Reviews by Mike Russo

Here’s a bit of Wintervale’s backstory that illustrates some of what makes this fantasy Twine adventure distinctive, in ways both good and bad: so the setting is a town in the icy north, which was founded after a wandering adventurer killed the dragon that was threatening the region. You’d think the town got its name since it’s cold and probably located in a valley, right? Nope – turns out the dragon-slaying warrior just happened to be named Wintervale! Good thing he wasn’t named Arthur Warmbeach, that would have really confused the tourists. The fractured D&D aesthetic behind Wintervale (the town) also animates Wintervale (the game). It’s a mix of overly-familiar, boringly-presented tropes and surprising left-turn choices that might not always make sense but are definitely intriguing. A decided lack of polish makes getting to the good stuff harder than it should be, but there’s more here than you might at first suspect.

Let’s talk a bit about that first impression. From the get-go, the player is hit with a high density of typos and confusion about the title (the initial screen appears to refer to the game as “When Time Converges”, and there’s soon a mention of “Windervale”). The opening narration wears its worldbuilding heavily, with the paragraph about the people of Wintervale including specific links for more than a half-dozen races that when clicked disclose enervating details like most orcs being construction workers because they’re strong. This wonkiness extends into the game proper, as you’ll see things like “(if 0 > 0)”, an event titled “EVENT”, and typos and malapropisms galore, while even characters the protagonist has appeared to know for years go by their occupation rather than having a name. And the setting – a tavern you own – is often described in about the most generic terms imaginable.

Once past this frankly off-putting beginning, though, I found Wintervale started to grow on me. The story that’s playing out in this played-out setting is actually more interesting than you’d first imagine. It’s a horror-inflected Groundhog Day scenario, with your tavernkeeper protagonist noticing stranger and stranger occurrences in their bar – suspicious blue-cloaked figures, a secret entrance cut into your storeroom, intimations that one of your employees is keeping secrets – before being repeatedly killed and waking back up at the beginning of the day.

The investigative bits of the game play out via a solid structure where you can move between parts of the tavern and speak to different people in whatever order you please. Early on, you also get access to a nifty bit of magic – a monocle that allows you to see temperature changes – which provides a neat perspective on this oasis of warmth amidst the cold, and which is used to open up a few needed options. Everything seems fairly linear; there are choices to make but no real puzzles to solve as far as I can tell. But I felt like there was enough for the player to do to draw me through Wintervale’s 45 minute or so runtime.

The other thing that makes the game surprisingly grabby is, funnily enough, how confusing much of the writing is. I’m not sure if it’s by design, but I spent most of the game off-kilter, never really sure exactly what was going on. I found a magical shard of glass that seemed to go missing when I wasn’t looking, people kept killing me but I wasn’t sure who or why, I got a mysterious note that the protagonist resolutely refused to read for a long long time, characters came in and out with no real rhyme or reason… And it’s not just at the level of plot and secrets, even what should be simple physical descriptions are skewed and unnatural. Here’s the protagonist remarking on a pile of broken glass:

"From a distance it’s not too significant, though after comparing it to a nearby broom its probably a good 2-3 inches tall."

This is not how human beings talk or understand the world, so at some points I was wondering whether there was some kind of mystery tied to the protagonist’s identity? But as far as I can tell, no, there isn’t. Regardless, the overall effect somehow wound up being intriguing as well as frustrating, in a David Lynch does AD&D sort of way.

Ultimately I reached an ending – a bad ending, though I’m not sure whether others are possible, or what I could have done differently. Nothing was explained: not the source of the time loop, what was up with the mysterious albino woman, where that shattered glass came from, or what the deal was with my receptionist. I can’t really recommend Wintervale on the basis of my experience with it, but while it’s not a diamond in the rough by any means, it’s at least a lump of coal that’s lumpy in a sufficiently odd and idiosyncratic way to make it stand out from the others.

A title (and author nickname) as over-the-top as this reads to me like a thrown-down gauntlet: will the actual game live up to the badass silliness being so ostentatiously signaled? I’ll admit to some skepticism after reading the blurb and loading it up – fantasy RPG parodies are a dime a dozen, often going for lazy skewering of the same tropes with jokes that feel like they would have been musty even in the 90s. Thankfully, JUF! charts its own path, committing to a very specific take on the gag and not forgetting to include an actual game under the parody.

The twist here is to treat big-budget RPGs as showbiz. The characters are all digital actors, supported by body-doubles and production assistants. So when the connection goes down right as the final battle ramps up – it appears to be a single-player game, not an MMORPG, so I’m guessing there’s meant to be some kind of DRM? – you control Tommy, the actor playing the protagonist, as he chats with his coworkers and tries to figure out how to get the show back on the road. In the course of these efforts, you get to know your colleagues, who are a nicely-humanized collection of Hollywood stereotypes – the overenthusiastic newbie, the ambitious co-star, the embittered journeyman, the overlooked PA who’s secretly running everything.

The writing strikes a good balance between serving up jokes and creating sympathetic characters, and it’s effective on both fronts. Take Lackey Three, for example – she’s played by Lucie, whose performance is checked-out because she’s studying to break into the digital assistant business. Her interjection of “additional words!” into the opening smack-talk, and the extended sequence where she reveals her uh, rather strong feelings about Clippy (the go-to example of a digital assistant), are both funny bits, but while she’s a bit abrasive because she wants Tommy to stop bothering her so she can study, I ultimately found her sympathetic and relatable, despite the beyond-silly context.

