Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

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…

There is a host of well-meaning, and actually quite wise, advice for first-time authors of parser games. This ranges from emphasizing the importance of beta-testing to coaching newcomers through the inevitably anxious process of releasing a game and getting public feedback, to far more granular pointers about implementation and technical challenges. But probably the biggest, most important single tip is to manage scope: you learn an enormous amount writing your first parser game, so there’s a major upside to keeping things relatively small and simple, minimizing the number of complex mechanics or branch-points in favor of getting a shipped game under your belt.

For all that this is rock-solid advice, though, many if not most parser newbies ignore it completely – they think they’re built different, they’ve got an idea, and by gum they’re going to reach for the stars. And you know, God bless those hubris-drunk rookies, among whose ranks I proudly count my younger self as well as the author of Edge Valley Bigfoot Society.

Sure, at first blush the game doesn’t seem crazily ambitious. The premise is classic parser-comedy stuff – you’re a sasquatch who’s been captured by a group of underachieving cryptid hunters, and you need to make your escape from their modestly-sized headquarters before so much time passes that the rest of your clan realizes that you were clumsy (and curious) enough to get caught and draw attention to them. The map has only maybe a dozen rooms, with a solid third of them being minimally-implemented transitional spaces. And the quickest route to an ending requires solving just three and a half relatively-simple puzzles.

Ah, but I said “an ending”, didn’t I? Yup, this sucker has six of them, with alternate solutions up the wazoo! And while many of the mechanics are standard medium-dry-goods affairs, at least one set of solutions I explored centered on the recondite ordering-NPCs-around mechanic, which is for real Inform heads only at this point. There aren’t any hints included so I didn’t manage to fully investigate everything on offer, but the game is deeper, with more simulationist elements, than it first appears.

Did it need to bite off as much as it does? …well, actually I’d say no, the straightforward puzzles are totally fine in themselves, with the quirky setting and enjoyably wry prose more than enough to carry the player through to the simplest ending. And at times I think the author was struggling to chew everything they had in their mouth: there are standard first-time Inform rough patches like line spacing errors, some confusion over scope, and a hesitance to extend build-in grammar (like, there’s a puzzle that should be solved via TAKE X WITH Y, but instead of allowing the parser to take an indirect object for that action, you just type TAKE X and the game checks whether you’ve got Y in your inventory and does the more complex action automatically if you do).

So yeah, there’s a hypothetical version of Edge Valley Bigfoot Society that trims its sails to eliminate all but one way through its puzzles, simplifies the implementation, and spends that time on polish instead. And that version would be a solid, fun game! But I much prefer the version we got; it’s only a little messier, but much more fun to mess around with – and, hopefully, more representative of what more the author might accomplish with a second parser game building on the lessons of making this first one, because it’s always a lot easier the next time out (see, that part of the advice is 100% correct).

Hot on the heels of Blossom, NY comes the author’s other local-history game focusing on upstate New York. But while the gently-pedagogic intention and conversational yet informative style are the same, actually Uncle Sam Atrium is notably different from the former both in approach and in subject matter.

Taking the first thing first, here we’ve got a visual novel in RenPy rather than a Twine game. Sure, in both cases the presentation is words plus pictures, but I found Uncle Sam Atrium to be more, well, visually-oriented than Blossom. I think this is just the nature of a VN engine: the pictures are bigger, spread out to the edges of the game window, while the text shrinks down to a small box that only holds a sentence or two at a time. There are advantages to this, because USA (oh hey, now I see what they were doing with that acronym!) combines contemporary photos with archival pictures showing how the eponymous building has changed over time, so being able to see more detail made these comparisons more arresting. At the same time, I sometimes wished there was a little more text – we don’t need Caro’s The Power Broker, here, but I missed Blossom’s footnotes providing additional depth and context. The narration is clear and coherent, don’t get me wrong, but I think the format wound up make the story the game presents simpler, or at least feel simpler, than it would have in the Blossom, NY format.

