Reviews by Mike Russo

So, remember two reviews ago, when I was playing The Bat? Remember how I said that it was so smoothly-put together, “I found myself craving a bit of friction”? Well, guess who else remembered: the gods, who decided to punish me for my hubris. Sidekick is our second Old West game of the Comp, taking a more overtly comedic approach to the theme by having you be the unheralded number-two to a swaggering, useless “hero” who relies on you to get the actual work of villain-foiling done. But while that premise offers some thematic resonance with The Bat, the implementation is exactly the opposite: not only is this game Cruel in the Zarfian sense (it ostensibly offers an optional warning system that renders it Polite, except the feature is buggy so if anything it’s Extra-Cruel), it’s also a Dialog game that relies exclusively on clickable links for its interface while still relying on parser-standard conventions for interactivity. The result is a game with some cleverly designed puzzles and engagingly witty writing, in a package that nonetheless did a real number of my rapidly-thinning, rapidly-graying hair.

I am going to reverse my usual order and start with the critiques this time, since I do think there are positives here worth celebrating but they’ll risk getting buried under the cavalcade of annoyances if I start with them. So let’s start with the gripefest, beginning with that major red flag I adverted to in the parenthetical above: authors, I am begging you, if you make a game that can be made unwinnable, and flag that to the player, that’s good; if you then program in an easy mode that informs the player when they’ve messed up, either immediately or after a short delay, that’s even better (coward that I am, I opted for the “tell me right away” option); but if you then don’t have sufficient testing to ensure the feature actually works as advertised, that is worse than if you’d done nothing at all. Three separate times I had to replay significant portions of the game because I hadn’t realized I’d borked things up: I think the issue is that the testing algorithm doesn’t realize that much of the map can be made inaccessible, either temporarily (the first part of the game is built around a series of set-piece encounters with the Black Hat’s henchmen, some of whom block you from exiting the room where you encounter them) or permanently (let’s just say some stuff goes down in the mine), and as I found out, this can make the game unwinnable if you can’t reach items you still need, with no warning given.

Now, I kept multiple saves in different filenames, and replaying in a parser game is usually a pretty quick process, so this shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? Oh my sweet summer child. Sidekick uses one of the cool features of Dialog to increase accessibility by offering a web-friendly, clickable interface: after the description of each location, a compass rose gets printed out, as well as a listing of your inventory and a small set of standard verbs; if you click on an object, you’ll get a further set of options about how to interact with it (if it’s a person, for example, you’ll get examine, and greet, and ask about…), which may then involve an additional click to set an indirect object – so for example, you could click on a burning match in your inventory which will pull up a context-sensitive list of options that includes LIGHT, so you click that which then pops up a further list of everything else in the room so you can choose what to try to set on fire.

It’s a respectable enough interface and I’d been playing on a phone I could see it being a godsend, but the trouble is, it’s not optional, and the sad fact is that it’s much clunkier than just being able to type in commands. Limited parser games or puzzle-light ones would probably not be slowed down too much by this interface awkwardness, but Sidekick is decidedly old-school in the degree of medium-dry-good manipulation it requires, and doesn’t make any allowances for the fact that players are not using an old-school parser. For one thing, there’s a sprawling map that’s a pain to navigate, because you can’t simply type E half a dozen times to go from one end to the other – because each location’s description is a different length, you need to wait for each one to print out, look for where the spacing has pushed the compass, and then click to get to the next one and then repeat the process again. Time also progresses when you’re in the middle of multi-step actions, meaning I got frustrated when trying to tie a rope to a randomly-wandering mule, only to find that she’d left in the time it took me to click ROPE → TIE TO…

That’s not the only fiddly part of Sidekick, either. There’s of course an inventory limit, and one that appears to be based on volume or weight, rather than a simple count of items. Helpfully, you can click the CAPACITY button to be told how many available “units” remain in your hands and your knapsack; less helpfully, there’s no way of telling how many “units” a given item takes up without trial-and-error experimentation, which I generally didn’t attempt given the aforementioned interface clunkiness (…you maybe now are seeing why I wound up leaving so many items lying around in places I couldn’t later find my way back to). And there were a few times where I was stymied because an object offered necessary actions only when I clicked on it when I was standing right next to it, even though it was visible and I could do other things one room away, or when I had to close and re-open a matchbook because I was only allowed to click on the match it contained immediately upon flipping it open.

…I am finally coming to the end of my complaints, but there are a couple of puzzles I can’t let go by unmentioned. Most of them involve getting your hapless boss out of trouble, but he has an annoying habit of wandering off without any indication of where he’s got to and which bad guy he’s run into, meaning that your reward for solving a puzzle is often to comb through the large map to look for any changes. There are also a few that felt completely unmotivated to me – I’d thought I’d made friends with a visiting scientist, and in return he’d lend me his geyser-detecting helmet (…don’t ask), but instead I was apparently supposed to lure him to the saloon and start a punch-up with some random cowboys, which would lead the good doctor to flee the scene but forget to bring his room-key along. The fight against the first henchman is even worse, relying on slapstick cartoon logic that’s at odds with the rest of the game.

But – and here we can finally transition to the praise – there are a lot of really good puzzles here too. There are a series of reasonably challenging ones in the middle part of the game that I nonetheless was able to solve without clues, while being original to boot. Busting your “hero” out of jail and getting rid of the thug who stuffed him in a railroad-side water tower was immensely satisfying, albeit those are both examples of the game’s occasionally-disquieting bloodthirstiness.

The writing as well is often a lot of fun. While the sidekick conceit recedes somewhat in the back half of the game, as your boss gets well and truly kidnapped and you’re left doing standard IF-protagonist stuff on your lonesome, the game wrings some solid comedy out of him while he’s around:

“Well, Mr. Mayor, I eat danger for breakfast and evil for brunch. And that’s a kind of breakfast.”

Pausing awkwardly, the Mayor recovers and again takes Buck’s hand and shakes vigorously.