The game side of things is no slouch either. It’s presented as a top-down RPG, and you click to move Tommy around and talk to the other characters (I had no idea Ink could do this!) Each character has the same dialogue tree, where you can ask them about themselves and their plans, their opinions on the other characters – which includes telling them what their colleagues have said about them – and ask them to swap an item. There’s a lot of depth here, and while it can get repetitive since everyone has the same options and getting all the dialogue requires doing two full passes over all eight characters, the writing is strong enough to support the time.

With that said, there are no dialogue options or other choices you make while talking that impact the game (well, except one to trigger the endgame) – it’s the item-swapping where the gameplay resides, and it too has surprising complexity. Tommy starts out carrying the ultimate sword, a less-good sword that looks like a fish (there are a lot of jokes about fishing minigames), and the Crown of Agency that marks him as the protagonist. Each character has a single item apiece, ranging from the metaphysical – a sense of purpose – to the mundane – an overwashed pair of pants – to the truly dangerous – a union organizing pamphlet.

You can work out chains of swaps by figuring out which character might accept as a trade, and what they should ultimately be holding when the curtains open once more. The object a character is holding when the end fight resumes (including what Tommy’s got in his inventory) has a major impact on how things play out – the traditional victory of good over evil can certainly happen, but there’s more than enough room for improvisation, flubbed lines, last-minute betrayals, and more. The combinatorial possibilities here are enormous, and after four playthroughs I feel like I barely scratched the surface – yet each ending went off mostly hitch-less, weaving together the different possibilities into a satisfying whole every time.

JUF! does have a few flaws. The biggest one is that the dialogue scrolls out slowly, and there’s a lot of it, meaning that clicking through it on replays can be annoying – and since repeated replays are needed to get the most out of the game, that’s a shame. There are some quality of life features unlocked as you go, including skipping the intro, but I really wished there was a “skip repeated dialogue” one. I also thought one very-positive ending was a little too easy to get (Spoiler - click to show)(painstakingly juggling everybody’s inventory got me a pretty solid result, but just making a beeline for Jacquie and swapping her the Crown of Agency seems like it’s close to the ideal ending. I support this rejection of damseling, but this is the point I stopped playing because I figured I couldn’t top that). I only noticed one stray typo – Boyle is referred to as Riley in one of his ending slides – but I did play a version that’d been updated a couple times since the Festival opened. But these are very small nits to pick, and I have to say, JUF! has taken its place as my favorite entry in this much-maligned genre.

A Blank Page is an appealing game that I suspect will resonate with most folks who’ve tried to create something. It’s exactly what it appears to be – a Twine game about writer’s block – but with a well-observed take on the subject that provides lots of specific details to flesh out this universal experience.

It helps that the presentation is attractive – black text on a clean white background matches the topic at hand, of course, but there’s also a nice blinking-cursor effect that underlines the anxiety of starting to write. The prose could use an additional editing pass, as there’s more than one typo or infelicity of language, but it’s also effective at conveying the subjectivity of the protagonist:

"You really like this old keyboard. Its soft touch caresses your fingers. The tapping sound it makes when typing accompanies you in the solitude of the apartment… But, like a curse, everything changes as soon as you stop using it to play or chat or whatever and start using it to write your projects… You notice the roughness of some of the keys and how some of them offer more resistance, slowing you down when typing. The sound starts to be annoying, like a little hammer incessantly beating your ears, reminding you that you are not quick enough, that you are wasting time."

The game’s structure is pretty standard but with just enough of a twist to be interesting – slight spoiler here: (Spoiler - click to show)as the game opens, you’re given several choices for how to try to write or procrastinate. None of it works, and when you go to sleep, you wake up the next day faced with exactly the same text and exactly the same options, with the only difference being the weather’s gotten worse – it’s Groundhog Day, more or less.

Again, the details are a lot of what makes this work – beyond the keyboard description excerpted above, I also really liked the notebook, which has a series of prompts and ideas you can cycle through, half or more of which are pretty awful while a couple actually have something to them (my favorite was the one about dead gods leaving giant corpses that cults spring up to worship).

It’s all very relatable, including its ultimate take: after trying a bunch of different stuff, including taking a walk, chatting with friends, doing some reading, and just keeping the main character’s butt in the chair, eventually I was able to get past the block and start writing. There’s no indication that that’s because I solved a puzzle or unlocked a magic formula, which seems true to my experience: if you leave space for inspiration, connect with other people, take care of yourself, and keep grinding out and persevering, eventually the block you’re facing unclogs, without any clear rhyme or reason for it.

This isn’t anything revelatory, I don’t think, but A Blank Page is a positive, grounded exploration of its topic, and did pretty much everything I want a short game like this to do.

After checking out its entry page, I was looking forward to this one: choosing the mythological counterpoint to Galatea as the title of your game is a move with appealing chutzpah, no matter how much extraneous punctuation you throw in there to muck things up, and Pygmalion’s blurb offers a pretty solid hook too:

"A story about You— The Murdered God— and the attempt to solve your death’s mystery in places beyond."

That enthusiasm carried me into the opening sequence, as the game’s got a neat CGA aesthetic and starts reeling off potentially-compelling plot elements: a murder-mystery where you’re the victim! Fourth-dimensional politics! Reformed necromancers! Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories! And there’s a fun little character-generation sequence here where you can define the genders of yourself and your sidekick.

Unfortunately, once I got to the game proper, my enthusiasm began eroding and I wound up not enjoying this one very much at all. On both the game and writing sides of things, my experience with Pygmalion was irritating and empty, despite the author’s clear intentionality and technical skills.

