Reviews by Mike Russo

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

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

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

"OMG you’re a crow.

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

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

Crows – they’re just like us.

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

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

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

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

I have a dilemma when it comes to reviewing visual novels: on the one hand, I’m firmly on board with a broad definition of IF, and against artificially excluding a clearly text-driven – and very popular! – genre. On the other hand, I often personally have a hard time getting to grips with them: I find the interfaces fiddly, as I have a hard time advancing the tiny, slowly-scrolling text window without missing stuff, and their design often presupposes multiple playthroughs, which is increasingly challenging for me as I have decreasing time for IF. Plus I usually ignore the graphics and find them a distraction from the text, which is what I come to IF for in the first place. So while I want to be ecumenical and give George and the Dragon the same level of engagement I’m giving to the other Spring Thing entries, I’m also acutely aware that I might not be the best person to assess how successful it is at doing what it sets out to do – so the reader might want to adjust their salt-grain intake accordingly as they proceed through this review.

George and the Dragon has an orthodox fantasy setting – according to the blurb, this is a story about how St. George became the patron saint of England, but while he does slay a dragon if you play your cards right, England never had a king named Dennis so far as I know, nor were gems of fire resistance thick on the ground, and the general vibe is pretty Ren Faire-y. Despite the familiarity of the setting, though, I had difficulty getting to grips with the story. It starts in medias res, with your character stumbling on an argument between characters you don’t know, without providing much context for who you are and what’s going on. Most of this got clearer as I played – the opening incident isn’t that important, and again befitting the game’s classic-fantasy approach, there’s a festival/lottery going on in the village, with the “winner” being offered up as a sacrifice to appease the dragon – but the exposition didn’t feel especially smooth to me, and I ran into a bug where the blacksmith told me something had happened before it actually did, which confused things further.

As I understand the gameplay tropes of the VN genre, it’s also pretty orthodox on that front – you get regular choices of options as you progress through dialogue-driven scenes, with an additional map interface that lets you choose where to go in a little village. It’s very likely you’ll hit a game-over in your first playthrough, because this dragon is not messing around, but there’s easy saving-and-loading and skip-read-text option to make replays more bearable (though I found that the option fussy, both skipping when it shouldn’t and not skipping when it should).
Your choices do have significant consequences, but in a way that occasionally felt obscure – for example, getting on a winning path seems to require visiting the princess when you go to the king’s camp to deliver a sword, but whether or not I was able to do that seemed to hinge on choices I made in the opening argument sequence, with no narrative threads explaining what had changed so far as I could tell (though this might be because I’d inadvertently skipped changed text in a replay, per the issue I mentioned above). It also doesn’t help that the game is tough, with a lot more ways to fail than there are to win.

One of the significant upsides of a VN is that with the real estate given over to graphics allows for visual storytelling, and the foregrounding of characters opening up the ability to display their emotions without needing to spell things out in text. As mentioned earlier, I’m probably not the best critic to assess art design choices, but I have to say I mostly didn’t like the graphics. The characters design was odd to me, with the kind sporting an unflattering 1970’s mustache and the princess wearing what look like day-glo Bermuda shorts, and scenes are often staged with the characters standing too far away from the game’s camera. There are some effective sequences – the climactic fight with the dragon has some visual pop – but for me, they came after a bad first impression.

I’ve said a lot of negative things about George and the Dragon, but as I review them, many of these critiques boil down to “I would have liked this better if it was a text-only Twine game” – without the distracting graphics and slow pace of text display, and with more focus on the written word to carry the weight of storytelling, I would probably find the game unpretentious but solid enough. So I could certainly see a player who’s more simpatico with visual novels having a much better time than I did, and I look forward to more VNs being entered into IF festivals and competitions if only so that I can get more comfortable with their way of doing things.