As for subject matter, I made that Power Broker reference advisedly because rather than a travelogue through a small town, the topic this time out is a forensic investigation of the death one particular building in the city of Troy. The game shows us the current, near-deserted state of this block-sized mall, then takes us back through consecutive strata of history to unpack the decisions that led to this point – and as with so many contemporary design issues in American cities, finds that a thoughtless, suburb-centric approach to postwar “urban renewal” set the project up for failure many decades on. What’s worse, the game closes by noting that current debates about what to do with the moribund building are in some cases retreading some of that same old ground, which will likely have similar results if followed through on, an eloquent testimony to the importance of paying attention to history.

It makes for a compelling story, but even acknowledging the upsides of the photos-first, limited-text presentation, I did find myself wishing for a bit more meat on the bones. We don’t get a sense of any of the personalities involved, or how the policies and economics around redevelopment have shifted over the decades, for example, which would help USA feel less like a cautionary fable and more like, well, history. I very much don’t want to begrudge what’s here, because I enjoyed it and it’s well done, and I have to admit that the average member of the audience is much less nerdy about this kind of thing than I am. But I think these two games, taken together (plus Swormville Sweep, the Google Maps one that I forgot having tested, thanks for the reminder Tabitha!) stand as a very strong proof of concept, and indicate there’s room to go both broader and deeper on these ideas.

(No star rating since this is just a write-up of the preview)

Exactly at the midpoint of my combined ParserComp/Review-a-Thon list, Isekai loomed, both enticing and dreadful. I’ve already played and reviewed several games related to the author’s magnum opus, most notably The Portrait, which is the very opening sequence of this deep and broad fantasy parser game, and First Contact, which is a choice-based prequel providing some background on the game’s world and the married trio of elf, demon, and angel who appear to take center stage in Isekai. I think it’s fair to say that while there are elements of both games that I enjoyed, like the depth of implementation and the author’s enthusiasm for the world and the characters, there are also many that game me pause – the prose in both was often prolix, with some infelicities that are attributable to English not being the author’s first language, and some that are not, for one thing. For another, those earlier games often treated fairly ho-hum fantasy tropes, like devils and angels being people rather than supernatural incarnations of pure evil or pure good, as revelations, and fairly ho-hum plot developments like a man being mystically transported into a woman’s body, or the existence of queer throuples, as meriting repeated all-caps exclamations of incredulity. And the elephant in the room is their treatment of sexuality, which simultaneously attacls prudery, insisting that residents of this plane are too enlightened to find nudity or, er, breast-feeding inherently sexual, while spending a lot of word count drawing attention to the bounteous, barely-concealed bosoms of the super-hot main characters.

But both The Portrait and First Contact clearly presented themselves as subsidiary works. This slice of Isekai isn’t the complete package – per the author’s note, it’s only about the first fifth of the game – but it is nonetheless the main event, the prime reason for all the worldbuilding and character work foregrounded in the other games. So I was curious to see how this would all work in that intended complex, as well as to see what the gameplay undergirding all this looks like.

Well, Isekai both is and isn’t what I was expecting. Having played the Portrait, I wasn’t surprised to see the level of detail in the game’s implementation of an elvish wizard’s house; while there are some notes saying particular areas or items are works in progress or placeholders, every conceivable item of scenery can be examined or, where appropriate, interacted with, and there’s practically a fractal zoom available, as looking at any particular item often leads to two or three more sub-parts that can likewise be studied. There are plenty of books providing lore infodumps, about two dozen rooms and hallways that make up the mansion, and a solid view of the outside provides plenty of opportunity to learn about your environs in detail.

The flip side of this is that Isekai is also a game with a large number of words, and relatively slow pacing – I suppose I didn’t have to check out as many incidental details as I did, but since the gameplay in this section is purely explorative, it would have felt odd to cut it short. While the prose is still often a bit iffy, with plenty of typos and missing spaces, and does run on a bit, I did find this aspect worked better than in the Portrait or First Contact. Beyond the writing just being overall more polished, in the former, all you had to do was examine every single piece of an obsessively-detailed painting, and the latter had a lot of relatively clumsy infodumps of deep background. Here, you’re getting snippets of detail in response to moving around the house and trying to resolve discrete questions or handle minor inconveniences, and the additional agency – and the dialing-back of implementation depth after that initial, scarily-involved painting – makes it go down easier.

