Reviews by Mike Russo

I usually don’t like to look at other reviews of a game before I’ve written mine, but I’m going to bend that rule this time so I can check how many others managed to refrain from mentioning House of Leaves… OK, as of this writing there’s only one public review (Mathbrush’s), and yes, despite him not having read it, HoL still manages to get a namecheck. I’m a big fan of that book, and it deservedly is the first reference point when you see a house behaving the way the one in Thin Walls does – sprouting up new rooms as it starts to get full, lengthening hallways to stymie exploration, and responding to the worst instincts and desires of its inhabitants. But while the house in House of Leaves stands in relation to the individual – it’s the unconscious, a spur to knowledge and its negation – Thin Walls uses this malicious bit of architecture to take aim at society.

What we’ve got here is a multi-chapter Twine game where vignettes from the perspectives of the different inhabitants of a rooming-house alternate with a recurring, exploration-focused sequence where you can see the house changing and pick which resident to follow next. After a disorienting opening, it quickly becomes clear what unites all these stories: the anomie of modern life, and how communal living can paradoxically become isolating. The writing isn’t subtle, but it communicates its ideas well. Here’s a bit of description from the frame sequence:

"You are in a small bathroom. There is a toilet and washbasin, beside which four little soaps sit in separate containers, and four little hand towels hang on a rack and a radiator."

And a bit of reflection from one of the later stories:

"But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it."

The way the house-metaphor expresses itself varies from chapter to chapter: in the most effective, it works to split up a couple who are having problems, creating space to isolate them and eventually putting up a wall between the two single beds they’d pushed together (again, the allegory is not exactly deeply obfuscated). In another, it ensures an Instagram-obsessed woman has a perfect, clean, white, sterile backdrop for all her photos. Another favorite sees a woman daydream about getting a boyfriend and moving in with him – but obsesses over the new space and the amazing furniture she’ll fill it with, until she loses track of the imaginary boyfriend and he abandons her.

By the end, I did find diminishing returns were starting to set in – the late chapter about the two housemates squabbling over who was eating the other’s cereal and making loud noises late at night reduces the house to an annoying prankster. I ran into a small bug where after I finished Chapter 4, a bit of Chapter 3 popped back up until it ended again (EDIT: I am unobservant, this is intended per the author’s reply below). And the writing does occasionally get too on the nose – at one point the Instagram lady says:

"My photos were my defence against the world, my pretence that all was well in this house."

But overall Thin Walls did a good job of keeping me engaged, and at the close of each vignette I was always eager to return to the free exploration sequence and see what had changed, who had moved in, and check whether the cupboard under the stairs had become unlocked, or the mysterious landlord who lives at the top of the house had come home yet. And the ending sequence is a return to form, with the house’s transformations becoming more and more kinetic and the social world of the house becoming unmoored and kaleidoscopic (though as involved as I was trying to solve the mystery of the house, I was also puzzled by why all the music at the climactic party was from the mid-aughts – I don’t think it’s meant to be a flashback!) It’s definitely worth the playthrough, and not just to get another menacing metaphysical house in the mental toolbox to sit alongside the house on Ash Tree Lane.

A couple of years ago I read this incredibly long analysis of the Mass Effect trilogy (ah, the things I had time for before I was a parent!) which sketched out a distinction between fiction that’s detail-first and fiction that’s drama-first. The idea is that detail-first fiction, especially in the genre space, is all about worldbuilding, consistency, and verisimilitude, even at the expense of a good story; drama-first works can have a complex setting, but the rules are much less important than serving the emotional beats of the story and making sure that there’s always something exciting happening and the stakes just keep going up and up. This isn’t a framework I find myself thinking about all that much – most things are somewhere in the middle, of course – but I think it’s really helpful for conceptualizing my response to Half-Alive, which I enjoyed even though the twists and turns of its plot had the detail-first part of my brain blowing a gasket.

What we’ve got here is a teenaged riff on the Underworld narrative, with Inferno-y bits – there are layers! There’s a guide! – and an Orpheus-y motivation – reclaim the missing part of your brother’s soul from the demon-thing that snatched it. The protagonist is Kendall, a 17-year-old girl with awful, broken-up parents who shoulders more responsibility than she should have to, and her interplay with her brother and Wyatt, the guide character, is enjoyable to read because she comes off as a classic hero. Indeed, Half-Alive does a good job of deploying the iconic elements of the journey, down to her weapon of choice – an ax – becoming a heroic attribute.

There’s enough that’s distinctive to keep it from feeling like a retread, though. This particular layer of the underworld is mostly populated by children, for one thing – some are ambivalent characters, but many are so-called “ringleaders”, who direct the weaker-willed kids and are bent on stealing the name and vitality from these living visitors to win the chance to return to the world above, but play fair if bested in a game of riddles.

