Reviews by Mike Russo

(I beta tested this game)

As modern video games get more and more complex, and the hardware gets more and more powerful, AAA games are capable of overwhelming feats – I gasped in wonder the first time I saw the crowded streets of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s revolutionary Paris, for example, and that’s more than five years old! But for whatever reason, when I run through the times when a game has just bowled me over with amazement, a disproportionate number are things from IF, like the power-fantasy of Hadean Lands, where I cackled with glee at the way I could type “W” and see the game visibly pause before spitting out the results of the twelve different sub-puzzles I’d automatically solved with that single key press. Perhaps it’s that the flexibility of text means it’s always capable of surprising you, whereas once you understand the systems at play in something like an Assassin’s Creed game, you’ve pretty much got the whole thing figured out. Or maybe there’s something to the old saw about imagination, and picturing what the text is describing, being more evocative than just seeing.

Anyway, add the Impossible Bottle to the list. I’ve seen a number of reviews that bounced out of this one early, before getting to what makes the game so amazing, so while I’ll be putting the rest of this under a spoiler block to preserve the surprise, I do want to clearly say for those who haven’t played yet that there is something amazing here and it’s not just a game about a six-year old picking up a mess, so stick with it through those first ten minutes.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get spoilery:(Spoiler - click to show) when I first realized what the gimmick here was, it made me smile – the idea of a magic dollhouse that lets you change what’s happening in the real house is a clever one, and the initial puzzle where you figure that out leads to a lovely aha moment that made me feel smart. But oh man I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. You can move things around, sure, makes sense. Putting a small thing in the dollhouse turns it into a normal-sized, real thing in the real house, OK. Putting a big thing into the dollhouse to shrink it, now we’re starting to get more complicated. Then add on that you can sometimes blow things up twice, or shrink them twice, and that changing their size might make them come to life or otherwise slightly shift? It stops feeling like a gimmick and starts feeling like magic, especially once your dad makes a fateful decision, and you figure out how to get into the titular bottle…

The dollhouse opens up a huge possibility space, but TIB does a masterful job of helping you stay on top of what you’re doing. There’s a handy GOALS command that lists what you could be working on at any given time, and a progressive hint system to keep you on track. More than these external crutches, the game also provides solid direction via suggested verbs and cueing from other characters, and while the magic of the dollhouse is very versatile, you generally have a good understanding of what kinds of things you can accomplish so you’re rarely left floundering. And it’s all implemented incredibly smoothly, so that it’s easy to do anything you can think of. I’ve only played a few Dialog games, but it really shows its strength and versatility here – I mostly played by typing in commands, but a few times when I ran into disambiguation issues (primarily when I was trying to mess around stacking furniture to see if I could break the game), the ability to click links made it incredibly robust to mischief and player screwing-around.

While the puzzles, and the size-changing mechanics, are the real stars of the show, there’s plenty to like about the narrative side of things too. The other members of your family don’t rise much above stereotypes, but they’re lovingly drawn and appealing nonetheless. TIB is another game that references the pandemic, but instead of using it as a tool of horror or isolation, instead it focuses on the way people and families can come together and support each other through a tough time, which is always a lovely message but is especially so right now.

Is TIB a perfect game? No, probably not – the solution to the dinosaur puzzle feels a little too unintuitive to me, for one – but it is a delightful one (you can get all the way through to the end and never realize that you can play the-floor-is-lava!), and, as I keep repeating, really just magic.

This was my favorite game of the 2020 Comp.

This is a delightful set of fables, done in what sounds to my ear at least a note-perfect ventriloquizing of Kipling’s Just So Stories voice. There are real opportunities for interactivity – the player inhabits the role of the child to whom the stories are being told, and gets to interject an excited choice when the narrator prompts them for input in the story. It’s a very natural, elegant device, and in fact while some options are merely cosmetic, there are a couple that determine which of the five stories on offer (I think – I replayed a second time and didn’t see anything obvious I missed) you wind up seeing. Of course, each ends up just-so-ing into the appropriate place, but that’s sort of the nature of just so stories.

But while the use of choice is canny, it’s really the prose that’s the main draw here, and I felt like every page had something that made me smile. There’s a call-and-response bit between the whale and the tiger that’s got a great rhythm to it, an understated bit of dialogue as the capybara and anaconda come to grips with the natural order of predation, and a crocodile offering help who (Spoiler - click to show)turns out to be a reptile of his word!

