Reviews by Mike Russo

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

The blurb for Beneath Fenwick says its genre is “suspense, with horror overtones”, but the opening of this parser-aping Twine game couldn’t be hitting the Lovecraft notes harder if it tried. The protagonist is on a creepy old bus, being driven towards an isolated New England town, and once you arrive the dilapidated architecture, pug-ugly inhabitants, and even the creepy grocery store invoke Shadow Over Innsmouth so directly that it’s clearly intentional. The story doesn’t stick too closely to that template, though – we’re in the present day, not the 1920s, and rather than being alone, the botany-student protagonist (named… Hedgerow) arrives alongside her boyfriend, as they’re both planning on attending the local college. Vive la difference, but still, I wound up wishing it had stuck with the horror tropes more fully, as the story slowed down in its last half before ending too abruptly. And while I usually enjoy the puzzley gameplay this kind of Twine game enables, Beneath Fenwick could have benefitted from leaning into its choice-based nature a little more fully.

Starting with the second piece first, the game’s interface does a really good job of mimicking parser conventions. Notable bits of scenery, usable objects, and other characters are highlighted in the text, and clicking on any of them pops up a new window with a more detailed description and possibly further possibilities for interaction – taking, unlocking, all the usual medium-dry-goods stuff, plus talking, which gives you a choice of topics. There’s a full inventory a click away, which works similarly, as well as a subsystem that lets you combine two or more carried objects. The major departure is in navigation: instead of compass directions, exits are listed by name.

This works well, but what you get is what you get, and I wound up missing more traditional Twine touches. Beyond the plain-vanilla puzzles, there are long cutscenes – especially the opening sequence – where there’s just a single continue option available, and the keyword-based conversation system doesn’t allow for dialogue choices. I suppose that it’s odd that I’m totally willing to roll with these limitations in a parser game, but it still seems a shame to do so much work to re-create in Twine the things that parser systems aren’t as good at.

The other issue I ran into had to do with moving around the world. The map is very dense, with a number of different roads and locations in the town, and the boarding house where the main characters wind up staying has an especially large number of rooms whose interconnections aren’t obvious and which have forgettable names. I know many folks find compass directions inaccessible, but they would have made it much easier for me to build a mental model of how the geography fit together.

Story-wise, Beneath Fenwick does a good job with the gradual build of tension. It’s beyond clear from the get-go that something’s deeply wrong in this town, but the game doesn’t tip its hand too early by indicating which of the many, many creepy people, places, and things on hand are the main threats. There’s at least one clever bait-and-switch (Spoiler - click to show)(the university at the edge of town isn’t a Miskatonic-style hotbed of occultism – in fact you never make it there), and it steers clear of the typical Lovecraft-game shift into gonzo violence midway through. At the same time, that means that some of the mid- and late-game felt slow, and even unmotivated – the requirement to fully explore the boarding house on the second day before running your errands felt artificial, and to get to the endgame sequence you need to break into a shed with no indication there’s anything important there.

Speaking of the ending, it’s effectively surprising, but rather abrupt – there’s no denouement to speak of, and the resolution of the mysteries of Fenwick felt disappointingly straightforward. I almost felt like the game stopped midway through – I would have definitely stuck around for a second hour that added in some more interesting puzzles and deeper interactions, while ramping up the tension into a more sustained climax. It’s always good to leave the player wanting more, of course, but maybe not so much more.

Highlight: The main character’s boyfriend – Randall, an architecture major – is a delightful fuddy-duddy despite being in his early 20s. He even introduces the protagonist (his girlfriend, again) as “my companion”!

Lowlight: It is possible to die in Beneath Fenwick, and while it offers a one-turn rewind, I think this can leave you stuck in an unwinnable state. Fortunately I’d done a save at the beginning of the day when this happened, but it was still frustrating to have to replay a bunch of the quotidian exploration I’d already completed.

How I failed the author: Playing the game went fine, but Henry’s been super congested and fussy today so I’ve written this review in like ten two-minute bursts, so apologies if it’s choppy and doesn’t make sense!

