Reviews by Mike Russo

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SALTWATER, by SkyShard
Drinking from the firehose, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

Now that the post-Twine revolution is well and truly settled, it feels natural to survey the different choice-based subgenres – branching CYOA-style narratives, RPG-lite quality-based narratives, puzzle-y parserlike hybrids – and think yes, of course this is how it had to be. But if you went back to 2000 to tell a reasonably-cosmopolitan member of the parser-focused amateur IF community that in 25 years choice-based games would be a big part of the scene, I’d bet that they’d think you primarily meant hypertext fiction. While many folks back then thought CYOA and gamebook approaches were overly simplistic, literary hypertext had serious ambitions and academic cred that matched the arty aspirations of the IF scene, so it might not have seemed like that big a gap to bridge. Of course that’s not the path events wound up taking, and I’m not sure of any contemporary authors mainline-IF working in that tradition other than Kaemi Velatet. But I still sometimes wonder what our Comps and Festivals would look like if the hypertext model was a major influence on our games: we might see narrative choices decentered in favor of allusive linkages, characters deemphasized in favor of linguistic play, and thematic coherence seen as a greater virtue than a satisfying plot. We might have better tools, in short, to create, present, and engage with games like SALTWATER.

Recapping the premise and the way it’s elaborated here might start to get at what I mean. The game plays out over three acts that are more like cycles, with each one moving an ensemble of half a dozen or so main characters (and maybe a dozen more supporting ones) through a sequence of set-pieces and flashbacks that see as much variation and elaboration as straight repetition, before ending in a climactic scene that brings everyone together in a collapsing church just as the world might be ending. The emotions are pitched fever-high, and the roles each character plays progresses over time: there are always people being lost, and people looking for them, but the identity of who plays any particular role is always in flux. There are different subgenres at work, largely divvied up between the different viewpoints the game provides: one character is drawn back to a past they’d tried to flee by the death of their parents, and is haunted by one of the people they left behind; another is running a sort of Lord of the Flies apocalypse-cult, squatting in the ruins of an old slaughterhouse to listen to the prophetic whispers of long-dead pigs. Much of this is compelling, but none of it is especially naturalistic, and besides a shared juxtaposition of externally-mediated catastrophe against salvation through connection, the strands aren’t woven together especially tightly.

Indeed, I have to confess that it took me a while to get into SALTWATER. The entire first act – an hour or so of playtime – consists of jumping from one perspective to the next, running through five or six entirely different sets of characters and situations with little time for the often-disorienting plot elements to breathe, much less engender investment in the characters or their world. And the relatively traditionalist choice-based approach to interactivity highlighted my lack of understanding and investment. There are quite a lot of novels I’ve loved while still experiencing pervasive moment-to-moment confusion about what exactly is happening or which character is talking (Ulysses is the obvious touchstone here, so let’s give the shout-out to Gaddis’s The Recognitions just for variety’s sake) – but that confusion lands different when you’re expected to put yourself in someone (whose?) shoes and make choices for them. There’s an early sequence, for example, where I had to decide whether a bartender (who I knew basically nothing about) was going to lie to Molly, a customer he’d just met (who both I and he knew nothing about), about an old woman who’d just collapsed upon entering the bar (who both he and she knew nothing about, though I at least had a small inkling about her deal since she’d featured in one of the earlier vignettes) – trying to figure out what the bartender might do, and why, and why I’d be expected to have any clue about any of that, took me right out of the game.

SALTWATER is also sometimes a bit slapdash about its worldbuilding and characterization. Rye, the aforementioned prodigal child, is introduced receiving a phone call from their sister, who asks them to come to their parents’ funeral to help support her. But then the next time we see them, the funeral’s over, and the last we hear of the sister is when an old friend asks Rye how she’s holding up, and Rye waves the question away with a dismissive “she’ll be fine.” Meanwhile, the societal decay implied by a bunch of children taking up long-term residence in the meatpacking plant is nowhere on display in the other sequences, and I got hung up on the revelation that the aforementioned bar is miles and miles from where people live (it sure doesn’t seem like it’s in a business district either, so who decided to set it up there?) And there’s an overreliance on talismanic images and activities – many of these are individually powerful, but between rising floodwaters, a collapsing church, a flickering lighter, bodies being put into and dug up from graves, people being lost in the snow and warmed back to the land of the living, plus the oracular pigs and maybe-ghost, there’s too much being crammed into the frame to fully cohere.

Yet I did find that I enjoyed the game substantially more when I got to the second act, and SALTWATER shifted from introducing a disorienting panoply of people to fleshing out their motivations, personalities, and the context for their decisions. And on a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is often quite evocative and engaging (the way Ink is customized here meant that copy and paste wasn’t working for me, so you’ll have to trust me on this). By the time the third act came around and it became clear that events were moving into their final configurations, I found myself moved by the plights of some of the characters, hoping for them to find some peace.