There are a few scattered typos – “infinte” for “infinite” once when describing the sagacity of the whale, and there’s an errant capitalized “he” in the middle of a sentence about everything the tiger ate. But very few as such things go – this is a smoothly put-together thing, in design and in writing. The author even gracefully takes on the less-savory aspects of Kipling’s legacy in a non-didactic, but very much appreciated, coda. Very much worth playing!

There are certain stories that only really snap into shape once you’ve reached the end. Obviously there’s your Memento-type puzzle box stories, or your last-minute-revelation-recontextualizes-everything-that’s-come-before ones (given the author’s pseudonym The Sixth Sense is the obvious name-check). Storytelling like this can be really compelling, even more so in IF where the player winds up not just stepping through the puzzles or individual plot points, but is fiddling with the overall story like it’s a Rubik’s Cube. But it’s also a risky approach, because withholding information on how the world works or a character’s motivation means that the work might not hold together as well when first experienced as it does in retrospect. Despite the authorial name-check, I’m not convinced High Jinnks is actually trying to be a high-stakes twist sort of story. But unfortunately I think the comparison is apt because I found the game does play things a bit too close to the vest, and as a result, doesn’t land as effectively as it should given the general strength of most of its elements.

It’s a little tricky to share the setup, since that shifts a fair bit over the course of the 45-minute or so playtime. You’re playing a jinn who’s able to take human form, but from the off you don’t have much in the way of motivation: you’re just emerging from a casino where you’ve fleeced a hapless mortal, at which point you’re free to wander without being pointed towards or away from anything in particular. There’s not much worldbuilding initially, which left me with a large number of basic questions about the main character’s wishes and desires (like, do all-powerful wish-granting jinn actually need money?), and therefore what I should be trying to do. A motivation does eventually emerge – the aforementioned fleeced mortal stole back the money you won off them, so you want to find them and get it back (though again, is this just a pride thing?) – and from that point on it’s usually clear what your next, immediate goal should be. But until the very end, the broader question of your characters goals and situation, as well as more nuts-and-bolts questions about what’s actually happening, weigh down what ultimately should be a heart-warming supernatural buddy comedy.

Some of this is due to unclear writing. I often found myself mouthing “huh?” at a passage where befuddlement was not, I think, the intended response. (Spoiler - click to show) I still don’t really understand the whole sequence where Ali traps the main character, and then releases him – and the whole sequence where Hakeem comes home was really off-kilter. But more often, it’s due to the choice to have the main character know far more than the player, without revealing that knowledge. Sometimes this is OK when it’s clear that it’s setting something up – I’m thinking of the gag with the (Spoiler - click to show)coffee maker, or decorative mirror, or… – but more often, the player character is making plans, or heading places, based not just on clever plans that will be sprung at the right moment, but on critical, character-driven goals that the player just isn’t let in on. The whole sequence after (Spoiler - click to show)killing Malik is like this – trying to get revenge on the sorcerer out to get the main character makes sense, but then you’re led through a series of plot points involving summoning another jinn, and then trying to break a curse they’ve put on you, and it’s only towards the end that you realize that the whole premise of the game is that the main character has been cursed to not be able to kill (by the by, being hell-bent on lifting this curse does not make for the most sympathetic protagonist) and exiled from the society of other jinns (which is incredibly hide-bound in a parody of government bureaucracy that also feels like it comes out of nowhere). This is really relevant information for understanding who this character is! As a result, while there are a good amount of choices and some reactivity, I found they typically didn’t feel meaningful because I lacked context for what I was trying to do.

The other questionable storytelling technique is to interrupt the main thread of the plot with vignettes and flashbacks, mostly drawn from or inspired by the actual stories in the Thousand and One Nights, as best I could tell. These are all right as far as they go, but I found they didn’t do much besides interrupt the plot and make it a bit shaggier, as they weren’t very related to the main story either narratively or thematically – the jinn in the flashbacks seems to behave differently than the contemporary one, and while the main character’s backstory is actually very important, those pieces are entirely separate from what’s in the flashbacks (Spoiler - click to show)– including the vignette involving the death of the protagonist’s child, which felt like it should have some impact!

This is all a shame, because when you know what’s going on in High Jinnks, I think there’s a solid story under there, and while the prose can sometimes be unclear, there’s also some good writing – I liked the way the relationship between the jinn and Ali (the hapless mortal from the casino, who winds up playing a significant role) evolved over time. There are also some really good jokes. But these storytelling missteps, plus a few technical niggles – I hit a dead link early on when trying to hit on a random I think drug-dealer, and later on I wound up at a park despite having opted to visit a library instead – undermined my enjoyment, to the extent that I went through the first chunk of the game half-convinced that the title hid a second pun and everybody, myself included, was just baked out of their damned minds, for all the sense anything was making. There’s a lot that’s promising here, though, so unlike with M. Night Shyamalan, I look forward to the author’s future work.

