Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

When I was little, I thought that the most important reason why it might be kinda fun to be rich is that you could hire somebody to be on call so that anytime you had a question about why the world was a certain way, they could run off to the library and do a bunch of research and come back and tell you the answer. The internet sorta scratches that itch, and in that respect I was right, it was awesome, but as far as I can tell from intermittent half-hearted Googles every couple of years over the decade or so I’ve pondered this mystery, no one has posed a robust answer to this question: given that basically every American in their late thirties to mid forties played the Oregon Trail to death in their elementary school computer labs, why are there so few clones, knock-offs, and spiritual sequels? Sure, there were some actual sequels, I’m aware of a series of Android-only fantasy RPGs that take a similar approach, and then more recently some satirical riffs like The Organ Trail have popped up in indie spaces – plus it’s certainly the case that some of the aspects of the game’s design have shown up in the DNA of roguelites like FTL. But given the ubiquity of the original, I’ve always been surprised that it’s inspired so few direct followers, and if I could fund whatever nerdy research projects I wanted, getting to the bottom of this conundrum would be high on the list.

Saltwrack is evidence in favor of my “there’s less Oregon Trail than you’d think” thesis, though that’s one of the less interesting things about it. This medium-length Twine game is working in an identifiable sci-fi tradition, exploring the aftermath of the uncanny ecological transformations wrought by an otherworldly incursion. But where Stalker situates the event in the steppes and Annihilation in the swamps, Saltwrack opts for the more-exotic-still polar salt flats. There’s a straightforward quest narrative, and characters with their own perspectives and backstories – you’ve decided you’re going to venture north until you can find the origin point for the eponymous Saltwrack, traveling in a sort of walking tank with a crusty guide and a psychic navigator – but the environment is the true star here. The post-collapse civilization gets a fair bit of world-building and is interesting enough, but pales in comparison to the restrained, evocative, and ominous descriptions of the changed landscape. Even before the metamorphoses are given free rein, these are a highlight:

"You pass through a landscape of short, gritty cliffs. Rectangular segments of rock lie littered in the snow beneath them. Lichens splotch the stone in unexpected colors: brilliant orange, soft green, scabby red."

Things escalate, of course, but the prose retains a slight detachment, a slight flattening, that I found made the weirdness feel more immediate and concrete: not bent on evoking any particular reaction in either the protagonist or the player, content simply to exist, independent of humanity:

"In the ice itself you find other wonders. Silicaceous networks and lattices, tubes, vase- and flower-shapes; you wonder if these are some relative of sea sponges or corals, and if so, how they could have made their way onto this land. Cnidarian clumps of tendrils, too, that hang from boulders or slabs of ice. Soft-bodied crawlers cling to these glacial reefs."

The gameplay around all this is structured as a there-and-back-again trek: throughout, a header tracks the time you’ve spent traveling, the number of miles you’ve accumulated, and a qualitative assessment of your supply level. You make some initial decisions about who to bring (you’ve a choice of two guides, and a choice of two “oracles”) and whether to overburden yourself to increase your stock of supplies, and from there you march through the journey day by day, typically facing a binary choice or two around the evening. Some of these are purely narrative – choosing which of your companions to chit-chat with while making camp, say – and others are fairly clearly testing how much the player is interested in dawdling to investigate interesting phenomena at the expense of quick progress to the goal. A few are higher-stakes, like planning how to cross a mountain range in the way of your route, or, once you get close to your destination, how much danger to life and mind to risk in pursuit of knowledge. They’re all reasonably engaging, but like the rest of the game, they tend to be dry and rather diffuse: again, you typically only have two choices (seeing the guide smoking a cigarette, you can only ask to try some or scold them), and the variety of different kinds of scenarios, and the relative scarcity of decisions, meant that it was over a week before I felt like I had even the slightest sense of who the companion characters were.

Contributing to the vague dissociative vibe the game projects is its refusal to go full Oregon Trail. Supplies are kept abstract, and the outcomes of your decisions are stated in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. A few times I pushed on to travel past dusk to avoid a danger, or overruled a companion’s suggestion, or saw some of my food spoiled by environmental contamination, but those displays at the top didn’t budge, and save for the climax, few if any of my decisions felt like they had any consequences past the scene in which I made them. And several elements of the game’s progression feel more tied to narrative considerations than systemic ones – I was told that packing supplies for 40 days should be adequate for a journey of several hundred miles, but it wasn’t until day 24, after going around a thousand miles, that my supplies finally ticked down from “plentiful” to “sufficient” (they finally gave out at a suitably climactic moment that also makes me suspicious of hand-waving in the background). This sense that my decisions weren’t having that much impact was exacerbated by some small bugs I found near the end, where one of my companies appeared to disappear without any direction mention that that’d happened; conversely, back at the beginning of the game the first choice you make is what title you’d like others to refer to you by, with clear social implications stated for the different options, but I only remembered it coming up once or twice, and seeming entirely cosmetic when it did.

I’m not too hung up on how gamey or “interactive” a particular game is, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a weakness that Saltwrack doesn’t track exactly how much food you have down to the pound, or pop up a numerical morale score for the companions that fluctuates according to your choices. But it did feel like a lot of the game was built around the expectation that these things would matter – that header, those go-slow-vs-go-fast dilemmas – so once I started feeling that a lot of it was for show, I got less enthusiastic about going through the motions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since as mentioned just focusing on Saltwrack’s scenery is a compelling experience by itself. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the version of the game that didn’t even feint in this direction, perhaps by communicating to the player that they wouldn’t need to worry about getting to the end, and thereby creating space for decisions about how they explore the world, rather than whether they explore it or simply beaver away at the trek (creating more opportunities to delve into the world’s mystery might also help make the slightly-underwhelming final revelations land with more force). Don’t get me wrong, Saltwrack is a worthwhile experience even in its current form – but it’s certainly consistent with the observation that even when developers lift the wagon train from of Oregon, they frequently leave the mechanics behind.

Violent Delight, by Coral Nulla

This is a game that’s impossible to discuss without going into a fair bit of detail on how the mechanics work – and where the surprise of figuring those details out is a big part of the experience – so as a result, if you’re spoiler-averse, this might be a review to come back to once you’ve given it a go yourself.