I’ve said in other reviews that I think it’s really hard to make a successful “message game”, where the game’s main goal is to make some kind of political or cultural point – in my experience they too quickly devolve into humorless, didactic gameplay where the obvious right answers are rewarded and the obvious bad ones are punished, with no real authentic engagement with the nuances of an issue and the important questions of design, plot, and character left almost completely neglected, making even those who agree with the politics on offer resentful and unhappy.

Good Grub! is a message game, and if I’m honest it fits the above description pretty much to a tee – plus it’s got only the basic Twine visual design –but with one key difference: it throws that “humorless” bit way out the window, meaning that I was more than happy to laugh my way through three different playthroughs. Maybe that makes me shallow, but I was having so much fun none of the other things I’ve previously harped on as flaws mattered at all.

It helps that the message here isn’t one that I’ve seen argued to death in online flamewars: it’s that eating insects can be an environmentally sustainable element in a healthy diet. I suppose some folks could find the idea gross, and I have to confess I do too to – but that’s just because I’m vegetarian and eating anything alive kinda freaks me out; meeting protein needs through bugs doesn’t seem inherently weirder than doing it through curdled soy milk, after all.

Anyway, the way the game makes its point is by having you choose the main features of an insect-only restaurant you’re launching, then go on a radio interview to promote it. Success and failure are definitely possible, but the game is short enough, and funny enough, that you’ll probably want to play through a bunch of times to see many of the options. Some have definite right and wrong answers – warming my heart as a life-long user of public transit, the clear worst choice in the game is to drive to the interview when you have other options – but for the most part it’s forgiving, with successful possible even if you decide e.g. to name your restaurant “La Cucaracha”, like an asshole (I named my restaurant La Cucaracha first time out).

It’s a short but well-considered design, with the initial set of choices leading to payoff as you try to sell the place in the interview, and the ultimate reveal of whether your business succeeds or fails. Gameplay-wise, the only critique I have is that I wish there was a “replay” button at the end it make it easier to try out different branches. It’s solid enough, but again, what makes it sing is the humor. I don’t want to quote too many of the other things that made me laugh, because most of the joy of Good Grub! is seeing how the playful narrative voice responds to your choices, but I can’t resist one pointer: whatever you do, make sure you try naming your restaurant “Big Bill’s Big ol’ Bug Emporium while ensuring the game knows you are not yourself named Bill.

Is Good Grub! good enough to make me rethink my generally downbeat outlook on message games? I suppose not – if I take a step back, it really does share many of the limitations I outlined at the top – but it does apply demonstrate that with enough charm, you can get away with anything.

A short visual novel filtered through a Game Boy aesthetic, You, Me and Coffee (God, it’s hard to omit the Oxford comma) wears its gameplay on its sleeve: as a post-college twentysomething who’s just moved back home and bumped into an old acquaintance at a coffee shop, interactivity consists of choosing in which order to introduce these seemingly banal but deceptively deep topics of conversation.

This one is all about the dialogue, then, so let’s start out by talking about everything else. The retro graphics are definitely one of YM+C’s selling points, and at least to this child of the 80s, they impress; in particular the pinkish monochrome image of the friend is expressive enough to convey relatively subtle shifts in facial expression without getting overly-detailed and distracting. The game’s structure is also clever: a full playthrough is expected to exhaust each of the six possible orders for the topics, at which point a new final dialogue unlocks. It’s not clear how diegetic this is supposed to be – there’s no indication the characters know they’re experiencing a time loop – but it does succeed in making the player keep track of what they’ve already asked and when, making the game more involved than the choice-lawnmowing visual novels can sometimes promote. On the flip side, though, I found the interface a little annoying – as with most visual novels, by default you only get a line or two of slowly-displaying text at a time, so I kept banging keys to hurry things up and then inadvertently skipping bits of dialogue. Using more of the screen’s real estate would have obscured the graphics, I suppose, but could have increased the readability.

As for the conversations themselves, while each of the six variations hits on distinct subject areas, with one or two exceptions they all share a common tone of warm nostalgia hitting a wall of barely-concealed hostility (this awkwardness is mostly avoided in the timeline where the conversation winds up turning to books – yes, this seems right to me). As it eventuates, you remember this acquaintance as a fun person to hang out with, and with whom you shared some low-stakes stabs at romance; on the other hand, she (I think those are the right pronouns) recalls things differently, and as a result most of the time she’s kind of a jerk.