(I beta tested this game)

A confession, dear reader: I am awful at IF mysteries. I like them in theory, and I’m pretty good at figuring things out when watching a murder mystery on TV. But put one in front of me in parser form and it’s a bad scene – maybe it’s because they’re timer-dependent and I don’t have the patience to take good notes, or that I usually have a hard time getting a handle on how NPC interaction is supposed to work, but every once in a while I decide to try one of the Infocom mysteries and get like five moves in before fleeing away in terror. I did once manage to hack my way through like a third of Make It Good before getting stuck and, upon checking the hints, discovered that actually all I’d done was fallen for red herrings and I’d actually been making negative progress.

Given all this, I was flat-out astonished that I was able to solve Happyland without any hints. I don’t think it’s because it’s too simple or easy – nabbing the right culprit isn’t excessively hard, true, but there are some sub-plots and side-areas of investigation that are pleasantly twisty, and I was able to unravel those after some careful experimentation too. Rather, it’s because the game generally plays fair, uses a timer but has a generous hand both with the overall limit and the windows for specific events, and does a good job of providing clues and enabling you to work backward through an intimidatingly-large possibility space to suss out all the whys and wherefors.

Speaking of working backwards, I should probably back up and mention the setup. At first blush, it’s a pretty standard cop-show premise, with your detective protagonist called in to investigate a death that may or may not be accidental (spoiler: it is not). I did experience a little bit of tonal disorientation on why a hotel is called “Happyland”, and the idea of a regular hotel in the middle of a rural area developing an amusement-park add-on seemed a little odd to me, but it’s easy enough to roll with: really, you’ve got a body, half a dozen suspects, and a forensics kit, so it’s all about diving into the details to try to solve the mystery.

That forensics kit does a lot of the heavy lifting – pretty much all the puzzles require using it to analyze fingerprints, assess trace chemicals, and magnify small discrepancies. The other half of the mystery-solving equation is interacting with the robust cast of characters, interrogating them and confronting them with various pieces of evidence. This is more complex business than the typical adventure-game TIE ROPE TO ROCK sort of thing, but the parser takes care of it quite well, with the only niggle a bit of wonkiness around disambiguation – especially notable given that this is a custom parser, which often have a negative reputation! But I didn’t run into any guess-the-verb issues, and NPCs were usually smart enough to draw the appropriate conclusions based on what I was showing or telling them.

There are a few small things that could be cleaned-up for a post-Comp release – notably, in one playthrough, I was able to nab the suspect before a particular event happened, but the post-game newspaper story still referenced that event (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m talking about Cooper’s death – I know the timing of his poisoning can shift depending on the player’s actions, but if you’ve never seen him collapse it’s odd to see it mentioned). But generally there’s a high degree of attention to detail, including probably my favorite Easter Egg of the Comp (Spoiler - click to show) (ANALYZE POEM). My only real complaint is that Happyland is lulling me into thinking I’m getting better at IF mysteries – so it’ll be at fault when I take another run at Deadline, am promptly smacked back down, and once again write off the subgenre.

Ghostfinder offers a strong hook: modern urban horror crossed with procedural-show sexmurder. I can see a significant audience for this sort of thing, but let me confess up front that I felt like it leaned much harder on the sexmurder part, which is not something I particularly enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve watched enough Brits seen off to depopulate a small county – whimsically in a village, ecclesiastically in a church, intellectually in a college, snootily in a manor, &c. – but forensically-described sexual assault and murder, of which there’s a lot on offer here (six victims), has a pretty different vibe. On the one hand, this is a personal preference, twelve billion CSI fans obviously have different tastes, and kudos to the author for offering a clear content warning that communicates exactly what’s in store. On the other – oh, this is probably spoilery: (Spoiler - click to show)part of what made Ghostfinder so squicky to me is that the serial killer’s modus operandi is very very closely based on the real-world Golden State Killer, who was responsible for at least 13 murders and dozens of rapes, and who was arrested last year and just sentenced a few weeks ago as of this writing. True, the crimes were several decades ago, and the author clarified that the game was started before the killer was arrested, but it felt maybe a little extra ghoulish given the circumstances.

