Reviews by Mike Russo

The genre listing for The Killings in Wasacona is one of those things that drifts right by you when you read it, but gets increasingly odd the more you think about it: “Crime Detective Mystery”. Combining these words in exactly this way feels natural at this point: stories where criminals are brought to justice by investigators who apply their intellects to solve the mysteries presented by their misdeeds are a dime a dozen. But I wonder how much of this seemingly-intuitive melding of the crime story and the brain-teaser would be left if we somehow were able to subtract the influence of a century of Sherlock Holmes? Real criminals, after all, are decidedly irrational, and are less often caught by an ineluctable web of deductions slowly closing in on them than by people they’ve pissed off ratting them out to the cops. On the flip side, the forensic methods used to identify and convict suspects frequently are just a patina of pseudo-science atop hunches and prejudice (if you ever want to make your blood run cold, read up on the people “arson investigation” has sent to Death Row). On this evidence, why would we think the messy, squalid stories of crime should render up their secrets if the detective does the equivalent of solving a sudoku?

These contradictions can be noted against just about any game in this capacious category, of course, but Killings in Wasacona raises them more than most, on both the cops and the robbers sides of the equation. The game offers a solid framework for building a mystery: as a rookie FBI agent, you’re brought in to help solve a trio of small-town deaths, at least two of which were clearly murders, in the course of a week. The interface shows potential investigative hot-spots on a map – the crime scenes, the houses of the victims and their families, and more – and once you choose one to visit, typically chewing up an hour of the limited clock, you pick your way through conversational gambits, searches for evidence, or whatever else is needed to reveal clues. After time is up, the final passage helpfully sorts everything you’ve uncovered according to the different theories of the case that it supports, and based on what you’ve found you select the appropriate culprit and motive for each death.

Some details of this setup, it must be admitted, don’t make much sense (where’s the federal jurisdictional hook? Why are we sent out alone for fieldwork just days after graduation from Quantico? Why is everybody so tall, with the shortest victim being a woman who’s 5’10”?) but it’s a well-designed structure for a mystery investigation. Similarly, while the prose regularly veers into melodrama (the prologue narrating the first killing uses sentence fragments to illustrate the crime, culminating with “A new demonic visage. A face of fire. Teeth. Pupils. Hands”, which seems to imply the murderer’s hands are part of their face; meanwhile, the proprietor of a party house refers to the protagonist as a “square”, which, come on, it’s not 1957 anymore) and the writing occasionally drops details that don’t make sense (a down-on-his-luck drifter “looks twice his age”, which given that he’s 45 seems quite extreme; a co-worker of one of the victims volunteers, without prompting, details of her and her friends’ drug use), the story itself is generally fine, turning on reasonably-plausible small-town secrets and eventually encompassing a stereotypical but reasonably-drawn cast (there’s a racist cop, but the game and other characters recognize that’s a problem, e.g.)

As a mystery, though, I found it less satisfying than I wanted it to be; I was able to logic my way through most of the solution, but key details eluded me. Possibly this is just because I’m a bit of a dunderhead, but I do think those twin issues I flagged above played a role. Starting with the criminals’ side of the ledger, it’s difficult to get at least one, and possibly two, of the murders “right” because in those particular cases the motive of the killer is bizarre and self-defeating. Guessing that it was Moriarty who committed a crime, and sussing out his methods, is hard because he’s so smart, but equally, fingering Inspector Clouseau and identifying his M.O. is tough precisely because he’s an idiot. This isn’t necessarily unrealistic, certainly, but it does make the puzzle of solving the mystery less satisfying.

The methods of investigation are also not unproblematic. Clues are unlocked not primarily through player skill – there’s more than enough time to visit every relevant location in the game, and you generally don’t have too many options at any of them, so lawnmowering is relatively easy – but through character skill. Yes, Killings in Wasacona has RPG-style stats, which you set at the beginning of the game either by picking a pre-rolled archetype (jock, nerd, face, etc.) or manually setting your bonuses or penalties across five different investigative approaches. Frequently a choice will lead to a test of one of these skills, at which point you roll a d20, subject your character’s relevant modifier – if the sum is 11 or higher you succeed and get the clue, 10 or less and you fail.

The specifics of the implementation make me feel like this might be a mechanic derived from Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s notable that these kinds of approaches to clue-gathering are very much out of vogue in tabletop RPG circles: these days, the mechanics for mystery-focused games are likely to focus on resource allocation, like spending a limited pool of points to automatically succeed at certain rolls, and mitigate the impact of risk by allowing for rerolls or partial success. And my experience of Killings in Wasacona bore out the wisdom of this shift, as I didn’t roll above a 6 more than once in my first seven or eight rolls (and since none of my bonuses were above +3, that means I failed nearly all of them).

Admittedly, my luck eventually reverted to the mean, and I wound up getting some additional “morale” bonuses that made rolls much easier (oddly, I got these bonuses mainly by chasing red herring, suggesting that the most efficient course through the game is to start out wasting time on tangential matters so that your chances of success are optimized by the time you turn to the actual investigation). And again, cops miss stuff all the time. But it doesn’t make for a satisfying set of mechanics, and as I was scratching my head on the final screen trying to figure out the last details of my theory, it was unpleasant to think that I might not be able to fit the pieces together not from lack of trying, but because the RNG gods decreed I shouldn’t see the relevant clue.

All told this means I found Killings in Wasacona more successful at the “crime” part of the genre label than the “detective mystery” part. But the framework and overall presentation, modulo the dice-rolling, really were quite strong, and I have to admit there’s a dark charm to the Fargo-esque series of misadventures revealed at the end – I’d definitely sign up for a sequel using the same basic approach, but tighter writing and more intentional design.

