Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

I don’t think we’ve seen a SeedComp game yet in the thon, so this is a nice surprise now that we’re getting close to wrapping up. Actually the genesis here is slightly more interesting than that; the plot and characters are drawn from the author’s earlier game Structural Integrity – where a city-planning bureaucrat faced a difficult moment in his relationship with his partner – while the seed provides the structure, summed up as “one click, one viewpoint”. That means there’s no branching this time out: the story, which focuses on the aforementioned couple having a strained conversation with the bureaucrat’s boss and his partner, plays out the same way every time, but after each bit of narration you’re given the option to jump to a new perspective to see the next chunk from another character’s perspective (in fact, until you complete a playthrough you can’t stick with the same viewpoint two times running).

I admit I experienced a bit of disorientation at first; less due to the perspective shifting as such than because it’s been a year and a half since I played the prior game, and having four characters with fantasy-ish names that lack close real-world equivalents who can be referred to either by their first or last name depending on what viewpoint you’re tracking. Fortunately there’s an always-available dramatis personae link in the corner, which was a helpful reference, but it still took me a minute to get into the swing of the story. Fortunately, what’s going on here is relatively simple: Ubay, the boss, is a snob intent on cutting his working-class staffer, Yaan, down to size with a withering remark or two, while their respective partners provide support and/or a bit of additional snark. And that’s really the size of it – there is a threat of escalation, but it’s preempted by the arrival of a fifth character, which ends the scene and the game.

It’s an engaging enough sequence that I replayed until I’d gotten the full story, but it’s also relatively slight, the kind of thing snippy exchange that would take up maybe a minute and a half in an episode of Parks and Rec. I don’t mind the stakes being low – heck, Parks and Rec is one of my favorite shows – but the quadrupling of perspectives means that this is more akin to a full six-minute sitcom act, and after the second or third repetition, the core action felt less compelling. Ubay’s classism doesn’t feel especially motivated, and despite his partner Erandan getting a bit of backstory establishing that he resents Yaan after being passed over for a promotion and is kind of horny for his partner Kel, he definitely feels like a bit of a third (or I suppose fourth) wheel.

With that said, the core dynamic between Yaan and Kel is well drawn, and having been to a lot of work events with my wife, seeing them support each other through an awkward moment resonated with me. And if I hadn’t replayed it fully, I might not have experienced the flaws mentioned above. Actually, I wonder whether the “stick with one character” mode, while a welcome convenience, might not have been the best idea to implement – because you can jump into any character at any time, each passage necessarily restates some of the core dynamics for that character, meaning that staying in just one head for a full playthrough, as I did for all of mine past the first, makes the game feel a bit more plodding and simple than if it’s played as intended. Besides that, given that it’s a sequel there might be more games in this sequence to come, which might provide better context for the eponymous conversation; regardless, for now it’s still a nice bit of writing that may be better to just experience once or twice than plumb exhaustively.

(No rating entered since I only played the free Chapter One)

Look, I get it: if you asked me what fictional world I’d want to live in, the Shire would definitely come to mind. Sure, it’s parochial and insular and state capacity is sufficiently low that per the book one point five sufficiently-motivated randos came close to knocking the whole thing over, but the flood of tourism New Zealand saw after the release of the films testifies to the impression those rolling hills, those lush gardens, those curly-headed children made on the broader public. As idylls go, the hobbit life seems hard to beat, and I say that as someone who’s never smoked pot, er, Longbottom Leaf – so a cozy game offering the opportunity to live life as a humble homebody who doesn’t go following wizards off on adventures has immediate appeal.

On the evidence of the one chapter provided as a free demo, Halfling Dale seems well-positioned to satisfy the fantasy. The model here is very clearly Choice of Games, down to the main audience being phone-users (in fact there’s no PC option so far as I can tell) – the blurb highlights character customization options, romanceable characters, and the number of words, so really, based on what I know about the CoG house style, this is a close match. There doesn’t appear to be a stats page where you can track the effect your decisions are having on your character, but there are an opening set of choices where you can establish some of your hobbit halfling’s traits so I suspect there’s a similar system running under the hood – though of course rather than being strong, tough, or social, here you can opt to be imaginative, mischievous, or have a good sense of humor, and you’re your job options include apiarist or cheesemonger, which make for a nice fit for this pastoral subgenre.