There’s an explanation for this unpleasantness in the bonus dialogue that’s unlocked after exhausting the others, and it rings true so far as it goes – without going into spoilery details, it turns out that main character was a self-centered jerk who didn’t really notice what was going on with the people around them when they were 17. But to me, what this revelation gains in plausibility it loses in pathos. Perhaps I’m telling on myself here, but my memory of those long-ago teenaged years was that pretty much everyone was completely wrapped up in self-absorption, with only a minimal set of tools for perceiving, much less responding appropriately to, the subjective emotional experience of others. The fact that the friend has apparently held a grudge for what after all are quite venial sins for years, into their mid-twenties, came off as absurdly small-minded, and made the ending feel unduly prosecutorial: instead of an embarrassed but deserved flush of catharsis, I was left blinking in confusion.

If the ending didn’t sit quite right with me, though, I did enjoy the well-observed brittleness of the main dialogues – so much so that I replayed a second time, based on what I thought were hints towards how to get an alternate ending (turns out there isn’t one, or at least I wasn’t smart enough to find it). As befits its early-video-game aesthetic, You, Me and Coffee’s characters are perhaps more callow than they think they are, but there’s pleasure in following along with them all the same.

Filthy Aunt Mildred is a nasty little thing, reveling in the physical and moral grotesqueness of the revolting, infighting family who make up its cast of characters and the baroque, decrepit mansion where it lays its scene – call it Knives Out by way of Gormenghast. Beyond the overall squalor, the narrative is the most drunken, meandering sort of shaggy dog story, overencrusted with the largely-irrelevant biographies of sundry louche and long-since departed aunts and uncles, and it doesn’t so much end as collapse in a heap, the few surviving characters having learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

I worry I am being too positive. Here is the second sentence of the piece:

"The air was sticky and horrible and Old Uncle Thomas who lived in the attic was smearing his faeces on the dining hall window, which meant it was six o’clock, because Old Uncle Thomas always smeared his faeces on the dining hall window at six o’clock.”

This is not the kind of filth I had in mind when I eagerly clicked “begin” on what is sold as a wholesome story about poisoning an awful spinster.

As a right-minded person I can under no circumstances recommend, or even commend in the first place, such a disreputable game. But with that understood: reader, I had fun. Each character is more loathsome than the next – the protagonist, and I use that term loosely, very much included – but who cares when they toss off bon mots like this (from the inevitable iocane-powder-ish scene near the end):

"'One of the cups contains lethal poison.', I explained. 'The other contains the greatest tea you’ve ever had in your life.'

'What kind?'

'Arsenic.'"

The narrator gets in on the action too, evoking the family’s halcyon, prelapsarian days:

"Money was plentiful, nobody had been murdered yet and the general attitude of the Bladesmith family could be boiled down to a mixture of 'why not?' and 'do you know who I am?'"

Sure, the accumulated vignettes lose some steam and effectiveness as you go on, and there’s the occasional typo. And the only choices are about how deep into this sewer you want to throw yourself. But this is one entertaining cabinet of horrors, and for readers who are able to swallow their revulsion and the potty humor and moral bankruptcy here on display, the sharp writing and darkly-inventive imagination are ample rewards for slumming it – you might just need a cold shower afterwards.

The Prairie House is an aesthetically pleasing Adventuron game with slightly wonky implementation – but I repeat myself! Most Adventuron games have lovely visual design but have a parser that doesn’t provide the most helpful failure responses (it can be pretty fuzzy on whether you’ve referred to an item incorrectly, or it just isn’t there) and sometimes struggles with actions that are more than two words. Still, these foibles aren’t too hard to come to grips with, and the effort is usually well worth it, which is certainly the case with this moody horror vignette set on the Canadian prairie. While the game’s various elements didn’t fully cohere for me, this is still an enjoyable way to spend half an hour.