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

I’ve seen a number of games that ape the text-message format, but Closure manages something novel and very impressive by doing so in parser, rather than choice based, format. It’s a brilliant move, since text-adventure shorthand makes more sense if you’re texting someone in a time-sensitive situation, and Closure goes the extra mile by recasting all the parser error messages in the voice of your friend. Oh, and through some interpreter wizardry, the game actually looks like it’s playing out via text bubbles, complete with short but not irritating delays between messages.

As impressive as the first impression is, Closure isn’t all style and no substance because the gameplay itself is satisfying too. It’s a short, one-room game, as you guide your friend Kira through an ill-advised break-in so she can search her ex’s dorm room for clues to what drove them apart. It does the usual one-room game trick of providing telescoping detail – there’s a closet, which when opened has another half-dozen objects, and so on – and since this is a character-focused piece, most of what you’re doing is just examining, with only one real puzzle (it’s a pretty clever one, though – it uses a trick that often seems a little unfair in a regular parser game, but makes total sense here). The voice is dead on, and it’s satisfying to peel back the layers of the ex’s plausibly-realized college life.

If I have a quibble, it’s that Kira’s moment of revelation felt a bit on-on-the-nose, and her sense of what counts as someone’s identity is pretty juvenile. Plus I’m pretty sure she could have read between the lines and figured out what was going on earlier than she did. But hey, these are teenaged characters, so maybe that’s fitting.

Highlight: there are a lot of neat touches here, but one of my favorites was the elegant way the game responds if you take the high road and refuse to read the ex’s personal notes.

Lowlight: There’s a mad-libs style opening where you can type in some things you do to relax, with the responses getting braided into the game later on. This works as well as mad-libs stuff usually does in IF, which is to say, awkwardly (both narratively and on a technical level, as I capitalized my entries, and the capitalization was retained even when the responses came in the middle of sentences).

How I failed the author: with Henry mid-nap I was able to play through in one sitting, and even took notes and everything! I did forget to save a transcript though, so my new-father brain did still manage to mess something up.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

It’s a testament to the current state of visual design in IF that in this Comp, a Twine game that uses the default formatting (black background, white text, blue links, that recognizable font) really stands out. This isn’t a critique, though, both because I’ve got no leg to stand on (one reason I like making Inform games is because the idea of having to make aesthetic decisions gives me hives), but because the unfriendly vibe of plain-vanilla Twine creates a fittingly stark, oppressive mood for this ghost story set at the world’s worst nursing home (predictably, it’s in Florida).

The story hits the beats you’d expect given that setup, but again, that’s not necessarily a negative. The Waiting Room doesn’t waste much time establishing the protagonist (a newly-hired nurse) or their motivations, focusing more on creating a foreboding atmosphere from the jump, and while the scares start early and rarely stray beyond what’s expected, nonetheless they’re executed well. Some of the story strains credulity – the number of moldering corpses secreted around the place makes one wonder how much the last state inspector got bribed – and it’s hard to imagine many players being tempted by some of the alternate paths on offer, many of which come down to whether you want to cover up for a fellow nurse’s potentially fatal negligence or instead behave like a minimally moral human being. But for a quick horror piece like this, that’s very much secondary to the chills on offer. Since I definitely had hair standing up on the back of my neck at least once, I’m counting The Waiting Room a success.

Highlight: there’s one particular scare (Spoiler - click to show)(the one hinging on Paulie’s echolalia) that I’ll definitely remember the next couple of times I’m trying to get to sleep.

Lowlight: the protagonist is so thinly sketched, I was pretty sure we were headed for a “you were a ghost all along” twist – but nope, it’s on the level.

How I failed the author: I played this one alone at midnight, with most of the lights off – I was keeping an eye on a napping Henry while my wife slept in the other room. For once, rather than failing the author, I think my circumstances meant I played the game exactly the way it should be!

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

This short Twine game is basically just one extended chase sequence, but it’s a pacey, thrilling ride that keeps the excitement high without resorting to killing the player. The setup is classic postapocalyptic sci-fi – you and your trusty robot sidekick (actually, given his competence maybe you’re the sidekick?) are transporting a mystery cargo across the hostile wastes in your hovercraft when everything goes wrong. Dealing with ship repairs, fending off angry raiders, and surviving the consequences of your patrons’ decision to keep you in the dark keep the player busy, as there’s always a new crisis coming up.

