Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

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.

I’m a big book person, so go figure, some of my earliest memories involve my mom reading to me at bedtime. It’s mostly the favorites that stand out – I was small even as a toddler, so I couldn’t get enough of The Little Engine That Could – but there was one that I didn’t really like, but my mom insisted on reading it to me anyway. It’s called The Runaway Bunny, by the same author and illustrator who did Goodnight Moon (another banger), and the story is incredibly simple: a baby bunny tells his mommy bunny that he wants to run away, naming the different things he’s going to magically transform into to escape – a sailboat on the waves, a flower in a garden – but every time she tells him that she’ll follow, turning herself into the wind or a gardener, until finally he gives up and goes to sleep. I liked the pictures, which whimsically depict the rabbits’ transformations, but the plot offended my child’s sense of logic: why would the baby want to run away from the snug burrow where he lives with his mommy?

Let me be clear: The Warren isn’t an adaptation of The Runaway Bunny – in fact it was an entry in this year’s Shufflecomp, based on two songs I’ve never heard of. You’re not a baby bunny here, but one who seems on the cusp of young adulthood, and you’ve got a rationale for wanting to leave your overprotective mother, who locks you in your tunnel every night behind a grating made from a lattice of hunters’ discarded arrows: you want to explore, to experience life outside the tunnels, to meet someone who might be unlike any other bunny you’ve ever known before – or just to be seen as an adult, an individual worthy of respect in the eyes of others.

The game presents itself in two short quartets of links, each of which reveals a possible consequence of slipping out one night in search of freedom – a warren of forking paths. And the rewards for your boldness are sweet:

"You’ve never been able to take time to appreciate the trees in full blossom, to savor ripe berries warmed by the sun, to simply exist and breathe the fresh air."

Or at least, they can be – for down another path:

"You know that a rabbit can never let their guard down, that you always have to have one ear fixed on any hint of possible danger. But you forget this just long enough for a cat’s jaws to clamp down on your leg."

For every positive future, there’s at least one other where your brashness brings you to ruin, all narrated in compact, evocative prose. You have no control about any of this, there are no clues in any of the links to prompt you about which lead to happiness and which to disaster, you just need to take your chances until you reach the final choice, wiser now about why your mother does what she does, but facing the same dilemma: play it safe, or take a risk? Stay home, or run away?

When my son was born, The Runaway Bunny was one of the first books we bought. It’s not one of his favorites, either, but I inflict it on him anyway. I think about my mom, who lives almost 3,000 miles away from me now, on the opposite side of the country; I wonder what she was hoping for when she read me that book, and I wonder what I’m hoping for, too.

Maybe it’s because I played All That Shimmers… hot (er) on the heels of Lewd Mod: No Butts, but the thing my brain keeps coming back to is that the witch is a babe. The game makes no bones about the fact that this woman who’s recently arrived in your town is up to no good – in fact she’s casting a spell to obtain world domination, so the business of the game is thwarting her – but even from the first time she’s mentioned, it’s emphasized that she’s a young witch, not one of those shriveled-up hags. When you finally track her down in her lair, all the cauldron-stirring has left her “quite hot and bothered”, and sure enough, tempting fate by hanging around long enough to tempt fate by examining her confirms that “you find her surprisingly attractive.” Heck, if you do manage to annoy her she zaps you with a spell, and the game-over text laments “this witch really was evil”, the protagonist seemingly as sad to not get a date as at the prospect of spending the rest of his life shapechanged into a duck.

The mystical femme fatale is of course an ancient archetype – paging Morgan Le Fay – but what’s distinctive about this whole setup is that (spoiler) the witch isn’t just a buxom co-ed trying on the dark arts for a lark: turns out she’s really a frog who was shapeshifted into her human form by a fellow witch. This is quite the twist, and raises questions like 1) wait, did the other witch cast a spell specifically to turn the frog into a hottie?; 2) have we been cheated of a prequel telling how these cross-species lesbian enchantresses tracked down the spell of doom that acts as a MacGuffin in this game; and 3) how dire is the protagonist’s dating life that, upon finding out that the lady he’s been lusting after is an amphibian, he doesn’t have the slightest reaction?

