Reviews by Mike Russo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tone is almost invariably overwrought and incredulous:

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, Did I Beta Test This?

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

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

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

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

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

This is really very good.

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

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

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

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

Here’s another one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not at all a betting man, but if I were, I don’t think I’d ever find a safer wager than betting that somewhere, there’s a version of The Krampus Case that was an actual Advent calendar. See, as the title indicates, this is a Christmas mystery – Santa Claus has gone missing, captured by his archnemesis Arius the homoian heretic -- sorry, I mean Krampus, definitely Krampus, and it’s up to you to find where he’s being imprisoned by interrogating elves, staking out the toy workshops, and maybe taking some time to see the North Pole’s sights in case a clue comes up. And the game’s structure is of a piece with its plot, because the way you do all those things is by picking one lead to run down per game-day, much like a child opens one calendar-door and consumes one chocolate each day of Advent. The about text even suggests you could play this way, starting on December 6 (right after Krampusnacht, which is when the crime goes down) and selecting a single path to play through each day before Christmas, when time of course runs out.

This isn’t to say that the Krampus Case is static. There’s only a limited amount of obvious interactivity – one of the 25 leads has to be unlocked by pursuing a certain other one first – but the game is full of subtle state-tracking, with plenty of nods to information you’ve already gathered or characters you’ve already met. There’s also a case notes feature that records the six clues as you find them, and a Christmas-Carol inspired timer system that sees you visited by increasingly-aggressive spirits bent on resolving your standard-issue Hard-Boiled-PI-backstory-angst before Christmas eve. And one of the leads (I’m not saying which) leads to a delightful minigame of sorts, which similarly appears to have a lot of flexibility in commenting on your performance.

The heart of the game is definitely just reading what’s behind each “door”, though, and with only six clues spready across four times as many options, you’ll be meeting failure more often than not, at least from a mechanical perspective. But for all that I never felt the need to skim; even when it was clear I’d followed a red herring, the good-natured writing and actually-funny jokes typically made me game to see what was in store. It also helps that you’re generally able to learn something, help someone, or otherwise make a difference pretty much anywhere you go, even if it doesn’t lead to a formal clue being added to your tally. Talking to the North Wind sees you politely ask if it’d mind sending its freezing-cold breath in some other direction when it talks, visiting the library reveals some wacky Christmas traditions from around the world – heck, you can even meet the Grinch’s reformed sidekick.

Things get slightly more serious when you resolve the case, which shifts into a short choice-based interactive vignette allowing you to resolve your deep-seated Christmas trauma; the lack of a save or undo feature means the stakes for this are surprisingly high, giving you the ability to push the simple plot rather farther off the rails than I was expecting. But all the endings are cute, and the choices allow you to cut the inevitable sentimentality of the ending with whatever touch of vinegar fits your taste.

While I had quite a good time with Krampus Case, there are some complaints I’d level – in particular, while the 20-days-to-Christmas structure is an integral part of the premise, I felt like the pacing did start to drag in the day 15-20 range. Similarly, while some clues are easier to find if you do some critical thinking about what earlier information you’ve uncovered is suggesting, much of the time I felt like I was making blind guesses, trying to decide whether the spa or the skating rink was a likelier source of clues. The vulnerability of high-concept experiences like this – it’s an Advent calendar that’s also a mystery game! – is always that the novelty runs out, and Krampus Case occasionally flirts with that line. But unlike a real Advent calendar, once you’ve gathered the requisite clues, you can trigger the endgame whenever you’d like, and even when the mystery felt like it was getting increasingly shaggy, I still enjoyed getting to hang with the various denizens of the North Pole.

All told I remain convinced there’s a paper-and-cardboard prototype of this game the authors used to delight their friends some Christmas Past, but the clever implementation and layering on of interactivity mean the game’s living in the Christmas Future, too. Now that’s quite a Christmas Present!

…shoot, that’s only three of the ghosts. Anyone know any puns for “Jacob Marley”?