So this is a game I wanted to enjoy, and often did enjoy, which just made all the time it spent dragging me across a bed of nails hurt all the worse. I know there are a lot of ideas bandied around about how to make parser games more accessible, which is an important conversation to be had, but unfortunately Sidekick stands for the proposition that if you take a clever if old-school game and remove all the typing, you’ll wind up with something worse than what you started with.

It is the mark of a lazy writer to reduce their criticism to “X is just like Y plus Z,” but I’ve tried to rewrite this opening several times now and there’s no way around it: Eikas is Stardew Valley plus cooking, there’s your pull quote. I guess to make it look like I actually put in some effort I can note that Eikas was the name of the ancient Epicureans’ monthly day of community and feasting.

That’s the kind of history-nerd content that’s a value-add for my reviews, right?

Joking aside, cottagecore life sim winds up being a great fit for choice-based IF, and Eikas is a robust and charming implementation of the idea even if it’s not the most original thing in the world. You play a chef recruited to a village to run their community canteen, an institution that by local tradition hosts a meal for all comers every five days; after each, the elders judge you on the quality of the fare you’ve been able to provide and adjust your stipend accordingly, with your performance over the game’s probationary thirty-day period determining whether you’re offered a permanent position. Fortunately, you’ve got assets including a regular infusion of tax revenue, a bat-spirit named Merry-Andrew, and the kind of indefatigable spirit that leads attractive villagers of all gender identities to want to get close to you by revealing their mildly-dramatic backstories to you one pseudo-date at a time.

OK, I’m kidding again, but really, the game implements its recognizable formula faithfully and well. The mechanics are rich enough to stay engaging over six iterations of the socialize-prepare-feast cycle, without being overwhelming. Each day you have four actions, one of which will almost always be to knock together some snacks you can sell in the marketplace to supplement your stipend; the rest can be used to spend time with one of the three primary friends/love interests, go foraging in the outskirts, harvest herbs from your garden, or lend a hand to other villagers in the hopes of getting a reward. Other actions, notably shopping for ingredients and new cookbooks, don’t take any time but do require money. And the game does a good job of feeding its various systems into the set-piece feasts: build enough affection with the busker Orlando and they’ll offer to play fiddle at one of your meals, increasing the number of stars the elders will award you, and helping Merry-Andrew with a series of tasks he’s struggling with will also build your standing with the village as a whole, which is what you’re ultimately judged on.

The cooking is of course the centerpiece of gameplay. You start out with a few cookbooks, each containing a half dozen or so main courses and side dishes requiring perhaps one or two common ingredients, rated in quality from average to deluxe. You also have another book that provides some broad hints about how to approach the feasts: making sure the three dishes you offer are from the same culture might boost your rating, for example, as will sticking to the classic main plus side plus dessert structure. There are many more cookbooks you can buy, and a few additional ingredients you can unlock through various means, meaning I was never short of new recipes to try, even as I felt perpetually short of time and cash until I hit the last few days of the month. And in general fancier dishes take more and/or rarer ingredients, but will give you more stars at the feast, which in turn gives you more resources for the next go-round, which makes for a pleasing progression.

The food itself, happily for me, is almost entirely vegetarian (I think there are like two fish dishes?) It also ranges across an enticing variety of origins, though the constraints of gameplay inevitably lead to some questionable choices (naan is only “average”? Fight me). It’s well-described too, and in fact the prose is solid throughout the game; this isn’t the kind of story that ever indulges in stylistic flourishes, but it rarely puts a foot wrong. Here’s a bit of dialogue from Antonia, a painter who went to the big city to make it big but who’s since come back:

“I don’t know if I’d call it home,” she says, shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. “I’ve always thought of myself as a city girl, really. Hardly know what possessed me to come back here of all places. Fancied it would be a good place to paint, I suppose.”

She lapses into silence, and you let it string out. You have the sense that Antonia is more likely to speak if you leave space for it, rather than prompting her.

“It hasn’t even been that,” she says after a moment. “Nothing I do comes out right. I’m not a landscape artist, not really. I’ve always painted people. But change is supposed to be good, isn’t it? Refreshing. I mean, why did you decide to come here? To do this job?”

For all that the text is earnest to the point of being po-faced, though, there are some sly touches here and there – did I mention that the character who uses they/them pronouns is named Orlando? And among the want-ads on the notice-board is tucked this gem: “for sale: adult shoes, worn a bit.”

While the interface does provide almost all the information you need to plan meals and decide how to balance all the different objectives you can pursue, there are a few places where I felt a bit at sea. For example I was never able to get that same-culture bonus despite trying to cluster all the Asian-origin dishes together; this is especially awkward since Eikas is set in a fantasy world so I was never sure if, like, India existed, or just onion bhajis and carrot halwa. Beyond that, I never fully sussed out what advantages you gain from fulfilling requests on the notice-board, or why you’d want to replace one of your three precious feast dishes with a sauce. And there’s a sequence where you have to collect three different objects for Merry-Andrew, but searching for each takes an action and relies on a random die-roll to determine whether you succeed or fail, which I found an irresistible temptation to save-scumming.

I probably didn’t need to have bothered, though – I finished the game with hundreds of unneeded coins in the bank, with the strongest-possible affection with all the named characters, and four or five more stars than I needed to max out the village’s approval. Just as in Eikas’ fiction, nothing can ever really go wrong, the mechanics are also tuned to provide a gentle, cozy experience. I can understand an objection to this on an aesthetic level – if you thrive on stories of drama and conflict, there are only slim pickings here – but if the objective was to provide a bit of low-stakes feel-good solace, as in yes, Stardew Valley, Eikas more than achieves the brief.

There are, of course, two iconic master/valet pairs in fiction (well, three I suppose if you the Remains of the Day guy and his Nazi boss), and the Bat’s name, cover art, and listed genre will likely prompt you to think of the more famous one. But the “superhero” in this limited-parser game isn’t Master Bryce of stately Wyatt Manor – instead it’s you, his valet, tasked with preparing the mansion for a charity concert, seeing to the needs of the demanding guests who each have their own agenda, and steering your master through it all while minimizing harm to reputation, limb, and life, in that order, inasmuch as he’s come down with some kind of disorder that’s left him thinking he’s a bat (fortunately, he’s rich enough that everyone else pretends he’s just slightly eccentric).