The other reason I’m hung up on this detail is that All That Shimmers… is the kind of debut any first-time author should be proud of: it’s of a manageable scope, with a straightforward plot well-suited to parser IF, with puzzles that don’t strain the basic action affordances of PunyInform but are well-implemented with a Goldilocks level of clueing, and plentiful dad jokes that mostly land. That means my review notes are basically just a list of things I enjoyed – groaning at the Garfield and Father Brown references, admiring the restraint in not spelling out the punch-line to the gag about the dog’s name, or pointing out the coincidence that there’s a puzzle here that’s exactly the same as one in ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, which I'd just played. It’s like listening to a jazz band play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – you know exactly where the melody is going, so it’s all about the grace notes and the vamping, the way they put their own spin on an old, old formula.

And yeah, one part of that spin is the sexy frog lady, but there’s also the fact that you get the call to adventure twice, once in passive form when you read a newspaper article about the witch being up to no good, then again when the ghost of your grandmother shows up to order you to do something about this (if the witch has something to do with the dead rising, the game doesn’t feel bothered to explain the connection). While some of the puzzles are as straightforward as giving an old coin to the lady who’s reading a coin-collecting magazine, there are a couple that rely on logical but non-obvious actions, which makes for a pleasantly-paced set of challenges. And the jokes really did make me smile, like this one poking fun at the awkwardness inherent in some parser conventions:

"To the west you see the enticing foliage of the local park, and opposite the park is the local shop. To the north is the local church, and following the street south will lead to even more local stuff belonging to this locality."

All That Shimmers… is emphatically not a game that breaks the mold or does something ground-breaking or unique with its format; it’s not going to generate heated debate or in-depth craft discussions. But it’s a very solid and entertaining example of its genre, and a heck of a debut. If the author does decide to try something more adventurous for a sophomore outing, I’d definitely be excited to play it – but more of the same sure seems like it would be perfectly enjoyable, too.

The Antediluvian Weapon, by Daniel M. Stelzer

An interesting thing about the Review-a-Thon is the way it recontextualizes its entries. The IF scene being what it is, just about every game is made as an entry in some particular event, jam, or competition, each with its own design constraints, thematic points of departure, and intended audience. And while this is all generally happening under the umbrella of the larger IF community, plucking games out from their points of origin and plopping them down in the new RAT context necessarily involves some flattening and some reconfiguration, and potentially also some fuzziness of purpose – like, the emphasis here is of course on evaluation, but how much should said evaluation incorporate a rubric proper to a game’s original home?

These wooly maunderings brought to you courtesy of The Antediluvian Weapon, an entry in this year’s Text Adventure Literacy Jam, which as I understand it is an event focused on creating games that can provide an entry point to parser IF for those unconversant with its interface and foibles. Judged on its own merits, it’s quite good, a small-scale limited-parser game in all but name with some clever uses of its core mechanic and a fun, breezily-established setting with an early-modern vibe and supernatural elements focusing on magical use of, er, the elements. As an intro to parser IF, though, I’m not convinced it’s a great fit. Admittedly, this is a tough remit, but the puzzles can be rather tricky, as a limited-parser game it barely touches on the majority of standard interactions, and the tutorializing is pretty light, primarily focusing on how Dialog’s (admittedly slick) hyperlink interface works – the ABOUT text does promise a series of accompanying articles to come, but I think those are meant to be more about the process of writing the game than support in playing it, and at any rate though don’t appear to be yet in evidence.

I’m just going to leave all that aside though, because the THON isn’t the place for such critiques, and as an increasingly-grizzled veteran of the scene I’m not best suited to judge what makes for an easy intro, anyway. Antediluvian Weapon is great! I often find Stelzer’s games contain elements that I find especially appealing, and the same is true here, from the title (I am pretty sure we both picked up “antediluvian” as a cool-sounding word from being exposed to Vampire: the Masquerade at a tender age) to the Renaissance magicpunk espionage setup, which recalls Jon Ingold’s All Roads (I should really replay that one of these days…) But even if you’re a tradfantasy or sci-fi type, I think you’ll have fun here: the worldbuilding is very efficiently sketched, conveyed in a short scene of dialogue and environmental storytelling through a couple of frescos – it’s enough to sketch out the history and provide some gaps your brain can worry away at if that’s your thing, but if it’s not the mission is clear, and doesn’t require engaging with the lore if you don’t want to.