Though to be brutally honest, this is a review that you might want to skip even if you have played Violent Delight, because while I always strive to come up with some insights or analysis or at least jokes that make reading my takes worthwhile, in this case I’m unconvinced that I have much of interest to say. Not to get all Marxist, but that’s because the material conditions under which I experienced the game were completely mismatched with the mode of production by which it generated that experience. Let me explain!

So this is a game with a series of interlocking gimmicks, and they all revolve around a temporal see-saw: either you’re waiting, desperate to kill time, or you’re desperately clicking around and speed-reading as the clock ticks down. There’s a robust narrative framework around this that we’ll get into in a sec, but in many ways that’s downstream of the experience of being crushed by this chronological trapjaw. Even under best-case circumstances, playing Violent Delight would be stressful, and you’d be inclined to miss stuff.

But I did not manage to achieve those best-case circumstances. See, I’d been spoiled on the first section of the game, which involves bidding on a video-nasty style video game on an eBay-alike and then waiting for an hour of real time for it to ship to you. And since I need to manage my game-playing time pretty aggressively to get through the full Comp, I figured I’d start things up and get the timer running in the background while I finished up my work day, so I could play it in earnest once I was done. Except just as I was about to put in my bid, my boss texted me about something, and while I was writing him back, the auction expired and someone else bought the cartridge, ending the game with nothing having happened (when I told this to the author, I found out this is considered the “good ending”).

Undeterred, I tried again, and managed to get into the meat of Violent Delight – once the cartridge arrives, there’s a gameplay loop of playing the thing – this involves clicking around low-res graphical mazes as occasional people or signs spout some text when you interact with them (it’s implemented in Decker) – before a timer runs down, your console overheats, and you need to wait for another timer to count down allowing you to play again. During these two-minute interregnums you can mess with the age-limiting chip you discover on the cartridge, which initially makes the game seem quite anodyne; as you dial it up, things get unsurprisingly sinister, and the increased intensity makes the console overheat even more rapidly once you get back into the cartridge.

Again, this is all in real time, and even after my work was done, it was very hard for me to play with the extended focus the game requires: my son’s been home sick and was bouncing off the walls, so I was popping up to do Legos with him or otherwise distract him, I had a couple late work emails come in I had to respond to, my wife came into the room and it would have been churlish to completely ignore her… this is kind of how my life goes these days, which is one reason why I play a lot of IF and turn-based games, and basically nothing real-time, since my son was born. As a result, the frantic sections of gameplay got even more frantic, my ability to connect the fractured elements of the intentionally-obscure plot was more or less shot by the constant interruptions, and I completely failed to take adequate notes, much less capture the game’s actual prose to ponder later (there’s a printer function that lets you dump text sections from the cartridge, but it strips them of context and the interface for retrieving them later is unintuitive, so that wound up just confusing matters further). Like, here is the stuff I have at my fingertips as I’m trying to construct a review:

electric volleyball, people not wanting to see attractive people

Ramping up snowstorms, hell to psychological testing vs. dreams of testing while dying (?) to hospital administration. Layers but also age

21 now! Time in each layer decreasing. Age rating?

Code?

Down, base, fall out? All you can say is I’m sorry. Breaks at 31?

This is very disappointing to me, since I think there’s some interesting stuff going on in Violent Delight beyond the mechanics – each time you tweak the age-rating, you unlock another level of the game, which seems to advance things temporally (the earliest stages have characters playing with toys in a park or taking tests in a school, later ones are set in offices or hospitals) as well as dialing up the horrific elements (there’s a hell-layer, terrible experiments are happening in another; people who find highly-abstract pixelated gore upsetting may want to steer clear) and playing with the structure. It’s elusive and downbeat, but there are good jokes too, especially in the time-wasting initial hour, which features some dead-on parodies of the Comp (though you can’t play any of them due to UK geoblocking).

If I can’t trace out all the nuances, though, I can maybe close with one big-picture thought, riffing on Violent Delight’s claim that it is “an experiment in withholding.” See, I think regardless of the semantic content of the game, it may be the alternation of bored waiting with desperate zooming around, with each cycle promising to get you closer to the truth concealed at the heart of all things, that’s the core theme of the game. This dynamic has all sorts of resonances – given the retro nature of the cartridge, it put me in mind of swapping urban legends about video game secrets on the elementary school playground, counting down the hours until I could go home and see what I could discover in the short window my parents let me mess around on the NES between homework and dinner. But you could equally draw similarities with social media, politics, consumerism and capitalism writ large, undergoing medical treatment… and the game touches on some of those themes, too. There’s definitely an element of trolling to the way Violent Delight deploys its interlocking timers, to cruel effect, but I don’t think that’s all it’s doing: I think it’s also lampooning the way we fritter away our lives, convinced that there’s some final point where all the busywork stops, our disparate experiences cohere, and it all makes sense.

Or it could be that’s just a delusive interpretation I dreamed up to try to wrestle my scattered understanding of the game, deformed by the stop-start nature of my distracted attempts to play it, into a plausible shape that retroactively gives meaning to the time I spent with it. If that’s the case, I guess this review is part of the joke too.

The comedy parser puzzler is a nigh-infinitely-extensible format, capable of incorporating the wildest of premises and set-pieces with nary a crack in the suspension of disbelief: we’ve been conditioned over the decades to accept puzzles based on logical absurdities and high-concept setups that wouldn’t pass muster as two-minute improv sketches, and in return, players are promised gags with a reasonable hit-to-miss ratio and the opportunity to participate in a farce. Polymorphed pigs, idiot knights, gentleman thieves, harried chefs – any protagonist you can think of can confront any mad-libs combination of wacky aliens, bumbling cultists, blithering aristocrats, or misunderstood monsters imaginable, and the critical inventory item could equally well be a piece of chewing gum, a leaky jar of battery acid, a toy sheriff’s badge, or an authentic death ray. For the most part Mr. Beaver fits seamlessly into this tradition – here, it’s a diligent mailman rescuing a shrunken shopkeeper using a patched-together diving suit – but by making the protagonist’s degree of desperation a critical game mechanic, it also tries something I don’t recall seeing before. In some ways it’s a not a perfect fit for this extremely-plastic genre, but it does add a critical touch of novelty.