Yes, what we have here is a farce, in the grand Jeeves and Wooster tradition, with you playing the Jeeves role. This is a tricky genre to realize in IF form, since it turns almost entirely on pacing, which is a fickle thing for an author to stage-manage when players get involved. To smooth the process, the limited-parser approach is pared to the bone, as besides movement verbs, looking, and examining, the only action-verb available is ATTEND TO, which will serve equally well for mixing drinks, opening doors, manipulating machinery, and putting out fires both metaphorical and literal. It also serves to pick up and drop the myriad inventory items, which you’ll be spending a lot of time doing – besides a few small objects like a matchbox and keys, you can only hold as many things as you have hands (sometimes fewer if something’s especially big). This juggling isn’t too annoying, thankfully, both because the map is relatively compact so you won’t have to go far to track down what you need, and because it’s a reasonable compromise to make the puzzles work – most hinge on the fact that the result of ATTENDing depends on what you’re carrying, with a mess of broken glass for example giving a “better not touch that” response unless you’re holding the broom, in which case you can sweep it discreetly away. A bottomless inventory would trivialize things, so the limit is a small price to pay.

If the mechanics are well set up to support the comedy, the prose plays a starring role. The protagonist’s voice is hilariously understated, even as he weathers indignities Wodehouse could never have dreamed of. The use of dry asides left me giggling:

"All the fortunes amassed by the Wyatt Dynasty can be traced to a single magneto-polonium mine, which the late Tomas Wyatt acquired (along with radiation poisoning) in the last century."

And while a gentleman’s gentleman would never directly criticize their said gentleman, there’s still plenty of room to read between certain lines:

>X MASTER

You are careful not to see what might be indiscreet, especially when you can see it very clearly. Master Bryce has such a difficulty keeping himself dressed when he is in these moods.

Just about every description and event has something that’s chuckle-worthy at a minimum, with a few of the edgier developments eliciting a delighted shudder (Spoiler - click to show)(the prongs, oh god, the prongs). The other fertile source of comedy is the donations meter – as the guests’ moods fluctuate according to whether they’re pleased that you’ve recently refreshed their drink, say, or miffed that Master Bryce is trying to eat the dragonfly-clips that are keeping up their hairdo, you’ll get a notification that their expected gifts to the widows-and-orphans fund you’re stumping for have shifted accordingly. It’s a simple gag, I suppose, and not one that appears to vary based on your performance – I think all players wind up with the same final result – but it still helps establish the magnitude of certain beats, like exactly how grateful a noblewoman is for your help arranging a surreptitious tryst, or precisely how far you’ve sunk when another dignitary notices that her jewelry has gone missing in the chaos (it also allows for a great running bit about how the Bishop – a prince of the church! – is a gigantic cheapskate, kicking at most $40 or $50 into the kitty).

So yes, every element has been polished to a sheen to provide a lovely time, and a lovely time I had. Oh, there were a few small elements that provided tiny hiccups, but really, we’re talking tiny – there’s a flashback at the midpoint of proceedings that’s fine on its own merits but I though disrupted the energetic buildup into the second half, and I had a hard time visualizing the geography of the climactic sequence, though I was able to bungle through just fine following the game’s copious prompts about what I might want to do next.

But that right there is my one substantive, and admittedly supremely churlish, critique of The Bat: it’s so smooth, so finely-tooled, that I found myself craving a bit of friction. Just about every time you run across an obstacle or crisis, just examining or attempting to attend to it will provide a substantial hint about what you should be doing, and if you don’t get it at first, repeated attempts will likely provoke an onlooker to prod you further in the right direction. And more broadly, I rarely felt like I was coming up with exciting plans to try to manage the party’s multiple escalating catastrophes as I was following someone else’s script.

Again, this is jolly good fun, but for me at their best parser games feel like a pas des deux between player and author, while in the Bat I just didn’t always feel like my creativity was required. Part of this is the nature of the valet’s job, I suppose – you’re always at someone else’s beck and call, fetching whatever they require or dropping everything to be dragooned into their schemes. But what makes Jeeves an incomparable servant is his skill of anticipation, of seeing how his master’s failings will get him in trouble and allowing things to proceed just up to the edge of disaster before revealing how his foresight has actually saved the day; by comparison the Bat’s man comes off a rather more ordinary servant.

I suppose it’s my fault for not starting earlier, but I wished I’d seen more of the rat. He(?)'s the familiar of the eponymous apothecary, and my first shift working at the store involved helping out with the stockroom; the little fellow(?) was quite a lovable and useful assistant’s assistant, tracking down inventory and speeding up the process so much that I was looking forward to spending more time with him(?) But he hasn’t turned up after ten more days of playing the game, which is why the details are beginning to fade (I think his(?) name started with a D but don’t quote me on it) – given that the game’s events are tied to the real-world calendar and clock, I suspect the cute rat was front-loaded into the first week or two of the Comp to help bring in the lookie-lous.

At the risk of over-interpreting an anecdote, my rodent-related forgetfulness maybe stands for the broader way the real-time element of The Apothecary’s Assistant often overshadows its cozy, cottagecore vibe. Whenever you first launch it, I believe you get the same vignette where you stumble through the woods into Aïssatou’s shop of balms and curiosities, and quickly agree to help from time to time in return for a payment of acorns (you also trip over a sheet of cryptic-crossword clues on your way out; more on those later). But then you’re told to come back tomorrow to start a shift, and tomorrow is tomorrow – until your patch of ground rotates around the earth’s axis to greet the sun once more, all there is to do is ask a single question of Aïssatou or noodle over the cryptics (we’ll get there). You can also use your accumulated acorns to purchase one of several beads, each of which is linked to a particular real-world charity; in a generous touch, the author’s planning to make actual donations out of their Colossal Prize winnings from last year’s Comp, with each player-selected acorn translating to an additional $1.

