Reviews by Mike Russo

Every once in a while the question of “what is IF?” comes up, and I have a couple of stock answers: one is that “IF” is a community-based discourse rather than a genre, and another is that “IF” is whatever we IF people are playing and talking about (these are equivalent formulations, just with more or less pretension according to taste). The other one I tend to trot out draws more from how academic disciplines are functionally defined, and holds that anything one can usefully analyze via the approaches IF critics have developed counts as IF.

These are broad definitions by intention, but by that last one, it’s very hard to consider that Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter is IF. See, this isn’t a complete game; rather, it’s a prompt you can paste into an LLM in order for it to create a game-like experience for you. As such, it’s pointless to talk about the stuff I usually do when writing a review: there’s no pre-baked prose whose quality I can assess, no ending I can weigh for thematic resonance, no puzzles that might be more or less fair. It’s all just down to whatever the plagiarism-bot feels like spitting up in the moment – so given that, as well as what I think is a well-founded reluctance to use an LLM unnecessarily, I didn’t actually bother to “play” this game.

There are other approaches to game criticism than the ones prevalent in our little community, though, and given the format Penny Nichols uses, I couldn’t help considering how it would look through the lenses tabletop RPG reviewers use when looking at scenarios. Those folks tend to look at questions like “how well are the scenario’s theme and flavor communicated to the GM so they can run it as intended?”, “are there raw materials here to allow the GM to construct a well-paced adventure”, “are the mechanics well thought-out?”, and “how railroaded is this adventure likely to be in practice?” And these are questions one can ask of the Penny Nichols prompt.

Unfortunately I don’t think it comes out very well on any of them. The prompt is quite short and devoid of any consistent vibe; there’s an underbaked science-fantasy theme that provides some proper nouns but no coherent guidance to a human intelligence as to how to play it. Like, here’s what we/the LLM are told of Penny:

The player character is Agent Penny Nichols, an Insurance Investigator from the Solar Insurance Company on Mercury.

Hue 150 (Divination & Illusion specialist).
Prefers indirect investigation, including cover identities.
Member of the Circle Trigonist faction.
Does that “hue” thing indicate Penny can do magic? What’s a “Trigonist”? Is locating an insurance company on a planet that’s consistently so hot it radiates mostly as a black body an indication that there’s some fraud going on, or are people just dumb? Your guess is as good as mine (and much better than ChatGPT’s); this is slightly better than “make up some bullshit,” but not by much.

As for the “plot” of the scenario itself, there’s more concrete reason to think that tabletop RPG design is the best way to think about this since it explicitly says the story should proceed according to the four-act kishokentetsu structure that was all the rage in RPG circles like five years ago. But the implementation of the structure is incredibly sketchy, not even running to 200 words: basically, there’s a space station studying an artifact, but the artifact has vanished, so you’re sent in to investigate. There’s meant to be a mid-story twist where you can find out that the artifact was a hoax by the lead investigator, because he wanted to get more funding; but then the final twist reveals that the artifact (or the station itself, the prompt isn’t clear) is actually a dragon’s hoard (or maybe the dragon itself?) that created the lead investigator as a psychic projection, in order to get the attention on which dragons (and hoards?) subsist. The resolution requires the player to “contain, banish, or escape before [the dragon] consumes more” (there’s no mention anywhere of the dragon having previously consumed anything).

Look, I’ve run a bunch of tabletop RPG adventures, and not to put too fine a point on it, but this one sucks. Hell, the notes I scribble to myself for scenarios I’ve come up with and already live in my brain contain way more detail about the psychology of the characters, how to construct challenges that are engaging to deal with, ideas about how to manage pacing, and particular bits of dialogue or turns of phrase to incorporate in my narration. Speaking as a reasonably experienced GM, I’d find this prompt worse than useless: it doesn’t give me any of the stuff I’d look to a scenario to provide, and in the time it’d take me to read, understand, and attempt to spackle over the holes of this prompt, I could come up with something far better using only my own creativity.

So that’s my assessment of what the author submitted to the Comp as a “game”, but I was morbidly curious about what could be included in the “walkthrough” file, since of course there’s nothing to walk through. Turns out it’s some commands that (might?) work to complete the scenario under Claude.ai, as well as a sample transcript of the author “playing” the game with ChatGPT. And oh lord, as bad a mood as reading the prompt put me in the transcript was worse.

For one thing, ChatGPT seems to insist on presenting everything as bullet-pointed lists of information and options, with embedded emojis, meaning reading it feels like being trapped in an Axios article (What they’re saying: “this is literally hell,” according to Mike Russo), and also makes me wonder how the author reconciled the “you can type anything and the game will understand it!” promise of LLMs with the reality that it was providing an interface indistinguishable from that of an especially low-effort choice-based game. For another, while the blurb promises that Penny Nichols is a “Star-trek style away mission”, ChatGPT sure seemed to think it’s a high fantasy setting where all your actions involve casting magic spells. And actually the prompt in the transcript isn’t the same as the prompt in the Comp submission!