Of course, the game isn’t set in the Shire, but in its non-union Mexican equivalent, and here’s where some problems start to crop up. The Scylla and Charybdis of the pastiche are either hewing so closely to the source material that you wind up in an uncanny valley, or making so many intentional departures that things start feeling incongruous. Halfling Dale definitely errs on the side of the former rather than the latter (though the fact that the halflings all love to play Go did tweak my what-the-heck-is-a-Chinese-game-doing-in-Hobbiton sensibilities). The game starts with a birthday party that involves a long speech, okay. You’ve got a family member who’s got a disreputable-by-halfling-standards association with dwarves, sure. And then there’s a wilderness-dwelling protector who frowns a lot, and you learn some backstory which has to do with well-meaning free folks needing to find a long-lost artifact to keep an ancient evil at bay, and the list of default options for your character’s name includes “Fredegar” and “Lotho”, and come on now, you don’t need to have the literal plot of Lord of the Rings playing out in the background to make this setup work.

In fairness, so far when it sticks to its knitting the game seems to work well. Your mom vents her frustration at your brother’s iffy friend by calling him a “confustable dwarf”, and the intimation that the fair that appears to make up Chapter Two involves a Naughtiest Parsnip contest is certainly intriguing (this thing’s rated G, right?) And the intro does efficiently set the table, establishing the world, your character, your family situation, and the ominous backstory, while still having time to offer each of the romance options a bit of spotlight time. If you’re not overly fussed about the degree to which pastiches cleave to their source material, and the CoG model is one that appeals, I suspect you’ll be in good hands with Halfling Dale; to be honest, though it’s not my usual cup of tea, I definitely experienced some of the draw myself.

It may be that there are other games that I’ve started up, squinted painfully at the text, and then thanked heavens – and then the author – that there’s a font size option in the settings. But I’m not immediately thinking of any off-hand, meaning it’s still a sufficiently rare occurrence that constellate’s opening made me acutely self-conscious of my age, and the current and sure-to-increase physical decline that goes along with that. It’s not a pleasant headspace to inhabit, but it’s an apt one for this story of spent interstellar gladiators coming together to manage their decay.

The backstory here is doled out in hints and partial memories doled out through multiple replays: you play a former soldier, scarred by what you’ve seen and done, retired now to become a farmer. Your former commander, Eris – who seems to be something more than human, almost like a Warhammer 40k Space Marine – took a more direct route out of the war, falling from the heavens and barely surviving the ordeal; you’ve been trying to nurse her back to health as best you’re able, though the things she’s done dwarf your own crimes by their enormity and you fear her age and scars mean she won’t ever be able to come back. Oh, and the devotion you used to feel for her may now be turning into a kind of love.

As is typical for the author, the prose’s lushness and emotional immediacy mean that the general fuzziness over exactly what’s going on doesn’t matter that much, as the feelings still come through. Here’s the opening, for example:

"A blanket of snow covers the earth, obscures its surface, veil waiting for debridement. Microcosm, these tiny moons carefully hung in orbit, made in desperately hopeful vignettes of a pastoral, ancient Earth. Manufactured nostalgia for things long since extinct; to work the land with your hands under pale blue skies, to find purpose as dirt gathers beneath your fingernails, to gaze up at the unfamiliar vestiges of the constellations, their myths blurred by time, lost in translation, warped by distance from home."

Or here’s a description of Eris:

"Her, the tired woman ill-accustomed to dealing with Earth-like artificial gravity and the changing seasons, long-limbed and thin enough to count each individual ridge of her spine, tattooed in elaborate patterns that emerge from the sleeve of the too-short sweatshirt and make themself known in other places, the thin strip of warm tan skin between hem and waistband, the pantleg haphazardly scrunched to rest below her knee. Beneath the softened exterior lies the spitting image of every heretic you were taught to fear and despise."

The themes here are right in the open, but not in any bald, dead way – this is a game that knows what it’s about, and isn’t afraid to tell you because it has confidence that its prose can carry you right along. And it did; much like the author’s earlier Protocol and the Revenant’s Lament, this is a story of a dangerous, broken person and the woman who loves them, but the specifics are drawn so distinctly that there’s no danger of repetition.

While the writing is the most immediately engaging element of constellate, I actually find its structure the most interesting piece. This is a relatively short game, but it has a fair number of choices, which significantly branch the passages you see and the text that you read – indeed, the IFDB page mentions that there are nine endings. But after three replays where I tried to take reasonably different tacks through the materials, I didn’t experience much difference in plot – things pretty much land in the same place, and the emotional dynamics between the two characters remain a constant, but the particular ways those dynamics get activated, the give-and-take balance between attraction and despair, can shift substantially, and I also saw noticeably different bits of backstory depending on the choices I made. In some respects this is an inefficient way to design a game; I suspect a single playthrough sees a much smaller percentage of the text than is typical for a game like this, and the relatively small number of choices that draw attention to how consequential they may be risks players feeling like the game is less reactive than it is. Plus I didn’t find myself compelled to go back and exhaust the different endings the way that I sometimes do when there are clear stakes established around decision points.