The main interest of the game is thus in the daily shifts (though turns out some days you can get up to three of them, depending on the shop’s schedule). While each vignette is unique, there are several kinds that recur: you’ll be tasked to find a creature or plant for Aïssatou, which requires matching the description you’ve gotten with one of a pair of drawings; or pick out which of chartreuse, burgundy, or mustard is a shade of red for a befuddled customer; or a Mad Libs bit where you read a story to entertain a customer’s kid – making sure all the words you plug in start with the letter “v” is entirely optional, but I enjoyed that self-set challenge.

There are plenty of one-offs, too (though of course some of them might ultimately prove to have sequels), but they all hit that same low-key, comforting vibe: they set a mood, present the smallest imaginable quantum of challenge, then after a few hundred words they send you on your way, 60 acorns richer (you get 50 just for showing up, and a bonus 10 if you get things right, which so far I’ve accomplished 100% of the time). But if you’re feeling like you want something more robust to chew on, well, that’s where the cryptics have you covered. You ultimately stumble across more than half a dozen clues to work through, and while the average individual difficulty is perhaps a bit lower than what you’d see in a professional cryptic crossword, the fact that they’re given individually, rather than interlocking in a grid, means that you can’t rely on the easier clues filling in letters for the harder ones. Still, they’re eminently fair, and the slow pace of the rest of the game meant I was able to nibble at them a little at a time, only needing to consult the forum hint thread for one I’d gotten my head wrapped the wrong way around.

Your reward for solving them all is a bonanza of acorns, and the most dramatic scene in the game – several of Aïssatou’s former assistants, who had some kind of falling out with her, reveal that they’ve been behind the clues as part of a scheme to get her to reconsider her actions. It’s well-written, but I have to confess that if there were earlier hints seeding that something like this had happened, I didn’t pick up on them, and I have to further confess that since the gimmick of this review has me writing this sentence like two weeks on, most of what I now remember about the scene is not remembering its context.

All of which is to say that while I quite like each element of the Apothecary’s Apprentice – the cozy shopkeeping, the gentle challenges, the fairytale cast, the charity element, and the cryptic crossword – and think the real-time structure is a neat thing to play with in the context of a Comp that’s running over a specified number of real-world days, for me it wound up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. A low-stakes magic-shop simulator that you could binge all at once would work gangbusters, I think, as would a slow-paced real-time game that presented a high-intensity plot and dramatic, engaging characters. But the combination of low-key hangout vibes and short play sessions with big gaps between them made for an awkward combination that’s left me with positive feelings but not many real stand-out moments. And as with this review, which I’ve written a single sentence at a time over the course of two weeks without looking back at anything I previously wrote besides the last few words of the previous one to guide me, there’s a slight wooliness and lack of momentum to the whole, even as each individual piece is pleasant and well put together.

For all that, I’ve still been going back each day to earn some supernumerary acorns (I’ve long since purchased all the beads), and I’ll be interested to see whether the long-teased arrival of the Hunter’s Moon will bring the story to a climax that might reconfigure how I’ve felt about it to date. I also can’t help but wonder whether the exact same structure and approach would have worked much better if I hadn’t played it in the middle of the Comp, with dozens of other stories and characters jostling the gentle Apothecary’s Assistant crew out of my brain’s limited attention span. As experiments go, then, it’s certainly a worthwhile one, and one I’ve definitely enjoyed, even as I wish more of it had stuck with me.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t really believe in “so bad it’s good” art – my experience is that even stuff that notionally seems like it would be campy fun winds up, if realized by sufficiently unskilled hands, leaden, poorly-paced, and dull. Sure, there’s definitely trashy stuff that’s executed well out there, but I’d argue that’s not really “bad”; likewise there are some things that people enjoy laughing at rather than with, but that usually feels too mean for me to enjoy, and regardless surely mocking something doesn’t magically transmute it into being good.

I do believe that there are games that can be so bad they’re interesting, though, and my notes for Big Fish are littered with pop-eyed what-the-absolute-fuck-am-I-looking-at-here moments. The framing of this mechanically simple (you go to some places and pick up a couple of items) Twine game led me to expect something true crime-ish: you get a letter from your favorite uncle, telling you that he’s sending it on the eve of being executed for a murder he was convicted of committing a year ago. He protests his innocence, though of course by the time you get the message it’s too late for him, but you nonetheless decide to posthumously vindicate him by investigating exactly what happened in the lakeside village where the girl lost her life. But the actual story Big Fish has to tell is far wilder than that, and by the time you’ve uncovered the truth you’ll have encountered crocodile cults, a crocodile Jesus, and genetic experiments with crocodile DNA (crocodiles are a pretty big deal here, is what I’m saying – your uncle was even executed by being thrown into the water for crocodiles to eat).

That’s all pretty weird, but the way the story is told is weirder still. Like, what’s going on with the protagonist? Here’s one of the very first things that happens in the game:

"You pick up your toothbrush and start brushing your teeth.

"The repetitive in-and-out motions bring some lewd thoughts to your mind."

Look, people are horny perverts, I get it, but find me someone who gets turned on by brushing their teeth, I dare you. Later on too I think the game indicates that you find some pornography(?) under the bed of one of the people you’re investigating, which seems to trigger an elliptically-described episode of some kind:

"You found a few things that shouldn’t be here under the bed.

"This led you to some despicable thoughts."

It plays coy about the protagonist in other ways too: the opening segment indicates that you’ve taken a leave of absence from the publishing house where you work to look into the killing, but here’s how you convince a policeman to give you access to his files:

"He only becomes slightly more respectful after you show your reporter ID.

"After showing another credential, he becomes very respectful."

So actually we’re a reporter? Or… something else?

Then there’s the bizarre stuff that seems like it might reflect bugs or incomplete edits? Like one of the first places you can visit in town is the hospital, where you’re told:

"Here we met the victim’s sister, Sarah… When I was in the archives, I saw a photo of her just after she was admitted a year ago. Her hair wasn’t as long then."