The transcript at least explains the last of these discrepancies; halfway down, the author realizes that things aren’t going well, and asks ChatGPT to change the rules, then regurgitate a new prompt capturing the alterations. It’s of glancing interest that even after the changes, the transcript remains awful: despite being told to stop prompting with an explicit list of options, ChatGPT keeps doing that; the stilted, buzzword-laden prose make it feel like you’re playing DnD with the worst, most corporate manager you’ve ever had; and there’s nothing resembling an actual conflict or revelation, just flaccid set-pieces and irrelevant revelations following each other in succession until the author declares that he’s won. To be fair, I guess I should note that I didn’t notice any glaring inconsistencies or logical contradictions in what the LLM spat out, which either indicates our forthcoming robot overlords are getting better with the hallucination problem or just that the “writing” was so soporific and arbitrary that there was no central narrative for individual developments to contradict.

But like I said, all those criticisms are only of glancing interest. I repeat: this prompt, which was submitted to the Comp as a thing you could use to get an LLM to play a game with you, is itself the product of an LLM – Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter is a coprophagous ouroboros, creating the very slop it feeds on, of no possible use or value to a human being. In that sense I suppose there’s something potentially meta to the prompt’s “final twist”: “Dragons feed on human attention, and this hoard has been feasting.”

They do, and it is.

Are we inclined to do something about that?

This is not IF.

I’ve since moved away, but for a long time I lived just a few minutes away from the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, CA. They’re a series of botanical gardens with various theme – there’s a rose garden, one with native plants, some woodier areas, a Japanese garden – plus a library, art museum, and conservatory, all based on the collection and estate of a railroad magnate who was a great philanthropist (but definitely did some shady stuff to make his money). It’s a lovely peaceful place, and I visited it a whole bunch when I leaved nearby, taking friends or family members when they were in town or just going to hang out on a lazy Sunday, in those pre-kid days when lazy Sundays were a thing.

So when I tell you that The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens is a game about spending a bunch of time at a magic version of the Huntington and solving some riddles and mysteries while building friendships and/or romance with a quartet of appealing characters, let there be no doubt that this is extremely my jam. Like, check this:

"A handful of visitors mill around, chatting and strolling. A half-elven couple and their toddler feed breadcrumbs to a flock of birds. A boy sits on a bench, absorbed in a book. The connected structures of the central villa, the library building to the East, and the glass conservatory to the West bound this area on three sides. An engraved bronze plaque identifies your location as 'NAIADS POOL.'"

There are things to do here: the reason you wind up at the Sylvan Gardens is that you’re afflicted by a strange sleepwalking malady that seems to keep drawing you to its grounds, so you’ve decided to investigate in your waking hours. And after you meet the aforementioned characters, they turn out to have their own problems that relate to your own, and running down these interconnected mysteries involves deciphering mythological references, brewing potions, and solving some similar gentle puzzles. These are all engaging enough, but for me the draw is just that this is a very nice place to spend time. There are follies! Two separate characters want to have tea with you upon first meeting them! There are bucolic graphics and a nice little map! The lady who founded this place was named Ploutossina Pecunia, which is a funny Dickensian name and also proof that this is one of those fantasy worlds that definitely had a Rome!

The characters are very nice too. As with the other game of the author’s that I’ve played in this Comp (Path of Totality), they’re all wholesome and down to earth; some of the early sequences hinge on whether you want to tell them all about your predicament or be more cagey, but they’re all so ingenuous I’d be surprised if many players took the latter route. There’s a child-prodigy librarian, a dedicated botanist, an easygoing gardener, a hermit who knows more than he’s letting on… you can choose to romance one of them, but that doesn’t stand in the way of just strengthening your friendships with the others, which are rewarding in themselves: you can go hiking or stargazing or eat a homecooked meal while getting to know them and helping them with their problems. Those problems aren’t exactly subtle – they’re each suffering from a different malady that mirrors your own, and which have thematic resonance with emotional challenges they’re experiencing as well; these are perhaps a bit on the nose, but allow the gameplay bits where you’re trying to lift the curses mirror the relationship dynamics sketched out via dialogue, which I think is a worthwhile trade.

There’s a lot of game here – I think it took me about three hours to get to the end – and I was engaged the whole time, as the game is paced well to make sure you’re always making progress; once I got through the initial setup I was worried that matters with all four characters would progress at the same rate, but actually you’re able to resolve some of their problems reasonably quickly while others linger into the endgame. And there’s one thread that initially seems to be just a bit of backstory on the same level as many others, but which takes on unexpected weight as you head into the endgame: (Spoiler - click to show)I’m talking, of course, of what to do about the mass killing of the dryads, which isn’t just part of the setup for one of the characters’ arcs, but winds up being the major question posed in the endgame: do you try to reverse the impacts of the genocide if it means potentially destroying this lovely place and the town that depends on it for its prosperity?