For all that this is an idiosyncratic choice to have made, though, I’m not sure it’s a bad one. My playthroughs feel more authentically “mine” as a result than I typically experience with choice-based IF, and the conflicted, self-denying nature of the protagonist’s feelings for Eris make it reasonable that there’s no canonical playthrough that directly lays out the relevant history and emotional toplines. For two people who don’t really belong, living on a fake planet that likewise doesn’t belong, feeling their bodies give out as fast as my eyesight, this sense of contingency is a perfect fit.

And so we come to the end of the RGB trilogy [later edit: per feedback from the author, no we don’t! There are still two to come. I’ll leave the rest of the review as originally written, but the last two paragraphs especially should be taken as much more contingent given that we haven’t yet seen the cycle’s last word]. True to form, there’s significant continuity of theme, moderate continuity of characters, and a whole new gameplay idiom in this final, red-themed installment. Speaking of red, he’s once again one of the primary characters here, as “quick-tempered and immature” as he was in the last outing, though substantially less dead. The introductory screen tells us that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”; perhaps he narrowly escaped death at his mother-in-law’s hands despite being trussed up like a prize turkey, or perhaps a better understanding is that we’re just meant to perceive continuity between the characters without fussing the details unduly. Adding to the sense of dislocation, despite the opening act of the trilogy leading off with Shakespearean language and the second having a bit of an Edgar Allan Poe vibe (albeit with some anachronistic touches of technology), we’re firmly in the modern day now, with the story opening on a chat window on a Grindr-like app warning you – teal – that the guy you just slept with – red – is a murderer.

Delightfully, your attempt to escape before he finishes his post-hook-up shower is rendered in parserlike form. There’s furniture to rifle, various locked doors and compartments, an inventory puzzle, and even a secret password. Teal, we are told, is “dense and nosy”, which as a descriptor of the prototypical parser protagonist made me laugh; yes, we’re usually feeling a bit thick as we bash our heads against the puzzles, and we certainly poke everywhere we don’t belong. The gameplay is standard enough, and the puzzles aren’t exactly brain-melters – there’s only so much you can do with 500 words, and the medium-dry-goods parserlike approach isn’t an especially plot-rich way to deploy them, so things are kept reasonably terse – but I still deeply enjoyed how surprising I found this move.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell the plot doesn’t ultimately branch based on whether you succeed at the parser section; red’s view of you in the climactic confrontation does seem to shift based on your actions, but that’s just a sprinkle of flavor on top of a cake that’s going to come out the same way every time. Again, that’s a reasonable design decision given the brutal word-count limits, and I don’t think the game would have worked as well as a capstone for the others if the ending was up in the air.

Now that the series is finished, I think I have a sense of the overall drift: once again, the target of violence in the previous act is the one directing murderous menace at the new protagonist, and once again marriage is the site of this violence (red is getting married in the morning). One doesn’t want to get too reductive and schematic about this, since there are unique elements to each game. This is the only act where we don’t see one member of a married couple threatened with death, for example, and a possible interpretation is that that’s because red is able to displace his lusts and his serial-killer tendencies out of wedlock – which would lend an anti-hedonistic tenor to proceedings that isn’t as directly present in the other acts. But still, we’re left with cycles of violence and marriage as an institution that at best is incapable of stability in the face of the storms of emotions it generates, and at worst is actually conjuring up the abuse.

Those aren’t especially novel themes, of course, but most themes aren’t – it’s the way an author uses plot, characters, and game mechanics to play them that can make something memorable, and I think the RGB cycle definitely does well on this score; the bones are solid and evocative, and the variations are well considered. I might have liked to see a bit more of a bow on the package at the end, perhaps a slightly more explicit looping back to the beginning, but that’s just a personal aesthetic preference; sadly, the omnipresent nature of intimate partner violence means that this is an idea that could just be endlessly riffed on until the heat death of the universe. And there are few games that I can think of that accomplish so much with so little, providing entertaining gameplay as well as some food for thought.

We’re doing this again, I say to myself – you can read that in an excited tone of voice, representing my combined eagerness and dread to revisit the horrifying yet oddly beautiful world of A1RL0CK, or with a world-weary sigh as I contemplate having to type out a bunch of number-for-letter substitutions once again (how ‘bout we just call it TROOP from here on out?) My emotions on this second encounter with the alien terrors and man-made atrocities found under the waters of Titan aren’t far afield from those of our protagonist this time out:

"Colonel J.T. Thomas. Father of twins that he hasn’t seen yet, husband of a semiotics teacher, head of a recovery team who doesn’t have a clear idea of what the fuck he’s doing three thousand meters deep in the black ass of the universe… Fuck Biofarm and fuck the fucking rescue team."