Getting back to the game, however! Ghostfinder has an interesting structure, where more conventional adventure-game sequences of going places, talking to people, playing cat-and-mouse with the killer, etc., bookend a large middle section that’s all about reviewing case files and Googling the secret database of your psychic investigation society. The adventure-y bits work but aren’t anything too out of the ordinary – you interview suspects, run down leads, and interact with fellow members of the Ghostfinders who are fairly well characterized. The database is a fun conceit, though – you get to dig through files on each of the serial killer’s previous murders, then search for particular names or places or things that you think warrant further investigation, which usually just gives you another document but sometimes opens up the possibility of visiting a new location or interviewing a new witness or suspect.

Investigation-via-Google is a fun structure – I quite dug Her Story from a couple years back, which took a related approach – and it does make one feel appropriately like a detective. There’s also a twist because beyond the case file, one of the detectives also has been having psychic visions that put her in the heads of various characters, one of whom is the killer, so in theory you can cross-reference her journal with the conventional investigation to rule out and rule in various suspects. In practice, however, I didn’t go too far down that path because I’d pretty much already solved the case by the time I worked through all of the case files, so was basically just nodding “yup, that fits” while reading through the journal.

Anyway the database is an effective central mechanic for the game, but I think it does throw off the pacing. There are a LOT of case files to go through – all very similarly bleak in describing horrible crimes of rape and murder – so that’s a lot to digest all at once, and after reading each, you’ll probably spend five or ten minutes inputting different options into the search bar. The writing style for these parts is fairly dense and procedural, which makes sense, but again sometimes made the game feel like a slog. All told it probably took me an hour to work through them all, during which time my engagement with the characters had pretty much fallen away, since they’re not very active in this segment except for a few short sequences where the detectives run out and interview some suspects. I experienced a bit of whiplash when I got to the ending sequence and I suddenly was reminded that these folks existed! There’s also a bit of wonkiness where sometimes, searching a name teleports you to an interview sequence, which was off-putting to me at first since I was worried that doing stuff in the “real world” would advance a clock (Spoiler - click to show)it doesn't.

The writing is generally solid, with only a few typos or infelicities (though I have to share one good one – during the inevitable struggle with the killer, the protagonist “hit(s) him again with the hammer, breaking his other jaw”. Wow, he really is a monster!) I thought the fantasy worldbuilding was occasionally a bit clumsily-inserted or underexplained, but since the focus really was on the real-world procedural stuff, this wasn’t a major area of weakness. Ghostfinder’s solidly put together, and fiddling about with the database does convey a fun frisson of really being a detective. Despite some subject-matter choices that put me off a bit, I think it’ll find an audience -- and I'm looking forward to hopefully less-macabre future installments!

The randomizer gave me an interesting, meaty game to start out with. FoPPSA, as I’m going to call it because I can’t resist a silly acronym, is apparently a sequel to a previous game, though it doesn’t advert to this and I haven’t played it, which may account for some of the feeling of confusion I felt for much of the playing time, though certainly not all.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how to organize this review, so let’s go with a good old tripartite structure, plus a summing-up.

1. Plodding literalism

Viewed strictly as a parser puzzle game, FoPPSA has some early high points. I found the opening enticingly odd, and the first set of tasks, while sometimes feeling arbitrary and lacking conventional logic, were motivated and fairly clued (the first significant puzzle, a minotaur-and-maze jobby, prompted a fun “aha” moment once I figured out the trick).

Once the second set of tasks opens up, however, I often found myself flailing, both to identify what I should be working on, and how to accomplish my goals. There were some guess-the-verb issues (Spoiler - click to show)(making the Molotov cocktail was probably the worst offender here), incomprehensible dialogue referencing events for which I had no context, and puzzles that didn’t seem like they’d have any connections to my goals (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking most immediately of the bit where you have to skin-dive into a shipwreck at the bottom of Tokyo Bay in order to obtain some plane tickets). I mostly typed in the walkthrough for the second half of the game. Beta testers aren’t listed in the ABOUT text, so in this frame I’m tempted to think the author ran out of time and didn’t have outside eyes helping to figure out where to focus their work.

2. Anime club in the basement

After I finished playing and I was making my first attempt to figure out how I felt about FoPPSA, I thought first of all about anime club.