We’ve been self-deprecatingly saying parser puzzlers with traditional mechanics are medium-dry-goods games for decades now, but never I think have I seen that conceit made so literal as it is in Dust: progressing through this Old West adventure requires grit and a swift hand at the revolver, sure, but mostly it just takes a lot of trips to the general store. Crowbars, rope, matches, you name it, they’ve got it, which allows you to progress through a linear sequence of logical, satisfying puzzles. Much like the game as a whole, it’s a little silly if you think about it too much, but as you’re playing it all makes sense.

The Western is not a genre whose subtleties I’m especially familiar with, but even with my cursory knowledge I can tell that Dust plays the hits. You’re a drifter who’s come into town on a personal errand of some urgency, before getting swept up in the ills facing the community and having to resolve them before you can move on, a victim of circumstance as much as your moral code (it is a ding against the game that the original errand doesn’t go as much as mentioned until you’ve saved the day, but I suppose that would just make the game feel less self-contained). Said town boasts a saloon, a sheriff’s office, a gallows and graveyard, and the aforementioned dry-goods story – everything an Old West community needs, and not a whit more. This also includes, of course, a ranch whose owners are up to no good, which is where the plot kicks in: some toughs under their sponsorship are doing something in the old mine, and they appear to be mixed up with the disappearance of an ingenue with a heart of gold, as well as her fiancée. Sure, the sheriff tells you you’re the main suspect and need to clear your name, but he immediately falls asleep and there’s nothing stopping you from just walking out of town: must be that you have a heart of gold too.

There are no surprises here in terms of either plot or character tropes – all is exactly as you’d think it’d be – so mostly all there is to talk about is the implementation. On the technical side, it’s all quite solidly put together, and as mentioned, the puzzles are a good fit for the setting and generally well clued, though I was getting a little sick of running back to Bill the Storekeeper every five minutes by the end (the puzzle requiring you to jump through a bunch of hoops to get some rope was perhaps a bridge too far in my book – come on, the only bit of rope that’s lying around in town is the leftovers from when they hanged some people?) They did hold my hand more than I wanted; in particular, many are resolved via dialogue, which is run via a menu-based system, so you don’t even need to ASK STOREKEEPER ABOUT MATCHES, just TALK TO him and select the single option available instead. And I was momentarily stymied when I couldn’t get other characters to acknowledge that I needed a lamp – turned out I needed to blunder around in the dark for a bit first, rather than just come up next to the darkened mine entrance and recognize that light would be helpful, which felt like overly-fussy authorial stage-managing.

If I’m searching for critiques, I’d also say that there are some occasional odd phrases, perhaps artifacts of the game’s translation from the German. The saloonkeeper is described thus, for example:

"She is in her late forties, a corpulent, attractive woman with laugh lines and calloused hands."

But with that said, the version with “plump” subbed in for “corpulent” is much less memorable, and strictly speaking there’s nothing actually wrong here. Actually if I’m honest I mostly enjoyed these occasional departures from standard English, as they’re at worst harmless, and at best reasonably amusing: in a game otherwise so dedicated to smoothly incarnating its genre, it’s fun to run across the occasional bit of friction. So too with the occasional challenge that sent me elsewhere than the general store – sure, structurally there’s nothing too different about borrowing a parrot from the German barber in order to take advantage of his expanded senses (the parrot, not the German) as compared to borrowing a crowbar from the nearsighted shopkeeper to pry up a rock, but it does lend some much-needed novelty.

The result is a success, I think, though a low-key one: if Westerns are your jam, you’re in for a solid take at the genre, and if not, well, at least Dust goes down easy and will probably offer you a chuckle or two along the way to boot. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to get too excited about this kind of thing after so many decades, but those with less experience in the dry goods industry might easily feel differently.

Some of my favorite works of IF are games where it’s part of the player’s responsibility to fit together different pieces of narrative that are intentionally presented out of order or out of context, engaging with themes, allusions, and character- or plot-based hints to create a gestalt theory of what the work is communicating. Obviously there are precedents for this sort of thing all over the arts – hello, Modernism – but it’s often an especially good fit for IF; even though we’ve long since moved beyond the genre’s puzzles-first roots, players and authors alike have been trained to think about the narrative possibilities inherent in what’s being presented, and allowing players to inhabit a story, poking and prodding at it to see how it responds, both forces players to slow down and think critically about what they’re reading while allowing for a kind of trial-and-error expectation that you can’t get just from e.g. reading Virginia Woolf. And when this approach works well, it can be amazing – I don’t think I would have gotten as much out of Metallic Red if it simply presented everything it was doing on a platter; actively engaging with it, testing out theories, and going back to earlier sections of the game to look for parallels all increased the impact it had on me.

This is a risky strategy to pursue, though. For one thing, you’re asking a fair bit of work of the player, and you need to make sure you’ve properly motivated them to put in the labor. And for a second, by leaving plenty of blanks for the player to fill in, you’re ceding control of what exactly gets put in them. And I found that Civil Service, while notionally being something I might enjoy sinking my teeth into, runs face-first into both of these dangers.