The plot here is fairly straightforward – you’re an academic who spends the night at an old field house, and spooky shenanigans ensue – but there are three well-researched bits of flavor that enrich the basic narrative. First, there’s a well-chosen amount of detail on the research; while you don’t need to actively do anything, it’s rewarding to explore the prairie, examine the various plants, and read about the standard practices and approaches to this kind of work. Second, the house you’re staying in was built and originally inhabited by Ukrainian immigrants, and there are some documents in the house that flesh out some of this history. Finally, many of the supernatural occurrences are drawn from the stories of some First Nations peoples – the author’s note cites the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe.

Since there aren’t really puzzles to speak of, beyond finding a couple of keys and going through a well-prompted pre-bed ritual, the game does rely on this research to enliven what would otherwise be a fairly direct case of things going bump in the night. It mostly works, and I was definitely engaged as I wandered around the house looking at stuff – it’s fun to learn about things I previously knew quite little about! Once the supernatural elements started kicking into higher gear, though, I wound up wanting a little more of a direct link between the research-y bits and what was happening in the game. There are definitely some allusions, but the game plays things pretty coy and ambiguous as to what’s actually going on. That’s often a fine authorial choice, but in this case it left me feeling like the ending was a little anticlimactic, with the game’s disparate elements never being fully knit together in my mind.

I did mention some implementation niggles, and while some of them do seem like features of the Adventuron engine, there were a couple of oversights that could be worth correcting in a future release. X ME doesn’t include a description of the PC, for example, which is a missed opportunity. X [document] and READ [document] are separately-implemented commands – it’s usually not an issue because upon examining one you’re often asked whether you want to read it as well, but this isn’t invariably the case. In my first playthrough, I missed an achievement, and some important flavor, because X BOOKS told me “you notice nothing unusual,” whereas READ BOOKS would have let me browse one of three different volumes. And when I tried to sit down in the armchair in the morning, the response indicated the game still thought it was night.

Still, I don’t want to end on a negative note – and I should admit that I played the game without music, which is apparently an original soundtrack, so I suspect I would have entered even more fully into the mood with that playing in the background. The Prairie House is an accomplished game that offers a unique, compelling experience that goes beyond the standard haunted-house experience.

“Abstract Twine game about mental health issue” is a cliché, but if it produces games as engaging and dare-I-say educational as fix it, that’s no bad thing. I’m a little wary of my response here because I have a fair bit of personal experience of OCD – one of my loved ones has it – and I’m curious what others who don’t come to the game with that context would think of it. Still, I can say that for me it very much works in depicting OCD’s hellish destructive-ritual-and-self-loathing cycle, as well the potential way out.

The game deliberately chooses to leave the inciting incident that sets off the OCD spiral abstract – you’re just told that there’s something making you (who you are is left vague) uncomfortable and standing in the way of the things (also not specified) you want to do. This means there’s not much of a narrative framework for the gameplay loop to hook into, but I think that’s ultimately a good choice. It universalizes the experience and creates the opportunity for more direct player investment, and also avoids the challenge that the stuff that sets off OCD can be so minor – touching a particular part of an article of clothing, fretting about ultra-rare side effects of common medications like Tylenol – or so over-the-top – worrying that somehow you’re secretly a serial killer or child molester, or that you’ll harm others for no reason – that it can seem completely ridiculous from the outside.

The rituals and behaviors you engage in to compensate for the feelings of unease are also left unspecified (though there is an intimation that hand-washing to the point that they bleed is included – this is I think a good example of a detail that’s 100% true to life but I worry could feel unrealistic), with the focus instead put on how you feel after performing each one: it doesn’t work to relieve the feeling of discomfort, but now there’s a healthy dose of self-directed criticism for being weak enough to engage in the ritual, or feeling like it’s made things worse, or that you’re just doing it for attention, so now more talismanic behavior is required to desperately try to set things to right. The writing in these bits of self-reproach is queasily compelling, and I thought did a good job of communicating what I understand is among the worst parts of OCD.

