Reviews by Mike Russo

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

This one lived up to its name for me, for a couple reasons that are more idiosyncratic and one about the way it’s written. I’m definitely glad I played it, but didn’t find it as emotionally resonant as I wanted it to be, despite how well-observed and grounded it is.

Starting on the idiosyncratic side: it was uncanny to realize this was a companion game to The Dead Account, which I’d played much earlier in the Comp – the main cast of Weird Grief are the friend and family group of the holder of the eponymous dead account in the previous game. I suspect this is the reverse of the ideal order, since Weird Grief is first in time and it also fleshes out the characters who show up only as screen-names in The Dead Account. Oddly, Weird Grief doesn’t go into as much detail on what exactly happened to Mike, the dead person, withholding information in a way that didn’t have much payoff for me. I suspect linking the games more explicitly, either by suggesting an intended order, integrating them into the same file, or shifting the way information is presented to provide analogous exposition no matter which is done first (though of course that would be hard!), might have been a good choice.

The other idiosyncracy in my response is that I’m unfamiliar with the subculture that takes center stage here – the protagonist is a furry who’s in a polyamorous relationship with the dead man and his widower – which is fine, but I sometimes felt at sea when trying to understand the norms around the relationship. Juniper, the main character, lives in a different city from Mike and Roger (the widower), and an invitation to move in is treated as a big deal, making it seem like the connection was relatively new or less formal. But she’s also specifically called out as their “third” at the funeral, putting her on a different level from another character who’s also present and had been a sexual partner for the couple.

My confusion about Juniper’s role and expectations tied in with the way she’s written. I didn’t find that she had a lot of interiority, or had a lot of direct feelings about Mike’s death (beyond a single admittedly-heartwarming anecdote that’s told a couple different times, and several reminiscences about sex). Partially this is the nature of protagonists in choice-based games, where room is generally made for the player to put their own stamp on the character. But here, this meant Juniper felt primarily like a lens for Roger’s grief.

This focus extends to the sex scenes – as the blurb warns, they’re here and they’re quite explicit. This sort of thing isn’t exactly my cup of tea, and I have to say that when I’ve experienced deep, soul-crushing grief, sex has been pretty far from my mind so there wasn’t much personal resonance. But I can see how for these folks, sex would be a source of comfort and bonding in a hard time, and definitely understand the artistic imperative not to draw a curtain over what goes on between the three character. Anyway putting all that aside, I felt like Juniper was sidelined in favor of Roger in these sequences too: in the first one, I don’t think she has an orgasm, and in the second, she’s more viewer than participant as the other two characters have sex. I assume this is intentional, and meant to reflect something about Juniper’s relationship with Roger, but once again my takeaway was that Juniper’s subjective experience was secondary to the piece, which feels like a missed opportunity given that she’s our viewpoint character.

The writing is strong throughout – the dialogue rings true, and I liked the focus on the logistics of the grieving period, albeit these folks ate too much fast food (there are lots of typos though, including one “double click passage to edit” error and an awkwardly double-nested parenthetical). And while there are few choices, they feel reasonably impactful. So the supporting pieces are all strong enough – I just wanted Juniper, structurally the center of the piece, to loom a little larger in the story.

Highlight: The characters are all winning, with Tammy, Mike’s sister, especially came through as a positive presence.

Lowlight: once again I played this choice-based game with Henry napping on me, but due to text size and other formatting issues it required a lot of scrolling when reading in portrait mode (I was going to say it’s hard to play one-handed, but that could be misinterpreted!)

How I failed the author: As I said above, this milieu is pretty foreign to my experience so I worry I’m missing, or misinterpreted, many of the social cues or other indications of relationship dynamics.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

If you’ve ever perused the IF Comp guidelines for authors, it’s hard to miss that there’s a single recommendation that looms larger than all the others: in a big bold heading right at the top of the document, it booms “playtest your game (and credit your testers).” Plane Walker sure seems like it didn’t mind the first part of this admonition, and it definitely didn’t follow the second, and as a result, a promising puzzle game with some clever math-based mechanics was for me an exercise in frustration, nit-picking, and authorial mind-reading. There’s fun to be had here, but if there’s any prospect of a post-Comp release, I’d hold off until there’s a more battle-tested version of the game available to play.

(Fair warning that I’m going to spoil a couple of the puzzles in the remainder of this review – I’m not putting them in spoiler text because I don’t think they’re fairly solvable in the current version of the game, so a push in the right direction is likely to make the game more enjoyable rather than less).