Yes, after the mess you contributed to creating in the first game, in the grand tradition of sequels everywhere now you’re sent to clean things up. The efficiency with which the above response to X ME conveys backstory and engenders sympathy – I definitely did not want to screw up and get this guy killed – is of a piece with the environmental descriptions, which grounded me in the awe and awfulness of going so deep below the seas:

"As you descend, the darkness becomes less penetrating. Black becomes blue, the same shade as any night at the north pole, under a sky with few stars…The water seems thinner here and the pressure less impressive. All directions are good, if you want to go to a worse place than this.”

There’s great imagery and evocative prose throughout the piece, which combines the laconic lilt of hard sci-fi with grand guignol sights and body-horror flashes that wouldn’t be out of place in a dark, edgy anime. It’s a combination that ratchets up the intensity beyond what I experienced in the first game; here, it’s clear that you’re to some degree complicit in the crimes committed in this place, even if you’re not aware of their full scope, and with the station now almost fully swamped, and fallen hundreds of fathoms deeper, I always felt exquisitely vulnerable in my explorations. And while J.T. is in some respects a more conventional main character that Chloe was in A1RL0CK, TROOP similarly manages to throw his sense of self into turmoil with a few well-judged and well-delivered twists.

Once again, though, I struggled with the puzzles. There are a few early ones that are simple but satisfying to solve, relying on your suit’s different scanning instruments to suss out the way forward. I was disappointed that this mechanic fell by the wayside as the game opened up into its middle act, though – as I explored a relatively large map with confusingly-described exits (sometimes passages towards a staircases are given as both a vertical and compass direction, sometimes only one) and no real sense of where I should be headed, I felt as though I was in a maze, and many of the challenges hinged on vaguely-described gadgets that I had a hard time picturing, much less knowing what they could do. There’s a valves-and-tubes puzzle that I think just requires a lot of trial and error, unless I missed some more direct clues, and one that involves combining a few devices that are described just by their shape rather than their function, which meant I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. Fortunately, David Wellbourn has pulled together a walkthrough of this game too, since I confess I was following it quite closely for the second half of the game.

I’m glad I did, though, since the final confrontation is appropriately nasty (even if I’m still not completely sure how I won it), and the hint of redemption in the epilogue is a lovely grace note. The story and environment here are really compelling, selling the fantasy of being unimaginably deep underwater and coming face to face with the worst fruits of man’s inhumanity. So it’s definitely worth a dip, I just wish the water was a little more welcoming – and for my nerves’ sake, I’m not sure I could handle a third visit to 0CEANUS PR1ME!

I don’t know if I’m especially atypical in this, but every once in a while I notice how there are certain allegedly-universal elements of the human experience that I’ve actually never personally experienced. I went to a boarding high school, for example, so the prototypical John Hughes version of one’s teenaged years is unrecognizably exotic to me. Or there’s the fact, which is not unrelated to the prior point and is related, finally, to the game I’m reviewing, that I’ve never been broken up with. That’s mostly just a factor of having had fewer, longer relationships rather than because I’m some amazing catch or anything, and of course I’ve read and watched plenty of breakups from both perspectives, but the result is still that my primary personal reaction to breakup conversations is just wanting them to be over and done with, rather than replaying them over and over in my mind to try to find just the right thing I could have said to get a different result.

Boy howdy is Tiel, the protagonist of Cycle, not in that boat. This is the choice-based original upon which How Dare You is based, and among the myriad differences between the two is that in this iteration, you are nearly compelled to replay the breakup sequence, trying myriad different strategies and exploring the tides of cause and effect; Tiel is frankly like a dog with a bone, unable to let go and accept Heron’s word that their relationship has run its course.

Another difference is that where the parser-based version of this story presents it almost as avant-garde theater, a nearly wordless tableau where the scenery reveals the merest hints of the context of the fight and gesture and action carry the plot, Cycle is not nearly so minimalist. The opening narration here is three or four paragraphs that provide more information on Tiel’s living situation, what he enjoys about his relationship with Heron, and creates a spirit of optimism that’s suddenly ground to a halt by his soon-to-be-ex’s “we need to talk”, whereas in How Dare You there’s only a bare sentence or two before hitting that moment. And in addition to the backstory and detail, there’s a lot more dialogue – I got a much clearer sense of both Tiel and Heron this time, and why their relationship is probably doomed.

