Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

Most of the Spring Thing games I’ve played so far have been relatively intense, so it was kind of nice to get another low-key entry after finished Orbital Decay. The Bright Blue Ball is a short, cute parser game pitched at IF beginners, and while its slightness, and slight wonkiness, means that it’s probably less suited for that purpose than other, more robust efforts to create a parser-IF gateway drug, nonetheless it’s a pleasant way to spend 15 minutes, with a few darker notes around the edges reinforcing how nice it can be to spend time in a safe place like this one.

Those darker notes are primarily about the situation that kicks off the action: this is the second Spring Thing game I’ve come across where you play a dog (the other of course being Custard and Mustard’s Big Adventure), and as the story opens you’re with your human “parents” as you flee your home due to a bombing alert – the resonance with the war in Ukraine seems entirely intentional. Thankfully, you quickly reach safety, but along the way you wind up losing your favorite toy, the eponymous ball, and the game consists of solving three or four small puzzles to retrieve it.

It’s always fun to play as an animal, and BBB does a good job of providing smell-centric descriptions and a robust SMELL command to allow for olfactory exploration. The protagonist’s canine nature also makes some traditional parser limitations more reasonable, like a one-item inventory limit that’s fair enough given that you have to carry things in your mouth. At the same time, I felt like the game sometimes didn’t go far enough to commit to its conceit: the first puzzle, for example, requires you to find a key and unlock a door, which is a good introduction to a common IF situation but makes for a bizarre mental image.

Speaking of the puzzles, they’re pretty much all of the medium-dry-goods variety, with one guess-the-action challenge thrown in on top. They’re all very heavily signposted, which is appropriate for the target audience, and feel satisfying to resolve. I did struggle for a bit with the first one, possibly due to some small bugs: I could smell something metallic in a table drawer, but after opening it the smell seemed to go away. I guessed that there was a key somewhere, which proved correct after I tried to TAKE KEY, but it hadn’t to that point showed up in the description of either the room, the table, or the drawer. Similarly, I was briefly stymied once I started wandering the city’s streets because one location had an unmentioned exit (for anyone else who hits a similar barrier: try going north). I also worried I’d made the game unwinnable when I solved the puzzles related to the little girl outside of the intended order, but despite the text seeming a little off-kilter it all eventually came right. As a final small niggle, X TABLE in the newsstand didn’t result in any output, indicating a missing description.

None of these bugs did much to impact my enjoyment – I usually wouldn’t list them all in a review, but since I don’t have a transcript I’m doing so in case it’s useful for the author. BBB is a fun, small game with a positive vibe that acknowledges that even when big scary things are happening in the world, small bits of kindness are important – maybe more important than ever (would that this message didn’t feel especially timely, given the state of the world). I enjoyed my time with the game, and would happily play (and test, if that’d be useful!) another game by the author.

For all that its plot hinges on a lone astronaut’s attempt to escape a doomed space station before it falls out of the sky, Orbital Decay is a surprisingly low-key affair. This choice-based take on a classic premise is distinguished by steering more into real-world plausibility than is typical (given how grounded the game’s tech is, I was surprised to learn the space station was orbiting an alien planet), but also by simple puzzles and a willingness to back-burner the imminent threat when there’s an opportunity to poke around its well-realized setting. This winds up playing to the game’s strong research chops – it’s fun to explore the station and read the various infodumps on how it should be working – but means the stakes and challenge felt reasonably low throughout.

I got a lot of enjoyment out of the game’s accurate rendition of NASA bureaucratese. After some early hiccups – the writing in the opening starts out a bit too wide-eyed (“The celestial heaven - an immense sea of black and stars, almost as if the uncounted fiery eyes of the Gods themselves were peering through the darkness”) and then overcorrects towards an overly-abrupt style when laying out the inciting incident:

"As an astronaut assigned to the COL (Crewed Orbital Laboratory) Bowman, you’re currently conducting a spacewalk to repair a failing AE-35 unit.

"Swiftly and without warning, the Bowman is struck by space debris. You survive, but the impact sends you spiraling into the vastness. Suddenly, you feel a violent recoil and realize your tether has miraculously remained intact!"

But once you’re back aboard the station, things settle down, and as you work through the puzzles, you’re treated to stuff like this:

"You’ve opted for the CEVIS pre-breathing protocol; before you can begin suit preparation, you need to perform exercise on a stationary bike while pre-breathing pure oxygen and then slightly depressurize the airlock to 10.2psi."

Maybe I’m a strange person, but I really like this! It gives a nice, grainy texture that lends novelty to a fairly played-out scenario, and if it sometimes undercuts the gravity of the protagonist’s predicament, I think that’s an OK tradeoff. The downside of this highly-technical style is that it risks bewildering the player by expecting them to have the same facility with jargon as the protagonist, but Orbital Decay avoids this by keeping the puzzles and obstacles quite simple to work through. There’s a pleasingly complex protocol required to move through an airlock, for example, but all the player has to do is click a series of links in order and enjoy the technobabble the game spits out. Similarly, there are a lot of different gadgets and items to find, but they’re pretty much all floating around in corridors, and with no inventory limit it’s easy to just grab all of them and then choose the usually-obvious options to use them appropriately.

I sometimes got the sense that the author realized that they’d streamlined things quite a lot and tried to re-add some complexity. For example, at one point you need to do an EVA to enter a damaged portion of the station from the outside, and have to make it across the gap. You have a large number of options to try, from using a tether to anchor you as you jump to using a fire extinguisher as an improvised propellant, but since you’ll have almost certainly picked up a jetpack that’s specifically designed for these kinds of situations as you went through the airlock, you’ll obviously want to just use that. Similarly, one of the options you’re given as soon as the game starts, when you’re still floating out in space, is to remove your helmet. It fleshes out the list of choices, sure, but having a “shoot self in face” button doesn’t really improve interactivity or add difficulty.

