Reviews by Mike Russo

The comedy parser puzzler is a nigh-infinitely-extensible format, capable of incorporating the wildest of premises and set-pieces with nary a crack in the suspension of disbelief: we’ve been conditioned over the decades to accept puzzles based on logical absurdities and high-concept setups that wouldn’t pass muster as two-minute improv sketches, and in return, players are promised gags with a reasonable hit-to-miss ratio and the opportunity to participate in a farce. Polymorphed pigs, idiot knights, gentleman thieves, harried chefs – any protagonist you can think of can confront any mad-libs combination of wacky aliens, bumbling cultists, blithering aristocrats, or misunderstood monsters imaginable, and the critical inventory item could equally well be a piece of chewing gum, a leaky jar of battery acid, a toy sheriff’s badge, or an authentic death ray. For the most part Mr. Beaver fits seamlessly into this tradition – here, it’s a diligent mailman rescuing a shrunken shopkeeper using a patched-together diving suit – but by making the protagonist’s degree of desperation a critical game mechanic, it also tries something I don’t recall seeing before. In some ways it’s a not a perfect fit for this extremely-plastic genre, but it does add a critical touch of novelty.

Without that element, the game would still work perfectly well, I think. We’re recognizably in the rescue-the-zany-uncle-from-his-kooky-mansion subgenre, which is a classic for a reason, and Mr. Beaver is a well-realized example of the form; the geography isn’t too expansive, and the locations are fairly dense, making the overstuffed antique shop something more than a bare setting for puzzles, with plenty of opportunity for character-ful details and tiny jokes. The inevitable sci-fi touches are also kept focused and while there are some out-of-left-field elements, like an incongruous coffin, they’re explained by Mr. Beaver’s eclectic taste, so the worst excesses of kitchen-sink aesthetics are avoided. I did find the very ending fluffed the balance slightly and drifted into more slapstick wackiness than I prefer, but save for those last couple paragraphs I enjoyed the vibe; the humor’s more likely to raise a gentle smile than a sudden guffaw, but there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

As for the puzzles, they’re cleanly in the medium-dry-goods tradition, though similarly a bit more grounded than is typical for the genre: there are secret passages and some devices to fiddle with, but with reasonable diegetic explanations and, usually, enough clueing to help the player understand what they should be trying to do and why. A few of the more esoteric puzzles did require highly-specific phrasing to get the parser to understand what I meant – there were a couple of these, but I’m thinking especially of a puzzle where you have to manhandle a reasonably-large object but PUSHing and MOVing and LIFTing didn’t register, with only TIPing did the business. My frustration was increased by the fact that every time I made an attempt, I had to struggle with a disambiguation prompt because typing the name of the object wound up getting it confused with the similarly-named table it was resting on top of. This is a custom parser system, and while it’s generally solid, this and a few other issues (notably, default responses printing out right after, and contradicting, the results of successful actions) make it a little less smooth sailing than the major platforms.

On these fronts Mr. Beaver is perhaps unexceptional though certainly unexceptionable. But it does have its one unique twist, the desperation-meter. Throughout the game, there are a series of actions that the average comedy-parser protagonist would perform without thinking twice – things like knocking over a shelf to get at a blocked passage, or opening up a sealed sarcophagus – but which here fail, with a pointed note that you’d only resort to such measures it were clear that the situation were especially dire. And as you conduct your investigations, you’re occasionally informed that your worries are increasing, allowing you to go back and try some of those formerly-blocked actions and succeed this time.

Functionally, of course this is just another way of constructing a puzzle dependency chain – you must solve X puzzle before solving Y. But building things this way helps take some of the arbitrariness out of the parser puzzler. I’m sure we can all think of examples where solving a puzzle makes a heretofore-hidden object incongruously reveal itself, or advance time in such a way that a previously-inaccessible area opens up. These contrivances are part of the genre, but too many of them can cause the player to roll their eyes, and also make it harder to make a plan, since you never know what might happen next. So there’s a benefit to having much of the gating depend on the protagonist’s mental state rather than seemingly-random circumstances. Similarly, this also helps mitigate the adventure-game-PC problem of the character who’s meant to be heroic, but nonetheless steals everything that’s not nailed down or engages in motiveless mayhem.