Said mission is a rescue and recovery operation, with the emphasis on the latter: another agent located the eponymous device in the fortress of a rival power before going dark, so you’re inserted via teleportation to steal the weapon, get out, and if possible help your predecessor escape. You purloin the weapon as soon as the introduction is over, so the game is entirely structured around learning what it does and deploying it in slightly different ways to overcome a series of obstacles. I won’t spoil the details, but I think it works well – the weapon’s function is relatively simple, but figuring out how to leverage it to evade the guards out to catch you requires a bit of lateral thinking, meaning the puzzles are satisfying to solve and largely hit a sweet spot in terms of difficulty.

Rescuing the other agent is a bit trickier, and turns on realizing that there’s something slightly unintuitive about how the weapon works – I think there probably would have been a way to create a smaller puzzle prompting the player to make this leap, but as it is this is an optional puzzle, with InvisiClues hints to boot, so it’s hard to complain. Meanwhile, the climactic puzzle is great, one of those set-pieces that requires you to act quickly and think outside the box, but with enough cueing and foreclosing of alternate actions to ensure that it clicks with a minimum of frustration. And while the writing is clearly in service to the puzzles – prose is generally terse and there’s a minimum of decoration, with an emphasis on clearly communicating to the player details about their environment and movement that are needed to overcome the obstacles – it manages to accomplish that goal while still being evocative and engaging.

So all told this is a great game, and I’d gladly play more with the same protagonist or the same setting; it seems a sturdy premise for unique-magic-device based IF, which can be a lot of fun. I’m not sure I’d rank it as highly as I do were I encountering it in the TALJ, but I’m not, so I do, and I’m doubly glad for playing it in the THON instead!

This is my third year of review-a-thoning, which means I’ve now played five different entries in the Lewd Mod series – though I believe several of these demo versions have been pulled from the same mainline (paid) game, while others are discrete, and the titles of these excerpts don’t provide much clarity about any of this, meaning there’s a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about how the various games relate to each other. And there’s also a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about what the heck the series title is supposed to mean; the “lewd” part is clear enough, inasmuch as the throughline is clearly the hand-drawn no-eyes, no-nose porn, but as for the other bit, is the conceit that these are like a XXX mod to some other, entirely innocent choice-based game about avoiding heat-stroke when the office AC is on the fritz? Beats me, but heck, I watched my law school roommate play through the second Kingdom Hearts game with no context, I know how to roll with a punch.

Comes now Lewd Mod: No Butts, though, and finally we have an explanation! This fundamental (er) text for the series establishes that the protagonist has just been hired as a content moderator for a social media site, responsible for ensuring that only innocent selfies, and not detestable smut, hits the feeds of its innocent users. This is of course a job that exists in real life, one that inflicts such terrible horrors that it drives even LLMs into psychosis, but there must be a super intense pre-screening process before people are allowed to register accounts on this particular network, like early Facebook’s creepy Ivy-League-only rule, except for hot babes obsessed with showing off their butts and sometimes their feet (there’s the occasional boob shot, but they’re conspicuously rare). Interaction primarily consists of reviewing a series of pictures and either letting them go through if they comply with the rules, or blocking them if they’re too hot to handle. In between batches, there are short choice-based dialogue exchanges with your supervisor, who starts sexually harassing you within about two minutes (she can dish it out but can’t take it – if you give her a compliment after she, mid-Zoom-call, shows off and fingers her example of the only symbol on the numpad naturally occurring on the human body, she gets demurely self-conscious).