Also on the negative side of the ledger, I did run into some technical niggles, including a soft state-reset where after pressurizing an airlock, my choice to look around before heading onward somehow depressurized the airlock and put me back in my suit. Some text that probably should only fire once – like the protagonist musing “where is everyone” upon seeing the empty crew hub – repeats whenever you backtrack. And played on a phone, there are some misalignment issues that meant that some lists wound up mismatched, making the last “puzzle” (you need to pick a landing point from a list that includes an assessment of how well-suited they’re likely to be) harder than it was intended – though again, it was probably intended to be too easy.

Would Orbital Decay be a stronger game if it was harder? I think in some sense yes, the version that has timers, inventory limits, and more challenging puzzles probably does a better job of realizing the premise. And the low-key vibe extends to the ending, which I found pretty anticlimactic. At the same time, I feel like I’ve played a million games milking drama and challenge out of escaping a crashing spaceship, so playing one that leans hard into nerdy technical detail, where it’s no big deal if I want to ride an exercise bike or rehydrate a burger mid-crisis, made for a nice change of pace.

I don’t usually second-guess myself when I have a review that’s out of line from the main thrust of opinion on a game – different people are different, and having a variety of takes on a work I think is helpful for players and authors alike. At the same time, when I’m pretty much off on my one, and especially when I’ve got a more negative view than others have, it’s hard not to wonder whether the problem is me. And there’s probably no recent game where I’ve had more of these second thoughts than Autumn Chen’s previous game, A Paradox Between Worlds. While I admired the enormous amount of work that went into it, and found the character interactions at the heart of the game really well-drawn and engaging, the several metafictional layers atop that heart worked less well for me, and the Tumblr-mimicking gameplay which involved lots of highly-granular decisions felt exhausting. In the face of near-universal admiration for the game, though, I’ve gone back and wondered whether my lack of personal experience with the kind of fanfiction-focused communities it depicts led me to judge it unfairly, or if my real-life exhaustion (my son was about six weeks old when I played it) was what was actually making me feel tired.

The bad news is that NYE2019 doesn’t help me resolve that question; the good news is that that’s because it’s a much more focused piece that foregrounds the character work I’d already enjoyed in APBW, without any of the stuff that had turned me off. Add in a richly-detailed setting – the protagonist is part of a Chinese-American family at a party mainly attended by other Chinese Americans – and well-framed choices that create a high degree of responsivity and you’ve got a game that’s been a highlight of my festival so far.

The game opens with a bit of Tolstoy-biting – “every social gathering is horrific in its own way” – and mostly lives up to the melodramatic gauntlet it lays down. As Quiyi (or Karen), a college senior with social anxiety who’s suddenly thrust into proximity with a set of high-school friends and acquaintances she’s largely not seen for years – several of whom she used to crush on – not to mention the inherent awkwardness of being around a bunch of older adults who primarily see her as the child she used to be, the protagonist is facing landmines aplenty.

Fortunately, you’re given a lot of options to navigate this complex milieu. I’m not familiar with Dendry, but at least as the author has adapted it, the interface looks fairly ChoiceScript-y, but with the ability to scroll back up and reread recent passages and without the sometimes-intrusive stats. Your possible courses of action are well-framed, with a small bit of writing often providing a little bit of a preview for what might be in store. Here’s the opening set of choices for who you might want to hang out with or what you might want to do:

• Mom - She’s hanging around somewhere…
• Kevin Zhao - In the basement with the other kids.
• Wander around aimlessly - Keeping your head down…
• Food - The ever-inviting lure of snacks…
• Use your cellphone - First finding a safe location.
• Emily Chen - Sitting alone in an alcove…

The social interactions sometimes have fewer choices, and occasionally there’ll be a grayed-out choice that’s visible but unavailable, usually to denote that Quiyi’s social anxieties are constraining her, but even on a second playthrough I always felt like I had a lot of different ways to approach each situation. Despite all this freedom, though, the game actually has a tight structure – after a freeform opening, there’s a bottleneck as you sit down for dinner with the other young adults, leading to a nocturnal walk through the snow that may lead to a second open-ended section before things wrap up. It’s a canny framework, allowing for a lot of different paths through the story and making me feel like I was directing the story, while still making sure that there’s an overall shape to the narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end regardless of what you choose.

Indeed, given the wealth of detail on offer, unlike the protagonist I had a lot of fun just exploring the party. I’ve been to a bunch of gatherings that aren’t too dissimilar in general dynamics from the one on offer here (though the specificity of this being a largely Chinese-American party was novel – I’m more familiar with being one of the token white guys at parties thrown by my Iranian-American wife’s family friends, or those of my South Asian- or Korean-American high school friends) and everything rings very true. The sequence where highly-educated lefties argue over the 2016 primary made me grind my teeth in just the way those actual conversations did, and on a more positive note the descriptions for the snacks were particularly good – the haw flakes sounded really appealing, and there’s some good character beats in just short asides on the presence of Lay’s potato chips on the food table:

"Anyway, these chips are for the kids, that is, you. Because the parents decided that ABC kids need their American snacks, or something like that. And well, you eat a bag full. Yeah."

