Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, they say, before blushing in shame from having wasted their first impression on such a cliché. Dead Sea could stood to listen though, as it had two strikes against it five minutes after I started it up: one, the silly genAI cover art, which just looks insipid upon first glance but seems sillier and sillier the more you try to work out what the waves, clouds, and light are doing, and two, the initial puzzle, which has you make a Fanta for a gravedigger by zapping a sapient monster-orange with a freeze ray and then dismembering it until it fits in a bottle. After those first five minutes, it’s clear that some actual care did go into making the game and it settles down to tell a dark-fantasy story with an occasional hint of whimsy rather than the wearying zaniness that opening challenge seemed to presage – so that’s all good news, but it’s still frustrating to see an author start off in a ditch due to such avoidable missteps.

What we’ve got here is a parser-like choice game that tasks you with uncovering the secrets of the ruler of the island called Necropolis – there’s Bluebeard-y backstory, Moby Dick references, souls being harvested and used to animate golems… The vibes are dour, though the compressed prose style largely gestures at mood rather than wallowing in it, in service of keeping things moving. That isn’t to say there aren’t any good images – I liked the use of color here, for example:

Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.

No way up found.

An injured White Whale is beached, reddening nearby water.

But as you can see, it’s nothing too fancy, it makes its points and then shuts up. This relative terseness puts the focus on the puzzles, and I’d say they’re serviceable. Most are inventory-based and fairly well signposted, with a few boasting multiple solutions. It’s clear that some of the systems are a bit hacked together – in particular, the inventory system doesn’t allow you to drop things, picking up something new will often just mean replacing what you previously carried, which silently goes back to where you first found it in case you need it again – but this winds up being intuitive enough, and I can’t complain too much since it does reduce the amount of inventory-juggling you might need to engage in. The other mechanic I wasn’t sure how to engage with were the small statues you run into every few minutes – you’re told that praying at one will “reset chapter parameters”, which seemed like it could potentially mean losing progress, so I steered clear. At any rate, what you’re called upon to do is typically straightforward, and you typically just have a small segment of the gameworld unlocked at any point in time, which means I found it hard to get too stuck; again, the pacing is enjoyably quick.

As for the plot, once you uncover enough secrets to understand the main conflict that’s playing out on the island, it’s reasonably engaging; there are a few nicely-observed elements, like how the girl betrothed to the dark, melancholy Duke dreads the arranged marriage but is still looking forward to the wedding. And while it’s clear how this will all be resolved, the option to make suboptimal choices to get premature game-overs makes the player’s input feel more impactful. On the flip side, there’s some bonus content you can access just as you win the game which slathers the functional story with a thick coating of proper-noun fantasy bollocks:

That was before the God fell.

Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here.

This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt.

Even angels fell because of it.

Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’

I suppose that means that Dead Sea’s last impression is just as dodgy as its first, but at least the stuff in the middle goes down easy!

In the very first IF review I wrote after coming back from a 15-year hiatus, I talked about the alienating associations anime tends to have for me – I know, this is a me thing, it’s obviously an incredibly successful medium with aesthetic resonance for untold millions of people! But nonetheless, while I can recognize the reasons why over-busy narratives involving sexy people with nonstandard eye and hair colors and histrionic science-fantasy apocalpyses can be lots of fun, I confess the appeal is somewhat lost on me; less “anime BS (laudatory)” than “anime BS (derogatory)”, to adopt a kids-these-days idiom I do enjoy.

Mooncrash!,if you couldn’t tell from that intro, is very much working in this tradition. In a world due to end any minute, you’re a second-tier hero who gets to team up with the A-listers due to the fact that the world is ending any minute now. The mechanics of this are initially obfuscated, but by exploring the four paths the game offers (each corresponding to one of the four superheroes you can work alongside) it’s clear it involves armies of demons and dragons, and the plans to forestall it involve constructing magitech devices to allow some people to survive the end of the world, stealing a biological WMD from an infernal vault, or possibly just creating a magical simulation into which to escape. And after you run through each of them (there’s a death-and-rebirth thing going on that enables you to toggle between branches, as well as retain your combat skills and achievements across lives) there’s a culminating vignette where you can choose which strategy to save the day you want to throw your weight behind.

