Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

In the early aughts, a documentary called The Aristocrats got a bit of buzz by digging into an inside-baseball joke structure widely used by comedians doing a set in front of other comics, but much more rarely presented to the general public (this was the middle-ish days of the web, so inside baseball as a concept still had a couple more years to go). I won’t go into detail on what, exactly, the joke is, since the whole point is that it’s extraordinarily filthy and changes every time, but the important part is that it’s a sort of shaggy-dog story with a set beginning, end, and punchline, which isn’t actually very funny. But there’s an extraordinary amount of craft that can go into filling in the middle part; because so much of the joke is already determined, it’s a stress-test of the comic’s pacing, delivery, and other technical skills.

There are some jam concepts that can be similarly restrictive, and Machina Caerulea clocks two of them – as a Neo Twiny jam entry, it’s got to operate under the absurdly stringent ceiling of 500 words, and since it was also in the Bluebeard jam, you pretty much know how the plot is going to go from the jump (the game was actually quadruple-listed, also qualifying for the Love/Violence and Anti-Romance jams, but those are much more spacious concepts in comparison). But while it doesn’t boast much in the way of surprises, it winds up as a really well-done example of intelligent implementation of a narrow brief.

Given the limited word-count, it’s smart that the setup is so archetypal: you wake up, amnesiac, in a sci-fi laboratory, get a couple choices to get your bearings, before the Bluebeard figure wakes you up, drops some exposition, and gives you the don’t-go-through-that-door warning. It’s not something that needs to be belabored, and the prose style leans into parsimony as a result:

"Arms interlocked. Cold floor. Faint smile. Sad eyes.

“Breathe in deeply.”

It’s effective in its own right, while leaving space for an exploration sequence with reasonably robust detail, and a climactic choice leading to three different endings – each of these pieces are short and focused, as they have to be, but they deliver just enough texture to work. The game also has some nice visual bells and whistles – a blue-shaded interface, cool-looking buttons, text that sometimes fills in from the middle of the screen instead of just the bottom – that sell the alienated sci-fi vibe without running down the scarce word-count.

It’s true, the endings do go pretty quick, and on the Bluebeard disturb-o-meter Machina Caerulea rates pretty low (admittedly, that scale goes quite high) – when I decided to desperately struggle to kill the husband character, it was more because it felt like the thing to do than because what he’d done seemed all that beyond the pale. But as with the Aristocrats joke, the punchline isn’t the point: as a demonstration of how to do a lot with a little, and fill out a familiar premise with verve and concision, this is an impressive piece of work.

For a couple years in the mid-90s, one of the best things in life was the monthly PC Gamer CD. You see, in those long-vanished days, most video games had demos, but it had historically been hard to get them. Reliable internet bandwidth was nowhere close to a thing, so occasionally a publisher would throw a promo for one of their other games in when you bought one, but other than that your main option was shelling out a couple of bucks for one of the questionably-legal floppies loaded with shareware or demos software stores would put in a rack by the checkout counter.

But then CDs made storage cheap, and the magazines all figured out they could collect demos from all the publishers and distributors they had connections to, pack them onto a CD, and get the hoi polloi to pay a couple extra bucks for their subscriptions. In retrospect it was all crass commerce, but at the time it was a revelation: for a game-starved teenager, getting a couple dozen demos every single month for functionally-zero marginal cost was amazing. Sure, most of them were usually stinkers, but there were typically at least a handful that even in their incomplete state were lots of fun – and in an age where there were many fewer games, and fewer still that I could afford on my allowance, that feeling of excess, of more free games than you knew what to do with, was a rare treat.

The magazine CD of course didn’t survive the rise of the internet, as the publications all shifted online and broadband meant anyone could pick and choose the demos they wanted to try rather than getting a collection pushed to them each month. And beyond that, demos fell out of favor through the aughts and teens, as I understand it because the big publishers realized making a special miniature version of the game and giving it away for free cost them money, which they’d rather be spending on licensing butt-rock songs for poorly-edited trailers and tie-in energy drink promos. But then the worm turned, as indie developers realized they couldn’t compete with the advertising budgets of the big companies, but they could give prospective players a taste of their game, no strings attached.

The return of the demo is objectively great, but speaking personally, the context of my gaming has changed so much since then that I often find I like them more in theory than in practice: there are now 12 billion games released every femtosecond, my leisure time is way more of a limiting factor than money (especially since most IF is free), and I’m already sitting on a backlog that conservatively would last me to the heat death of the universe. Instead of a cornucopia to fill my game-starved hours, demos now can feel like an imposition, like a free perfume sample aggressively spritzed on you when you’re just trying to sneak into the department-store bathroom. The question isn’t just “is this demo good enough to sell me on the full experience?” but “does this demo, standing on its own, justify the time I spent on it instead of just waiting for the actual thing?” Which I’ll acknowledge is a high, probably even unfair, bar to set.

So yeah, Resurrection Gate is a demo, and I have some feelings.

(For those of you who haven’t read my reviews before, since it’s been a year-ish since I’ve been on the grind: hi! I’m Mike! And yeah, that was 500 words whose relevance to the game I’m ostensibly talking about is tangential at best, that’s just how we roll in these parts).

