Reviews by Mike Russo

I’m hoping that by the end of the Review-a-Thon, someone will write up Lilac Song without having played Social Democracy; it’s impossible for me to view it as anything other than a coda to that earlier game, but I’m intensely curious what someone unaware of the save-the-Weimar-Republic strategy hit of 2024 would make of it. Unlike that Brobdingnagian triumph, Lilac Song is relatively slight; it’s a short choice-based work where you play a servant puttering around in the household of Otto Braun, the chief executive of the German state of Prussia. The main thing to do is consider making some tweaks to a board game you’re developing to explore the highly dynamic political situation, but before you can spend much time on that hobby the newspaper arrives, announcing a right-wing power play of the kind you’ve spent so much time anticipating via your game.

The game, of course, is an analog version of Social Democracy, a tool the protagonist is using to try to understand the threat Weimar’s enemies pose, and how, if at all, they can be stopped. But while SD’s pleasures are all about exploring a confidently-presented simulation, these segments in Lilac Song are all about anxiety – you fret about your assumptions, consider making changes to the numbers and then second-guess yourself, growing increasingly worried that these simplified mechanics mask the way you’ve piled one uncertainty atop another…

There’s a reading of Lilac Song where it’s simply about the anxiety of authority, an attempt to draw back the curtain on a game that broke containment and surely had some of its players feeling sure they could have beaten the Nazis after playing it a couple of times. And sure, that’s part of what’s going on, but I don’t think that exhausts what the LS has to offer, slight as it is.

For one thing, it humanizes the grand sweep of history dramatized by SD. In addition to futzing with the game, you can listen to music or look at some art, which provides some texture to the cultural blossoming wiped away by the Nazi’s reactionary aesthetics. So, a fortiori, does the identity of the protagonist – though the century-old words and concepts she uses are of course different, she’s a trans woman who’s managed to achieve a life with some dignity, due to the liberalization of Weimar’s science and politics. But beyond clarifying the stakes, this zooming-in to the personal level is also a reminder that history is not a bloodless game. The climactic scene sees the protagonist begging Braun – whose ability to leverage Prussia as an independent power base makes him a very impactful presence in games of SD – to take action to oppose this right-wing overreach. But Braun is old and tired, and much as the protagonist dithers over the stats on her game-pieces, he lacks the courage of his convictions:

Otto shakes his head. “The police will obey the constitutional authorities. We do not have the legitimacy to order the police against the Reich government.”

“Then what were all the Republican purges and hires for?”

“To defend the constitution against those who would overthrow it, as you are suggesting now.”

It’s not hard to detect here the voice of certain accommodationists quick to reconcile themselves to Trump’s second electoral victory, or just those too worn out by a decade of resistance to haul themselves off the mat to do it all over again. As Yeats wrote of the apocalypse, “the best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity” – analysis, intelligence, empathy can all feel feeble against the brute action of the fascist.

One could swerve to find completely different resonances with the modern world, though: the warning that even a sophisticated simulation is at best a series of guesses, weighting uncertainties towards an outcome that seems plausible given all that’s come before but might not be able to adapt to fundamentally changed circumstances is also resonant in an age where an increasing number of people view LLMs as oracles (I was in a meeting last week where a colleague said that many of her friends asked ChatGPT how they should vote in our recent primary election).

Lilac Song provokes a lot of reflections, it’s fair to say – and it’s a mirror rather than an oracle, providing no answers to the myriad questions to provokes. But that’s very much the province of art, which is more valuable when creating ambiguities than creating certainties, and always insisting on the human.

Titles are one of the many things I struggle with when writing my own IF, so I always perk up when I come across one that seems to scoff at the idea that naming stuff is hard. What could the game about escaping from an elevator during World War II possibly be called other than WWII Elevator Escape? Admittedly the “WWII” part is a bit superficial. Per the opening story, you’re a member of the German Resistance who’s just gathered a key bit of intelligence by attending a meeting with Hitler while undercover – now your cover’s been blown and you need to get to the roof and parachute off it to make it to the rendezvous point. But as for the elevator escaping, yeah, you’ll be spending most of your time on that.