The stories of many of these kids, including Wyatt, are counterposed with Kenny’s journey, and it’s here that I most struggled with the game. The characters you encounter are drawn from different times and places – though I believe they’re all American – and even allowing for their modern locution as a forgivable concession for both reader and author, the vignettes are full of anachronisms and wild plot twists. There’s a pair of twins who were born in the 18th century; their backstory is that they were abandoned in a dumpster, then fell in with a traveling circus that toured the country complete with an elephant. Another character’s story is a riff on the child-gang bits of Oliver Twist, except he always wears a burlap sack for a mask – after he tries to betray the gang’s Fagin figure, the crime boss travels all the way to the west coast to make him sleep with the fishes, but is still nice enough to put up a gravestone with the kid’s name on it back home in New Jersey. The plan also hinges on a pocket recording device, despite the character having been born in the Great Depression.

This all makes for emotionally-charged, dramatic reading, but at the same time there’s a cost to playing so fast and loose with plausibility. The trend isn’t restricted just to the flashbacks, either, with details changing or going unmentioned until just before they can land with the most impact: Kenny’s ax doesn’t work against the demon until suddenly it does; the demon has a staff that allows it to travel between worlds, but as soon as Kenny gets her hands on it we’re told it’s almost drained of its limited number of charges.

The prose is similarly highly emotional, but often a bit slippery on details. The town where the game starts is alternately called Millflower and Mayflower, and it changes its mind on whether Kenny’s brother was attacked by the demon minutes or hours after school ended. There’s a regular drifting of tenses from present to past and back. Sometimes these infelicities undermine the impact of the story:

"In a fit, Dad flips our living room couch to which my mom slaps him. Yelling vulgar insults at each other, he stuffs his hands in his jeans and then storms out."

More often, though, the exuberance of the writing was enough to carry me along. Here’s a bit that’s definitely overheated, but works much better:

"The chill would make you feel as if you landed in Antarctica and the dirty fog that invaded your lungs was so thick and heavy that you could barely breathe or see.

"On the wind, miscellaneous whispers and wails were being carried, filling their confused bodies with fear. Not to mention the overbearing smell of the area which stank of decaying flesh."

And like I said, despite noticing these weaknesses, I wasn’t too bothered by them once I tried to enter into the spirit of how Half-Alive was telling its story. It also really helps that the game side of things is well-designed and player-friendly. The opening About text nicely explains the length and overall structure of the piece, which is a helpful convenience in a longer game like this. While the focus is very much on the narrative, there are some significant choices to be made in navigating the afterlife, including the aforementioned riddles and also some timed challenges. Nothing’s especially hard, and you can easily rewind even if you do make a mistake, but the gameplay is all engaging enough, and works well as a pacing element to break up the talkier bits.

Playing Half-Alive can feel like being on a roller coaster curated for maximum thrills – if you’re worried about the plausibility of each swerve and scare, or annoyed because you could see the final twist coming a mile away, you’re missing the point. I wouldn’t want every game to be this way, of course, since pure emotion can get exhausting and I typically prefer a story with careful intellectual scaffolding supporting the drama. But for this game and this author, it works, and despite my caviling Half-Alive pulled me through with its energetic, iconic storytelling.

Reader, let me level with you: I was in the bag for this game before I even clicked the word Start. The first Lady Thalia installment was a highlight of last year’s Spring Thing for me, with its zippy heists and even zippier repartee fine-tuned to delight. So how could more of the same be anything but lovely? True, sometimes a sequel brings diminishing returns, but given how much I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything by this pair of authors, the thought that 2 Lady 2 Thalia could be a disappointment never crossed my mind – as well it shouldn’t have done, because as I suspected, in this case even more of a good thing is even more of a good thing.

For those lucky souls who’ve yet to try one of these games – oh, how I envy you! – the protagonist is a former demimondaine who’s clawed her way into respectability by day, while slaking her thirst for objets d’art at night through her alter ego as Lady Thalia, gentlewoman thief. The first game, set in Jazz-Age London, saw her carry out a series of escalating thefts, thumbing her nose in the face of her arch-rival, Melpomene Williams of Scotland Yard.

While the setting and characters have immediate appeal, a big part of what made it so successful is the heist mechanics, which carry over to the sequel. There’s an initial phase where you case the joint, digging up information about security measures and alternate routes, via some hopefully-subtle poking around as well as a social engineering minigame that requires sussing out whether a particular mark is best approached in a friendly fashion, bowled over by the direct approach, or drawn out so they can vent their natural loquaciousness. Then it’s time for the operation itself, where you need to put you planning into practice and respond to the many curve-balls life, and the Yard/gendarmerie, throw your way. Finally, there’s a wrap-up where you receive a score rating the panache with which you pulled off the job. Sticking to this framework means there are some similarities between heists, sure, but it also means that each has its own narrative structure, with the methodical exploration-heavy investigation giving way to a puzzley heist and an improvisational exfiltration, and then the score helps motivate you to do as well (or better) next time.