What we’ve got here is a fifteen-minute slice of what looks like it’ll be a lavishly-produced high fantasy IF/RPG hybrid. There are multiple playable characters, who boast a handful of stats, a couple bespoke and flavorful traits, and limited customization (you can make Yasha, a battle-scarred veteran, an introvert or a horse person, for example. I decided to lean into role-playing and picked the latter). Richly-colored pixel graphics illustrate the key characters and backdrops, and there’s a lot of incident packed in: the demo starts in media res, on the run from an army that just beat your own and killed your liege, hoping to make it to an allied city offering shelter; then an action-horror sequence as undead attack and drag off a camp-follower, and you enter the belly of the beast to save them. There’s a last-minute rescue, sexily mysterious characters entering stage left and dropping lore and plot hooks, and then a perspective-shift to a more politically-connected character that sets up some higher-order conflict before the inevitable cliffhanger.

It’s all kinetic enough, while the fantasy setting has some steampunk and body-horror grace notes that keep it from feeling too generic – and the aesthetics really are great, too. I’ll confess that this style of epic, all portent and proper nouns, isn’t my favorite these days, but it’s very hard to complain about execution this lush. As a teaser, I think it works – I have questions, and unused skills on my character sheet, so yeah I’d keep playing to see what comes next.

As a complete experience, though, I’m not quite so convinced. Partially that’s because the demo feels so desperate to get the game’s key elements on screen that it sometimes runs out of breath. Like, the opening sequence had me focused on the danger of being caught by scouts from the pursuing army – but the attack came from previously-unmentioned undead, and I’d hardly wrapped my head around that shift before the aforementioned bishy GMPC suggested that actually there were other powers at play far beyond my comprehension. Everything is a pretty standard fantasy trope so it’s not like things were moving too fast for me to keep up – but the velocity meant I didn’t have enough time to get too invested in any given conflict. Similarly, the RPG elements weren’t given enough space to get their hooks in; the one time I could choose to use a stat (one I was allegedly very good at!) it just injured Yasha without having any visible impact on the plot.

The intentionally-obfuscated prose style also doesn’t work as well in a shortform piece, I think. An orotund style can be a good fit for fantasy, but there’s some clunky verbiage, and descriptions of often tilt ambiguous (especially in a few cases where a character’s singular they/them pronouns aren’t clearly delineated from standard plural they/thems referring to different folks). There are some strong images peeking through the cruft, don’t get me wrong:

"The ostentatious design and the hardy sleekness of the mount would suggest a rider of some distinction, a high-ranking cavalry. But there had been no sign of the rider, save for perhaps the dried blood in the mount’s mane, the blackened stain frozen in the same pattern it sluiced down the horse’s withers."

But while in a longer piece, I would have eventually figured out who was who and gotten more on the author’s wavelength over time, in the demo context the spikiness felt more, well, spiky.

I’m having a hard time resolving Resurrection Gate’s contradictions because ultimately that hinges on evaluating its success as a marketing strategy – like, I don’t think this demo is a great piece of IF, but it could be that it’s a teaser for one. Based on what I’ve experienced so far, I’d play the full game, sure, so I guess that means it worked! But I also suspect I’d enjoy the complete piece more if I hadn’t played this teaser – which is a sad comment on how far I’ve come from the excited 14-year old shoving the new PC Gamer disc into the CD drive, intent on devouring its contents no matter their quality or my pre-existing interest. I’m sure Yasha would agree: you just can’t go home again.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp)

Remakes! I dunno, man. They’re everywhere and of course mostly awful (my wife and I were talking about this and the only worthwhile ones we could come up with off the top of our heads were Sabrina – romcom, not witch, though that would be more relevant to the review I suppose – and The Thing), and an obvious sign of the entertainment industry’s creative bankruptcy. Yet, while as far as I can tell, these are the universally-agreed-upon views of everyone who voices their opinions, these remakes keep coming because people watch and play and like them. And if it’s true that ideas mostly don’t really matter, it’s all about execution – which I think is right – what’s the matter with dusting off an old concept, for its name recognition or its unrealized potential, and just trying to do it different or at least better? What if remakes are just… fine?

These heady thoughts brought to you by Witchever, a game that coyly acknowledges that it’s a remake of the author’s 2023 Comp entry The Witch. I remember The Witch! It had a fun opening, where you’re a Keebler-ish elf who wakes up in a tree, sporting a vicious mead hangover (but I repeat myself), and has to save his village from an attack by the eponymous enchantress. I dug the setup, but the game itself situated itself too far on the wrong side of 1990 for me to enjoy – I remember annoying inventory limits, an always-ticking-down timer, and some buggy business with a badger, which meant I let my playthrough peter out halfway rather than power through to the end.

Witchever recycles the opening, which is a savvy call, and likewise retains the dry whimsy of the original:

"The bark is utterly smooth and white and seems to shimmer in the sunlight. Oddly, the entire tree rotates clockwise at regular intervals (you’ve heard that magic trees rotate counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere), the canopy overhead rustling with every turn."

