himself that engaging, even when I did a playthrough investing heavily in speech. He’s not a very garrulous conversationalist, which is fair enough given that he’s talking to a disembodied ghost, but still, the perfunctory way most exchanges play out is both a bit dull and mechanically punishing since you need to pay energy to keep each back-and-forth going. He also comes off as lightly characterized, despite a few hints of an enjoyably-spiky personality in some of his lines; likewise, nods to his backstory occasionally come to light but since that’s all spelled out in the pre-game infodump there’s not much intriguing about them. And outside of dialogue, he also isn’t especially proactive in taking any actions on his own to try to get himself free. Again, this is narratively reasonable: by the time the game opens he thinks he’s been held captive for fiveish months, so presumably he’s already explored around and tried everything he can think of, but the result is that without the benefit of how he’s established in BG3, I found him a passive, somewhat-generic character who couldn’t bear the weight the game’s structure puts on him.

All of which is to say that on both the mechanical and plot levels, the game creates a lot of tedium and frustration which is thematically relevant but doesn’t provide much for the player to glom onto – and the slow pacing and unrewarding narrative progression are exacerbated by the difficulty level, which at the default “balanced” level required me to start over several times to make progress. The easy “story” mode was slightly faster on the mechanical level, at least (I shudder to contemplate the unlockable hard difficulty), but that didn’t provide much of a patch on the game’s other issues; heck, I got to the end successfully in that playthrough, but it still wasn’t clear what I did to trigger the deus ex machina event that caps off the demo, adding lack of agency to my complaints.

I realize this is a lengthy review that’s more negative and less balanced than I usually try to be, so it’s worth repeating that this is probably due to my frustrated expectations – I went in expecting to really like A Dream of Silence, so I’m still working through the whiplash of bouncing off of it instead. I’m interested enough to still check out the full game, I suppose, but I’ll be sticking to the easiest difficulty and hoping for substantial changes behind the scenes.

I am not usually one to police genre boundaries – these are useful shorthands for discussion, analysis, and (mostly) marketing, nothing more – but I have to admit my ears pricked up when I saw a slight inconsistency in the tags the author provided for Provizora Parko (which as far as I can tell is Esperanto for “provisional park”, reinforcing my conviction that Esperanto is just a monoglot American putting on a fake accent and pretending to speak Russian). The primary genre is tagged as surreal, you see, while there’s also a content warning cautioning about implied violence “in a magical realist context.” And while the border between these two things is admittedly vague, there are real differences, beyond just that I tend to like magical realism and am more frequently left cold by surrealism. The former is more likely to accord with the traditional plot dynamics of a literary novel, with occasional fantasy elements introducing moments of illogic into a familiar structure, whereas in my experience the latter eschews linear narrative and tends to put conventional elements and outré ones at the same level. My complaint about surrealism is that it can often feel lightweight: a bunch of stuff happens, but there’s no throughline of dramatic progression ensuring that actions beget consequences in a comprehensible way. For a poem, that’s completely fine, but for a story – and most IF is structured as a story, of course – it’s a riskier proposition.

Provizora Parko definitely falls much more on the surrealism side of the line. But! Like a good poem, it’s also admirably disciplined about the language, imagery, and themes it deploys, which mitigates that feeling of weightless contingency: this is definitely not a world where anything could happen. As you (it’s unclear who “you” are) explore the titular mostly-abandoned zoo, there are certain elements that recur: crowd scenes, birds, travel, disaster. While you’ve got freedom of movement (this is a Twine game that allows you to navigate, though there’s no compass directions or inventory or any other parser-like touches) the map imposes or at least suggests a particular progression through the space that leads to something resembling an arc, with individual, memorable set-pieces gaining significance by the way they’re juxtaposed.

I want to zoom in on the language, since to my mind that’s the primary draw here. It’s evocative and clear while still remaining elusive, like this bit of landscape description:

"Rainbow shower trees with sherbet-colored blossoms border the plaza and cast crisp shadows in the midmorning sun."

This approach extends even to the unfamiliar or fantastical elements – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which, in fact. Take this bit:

"Sunlight dances on the path, which is carpeted with layers upon layers of exploded figs. In the heat and humidity, the sugar sculptures are beginning to sweat, the beads of moisture hardening into tiny pimples."

I don’t really know if that’s how a sculpture of sugar really starts to melt, and that tentative sense of alienation, that tension between the alien and mundane, helped keep me engaged. It also helps that there’s a real sense of variety to the half-dozen different areas: one uses timed text to create a delightful emulation of luggage coming down an airport’s baggage claim carousel, while another takes the shape of an extended, absurd dialogue with a man and his perhaps-imaginary bird.

For all that I enjoyed much of the experience of playing Provizora Parko, I ultimately did find that its surreal aspects were too distinctive for my tastes. In particular, while I can identify some of the game’s key concerns, and squint at the endings to see how the theme of substitution or transformation that runs through them finds echoes in earlier parts of the game, it didn’t feel to me that this was an organic climax that brought everything that came before into coherence. This might just be a reflection of wanting the game to be more prosaic than poetic, but even very abstruse poems usually strive to leave the reader with a pop of insight at the end that refigures what’s gone before. Someone else more on the game’s wavelength might feel differently, though, and just based on the quality of the writing I’m certainly satisfied by my visit to this park.