This dilemma is more pointed than I was expecting from the otherwise cozy vibe, and the game doesn’t make it too easy on the player (Spoiler - click to show)(taking the morally correct option of maximally repopulating the dryads does lead to some downer consequences as everyone moves away and the town dies). And that’s all to the good: I’ve used “nice” a whole bunch in this review and in my notes, but this element shows Secrets of Sylvan Gardens has more than just pleasant vibes to offer. So it’s maybe apt that the game’s postscript doesn’t list the Huntington as one of its real-world inspirations, but it does mention the Boboli Gardens in Florence, which I’ve also been to. They’re likewise a beautiful, manicured collection of landscapes, with cypress trees and Italianate sculpture and all the rest. But unlike the SoCal facsimile of European elegance, there’s weirder stuff too – my wife and I still talk about the strange grotto we stumbled across there, where after peering through an arch decorated by overgrow, cancerous stucco we glimpsed a bizarre altar resting under sculptures depicting putti, a goat’s head, and a pregnant she-goat with swollen teats. There’s nothing quite so disturbing in the Sylvan Gardens, thankfully, but neither is it an entirely manicured experience.

It’s getting on towards October, so my four-year-old son is enjoy the advent of his favorite holiday. He enjoys everything that makes up the Halloween bundle of spookiness, but some of it is admittedly easier for the toddler brain to assimilate and some is harder. Spiders and skeletons are straightforward enough, and the Count from Sesame Street gives him enough context to understand vampires. But this year he’s been asking a lot of questions about Frankenstein’s monster, which frankly (so to speak) is a bit confusing: I’ve of course been clear that the monster isn’t Frankenstein, but also that Frankenstein is the monster. That is, the point of the story is that the monster is grotesque, but was born innocent, like all children, before turning bad because of how he was treated; the good Doctor, meanwhile, is anything but, and the way he created the monster while rejecting the obligations of parenthood is the motivating crime of the tragedy.

Armed with that understanding, I think he’d be able to make sense of INPUT PROCESS, though I might glide over certain details. Here, you play Frankenstein, and there’s not one but two monsters, both digital creations rather than stitched-together carcasses: the first AI is upbeat and talks like an LLM, while the second is better rounded, and smart enough to ask you some pointed questions about the why (and who) of its creation. This is a game of dialogue, made up nearly entirely of conversations with these two digital avatars, and mostly linear, too, though there are a few choices offered towards the tail end of the game that slot you into one of the several endings. But while the branching may be rather shallow, the presentation takes full advantage of the digital format: the first conversation plays out in a convincing simulation of a terminal (though having a chatbot conversation play out in a DOC prompt, complete with directory path printing out before each bit of user dialogue, is kinda weird), while the second adds graphical elements, notably a yellow eye that’s ready to catch you in an inconsistency.

The first two-thirds of the game play out as a mystery, teasing the question of why the protagonist created the Ais and what secrets she’s keeping from them, but I didn’t find this especially engaging. Beyond the fact that the blurb more or less spills the beans, this is a Frankenstein story, and there’s only one reason a stunted genius tries to create artificial life (well, one and a half if you count hubris). Adding to my impatience for the game to just acknowledge that you’re trying to recreate a lost loved one, duh, is the way it doles out its exposition, which is to say, oh god the timed text. You need to click to get each new paragraph to display, and even once you click the lines fill in letter by letter, making the buildup feel excruciating. I’ll admit that there are a few places where the added drama of delay enhances the narrative, but the omnipresence of this frustrating mechanic is the worst thing about INPUT PROCESS – imagine how much less fun Frankenstein would be if you spent half your time reading it waiting to actually read it!

Fortunately there are some high points too. Beyond the generally lavish production values, the writing is up to the challenge of depicting two different attempts to capture the same character in silicon, with the less-sophisticated iteration sporting noticeable LLM-style tics. The worldbuilding is also nicely shaded in; for plot purposes, all that’s important is that kitbashing AIs is possible but not exactly legal, but there are enough glancing details about the way this cyberpunk-y world works to make it feel lived in. The final segment of the game also is more engaging that what came before – some of this is down to choices finally starting to appear, but it isn’t just a matter of interactivity as such; the last couple of scenes focus more on the emotional dynamics of the situation rather than trying to prolong the aura of mystery, and gain power by that choice. Sure, the protagonist’s psychology here is familiar enough (stop me if you’ve ever read a story about a precocious genius with self-esteem issues who fears getting close to anyone!), but the AI’s reactions are the focus, and lead to an endgame that’s more about feeling out whether a newly-constructed relationship with the protagonist might be plausible or desirable, based on what level of sharing you choose to engage in.

And to the game’s credit, it does allow you to skip to other choice points once you finish the old-fashioned way, which takes much of the sting out of having to face all that timed text a second or, heavens forfend, third time if you want to see how things change in the other endings. All of them are ambiguous to one degree or another since this isn’t a rainbows-and-sunshine kind of game, but they all do open up space for the protagonist and her creations to escape the sort of destructive cycle that consumed Frankenstein and his monster, one way or another, which I suppose can count as hopeful if you catch it in the right kind of light. Of course, in this day and age a story about AI that posits them as specific characters striving to understand humanity, not brainless purveyors of cheerily-delivered slop, feels a bit old fashioned, but as my son’s fascination with Frankenstein indicates, there’s a reason we keep going back to the classics.