The paradox of linear games (by which I guess I mean non-branching, puzzleless ones) is that the best ones often give the player a lot to do. Games are all about player engagement, which can come in a lot of different forms, from trying to optimize your path through a narrative to fiddling around with complicated machinery, but most of the easy options are off-limits for a linear game. Clicking “next” to see what’s going to happen in a pre-baked story can certainly be interesting, don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of these things called “books” – but in an interactive medium, authors are often best served by seeing what else they can leverage.

Something in our heart is a good example of the benefits of thinking outside the click-to-continue box. As far as I can tell it’s completely linear (there are one or two passages where there are things you can click on or type in, but these are very much exceptions to the rule, and messing around with the optional bits and bobs doesn’t appear to change anything). But my brain, eyes, and hand were all kept quite busy, frankly more busy than they’ve sometimes been in an uninspired parser game with easy puzzles or a branching choice-based one with a trope-filled narrative.

First, the brain. The basics of the cyberpunk story here aren’t too hard to grok: the protagonist, who goes by the forum handle “Res Delicta” (more or less “offensive thing,” if I have my legal-Latin right [EDIT: no, it’s actually “Derelicta”, closer to “abandoned thing”, I can’t read]), is deeply alienated from their body and as a result does some deeply ill-advised experimenting with a definitely-not-under-warranty third-party consciousness-uploading rig. Once infused into silicon, Res encounters a ghost in the machine, which has some history of its own and is enticing and dangerous in more or less equal measure; they dance around questions of trust, with the ultimate resolutions of those questions having significant repercussions for themselves and others. But within this relatively grounded frame, the game is rich with detail, toggling nicely between deep abstractions and surprisingly grounded conversation (at one point Res, starting to get a hint of what the other mind has experienced, says “looks like you came with LORE” and yeah, I laughed), and doesn’t spell anything out especially cleanly. The narrative is also refracted through multiple viewpoints: the main pair, of course, but the story also gets told through threads on the aforementioned forum, EULAs, and even stranger materials. As a result, there’s a lot to do to fit together the different pieces of the kaleidoscope and assess the twists and turns as they’re presented.

Speaking of presentation, that leads to the eye and (mouse) hand bits, because we’re a far way from basic Twine here. I haven’t played a ton of Decker games, but I’m pretty confident that there are very few that take advantage of the platform’s capabilities to the degree Something in our heart does. There are windows and sub-windows, primitively-rendered computer graphics, and strange effects that distort the text (though not, crucially, past the point of readability, so of course I squinted my way through all of those). Progress usually just depends on clicking a button, but the button changes shape and moves around, and sometimes you need to type a letter instead. Each passage is like a bespoke art piece, requiring you to engage with the plasticity of its surface in order to extract its semiotic meaning and the way to move on. There are some repetitions, sure, like the recurring forum bits, but that’s inevitable for a game of this length (it took me about half an hour to play through) and often the familiar is being deliberately invoked just to set up a deeper rug-pull; the effect really is of a box of chocolates, with surprising new delights in continual supply.

It all adds up to an impressively complete package, a polyvalent cacophony with a clear structure and arc. And for all the trauma and dehumanization of the subject matter (did I mention Res prefers “it/its” pronouns?) I found it ended on an appropriately ambiguous, but still hopeful note, centering trust, connection, and the faith that tomorrow can be different from today – and that while different is definitely different, that can be good. It’s an experience that would only work as a game, and as a game, it works very well indeed.

One of the things I like about my approach to reviewing IF is that it’s a prompt to think about games, to try to develop a take about what it’s doing or the craft by which it’s been put together. It’s fun to think about stuff rather than letting it passively wash over you, which is way too easy to let happen given all the distractions of modern life, and ideally it means I have some insight or analysis to share when I write things up – a couple of the reviews that I’m most proud of are basically just an attempt to construct a reading for a difficult game that some players might have bounced off.