There are some set-pieces in common – I remember solving a version of the puzzles around this turning-tree in my first go-round, and the chair lift pinged my memory – and I think the final way to defeat the witch is the same, but otherwise this is a pretty thorough reworking (no badger in sight – which this time is great, unlike in the earlier game where its failure to appear locked me an unwinnable state). Some of these changes are cosmetic and don’t amount to much, like the way that instead of saving your own village, you get dragooned into visiting the next town over to save them before the witch gets to you. But there are substantial new areas, like a gnome burrow, a maze, and a giant-pumpkin patch.

Look, this is still an old-school game where you’re not given much direction or motivation – and the maze has a gimmick but it’s still a maze, and that pumpkin patch will instantly lock you into a game-losing trap unless you happen to have brought a couple items that you’d have no reason to expect you’d need. But the proceedings are notably less buggy, and the gameplay’s smoother too. There’s menu-based conversation, and better clueing throughout – I had to hit the hints a couple times, but I was often able to get past sticking points by stopping to think about what I needed to do, having a logical idea, and seeing it work once I tried it, with some genuinely clever puzzles I haven’t seen before (I really liked the way you figure out the path through the colored doors, for example). And the wit often did leave me chuckling:

“I have great… well, some confidence that you will be able to defeat the witch as well. If I can provide you with any assistance…” his voice trails off and he starts to dig around in his pockets. Finally, he pulls something out of each one and hands it to you.

This is the king of the elves speaking; he gives you two somewhat-dinged-up pieces of candy. And there’s an unexpected two-factor authentication gag that merits a mention too.

There are still places where the implementation could have been tighter – I was stymied for a while because ON and ONTO aren’t synonyms, for example – and the plot is notably light even by puzzle-fest standards (it wasn’t really clear to me what the witch was doing to make the elves so upset). And there are a few clunkers remaining in the puzzle list, like one involving a paperweight. But Witchever is a solid time on its own merits, and because I was playing it while haunted by the memory of its earlier, more hostile incarnation, I found myself perpetually relieved when the lows weren’t as bad as I’d remembered, while the highs were much higher indeed. I guess that’s what they call the soft bigotry of low expectations, but at least in this case, it kinda worked for me – bring on the remakes!

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp)

One of the canonical justifications for text-only interactive fiction goes back to an old Infocom magazine ad: no graphics can compare to the visuals the human imagination can conjure when prompted by evocatively-written text! It’s never resonated very strongly for me, though. There’s an air of flop-sweat and defensiveness to the claim, sure, and it’s maybe slightly less true now than it was in 1984, but the reason I shrug at the argument is simpler: I don’t tend to visualize stuff I read unless I’m specifically prompted. While in theory I suppose I could use my imagination to create a spectacular setting ever based on my interpretation of the words West of House, in practice I’m just getting the words. But! That’s no bad thing, because words offer aesthetic pleasures all their own (like, I really enjoy chalcedony, 90% because of the sound and rhythm of the word but only 10% because of what it looks like), and there are a whole host of experiences that can only be imperfectly captured in visual media – that, to my mind, is where IF’s competitive advantage truly lies.

Swap Wand User is a case in point. It’s a wordplay game, already a genre that plays to the medium’s strength, but unlike, say, Counterfeit Monkey, where you can kind of picture what a movie version would look like (albeit it’d be kind of terrible and people would have to say stuff like “to be clear, this stick is actually a twig!” three times a scene), this one plays out entirely on the page. It’s a series of self-contained puzzles, each presenting an excerpt from a different document that’s been scrambled up; you’ve got a wand that enables you to transpose one word with another, and so you’ve got to undo the scrambling to recover their meaning.

That’s a simple mechanic to describe, but the puzzle design here is very, very finely judged. There’s a clear progression as early puzzles ease the player into the basics, for example helping you to notice that capitalization and punctuation don’t change as you move words around, so you can use them as anchor points to figure out which words lead off sentences. New constraints get layered in as you go, notably a requirement that swapped words have more or less the same character length, which restrict your freedom but also provide additional clues by ruling out possibilities as the passages increase in size. Repeated words are also kept to a minimum, eliminating disambiguation issues – which is easy enough to say, but just you try writing a hundred words with at most two of them being “the”. Heck, in a just-showing-off touch, even the title is (Spoiler - click to show)the solution to the first challenge!

As for the content of all those documents, the story they tell isn’t nearly as novel as the game mechanics, but they work well enough. Between technical manuals, newspaper stories, and police reports, they tell a predictable yet effective story of scientific innovation and corporate greed. The structure requires that most of the narrative be left to implication – getting into too much detail would make for laborious puzzles – so relying on standard plot-beats is a smart choice, and there’s room for a bit of character-driven pathos along the way. There’s even a late-game shift into a more stream-of-conscious narrative voice, accompanied by a radical reduction of difficulty, allowing the player to barrel downhill through the final set of revelations (which boast a SWAP (Spoiler - click to show)WRONG (for) RIGHT command that’s incredibly predictable and on the nose but also awesome). All of which to say the pacing feels exactly right, and the artful semantic disarray leads to moments of clearly-intentional poetry:

"in a lucid moment, kathleen addled me to liberate her from that begged mind."