Without that element, the game would still work perfectly well, I think. We’re recognizably in the rescue-the-zany-uncle-from-his-kooky-mansion subgenre, which is a classic for a reason, and Mr. Beaver is a well-realized example of the form; the geography isn’t too expansive, and the locations are fairly dense, making the overstuffed antique shop something more than a bare setting for puzzles, with plenty of opportunity for character-ful details and tiny jokes. The inevitable sci-fi touches are also kept focused and while there are some out-of-left-field elements, like an incongruous coffin, they’re explained by Mr. Beaver’s eclectic taste, so the worst excesses of kitchen-sink aesthetics are avoided. I did find the very ending fluffed the balance slightly and drifted into more slapstick wackiness than I prefer, but save for those last couple paragraphs I enjoyed the vibe; the humor’s more likely to raise a gentle smile than a sudden guffaw, but there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

As for the puzzles, they’re cleanly in the medium-dry-goods tradition, though similarly a bit more grounded than is typical for the genre: there are secret passages and some devices to fiddle with, but with reasonable diegetic explanations and, usually, enough clueing to help the player understand what they should be trying to do and why. A few of the more esoteric puzzles did require highly-specific phrasing to get the parser to understand what I meant – there were a couple of these, but I’m thinking especially of a puzzle where you have to manhandle a reasonably-large object but PUSHing and MOVing and LIFTing didn’t register, with only TIPing did the business. My frustration was increased by the fact that every time I made an attempt, I had to struggle with a disambiguation prompt because typing the name of the object wound up getting it confused with the similarly-named table it was resting on top of. This is a custom parser system, and while it’s generally solid, this and a few other issues (notably, default responses printing out right after, and contradicting, the results of successful actions) make it a little less smooth sailing than the major platforms.

On these fronts Mr. Beaver is perhaps unexceptional though certainly unexceptionable. But it does have its one unique twist, the desperation-meter. Throughout the game, there are a series of actions that the average comedy-parser protagonist would perform without thinking twice – things like knocking over a shelf to get at a blocked passage, or opening up a sealed sarcophagus – but which here fail, with a pointed note that you’d only resort to such measures it were clear that the situation were especially dire. And as you conduct your investigations, you’re occasionally informed that your worries are increasing, allowing you to go back and try some of those formerly-blocked actions and succeed this time.

Functionally, of course this is just another way of constructing a puzzle dependency chain – you must solve X puzzle before solving Y. But building things this way helps take some of the arbitrariness out of the parser puzzler. I’m sure we can all think of examples where solving a puzzle makes a heretofore-hidden object incongruously reveal itself, or advance time in such a way that a previously-inaccessible area opens up. These contrivances are part of the genre, but too many of them can cause the player to roll their eyes, and also make it harder to make a plan, since you never know what might happen next. So there’s a benefit to having much of the gating depend on the protagonist’s mental state rather than seemingly-random circumstances. Similarly, this also helps mitigate the adventure-game-PC problem of the character who’s meant to be heroic, but nonetheless steals everything that’s not nailed down or engages in motiveless mayhem.

So in concept I’m a fan, but I think the implementation here could be smoother. For one thing, the choice of what actions are verboten can sometimes feel arbitrary – breaking open a coffin requires less disquiet than looking under a doily, for example, and no matter how worried you are that Mr. Beaver’s time is running out, nothing will persuade you to risk disassembling a Jenga tower. For another, there are I think five levels of escalation, which is probably too many to be qualitatively distinguished – it felt like a few times, I ran across information that felt mostly redundant with what I already knew, but was told that his had ratcheted up my desperation another quantum; combined with the previous issue, this wound up requiring a bit too much tedious lawnmowering of previously-forbidden actions to see what had opened up this time. And there are some places where the mismatch between player-knowledge and what the protagonist is willing to do gets sufficiently wide as to cause frustration: any player who glances at the cover art for half a second will realize that the aquarium – and by extension the diving suit and related paraphernalia you find about the shop – will be important to the endgame, which is quicky confirmed by messing about with it, but you’re prevented from doing much to start in on that puzzle chain until very late in the game (since the cover art is AI generated, if you glance at it for more than half a second will note that the crab has seven legs, no claws, and no mouth; for all that the text portrays Crusty as a charismatic little arthropod, as a result I shuddered any time I had to interact with him).

I’m sharing these quibbles less because I think they’re significant flaws, though, than because I did find this novel gameplay system an interesting, worthwhile one, and as with any system in its infancy it’s worth giving detailed feedback to help figure out best practices. It’s not the only reason to play Mr. Beaver – as I’ve said, if this is a kind of IF you like, there’s much to enjoy here – but it did give me something more substantive to chew on after the farce was done.

One of the weirder experiences of my reading life was a couple years ago, when I wound up spending most of the night at the ER with my wife – she wound up being fine, but it was stressful and there was a lot of that hurry-up-and-wait that always happens in hospitals, so I wound up reading all the way through the short book I’d thrown into the go-bag since it was next on my to-read pile: The Pilgrim’s Progress. Now, this is already a bit of an odd duck of a book; it’s an allegory from the late 17th century depicting a soul’s progress towards salvation, taking much of its surface incident from the stuff of chivalric romance but its structure, and deeper meaning, from the radical strains of Protestant theology that briefly flourished during the chaos of the English Civil War before being inevitably quashed as order was restored. I’m reasonably well versed in the milieu for a layperson, but it definitely still feels like an alien text to me – and that’s before accounting for the fact that I read it in one sitting, in the middle of the night, trying to distract myself from anxiety.