Rose of Rocroi puts a few spins on this high-quality formula. You’re vacationing in Paris so the scenery is even better this time out (the authors wisely exercised restraint and kept the dialogue free of mais oui and zut alors! interjections, though there are fun references to Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis). You have a new candidate for nemesis, as you’re actually working with Mel to foil a chauvinistic French thief with a penchant for fancy-dress and a disrespect for fine art. And then – well, let me spoiler block this next bit: (Spoiler - click to show)in the most exciting alternate-protagonist twist since Halo 2, you actually play Mel in the investigative sections this time out!

These aren’t radical changes, but they’re enough to keep an already-great formula fresh. The writing draws you along on a paragraph by paragraph level – picking two examples from an endless candy box of bon mots:

"You are once again at a garden party (being wealthy seems to involve an almost intolerable amount of garden parties) and are just about to claim a headache and beg off when you overhear something that catches your attention."

And:

"You are Lady Thalia, and it is time to commit a crime. Well, a crime sanctioned by the police. Well, sanctioned by one policewoman who doesn’t have jurisdiction in this country. Not that any of that makes this any more or less illegal than what you typically get up to, anyway, but it is a change of pace."

Then the meaty crunch of each heist gives you something to sink your teeth into. None of the challenges are that hard, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the possibility of getting a perfect score is always there, urging you to pay attention and ensure Lady Thalia lives up to her reputation. And sitting above the episodic bouts of thievery, the overall plot, and more importantly, your relationship with Mel, provide a sense of progression through the game as a whole. It’s really smartly-designed stuff, and it makes the time playing this medium-length game feel like it just melts away.

Lest I be accused of a total lack of impartiality, I do have one and a half points of criticism to leaven all this praise. The half-point is that while the narrative nicely escalates into the finale, mechanically speaking the climactic heist didn’t feel more complex or challenging than the earlier ones, which was a small missed opportunity – but only a small one, given how much this last job gains in coolness from being set in Versailles. The full point, though, has to do with how the most important relationship in the game is handled: I’m speaking, of course, of the Mel/Thalia frenemy romance (alert a leather worker, I need to cram a third word into my portmanteau).

Look, obviously these two crazy kids are meant to be together. And obviously given the differences in where they’re each coming from, that shouldn’t be a cakewalk. The game does a good job of signaling that you need to need to walk a fine line to get the best ending with Mel – lean too much into the archnemesis side of things, and there’s no opportunity to make nice, while Mel justifiably views too-enthusiastic expressions of affection with suspicion. So in my playthrough, I aimed for varying moments of sharp-elbowed banter with heartfelt moments of vulnerability, hoping this changeup would melt Mel in her boots. Sadly, though, when the game listed my final scores, I did near-perfectly on the heists and investigation but only got a 4 out of 9 in my relationship with Mel. That’s all well and good, but when I went back and replayed, trying even harder to focus on getting this path right, I still got that same mediocre score.

It could be that I’m just not any good at this and I should stick with crime rather than romance (and in the game!) But from looking at the comprehensive walkthrough provided with the game, I feel like the requirements here might not be as elegantly signposted as most other mechanics in the game are. It seems as though rather than allowing you to succeed by balancing meaner and nicer options, instead at each decision point there’s a single correct answer you need to pick to optimize your score. From the way the narrative presented things, it wasn’t clear to me that this is how things were going to work, and sometimes the differences between choices were subtle enough (like the one offering three slightly-different ways of suggesting Mel work undercover) that I’m still not sure why one was correct and the others weren’t.

It feels unfair to harp on this, since – I can’t emphasize this enough – the game is deliriously fun to work through and even replay. But shipping Thalia and Mel is a hugely appealing element of the story, so it was a shame that it felt frustrating. Fortunately, I had no shame about stooping to the walkthrough to make sure that third time around was the charm for our mismatched leads. And here’s hoping that next year, there’s a third entry in the series waiting for us. Maybe a visit to the casinos of Monte Carlo is in order, or perhaps she’ll return home and try to swipe the Crown Jewels? Wherever she goes, I’ll be there, since I’m nowhere near done with Lady Thalia!

In other reviews I’ve advanced the theory that one of the distinctive things about this era of IF is that the parser vs. choice dichotomy that loomed so large – and, er, acrimoniously – through the 2010s is starting to dissolve as authors who play, and sometimes make, both kinds of games experiment with ways to get the best of both worlds. Typically the way I’ve seen this play out is through choice-based games that implement parser-like navigation and a world model while filtering interaction through a set of always-available actions rather than bespoke choices. Digit represents the opposite approach – it’s a parser game with no puzzles and large chunks of text between actions, where almost all of the interactivity is embedded in the menu-based dialogue system.

This is a rather bloodless way to describe a sweet albeit graphically sexual (or maybe it’s the other way around?) story of two best friends visiting a street festival and learning more about each other than they’d bargained for. But I’m foregrounding structure because – well, it gives me a chance to expound a pet theory, but also because it’s helpful to let potential players know what to expect – choice-based mavens who typically shy from parser games I think would find Digit a gentle way to dip a toe (groan) into the pool, while parser boffins looking to juggle inventories and unlock every door they see should adjust their expectations. It’s also relevant to how I evaluated the game, though: viewed narrowly through the criteria I usually use for a parser game, it has some real negatives, but making a broader assessment these don’t matter so much compared to its strengths in what it’s actually trying to do.

