Reviews by Mike Russo

My son was home from preschool for six straight days last week – a combination of the weekend, Easter holidays, and a bout of strep throat we both got – and as a result we wound up watching a bunch of kids’ movies (and doing Lego. So much Lego). On back to back nights we did Ratatouille and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and I was intrigued to discover that despite their wildly different plots, i.e. up and coming rat proving himself in the realm of haute cuisine vs. lovable mad scientist trying to save the world from a plague of giant raining food he accidentally unleashed, their emotional spines were completely identical: in both, a comedian plays a young man (well, rat) with a special gift (good taste/off-the-wall inventing) that places him at odds with the expectations of his society, and especially with his father, an emotionally-distant patriarch played by a respected actor of yesteryear slumming for a paycheck, until at a climactic moment the son proves his independence and worth, and his incommunicative father is finally able to express his love.

It’s maybe not surprising that people who write and make movies specifically have some unresolved feelings about feeling less supported by their primary male role model, but this is not peculiar to the field of children’s animation – as a society, we have daddy issues, look around (the first draft of this intro included more geopolitics and was a much bigger downer). So 23 Minutes, an extended Twine narrative-poem about the anxieties of being a new father that unfurls across a sleep-deprived walk to work, has a claim to a broader zeitgeist, even as its signifiers (Tesco, newly-creaking knees, Nigel Farage) anchor it to a particular older-British-Zoomer milieu.

It’s less these particulars and more the presentation that stand out at first impression, though. The commute is rendered as a long series of moments, with each click revealing a handful of new words and updating the blurred background photo to a view a few feet further down the London streets. While I often find excessive clicking an annoying way to navigate a game, 23 Minutes’ approach worked for me, since lingering on each cluster of words in turn feels like an appropriate way to read poetry, and the progression of the photos communicates a sense of motion (as well as a sense of danger: there’s one bit where a van hops onto the sidewalk and comes towards that camera that left me worried for both the protagonist and the author!)

Keeping the player feeling like they’re always moving also fits well with the protagonist’s lapidary thoughts – since for all that fatherhood is the central theme, his narrative stream jumps around quite a lot. Early grumbles at sleep deprivation and regret at snapping at his wife over a trivial household chore give way to frustration at the seeming meaninglessness of his work (he’s a teacher), then deepen into more anxious ruminations about whether he’s emotionally connecting with his new baby and finally digging into a major conflict with his own dad, with diversions into his musical preferences and how he met his wife along the way.

Having been a new father myself, I can testify to the way your sleep-deprived brain can flit from topic to topic at the slightest provocation, and the connections between these leaps are usually clear. And the writing is dense with memorable details, like this early bit where the somnambulant protagonist:

Wipe[s] the debris from my eye / crunchy / like the tips / of oven-baked broccoli

(The crunchy broccoli even gets a callback when he reflects on those cracking noises his knees have started to make)

The author also uses the trajectory of words on the screen to mirror the protagonist’s distraction-prone consciousness; the word yesterday on the right-hand side of the screen calls to mind apposite Beatles lyrics on the right.

With that said, 23 Minutes isn’t just trying to dig into the subjective experience of being an exhausted parent trying to keep their head together while they go through their day; it becomes clear that there’s a progression to the topics the protagonist’s brain keeps bringing up, with all of it ultimately being rooted in that pivotal conflict with his father. While he’s prey to a whole host of worries – that he’s too irresponsible yet to be a good dad, that he’s not able to answer his students’ questions about the really important things in life, that he’s too emotionally detached to bond with the baby, and that he’s being childish and churlish with his wife under the pressure of their new status quo – there’s a particular abscess at the root of all this: the dad, you see, has turned to Reform’s anti-immigrant politics as an emotional salve in the wake of a late-in-life layoff, and when he lashed out at the protagonist’s immigrant wife, the protagonist bumbled along trying to keep the peace rather than sticking up for her. The game makes of this incident a big reveal, building up to it and adverting to its significance even as it works through the protagonist’s subsidiary issues, making clear the connection between this primal emasculation and all his other concerns.

It’s a choice that admittedly lends some drama to proceedings, but one that I have to admit left me somewhat cold. One doesn’t need such a Freudian origin-story to explain why you’re not your best self with your spouse in the heat of the feed-the-baby-every-two-hours crucible, and I think pretty much everyone second-guesses themself about what kind of parent they’ll be. I found myself far more invested in the protagonist’s relationship with his wife and child, and was disappointed that the latter part of the game refracted them through the lens of his more stereotypical daddy issues. In fairness, 23 Minutes does soften this blow by toggling to a more upbeat mode for the ending, with hope represented by self-acceptance and a dedication to change for the better, rather than suggesting that everything would be fixed if the protagonist got in a screaming match with his dad. And there are a few other scenes with the dad, set before he gets sucked down into the black hole of right-wing politics, that prevent him from being a complete caricature.

