Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ingredients in this Adventuron game aren’t especially novel by IF standards – a dungeon-crawl with a combat system, an Alice in Wonderland riff, an inversion of the typical adventurer-vs-monster moral framework, a pun-filled scavenger hunt – but there’s something about the way they’re stewed up in Off-Season at the Dream Factory that feels fresh and coherent. The clean prose and fantastical yet grounded visuals help create a unified aesthetic that equally fits the orc protagonist’s dead-end job (he gets repeatedly slain by paying adventurers looking for a thrill) and his occasional visits to his fetch-quest setting uncle, who’s straight-up Lewis Carroll in orc drag. And the one element that’s thematically out of place – the occasional dungeon-delving segments where you’re a customer, not an employee, of the Dream Factory – is set off by bespoke vector graphics that make these sequences visually distinctive too.

(Side-note on my expectations on Adventuron games – by this point I’m unsurprised to find one with great visuals, but I also mentally prepare myself to struggle with the parser. But this time I didn’t, and that’s been true of other more recent Adventuron games I’ve played too. I’m guessing this is some combination of authors gaining familiarity with the platform and the system maturing, but it’s awesome to see).

The other thing that makes the disparate pieces work well together is momentum. I tend to like IF Comp games with a good number of easy puzzles – they make me feel like I’m a clever person making good progress through the big competition (this is not a flattering observation about myself) – and it’s an effective choice here. There's a good variety of puzzles, from figuring out viable combat strategies for different opponents to some maze navigation, but none of them are especially difficult, and many even solve themselves, with inventory items being used automatically if your command is even in the right ballpark. Combined with the interesting worldbuilding, solid writing, and pretty pictures, this makes Off-Season at the Dream Factory go down easy.

Highlight: I figured out one somewhat outside the box puzzle straightaway (Spoiler - click to show)(catching lightning in the bottle) which made me feel clever, though I also worried it was underclued. Then I kept playing and found it actually was well clued, I’d just gotten to the solution a little early.

Lowlight: The ending is generally satisfying, but I felt like one subplot (Spoiler - click to show)(the fate of the protagonist’s father) was left a bit hanging – though I didn’t get the Last Lousy Point, which I suspect might bear on that.

How I have failed the author: not by very much, I don’t think! Henry was sleeping and I pretty much banged through this one, despite my new-parent brain.

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

Going into this year’s Comp, I knew that my time for IF would be limited, so I resolved not to get too sucked into any of the “longer than two hours” games on offer, to make sure I was able to play as many games as possible. Well, here I am, my resolve in tatters: I’ve probably put five or six hours into 4x4 Archipelago over the last few days, and immediately upon winning was tempted to start again to try a different one of the I think three possible main plots driving this slick, addictive Twine CRPG.

I call 4x4A a CRPG advisedly, not to imply it’s not IF – ugh to genre gatekeeping – but to highlight how far it goes to deliver the features you’d expect in a mainstream CRPG. As your randomly-generated adventurer embarks on a voyage across the 16 islands making up the titular archipelago, you’ll encounter a clever skill system that starts you with two skills out of a choice of fighting and noncombat options; a robust inventory tied to an economy that stays relevant throughout the playtime; a main hub boasting shops, services, a library, and more; a multi-step primary quest and numerous fleshed-out side quests; a host of dungeons and mines, many with a boss at the end; and random encounters out the wazoo. Oh, and an automatically-updating journal that puts all the key information you’ll need at your fingertips – seriously, this thing is better than the journal in any AAA CRPG I can recall playing. Plus it’s all randomly generated so replay value is high.

Of course, just as the game delivers so well on the CRPG genre’s positives, it also inherits some of the weak points too. It can feel grindy, with a few too many dungeons that are a few rooms too long. My main character was a magician, and I definitely wound up with a bad 15-minute-workday habit. Plus the early stages can feel a little tough, as you go from island to island building out a list of fun stuff to do but the ability to complete only like 10% of the tasks given how much of a greenhorn you are. But I can’t lie, there’s comfort-food pleasure even in these hoary irritants. 4x4A is the kind of game that isn’t always well-served by the Comp, since it’s long and a bit outside the genres that traditionally do well, but it’s super fun and I’m definitely looking forward to coming back to it post-Comp.

Highlight: The game sets out clear patterns and expectations around how side-quests work and the geography of the archipelago, but it also doesn’t hesitate to break those patterns to create some cool moments of surprise.

Lowlight: The writing here is actually better than it needs to be – here’s the description of one island: “The forests of Old Oak Island remember ancient times. They are dark and foreboding, and hide numerous secluded gorges and valleys. Many islanders are woodcutters, hunters, or pig farmers; local long-haired, black pigs are grazed in the oak woods, where they gorge themselves on acorns.” But it’s too bad that the well-crafted text really fades into the background as the gamier aspects take over and you visit the same places and encounter the same monsters over and over.