See, when I was in college, I had a girlfriend who was big into anime (I was not). This was in the late 90’s, so rather than that meaning she had a subscription to a bunch of specialty streaming services, this meant that once a week she liked to go to the school’s anime club, which met in a basement to watch inconsistently-subtitled (or, God help us, over-earnestly overdubbed) episodes of two or three series which they ran through concurrently. Every once in a while I would go along with her, but without seeing most of the shows from the beginning, to this day I unfairly associate anime with the experience of squinting nearsightedly at blurry text (again, this was the 90s, we had CRTs) while attempting to figure out why Japanese teenagers were yelling at each other while obliquely referencing grievances and events that I’d missed by coming in late.

You see where I’m going with this.

And I don’t say that intending to be unkind! Just that in that first assessment, I thought part of what FoPPSA was doing was genre emulation of a genre with which I don’t easily get along, and which often can be intentionally alienating. Some of the tropes were fun – – but the overall structure isn’t one that’s trying to provide easy answers.

3. Bertolt Brecht

OK, here’s why I used the past tense in the paragraph above. As I was going to sleep after playing FoPPSA, one detail suddenly jumped out at me – oh, and I can’t really say what it was without a spoiler. Actually:

(Spoiler - click to show)So the detail is that the floating casino that hosts the game’s climax is called the “Mahagonny”. One might be forgiven for thinking that’s a misspelling of a type of wood, but I think it’s actually a reference to a Bertolt Brecht opera (I haven’t seen it, but that same ex-girlfriend was also interested in opera and once described the plot to me). And once I realized that, I thought to myself, hang on, the author isn’t (just) doing anime, they’re doing Brecht.

I am not anything resembling a theater scholar by any means, so most of what I say here is probably wrong. But my understanding of Brecht is that he was a devout Communist and critic of capitalist society who developed a theater focused on an ethic of estrangement that interrogates the role and complicity of the audience in what they’re watching. And it sure seems like there’s a lot in FoPPSA to support a Brechtian reading!

The slow ascent up the apartment-tower of privilege, for example, with the player becoming further compromised with each step they take, is a relatively straightforward critique of capitalism (I found the dialogue options here a little wonky, but I believe it’s possible to end the game after getting each apartment if you say you’re content with it – it’s just that you get a “bad ending” so you’re pushed to try for the next). And speaking of allegories of capitalism, the horrifying fish-canning factory is if anything a bit too on the nose. Plus the dialogue with and about the trio of dudebros has a lot of references to revolutionary theory and practice.

Beyond the focus on class, there are also parts of the game that might be intentionally estranging. The host of Japanese words, likely unfamiliar to most Western players, put a layer of effort between the player and the game. There are interspersed quotations, I think mostly from the Brothers Grimm, that unsettle the narrative. There are several random sections where you just need to keep trying the same things over and over until you happen to get lucky. One might even view some of the fiddliness of the parser and puzzles as attempts by the author to engage the player-as-audience in a Brechtian sort of way!

4. Summing up

I mean, if you read the giant spoiler-block above you know that I can’t really pretend to sum this up. There’s a lot going on in this one, with some real intelligence behind the game, but also some messiness, bugs and flaws. I’ll need to go back once the comp ends, including playing the prequel, and see if I can get any further. I also hope there’s a post-comp release, because I think some clean-up would help delineate which bits of oddness are intentional, and which are bugs. In any event, FoPPSA was an intriguing start to the Comp for me!

(I’ll wrap up with a small bit of service-reviewing: there were two significant bugs I ran into that even the most devout Brechtian wouldn’t include on purpose: while trying to solve a disambiguation issue, I tried to drop one of the items and got a “fatal error: Out-of-bounds memory access” crash (this terminates the transcript, since I didn’t remember to start a new one when I re-opened the game); the game also didn’t end for me after I performed what I’m pretty sure (from the walkthrough) should have been the last few moves. (Spoiler - click to show)This means that my antagonist/rival/romantic interest was left forever bleeding out, gasping out the same final bit of dialogue, no matter how many turns I waited or tried to keep talking to her.) I believe these may have been fixed in a mid-Comp update, though).

I try not to bang on about my own entry in the Comp in these reviews, but for y’all who haven’t played it, it’s an Ancient Greek mystery-cult initiation as told by P.G. Wodehouse. I share this because I’m excited that I’m not the only one offering a bizarre British-literature mashup, and in sheer creativity, I’m quite sure “late-Victorian geometry satire meets steampunk browser game” beats me hands down.

For all the potential outlandishness of the setup, though, Flattened London goes down easy. I’m only dimly familiar with the inspirations (I read Flatland maybe 20 years ago, and have maybe played two or three hours apiece of Fallen London and Sunless Seas before bouncing off them), but the author doesn’t assume too much advance knowledge, providing enough context to make the player feel sure-footed, without overloading things with too much lore or too many exposition dumps. There are certainly lots of things that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I suspect most of those were places where ambiguity and mystery were intentional, and I generally had a solid enough understanding of how things behaved to be able to move forward.