The downside, though, is that sometimes a game just leaves me befuddled, which leaves me even more flummoxed about how to talk about it. Such is the case with recombinatorial, which has been percolating in the back of my head for the couple of days since I played it, as I wait, increasingly in vain, for something to click. Part of this is probably situational, as I’m a bit sick and my son’s preschool has been closed for a week, meaning I’m fuzzier and more distracted than usual. But part of it is that this is an elusive work, a downbeat prose poem about obsession, confusion, and disintegration with gorily compelling scenery. It also has a color scheme that’s surely intentionally off-putting and hard to parse, with links showing up dark brown on a black background.

Those links are very interesting, actually, and one of the key things I haven’t been able to figure out: they go white when you click them but don’t seem to lead to branches or other changes within the story, from the limited set of text comparisons I did, though from some comments on the game’s page perhaps the poem whose disintegration is the climax of the work varies based on which you clicked and which you ignored? I suppose I could experiment with that, but honestly, while it’s an effective ending I’m not sure I remember any of the specifics, it’s thick with portent, an impasto rendering of the dissolution of identity, but it was the vibes more than the particular words that stood out.

Not to say that the words in earlier parts didn’t stand out, though. As I said, there are some engaging images along the way, most involving blood and viscera:

"They string up the criminals all Jesus-like here, dangling from long poles sunk in black sands. Soot, holy ashes on flayed martyr-skin."

…

"Gore-frothed waves break on men and women marching to drag the butchery inland. They were not from here. Tore themselves apart, raised lances like lightning. Struck and became anew, fin and fang and beak and too-many-too-dark eyes. Images folding on images folding on images in the coiled gut-pattern spilt on the docks, kinked and curled message in their square-and-triangle script."

“Images folding on images folding on images” is a frequent refrain throughout, I think speaking to a sort of kaleidoscopic negation of meaning? And the equation of spilled intestines with language is clear enough, I suppose. But I’m not sure what to make of the other repeated phrase, “go north”. That’s the one link that visible does something, moving you to the next passage and retroactively reconfiguring the previous one (e.g. “North facing beaches, you wonder if they too felt they must. Go north.” Becomes “North facing beaches, you wonder if they too felt they must go north.") On a literal level, this is because the protagonist is traveling to the ends of the earth on their death-pilgrimage (the game specifically cites the way insects suffering from a fungal infection will travel large distances to climates more favorable to the fungus), but beyond that I’m drawing a blank – maybe that’s all there is?

So yeah, more question marks than usual for one of my reviews (did someone swap me for Victor Gijsbers?) It’s hopefully not too flippant to characterize the author’s typical formula as immaculately threatening vibes combined with queer melodrama, and I found without the latter part of the equation the vibes remain very compelling, but there’s a little less to hang onto, and proceedings are a little too enigmatic, for my personal taste.

My old gaming group was very into the old World of Darkness tabletop RPGs, but we never played much Vampire – our tastes tended more towards the heroic and optimistic, and we were mostly on the “nerd” side of the nerd vs. goth side of the WoD fandom spectrum. So when I finally had an idea for a one-shot and the rest of the group bit on the pitch, I came up with a house rule to try to prod folks into the right headspace to play one of the damned, which was simply that creating a new vampire wasn’t deterministic: even if you follow all the steps that would lead to someone joining the ranks of the undead, it wouldn’t work for everyone. The ones who did survive the process were the ones who, when faced with the choice between oblivion and life, even a harshly limited form of life centered on predation, in their heart of hearts – or heck, we’re talking about vampire fiction, we can say “soul” here – decided to take the deal. It was a simple tweak, but I thought a fairly idiosyncratic one, given that it was aimed at the specific foibles of my players. So I was completely flummoxed when, upon playing oxblood, I saw this discussion of the kinds of individuals who can become vampires:

"There are people who are… predisposed. They’ve got that sense of perpetual unfulfillment. They float by. They don’t remember much. Essentially, their lives seem to be nothing and they feel themselves as being nothing. They’re a time bomb but they don’t know it yet. One day, something will happen to them — something that will make them feel for the first time. It’s always either profoundly beautiful or profoundly destructive. The outcome is always the same: the thirst for life."