Still, it’s a bit tidier than I wanted it to be. It’s notable that as the bad-dad plot comes to the fore, the writing feels prosier, more like narration. But the game works best, I think, at it’s most specific, when it’s using the tools of poetry to embed the player in the mind of a lost soul hyperfixating on tiny details in a blurry landscape while he tries to figure out this radical change in his life – I wouldn’t have minded 23 full minutes of that.

My wife is a fan of all things British, and I’m usually happy to go along for the ride, so when she started getting into TV adaptations of UK-set cozy mysteries, I gladly watched them alongside her. I could definitely see the attraction – one of her favorites was set in the Cotswolds and added to its bucolic setting wacky hijinks and endearing side-characters, while ensuring that the murders were handled with discretion and indeed, a hint of whimsy, which kept the quantity of ugly brutality required to set the mechanism of mystery into motion to a minimum (see, you start writing about these things and the twee wordplay is infectious). So it was all a good time, save for one rather large fly in the ointment: none of the aforementioned mysteries made a lick of sense.

See, when I watch a murder mystery, I like to play along and guess at whodunnit (not to mention why and how), and while my hit rate is generally pretty solid, I wound up completely stymied when watching these. Reliably, the investigation in the first three quarters of the show would serve only to chase down red herrings and false leads, the blundering policemen would get in the way just when the detectives were about to figure something out, and pretty much all the cases were “solved” when one of the lead characters inadvertently put themselves into the power of a heretofore-innocuous supporting player who would suddenly reveal an unguessed and unguessable motive that had only benefited from the lightest of foreshadowing in the course of trying to cover their tracks through one final (inevitably foiled) act of violence.

For all my complaining, there’s a method to the madness – a cozy mystery wouldn’t be very cozy if the reader/viewer were tensed up on high alert the whole time, scanning for the scantest clue and obsessively weighing and reweighing competing theories. That’s good for a high-tension Christie novel, but here, it’s all about the vibes, and once I realized that they’d intentionally removed the solve-it-at-home aspect, I was able to relax and enjoy the ride.

Anyway, that’s my theory of cozy mysteries, and while I hesitate to tar the entire genre with this critique, since I’ve by no means assessed a representative sample, I will say that The Coffee Cake Caper didn’t disabuse me of my stereotypes. Setting-wise, we’re clearly in cozy territory: the protagonist, a neophyte sleuth, is called to a British carnival where a longstanding baking competition has been thrown into chaos by the disappearance of one contestant’s dough during an overnight proof (shades of Bingate). While the stakes eventually do rise slightly (groan), there isn’t even the slightest flavor of danger to proceedings, and the characters are an enjoyable cast who, if anything, could have been a bit more eccentric: you get two bakers (one uptight, one flashy), a somewhat diffident judge, a stolid night-watchman… It’s a fun world to inhabit, and is fleshed out to a reasonable degree, with the carnival’s environs enlivened with just the right amount of detail. There’s a fair bit of exposition and characters giving their alibis, but it’s all written with a light touch and moves along at a good clip.

But this isn’t just an explore-and-chat-em-up, this is a mystery, and that’s where Coffee Cake Caper’s troubles begin. First, the interface is not well suited to the gameplay on offer. The main interactivity is a series of mad-libs deductions where you must poke holes in the stories of each of the suspects, before transitioning to the finale where you solve the case once and for all (there are a handful of places where the game feints at providing some branching options, but these are invariably but-thou-must Hobson’s choices). The mechanics are simple enough – you fill out the contents of an accusation, then list the three or four pieces of evidence that that support your contention – but the implementation left me flailing. For one thing, despite the fact that the text frequently mentions that you’re taking notes about the clues you discover, there are no handy player aids keeping track of what you discovered; hopefully you were doing that on your own, or enjoy scrolling back through thousands of words of infodumps, in order to review the case file. For another, sometimes the grammar required is strained – at one point I wanted to accuse someone of lying about when they went home, but I had to render it as lying about “when you took the car” – and the fiddliness of getting everything exactly right can lead to farce, as when it took me five tries to figure out how to call out a carnie for eating some of the missing dough, when I’d caught him red-handed with some of it in his waste basket and on his collar (my problem – shared by the walkthrough – is that I called his clothes a uniform rather than a costume). And making everything much more annoying, the order of clues within each drop-down menu is randomized, I suppose to punish lawnmowering, which means hunting for the five or six specific items you’re looking for is always a pain.

Beyond these mechanics, the mystery itself relies on soaring leaps of logic and frequently calls back to small details mentioned at most in passing long before the player knows they should be relevant. Admittedly there are a few places where this is done elegantly – there’s an early bit in the parking lot where the descriptions of two cars sets up a later chain of logical reasoning that I felt clever for figuring out. But for the most part it’s intensely frustrating and had me running to the walkthrough, with the most egregious example being an endgame deduction that requires the player to work out that a character’s brand-new outfit indicates they’d had to change out of a soiled one – except as far as I can tell from the transcript of my session, the only indication they were wearing new clothes is that when they were first introduced, at the very beginning of the game, their outfit is described as “sharp.”