The structure here is interesting. There’s a clear main plot – the player character (a triangle) is tasked by one of the eldritch overlords of the post-lapsarian city with tracking down a forbidden treatise adverting to the existence of a heretical third-dimension, and once obtained, there are a number of different things you can do to dispose of it. But if you just stick to that, you’d maybe see only a third of the game – perhaps I just got lucky with where I chose to start exploring the fairly-large game map, but I resolved the plot and got a perfectly satisfying ending in about 45 minutes.

Below (can we say “below”?) this more modern, story-driven structure, though, is a Zork-style treasure hunt. You have a 13-slot trophy case in your apartment, you see, and as you explore the world, poke into ancient mysteries, and solve various side-puzzles, you accumulate various valuables that can be deposited back home. It’s hopefully not a spoiler to share that something fun happens if you find all of them, and I found tracking them down sufficiently engaging that I kept playing until I’d caught them all (in a bit under two hours, for those who might be intimidated by the “longer than two hours” estimate on the blurb).

There are two reasons this way of doing things works well for Flattened London, I think. First, exploration is rewarding in its own right – there are lots of places to poke into, secret histories alluded to, endless libraries to get lost in, and even a whole (Spoiler - click to show)parallel dimension to discover. The writing here is never as rich and allusive as what I’ve seen in the Failbetter games, sounding a bit more prosaic than the antediluvian ruins and dimension-hopping monsters on offer might seem to merit – and I’m not sure it does as much as it could with the Flatland part of the premise – but there are definitely moments that are enticingly weird (I’m thinking especially of the (Spoiler - click to show)bit with the pail), and the clean prose keeps the focus on the puzzles, which are the other reason the structure worked for me: there are a lot of them, but I found all the puzzles pretty easy.

Most involve a pretty direct application of a single inventory item, with generous clueing, and even the slightly more involved ones don’t give much trouble (there is a maze, but it’s pretty easy to map using the old drop-your-inventory-to-mark-where-you’ve-been method, and you don’t even need to do that since there’s a clue found elsewhere that enables you to run straight through it). There’s a game of Mastermind, but I think you’ve got infinite time to solve it so that’s no big deal. There was one puzzle that I’m still not quite sure how I solved (Spoiler - click to show)(getting the treasure on the shelf in the elevator shaft – after I made it through maze, suddenly this was accessible on the way back, but I’m not sure what I’d done to open that up. I also might have sort of broken it, though, since I’d realized that while you can’t take the object on the shelf as you’re whizzing by, you can take the shelf itself, which I’m pretty sure isn’t intended). But overall the game plays as a romp, as you wander around a large map plowing up treasures and secrets practically every five minutes.

I’m not sure how long Flattened London will stick with me – that’s the down side (argh, “down”, I did it again) of being so easygoing – but there’s a lot to be said for just rewarding the player! This is probably some of the purest fun I’ve had so far in the Comp.

I am not convinced this is not a joke.

Fight Forever is a maximalist MMA simulator, and it leans hard into every dudebro cliché you can imagine. You play an up-and-coming fighter, who gets to pick a name, a mentor, and a style, from a dozen or so options for each (I opted to name my – I think guy? – Frankie, hoping that I’d eventually be able to take a trip to Hollywood. No dice, but pre-fight my trainer did tell me to “Relax”, so I got my win after all). The heart of the gameplay is preparing for, then engaging in, a series of amateur and ultimately professional fights.

It is hard to overstate how authentically meatheaded this all feels. Your options in between fights include three different versions of training (“Train,” “Spar,” and “Fight Camp”), and one catch-all category labeled “Life”, with sub-menus for “Travel,” “Social,” “Sports,” “Stuff,” and “Master Class.” Master Class lets you get inspirational quotes from e.g. Margaret Thatcher. The others have like 15 grayed-out options and only one that works; for Social, predictably, it’s Booty Calls (Family, Philanthropy, Date, Read, Teach, and, endearingly, Tabletop Games, all either need to be unlocked or haven’t been implemented yet. You’ll also eventually be able to purchase Real State).