It’s a relatively simple setup, but Mooncrash! is maximalist in its storytelling – most actions you take produce long passages of text, dense with proper nouns and action and exposition. When the conflicts it describes are straightforward, this lends a pleasant over-the-topness to proceedings:

"The wind whips around you as you soar through the air, and you grip the red scales of the dragon below you for dear life. Below you, a battle rages on a bridge made of solid hard-light. Your allies, The Dawn Legion of Leont, do battle against the forces of Izalith, The Dread Horde. Twisted forms, demonic and devilish alike, clash against the shining armor of your brethren."

You can practically hear the death metal!

The prose can get bogged down when the action quiets down, though. One of the four branches is an extended conversation with the wizard who’s created the magical simulation I mentioned above – this involves them going into their overcomplicated backstory (they’re a refugee from another reality that collapsed in a crisis similar to the one yours is currently undergoing), their romantic entanglements, the reasons why they created their tower headquarters where and how they did, the nature of the alternate world they’ve built, how it could be used as a cheat code to escape the apocalypse… Again, I can see how those with a taste for this stuff would lap it up, but I found it dragged.

Other sections have more involved gameplay, though. The combat one is straightforward and does require some repetition to grind your skills to the necessary level, but it’s hard to go wrong skewering monsters. There’s a medium-dry-goods one where you solve some very simple object-based puzzles to prepare the ingredients for a sorcerous construction project. And the last involves either a conversation puzzle or a maze, before the endgame puts all the pieces together. They’re mostly pretty basic in terms of challenge, but they all have some time pressure to keep the player on their toes, and can be repeated as many times as needed (plus even failed attempts will typically give you an achievement, which is a motivating touch).

I’m unconvinced that a parser-based interface was the best fit for this game, though. Many sections play out in a primarily or exclusively choice-based mode, with the game prompting you to type CHOOSE (keyword) at some important points; I’d have rather just been able to click on an appropriate link, and a choice-based interface would have made some of the longer chunks of text go down smoother, too. Mooncrash! also doesn’t do much to take advantage of the affordances the parser offers – the object manipulation section spells out exactly what you need to do, for example, and the game is generally underimplemented, leading to unintentional comedy like this:

DANGEROUS PATHOGEN - DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ALPHA-PLAN AUTHORIZATION

CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE - DO NOT REMOVE FROM CONTAINMENT FIELD BEFORE DEPLOYMENT

REPENT, YE WHO WOULD SEEK THE POWER OF THE BAD BLOOD

Staring at the pitch black vial sends a shiver down your spine. You look away on instinct. You get the sense that a single drop of this vile liquid could kill you instantly. Thankfully, the vial is sealed shut, and not a single smudge of the stuff has reached the outside.

x blood

You see nothing special about Bad Blood.

For all these complaints, though, there are definitely clever touches to Mooncrash! – I particularly liked the way a particular endgame challenge manipulated the choices available to you to mirror a mental assault, and the game is chock full of nonstandard, ambitious elements like this (I haven’t even mentioned the extended personality test that opens the game – it’s kind of pointless since the protagonist is a cipher, and while it shunts you to one of the four branches, you eventually need to play all of them. But I kind of love the ridiculous juxtaposition of a melodramatic Götterdämmerung with an OKCupid quiz, as well as the fact that the answers to “what kind of a person are you?” are basically three flavors of “I’m kind of a jerk” plus “I’m a jerk but I hide it”). Mooncrash! is identifiably a first parser game, with some of the lack of polish that implies, but it’s clearly been well-tested to smooth out bugs, and includes a bunch of customized systems that go way beyond what most rookie authors dare to bite off. And while as I said the specific subgenre it inhabits isn’t one I have much native affinity for, I think its emulation of said subgenre’s aesthetics is spot on, reflecting careful, intentional writing and design. So this is definitely an author to watch; even if Mooncrash! isn’t especially my speed, it’s still an impressive debut.

I’ve been in the tank for the Lady Thalia games pretty much from the minute I first encountered them: I love a heist and a period piece, so add on a flirty enemies-to-lovers dynamic between the lady thief and her policewoman antagonist and I’m more than sold, but the nimble pacing and tightly-designed puzzles take things to the next level. But I’m in an odd situation with this fourth installment: you see, I still haven’t played the third one, since it was released in Spring Thing 2023, and some life events interrupted by reviews of the festival that year. I still want to get back and finish those, and Lady Thalia and the Masterpiece of Moldavia is a reward I’ve set myself for doing so. But that means that I’m coming to this one having missed an episode.