All of which is to say there’s a better version of SALTWATER that ruthlessly simplifies it, cutting unneeded viewpoint characters (the bartender and Molly wound up being completely irrelevant so far as I could tell), building more extensive linkages between those that remain, and rigorously providing context so that the player feels empowered to make choices on their behalf. But I think I’d like that less than the other better version of SALTWATER that leans into its messiness, doesn’t impose expectations of agency on the player, jumbles up the characters without worrying so much about where one ends and another starts, shifts the prose to be even more poetic, and presents its various narrative strands not as rigorously-alternating plaits in a braid but as nodes in an ever-expanding, densely-interconnected web: a beautiful sally in a hypertext revolution that never was.

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Captain Piedaterre's Blunders, by Wade Clarke
Feathering a rat's nest, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

What makes a Verdeterre-like a Verdeterre-like? A design-focused analysis of the subgenre would zero in on key elements of Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure, the game that launched the mini-trend: high-score-chasing gameplay, a time limit, a complex optimization metapuzzle providing a framework around the individual challenges, and an expectation of multiple replays to come to terms with all of the above. Captain Piedaterre’s Blunders, however, has a much simpler answer: just put Captain Verdeterre, the world’s snarkiest rat pirate, in the game.

Mr. Green-dirt only has a glorified cameo at the end, however – instead looting duties fall this time to his cousin, the eponymous Captain Piedaterre. That punny name is one of the one and a half very solid jokes in this short choice-based take on the formula. The half is the Piedaterre takes the adage that one person rat’s trash is another’s treasure a bit too literally; as you run around a treasure-laden pirate ship (not your own), you reject the shiny stuff in favor of everyday dross. There’s a bit of backstory here that explains the source of this curious approach to valuation, and provides a sample of the game’s breezy prose:

"This splintered chair leg lights the corners of my mind. It reminds me of the day when, as a wee rat, I fell off a broken chair and landed on my head. Coincidentally, that was the day I discovered I had exceptional taste in all aesthetic matters."

Despite its choice-based interface, the game is unexpectedly written in Inform, with a convenient set of options enabling you to make choices by clicking hyperlinks a la Twine, typing a number, or both. The system itself works well, but I ran into some broader UI issues when playing via the browser, as “More” prompts kept popping up and requiring me to scroll down to the bottom of the window in order for new keypresses to register; sometimes a simple space bar or page-down would do the trick, but other times I was reduced to using the mouse to manually drag down the scroll bar, which was finicky process – fortunately the clickable links helped avoid this issue when it got too annoying.

For all that there was clearly a lot of time spent on the interface, I did find the substance of the game rather bare. It doesn’t wear out its welcome, to its credit, but as mentioned, it forgoes the dynamism and optimization of the core Verdeterre-like gameplay loop in favor of presenting a static environment with few puzzles; you mostly just walk through the small map grabbing whatever bits of dross you see (and if you don’t see any upon entering a room, you just poke and prod at the scenery until you find it). For a short comedy game, it’s fine, but since it so clearly invokes the original, it can’t help but suffer from the comparison – really, that title is a magnificent gag that deserves at least a little follow-up (I would love to see how Captain Piedaterre’s city apartment is decorated).

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Larvae, by A. Villarroel
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Parasite camp, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

I was mystified by the first ending I reached in Larvae: for one thing, there’s no clear indication that you’ve reached the final passage, which left me half-expecting that there was timed text still to come or I’d run into a bug. For another, it felt like some horror elements teased in the opening sections (and the genre tag on IFDB) had receded without fanfare, with the story seemingly content to pivot exclusively to low-key teenage melodrama. Wondering if I’d missed something, I backed up and started making different choices – where before I’d picked options having the protagonist I’d chosen, Isla, express contentment with her boyfriend Cam as they spent a month together at an academic summer camp focusing on biology research, I tried to pull back and see if this would provoke a blow-up. But no, this just made the conclusion an understated break-up scene, rather than an I’ll-visit-you-during-all-the-vacations lovefest.

Then I went back to the very first choice I’d made after deciding which of the pair to play as, which bizarrely had me as Isla deciding whether Cam wanted a drink from my water bottle, and this time opted for him to say he’ d already had his own water. This seemingly-innocuous choice was the last one I made, as it put me on an underexplained railroad track to an entirely different kind of ending.

While this kind of non-telegraphed swerve between genres can work – heck, Hanna, We’re Going to School does something not entirely dissimilar – it’s a tricky thing to manage in practice. Ideally, each branch of the story would make sense of what comes before and act as a satisfying resolution of at least the major themes the beginning has put into play. Or if there are less-canonical options that provide a quick off-ramp from the story, that can work if the author signposts where the story is supposed to go, so the player gets a thrill out of bucking their fate for a minute before getting back on the ride. But here, it really does seem like there’s meant to be a “right” option – the horror one – which is less worked-out than the longer set of branches that don’t pay off a key element of the setup, and the contrast between the trivial decision and its fatal consequences lends the game an unintended note of bathos.