Plane Walker doesn’t give the greatest initial impression. The very first character of the game is a superfluous space that awkwardly offsets the opening text, which is a single too-long paragraph saying you’re alone on a plane and are suffering from amnesia (sigh). There’s no ABOUT or HELP text, and the player character is as good looking as ever. The first puzzle requires typing X SEATS twice, with a critical item only being revealed after the second time; the second needs you to spell out an action with absurd specificity (to break open a keypad HIT KEYPAD WITH STICK doesn’t work – you need to go through the specific keys to find one that’s susceptible to brute force); and the third is a trial-and-error exercise with a time limit (Plane Walker will kill you, including one open-the-door-and-die sequence in the midgame, so definitely make saves).

Things improve a little once you reach the second major area. The environment opens up, something like a plot slowly starts to emerge, and there are a couple of really clever puzzles – though again, they aren’t well clued. For example, the major puzzles in this section require exploring some math books by literally entering them, but the possibility of doing so, much less the mechanism for doing so, isn’t suggested anywhere as far as I could tell.

Once I went to the walkthrough and got over that hump, I was able to get my teeth into things, but again, too many of the puzzles are undermotivated. The best of them involves turning yourself imaginary – in the mathematical sense – to explore the blocked-off part of the area. The steps you take to do this are fun and make sense, but the problem is there’s no reason to think it should accomplish anything: trying to access the locked-off areas before you solve this puzzle gives you a failure message saying you’re worried about getting lost, which has nothing to do with the intended solution.

Making matters worse, implementation is spotty throughout. I didn’t run into bugs as such, but there are a host of typos, unimplemented synonyms, disambiguation issues, guess-the-verb puzzles, and actions requiring very specific syntax to succeed. It all adds up to frustration, and makes the trial-and-error the puzzle design often requires even more annoying.

Again, this is a real shame, since I was enjoying some of the puzzles, and while the story doesn’t make complete sense, I did like the pieces of it that I understood, which see you dragooned into a secret war between mathematical planes. There’s a version of Plane Walker that I could highly recommend as a tough-as-nails but fair old-school puzzler, but that’s unfortunately not the one we currently have.

Highlight: By the endgame, either I’d tuned into the game’s wavelength, or the author had mercy and decided to make the climactic puzzles easier (always a good practice) – either way I found the last challenge fair and fun.

Lowlight: OK, I’m going to spoil a puzzle. To get through a particular barrier, you need to turn yourself two-dimensional, which is a cool idea! However, the way you do this is you pick up an anvil with a hole in it, cut a strange rope you find embedded in the ceiling (you need to cut it with a broadsword – if you try to cut it with your handsaw, you get a default “that would achieve little” error), tie it to the anvil, and then tie the other end to an iron bar in a supply closet. I can’t reconstruct the logic behind even a single step of this process!

How I failed the author: this is another one where I think the impatience caused by my new parenthood was actually helpful – I went to the walkthrough relatively quickly, which was definitely the right move.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

Oof, I can’t help but feel bad for the timing of launching a Facebook Messenger game the same week that it crashed. I didn’t run into any downtime, but I did find FB Messenger an awkward platform for this game, from really-annoying timed text, the need to manually scroll down the chat log after each prompt to see the options, and accidentally restarting the game several times when I tried typing instead of just clicking. It definitely seems like there could be advantages to the format that make it worth these downsides, but I don’t think The Belinsky Conundrum does anything that can’t be capably handled by more traditional platforms like Twine, and using one of those likely would have made the implementation a fair bit smoother.

The substance of the Belinsky Conundrum is also a little awkward. The blurb made me expect intense moral dilemmas, and then the opening seems to be framing a high-stakes espionage mission, important enough to be launched from the White House Situation Room, but your character’s dialogue options radically undermine any sense of gravity – like, upon being told that the mission will involve assassinating an American citizen and his minor children, my choices were “sweet!”, “that’s messed up”, and “oh my god”. Which, I mean sure, it is messed up, but I was expecting something a bit more articulate? This irreverent tone continues throughout the mission, and while I guess it’s meant to keep things grounded and conversational, it really took my head out of the game.

It doesn’t help that most of what you wind up doing is fairly dull. The primary gameplay is about managing the logistics of getting to the mission and gathering the needed weapons and transportation. Preparation can be a fun part of a heist story, but here there’s not much interesting going on in any of the sequences – even a (Spoiler - click to show)a surprise betrayal from a key contact played out in a low-stakes, low-consequence way – and I ran into what was I think a bug that made the resource-management part of these decisions moot, since I started out with several thousand negative credits (but could keep spending anyway).