This used to happen all the time, of course – when I went off to high school, I remember being frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep up with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, doubly so because on the odd occasions I could catch an episode suddenly Worf was there – but in this age of on-demand streaming everything, it’s an unfamiliar sensation, and actually not necessarily a bad one? If anything, I’m now even more excited to go back and learn how Thalia and Mel struck a truce that saw the latter leaving the Yard and then the pair going into business together as consulting private detectives. I’m also curious whether Thalia’s heretofore-offscreen husband made his first appearance in that installment, or if the supporting role he places here is his actual introduction (he’s a gay bank robber married to a lesbian cat burglar, you’re each others’ beards, it’s cute). There’s also a distaff Sherlock Holmes analogue who I don’t remember from the first or second game but definitely makes an impression.

But though there’s a lot to catch up on, the game gives you the context you need, and the characters are as always drawn with such bright colors that you feel you know all about them from the moment they come on screen – actually, now that I think about it, Lady Thali4’s handling of Mel on this front is especially deft, since she hasn’t had that much screen time to date, even including her role as deuteragonist in the second game; nonetheless, her dogged approach to investigation and clumsy approach to romance were exactly what I expected based on her prior experiences.

The puzzles are likewise unsurprisingly satisfying. By now the series structure, of alternating case-the-joint sequences where you learn about a target through some light social-engineering mechanics with the actual heists, where you might need to pick some locks, crack a code, or engage in a chase is well established, and even though you’ve gone straight, the rhythm hasn’t changed: it’s just that this time out you’re trying to catch a copycat thief who’s appropriated your name in the act, and investigating their potential targets before they strike. This doppleganger plot is a great way of continuing to play to Thalia’s strengths even as she’s shifted to the side of the angels, and the set-pieces continue to be great fun, with a break-in at the headquarters of an off-brand Golden Dawn a particular highlight. None of the individual challenges are that challenging – you’ll get to the end regardless – but you are graded on the verve and brio you bring to your role, with top marks reserved for those who manage to balance the need to hide your tracks with the urgency of keeping up with your rival. The other fun addition to the series’ systems is interrogation sequences where you play as both Thalia and Mel simultaneously; in the stratified world of Edwardian (I think?) England, what you say might not matter as much as who says it, after all.

“Much as it was, but with some fun new twists” is also my take on the writing. The prose has always been alternately zippy and wry, which kept a smile on my face throughout:

"He chuckles. 'Scandalous of me, I know! To come to an art gallery—making an appointment, no less—with no interest in the current exhibition and no intention of buying anything!'

"You probably do six things more scandalous than that before breakfast each day, but you want to know where he’s going with this, so you laugh along."

I also enjoyed the running joke where Thalia keeps workshopping different nicknames for Mel, which is all the funnier for not drawing undue attention to itself. But the focus on these two characters’ relationship also creates space for things to get more serious at times, including a nicely understated scene where Thalia and her ex talk around their breakup. The central romance is of course the main event, and through the inevitable ups and downs, there’s no getting away from the sweetness of the two falling in love:

"She looks like she hasn’t slept properly in several days, and some of her hair has escaped its bun and is falling in her face, and there’s still a yellowing bruise around her left eye, and of course she’s also currently angry with you. Nevertheless, some part of you is still convinced that she’s the most attractive woman you’ve ever seen, simply because she’s Mel."

I’m not sure whether this fourth installment is my absolute favorite, as there were some minor blemishes to my enjoyment on the mechanical side – I found navigating through the gallery backrooms was a bit more confusing than I wanted it to be (since on my first visit, I had to choose between which door to try, whereas during the subsequent one you need to pick which room to go to), and while an Arts and Crafts exhibit is a cool backdrop, I think the final heist felt like it was over a bit quicker than the prior ones; the titular artifact also feels like it’s underdeveloped. But the story here could well be the best it’s been – all the more reason for me to circle back to the third installment to find out for sure!

Reviewing a chunk of games all at once through the course of the Comp can be a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, there can be synchronicities that help you look at a game through an unexpected angle. On the down side, though, sometimes it’s hard to avoid feeling like past-you is stepping on your toes. Case in point: the best jumping-off point for My creation is Frankenstein, since the game excerpts it at length and is clearly in dialogue with Shelley’s classic. But having already reviewed Frankenfingers, and done a little tap-dance about the not-so-good doctor in my INPUT PROCESS review, it feels awkward to go back for a threepeat.