True, if you play as Cam you get a bit more perspective on why that choice of potables matters, but why would you? As mentioned, the setup here is that he and Isla are a couple of high school seniors who get an opportunity to attend a prestigious research program bringing together talented students with biologists doing cutting-edge work in a variety of fields. Except it’s Isla who’s the talented student – Cam just gets to come along as her plus one so they can spend some time together before university, and maybe so he can do some livestreaming of anything interesting they see – and if there are any players of IF who are going to pick the bro-y YouTuber over the studious, responsible one, I’ve yet to meet them.

Larvae’s multigenre ambitions are also let down by some weak writing. Neither of the main characters enjoys much in the way of characterization, and the worldbuilding is thin (it’s notionally set in the 2050s, but the world pretty much works the way it does now, except that the only cultural touchstone people tend to reference is 1979’s Alien). The rules of narrative economy are flagrantly violated – there are two different scientific legends who are introduced as potential mentor figures, but who both immediately disappear after the passages when they’re first mentioned. And the prose has the feel of something translated from another language, which sometimes can work to add an unexpected note to a game’s writing, but here is just awkward:

“Come on, you have enjoyed the activities we’ve been doing these weeks, right?” I observe a strawberry, and toss it away as it’s rotten.

“Yeah, yeah I know,” he says, taking my hand as he rises.

“Besides, it does you some good to be away from your truelove the blue-light devices.” I say, taking a look at the beautiful lavender sky. Stars are already sparkling it.

He smiles. “You’re literally my next-door neighbor girl.”

Admittedly, some of the creepier horror elements are effective, especially a viscerally upsetting bit of gore in the worst endings. And even sadder is that I think there’s the germ of an idea here that could have worked really well: when you’re experiencing the last few weeks with your girlfriend before she goes away to school and might forget you forever, it does kinda feel like there’s a monster growing in your guts could explode your heart any minute. But making that work would have required ensuring that all the pieces of the premise come into play in most paths, and sharpening the writing so that we really feel the emotional bond between the core pair, and understand them as distinct, engaging people. Unfortunately in its current version, Larvae is only able to gesture towards the stronger game it could have been.

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Hanna, We're Going to School, by Kastel
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Only happy when, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

Sometimes I play a game and it’s like sinking into a warm, familiar bath – I’ve got a history with the genre it’s playing in, the cultural signifiers are familiar, the character dynamics are ones I’ve directly experienced. With Hanna, We’re Going to School, I’m facing the opposite situation, though: while presented as a fairly standard piece of choice-based IF, per the author’s note at the end it’s directly responding to a visual-novel subgenre I’ve at best dimly heard of (and in fact specific games within that tradition). It’s set in a Singaporean high school, though it’s an international school that cleaves more closely to the John Hughes model than you might imagine – though that’s little help to me, since I went to a boarding high school and those traditionalist tropes are just as foreign to me. Meanwhile, the situations the protagonist, Jing, faces turn on gender-based bullying and stereotyping, not to mention navigating her relationship with her best friend’s ghost (I am a straight white dude and am friends with zero ghosts).

Alienation is maybe not the worst standpoint from which to approach Hanna, We’re Going to School, though. Beyond creating a perverse sense of identification with the uncomfortable-in-her-skin Jing, it’s also clear that the game is more interested in providing a critical take than serving up warmed-over tropes as comfort food. The most hilarious example of this is too good to spoil, but I’ll just say that while you’re given plenty of options as you help Jing navigate her teenage wasteland, there are only two choices that determine which ending you get: the tack you take when you finally confront your bully, which is appropriately dramatized as a high-stakes encounter, and another completely unheralded moment that you or I might experience every morning (Spoiler - click to show)(well, more so those of you who live in places where it rains, I suppose). It’s hard not to read this as cheeky commentary on the most fundamental premise of choice-and-consequence gameplay, lifting up the absurd triviality of the decisions on which whole lives can turn.

Not that this is a cynical game. Jing is a hesitant protagonist, riven by self-doubt and perennially unsure of what she wants, much less how to get it, but she’s utterly sincere in her emotional responses, feeling compassion for a victim of cool-kid teasing, passion for the idea that there can be some justice somewhere, and deeply connected to her best friend. Hanna’s a unique character in her own right – a trans girl who killed herself because of the rejection of her family and most of her peers, including Clara, the school’s queen bee, she failed to move on to the afterlife and is now tied to Jing. They make for an appealing double-act, Hanna mothering Jing and trying to look out for her, Jing honoring her memory and struggling to accept the world that threw her away. Seeing Jing navigate the high-school hellscape while Hanna tries her best to act as a guardian angel – though she’s just as young and occasionally clueless – is endearing.