What you’re meant to do next is usually clear, but figuring out the exact right places to look for the tools you need, or how best to shoot up the nomads, can require a bit of fumbling that ratchets up the tension. At first the interface was responsible for some of this clumsiness, since the inventory system is a little idiosyncratic, but once I figured out how it worked everything was very smooth. The story here goes exactly how you would expect, and all the characters remain stock types, but the high quality of the implementation still makes the game an entertaining way to spend half an hour.

Highlight: The descriptions of the wasteland were surprisingly evocative, given that it could have easily just been a sketched-in backdrop for the action.

Lowlight: The ending is the one place where the pacing fails; after the clear climax of the story, there’s an extended but simple sequence where you secure transportation for your escape, and then the game ends anticlimactically, without much of a denouement. It would have been more satisfying had the ending been either hard up against the action-packed climax, or pushed back to allow more room for the aftermath of the story to be established.

How I failed the author: I was once again playing this left-handed on my phone, so I didn’t copy-and-paste any of the wasteland descriptions to illustrate the highlight – you’ll just need to take my word for it.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

The credits for Cyborg Arena include thank-yous to a large number of Patreon donors, and I can see how a game like this would be perfect for building a dedicated following on that platform: it’s got a compelling and accessible hook, clean storytelling, lots of opportunities to customize the player character’s identity and key relationships, a complex but manageable set of mechanics, and a half-hour length that’s perfect for showcasing the impact of choices without letting things become unmanageable (and also makes it possible to finish new projects at a reasonable clip). Turns out this makes for a solid IF Comp entry too!

The premise here is sturdy, and well-communicated by the blurb – you guide a cyborg gladiator through a climactic fight – but everything is realized with more craft than it needs to be, from the grabby in medias res opening starting things off with adrenaline to the embedded character-defining flashbacks that go beyond the literal nuts and bolts of your stats to get at how you navigate the dog-eat-dog social milieu of the gladiator stables. While the worldbuilding doesn’t go beyond what’s needed to support the big fight, there’s also some plausible social satire that I thought was well handled.

All this attention to bells and whistles (oh, and on that subject, the visual design is good without being overly fussy) doesn’t come at the expense of the game’s core appeal, either. The fight involves juggling two distinct tracks – there’s a set of rock-paper-scissors combat options that depend on the stats you’ve chosen for you and your opponent, but you also need to keep the audience’s interest high, which requires not repeating the same moves too many times. This means you have to mix things up and trade off fighting effectiveness against crowd appeal, sometimes taking a punch if it adds to the match's excitement. It’s not especially hard, but it’s engaging to decide on your round-by-round approach, and this added complexity makes victory feels satisfying.

If I have a critique, it’s that the game ends rather abruptly, and while there are lots of different ways the fight can conclude based on your decisions, there’s not much of a denouement laying out your character’s fate beyond the immediate events of the night. But since one of the key tenets of showmanship is to always leave the audience wanting more, it’s hard to lay too much fault here – Cyborg Arena is already much more generous than it needs to be.

Highlight: The game takes a page from modern deckbuilders by disclosing what move your opponent is going to make each turn, meaning combat isn’t a roll of the dice but requires strategic consideration of your options, as you consider both short-term success and your longer-term positioning in the fight overall.

Lowlight: I mentioned the abbreviated ending above, but I especially wanted a little more closure on the legal and social changes the game briefly sketches in – again, this is efficient worldbuilding but it left me feeling a bit unsatisfied at a lack of follow-through.

How I failed the author: Cyborg Arena is sufficiently short and player-friendly that I don’t think I could have messed it up if I tried.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

There’s lots of high-concept IF, but those concepts usually focus on a specific gameplay gimmick or unique setting – After-Words takes the road less traveled by adopting a constraint on the writing. Every sentence, description, and response in the game is at most two words long. There are two different ways you could go with this: one would be to keep things as stripped-down and literal as possible, to make sure the player always understands exactly what’s going on despite the limited number of words available to communicate, while the other would be to use evocative language, neologisms, and metaphor to paint a picture and engage the emotions even at the risk of leaving the player a bit at sea. After-Words opts for the latter approach, which makes for a more fun game overall though I did spend some time floundering.