For a passively-consumed cozy mystery, this wouldn’t raise an eyebrow – you’re here for Diffany and Cornie’s ridiculous rivalry and more-ridiculous names, not to play Sherlock Holmes. But enlisting the player in a mystery constructed this opaquely is no fun, even if you were going into it expecting to exercise your little gray cells to their utmost. With a system that didn’t demand quite so much specificity of the player, and that highlighted important clues so you could spend more time testing theories and less hunting through walls of text, it would all go down a lot easier. So, for that matter, would quashing the bugs that twice required me to start over when clicking a link grayed it out but didn’t display any new text – fortunately that only happened in Chrome, and I was able to reach the end in Firefox. The mystery could also use fewer red herrings, and more logically-clued deductions, to truly sing (some testers could really help with ironing such things out; none are currently listed in the credits, but the difficulty of an investigation is very hard for an author to gauge, meaning their feedback is especially important in this kind of game). There’s a lot that’s appealing about the Coffee Cake Caper, from the solid prose to the appealing characters, but as is so often the case in a competition, it would benefit from a bit more time in the oven and some outside perspective – here’s hoping for a post-festival release that smooths out the rough patches and makes for a more enjoyable ride!

(I beta-tested this game).

“Where do you get your ideas?” is surely the most vapid question you can ask a writer, but spare a thought for how much worse it must land when the writer in question is a poet. Poetry isn’t so much a what as a how, “ideas” are at best the jumping-off point that has as much to do with rhythm, an image, a sense of a word’s full freight, as anything else. So spare more than a thought for the protagonist of you are an ancient chinese poet…, child of a disgraced courtier who amuses himself with anonymously-circulated verse but is suddenly summoned to the Emperor’s court to take part in a poetry competition. You have a couple of hours to circulate amongst the great and the good, observing their foibles and possibly being recruited into their intrigues, but you’d better hope you catch a spark somewhere along the way because given the cut-throat nature of court politics, “sorry, I just wasn’t feeling it tonight” probably isn’t going to go over well.

I haven’t exhaustively plumbed the game’s many, many endings, but at least in the ones I’ve tried, the protagonist does manage to rise to the challenge. Admittedly, there’s quite a lot here to stimulate composition: after a prologue that efficiently sets the scene, you’re set loose to wander the garden, where you’ll meet cliques of other poets pursuing their particular passions, and maybe have an opportunity for a tete a tete with the princess and general bent on agendas of their own. They’re a colorful bunch – I was partial to the gang trying to escape the moral burden of choice by embracing extremist fruitarianism, but they’re all in thrall to some decadence or other, even the ones espousing moderation obviously taking things too far. There’s more than a hint of contemporary social comment to all this, which can likewise feel like it tips just over the line of plausibility on occasion, like the voyeurs whose activities are an analog analogue of prurient pursuits that more often play out digitally. But even these moments when the fourth wall strains, the game’s understated prose and its structural imperative to somehow make a poem of all of this helps bring the player along.

There are also a lot of decisions to make, because there isn’t enough time to go everywhere in the pavilion, and each vignette puts you on the spot. The others are keen enough to have noticed that the Emperor’s recruited you as an outside observer, here to render judgment on what you see, so they try to get out ahead of the game by pushing you to preview your reactions, issuing an approval or disapproval of their ideology and behavior. And while it’s not too difficult to map each faction to their real-world inspirations, the game does a good job of complicating the picture so that either response can be justified – the proponent of free speech correctly identifies the need to speak truth outside of systems of constraint, but he’s also a rich kid slumming for clout, and his crew seem more interested in getting sloshed and feeling self-righteous than actually trying to change things. Things get more complicated still when you’re pulled into a conference with one of the Emperor’s would-be successors (you get either the princess or the general, not both); these are not nice people, but they’re powerful ones, and compelling too, so I definitely felt put on the spot.

The prose is restrained throughout, zooming in on tell-tale details that communicate that the Emperor made a good choice when he tapped you as his eyes, and the writing appropriately reaches a climax when it’s time to recite. Your choices in the rest of the game unlock the choices available to you in the final composition – each of the five lines can be cycled through to emphasize a different take on what you’ve experienced in the different vignettes; it’s a happy medium between a pre-baked result and pure Mad Libs, and while it’s possible to make something awkward if you really try, I was impressed at how easy it was to come up with a coherent and compelling poem. Appropriately enough, your words can have significant consequences indeed, or at least, they can for the empire as a whole, because in all the endings I’ve experienced, the protagonist simply returns home to an exile that now might be as much self-imposed as enforced from outside – having seen what it takes to write high-stakes poetry, perhaps you’ve decided from now on to get your ideas closer to home.