The 2023 Comp was notoriously a festival of murder-mysteries and boats, and while we’ve seen our share of the former this year, maritime adventure has been rather thinner on the ground (er). There’s a bit of sea-going amongst the general phantasmagoria of Us Too, and you take ship right at the end of Warrior-Poet, but aside from the inevitable spaceship stuff – which is a different category, to my mind – but that’s pretty much it. So I’m excited that two thirds of the way through the Comp, things are looking up on the boat front! Crescent Sea Story boasts its boatiness in its title, of course, and also offers a lovely watercolor map to trace your progress about its blue-water archipelago.

That’s about the only loveliness to be found, however, since this is a dark story. The protagonist is an amnesiac wizard in a world where people and spirits live in symbiosis – or, as you begin to intuit as you recover your memories, perhaps the relationship is more parasitic than that. As you sail to one island or another, you enter flashbacks that illustrate key moments in your life, jumbled out of order, so beyond the individual challenges in each episode, there’s a metapuzzle of putting them into their proper sequence to suss out who exactly you are, and what you were doing that led you to forget yourself.

This is an engaging structure, and there’s a nice variety to the individual sequences: one starts as a slice of life, with choices primarily keyed to navigating high-school relationship drama, before taking a turn for the macabre, while another sees you performing monotonous task after monotonous task for a sorcerous mentor who seems more focused on getting you to do his chores than teaching you magic. And beyond the shifts in subject matter, the length is also pretty variable, which helps keep things well-paced all the way through to the inevitable climax.
The prose also makes things go down easy. It’s smooth throughout, equally adept at the high-fantasy moments as the quiet, bucolic ones; the style shifts slightly to accommodate these different moods, but not so much as to cause whiplash. I personally like a bit of friction to my writing, especially for fantasy stories, as there are moments when things feel a bit flatter and more contemporary than I’d like – but that’s purely a subjective preference, and the presence of computers and other anachronistic touches indicate that Crescent Sea Stories isn’t actually going for a traditionalist fantasy vibe.

One commonality between the memory-vignettes is that they end with assigning you a character trait, usually based on some climactic choice: the fact that none of these are positive traits (you have your pick of rage, despair, or coldness) is one of many clues that the protagonist’s viewpoint might not be an unbiased one. While your grudge against the gods has its reasons, there are definitely hints that you’ve been shown an incomplete picture – and that regardless of the ends you’ve pursued, the means you’ve employed have put you beyond the moral horizon.

It all makes for a satisfying package, albeit not one without its blemishes. The hardest to ignore of these is the timed text; much of the story requires you to click links to get more text to display, and there’s a noticeable lag before the next paragraphs appear. Meanwhile, choices aren’t offered in list form, but rather via a widget requiring you to click a button to cycle through options, at which point you can click to lock one in. It’s just a little slower and a little fiddlier than you want it to be. Some of the design can exacerbate this sluggishness, especially the training sequence, which has you trudging through a maze and performing repetitive jobs through clicking the same links over and over; it’s thematically appropriate that the protagonist’s impatience would be bubbling over, but I’m not sure the player needed to experience quite so much bleed-through.

These are small quibbles though; Crescent Sea Story is a nicely put-together package, tracking an anti-hero’s journey through engaging reveals and without getting too grimdark. And while the ending shows you triumphant, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re headed for comeuppance in some sequel or spin-off that delves into the folly of your actions – definitely sign me up for that, especially if there are more boats involved.

I think a lot about The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Let me rephrase: relative to most Americans born in 1980, I think a lot about the Sorrows of Young Werther, not so much for the novel’s literary qualities – though it did kick-start the Romantic movement and has some good set-pieces – as for its social impact. The thing about this book is that it was huge, and not in a normal way: “Werther fever” had masses of people over-identifying with the main character, reading the story in paroxysms of emotion, dressing up like him, and even, allegedly, killing themselves to escape their romantic travails, just as he does in the book.

Which is to say that parasocial relationships with literary characters may technically be a modern phenomenon, by virtue of the fact that 1774 is after when many consider the early-modern era to have ended, but they nonetheless have a history that long predates social media (so does cosplay!) And while Werther is obviously a poor choice of role model, I don’t think it’s the case that these kinds of feelings are necessarily bad when kept to a proper proportion: my wife is a big fan of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, and cried happy tears when she read an estate-approved novel that capped off their narratives by marrying them off. When you come to know a character by reading about them, you really do feel for them, and want good things to happen to them, at least once the adventures that provide you with so much excitement are through.

This is exactly what the Little Four is up to. This low-key parser mystery brings Hercule Poirot and his Watsonian sidekick, Captain Hastings – both the protagonist and the putative author – into a domestic menage: after the death of Hastings’ wife, he’s moved his four children into the flat below Poirot’s, while he himself takes the great detective’s guest bedroom (one does not need to look far to find queer subtext). The kids play games, Poirot’s mostly retired and alternates phone consultations with the Yard with cooking meals for the extended family, and Hastings’ greatest obstacle is taking the dog out for a walk on a rainy day.