I can see how things might pick up at the climax, but just as I got to the mission’s target the first time, I learned that they were about to be raided by the cops, and I decided to scrub rather than get caught in the middle. Turns out this ends the game, which is fair enough, but since there was no save functionality, rectifying that mistake meant starting over, and I didn’t have the endurance to face all that timed text again immediately (I eventually won -- see below). It’s a shame, since a good moral dilemma can be satisfying to work through, but I fear TBC might have gone too far in back-loading the good stuff.

Highlight: I did enjoy the drama of kicking off the story in the Situation Room – it’s a fun touch.

Lowlight: Getting a gun was a really tedious process, not least because you need to call through five different people with very-similar names to figure out which one is actually your contact. It’s pointless busywork since there’s no way to guess which one’s right, and no penalty other than sitting through identical wrong-number dialogue, if you fail.

How I failed the author: I haven’t logged onto Facebook in like 3 or 4 years (look, I’m not a big social media person) so I was distracted the whole time I was playing by a sidebar full of people I’ve flaked on writing back to for an extraordinarily long time. Sorry!

MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back and replayed this one to a real ending. There’s definitely a climax that brings some excitement and ties together the plot threads laid down earlier, and presents the promised moral dilemma. This didn’t change my mind on the game too much, though, since the story felt very much on rails after the point where my first playthrough prematurely concluded. There’s a lot of action and some wrenching decisions, but they all appeared to happen automatically, with only one significant choice coming in at the very end. There do appear to be major consequences for the decisions made in the mid-game – there’s a score listed at the end, and there was definitely room for improvement – but I think front-loading the interactivity like this wasn’t a great idea, since it means there’s a lot of fiddly decision-making before the story kicks into high gear, then not much to do except click “next” once the ending arrives. If this had more of a heist vibe, where you could know a bit more about what the climax was likely to look like and make your preparations accordingly, I might have liked it better, but as-is the decisions felt too much like shots in the dark.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

A tightly-designed and well-researched period-piece puzzler about a singing cowboy rescuing his sweetheart from a band of outlaws, The Song of the Mockingbird has a lot going for it: it nails a consistent voice that fits the setting, it boasts complex but fair puzzles that can be tackled in nonlinear order, and there are really robust post-game notes laying out the historical context. This of course did really well in the Comp, and deservedly so – but for a few mostly-idiosyncratic reasons it didn’t fully resonate with me, so I didn't wind up enjoying Mockingbird as much as I admired it.

First, I struggled with the puzzles. Some of this is due to my new-father brain, I’m sure (I played the game over a couple of late-night sessions), and all of them make sense once they’re solved. But I wound up using the hint system more than I was expecting to, largely because I had a hard time getting my bearings. Many of the puzzles hinge on using historically-appropriate equipment, like (Spoiler - click to show) making the lighter work and fixing the wagon-wheel, but the way objects were described often made it hard for me to picture what was going on. Location descriptions were also often really verbose, with a lot of detail on the environment and relevant objects, as well as usually having a couple of additional paragraphs laying out what a nearby bad guy was up to. Again, this is probably a strength, since it helps get the player grounded in a complicated, unfamiliar environment – but something about the writing sometimes left me feeling a bit at sea.

Another reason I found the puzzles hard is that the vibe of Mockingbird is much more serious than I was expecting. While the blurb and cover art aren’t zany by any means, the presentation of the disarmed singing-cowboy protagonist whose wits and guitar are going to save the day led me to expect something reasonably lighthearted. Deviating from parser-comedy conventions is no bad thing, but in this case, one way the difference plays out is that the puzzles are ruthless than I was expecting. They're all about getting rid of various outlaws who are keeping you from the ranch house where your sweetheart is being held, but while I was mostly trying to disarm them or knock them out, the actual solutions were way more bloodthirsty. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed how the game takes its premise seriously – but seriously doesn’t have to mean violent, and personally this choice didn’t work well for me.

Finally, while the game is technically solid and I didn’t run into any bugs, I found it was missing a number of conveniences that I’ve come to expect from modern IF. The biggest offender is a door locked with three different keys – once I’d solved all the puzzles needed to collect them, I tried just typing S or OPEN DOOR, but nope, I had to manually unlock each different lock, with lots of disambiguation issues along the way because UNLOCK BRONZE WITH BRONZE wasn’t understood (nor does UNLOCK DOOR WITH BRONZE KEY work – you need to match each key to each lock). This is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme, but it still look me like two dozen turns to get this stupid door opened, and there were a few other similar places, like futzing with (Spoiler - click to show)the gold casket or finding the block and tackle, where the parser wasn’t as helpful as I wanted it to be.

So yeah, this is a review full of niggles of what’s a really well-done game, and I know a good amount of my caviling above is really down to personal preference – there’s a lot of good work and solid craft that went into Mockingbird, and I love seeing more historical games in the Comp. Sadly it didn’t fully gel for me, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the author does next.