This is a short parser puzzle game that runs on a tight timer, with Nazi guards gunning you down unless you do everything right. And friend, you are not going to do everything right. There’s zero margin of error: if the elevator dallies too long on one floor, the bad guys are likely to tromp up the stairwell and gun you down. If you just try to ride the elevator straight up to the roof, unknowing passengers are likely to stymie your efforts (and tell the guards which way you were going when they last saw you). You do start with a couple of potentially-helpful items in your inventory, and some relatively straightforward puzzles will allow you to manipulate some of the elevator’s features in your favor. But sussing out how you can evade the Nazis, and then coming up with the step-by-step implementation of that plan, is intentionally difficult.

I do sometimes like these kinds of trial-and-error optimization puzzles, and I did get some enjoyment from figuring out how the well-implemented elevator’s different mechanisms worked. The prose is also clean and focused, providing detailed feedback on exactly what’s happening in each turn. But I couldn’t for the life of me get a handle on what I should be trying to do – no matter what I tried, the Nazis always got to the roof just ahead of me (the fact that many parser errors make time advance made this extra frustrating). Fortunately, there’s a hint system, because I’ll admit that while the solution makes sense in retrospect, it relies on a couple of leaps of logic, as well as a nonstandard command I don’t think most parser systems accept by default, so I doubt I ever would have gotten it.

Luckily for my self-esteem, actually parachuting off the roof once you arrive requires solving a second, smaller puzzle, that likewise relies on timing and idiosyncratic commands, but here I had a much easier time understanding the assignment and the obstacles, and the use of the nonstandard verb was more directly prompted. It still took a fair bit of trial and error to complete, but nothing a bit of UNDOing didn’t solve. The challenge of a game as focused as this one is that if the player isn’t sufficiently motivated by what’s on offer, they won’t commit to the many, many deaths required to make progress. But if that’s the case, you can’t say the title isn’t fair warning – this is a game that does exactly what it says on the tin.

I’ve been to a lot of communications trainings over the years – I work in policy advocacy, so the topic of how to use words to persuade people is kind of important – and there’s one hangup that pretty much always throws somebody in the group. See, comms professionals will often distinguish the message – what you are trying to get across – from the story – what you actually say. But for some people, there’s a disconnect because they don’t get why you wouldn’t just say the thing that you’re trying to get across? Like, if the message on health care reform is that if we rein in insurance company greed sick people won’t go bankrupt, isn’t that what we should trumpet from the rooftops? But of course that’s not how human beings work. Sure, some people will nod along, but those are mostly the folks already on your side. Tell a story about a specific, actually-existing sick person who actually experienced these things, talk about how it felt, what exactly they did, drawing out the message like the moral from a fable – that’s what will actually move people.

my baby needs blood has an interesting message, but I wish its author had sat through one of those trainings and made it more of a story. The setup here is definitely novel; the protagonist is an Ainu (I think, from googling some of the proper nouns) woman living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Her partner is deeply unwell, and depends on her to bring him food, and especially the wineskins full of blood that he’s sure will bring him back to health. At the same time, he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want a family the way he does; if nothing else, surely extra hands will help lighten her burden, once the children are grown? As she goes back into the woods and reflects, she encounters, or thinks she encounters, a creature that maybe be the goddess of hunting and motherhood – or may be her demonic doppelganger, who impersonates the goddess, pretending even to have a child, only to lure hunters to her and drink their blood.

The dramatic questions are clear, and have an appealing mythic resonance: the woman is sure she doesn’t want to be a mother, so while her partner sees her as the fecund, all-providing goddess, she’s worried she’s actually the demon. Meanwhile, he also says he needs blood, but the game’s text emphasizes that he’s relying on tradition – and a specifically paternal tradition – rather than direct knowledge, so perhaps this violently-slaked thirst isn’t a real need, just something imposed by the patriarchy much as the expectation of childbearing is?