(I beta tested this game)

3XXX is not a subtle game. From the moment you enter its hyperrepressed world, where tough-as-nails cops clean up the pieces after infantilized, sex-starved people literally combust when their lust inevitably boils over, it’s clear that the agenda here is to take an axe to the censors and bullies currently trying to enforce heteronormativity and sexual continence at the barrel of a gun. But while it absolutely telegraphs its concerns, it still very much retains the capacity to surprise: I congratulated myself on twigging to where the story was going early on, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when what I’d clocked as the final twist actually happened before the end of Act One. And that same dynamic played out twice more, because while each segment of the game is very clear in its themes and they all mesh together quite neatly, the narrative manages to swerve as much as it escalates, broadening and complicating its dialectics at the same time it keeps its high cards for last.

Indeed, what makes 3XXX more interesting than a latter-day Stiffy Makane game is that it doesn’t simply counterpose fascist repression against libertine indulgence. Sure, the cop protagonist inevitably crosses to the over side of the law, and the community of people trying to imagine a different future understand that a healthier relationship to sex is a key part of the puzzle. But this isn’t a wish-fulfillment fantasy – although they can see the ways the society in which they were brought up has harmed them, the scars linger, and it takes concerted effort to learn to speak without self-censorship, much less act on their desires. For that matter, those desires are by no means identikit; some characters are farther along in one aspect of their liberation than others, and the sensitively-drawn give and take of who’s teaching and who’s learning shifts from scene to scene.

As a game, 3XXX is assured enough to know where it’s headed. There are choices, but they’re mostly there to keep the player engaged and push you to think about what you’re reading instead of mindlessly lawnmowering on – this isn’t a game that needs branching though, no one is thinking “hey, what if I could keep working for the Nazis instead?” And there’s a lot to think about, as this is a provocation that resists supplying easy answers to the dilemmas it creates. This extends to the prose, which is direct enough on a sentence by sentence basis but preserves its ambiguity; there are jokes (funny ones!) but even the winks to the camera can’t always be taken at face value. It all adds up to a compelling experience that’s as personal as it is political, as outrageous as it is empathetic.

I beta-tested this game)

I always question my objectivity when I’ve beta-tested a game – it’s hard to figure out an appropriate critical approach when you’ve spent a bunch of time with a version of the game that’s not the same as the one the mass of players will experience, and on top of that it can be hard to untangle the inevitable feelings of investment that come with helping an author improve their game (at least, I hope that’s what my suggestions are doing!) But even leaving all that aside, there’s no way I wouldn’t be in the tank for a rich, robustly-implemented game that lets you explore the waning days of the Hittite Empire (with footnotes, no less!) and boasts a complex, systems-driven magic system and lets you play as a dog (I like cats just fine, but I’m definitely outside of the IF mainstream in agreeing that canines are man’s best friend).

Starting with the setting, like most I’m by no means super au courant with Bronze Age Anatolia, but it’s a region and era that’s adjacent to a lot of other history that is more accessible: the Homeric epics are notionally happening right next door and Egyptian civilization was reaching one of its period peaks, while there was plenty of confusing back-and-forth warring with the Assyrians and other contemporary powers of Mesopotamia. The Hittites feature in all these stories as antagonists, so it’s fascinating to see something from their perspective; hints of the political situation do leak in from snatches of overheard conversation, and the concomitant footnotes providing needed context, but the dog’s eye view of first an agricultural village, and then a major trading city, do far more to provide a window into this long-lost world. There are relatively crowd-pleasing gags like a tip of the hat to the famously corrupt copper merchant Ea-nāṣir, and what must be an intentional reference to the way a major fire in the Library of Ashurbanipal fired the clay tablets it stored and better preserved them for future archaeological study, but that’s just the surface-level stuff: if you’re a nerd for irrigation practices, religious taboos, and ancient tax policy, Wise-Woman’s Dog is a cornucopia of delights, and if you’re not, man, I’m sorry for you. It’s all delivered with a lightness of touch – at least so long as you don’t binge on the footnotes – with the world-building in service to the puzzles, but I found exploration a joy.

Speaking of those puzzles, they’re another highlight, both complicated and organically embedded into the world. See, you’re not just any dog, but the familiar of a village wise-woman who’s fallen afoul of a rival’s curse. To save her, you need to search out some new, powerful magic, which involves first helping the inhabitants of your city prepare their yearly tax payments, and then, once the raft to the provincial capital departs, gather treasures in the big city in order to amass enough money to purchase what you need. As a dog, your ability to directly intervene in human affairs is modest, but you have a secret weapon up your sleeve: as a “magic sponge”, you can absorb curses and blessings, and move them from one object to another. There are only a modest number of “spells” to find and use, but they’re versatile – one’s related to temperature, another makes things lighter, a third keeps things locked up tight – and it’s very satisfying to figure out how to use them to solve the various challenges thrown in your way.