Highlight: I loved the lavish historical notes available after winning the game – I’m kind of a history nerd so I love this stuff (though see next point…)

Lowlight: OK, so the game is set in 1867, but in the epilogue the main character reflects on how “President Johnson will snuff out the embers” of the Confederate dead-ender movement the outlaws are supporting. Come on, this is post Swing Around the Circle! Sure, the local military head, General Sheridan, was a staunch Reconstructionist, but from the timing implied by the notes, he was at best only weeks away from being transferred away by the soft-on-Confederates Johnson! (OK, I suppose maybe the singing cowboy isn’t so up on politics, but come on, this feels like an oversight -- albeit one the author's said will be changed in a post-Comp update).

How I failed the author: er, per the above, I may have been overly-fixated on historical minutiae.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

I’m a firm believer in playing games in the random order that the Comp page spits out. Sure, it’d be easy and immediately-rewarding to jump around looking for games from authors I know and picking the ones with blurbs that immediately appeal. But that would mean I wouldn’t give as much attention to games by new or lesser-known authors, and would probably make me burn out on getting through the full Comp, since I’d be front-loading the stuff I’m likely toto dig and backloading games that might take more of an effort to play. With that said, I am only human, and every Comp, there’s a game or two that strikes my fancy right off the bat, leaving me to furtively scroll down, drool over the blurb, and anticipate the moment when I finally get to play.

Reader, since October first I’ve been jonesing to dig into The Golden Heist, since it seems laser-targeted to appeal to my interests. I’m a sucker for a good heist, and the record will show I’m quite a fan of lightly-comic Classical settings (ahem). And I’ve long wanted to visit the ruins of the Domus Aurea – while I haven’t managed it yet, I have walked past the entrance while pestering my wife with fun facts about it (she really appreciated that, I’m sure). So while I think this is a fun, well-designed game that anyone will enjoy, you might want to take the following rave review with a grain of salt given how many of my buttons it manages to hit.

To be successful, The Golden Heist needs to walk a tightrope between breezy accessibility and historical grounding – anyone drawn in by the specificity of the premise is going to want to see the game reflect what we actually know about this time and place in early-Imperial Rome, but at the same time, a heist needs zippy dialogue, narrow escapes, and surprise reversals that can’t be too indebted to plodding realism. It’s a tough balance to strike, but the game manages it really well, with incidental details about things like the fire hazards endemic to ordinary life in Rome lightly scattered throughout the story. The take on Nero, too, is pretty pulpy, but I think is closely modeled on the portrayal in Suetonius (whether or not the dishier bits of the Twelve Caesars were anything other than scurrilous gossip is whole separate question).

Of course, the player needs something to do in this well-realized setting, which brings us to the heist. It’s all well-motivated – your father was an architect who helped build Nero’s new golden palace, but was cruelly cast aside after an injury, so now you’re out to rob the place blind as an act of revenge that will incidentally make you rich – and while there’s not much of a separate planning phase, which is something I enjoy in these kinds of stories, you do get to choose one of three mutually-exclusive partners for the caper and bring their particular specialty (fists, wits, or brains) to bear. I went with charming rogue Felix – he seemed lucky – which had a major impact on how things played out, both lending his talents to overcoming some of the obstacles we encountered and adding some complications of his own, as some of his past swindles caught up with him at the wrong time.

The heist itself plays out as a series of obstacles that need to be confronted in sequence, from making your way in (I had the choice to blag in the front or sneak in the back) to connecting with a contact to setting up your distraction to the light puzzle-solving required to get into the vault, and climaxing with the desperate rush to escape once things go inevitably pear-shaped. While the tone stays breezy (and bringing Felix along set up some pretty good jokes, including his threatening bluff that the main character’s a Macedonian known as Alexander the Great With His Fists), there’s definitely a ratcheting up of tension.

I’m not sure whether it’s possible to have to abort the heist early if things go too wrong, but it certainly feels like there are degrees of success or failure that have consequences later, especially in the push-your-luck escape bit. I have to confess that my run was more Benny Hill than Danny Ocean, with a few small missteps in the opening cascading into big problems on the way out. Still, I managed to get away with a reasonable chunk of loot (though the game seemed to think I’d lifted Nero’s golden lyre when I’d actually left it behind), and I’m eager to replay post-Comp to see if I can do any better. And given how big a role Felix played, I’d imagine that picking one of the other sidekicks would feel like a substantially new experience.

There are certainly some parts of the game that don’t work as well as the rest – in particular, the puzzle to unlock the vault feels too adventure-gamey to me – plus there are a couple typos, and it’s a little disappointing not to have the larger cast and cross-cutting of scenes that you sometimes get in heist stories. Still, even discounting the way the setting and vibe play to my preferences, Golden Heist is a fun, fleet piece of work that lived up to my high expectations.