Throughout, the writing is a significant strength, and while Quiyi’s narration is generally quite understated, this means there’s little distracting from the canny way particular details emerge into focus:

"You put on your jacket and your shoes. No one is watching you open the door. You leave. You’re free. It’s quiet. Snowflakes glisten in the air, shining under the streetlights. Your footprints defile the fresh snow."

My first time through the game, Quiyi mostly wandered around aimlessly, having a few haphazard stabs of conversation with her peers at dinner but otherwise spending time at the snack table, wandering aimlessly, and checking in with her (nice) mom and (standoffish) brother. Predictably, this led to an ending where her feelings of isolation and pre-post-college ennui didn’t move much over the course of the evening, even as it was clear there might have been other potential outcomes, or at least that other people were capable of achieving moments of connection. I though this late-game passage about her feelings of alienation and having let opportunities slip through her fingers making the inevitable let’s-all-take-a-bunch-of-photos-so-paste-on-a-smile phase of the evening all the worse:

"Someone takes a picture of Emily and Miri, smiling and hugging. You didn’t know they got along but somehow it makes you a little sad. Emily stops smiling for the photo with her parents. They don’t force her to smile. Come to think of it, you haven’t spoken to her dad all night, even though you worked with him before. Oh well."

It’s a flat recitation, but that gels with how I imagine she’d be retreating into numbness as a self-defense measure. I found a lot of pathos in this ending, as Quiyi’s failures felt like ones of imagination: as she wandered alone through the snow, she conjured up daydreams of difference sci-fi futures, but she can’t picture a conversation that goes well. If the story peters out rather than reaching catharsis, with her getting stuck in an extended moment of stasis despite her impending graduation, that’s fitting, and had its own kind of poignancy to me.

Except I should probably say my failures, rather than Quiyi’s, since this is only one branch the story can go down. My second play-through, I was able to help her to some moments of positive connection, including establishing a burgeoning romance with Emily. This set of scenes is also well-written – I found the awkward I-like-you conversation segueing into awkward but really amazing hand-holding very relatable, as well as the out-of-nowhere discussion of whether to have kids which is ridiculous for 22 year olds who haven’t even kissed yet to do, but seems completely plausible to me.

Ultimately though I liked my first playthrough better – there’s something inherently artificial about gameplay where you make the right choices and you get to date someone, and while there’s some funny lampshading of it, this plotline inevitably feels a bit more tropey and familiar than the one I first experienced. I’m not sure this is anything I would have picked up on if it had been the only narrative option on offer, though, so it’s more a matter of preference than an actual weakness.

My only real complaint here is that I think this branch might be too hard to get onto, at least on a first playthrough – having not played the prequel game, I hadn’t necessarily picked out Emily as a more significant character than say my mom, and since as far as I can tell opting to talk to her in the game’s first set of choices is necessary or at least very helpful for being able to strengthen the relationship later on. But playing as someone with social anxiety, first time around it made more sense to ease into the party by checking in with family, grabbing some food, etc., by which point I think that ship appears to have sailed.

I also have a note of caution. As I’ve been writing this review, I pulled the game up to double-check some stuff, and discovered that there’s a Status page that tells you how hungry or thirsty you are, your overall emotional state, and provides some background on the other characters that explains some stuff I had to dig to find out (like what’s the deal with your parents’ marriage) as well as displaying a numerical ranking for your relationships with each of them. I completely missed this when I played – I did so on my phone, which maybe made it harder to find some options – and while it the info it provides probably makes it easier to get together with Emily, honestly I’m kind of glad I didn’t know it was there, since the in-game exposition covers these bases in a considerably more deft way. So if you haven’t played the game, maybe steer clear of that page.

Anyway hopefully it’s clear that these are beyond niggly nits to pick. I’m really glad to have played New Year’s Eve 2019, and I’m glad I can now wholeheartedly jump on the Autumn Chen fanwagon.

Dear reader, you don’t know me from Adam so you’re going to have to take my word for it, but: I am not especially easy to flummox. That sounds like a boast, and I suppose it is and there’s more boasting to come, but still, I’ve read Joyce and Woolf and Foster Wallace and had some struggles, sure, but modulo Finnegans Wake I feel like I understood and appreciated them. In undergrad I was able to keep straight the astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and advanced classical mechanics I was studying all at the same time, and did fine in law school even when having to unknot the trickiest problems of jurisdiction in my Fed Courts class. My favorite game in last year’s Spring Thing was Queenlash, which is like 80,000 words of superdense metaphor about Cleopatra.

So when I tell you that I spent my playthrough of Abate not having the first clue what on God’s green earth was going on, I hope you will give me the benefit of the doubt that it’s not because I’m just a big dummy easily confused by nonlinear storytelling. Like, I’m going to summarize the plot, and if you haven’t played it you’ll read the summary and think “oh, that’s not so bad, I kind of get it,” but trust me, no, you don’t.

There’s definitely something liberating about playing a game so free of the bounds of traditional narrative causality that it could serve as an interactive rebuttal to the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, and I have to confess that like 25% of the bemused chuckles I emitted during my playthrough were prompted by the anarchic glee here on display. But it gets exhausting not being able to understand whether anything that’s happening is connected to any of the story’s previous events, or will lead to any coherent resolution in the future – especially where, as here, the prose doesn’t provide sufficient pop to serve as a throughline and the choice the center-align all the text makes reading a bit of a headache.

OK, here comes the summary so you can see what I mean: in this bespoke choice-based game, you play a student stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop on the day of a big school celebration. There’s a lot of incident: your best friend is bent on confessing his love to the student council president, who in turn wants to buttonhole you to rope you into helping with the school activities. Meanwhile, you’re trying to avoid a frenemy who doesn’t realize that you’re the one who wrote the now-defunct cooking blog that’s inspired their own culinary efforts. Every once in a while, for reasons that remained obscure to me, everything blacks out and you confront the void – and a beyond-sketchy tempter figure whose proposed “you’ll just owe me one, it’ll be no biggie” deal seemed like an incredibly bad idea – and things reset, until they don’t.