It’s not just a critique and not just a compliment that playing WATT reminded me of that experience: just as the eponymous Pilgrim is called to abandon his family to seek salvation, the eponymous WATT hears a voice ordering him to leave his home in order to save it; just as Pilgrim undergoes allegorical trials as he struggles with despair, fear, and other sins, WATT visits seven houses that each host a challenge focusing on aging, anxiety, or the difficulty of making a human connection; just as the locations in the Progress have excessively-literal names, like the Valley of the Shadow of Death or Doubting Castle, WATT’s journey sets from a town that’s just “Penance” spelled backwards; just as I sometimes found the early-modern text alternately uncommonly lyrical rough going, some of the prose in WATT is really good and some verges on doggerel; and just as I felt flipping to the end of the book in the ER, I finished WATT rather unmoored and unsure of what had just went down.

There are two ways you can assess an allegorical journey like this, I think – the first is how well the overall arc functions, and the second is weighing up the individual steps in the path. The former is where WATT is unfortunately least successful. Not to extend the Pilgrim’s Progress comparisons past the point of reason, but while the opening there is similarly abrupt and disorienting, it’s drawing on centuries of Christian teaching; we know what salvation is, we know roughly what is needed to attain it, and we know that, at least within that worldview, it’s the most important thing there is. The Pilgrim, who’s actually called Christian, is an intentional everyman figure, from his generic name to his lack of backstory beyond a consciousness of sin. In WATT, we’re not given much to understand who this voice is or how credible it is, and what if any metaphysical significance the task it gives to the protagonist – finding seven keys to unlock and activate a lighthouse – is meant to have, which makes the game’s feints towards religious issues unsatisfying: there’s just not much substance here to engage with. And while WATT initially seems to be a blank slate, down to an opening “character creation” section that aborts, telling you that you don’t have the power to make such choices, he eventually develops a very specific history that might have impacted how I understood the first half of the game. And the ending exacerbates this lack of coherence, both by introducing an unnecessary twist that further undermined my investment in the overall arc, and concluding the story in a way that I didn’t think tied off the various threads of the plot.

The other side of that criticism, though, is that there were threads of that plot that I was invested in, because some of those individual steps are quite good. Oh, there are some clunkers, especially in the first half – there’s a contextless school quiz, a dialogue with a naïve woman that moves too quickly to establish a forced emotional connection, a workplace simulator that doesn’t have much to say about capitalism – but they’re all over relatively quickly and, except for that second one, work fine for what they are. But the latter set of vignettes boast less standard setups: there’s more about WATT’s regret at having never met his mother, a miserabilist flash-forward to a failing marriage, and a long slog of a climb that uses timed text to defensible purposes. But the real standout is a section where you’re playing the role of the emperor in a classical Chinese opera, choosing how to govern your nation and your household but always aware of the audience’s expectations, and the way they push you into playing a specific role that holds emotions in reserve and never commits to anything (that the audience might only exist in your head is a nice grace-note). The writing here also gets more lyrical:

"She enters the front yard of your chambers, perfumed in jasmine and rogue. Her silk trails behind her like a serpent, the colour of dusk after rain – deep, warm and aching."

The momentum the game builds through the back half of its journey was strong enough that even the disappointing ending I mentioned above wasn’t enough to blunt my enjoyment – and after all, Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t memorable for where it ends up (one vision of heaven is much like another, and Christian’s redemption is pretty much guaranteed from the get-go) but for the vividness of the obstacles in the path, and how they relate to moments of moral struggle we’ve all experienced. So on that front, WATT is in good company.

I don’t think I’m especially atypical in finding that it’s increasingly hard to steer clear of revenge fantasies. The rise of authoritarian regimes in what are notionally democracies means that every day, we’re confronted with the latest antics of amoral grifters, who put on a paper-thin veil of piety while committing crime after crime to line their pockets and save their skins. How can you not occasionally give in to the temptation to imagine that some form of divine justice could be realized in this world, not the next one, and redeem our debased reality? And of course I’m talking here of Trump and his cronies, but also of the Netanyahu regime, which even as I’m writing this is launching another ground offensive in Gaza, targeting already-starving civilians because two years of genocide apparently isn’t enough to satiate their bloodlust.

Just Two Wishes is a revenge fantasy, though to its credit it’s a lot less vicious than mine tend to be. It doesn’t reveal this at first, because it’s told backwards: there aren’t really any puzzles in this parser game except for piecing together the meaning. As a result, I can’t really talk about it without getting into that meaning, so fair warning: if you haven’t played it yet and don’t want the experience spoiled any more than I already have, it’s time to bounce.

OK, now it’s just us chickens. So yeah, this is the game that depicts the aftermath of a Palestinian child’s birthday wishes: that Bibi and Trump turn into the frayed teddy-bear she’s playing with, and that a giant black bowl like the one she’s got clapped over a bunch of beetles seal off Israel from the outside world. Because it is played backwards, the Tel Aviv segment feels like a disquieting mystery, with the disappearance of the sun and sky a horrifying bit of magical realism – admittedly, on my first go I missed seeing the Netanyahu speech, which would have broken up the somber mood, but that did mean that the jump to Mar-a-Lago was even more ridiculous, as the smash-cut to Trump in bed with a Hitler Youth and suddenly sprouting fur left me enjoyably discombobulated. I sometimes like not knowing what the heck I’m playing!

As a parser-game experience, it works well enough – design-wise, it’s all about moving through space until you get to the climactic cut-scenes that trigger the next sequence. With that said, the implementation is pretty thin; the menu-based conversation is slickly done, but you only ever have one or two choices, and the characters don’t have any depth, largely two-dimensional villains, heroic victims, or background players there to help the machinery of plot move along (though Zulaija has an understandable, and appealing, nasty streak). Meanwhile, the use of PunyInform means that there’s a bit more fussing about with doors than fits the game’s story, and the persistence of default Inform responses makes for some inadvertent comedy, especially in the Trump section (being told that, after JD Vance informs you that he’s taking over the presidency, “you politely end the conversation” beggars belief, as does the “violence isn’t the answer to this one” when you subsequently try to tear him limb from limb). But this isn’t exactly a game that lives and dies by its simulation – a parser presentation is a good fit for a story where you’re wandering around confused.