That’s not the game’s other departure from the standard Dracula line: these vamps can walk around in the sunlight, can easily get enough blood without killing anybody, and don’t mind running water so long as it comes from plumbing. Sure, they avoid looking in the mirror, but that’s not because they can’t see their reflections, it’s because they don’t like what they’ll see, due to the tendency of their bodies to seem a bit corpse-like and identity-dissociation most tend to develop over the centuries.

I’m often wary when vampire fiction messes with the traditional formula, not due to a slavish adherence to dogma but just because it tends to undercut the drama – I get it, vampires are fun and they’re a more comfortable vector for exploring difference (especially queerness) if they’re not all mass murderers. But those changes can also mean a story is borrowing the trappings of angst without the actual danger; the human prejudice against vampires is often portrayed as irrational in these kinds of stories, a thoughtless hatred directed at a harmless minority. That’s a fine approach, but as I said, personally, I like my vampires to have more bite.

Fortunately for me, this is another place where oxblood is on my wavelength, because the point of these changes isn’t to let vampires off the hook: just the opposite. Again and again, it’s made clear that vampires don’t have to be monsters who are a threat to anyone who gets close to them. So when they are – and Ethel, the game’s protagonist, definitely is – that’s a choice they’re making, not something they can blame on an impersonal undead condition.

One part of what makes Ethel so compelling is that she goes through incredible mental and moral gymnastics to do exactly that, though. Here’s her Catholic-inflected thought process after she’s accidentally (“accidentally”) harmed her human lover, Erin:

"Of course, she thought she didn’t deserve forgiveness from Erin but it was the only thing she wanted in that moment. It would feel so good to have all of her sins absolved; she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, after all, and biting is just her nature, so how could it be held against her?"

But this doesn’t work out for her, because absolution requires sincere contrition, and Ethel is wallowing in bad faith:

"It wasn’t and she knew it but admitting what it really was would be an admission of guilt. She couldn’t have that, no, she had to pretend to forget until she thought she forgot, until she led enough new lives to bury all her faults beneath them so she doesn’t have to confront herself."

This is the primary conflict of the game – almost everything Ethel does is aimed at escaping herself and sublimating her past. The title is even a reference to her tic of referring to blood as “(ink)” instead, an evasion one of the humans she feeds on even calls her out over. Much of the plot of the game also concerns itself with the process of her creating these “new lives” – we get flashbacks to a much earlier life, when she went be “Ethedread” and did something that appears to be unforgiveable, but also see her abandon being Ethel as she flees from the fallout with Erin, and adopts “Adele” as her new name.

This narrative business is compelling, especially as a psycho-moral menage a trois develops between Adele, the aforementioned willing-blood-source, and another vampire named Virgil, who’s unique among his kind because he has faith that there’s a purpose to life. But ultimately it’s Ethel/Etheldread/Adele’s interior dynamics that make oxblood so successful. Much of the story is told via dialogue between several of her internal voices, with their lines often appearing as links you can click through to get more detail or background (this is where much of the lore is delivered). There’s one voice that’s perennially making excuses or trying to appeal to the audience to sympathize with poor Ethel – but there’s another that doggedly reiterates the rules, refusing to let her off the hook and making clear that at every moment Ethel is making choices. The possibility of accountability is the same thing as the possibility of grace, and it’s always, always present.

oxblood is the kind of choice-based game where I’m happy there’s no branching. It feels quite engaging, don’t get me wrong – if nothing else, there are lots of those optional links to explore – but the story is the story, and the last link on the page will lead you to the next one until you reach the end. That’s the right call, because this is a game about choices: but they’re Ethel’s choices, not yours.