Training is the main focus of the game, as far as I could tell. It allows you to increase an incredible array of stats, both primary and derived. You can focus on “Boxing” or “TKD” or “Sambo” (erm) or for that matter “Awesomeness” or “Strategy” at Fight Camp, while Training lets you choose from a bunch of different exercises that seem to relate indirectly to this flurry of statistics. At one point I was told my “measurable takedown level” was 0 – seems bad! There’s no way I could see to actually access these all on one screen, though the Sparring option I think allows you to reveal a single one per mainline fight.

Speaking of those fights, there’s much less here than you might think. You click “fight”, you get some text, a mysterious gauge shows up, and you win or you lose, with no indication of why. There are sometimes previews of who you’ll be up against next, but these are beyond cryptic: the most clear one I got was a flag that the next opponent was very durable, but beats me whether that meant I should be focusing on endurance to be able to last in the ring with him, or power to break through his defenses (I tried endurance, and I lost. Or maybe my rockstar juice level wasn’t high enough? Yes, that’s a real stat). Heaven only knows what one’s meant to do to prepare to fight “well-educated boxers” (distract them with some Keats, perhaps?). And I thrilled to the mental image of going up against an “orthodox” fighter (I am picturing the hat, sideburns, and tallit).

Surprisingly, this is actually pretty fun! Kieron Gillen has some line, I think in a review of Diablo or one of its progeny, that a dirty secret of video games is that sometimes it’s enough to just watch a number go up. FF has a bunch of numbers and they go up – what more do you need? The bloom started to come off the rose once I got silver in the Olympics and then transitioned from amateur to pro, though. I found these bouts much harder, and suddenly training cost money. I also kept getting concussed and told I should see a doctor, but couldn’t find that option. Losing interest, I decided to explore the game’s legacy mechanic, where you can have a kid and shift to guiding their journey through martial arts. Once I clicked to confirm this is what I wanted to do (with the cheapest option, because apparently you’re paying for your sperm/egg donor?) I got this sequence of text:

"Frankie is succesfully having sexual intercourse with Busting Beaver, and viceversa…

Name your gamebred:

[blank to fill in name]

Sprinkle"

I swear I’m not making any of that up.

Anyway the game restarted except now I’m 14 and unable to compete in fights (good?) but I’m still able to engage in booty calls (NOPE). My age is stuck at 14.203846153846153 and I’m not sure how to advance time to the point that I can get back in the game, so I’m calling it here: goodnight sweet prince, and may your days be filled with the wisdom of the Iron Lady and getting ready to fight an opponent “who throws punches and punches”.

The curse strikes, as it inevitably must: in the opening text of Ferryman’s Gate, a game whose stated purpose is to inculcate good grammar, there’s a grammar error. Admittedly, it’s an omitted apostrophe (“in your mothers words” should be “in your mother’s words”) and FG is all about the commas, but the rule that you can’t talk about grammar without messing up your own claims another victim (though there’s an alternative explanation – the author, well aware of the curse, is prophylactically warding it off with an early sacrificial offering!)

This is pretty much the only clear misstep in a game that I’d been looking forward to ever since I saw it on the list. Among my many exciting and romantic-partner-attracting interests, grammar looms large, and if the humble comma doesn’t have quite as much to offer as the stately semicolon or the forceful em-dash, nonetheless it has a lapidary charm all its own, as well as a host of teeth-gnashingly awful potential misuses. My expectations led me to imagine something pretty off-the-wall that went all-in on the concept, stuffed to the gills with comma gags and puzzles. For all its pedagogical premise, though, FG’s world is fairly grounded and dare I say plausible, with the comma obsession of the player-character’s great-uncle given a psychological basis. And the gameplay is familiar and solid for anyone who’s steeped in parser IF: you rove about the mansion of a dead relative, slowly unlocking new areas, interacting with family members who have reasonably deep conversation trees, solving swap puzzles, dealing with areas of darkness, performing a few secret rituals, and taking everything that isn’t nailed down.

The twist is that scattered among the more traditional adventure-game puzzles are a series of tests your deceased great-uncle has set, requiring you to demonstrate your knowledge of proper comma usage. There’s a book that ably spells out the rules, so I think this is fairly accessible even to folks who didn’t learn English grammar in school. You’re usually asked to pick out the one sentence that’s error free, or that demonstrates a specific kind of mistake, out of a number of options, which will guide a choice of actions: it’ll indicate which button to push or sign to dig at or way to go at an intersection or what have you. FG leans less on the commas than you might think, though – while the major puzzles gating progress do involve grammar, there’s also a collect-a-thon running in parallel where you need to obtain a dozen metal plates to solve the final puzzle of the game. These plates are hidden throughout the rest of the game and usually rely on exploration or light object-based puzzling to obtain, meaning you’re usually making some kind of progress as you go, and making sure you don’t get sick of the comma stuff (is it weird that if anything I wanted more?)