When I type it all out like that, it sounds pretty cool! But while the game doesn’t state matters quite so baldly, it doesn’t do much to dress these dilemmas up into a story, either. The plot doesn’t really progress, for one thing, ending well before any of these conflicts begin to resolve themselves, and there’s no interactivity to foster player engagement. For another, detail that would help make the characters feel more human remain frustratingly undeveloped, including the all-important question of why the narrator feels the way she does about having a child. The prose is also frequently a bit awkward and unconvincing. For example, there’s a reference to the protagonist’s mother having read her stories when she was a child, which seems implausible for a hunter-gatherer culture (a quick google indicates that the Ainu language doesn’t actually have a written form, just being transliterated into other scripts once other cultures came into contact with them). And this excerpt contains the nugget of a compelling idea, but conveys it awkwardly, at least to my ear:

"We can only adapt to [winter]; weapons serving for where we lack strength, wardrobe for where we lack fur. But no matter the arrowheads I carry or the layers I dress, I still feel these shivers."

The counterpoint to these complaints is that the story of my baby needs blood isn’t in the text – it’s in everything else. Because this is a multimedia production, with monochrome-blue, downsampled videos of a frosty landscape lending substantial ambience to proceedings, and character portraits in the same vein theoretically providing additional emotional heft to the dialogue. While I didn’t play the game with sound on, intermittent black screens that persisted for a few seconds made me think that there’s an audio layer too. It’s all admittedly very well done, but there’s also a price to be paid for all those bells and whistles, which is that there’s a delay on every word the game displays, which quickly began to feel excruciating.

For some players, of course, that will feel like a quite modest admission-cost given the cool vibes on display, finding the audio-visual tapestry provides a richly evocative context for the words. But I like text games because I like text; I want the theme to be dressed up in words, not pictures or sounds, no matter how artfully produced they are.

Blood and Silver is a short vignette in the relationship between a vampire and his human partner, deepened by being one installment in a larger series featuring the couple. I’d played its immediate predecessor, Blood and Sunlight, in last year’s Review-a-Thon, so I was able to get my bearings quickly, though the flip of viewpoint character to the human, Lyle, made for an interesting change of pace. And “pace” is the right word because the game does a good job jumping into an interesting situation – you decide to get your boyfriend, Zach, a piece of jewelry as an anniversary present, not knowing that silver is painful for vampires, and the awkwardness of the misfired gift leads to a state-of-the-relationship chat.

The choice structure here is highly granular, with the ability to pick just about every bit of dialogue Lyle utters, which means there’s a lot of branching – there are nine endings, and while the broad contours don’t change too much (presumably to allow for better continuity with future games in the series), there’s a broad variation in the emotional impact, with this moment seeming like can be either a high point or a low point in the relationship, depending on what choices you make. Understandably, deciding to deflect Zach’s attempts to have a heart to heart or emotionally withdrawing after he’s said his piece lead to the most diffident endings, while being more open and steering into the fraught waters of potential conflict is riskier but potentially more rewarding.

The prose style is a good fit for the story; it’s dialogue focused, and unafraid of talking clearly about emotions:

"He sighs, hands gripping the cold metal railing. 'I sometimes feel like being with me is a waste of your time. You could be with someone who could stay over at your place, and go to concerts with you and your sister, and wear the ring you bought them. I feel like I’m always restricting you and letting you down, and I know—' he continues over the objection you’ve begun '—that you’d never say that, but it’s how I feel.'”

There are some nicely-observed details and a few gentle jokes, but those never distract from what’s basically an intense two-handed one-act play.

My one early disappointment with the game is that, per that excerpt, at first the game seemed to be replaying the same key conflict that featured in Blood and Sunlight – Zach’s feeling that because he’s a vampire, he doesn’t deserve love – but while Blood and Silver reestablishes that dynamic to allow players who haven’t experienced the earlier game to get up to speed, it soon breaks new ground. See, one of the things Zach feels bad about is his need to feed on Lyle, which provides him necessary sustenance but also brings him a lot of pleasure. All your choices in response to this prove some degree of reassurance, but Lyle’s internal monologue indicates that actually, there is a potential fly in the ointment here – once the endorphins of new infatuation had faded, the feeding has grown physically inconvenient and, what’s worse, emotionally distancing, as Lyle lies back and thinks of England while Zach enjoys an activity that’s unsurprisingly heavily orgasm-coded.