The system here recalls similar frameworks like Hadean Land’s alchemy or Savoir Faire’s sympathetic magic; they’re satisfying not just because they’re complex, but because their consistent rules enable a player to deduce solutions rather than resorting to trial and error. And without spoiling things too much, things get even more engaging – albeit complicated – once you gain the ability to break some of the rules the first half of the game’s established. The flip side of all of this is that there definitely are some very challenging puzzles, even accounting for the various hints and playing aids, but happily you’re not forced to 100% everything if you don’t want to; in both of the game’s main sections, you can move on once you solve most of the puzzles rather than having to pursue all of them to the bitter end.

Speaking of the hints and playing aids, the game’s implementation also deserves some praise. Beyond taking advantage of Dialog’s ability to seamlessly mesh parser input and hyperlinks, Wise-Woman’s Dog has a built-in map, commands that will nudge you in the right direction by highlighting puzzles you’ve yet to solve, and a variety of shortcut actions that make the business of juggling spells (you can only carry one blessing and item at a time, since of course you’re a dog) and moving from one part of the reasonably-sized play area to another much less painful. This does mean that, combined with the rich location descriptions and active NPCs, there are a few places where the player can get overwhelmed with information, but I found it didn’t take too long to get up to speed, and the upsides of all this support are clear.

Taken together, it’s an impressive package: players who like history, deeply-worked-out magic systems, and deluxe parser-game experiences will all find a lot to enjoy – and if, like me, you check all three boxes and are a dog person to boot? That’s a blessing indeed.

(I beta-tested this game)

As late-period capitalism slouches its way to the trash-heap of history, to be replaced by something that’s almost inevitably going to be worse, the scope for systematic revolt narrows, and the stakes for individual acts of rebellion rise in parallel. The getting-comeuppance-on-a-crappy-boss plot perhaps peaked in the late 90s, with Office Space and the retroactively-incredibly-creepy American Beauty, but there’s something evergreen about an unjustly-terminated employee wreaking their righteous revenge.

Fired offers that fantasy in spades – and actually, you don’t need to do too much of the hard work; you’ve already accumulated hard copies of the evidence that will bring your corrupt old boss down, but now that you’ve been fired and stripped of access to the office where all that stuff has been moved, you need to break in and get it back. In addition to this narrative catharsis, it also offers closure for sinned-against employees by containing a litany of invective, imprecation, and swearing that would make Captain Haddock blush:

"this boogystained breakfast director, this pukebag of a dumbass, this sleepyhead, this freshwater sailor, this pedantic cretin"

This revenge-fantasy is definitely funny, but it’s also nicely designed; there aren’t too many puzzles and too many hoops to jump through as you pursue your vengeance, but they’re cleanly designed so each leads on to the next, and there’s a bit of a sandbox vibe to proceedings: rather than pursue your quest to the bitter end, you can declare partial victory at almost any time, and there are various actions you can take that can wreak extra havoc on the company at risk of having an arrow pointing to you as the culprit. These mostly just reduce to optional, incomplete endings, but they’re logically and entertainingly narrated, and make final victory all the sweeter. There are also a fair number of bonus points available to careful players who go beyond the jokes to examine their surroundings carefully, so while Fired works well as an angrily satirical take on workplace abuse, it’s got more than enough substance to be satisfying to play on its own merits, even if you’ve never personally writhed under the thumb of a supervisor who’s venal, stupid, smelling of bilgewater and pink mold, a scabrous sphincter on the face of the earth…

(I beta tested this game)

The first Galaxy Jones game was a highlight of Spring Thing 2023, a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure that saw you foiling an evil mastermind with adrenaline-fueled displays of derring-do. This sequel in some ways works the same groove – Jones herself is just as appealing a heroine as ever, you’re up against a doomsday plot with high stakes, and making progress gets you the same awesome ASCII banner-drop. But some things are different too, and digging into those changes suggests there might be something beyond simple pulp escapades going on this time out.

These are puzzle games, so perhaps the most notable shift is the nature of the challenges. Progress in the first game often involved working through a series of action-movie set-pieces, the most memorable requiring you to climb up the side of a Martian building. But while in Phobos you’re up against an alien terrorist faction bent on using the eponymous moon to inflict mass casualties on a human colony, at least for the first two thirds of the game, you’re mostly confronted with hacking puzzles rather than zapping guards or otherwise behaving like Die-Hard-era Bruce Willis. Admittedly, you can just use one of your powered-suit’s charges to bust through any lock that’s being overly recalcitrant, but for the most part the action is more cerebral. There’s a pleasing variety to the button-pushing – some of the early challenges are simple bit-flip challenges where pushing button 1 also activates buttons 2 and 4, that sort of thing, but others are more involved – but most of them hinge on decoding the aliens’ language, and especially their numbering system, which is presented via an exotic font substitution (it was sometimes so exotic that it lead to a bunch of squinting, but copy and pasting into a text file helped me parse things).