As politics, well, it’s not exactly trenchant. The caricatures of the bad guys are just that, and the fantasy being played out is satisfying but woefully incomplete (in particular, while I’m definitely a voting-for-the-Democrat-is-necessary-but-not-sufficient liberal, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the genocide started in the Biden administration – it’s obviously gotten worse since Trump took over, of course!) On the flip side, some of the characterization of ordinary Israelis made me uncomfortable: while I can’t fully disagree with the statement that “what Israel’s voters want is the eradication of Palestine, genocide pure and simple”, at least in terms of revealed preferences, it’s worth noting that there’s a large contingent of Israelis deeply unhappy with Netanyahu. Along similar lines, there’s a magazine described as featuring “Zionist beauties” Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman; I don’t follow the political views of celebrities all that closely, but while Gadot was famously in the IDF and has repeatedly stuck her foot in her mouth criticizing people who support Palestinians, I wasn’t aware of Portman doing anything in particular that would open her up to an implication of complicity with war crimes — and a quick Google left me no better informed since it turned up reasonably high-profile opposition to Netanyahu and some support for Gazans. And the reference to the elevator in the Tel Aviv apartment building being a “Schindler” feels like an awkward Holocaust reference, though per the author's later comments this is just a meaningless coincidence. There's nothing out of bounds here by any means, I don't think, but since collective punishment is so central to what's happening to Gaza, a work engaging with it necessarily is going to invite heightened scrutiny about its portrayals of collective guilt.

Calling a revenge fantasy occasionally tasteless isn’t exactly a criticism, though – that’s kind of the point. Nuance isn’t the order of the day, emotional catharsis to help manage the day to day stress of living in an unjust world is. By that standard Just Two Wishes does what it’s supposed to, I have to admit – I’m just not sure whether that daydream is completely healthy, or one that’s appropriate for me as an American to indulge in. And in fairness, the game seems to share that ambivalence to at least a certain degree – its subtitle is “a triptych on anger”, which at least implicitly passes judgment on little Zulaija’s dreams of vengeance. Some degree of retribution will be needed if we’re ever to live in decent societies again, but finding the right degree without going too far will take more than an idle daydream.

The mash-up is a big part of contemporary culture, from X-meets-Y high-concept movies to pop music, where samples and guest verses rule the charts, but it’s notable that, save for the burst of popularity enjoyed by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies some 15 years ago, the literary mash-up doesn’t tend to be especially commercially successful – and yet, it still gets written, Jeeves meets Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes meets the Great War, Star Wars meets Shakespeare, and so on. My suspicion is that part of the explanation is that for an author in a gamesome mood, it’s an exciting challenge to just answer the basic question “can this be made to work?” Getting into the guts of genre and prose style and suturing together two disparate approaches so that the seams don’t show appeals to the Dr. Frankensteinian hubris that lurks within most writers.

On this score, I think Anne of Green Cables can be adjudged a success – with the notable caveat that I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables all the way through. Still, I’m familiar with the basics of the plot and writing style – my wife is a major fan of the books, so I’ve absorbed a lot second-hand – and I skimmed the original as I was playing the game, so I think I’m not totally speaking without foundation when I say that its ventriloquism of L.M. Montgomery in a cyberpunk range comes off.

In the early going, this is because it mostly sticks to a line-by-line retelling of the original, just with the odd bit of sci-fi jargon thrown in: an “intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade ” becomes and “intricate, forgotten bulk of undersea cables in its earlier course, sporadically garlanded with dark fiber splitters and routers,” for example. Sure, the latter excerpt misses some of what’s great in the former – “dark secrets of pool and cascade” is a banger – but the rhythm and sense mostly come through. As the game progresses, though, it gains confidence, and risks more departures from the text. Rather than a simple orphan, in this telling Anne is the ward of a megacorp swallowed up by a hostile acquisition; she’s hired out on a gig contract to the Cuthbert siblings, and while the anachronistic sexism of the original is maintained – they’re disappointed she’s not a boy – she’s got a knack for hacking that lets her work wonders with their glitchy farm equipment.

Notably, while pretty much every incident save the climax is drawn from the book, the amount of recontextualizing varies: some see a near-complete translation of genre tropes, like when a younger sibling laid down by croup is instead rendered insensate by a computer virus. But the infamous raspberry-cordial episode, where Anne accidentally gets a friend drunk, comes through almost entirely intact. This is a good choice because it means that the game isn’t forced to strain for cyberpunk analogues for every little thing, and that the original’s pastoral vibe isn’t totally swallowed up. And the places where the two work in concert are really fun, like the nosy gossip-hound of a neighbor who’s now a vlogger and influencer:

"If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a J-Pop idoru bot Mrs Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually piping /dev/null for a solid five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but as her Bayesian agents suggested, Mrs Rachel was almost forced to suppose it."

Again, it’s clear the best lines are Montgomery’s – this bit, where Anne relates how she and her friends have been writing melodramatic VR-stories, earned me a guffaw (the punch-line is verbatim from Green Gables):

"We made vids of the best ones and sent them to Diana’s aunt Josephine. She messaged back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died."

But some of the prose that’s wholly new to the game, as far as I can tell, is very very good as well, with Anne’s monologue upon the death of her almost-stepfather particularly affecting:

”I haven’t been alone one minute since it happened—and I want to be. I want to be quite silent and quiet and try to realize it. I know a Matthew who wasn’t dead, and I need to bring that man over the threshold.”

So all told, despite some bumps I think that author-teasing question of “can I?” can be answered with a yes – but for a reader, there’s also the question of “should you?” to be addressed. The point of a mash-up isn’t just to show off virtuosity, after all, but to illuminate something heretofore-unnoticed about the two things being juxtaposed. And here’s where I think Anne of Green Cables begins to struggle. The dour social comment of cyberpunk doesn’t sit all that easily next to a rural Canadian idyll, so what’s the thematic connection the game’s trying to draw?