Before getting to the critique, a potted summary of how Pygmalion plays is needed, so here goes: you’re a god who’s been murdered by parties unknown, but a helpful necromancer has resurrected you by shoving your spirit into a marble statue. This second lease on life is on a severe timer, but it’s enough to allow you (with the necromancer in tow as a sidekick) to revisit the scene of the crime – a sort of cross-dimensional nexus – and interrogate the suspects and hopefully figure out whodunnit before you re-expire. The game is in Twine, but with a stylized presentation where you’re always looking at a retro, 4-color picture of a character or location, with navigation or dialogue choices listed below.

There are eight locations that play home to five suspects, with lots of incidental environmental details to investigate along the way. The places you can go are mundane – a garden, a foyer, a rec-room – but the contents are offbeat, including strange half-mechanical plants, ley-line tangles, and obelisk-fountains that resolutely refuse to grant any wishes. So too are the suspects, who are nameless representations of aspects of society: politics, capitalism, entertainment, big tech, and athletics (though I was confused on this last one since his picture makes him look like a motorcycle cop), each of whom occupies a different point on the spectrum between menacing and alluring – the cast reminded me of the characters you can make in the tabletop RPG Nobilis, if anyone remembers that. After time’s up (there is a real timer that ticks down as you explore), you accuse one and get an ending, though you appear to die again no matter what.

Even reading this summary, I think it sounds really great! But like I said, I got very little enjoyment out of this one. Partially this is due to how finicky the interface is, which adds friction to every interaction. Because of how much space the pictures take up on the screen, the text is spit out only one or two sentences at a time, and sometimes there’s quite a lot of it to get through before there’s a choice. Unfortunately, this requires either hitting the space bar – which I found often led to skipping over a line – or clicking a tiny > button that shifts slightly up and down in the window depending on how much text there is, which is a constant, low-level frustration. There are also sometimes options or explanatory text that shows up below the main display, meaning you frequently need to scroll up and down to see whether you’re missing anything.

I also didn’t really enjoy the game’s prose, though it’s technically well done – I noticed only a few scattered typos, and it’s got its own style. Unfortunately the style is one I don’t like. Sometimes it’s flat and dull, listing the furniture and stating how characters are standing and moving in terms more unimaginative than you’d think given the setting. It does occasionally liven up, typically when interacting with the suspects, but usually that means it starts sprinkling in references and adjectives that don’t quite fit, while remaining emotively flat, which winds up creating a kind of vague, hostile atmosphere. This alteration of styles I’m sure is intentional – it reminded me a bit of some of the literary fiction in vogue in the early 90’s, like David Foster Wallace circa Girl With Curious Hair – but it made my experience playing the game alienating and dull.

Speaking of things that are alienating and dull, the murder mystery here underwhelmed me. When you sketch the outline, again, it should be great! The problem is that there’s no actual investigation to undertake. There are no physical clues (crime scene’s been tidied up); you can only ask the suspects the same three questions, with none of them having anything substantive to say in response; and at the end, you can accuse anyone you want but regardless of your choice, you appear to only get a sly hint that sure, maybe they did it, without any resolution. Your actions wind up being completely unimportant as far as I can tell, with the player character unable to even attempt to solve the mystery. I suspect, as with the prose, this is the point, but for reasons I won’t rehash here since this is already running long, I really don’t get on with 99% of postmodern detective stories.

(I should say that I found one small bit of interactivity in the scenery, where options changed depending on what order I did things – if you check out the fountain and bum all your sidekick’s coins to throw into the water, you can then go back to the car and get a much larger haul of change to dump in. This leads to a little reflection that I kind of liked, with that act being a sort of commemoration of your soon-to-end existence, a kind of riff on writing your name in water. But this little narrative cul-de-sac, as always, doesn’t appear to have any impact on anything else that happens).

The last redoubt here would be the thematic level – if I found the story was ultimately one that had an impact on me and illuminated some aspect of the human condition, certainly all the above would be forgivable. Alas, I found things uninspiring on this front too. The narrative doesn’t have much in the way of specificity – like, who the god you’re playing is, or how they’re related to the characters you meet and why anyone would want to kill you. This is a problem not just for the murder-mystery side of things because no one has a motive, but also on the literary side of things because there’s not really any conflict. Sure, you can impose your own reading on this empty vessel – the best I can do is to imagine that the murdered god is a representation of religion, so Pygmalion is about allowing you to level a finger at the force that’s displaced you from pride of place in contemporary American society. But the game doesn’t give you enough interesting building-blocks to really support that interpretation.

As I’ve said throughout, this is a well-considered game that doesn’t do things accidentally, and shows quite a lot of skill and craft (though I did notice two bugs – a broken link to an image when examining the portraits in the stateroom, and a missing macro closing tag error in the Chanteuse ending). And I can see it resonating really strongly with certain players. But sad to say on this one, I’m on the outside looking in.

I played the Weight of a Soul in two sessions – it’s a longer game than I’m used to seeing these days. After the first one, I was already working on this review and planning to lead off by saying “the only thing wrong with Weight of a Soul is that it slowed down the previously-torrid pace of my review thread”. Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I have a few more caveats, but this is still a really impressive and enjoyable piece of parser IF, with strong characters and a lovely world in which to get lost.