There are of course innumerable ways you can divide people in two – by which I mean, do the whole “there are two kinds of people in the world” thing, not literally bisecting them – but the opening passage of ChoiceScript demo Ink and Intrigue provides, I suspect, a handy litmus test for an IF-relevant difference of viewpoints:

"Chapter One: The Call of the Kitherin

"The approach to Ra’zai is best made in the last hour of darkness. So say the books you’ve read, the innkeepers you’ve chatted with on your month-long journey across Rzskador, and the ferrymaster who took your coin at midnight and welcomed you aboard."

Some people will perk up at this reasonably-well-written excerpt, curious to learn more about what’s surely a mystical world of legend and excitement. Others, seeing the profusion of unexplained proper nouns and especially sensitive to that “Ra’zai”, will feel their stomachs sink at the realization that they’ve unwittingly wandered into the domain of Apostrophe Fantasy.

Reader, I confess that I am of the second party; it’s a totally valid preference, but so too is liking this stuff, and I fear that I had a hard time separating my ennui at the game’s genre from my response to the game itself. In trying to evaluate it objectively, I think it’s a reasonable enough teaser – there’s a potentially compelling premise, the writing is generally solid, the plot, characters, and mechanics all seem like they’d support the kind of game the author is going for. The stuff that I disliked, beyond the generic fantasy setting, is also somewhat down to personal taste: the pacing is perhaps slow, the character generation section sometimes dwells on what seem like trivialities to me, and the love interests a bit schematic, but my sense is much of that’s standard for the Choice of Games style, which places a premium on role-playing and tries to create space for players to project their own perceptions and preferences onto romanceable characters. So it’s tempting to just do the mealy-mouthed “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’d like” dance and call it good.

That’s not the kind of lazy reviewing y’all are paying for, though, so we’re not going to do that! No, instead I’m going to dig into a couple aspects of the games that I think count as strengths, and then some weaknesses, without hiding behind a subjectivity dodge.

On the positive side of the ledger, the opening bit where you define your character’s background and abilities deftly weaves together mechanical choices with bits of worldbuilding: you’re a spy for your royal uncle, but “spy” is one of those job descriptions that can be interpreted rather creatively, while lending itself to interesting missions, and picking things like how I chose to infiltrate a decadent cabaret that presumably hosted clandestine meetings and furtive assignations was way more engaging than just deciding whether I wanted +2 to dexterity or charisma. You also get some cool bonus elements to define, like your relationship with your pet hawk, that sit nicely between the choices that are obviously purely cosmetic (seriously, why are these kinds of games so insistent on making me choose an eye color?) and the clearly mechanical ones (to Ink and Intrigue’s credit, these are more frequently personality-based than attribute-based).

On the flip side, I think the game gets in its own way when it comes to establishing stakes, which meant my engagement generally fell off after the stronger-than-expected chargen system. See, this isn’t just a fantasy James Bond scenario – your mission is largely a diplomatic one, as you visit a secretive order of warrior-mages in an attempt to recruit them to your monarch’s side in an upcoming war. Except as soon as you enter their enclave, the magic alarm-bells they put in the gate announce that you’re a Chosen One and you get dragooned into being initiated into their order. The game is clearly much more interested in these guys than in your original mission, which is established in a couple of bottom-lined backstory paragraphs that once again feature apostrophes; further, the chargen section heavily prompts you to think that the king is kind of a bad dude and you might want to think about other options. And beyond that, it drops heavy hints that these Jedi-ish folks are too cool to get enmeshed in petty mortal struggles anyway, since they’re all about preserving the balance between different realities. So that initial motivation is quickly sapped of urgency; I think the idea is that the desire to go through the monks’ (apparently very long) list of initiations and tests to unlock your new powers will replace it, but without any clear sense of why you want these powers and what you’ll do with them, I found my interest flagged.

The other place where I think the author puts a definite foot wrong is with those romance options. Again, I think it’s fine for them to be stereotypical in order to increase the odds that a player will find at least one appealing. But these bunch often seemed more bland than archetypal to me. Partially this is because most of them don’t really do much; they’re all either fellow initiates or mentors who play some vague role in the tests, so outside of infodumps and light socialization there’s not much for them to do, at least in this opening section of the game. The writing also can be excessively didactic in laying out their personalities:

"You lower your voice. “Is your sole motivation the mission you’ve been denied, or is there something more?”

"A wry smile tugs at his mouth. 'I think my motivation is an alchemist’s mixture of rage, vengeance, and optimism. I’ve been planning my revenge for most of my adult life, but I push myself for bigger reasons than that.'"