Thankfully, fix it doesn’t trap the player in a forever-static loop, but does eventually provide the possibility of a way out. In contrast to the way the rituals are played, this piece is very specific, and from my understanding lines up pretty exactly with the tools folks suffering from OCD often find successful in managing their intrusive thoughts and behaviors. Getting to this off-ramp definitely felt like a relief, with calm blue coloring on the fonts replacing the angry red of the rest of the game. Again, this is very much not a narrative-driven experience, but it definitely has an arc, and catharsis at the end. It’s a focused experience, but the gameplay elements, visual design and layout, and writing all work well together to provide a compelling and accurate view of OCD from the inside, which I can see being impactful and even useful for all sorts of players.

It’s always nice when the first game you play in a festival or comp gets things off on the right foot, so I count myself lucky that The Light in the Forest was the lead-off game in my randomized shuffle. Admittedly, it didn’t make the best first impression on me, with default-Twine formatting and a wall-of-profanity opening that situates the player in a deeply unpleasant situation – the protagonist is a trans woman with some mental health issues about to flee a Dickensian psychiatric facility. But the game quickly reveals that it’s anything but miserabilist, as she’s soon able to make a charming, supportive reconnection with an old friend, and some creepy-yet-compelling fantasy elements start to come into the narrative (the formatting also gets more creative). While there are definitely still some intense challenges to face, the game’s grounded, low-key writing and fundamentally decent characters made my experience of playing the game a really positive one.

Most of the story is focused on the protagonist’s relationship with two women – Mandragora, an acquaintance from school who happens to be working as a barista at the coffee shop where the protagonist takes shelter after the opening and who quickly gives her a place to stay, and Nightshade, who’s a sort of half-demon witch from another dimension with a mystic connection to her (everyone is named after plans, including the protagonist who’s called Solanine). Things with Mandy primarily focus on Solanine working through her social anxiety and ADHD in a series of well-realized set-pieces – there’s a complex bit about making a grilled cheese sandwich that’s almost-but-not-quite a puzzle – while choosing how flirty to get with someone who’s clearly into her. As to Nightshade, it’s a matter of deciding what to make of a series of strange happenings and whether or not to maintain their connection or separate it. This makes the character interactions engaging on a gameplay level, beyond the often-charming dialogue itself.

I also really enjoyed the fantasy elements, which isn’t always a given for me. They aren’t overemphasized, but it’s mentioned in passing that there’s been a magical apocalypse that’s seen demons hopping into our reality. It’s nonstandard, but I liked the fact that the world has ended but life still goes on – and isn’t even all bad, making it a nice metaphor for the identity struggles the game’s focused on, as well as a nice idea on its own. Again, this isn’t a central part of the story, and there isn’t like Tolkien-style WORLDBUILDING by any means, but there are some compelling details in this part of the game, like the way Solanine performs a regular ritual to ward off negative spirits:

"You left your candlebone pen on the dresser. Ideally you would light a candle as you do this, but with only their bones and nothing for fire you are forced to make do without as you trace over the sigils on your arm."

Sure, there are some niggles here. For example, while the writing is generally strong, beyond the odd typo there’s the occasional line of clunky dialogue (at one point Mandy says “Like I said, you’re important and I don’t want to let anyone be abandoned. Especially not when everything is likely to be much worse for them because they’re being constantly misgendered.” Nice idea, but a little on-the-nose). And sometimes the low-key vibe can undercut the intensity of events – I hadn’t realized how close to panic Solanine was meant to be as she was rattling around the cabinets trying to rustle up her sandwich. Similarly, the ending I got was also more understated than I might have preferred. But none of this did much to impact how much I enjoyed my first dip into Spring Thing!