To get those negatives out of the way quickly so I can focus on why I enjoyed Digit so much: yes, it’s largely on rails, with much of your keyboard input simply just hitting a button to get the next line onto the screen, up to and including the game typing in an action for you on occasion. In terms of interactivity, you can choose different dialogue options but the order doesn’t seem to matter so you can just lawnmower your way through. And it’s a bit underimplemented, without much scenery to explore, few synonyms for the objects, the world model not always matching the story (like a character still being present in a room after dialogue indicates she’s gone to the bathroom), actions that could have been implemented separately swept up into the general TALK TO command (e.g., there’s a point where you need to give a series of foods to your friend, but attempts to GIVE are unsuccessful), and a few small bugs like a cute sequence at a water fountain that you can repeat even after it’s fired.

If you want to get hung up on that stuff, I can’t stop you. Still, I think that would be missing the forest for the trees, because even if all you’re doing is typing TALK TO EVIE, picking an number, and bouncing the space bar a dozen or so times before going back to step one, nonetheless I think this is still a really good game, because it’s really well-written. The central element here is that the prose, while not at all showy, is really really good. Often in my IF reviews I note that a game has solid writing, which is to say, it’s fine, it gets the job done, nothing to worry about here. But for me personally, the quality of the prose is probably the single biggest factor in how much I enjoy something. Outside of IF, 99% of what I read is literary fiction, and that’s due to how much attention those authors typically put into every word they use, not because I have an obsessive interest in reading about New Yorkers getting divorced (–though you know, I’ve just this moment connected the dot that my parents were New Yorkers who got divorced. This seems a dangerous idea to keep unpacking, though, so let’s move on). Digit does great on this score, boasting clever yet naturalistic dialogue, landscape descriptions that are low-key while still having the occasional moment of lyricism, and a global grounding in the concrete and physical that meant I was always right there with Sirin and Evie. Like, here’s a passage chosen at random:

"I led us down a footpath, which ran down a hill to the waterfront promenade. As it approached the horizon from behind a fluffy cloud, the evening sun bathed the sky in peachy hues - but damn, it was still a hot one.

"Not far from where we were standing, gentle waves were breaking on the shore, caressing the rocks with a quiet murmur. A light seabreeze ruffled my hair. It felt cool against my sweat. It was nice. The promenade was a place I often came to jog, but it felt totally different being here now with Evie."

Again, it’s nothing that’s jumping up and down screaming “look at me!” But this sets a mood, and you read it with satisfaction without consciously noticing the way the author adeptly slips from landscape description to character responses to embedded flashbacks, alternating longer, fancier sentences with shorter, more direct ones. This same care is present in the dialogue sequences too, like an effective scene where the protagonist is sharing some tough personal stuff with her friend while skipping stones, and the conversation is regularly interrupted with a count of how many skips she’s getting, illustrating how emotion is getting the better of her in a neatly understated way.

The strong writing extends to the character work, too, which is really what takes center stage. Given the tags and the content warning, it’s hopefully not a spoiler to say that the whole game is a dance of seduction – though who’s seducing who is definitely placed into question!. It’s appropriate, then, that Digit is in no rush to get to the sex. We get a sense of who these characters are, what’s going on in their lives outside of their relationship, and what they mean to each other, so that by the time the low-level flirtation bubbles over, it’s not sexy just because people are having sex, but because these characters are having this sex. The strong writing is also a godsend here, because of course sex writing is so frequently ridiculous; it’s good here, as befits a game from the author of Turbo Chest Hair massacre, which has the steamiest robot sex ever featured in an IF Comp entry (with all apologies to Hanon Ondricek for robotsexpartymurder’s competitive second-place showing).

Would Digit be a better game if it had all the usual parser game bells and whistles? I guess in a formal sense, but beyond the small bit of bug-squashing alluded to above, the only change I’d really want the author to make is to alter some of the default Inform responses – hearing Graham Nelson intone “that was hardly portable” took me out of the story a little bit. As it is, I had a lovely time with Digit, and if there are more parser/choice mashups like this to come, bring on the revolution.

It’s fitting that my randomization gave me Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel right after The Hole Man, since they’re alike in a lot of ways: they’re both choice-based games that work something like funhouses, letting the player wander an environment that’s densely packed with characters enacted their own stories, with the protagonist choosing which to get swept up in. And yet, what a difference a genre makes – this approach is charming when you’re ambling around a lightly-philosophical fantasyland, but can feel pretty silly when the operative tropes are those of horror fiction. The eponymous motel packs in more monsters per square inch than Call of Cthulhu’s worst Mythos Hoedown, leaving me wondering what goes on the other 364 nights of the year and questioning the protagonist’s grip on reality even before she starts running across any sanity-blasting horrors. Despite this, the various storylines boast some creativity, but less-compelling writing and some implementation awkwardness mean I probably won’t be coming back for a return stay.