(I should note that there are optional graphic sex scenes that are part of the game, if this kind of talk turns you on; I opted into one, largely to have something to do. It seemed fine, though the diffuse nature of my engagement with the characters likewise made the hook-up likewise feel perfunctory).

This is a demo, and given the average length of Choice of Games works I’m guessing there’s a lot more to go, which makes it somewhat unfair to judge the narrative and characters just on this limited slice, I suppose, just as it’s unfair to keep moaning on about how jaded I am about generic fantasy stories. But I do think tightening up these elements would increase the pitch’s appeal, even if it’s not going to hook everyone, and give those of us outside the target audience a little more to enjoy along the way.

Or just add more apostrophes to stuff, everyone likes that!

There’s not much to say about Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights – as its charmingly awkward, late-period-Planet-of-the-Apes-sequel-ish title suggests, this is an author’s first parser game set in a generic deserted dungeon that doesn’t do more or less than you’d imagine it would. After playing the first couple of rooms I thought to myself that the prose was cleaner than I’d expected, and then immediately ran into a series of capitalization errors and an its/it’s typo soon thereafter. There’s a little bit of spooky atmosphere conjured by a statue of the eponymous knights that conspicuously doesn’t reveal what, if anything, is under their armor, which is undercut by all the rest of the tomb’s décor consisting of variations of that one statue (well, except for the parts that are skulls or coffins, both generic). There’s a gimmickless maze, but it’s basically fine; of course there’s no plot to speak of but that’s as much a relief as a negative. When playing online there’s a noticeable lag (there’s no local download option), the parser’s a bit finicky, and I couldn’t get the transcript to work, but this is a Quest game so it’s hard to hold all of that against the author.

It’s understandable why you’d take this kind of approach for your initial foray into writing a text adventure: the simple, sturdy setting and gameplay make it maximally likely that you’ll be able to complete the hardest step of the game design process, which is to say, finishing something. But it also puts a ceiling on what you can achieve – even if all the little niggles I mentioned above had been resolved, so that rather than dichotomies each sentence was unalloyed praise, it’d still be faint praise indeed. It’s in theory possible to implement this generic scenario with such quality that it’s nonetheless memorable, I suppose – as I write this, I’m recalling a game from maybe a couple years back that had a similar start-at-the-bottom-of-the-dungeon setup and was also a first-time effort, but had some interesting ornamentation and dressed up the puzzles fairly well? Ah yes, The Hidden King’s Tomb: but the fact that I had to struggle to come up with the name (this took a solid ten minutes of scrolling through my old reviews to find), and that it turns out I rated it only a 2 out of 5, perhaps makes this less of an exception than I thought when I began this anecdote.

Sadly, I doubt Escape From the Tomb of the Celestial Knights will have much more staying power – besides the funny-ish title, my main takeaway is that I continue to really struggle with even simple puzzles in games with two-word parsers where USE is the main action you’re meant to use. Still, this is a first game, and it is entered into the Back Garden, so it’s probably unfair to set expectations too high. I’ll wrap up by paraphrasing what I said in that Hidden King’s Tomb review: this isn’t the kind of first game that’d be of much interest to anyone but the author, but it is the kind of first game that the author might have had to write in order to write a much better, much more interesting second game – and I look forward to playing that second game.

I throw around the term “old school” a fair bit when discussing IF, but it’s worth remembering that the scene has never been a monolith. For all that the term conjures up the bad old days of hunger daemons and time-limited light sources, it’s also now been a full quarter-decade since the launch the IF Art Show, a series of BREASTS events that aimed to explore the boundaries of parser IF by asking authors to eschew complex puzzles or melodramatic narratives and instead, by analogy with a museum’s offerings, present still lives, landscapes, or portraits – which is to say deeply-implemented single objects, locations, or characters. For all that there are some celebrated works that came out of this tradition, most notably Galatea, a portrait entry that unsurprisingly won best in show in 2000, it represents something BOSOMS of a road not traveled; the events themselves petered out in the mid-aughts, and while modern IF certainly prioritizes deep implementation, it’s almost always in service of plot or gameplay rather than the more reserved, intellection engagement that the very name “Art Show” evokes.

It’s notable, then, that the Portrait explicitly situates itself within that moribund tradition, down to including the actual guidelines from the original 1999 event in an “extras” folder accompanying the download. It’s certainly DECOLLETAGE the case that there’s a story visible in the margins – the game is a small, self-contained excerpt of a forthcoming game titled “Isekai” which, per the eponymous genre, will presumably involve a person from the real world being sucked into and engaging in adventures in a fantasy world – but this nondiegetic framing, and the parsimonious amount of plot available in the excerpt, push the player to engage with the game in a less-directed, contemplative manner. The four BOOBS rooms that constitute the game have a fair amount of scenery to explore, but not much in the way of items to pick up or obstacles to overcome. Instead you’re encouraged to just wander around and examine as many details as you can – especially the details of the painting that gives the game its title.