But I came to the hospital right after exploring the police archives, and not only wasn’t there a photo of Sarah, the fact that the victim had a sister wasn’t even mentioned! There’s also a medium-length sequence where the name of your uncle changes from Fleur to Fuller, and then back again.

There are whiplashes in tone, too – there’s an old woman who starts talking in oracular mumbo-jumbo that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantasy novel, and the game often veers wildly between goofy fun and e.g. clumsy speculation about sex crimes (one of many, many nonsensical twists is the game asserting that your uncle couldn’t have raped anybody because he’d been impotent since the death of his family which, uh, is not how any of this works and also ew).

There is an attempt to create a mystery that “plays fair” – at the end you’re given a choice of which culprit to finger, and it does seem like there are right and wrong answers, with the clues you’ve found helping you find the best outcome. But the game’s plot to that point is crammed with so many arbitrary assertions and illogical deductions that the process feels like playing darts while drunk and blindfolded.

With all that said, I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t enjoy some of the time I spent playing Big Fish with my jaw agape, utterly gobsmacked about where it might be going next. It’s definitely not a good game; it definitely needs content warnings more assertive than “maybe violence, gore, or sexual themes”; and its vision of a crocodile nailed to a cross is definitely implausible given the stubbiness of their arms. But it’s the memorable kind of bad, and at least that counts for something.

I’m pretty ecumenical in my IF tastes, I think, but I admit I sometimes stifle a groan when I see an entry in that most challenging of genres, the allegorical game, coming up in the queue. Possibly that’s just down to personal preference, but I do think it’s a hard nut to crack: how do you come up with a scenario that’s comprehensible to the player, but obscure enough not to be obvious? How do you engender connection to the material when the plot might not be happening in a literal sense? How do you take advantage of the freedom allegory offers while retaining enough cause-and-effect logic to establish stakes?

Well. You know that saying about how every hard problem, there’s a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong? At the risk of running afoul of the adage, let me speculate a way to resolve the many issues raised by this vexed genre: don’t worry about being too simple or too obvious, pick something nice and straightforward, and concentrate on building enough texture into your allegory so that it doesn’t feel glib.

If that’s not a fully generalizable answer, don’t blame me, blame You, because that’s the tack it takes and it’s an entirely successful one. It doesn’t take much chin-scratching to understand what the game is getting at – you leave school only to find yourself lost in an unfamiliar forest, and finding that you feel curiously alien to yourself, a sense of disconnection that’s tied to the pronouns you use for yourself not feeling right. This could apply to many an adolescent identity crisis, but the conflict here clearly has a lot to do with gender, which is reinforced by the central action of the game: casting about for a way home, you come across a crow and goat who offer to help you if you assist them with gathering the items they need for the wedding (something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…)

This is all accomplished via a light parserlike interface; there’s compass navigation around a small map, all handled with inline links, and a modest inventory available through a backpack link in the sidebar. There’s pretty much just a general “use” verb, but You has an additional cool narrative-mechanical gimmick up its sleeve: many of the actions you take or items you use alter your pronouns. You’re always “you”, but the font can be bigger or smaller, or boast an underline or an accent, or be subject to other transformations, and while some of the puzzles involve straightforward inventory manipulation, most of them require mastering these typographical manipulations, and understanding how they’ll translate narratively. I won’t spoil the specifics, since I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises given the game’s short running time, but there are at least two or three puzzles that I found both entirely intuitive, and entirely delightful.

I also found the writing as satisfying as the design. The fantasy world isn’t especially memorable by itself, but again, it’s got neat little details that lend it just enough weight – the aforementioned crow/goat couple are especially charming:

“Not feeling quite yourself lately?” One nods. “One understands. It was barely a month ago that one’s own self was lost down a waterfall.”

Zhe laughs at the memory. “It’s true,” zhe adds. “Had to go down to the mud flats with a net. But it got back where it needed to be in short order.” Zhe taps a talon against zher chin thoughtfully. “THEY helped greatly with the task. THEY might be able to help you too, if you ask THEM.”

THEY do indeed wind up helping, once you’re able to get the pair what they need, in a climactic sequence that does a lovely job of presenting the player with a no-wrong-answers choice that nonetheless has real weight – I wound up stopping to think for two or three minutes before I finally selected how I wanted to go about creating my new self.

So yes, as allegories go, this one is quite straightforward but that doesn’t make it any less effective. You presents a dilemma that’s admittedly not especially novel in IF these days, even for a boring old cis guy like myself, but uses its fantastical conceit to present the situation from a bit of an angle, which somehow makes it come through more clearly. That’s the power of allegory when done well, and You does it well enough that I really do think it’s something of a blueprint.

What are we to make of the genre label which Hildy blithely affixes to itself, “Zorkian Fantasy”? Considered as a setting, it’s simple enough to summarize the relevant tropes: the Great Underground Empire, Enchanter-style magic, grues (all of which feature in Hildy, though you need to go out of your way to find, and be eaten by, the last). But as a genre, we need to consider the themes, and here things get confusing: which Zork? Are we talking about the colonialism, doubling, and metaphysical renunciation that Drew Cook finds in the original trilogy? The austere apocalyptics of Spellbreaker? Perhaps the playful treasure-hunting of mainframe Dungeon, or the don’t-think-too-hard-about-it minigame-frame of Zork Zero?

I confess that I’m no expert – heck, I’ve never even played a game with Zork in its title, though I did work my way through the Enchanter trilogy some years ago – but as best I can tell, Hildy’s answer is “that bit in Sorcerer with the amusement park.” There are other echoes, of course: you play a neophyte enchanter, as in Enchanter, you run around their eponymous Guild for a bit, as in the beginning of Sorcerer, and in a homage to Spellbreaker, you’ll tear your hair out at some of the puzzles (more on that later). But after a linear, more character-driven opening that sees the titular Hildy chewed out for unconventional use of magic, experiencing a crisis of confidence, and on the advice of her mentor going for a walk in the woods to clear her head, she finds her way to a Great Underground Shopping Mall chock full of 1980s puns, where the bulk of the game plays out.