It’s also often quite funny, since for all the dark themes the writing here crackles with wit. When you first meet your classmate Harold, his name is highlighted, indicating you can click it to expand some new text explaining something about who he is: when you do, you learn he’s “a guy who really likes to draw tanks during math class.” When you go down your building’s elevator, there’s an impressively large store of random gags that can fire as Hanna struggles to time her levitation appropriately. And I loved this little excerpt, which describes the entry to the school and makes clear that this is a turn-of-the-millennium period piece:

"…preschoolers crying, elementary students playing their Gameboys, middle schoolers tittle-tattling about their crushes, and angsty high schoolers listening to Linkin Park through their cracked earphones all in one bus."

So yes, there’s angst here, but it’s presented with heart and perspective – and it helps that Jing isn’t just struggling with the typical no-one-understands-me blues. A lesbian, she’s acutely aware of the ways that social pressures are pushing her to conform, especially the ostensibly well-meaning overtures Clara makes to improve her dating life. And she’s also got a sneaking suspicion that she won’t fit into the grown-up world school is theoretically helping to prepare her for, anyway – this is especially foregrounded through sequences showing the strong holding up the weak to ridicule, or asserting stereotypes about submissive Asian women. The character work makes these themes land, too – heck, even Clara, who’s a bit of a monster, appears to sincerely understand and appreciate poetry, and is given surprising depth in some of the endings.

Hanna’s portrayal, interestingly, is a bit flatter; for all the horror of her death, there are very few moments where we see her reflect on her struggles, or the existential precariousness of her current position. While she’s an active character who’s constantly talking to Jing, we get the clearest view of her subjectivity in flashbacks filtered through Jing and Clara’s imaginings of her experience. To an extent this makes her slightly flat, but then, she is a ghost; a reminder, perhaps, that there’s a sort of privilege in even the terrible parts of life being reserved to the living.

This review is, I know, a bit of a cop-out; “look at all the interesting things going on here,” I say, without landing on a particular core for my critical reading. This may just be a consequence of the fact that I’m a bit of a stranger in a strange land here, ignorant of the dialogue into which I’ve blundered, or that this is a rich text that resists oversimplistic reductions. But it’s also, I think, emblematic of the confusion of your teenaged years and school experience: a lot happens, the choices you make may matter but the way it all adds up is elusive, until you grow out of it and impose a narrative on it in retrospect. Unless you don’t grow out of it.

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My Girl, by Sophia de Augustine
The ocean doesn't want me today, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

Starting up My Girl I was initially overwhelmed by a swarm of dubious associations. No one of my generation can read that title without thinking first of the lively Motown standard and second of a dying Macaulay Culkin, and then when I started the game and saw that the protagonist’s husband was named Santiago and spent most of his time out at sea, Hemingway shouldered his way in there too. But it didn’t take long to realize that none of these were authentic influences: this is Bluebeard, and a Bluebeard played shockingly straight, with no dramatic twists to the premise or gimmicky gameplay to distract (indeed, this is dynamic fiction – the only interactivity is clicking forward to the next passage).

This means that the game’s prose has nothing to hide behind – which is good news, since you wouldn’t want it to even make the attempt. Some early excerpts will stand for many more that I saved in my notes file, with their precise mastery of detail and portentous allusion:

“You know that I love you, don’t you, Carmilla?” he asks. His eyes are doleful, focused intently on your own: pinning you beneath the weight of his gaze like a butterfly skewered for a collector’s pleasure. “Thank you for listening to me. You know that I only want what’s best for you,” Santiago says. He brushes aside a curl of your dark hair, smudging his thumb against your forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. You close your eyes. You don’t want to see his mouth slanting closer.

"Later, Santiago is fiddling around with a length of rope, restlessly tying and untying knots in turn. The fires crackle in the distance, the thick stone walls slow to warm. Santiago loves the sea, is bound to die by its hand someday - to be swallowed by the arctic depths, bones plunging to the bottom of the sea: whale-fall, to return from whence he came. Sea foam and salt, smooth bone and corrugated shell. When you view your husband at just the right angle, in the fast falling light, he is nothing but the blue afterimage that burns after bearing witness to the sea."