The setup here as you as the late-night desk-clerk for an absolutely cursed motel; after clocking into your shift, gameplay consist of either sitting in the lobby waiting for guests to arrive or depart (in more than one sense of the term) or for the phone to ring, checking text messages from your friends, or poking around the motel, including making use of the voyeur-holes hidden behind paintings in six of the motel’s rooms. There’s something uncanny going on in each, from vampiric bloodsucking to Exorcist reenactors to whatever’s going on with the guy with the deer pelt. Add in something nasty lurking below the surface of the pool, and you’ve got more macabre happenings than you could possibly plumb in a single playthrough.

This is especially the case because the monsters will, unsurprisingly, kill you real dead. This is all fair enough – they’re monsters, duh – but I found the way these sequences played out hurt my engagement with the game, since they punish saying yes to stuff. Want to follow the obviously-bad-news femme fatale out into the parking lot? That’s not going to end well. Want to figure out why there’s all that slime by the swimming pool? Likewise (all the more so since doing this got me stuck in a loop where an object kept falling into the pool, leaning me to go check it out, at which point a strange noise or vibration made me retch, at which point something fell in the pool… finally after five go-rounds something with tentacles put me out of my misery). I did manage to survive the night on my third try, largely by sitting on my hands in the lobby, which counts as a win but wasn’t that satisfying.

Throughout, the writing is sometimes creepy but also ungainly. This could be a David Lynch style attempt to unnerve through awkwardness, but for me at least it doesn’t land:

"The nervous guy who came in earlier walks with a strange swagger into the lobby yet he is tightly clutching a leather bag to his side. As he walks by me he gives me a wink and how quickly the smile from his face falls tells me I grimaced in response involuntarily."

Added to this, the implementation sometimes left me unsure where I stood – beyond the shenanigans at the pool, many other random events also seemed to repeat over and over again, but I’m not sure whether that’s because time also didn’t seem to advance every time I clicked to wait at the lobby desk. Were these bugs, the randomizer not being tuned to avoid repetitiveness, or was there some hidden mechanic about what actions moved the clock forward? I’m not sure, and while uncertainty is fine in a horror game, I like it to be deployed to clearer thematic ends.

I suspect there’s an intended way of engaging with the game where the player is more active, zipping around the motel’s locations, spying on each of its residents and dipping in and out of each of their storylines, with replays enlivened by different permutations of the ways each can play out. And as I mentioned there’s some fun creativity here, with even the fairly standard vampire vignette boasting one or two novel images – and my subconscious will be trying to figure out that deer guy for a few days to come. But the fiddly implementation and too-common deaths mean I wasn’t able to find that intended experience, which means I unfortunately didn’t get out of Graveyard Shift everything the author put into it.

In my head, I sometimes like to anthropomorphize the different kinds of IF.

(I don’t really, but the conceit’s our entry point into the review and the alternative was a comparison to Waking Life, so I think we’re all agreed this is the less-bad option).

As I was saying before that rude interruption, I like to picture all the different kinds of IF like they’re people: you’ve got your nerdy, spreadsheet-loving puzzlefest; your overearnest theater-kid narrative-driven game; your emo, edgy autobiographical choice-based game about trauma and mental health; your trying-too-hard-to-be-funny class-clown comedy. Then there’s the figure that’s loitering around at the edge of the crowd, smoking something that definitely isn’t tobacco and flipping through an old worn-out Pynchon paperback: our old friend the druggy, philosophically surrealist art game.

The Hole Man is very much part of this proud tradition, and acquits itself well, though falling prey to the Achilles heel that tends to plague this kind of game. The conceit of this long choice-based game is that you’re on your way to jury duty (side note: I would 100% play an IF game about jury duty) when someone trips you, and you… sort off… have your body fall out of yourself, so it walks away while you’re stuck as an empty outline where a person used to be. Cue peregrinations as you wander a fantastic landscape that mashes up the quotidian with the outre, seeking an identity to take on to replace the one you’ve lost.

Whether this kind of thing works or not is almost entirely down to the execution: how good are the ideas, and how good is the writing? Hole Man is good on both scores, with a funhouse of cleverly-philosophical situations presented in an appealing, wry narrative voice. Like, here’s what happens after you meet the king of a castle that’s also the insides of a dragon, and who’s himself a weird congeries of other serpents:

"You’re not sure if you just met royalty, or a just a bunch of snakes that enjoy living in a basket and pretending to be a king. They were quite cordial in any event, though."

It’s a bit what-even-is-identity-comma-man, sure, but it made me laugh. Or there’s a song I found when pulling another thread:

"I need a glass-bottomed boat
I need an able seaman
I need the kind of attraction
That you can’t find anywhere but the Amazon River!