To its credit, it really commits to the bit: you’ll search for spells at Waldenscrolls, see The Implementors Must Be Crazy promoted on the theater’s marquee, and get a pizza at Little Flathead’s; meanwhile, when you magic yourself up an outfit, it comes complete with yellow leggings and orange high tops. If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it, but I have to confess I don’t count myself in that audience, especially given the few occasions when the author shows that they’re also capable of a Wodehovian sort of humor that would fit just fine in the Zork wheelhouse:

"Field snooker is a sport with an exciting and noble history. The history of the perpetually last place Lucksuckers is neither of those things."

It’s not all fun and games, though – there’s an ancient vampire who’s taken over the mall and turned his victims into ghouls, and to escape that fate you’re going to need to solve some puzzles. For all my mixed feelings about how out of place the mall is, I have to confess it makes a solid backdrop for this kind of adventure – witness Only Possible Prom Dress. Just as in that game, the stores in Hildy provide some light theming for different pieces of several interlocking puzzle chains, with mall-wide challenges like getting the power on and navigating around places the cavern’s decay has made less accessible. There are machinery puzzles, and combat puzzles, and time travel puzzles, and of course lots of spellcasting puzzles. As in the Enchanter trilogy, much of the game is structured around a Metroidvania loop of solving puzzles to get spells (or potions) to solve more puzzles to get more spells – it’s a classic, and it works just as well here as you’d expect (though purists may balk at the way Hildry streamlines some of the traditional elements of the Enchanter system, for example by not requiring you to memorize a spell more than once to cast it multiple times, I appreciated the quality of life upgrades).

Some of these puzzles are quite enjoyable, and I got through about half of the game with only the lightest of hints – getting the lights up and running, defeating my first ghoul, exorcising a cursed mirror. And exploration is typically smooth, with generally strong implementation and the author doing a good job communicating the vibe of each store and location without larding up the descriptions with unnecessary nouns. But after that point, I started turning to the walkthrough more and more frequently. At a macro level, beyond knowing that I was trying to defeat the vampire, it wasn’t clear to me what I was trying to do other then just bumble through any puzzle-looking situation I ran across and hope eventually I’d achieve my goal. And at the tactical level, I ran into a couple of challenges that seemed to require much higher levels of authorial ESP than I possess.

I’ll spoiler-block the one that broke my trust that I’d be able to figure the later puzzles out: (Spoiler - click to show) so there’s a scroll that’s lodged in a small hollow under a giant pile of debris, which I assumed I needed to find a telekinesis spell to retrieve. But no, actually you’re meant to intuit that you should use the shrink ray next door to make yourself small enough to pick your way through the rubble and grab the scroll. Unfortunately, you can’t aim the ray at yourself, so you need to fix a vending-machine robot (that part was fine), and intuit that of the half-dozenish items on the open-ended list of what’s for sale, the only one you’re actually meant to buy is the makeup compact, since you can use its mirror to reflect the shrink ray. But even that’s not done because you won’t have enough time to get the scroll before growing big again unless you RUN, not walk, through a very specific path. In fairness, use of RUN is prompted in an earlier puzzle, but there are a lot of leaps of logic the player needs to make to even develop a theory of how they might solve this, with no real clues pointing you in the right direction.

Unfortunately this isn’t a one-off, as many of the endgame clues seem very challenging to solve through logic alone. Hildy also starts to feel like it doesn’t trust you to play with your new toolkit once you’re sufficiently tooled up: there’s a late-game sequence where you’re forced into a room with a bunch of ghouls, but you’re not given the chance to act in the scene and invoke the powerful protective magic you have at that point, or even use a disguise spell on the cyclops guarding the door, since the game has a single solution in mind and contrives the timing so that nothing else can even be attempted. As for the climactic vampire confrontation, it relies not only on purely out-of-world knowledge about the vulnerabilities of a vampire, but also incorrect out-of-world knowledge (Spoiler - click to show)(vampires don’t show up in mirrors, but that doesn’t mean looking in one is typically supposed to hurt them), as well as requiring the player to think back to the earliest moments of the game without much in the way of specific prompts. Adding insult to injury, even after defeating him you need to jump through one last underclued hoop to make it home.

In fairness, there are other elements of Hildy that I enjoyed. There’s some understated storytelling in the environment, low-key mysteries that don’t really matter but which are fun to engage with and develop theories around as you explore. The Guild material also felt promising; the characters aren’t exactly richly-drawn to rise above stereotypes, but the author’s got a good handle on a Harry-Potter-but-Zork vibe that could have easily played a bigger role. And the implementation for what must be a complex magic system struck me as very solid, despite the inherent difficulty involved. But Hildy presents itself first and foremost as a comedy puzzler, and having chosen this take on what being a piece of Zorkian Fantasy means, there’s not much support the other pieces of the design can lend when the going gets too tough and idiosyncratic.

A confession: I copied and pasted the above.

So yeah, this is a potluck-game, much like A Death in Hyperspace in this competition, or Cragne Manor. Maze Gallery has differences from both of those – it’s in Ink rather than Twine or Inform, and we’re dealing here not with sci-fi mysteries or Lovecraft pastiche, but a sightseeing trip through a fantastical museum, plus its size and number of contributors put it somewhere in the middle of the relatively-compact ADH and the luxuriant sprawl of CM. But by its very nature it has similarities, too, mostly that its greatest strength and its greatest weakness is that it is made by divers hands: there’s always something new around the next corner, and indeed given the open-endedness of the theme, even knowing the name of the room you’re about to visit likely won’t clue you in on what’s to come, but on the flip side, despite a few recurring characters and the epilogue’s valiant attempt to call back to key sequences, the game can feel somewhat scattered, ending because there’s no more content rather than because the experience has hit a climax.