So in concept I’m a fan, but I think the implementation here could be smoother. For one thing, the choice of what actions are verboten can sometimes feel arbitrary – breaking open a coffin requires less disquiet than looking under a doily, for example, and no matter how worried you are that Mr. Beaver’s time is running out, nothing will persuade you to risk disassembling a Jenga tower. For another, there are I think five levels of escalation, which is probably too many to be qualitatively distinguished – it felt like a few times, I ran across information that felt mostly redundant with what I already knew, but was told that his had ratcheted up my desperation another quantum; combined with the previous issue, this wound up requiring a bit too much tedious lawnmowering of previously-forbidden actions to see what had opened up this time. And there are some places where the mismatch between player-knowledge and what the protagonist is willing to do gets sufficiently wide as to cause frustration: any player who glances at the cover art for half a second will realize that the aquarium – and by extension the diving suit and related paraphernalia you find about the shop – will be important to the endgame, which is quicky confirmed by messing about with it, but you’re prevented from doing much to start in on that puzzle chain until very late in the game (since the cover art is AI generated, if you glance at it for more than half a second will note that the crab has seven legs, no claws, and no mouth; for all that the text portrays Crusty as a charismatic little arthropod, as a result I shuddered any time I had to interact with him).

I’m sharing these quibbles less because I think they’re significant flaws, though, than because I did find this novel gameplay system an interesting, worthwhile one, and as with any system in its infancy it’s worth giving detailed feedback to help figure out best practices. It’s not the only reason to play Mr. Beaver – as I’ve said, if this is a kind of IF you like, there’s much to enjoy here – but it did give me something more substantive to chew on after the farce was done.

One of the weirder experiences of my reading life was a couple years ago, when I wound up spending most of the night at the ER with my wife – she wound up being fine, but it was stressful and there was a lot of that hurry-up-and-wait that always happens in hospitals, so I wound up reading all the way through the short book I’d thrown into the go-bag since it was next on my to-read pile: The Pilgrim’s Progress. Now, this is already a bit of an odd duck of a book; it’s an allegory from the late 17th century depicting a soul’s progress towards salvation, taking much of its surface incident from the stuff of chivalric romance but its structure, and deeper meaning, from the radical strains of Protestant theology that briefly flourished during the chaos of the English Civil War before being inevitably quashed as order was restored. I’m reasonably well versed in the milieu for a layperson, but it definitely still feels like an alien text to me – and that’s before accounting for the fact that I read it in one sitting, in the middle of the night, trying to distract myself from anxiety.

It’s not just a critique and not just a compliment that playing WATT reminded me of that experience: just as the eponymous Pilgrim is called to abandon his family to seek salvation, the eponymous WATT hears a voice ordering him to leave his home in order to save it; just as Pilgrim undergoes allegorical trials as he struggles with despair, fear, and other sins, WATT visits seven houses that each host a challenge focusing on aging, anxiety, or the difficulty of making a human connection; just as the locations in the Progress have excessively-literal names, like the Valley of the Shadow of Death or Doubting Castle, WATT’s journey sets from a town that’s just “Penance” spelled backwards; just as I sometimes found the early-modern text alternately uncommonly lyrical rough going, some of the prose in WATT is really good and some verges on doggerel; and just as I felt flipping to the end of the book in the ER, I finished WATT rather unmoored and unsure of what had just went down.

There are two ways you can assess an allegorical journey like this, I think – the first is how well the overall arc functions, and the second is weighing up the individual steps in the path. The former is where WATT is unfortunately least successful. Not to extend the Pilgrim’s Progress comparisons past the point of reason, but while the opening there is similarly abrupt and disorienting, it’s drawing on centuries of Christian teaching; we know what salvation is, we know roughly what is needed to attain it, and we know that, at least within that worldview, it’s the most important thing there is. The Pilgrim, who’s actually called Christian, is an intentional everyman figure, from his generic name to his lack of backstory beyond a consciousness of sin. In WATT, we’re not given much to understand who this voice is or how credible it is, and what if any metaphysical significance the task it gives to the protagonist – finding seven keys to unlock and activate a lighthouse – is meant to have, which makes the game’s feints towards religious issues unsatisfying: there’s just not much substance here to engage with. And while WATT initially seems to be a blank slate, down to an opening “character creation” section that aborts, telling you that you don’t have the power to make such choices, he eventually develops a very specific history that might have impacted how I understood the first half of the game. And the ending exacerbates this lack of coherence, both by introducing an unnecessary twist that further undermined my investment in the overall arc, and concluding the story in a way that I didn’t think tied off the various threads of the plot.