I felt similarly about the sexy bits. Isekai still risibly tries to have its cake and it eat too, emphasizing that the elf babe whose body you’re inhabiting is totally uninhibited and doesn’t find nudity sexual, but having practically the first bit of business that happens to you be a bit of burlesque farce that sees your bodice cut open and your skirts falling down (and for all that you’re not meant to be squeamish about your body, you’re awfully embarrassed by the sheets showing evidence of menstruation). Boobs are less of a focus than they were in the lactation-rama of First Contact or in the Portrait, where the gameplay entirely consists of ogling a picture of three well-endowed ladies, but the game still elicited more than a few eye rolls (like, one of the few books fully implemented in the library is a gynecology textbook).

All of the above is pretty much just a rehash of those earlier reviews, though, even if the particular valence of specific critiques shifts in this different context. I had two new reactions to Isekai proper, though. The first of these is that there is actual stuff for the player to do here, and I thought it was actually fairly mechanically engaging. I haven’t directly stated the premise, but the idea here, per the title, is that you’re a modern male human who has a bad dream and suddenly wakes up inside the body of the afore-discussed elf lady. And so this slice of the game is about trying to understand your new circumstances and surroundings, with regular prompts of italicized text pointing you towards the next revelation. Having played the author’s other games, I can’t say that the new information itself was all that interesting, since I’d already come across it before – though even then, it feels like the game makes a way bigger deal of elves having six fingers than that deserves – but the process of uncovering it feels pleasingly deliberate. You learn this new world’s numeric system by finding a ruler, noting the symbols marked on it, and counting its markings, and you similarly develop your literacy by working your way up from simple comic books to YA novels (the game acknowledges this is unrealistic, pitching it as your brain just catching up with a language your body already knows). My favorite moment in this vein was when the main character – who was a sailor in his previous life – was able to identify that this world was in another part of the Milky Way by finding the Magellenic Clouds. None of this is especially difficult, so I wouldn’t call them puzzles per se, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the emphasis on the way learning new things is helping develop your capabilities and understanding lends some purpose to the infodumping.

The second thing has to do with the isekai-ness of Isekai. I’m not super familiar with this genre, but it’s a version of portal-fantasy centering on the possession of the body of a native of the fantasy world. There’s a lot of dramatic potential in the mismatch between a character’s previous understanding of their identity and circumstances, and how those things have changed in their new reality, and the game is constantly drawing foregrounding the protagonist’s awareness of these mismatches, especially as it pertains to gender and sexuality. There are easily a dozen times – probably more – when the game harps on the protagonist recognizing their situation:

"I realise that my thinking is more than mine, the thinking of Etuye of now. and I realise my being Etuye: Inside me, Inside my soul, I’m myself, I’M ETUYE."

The tone is almost invariably overwrought and incredulous:

"After this realisation, you fight really hard to banish from your mind the surreal mental picture of three females, a demon, an angel and an elf sharing together the same bed… albeit that mental picture gives you an unexpected warmth inside your chest and tender feelings of… love ??"

It can feel comedic, because again, has this guy never heard about trans people, or lesbians, or poly folks? It’d be one thing if what was going on was a conflict between the protagonist’s pre-existing personality and sense of himself, and the way they’re attempting to assimilate these changes. But the protagonist is almost completely uncharacterized; his previous gender is established, and we know his profession, but other than that he’s pretty much an AFGNCAAP.

Because there’s no real interiority to the characterization, no substantial engagement with the subjectivity that shapes the experiences and revelations the game depicts, some moments that are clearly meant to be profound land as comedy. “Can you imagine a man suddenly having a woman’s body??? Or an elf lady being married to a demon lady and an angel lady???” Well, yeah, of course I can imagine those things, repeating this stuff over and over just feels silly – I get it already. But imagining a particular character, who had a particular relationship to their previous, male, body, trying to figure out what that shift means for his understanding of himself – that’d be something different, and more interesting. The same is true on the relationship side: was he married? Happily or unhappily? Was he straight, or gay, or something else? How do those experiences shape his feelings about Etuye’s menage, as he realizes that he might soon be called about to inhabit it? In the absence of a characterized protagonist, there’s nothing for these questions to stick to, no central figure whose form is reshaped by these changes. And so they just float, abstract and insubstantial, with the game reliant on repetition and emphasis to try to sell their impact.