So I’ve tipped my hand that I think WoaS ends weaker than it begins, but it begins REALLY strong. The opening is in medias res, and showcases the paciness and quality prose on display through the rest of the game. Here’s the first full paragraph, as the player-character – a doctor-in-training named Marid – grounds herself to deal with an emergency:

"He was healthy not a day before, or so he said when he stumbled into the clinic just minutes ago. You should have seen the signs — the shivers, the black stains around his eyes — but the shadows were long in the hour of night, and in the darkness you couldn’t see, you couldn’t see…"

As Marid works with her mentor to try to save the patient (a goblin), details establishing the world and characters are skillfully woven with escalating tension and prompts for the player to assist in the treatment. Then after the crisis is past, there’s a breather for Marid to clean up, return to her home, and unwind with a drink. It’s a bravura, well-paced sequence that draws the player in, establishing the themes and narrative stakes of the story. It also fills in just enough about how the world works – we’re in a steampunk type setting where alchemy is the dominant science – to allow the player to get their bearings, without overburdening the introduction with dry exposition.

Indeed, the light-touch worldbuilding is a major strength of Weight of a Soul. It reminded me of a dozen different settings – the Dishonored immersive sims and the Zachlike Opus Magnum probably most directly – but it’s got its own spin on things, and the game has answers for all sorts of questions about how society, infrastructure, science, and politics work in Furopolis (admittedly the Greek-and-Latin linguistic slurry behind the terminology might not be its strongest suit). Critically, none of these details are rammed down the player’s throat – throughout, descriptions are short and suggestive, conveying what the player needs to know to act and a little bit more to excite interest, without getting flabby. My notes are scattered with delightful coos over things like the paired cold-closet and stove, how the char-golems work (and are named), the dignity of the bemasked mutant bartender, and the individual descriptions of the statues making up the Chorus Metallis, a personified pantheon of alchemical substances. The card-reading – which I think is a completely optional sequence – was also a major highlight. I will say that my suspension of disbelief was a bit shaken by the line of dialogue suggesting that the underclass goblins toiling away in a hellish foundry have access to bereavement leave – probably that’s just due to overfamiliarity with how awful U.S. labor law is though…

Another immediately-noticeable strength is how well Weight of a Soul manages being a big game. To help the player deal with the scope, there are plentiful supports, including a dynamically-updated journal and list of characters, and a beyond-gorgeous map. But I actually barely touched these, because the design itself is careful never to be overwhelming. There are a lot of places to go, but they’re laid out in a big loop, and you can’t stray too far from the beaten path without reaching a dead end and going back to the central artery. Locations have a good amount of scenery, but not too much that it feels exhausting, and the number of characters and objects who can be interacted with is actually relatively modest. It’s generally quite clear why you should be talking to a particular person – and even if you’re a bit fuzzy, either Marid or her interlocuter will make it plain soon enough. And since the game is based over multiple days, the plot mostly progresses not by opening up massive new areas – though it does this a few times – but by changing the existing geography and providing new motivations or roles for characters you’ve already met. This meant that on my first trip out into the Channelworks District I behaved much like a tourist, gawking at every new sight, but quickly grew familiar with it and was able to pick out what was different on subsequent visits. I usually prefer a game go deeper in a relatively smaller set of elements, than sprawl out with more, shallower ones, and that’s especially important in a larger game – Weight of a Soul nails this.

I haven’t talked much yet about what you actually do in the game. This is good too! You’re tasked with investigating the mysterious plague that afflicted the goblin you treat in the opening. So you beat feet to explore his haunts, talk to his associates – and then, as the disease inevitably spreads, the scope of Marid’s investigation expands as well, taking in physical evidence-collection and some light puzzling. Really, though, most of what you do in Weight of a Soul is talk. The author has a good ear for dialogue, and these menu-driven chats unsurprisingly do a good job of establishing the characterization and voice of the supporting cast, while striking a balance between offering up a list of topics to be lawnmowered through one by one, and actual choices that allow the player to proffer their own interpretation of Marid (she is very much a fully-drawn character herself, though, so this is more about putting a bit of spin on her already-established traits).

The reliance on dialogue also opens into how well-done the technical implementation is here. Because there’s a lot of talking in this game, it adopts a visual-novel style approach where after each line or two, the player needs to push a button to advance. I typically find this interface slightly annoying, but here it’s well-chosen, because otherwise the player would be forever scrolling up and trying to find purchase in massive walls of text. This same care’s been taken when it comes to other potentially-tricky bits of the implementation. In one sequence around the mid-game, for example, you need to examine four different cadavers, including looking at different parts of their bodies and their clothing. Once I realized what was in store I had visions of the disambiguation hell to come, but instead it was seamless, with commands like X EYES automatically cueing off of the last person examined.

I did mention up top that I found Weight of a Soul grabbed me less as it went on, though. Much of this is down to a slight mismatch of expectations on my part, but the butter-smooth implementation of the first two-thirds of the game does start to break down a bit in the last few sequences. It’s still very good, don’t get me wrong, but I did find myself wrestling with the parser when trying to exit through a window, unlock a hidden door, or even trying to shortcut talking to Marid’s mentor by typing TALK TO DOCTOR. I also ran into a run-time error in the code generating background events on Day Three.

I also found the dialogue and writing strayed a notch too far into melodrama for my taste as the stakes got higher. Weight of a Soul is I think operating within YA conventions – you’ve got a teenaged protagonist taking on a problem the grown-ups are powerless to solve, a somewhat trope-y love triangle, and after poking at a bunch of small details I’m pretty sure it’s even set in a post-apocalyptic world. This isn’t my genre of choice, and I think heightened emotion is very much part of what folks who like it enjoy, but things like Doctor Cavala declaring that Marid is the one person who’s made all her work worthwhile sometimes took me out of the story.