Early on you find a helmet that provides some translation capacity, and the way you can leverage it to bootstrap an understanding of the digits makes for an elegant on-ramp to the meat of the game. But the language mechanic isn’t restricted to the hacking puzzles, because as you explore the alien base, you’ll come across a bunch of reading material; at first, you can only make out a few words, but increased facility with the language allows you to catch more of the meaning. There are some important clues embedded in these documents, and there’s thematic resonance to the way Jones’ understanding of her foes deepens as she learns more about them – hopefully it’s not spoiling things too much to note that on this adventure, going in guns blazing isn’t always the right answer. Similarly, the full picture of the aliens’ motivations is a bit more complex than the black-and-white conflict of the first game led me to expect. None of this undercuts the essential pleasure of inhabiting Galaxy Jones – that ASCII banner remains as awesome as ever – but sitting here in late 2025, with political violence ratcheting up and accusations of terrorism being thrown at people just trying to keep their communities safe, it’s satisfying to see a hero who scores points for saving lives, not killing bad guys.

The Litchfield Mystery is the latest in the author’s series of whodunnits distinguished by their fidelity to real-world forensics. The first was an engaging but rather dry parser game where various escape-room style puzzles didn’t have much to do with actually solving the mystery, which required consulting some medical reference book in details; the twist was that there wasn’t actually a murder, just an unfortunate drug interaction. The second was an engaging but rather dry choice-based game where solving the mystery involved interviewing suspects, sending evidence in for analysis, and consulting some medical reference books in detail; the twist was that there wasn’t actually a murder, just an unfortunate drug interaction. And here we are, third time out, with some commonalities – the gameplay structure is once again choice-based and the evidence and suspect-interviewing mechanics are unchanged – but some differences too: we’re in the early 20th century, the reference books are decidedly less tome-like, and this time the eponymous lord has shown up with a letter-opener stuck in his back, so the the-murderer-was-nobody twist is off the table. It’s still a bit dry, but Litchfield Mystery has loosened up and thereby manages to be the best installment yet.

The actual setup here is pure English country-house murder: you’ve got the dead paterfamilias, the grieving wife, the shady business partner, the dissolute brother, and household staff occupying various points along the Downton Abbey trustworthy-to-devious continuum of English servants, all gathered in the drawing room for you to interrogate after you’ve done sweeping the study, the bedrooms, and the grounds for clues. It’s all slickly managed through a clean interface that keeps track of your notes and leads in the sidebar, and the mechanics do a good job of creating a structure for your investigation: at first you’ll want to go through each room, looking for fingerprints and hair samples alongside documents and other traditional clues, sending anything more recondite out to the crime lab to take a look at. While they’re running their tests, you can get into the interviews, which consist of a standardized opening statement and then a few pointed questions. At that point, you’ll start getting your evidence reports back, and the interviews will have thrown up new leads, allowing you to circle back around the mansion for a closer inspection or raise new lines of questioning with the suspects. Eventually, the game tells you that you’ve gathered enough evidence, opening up a multiple-choice questionnaire where you select the culprit, their means, motive, and opportunity, and find out whether your theory of the case is correct.

It’s hard to think how this framework could be improved, and it’s filled in with careful attention to detail and a clear affection for the tropes of the genre. There are no smoking-gun clues, but certainly a lot that are suggestive, and the hard work is less in accumulating them than in interpreting them. While the writing does have a few small infelicities like inconsistent tenses, it’s generally good at efficiently conveying information and comfortably inhabits the restrained voice of a veteran British investigator, so much so that the few times the prose takes a bigger swing (“She dabs her eyes with a handkerchief, but all you can see are her nails. Blood red. Like the blood of every victim in your cases, crying out: ‘Justice!’”) the awkwardness feels charming.

Cracking the case has more to do with weighing the evidence than delving into psychology – though a read on the interpersonal dynamics can be helpful – though as mentioned above, the materials you consult here aren’t quite as dense as those in the author’s previous games. The main point of scientific interest is the presence of meat from two different poisonous animals in the mansions fridge; there are a few reference passages to consult and cross-reference to help you assess what role, if any, they might have played in the crime, but it’s a long way from the detailed list of chemicals and drugs in the previous games, but I’ll admit I kinda missed the feeling that I was doing something resembling real forensics. Similarly, it took me a few tries to zero in on the solution to the mystery, because much of the evidence wound up being circumstantial and a key element (Spoiler - click to show)(the governess's affair) could only be guessed at; that’s certainly a valid style of deduction, but it’s distinct from the science-nerd just-the-facts-ma’am approach I’d been expecting.