This is silly and, if you took it the slightest bit seriously, deplorable, but I think Stockholm Syndrome has set in for me – No Butts is too goofy to be mad at. Like, during your orientation, your boss explains that a selfie has to contain a face to be OK to post, clarifying that means “it must show lips or eyebrow”, because of course, there’s nothing else that goes on a face, right? And maybe I’m judging on a curve, but the details of the rules, including the way they change mid-game to allow more risque pics (there is a lot of po-faced belaboring of the precise definition of “buttcrack”), strikes me as an entertaining satire on the absurdist moderation policies of actual social media companies, even as it’s clearly just a mechanic to make sure you need to shell out for the full game before you get the spiciest stuff.

Is No Butts worth playing? No, but it answered questions about Lewd Mod lore I didn’t know I had, so at least that’s something – we’ll just have to see if this year’s second installment in the series, which I’ll get to in about fifteen more reviews, manages to justify its existence.

I work in policy advocacy and one of the big no-nos in that corner of the world is Christmas trees. That doesn’t mean actual Christmas trees, of course – the forces of godless heathendom haven’t advanced that far yet; it’s just a term of art for campaign platforms that amount to a bunch of disparate issues and policy ideas with only the thinnest of connective tissue explaining how these things are related or why they’d work well together, much as a gawker looking at a really first-rate Christmas display finds their eye drawn to one bauble after another, barely paying attention to the timber and fir-needles providing the scaffolding.

There are sound reasons to deplore these things in politics (ideally your platform should tell a cohesive story, and bring people who support one piece of it to endorse the others too). But in real life? Christmas trees are great, they’re super pretty and there’s no inherent reason why it’s bad to be drawn to one ornament after another rather than come to a considered and mature appreciation for the branches upon which they hang.

Turns out the same is true in IF! requiescat, spruced up from its original showing in last year’s Ectocomp, doesn’t have an especially unique spine. It’s a choice-based relationship drama that relies more on sudden dramatic escalation than deep character work or originality of plot to generate interest – the core story is fine enough, but it’s a bit too abstract to be memorable. Similarly, the prose is unexceptionable but unexceptional, and I can’t point to any particular thing the game does to put its own spin on the premise.

And yet, there are a bunch of nice flourishes, interesting ideas, and clever pieces of implementation which don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts, but still add quite a lot to the experience. For one thing, there’s a slight element of comedy threaded throughout the game, especially in the excited, slightly-defensive bits of dialogue that close each passage and provide a clue that the great romance depicted in the early parts of the story is a bit of a pretense. For another, the game does occasionally slow down to provide some specific details that provide color to the sweep of the game’s arc, like a karaoke night that proved a turning point in the central relationship. And I liked the use of text-expansion links: on most pages there are several places where you can click to get an additional sentence or two of context or elaboration, which occasionally are daisy-chained one after another and take the reader to quite a number of different places in a short paragraph or two – it’s an accumulation of effect that left me enjoyably bewildered. The thing that I liked the most was the way the game turns back on itself to recast some of its earliest scenes in light of the final revelations, which helps them sink in and lends some needed depth to what at first seems like simple puppy love.

Admittedly, there are some issues here that do drag these high points down – in particular, the way the game skips over a decade of the main characters’ married life only to have a completely mundane incident trigger a shocking act of violence, with no apparent warning signs or buildup, makes it very hard to see the characters as anything but playing pieces being moved around, semi-arbitrarily, to reach a preordained end (either that or one of them is incredibly thick). That kind of thing is hard to completely avoid in a five-minute game, though, and again, the central story elements aren’t the major draw here: the nice thing about being distracted by a Christmas tree’s lights and tinsel is that the luster of the trunk is neither here nor there.

This is unavoidably going to sound like damning with faint praise, but Unseelie is really good for an untested parser game made in a week. Like, there is a reason this is not how anyone writes parser games these days, outside of speed IF and other such contexts where having even a minimally-playable game at the end counts as an achievement – beyond the fact that it’s unfinished, with a plot that ends just when things are starting to get interesting and a solid quarter of game’s puzzle paraphernalia going unused, there are bumps in the road a-plenty, from underclueing to a frustratingly-invisible disambiguation issue that almost prevented me from getting through the final set of challenges. But! While presenting a reasonably old-school puzzle-dungeon, the design is generally welcoming and engaging, with fairly robust implementation, a couple of distinctive setting elements living up proceedings, and unpretentious, confident prose that knows how to lift up an evocative detail. Even if it’s hard to exactly recommend in its current state, Unseelie can already be a lot of fun if you go into it with the proper mindset, and if it’s ever finished, it could well be something great.