Highlight: Picking just one is really hard, but I did especially enjoy the bonkers way the running-away portion of the heist played out, with priceless treasures of the Julio-Claudians bouncing across the marble floors.

Lowlight: I’ve refrained from mentioning it so far, but much of the game’s text is timed, fading in sentence by sentence. It comes in pretty quickly, but still, why must authors do this?

How I failed the author: While I was 2/3 of the way through the game’s major puzzle, Henry woke up hard from a long nap, with a dirty diaper, a gas back-up, an empty stomach, and a nose stuffed with boogers. Seeing to all that took quite a bit of time, but it’s a testament to how much I dug this game that I felt like I’d barely missed a beat when I came back to it.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

With a new Matrix sequel coming out I think reasonably soon (“linear time” is a concept that feels like it only applies to other people ever since Henry came) I’ve been reminded of why I found the previous set so utterly disappointing. Like basically every then-teenaged boy I was very excited by the first one, and I thought it ended on a really exciting note: the humans were poised to go on offense, and clearly the way they were going to do that was via mass-Satori, awakening all the people trapped in the Matrix from their illusions - and crashing the machines’ power systems in the process. But then the sequels arrived and were, uh, not that – instead of a Buddhist parable of human liberation, we were suddenly supposed to be invested in all these new AI characters and their muddy Gnostic maundering about destiny for two long movies.

This may be running a little afield when assessing You are SpamZapper 3.1 – though the turn-of-the-millennium setting means it’s tapping into at least some of the same zeitgeist – but I had a similar reaction to the game, as what initially seemed like a winsome workplace comedy turned into an overlong melodrama about immortal intelligences and their codependent relationships with their users. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I think it’ll find an audience that enjoys the heightened emotion and big-idea twists it has to offer, but it didn’t land for me as well as it probably deserves.

Now that I’ve spoiled a bit of where the story goes, I should lay out where it starts, which is with your anthropomorphized spam-blocking software meeting a new coworker (an email plugin that dings when an arriving message hits the inbox) and logging in for a busy day’s shift zapping spam. This segment of the game makes elegant use of the sometimes-constrained nature of a choice-based game, since the only agency you have is to block or approve incoming messages one by one. As the flood of email rises, you start to get a sense of who the human user’s friends are, and also a retrospectively-idyllic look at vintage-2000 email ads.

I enjoyed this bit, but it definitely goes on for a while (I think 50-odd emails) before the main plot stats to emerge. Because this is not just a regular workday: a friend of the user’s (Laurie) is having issues with her Christian-conservative father, who’s considering taking her computer away. The stakes for this are higher than just being e-grounded, though, since Laurie has, uh, fallen in love with another program, the letter-writing wizard in her word-processor. To avert the separation of these two lovers, you need to work together with the other programs to change the father’s mind about the temptations posed by technology. Along the way, you also learn to deal with your crippling self-esteem and anxiety issues (you’re perpetually worried that if you make too many spam-blocking mistakes your user will uninstall you), plus there’s a recurring subplot going into way too much detail on the mechanics of why the programs are sentient – it’s not just a comedy bit we’re supposed to go with, in fact these email plug-ins are incarnations of immortal noosphere intelligences who exist simultaneously at all points in time (there’s yet another plot strand set in a post-climate-apocalypse world).

It is a whole lot, in other words, and reader, I can’t say I followed all the way along the journey. The writing is solid enough – the different programs have a good amount of characterization, and there are some really good jokes involving the different chimes the new-mail signal program can make (I remember that duck quack!) and all the different obnoxious spam running around the early-00’s internet. But there’s also a lot of text here, most of it delivered in linear click-to-advance fashion that started to feel exhausting by the second hour, and some things are definitely over-explained. Similarly, Zappy’s various crises of confidence began to feel fairly belabored by the end. I also really had a hard time investing in the love story between a girl and her Word template: I get that we’re supposed to see the programs as metaphors for people, but their obsessive, near-slavish devotion to their user stands as a creepy barrier to taking the metaphor seriously.

There are some puzzles and choices to break up the progression of the story, and a few of these I thought were quite clever: your merry band of AIs only has a few things they’re allowed to do, so figuring out how to leverage those abilities, which includes leveraging opportunities in the giant mountain of spam, is generally pretty fun (though there is one pick-the-right-spam-message-to-exploit puzzle that felt like it required reading the author’s mind, as the characters even comment on what an off-the-wall idea it is). The balance between puzzles and reading seemed off to me, though – I wanted less text in between the interactive bits.