The game elements are pretty unique, too. After-Words uses a custom web-based interface that’s narrowly-tailored to what it does. The main screen shows an icon-based grid map that you can directly navigate with arrows, gives you an interface element to toggle between your two available actions (looking and interacting), and features a small window for the text describing what you see in each location. You’re exploring a surreal city, most of which is initially gated off – unlocking the various barriers so you can open up the full grid takes up most of the game’s running time, and this is largely done via a series of simple item-based interactions. Sometimes this is as simple as using a coin to pay a bridge’s toll, but usually there’s some leap of logic required, based on interpreting the fantastical world sketched out by the game’s dreamlike language: figuring out how to repair the city’s screaming gunflowers, or how to impress the backflipping flickerking.

There’s only a minimal amount of story or context here – you’re solving puzzles because you’re a player and supposed to solve puzzles – but the writing does a good job of presenting a consistent world, and key themes do emerge: there’s a strong elemental vibe to the different districts of the city, religious practice seems to be a central concern of its residents, and what technology exists is bespoke and near-organic.

Getting to see new parts of the map, then, also means learning more about this strange, intriguing place, and solving the puzzles similarly provides a sense of the rules that govern it. I found this gameplay loop effective for about the first two-thirds of the half-hour running time. In the last ten minutes or so, the large number of open locations and slightly bigger inventory (previously there’d only been one or two items carried at a time) made it harder to intuit what steps would lead to progress, and reduced me to lawnmowering my way through the map. But overall I’d judge After-Words an experiment that succeeds – though I wouldn’t be shy about using the built-in hints to prevent it from wearing thin in the late-game.

Highlight: One location, described as the city’s “stochastic court”, just intrigued me no measure, and I spent a few minutes spinning out possible interpretations for what the legal system here could look like.

Lowlight: There’s one interaction – receiving a benediction from “in-sects” who inhabit the city’s “seahives” – that seems to break the two-word-sentence rule: ”our – buzz – blessing – buzz” only skates by on a technicality.

How I failed the author : As with many of the choice-based games, I played After-Words on my phone in between taking care of the baby, which wasn’t the best way to experience the game – using Safari to play it online, the top-of-window options (including save and load functionality, as well as hints and a walkthrough) weren’t visible, and using inventory items required a lot of awkward scrolling up and down. Dipping back in on my desktop makes the game a much smoother experience.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

The Last Doctor is one of the slightest games in the Comp – my first playthrough took less than ten minutes, and there are only two or three substantive choices on offer. There’s basically zero context provided for anything, with the central-casting post-apocalyptic milieu only barely sketched and the doctor protagonist getting only a word or two of backstory and certainly nothing as specific as a name. And yet!

Since IF Comp is primarily concerned with text, writing that’s good enough can turn even the most prosaic game into a killer app – and the prose in the Last Doctor is quite good indeed. In the author’s capable hands, even a few details or a single line of dialogue are enough to conjure up an image or reveal character. As with most of the choice games, I played this one one-handed on my phone while Henry was napping, but atypically, I actually went to the trouble of typing out some of the bits of writing I liked so I could include them in this review. Your clinic is host to “two medical beds [and] a chessboard of pill bottles”, for example, and the choice to ask a patient a bunch of questions about their condition is labeled “introduce her to Socrates.” And the writing is good enough to enliven the central moral dilemma, which could feel hackneyed and contrived if told by a weaker pen, but here feels satisfying and just right, regardless of how you resolve it. Again, this is a small thing – but it’s a small, beautiful thing, which is no bad thing to be.

Highlight: I’ve singled out some of the favorite bits of writing, but I also admired the laconic scene-setting of “Your days are long. Your hair is short.”

Lowlight: I may have found a slight bug having to do with how the game tracked my choices: (Spoiler - click to show)opted to treat the scavenger with all the supplies I had, and then tried to save the syndicate boss but failed due to not having what I needed. But in the final conversation with Baba, he said a line that implied the boss had died because I’d refused to provide him treatment.