The author – I think a first-timer, given some self-deprecating notes in the ABOUT text – takes a canny approach to implementation. Most scenery is implemented, and objects that you can interact with are for the most part clearly set out from the main text, though several objects, including the player character, do have default descriptions. The map is large, but navigation is easy due to the mini-map in the corner (I didn’t see any extensions listed, so this might be custom-coded, in which case nicely done!) and there are very few guess-the-verb issues or other struggles with the parser. Partially this is because most of the puzzle solving happens in the player’s head, as you identify grammar errors; the actual commands you type in once you’d identified the solution are usually simple applications of Inform’s default systems, like moving around, pushing buttons, or opening containers and putting things in them. This is a really smart choice that minimizes parser frustrations and the risks of bugs creeping in from complex logic, without having to trade off the novelty or complexity of the puzzles. I did run into one small niggle – I think the plates were each supposed to be marked with an alchemical symbol, but only the one for Mars displayed correctly in my interpreter – but the relevant association is helpful spelled out in the text description too, so this doesn’t impact progress.

Sometimes I say a game is solid and feel like I’m damning it with faint praise, but not so here. FG takes a somewhat off-the-wall premise but grounds it in well-considered design and a surprisingly serious though never grim storyline. While part of me can’t help but wonder what the maximalist version would have looked like, there’s a power in restraint that Ferryman’s Gate amply demonstrates.

I think many of us have had the experience of being on one side or another in a conversation where someone’s trying to communicate an experience that was incredibly profound and meaningful to them, but can’t articulate it in a way that really lands. It’s a frustrating experience – more so for the teller than the listener, I think – because even while it’s clear there’s something important on the table, the palpable lack of understanding becomes alienating. That’s very much how I felt about Equal-librium, a game desperate to share something life-changing, but which at best is only able to talk around the space where that something should go.

It’s hard to go into what I mean without spoiling the whole game – it’s very short, and there’s really only one central dilemma. So I’m going to assume you’ve finished it in the paragraphs that follow.

Right, to sum up the story as I understand it: you play the CEO of an investment bank that seems to primarily deal with the resource-extraction industry. You’ve just cut a deal with a nonprofit to exploit some land they had obtained for conservation purposes, and as part of the negotiations you’d demanded (and received) a bribe. However, a hacker has accessed your email and found out about this, and is blackmailing you. Depending on whether you’ve managed to reconnect with an old friend from college when he accidentally spilled coffee on you earlier in the day, you either are able to identify the culprit, or have a last smoke and kill yourself.

This story doesn’t really make much sense – most notably, shouldn’t the bank be bribing the conservation nonprofit, and not the other way around? But stuff like that is relatively easy to ignore if the character work is up to snuff. Sadly, where Equal-librium really goes astray is in its depiction of the relationship with the old college friend. Shu/Will seems nice enough, and it’s clear there was some important connection between the two almost twenty years ago. But the game talks around that connection – it has something to do with the main character helping Shu quit smoking? – but it feels like there must have been something more important, and more reciprocal, going on.

The thematics of the ending also don’t feel like they quite click. In the “bad” ending, the CEO, facing the ruin of his reputation and bereft of human connection, decides to end it all. You then get some moralizing final text talking about the importance of balance: “Every system, whether the economy or the ecosystem, has an equilibrium. When we keep extracting the resources, exploiting human moral bottom-lines, consuming carelessly, and ignoring small but essential part of the system chain, the system sends a feedback loop to break in most unexpected ways… Perhaps you need to restart the system to really experience how good it is to be in Equal-librium.” But in the “good” ending, the main character is just able to strike back at their rival, and does reconnect with their friend, but doesn’t seem to change their ways at all, making the ultimate meaning very unclear.

The technical implementation is fine – the color and font choices are attractive, and there’s an undo button always available, so it’s simple to explore the different possibilities, which is good because I think the game only works if you can see the different paths. I did encounter an odd error having to do with a non-existent macro, but it didn’t seem to affect progress. I did find the prose a bit of a stumbling block; there aren’t many out-and-out typos or grammatical errors, but there are a lot of awkward phrasings and run-together clauses that made the writing a bit unclear at times. That’s Equal-librium in a nutshell, I think – there’s intentionality and heart to it, but in its current form, it’s not quite able to bring the player fully in to the experience it’s working to evoke.