One of the great powers of parser games is to evoke a place, and the apartments here are nicely drawn and cleanly implemented; they’re substantial without feeling too big, and contain a generous portion of lovingly-described mementos and Christie references without being overstuffed (the robust feelies, which in addition to instructions on commands and a spoiler-y walkthrough also include a map, help make things feel even more manageable). While I’ve not read the original books so can’t directly compare the prose, the writing here is very good, conveying sensory impressions and character details while maintaining a post-Edwardian crispness. Here for example is X SLIPPERS:

"Poirot, in his dandyish and self-admiring manner, loved to have his most luxurious personal items inscribed with his elegant monogram of an intertwined H and P. He sometimes wore these dark velvety slippers around the house after his bath, when the day’s schedule allowed him to keep a casual presentation. I confess that the aches of advancing middle age were making me crave comforts that I had scorned as a younger man, and I was tempted to procure some slippers of my own."

This excerpt is typical in centering on Poirot, who is unsurprisingly the main subject of the game: exploring the apartment gives you a sense of the place but more so provides a portrait of its inhabitant, who comes across as charmingly vain but intensely sentimental, doting on Hastings and the children:

"I have always known Poirot to be a masterful cook; lately, he had been honing his skills with particular zeal by cooking dinner on most nights, and appeared determined to outdo himself at every opportunity. He was on a mission to render even the most dubious of Belgian dishes somehow palatable to young children. He sometimes spoke fondly of his mother as he explained a recipe’s origins, offering us glimpses into a past which he had been reticent about for as long as I have known him."

I can imagine how much enjoyment a Poirot fan would get from this picture, seeing a beloved character happily at rest. And filling out this picture is mostly what there is to do: you’re set a series of simple chores at the beginning of the game that mostly serve as an excuse to wander around the place checking out the scenery and having short conversations with the rest of the supporting cast, while Poirot remains off-screen. There is an added note of excitement as you head into the endgame, but this is exceedingly modest: Poirot sets a simple test of your deductive prowess, which is solved by doing just what you’ve done for the rest of the game, wandering around and looking at things, which is made easier by the convenient way items you haven’t yet sufficiently examined are printed in bold (after you’ve found everything there is to find, cracking the conundrum does require typing in a culprit for the mischief you’ve uncovered, but this too is exceedingly obvious, and anyway there are no consequences for failure). And then the story draws to a close.

It’s a lovely little thing, but I have to confess that – well, I’m not a Poirot fan. I’ve seen an episode or two of the David Suchet series and one of the Branagh movies, but as I said, I’ve never actually read any of the books, and wasn’t aware there was such a character as Captain Hastings until I checked on Wikipedia to see whether he was the game’s creation or original to Christie. So while I can certainly appreciate the happy ending he’s provided here, I still viewed all this coziness with something of the uncomprehending detachment of someone watching a Wertherite sob over a fictional character’s heartbreak – though unlike in that case, part of me was a little disappointed that nobody got killed, since I do love a murder-mystery. But corpses are a dime a dozen in Poirot’s career; evenings where he’s surrounded by affectionate children and shares a nightcap with a friend, I suspect, are rarer, and even our fictional friends deserve a little peace.

It’s a sign that a writer has reached their decadent phase when they turn their critical eye upon themselves and begin to obsess over their process, but I am feeling stymied about how to start my review of A Day in a Hell Corp and the only way I can think of to break through the logjam is to let you behind the curtain a little bit. See, typically my reviewing is two or three days ahead of my playing, which is an important part of how I’m usually able to get through the Comp: between work, taking care of my kid, various chores and errands, and maintaining some minimum of a social life, and cramming 85 games into 45 days, I need to maximize the efficiency of the hour and a half to two hours a night when I can actually sit down and write reviews. And that time lag is a big piece of that, since as I’m doing the laundry or cooking or taking a couple minute break between meetings, my impressions of a game are marinating in the back of my brain, and I can mentally workshop different angles to takes, these to propound, gimmicky intros to use as a way into talking about the game, so by the time I’m in front of the keyboard I can just go without needing too much in the way of anticipatory throat-clearing.

The previous 250ish words, though, are of course anticipatory throat-clearing of the lowest order: pure waffle, the kind of tap-dancing that a sophomore bangs out to bulk out their two-and-a-half-page essay to the requisite three-page mark, valuable only to the extent that they gift an editor a moment of satisfaction as they drag their red pen across in a diagonal slash. And yet, despite my method theoretically safeguarding against such a result, here we are. Why? Well, for one thing, I don’t actually have an editor, but the main reason is that every time I’ve tried to think about A Day in Hell Corp over the last couple of days, I’m overcome by a wave of irritation that renders analysis untenable.