(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)

Is there a harder genre at this point to parody than Hammer horror flicks? By this point, not too many people have actually watched the movies, but we’ve all seen a million I-vant-to-suck-your-blood-bleh-bleh sendups that make it seem like the originals were just as silly. Dr Horror’s House of Terror manages the task, though, keeping the traditional comedy monster-mash angle while adding a meta twist (you’re not running around actual Transylvanian villages and Alpine laboratories, just movie sets) and playing some moments of horror just straight enough to land. To be sure, the main draw of this big puzzlefest is working through its just-hard-enough challenges, but the tone is also just-novel-enough to make the fourish hour runtime go quickly.

The other strong element here is the pacing. I find long games can often feel awkward on this score, with an intimidatingly-big environment at the beginning and a saggy late-middle as you run out of things to solve. Dr Horror does well out the gate, though, with a focused, linear opening that establishes the premise and stakes – the head of the horror-movie company moonlights as a cult leader and wants to give you a starring role in a sacrificial rite to summon their demonic patron to earth. Then the map leads you to a hub where you find five different themed soundstages where the bulk of the game plays out, but you need to solve the first one, and get a feel for how the puzzles will work, before all the doors unlock.

Indeed, the game actually winds up being a bit formulaic. To fight the cult and their demons, you need to build an army of undead, since turns out Dr Horror has been cutting costs by enslaving real-life (er) zombies, vampires, and mummies. On each soundstage, you’ll need to deal with a roving security guard (in gruesome ways that raise the question of who exactly is the monster here), then figure out how to find, summon, resurrect, or control the various flavors of monster before doing it again at the next stage over. There’s enough variety of theme – you’ve got your werewolf-stalked hamlet, your sun-blasted Egyptian ruins, your voodoo-y New Orleans – as well as puzzle style – there’s some traditional object manipulation, some messing around with NPC behavior, some light futzing with machinery – that this formula winds up being a strength, since it gives the player a framework to grab onto without making things stale. Then there’s an endgame that introduces a fun new puzzle-style that’s not too out of left field, nor too hard – often the bane of late-game mechanical twists.

Speaking of difficulty (what a segue!) I found it tuned well throughout. Most of the soundstages are self-contained, with only a few requiring bringing items over from other areas, which helps limit the possibilities, and several puzzles have alternate solutions implemented. The puzzles aren’t easy enough that I solved them immediately, but at the same time I only needed one hint (Spoiler - click to show)(I didn’t realize the animal cages were portable) which is impressive in a game as long as this. The implementation was also quite smooth, and once I had an idea it usually didn’t take any wrestling with the parser to make it happen. I did run into a couple of bugs, though – I encountered a thematically-appropriate resurrecting security guard in the sands of Egypt, and one time when I got thrown out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, the crematorium wound up accompanying me to the parking lot. But some quick UNDOing was enough to set things back to right.

The writing is another strong point, with jokes that generally land (I liked the main character’s perhaps-forced naivete about where their co-stars kept disappearing to) and some real moments of gross-out horror preventing things from getting too weightlessly silly (those poor security guards!) There are some typos, though, and I did find things got a bit overly wordy in places, leaving me scrolling through more than one page of text just to see what was happening in a location. These are small niggles that hopefully can be ironed-out for a post-Comp release – given its long run-time, I’m guessing some folks won’t completely finish Dr. Horror’s House of Terror during the judging period, but this would be a perfect one to revisit once the time-pressure is off.

Highlight: There’s one puzzle that was a standout for me, a Delightful-Wallpaper-style combinatorial riff that requires you to reenact a Cajun-spiced melodrama of family secrets and voodoo curses. The writing and puzzling are both really fun, and there are enough clues to prevent things from devolving into the trial-and-error slog that often reduces the fun-factor of these kinds of puzzles.

Lowlight: When you solve that puzzle, instead of recruiting the cast of messy antebellum ghosts, you just got a crowd of zombies to swell the ranks of your undead army. Boring!

How I failed the author: I played the first half of the game while keeping my wife company during one of Henry’s late-night feedings, when I was feeling pretty loopy – things got pretty wacky in my transcript as a result.