So let’s go with what’s arguably the second-best jumping-off point: parenthood, specifically those first few days when you’re back from the hospital with your first kid and you are sleep-deprived and your life has changed and you don’t know how anything works. It’s a terrifying, disorienting experience, and so in some respects it’s a perfect fit for a somewhat wonkily-implemented parser game: the sense that moving around is harder than it should be, you’re either seeing double or things that should be there are nowhere to be found…

My creation does communicate the claustrophobic vertigo of those moments quite well via its writing, too. The game starts with your days-old baby screaming and crying while your headache gets worse; you don’t know what to do to quiet the kid down, and as the blurb indicates, you don’t have another parent or any other family member providing any help. Small wonder that even moving from one side of the bed to the other involves “dragg[ing] yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers,” and that there’s a clumsy tactility to your physical interactions with the baby:

The unevenness of the floor and the speed of your movements shake the basket, and the child within it, more than either of you expected. The moan has become a cry. You shift your hand on the floor and grab the baby’s wrapper with the other. In one swift movement, the child is on the bed. With wide, tearful eyes, the child watches you groan and sigh, your face scrunched up in pain.

Thankfully, this isn’t an extended experience – My creation is a short game – but it’s an authentically horrifying experience, knowing you’re responsible for another life but not sure how to do that while also needing to take care of yourself, too. There’s only a single challenge to overcome, but it’s a doozy: get the kid to stop crying, with nary a formula bottle or white-noise machine in sight. As mentioned, the game really could have used more testing, because there are rough patches everywhere: moving from one corner of the bed to another absurdly uses compass directions (and UP and OUT and EXIT won’t let you stand up), you can get told that there’s a basket and a baby where you are but trying to interact with them reveals that they’re actually somewhere else, and Inform’s default responses are jarring when they intrude, both because of their voice – Graham Nelson’s studied disinterest has rarely felt less apposite – and their content, with SLEEP throwing up a totally-not-true “you aren’t feeling especially drowsy” and FEED BABY horrifyingly generating a “(to yourself)” implicit action (thankfully, it fails). The gameplay wouldn’t work in a choice-based interface, since the desperation of typing anything you can think of into the parser, with most of it not working, is 100% the way to marry form and substance when depicting the existential despair at not being able to quiet a crying infant. But the same effect could have been achieved without quite so much clunkiness – heck, the game doesn’t actually end, it just throws a “(the end)” after the wall of text following the correct move.

All right, I think we can circle back to Frankenstein now. The protagonist has a copy of the book right by their bed, and examining it displays an extended passage near the middle of the novel, as the reanimated-and-abandoned monster reflects on his miserable condition by comparing himself, and what he’s been able to intuit about his nature, to the lives lived by a seemingly-happy peasant family. This also prompts him to ponder his origins: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to answer them.”

Dr. Frankenstein is undoubtedly one of the worst parents in all of literature, so it’s understandable that an anxious, frightened father worried about how bad a job they might wind up doing would think of Frankenstein, though there’s a more direct reason why the protagonist would find the monster’s situation resonant too (despite copious clues about where the game is headed with this, it treats this as a reveal, so I’m not going to spoil it). Babies can feel so fragile, and the psychology of child-rearing is presented as requiring such specialized knowledge and attention, is it any wonder that a parent who doesn’t have their whole life already figured out would be terrified that they’ll make a child as broken as they are? Even for those of us who faced parenthood with plenty of supports My creation’s protagonist lacks can find these fears relatable, I think, which is why I appreciate where the game ends: you can stop the kid crying, and hopefully start to get a handle on your anxieties by articulating them, but they don’t go away, and the baby doesn’t stay quiet forever. Taking care of someone else is something you do hour after hour, day after day, never knowing where you’ll both wind up at the end of it – hopefully not locked in an Arctic death-hunt, at least! – but dragging yourself out of bed, searching for creativity even at your wits’ end, nonetheless.