This is a style of gameplay that I enjoy, since I think it leverages the exploratory strengths of the parser game while making a virtue of its often-pokey pacing and issues creating UNDERBREAST plausible, interactive characters. I’m more than happy to just stroll around an environment or cast my virtual gaze on each element of a scene in turn, even without much extrinsic motivation. But the thing about eschewing those more atavistic drivers of engagement is that it puts a lot of pressure on what exactly you’re asking the player to spend so much time on. And here, while I admire the PELVIC MOUND Portrait’s formal approach, I have to admit that I found the content somewhat lacking.

The portrait itself makes a reasonable first impression: it’s a picture of three women native to the fantasy world that the protagonist has found himself in, namely a demonic-looking one, an angelic-looking one, and one who seems to be an elf. And there’s an element of personal relevance, because once you find a mirror the protagonist realizes that although he’s a he in the real world, in this fantasy milieu he’s somehow taken on the shape of the elven woman who’s center stage in the portrait. So trying to learn more about her and BIG AND GORGEOUS D CUP BREASTS her world by closely studying the portrait is an understandable step. But I found there wasn’t much payoff to this setup: it doesn’t take much observational acuity to realize that the trio are a throuple, which isn’t very interesting since the player never makes their acquaintance, and the hints of personality given off by the visual detail are as bland as the fantasy world seems to be, from this short preview: would you believe the demon girl is a brunette and seems passionate, while the blonde angel is full of strong will to protect the other two?

Similarly, the implementation feels deeper than the substance supports. There are apparently 46 sub-items that can be examined within the painting, and the game provides a score system to help you track your progress, but the level of detail feels excessive. Even after looking at the ODDLY SEXY BAT-WING picture’s background elements, each of the three figures, their clothing and jewelry, and their faces and significant parts of their bodies, I only found 39 of them – but even then, there were many details that gave near-identical descriptions to others when examined, making this feel more like an exercise in box-checking than in discovery. The often-haphazard nature of the game’s prose is likely an understandable consequence of the author’s first language not being English, but it still often winds up coming across as vague and awkward, as in this description of a “stand”:

"the large and prominent stand, clearly a permanent fixture, is elaborately adorned, in a very festive but at the same time solemn manner, giving out that the context depicted in this portrait is of a very significant and joyous ceremony, like a rite of passage."

Or this early glimpse of the portrait itself:

"On the centre of the southern wall, flanked by an arched passage on its left and a larger archway on its right, hangs, an huge life-size painting, so detailed and realistic that you can’t exclude that is actually a photograph, no wonder that has catched your attention."

Some grammar-checking and beta reading could help tighten up the prose, but as it stands the writing isn’t enough to reward the obsessive poking about that would be required to get full points.

In fairness, the game provides an early off-ramp, with an authorial stand-in entering the scene and telling you you can stop at any time after you find SINGLE AND SPECTACULARLY ILL-CONCEIVED REFERENCE TO GENITALS about 15 details – and I think that probably is about the number of actions, and depth of implementation, that would feel right. So the fact that I kept going past that is mostly on me, and to a certain degree on the scoring system that I suspect won’t be the same in the full game. And in the context of the bigger story that’s teased here, this intro might work well enough to give the player a chance to slow down and get their feet under them before being swept away by a grand adventure, like an opening CGI cutscene lending gravitas to an action RPG. But presented on its own, framed as an objet d’art, I’m not sure it’s up to the amount of scrutiny it invites.

I’m a reasonably confident critic of several things: writing, first of all, but also characterization, plot, and puzzle design (whether I’m a good critic of these things is a separate question). But when it comes to things like graphics, movement-based gameplay, and music, I’m anything but, often struggling to feel like I have anything interesting to say – heck, I play most IF, this game included, with the sound off, so I’m especially at sea as to that last bit. As a result, I’ll take a page from this near-wordless micro-length game and try to keep this short, to avoid embarrassing myself with too much aimless flailing.

Bydlo is a second-order bit of ekphrasis – that’s a work of art that describes or deeply comments on a single other work of art, Ode on a Grecian Urn being the canonical example. Here we’re told the game is based on one of the movements from the classical music suite Pictures at an Exhibition – the gimmick of said suite being that each movement was based on a single painting from a posthumous exhibition by a now-obscure Russian artist. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of either the music or the painting (and actually it turns out many of the paintings are now lost, including this particular one so far as I can tell from Wikipedia), so that doesn’t provide much in the way of context for me to grab onto; fortunately, the itch.io 1 page does directly say what the game is about, albeit with a spoiler warning, so I’ll likewise spoiler-ify it here: (Spoiler - click to show)the triumph of art over drudgery.

Does the game incarnate that theme? Maaaybe. This is a Bitsy game with a simple set of mechanics: your little guy starts out in a fenced-in field, with an ox-cart at the other side of the screen. Shiny lights at the exit of the field and then a path leading off-screen indicate destinations towards which you should walk; when you reach the latter, the screen resets, with the field being encumbered with incrementally more obstacles and the cart moving one square over. Over the course of subsequent iterations, the field becomes a maze, clogged with pixel-art squiggles that might be bales of hay, fallen crops, and the bones of other oxen (I think? I have a hard time decoding them); finally, the cart exits stage left. You’re allowed to follow its tracks; a new set of screens open up, empty space filled only by the one track, which is then joined by two others running parallel to it. Musical notes begin to fill the tracks, which have becomes a musical score; you reach a last screen where an orchestra plays, with the word “FIN.” printed across the top.