The second issue was actually the bigger one for me, but it hinges on some stuff that happens later on in the game so first things first: what does make a player willing, if not eager, to try to make sense of a fragmented narrative? Well, let’s not overthink this, it’s basically just the stuff that makes fiction compelling in the first place: if there’s an intriguing mystery plot, or there are compelling but enigmatic characters, or there’s something about the structure that compels you to find the story’s intended shape, or the prose and narrative voice are sufficiently rich that your brain naturally wants to spend more time in their world – or, if it’s a game rather than a piece of static fiction, there are gameplay mechanics that promote exploration – that’s a good start, and if you’ve got two or more you’re off to the races.

Civil Service, though, maybe checks a couple boxes halfway? The plot takes a long time to emerge: the game starts more or less in medias res, with your character, who appears to be some kind of ghost or spirit, musing negatively about offices in general and this one office they’ve started haunting in particular. You appear to have some kind of mission, with some urgency attached to it, but this is mentioned only quite obliquely, and you spend most of your time alternately focusing on the quotidian annoyances of the trio of workers you’re cohabitating with (perhaps straining your spectral powers to rattle some office supplies ominously) and zoning out to look at the business owners and passersby outside the window; then there are occasional interspersed vignettes that wrench you away from this grounded milieu and require you to make one-to-three star ratings of various things, or immerse you in flashbacks without direct linkages to the main plot. As to the office stuff, it’s grounded enough to be banal, and the other pieces are sufficiently disconnected that I rarely felt my brain tickle with an exciting insight.

Characters are even more of a bust. A day on from playing the game, I can remember that there were two male workers and one woman, and one of the guys has a dog he brings to work, and might be named Colin (the person, not the dog); they’re all kind of petty and appear to passive-aggressively dislike each other, and that’s about all I got in terms of personality. The outside-the-window people are even more thinly drawn – the narrative tries to indicate that your character feels a mysterious connection with at least one of them, which is fair enough but not especially exciting when you haven’t heard a word of dialogue from them. Meanwhile, the structure is a bit wooly – it’s structured about workdays, but Monday stretches on for quite a while, but Tuesday and Wednesday are over in flash – and the writing is fine, but largely devoted to establishing a mood of grim monotony. Like, lest you think these workers are doing anything interesting or valuable:

"An application to the state, a plea to ungodly power, through the right channels and justly made is - in my colleague’s world - a grey and spectral effort from the office printer… Tea stained, creased, worthless. These are the things they deal in."

It’s fine, but it doesn’t really compel one, does it?

Mechanically speaking, this is largely structured as a hypertext narrative, where seemingly-random words throughout each passage can be clicked and move you through the story; the narrative apparently does branch somewhat based not on anything you have the protagonist directly do, but of all things on the ratings you give in those seemingly-random Yelp-ish segments. It could work fine if the other aspects of the game were more engaging – heck, it’s not miles away from how some of my favorite games, like Queenlash and Manifest No are designed – but lacks much in the way of standalone appeal.

Now, having said all this, there is one vignette – I think a flashback – that I did find grabbed me: it’s quite disconnected from everything else in the game, narrating a holiday-gone-wrong that sees a caddish character snubbing his new girlfriend’s attempts to make their relationship something special. You get a sense of the boyfriend as an actual human being, with (admittedly awful) desires and a personality, and the writing is noticeably more energetic as for once it’s got events that fit together into an actual conflict to narrate. Unfortunately, it comes quite late in the game, perhaps 2/3 or ¾ of the way through, and it’s not directly built up to, or followed up on, in the rest of the plot: I have a theory or two about how those characters relate to the main story, but even if I’ve guessed right these connections feel like something I’ve imposed on an arid text, rather than noticed organically growing out of the piece.

I worry that the above comes off more negatively than I intend it. Really, most of the game is fine; I was mildly disengaged as I clicked through it, but it’s more mediocre than actively bad, and there is that one bit that’s good; I wasn’t super excited to think rigorously about what all the stuff it was slinging at me meant, but it got me to at least do the minimum. And here is where we get to the second issue I mentioned above, because I found the theory I developed about the game’s key mystery completely ridiculous.

Throughout the game, you’re cued to think of the three office-workers as bad people: you alone can tell that their environment is spiritually corrupted and they snipe at each other under a cloak of politeness, but there are intimations that there’s some deeper crime they’re complicit in, some offense they’ve committed against a capitalized She. And then among the seemingly-random bits of prose that get dropped in your lap, there’s this:

"Fifty three miles away at the
bottom of a ravine
Her veins chill"

So clearly these bad people like murdered someone, maybe because they’re embezzling or otherwise up to no good and were trying to cover up the crime? That would be a bit cliched, I suppose, but a reasonable enough motivating incident and fit the downbeat mood of the game. But no, I’m quite convinced the truth is something different: (Spoiler - click to show) there are repeated references to something terrible happening at an office morale-building event, and that the trio of jerks paid so little attention to Her they didn’t even remember her name. In the event, it appears that they all were brought together to do a ropes course and She slipped doing a trust fall or something, fell into a ditch, and the other workers were so self-involved they didn’t notice.

While respecting the sanctity of the spoiler-block, I’ll just say that this feels more like a cut subplot from a late-season episode of the Office than the stuff of drama; I suppose you could suspend disbelief about the unrealistic aspects of it, but you’re still left with a plot twist more likely to elicit hilarity than any other response, and the rest of the game sure doesn’t seem to indicate that it’s a comedy. And then the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)She isn’t actually dead yet, and manages to cling to life at the bottom of the ravine for the better part of a week until your white-out related antics somehow trigger an ending where She’s suddenly remembered and rescued just adds an additional note of slapstick.