There are some weak spots to Swap Wand User, but I think they’re intrinsic to its approach. I made a lot of typos when trying to swap longer words, which is kind of inevitable, but I still sometimes wondered whether a mouse-driven drag and drop interface would have worked better (heresy since this is a ParserComp entry, but there you are). I also am frankly stymied when I try to think about how, diegetically, the word-swapping wand is supposed to work. Like, the game makes clear that this is a technology that’s been invented and being used in the game’s story, and some of the switches seem to have impactful real-world implications, like the possibility of changing one person for another – but when I swap “an” and “of” in a document, what exactly is supposed to be happening, and why is this tech any more impactful than a bottle of white-out?

But this is where that no-graphics limitation of IF becomes a superpower: I don’t actually need to be able to picture what’s happening, since this is a story told entirely in words – everything else is secondary. In other media, that wouldn’t be enough to be successful, but a reason I love IF so much is that here, it really really is.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp)

In the first couple turns of A Taste of Terror – an Inform 6 reimplementation of a lost ‘80s game by an unknown author – the ten-year-old protagonist, whose defining backstory element is that he’s a middle-school chess champion, gets his hands on a matchbox and also a dagger. “We’re going to get into the fun kind of trouble,” I thought to myself, and reader, I didn’t know how right I was: by the end of the game, I’d added a pitchfork, bolt-cutters, and a length of chain to my melee-weapons arsenal – to say nothing of the two severed heads I was toting around – and used accelerant to make a big bonfire, and blown a witch away with my trusty double-barreled shotgun. The grindhouse air perhaps makes little Sean an inapt protagonist (most fifth-graders can’t do quite such a convincing impression of Ash from Evil Dead) and while the game has a modern polish, there are some archaisms like a bigger-than-it-needs-to-be map and a lack of clear direction for much of the middle section. But beyond the mayhem, this is a tightly-constructed adventure with some cute flourishes and a satisfying execution of its theme.

The plot ultimately goes to predictable places – there’s a cult, evil magic, a ritual to perform – but I enjoyed the grounded way Taste of Terror starts: as it opens, you’re visiting your aunt and uncle’s farm on a school break, but your uncle just died under mysterious circumstances, your aunt is acting weird, and you’ve woken up in the middle of the night with odd back pains that make it hard to sleep (bad news, kid: in a couple of decades, you won’t need to cast about for a supernatural explanation for those). It doesn’t take too much effort to effect a cure, at least as long as you remember this is an old-school adventure and you should be SEARCHing and LOOKing UNDER and BEHIND everything you see, but the game prevents you from just going back to sleep. In the event this turns out to be a good thing, but it does mean that you’re then left to explore the rest of the house, and a large outdoor area, with no real in-character goal other than to poke around. Fans of detailed character motivation might find themselves a bit nonplussed by the amount of unprompted breaking and entering you need to perform – as I crawled my way through a broken window in the middle of the night, while juggling the aforementioned pitchfork and most of the contents of a workbench, I found myself wondering whether this was going to be worth the tetanus I was most assuredly about to catch – but there is a lot of fun stuff to uncover, with some satisfying puzzles to work through, even if I wasn’t always sure why I was doing what I was doing. I was relieved that eventually there are some revelations about what’s going on, and what you need to do to stop it, so my priorities for the last third of the game were a lot clearer – again, this is the kind of the game that’s much more about the puzzles and the gameplay than a deep, never-before-heard story, but the various revelations hit their marks, and I’m always a sucker for a collect-the-ingredients-for-the-spell quest.

As that summary indicates, we’re also in pretty familiar territory when it comes to the puzzles, but there’s a pleasant variety, with a bevy of locked doors to be opened, a few action sequences and navigation puzzles, and the aforementioned ritual-components bit. There’s nothing here that will make you sit up and take notice of its daring innovation, I don’t think, but many puzzles have alternate solutions and most of them are reasonable enough – it was smooth sailing throughout, except for one time when the requirements for getting raven’s blood seemed oddly specific (Spoiler - click to show)(I was out of shotgun shells at that point, but STAB RAVEN WITH PITCHFORK and THROW DAGGER AT RAVEN both failed to get the desired result; THROW PITCHFORK AT RAVEN feels much less likely than those other two theories, though), and then I spun my wheels for an extra fifteen minutes at the end since I’d neglected to notice a clearly-marked exit in one late-game area (the instructions suggest making a map; I didn’t, and don’t think it’s exactly necessary, but it would have helped!) Meanwhile, the handful of characters are implemented to a fairly deep level, responding to just about every conversational topic I could think up (though referring to the Roma characters with the g-word is one thing that could have stayed in the 80s).

As for the writing, it’s not going for anything overly fancy, but it conveys a spooky vibe and gets across the information you need to solve the puzzles with a bit of flair – it’s not Proust, but the prose is more robust than what you would have gotten in the '80s. While I do think the lurid nature of events would have made a slightly more intense impression on the protagonist than what we see, Taste of Terror isn’t the sort of game that would be improved by a realistic treatment of PTSD – and I suspect actual ten year olds would be tickled pink by the Grand Guignol horrors here on display.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp. After it was posted, the Comp's results were posted, which contained strong indications that the author was complicit in voting irregularities that benefited the two games he'd entered into the competition, although no smoking-gun proof was discoverable. I'm keeping this review up for accountability's sake, but revising its previous two-star rating to one, as under the circumstances I don't think anyone should pay attention to or play this game, and I regret the time I spent giving it substantive feedback; as the conclusion to the review-as-written said, turns out things could always be worse when it comes to AI proponents)