Again, that sounds wacky but not too far outside the realm of comprehension, so I’ll provide a taste of what Abate is like. This is part of an embedded flashback where you reflect on how you met your best friend:

“'Why do you even space out so often?' Vysian would always ask you with confusion, and you would make something up but one day you decided that he deserves the answer – 'spices' you shout, 'I was thinking about the spices that adds the most value to boiled potatoes, I’m yet to find the one.' 'Onions' Vyusian assures, 'boiled potatoes taste the best with onions'. You felt a spark within your heart that could only be used to light up the dream that one day you may just find the one, and here it was, you rushed to your house, prepared the dish to your satisfaction and take a taste – 'this is indeed the one, my dream has been achieved.'"

There has been no groundwork previously laid for the main characters obsession with potatoes, and if you’d expect there to be some like acknowledgment that “onions” are not a spice, your expectations will go unfulfilled. It’s entertainingly zany to read a little bit of stuff like this, sure, but the whole game is this way, with characters running in and exclaiming about stuff that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else before moving on to the next thing. Eventually it ended, after I rejected the deal with the devil and then managed to unite my friend with his crush through the expedient of wandering randomly around the school unsure of what I was doing – so I think I won?

I unfortunately can’t say it was very satisfying, though; the lack of coherence meant that I felt little sense of agency, and the sheer randomness of everything that was happening meant I couldn’t find a consistent set of themes or ideas with which to engage. Maybe that’s the point, and it’s all meant to mirror the atomized, discombobulated nature of postmodern life – but even if that’s the case, more unified aesthetics and a few concessions to causality would probably have helped the argument land a bit better.

Based on the title, I went into Another Cabin in the Woods expecting a horror story – but while, per the author’s note, that was the initial conception of the game, what’s on offer here is an emotionally-charged reflection on long-buried family trauma. There are no monsters here, only poor communication skills, though man, the damage they can do is sometimes almost as bad.

(That last sentence is a paraphrased bit of Mountain Goats stage banter).

Speaking of musicians, this is an audio-rich game, with sound effects, a musical score, and even voice acting. This is fitting given the plot setup, which sees the protagonist visit her childhood home after the death of her mother in order to clean it out before it’s sold – the mother was a musician, and much of the first part of the game involves finding different sheets of music and playing them on the family piano to trigger flashbacks. I can’t speak to the substantial work that went into the audio side of things, as I played the game muted – my life circumstances right now don’t make it easy to play IF with sound on – but I suspect it will enrich the story.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t work well as a text-only work, though, since I enjoyed my time with the game. The cleaning conceit is a smart one, creating a rationale for the protagonist to poke around exploring the cabin and triggering different memories as they visit each space in turn. And the writing is good enough that even without the sound on, I got a sense of what emotion each musical work is meant to evoke:

"The piece starts so quickly, with note after note rushing by on both hands. Every so often there are moments of longer notes, but they are still peppered with rapid bursts of melody."

Throughout there’s a good eye for detail – the prose isn’t doing anything fancy, but again, it effectively communicates the mood of abandonment and decay:

"The smell of rotting food and animal leavings mixes into the air before you. Dishes piled high in the sink threaten to topple over and shatter. A crunch underfoot tells you some already have."

As for the story itself, it’s unsurprisingly downbeat, but it mostly earns its pathos honestly, I think, and keeps the melodrama under control for the most part. The family dynamics are depicted sensitively, with no one coming off perfectly well but nobody an irredeemable monster, either. I also enjoyed the distance provided between the protagonist’s point of view and those of the memories, which are from the perspective of the mother – the protagonist is regularly surprised to have remembered things differently or that her mother’s memories are often substantially more positive, which helps energize a story where almost all the important events happened well in the past.

While the writing for them was overall strong, there were a few design decisions about how the memories worked that I found created a little bit of friction. First, I think they would have been more effective if the flashbacks were parceled out one at a time, but for me and I suspect many other players, the most natural approach was to explore the cabin, find all the different pieces of music, and then play them at the piano all at once. Again, each piece of this is good but the pacing wound up feeling a bit back-loaded. There’s also a small puzzle that needs to be solved to reach the endgame that involves putting the different memories in chronological order, but while after reading each, I had a sense of how each fit with the others, but in the reassembly process they’re labeled not as “memory about the piano lesson” but as the less-descriptive “piece found in bedroom” which made the process harder.

These are small niggles, though, and besides the lack of spacing meaning I sometimes worried about mis-tapping, they’re pretty much the only negatives I found in the game. I was engaged with the story Another Cabin in the Woods was telling, despite its dark moments; the author mentioned this is only their second game and they’re already thinking of repurposing the initial horror hook for a subsequent game, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of their future work!

I usually don’t like to look at other reviews of a game before I’ve written mine, but I’m going to bend that rule this time so I can check how many others managed to refrain from mentioning House of Leaves… OK, as of this writing there’s only one public review (Mathbrush’s), and yes, despite him not having read it, HoL still manages to get a namecheck. I’m a big fan of that book, and it deservedly is the first reference point when you see a house behaving the way the one in Thin Walls does – sprouting up new rooms as it starts to get full, lengthening hallways to stymie exploration, and responding to the worst instincts and desires of its inhabitants. But while the house in House of Leaves stands in relation to the individual – it’s the unconscious, a spur to knowledge and its negation – Thin Walls uses this malicious bit of architecture to take aim at society.