But while I’m pretty sure I’ve got the basic sequence of events right, these tone issues also make me quite sure that there’s a version of all of this that looks quite different in the author’s head. Alas, she didn’t write it, or provide sufficient prompts to make my brain fill out the paint-by-numbers in the right way. Trust the player/reader, authors are often told, so I think this failure must have come out of a noble impulse – but I, at least, needed a bit more hand-holding to see what the author wanted me to see, and feel why all of this was worth caring about.

“Well, this is quite pleasant” is perhaps an odd reaction to a decidedly idiosyncratic game: Forsaken Denizen is written in Dialog, has gameplay structured around survival-horror resource management tropes, and is set in a High Weird sci-fantasy world that puts me in mind of the Metabarons or the less-fascist parts of Warhammer 40k – oh, and the narrative voice belongs to the protagonist’s space-princess girlfriend, who won’t condescend to her or drool over her when she can do both at the same time. But while there’s a version of this game that’s a spiky, off-putting blast of weirdness, instead there’s a smoothness of design and of implementation that makes playing it just feel very nice indeed.

There are any number of places to dig in, but let’s start with that last one, the narrator, since she’s got to be my single favorite element of the game. Princess Cathabel X starts the game locked in her floating palace, victim of her own machinations after the extradimensional finance-monsters she cut a deal with decide to collateralize the debt by turning the citizens of her space-colony into cybernetic zombies. When you put it like this, she’s possibly the villain of the piece, though as a clone of the galaxy’s sovereign assigned to a periphery world to operate the infrastructure that allows for space travel (I think – the worldbuilding here, to its credit, is portentous and a bit confusing), and raised as part of a failed experiment to perform a royal marriage to space-bees, perhaps she was just acting out. By far her most redeeming feature is that she’s head-over-heels in love with the game’s actual main character, Dor, who’s a working-class (and possibly trans? Again, I confess I’m not really sure how all of this is meant to work) alien crammed into the skin of a human-looking bureaucrat; she’ll need to use every scrap of her ingenuity to save the day, and Cath will be squeeing over her, while pretending to remain archly unimpressed, the whole time. They’re a heck of a pair – I mean, here’s their meet-cute:

"Thirteen years ago. She was twenty-two and I was nineteen. When my automated guardians dropped from orbit, all they saw was someone threatening the Second Princess of the Empire of the Final Sun.

"But I saw someone gaunt with hunger and exhaustion, with a weapon that didn’t look like it would even fire. I saw someone with a burning flame behind her black eyes. And it suddenly felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a pretty woman to jam a gun into my sternum."

There’s not much of a plot beyond Dor making her way through the city to find Cath, then deciding she’s not leaving and it’s time to take the fight to the mastermind behind the attack on her home. But there’s plenty of incident along the way. Traversing from one side of the map to the other requires going through Dor’s workplace, her home, and an industrial district, with gonzo lore dribbled out in compelling nuggets along the way – there are clever details by the wazoo, from the aforementioned demonic capitalism to weird shadow-based technology to small-scale human stories that are there to remind you that there are actual stakes here. It’s all done by allusion and is maybe hard to take too seriously, but they’re well-written enough that I was excited to track down every errant fax (seriously, they still use faxes) and document I could find. Beyond the environmental storytelling, there are metroidvania elements that make exploration a key part of the game; mostly this reduces to finding new flavors of keys to unlock new flavors of doors, but the rewards you find, from unique conversational partners to one-off rewards that create new gameplay opportunities, were enough to keep me engaged through the game’s running time.

Speaking of the gameplay, as I mentioned it’s going for a survival-horror vibe, with a limited-parser interface mostly channeling your options to shooting or running from the baddies. Of course your ammo is limited and replenished only by scavenging (killing monsters doesn’t result in bodies to loot, sad to say), UNDO is disabled and you can only save in specific map rooms, and there’s an inventory limit keeping you from having all your tools on you at once; that sits alongside a light equipment system that allows you to wear different outfits for bespoke benefits like more frequent critical hits. Beyond the specific mechanics, there are also a few nods to past examples of the genre, like a roving super-zombie who recalls Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis and an unlockable opera-dress outfit that sets enemies on fire, which is surely a Parasite Eve callback. It’s typically possible to evade monsters by just going to a different location, but many of the game’s puzzles require juggling inventory items or waiting for processes to finish, which is often tricky when cyborgs are trying to burst you like a pinata. Fortunately fighting is straightforward, too: at its most basic, you just need to land two regular hits on a monster to kill it. The feelies spell out the math – 1/6 of the time you crit, 1/6 of the time you miss, and 4/6 of the time you land your blow – which is generally forgiving unless you get ganged up on, and of course there’s limited healing as well as several special attacks available.

It’s all very cleanly designed; despite this adding up to a fair number of systems, everything is explained quite well and works straightforwardly in practice, so it only took me a few minutes before I was skulking through the alleys and splattering techzombies like a pro. And though it’s churlish to say this, that leads to my only major critique of Forsaken Denizen: there’s perhaps a mismatch between the desperate struggle for survival that Cath narrates and the frictionless, laid-back set of combat puzzles I actually played through. I always knew where I was going, I never felt in danger unless I was intentionally pushing my luck (and even then I knew I had close checkpoints to fall back to), and I wrapped up my first playthrough with substantial reserves of bullets and healing items left. Generously, the game does encourage challenge-run replays, since you’re given a score when you win which unlocks new outfits with exciting bonus powers, like the aforementioned opera dress and a jacket that allows you to opt into fun alternate endings; a series of achievement-like goals or restrictions that will win you extra points are also listed.