Maybe I’m wanting something from Isekai that the game isn’t interested in providing. But I don’t think so! In fact the whole structure seems to demand an actual character at its center. And that absence is a shame, because having played this substantial chunk of the full game, I do see its appeal – there’s definitely an idea here that could work, and a dedication to craft that could make for something truly unique (plus yes, the sexy stuff, which I repeat is kinda out there but I gotta admit is distinctive). But far more than tightening up the prose or speeding up the pacing, to be a success I think the final game really needs to figure out who the story is about. It could be that actually, it’s just about the elf lady and her adventures, which would be fine, if a bit conventional. If the game is going to emphasize the alienness of its premise, though, I think it needs to go a different direction, and create a protagonist who’s just as compelling as the natives of the fantasy world.

OK, now for the first installment in a series that we’ll occasionally dip into through the remainder of the Review-a-Thon:

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

See, I have beta tested a fair number of games, and I got no more than a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep at a time when my son was in his baby-to-toddler phase, meaning that my medium-term memories of like 2022-4 come in obscure glimpses rather than a coherent whole. But when I saw the name “Blossom, NY” pop up on my to-play list, suddenly I recollected testing a game by the author set in upstate New York, where you used a Google Maps type interface (maybe it was literally Google Maps?) to follow pointers from one historical building to the next, learning more about the architecture and personalities at each stop.

It was a fun way of exploring local history, so I was excited to come back around to it and give it a go in something more closely resembling my right mind – only to discover that No, I Did Not Beta Test This. I’m pretty sure it’s set in the same town hamlet, with the same general theme, but the presentation is more traditional, as it takes the form of an illustrated travelogue narrated by (a version of) the author, implemented in Twine with links alternately progressing to a new site, or providing footnote-type explanations that go into topics discussed in the main text in more depth.

I’m still a fan, though! Like here’s a tip, if you want maximize your chances of getting a good review from me, you can’t go wrong by including a passage entitled “Municipal Divisions of New York State.” And as I read it I couldn’t help noting that it’s pretty northeast-focused, since the “township” model it discusses doesn’t hold in most of the west, where there are lots of unincorporated communities within counties rather than literally everything being attached to some sub-county level division. But nerding out in this very specific way is a lot of fun to me, especially when it’s paired with cool photos and background on the German sect that occupied the town for a decade before deciding that thing were getting too worldly and moving on. There’s a well-preserved mill, and old bridges, and 19th-century houses incompetently updated to modern standards! And the author’s inconclusive detective work aiming to uncover the origin of the town’s name is so great I’m surprised it was relegated to optional, red-link status.

There’s not much of a narrative here – as I said, it’s pretty much a tour, and a short one given that the town only occupies about two streets. There’s no grand drama revealed in the past, just an accumulation of migrations (some voluntary, some forced: this was Seneca land originally, and then one of their reservations, before being displaced), fires, and renovations. I didn’t mind any of that, my only critique is that I wish the game had been longer, and went even deeper, since I was having such a good time; I dimly remembered other buildings and other anecdotes from the Google Maps version I actually tested, and wanted to hear more about the rivalry between the German Evangelicals and German Lutherans, or what kind of stuff the gift shop that moved into the old lightning-struck church building sells.

Blossom isn’t anyplace special in the scheme of things, I’m sure you could make a game equally compelling about any of five hundred other towns in New York. But that’s the point, to my mind – every place has its stories worth telling, and this is a great formal for telling them.

This is really very good.