The other side of that criticism, though, is that there were threads of that plot that I was invested in, because some of those individual steps are quite good. Oh, there are some clunkers, especially in the first half – there’s a contextless school quiz, a dialogue with a naïve woman that moves too quickly to establish a forced emotional connection, a workplace simulator that doesn’t have much to say about capitalism – but they’re all over relatively quickly and, except for that second one, work fine for what they are. But the latter set of vignettes boast less standard setups: there’s more about WATT’s regret at having never met his mother, a miserabilist flash-forward to a failing marriage, and a long slog of a climb that uses timed text to defensible purposes. But the real standout is a section where you’re playing the role of the emperor in a classical Chinese opera, choosing how to govern your nation and your household but always aware of the audience’s expectations, and the way they push you into playing a specific role that holds emotions in reserve and never commits to anything (that the audience might only exist in your head is a nice grace-note). The writing here also gets more lyrical:

"She enters the front yard of your chambers, perfumed in jasmine and rogue. Her silk trails behind her like a serpent, the colour of dusk after rain – deep, warm and aching."

The momentum the game builds through the back half of its journey was strong enough that even the disappointing ending I mentioned above wasn’t enough to blunt my enjoyment – and after all, Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t memorable for where it ends up (one vision of heaven is much like another, and Christian’s redemption is pretty much guaranteed from the get-go) but for the vividness of the obstacles in the path, and how they relate to moments of moral struggle we’ve all experienced. So on that front, WATT is in good company.

I don’t think I’m especially atypical in finding that it’s increasingly hard to steer clear of revenge fantasies. The rise of authoritarian regimes in what are notionally democracies means that every day, we’re confronted with the latest antics of amoral grifters, who put on a paper-thin veil of piety while committing crime after crime to line their pockets and save their skins. How can you not occasionally give in to the temptation to imagine that some form of divine justice could be realized in this world, not the next one, and redeem our debased reality? And of course I’m talking here of Trump and his cronies, but also of the Netanyahu regime, which even as I’m writing this is launching another ground offensive in Gaza, targeting already-starving civilians because two years of genocide apparently isn’t enough to satiate their bloodlust.

Just Two Wishes is a revenge fantasy, though to its credit it’s a lot less vicious than mine tend to be. It doesn’t reveal this at first, because it’s told backwards: there aren’t really any puzzles in this parser game except for piecing together the meaning. As a result, I can’t really talk about it without getting into that meaning, so fair warning: if you haven’t played it yet and don’t want the experience spoiled any more than I already have, it’s time to bounce.

OK, now it’s just us chickens. So yeah, this is the game that depicts the aftermath of a Palestinian child’s birthday wishes: that Bibi and Trump turn into the frayed teddy-bear she’s playing with, and that a giant black bowl like the one she’s got clapped over a bunch of beetles seal off Israel from the outside world. Because it is played backwards, the Tel Aviv segment feels like a disquieting mystery, with the disappearance of the sun and sky a horrifying bit of magical realism – admittedly, on my first go I missed seeing the Netanyahu speech, which would have broken up the somber mood, but that did mean that the jump to Mar-a-Lago was even more ridiculous, as the smash-cut to Trump in bed with a Hitler Youth and suddenly sprouting fur left me enjoyably discombobulated. I sometimes like not knowing what the heck I’m playing!

As a parser-game experience, it works well enough – design-wise, it’s all about moving through space until you get to the climactic cut-scenes that trigger the next sequence. With that said, the implementation is pretty thin; the menu-based conversation is slickly done, but you only ever have one or two choices, and the characters don’t have any depth, largely two-dimensional villains, heroic victims, or background players there to help the machinery of plot move along (though Zulaija has an understandable, and appealing, nasty streak). Meanwhile, the use of PunyInform means that there’s a bit more fussing about with doors than fits the game’s story, and the persistence of default Inform responses makes for some inadvertent comedy, especially in the Trump section (being told that, after JD Vance informs you that he’s taking over the presidency, “you politely end the conversation” beggars belief, as does the “violence isn’t the answer to this one” when you subsequently try to tear him limb from limb). But this isn’t exactly a game that lives and dies by its simulation – a parser presentation is a good fit for a story where you’re wandering around confused.