It’s not that its bones are irreducibly awful. What we’ve got here is an old-fashioned Twine game with puzzles, but none of the systems that edge a choice-based game into the “parser-like” category – I suppose there’s a vestigial inventory, but there are only a couple of different items you can pick up, and they automatically enable a choice to use them when appropriate, so that hardly counts. Similarly, there’s a bit of navigation, but the map is simple and there’s not any need to retrace your steps after you’ve cleared each small region. So basically you just wind up going from room to room, clicking through all the links, then circling back once you hit the end to see what’s changed based on your first round of clicking – the puzzles all solve themselves through lawnmowering, so no actual thought is required; it’s not especially satisfying but this can be a brainlessly pleasant structure upon which to hang a story, so like I said, not irreducibly awful.

The same goes for the story, I suppose, though its margin of grace is much narrower. You play a middle-manager demon eager to win a competition whose prize is a celestial vacation, and as a result you have to review the torments of the souls under your care to find ways to dial their suffering up to 11 (a running subplot is the way you screw over, and are screwed over in turn by, your coworkers – it’s an imp eat imp world out there). This is rather broad as workplace satires go, and the gender politics are gross (female demons are either super hot or grotesque, and none of them are smart), but again, a good writer could do something with this setup.

The issue though is that we are not dealing with the work of a good writer, or at least one whose style is to my taste. In fact, I kind of hope that an LLM was used to generate some of this prose (though let me be clear that there’s no disclosure to that effect), because the alternative – that a human being wrote all this – is depressing to contemplate:

"Whoa, in that orc infirmary, those alembics and potions, they’re one crazy, funny mess!

"Alembics: All scattered on the shelves, these alembics got wild shapes, like glass giraffes or hunchback witches. They’re bubbling and gurgling, with colorful smoke and funny sounds, like whistles and burps. Some of the stoppers pop off like champagne, making it even wilder.

"Potions: The potions, in bottles all shapes and sizes, colors like rainbows and glowing. Labels all scribbled and unreadable, like spider tracks, and the effects are crazy, like laughing fits or turning into dancing pumpkins. It’s a real hoot!"

The whole game is like this, every interaction exaggerated into zaniness, visible flop-sweat coming off of the text as it tries to convince you how crazy and over the top the mild humor is:

"The moment you grab that hammer and smack the alarm clock, everything goes kaboom in a total mess. But the alarm clock? It’s still there, perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened. Oh, the irony! And just then, the hellish door opens up, ready to take you to work. Good day, huh? :sweat_smile:"

Or:

"Orc nurses run back and forth, tripping over their own feet, while screaming patients are carried on creaking stretchers. An atmosphere of total disorder, where every step is an adventure into the bizarre."

Or:

"So, our antihero, with a clumsy leap, jumps onto the table. First move? Epic fail, the gum falls and sticks to his tail. Second try? Even worse, he ends up with a foot in a bucket some jerk angel left there, now all rusty—real funny, guys."

It’s exhausting, sucking all the energy out of even the slightly-better gags; I didn’t think you could make whale laxatives enervating, but the game accomplishes it. There’s no sense of pacing, no quieter bits allowing for escalation into comic chaos, just increasingly-incoherent noise wearing down my rational faculties. Heck, there’s one late-game puzzle involving a union rep and some misers that I still don’t fully understand, since the dialogue felt like it was fed into a make-snarkier filter over and over again until the original meaning had long since fled. Perhaps there are people who do find this stuff funny – I’ll confess that maybe I’d have been among them when I was twelve – but these days I find comedy needs some sense of restraint in order to land. Here in IF land, it’s not the mind, but writing, that can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven; that’s certainly the case here.

I’ll give credit to You Cannot Speak for an interesting opening – sudden-onset aphasia, intrigue on a Martian colony, and sleep paralysis are an unlikely set of themes to throw into the blender, but you can see how they’d connect up: they all have to do with isolation, alienation, and a lack of agency. The game’s protagonist seems well-fitted to explore this mélange of concepts, too, as she’s fleeing some entanglements on Earth and clearly has cut herself off from her history: upon waking from the aforementioned hag-dream, instead of immediately jumping into your daily routine you can choose to sit for a while and reflect on your past, which involves a premonitory warning that “sometimes it’s better not to ruminate”, and you gate off a detailed description of something that went wrong for you with a simple “you don’t like think about it.”

Unfortunately none of this is paid off in any way: the game as entered into the Comp is a short demo, comprising maybe the first ten minutes of what’s clearly a larger story (part 2 is plugged in the ending). Besides the ominous opening and the vague backstory, you can take a (deeply unpleasant) shower, check out your few belongings, and then get a strange warning from someone lurking outside your quarters. It’s hard not to be a bit frustrated, because this is in no way a complete experience. There have been other part ones entered into this year’s Comp, of course, but Pure and Warrior-Poet are both notably longer and more robust in both gameplay and narrative terms; they reach climaxes at the end, even if there’s clearly more story to go before everything is resolved. You Cannot Speak has none of that, and it doesn’t even elaborate its themes sufficiently to create a hook – sure, there’s the mystery of why the protagonist can’t, well, speak, but this is just an out-of-context mystery, without any potential explanations or avenues of investigation on offer, so it winds up feeling disconnected from the actual gameplay on offer, which again is mostly just twiddling around in a minimally-furnished space cabin.