How I failed the author: I don’t think I did, happily enough – the effort to type out that Socrates gag one-handed was definitely worth it.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

Codex Sadistica gives off big music-zine vibes: it’s got a self-consciously over-the-top aesthetic of total commitment to and love of heavy metal, with stripped-down gameplay where you solve puzzles almost exclusively through power chords. On the other hand, while the game’s perfectly functional, all its edges are rough, with implementation issues everywhere you look. Would it have violated Codex Sadistica’s artistic ethos to have butter-smooth programming and elegantly-implemented parser responses? Yes, 100%, but I still missed them.

The premise is a classic get-the-band-back-together quest, as you must go extricate your bandmates from their individual predicaments so you can storm the stage and kick off a performer who's overstaying his timeslot (admittedly, the game kinda lost me here, since Faramir Spidermoon’s eleven-act song-cycle of himself sounded awesome). The venue is a tight four-and-a-half locations, and the writing really lets you feel the grime and sweat coming off the walls. The puzzles you need to solve are grounded (sneaking bandmates past an overzealous fan, helping another win an argument with well-actually-ing dudebros), but the method for doing so is anything but: once you’ve got your first bandmate liberated, you can jam with them to create powerful effects, from a fuzzy doom-metal riff that conjures up fog to pirate-metal that summons a crowd of larcenous seagulls. Further complicating matters, you can genre-mix by playing with more than one of your bandmates at a time, increasing the face-rocking quotient while adding complexity.

This is a lot of fun, but as those examples indicate, it’s hard to deduce the consequence of the different musical effects just from their descriptions – we’re firmly in trial and error territory here. There aren’t so many combinations to make this annoying, and the writing is sufficiently fun to enliven even unsuccessful attempts, but this did mean that I didn’t get much satisfaction from solving the puzzles.

Now that I’ve segued over to critiques, it’s time to turn to those implementation issues. I didn’t run into any bugs that impacted progression, but there are a lot of niggles in Codex Sadistica. Locations list their contents using the default Inform rules, often redundantly when objects are already mentioned in the room description. Multiple plot-critical items don’t have descriptions (“you see nothing special about Mae’s Lighter.” Really?). Items and people mentioned in room descriptions sometimes aren’t actually present. Character interaction is handled with a TALK TO command, but this is never mentioned to the player. And damningly for a music-focused game, LISTEN, DANCE, and SING didn’t have any effect.

Again, given the context, I suppose this is all fair enough, and leveling these critiques just marks me out as the lame dad who brought his kid to the show and can’t shut up about how talented this band is so it’s a shame they don’t apply themselves a little more. But hey, now that I’m a dad, I come by this lameness honestly – so I do hope there’s a post-comp release to iron some of this stuff out.

Highlight and lowlight: I have a tricky combination *light for this one. An early puzzle requires you to help your guitarist get through a dungeon in their DnD game – awesome! But it’s a one-move sequence that’s over as soon as it begins – lame!

How I failed the author: my streak of luck with baby-napping (like, the amount of napping the baby was doing, not good fortune stealing somebody else’s baby) came to an end near the close of Codex Sadistica – Henry was waking up with a dirty diaper just as the climactic showdown kicked off, so I went straight to the walkthrough there when I couldn’t immediately solve the puzzle.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

My Gender is a Fish is a short, surrealist Twine game that’s hard to characterize. It’s not quite an allegory, nor a fable, but neither is it tied to the concrete in any meaningful sense (the inciting incident is a magpie swooping down and yoinking your gender identity). A sui generis work like this is usually, I find, either really good or really bad; happily, this time it’s the former. Since this is a short game with only a few choices and I don’t think any state changes, its success is pretty much 100% down to the writing, which is playful and thoughtful in equal measure.

The notional action involves the protagonist embarking into a dangerous forest in search of what they’ve lost, and considering whether various objects and creatures they run across are their lost gender, but what’s rewarding is the ruminations triggered by considering each possibility. While the subject matter is clearly serious, the tone here holds possible meanings or conclusions lightly, raising questions rather than driving towards any plodding conclusions. I found this approach really effective – as the world’s most boring cis straight guy, I think I sometimes come to art that’s about issues of gender from a more intellectual angle, but while the game probably most directly speaks to trans or genderqueer folks, I found its way of opening up these topics was sufficiently broad to resonate with me on a more personal level too.