Visible too in these passages are some of the grace-notes the game does introduce to the folktale. First, rather than doom standing over Bluebeard’s wife, here it’s the sailor himself who seems destined an early grave; second, despite her material dependence upon him, his need for her love and approval goes some way to balancing or even reversing the traditional power dynamics. For all that Santiago carelessly constrains Carmilla to the same straitened horizons as her literary precedents, fulfilling his role as an instrument of the patriarchy, this is a softened Bluebeard: there’s no confrontation scene after she disobeys his instruction, as he meekly accepts her lies and slinks off-stage to be murdered. Indeed, the discovery of the Bloody Chamber is underplayed, so much so that I could almost believe Carmilla decides to kill him as much out of jealousy for his love of the sea as out of desperation to save her own life – indeed, the happy ending crows that “the sea will haunt [her] no more,” as though the ocean was the target of her vengeance, with Santiago simply the unfortunate vessel.

Of course it’s not as simple as all that; the patriarchy is ultimately what sets women against each other in competition, and the sea’s not immune to that, and Santiago’s very blindness to his wife’s needs and emotions justifies his demise. Beyond being a lush and lovely retelling of one of the great stories, I also enjoyed My Girl for the way it denies the ideas that a threatened wife needs to be only a victim, or that a monstrous husband can’t suffer.

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VESPERTINE, by Sophia de Augustine
Goncharov montage, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

It’s appropriate that VESPERTINE comes from the Goncharov jam, since more so than the classic techniques of interactive fiction the primary structural approach is the montage. We’re given hints of context, allusions to background, a looming presentiment of violence that will become the plot, but mainly what we see is two men coming together: the eponymous Russian mobster and his chameleon lover, Andrey. It’s clear that theirs is a long-standing affair, but the game isn’t overly fussed with sectioning time and space to keep their illicit encounters distinct: they might be tangled together in bed and a footnote will see them encountering each other in the street, but who’s to say whether that’s a memory from five years or five minutes ago, or even a glimpse of things to come? Indeed, as the evocative prose ranges over the territory of their bodies and the territory of their relationship, the boundaries between the two sometimes dissolve: at the level of language, in the way any given “he” might refer to either or both of them, at the level of metaphor, in the way Goncharov writes secret missives in the black book Andrey keeps as a journal.

The writing is dreamlike yet holds nothing back in exalting these characters in each others’ eyes. This early bit about Andrey’s penchant for hair-dye as an element of disguise is emblematic of the way a facility with the tools of violence and crime become sexy:

"But I’d want you all the same as a blonde - like the wheat fields we painted portraits of each other in, summer sun baking over our shoulders. Alla prima: all at once. You and I know something about that. I’d have eyes only for you as a brunet: church mouse brown, a shy, faltering touch over communion. Such a devoted man. And as a redhead - you captivate the room, eyes drawn to the flame, to the way you liven up a room."

Color recurs – there’s that link to film again:

"I love you the way the dead sea loves: caustic, catastrophic, and still- halophilic archaea persist in those blue, blue waters. The way a lighthouse throws its light over the ocean waves: a beacon of warning, to stay away- refuge is not in sight. Those craggy corals and rough rocks will tear into your hull, until there’s nothing left of you."

It’s heady stuff, straining at the very edges of the sublime but never tipping over into the ridiculous. The disorienting way the prose is delivered also makes the player vulnerable to sudden, unexpected imagery: the main thrust of the progression spools out linearly, through end-of-passage links that move onward, but each page boasts several superscripted end-notes as well as a single highlighted word or phrase that will reveal new vignettes, some short flashbacks, others discursions into the first person, and yet others perhaps indicating hoped-for futures that may or may not come. It’s an effective delivery mechanism, though I found it perhaps a bit baroque, with the many different ways and places to click drawing more attention to themselves than I needed them to (I wonder how this piece would work as literary hypertext?)

Beyond the slightly over-engineered interface, the only other thing that left me less than enraptured was a fleeting reluctance to believe that these hyperaesthetes truly lived the lives the story was telling me they did: none of the violence they inflict here is brutal, it’s just as heartbreakingly beautiful and painful as their lovemaking. Perhaps having more familiarity with the Goncharov meme would help with that, though – or perhaps it’s just another nod to the game’s filmic origin, as the camera’s got a long history of making killing look like art.

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Teatime with a Vampire, by manonamora
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Bad romance, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is one of the all-time greats of vampire cinema. His background and agenda don’t really stand out, inasmuch as Murnau just filed off the absolute minimum quantity of serial numbers to avoid infringing on Dracula’s copyright. He’s also not much of a conversationalist, inasmuch as all his dialogue has to show up in intertitles and is translated from German. But oh, that look! Pointy-eared, bald-headed, snaggle-toothed, giant clawed hands at the end of too-long, too-straight arms, and those eyes – deep set, black-rimmed, perpetually bugged out. He’s operatically hideous, you can’t look away. Teatime with a Vampire’s Mr. Orlok, by way of contrast, is a charming flirt, always one bon mot ahead of the guests on his midnight talk show; he smells great, has a great head of hair, and golden, limpid eyes; Alex, our protagonist, spends the whole game lusting after him because he’s the sexiest thing on two legs. Me? I miss the Count.

