Reviews by Mike Russo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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