In fact that – less – is just what I wanted for You are SpamZapper as a whole: less word-count, sure, but I also think I would have enjoyed the game more if a few of the plot’s twists and turns had been excised in favor of a leaner and more compelling progression, and if some of the crazier ideas had been weeded out where they get in the way of the emotional core of the story.

Highlight: I really liked all the mail-ping jokes – something about that bit of circa-2000 Internet nostalgia works for me.

Lowlight: I ran into a bug around the bit where you (Spoiler - click to show)open a new credit card – a development-tools window popped up at the bottom of the screen that made it hard to click the links, though eventually this went away (I played in a Safari browser on an iPhone).

How I failed the author: I was really tired when I played the first part of the game, so the business where two characters were sharing an email account left me permanently confused about who was who.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

I’ve heard various theories for how to do well in IF Comp posited over the years, but Fine Felines cuts the Gordian knot with an outside-the-box strategy that’s obvious in retrospect: jam a game chockablock with kitty pictures and wait for the 10-out-of-10s to roll in. That’s not all this ChoiceScript entry has going for it, since I found the economic side of the cat-breeding system engaging, the potentially-twee premise is leavened by some more serious themes, and the writing is assured too, sketching in four different romanceable NPCs and juggling the different subplots with aplomb. But despite trying to maintain critical distance, I still spent a disproportionate amount of my time with Fine Felines cooing over photos of kittens – I’m not made of stone!

The main thrust of the game is as advertised: in the wake of the death of your disabled mother, for whom you’d been the primary caregiver, you’ve decided to use your inheritance to set up as a cat breeder. I know nothing about the specifics of the business, but Fine Felines goes into just enough detail to be fun, making sure you need to consider things like license requirements and the characteristics of different breeds of cat but providing enough info and context that I never felt like I was in over my head. The game’s roughly divided into two phases: in the startup portion, you meet different cat-breeder NPCs and decide which two (of six) cats you want to use to seed your stable, while spending your nest egg to keep the kitties healthy and happy, with options for food, exercise equipment, and more, as well as the advertising and overhead every business needs. Based on your decisions here, you’ll eventually wind up with a number of kittens, and the second phase is about caring for them and hopefully selling them to their lucky new owners.

These systems aren’t tuned particularly harshly – without agonizing over my decisions, I wound up with a successful business that was swimming in cash by the end. But the choices still feel meaningful, and it’s satisfying to see the main character’s life get better. It helps that this isn’t a dry management minigame – all the decisions you need to make on how to run your business are embedded in the narrative, and many of your choices aren’t made in the abstract, but also let you engage with the cast of NPCs. When you pick the breed of cats you want to purchase, for example, you’re also picking which of the breeders you want to spend more time with, and potentially check in with when crises hit.

Beyond this main thread, there’s an additional subplot involving your character being diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and having to use some of their financial and emotional resources to protect their health while running a successful business adds an additional, more serious tone – though again, I found that the game’s difficulty was easy enough that this became an upbeat story of adjusting to life with a disability, while not sugar-coating the challenges that the disease poses.

All in all, Fine Felines succeeds at what it sets out to do. If I have a critique, it’s that the various NPCs, while endearingly drawn and refreshingly diverse, didn’t for me take on a life of their own beyond their somewhat-tropey initial presentation. Given the game’s relatively short running time and the broad range of potential interactions, though, this is a minor fault. And did I mention that it’s lavishly illustrated with cat pictures? 10/10, wins the internet.

Highlight: look, I hate to be superficial, but again, these are adorable kitties, and despite the fact that I’m primarily a dog person, I still found the choice of which cats to pick super hard because they were all so adorable.

Lowlight: I wound up choosing a matched pair of cats from the same breed, since the game seemed to present that as the default option – going with two different breeds requires clicking through to a second set of choices, and also seemed like it required rolling the dice on whether these cats who didn’t know each other would get along. But this choice made me feel like I missed out on interacting with two of the main NPCs, since it was hard to come up with reasons to talk to them rather than the one who was an expert on the breed I selected. True, this design means replays will be more rewarding, and Fine Felines seems like it’s meant to be run through more than once, but I still think it’d be more fun if I’d been pushed more aggressively towards the mix-and-match option.

How I failed the author : again I’m going to mark this down as a secret success, since in the last few weeks I’ve gained a new appreciation for the joys of caring for a helpless but cute little creature.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I have evolving views about custom parsers, but at this point in the Comp I’m starting to realize I should probably develop some thoughts about custom choice engines too! I'm lucky that it’s Silicon and Cells that occasions the thought, because it’s a really impressive piece of work. The system has an attractive visual design, with a nice color scheme and the ability to display graphics; the text is clean, large, and readable; it’s quickly responsive to user clicks; and it’s got support for timed events and other bells and whistles.