A mismatch between how much the members of a couple are enjoying sex isn’t an especially novel topic, of course, but what’s interesting here is that both Lyle and Zach identify as “gray ace” – I am old and boring so I had to google this to learn it means largely asexual but experiencing fitful moments of sexual attraction. This seems to play out in what we’re told of the physical side of their relationship, with regular makeout sessions that don’t appear to escalate beyond (er) necking. But with Zach frequently achieving a level of physical satisfaction via blood-drinking that doesn’t appear to be shared with Lyle, I was curious how this might destabilize Zach’s identity, or at least Lyle’s understanding it, and the impact those shifts might have on their relationship – and their shared ace identity is a big deal, we’re told that’s how they first met each other!

The downside of this being one installment in a larger series is that just as I was getting invested in how the protagonists were going to navigate this new challenge, the game stopped, with Lyle noting that they’re not ready to be honest with Zach about these feelings yet. I read that as a suggestion that there’ll be more to come on this front in a future sequel, so while I’ll admit to being disappointed that the game ends where it did, it definitely leaves me eager for what’s coming next.

Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games have always been distinguished by a copious amount of documentation and player support, even as their gimmicks can often be brain-meltingly challenging, so the idea of him writing a game aimed at players brand-new to parser IF for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam is at once entirely natural and counter-intuitive. Also, while I’ve played quite a lot of his games, they’ve almost all been written in Inform – this is an Adventuron game, so would there be any strange parser, er, quirks, or slightly-different approaches to implementation that would trip me up?

Turns out I needn’t have worried in the slightest; Quirky Test is a smooth, well-judged ride that’s a great introduction to Schultz’s unique approach to IF, as well as providing some pointers towards what other, more traditional games are like. The setup here is much as it always is: the player moves through a large map, solving puzzles not based on object- or NPC-manipulation but by typing out the answers to a series of riddles that work according to a specific wordplay scheme. This time out it’s reverse-engineering Spoonerisms – like taking “fighting liar” and flipping the leading syllables to get “lighting fire”. This is a relatively simple bit of linguistic legerdemain, as such things go, especially since by default the game highlights the key phrases you need to invert to progress (though attentive players who note other Spooneristic bits of text sprinkled throughout the game can rack up some bonus points). There’s also a hint system – integrated into the parser, rather than being embodied in a complex, standalone object as in some of Schultz’s other games – that tells you if you’ve got half a riddle solved, as well as copious tutorial messages to help walk you through both the main puzzle mechanic, and other potentially-tricky bits of IF design, like diagonal directions.

The tone throughout is appealing, conversational and positive. Descriptions of IF conventions are clear and direct, and while as is often the case for Schultz, the overall plot that connects the various puzzles is very thin – you’re trying to get the better of some bullies and explore for its own sake, I think – the focus is very much on the journey, rather than the destination. The charming, low-fi illustrations that accompany each location also reinforce the sunny vibe.

So Quirky Test nails the basics, but there’s plenty more here to enjoy. Beyond the bonus points mentioned above – almost as many as there are mandatory puzzles – there are a whole host of additional features, from a large number of achievements to unlock, developer commentary accessible via a new game plus mode, and even an extended exegesis on Graham Nelson’s Player’s Bill of Rights, accompanied by notes from Schultz on how he tried to incorporate its tenets into the game. I wound up with half the bonus points, a few achievements, and just dipped my toe into the commentary mode, and felt more than satisfied – there is a Review-a-Thon on, after all – but this is definitely a game you can enjoy by ripping through the critical path in fifteen minutes, or spending an hour or two plumbing the depths, which also means it’s a good fit for IF (and Schultz) newbies while still having something to offer the veterans too. I’m glad that there are harder iterations of this design out there, too – I’m sure there’ll be an example or two or three to look forward to in the Comp or EctoComp or next year’s Spring Thing – but as an easygoing change of pace, it’s hard to beat Quirky Test.

(Oh hey, I just got that joke! Yup, now I’ve got ten bonus points).