I can try to venture a few interpretations of all of this – if I’m right about what the graphics represent (and I’m supremely unconfident that I am), perhaps the protagonist is a farmer who’s neglecting their work because of their fixation on music? If one part of the theme is meant to be drudgery, I’m guessing that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy running through the mazes (they weren’t super fun but the worst of them only took five seconds to solve)? I did feel a sense of relief and possibility at finally seeing a new screen after doing the same thing twelve times in a row, though I can’t help but feel that moving to the left four times isn’t substantially less drudgery-y than doing a maze a dozen times. Does the fact that I can run straight through the orchestra members and the “FIN.” at the end indicate that they’re a hallucination? If so, what does it mean that the notes seem to be solid? Was coding this game (Spoiler - click to show)a triumph of art over drudgery, or was it (Spoiler - click to show)drudgery in service of art, and if that’s the case, is composing a symphony or painting a picture any different?

These are not questions posed for rhetorical effect: I really don’t have a strong take on Bydlo. It seems like a unified aesthetic object that’s aimed at questions I find important and interesting, so I will say I’m happy it exists – in fact I think it’s kind of neat to engage with something that’s coming at these themes from an entirely different frame of reference than those I’m more used to. And I think it’s meant to be open-ended and unbothered by whether or not I “got” anything out of it – like a placid ox tilling its furrow, I suppose, though I still can’t help but feel it deserves a better critic than me.

(This is a review of the Spring Thing version of the game; I understand it's since been updated to address some of the implementation issues raised below)

Having just written a review of a Back Garden game that could have just as easily been entered into the Main Festival, I turn now to one that clearly belongs where it was entered. In some respects that’s simply an acknowledgment of what’s on offer here, which is a self-contained tutorial or demo section of a larger game targeted for release next year – and in many ways it’s an effective teaser, with the Taoism-inflected magic academy setting hitting a nice balance point between familiarity and novelty, and a backstory involving a dead parent and their mysterious former paramour that I’m curious to further unravel. In other respects, though, in its current incarnation Luna Gardens is recognizably a clumsy first draft in need of further refinement.

The game’s central mechanic is emblematic of this duality. Appropriately for the setting, you’re required to perform an act of divination to successfully complete the opening section, and the basic outline for how this is done is solid: first you identify particular mystically-significant symbols by exploring the eponymous grounds and finding especially resonant objects, at which point you can try to guess which are most relevant to your present circumstances and construct an oracular reading from combining the correct set of three. That’s a nice way of embedding a magic system in behavior that’s well-suited to a parser game – wandering around and examining everything you can see – and leveraging a game-y but reasonable enough structure to lend narrative weight to what’s mechanically speaking a basic combination-lock puzzle.

The difficulty is that every step of this process has significantly more friction than it should. Start with exploration: getting around the garden is a little tricky, I found, since neither of the two navigation options on offer is completely intuitive. Traditional compass navigation works well enough, but exits aren’t always clearly marked, and the frequent use of ordinal directions made it hard to build a mental map. There’s an alternative keyword-based system that allows you to simply jump to neighboring locations, but I also found it occasionally leading to strange results. For example, each location tends to list adjacent landmarks in a final paragraph at the end of the description, but upon being told “farther away, you see a dark gate rising in the air and a rusted light pole” I was surprised that EXPLORE GATE just resulted in the game saying “You can’t see The gate.” I’m pretty sure that capitalization means you knew what I was talking about! Admittedly, this is partly to do with the barriers cutting off the demo area from the larger game’s map, but it can still make for a frustrating experience.

Finding the symbols also had its speed-bumps. I like taking my time checking out scenery, and Luna Gardens does a good job of making the process rewarding by sprinkling hints of backstory and worldbuilding into object descriptions. But there are some rough patches in the implementation that sometimes led to me tearing out my hair:

> x trees

…You notice a carving someone made on one of the trees.

> x carving

You can’t see any such thing.

> x tree

You can’t see any such thing.

I was eventually able to guess that the right answer was X INITIALS, which isn’t totally unreasonable but still, the protagonist obviously knows what they’re looking at so why make life hard for the player? At least this is just an incidental detail; I needed a hint to complete the game because X OCEAN at a cliffside overlook was insufficient to reveal the relevant symbol, with X WAVES being required to progress (X WATER just got my “you can’t see any such thing).