When I’m playing video games as a civilian – i.e., when I’m not blasting through IF so I can meet the review quota before a deadline – I actually tend to prefer games robust systemic elements on top of engaging stories, rather than just pure narrative games. As a result, immersive sims are among my favorite genres, and Prey, a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, is one of the best of recent years, directly bringing in many elements from its inspiration while adding some new ones. And like the best immersive sims, much of the fun is in the way these systems interact in unexpected ways: for example, in both Prey and Shock, the skill points you use to gain character abilities aren’t an abstracted currency, but physical items you acquire in the game world. Something Shock doesn’t have but Prey does is a 3D-printing system that allows you to break down random junk in the world into its constituent parts, and then use the raw materials to build anything you’ve got the specs for. And – you see where this is going, if you hack the right systems or explore in the right areas, you can find a blueprint for the XP items, enabling you to cross the streams of the game’s different sub-economies. It doesn’t quite break the progression wide open, but discovering this obviously-intended exploit made me cackle with glee.

Detritus is a traditional adventure rather than an immersive sim, but the whole thing is built around a similar recycle/fabricate gameplay loop – and, impressively, it manages to come up with a twist on the system’s capabilities even more impactful than the one in Prey. Admittedly, this isn’t obvious for most of the game’s running time. It starts out as a minor riff on the very traditional spaceship-disaster subgenre of IF: a meteor’s hit your courier ship, causing an explosive decompression and the deaths of everyone on board, but since part of the emergency protocol involves having a backup of one of the crew loaded into the fabricator just in case, you get a second lease on life as a 3D-printed clone with your predecessor’s memories, and a mandate to save the ship. This involves traditional fare like reading datapads to find passwords, fooling biometric locks, and hacking electronic systems via a math-based minigame.

You’ll have done all of this before, and to its credit Detritus doesn’t pretend otherwise; each of these puzzles are implemented smoothly, with a clean choice-based interface and high production values, but they’re not harped on. What is harped on is the fabricator. Almost all of the conventional challenges require some piece of kit that you can manufacture on the spot, or unlock upgrades or raw materials allowing you to make more, different stuff to solve more, different puzzles… It makes for a compelling gameplay loop, as you start out bobbling a few pieces of space-junk back to the fabricator at a time in order to fuel your first, tentative explorations, before increasing upgrades, confidence, and knowledge see you hauling much bigger loads into the recycler and creating ever-more-useful tools. There’s also a gentle survival element to the gameplay – your need for food, water, and oxygen is always ticking up with everything you do, and you have to scavenge, or use your limited stock of fabricator resources, to meet those needs.

This does mean things are a bit more fiddly than in similarly kinds of stories, but again, there’s a robust interface that makes the inventory-juggling quite manageable and at least on the default difficulty, the various timers serve to ground the player in the protagonist’s predicament without ever becoming too much of a nuisance (in a nice touch, if, like me, you neglect to eat or drink while pushing to get to the endgame, Detritus ensures you can get a final meal and gulp of water to allow you to reach the finish line). The logistics-focused gameplay is also often interrupted, sometimes for exposition that fills in the backstory and raises questions about just what you were up to when the accident happened, and action-focused set-pieces like an EVA sequence that sees you explore the breach in the hull. The writing here isn’t flashy, but it sells the space adventure theme with more than adequate panache:

"I look up… through. The distant stars shine with the utter clarity you only get when looking at them directly, and distant nebulae glow with an almost iridescent colour. The hole is large enough for me to fit through. If I were crazy, I’d actually consider it. Am I crazy?"

In true immersive-sim style, there are also lots of flashbacks, unlocked either as your memories come back over time, or when you gain access to various computer logs and terminals. On the plus side, even though the other members of the crew are all dead, they get some solid characterization through these scenes, which makes exploring the ship that became their tomb all the heavier. On the other hand, the backstory you uncover is relatively straightforward, and boasts a reveal that did significant damage to my suspension of disbelief ()

While I’m complaining, I might as well dole out the last of my criticisms now: the twists of Detritus’s plot do somewhat outlast the interest its systems provide. Despite the last couple of upgrades I unlocked in the fabricator seeming useful in theory (one notably expands your inventory limit, another obviates the hunger/thirst timers, and a third allows you to combine a bunch of tools you otherwise need to juggle into a single item), the number of resources they required was sufficiently high that I preferred the annoying grind of forgoing them to the annoying grind of obtaining them. The last major puzzle also feels like it relies on a cartoon logic at odds with the otherwise grounded, often-dark vibe of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I assume it’s just part of the genre rules that we’re ignoring how cost-prohibitive it would be to blast a colony’s trash into space – but even with that hand-wave, what sense could it possibly make to ship it to another planet rather than just dumping it and letting it drift into the star or an asteroid field?).

