Reviews by Mike Russo

(I beta tested this game)

So far in this festival we’ve seen games that seem to be about politics but aren’t (Potato Peace, Pass a Bill) and games that seem to be about politics and are (Social Democracy, Dragon of Steelthorne sorta); Loose Ends completes the set, being a game that doesn’t seem to be about politics but actually 100% is (I suppose there are also a bunch of games that neither seem to be nor are about politics, but that’s a singularly unedifying line of inquiry). It’s about vampires, you see, but not just any vampires: these are the Kindred of the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade, which can be played in a variety of styles ranging from angsty personal horror (…or so I’ve heard) to superheroes with fangs (definitely played in a few campaigns like this), but always foregrounds the complex web of relationships, feuds, and factions that dominates the endless unlives of the titular immortals.

The game does a good job of letting you slowly wade into the deep end of the pool, though. You’re a newcomer to town who gets hired for a classic Vampire task, a Masquerade cleanup: some chump of a vampire’s revealed their supernatural powers to mortals, leaving witnesses and evidence, and it’s up to you to preserve the secrecy of undead society by seeing to the requisite disappearances and threats. The early stages of the game therefore unfurl as an investigation, as you follow the schmendrick’s tracks and try to figure out exactly how big of a mess has been made. But it doesn’t take long to realize that, again in classic V:tM style, the job isn’t on the level and by nosing around, you’ve inadvertently put yourself into grave (groan) danger. As the game progresses, gameplay shifts from finding evidence or persuading witnesses to strategizing about trading favors: there are a wealth of characters representing a wide number of factions, most of whom hate each others’ guts, and sharing resources, information, or promises with some of them will help unlock secrets, or lend you mundane or supernatural aid. It all comes to a crescendo in a final conflict that turns less on whether you’ve sussed out the mystery than if you’ve made any allies who’ll care enough to keep you from getting squashed by a bug.

The interface does a good job of helping you master the array of options and information at your disposal; each night, you’re given a choice of locations to visit, and also the chance to review your resources and what you’ve learned. Gameplay largely proceeds via standard choice-based gameplay, but with clearly-marked places where your choice of focus attributes and vampire powers unlock new options. When it comes time to offer a favor, you always have a chance to back down and change your mind; likewise, while the game does have an overall time limit, it’s fairly forgiving and runs partially according to the rules of drama rather than a strict clock. As a result the game feels quite fair, even as the social-engineering puzzle it presents can be quite challenging to navigate.

The characters are a highlight, brought to life by evocative prose and well-chosen dialogue. They tend a bit to the stereotypical, if you’ve played the tabletop game, since most stand in as single representatives for their faction, but they’re all well done, and there are some who stand out as individuals, like the freethinking university professor or the alchemy-dabbling painter and her making-a-series-of-bad-decisions lover. And I’d imagine they make the cavalcade of political groups a little easier to navigate for newcomers to the World of Darkness, by personalizing the factions – in fact overall I think the game does a good job of explaining itself and not presupposing prior knowledge of the setting (if anything, I might have wrong-footed myself through my familiarity with older versions of Vampire: in my first playthrough, I caught wind of the hideout of a Sabbat cabal. Seeing as they’re a sect of vampires whose cruelty and fanaticism are so extreme that I’m struggling to come up with a plausible real-world analogy, I steered well clear. But when I visited them in a subsequent save-file there was just a tense conversation waiting for me, reflecting I think that the Sabbat have been toned down in recent editions).

I can still see Loose Ends not being for everyone: the web of information and relationships is tricky to navigate successfully, and if you’re interested in the personal-horror aspect of vampirism, your thirsts will largely go unslaked – there’s no existential angst here, and heck, feeding on the blood of the living is mostly something that gets taken care of in a perfunctory paragraph between chapters. But if the idea of trying to use your wits to survive jaded immortals’ games of feint and counter-feint, look no further.