This was all fun enough that I did a quick second play-through that won me all but one unlock, but the lack of randomization and the ease with which I’d identified what felt like an optimal strategy meant I didn’t feel too compelled to play a final time to get the last outfit – not having systems that are robust enough to support full roguelike replayability is a pretty faint criticism to levy at a piece of IF, though. Again, it’s all very fun, and very winsome, but part of me wonders if I would have enjoyed Forsaken Denizen more if the experience of playing it was more like the experience Dor is diegetically having: marshaling my strategies to the utmost, wincing at every run of bad luck, moments of sanctuary hard-won and few and far between, might have been less fun but more memorable. But, well, probably not – I don’t actually like survival horror games that much, and there are far worse things to be than pleasant.

I find it very hard to review a game like A Warm Reception, because it’s part of a very well-populated subgenre – the anachronism-and-joke-filled fantasy romp by a first-time parser author – that could just as well be designed to frustrate criticism. These games are usually more wacky than funny, inevitably have some infelicities of implementation, and offer up puzzles you’ve generally seen a million times before and a plot that you’ve seen a couple million more than that. But all of that is besides the point; these games are mostly earnest learning experiences, where the author is visibly having a great time making a world and bringing it to life. And that enthusiasm can be infectious when, like the present case, they’re well put-together. So perhaps the thing to do is take as read all the above critiques, so we can just move on to the things that are relatively unique about A Warm Reception.

It must be said that the premise is one of those elements that stands out – you’re a medieval reporter who’s going to the princess’s wedding reception to write a puff piece – but also one that the game jettisons on pretty much the first screen. The castle is of course deserted (relatable, NPCs are tricky!) because a dragon’s rather spoiled the party by attacking, so it’s of course up to you to save the day by driving off the beast (in fairness, if you try to sleep the narrator will demur, saying “you need to finish the case”, so it’s unclear you really know how journalism is supposed to work). So off you go to ransack your way through the mid-sized castle, looking for the equipment that will give you an edge in the final fight with nary a second thought of the “wait, doesn’t the king have a guy for this sort of thing?” variety to slow you down.

That actually leads to a second unique element: rather than having to check every item off the scavenger hunt before you can reach the endgame, you can give it a go any time you like, with your score giving you bonuses on a d20 roll that determines the outcome. It’s the kind of idea that could work in a tabletop RPG, but winds up unsatisfying in an IF context; for one thing, you can just UNDO-scum to get to the winning sequence right out the gate, and for another, your reward for gutting out a close victory is that you miss out on content. More charitably I suppose the idea is that you get to skip puzzles that you aren’t working for you, but actually the puzzles are fun enough that I was motivated to finish them all. Sure, a bunch are straightforward lock-and-key dealies, and there’s a maze with a blink-and-you-missed-it gimmick, but the author manages to deploy typical medium-dry-goods interactions in entertaining ways – the puzzle chain involving the moths is especially good.

So much for the bits that are memorable. The prose and implementation fall into the “workmanlike” category; I won’t harp on the latter, except to note that there are a few places where simply examining an object triggers an action, like allowing you to input the combination to a safe, which led to some moments of confusion (for the author, I noted a couple of additional small snags in the attached transcript). As to the former, well, this is the kind of medieval fantasy world where they eat pizza and reference break-dancing and professional wrestling. For all that I still found the plot more endearing than it needs to be, with patriarchal mores lightly sent up and love conquering all in the end.

Now that I’ve run through a bunch of particulars, by tradition I should now transition back to some general judgment and overall critical evaluation of A Warm Reception. But as I said, that’s devilishly hard – it’s a solidly engaging but slightly rough entry in a deeply inessential subgenre, so what does that make it? I guess we can just call it a promising start for an author who might very well wow us with their second game.

(This is one of those games that’s difficult to discuss without getting into spoiler-territory, and blurring out ¾ of the review would be an awkward compromise, so caveat lector).

A couple of times this Comp, I’ve stumbled onto decidedly non-standard ways of experiencing games: I mistook a jokey ending in the Curse for the main thrust of what it was trying to do, and I inadvertently gave myself the same name as the principal NPC in Final Call, making it all go off a bit more Fight Club than intended. Now with Metallic Red it’s happened again: when my solitary space-trucker had a dream where a hooded figure asked “have you drunk the kykeon?”, I assume for most people it will be an alienating, mysterious beat, but for me it was like sinking into a warm bath: oh hey, we’re doing the Eleusinian Miseries 3, er, Mysteries!

In fairness, that’s not all we’re doing. Metallic Red starts out quite austere: after the lovely but forbidding tarot-inflected cover art sets the mood and an introductory paragraph establishes the boxy, dilapidated nature of the ship you’re piloting, you’re confronted with an excerpt from Oedipus Rex that ends “Do you know the family you come from?” From there you’re shunted into a series of highly granular, dull activities as you while away the days until you reach your destination. That first day you meticulously clean the ship; on subsequent ones, you can tend to the greens in the hydroponics bay, exercise to keep muscle atrophy at bay, or just futz around on the internet. More interesting, perhaps, are your flirtations with divination: you 3D-print a tarot deck and pull a single card every day or two, and you’re also erroneously delivered a mechanical orrery that you rewind in order to track the astrological influences of your life and birth, though in both cases there’s something half-hearted or desultory about your engagement, performing the requisite actions without thinking about what they mean.

Oh, and in between days you dream, visited by some that appear to be fantasies, others that might be memories (the Eleusinian Mysteries one struck me as the former at first, but turns out to be the latter). Their content seems to reflect a fear of engagement (in one, you’re horrified at the idea that another person might be coming within a thousand kilometers of your ship), of disorder (an earlier part of that sequence involves trying to adjust one bolt in your food-synthesizing machine, only to be horrified when it breaks), or both (the most viscerally compelling one sees you sitting next to your dad on the grounded ship, as he eats a hamburger and spills food waste all over the consoles).