I promised we’d be circling back around to this series, and so the time has come for another thrilling installment of:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

This time I’m pretty sure the answer is yes! My son was one and a bit during the 2022 holiday season, which was about when he started sleeping most of the way through the night, so while I don’t have perfect recall of those almost-four-years-ago days by any means, I went into this one pretty sure I remembered some of the high points from putting it through its paces – artillery fire, a satisfyingly complex implementation of a radio, a bunch of rigmarole with some wire. But sadly it turns out I’m 0 for 2 in this series, as per the in-game CREDITS it was actually some guy named Mark Russo who tested it.

Well, whoever that Mark dude is, he must have given some solid feedback because I had a lot of fun with whatever number run through the game this was! In my Edge Valley Bigfoot Society review I mused on the well-intentioned advice to newbie authors to focus on finishing a small game before getting too ambitious, and how despite agreeing with that advice I admire the hubris of those who choose to disregard it. Trenchline does a really good job of walking the balance-beam, because on the one hand it’s got a very manageable scope – the map has half a dozen or so locations, most with only one or two interactive objects, and there’s only one real puzzle. On the other hand, that puzzle has a lot of different steps, all logical and satisfying to solve without requiring excessive hand-holding (though the hints are a lot of fun, if you do have recourse to them). Meanwhile, the radio is a very ambitious bit of design – there are a bunch of different parts, all of which behave the way you’d think, and once you get it working there are multiple NPCs you can interact with. The implementation is tight, with lots of scenery implemented and logical courses of action anticipated, and good use is made of some of TADS’ bells and whistles, like hyperlinks for navigation and topic-suggestion in the ASK/TELL conversation system. About the only hiccup I noticed was that there’s a bit of disambiguation required when you’re juggling multiple parts of a long wire, but it only held me up for a few seconds.

Beyond the design, the writing is also nice and tight. The setup here is that you’re a mercenary (don’t worry, you were hired to fight fascists) whose company has been slaughtered, left to take shelter in the eponymous underground bunker to avoid a withering artillery barrage and hopefully find some way of escaping. I’m not aware of too many pieces of IF that center on modern-ish infantry warfare, and still fewer that present military matters with any sort of verisimilitude, so I was impressed by the game’s ability to present what felt like a well-observed, grounded setting without forcing the player to wade through boring gun porn. There’s even a bit of environmental storytelling in the laconic descriptions, like this bit that provides some hints about how and why the bunker became abandoned:

"A clearly professional job of smashing these crates was recently conducted. Few splinters are larger than a forearm and all of the ammunition the crates previously contained, now gone. Whether issued to PWM forces or expended in anger there is no way of knowing. The wooden debris is loosely scattered about."

Similarly, conversations with the soldiers on the other end of the radio are appropriately bureaucratic, but I always felt like I had enough context to understand what they were saying and how to respond.

It all adds up to a satisfying package – confidently written, cleanly implemented, with a single puzzle that’s satisfying to solve and doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s about as assured a debut as you could hope for, so plaudits are definitely due to the author and the mysterious tester who backed him up.

I’ve said before that one of the nice things about the ‘thon is that it enables you to engage with games without necessarily having to be confined to the context of their original release: the focus is reviewing, so if the most interesting way to look at something is as an entry in Thematic Game Jam X, knock yourself out, but if another interpretive lens better strikes your fancy, that’s totally fine too. GET MANIFE$TO, though, is pretty hard to divorce from its intended target context: in the event, it missed the deadline for this year’s Manifesto Jam, but given its title and its content, the only real way to assess the game is as a vector for delivering, yes, a manifesto.

Interestingly, this isn’t just a screed masquerading as a game; there’s a reasonably-sized parser game with plenty of puzzles here, it just happens to be the case that you regularly run across items that, when examined, give you some points and feed you a sentence or two of the full manifesto. The kindest thing I can say about its virtues as a game is that it leans into the DIY punk ethos that manifesto-penning seems to invite: the puzzle design is unremarkable, and the under-explained premise (you need to an escape a lab where… something has gone wrong, which you’ve found yourself trapped in for… some reason or other) is at least enough to motivate exploration and set up some fun set-pieces like water-gunning a fed with radioactive fluid and drinking a strange concoction so you can see Cthulhu. Unfortunately, the connection between what the protagonist is up to and the game-design manifesto that’s the point of the proceedings is obscure. Worse, this is definitely the kind of game that when you check the credits and see that there are no testers listed, you nod and say “yeah, I could have told you that.”