(Please do not stand up until
The boat has docked at the pier)

Help me.
Electric eel!

I want a giant snakehead!
I want an arapaima!
I want to prove the existence, of an ahuitzotl, with a hand on its tail!"

(That Pynchon reference I made above didn’t come out of nowhere).

(After I posted this review, the author explained that in fact the Pynchon reference did come out of nowhere, and this is actually a Weird Al lyric.
You may want to reassess the weight you give to your reviewer's analysis accordingly).

There’s definitely a lot to explore, and it’s both superficially fun to turn over rocks to see what’s below – Castlevania 2 references! Tiny dragons who work like fairies – as well as to encounter the somewhat-deeper mediations on offer. Each path you take through the game puts you in front of a different archetypal figure, leading to a dialogue or disquisition that engages with topics that – well, honestly felt a bit random and not narrowly confined to the overall theme about identity, but I found them enjoyable just the same. There’s a neat conversation about flipping Clarke’s law of magic vs. technology on its head, some surprisingly-poignant existentialist ruminations on how to go on given the inevitable death and ending of all things, and an examination of the difference between toys and games that isn’t too on the nose (though it’s a bit on the nose).

When I say it’s a lot, though, it’s definitely a lot. The blurb says that there are 12 endings, and it’s a bit of work to wander around and find each of them – I found five of them, and while each only took five or ten minutes to reach, contemplating doing that seven more times felt exhausting. This is what I meant when I mentioned an Achilles heel above: when everything works on an arbitrary logic, traditional narrative stakes are hard to establish, and that anything-can-happen vibe means there’s not a lot of connective tissue binding the different paths, and potential identities, together.

Again, the blurb indicates that there’s a “special surprise” waiting for those who run down all the different avenues, but that alone wasn’t enough to keep me motivated through seven more replays. I also ran into a few small bugs – a dead-end passage in the basement of the parking structure, the description of a bookstore that presupposed I’d been there before even though it was my first visit – that, while not anything big in of themselves, threw up just enough friction that the idea of systematically charting out all the different ways to navigate my choices felt like too much work. I console myself with the thought that Gradgrindian assiduity is at odds with the philosophy of a game like this – better to go with the flow, dip in and dip out as the spirit moves, and not worry about wringing it dry of every drop of content. Approached like that, it’s hard not to recommend The Hole Man – I can’t tell you what you’re likely to get out of it, but you’ll probably get something.

Appropriately enough for a game structured like a five-act play, my reaction to Thief of the Thousand Suns had a whole narrative arc to it. Based on the blurb and opening material, like the Dramatis Personae page complete with period font and interspersed footnotes, I went into it with high expectations since a Shakespearean IF very much appeals to me. These hopes suffered a u-turn as I was disappointed to realize the game wasn’t in verse, and had a plot drawn more from the swords-and-sorcery pulps than Elizabethan drama. After getting over those dashed expectations, though, I found there’s a lots that’s enjoyable here, as the game offers a fleet, fun adventure with a winning pair of protagonists – and if they’re more Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so what?

(Yes, this would be a three-act structure, not five – perhaps proving my point that fitting a piece of writing to Shakespearean conventions is hard!)

So the setup here is that a two adventurers, roguish Billy Bard and big-hearted muscle Grimm, are on the lookout for a particular ruined temple, hoping to find the treasure it contains. After bargaining for directions from old man in a bar (see what I mean about the fantasy tropes?) they make their way through various forest hazards before finding more than they bargained for at the temple.

For the most part the story is on rails, though there are three more interactive bits – there’s a minigame where you dicker with the old man over how much to pay for his guidance to the temple, an involved series of choices to work through when dealing with a group of banditti, and then some light puzzling to make sense of the temple’s curious, magical properties. It’s a fun romp, with new obstacles and situations thrown at you at a rapid clip, and the banter between the two protagonists is well-written and enlivens proceedings, helping the more dramatic moments land.

This all works well on its terms, but again, it does feel a little more generic-fantasy than I would have liked – the story’s presented solely through dialogue and stage directions, but the directions often go into detail far beyond what a 16th-century stage could plausibly depict, and while there’s one song (which I enjoyed!) the dialogue is in prose rather than any sort of meter, much less strict iambic pentameter. Going in with appropriate expectations, though, it’s hard to see these as real minuses, especially given the dramatically increased authorial effort that would have been required (one of my games has a short poem in more-or-less dactylic hexameter, and it took probably three or four hours of writing to firm up – iambic pentameter is easier, but still!)