The prose, meanwhile, is fine (there’s a line about how the TV-picture you’ve got instead of an actual window shows a “canyon [of] breathtaking natural beauty, with all the timeless qualities of a MacOS desktop image”, which I think is good assuming that I’m right that it’s meant satirically) but it’s not especially flashy. So while sure, I’d keep playing based on these first ten minutes, I can’t say that’s because I found a compelling reason to continue as much as that I didn’t find anything sufficiently off-putting to drive me away. And if the plan is to release the second installment in next year’s Comp, I’m pretty sure I’d have to replay this opening in its entirety to remember what happened – to be honest, I’ve already kinda forgotten what the deal is with the protagonist’s sister, and what the guy lurking outside the door said that was creepy – which isn’t a problem I’d have with Pure or Warrior-Poet. Inasmuch as it’s a teaser, You Cannot Speak probably could have stood to be more of a tease.

Probably the most interesting thing about the rise of LLMs (a low bar) is that it’s given us a new AI story. When I was growing up, there were just two: Pinocchio, and 2001. That is, either the story was going to be about whether or not an artificial consciousness could be “real” (so Data from Star Trek, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, Spielberg’s Kubrick’s A.I.), or about whether the robots were going to destroy their creators (Terminator, The Matrix… heck, this trope goes all the way back to R.U.R.) But now there’s a third story, reflecting the anxieties brought on by generative AI: maybe the machines won’t live alongside us, or violently overthrow us, but instead simply supplant us, doing all the work and making all our decisions until we’re superfluous.

One Step Ahead’s implementation isn’t especially impressive – presentation-wise, this is bare-bones Harlowe, and the writing is marred by plenty of typos and infelicities – but when it sticks to telling this new story, it managed to sustain my attention as the protagonist, worn down by the demands of classwork and decision fatigue, slowly cedes more and more of their agency to an LLM. Soon it’s doing their homework, deciding on their meal plans, and shouldering them out of their life. There’s not much characterization or specificity, and the use of interactivity is rather blunt (you can either give into temptation and use the AI – or you can choose not to, which swiftly ends the game without anything by way of denouement), but hey, who doesn’t want to see Faust get his comeuppance?

The trouble is, in the third act of its short runtime, the game swerves back into one of the old narratives, specifically the oh-no-AI-will-kill-us-all one. You have a moment of clarity and try to delete or at least step back from using it, before it’s inevitably reinstalled and punishes you for your disobedience. Narratively, this isn’t especially convincing – the details on how all this is happening are vague, beyond red angry-text being displayed at odd angles. And thematically, it’s a muddle: what’s terrifying about being replaced by an LLM is specifically that it doesn’t have any agency, we’re just making ourselves obsolete through sheer lack of character, or having it imposed on us from above by rapacious bosses. Killer robots reflect a capitalist’s guilty conscience at the oppression of the proletariat, so bringing this note into the mix adds nothing but discordance – it’s a plot twist for the sake of a plot twist, an escalation for the sake of an escalation. And since, unfortunately, there’s not much here beyond the very basic skeleton of a narrative, when that goes off the rails there’s similarly not much left for One Step Ahead to fall back on.

On thing that I never fully appreciated until I started writing some of my own fiction is just how full of holes most narratives are. I don’t mean inconsistencies in the plot or anything like that – just gaps, elisions, places where the story skips through some dull bits. They seem simple enough when you’re reading, but when you’re in the author’s seat, I found it was very easy to get sucked into the momentum of narrating everything that happened to my characters: if I said they went out their front door, well it just stood to reason I’d need to relate what they saw on the other side, then which direction they turned when they finished walking down the driveway, and then whether they had to wait for the stop-light to cross the street… internalizing that you can (and should!) segue into the next place where something interesting happens, trusting that the reader will follow, can be deceptively hard, especially when the next sentence isn’t “when X arrived at school…” but “the next day…” or “by the time Summer Break was over”, much less, as in the case of the fairy tale on which valley of glass riffs, “seven years later…”

The game doesn’t attempt to tell the full story of that fairy tale, or even an incomplete slice of it – instead, it lives entirely in the gap. I had vague memories of the Black Bull of Norroway, which is name-checked in the blurb, but had recourse to Wikipedia to fill in the details, and it sure is a fairy tale: there are three daughters who go off on three separate journeys, a youngest daughter who travels alongside a black bull and is gifted three miraculous fruits, a seemingly-simple instruction that’s accidentally violated to supernaturally-catastrophic effect, and then transformations, setbacks, a trilogy of bribes, and true love winning out in the end. There’s a bit too much business, a bit too little thematic resonance, for Disney to be adapting this anytime soon, but it’s an enjoyable example of the form, and valley of glass zeroes in on one particular lacuna in the narrative: after the youngest daughter inadvertently disobeys the bull which is her polymorphed love, she’s abandoned in the eponymous dale and forced to work for a blacksmith for seven years, at which point he promises to make her iron shoes that will allow her to climb the slippery slopes and make her rendezvous with destiny.