I think it’s largely meant to be the figure of Anne herself, whose charisma, optimism, and willpower can push through country small-mindedness and megacorp amorality alike. It’s an inspiring idea – especially, let’s acknowledge, in our depressing political circumstances – but it’s one the game hints at rather than fully elucidates. A big issue that blunts the parallel is that most of the plot requires the cyberpunk world to be a reasonably cozy one; while there is one clear bad-guy corp, the other one just seems bumbling, and while the game’s vague about what kind of tech-assisted farming the AvonLea community performs, the environment and people are generally depicted as wholesome. When, at the eleventh hour, a more traditional techbro bad guy sweeps onstage, accompanied by NFT-memes and ChatGPT jokes, the effect is jarring, but worse, the threat he represents also feels like it comes out of nowhere. Anne isn’t showing up how to rebel against a near-overwhelming foe, but simply to dispatch a comic-opera buffoon.

That is, instead of a cyberpunk story featuring Anne Shirley – which I think would be thematically powerful, but much less fun to write and read – what we’ve got here is a romantic bildungsroman with a sci-fi gloss, which is more fun but less coherent. This weighting of the elements extends to the interactive pieces of the game – there are some decision points, but mostly they feel like they don’t lead to much branching and often perceptively offer a choice to either stick to the book-Anne, or do something different, and unsurprisingly book-Anne is more fun. Even combined with an endgame minigame that I still haven’t wrapped my head around, the game-y elements of Anne of Green Cables don’t feel like the major draw.

The major draw, of course, is just Anne herself, and to return to where I started, the success of the game is that she’s as appealing, and inhabiting a world just as inviting, as in the original novel. If the game doesn’t throw a whole new light on an acknowledged classic, that’s entirely forgivable, and if the risk of trying to do so would be weighing Anne down with grimdarkery, a la the Netflix adaptation from a couple year ago that my wife still complains about, it’s even easier to pardon. Having gotten to the end of Anne of Green Cables, I find myself eager to finally read Anne of Green Gables once the Comp ends – and it’s hard to think of a better tribute to the game’s success than that.

The summer of my second year in law school, I got an internship in DC and needed to figure out where to live. My school provided a listing service through which I found someone at a school there who likewise had an out-of-town job for the summer, making her place available to sublet, but the dates didn’t quite match up, forcing me to find someplace to stay for the week between when my internship started and the sublet became available. In those pre-AirBnB days I just checked out Craigslist, and eventually found a room I could rent for a couple of days in a suburb just outside the city proper. I was feeling good about my resourcefulness as I threw my giant duffel over my shoulder and caught a bus from the bus station to my new home for the next week – feelings which curdled as I rang the doorbell to find there was no-one there to answer me, and that turned into a cold weight in my stomach once I realized that when I called the host’s number, nobody was picking up.

Fortunately, it was not a scam after all! The guy had just been out and his phone had died; after fifteen minutes he came over and we sorted it all out (okay, he had double-booked the room so I had to sleep on a futon for the first night, so I guess it was kinda scammy, but he was apologetic and knocked the price down as a result – compared to my fears of being left totally up a creek I wasn’t inclined to complain too much). Still, I remember the way my heart sank as I arrived and realized getting into the place I was supposed to stay that night wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, which means the setup of Rain Check-in immediately had resonance for me. In the game, you’ve arrived at an AirBnB in a rural area, but all the lights are off, your phone is low on charge, and the host’s given you cryptically-translated instructions for finding the key that are only medium helpful. Oh, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way. Good luck!

It’s a fun premise, though in practice what we’ve got here is Standard Parser Scenario #7: “get into a locked house.” There’s a little bit of local color with some patio furniture and a squeaky gate held closed with a rock, but outside of a bonus area I didn’t find on my first playthrough (hint: try exploring around before heading to the house), there aren’t any characters to interact with, or much scenery to ground proceedings in any particular place or time, much less anything resembling environmental storytelling – the closest it gets are a few wry footnotes that do at least add a slight flavor of humor. The few puzzles are likewise ones you’ve seen before – it’s not quite moving the doormat to find the key, and then entering the combination that you find written on a post-it one room over from the safe, but it’s also not miles away from that kind of thing, either.

There are two departures from the generic, one good, one bad. On the plus side, there are more endings than I expected, and some puzzles have alternate solutions. These don’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it was fun to see that you could use brute force to get around some challenges, allowing you to reach a suboptimal ending. The other departure is less enjoyable, sadly: not only does the game have an overall time limit, you also have a light-source with limited charge, and when you run out you die. Mainstream parser-IF design has long since moved away from these kinds of timers, and for good reason – leaving aside questions of verisimilitude and Zarfian cruelty, they tend to disincentivize players from spending excess time exploring and checking out details, which undercuts one of the major strengths of parser IF. There are some ways of taking the sting out of them, but I think it would be hard to find these options on a first play-through, it’s galling to have to treat that initial play-through as initial scouting that must be thrown away to inform a subsequent run, though at least the game is short and simple enough that this only winds up being a minor annoyance.

Implementation-wise, Rain Check-in is more ambitious than other games of its length and simplicity: there are some robust features, like the aforementioned phone and endings. The former has some wobbles – it’s implemented via somewhat-wonky multiple choice menus, and I couldn’t actually get the option to display the phone’s charge in the header to work – but I didn’t find any out and out bugs, beyond a few Inform-standard things like an object whose display name doesn’t match what you need to type to interact with it, and the verb to enter the combination being a bit idiosyncratic. For an author who appears to have only made a few small prior parser games, it’s a pretty good showing.

As for the writing – well, the elephant in the room here is the use of ChatGPT to help generate the game’s prose, which the author discusses in the Comp blurb: as a non-native speaker of English, he used ChatGPT as a translation aid and to refine grammar and phrasing. While I usually find text straight from the LLM intolerable to read, here the writing mostly struck me as unobjectionable, I have to say; while I didn’t note down any especially unique turns of phrase, there weren’t any clunkers, either, and it mostly avoids the annoying tics LLMs tend to get up to when given free rein. I have to believe there are more ethical and sustainable tools for ESL authors to use to sharpen their prose – not least, volunteers from this very forum! – but at least as to the results in this game, it’s not too bad.