As for the actual divination process itself, the syntax is a little under-clued – I thought at first I had to type DIVINE [SYMBOL 1] [SYMBOL 2] [SYMBOL 3], but actually you just enter DIVINE and then get a follow-up prompt where you pick the symbols you’d like to try. Further complicating matters, you don’t actually slot in the short-form name of a symbol – there’s a FIND command that tells you that, say, the connection symbol translates into “a link between two poles”, and that longer formulation is the one you need to write in, magnifying the scope for typos and confusion. Meanwhile, the actual answer of which symbols are the “right” ones that trigger the end of the game is underclued – there’s a FORECAST hint command that gives you a strong prod in the right direction, but there aren’t really any diegetic prompts to help you avoid simple trial-and-error, so far as I could tell.

The good news is that the author’s indicated that the final game will be redone and written in Gruescript, rather than Inform, which strikes me as a smart idea – using that choice-based interface will remove some of the ambiguities and confusions around navigation and identifying relevant nouns, while giving more space for the prose’s wry mix of mysticism and observational humor.

(I haven’t mentioned the writing yet, but while it’s occasionally a bit convoluted due to complex syntax and the use of the passive voice, I generally liked it! Here’s a matter-of-fact bit of landscape description:

"A grove of trees forms a circle in the middle of this garden and shield from the outside world the bench you like to nap on in-between classes."

Or a later bit:

"In fact, the only things resting around here are students reaching the end of their wits as they journey through textbooks, dry lectures, and someone’s bright idea of putting everything on campus far away from each other.")

A clickable interface would also make the divination system more manageable, and generally reduce friction across the board. Hopefully the feedback from this and other reviews will help inform the future, final release of Luna Gardens, since there’s definitely enough promising elements here to make me look forward to it.

My wife recently decided she wanted to get into gardening, and as a result we’ve started to slowly make some improvements to our back yard, which heretofore was evenly divided between tufts of fake grass (don’t judge, we live in Southern California where we’re just getting out of a yearslong drought with more to come) and a dirt patch overgrown by snarls of weeds and a tree that keeps sending off a fusillade of saplings as though it’s overheard us speculating about chopping it down (again, don’t judge, it’s really tall and close to the house so we’re paranoid it could fall down in a wind storm). We’ve now mostly pruned that whole mess back, and gotten a couple pots of flowers and vegetables to prop up by the fence, and while it’s not much to look out we’re proud of the progress. It’s a bit sobering when we consult the source of her horticultural impulse, though, which was born of watching a British reality show: in that, people are always acting all ashamed about the state of their rear allotments, which boast lush flowers, well-tended herb beds, and a well-judged mix of different plants; it’s on a whole different level from our meager efforts.

All of which is to say that opinions differ about what standard “Back Garden” implies, and I’ll confess to being a bit mystified about why Nonverbal Communication isn’t in the main festival; it’s a bit short, sure, but it’s got a neat premise that combines real-world resonance with a clever riff on standard fantasy tropes, some clever puzzles with multiple solutions, and in my view the best joke of Spring Thing to date (I won’t spoil it, but it’s the death banner when you try something obviously and spectacularly stupid – nothing quick UNDO doesn’t fix).

The setup here is that you’re a wizard whose power comes from their mastery of words, but in your haste to prepare for an attack from a dragon, a mishap occurs that throws your magics all out of whack. I’ll quote the game’s description of the result, since it’s emblematic of the elegant yet approachable prose:

But verbs are independent, fickle things, and although you feel the presence of some of your most beloved verbs within the tower, you doubt you’ll be able to compel them directly.

What this means is that you don’t have access to verbs: a set of the most common Inform actions, from the humble EXAMINE to the workhorse OPEN to the disfavored ATTACK to the how-am-I-supposed-to-live-without-this GO have flown out of your head and become incarnated in various automatons scattered throughout your tower (WAIT, THINK – a hint command – and various out-of-world activities like SAVE and TRANSCRIPT are still available). Interaction therefore hinges on your nouns – by typing in the name of a thing, you can focus the automatons’ attention on it and prompt them to target each of their actions at that one object.

That’s simple enough in theory, but in practice this makes for some tricky puzzle-solving, as well as some slapstick comedy. There’s always at least two or three automatons firing off at one time, and with no ability to tell the automatons that OPEN is needed here, so having CLOSE execute immediately thereafter is counterproductive, you need to get creative – while none of the puzzles are too too hard, I definitely did some floundering, and picturing all the different gizmos faffing about and working at cross-purposes definitely elicited a giggle. The flip side is that cracking each conundrum left me with a strong sense of satisfaction.

The narrative was also satisfying; there are multiple endings, tied to which of several significantly-different tacks you take to solving the game’s puzzles, and the one I found tied a neat bow on the themes implicit in centering a protagonist who struggles with the sometimes-destructive results of their careless words. This turn towards the serious isn’t enough to bring down Nonverbal Communication’s lighthearted vibe, but it definitely lends the game more heft than the average hey-look-I-came-up-with-a-cool-mechanic-for-my-half-hour-puzzle-game puzzle game.