I am on the record as being grumpy about generative AI – including in this very thread! – so when I saw that Mystery Academy is an LLM-centric game, with its itch page talking up features that mainstream IF has generally discarded as pointless or actively bad design (stacking multiple actions in a single input line, adverbs/tone), I admit that it was hard to put that grumpiness aside and keep my mind as open as it gets at my advancing age. So I’m as shocked as anyone to report that I actually kind of liked this? It helps that Mystery Academy, per the about text, is a custom-built and trained system rather than one of the off-the-shelf programs, and most of the important prose (like the case files setting up each segment of the game) seems human-written. There are the inevitable issues with lag, and I have a suspicion that some of my failure to solve a single one of these cases was due to the chatbot yes-anding my questions, so I’m not a convert yet, but this might finally be the first LLM game that I think is basically OK.

A lot of that has to do with the constraints the design imposes on the game: you’re a junior detective tasked with solving minor-league cases – the game cites Encyclopedia Brown as an inspiration, and that’s definitely the territory we’re in, as each of the three mysteries on offer has to do with the theft of a valuable object with a minimum of bloodshed or skullduggery. Neatly, each crime has three and only three suspects, and your boss is an efficiency-minded chap who requires you to ask at most three questions of each of them. You get an introduction and the aforementioned case file at the top of a case, then it’s just a matter of choosing which suspect to interview first, asking your three questions, doing the same with the other two, and making a final accusation. The advantage of this focused setup is that it leans into what chatbots are good at – mimicking human conversation – and away from the areas where they struggle – consistent world-modeling, while the three-question limit pushes the player away from asking silly or absurd questions that could break the simulation, or letting things go long enough that hallucinations or inconsistencies start to sneak in.

The writing is also frequently charming, which helps build goodwill and reassurance that you’re not in for typical AI slop. It’s nothing fancy, but it fits the gentle middle-school vibe, lending some character to proceedings. I liked this description of an avant-garde piece of music:

"They say the first performance was held in total darkness, lasted 7 hours, and included instructions like 'play what the cello might have said if it had lied.' Forty-seven people fainted. Two went temporarily catatonic."

Dialogue from the different suspects is also pretty solid, with the wordy teacher bringing an appropriately Brobdingnagian vocabulary to every response, and the system does seem more sophisticated than just keyword-matching, with some ability to detect and respond to the nuance in your questions, which makes the interrogations feel responsive. With that said, I did run into some hiccups with the writing – “you understand why Theseus needed a spool of thread to navigate his own maze” prompted a double-take – and while the game hypes up the interrogation sections as core to the game, after playing through three cases I feel like they might actually be a sideshow?

See, in each of them, I think the information you need to crack the mystery is right in the introduction and casefile, and in two of them I actually managed to second-guess myself out of the right solution after talking with the suspects (spoilery details: (Spoiler - click to show) in the first case, I immediately noticed that doing a “midyear assessment” on the first day of school seemed odd, but Croft had a superficially plausible explanation, and without the ability to check with any of the students who would have been taking the test, I wasn’t sure whether he was lying; meanwhile, in the second one, the footprint-size clue seemed way too honkingly obvious, and I wound up noticing the detail of a control panel that had been left clumsily open at the crime scene, which seemed to align with what the game was telling me about one librarian being fussy and the other being slovenly). Meanwhile, in the third case, I couldn’t get a suspect to provide any explanation for a potentially-incriminating clue (Spoiler - click to show)(the engineer told me that of course there was a lot of oil around the ship when she was doing maintenance, but didn’t have an on-point response when asking how it got on the captain’s ladder, which presumably isn’t near the engine room) even though she turned out to be innocent. LLMs are BS machines, and I guess most guilty suspects likewise want to BS their way out of getting caught while jittery innocent ones sometimes accidentally fumble a question, so I suppose this is plausible enough. But after realizing that in every case I would have been better off if I just hadn’t questioned anybody, I felt like I’d figured out the magic trick and what seems like the meat of the game is just misdirection.

So I don’t think this kind of LLM-based approach is going to replace actual detective IF anytime soon, since stapling a static Encyclopedia Brown story to a chatbot is a novelty, but not much more. And I did run into some technical issues – every command I typed took 5-10 seconds to process, and in the third case the question limit didn’t seem to be enforced. Still, Encyclopedia Brown stories are fun (I still remember the gag in the first one I read as a kid, about a commemorative cavalry saber from the first Battle of Bull Run), and Mystery Academy’s good-natured vibe meant I had some moments of enjoyment with the game even as I was critiquing it. I continue to be deeply skeptical that generative AI is the future of IF, but if these are the kind of experiments we’ll get along the way to establishing that, things could be worse!

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp. I beta tested the game).

You don’t see as many one-room parser games as you used to. It’d be rank speculation to consider the reasons for this given that even asserting the claim should make a big fat [citation needed] pop up, but I’ve never let that stop me: maybe it’s because there are other more enticingly-minimalist constraints, like sub-1,000 word limits or speed IF, that have come into vogue because they actually impose, well, constraints, while a single room can contain just about the whole world? Or maybe it’s because the IF community as a whole is still working off the Cragne Manor afterglow, inasmuch as it’s basically just 80-odd (and 80 odd) single-room games stapled together? Regardless, I find it’s a rare treat to come across a nicely-polished example of the form these days; it’s satisfying to work through a complex yet neatly cabined series of challenges, like peeling a hard-boiled egg just so.