Cycle also does some interesting things with its gameplay and potential branching that I don’t think are mirrored in its remake, but they’re sufficiently spoilery that I’ll hide them for the rest of this paragraph: (Spoiler - click to show)so the “cycle” of the title, and the esprit d’escalier that I understand often accompanies being broken up with, are made quite literal here through the device of the watch Tiel can use to rewind time and try again. I was really taken by surprise by this pot twist, delightedly so – I’d gotten a sense of why Tiel was a bad partner, but seeing him manipulate Heron via undetectable means, and reading the implication that he’s been doing this from the very beginning of their relationship, makes this story something far more memorable than a quotidian breakup. I also really liked that the game doesn’t just make every option available to you from the get-go; each loop adds only one or two new options, based on what didn’t work or almost worked the previous time. This means that there’s a sense of progression even as events are repeating: structurally, we’ve got a spiral, not a circle. And the possibility of reaching one of the endings is withheld long enough for the player to have no illusions about the stakes for their choice.

All told I have to say I enjoyed Cycle significantly more than How Dare You, though I respect its radically different approach. I’m also now very curious how I would have felt about it had I come to it assuming its characters are the same as the ones in this game; the subtle push towards making Tiel physically violent in the latter game makes a lot more sense to me now. Regardless, Cycle certainly stands on its own as well as being part of an interesting pairing – though it’s definitely cemented me in my belief that the best breakup is the one everyone walks away from as quickly as possible.

Having just written a long review taking a game to task for its toothless satire, I come now to Renegade Brainwave, which finally has the gumption to set its lance at a real sacred cow: terrible B-movies of the 1950s, especially those made by Ed Wood. This is working in “loving parody” mode, though – from the overwrought narration to the main character’s penchant for cross-dressing, the game’s animated by a clear affection for its source material, warts and all, and wants nothing more than to share its enthusiasm with the player. The introductory narration, for example, comes from an undead circus-ringmaster whose words practically beg you to imagine the hammed-up delivery:

“Beware! Take care! For you are about take part in an interactive story that will reveal the terrifying truth behind the ill-fated Soviet space program! Revelations of incredible horrors that will terrify you with their brutal reality!”

“For this is the story of a mysterious force — a force that has crossed the billion-mile vastness of infinite space! Boneless, fleshless, almost invisible and yet imbued with incredible power — I speak to you of cosmic radiation!”

(Almost invisible?)

This histrionic voice is maintained in the game proper, where you step into the white vinyl go-go boots of a beat cop who’s been charged with investigating a mysterious meteor that’s cratered into the burial ground for local carnies, alongside your partner, an off-brand Ronald McDonald (I am not trying to be funny, this is just a straightforward description of the setup). The swamp-choked graveyard is home to all sorts of hazards and haunts, all described with a purplishness of prose that would put the ripest eggplant to shame, but there’s room for snappy jokes, too:

"Pallid-faced with a shock of orange hair and a red nose, Donald is one of the more bizarre-looking officers in your precinct, topped only by Officer McGillicuddy who is a chimpanzee, and Officer McKenzie, a spoon."

The map is laid out in a compact three-by-three grid, and it doesn’t take much poking around to learn what’s actually going on: that meteor was actually a crashing Russian spaceship, and the cosmonaut, a Soviet cur – I mean she is literally a dog – has been given psychic powers by space radiation and now is working on a machine to create an army of the dead (again, this is just the plot, I’m not adding any additional wackiness or anything). Foiling her plans requires testing your wits against the living and unliving denizens of the swamp, from a giant alligator to a fetid bubble of swamp gas, and marshaling the talents of your often-uncooperating partner to boot.

The game’s wordy narrative voice does mean that I struggled at first to get into the rhythm of the puzzles; nine locations isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things, but some of them boast entrances to buildings, and all have long, dense descriptions that take some repeated reading to fully parse. Fortunately, they don’t actually have all that many implemented nouns, and the game’s pretty good about highlighting the one or two actually-interactive objects per area. While some of the challenges can feel a bit obscure, the fact that at any given time there’s only one or two puzzles you can make progress on paradoxically helped me focus my efforts, since it meant I could put all my brain-power to the question of what good the angora sweater I just recovered could possibly do me (beyond going nicely with my Mary Quant dress, of course). There were a few challenges that stymied me for a bit – including one that appears to have been added in an update to the game, and therefore isn’t addressed by the hint system or provided walkthrough – but close observation and a bit of trial and error were generally enough to come up with a reasonable solution.

Some of those solutions might be more challenging for beginning and intermediate parser players, though, as they center on ordering around your partner, Donald – I get the sense that the NPC, ACTION syntax isn’t especially commonly used, these days. Once I got the idea to try to leverage his skills, though, I found these puzzles were generally intuitive, though I think as a sidekick Donald unfortunately does leave something to be desired. For one thing, every turn you direct a bit of banter at him, and even though there’s a long list of random lines here, over the course of the game the well definitely ran dry, and the duplicative dialogue contributed to the feeling that location descriptions were exhaustingly long. For another, Donald often works at cross purposes to you, stealing your things, playing practical jokes on you, and generally being a nudge. It’s easy to recover from most of his hijinks, and I suppose the incompetent sidekick is a B-movie staple, but I still found it pretty irritating to be locked into a coffin over and over.