What we’ve got here is a multi-chapter Twine game where vignettes from the perspectives of the different inhabitants of a rooming-house alternate with a recurring, exploration-focused sequence where you can see the house changing and pick which resident to follow next. After a disorienting opening, it quickly becomes clear what unites all these stories: the anomie of modern life, and how communal living can paradoxically become isolating. The writing isn’t subtle, but it communicates its ideas well. Here’s a bit of description from the frame sequence:

"You are in a small bathroom. There is a toilet and washbasin, beside which four little soaps sit in separate containers, and four little hand towels hang on a rack and a radiator."

And a bit of reflection from one of the later stories:

"But when you move in with people and there is no relationship, any little tension becomes all that you know of them, it becomes all that they are. Just a paper doll with ‘Noisy’ or ‘Makes a Mess in the Bathroom’ written on it."

The way the house-metaphor expresses itself varies from chapter to chapter: in the most effective, it works to split up a couple who are having problems, creating space to isolate them and eventually putting up a wall between the two single beds they’d pushed together (again, the allegory is not exactly deeply obfuscated). In another, it ensures an Instagram-obsessed woman has a perfect, clean, white, sterile backdrop for all her photos. Another favorite sees a woman daydream about getting a boyfriend and moving in with him – but obsesses over the new space and the amazing furniture she’ll fill it with, until she loses track of the imaginary boyfriend and he abandons her.

By the end, I did find diminishing returns were starting to set in – the late chapter about the two housemates squabbling over who was eating the other’s cereal and making loud noises late at night reduces the house to an annoying prankster. I ran into a small bug where after I finished Chapter 4, a bit of Chapter 3 popped back up until it ended again (EDIT: I am unobservant, this is intended per the author’s reply below). And the writing does occasionally get too on the nose – at one point the Instagram lady says:

"My photos were my defence against the world, my pretence that all was well in this house."

But overall Thin Walls did a good job of keeping me engaged, and at the close of each vignette I was always eager to return to the free exploration sequence and see what had changed, who had moved in, and check whether the cupboard under the stairs had become unlocked, or the mysterious landlord who lives at the top of the house had come home yet. And the ending sequence is a return to form, with the house’s transformations becoming more and more kinetic and the social world of the house becoming unmoored and kaleidoscopic (though as involved as I was trying to solve the mystery of the house, I was also puzzled by why all the music at the climactic party was from the mid-aughts – I don’t think it’s meant to be a flashback!) It’s definitely worth the playthrough, and not just to get another menacing metaphysical house in the mental toolbox to sit alongside the house on Ash Tree Lane.

A couple of years ago I read this incredibly long analysis of the Mass Effect trilogy (ah, the things I had time for before I was a parent!) which sketched out a distinction between fiction that’s detail-first and fiction that’s drama-first. The idea is that detail-first fiction, especially in the genre space, is all about worldbuilding, consistency, and verisimilitude, even at the expense of a good story; drama-first works can have a complex setting, but the rules are much less important than serving the emotional beats of the story and making sure that there’s always something exciting happening and the stakes just keep going up and up. This isn’t a framework I find myself thinking about all that much – most things are somewhere in the middle, of course – but I think it’s really helpful for conceptualizing my response to Half-Alive, which I enjoyed even though the twists and turns of its plot had the detail-first part of my brain blowing a gasket.

What we’ve got here is a teenaged riff on the Underworld narrative, with Inferno-y bits – there are layers! There’s a guide! – and an Orpheus-y motivation – reclaim the missing part of your brother’s soul from the demon-thing that snatched it. The protagonist is Kendall, a 17-year-old girl with awful, broken-up parents who shoulders more responsibility than she should have to, and her interplay with her brother and Wyatt, the guide character, is enjoyable to read because she comes off as a classic hero. Indeed, Half-Alive does a good job of deploying the iconic elements of the journey, down to her weapon of choice – an ax – becoming a heroic attribute.

There’s enough that’s distinctive to keep it from feeling like a retread, though. This particular layer of the underworld is mostly populated by children, for one thing – some are ambivalent characters, but many are so-called “ringleaders”, who direct the weaker-willed kids and are bent on stealing the name and vitality from these living visitors to win the chance to return to the world above, but play fair if bested in a game of riddles.

The stories of many of these kids, including Wyatt, are counterposed with Kenny’s journey, and it’s here that I most struggled with the game. The characters you encounter are drawn from different times and places – though I believe they’re all American – and even allowing for their modern locution as a forgivable concession for both reader and author, the vignettes are full of anachronisms and wild plot twists. There’s a pair of twins who were born in the 18th century; their backstory is that they were abandoned in a dumpster, then fell in with a traveling circus that toured the country complete with an elephant. Another character’s story is a riff on the child-gang bits of Oliver Twist, except he always wears a burlap sack for a mask – after he tries to betray the gang’s Fagin figure, the crime boss travels all the way to the west coast to make him sleep with the fishes, but is still nice enough to put up a gravestone with the kid’s name on it back home in New Jersey. The plan also hinges on a pocket recording device, despite the character having been born in the Great Depression.

This all makes for emotionally-charged, dramatic reading, but at the same time there’s a cost to playing so fast and loose with plausibility. The trend isn’t restricted just to the flashbacks, either, with details changing or going unmentioned until just before they can land with the most impact: Kenny’s ax doesn’t work against the demon until suddenly it does; the demon has a staff that allows it to travel between worlds, but as soon as Kenny gets her hands on it we’re told it’s almost drained of its limited number of charges.