My transcript flags a long list of implementation infelicities, from missing synonyms to guess-the-verb challenges to misleading responses. There are some neat bits, don’t get me wrong, including an elegant use of text colors to highlight information, and a broad range of items and systems to play with, but I’m glad the game came with source code included because I needed to check it once to get through a puzzle that was either underclued or oddly implemented (I also checked it to see why I didn’t get all the points when I won – turned out that’s because when I saw there were lizards on a tree, I typed X LIZARD and when I got a default you-don’t-see-that error I assumed it was another piece of unimplemented scenery, rather than an indication I should try X LIZARDS instead). It’s not unplayable by any means, but GET MANIFE$TO is definitely a game best played by someone familiar enough with parser mechanics to suss out when a puzzle is hard because it’s hard, and when it’s hard because of first-time-author implementation challenges.

As for the content of the manifesto – well, it’s also fine. You uncover a list of numbered precepts laying out the author’s views on making games, and while I nodded along with each of them, I couldn’t help feeling that they were mostly anodyne. Like, here’s number seven:

"If you like playing your game, someone else probably will too; if you don’t like playing your game, try making it more fun or using fewer words."

“Make it more fun” is not super helpful; “use fewer words” is good advice; but either way, this is hardly a slogan you can scrawl on the rag you’re going to use to wick a Molotov cocktail. The best manifestos are full of fire, j’accuse’s leveled not at a faceless monolith but at the writer’s peers, urging them to do better – like 40% of the Communist Manifesto is pure score-settling with other German leftist factions, Marx was a hater (complimentary). Sure, some of the manifesto’s points sling barbs at AAA game development, but I doubt many of those folks are playing indie art-games, and even if they are, they’re mostly too busy getting fired to pay much attention. Like, what are we meant to do with precept five?

"Big studios need to fill their games with moviewatch because they perceive film as the most prestigious medium. You are fortunate to be unburdened by this convention: it means your games will be better."

I’m unconvinced that “prestige” is really the motivation for this phenomenon, but even leaving that aside, is the IF developer just supposed to congratulate themselves and move on?

Possibly I’m being overly hard here because I’m skeptical that the IF community is in much need of manifestos right now. We’re just over a decade out from our last revolution, and the insurgency and reaction have both subsided, after all the conflict, into a mature scene that IMO hasn’t yet tipped over into the decadence that would make us ripe for another upheaval. Still, if I’m going to be convinced otherwise, I think it’ll take a manifesto that pisses me off, that says stuff I don’t want to hear, that paints a vivid picture of a future I can’t get out of my head. Feel-good tips aren’t going to do it, much as I might agree with them on their own, and embedding them in a largely-unrelated puzzle game doesn’t add much to their persuasiveness either.

These days, the phrase “significant other” is probably most familiar from a period around the 90s when straight people were flailing around trying to find a less age-inappropriate alternative to “boy/girlfriend”, before giving up and just stealing “partner” from queer folks. But it’s got another, older history: in early 20th-century anthropological theory, a “most significant other” is a person who helps define your identity in your community, through the act of perceiving you and thereby granting you a particular level of status. Early 20th-century anthropology being what it was, the examples I read about in my textbook were preeeety racially coded – chieftains and shamans recognizing people who’ve gone through particular rituals or accomplished impressive deeds – but the basic idea is of course generalizable: identity is status is performance, and performance depends on an audience to view it and respond to it. The place where technological modernity offers a clean break from other modes of social existence, though, is in our severing of these acts of perception from social relationships. What happens when this is all commodified and fed through an anonymized network that offers eyeballs in exchange for content, where instead of status being mediated through a specific set of figures held in high regard (note “regard”, by the way, these dynamics are embedded in our language) by everyone in your shared social universe, it’s the result of easily-manipulated algorithms, parasocial feeding frenzies, and dopamine-feeding likes counters?