How I failed the author: Henry was having some rougher days sleep-wise whie I was playing this one, so after starting out the game and getting about an hour in, I didn’t get back to it until a few days later, only to find my saves were wiped (there may have been an update in the interim?) Too bad, Titus the Swashbuckler, but Letho the Tinkerer found the Heavenly Spire in your place!

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

This ChoiceScript game about a fictional online fandom is a lot. Before you start, there are two full pages of stats, eight or nine pages with background on the online personalities as well as in-universe info on the Nebulaverse, the tropey YA series the fandom focuses on, and a character-generation process for your blogger-avatar that comes complete with two “what Hogwarts House are you?”-style quizzes – and then gameplay itself involves going through five or six “rounds” of play, each of which has you first reading half a dozen different Tumblr-ish blogs and deciding whether to like or reblog (or possibly reply to) each of their 5-10 posts, then making choices about how to write your own fanfic set in the Nebulaverse, plus some optional additional engagement with other bloggers.

There’s a lot to be said for creating a detailed and consistent world, but there’s also a need to present the player with a compelling hook to bring them into said world – a resonant goal, some emotionally-engaging conflict, an interesting puzzle or strategic challenge, or even just a clever take on a familiar milieu – and here’s where I found APBW fell down. Notionally, you’re meant to be optimizing your follower count by reblogging good content and writing resonant fanfic, but this is presented in a pretty bloodless fashion and is clearly more a pretext than a motivating force for engagement. The breadth of the game also means there’s less time to go deep and make any particular character or mechanic stand out, plus the incredible tropiness of the Nebulaverse, while clearly intentional to help it resonate with more real-world fandoms, made it really hard for me to care about shipping the blank-slate chosen one, the genius love-interest, the blue-blood frenemy, the white-bread sidekick, or… the other one who I don’t remember that clearly two days on from playing.

Eventually the game reveals that it is about something specific, and I found it got a lot more engaging (Spoiler - click to show)(it ultimately hinges on a pretty much note-for-note riff on the Harry Potter fandom’s reactions to J.K. Rowling’s increasing transphobia). But it took too long to get there for my tastes, and didn’t integrate the fanfic stuff with this main thread tightly enough for me to stay invested. Works of IF are almost always in real need of a good editor, because all pieces of writing are in need of a good editor (the beta testing process isn’t a substitute, in my experience) and I think APBW suffers that lack – it puts in so much effort to create a plausible world, and has something to say, but needs some nips and tucks to better help the player find what's engaging.

Highlight: Despite the game making clear that I was making incredibly suboptimal choices in terms of follower count, it was perfectly happy to let me express myself as a normcore loser – I took a gleeful joy in choosing the most boring hero as my favorite one, eschewing shipping to focus on the setting’s lore in my blog posts, and even quitting writing the fanfic super early because of (Spoiler - click to show)the transphobia incident.

Lowlight: As I alluded to above, I found the blogging sections offered way too much granularity of interaction – so the game’s bow to realism by having characters re-post stuff you’ve already seen on the pages of other bloggers made for extra drudgery.

How I have failed the author: Due to a general lack of brain-bandwidth, I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to read the multiple pages of background info on the Nebulaverse, which probably reduced my engagement with those sections – and that in turn meant I was eager to stop writing the fanfic so I could skip those bits and get to the end faster, missing out on most of the thematic resonance that I’m sure exists between the different strands of the story.

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

The Best Man sits firmly in a genre that’s typically less well served in IF than in static fiction: it’s a piece of literary fiction, with nary a spaceship, broadsword, dead body, or tentacle in sight. For all the mundanity of the setting, though – we’re at a wedding in a small, well-realized Irish town twenty-odd years ago – I found the protagonist the most bone-chilling character I’ve seen in the Comp. By dint of his predicament, Aiden could be sympathetic: after a stag night mishap, he’s called up to be the stand-in best man, with the twist that he’s been nursing a years-long crush on the bride. Being relegated to the friendzone is, I think, a broadly-shared experience, so heightening the drama around this common situation makes for compelling drama. The Best Man isn’t trying to create a universally-resonant story, though – it has a very specific narrative, with very specific characters, and what really drives the story is Aiden’s toxic self-involvement.

This is all extremely well-motivated: long-term romantic disappointment can be tough to weather for anyone, but Aiden has a combination of vain self-regard, social awkwardness, and inability to self-regulate this emotions that means his infatuation with Laura immediately curdles, and by the time of the wedding, he’s developed a whole alternate universe in which his sense of his own intellectual and emotional development means that he is now a fitting romantic partner for her (or at least will be after the inevitable divorce). The twist of fate that’s led to his brevet promotion is reinterpreted as meaning he’s now playing a leading role in the wedding, and I felt a queasy sense of anxiety as he ran pre-ceremony errands for fear of what awful gesture he had planned for the big moment of the best man's speech.