It’s exactly this satisfaction Lockout offers up. As the title indicates, an emergency lockdown has trapped the player character in a ship’s engine room, and you’ve got to figure out how to work the various mechanisms at your disposal to get out. While the setting is never fully specified – the game does a good job of leaving implications to the player to figure out, rather than bogging things down with exposition – this is no excuse for twiddling around with wacky contraptions: if the model here isn’t a modern, real-world ship, the difference is lost on me. As a result, the puzzles are very grounded, hitting a nice mix of physical manipulation and device- and computer-based challenges without requiring leaps of logic (though there are a couple that do take some chewing on, I think they all play fair).

One potential downfall of the one-room game is overwhelming the player with information, since the object density required to support even a short game like this one is much higher than the parser average. Lockout does well on this score, first by keeping the extraneous scenery to a minimum and not unduly extending the puzzle chain past the point of annoyance, but also by keeping certain objects off-limits until earlier challenges have been resolved, creating a solid sense of progression while also managing the player’s attention. Similarly, while there’s a robustly-implemented computer and quite a lot of control panels, Lockout bottom-lines the info you’ll need and redirects unmotivated flailing to keep you on track. Here’s what you get from examining a complicated series of readouts, for example:

"The gauge you instinctively look at first shows the reactor temperature is in the safe region. The second gauge you look at shows the hull pressure differential in the red."

As that excerpt suggests, the prose here is dry, technical, and understated; it fits the techno-thriller vibe and conjures up a sense of place, but it has to be admitted that it’s not very exciting. If compelling writing is one of the main pleasures you get from IF, Lockout might not be your jam, but if you’re in the market for a one-stop-shopping puzzler, this assured debut has you covered.

For good or ill, we as a society appear to have move past the era of the mash-up – instead of “it’s X meets Y!” we now have “it’s X, but rebooted!” – but it’s still enough of my cultural DNA that I thought I had The journey (sic?) pegged within the first couple of moves. The game starts with you waking up from cryogenic suspension on a colony ship that’s been orbiting the earth, waiting for enough time to pass from an environmental catastrophe for the planet to become habitable again. Except the earth isn’t quite habitable yet, because you’ve been woken up early, apparently by a strange old man who ducks out of the room as soon as you come to. So yeah, that’s WALL-E meets that Passengers movie from a couple good lord, almost ten years ago, minus the romantic tension (I mean from the latter, though the WALL-E / EVE relationship is pretty cute). But little did I know how far off I was, because even though the game as a whole is only ten minutes, man does it go some places.

I’m going to pause for a minute to talk about the custom parser system that powers the game, before things go completely barmy. It’s fine! This is a web-native game that looks slicker than the average parser interpreter; there’s a starry background that helps set the stage, and functional windows that don’t draw too much attention to themselves but neatly separate output from input. The parser makes for a smooth experience, though the game is simple enough that there’s not really room for it to get itself in any trouble – the design is so minimal that there are no takeable objects, containers, items with duplicate names giving rise to disambiguation problems, characters with whom you can have a conversation… But I’d rather have something stripped-down that works than something fussily over-engineered and fragile.

The gameplay likewise accords with KISS principles. There’s one and a half puzzle – the half involves examining an obvious bit of scenery to find a password that you can type into a computer through the simple expedient of TYPE PASSWORD rather than having to actually memorize the digits. Then the main puzzle just involves following the instructions you find on the unlocked computer. It’s likewise fine! There’s also an interactive flashback, and it took me maybe thirty seconds to figure out how to move into this scene and then back into the main timeline, but that’s about it in terms of stuff for the player to do.

That just leaves the writing – the plot and the prose. The second of these, you will be shocked to learn, is also workmanlike. All the descriptions are very matter-of-fact, even those in the flashback where some emotionally intense stuff is happening. With that said, there few times when the laconic style is effective, like this bit from the flashback:

"It’s my drawing of a spaceship with different parts. Mom likes it, but Dad doesn’t. He really yelled at me. I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function."

The story is what bucks the trend. See, the flashback leads to two rapid-fire revelations about the present-day situation: not only did the old man wake you up for reasons more sinister than simple loneliness, he also has an unsuspected connection with the player character. And then something happens with the ship to bring the entire narrative to a climax. Each of these three things are entirely unrelated to the others, as far as I can tell, which feels like at least one coincidence too far, even leaving aside the lurid details behind that overview, which are really tipped me over into being completely nonplussed by the ending (Spoiler - click to show)(I feel like you could say “it’s WALL-E meets Passengers!” at a pitch meeting and get at least a few heads nodding; “it’s WALL-E meets Passengers meets survival cannibalism!” is going to get you escorted out by security). Sometimes, more is more – bouillabaisse, say, or family reunions – but journey is way too short to comfortably support all the ideas it’s bringing to the table. Not everything need to be straight reboot of something we’ve all seen a hundred times before, but there’s still something to be said for restraint and allowing the ingredients you’ve got time to blend.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forums during ParserComp)