The engine’s in service of a game that’s on the more systemic side of the choice-based spectrum, as you guide a plucky heroine through a heist and subsequent investigations in a cyberpunk world. The hook here is that through the course of the story, you pick up a variety of Deus-Ex-style upgrades – for each slot, you get a choice of either psionic or cybernetic options which works a little differently – that open up new choices if they’re activated at the appropriate time. You only have limited energy, though, so you’ll usually need to choose which to have powered up. In most sequences, you can freely reallocate energy so you can lawnmower your way through the options, but there are some timed events where preparation – or manual dexterity in clicking to shift energy – will lead to better outcomes.

It’s this aspect of the game that gives rise to the “metroidvania” tag in the blurb, as you spend a good amount of time looping back over previous locations to see whether a newly-acquired ability has unlocked any new possibilities. This is just as satisfying here as it is in a traditional side-scroller, too, so it’s neat to see the mechanic deployed in a radically different genre.

As for the story behind this system, it’s a solid one, though Silicon and Cells is less innovative on this side of things. The introduction feels rather abrupt, as we’re thrown into an expository conversation where Jaya, the protagonist, meets with a mentor character and gains her first ability in service of a planned heist of a high-rolling casino. It took me a little while to feel like I was up to speed on why we were doing this heist and how the characters related – plus I found Jaya was a bit of a cipher at first.

This initial awkwardness goes away reasonably quickly, though, as the momentum of the heist – and its fallout – creates immediate goals, and Jaya begins to develop more of a personality. She’s an appealing figure, from one of the city’s slums but trying to do better not just for herself but also her community, and as the plot expands in scope you wind up getting the chance to make decisions that can have a really significant impact. Most of the main beats are things you’ve seen before in cyberpunk stories – there’s an all-powerful AI running the city, a corporation with shady motives, a circle of founding hackers with messy personal fallout – but it’s all well executed, and the different environments and challenges provide good variety. There’s a fantasy MUD that’s the playground of one of the aforementioned hackers, the casino, which has some working gambling games to play (though I think I found a bug where I couldn’t win at the Yes/No/Go game in the Pearly Gates section, albeit I had so much money by that point it didn’t matter), and various cyberspace archives and corporate HQs, all rendered in tight prose that provides just enough detail to be memorable. Overall, by the ending, I was invested in the story and satisfied with how the choices I’d made – both about gear and about people – wound up playing out. I know download-only games sometimes don’t get as much attention in the Comp, especially if they’re choice-based, but this one’s definitely worth a play.

Highlight: I enjoyed the MUD pastiche, from the realistically-annoying veteran player to the bartender who uses timed-text to deliver a well-paced joke.

Lowlight: the plot thread involving the casino owner felt underdeveloped to me, which was too bad since I enjoyed the initial verbal sparring with her and would have enjoyed seeing it go somewhere – possibly there are alternate approaches where she plays more of a role in the endgame, though.

How I failed the author: the timed events are fun and well-designed, but I’m clumsy with my laptop’s touchpad in the best of circumstances (I haven’t had much chance to sit down at a desk these last few weeks) so reallocating energy to my mods in real time was very hard. Fortunately the game’s forgiving, and autoresolved the key challenges in my favor even when I was flailing, though I was embarrassed that it basically wound up playing itself.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

I’m bummed I already brought up the comparison in my Ghosts Within review, because now that I’ve played D’ARKUN, I’m turning into the Boy Who Cried Anchorhead. The similarity is even clearer this time out, though, as while the former game had a dreamlike vibe very much its own, in this long Dialog game we’re firmly in remixed Lovecraft-plot territory. There’s a decayed mansion with secret passages a-plenty (including an attic telescope), a seaside town with more than its share of creepy inhabitants, nightmares that grow worse as the days go by, a wicked inheritance dredging the sins of the past into the present day, and – natch – tentacles galore. While D’ARKUN has its weak spots, with a thinner-than-it-needed-to-be story and some underclued puzzles in the back half, it very much scratches that old Mythos itch.

Starting with that plot, the impetus for getting the protagonist to this accursed stretch of the German coastline is a new one on me – your student character is on vacation and managed to rent the world’s worst Airbnb – but after an eldritch encounter all thoughts of relaxation are put aside as you start delving into the mysteries of your rented house. This shift happens too abruptly for my taste, as there isn’t much time spent establishing why you’re suddenly climbing down cliff-faces and looking behind paintings, except that there’s not much else to do to pass the time (if the cosmic horrors hadn’t materialized, one wonders how you’d have spent your holiday).