This is a somewhat churlish objection to a single element of an incredibly good-natured package. Renegade Brainwave wants you to have a good time, and if counterproductive slapstick is part of that package alongside over-the-top writing and cartoon-logic puzzles, well, I won’t presume to mess with the recipe. If you don’t enjoy the vibe of the source material, or don’t get on with fairly challenging puzzles, Renegade Brainwave probably won’t change you’re mind, but if you’re an MST3K fan who wants to go back to where it all started, this game’s got your frequency.

Satire is a tricky beast. Oh, I get the allure – it’s a writer’s dream to cut the Emperor down to size with razor-sharp, Swiftian wit and reveal his naked form to all and sundry. But there are many ways the implementation can go awry. Pitch it too dry, and people might not notice you’re taking the piss (well, I say “people” but I’m mostly thinking of sixteen-year-old-me watching Starship Troopers). Go too over the top, and you’ve got a toothless parody – nobody ever had second thoughts about the carceral state after watching Naked Gun. But worse yet, if you don’t quite grasp why the system is actually bad, you can wind up making superficial jokes while reifying the too-comfortable worldview you thought you were tearing down; what starts as satire ends as propaganda.

Cubes and Ladders is a parser-based lampoon set in the target-rich environment of corporate America; as a fledging employee at photocopier-turned-financial-services-firm Minimax, you’re told that the report you’ve written for your boss is too short, simple, and buzzword-free to cut the mustard, and you’ve got to zhuzh it up before the noon board meeting where layoffs are the agenda item of the day (for some reason, the photocopier-turned-financial-services firm is struggling). For what appears to be the author’s debut game, there’s a lot of ambition on display – there are several characters with relatively deep conversation trees, a turning-point midway through that adds a whole additional layer to the story, a fun running gag about your character’s ability to detect the hyper-specific scents that mark out everybody else at the office, and a Vorple-based presentation that shows off a robust suite of AI-generated art (more on this last bit later).

The puzzle design is quite solid, with the game often hitting that sweet spot where it feels harder than it is. There’s a maze that mostly serves to just waste a bit of time and lightly poke fun at cube farms, a confrontation with an elderly security guard that unexpectedly solves itself, a multi-step puzzle to retrieve a branded baseball cap that’s just out of reach, and a mess-around-with-the-complicated-machine puzzle that again winds up being fairly intuitive in practice. Admittedly, they’re not all winners – there’s a guess-the-combination puzzle that I solved only by noticing that there was only one number written down anywhere rather than through any real sense of logic, and which requires some finicky syntax to input besides – and the fact that there’s a time limit made exploring more stressful than I’d have liked, but the batting average is solid, with reasonable clueing and satisfying aha moments.

Circling back to the implementation, though, there are some more flies in the ointment here. I wound up taking an expansion port right off a large machine that I’m pretty sure was meant to stay there, a fair number of non-scenery items aren’t given descriptions, and I experienced noticeable lag when inputting some commands (the game can’t be run locally, so could be I was just having a slow internet day, though). Provoking more hair-pulling is the fact that save, load, and undo appear to be disabled; beyond the time limit, it’s also possible to die in this game, via a pratfall that would have been funny if I could have just typed UNDO and not done the stupid thing, but which instead required a full replay and occasioned plenty of grumbling.

The AI art that’s a centerpiece of the presentation is also not up to much. It’s exhausting to have to recapitulate the broader conversation about LLMs and AI-generated art every time it comes up in a review, so I’ll just say that while I’m very much on the skeptical side of these debates, even folks far more comfortable with generative AI than me would have to admit that the pictures are a bit of a mess, showcasing impossible spaces and uncanny figures in a way that took me out of the game; the author mentions that the pictures were generated based on their own sketches, and I’m pretty sure I would have preferred just seeing those.

And not to bang on about the AI thing, but that brings me back to where I started, which is the question of what exactly Cubes and Ladders is saying. Look, I get that this is just a silly parser puzzle game and not worth getting too worked up about, but I’d be lying if I said the ending didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth. After spending the first half of the game trying to avoid being laid off while enduring lectures by all the other characters about how everyone was looking at me to innovate (there’s no dialogue option to say “I’m pretty sure I’m getting paid minimum wage, how about you do the ‘innovating?’”, sadly), I wasn’t too surprised when the back half moved from trying to save my job to trying to save the company. And this is presented as an act of regeneration, turning back to using engineering to actually create things again after the company founder’s failson decided to move into investment banking. Except the punchline is that the game-winning invention is a socially-useless arbitrage machine (Spoiler - click to show)(it predicts stock fluctuations based on yesterday’s newspaper) – never mind that all you’ve done is figured out a way to move money around in such a way as to make rich people ever richer, at the expense of people who aren’t lucky enough to be able to pay for your prophecy engine, the ending straightforwardly fetes you for your accomplishment, rewarding you with a corner office overlooking a golf course and your former boss as your new assistant.