Still, with my assumptions properly reset, the Litchfield Mystery was a satisfying one to unravel, and demonstrates the author’s success in taking what was originally a heavily pedagogical model and making it much more gameable – if anything, I think there’s room now to take it back a little bit in the other direction.

A story I am astonished to discover I haven’t yet related in an IF review is the time I married my twin sister – she was wearing my mother’s wedding dress, it was a Freudian nightmare. And did I mention I was twelve? Such are the wages of having gone to a small elementary school, where the limited number of students meant that the teachers doing the casting for the eighth-grade production of Fiddler on the Roof wound up making some perverse choices. Despite this slight embarrassment, I really enjoyed the play, and wound up renting the movie version a bunch of times. I was kind of a rigid kid, so beyond the catchy tunes there was something especially appealing about the story of a shtetl milkman who discovers exactly how far he can, and can’t, bend as his daughters begin pairing off. The other thing that made it especially compelling was the ending: unlike the stereotypically happy closings of much musical theater, Fiddler’s last scene has everyone fleeing the village because the Tsar has decided to seize their land and give it to Christians, with a pogrom coming for anyone foolhardy enough to stay.

This is about the moment where Escape the Pale picks up; despite a few in-jokey references, it’s not of course a direct sequel, but the setup has you dusting yourself off after being ejected from your ancestral home, forced to hustle around an economic simulation of Eastern Europe in hopes of accumulating enough money to reach the hopefully-more-than-temporary safety of Istanbul, Austria, or America. That’s a potentially rich premise, but the operative aesthetic here is very stripped-down, from the minimal narrative to the simple gameplay to the bare-bones presentation (we’re talking black-text-on-a-white-background-with-numbered-menus). There are some neatly-designed places where the mechanics create specific story beats in what’s otherwise an open-ended simulation, but despite the impassioned author’s note at the end, I’m not sure there’s enough meat on these bones for the game to make a significant impact on anyone already familiar with the basics of the history.

Let’s start with the economy, since that’s what you spend the great majority of your time in Escape the Pale engaging with. The basic gameplay loop involves arriving at a city, selling any of your wares you might be carrying, deciding whether to buy the single good that city produces (after reviewing a table with the rumored prices of said good in the region’s dozen other cities), and then paying a small amount of money to travel to one of the 2-5 other cities you can reach from where you’re at. Every once in a while a random event will occur – maybe a customs official will ask for a bribe, or your cousin will run afoul of the authorities, they’re never anything positive – and on your first playthrough it’s worth keeping a spreadsheet to track which cities connect to which other ones, and where you can take a train to Vienna or a boat to New York, but the simulation isn’t really robust enough to support anything but the most basic strategy: prices do fluctuate a bit from what the rumors say, but with travel costs imposing friction and no ability to check on the sale price of your goods once you arrive in a new city, the only real strategy appears to be spot-checking whether the good on sale in a city seems to have a good profit margin in any of the places you can reach in one or two hops, then filling your cart with as much as you can afford and hoping you get lucky.

Standing in the way of simple accumulation are a half dozen or so narrative set-pieces, some of which are purely for flavor while others shift the rules of the game. They all play out in only a few bottom-lined sentences, but since they almost all depict the casual inhumanity with which the region’s governments treat Jews, some of them can be chilling if you’ve got the imagination to fill in the gaps. The most impactful is running across some distant family members who beg you to take a young cousin with you when you leave for someplace safer; carrying her around increases your travel costs, and also increases the dangers some of the events pose.

There are other places where the mechanics shape the narrative in a particular way, and again, most of these are unpleasant and unfair. The most galling of these is the way that the price tables always show that the best resale value for any item can always be found in Bucharest. If you do manage to figure out how to travel through the node-web to reach it, though, joke is on you: your papers don’t allow you to enter Romania, so you get an automatic game over (there’s no save function, of course). Similarly, to get to America you need to leave from Vilno, but you can almost never get a good value for your goods there, and if you try to carry in a lot of cash, a corrupt official will invariably steal half of your money, so you’d better make sure you have more than you need for your ticket – although, not too much, because if you ever accumulate an especially significant nest egg the game also arbitrarily imposes a bad end. This obviously helps reinforce the ways that Jews were unjustly victimized, but the blunt approach here risks making it feel like the author, rather than the governments, is the one out to get you.

Ironically then, the part of the game that evoked the greatest feelings in me was the author’s postscript, which has two main themes: first, the way that this game, alone among others, seemed to create controversy among the circle of friends and family to whom the author habitually circulated them, and second, their decision to leave their position at a university and leave the U.S. There’s very little that’s stated directly, but reading between the lines, I’m guessing that the controversy had to do with Israel’s genocide in Gaza – there’s a sentence in one of the endings about how the Jews suffer without a homeland, which is an understandable statement to articulate in 1905 but lands differently in the context of 2025 – and that leaving the country has something to do with Trump’s authoritarianism and targeting of academics (apropos of the author, it’s worth noting that the pseudonym recalls Nabokov’s novel Pnin, about a Russian émigré academic who’s wound up teaching in the US after fleeing the Russian revolution and losing a Jewish lover to the camps).