All told this is a polished game that checks all the boxes it should – my only points of critique are that the convenience of bolding significant nouns when they show up in room descriptions meant it took longer than it should to realize that other nouns might also be available, and in common with other limited-parser games that get rid of access to the EXAMINE command, room descriptions could sometimes get a little long. It occurs to me that one reason the author could have nonetheless picked the Back Garden is that they’re considering this a proof-of-concept for a longer game, because yeah, it is a little on the short side – if that’s the case, I’d definitely be interested in seeing more of both this world and this approach to puzzles, since I think there’s plenty more room to explore here!

You’ll probably go into this death-of-the-Weimar-Republic simulator expecting a titanic struggle against Hitler, pouring all your wits and intelligence into a duel against one of history’s greatest monsters. But it’s emblematic of the intelligence with which Social Democracy is made that Hitler’s only present in the game as a mostly-ineluctable fail state; no, if there’s anyone the game teaches you to hate, it’s Hjalmer fucking Schacht, the central banker who uses the credibility gained from his admittedly-impressive achievement of ending hyperinflation to take a meat-axe to any plans to fight the Great Depression with Keynesian stimulus. Doesn’t matter that your party, the Social Democrats, has the chancellorship and plays the leading role in the grand coalition governing Germany at the dawn of the thirties: this hidebound, reactionary asshole is here to prevent you from doing the obviously-right thing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

(On reflection, maybe Schacht isn’t the most emblematic villain here, since if you’re up on history, or have your internal security forces dig into just the right scandals, you know he actually wanted the Nazis to win. But for purposes of the above paragraph let’s pretend he was just an asshole).

I wish I could report that things are better on the Left. Alas, the Communists are intransigent as all get out too – despite agreeing that the working class and unemployed need to come first, they’re not willing to look past your failure to kowtow to Moscow (and plus, any loss of support the Social Democrats experience will likely translate into direct gains for them). With plenty of wooing, they’ll at least go along with a truce between your respective paramilitary arms, but since they’re not willing to participate in bourgeois parliamentary government, you can’t work with them to form a coalition even if you do manage to eke out a Reichstag majority between the two parties (or at least, if you can, it’s well beyond my skills, even when notching the difficulty down to easy).

So yeah, as you ping-pong between inflation-spooked centrists and blinkered tankies, with election after election failing to produce a stable government, Hitler doesn’t need to do much: the Nazis just lurk in the middle distance, making greater and greater gains as this frantic, useless politicking discredits the idea of democracy in the eyes of a growing share of the populace. All historical games build an argument into how they frame their simulations, of course, and I think Chen has struck on one that’s insightful in historical terms, while also providing for engaging gameplay: Hitler’s rise was only possible because of the choices made by a whole host of people who nominally opposed fascism, and even 20/20 hindsight doesn’t make this an easily-solvable problem due to the strictures of politics. Even those with lots of power were tossed about by the whims of chance and the force of outside interruptions, limiting their ability to play out their intended strategies – which is why it’s apt that Social Democracy’s simulation is built as a card game.

The touch-point here is probably Fallen London, whose storylet-based design inspired the construction of the DendryNexus platform that powers Social Democracy. Rather than assuming the mantle of a specific character, the player is the animating spirit of the party as a whole (don’t call it a Zeitgeist….) A turn takes a month, in which you can choose to play one of three cards from your hand, each of which represents an opportunity or threat to respond to via a simple choice-based interface. You might be given the chance to invest your precious party resources in outreach to one of a choice of key constituencies, or weigh whether to make overtures to another party to improve relations, or have to decide whether to issue arms and military training to your citizen’s auxiliary; if you’re part of the governing coalition, you can also draw from a deck that contains cards allowing you to set policy on labor issues or address women’s rights. Most of the time, the presence of grayed-out options allows you to see the way that your choices are constrained, due to limited resources or inadequate party relationships or lack of support within your own party’s internal factions (briefly: tankies, squishes, teamsters, and lanyards) – a nice mirror of the way that those working in practical politics can see the path to a better outcome even if they can’t manage to take it. There’s some limited scope for proactive action – in particular, you pick a trio of core advisors who each have one or more special powers you can deploy at any time, though there’s a six-month cooldown that’s shared by all three – but the limited hand size and the pace of play means you’re always somewhat at the mercy of events.

This is never more obvious than at election time. As the game opens, you’re informed that the polls will open in only a few months’ time, lending the beginning turns a campaign rhythm that’s familiar enough to American players (the game also provides a nice hit of dopamine by setting starting conditions that mean you’re almost certain to have the plurality once the votes are counted). At that point, the next scheduled elections are four years away – again, so far so familiar – but once the ravages of the Depression begin to fray the bonds that allow coalitions to function, elections can come whenever a restive partner decides to call for a no-confidence vote. If you’re in the government, you’ve got some room to maneuver to fend these off, from offering policy concessions to straight-up bribes, but as the lines harden and resources become scarce, it’s easy to wind up in a Blitzkrieg of repeated elections, none of which deliver a decisive result and each of which drains you still further, as the Nazis make greater and greater inroads.