In terms of gameplay, I kept waiting for things to get a bit more puzzle-y. Since the first half is focused on world-building and investigation, I didn’t mind that there weren’t any real obstacles in the way. But as the climax neared, the few puzzles that did appear were nothing too special (the two main ones being (Spoiler - click to show)outwitting Carnicer, whose solution is telegraphed with what I thought was a very heavy hand, and the (Spoiler - click to show)piston-pressure puzzle, which is just an exercise in trial and error). Many players won’t mind that there are only a few, easy puzzles – but given that they are there, it’s a shame that there’s less creativity on display than in the rest of the game, especially since the alchemypunk world sure seems like it would lend itself to interesting challenges (I was itching to get clever with the Metallic Chorus!)

Finally, for all that I really dug the characters, world, and plot of Weight of a Soul, I didn’t find its themes to resonate that strongly. Marid’s central struggles are definitely legible to the player (letting go of the past, figuring out how to be a healer given the inevitability of death) but they’re very familiar ones, and often felt a bit too abstract, or too tied to the details of the fantasy setting, to land strongly. I’m significantly older than the protagonist, which could be reducing my ability to relate to her journey, but I do think some of the game’s narrative choices wind up short-changing the themes – for example, having the only patient we see Marid treat be the goblin whose awful death kicks off the plot undermines the player’s ability to appreciate her late-game reflections on the grind of serving the same people, day-in and day-out, as they slowly decline. Sure, I intellectually understand that that’s her experience – but my experience as a player is different.

Compounding this slight feeling of abstraction, I was underwhelmed by the final reveal of the mystery, which ideally would have tied Marid’s internal and external conflicts into a unified whole. I’m going to put all of this behind spoiler tags: (Spoiler - click to show)I only really understood Justinian’s plot (that is, the motivation behind it, not what he was doing and that he’s a baddie since that was pretty clear early on) like the third time he explained it. It seems to depend on the player noticing some pretty subtle bits of world-building, like the fact that this is a post-apocalyptic world with the population squeezed into overcrowded cities, which I think is only alluded to if you examine second-order nouns in an incidental mural. And even with the background granted, I thought there was a really substantial mismatch between Justinian’s stated aims – radically change the world for the better, somehow – and means – culling the population of the poor so they don’t have so suffer so much. I’m happy to accept him as a delusional psychopath, but Marid seems to think what he’s doing has some logic to it, and not I think just because of her puppy-dog crush. And since the major plot felt like it reduced to “eh, dude’s nuts” I didn’t experience much catharsis around Marid’s final choices. Oh, and while I’m being spoiler-y, I also thought Carnicer’s actions didn’t make any sense (she was a hired hitman, paid to knock off Doctor Cavala but not a member of the conspiracy – so what possible reason would she have to freelance on an unpaid gig trying to kill the person her patron specifically told her not to harm?)

Again, though, I think like 75% of my criticisms here are pretty much just down to me wanting a slightly different experience than Weight of a Soul is offering up – if you’re in the market for a YA-style adventure with dialogue-first gameplay, I don’t think there’s anything else remotely as good. And most of that remaining quarter would be pretty easily addressed with a few nips and tucks before the next release. Even in this Brobdingnagian review, I haven’t managed to even name-check everything that delighted me in Weight of a Soul (let me squeeze in a final pair: the undead pigeons, and the way you’re introduced to Horatio standing by a bridge). This is a game that I’m quite sure folks will still be recommending ten years from now, and I’m excited I got to play it when it was brand new.

Perihelion is a well-done game that I admired more than enjoyed. It’s got a compelling, hypercompressed and occasionally poetic prose style that’s really well done, and the aesthetic pleasure is compounded by some neat color-gradient backdrops that do double-duty to indicate time of day. The setting is an elliptically-described alien world with awesome vistas to explore, and there a few gentle puzzles that help give the player some direction in what’s otherwise a fairly abstract story space. Unfortunately, I found my appreciation of it to be held back by the game’s occupying an uncanny valley between the abstract and the literal, and by its overuse of an awful timed-text mechanic.

The opening and closing are the strongest parts of Perihelion. In the beginning, you (some kind of alien – (Spoiler - click to show)I think a sort of air-elemental?) witness a comet breaking up and ejecting a (different) alien, in a sequence that’s compellingly written and prompts you to come up with adjectives to describe how you perceive the novel form of this interloper into your world. In the ending, the viewpoint shifts to that of the interloper, who describes what they’ve experienced and recontextualizes the events of the game.

In the middle sections, you guide the first alien as you decide to help the second – OK, look, this is getting unwieldy, I’m going to call the first alien “Fred” and the second one “Sam”, OK? – you guide Fred as you decide to help Sam return to the stars. Or at least, you decide to do that if unlike me you head first to the Mausoleum-Museum to chat with Sam, rather than saving it for last – I spent much of the middle section wandering around unsure of what I was supposed to be doing, and in retrospect wish the game had opened up free navigation only after the initial sequence with Sam imparted some direction.

Getting Sam spaceborne again involves going to three different locations on Fred’s planet and accomplishing a series of small tasks. These are barely puzzles – you’ll go to an observatory and be told that it’s cloudy, so you need to wait until it clears up, or try to slip into a guarded location and be told you need to do that on a weekend night. Once you’re past these barriers, there’s only one option to take in the different locations (except with the (Spoiler - click to show)lava, where you can choose to do a kinda-risky thing or a stupidly-risky thing), so it’s a quick matter to do everything you need to do.