The prose is similarly highly emotional, but often a bit slippery on details. The town where the game starts is alternately called Millflower and Mayflower, and it changes its mind on whether Kenny’s brother was attacked by the demon minutes or hours after school ended. There’s a regular drifting of tenses from present to past and back. Sometimes these infelicities undermine the impact of the story:

"In a fit, Dad flips our living room couch to which my mom slaps him. Yelling vulgar insults at each other, he stuffs his hands in his jeans and then storms out."

More often, though, the exuberance of the writing was enough to carry me along. Here’s a bit that’s definitely overheated, but works much better:

"The chill would make you feel as if you landed in Antarctica and the dirty fog that invaded your lungs was so thick and heavy that you could barely breathe or see.

"On the wind, miscellaneous whispers and wails were being carried, filling their confused bodies with fear. Not to mention the overbearing smell of the area which stank of decaying flesh."

And like I said, despite noticing these weaknesses, I wasn’t too bothered by them once I tried to enter into the spirit of how Half-Alive was telling its story. It also really helps that the game side of things is well-designed and player-friendly. The opening About text nicely explains the length and overall structure of the piece, which is a helpful convenience in a longer game like this. While the focus is very much on the narrative, there are some significant choices to be made in navigating the afterlife, including the aforementioned riddles and also some timed challenges. Nothing’s especially hard, and you can easily rewind even if you do make a mistake, but the gameplay is all engaging enough, and works well as a pacing element to break up the talkier bits.

Playing Half-Alive can feel like being on a roller coaster curated for maximum thrills – if you’re worried about the plausibility of each swerve and scare, or annoyed because you could see the final twist coming a mile away, you’re missing the point. I wouldn’t want every game to be this way, of course, since pure emotion can get exhausting and I typically prefer a story with careful intellectual scaffolding supporting the drama. But for this game and this author, it works, and despite my caviling Half-Alive pulled me through with its energetic, iconic storytelling.

Reader, let me level with you: I was in the bag for this game before I even clicked the word Start. The first Lady Thalia installment was a highlight of last year’s Spring Thing for me, with its zippy heists and even zippier repartee fine-tuned to delight. So how could more of the same be anything but lovely? True, sometimes a sequel brings diminishing returns, but given how much I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything by this pair of authors, the thought that 2 Lady 2 Thalia could be a disappointment never crossed my mind – as well it shouldn’t have done, because as I suspected, in this case even more of a good thing is even more of a good thing.

For those lucky souls who’ve yet to try one of these games – oh, how I envy you! – the protagonist is a former demimondaine who’s clawed her way into respectability by day, while slaking her thirst for objets d’art at night through her alter ego as Lady Thalia, gentlewoman thief. The first game, set in Jazz-Age London, saw her carry out a series of escalating thefts, thumbing her nose in the face of her arch-rival, Melpomene Williams of Scotland Yard.

While the setting and characters have immediate appeal, a big part of what made it so successful is the heist mechanics, which carry over to the sequel. There’s an initial phase where you case the joint, digging up information about security measures and alternate routes, via some hopefully-subtle poking around as well as a social engineering minigame that requires sussing out whether a particular mark is best approached in a friendly fashion, bowled over by the direct approach, or drawn out so they can vent their natural loquaciousness. Then it’s time for the operation itself, where you need to put you planning into practice and respond to the many curve-balls life, and the Yard/gendarmerie, throw your way. Finally, there’s a wrap-up where you receive a score rating the panache with which you pulled off the job. Sticking to this framework means there are some similarities between heists, sure, but it also means that each has its own narrative structure, with the methodical exploration-heavy investigation giving way to a puzzley heist and an improvisational exfiltration, and then the score helps motivate you to do as well (or better) next time.

Rose of Rocroi puts a few spins on this high-quality formula. You’re vacationing in Paris so the scenery is even better this time out (the authors wisely exercised restraint and kept the dialogue free of mais oui and zut alors! interjections, though there are fun references to Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis). You have a new candidate for nemesis, as you’re actually working with Mel to foil a chauvinistic French thief with a penchant for fancy-dress and a disrespect for fine art. And then – well, let me spoiler block this next bit: (Spoiler - click to show)in the most exciting alternate-protagonist twist since Halo 2, you actually play Mel in the investigative sections this time out!

These aren’t radical changes, but they’re enough to keep an already-great formula fresh. The writing draws you along on a paragraph by paragraph level – picking two examples from an endless candy box of bon mots:

"You are once again at a garden party (being wealthy seems to involve an almost intolerable amount of garden parties) and are just about to claim a headache and beg off when you overhear something that catches your attention."

And:

"You are Lady Thalia, and it is time to commit a crime. Well, a crime sanctioned by the police. Well, sanctioned by one policewoman who doesn’t have jurisdiction in this country. Not that any of that makes this any more or less illegal than what you typically get up to, anyway, but it is a change of pace."

Then the meaty crunch of each heist gives you something to sink your teeth into. None of the challenges are that hard, but they’re satisfying to work through, and the possibility of getting a perfect score is always there, urging you to pay attention and ensure Lady Thalia lives up to her reputation. And sitting above the episodic bouts of thievery, the overall plot, and more importantly, your relationship with Mel, provide a sense of progression through the game as a whole. It’s really smartly-designed stuff, and it makes the time playing this medium-length game feel like it just melts away.