To say this is all conveys a monastic vibe would be an understatement – but per the twist halfway through, it would also be completely wrong. Your trip, you see, has taken you back to Eleusis, or at least an underground colony that’s named itself after the sanctuary of the cult. Here, the spartan choice-based interface, which previously presented only a few options at a time, each of which had to be exhausted to progress, blossoms into the freedom of parserlike navigation as you’re welcomed back to a spiritual community that once counted you a member: you’re here to consult with the hierophant. And as you wait for your audience, you meet an old friend again, help with the cooking via a lovely peanut-sauce-making minigame that’s dead-on to how I do it (add half a dozen ingredients a little bit at a time to keep things proportional as you accumulate enough for the dish, tasting liberally as you go) before being served a deliciously-described feast – by leaving the brethren, you haven’t escaped asceticism but embraced it.

The hierophant, meanwhile, is no dogma-bound prelate. By this point I was unsurprised that he was sympathetic, while the protagonist indefatigably pressed an absurd point, insisting on being allowed to renounce membership in the community – absurd because, as the hierophant reasonably pointed out, while they’re happy to say goodbye to you and let you continue on your own way, what you’re really asking for is to forget what you learned when you became an initiate, and that’s impossible. And then the game ends.

This review has seen me just uncharacteristically narrating the plot of the game, because I think before evaluating Metallic Red it’s important to get a sense of what it’s doing, and what it’s doing requires some explication (I haven’t read other reviews yet, but I’m very curious to see what folks made of it) – and that comes back to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Again, it’s not just the Mysteries, there’s some business with jade figurines that I think must be drawn from a different tradition, references to bird-auguries that are more Roman than Greek, and it’s notable that your ship is a “Buraq class”, referencing the flying steed that took the prophet Mohammed on a trip to the heavens. But the conversation with the hierophant clearly centers on something the protagonist learned or intuited in a ritual, so this is the natural jumping-off point. And while we don’t fully know what happened in the sanctuary at Eleusis, we do know they focused on the earth-goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and had to do with the latter’s journey to and return from the Underworld: allegories for death, but also rebirth and, perhaps, immortality.

Why does the protagonist want to escape a memory of immortality? We can’t know for sure, and in fact clearly aren’t meant to; in one of the web-surfing sessions from the first part of the game, you read an interview with a game designer who’s chosen to keep the important elements of the game’s narrative off-screen, only gesturing towards them in dialogue, because:

"when an event has already taken place and players only hear about it after the fact we begin to look at agency differently. No one can change the past, but we can use our agency to build a future."

Still, there are intimations of what might be driving this perverse desire. For one thing, the protagonist’s father, he of the distressing dream, is noted as a major supporter of the cult, and presumably the reason you joined it as well, which puts that Oedipus Rex quote at the beginning into some context. And then there’s your attitude to your decaying ship, which is worth quoting at length as I think it serves as a kind of thesis statement:

"You suspect that once it passes from your hands it’ll be decommissioned but you don’t mind old things. It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. If you float through a bulkhead awkwardly and chip some of the paintwork, it’s just another chip to be added to the litany of minor damages the craft has sustained over its working life. And the totality of damages is just what the ship is composed of. No one at this point could really imagine what the Metallic Red was like when it was new. When it was first built, the concept of an object without history was entirely different to what it is now, and there’s no way to think backwards into what it meant whilst surrounded on all sides by the ship as it currently stands."

This idea of an object without history recurs in various forms through the piece: there’s also an article on a jet fighter that’s been abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle, which makes the protagonist muse on the contrast between the anonymous thing it’s becoming and the bureaucratically-known machine it once was, with a serial number and kill counts and all. So too is the theme of going backwards: recall how you retrace your past via the orrery.

Existence as the accumulation of damage; a father who’s part of a religious cult; the impossibility of imagining original innocence when inside the wreck of what it’s become. It’s not very subtle when you look at it like that, is it? Noting that “metallic red” can refer not just to rust but to (iron-filled) blood would just be gilding the lily; so too would nailing down the trauma that makes the protagonist view the knowledge of immortality as a curse rather than a blessing, and turn their back on sensual pleasures to boot.

To be clear, I’m not intending to oversimply what the game is saying – we’re finally at the evaluation part now, and I can say that I very much enjoyed this. The author has taken what could have been a simple core story and through restraint, allusion, and skill, created something so memorable no world-fleeing hermit could forget it. Admittedly, perhaps its blurb’s warning that it contains “elements of esotericism” is too understated – the player probably needs to have a reasonable knowledge of its reference points to make sense of Metallic Red’s agenda – but after all the way of the Mysteries is that only the initiates understand.

Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.

There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.

Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.

Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).

But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:

"Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk."

So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?

Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.

Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: (Spoiler - click to show) I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.

I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.

When the Republican Party inevitably moves on from having Trump as its standard-bearer (soon may the day come), there’s a chance they’ll land on Hubert Janus next. Sure, he’s fictional, and probably British, to boot, but he’s clearly devoted to inverting Marx: for in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, Europe is haunting a spectre.