Or at least, it should be a quick matter. The overwhelmingly worst part of Perihelion is that much of the text is timed. When you move from one area to another, there’s about a five second lag. When you sleep, there’s a similar pause before time resumes and you can act again. This is frustrating enough on its own, but when making progress meant waiting around for half a week to be able to access one of the locations, I wound up alt-tabbing to read Twitter to kill time during the delays, which really reduced my enjoyment and immersion in the story. I’m not a blanket no-timed-text person – I think there are times when, if used sparingly, it can emphasize a really critical point in a game – but its use here is just awful.

My other critique is a little harder to pin down, but I wished Perihelion had committed a little harder to either being an abstract art-game, or a more grounded space-adventure instead. It sits in an awkward middle where key pieces of the situation are under- or un-explained, just alluded to through obscure allusions and complex language, but the player’s primary engagement is still a more traditional model of traveling around a map and solving puzzles. The puzzle-solving is undermined by the player’s weak grasp on what they’re trying to accomplish in each location (I still don’t think I could really explain what Fred actually did to help Sam, on a literal level), and my engagement with the rich, dreamlike language was undermined by having to shuffle back and forth trying to circumvent obstacles. As a result, even though I really liked pretty much every individual part of Perihelion other than the timed text, I don’t think it made as much of an impression on me as it deserved to.

I really dig the premise of Sunny’s Summer Vacation – you play a Very Good Dog (a corgi) whose person, Emma, is headed to the beach for a weeklong vacation with one of her parents (you get to pick if it’s a mom or a dad). The serious part of the backdrop is that Emma’s folks are in the middle of getting a divorce, so it’s your job to take care of her and cheer her up. This is a relatable set-up that allows for Sunny’s cartoony antics – playing volleyball with a seal or helping Emma build sand-castles – to sit alongside a plot arc with some depth and resonance, as lots of people have been on one side or another of this particular experience.

Structurally, the way this plays out is that each day, you help Sunny have fun with Emma by playing one of a series of minigames, with success rewarded by shells you can use to upgrade her treehouse-cum-shanty. Then each evening, there’s a vignette between Emma and her parent that advances the story of their relationship and the divorce. In the story sections, you often have a few choices about how to interact with Emma, though these usually reduce to either being playful or being really playful. When it comes to the minigames, you’re in the driver’s seat, and that’s where the large majority of the game winds up being spent.

This is where the issues come in, since I found the minigames dull and unrewarding. There are four of them, and they remain the same each day:

• A scavenger hunt where you hover your mouse over some highlighted words to find out whether you found treasure; after doing this about 20 times, the round ends.
• A stone-skipping challenge that plays out like a Twine version of a golf game, as you need to click to stop fast-moving counters the determine the orientation, angle, power, and spin of your shot (either I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing or the coding here is wonky, though, since my best throw came when I released a stone at a 97 degree angle to the water!)
• A sand-castle building game where Emma describes her plan, and then you dig sand and use differently-shaped buckets to build walls, gates, fountains, and castles in a 3x3 grid.
• A volleyball game, played against an easy, medium, or hard opponent, where you click to serve, bump, set, and spike.

These are all good ideas for beach activities, but the problem is that many of them are overly complicated and drag on way too much, while offering zero in the way of interesting choices. The volleyball one is the worst offender – you need to click to serve, click up to three times to see if your opponent manages to bump, set, and spike it back to you, then make up to an additional three clicks to bump, set, and spike yourself, then click again to see if your shot succeeded… you or the opponent can fail at any stage, but against the toughest opponent, a single point can take up a couple of shots back and forth, so it’s a lot of clicking with no strategy or choices to determine whether you win or lose.

Compounding the boredom, the notional goal of the minigames – winning sea shells with which to pay the gopher for upgrades to the shanty – wasn’t very motivating. You get almost the same number of shells for mediocre performance as for a perfect run, and I got more than enough shells to finish the upgrades midway through the vacation. Plus the upgrades didn’t appear to do anything to change the description of the shanty, or open up any new options – all that happened was a number indicating my shanty level ratcheted up.

Besides the minigames, there’s not really much to do during the day – if you explore all the locations you’ll find a few small treasures that wind up getting featured in your shanty’s trophy cabinet and win you an achievement. But you’ll do this on your very first day and after that the environment stays static, despite indications that a fair will be coming to town and a shift in the tides might open up the way to a hidden cove (the about text indicates that a later, commercial release is planned, so possibly these locations are meant to be fleshed out at that point).

Happily, the evening sequences are well-written (though the author’s got maybe a touch of adjectivitis), and I enjoyed seeing the dynamic between Emma and her parent develop. Sunny’s attempts to play with her and cheer her up are heart-warming and satisfying, though I wished there was a way to get a fuller view of how Emma feels about the divorce, or what her relationship with the absent parent is like. Also, indications that the vacationing parent still has feelings for their former partner, and the wistful way they talk about their absence, took me aback – it sometimes feels like the divorce is something that’s happened to the family, rather than a choice being made (I almost think game was originally about the other parent dying, then was quickly rewritten to be about a divorce). But given that you’re playing a Corgi, I suppose this muddiness in understanding the marriage is appropriate.

Anyway the result of this mismatch is that by a couple days in, I started skipping the minigames so I could get to the good stuff, except then Emma complained that she was said and feeling like she wasn’t making the most of the vacation. So I forced myself to suffer through at least a couple for each of the remaining days, but I still only got a mediocre ending that didn’t seem to hold much in the way of catharsis or character development for anybody. Part of me wanted to replay again to see if I could get a more satisfying resolution – but the thought of having to go through all that filler to get to the good stuff dissuaded me. With that said, the core of Sunny’s Summertime Vacation is solid, and if the later release retunes the minigames, it’d be well worth another look.