Lest I be accused of a total lack of impartiality, I do have one and a half points of criticism to leaven all this praise. The half-point is that while the narrative nicely escalates into the finale, mechanically speaking the climactic heist didn’t feel more complex or challenging than the earlier ones, which was a small missed opportunity – but only a small one, given how much this last job gains in coolness from being set in Versailles. The full point, though, has to do with how the most important relationship in the game is handled: I’m speaking, of course, of the Mel/Thalia frenemy romance (alert a leather worker, I need to cram a third word into my portmanteau).

Look, obviously these two crazy kids are meant to be together. And obviously given the differences in where they’re each coming from, that shouldn’t be a cakewalk. The game does a good job of signaling that you need to need to walk a fine line to get the best ending with Mel – lean too much into the archnemesis side of things, and there’s no opportunity to make nice, while Mel justifiably views too-enthusiastic expressions of affection with suspicion. So in my playthrough, I aimed for varying moments of sharp-elbowed banter with heartfelt moments of vulnerability, hoping this changeup would melt Mel in her boots. Sadly, though, when the game listed my final scores, I did near-perfectly on the heists and investigation but only got a 4 out of 9 in my relationship with Mel. That’s all well and good, but when I went back and replayed, trying even harder to focus on getting this path right, I still got that same mediocre score.

It could be that I’m just not any good at this and I should stick with crime rather than romance (and in the game!) But from looking at the comprehensive walkthrough provided with the game, I feel like the requirements here might not be as elegantly signposted as most other mechanics in the game are. It seems as though rather than allowing you to succeed by balancing meaner and nicer options, instead at each decision point there’s a single correct answer you need to pick to optimize your score. From the way the narrative presented things, it wasn’t clear to me that this is how things were going to work, and sometimes the differences between choices were subtle enough (like the one offering three slightly-different ways of suggesting Mel work undercover) that I’m still not sure why one was correct and the others weren’t.

It feels unfair to harp on this, since – I can’t emphasize this enough – the game is deliriously fun to work through and even replay. But shipping Thalia and Mel is a hugely appealing element of the story, so it was a shame that it felt frustrating. Fortunately, I had no shame about stooping to the walkthrough to make sure that third time around was the charm for our mismatched leads. And here’s hoping that next year, there’s a third entry in the series waiting for us. Maybe a visit to the casinos of Monte Carlo is in order, or perhaps she’ll return home and try to swipe the Crown Jewels? Wherever she goes, I’ll be there, since I’m nowhere near done with Lady Thalia!

In other reviews I’ve advanced the theory that one of the distinctive things about this era of IF is that the parser vs. choice dichotomy that loomed so large – and, er, acrimoniously – through the 2010s is starting to dissolve as authors who play, and sometimes make, both kinds of games experiment with ways to get the best of both worlds. Typically the way I’ve seen this play out is through choice-based games that implement parser-like navigation and a world model while filtering interaction through a set of always-available actions rather than bespoke choices. Digit represents the opposite approach – it’s a parser game with no puzzles and large chunks of text between actions, where almost all of the interactivity is embedded in the menu-based dialogue system.

This is a rather bloodless way to describe a sweet albeit graphically sexual (or maybe it’s the other way around?) story of two best friends visiting a street festival and learning more about each other than they’d bargained for. But I’m foregrounding structure because – well, it gives me a chance to expound a pet theory, but also because it’s helpful to let potential players know what to expect – choice-based mavens who typically shy from parser games I think would find Digit a gentle way to dip a toe (groan) into the pool, while parser boffins looking to juggle inventories and unlock every door they see should adjust their expectations. It’s also relevant to how I evaluated the game, though: viewed narrowly through the criteria I usually use for a parser game, it has some real negatives, but making a broader assessment these don’t matter so much compared to its strengths in what it’s actually trying to do.

To get those negatives out of the way quickly so I can focus on why I enjoyed Digit so much: yes, it’s largely on rails, with much of your keyboard input simply just hitting a button to get the next line onto the screen, up to and including the game typing in an action for you on occasion. In terms of interactivity, you can choose different dialogue options but the order doesn’t seem to matter so you can just lawnmower your way through. And it’s a bit underimplemented, without much scenery to explore, few synonyms for the objects, the world model not always matching the story (like a character still being present in a room after dialogue indicates she’s gone to the bathroom), actions that could have been implemented separately swept up into the general TALK TO command (e.g., there’s a point where you need to give a series of foods to your friend, but attempts to GIVE are unsuccessful), and a few small bugs like a cute sequence at a water fountain that you can repeat even after it’s fired.

If you want to get hung up on that stuff, I can’t stop you. Still, I think that would be missing the forest for the trees, because even if all you’re doing is typing TALK TO EVIE, picking an number, and bouncing the space bar a dozen or so times before going back to step one, nonetheless I think this is still a really good game, because it’s really well-written. The central element here is that the prose, while not at all showy, is really really good. Often in my IF reviews I note that a game has solid writing, which is to say, it’s fine, it gets the job done, nothing to worry about here. But for me personally, the quality of the prose is probably the single biggest factor in how much I enjoy something. Outside of IF, 99% of what I read is literary fiction, and that’s due to how much attention those authors typically put into every word they use, not because I have an obsessive interest in reading about New Yorkers getting divorced (–though you know, I’ve just this moment connected the dot that my parents were New Yorkers who got divorced. This seems a dangerous idea to keep unpacking, though, so let’s move on). Digit does great on this score, boasting clever yet naturalistic dialogue, landscape descriptions that are low-key while still having the occasional moment of lyricism, and a global grounding in the concrete and physical that meant I was always right there with Sirin and Evie. Like, here’s a passage chosen at random:

"I led us down a footpath, which ran down a hill to the waterfront promenade. As it approached the horizon from behind a fluffy cloud, the evening sun bathed the sky in peachy hues - but damn, it was still a hot one.