Fortunately for my enjoyment of the game, we’re not locked into Aiden’s claustrophobic viewpoint the whole way through. In addition to chapters alternating wedding business with flashbacks to Aiden and Laura’s college days, there are also several that follow residents of the town incidentally swept up in the nuptials: the widower Aiden bumps into mid dog-walk, the partner of the Civil-War-obsessed florist (Roundheads vs. Cavaliers, not Blue vs. Gray), the church organist who could have been so much more (maybe?) Besides providing some relief for the reader, these vignettes also highlight Aiden’s self-absorption, laying out the rich seams of life he’s oblivious to in his inability to see anything but (his distorted image of) Laura. There’s also a sequence from the viewpoint of another wedding guest, Nick: a pleasant fellow who tries to make friends with Aiden but is instead ruthlessly judged, partially on the basis of his lower-class food preferences (though being a vegetarian from California, I share some queasiness at Nick’s love of white and black puddings).

Literary fiction lives and dies by the quality of its prose, and The Best Man for the most part gives a good account of itself, with lots of well-observed details and generally naturalistic dialogue. I’m adding caveats because I found the Aiden sections to have noticeably weaker writing than the rest of them. Given the contrast, this is clearly the result of authorial choice: his voice is generally intense to the point of histrionics, and the thing about histrionics is they do sound clangy when written out. Still, I found the dialogue of some other characters also felt clumsy during these sections – the opening exchange with Laura I think has some of the weakest writing of the game, unfortunately – so feel like another editing pass wouldn’t have gone amiss.

I’m quite deep into this review and haven’t mentioned anything about interactivity yet, which isn’t necessarily a kick against how the game deploys its choices but just an indication that they aren't what’s of most interest here. There are opportunities to decide on different high-stakes courses of action for Aiden – most notably how he behaves when it’s time to hand over the rings mid-ceremony, and what he says in an impromptu post-wedding speech – but in most passages, there are options to expand different sections of the text through inline links. While this is definitely a game with a specific story to tell, and you can’t change the viewpoint characters into people that they aren’t, the process of playing The Best Man definitely feels engaging enough.

I can see this game bouncing off of some people, given the comparatively low-key setting and the off-putting central character (the closing narration from Aiden made me think that in the years since the wedding, he’d become an incel or something – he’s that awful). But anyone who likes literary fiction, or a good antihero drama on TV, will find some real enjoyment here.

Highlight: I really, really loved the sequence with Bill, who can turn even the most innocuous of questions into a disquisition on the New Model Army – it made me sympathize with what my loved ones put up with.

Lowlight: The whole sequence with the bride’s 15-year-old sister. Ugh. Just ugh.

How I failed the author: I don’t generally listen to sound when playing IF, and that’s true a fortiori now with the baby since I’m typically playing while Henry’s napping and I don’t want to wake him up (or not hear if he makes noises). From the listing in the credits, though, it seems like there’s a great soundtrack for The Best Man that I’m bummed to have missed – though if there was going to be a Pulp song, I question going with This is Hardcore when Disco 2000 seems to have by far the clearer thematic resonance.

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

When looking over the list of entries into this years Comp, I found myself looking forward to Funicular Simulator 2021 just on the strength of its title. Oddly, I’m a sucker for a good transit-themed game – I’m thinking of the waking-dream fugue of What the Bus in last year’s Comp, or the meditative hangout-game Misty Hills in this year’s Spring Thing. I’m guessing this is partially because I miss my public-transit commute, 18 months into COVID (I used to get a lot of reading done!) Beyond this personal bias, though, I think public transportation is actually a great match with IF: transit is a liminal space, where you can encounter different people whose lives are very different – and while the destination is your own, someone else is driving, so you can sit back and enjoy the journey. Funicular Simulator 2021 is not really a transit-game in the sense I was expecting – there’s nothing quotidian about this trip, as the protagonist is climbing a very special mountain on the night of a once-in-a-lifetime aurora. But it wound up scratching the itch nonetheless, because it provides some of the same pleasures.

Belying its title, Funicular Simulator isn’t about the vehicle but about its passengers. The main gameplay consists of extended conversations with four different people, all of whom are ascending the mountain for the same basic reason – to check out the mountain’s mysterious phenomena – but who ascribe very different meanings to what they’re about to experience. You get to learn more about their backstories and what they’re hoping to find, and while the protagonist is a blank slate, by responding to the various characters and validating or denying their motivations, you can define what's brought you to the mountain. Without spoiling too much, my takeaway was that this is about allowing the player to explore some of the common human responses to the numinous: to look to it for escape, for study, for comfort, or for distraction.