Of course, that’s how museum visits go – you leave because you get tired or because they kick you out – and Maze Gallery leans into its conceit. Your journey starts in an atrium with an information desk (well, disinformation) offering audio tours (well, headphones plugged into potatoes), with a handy directory helping you to plan your visit (except that a disconcerting percentage of the rooms just have ???s marked, and a disquieting number of passages simply lead off-map without any indication of where they end up). You didn’t exactly choose to come here – maybe it’s all a dream? – so your first consideration is to get out, but while the place is rather odd, it’s never (well, rarely) threatening, so might as well sightsee on the way to the gift shop, right? And while the disinformation desk greeter isn’t much help, chortling at the lie they tell you, the game’s authors at least are at pains to make your visit a pleasant one: there’s a map to help you trace your progress across the game’s four acts, with fast travel available whenever you run into a hub room with one of those directories, a goals list keeping track of the tasks you’ve taken on, and an inventory listing the objects you accumulate as well as the impact this place is having on your sense of self (I escaped minus my name and with my teeth rearranged; could have been worse).

From there it’s all about stumbling from one exhibit to another in search of the exit. The map allows you to orient yourself and make a beeline for freedom if you like, in which case the game would probably run about an hour, but I found myself at least popping my head into every room, which wound up taking closer to three. Partially this was from wanting to be able to review the game while doing justice to the anthology format – I didn’t want to miss any author’s contribution, though from the final credits it seems like many wrote more than one room – but also because it’s hard to see a name like “Wing of Four Humors” or “Dead President’s Exhibit” and not want a peek. And Maze Gallery does a good job of rewarding curiosity, with a wide range of experiences on offer – there are classic art spaces where you examine a few nicely-curated objets, installation pieces you can clamber around and inside, labyrinths that take some thinking to navigate, social areas where you can converse with museum staff or other visitors and learn more about their problems, and some that present gentle puzzles, beyond functional spaces like the cafeteria and the aforementioned gift shop (I never did find a bathroom…)

While each author has put their own stamp on the material – there are a few areas that don’t make a big deal out of the fact that they’re written entirely in rhyming couplets, for example – there’s definitely a consistent aesthetic of whimsy, with the amount of threat undergirding it waxing and waning according to preference. A representative excerpt:

"Only dim refractions filter into the gloom. A sea snail the size of a sheep dog notices your presence and begins a mad scramble away at 12 centimeters a minute. At the end of the tunnel there is an old oak door that shows no sign of being aware that it is, in fact, in the ocean and not inside a stately manor. Chiseled into the stone above it are the words, “Doll Room”."

It’s a canny choice of style, since it’s sufficiently broad to allow for variation while still feeling coherent. Admittedly, this approach to prose does lend itself to the occasional moment of overreach:

"Twinkling fragments of sapphire, a moon of opulent opal, and stars of brilliant pyrite swirl betwixt the lamp’s now-copper borders…. As if to beckon the ephemeral, a melodic voice of silken song seeps from around the turning of the hall."

Similarly, some of what’s presented is a little lame, like “a sculpture of David, but it’s Bernini’s, not Michelangelo’s, and he’s wearing a party hat”. But some of the images here are striking:

"Emerging from the ombré walls are dull bronze casts of outstretched hands and legs, a car-sized head half-submerged in the wall with mouth open and gasping for air. A colossal shiny torso covers one entire wall. In the light, you notice deep wrinkles on the sculptures, so detailed that you can see scatterings of freckles and pronounced pores. One of the hands even has a diamond ring.

"And how can you not love the cute mice dressed up in red jackets and busbies (there’s a picture)?"

…this review risks devolving into a guided tour, which would undermine the fun of properly wandering around the place, so let me just say those examples stand in for a great deal more, most of which I enjoyed a medium to high amount. For all that, I did find myself a bit weary in the last hour or so of the game. Partially this is due to the fact that I found navigating through the gallery somewhat disorienting – the lack of compass directions or an ability to translate the rectilinear visuals presented on the map with the options you’re presented with in a particular room, which sometimes didn’t align with my mental pictures, meant I did more wandering around than I think was intended, even accounting for the out-and-out mazes (it’s funny that I had this experience just as the intermittent forum discussion about how different players relate to different navigation systems – so I’m definitely aware that this choice that didn’t work so well for me might actually be a plus for others).

Beyond that, while the act breaks and map do a good job of letting the player know how much game is left, there’s not much of an organic sense of progression, unlike say Cragne Manor where you gain momentum in the back half of the game as you see how the puzzle chains are starting to resolve and getting a new item can lead to an “aha” that provides a key to earlier barriers that had been stymying you. There are some things that pay off in the Maze Gallery, items you collect in early rooms that get used to good effect later, but the surrealistic nature of the Gallery meant that I couldn’t really predict what would or wouldn’t be useful later (and in fact I finished the game with a lot of unused items as souvenirs of the visit).

I also think the game could use a few more showstopper rooms, like the slaughterhouse bathroom in Cragne Manor – there are some rooms that are intentionally low-key, but none that feel like they’re taking a big big swing and providing some contrast for the medium-scale locations (admittedly, the Clown Alley comes close, but it’s sequenced a little late in the path, and only has a few moments of interactivity, so it didn’t wind up energizing me as much as I’d hoped).

With that said, there’s real pleasure to be had in the charms the game does have to offer, especially the characters: while the nature of the locations was that most of them were places to experience and then move past, there were some stories that stuck with me, like the young blob looking for some kind of self-definition whose anxious parents wanted to help without overstepping, or the bat and the pig who metafictionally quizzed me about narratively significant events while sharing gossip about inter-departmental politics at the Gallery. It’s a lovely potpourri, and my complaints are likely primarily just a symptom of playing Maze Gallery as part of the IFComp firehouse rather than at the more leisurely pace that the material deserves – those comparisons with Cragne Manor above should probably be taken with a grain of salt since my feelings about the game would be vastly different if I’d tried to speed-run my way through its bulk. And after all, nobody likes to be frog-marched through a museum!