It’s an ending that could work to make fun of the empty cult of “innovation” that animates corporate America, but if this is satire, I admit I didn’t get it. Cubes and Ladders gets some hits in along the way against over-the-hill salesmen who get too excited for company merch and bosses who talk only in corporate platitudes, but these are glancing blows at best against capitalist ideology. I’m not saying I can only enjoy text adventures with an orthodox Marxist pedigree by any means, but if a game seems like it’s trying to say something, it’s hard to ignore when that “something” appears to be unquestioningly reinforcing an empty worldview – all the more so when it’s festooned with ugly and questionably-ethical corporate art.

I’ll close by emphasizing again that there’s a lot of promise here; the puzzles are good, the writing quality is solid, and modulo the ill-advised decision to eliminate saving and undoing the implementation mostly impresses. And once again, not every piece of IF needs to have a political axe to grind (god, that sounds like it would be tedious). But if you choose to write satire, you either go for the jugular or you risk looking like a lapdog.

I have now played a number of Neo-Twiny Jam entries (yes, saying “a number” rather than going back to check is lazy, but look, I’ve capped out on my sponsorships and you get what you pay for) and I feel like I’m starting to get a sense for how you can make a memorable game under brutal space constraints. Minimizing branching is definitely a key strategy to wring the most out of the word-budget, as is focusing on dialogue, or at least prose with a voice, so that fewer words can have more impact. Managing the scope of the story also makes a lot of sense (though now I’m curious whether you can stitch together one or two word mini-phrases, Collision style, to weave together an epic). But less obviously, I wonder whether a respectful relationship with storytelling archetypes – okay, we can just call them tropes – should also be on the list. Not to say that there’s no place for surprises, but being able to sketch a narrative in just a few lines, and then devote the rest to the ways this story is different or unique, probably puts an author in a better position than having to burn most of their fuel just getting the reader to understand what’s going on.

So yeah, given that intro, despite some arresting themes and well-turned phrases, Read This When You Turn 15 didn’t fully work for me because I think its narrative ambitions outstrip the space it’s been allotted. Pitched as a letter written from a brother to his adopted sister, for her to open when she’s old enough to understand it, its 500 words of dynamic fiction paint a picture of an abusive family so idiosyncratically awful I was too busy asking questions to feel very much.

As I understand it, the core trauma here is that the sibling’s mother adopted the sister to be a remote-viewing fashion plate: while galivanting around the world on trips to fashion capital after fashion capital, she has various nannies and caregivers dress up the infant in precious baby-outfits and parade her in front of the webcam (the brother might be complicit in this). But then she apparently tires of this amusement by the time the kid’s Pre-K aged and abandons her to neglect, perhaps assuaging the occasional tiny shred of guilt by sending some of the largesse from her latest shopping trips home. Speaking of guilt, the brother has a lot of his own since the occasion for him to write the letter is his departure to America to get a remunerative job; he took care of her when she was little, but knows he won’t be there during the very hard years to come:

"You are going to be a stranger to me by the time you read this. The isolation and traumas you’ll face, I cannot imagine. I can only hope that this letter is not the way you found out you were adopted."

(Jesus Christ, buddy, if you write a sentence like that maybe take a step back and ask yourself “wait, how would I write this letter differently if it was going to be the way she found out she was adopted?")

On the bright side, the brother’s goal in writing the letter isn’t to try to wring possibly-unearned forgiveness from his sister; less cheerily, that’s because he’s monotonously focused on making sure his sister blames their mother for her misdeeds:

"But your mother, she’ll say she loves you and remind you that she put money into your education.

"I have only one request: please have the courage to hate her."

It’s searing stuff, and I have no doubt that there are abusive families where this particular configuration of pathologies and hatreds could play out. But it’s not a familiar configuration, to me at least – I wanted to know more about what precisely the mom was thinking (adoption is not a quick or easy process in most countries, so it’s a hell of a lot to commit to for some photo ops, especially if you already have a kid), what the brother’s relationship with her was like (was he treated the same, or different?), whether there was another parent in the picture and what they thought of all this, whether the brother was specifically focused on money (he name-checks “getting a job in Silicon Valley”) or just looking for the easiest possible escape….