Excalibur is somewhere between odd duck and rara avis. Created by a murder’s row of talent, it’s a Twine game built as a fan-wiki for a low-budget BBC space opera from the 70s. There’s some dynamism to it, with a few additional links and comments opening up as you read through the entries, and a sequence that’s more or less an ending. But there’s no puzzle-solving beyond what’s happening in the player’s own head, as they browse through the wiki and mentally assemble each individual jigsaw piece into a mental model of what was going on with the show.

Excalibur’s success, then, is all down to how enjoyable it is to read each of its pages and engage with the questions it raises. Happily, it is a success. There’s an enormous amount of craft on display in how the authors’ have conjured up this two-season wonder, spanning not just plot summaries and character bios, but also backstage drama like writer/director clashes, special-effects mishaps, and more. My upbringing was about 15 years too late and 3,500 miles too occidental to fully appreciate all the references, but I know enough about Windrush and the coal miner’s strike to tell that the story is cannily situated in its time and isn’t just a classic Dr. Who send-up (though I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of that here too).

Of course, just methodically clicking through cast and crew listings for a nonexistent show could get a little dull, no matter how many finely-crafted details and in-jokes there are to find (the Russian-language poster for Terrovator – or “Death Lift” – made me laugh). In a well-considered move, there’s an element of creepypasta to proceedings too, which provides some of the most immediately engaging stuff. As you browse the entries, you come across hints that there could be something odd about the fact that no recordings of the show still exist, or that some of the accidents that plagued the cast and crew had to do with the incorporation of a ritual in the series one finale.

I’ll say that little of this struck me as super original – perhaps I’m biased because I live about three miles from Jack Parson’s old house – and I thought the way the “trivia” and “fan theory” pages spelled out many of the mysteries was less effective than it would have been to just let the player notice this stuff and come up with their own ideas. But overall, this element definitely does the job of providing the sugar-coating that entices the reader to do a comprehensive dive through the wiki (I especially enjoyed figuring out what was up with the crossing-guard and tracking down his comments).

What’s ultimately more compelling is that in amongst all the speculation about whether the show is a (Spoiler - click to show)tulpa and what exactly happened to Old Alfie, Excalibur engages intelligently with the role nostalgia plays in our culture and interrogates the impulses that give rise to these kinds of massive fan-projects. One key perspective comes from the writings of a French existentialist who consulted and wrote a few of the show’s scripts, including one where the character’s experiences seem to presage future developments and even mirror those of their off-screen counterparts ((Spoiler - click to show)Bleak Planet):

"Vaillant defines ‘haunting’ as the ineluctable repetitions of immaterial, atavistic terror birthed by the machinations of human consciousness. In this view, humankind is doomed to face a ceaseless mockery at the hands of its own creations."

He ultimately espouses a radical ethic of forgetting, and in the cast interviews that are some of the last pieces to open up, you can see some of them coming round to this approach too (there’s some in-show mirroring of these ideas too in how the Lethe Ray is used in the final episodes). And the game doesn’t shy away from portraying the negative side of obsessive fandom, largely through the gatekeeping, nerd-raging character of Ian Newell. At the same time, this pro-oblivion theme doesn’t exhaust what’s in Excalibur, not just because of the obvious love and dedication that went into making it, but also in the experiences of the less-crazy fans and the positive connections they’ve developed out of their devotion to this deeply weird (Spoiler - click to show)and possibly made up show. The urge to reify our memories through a shared cataloguing has taken on the very specific form of the fan-wiki at this particular moment in late-stage capitalism – and yes, there’s politics in Excalibur too – but it’s also recognizably the same urge as leads to story-telling at a funeral. The game cues up the difficulty of finding the balance between remembrance and forgetting, a very human dilemma, even as it comes down more strongly on one side than the other.

I noticed a few technical niggles with the game (the “Television Series” category link at the bottom of the “Excalibur (TV Series)” link doesn’t work, nor do any to the character page of Chanticleer) and some typos and inconsistencies (the audio archive page mistakenly lists series two episode 13 as a second episode 11, the Lodestar One page says it should be included in the “Derivative Works” category but it’s not actually listed, and one of the trivia entries for the episode Oneironaut says it was directed by Goulding, when obviously it was really LaGomme). I was also able to sequence-break by accessing the series two episode summaries before they officially unlocked (via the wiki-maintainer’s profile page). Though given that this is meant to be an amateur, fan-driven effort, perhaps all these errors are diegetic! Again, there’s a smart alignment of form and function that means even mistakes help draw the player in rather than drive them away. Excalibur’s great accomplishment is to conjure up a richly realized alternate world in which to get lost, while raising more than enough interesting reflections for when we return to the real one.

Much like Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires, An Amical Bet is about a dashing lesbian thief committing crimes in a lavish setting, but unfortunately this one doesn’t rise to nearly the same heights. The premise bodes well – unwinding after a big score, the protagonist and her lover relax by seeing who can be the first to steal something shiny, something useful, and something unexpected while at a party in Rome. Unfortunately, the implementation doesn’t live up to the hook.