The old saw about IF being a story at war with a crossword has always sat uncomfortably with me for a variety of reasons, one of the less commonplace of which is that actually IF puzzles aren’t very much like crosswords. Even in their cryptic forms – more common in the UK, where the author of the saw is from – crosswords tend to rely on the solver bringing in some outside knowledge, some bits of trivia to help get the process started, before the business of pattern recognition, deduction, and wordplay come in to supply the answers that you don’t know off the bat. No, IF puzzles to my mind are more like the logical games that give their name to a section of the LSAT, where you’re given a number of starting conditions (there’s a dinner party where someone whose name starts with A is sitting next to someone eating a vegetarian entrée and another wearing a purple dress; meanwhile there’s a pair of twins who dress alike but refuse to eat a dish if the other’s already eating something with the same number of letters in its name) and then need to work out the implications (which fashion-victim is wearing a bright red suit? If the person eating salmon leaned over the kiss the person eating beef stroganoff, who would they be awkwardly shouldering aside?)

EYE is very much in this tradition – a parser game that has a few tricks on its sleeve, but which largely relies on alternating cycles of induction and deduction to lead the player through a finely-calibrated chain of puzzles. Unsurprisingly for this author, it’s a limited parser game, but the twist this time is that you have quite a lot of commands at your disposal, and uncovering new ones and sussing out what they can do is the meat of the game. There’s not so much a story as a bit of narrative texture – the conceit is that you’re a kind of ghost, flitting around an academy and trying to learn the secrets of the various magical words they employ – and while reaching an ending reveals a bit of motivation for what’s come before, what drives you on to try again and reach for a better ending isn’t so much a desire for closure as it is an itch to complete filling out the grids of spells and locations that you’ve been developing (this is a game that requires notetaking).

I’m talking around the substance of the puzzles, because they’re quite fun to work through and I’m loath to spoil them. Most of them involve gematria of one form or another – that is, reading numbers as letters or vice versa – which is an age-old occult practice that also lends itself well to puzzles. Unlocking new magic words also tends to allow you access to new areas within the academy, with offer news sets of clues to help you suss out the next set of “spells”. Every once in a while this orderly progression halts as you encounter one of a few self-contained set-piece puzzles, and there are three different endings, with progress past each of the first two gated by a significant logical leap that opens up a significant new possibility-space to play with.

Those set-pieces are a highlight, and often reminded me of Sage Sanctum Scramble, a wordplay game that may be my favorite of the author’s previous works. There’s a nice variety, with the best reminding me of a description in Richard Feynman’s autobiography about how he approached mathematical transformations, picturing numbers turning colors or sprouting polka dots – except here you’re working out which magic words are Sandwiched or Primeval… I have more mixed feelings about the two leaps of logic: the first feels fairer to me, since it provides a handful of examples before it expects you to deduce a general principle, and a clear dangling thread prompting you to experiment in the right direction (Spoiler - click to show)(since you’re given the name of a room, but not the word that will take you there). The second one, though, only gives you two examples before expecting you to figure out what’s going on, and I didn’t notice any suggestions of where I should be focusing my experiments, making the solution feel like it requires brute-force effort more than intuitive inspiration (I looked at hints).

My only other misgiving is that while logical games tend to carry a bit more narrative texture than a crossword, they’re still not actually a story. There is a fun narrative hinted at in the various endings here, but they really have nothing at all to do with the main action of the game. All of the author’s other games are unabashed puzzle-fests too, but they often do a better job of grounding the gameplay in some kind of fiction; here that layer is so thin as to be nonexistent. Heck, there’s even a sort of puzzle attached to how much the narrative elements can feel like an afterthought – some clues require you to go back to the room descriptions and remember what they contained, which is hard because they’re generally perfunctory and irrelevant! Personally, I still very much dig this kind of thing – the logical games section was my favorite part of the LSAT, nerd that I am – but EYE does fall short of the very best pieces of IF, which tend to do a better job of integrating the form’s two constitutive elements.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp. After it was posted, the Comp's results were posted, which contained strong indications that the author was complicit in voting irregularities that benefited the two games he'd entered into the competition, although no smoking-gun proof was discoverable. I'm keeping this review up for accountability's sake, though given the circumstances I don't think anyone should pay attention to or play this game, and I regret the time I spent giving it substantive feedback).

Well, that didn’t take long.

Just a couple days ago I played the author’s other ParserComp entry, Mystery Academy, which took advantage of its LLM-based system’s affordances to present some light interrogation-based mysteries. Sure, I had some questions about the extent to which those conversations were actually necessary to cracking the cases, genAI’s tendency to run with your prompts occasionally muddied the waters, and the post-command processing wait could feel interminable, but between the gentle humor and the way the design played to the system’s strengths (keep things focused on conversations) and mitigated its weaknesses (putting strict limits on the numbers of questions you could ask any suspect and keeping the mysteries simple), despite my justly-earned suspicion of LLM-focused IF I found myself having a reasonably good time.