This is an entry in the romance-focused Smoochie Jam (and, apparently, the awfully-specific Queer Vampire Jam?) but it takes a minute to warm up to its theme. The extended opening sequence focuses on Alex watching TV while in the throes of depression; with eir roommate out and up way too late, ey’s flipping channels and wallowing. Mr. Orlok’s a vital presence, so to speak, who arrests Alex’s progress clicking by, and given that the name of his show matches the name of the game – this is all happening in a universe where vampires are a mostly-accepted part of society, though they’re still exotic enough to make Alex’s clear thing for them slightly uncomfortable, like a white guy who only dates Asian women – it’s clear which way the plot lies. But you’re given a surprising amount of leeway to refuse the call in one way or another; deciding to keep on channel surfing, or just go to bed early, results in distinct early endings that elucidate a little more of Alex’s angst. Though the prose has a fair number of typos, there’s some quite solid writing in these short stubs that few players will likely see:

"Alex pushes the remote to the side and lets eir head fall back on the couch, eyes staring at the colours flickering on the ceiling. Because of the colourful set of the show and the contrasted individuals on TV, shades of yellows and reds, and sometimes greens, dance with the shadowy blues. Pushing and pulling, twirling, merging and separating. Ey lets out a deep sigh."

If you keep watching Teatime With a Vampire, though, the story takes a more compelling turn, which brings Alex into a close pas de deux with the eponymous Mr. Orlok. Against the backdrop of cheesy daytime talk-show staples given an additional bite – think a truth or dare game enlivened with some truly awful offal, or a photo montage featuring some preternatural snaps – your choices determine whether you go along with the sexy but threatening ride Orlok is offering, or instead reject it. There’s quite a lot of reactivity here, with the game saying there are 13 endings, of which only three or four appear to be of the bailing-before-things-get-good variety; while mostly played nice with Orlok, that definitely felt like one choice among many, rather than the “do you want more plot Y/N” of the early going.

It’s a clever setup telling a novel story, with writing and mechanics that serve the narrative. The exposition is also woven in with a deft hand, with interview questions giving Alex a chance to rattle off previous romantic partners or gesture towards what appears to be a trans narrative. All told the game offers an impressive package, but I have to confess that I enjoyed it less than it probably deserves because I felt a bit too much of Alex’s ennui rubbing off on me. Partially this is down the pacing, which feels like it slows the game way down in the back half – there’s an innuendo-filled cooking segment that feels like it just keeps going on and on, without much sense of escalation or anything that it’s building towards, which I found especially sapped my energy – but partially it’s that I found the characters dull as dishwater. This is maybe a slightly unfair accusation to level against Alex; no one is especially dynamic when they’ve been sitting on a couch for weeks, and Alex does have some people ey cares about. But eir conversational mode is basically either “get super flustered” or “pretend to be cool”, and the particulars of eir anomie are left pretty vague, save for it being something that some hot hot vampire loving might solve; it’s a setup that works to create a self-insertion-friendly romance protagonist, but I didn’t find it especially exciting.

Orlok is the bigger disappointment, I think. As a nigh-immortal creature of darkness, I wanted him to be dangerously compelling, but instead he came off like – well, like someone who belongs on daytime TV. His jokes aren’t especially sophisticated, his flirting is all a bit camp, and his looks, as described, are pretty but generic. Sure, he’s putting on a performance for the camera, but that’s just about the only way we see him: my favorite moment is where he responds to a question about the most interesting place he’s visited by telling a story about walking to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and image of a deathless but hungry immortal slowly dragging himself to such an alien sight, fathoms-deep below the waves, is immediately compelling, and makes me want to know more about the kind of person who’d do that – but then the moment passes and he’s fake-laughing again.

I wanted to find Orlok as magnetic as Alex, and the game, both do; I wanted someone I couldn’t stop thinking about. If the game had taken a risk and put in the “real” Count Orlock, buck teeth and all, that might have stood in the way of the romantic fantasy, but I think something like that would have been a bold but ultimately more successful choice – the game is really built around Orlok, who’s the vehicle and impetus for Alex’s self-discovery and transformation, and no ordinary vampire will do.

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A Collegial Conversation, by alyshkalia
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Rashemon but with a sewer administrator, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

I don’t think we’ve seen a SeedComp game yet in the thon, so this is a nice surprise now that we’re getting close to wrapping up. Actually the genesis here is slightly more interesting than that; the plot and characters are drawn from the author’s earlier game Structural Integrity – where a city-planning bureaucrat faced a difficult moment in his relationship with his partner – while the seed provides the structure, summed up as “one click, one viewpoint”. That means there’s no branching this time out: the story, which focuses on the aforementioned couple having a strained conversation with the bureaucrat’s boss and his partner, plays out the same way every time, but after each bit of narration you’re given the option to jump to a new perspective to see the next chunk from another character’s perspective (in fact, until you complete a playthrough you can’t stick with the same viewpoint two times running).