No, wait, I mean: in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, history repeats itself, first as farce, second as tragedy. ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG is of course the sequel to last year’s DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, which was precision-engineered to win the Golden Banana of discord (seriously. There was math). It offered two separate paths to potential players, determined randomly and irrevocably upon startup; while I believe both elaborated upon the scenario teased in its title one, apparently, was surprisingly robust and engaging, designed to elicit a middling score, while the second was an intentionally-awful congeries of timed text, GeoCities-era flashing text and overbusy design, completely linear gameplay, and a conga line of cameos from Darth Vader to Adolf Hitler. I got the second version, and finding its goofily over-the-top effort to be the worst game in the Comp sublimely ridiculous, gave it the 1/10 it was angling for.

To say DICK MCBUTTS is a tough act to follow is an understatement (and possibly a butt joke in itself). But ROD MCSCHLONG makes a manful go at providing more of the same, but different. In particular, whereas the comedy in the former came from the dizzying variety of ways that the titular act was perpetrated, here DONG-PUNCHING is a fail state; the groin of our hero is ever-threatened, but the player has the agency to guide ROD through the gauntlet and escape the ever-thrusting fists of, in turn, a swole leprechaun, a passel of mutated Sciuridae, alien overlords with more limbs than a Hindu god, and more besides. You’re only offered at most two options at any time, and the Twine game allows you to freely undo, so a bad end just means enduring a gif depicting shocking stick-figure violence and then a replay, but for a joke game, ROD MCSCHLONG does a good job of playing fair; more often than not, logical deduction, careful attention to detail, and a cautious regard for the importance of safeguarding your “baloney pony” will see you through. There’s an engaging sense of escalation throughout, too – it’s hopefully no spoiler to reveal that ultimately the very multiverse is put into the balance, meaning that you’re not just protecting one dong, but innumerable dongs across countless realities.

The tragedy is – well, there are two tragedies (see how elegantly Hubert rebuts Karl: everything repeats, not just history!) For one thing, while the game is structured around a dream of escape, the title exerts a remorseless pull: no matter how you try, no matter what you do, ROD MCSCHLONG will GET PUNCHED IN THE DOG, with each near-miss serving to raise the tension before the inevitable. Heck, you need to get out your classical-tragedy bingo card, because here we’ve got both character-is-destiny (the piece opens with ROD’s hubristic boast that no one will ever PUNCH him in the DONG) and trying-to-escape-fate-makes-it-happen (ROD’s efforts to evade PUNCHES are themselves what eventually put his DONG right in the line of fire).

The second tragedy is, well, of course it’s not quite as funny as DICK MCBUTTS. There are some great one-off gags, don’t get me wrong – I don’t exactly know what it means to say performing the eponymous assault would be “[l]ike going to the Cumberland Pencil Museum and trying to beat up the world’s largest coloured pencil,” but it makes me laugh anyway – but inevitably the second time around, the jokes don’t have quite the anarchic zing they once did. There’s an extended sequence involving an athletic supporter and cup that’s played a little too straight, and the easy way failure can be undoing means that ROD MCSCHLONG actually GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG quite a lot, with no lasting consequences. Despite a glee-inducing late-game cameo and quite a lot of craftsmanship, sadly the game ultimately can’t help but disappoint.

That’s OK though, since as stated it’s all in service of inverting Marx’s dialectics and endearing Hubert Janus to the GOP’s movers and shakers – at least until next Comp’s inevitable DONNIE MCTRUMP GETS THRASHED ON THE RUMP.

The Comp welcomes all kinds of IF, but it’s also an awkward place to enter a teaser. As the most, well, competitive of the community’s various events, it tends to be where long, polished games by seasoned authors tend to wind up, so an incomplete effort will look even slighter by way of comparison. But beyond that, the audience simply expects complete experiences: while the Comp’s been home to multi-part series, like the Earth and Sky superhero trilogy that dominated the winner’s circle in the early aughts, or the game I’m going to be reviewing next for that matter, those games had full beginnings, middles, and ends, with linkages to future installments being akin to Marvel-movie postcredit sequences. Well, I say “the audience” but I mean “me” – for all that the blurb clearly discloses that we’ve got here is “simply the prologue” to The Lost Artist, I was still disgruntled to reach the end well before I expected to, all the more so since there’s no indication of when and where the continuation might show up.

But admitting that putting a teaser in IFComp is probably not a good idea, is this prologue nonetheless an effective one? I’d have to say no. For a preview to make me excited to check out the full experience, I think it has to establish the premise and end on a moment of drama, when things are opening up and you’re left on the edge of your seat, half-imagining what might happen next but sure that there’ll be plenty of surprises beyond what you can think up. Think about the Lord of the Rings: you could cut things off after the hobbits take the Buckleberry Ferry just ahead of the Ringwraiths, say, and have a solid teaser. If that’s too much movie to give away for free, you could push back to the moment where Frodo tells Sam that he’s about to go farther from home than he’s ever been before: we don’t get the excitement of the Black Riders or the other hobbits yet, but we know what’s at stake, and that the journey’s about to begin in earnest.

The Lost Artist: Prologue, by way of contrast, basically decides to cut off just as Bilbo slips the ring on at his party, and excises the opening historical flashback besides: we have a disconnected set of characters who’ve barely interacted with each other, some kind of inciting incident that seems like it’s going somewhere, but no real idea of the shape of the story, what the themes or conflicts to come will be, and little reason to care about anything we’ve just seen. Here, instead of hobbits we’ve got a pair of bird-sanctuary-keepers turned bank robbers, an artist trapped against her will and losing her creativity, and the world’s most generic detective; instead of the dark lord Sauron we’ve got an ominous megacorporation with decidedly odd ideas about profitability (we’re told that at least one part of their business is making corporate logos, and they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?), and instead of magic rings we’ve got low-context invocations of time travel and a mystical raven. Possibly there are rules and thematic linkages that unify all of this, but the vibe is that anything could happen, and not necessarily in a good way:

Balding picks up the envelope but notices that his name is misspelled.