I think a more legitimate critique is that the moments of reactivity sometimes don’t feel fully baked. The bargaining minigame is done pretty much blind, and since you can redo it at any time the optimal course of action is to just inch up your offer until you hit something the other party will accept. And I found the encounter with the bandits hard to navigate until I realized that clicking the earlier set of links on the page would change them and shift my strategy for dealing with them, while the last one would commit to that approach and move the story ahead. Again, there are free redos available, but that lowered the stakes, all the more so when I realized that a key event that may or may not happen here – (Spoiler - click to show)Grimm’s killing of the bandit Aileen – doesn’t actually impact where the story ultimately goes, though it’s presented as though it would. Lastly, the exploration in the temple is entertaining but feels underdeveloped, with multiple different scenarios for the most part resolved as quickly as they’re spun off. None of this reduced my enjoyment that much, but it did leave me wishing that either these mechanics had been fleshed out more thoroughly, or just streamlined in favor of a cleaner story.

On the flip side, I found that implementation was quite clean. There are only a few typos, and those that are there are the high-class, artisanal sort – wain for wane, that sort of thing. At first blush I thought I’d come across a bug where some of Act IV was accessible before Act III, but now that I’ve reflected on the plot that might actually be a clever meta touch (Spoiler - click to show)(the temple does allow for time travel, after all).

All told this is a fleet, confident game with winning characters and a romping, fast-paced plot, and if it’s not one that William Shakespeare would have written, well, there are other authors out there just as good.

Let’s Talk Alex is a Twine game about some very heavy subjects – gaslighting and emotional abuse in romantic relationships – that matches its emotionally-engaging premise with solid prose and an ultimately positive, actionable message of empowerment. I think it’s a very fine game, though I didn’t find myself as involved in it as I expected I’d be, partially because, per the game’s blurb, it’s not just a story but aims at being a simulation of how to get out of this kind of toxic relationship.

LTA realizes this ambition by structuring itself as a series of conversation puzzles: in any playthrough, the confrontation with the partner, Alex, plays out as a collection of four different mini-conversations (out of a pool of six), each focusing on a different aspect of their controlling behavior, and with clearly-laid out different strategies to try, some of which are always going to be successful in helping you get out of the relationship, and others (so far as I could tell) always unsuccessful. The choice of which topics you see depends on what you do during a pre-fight preparation phase, as you reminisce about different bad moments in the relationship. You get a short memory, which is mixed with the protagonist’s usually-positive thoughts about Alex even as they’re exhibiting a different strain of really negative behavior.

Then Alex comes home and there’s a transition into the fight:

"I’ve been feeling concerned that you’ve been showing some unhealthy behaviors. I feel like you’re unaccepting, controlling, take things too personally, and don’t trust me."

This definitely allows the player to take stock and understand how the stuff Alex has been doing falls into specific categories of emotional abuse, which helps with the educational or simulation side of things. But I found this bit of dialogue jarring, since it feels rather clinical, and I wondered how someone capable of saying this sentence about their partner hasn’t already realized that the relationship needs to end!

Once you zero in on one topic – say, the lack of trust – you get a few dialogue options, and here’s where the different strategies come in. Again, there are better answers and worse answers here, and while it’s usually pretty easy to suss out what’s likely to work (there are also some strong hints in the game’s introductory material), the choices set out a bunch of plausible responses. But I found myself wishing the conversations had a little more depth, since usually there’s only one or two choices before you’re back to the hub menu and on to the next topic – the focus is on providing feedback on whether the choices have been effective, rather than portraying all the back-and-forth of a big argument.

Ultimately, it’s a positive that there’s a good amount of signposting and that the writing is precise throughout, since that communicates why things are happening the way they are and makes the puzzles legible to the player. But at the same time, I found this approach sometimes too cut-and-dried given the emotional dynamics at issue, with the clarity sometimes undermining the verisimilitude and messy immediacy of what a relationship-ending fight can feel like. I don’t want to ding LTA too harshly for this slight dryness, though; if it makes it a better tool for exploring different ways a controlling relationship can be escaped, and a less-compelling story about one single way that plays out, that’s certainly a reasonable choice. On the Spring Thing festival page, it’s also got an “autobiographical” tag, and god knows that know that when I made my own autobiographical game last year, there were a whole bunch of topics and storytelling approaches that I dialed down or avoided, because I wouldn’t have been emotionally capable of writing the thing otherwise. Regardless, LTA tackles a tough set of topics with grace and clarity and is a worthy entry in the festival.

I’m less than ten games into Spring Thing, and somehow I’ve already hit two whose opening screen is just repeated f-bombs (the other was Light in the Forest) – man, the 2022 zeitgeist is pretty grim. Here, the profanity reflects the dire situation the protagonist has found herself in, as she’s fallen into some caves below a tourist site in the wilderness, and after an ill-timed bout of unconsciousness, she realizes she’s alone and trapped. Fortunately, there’s some strange machinery that might hold out the promise of escape…

If you were to picture a game in your head based on that description, I’m guessing that you’d come up with a parser game, because this is a classic setup. But no – it’s Twine (complete with overuse of various blurring and moving text effects, alas)! There are some reasonably fun puzzles here, and the mystery of what’s going on in the caverns is intriguing enough, but for me the novelty of navigating such a hoary scenario in a choice-based game was the most interesting element of Beneath the Stones. Now that the parser/choice wars that roiled the IF community a decade ago are firmly in the rear-view mirror, it seems to me that both the audience and authors are increasingly ignoring the stereotypes of what kinds of games belong on each side of the theoretical divide. And while there is some narrative here – the main character has a name, and a little bit of dialogue with her boyfriend in the immediate aftermath of the fall – the game really is about a lonely explorer poking at stuff in the dark.