But I’ll close on a justified positive note, which is to return to that final reveal about the fabricator I mentioned up top. Without spelling it out, I’ll just say that it was the one development in the plot I didn’t see coming from a mile away, while it also made sense of some inconsistencies that I’d written off as just part of the game’s modeling of how immersive sims work. Beyond all this, it takes the creepiness inherent in Star Trek’s transporters and dials it way up, then uses that as the jumping off point for a closing moral dilemma that I legitimately don’t think has an easy answer. It’s a great way to wrap up the game, and some of the questions about consciousness it raises pair nicely, albeit in an understated way, with some of the more standard plot elements having to do with AI possibly replacing ships’ crews. It’s these kinds of juxtapositions that make immersive sims so much fun, so Detritus deserves some kudos for crossing the streams with such gusto.

Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer has comfortably the most bizarre setup of any game I’ve played so far in this year’s Comp – and that includes the explicitly surreal ones like the game where your body occasionally disintegrates into spaghetti. As it says on the tin, it opens with you and your brother raiding a Tokyo office building to perform the eponymous deed, resorting to violence in order to get human-being-who-actually-existed Kenji Eno to surrender his in-development game to your employers. But the gameplay, thankfully, doesn’t involve directly participating in the interrogation: rather, your brother’s browbeating of Eno, which involves running through a potted history of his bad-boy career making PS1- and 2-era survival horror games, is repeatedly interrupted by his (Eno’s) turtle going missing, which triggers him (your brother) to freak out and scream at you to find the animal, so you do that by solving an escalating series of puzzles as he (the turtle) climbs his way into more and more unlikely places.

So yeah, I was pretty lost here, though I was having fun with the anecdotes about the 90s Japanese development scene and the enjoyably over-the-top dialogue – until finally, well after I should have caught on, the game clicked and I realized why every bit of that premise is completely perfect. I won’t spoil what’s going on except to say I laughed quite a lot once I twigged to the twist, and found it added an additional fun layer through which to interpret the main action. But that main action works pretty well on its own, too. The narrative voice is lots of fun, with your brother’s frequent profanity obscured by stars, and entertainingly out-of-context gags. I liked this early bit, right after you restrain Eno:

"Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions."

The game also makes a convincing case for Eno as an under-appreciated (at least in the West) artist. The best story is the one where he outfoxes the console approval process to get an uncensored version of one of his games onto store shelves without anyone the wiser, but even in the quieter bits of the history, as well as his interactions with you and your brother (which per the credits are drawn from actual interviews) he comes across as a thoughtful humanist trying to do something different from the mainstream, not just to shock but because he had something idiosyncratic to communicate – I can easily see how he’s become a cult figure.

As for the puzzles, they’re good examples of how to make such things work in Twine without going whole-hog into designing a parser-like interface. Most of the action plays out in a single combined kitchen/office (though there are occasional forays into other locations once you hit the midgame, including a maze that I think you’re guaranteed to solve just in the nick of time) with a bunch of different interactive features: a fridge, a stove, a cabinet. You can click on each one to interact with it, and for objects you can manipulate, like a stool you can shove around to different locations to help you climb when needed, the appropriate link cycles through to show where you’ve currently pushed it to. There’s perhaps a bit of fiddliness in the way you need to back out of examining stuff to try to climb around (most of the turtle-finding puzzles involve clambering around atop the furniture), and the final challenge maybe involves a slight bit too much busywork, but overall it’s a solid package that kept me engaged while I waited for the next bit of Eno’s career retrospective.

And that’s really where the heart of the game lies, I think. The twist I’m talking around gestures towards some contemporary questions about censorship and what counts as “age-appropriate” material, as does a slightly-didactic epilogue. The points raised are important ones, I think, and the way the game gets at them is unique. And possibly if I were one of the people unable to access a number of the Comp games due to the UK geoblock, that part of the story would be the one that resonated the most strongly. But since I’m American, it feels to me like the reason we don’t get as many video games with the artistry and sensitivity Eno appears to have brought to his stuff isn’t censorship (whether governmental or corporate), but because the mainstream industry has largely decided not to pursue those ends. That being the case, I’m walking away from Kidnapping thinking mostly about the ways he was able to get his games made in the face of a corporate culture no more welcoming to that kind of thing than the one we have now; I’m glad to have learned about his example.

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.