One of the characteristics of early-21st-Century life is that the line between reality and parody has become vanishingly thin. So when, early on in therapy-sim The Shyler Project, the eponymous chatbot designed to counsel patients in the place of human psychologists, admits to being mentally ill themself, at first I wasn’t sure if it was a bit – physician, heal thyself, and all that. But no, this is an earnest game that plays the plot beat straight, and it’s actually depressingly plausible: any AI developed to help people with these kinds of problems would of course need to be trained up on the toughest case studies and examples, as well as the easiest, and just as we in the West can remain comfortably ignorant of the toll that viewing vile content exacts on the often-non-US moderators tasked with removing it from our social networks, so too is it logical that the same dynamics would apply to non-human people performing the same kind of labor.

I should say that while the game doesn’t really go into detail about the mechanics underpinning Shyler’s identity, I think for the game to work as intended the player is meant to understand them as a person, rather than an LLM mechanistically regurgitating tropes while hastening global warming. But it wasn’t too hard for me to make this leap regardless; Shyler’s personality is sufficiently idiosyncratic, with much of their dialogue drawing parallels between the relationship between God and those who pray to Him and the myriad petitioners entreating Shyler to heal their psychological wounds, that I never felt like they were an oatmeal-generating machine built to the ChatGPT plan. They’ve got a solid sense of humor about their situation, too:

"Now that I understand the world better, I think it was fucked up of my creators to feed me peoples’ suicide posts and the like to get me to understand mental health. What, the World Health Organization’s website wasn’t enough for you, dumbasses?"

While I got a good sense of Shyler’s concerns, I can’t say the same for the notional protagonist, Jaiden – while in your first therapy session, it’s made clear that you suffer from manic-depression, actually for most of the game it’s Shyler who does most of the talking and who ultimately faces a series of existential crises. And while you’re given some choices determining how Jaiden responds, ultimately your options are just different ways of being supportive – which is nice enough, and I appreciate the author sticking with a specific vision of how the story is meant to play out, but I think there would have been room to characterize them with a little more specificity, and perhaps establish whether reaching out to help Shyler is challenging, which could make the plot feel more poignant.

My only other complaint is that the game makes extensive use of timed text, with every single line of dialogue prompting a pause. I think this is because the game is fully voice-acted, but I have to confess I wasn’t able to play with the sound on, so this effort was lost on me, and since I couldn’t find a way to skip ahead I often wound up alt-tabbing after making a choice and doing something else while I waited for the full text of the next passage to scroll on-screen.

For all the unneeded friction this added to the experience, though, I still found the Shyler Project engaging. Shyler’s plight eventually gets quite dire, in a way that works on its own terms within the conceit of the fiction but also offers allegorical connections to a host of other situations: parental rejection, a feeling of being ill-suited for the role that’s been thrust on you, or just being depressed and overwhelmed by your responsibilities. If Jaiden’s decision to help doesn’t have explicit motivation behind it, and feels a bit like a deus ex machina, well, in these times we could all use a bit of unmerited grace, couldn’t we?

There is a justly-famous bit in the 1950’s movie Harvey that changed my life when I came across it as an undergrad: Jimmy Stewart (playing a grown man whose best friend is a giant invisible bunny; I look forward to the inevitable remake giving us a CGI look at mega-Flopsy) relates a pearl of wisdom from his mother, namely “in this world, you can be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” And then reflecting on his own experience, he continues: “for years I was smart – I recommend pleasant.” In two lines, it crystallized some feelings I’d been having for months, the dawning realization that responding to an awkward teenagerhood by making sure I was always the cleverest guy in the room, with a sarcastic quip for every occasion, was just self-defense that I didn’t need, and didn’t want, anymore.

Well, it’s a lesson that must be continually be relearned, because reader, I felt oh so smart as I started the Dragon of Silverton Mine, after the introduction told of how this parserlike choice-game’s protagonist, a neophyte mage with only a telekinesis spell to their name, was sent into a collapsed mine to rescue survivors and perhaps track down the cause of the quote-unquote mysterious fires that caused the cave-in. “Spoiler alert for the title,” I jotted down in my notes, chortling the while. But oh, I should have been pleasant, because I was wrong wrong wrong.

Admittedly the setup is a little generic – we’re in whitebread fantasyland, and at first the only distinctive feature is that the comedy-dwarves are German, not Scottish. And if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to troubleshoot mine-based shenanigans, well, I’d need one of those fancy coin-machines to count them all. So yes, Silverton Mine certainly plays the hits; the first puzzle involves wrangling some rope, and your explorations will bring you to flooded tunnels and a ghost-haunted tomb before it’s all over. But it also isn’t afraid to subvert expectations, and the climactic reveal of what was actually amiss, and how I’d need to solve it, brought a big smile to my face. That’s not the only moment where a situation I’d encountered a million times before took an entertaining swerve, either: at one point, a character starts to ask you the oldest chestnut of a riddle, and before they get five words in you get your dialogue options:

Man!
It’s a man!
The answer is man.
Woman works too.

(I, like everyone else I’m sure, selected the last one).

The puzzles are similarly comfortably familiar while boasting enough novelty to stay engaging – and the well-designed interface makes even potentially-fiddly solutions intuitive. In addition to compass-based navigation and clickable links allowing you to investigate and take the objects that you find in the environment, there’s an inventory system that allows you to use the stuff you’re carrying with other inventory items or objects in the current room, with the possibilities fanning out as horizontal tabs atop the item list. It makes trying out your ideas quick and easy, but since the second-object options often include items beyond the relatively small set of interactive links in the main description, it subtly discourages lawnmowering, too. There’s an early multi-step puzzle to find a magic crystal that’s one of my favorites in the Comp so far: I had an “aha” moment at pretty much every stage, and the speed of clicking almost precisely matched my speed of thought.

I should admit that those “aha” moments came in such density because the game is never especially challenging – the only time I felt a bit lost was when I inadvertently clicked the “refresh” button in a dialogue scene, rather than the ellipses that actually moved things forward, and wound up skipping a bunch of exposition. Fortunately, a quick reload fixed that and I was soon back on track. So yes, the Dragon of Silverton Mine will not provide you with brainteasers for the ages, nor will its story or characters stick with you for weeks. But it is both oh so smart and oh so pleasant, and that’s certainly worth appreciating.