Untitled (Underground) is a short creepypasta visual novel, but the above would have been an even more hilariously inapposite opening paragraph if all it had in mind were cheap scares. Oh, the signifiers are certainly here in force, with the protagonist, an urban-exploration streamer named Aisling, tracking down an old video that purports to show the way to a lost Underground (as in, the London subway system) station and ignoring common sense to try to find it for themself. Their hubris is most visibly rewarded by running into some uncanny apparitions, but more unsettling is the monologuing of an unseen narrator, whose words are counterposed with Aisling’s deeper and deeper explorations, recounting an obsession with building more and more elaborate mazes and traps just to see what will become of those sucked into them.

These horror elements, though, didn’t feel especially horrific to me. There’s definitely an aura of menace, and at least one ending strongly suggests something quite bad happening to Aisling, but prose holds things at a remove rather than opting for visceral detail. There’s also not much in the way of a climax, with the mood just building and building until it’s abruptly resolved. Even the creepypasta elements are just, well, creepy, rather than actively threatening: there’s a businessman who keeps walking past Aisling, saying the exact same thing each time, and a rather pathetic ghost, but things don’t really escalate from there.

So I think all this is just the infrastructure that allows the game to play with what it’s actually interested in, which is exactly the aforementioned questions of identity and perception. Aisling is trying to livestream everything that they’re seeing, even well after that point past which it’s clear that there’s real danger here, and that there’s nobody watching on the other end of the camera. The narrator, meanwhile, is a sadist and a voyeur, compelled by a traumatic backstory to reenact terrible situations to see what happens to their victims, observing but never coming into contact with them. The player, meanwhile, doesn’t get to stay innocent of all this: the only gameplay element here is that periodically, a choice will pop up enabling you to decide what happens to Aisling as they keep walking down that endless Tube corridor: either “there is nothing”, or “there is something [presumably bad]”. So the question becomes whether you, comfy in your chair, will tolerate boredom or whether, much like the narrator, you’re jaded enough to inflict harm on Aisling just to relieve the tedium. Everyone is either pathologically watching, or wanting to be watched, but there’s no reciprocity, no engagement: it’s atomized, disconnected, faintly pathetic.

That’s all a reasonable approach for a horror game to think, appropriately intellectual, but I think there are some elements of the design that softened the impact Untitled (Underground) had on me. For one thing, I played twice, the first time going for all “nothing” choices, the second time all “something” ones. In the former case, there’s a happy ending that feels slightly insincere, with an out-of-context character sweeping in for a rescue. The latter course was, as advertised, more interesting, but still suffered from the static pacing mentioned above. In neither case did I come across any plot beats that provided any resolution for the narrator character, and in neither case was the something/nothing choice ever framed diegetically, which undercuts the degree of player complicity. And maybe this reflects a personal bias against streamers, but I didn’t find Aisling at all likeable, which is a totally fine choice for a game to make, but it did mean that I was largely indifferent to their peril. So while I think Untitled (Underground) works nicely enough as an examination of what happens when our Most Significant Others are replaced with A Billion Anonymous Others, there’s not enough blood in its veins to do more than that.

(Spoilers for this short game, which is very much worth a play).

About a third of the way through the lamp of your body, I squinted at the screen and alt-tabbed into my notes file. The game had been grabby enough from the beginning, with a narrator realizing that there’s a strange woman with unearthly eyes in one of his classes who keeps staring at him, leading to an early, memorable hallucination:

And then, her pupil ruptures. It spills out like an undercooked yolk, all over the whites of her eyes. I need to look away but I can’t. It’s hypnotic, the way the darkness takes over, slowly, slowly, and pools on her waterline. I’m holding my breath, waiting for it to overflow and splash on the table.

I remained intrigued as the narrator’s investigation into her identity kept coming up short, stymied by one uncanny barrier about another, before actually engaging in some direct but enigmatic conversations, but wasn’t quite sure where the game was going with all this. Then, after a snafu with the protagonist’s financial aid means they’re having to skip meals until the next check arrives, the woman says she can get them something to eat; the protagonist demurs, but nevertheless, the next time they open their fridge, rather than just having a few sad eggs it’s stuffed to the gills. This is the point at which I switched to my notes and wrote “hmm with the food in the fridge, are these riffs on the temptations in the desert?”