And that’s pretty much my judgment on Rain Check-in – it’s not too bad! Again, as a neophyte’s work it’s reasonably well put together, while its most annoying features (those timers!) would hopefully be easy to correct in a follow-up work. As a story, there’s not much there, just a sketch towards an anecdote, but it’s a good-natured enough predicament to be stuck in, and I did enjoy the footnotes. And while “not too bad” isn’t high praise, but sometimes, like when you’re locked out and expecting the worst, “not too bad” can feel like intense relief.

My wife had never been part of an Internet community before last year, when she got into the Bridgerton fandom in a big way: like, she reads the fan-fiction, sure, but also had some of her takes go semi-viral on social media, gotten banned from a subreddit due to inter-board feuding, and even co-hosts a podcast. It’s been an eye-opening experience in a variety of ways – IF drama has nothing on what they get into over there, let me tell you – but has also given me a much finer-grained view of the standard tropes of romance fiction than I had heretofore possessed. Beyond the intrinsic interest, it’s also expanded my critical vocabulary, which was helpful as I turned over my reactions to Pharos Fidelis: it’s a game that I really enjoyed, but whose central relationship I didn’t find as engaging as its other elements. And I now I think I know that that’s mostly just due to a difference of tastes than anything lacking in the game: I’m just more of a Friends to Lovers guy than a Forbidden Love one, and Wound-Tending strikes me as nice but not especially hot. À chacun son goût, no big deal, especially when the game offers so much to dig into (so much, in fact, that I feel greedy for wanting even more in some places).

The game’s setup combines pieces of a bunch of different premises, but manages to feel completely seamless and its own thing: in a world riven by a magical war, a young prodigy named Finnit is studying demon-summoning at a prestigious magical academy; he’s fascinated by these otherworldly entities and their world, but his crappy advisor sees them only as weapons that must be dominated. As part of a final exam slash hazing attempt, the advisor teleports Finnit to the ruins of a remote magical lighthouse, telling him he has only a few weeks to unravel its mysteries and reignite it. Knowing he can’t do this alone, Finnit summons a demon he’d previously seen his advisor abusing; working together, the two learn about each other’s worlds and ways, and discover some shocking secrets about the lighthouse’s history, too.

That relationship is the heart of the game, with revelations about the lighthouse always tied to breakthroughs in the characters’ bond (or vice versa). But Pharos Fidelis is confident enough to delay the two meeting for quite a while, long enough to make sure Finnit and his predicament register, as well as to establish the rules of this world. Demon-summoning is subject to laws, in both senses of the term: some are akin to thermodynamic principles, but others are more like moral injunctions, and the game intersperses its narrative sections with bits of textbooks and other in-world documents fleshing things out. They’re well-written in of themselves, and also feed into the character development – seeing the three iron laws of summoning elucidated by your advisor in stentorian terms, and then having the click-to-proceed link read “ignore his wisdom” helps puncture the pretension and communicate where Finnit is coming from.

The prose is a major highlight throughout, in fact, dense with wordplay and memorable images while still remaining propulsively readable. Here’s a description of the aforementioned advisor:

"Raekard was there, tall and spidery, with the indistinct age of a man whose years had intertwined too closely with the power he commanded."

And a vignette that’s part of Finnit’s tragic backstory:

"Wizened boughs set coral pink leaves adrift. They clung, in soggy piles, to gaps between paving slabs. Young Finnit faced a chore deferred, tender fingers gripping a broom too unwieldy to shoo the litter off the patio at any reliable pace."

There’s alliteration, well-judged details, even small jokes – “wizened” sure seems like a nod to what Finnit’s job winds up being, and there’s a later description of the lighthouse’s focusing-crystal, a survivor of many thunderstorms, which notes “the memories of lightning that had long since bolted.” Come to think of it, “Finnit” is itself a sort of pun, highlighting the bounded, finite nature of his being compared to his immortal lover. There are a few flies in the ointment: the game definitely has fantasy-name disease (I’m awkwardly writing around the demon’s name because I can’t remember it off the top of my head – it definitely starts with a V?), there are places where the dialogue struck me as too informal for the high-fantasy vibe, and it takes some big swings, so of course some of them miss.

But these are tiny niggles; 98% of the time the prose is a delight, which is impressive indeed for a work of this length. In fact, even though it pretty much took me the full Comp-standard two hours to reach an ending, part of me was eager for more – I wouldn’t have minded if the process of understanding and trying to fix the lighthouse had had a couple more scenes to play out in, and there are a few glimpses of hell that likewise could have been expanded. Part of me also wishes the central relationship had been more of a slow-burn, but again, I think that’s just down to preference: in some ways it’s more romantic to have the near-immediate spark of attraction quickly having the two of them thinking sexy thoughts about each other, even if personally I think it would have been fun if they’d started more platonic, until Finnit’s flash of insight in a late-night magical engineering session suddenly made the demon want to jump his bones…

Speaking of the demon, I didn’t find him as cleanly-drawn a character as Finnit, but I think that’s actually a strength of the work. Demons are meant to be more protean and amenable to change, and as he’s recovering from trauma, he could reshape himself in different ways. In fact, cleverly and thematically, while Finnit is the viewpoint character, all the choices are on the demonic side of the ledger. There are only a handful of decision points, a few of which are seemingly low-key, but as far as I was able to experiment, they can have pretty significant impacts on where the plot ultimately goes (the chapter select function also makes it easy to experiment).

To be honest, though, while it’s there and effective, I didn’t need the interactivity, or, as mentioned, to get too hot and bothered by the romance plot, to find Pharos Fidelis engaging – the character work and magical investigation are top-notch, delivered in lovely, luminous prose, with several surprises I didn’t see coming (I haven’t mentioned the way the game plays with the second-personal narrator as it nears its conclusion). A highlight of the Comp for sure, and I’d gladly play any prequels or sequels the author cares to write.

Reader, I’m going to have to say something right now that might be hard for you to hear. Are you ready? Do you want to sit down? Do you have your preferred beverage to hand (but not too close, we wouldn’t want to run the risk of spillage)? Okay.

I have some flaws.