The game doesn’t posit these as exclusive choices, I don’t think, and doesn’t put its thumb on the scales for any one in particular, allowing you to see the value in, as well as the counterarguments against, each worldview (though with that said, I found the artist to be too callow to take seriously – perhaps that’s more about where I’m at in life than about anything in the game, though). You get multiple opportunities to engage with the four characters, and you can spread your attention equally among them, or focus on just one or two to explore their conversations more deeply. Replay shows that there isn’t a huge amount of branching in the content of what they say, but the different choices do feel like they portray the protagonist in a significantly different light, so I found them satisfying.

The writing is strong throughout, taking sentiments that could be cliched and events that could be too abstract to resonate and making them sing. The understated visual design – which portrays the night progressing from the initial golden hour through midnight – aids the immersion. It all leads to a final choice that’s lightly shaped by how you’ve spent your time on the journey. The stakes for this choice weren’t completely clear to me, nor am I sure how much changes based on your decision. But the ending I got was poetic, and felt like it organically built on what came before, so much so that I don’t feel tempted to take the journey again and make different choices just for the sake of it.

Highlight: I found the conversation with the pilgrim character really well-done and personally impactful – her situation could be played for melodrama, but the grounded dialogue and unique worldview she offered made her stand out.

Lowlight: Some of the sequences when you reach the mountain struck me as a little too oblique, but if so it’s a close-run thing.

How I failed the author: I played this one late at night, after a day of Henry not sleeping well at all. But I think this wound up being good, since even though this meant I didn't appreciate the prose as much as I should have done, my zonked-out brain found a lot emotional heft in the game that I might not have been able to experience clearly if I’d been feeling sharper (you ever notice how pregnant with meaning the world can seem at 5 AM when you’ve been up all night?)

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

My favorite band is indie-rockers the Mountain Goats, on the strength not just of the songs but also the witty, humane stage banter. There’s this one bit that's stuck with me ever since I heard it: the frontman talks about how when he first started writing songs, all the romantic ones involved protagonists stalking the objects of their quote-unquote affections, because what’s more emotionally intense than stalking? But of course beyond the super problematic nature of this approach, this means all your songs are kind of the same, and have nowhere to build. So pretty soon he wised up and moved on.

One glance at the content warnings for we, the remainder should indicate why I bring this up – I thought A Papal Summons was going to run away with the Most CWs sweepstakes, but it’s actually a close-run thing. The game is about a disabled girl who’s been left behind when the cult she and her mother belong to transcends their earthly fetters. This is a compelling premise, but I found myself exhausted by the author’s decision to twist every dial to 11. There are piles of dead bodies, gross-out scenes with spoiled food, and a bingo-card’s worth of abuse heaped upon the young protagonist as well as comprehensively meted out from the prophet to all his followers. It’s certainly effective at setting a mood of well-nigh-postapocalyptic horror – and there are indications that some of the terrible things on display are hallucinations brought on by trauma and starvation – but I found it hard to immerse myself in such a grand guignol spectacle, as the comprehensive awfulness put me at a distance. It also made the cult members seem less like real people who’d made understandably-bad choices to trade off their autonomy for a sense of belonging, and more like cardboard cutouts in a cabinet of horrors.

Gameplay-wise, we, the remainder is curiously parser-like, with compass navigation links off to the sides of the screen and each location in the large map offering three or so different objects to interact with. Some are just there for atmosphere, but a few of can be picked up (there are inventory puzzles, but they’re handled automatically so long as you’ve been to the right place to get the right item). And others trigger flashbacks, as the protagonist recalls one or another instance of abuse (there’s a suppressed-memories trope here that feels a bit icky). The writing is effective, as these vignettes do convey a sense of what life was like in the cult – and in fairness, there are a few moments that leaven the near-unremitting darkness of the story with at least potential rays of light. The ending too is reasonably positive, at least the one I got (apparently if you’re less efficient at exploring, you can get different ones). I think it would have rang truer if the path to get there had been less choked with muck, though.

Highlight: There’s an effective bit of characterization early on, where you can decide what single talismanic object you’ve kept hidden from your controlling mother – and once you’ve picked it, there are numerous callbacks to you touching it for comfort as you encounter the compound’s terrors.

Lowlight: Since I was playing on mobile, I accidentally clicked through the aforementioned passage really quickly, and didn’t see a way to undo to see the other choices. I wound up with an Orioles baseball cap, which I guess was OK?

How I failed the author: since I played on my phone, the cool ascii-art map didn’t display properly, which made navigation difficult. Though east and west seemed to be flipped on my screen in a confusing way, and having the map available maybe would have made me feel like I was playing Angband, so perhaps it’s for the best!