I admit I experienced a bit of disorientation at first; less due to the perspective shifting as such than because it’s been a year and a half since I played the prior game, and having four characters with fantasy-ish names that lack close real-world equivalents who can be referred to either by their first or last name depending on what viewpoint you’re tracking. Fortunately there’s an always-available dramatis personae link in the corner, which was a helpful reference, but it still took me a minute to get into the swing of the story. Fortunately, what’s going on here is relatively simple: Ubay, the boss, is a snob intent on cutting his working-class staffer, Yaan, down to size with a withering remark or two, while their respective partners provide support and/or a bit of additional snark. And that’s really the size of it – there is a threat of escalation, but it’s preempted by the arrival of a fifth character, which ends the scene and the game.

It’s an engaging enough sequence that I replayed until I’d gotten the full story, but it’s also relatively slight, the kind of thing snippy exchange that would take up maybe a minute and a half in an episode of Parks and Rec. I don’t mind the stakes being low – heck, Parks and Rec is one of my favorite shows – but the quadrupling of perspectives means that this is more akin to a full six-minute sitcom act, and after the second or third repetition, the core action felt less compelling. Ubay’s classism doesn’t feel especially motivated, and despite his partner Erandan getting a bit of backstory establishing that he resents Yaan after being passed over for a promotion and is kind of horny for his partner Kel, he definitely feels like a bit of a third (or I suppose fourth) wheel.

With that said, the core dynamic between Yaan and Kel is well drawn, and having been to a lot of work events with my wife, seeing them support each other through an awkward moment resonated with me. And if I hadn’t replayed it fully, I might not have experienced the flaws mentioned above. Actually, I wonder whether the “stick with one character” mode, while a welcome convenience, might not have been the best idea to implement – because you can jump into any character at any time, each passage necessarily restates some of the core dynamics for that character, meaning that staying in just one head for a full playthrough, as I did for all of mine past the first, makes the game feel a bit more plodding and simple than if it’s played as intended. Besides that, given that it’s a sequel there might be more games in this sequence to come, which might provide better context for the eponymous conversation; regardless, for now it’s still a nice bit of writing that may be better to just experience once or twice than plumb exhaustively.

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Halfling Dale, by Wysiwyg Wizards
Taste of the Shire, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

(No rating entered since I only played the free Chapter One)

Look, I get it: if you asked me what fictional world I’d want to live in, the Shire would definitely come to mind. Sure, it’s parochial and insular and state capacity is sufficiently low that per the book one point five sufficiently-motivated randos came close to knocking the whole thing over, but the flood of tourism New Zealand saw after the release of the films testifies to the impression those rolling hills, those lush gardens, those curly-headed children made on the broader public. As idylls go, the hobbit life seems hard to beat, and I say that as someone who’s never smoked pot, er, Longbottom Leaf – so a cozy game offering the opportunity to live life as a humble homebody who doesn’t go following wizards off on adventures has immediate appeal.

On the evidence of the one chapter provided as a free demo, Halfling Dale seems well-positioned to satisfy the fantasy. The model here is very clearly Choice of Games, down to the main audience being phone-users (in fact there’s no PC option so far as I can tell) – the blurb highlights character customization options, romanceable characters, and the number of words, so really, based on what I know about the CoG house style, this is a close match. There doesn’t appear to be a stats page where you can track the effect your decisions are having on your character, but there are an opening set of choices where you can establish some of your hobbit halfling’s traits so I suspect there’s a similar system running under the hood – though of course rather than being strong, tough, or social, here you can opt to be imaginative, mischievous, or have a good sense of humor, and you’re your job options include apiarist or cheesemonger, which make for a nice fit for this pastoral subgenre.

Of course, the game isn’t set in the Shire, but in its non-union Mexican equivalent, and here’s where some problems start to crop up. The Scylla and Charybdis of the pastiche are either hewing so closely to the source material that you wind up in an uncanny valley, or making so many intentional departures that things start feeling incongruous. Halfling Dale definitely errs on the side of the former rather than the latter (though the fact that the halflings all love to play Go did tweak my what-the-heck-is-a-Chinese-game-doing-in-Hobbiton sensibilities). The game starts with a birthday party that involves a long speech, okay. You’ve got a family member who’s got a disreputable-by-halfling-standards association with dwarves, sure. And then there’s a wilderness-dwelling protector who frowns a lot, and you learn some backstory which has to do with well-meaning free folks needing to find a long-lost artifact to keep an ancient evil at bay, and the list of default options for your character’s name includes “Fredegar” and “Lotho”, and come on now, you don’t need to have the literal plot of Lord of the Rings playing out in the background to make this setup work.