I know my schtick is usually to dress things up, do some tapdancing with a barely-related personal anecdote or set up a joke that pays off at the very end, or at minimum lay the groundwork for judgment instead of just announcing it. But here we are – and I’m saying this about a linear Twine game that uses vampirism as a not-even-thinly-veiled avenue to talk about loss, alienation, dysphoria, and the compromises we make to get through what we optimistically call our lives, at the level of concept there’s not much about Sleepless in the Sapphire City that’s very interesting, much less novel, at all.

The secret sauce, unsurprisingly, is the writing. I copied at least half a dozen full passages from the game into my notes, since they stand on their own as tiny poems and I wanted to be able to read them again. Here’s one of the first, and one of my favorites:

We say it’s dark
but look at that:
midnight
and the sky glows.

It’s not a haiku, metrically speaking, but it does everything you want a haiku to do. It’s also a nice bit of exposition, because the sky isn’t just bright at night due to ambient light pollution, but because the game takes place in a world with two moons, reflecting double the sunlight at the unhappy vampires below. That’s not just pointless worldbuilding, though, because that in turn sets off a rumination from the main character, who wonders if somewhere there’s a universe with one moon that’s more peaceful, because people can sleep better at night and the oceans are calmer. It’s got the structure of a joke, but also serves as a thematic reminder that one person’s worst-case status quo is another’s yearned-for escape.

Here’s another one:

I’m too aware
of where I live
I don’t say
“I live in a body”
I should say
“I live in a box
stacked up with other boxes
in a whole mountain of boxes
all the same
all different
and I’m a letter
in a word
in a sentence
on a page
in a newspaper
on a film reel
in a library
on a street of libraries
and we used
to be a novel”
I should say that
if I could speak to anyone
without leaving bite marks.

Reduced to its semantic content this is trite, but with these words and this meter, it’s a devastating statement of alienation and isolation.

I should say that the game isn’t all vibes and self-contained poems. Actually, there’s a reasonable amount of infodumping about bespoke vampire lore, but mirabile dictu, it’s actually a unique spin that updates the tropes while maintaining close ties to the traditions that birthed them. The cleverest bit here is the take on vampiric weaknesses: it’s not sunlight but the blue light of LCD screens that’s anathema to the undead, leaving them cut off from the screen-mediated society of humans; the symbols of faith that harm vampires are no longer religious ones, but corporate brand logos; and it’s not literal stakes but stakeholders, that is, connection with people who give a damn, who are the deadliest danger. Again, this has the shape of a joke, but is actually a canny way of repositioning the relationship between the vampiric protagonist and the elements of the living world, both good and bad, that will harm them, turning the logistics of managing an undead life into something more broadly resonant, into mythology.

There’s a plot too – it’s simple in its outlines, but effective, taking the protagonist from a childhood idyll through bereavement before ending in a squalid, heartbreaking climax. Or actually, not ending there, because my only complaint about Sleepless in the Sapphire City is that after it builds to a searing turning point, it keeps going for another ten minutes, with those final minutes largely return to the register of the opening, rather than sitting with the enormity of what’s happened. From a certain point of view, that’s thematic – pretending that a just-committed crime is no big deal is a classic coping strategy, after all, as is pretending that sleeping with someone you just slept with was likewise no big deal, and protagonist’s just done something that partakes of both those things – but I still found it a little disappointing.

That ending is a real weakness, but I minor one, I think. I return to where I started this review: Sleepless in the Sapphire City is really very good, exactly the reason why I keep coming back to IF decade after decade.

I suppose I’ve played a fair number of visual novels, in an objective sense – each year sees at least a couple entered in the various annual comps and events, so even though I haven’t played any of the big, longform names, I’ve got at least a fair bit of exposure. But it’s definitely an area where I feel myself on unsure footing, and so when I find myself wishing DEVIL’S LIMINAL weren’t quite so slow-paced, I wonder whether I’m critiquing the game or the format. Like, it’s definitely the case that it takes its time to get going: this is a supernatural mystery, but the first hour of the 1.5 hour demo version is content to slowly establish the main character, a teenager spending one last summer at home in small-town Arizona before heading off to college, and her milieu, with only the slightest hints of plot. And while there are a few choices, they’re not especially engaging, largely amount to either picking lines of dialogue that all have to be exhausted to progress, or answering simple “do you want plot or not?” questions when a friend calls to ask you to hang out.