“Damn.” The Detective whimpers to himself, looking off to somewhere else.

The letters of his name are floating in the center of his view. The letters continuously disassemble and reassemble into hallucinated shapes.

He gets all weird about that.

Better to find something else to focus on.

Hey! What’s over there?

Let’s just say that the word “huh?” recurs a lot in my notes.

There are one or two possibly-intriguing images here – I liked the bit where the captive artist, who’s stuck working on the aforementioned logos, has a moment of clarity after she clumsily spills maté tea powder on one of her doodles and is arrested by the “depth and texture” it lends to her work – and just at the end, it indicates that the detective is being brought in to investigate something to do with the artist’s predicament. But there’s just not enough here to make me care about what happens next, even without the wacky tone, barely-there characters, and underexplained worldbuilding. It could be that after another act or two, the Lost Artist brings its disparate parts together, establishes compelling themes, and creates an engaging narrative – or it could be that it doesn’t. But either way, this prologue doesn’t allow the player to give it a fair shake.

I was recently reading a review of the DnD 3rd Edition version of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting – sometimes I make questionable choices about what to do with my spare time – and the author teased out a distinction between “generic” fantasy and “vanilla” fantasy: there’s some fantasy that’s too specific, too flavorful, to count as generic, and yet lacks the sort of twist or high concept or especially-novel distinguishing feature that would admit it to a subgenre. Thus: vanilla.

(You might be pooh-poohing this whole idea, but try a spoonful of regular plain yogurt, and then vanilla. They’re different!)

(You might prefer the plain, of course. That’s fine too).

So yes, The Saltcast Adventure is the kind of fantasy where you can’t get two paragraphs in before the narrator informs you that you’re now the farthest you’ve ever been from home (those of you reading these reviews in order will note that I mentioned this scene in Fellowship of the Ring two games ago), and where one paragraph after that we’re told, in solid but Tolkien-invoking prose:

"The trees here look different; they’re taller, with canopies that reach high into the autumn air, grasping at the pale sun. There are huge boulders scattered across the landscape, glittering stone that looks nothing like the occasional flint pebbles that fleck the paths long behind you. The smell in the air is sweet, unflavored by human industry."

The protagonist is of course an unassuming peasant who’ll have to tap into heretofore-unguessed reserves of strength to succeed in their quest, which is to delve deep into a subterranean world of monsters and stop their attacks on humanity and get a reward from the king. She (yes, she’s a she, and a mother, so that’s a nice departure from the norm though hardly that interesting in itself) starts off with some water, some rope, a knife, and a lantern with a small enchantment placed on it. The lore infodump is woven skillfully through the opening, but it’s there, and the setting’s major distinctive element – magic gone awry can create different kinds of the eponymous Saltcasts, mutated or spirit-ridden creatures with supernatural powers whose lives are bound up in tiny mirrors – is a specific, but not exactly revisionist, take on fantasy worldbuilding.

And yet, the game leans into its meat-and-potatoes conceits with admirable consistency. The Saltcast are the only unnatural creatures in the setting, for example, and while the exact mechanics of the magics that create and sustain them are laid out with the detail of an RPG monster manual, they’re all presented as individuals, both as to their powers and their personalities, and not all are hostile. Madelaine, meanwhile, while the very model of the plucky hero’s journey protagonist, is drawn with conviction – her grit and perseverance feel well-earned, her devotion to her struggling family rendered with poignancy:

"You close your eyes, see your children’s faces. Thin, wan, smiling. Mattias’s teeth have started falling out because he does not eat well enough."

She seems like an individual, not an archetype, and the same is true of the central antagonist, who is recognizably a load-bearing Foozle of the type that has clogged CRPGs since time immemorial, but whose uniqueness extends beyond a perhaps-overcomplex backstory and cool special effects – not to mention the plucky supporting cast.

There’s a risk that all I’m doing here is inferring a qualitative difference based just on quality. It is true that Saltcast Adventure is a well-executed example of its form; as noted above, the prose largely avoids Generic Fantasy Bollocks, with descriptions that leverage all the senses, and while the piece is long it’s well-paced, with act breaks coming just as I was feeling like the plot structure could use a change-up. Meanwhile, the choice mechanics are nicely done too – besides a few pick-a-door false choices that shunt you to the same scene regardless and could have been excised, you’re given options to try to build connections or prioritize efficiency, with stakes that feel high even though the mechanics are reasonably forgiving (you can accumulate wounds, but the game doesn’t visibly track them, and if you die you’re able to immediately undo, so I think it’s hard to lock yourself out of good outcomes).

But I’ve played tightly-made stories like this before, and this one does do things a little bit differently. There’s a big twist right at the end of Act 2 that I legitimately failed to predict, for example, and if the final section can’t fully pay it off, that’s probably just because the author would have needed to add an extra hour to this three-hour game to make it land. And while each decision the author made about how to construct the Saltcast, their origins, and their society comes straight out of the fantasy playbook, the gestalt still winds up being memorable. Moreover, the game has the discipline to stick with its intentionally-picked elements rather than watering them down with the exact same stuff you’ve seen a million times before. So yeah, if the only kind of yogurt you like is peach or blueberry or, god help you, chocolate raspberry, you’ll probably want to give Saltcast a miss, but it remains a great example of why vanilla keeps selling too.