Then I clicked to the next passage, and laughed out loud when I saw that it started “we’re standing on the roof of our uni library…”

The lesson I suppose is that you can take the boy out of the Catholic church, I guess, but you can’t take the Catholic church out of the boy, even three decades on. In fairness, the itch page literally says “run temptation” when you start the game, which is a detail I’d forgotten until just now but probably subconsciously primed me to recognize what was going on. The fact that the protagonist attends the kind of school where there are electives about the apocrypha is also a reasonably direct prompt.

Still, for all that the parallels are rather clear, and the protagonist’s increasingly apocalyptic visions leave little doubt about the demonic nature of their interlocutor, the lamp of your body isn’t a clangingly obvious allegory by any means. While the basic arc of the story matches what’s in the gospels, the major difference here is that the protagonist doesn’t appear to be supernaturally chosen or even all that special. While the devil’s rationale for trying to corrupt Jesus are obvious, the motivation behind all the special attention the woman showers on the protagonist remains obscure, and it’s a testament to the quality of the game’s writing, grounded yet philosophically rich, that I couldn’t help turning that question over and over in my mind.

Is it just a matter of trying to collect one more soul, as Satan clocks through yet another workday in an eternity of trying to make quota? I don’t think so; the woman appears genuinely obsessed with the protagonist, and her offer of temptation after temptation seems less the calculating stratagem of a great deceiver, and more the only recourse of someone who knows no other way of engaging with another mind. In fact, the climactic moment of the game, the one choice that’s offered to the player, hinges on the woman asking whether the protagonist thinks the devil is inherently evil, or if they have the freedom to try to repent – and the woman seems sincerely invested in what they say.

Of course, maybe it’s all an act, with the question serving as the last temptation: while the protagonist demurs at all the woman’s other offers of aid or power, this is the one you, the player, can say yes to, and if you do, your eyes start to turn black just like hers. But even if you say no, while the woman disappears, the protagonist is still haunted by her absence, a black shadow always lurking at the corner of their eye: “I don’t know if it’s because I’m blessed or cursed,” they muse, “maybe there never was a difference.” The game’s title is an allusion to a verse in Matthew: “if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” If our perceptions are clear, and we see things the way they truly are, in other words, we will be illuminated, but if our perceptions are clouded, we will be dragged into darkness. But isn’t it tempting to think that just maybe, it’s the other way around?

Folks, we’ve had a good run. Across five Lewd Mod reviews, I like to think I’ve provided some insight and entertainment, from the early days when I was incredulous at how everybody lacked eyes and acted like horny robots, all the way through to the belated realization, in my No Butts review, of what the premise of this series actually is. But with installment number six, I fear the well has run dry. Maddie Teases is extruded Lewd Mod product, and after two years of familiarity with how these things work, I’ve grown too jaded to have any real reaction.

Like, our coworker texts us out of the blue to say she’s going to send us increasingly-risque selfies to workshop the hottest ones to send to her boyfriend, and won’t take no for an answer? Been there, done that. Our all-caps dialogue options read like they were written by someone high on paint thinner? Of course, how else do people talk. The naked drawings omit all facial features except mouths and eyebrows? Wake me when something interesting is happening.

Reader, I tried to come up with something interesting to say here. I even played twice, role-playing a total horn-dog the first time and a complete cold fish the second. Typically in this series the latter is a surefire recipe for hilarity, as the half-naked lady steamrolls your diffidence and non-sequiturs, but this time that too was a damp squib, just terminating proceedings at the PG-13 level without any bonkers miscommunications along the way.

So yeah, after playing Maddie Teases, I was bored, but also, I confess, disappointed – and hopeful that when next year’s Review-a-Thon rolls around and the author inevitably enters another brace of demos and excerpts from the extended Lewd Mod cinematic universe, they’ll boast enough novelty or demented titillation to perk up my interest again. I recognize this is a very bad sign, inasmuch as I’m now in the position of someone whose tolerance to their intoxicant of choice has gotten sufficiently robust that they need harder and harder stuff to feel anything. But here we are: I’m too benumbed for an experience like this to register anymore, but maybe if I keep chasing the green fairy, I can recapture what it felt like in those first days…