Does that streak continue in Last Audit of the Damned? It does not, largely because the system’s flaws are on glaring display when applied to a scenario resembling a typical parser game, rather than sticking to the kinds of scenarios to which it’s better suited. The text-based lightly-comedic medium-dry-goods puzzler isn’t a fully solved problem by any means – heck, I wrote one a couple years ago – but this is an area where the traditional authoring systems and design approaches are very, very robust, and as a result the game’s failures to measure up to the state of the art feel glaring.

The most fun I had with the game was reading the opening, which isn’t damning with faint praise: the idea of a pirate accountant is, to my mind, the good kind of silly – I’m a sucker for any game involving taxes – and a shipwreck is a classic IF setup for a reason. The jokey prose largely hits that Monkey Island vibe, even if there aren’t any laugh-out-loud jokes and the mention in adjacent lines that both the ocean and the waves were “indifferent” felt like awkward redundancy. But then I started to play and my cautious optimism quickly curdled.

It’s going to be hard to avoid the rest of this review turning into a litany of annoyances and LLM-bashing, so I’ll at least start with a design issue that can’t be blamed on generative AI. The game’s divided into self-contained sections corresponding to your trek across the desert isle you’ve washed up on (you can see them all on the included map, and jump to any you’ve unlocked), and each – or at least the two I was able to play – includes a quite limited time limit. This has some minimal plausibility in the first chapter, which is a race to get water before you die of thirst, but there’s no diegetic explanation given for a timer in the second chapter, where you’re exploring an abandoned hut. The limits are fairly short, too – only 20 turns in the first section, which feels quite limited given that there are around a dozen different pieces of flotsam you can mess around with. Sure, the game’s engine allows you to enter multiple commands per line, much like all the traditional IF systems, which only counts as a single turn, unlike in all the traditional IF systems, but typing out a run-on sentence and then paging through reams of output is a decidedly unpleasant mode of play. And once you’re out of time, you need to restart the full section, which is not much fun – these limits were a bad idea.

Okay, with that instance of a purely-human design flaw, now we’re in the realm of generative AI issues. The first section seems calculated to focus on the strengths of an LLM system by presenting what’s basically a complex engineering problem – to avoid fatal dehydration, you need to jury-rig some kind of mechanism to help you get water. In theory, the open-ended nature of the problem lend itself to the freeform back-and-forth an LLM enables. In practice, though, I wound up spending only a few turns looking around before the narrator started getting pretty heavy-handed with its hints: I examined some rocks only to be told that they would do a good job holding down the sailcloth if I wanted to make a solar still. So MAKE SOLAR STILL, I typed, and my larcenous CPA did as I asked, which didn’t do much to make me feel like I’d solved a puzzle (in fairness, I hadn’t – the solar still is a dead end that doesn’t buy you as much time as it takes to construct; instead, you need to build the other contraption the narrative voice starts telling you to make). In a traditional parser game, I’d expect that examining each of the potential components in turn would hint at its potential use in the machine I was trying to build, allowing me to assemble the pieces without me, as a player, knowing exactly how a solar still works – here, though, I’m guessing it was too hard for the LLM to provide the right level of cueing, so it speed-runs from presenting a challenging situation to serving up the answer on a silver platter lightning-fast.

As for the second section, as I mentioned it’s about checking out a hut, and solving what appears to be some kind of riddle, but I admit this is as far as I got, because even ten minutes into the game its ability to hold a consistent world state was feeling rickety. For one thing, the hut is mentioned in the game’s intro, so before slaking my thirst I’d tried to break into it and eventually succeeded – so I was confused when, after the section transition, it was locked again, the method I’d used the first time didn’t work, and once I did get in the contents were completely different (I’m guessing that the hut is only specified as scenery in the first section, so this whole line of exploration was just LLM BSing that wound up completely inconsistent with the “real” hut). For another, I replayed this section a few times – the turn limit here is reduced to only 10 – and the same action led to inconsistent results for no reason I could understand, like when throwing a rock at a precariously-balanced key sometimes did and sometimes didn’t knock it free. My frustration peaked – and my playthrough ended – when I saw that the riddle had something to do with arranging a stack of books. I told the game to try alphabetizing them, which it duly did, albeit the 15 books I’d started with had been whittled down to a lucky 13.

As a cherry on top, there are of course significant pauses whenever you take an action; I’m not sure whether it was because of the time of day or the vagaries of server load, but I felt like they were longer than the stops in Mystery Academy, and got one time-out error where after waiting for a minute or so, I got a message saying the previous command failed and the window was replaced with a non-interactive ellipsis.

If all of this comes off bitter – well, I am bitter. Playing Last Audit of the Damned is an exercise in frustration, made all the worse by the fact that it’s easy to imagine how this game could have been pretty fun if it was just written in Inform or TADS. The stuff the game asks you to do are all things those systems can handle with aplomb, with no hallucination, lag, or inconsistent clueing besides what an author intends to put in. I suppose a counterargument might be that there are boundary-pushing gameplay elements in the 2/3 of the game I didn’t play – but I thought half the case for using LLMs in IF is that they can make the genre more accessible and prevent parser errors from provoking players into rage-quitting. My experience with Mystery Academy suggests that there might be some novel kinds of gameplay scenarios where an LLM-based system provides some advantages, but on the evidence of Last Audit of the Damned, trying to use them for bread-and-butter parser IF sure seems like a fool’s errand.