In fairness, so far when it sticks to its knitting the game seems to work well. Your mom vents her frustration at your brother’s iffy friend by calling him a “confustable dwarf”, and the intimation that the fair that appears to make up Chapter Two involves a Naughtiest Parsnip contest is certainly intriguing (this thing’s rated G, right?) And the intro does efficiently set the table, establishing the world, your character, your family situation, and the ominous backstory, while still having time to offer each of the romance options a bit of spotlight time. If you’re not overly fussed about the degree to which pastiches cleave to their source material, and the CoG model is one that appeals, I suspect you’ll be in good hands with Halfling Dale; to be honest, though it’s not my usual cup of tea, I definitely experienced some of the draw myself.

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constellate, by 30x30
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fallen star, October 25, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: Review-a-Thon 2024

It may be that there are other games that I’ve started up, squinted painfully at the text, and then thanked heavens – and then the author – that there’s a font size option in the settings. But I’m not immediately thinking of any off-hand, meaning it’s still a sufficiently rare occurrence that constellate’s opening made me acutely self-conscious of my age, and the current and sure-to-increase physical decline that goes along with that. It’s not a pleasant headspace to inhabit, but it’s an apt one for this story of spent interstellar gladiators coming together to manage their decay.

The backstory here is doled out in hints and partial memories doled out through multiple replays: you play a former soldier, scarred by what you’ve seen and done, retired now to become a farmer. Your former commander, Eris – who seems to be something more than human, almost like a Warhammer 40k Space Marine – took a more direct route out of the war, falling from the heavens and barely surviving the ordeal; you’ve been trying to nurse her back to health as best you’re able, though the things she’s done dwarf your own crimes by their enormity and you fear her age and scars mean she won’t ever be able to come back. Oh, and the devotion you used to feel for her may now be turning into a kind of love.

As is typical for the author, the prose’s lushness and emotional immediacy mean that the general fuzziness over exactly what’s going on doesn’t matter that much, as the feelings still come through. Here’s the opening, for example:

"A blanket of snow covers the earth, obscures its surface, veil waiting for debridement. Microcosm, these tiny moons carefully hung in orbit, made in desperately hopeful vignettes of a pastoral, ancient Earth. Manufactured nostalgia for things long since extinct; to work the land with your hands under pale blue skies, to find purpose as dirt gathers beneath your fingernails, to gaze up at the unfamiliar vestiges of the constellations, their myths blurred by time, lost in translation, warped by distance from home."

Or here’s a description of Eris:

"Her, the tired woman ill-accustomed to dealing with Earth-like artificial gravity and the changing seasons, long-limbed and thin enough to count each individual ridge of her spine, tattooed in elaborate patterns that emerge from the sleeve of the too-short sweatshirt and make themself known in other places, the thin strip of warm tan skin between hem and waistband, the pantleg haphazardly scrunched to rest below her knee. Beneath the softened exterior lies the spitting image of every heretic you were taught to fear and despise."

The themes here are right in the open, but not in any bald, dead way – this is a game that knows what it’s about, and isn’t afraid to tell you because it has confidence that its prose can carry you right along. And it did; much like the author’s earlier Protocol and the Revenant’s Lament, this is a story of a dangerous, broken person and the woman who loves them, but the specifics are drawn so distinctly that there’s no danger of repetition.

While the writing is the most immediately engaging element of constellate, I actually find its structure the most interesting piece. This is a relatively short game, but it has a fair number of choices, which significantly branch the passages you see and the text that you read – indeed, the IFDB page mentions that there are nine endings. But after three replays where I tried to take reasonably different tacks through the materials, I didn’t experience much difference in plot – things pretty much land in the same place, and the emotional dynamics between the two characters remain a constant, but the particular ways those dynamics get activated, the give-and-take balance between attraction and despair, can shift substantially, and I also saw noticeably different bits of backstory depending on the choices I made. In some respects this is an inefficient way to design a game; I suspect a single playthrough sees a much smaller percentage of the text than is typical for a game like this, and the relatively small number of choices that draw attention to how consequential they may be risks players feeling like the game is less reactive than it is. Plus I didn’t find myself compelled to go back and exhaust the different endings the way that I sometimes do when there are clear stakes established around decision points.

For all that this is an idiosyncratic choice to have made, though, I’m not sure it’s a bad one. My playthroughs feel more authentically “mine” as a result than I typically experience with choice-based IF, and the conflicted, self-denying nature of the protagonist’s feelings for Eris make it reasonable that there’s no canonical playthrough that directly lays out the relevant history and emotional toplines. For two people who don’t really belong, living on a fake planet that likewise doesn’t belong, feeling their bodies give out as fast as my eyesight, this sense of contingency is a perfect fit.

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