Exploration is almost immediately rewarding, though, and it’s just fun to find a madman’s scrawled notes or hidden compartments in the family mausoleum. This first half of the game is well paced too, as new locations gradually open up as the clock moves forward (the accompanying map is really evocative), and you work through satisfying puzzles that aren’t too tricky: there’s a well-implemented set of climbing gear that allows you to clamber around obstacles, and while there are some objects that require SEARCHing to find, the ABOUT text gives fair warning. There is a tricky light puzzle, where you need to make good use of the handful of turns your lantern has before it runs out of oil, but copious use of UNDO saw me through.

I found the second half didn’t fully pay off the promising opening, though. Partially this is due to the implementation starting to feel less polished: I started running into disambiguation issues, there are some guess the verb issues (figuring out how to use the syringe was tortuous), and to get to one location I think you have to type RIDE TO SIEBENSCHIEDERSTEIN, which should never be required of any player. There are also more NPCs to deal with, and they’re drawn rather thinly, without many dialogue options or much in the way of interactivity to make them feel like anything other than contrivances. Beyond implementation, the clueing also starts to get thinner: there’s a puzzle involving getting past a guard that feels like it involves reading the author’s mind, a maze that has a clever twist but will probably get brute-forced, and at another point progress requires you to get into what looks like an unwinnable situation and spend several turns waiting before a deus ex machina rescues you, rather than undoing or restoring to safety.

More impactfully, I didn’t feel like the plot really cohered. It gestures in the direction of enough Lovecraftian tropes that I can see where things are meant to be going – there’s a horrifying ritual, an extradimensional temple, a surprise or two – but the stakes are sketchy, both for the world as a whole but also for your character. A bit more polish and a bit more focus on the subjectivity of the protagonist would have made D’ARKUN a very worthy Anchorhead-alike; as it is, it’s a good time but requires the player to fill in some blanks.

Highlight: the creepy mansion is a good example of the genre; it’s not too big, but dense with creepy scenery and not-too-tough exploration puzzles.

Lowlight the recipe puzzle is neat in theory, but required more trial and error than I wanted – there are clues helping you figure out what the mixture is supposed to look like, but there’s some vagueness in the puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)(I got the potion to look “shiny”, as the notes said, but still needed to add another dose of the relevant ingredient) that made it unsatisfying to solve.

How I failed the author: this is a long one and it took me a couple days to work through it, so that’s perhaps contributed to my feeling that it’s a bit scattershot.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

Universal Hologram takes the player on a joyride through altered states both inner (via lucid dreaming) and outer (via stacked simulated realities), with enough big ideas to make Philip K. Dick blush and off-kilter prose that sells the premise with brio.

Admittedly, it starts a little slow – the opening is well considered in name-checking some of the major concepts that will be explored in what’s to come, and giving the player the opportunity to dig into what they’re most interested in, be that the history of the far-future world, the mechanics of lucid dreaming, or just interacting with other people. But it isn’t until maybe a third of the way in that a real conflict or sense of urgency start to come into the story; before that, it’s pretty much all exploration. Since the writing is good and the world is interesting (it’s a sort of Martian post-scarcity techno-utopia where the Internet is a person and the Earth is gone, but much less annoying than I’ve made that sound), I was sufficiently engaged to stick around until the game got more grabby. I’m once again in the position of having played on my phone, so I was too lazy to copy and paste bits of writing that I liked and I’m therefore in the unenviable position of having to broadly characterize it and say “trust me, it’s good.” But I really liked the way the writing takes a off-kilter conversational, even occasionally lightly confrontational, tone while digging into the heady concepts underlying the setting.

The plot, once it comes, ties together the game’s different themes with some elegance, and the choices at that point shift from being primarily about which parts of the setting you want to dig into to allowing you to decide how or whether you want to cooperate with the ontological heist your character gets press-ganged into, with some surprising action-y bits even coming into play to change things up in the late game. I’m not sure the ending I got completely stuck the landing (though see “how I failed the author,” below), but the journey was well worth the price of admission.

Highlight: I’m a sucker for a good heist sequence, and this one delivers, with high stakes and curve-balls coming left and right.

Lowlight: A tradeoff of this fleet, too-clever-by-half voice is the occasional clanger – there’s one out-of-context Lawnmower Man reference that really should have been left on the cutting room floor.

How I failed the author: after I finished the game, I was turning over its big-picture themes and intentionally-disjointed plot in my brain to see how it all coheres. But almost immediately Henry needed a diaper change, and it was a rough one with two mid-change pees, and after the chaos died down I’d lost the thread and as a result my final take on what the game’s saying and doing is fuzzier than I’d like!