As mentioned, this is a slightly old-fashioned kind of game where you wander around an underground world featuring magic – largely mushrooms with various unearthly powers, plus I suppose the woman whose portal-spell transports you into the aforementioned catacombs to begin with, though that’s more of a plot device than an element in the game as such – and anachronistic technology (plumbing, key cards, pressure plates). You’re not given much direction beyond a general desire to explore and hopefully escape back to your own reality, but there are enough obvious barriers and things to poke at that I found myself getting into the swing of things soon enough.

The writing definitely helps. It focuses attention on gameplay-relevant elements while not neglecting to set the mood, like this location description:

"The corridor ends here to the west in a metal gate beyond which you can see the outdoors—though a part of the outdoors apparently teeming with giant mushrooms and wickedly thorned plants. The sky outside is an odd shade of lavender that skies should definitely not be. A single thorny bramble extends through the gate into the corridor, winding along the stone floor."

It hits a deceptively hard-to-nail sweet spot, I think – these kinds of games work best when they don’t feel like bare mechanical challenges, but also can get frustrating if overly-elaborate language obfuscates the interactive bits you use to solve the puzzles.

Speaking of, the puzzle structure is rewarding, with new areas opening up as you explore and overcome obstacles, and a couple of moments when previously confusing or useless things come into focus, most notably when you reach the sole real NPC, who’s implemented fairly deeply and can tell you what all the fungi you’ve been finding can do. There’s also a fairly broad variety of things to do for what’s a relatively small game, from straightforward fetch quests and use-x-on-y puzzles to some that involve slightly more complex object manipulation and others that focus on the aforementioned NPC (a prisoner who promises to help you if you free him) or shifting the behavior of an animalistic native of this strange place. There’s nothing that made me slap my head in novelty and surprise, but equally, none felt illogical or like busywork, albeit there were a few where the clueing was noticeably thin – just the sort of thing that testing is good at smoothing out.

And yes, now that we’re talking of testing we have to come to the critiques, few of which I suspect will come as a surprise to the author given the caveats in the ABOUT text. While the implementation here is fairly robust, in terms of attention to detail, there are also a good number of rough patches – I’ll go into detail on the bug I mentioned above, since while it comes late in the game, spoiling the puzzle solution it pertains to will be a positive good to most players. See, at one point the complex quest chain to free the prisoner requires you to get a hypodermic needle that he’s got in the cell with him, due to some Geneva-Convention-violating stuff his captors got up to. But every attempt I made to take the needle or get him to hand it over ended in failure, with him annoying declaring that the needle couldn’t possibly be useful when I had a very clear understanding of what I needed it for. Turns out, I was on the right track, but the game was confused because there was also a needle-like thorn in the room, and the parser was automatically assuming I meant the latter rather than the former – referring to the HYPODERMIC rather than the NEEDLE cleared things up right away. Again, it’s a small quality of life fix that testing would immediately reveal the need for – but the lack of it wasted half an hour and burned quite a bit of goodwill.

(Oh, while I’m dispensing spoilers, I might as well mention that from glancing at some other reviews at transcripts, many players seem to be missing that (Spoiler - click to show)you need to examine the gap in the control room).

What’s here isn’t at all unplayable, let me be clear, but it’s also clear what we’ve got is a really fun Zork-like reduced to only moderate fun-ness and lacking half or so of the plot by the vagaries of its creation. Given all that, Unseelie’s entry into the Back Garden rather than the main festival makes sense – and if that decision was the author’s desire to test the waters before committing to doing the work to finish the game, hopefully this review counts as clear evidence of the need for, and upside of, that work.