In a longer work, there’d be room to modulate tones, contrast the Grand Guignol awfulness of the world’s worst mother with a grounded, psychologically-driven portrait of what could have motivated her, and what the consequences could be for her kids, and give a sense of the personalities behind the abuse. And what’s here is a good teaser for that longer piece – it’s shocking, well-written, and again, I want to know more. But I felt like it was trying to do too much in its limited space; to work at 500 words, it might have been wise to make at least some aspect of the family’s unhappiness more familiar, to take some pressure off the player’s imagination and enable the truly aberrant pieces to stand out.

(I haven't given this a star rating since since currently only the demo is available)

There are a lot of ways the contemporary video game scene is different from what it was when I was growing up, many of which are good and many of which are bad, since the transition from playground-for-insular-but-sincere-weirdos to gigabuck-suffused-juggernaut-targeting-every-imaginable-demographic doesn’t lend itself to a simple good vs. evil dichotomy (though I will note in passing that the clear balance point of awesome between these questionable extremes was 1998, a year that was clearly Peak Videogames; yes, I was 17 that year but leave that aside, I am 100% right). Despite the profound ambivalence I typically feel when comparing then with now, though, one thing that still evokes uncomplicated nostalgia for me is the demo. Demos were the 1990s version of Early Access – developers trying to build buzz for their games by releasing a limited slice ahead of the full release – except you didn’t need to pay for the privilege and the games would eventually come out. Some were good, and admittedly some were quite bad – a particularly dire Hellboy demo that involved spinning around endlessly in a deep-brown graveyard looking for a way out was a lowlight – but regardless playing a demo was an exercise in abiding in hope: this was just a little bit of game, it’s still being worked on, and besides, it’s free, how great is that?

There are a lot of reasons the demo has gone by the wayside in the larger video game culture, and understandably they’ve never been big in IF, province of short, free games that typically don’t use teasers to sell themselves. Romance the Backroom isn’t a typical piece of IF, though – though using Twine, it’s styled as a visual novel, with copious character and background art, music, and (eventually – it’s not in this release) voice acting. It’s also got a long playtime, judging from the fact that the piece that’s currently available is billed as only the first act. So a demo to give players a low-commitment way of trying things out actually makes sense.

The balancing act a demo must undertake is to provide a satisfying, self-contained experience that lets the player experience what’s good about a game, while making clear that there’s a lot more to come in the full game. On this front I think the present demo is a success. The setup here is that the main character, Carla, falls through the cracks in the world into the “backrooms” that undergird the multiverse, literally tripping on her way out of the day-care where she works and finding herself far from home. It’s an abrupt, unexplained shift, but the details ground it:

"…instead of my hands hitting the cold hard gravel of the parking lot, they hit a wet, carpeted surface, splashing on top of it with a loud smoosh."

That is just viscerally unpleasant! The backrooms themselves are an interestingly empty setting; at first they’re just a maze of yellow-wallpapered hallways (the protagonist made a Charlotte Perkins Gilman reference just after I did), but you soon run across a bizarre fellow named Kilcal – he’s got a clock for an eye and is clear that he’s not a human – and his compadres, four other warm-hearted grotesques (my favorite is a guy with eyeballs in his hair named Glarence, I mean come on) who promise to keep an eye on you and help you get home. But it doesn’t take long for you to be separated from them and kidnapped by a creepy group of “mimics”, who take you back to their king, who menaces you for a bit before Kilcal and company show up to rescue you, starting your world-hopping adventure in earnest just in time for the “coming soon…” banner to pop up.

It’s a lot of backstory, worldbuilding, and characters to establish, but the game lays out its premise effectively; there isn’t enough time to feel like I really got a handle on the main supporting cast, who I assume will carry the “romance” part of the title (this part of the gameplay isn’t really evident yet in the demo), and Carla is a bit of a generic protagonist, but things are archetypal enough that I never felt overwhelmed, and the writing is specific enough that I never felt like I was just experiencing a naked trope-fest; this is especially the case with the villains, who are legit creepy. The prose is straightforward, but each of the characters does have an individual voice, which is no mean feat. And the setup seems sturdy enough that I can imagine a lot of adventures, and interpersonal drama, to come.

On the more questionable side, the visuals lean a little far to the grotesque for my taste, and I ran into an odd bug where the top 20% of the images started getting cut off after a bit. But I tend to find it pretty easy to ignore pictures in my IF. Similarly, the frequency and impact of choices seems relatively light so far, with the few on offer primarily giving you the opportunity to resist or give in to the obviously-bad king’s blandishments. But I was certainly feeling engaged regardless, and I assume that as the game progresses, the gameplay will open up a bit too. For that matter, future development might shift the art style into something I enjoy more – again, that’s the beauty of the magical thinking prompted by a demo! But in this case I feel confident expecting that the solid parts of what I’ve played so far would translate over into the full game, and even if the weaker pieces remain as they are, they’re still not sufficient to drag down what’s shaping up to be the weirdest Saturday morning cartoon that never was.