In a book or a traditional piece of IF, where you could read all the dialogue in its short scenes in one or two passages, I think that would work fine, and I actually might admire the commitment to sitting with the characters before the mystical shenanigans started. But in VN format, the need to click through each individual line of dialogue was generally enervating. Fortunately, I’ve played enough VNs to know the RenPy trick where you can just click a bunch to get through the timed text, and then scroll through it much faster the second time using the mouse wheel, which made things more bearable, but I’m still worried that my concerns about pacing are an artifact of my unfamiliarity with VN conventions.

Even leaving that big question aside, there’s both a lot to enjoy and a lot to critique with DEVIL’S LIMINAL, though I come down more on the former side than the latter. Just to get the rest of the VN-specific conversation out of the way first, I’ll note that the visuals are very well done. Just about every character has an expressive, lightly-animated drawing representing them, with the exceptions (largely your mother, who is never directly depicted) pretty clearly intentional. The backgrounds, meanwhile, look to be photos fed through an early-Macintosh filter, evocative in black-and-white dithering. I often find the fact that 2/3 of the screen in a VN is mostly static kind of annoying, but DEVIL’S LIMINAL makes good use of the real estate, frequently shifting locations or bringing character icons on or off screen, with visuals that largely complemented the text.

That’s helpful because sometimes the text withholds a bit more than I think it should. For all that the game takes its time introducing Margo (the main character), her family, her work situation, her friends (including some new ones), and her backstory, it doesn’t provide context for much of what’s happening, allowing interactions to play out without always letting the player know about the dynamics beneath the surface. Sometimes that’s a reasonable choice – there’s clearly some Big Deal with Margo’s dad, and the game seems to be building up to a set of reveals that I suspect will land pretty well – but I was annoyed that it took two long scenes of interacting with Lee, the first of which seemed pretty innocuous, to learn that he was Margo’s dirtbag ex. And there’s a scene about an hour in, right when supernatural stuff starts getting weird, that talks about how she’s always yearned to be special, some kind of chosen one, and live in a world of demons and monsters, which feels like important characterization that’s just nowhere in play before that moment, aside from a couple glancing comments like saying that if she wrote a comic book, she’d want there to be vampires in it.

The characters and the setting are similarly both mostly good, with some less successful elements marring the picture. The cast is generally appealing, especially Bec, a new friend who turns out to actually share some history with Margo, with engaging dialogue that helps keep the slower scenes moving. My only cavil is that there are a couple of characters who are just wearing giant “bad guy” hats, coming off much flatter than the others: the aforementioned Lee is one of them, but the mother is even worse, a vicious, unpleasant caricature of a human being. Melodrama needs stock villains, I suppose, but especially in that more naturalistic first hour, I felt some whiplash between the author’s effort to carefully sketch in Margo’s personality, and the whirling black hole of motiveless malice that is her mom (the fact that it seems like some of her behavior may be driven by OCD, but that’s never directly addressed or interrogated, also doesn’t feel great). It could be that the non-demo portion of the game adds some nuance, of course!

As for the setting, the strip-mall wasteland of a small town in the American Southwest is generally well realized, with attention paid to the flora and fauna. One detail struck me as jarringly ill-chosen, though, which is the blasé way the characters talk about the heat: like, I’ve been in Arizona a couple times when it was 110 degrees, that’s not a mild inconvenience that makes your walk to work slightly uncomfortable, it’s an assault by an angry God that can leave you dead if you stray too far from air conditioning.

But these complaints are getting more minor as I go, so I’ll repeat that but for the pacing, I found a lot to like in DEVIL’S LIMINAL – and even that was starting to pick up as I got to the end of the demo and the plot began to kick in. Honestly, if this were a traditional piece of IF I’d be tempted to try the full game to see where things ultimately go. Since it isn’t, and I’m not really a VN person at the end of the day, I’ll count myself content with the piece of the experience I got, and allow myself to imagine the places it might go – imaginings that show up a full page of text at a time.