"Not far from where we were standing, gentle waves were breaking on the shore, caressing the rocks with a quiet murmur. A light seabreeze ruffled my hair. It felt cool against my sweat. It was nice. The promenade was a place I often came to jog, but it felt totally different being here now with Evie."

Again, it’s nothing that’s jumping up and down screaming “look at me!” But this sets a mood, and you read it with satisfaction without consciously noticing the way the author adeptly slips from landscape description to character responses to embedded flashbacks, alternating longer, fancier sentences with shorter, more direct ones. This same care is present in the dialogue sequences too, like an effective scene where the protagonist is sharing some tough personal stuff with her friend while skipping stones, and the conversation is regularly interrupted with a count of how many skips she’s getting, illustrating how emotion is getting the better of her in a neatly understated way.

The strong writing extends to the character work, too, which is really what takes center stage. Given the tags and the content warning, it’s hopefully not a spoiler to say that the whole game is a dance of seduction – though who’s seducing who is definitely placed into question!. It’s appropriate, then, that Digit is in no rush to get to the sex. We get a sense of who these characters are, what’s going on in their lives outside of their relationship, and what they mean to each other, so that by the time the low-level flirtation bubbles over, it’s not sexy just because people are having sex, but because these characters are having this sex. The strong writing is also a godsend here, because of course sex writing is so frequently ridiculous; it’s good here, as befits a game from the author of Turbo Chest Hair massacre, which has the steamiest robot sex ever featured in an IF Comp entry (with all apologies to Hanon Ondricek for robotsexpartymurder’s competitive second-place showing).

Would Digit be a better game if it had all the usual parser game bells and whistles? I guess in a formal sense, but beyond the small bit of bug-squashing alluded to above, the only change I’d really want the author to make is to alter some of the default Inform responses – hearing Graham Nelson intone “that was hardly portable” took me out of the story a little bit. As it is, I had a lovely time with Digit, and if there are more parser/choice mashups like this to come, bring on the revolution.

It’s fitting that my randomization gave me Graveyard Shift at the Riverview Motel right after The Hole Man, since they’re alike in a lot of ways: they’re both choice-based games that work something like funhouses, letting the player wander an environment that’s densely packed with characters enacted their own stories, with the protagonist choosing which to get swept up in. And yet, what a difference a genre makes – this approach is charming when you’re ambling around a lightly-philosophical fantasyland, but can feel pretty silly when the operative tropes are those of horror fiction. The eponymous motel packs in more monsters per square inch than Call of Cthulhu’s worst Mythos Hoedown, leaving me wondering what goes on the other 364 nights of the year and questioning the protagonist’s grip on reality even before she starts running across any sanity-blasting horrors. Despite this, the various storylines boast some creativity, but less-compelling writing and some implementation awkwardness mean I probably won’t be coming back for a return stay.

The setup here as you as the late-night desk-clerk for an absolutely cursed motel; after clocking into your shift, gameplay consist of either sitting in the lobby waiting for guests to arrive or depart (in more than one sense of the term) or for the phone to ring, checking text messages from your friends, or poking around the motel, including making use of the voyeur-holes hidden behind paintings in six of the motel’s rooms. There’s something uncanny going on in each, from vampiric bloodsucking to Exorcist reenactors to whatever’s going on with the guy with the deer pelt. Add in something nasty lurking below the surface of the pool, and you’ve got more macabre happenings than you could possibly plumb in a single playthrough.

This is especially the case because the monsters will, unsurprisingly, kill you real dead. This is all fair enough – they’re monsters, duh – but I found the way these sequences played out hurt my engagement with the game, since they punish saying yes to stuff. Want to follow the obviously-bad-news femme fatale out into the parking lot? That’s not going to end well. Want to figure out why there’s all that slime by the swimming pool? Likewise (all the more so since doing this got me stuck in a loop where an object kept falling into the pool, leaning me to go check it out, at which point a strange noise or vibration made me retch, at which point something fell in the pool… finally after five go-rounds something with tentacles put me out of my misery). I did manage to survive the night on my third try, largely by sitting on my hands in the lobby, which counts as a win but wasn’t that satisfying.

Throughout, the writing is sometimes creepy but also ungainly. This could be a David Lynch style attempt to unnerve through awkwardness, but for me at least it doesn’t land:

"The nervous guy who came in earlier walks with a strange swagger into the lobby yet he is tightly clutching a leather bag to his side. As he walks by me he gives me a wink and how quickly the smile from his face falls tells me I grimaced in response involuntarily."

Added to this, the implementation sometimes left me unsure where I stood – beyond the shenanigans at the pool, many other random events also seemed to repeat over and over again, but I’m not sure whether that’s because time also didn’t seem to advance every time I clicked to wait at the lobby desk. Were these bugs, the randomizer not being tuned to avoid repetitiveness, or was there some hidden mechanic about what actions moved the clock forward? I’m not sure, and while uncertainty is fine in a horror game, I like it to be deployed to clearer thematic ends.

I suspect there’s an intended way of engaging with the game where the player is more active, zipping around the motel’s locations, spying on each of its residents and dipping in and out of each of their storylines, with replays enlivened by different permutations of the ways each can play out. And as I mentioned there’s some fun creativity here, with even the fairly standard vampire vignette boasting one or two novel images – and my subconscious will be trying to figure out that deer guy for a few days to come. But the fiddly implementation and too-common deaths mean I wasn’t able to find that intended experience, which means I unfortunately didn’t get out of Graveyard Shift everything the author put into it.