So how well does the said poking work? I’d say reasonably so. The nice thing about this being a choice-based game is that there’s no fumbling with darkness puzzles or navigating a dreary maze: everyplace you can go and all the options are clearly laid out, and it’s easy to toggle from one sub-area to another. There’s also an inventory system that works quite well and even allows you to use one item on a second, albeit only in specific, scripted instances.

On a more equivocal note, since the puzzles mostly just involve manipulating stuff you find in the environment that only have one effect, the game is pretty easy to solve since you’ll typically be able to progress by just clicking through all of your options even if you don’t understand what you’re doing. I’d actually rate this a positive, partially because I found the environment a little confusing. The game’s chatty style meant that I was sometimes unsure about what I was seeing, and how the area I was in related to the place I’d just been. Descriptions are also a bit loose sometimes, meaning that for example I wasn’t always clear on whether something described as “gunk” was the same as the previously-mentioned “goo” – in a parser game, it’d be easy to disambiguate, but of course that option wasn’t available here. Further adding to my discombobulation, I ran into a bug that had me see a passage comparing what I was seeing to a podium that it implied I’d already encountered well before I’d actually come across the thing.

While I think Beneath the Stones could have benefitted from another testing pass (there are some typos, too) these are still minor complaints, though. Even if I wasn’t always sure about what I was doing or why it was working, it was fun to work through the puzzles and escape the caverns. The game does also succeed in setting a creepy mood at times, especially when I went back to find a bad ending that sent a little shiver down my spine. Would I have liked this better as a parser game? Probably, but I suspect that just reflects my pre-existing experience, and the fact that a Twine author can create a gameplay experience like this and make it accessible to folks who don’t play parser games is pretty cool in my book.

I’m a sucker for smart-animal content – stories about the social intelligence of elephants, books on how the distributed nature of octopuses’ nervous systems might impact their consciousness, rats problem-solving their way through lab experiments, I’m here for all of it. So even though I first came across it in the early days of YouTube, even the better part of two decades later I can still clearly remember how exciting it was to see this video of a crow trying to fish some food out of a bottle, failing, then realizing it could bend a bit of wire into a hook and get to its snack that way. Crows – they’re just like us!

(Due to the deathless nature of the internet, I realized after writing the above paragraph that this video is probably still findable – I think this is it, in fact! Rewatching it, my description wasn’t too far off, thankfully).

Anyway all this to say that when I saw there was a game coming up whose aim, according to the blurb, was to “celebrate the intelligence, eloquence, and sophistication of urban crows”, per the above I was pretty excited, all the more so since I don’t think crows really get their due. As a result of these expectations, though, I was deflated when I saw the opening text:

"OMG you’re a crow.

One day, you could be king of this shitty suburb.

But for now, it’s just you and your ATTITUDE."

Crows – they’re just like us.

This irreverent tone is actually a good fit for the game, though – if you look past the internet-poisoned dialogue, the birds on offer here, as promised, are smart and socially adept, and given how crows behave I can totally imagine that their internal lives are based on an obsessive focus on getting more stuff and maintaining their position in the pecking-order (sorry).

The silliness, and the striking drawings, also liven up a game that’s pretty solid but could have been a bit dry if played straight. Your success in becoming the baddest bird on the block is measured through increases in your numerical attitude score, and after a preparatory phase where you decide whether you want to have a wingman (er) join your quest and choose from an assortment of inventory items to bring with you, the main section of the game has you encounter a series of randomized events. If you hit the right events – and get lucky or have the right gear – your attitude will go up, say by befriending a little girl. But there are negative, attitude-draining events too that can for example see you captured by a geezer with a net. The trend is always up, though, and after maybe a dozen or two events your attitude rises sufficiently to open up the endgame, which sometimes involves a climactic rock-paper-scissors duel with another crow.

This all works well enough, though I think one more iteration on the design would have made it more compelling. There’s a slight mismatch between the attitude threshold and the number of random events on offer, meaning that even in a single playthrough you’ll see a lot of repeats. I thought the fight at the end went on a little too long, even once you realize that there’s a trick to it. And while I’m listing niggles, while I understand that the gag where the game prompts you to enter your name and then says that’s a stupid name, and your real name is e.g. Bingley Polligan (the exact choice is randomly generated) can’t admit of exceptions, I was still annoyed that “The Incrowdible Hulk” got rejected. C’mon, game, I’m working with you here!

Still, even despite these small shortcomings this is a fleet, fun game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. And while it’s not the high-minded ode to corvid smarts I was after, it does make a strong case that crows are punk-rock badasses. What more could anyone want?