I know, you’re going to say, that’s not news, of course you sometimes pad your reviews with hilarious and insightful but maybe only tangentially relevant personal anecdotes, and perhaps sometimes your writing can be too analytically rigorous and insightful. Which, yes, guilty, but actually no, I mean real flaws. I’m terrible at languages, tend to flail when small talk is required, and (worst of all) am too middlebrow to actually enjoy abstract art. I can maunder on about color and composition if I’m trying to impress someone (I’m always trying to impress someone), and there’s definitely some post-Impressionalist transitional stuff, where you can see where the artist jumped off from representation and hangs poised in the air in defiance of gravity, using shapes and textures that aren’t representational but nonetheless have the faintest of tethers to something real, that I find compelling. But beyond that I’m at sea.

All of which is to say that I don’t think I’m the right person to give Eight Last Signs in the Desert its due, even if I weren’t playing it just about a third of the way into this enormous Comp, when my brain is starting to get benumbed at the scale of the task before it and groans in protest at the idea of having to do work. There’s nary a character in sight, much less a motivation easily translatable to Maslow’s hierarchy of need, in this impressively-produced choice-based game: the protagonist addresses a septet of monuments in a sandy wasteland, each of which lets you craft a tone-poem through careful selection of cycling links. There is a progression, as each monument vanishes as you complete it, and for every pair you finish, you get a bonus bit of text that appears customized to the combination of those two. Do that three times, then wrap it up with the final monad and then the surprise eighth monument (no points for guessing what that is), and that’s the game.

It’s a solid enough structure, and the themes at issue – dissolution, the slippery nature of reality, the aridity of the detritus of contemporary civilization – are trenchant enough: what are we living through but the decay of modernism into the abstract? And the prose, er, poetry, is really good, with thought-through meter and memorable images by the score. Heck, speaking of art, the backdrop to all this is lovely, Seurat-style landscapes that provide an unsettling, lyrical home for the seven brooding metaphor-totems.

But good lord is it abstract. Here’s a late-game peregrination:

"You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame."

This is good, but it’s a lot, metaphors tripping over each other in a torrent, and it’s not an exception – this is an extended excerpt of what I landed on for my first monument:

"Enter the palace. Wander its halls until you find the window. Layer its transparencies in a grandiose matrix.

"Seal your choice. Cross it and float outside. Reach for the moon above, but it’s too late in the palace gardens.

"Seal your choice. Sit in it. Dream an uncertain story of the sea."

The lapidary nature of the imagery wound up feeling exhausting to me; until the very end nothing feels like it reaches a climax, each stanza just gives way to the next, sometimes with only the most tangential linkages. Similarly, I experienced the choices as simultaneously polyvalent and weightless in their lack of implication:

"Seal your choice. Rise again and take one step back. Reach for the [discarded/once public/exclusive/devoted] strand and pull."

“Discarded” and “devoted” are wildly disparate concepts, to say nothing of “once public”, so trying to parse out these possibilities imposes a cognitive burden, but then I found it even more challenging to keep those choices in mind once the text moved on, as the subsequent lines might not even mention a strand, much less an excusive one. A more labile brain than mine might have been able to surf the vibes, weaving this riot of language into something that coheres, but I freely admit mine wasn’t up to the challenge: to the extent my quick summary above winds up being accurate, I did end up with a sense of what the game is getting at, and as an aesthetic experience I found a lot to admire in Eight Last Things in the Desert.

But personally in my IF I need a bit more of, well, a personality, and a more disciplined metaphor-palette plus ideally some drama beyond the wearied acceptance of discorporation. So file this one under games I admired more than liked, though I’m pretty sure that to the kind of player who lives for Surrealist art exhibitions and jams to Symbolist poetry will find this among their favorites of the Comp: the fault is not in Eight Last Signs in the Desert, but in myself.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: there’s a Towers of Hanoi puzzle in whoami. It’s only four disks, and seems like it’s at least partially a piss-take – the puzzle is meant to represent the transfer of a full digital encoding of human consciousness that takes literal years to scan in sufficient depth, so seeing this awesome and profound technological feat reduced to a brainteaser that last seemed cool when I was in middle school earned a bark of laughter. But still: it’s 2025, no more, please.

Fortunately, that’s about the only bad thing I have to say about the game! Despite having only used Windows since I graduated from college, I am a sucker for IF that mimics a UNIX shell, and whoami is one of the slickest examples of the subgenre I remember playing. It’s choice-based, so you don’t have to actually type commands, just click on directories and file-names to move around and open stuff, but the presentation is sufficiently authentic to make the player feel like a hacker, even as subtle color-coding helps guide you towards which things you should click. The drive isn’t especially big – I got through the game in maybe fifteen minutes? – and the plot isn’t especially novel, though it mashes up familiar elements into a mélange that I don’t think I’ve specifically seen before. But the “environmental storytelling” of putting together the narrative by reading emails, running a date routine to figure out how time is passing, and checking user logs to piece together what’s happened makes things feel fresh and engaging. Heck, it even hides the save/load functionality behind diegetic dump and reboot functions that you need to hunt around for, which in a longer game would be annoying but since you’ll almost certainly not need them, just registers as another fun bit of business.

whoami also knows the value of changing things up. OK, maybe the Towers of Hanoi were a flop, but otherwise the puzzles are well paced, punctuating progress and giving the player something to do beyond crawling directories. Sometimes this is just a matter of visual presentation, like the web-page mockup whose blaring light-mode makes an unignorable contrast with the black-background filesystem work of the rest of the game. But others are more interactive, including a gag even better than the Towers practical joke (Spoiler - click to show)(the fact that the “primitive” simulation is a seamlessly-implemented-in-Twine Inform game is hilariously meta). There’s also a pretty solid plot twist, and while, again, there’s nothing especially novel here, things move zippily enough that I never felt like the story was getting bogged down, with just enough detail provided to suggest depth without requiring the player to ever get stuck in the weeds, and the game ends just when you want it to. As for the prose, it’s unostentatious but effective, adopting multiple voices as needing and doing a credible impersonation of personal messages or bureaucratese as the situation varies.

I’m struggling to think of much else to say, because whoami is a short game that does exactly what it sets out to do, with style and substance to spare. Even those with a terminal aversion to disk-swapping puzzles should just grit their teeth and power through this once.