The game doesn’t give you the full context for why you’re here, or where you’re headed after your labors have finished – I’m not sure because the author assumed the audience would know the story (debatable, I think, at least in the US) or if being enigmatic was an intended part of the vibe. I will say I’m glad I looked up the story, since it enabled me to appreciate some details that initially left me nonplussed, like the fact that the aforementioned fruits start out in your inventory. Honestly, even with that background, the game is pretty slight: it just depicts you remembering how you came to the valley and then turning back to the forge to keep up your labors, hoping one day to escape. The writing is evocative, but there isn’t much in the way of interactivity:

"It is early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith. Your breath clouds in the crisp morning air as you walk the North Road, your borrowed coat wrapped tight against the chill."

(That last line is unchanged even if you remove the coat).

Pretty much all the player can do is explore off the road, which triggers the aforementioned non-interactive memories. The fantastical nature of the landscape isn’t especially harped on in these sequences, and while I typically like understatement, in a piece this short (it took me less than ten minutes to play through) I think going bigger would have helped it make more of an impression. Similarly, if you’ve read the story, there are some things you can do that would eventually change the outcome (Spoiler - click to show)(breaking open the fruits so the daughter can’t use the gems within as a bribe) but the game can’t really acknowledge that, since its horizon closes well before the next bit of the fair tale’s plot picks up. This makes for a game that’s pleasant enough while it lasts, but almost militantly low-key in its refusal to offer challenges, choices, or consequences, and even the mood it evokes is rather restrained. It’d be churlish to suggest that the fairy tale skips over this bit for a reason, but I did find myself wishing the author had communicated a clearer rationale for why this particular bit of the story was worth spending time on, besides the aforementioned narrative-autopilot I had running as a novice author.

I don’t mean to be controversial here, but I’m going to go ahead and say it: Kafka was a great author. Oh, I know some might disagree – including the man himself, who famously wanted all his writing to be burned after his death – but for all that he’s not great at interiority and he’s better at situations than plot, he sure nailed the 20th century. But beyond his ideas (bureaucracy, alienation, the absurd), he sure could sling a sentence even when working in a more mundane register. Temptation in the Village is an interactive rendering of one of his fragments, and where the game sticks close to his prose, there’s something about it that makes me squirm in my seat with glee:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you. You try to convey this in the way you greet the people standing at the gates; their replies are friendly, though a little reserved."

I can’t easily articulate why this delights me, but it does: the simple words, the emotional immediacy, the accumulation of simple clauses creating a momentum belied by the fact that nothing in particular is happening, the small note of unease at the end… Sure, this borders on the pastoral, but when we get down to the grubby business of human interaction, the distinctively Kafkaesque note begins to emerge. For example, after you decide to take lodgings in the village and bandy some words with a curiously-hostile passerby, a supercilious young man pops atop a wall to tell you you can stay at a farmhouse:

“That’s right,” he replies, with the same arrogance in his reply that there is in all his behavior. He sits above like a master, you stand down below like a petty servant; you have a great desire to stir him up a little by whirling a stone at him.

“Beds for the night are furnished here, not to everyone, but only to those to whom they are offered,” the young man continues.

The near-tautology at the end: lovely.

The gameplay here is pretty minimal – just moving about the map and taking simple actions (talking, sleeping) according to the game’s prompts, which lend a minimal interactivity to the fragment. Sometimes the suggestions can get pretty bald, telling you exactly what the protagonist is feeling and what you should do next, and while these can feel intrusive, I think that’s forgivable due the exigencies of adaptation, especially of a piece so light on plot as this: without clear narrative stakes or character goals to structure things, a heavier authorial hand helps the player avoid flailing.

The trouble is that this is just a fragment, and the author’s given in to the temptation to finish it. It’s hopefully no major critique to note that the writing in this section isn’t as good as Kafka’s, and both the plot and the structure open up a bit: the bit Kafka wrote breaks off after the protagonist experiences an odd incident upon awakening in the farmhouse in the middle of the night, but from there the game’s narrative has you deciding to work as a farmhand for a while, which requires you to perform some chores to prove that you’re up to the task. This involves some satisfying but very typical parser-puzzle business – you need to oil a rusty wheel, things of that nature – and while there’s a consistent undercurrent suggesting that things aren’t right, this comes across more as the locals playing a practical joke on an outsider, which doesn’t contrast well with the more uncanny, slightly-off vibe of the first half. And then the ending strikes the least Kafkaesque note I can imagine:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

Still, a too-pat finale can’t negate how engaging I found the first part of the piece; I do wish the author had been more willing to let narrative uncertainty lie and end the game the same place Kafka did, but that’s not because the second half is bad, just comparatively banal. And heck, compared to the various forgettable-at-best attempts at adding closure to incomplete narratives – stabs at solving the Mystery of Edwin Drood or bringing Sanditon in for a landing or the last seasons of Game of Thrones – it could have been a lot worse.