The systems make for nervy, engaging play, and with only a few concessions to the board-game logic running things (that limited hand of possible actions, the artificial constraint on advisor actions) it often feels more like a simplified version of history than a mechanical simulation. It’s possible, if not mandatory for any degree of success, to pursue an intentional strategy. Appropriately, the game’s difficulty isn’t tuned to make a total victory for democracy simple to achieve, even on the easiest setting. My first time out, I tried a no-enemies-to-the-left strategy that saw me punted out of the government early on but maintaining my base among the proletariat through staunch advocacy for welfare and stimulus; I was also able to work out a modus vivendi with the Communists (and came within one resource-spend of installing one of them into the presidency!) The endemic lack of a governing coalition meant that the Nazis were quickly ascendant, however, and while I was able to pivot to arming and training my auxiliaries while creating a united defense front with the Reds, that just meant we were able to give as good as we got in the devastating civil war that followed. The opposite path of sticking around in the government and avoiding snap elections by going along with austerity was even less successful – the workers flocked to the Communists as welfare cuts stifled the already-struggling economy, and after four years the Nazis once again sewed things up handily, except this time I didn’t even have enough of a base to launch any sort of armed struggle.

I found my best success with what I called my Belgian strategy, developing and pushing a massive public works program to maintain my support, while playing a waiting game on the governmental side of things: after each election I’d join the coalition and work on mending fences, but then I’d quit and trigger new elections whenever a proposal for cuts came down the pike. This somewhat-farcical cycle created just enough stability for me to kick the can down the road long enough for the economy to slowly improve, and temper the fires of crisis (I later attempted to replicate this half-success on the hard difficulty – lack of resources and lack of focus meant I failed once again).

If you are at all interested in history, this is riveting, riveting stuff – a story engine on the level of the Paradox grand strategy games, without the often-wacky left turns they often take. Indeed, while I’m usually a stickler for authenticity in games set in the past, I’ve got vanishingly-few complaints about Social Democracy, most of them simply just places where the game starts to push up against the limits of its implementation: each turn representing a whole month means that several times I’d resolve an election, work to influence the selection of chancellor, and click to start the next turn – only to immediately be told that Hindenberg had already cashiered the new guy and picked someone even worse. It’s frustrating, but might not be all that ahistorical – however, the event where I was told “Hindenburg’s camarilla has turned against Papen, and Hindenburg has dismissed the Chancellor, replacing him with the more reactionary Franz von Papen” seems like it’s probably a bug rather than modeling the long-suffering president entering a fugue state. In a game of this complexity, this is small stuff indeed.

No, my only substantive critique is that I think there are a few places where readability could be improved on the mechanical end, and more context could be provided on the historical side of things. As to the former, I didn’t notice any reminders of when the presidential election was going to happen, which meant I was woefully unprepared the first time it came up, and greater feedback for repeated actions would be helpful in a few areas to better indicate progress (I of course wanted to clean up the police force in Prussia before recruiting more members, but wasn’t sure whether I was having meaningful results in my efforts due to always getting identical feedback). It would be nice to know what the difficulty levels actually do. And perhaps this marks me as a Marxist, but I wanted a bit more visibility into material conditions – that unemployment ticker is arresting, but given that you have real-time polling data whenever you want it, it’s striking that there’s no other way of gauging the health of the German body politic.

As to the latter, much as it pains me to admit that the assholes of the left and center have reasons for their actions, I think the game may assume more player knowledge of the relevant history than is justified. Schacht was being all Schacht-y because of hyper-inflation, and he and his cadre sincerely feared that deficit spending would bring it all back, but the game doesn’t really spell this out. Similarly, there are only a few glancing mentions of the Spartacist Uprising and Rosa Luxemburg scattered through events that happen reasonably far into the game; knowing that within the past decade the Communists launched an armed revolt against the state, and the Social Democrat leaders condoned the extrajudicial murder of the party’s leaders, rationalizes their reluctance to form a coalition of the willing. There are similarly glancing references to the Stabbed in the Back myth that might be hard for some players to decipher, and I can’t help but wish some of the culture of the Weimar Republic could make an occasional appearance (maybe some Otto Dix paintings for particularly grisly event-cards?) I certainly appreciate that there’s a fine line to walk between providing enough information to the player to allow them to make solid decisions, and keeping the amount of text and background reading light enough to stay accessible, and I should emphasize that the game generally does quite a good job of this – there are just a few places where I think it could usefully go into a little more detail.

It’s impossible to review Social Democracy without being aware that it is a miraculously buzzy game – an example of the vanishingly-rare piece of IF that manages to get noticed outside our little community, and get attention from the mainstream gaming press. Sometimes lightning strikes for incomprehensible reasons, but this time the virality is entirely understandable and deserved. This is a masterwork of design by one of the scene’s most exciting authors, which makes the past come alive and feel immediately relevant – having been engaged in politics during the 2008 financial crisis, the failure to adequately respond to it, and the ensuing emboldening of fringe right-wingers, I grimaced at the familiarity of many of the scenarios I encountered. I’ll be returning to this one quite a lot after the festival is over, I think, if only so I can finally get one over on $%@# Hjalmer.