Partially this is because of the writing. There are a host of typos and strangely-written passages, including the title which I think is supposed to be “Amicable”, and some of these phrases are so tortured I can’t even tell what the mistake was – like the corridor that’s described as “fastuous” (that could be a typo for “fatuous”, but that still wouldn’t make any sense?) With that said, occasionally some humor gets through the tangled prose – this response to TAKE STATUE made me snort:

"'Yes and to do what exactly? My God, I really have to stop drinking wine.' you say, drinking wine." [all punctuation issues sic]

The major issue is that the scavenger hunt, such it is, doesn’t hold any interest. Unlike the locked-door puzzle in fellow Quest game A Strange Dream, it is possible to complete this one. But there aren’t actually any puzzles to solve – you just go from room to room looking for portable objects, and if you take something that satisfies one of the conditions, the game will tell you in bolded text that you’ve got one of the three necessary items. None of the objects are hidden or gated in any way – it’s just a matter of hoovering your way through the dozen-odd locations – and for the “unexpected” and “useful” objects, I have to confess I didn’t fully understand the logic behind their selection.

There is a small, fun twist at the ending, and the game definitely wouldn’t have been better if it took longer to get where it’s going. Still, An Amical Bet is a very small, very slight thing that serves to pass five minutes of time but not much else.

Thalia is the Greek muse of comedy, and she’s an apt namesake for what’s the most purely fun game I’ve yet hit in the festival. It felt like LTSS was grown in a lab to plaster a grin to my face – I’m a sucker for anything involving British twits, heists, libraries, and museums, and here we’ve got the eponymous burglar planning not one but three heists (at a library, a museum, and a British manor), all to tweak the nose of a supercilious society doyenne. Oh, and there’s an extended game of cat and mouse played against a sexy art-theft consultant to Scotland Yard. Still, even if these particular tropes aren’t your specific cup of tea, the breezy, clever LTSS is a rewarding gem of a game.

Admittedly, I went into this one expecting to like it – one half of the authoring duo, E. Joyce, previously wrote What the Bus? for the 2020 Comp and Social Lycanthropy Disorder for last year’s EctoComp, both of which I’d played and really enjoyed. And the gauntlet thrown down by the ABOUT text got me even more excited:

"[The game] has been lovingly researched; much of this research was subsequently thrown out the window for reasons including plot convenience, genre convention, wanting to have female characters do things that women shouldn’t historically have been doing, and things just being funnier that way."

Happily, LTSS lives up to this initial promise. The opening does a great job of establishing the milieu, the antagonist, and the player character, who’s a social climber with a masked alter-ego and a fondness for relieving snobs of their possessions. Hearing her stuck-up hostess brag about the gems she’s about to parade at a fancy party, our heroine takes it upon herself to lift not just the jewels, but also a rare book and valuable painting in the lady’s possession.

The game thus plays out as a trio of heists, each proceeding according to a well-paced structure: there’s an initial planning meeting with your sidekick Gwen, who’s a seamstress and gadgeteer of no mean skill, then a sequence of casing the joint incognito, before the final nocturnal visitation to put the scheme into action. Of course, the best laid plans of mice and muses gang aft agley, so even the most meticulous preparation doesn’t save you from occasionally having to improvise. And then after each heist is done, you get to read about your exploits and get debriefed – and rated – by Gwen.

These sequences are all really well done – none wear out their welcome, and each builds momentum into the next as you’re eager to see how the groundwork you’re laying will pay off. Each works differently, too, which helps keep interest high. The briefing scenes are pure dialogue, primarily giving you a chance to add some shades to Lady Thalia’s characterization as the outlines of the plan get established. When you hit the streets, you usually get a choice of three or four leads to pursue to gather information, hide your tools of the trade in a useful spot, or recruit confederates, before time is up and it’s time for the heist. It’s possible to succeed or fail at each of these subtasks, which could make the actual burglary sections faster and easier, or more time-consuming and challenging – these bits are set up as linear gauntlets, and can be appropriately nerve-wracking, though generally you’re more in danger of making a mess of things and having to endure Gwen’s mockery than of losing life and limb.

The challenges are varied, too. Most of the social challenges use a system where you choose an approach from a menu of direct, friendly, or leading (this last meaning you’re asking leading questions aimed at getting more voluble types to share more than they ought). This is a nice framework, since it creates some structure around what could otherwise be very fuzzy social challenges, and it also prods the player to think about the personalities and desires of the other characters rather than as mechanical obstacles to circumvent (admittedly, sometimes using the direct route with servants and employees can feel a bit like bullying, though Thalia typically stays on the right side of that line). One heist largely hinges on a word puzzle; another’s all about planning ahead; and a third involves Burke’s Peerage, because of course this is that kind of game.

The writing is just as good as the puzzle design, in particular when it comes to the protagonist. Thalia herself is a joy to inhabit, and has some of the best lines. Here’s her reflecting on how her status has risen after many successful jobs:

"You are at the level of wealth where you can get people to do you favours by giving them money, but not quite at the level where people will do you favours because you said you might give them money, so you are here in disguise."

And here she’s sizing up a potential mark:

"She has the air of a spinsterish academic — which you don’t mean as an insult; you can appreciate a bluestocking. You’ve appreciated some of them quite a bit in your day."

(Yes, Thalia is unashamedly randy).

There are a few flies in the ointment: I ran into a couple of small bugs (when faking a swoon in front of one of the museum guards, I got a “cannot execute macro” error, and when chatting with Lady Satterthwaite’s maid, one of the friendly dialogue options appeared to redirect back to the same passage, so I had to choose a different approach to progress). There was one sequence that I found hard to parse –the duel of wits with Mel in the museum – where I understood what Thalia was planning but wasn’t clear on how to implement it given the options available (this was the one place where I save-scummed). Gwen also scored my performance on the first heist as a 15 out of 13, which could be an error or just an indication of how awesome Lady Thalia is, I suppose. But these minor flaws do nothing to detract from the zippy, cannily-designed pleasures on offer – LTSS is a must-play, and here’s hoping this isn’t the last we see of its dashing heroine.