This is clearly a significant game to the author, but I found this cri de coeur frustratingly vague given how reticent Escape the Pale is to say beyond pointing out the ways the Jews have suffered – fleshing it out to make clear what modern echoes the author would certainly have risked pissing people off, but shorn of the passion animating something like Fiddler, the game doesn’t amount to much more than an arid gesture at some heart-rending history.

I’ve gone to the Star Trek well several times through this year's Comp reviews, so now that we’re nearing the end of the Comp, let’s do so one last time by recalling the objections leveled against Deep Space Nine when it was announced. The fourth series in the franchise (you didn’t forget the animated series, did you?), it departed from tradition not just by failing to be centered on a ship called the Enterprise, but by failing to be centered on a ship at all. I recall all sorts of naysayers arguing that Star Trek was all about discovery, “seeking out new life and new civilizations” (admittedly, the naysayers had some textual support in their favor), so having a show where nobody went anywhere and they just sat around on a space station waiting for the new life to come to them wouldn’t be that interesting. As it turns out, though, they were wrong – after the inevitable season one growing pains that’ve plagued every show in the franchise save the original series, DS9 turned out to be great, by the simple expedient of the writers putting the station in an interesting place that interesting people kept on visiting.

A Rock’s Tale is a fantasy choice-based game rather than a sci-fi television spinoff, but save for that small detail, it’s basically DS9: the game, and succeeds on the same terms. The setup is bizarre but compelling: you’ve been teleported into a new world and transformed into a talking rock, and escaping your predicament will require you to meet, befriend, and problem-solve for a variety of colorful characters who wander across the forest path where you’ve wound up. Given how high the concept is, everybody is remarkably down to earth, and the robust cast is a major highlight of the game: there’s an artistic lumberjack, an anxious florist, a lovelorn cobbler, a fisherman too young to have fully twigged to his family’s poverty, and more. Meeting them is fun in of itself – you can jump-scare most of them, because who expects a rock to talk? – and it’s even more fun to peel back the layers of the game’s onionskin design: befriending them will give you a sense of what they need and what they can do, and allow you to call for them at any time rather than just wait for them to stumble across you at random, which then allows you to start tagging them in to solve problems for each other or otherwise figure out how their lives can be made to intersect.

Gameplay-wise, this is all carried out through a simple set of dialogue menus, but structurally, this is an ending-chase game; there are 20 distinct outcomes, and you’re meant to collect them all in order to unlock a final resolution. But that makes the game seem more intense than it is; you can immediately rewind to the previous decision point upon reaching an ending, so while there are some endings that are mutually exclusive, to see everything you’re looking at probably three of four replays rather than 20. For another, the “true ending” didn’t feel, to me, that much more satisfying than any of the others. I enjoy being a completionist, but I think A Rock’s Tale would work just as well for a player who felt like they’d had enough after seeing ten endings – in fact, possibly more so, as there are a bunch of branches that require you to be motivelessly mean to the characters, which I didn’t really enjoy.

What I did enjoy was the way that each ending wound up in the same place. In some you’re brought home by a cherished friend or are given a new job appropriate to your talents as a rock, while there are a few that seemingly put you in danger of life and er, non-limbs. But in every case, it works out fine after all, and the last line is always “you decide this is not so bad.” Now that’s positive thinking! In fact, the writing throughout is pleasant and grounded, without feeling overly twee. The forest is a generic fantasy forest, but there are still some nice details to savor:

"As you sit alone the sky above you begins to darken. A couple precursory droplets hit your head before thick raindrops descend in droves. You realize that getting stuck in a rainstorm is not so bad for a rock. Through the cacophony you start to discern what sound the rain makes when it collides with certain objects. Before long you have your own personal percussion section, playing to an arbitrary rhythm."

The characters similarly each have their own manner of speaking, and are all sympathetic in their own ways, too – with the possible exception of the overly-mercenary Ringmaster. I admit I did start clicking through their dialogue on repeat play-throughs, but the conversation trees aren’t especially broad, so it didn’t feel especially onerous. Getting the full suite of endings is likewise made easier by two levels of hints for each one, with the first giving some vague direction and the second directly telling you what to do; I did enjoy my time with the game but was getting a bit tired of lawnmowering by the time I got to about ending 14, so I appreciated the touch.

Rocks may be hard and unyielding by way of stereotype, but contrary to all that I found A Rock’s Tale a gentle, upbeat experience. It’s more of a pleasant hangout than a directed experience – to stick with the DS9 comparison, definitely think of the seasons before the Dominion War metaplot kicked in – but stopping to smell the flowers can be lots of fun when they give off such an inviting aroma.