Highlight: It’s hard to pick this one apart into component pieces, but I will say the way the opening smoothly slips from grounded description to the protagonist’s new metaphysical predicament was deftly done.

Lowlight: I maybe wish there’d been a little state-tracking, so that earlier choices had more of an impact on later ones? The fact that I can’t immediately tell what that would look like, though, means this might be a knee-jerk idea more driven by the conventions of choice-based games than something that would actually improve the game.

How I failed the author: Since this is a 10-minute game that’s making thoughtful points, but not in a needlessly obscure way, even I was incapable of messing this one up.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

I primarily come to IF for the story, but I have to say, I really appreciate it when a pure puzzler comes up in the middle of the Comp: there are usually lots more narrative-focused entries, so it’s really nice to have a change of pace that exercises completely different parts of my brain. This isn’t to say that FQ doesn’t have words – there’s actually a robust introductory story that follows on from where the prequel game (Fivebyfivia Delenda Est, entered in this year’s ParserComp) left off, and there are some good jokes as rewards for solving each challenge, hinging on a series of diplomatic “gaffes” being interpreted in bad faith as casus belli – but the main engagement here is working through a series of well-curated chess puzzles, as you place a limited set of pieces in a stripped-down five-by-five chess board to defeat a series of opposing kings.

Doing chess via parser-IF commands could be a fiddly nightmare, but the mechanics here are smooth as silk. There’s a well-done ASCII-art depiction of the chess board, plus an accessible description mode, so it’s always clear where things stand and it’s simple to move around and call in new pieces to your position (this sequel switches up the gameplay from FDE by dropping the requirement that your character navigate the board via the knight’s move). And the number of pieces at play in each puzzle isn’t too large, which keeps the gameplay focused on thinking of solutions, rather than having to type a bunch of commands implementing them. Similarly, the game’s overall length and pacing are great, providing just enough time to lay out the mechanics, develop them a bit, and end before it wears out its welcome.

As with many of Andrew Schultz’s games, the core gameplay is supported with lots of documentation, a tutorial mode, help commands, and options. And in addition to some gentle hints, there’s a robustly-annotated walkthrough fully explaining the solutions (actually there are three, one each for the hard and normal versions of the game, as well as a brief version with just the key commands). It’s all very helpful, but I do wonder whether it might be a little much for a new player who didn’t play the prequel. Relatedly, I really enjoyed the introductory text, but it is fairly dense and could take some effort to decode in order to understand what the goal of the puzzles actually is – now that the press of the Comp is over, prospective players might be well-served playing the first game first.

While I’m mentioning small cavils, I did find the game text introducing the idea of the “traitor” pieces pretty confusing – the game told me that “[y]our trips to Southwest Fourbyfouria and West Fourbyfouria will include the yellow knight who is not as loyal to their King as they should be,” but it seemed like the yellow knight was actually on my side, and the traitor was actually grey, so this threw me for a bit of a loop (I believe this will be fixed in a post-comp release). Rearranging my pieces could also sometimes be a little more awkward than I wanted – in particular, when I wanted to reposition my own king, rather than summon the opposing one, I had to type “twelvebytwelvian” for disambiguation, which is a mouthful (maybe “your king” vs. “their king” could be an option, or something like that?) But these are very minor niggles that did nothing to reduce the fun I had solving the puzzles and adding to the Twelvebytwelvian empire.

Highlight: I mentioned the hint system above – after being a bit stymied by one mid-game puzzle, I had recourse to one, and it did a marvelous job of getting me unstuck without ruining the fun of solving the puzzle.

Lowlight: This isn’t much of a lowlight, but it took me a while to twig to what winning each section required – I’m spoiler-blocking it because it’s possible that figuring that out is an intended part of the challenge, but I had more fun once that light-bulb had gone off for me: (Spoiler - click to show)you have to force a stalemate before getting the mate.

How I failed the author: this is another one where I don’t think I did! Even though I was sleep-deprived and I’m not that good at chess, the game’s difficulty curve is well judged and I was able to work through the hard version pretty quickly during one of Henry’s naps.