I wrapped up my review of Spring Thing 2021’s The Bones of Rosalinda with a tossed-off wish for an eventual sequel, off the strength of its winning characters and engaging gameplay. Three years later, that wish has been granted, and it’s worth pausing for a minute to note how tricky sequels can be, balancing the audience’s desire for things to stay the same while also feeling different – characters should evolve but too much, the scope should broaden but not unrecognizably so, the gameplay should stay familiar but boast new twists and turns, and the plot should raise the stakes without undermining the original. With so many balls to juggle, it’s almost inevitable that one or two will fall, right? Yet Trials is a banger of a follow-up, delivering everything a sequel ought to and making it look easy.

The core of its success is once again the characters: double act of Rosalinda, a free-willed skeleton, and Piecrust, a wizard shapechanged into a mouse, is as compelling as ever, two plucky underdogs who use all their wits and heart to look out for each other. The supporting cast is even bigger this time out, though, and every one is a winner, including some returning favorites from Trials, like Teckla the conscientious ogre and Albert, a former servant of an evil wizard trying to make good. The newcomers make a strong impression too, though, with even some initially-antagonistic characters eventually joining team Rosalinda to help save the day.

Similarly, the story is much the same in its broad contours – there’s a naughty magic-user up to no good – but this threat feels distinct from the small-time necromancer of the first game. The villain has many more henchmen, and illusion-based powers that can strike terror into the hearts of all the living characters. The setting is also more engaging than the sometimes-samey dungeon of Bones; after an action-packed prelude that quickly shuttles between environments, the meat of Trials plays out in a haunted forest that’s grown up around a ruined magical city. It’s a standard fantasy locale in some respects, I suppose, but it’s enlivened by compelling images like an atmospheric underwater sequence where you need to swim among the city’s fallen buildings to recover an artifact.

Also in the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it camp is the parser-like choice-based gameplay. Once again, there’s a linear tutorial that carefully walks the player through the key elements of puzzle-solving, which involve switching between Rosalinda and her detachable, independently-controllable skeleton-limbs and Piecrust with his ever-growing magical powers. It’s a fast-paced affair, jumping around to a few different locations and introducing a new faction of overzealous religious warriors, which winds up pushing Piecrust more to the fore, as Rosalinda’s capabilities tend to require more set-up to be useful; regardless, it’s an effective refresher that benefits from a clear UI that makes it easy for the player to navigate a suite of options that could otherwise feel overwhelming. It helps that the puzzles are well clued, and progress in the main forest area carefully constrained, so that the player usually has a clear sense of where they need to go to advance the plot, and has a manageable two or three obstacles to work on at any time.

The writing throughout is unpretentious but effective; there are occasional passages where the tendency of each noun to have exactly one adjective starts to feel awkward, and a few typos (largely places where the past-tense narration slips into present tense), but the dialogue is strong, with each character having a distinctive and appealing voice. And while this is no indie platformer screaming I AM AN ALLEGORY, there are some pleasing thematic resonances between Rosalinda’s e pluribus unum puzzle-solving body and the way the larger group of characters bring their own unique skills and personalities to bear to support each other; it’s also no coincidence, I think, that the few truly irredeemable villains are the ones bent on controlling other people for their own ends.

So yeah, another Rosalinda game, another triumph. This is about as good as this strand of IF gets; if you added graphics and told someone this was a lost LucasArts demo, they’d believe you. I’m not as unconflicted about calling for a sequel this time out, largely because of a plot development that’s satisfying here but might make future installments tricky (Spoiler - click to show)(Piecrust’s transformation back into a human, I mean – wizards are fun and all, but they’re not mice, now, are they?), but I’m more than willing to be convinced.

It took me many years to figure out exactly how I felt about horror as a genre. I really enjoy some parts of it – ancient curses, hidden secrets, vampires and werewolves and ghosts all spooky in themselves but also metaphorically representing aspects of the human condition! – whereas there are other parts I find pretty unpleasant – gore, traumatic violence, bad things happening to nice people. After running through a bunch of different theories (maybe I just like certain subgenres? Maybe I’m getting squeamish in my old age?) I think I’ve landed on the explanation: I like the trappings of horror, but not the substance. My ideal horror movie is something like the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula: sure, there’s blood and madness and everyone on a ship gets torn apart, but that’s mostly superficial, the movie’s basically a – well, I was going to say “romcom”, except that would imply that its tortured romance and slapstick comedy were harmoniously integrated, which is not at all the case. But the point being that rather than dealing with the core themes of horror – man’s inhumanity to man, the terrifying threat of dangers that can strike without warning, etc. – it’s concerns mostly lie elsewhere, with the horror tropes sprinkled on top for flavor. And that’s okay by me!