(This review was originally posted on the IF newgroups immediately after the 2003 IF Comp).

Slouching Towards Bedlam involves eschatology, a British insane asylum, a player character whose mental state is very much in doubt, gnosticism, a memetic word-virus, steampunk, the "Second Coming" of W.B. Yeats, the Kabbalah, and a Benthamite panopticon of the type deconstructed by Michel Focault. Let me say right out that the only way the authors could have possibly done a better job of pandering to me would have been to include some Buddhism. So authors, if you want a 10 from me next year, that 's your blueprint right there.

But regardless of the personal affinity I have for the subject manner, the game is still easily one of the best in this year's comp. The authors tackle some dense, weighty problems, and manage to wrap theological speculation in a compelling mystery and pose an insoluble moral quandary to boot. While there are a very few missteps, they're easily swept away by the sheer power of the work.

Slouching Towards Bedlam opens inside the eponymous asylum, where the player character is listening to your own voice describing the slow realization that you're going mad. The player's explorations are periodically interrupted by a (mental?) burst of strange words; at first the tendency is to tune them out, but soon they begin to take on a terrifying significance. As you attempt to understand what has happened to the player character, you find your course unerringly transformed into the reverse of the path a particular inmate took to Bedlam; this perverse recapitulation is retrograde in more ways than one, for your investigation is also the vector for an agent of infection. Soon, the player is caught in a crux: to play midwife to a new paradigm of humanity or to safeguard the status quo, if such a thing is even possible.

The above summary doesn't do the game justice. At all. Each elements works in concert to create a thrilling sense of momentum and discovery. There are distinct phases, through which the player passes effortlessly. The mystery surrounding Cleve's disposal in Bedlam segues into an investigation of the society whose secrets he uncovered, and once the whole is apprehended, the player gets to make a choice of monumental import. Throughout, the razor-sharp prose keeps the player tense and engaged. The alternate London the authors have conjured is a brittle place, where violence, communication and becoming lurk under the surface of an ordinary street market: "its presence threatens to overwhelm the senses - the smell of an abattoir, the din of a thousand voices shouting, the sight of masses of humanity talking, shopping, selling." Or this, the first chilling line of the response to KILL DRIVER: "A false destination. It is as easy as that." The Logos' interjections could have easily been ridiculous, but they are in fact alien and obscure, as they should be.

The allusive brew of the game is thick and heady, but while some knowledge of gnosticism and Jewish mysticism will deepen one's enjoyment, everything one needs to fully appreciate the game is right there on the screen - an impressive feat considering that this involves communicating certain nonstandard ideas about the Christian Logos and the relationship between Kabbalistic sefirot!

Remarkably, all this thematic activity doesn't occur in a puzzleless environment. There are real obstacles to progress, and while the difficulty level is generally low enough to allow the story to drive forward, thought is definitely required. The tasks facing the main character range from the mundane (fixing a radio) to the complex (operating the Panopticon and the Bedlam archives) to the recondite (feeding a dying madman's ravings into a mobile steampunk computer), and each manages to be well-clued and flawlessly integrated into the whole.

The endgame is perhaps the most impressive of Slouching Towards Bedlam's many achievements. Once the mystery is solved, the player must make a difficult choice. While some resolutions are easier to achieve than others, there is no facile "right" solution; ambiguity is inevitable. Even acting on one's choice can be quite difficult; the Logos is a powerful entity, and arresting its growth requires sacrifices far more terrible than merely the player character's life: to be humanity's savior is to be a monster.

I could go on; one could fruitfully apply the techniques of structural analysis to examine the game's pervasive twinning of progress with regression (the player character's forward movement is often exactly the reverse of the path taken by the madman Cleve, for example), or chase down references to the authentic texts that lie behind the fiction, but I think I've said enough. While I do have a few minor complaints - I thought the TRIAGE computer was underutilized, and some NPC interactions were a bit lightweight - I feel like an ingrate for even mentioning them. My favorite game of the 2003 comp, hands down.