I suspect something similar is going on with Potato Peace, a politics-themed visual novel with no actual politics in it. This isn’t because it’s set in a fantasy world – admittedly, the setup where people and slightly-svelter Mr. and Mrs. Potato-Heads coexist in an advanced society is pretty out there, but of course there are lots of opportunities to dig into real-world dynamics with that kind of frame. Nor is it because the game’s pitched as a comedy; plenty of political satire out there, after all, not all of it dark. It’s because as hard as I tried to figure out what was at stake in the narrative, I felt stymied: while the investigator protagonist has an opportunity to bring down a possibly-corrupt mayor and make a rousing speech straight out of the West Wing, the context for the action and the motivations of the various characters go largely unexplained.

The main way this plays out is in the relationship between the two populations (man and potato-man). There’s a thread of the investigation that brings you into contact with an activist type who implies that potatoes don’t have the same rights as humans, but this isn’t really specified, and the most powerful character in the game – that mayor – is himself a potato. It could be that there’s stratification within the potato-American community; well-dressed jacket potatoes taking advantage of the grievances of ordinary spuds, say. But without more detail the worldbuilding – and thus my engagement – felt thin.

Exciting gameplay or clever wordplay can help make up for a lackluster theme, of course, but here I found those aspects were similarly of middling effectiveness. The game is mostly linear until the final sequence (helpfully, it flags this to players, which makes replays easier); there are a few choices along the way, but they generally reduce to “advance the plot” / “advance the plot zanily”. The finale, meanwhile, has razor-thin margins between crushing defeat and overwhelming success; in my first playthrough, I went on with my climactic oration a bit too long, and the crowd turned on me for piling the rhetoric on too thick, but when I replayed and made the opposite choice, everything turned up roses. Meanwhile, on the writing front, the jokes often felt strained – there are some okay ones about things piling up “like a mountain of fries”, but I was hoping for something more like “in the land of the potatoes, the one-eyed man is king”, y’know? And these two strands occasionally combine when the prose makes the available choices unclear, as in this bit:

"Will you stand idly by and watch as chaos reigns, or will you rise up and fight for the peace and harmony that once united humans and potatoes alike?

-Attempt to intervene and debate the mayor.

-Rally the town against the mayor’s tyranny."

Er, both of those seem like rising up and fighting for peace?

Possibly I’m giving Potato Peace too hard of a time; I work in a politics-adjacent field so I’m probably more disappointed by the lack of substance than the average player (I’m also probably way more disappointed by the lack of a Dan Quayle joke than the average player). In its favor, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the author does describe it as a testbed for a visual novel engine. Judged as a jokey technical proof-of-concept it probably does better; whatever hacks were used to make Ink look like RenPy were pretty well done, to my eye.* Still, regardless of the attention paid to coding, I wish a bit more effort had gone into sharpening the language and clarifying the conflicts the story presents – I didn’t need to see details of impeachment procedure or a run-down of the state of civil rights law in Potatotown USA, but knowing what wide impacts my actions had would have felt the story feel more political, even if it is just a paprika-sprinkle on top of a mound of starch.

*Actually, speaking of visuals, while there’s no mention of their source they sure seemed “AI”-generated to me – there were characters with inconsistent numbers of fingers on each hand, background writing was oddly-aligned and out of focus, there’s a non-Euclidean pie lattice… I know there are a variety of opinions about AI art, but speaking personally, it bums me out and I especially really hate having to second-guess what I’m seeing to try to figure out whether or not a person drew it. Again, I know there are different opinions on this, but I think it would benefit everybody if there were a really strong norm of disclosing the use of such tools so players can know what they’re seeing.