As politics, well, it’s not exactly trenchant. The caricatures of the bad guys are just that, and the fantasy being played out is satisfying but woefully incomplete (in particular, while I’m definitely a voting-for-the-Democrat-is-necessary-but-not-sufficient liberal, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the genocide started in the Biden administration – it’s obviously gotten worse since Trump took over, of course!) On the flip side, some of the characterization of ordinary Israelis made me uncomfortable: while I can’t fully disagree with the statement that “what Israel’s voters want is the eradication of Palestine, genocide pure and simple”, at least in terms of revealed preferences, it’s worth noting that there’s a large contingent of Israelis deeply unhappy with Netanyahu. Along similar lines, there’s a magazine described as featuring “Zionist beauties” Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman; I don’t follow the political views of celebrities all that closely, but while Gadot was famously in the IDF and has repeatedly stuck her foot in her mouth criticizing people who support Palestinians, I wasn’t aware of Portman doing anything in particular that would open her up to an implication of complicity with war crimes — and a quick Google left me no better informed since it turned up reasonably high-profile opposition to Netanyahu and some support for Gazans. And the reference to the elevator in the Tel Aviv apartment building being a “Schindler” feels like an awkward Holocaust reference, though per the author's later comments this is just a meaningless coincidence. There's nothing out of bounds here by any means, I don't think, but since collective punishment is so central to what's happening to Gaza, a work engaging with it necessarily is going to invite heightened scrutiny about its portrayals of collective guilt.

Calling a revenge fantasy occasionally tasteless isn’t exactly a criticism, though – that’s kind of the point. Nuance isn’t the order of the day, emotional catharsis to help manage the day to day stress of living in an unjust world is. By that standard Just Two Wishes does what it’s supposed to, I have to admit – I’m just not sure whether that daydream is completely healthy, or one that’s appropriate for me as an American to indulge in. And in fairness, the game seems to share that ambivalence to at least a certain degree – its subtitle is “a triptych on anger”, which at least implicitly passes judgment on little Zulaija’s dreams of vengeance. Some degree of retribution will be needed if we’re ever to live in decent societies again, but finding the right degree without going too far will take more than an idle daydream.

The mash-up is a big part of contemporary culture, from X-meets-Y high-concept movies to pop music, where samples and guest verses rule the charts, but it’s notable that, save for the burst of popularity enjoyed by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies some 15 years ago, the literary mash-up doesn’t tend to be especially commercially successful – and yet, it still gets written, Jeeves meets Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes meets the Great War, Star Wars meets Shakespeare, and so on. My suspicion is that part of the explanation is that for an author in a gamesome mood, it’s an exciting challenge to just answer the basic question “can this be made to work?” Getting into the guts of genre and prose style and suturing together two disparate approaches so that the seams don’t show appeals to the Dr. Frankensteinian hubris that lurks within most writers.

On this score, I think Anne of Green Cables can be adjudged a success – with the notable caveat that I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables all the way through. Still, I’m familiar with the basics of the plot and writing style – my wife is a major fan of the books, so I’ve absorbed a lot second-hand – and I skimmed the original as I was playing the game, so I think I’m not totally speaking without foundation when I say that its ventriloquism of L.M. Montgomery in a cyberpunk range comes off.

In the early going, this is because it mostly sticks to a line-by-line retelling of the original, just with the odd bit of sci-fi jargon thrown in: an “intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade ” becomes and “intricate, forgotten bulk of undersea cables in its earlier course, sporadically garlanded with dark fiber splitters and routers,” for example. Sure, the latter excerpt misses some of what’s great in the former – “dark secrets of pool and cascade” is a banger – but the rhythm and sense mostly come through. As the game progresses, though, it gains confidence, and risks more departures from the text. Rather than a simple orphan, in this telling Anne is the ward of a megacorp swallowed up by a hostile acquisition; she’s hired out on a gig contract to the Cuthbert siblings, and while the anachronistic sexism of the original is maintained – they’re disappointed she’s not a boy – she’s got a knack for hacking that lets her work wonders with their glitchy farm equipment.

Notably, while pretty much every incident save the climax is drawn from the book, the amount of recontextualizing varies: some see a near-complete translation of genre tropes, like when a younger sibling laid down by croup is instead rendered insensate by a computer virus. But the infamous raspberry-cordial episode, where Anne accidentally gets a friend drunk, comes through almost entirely intact. This is a good choice because it means that the game isn’t forced to strain for cyberpunk analogues for every little thing, and that the original’s pastoral vibe isn’t totally swallowed up. And the places where the two work in concert are really fun, like the nosy gossip-hound of a neighbor who’s now a vlogger and influencer:

"If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a J-Pop idoru bot Mrs Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually piping /dev/null for a solid five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but as her Bayesian agents suggested, Mrs Rachel was almost forced to suppose it."

Again, it’s clear the best lines are Montgomery’s – this bit, where Anne relates how she and her friends have been writing melodramatic VR-stories, earned me a guffaw (the punch-line is verbatim from Green Gables):

"We made vids of the best ones and sent them to Diana’s aunt Josephine. She messaged back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died."

But some of the prose that’s wholly new to the game, as far as I can tell, is very very good as well, with Anne’s monologue upon the death of her almost-stepfather particularly affecting:

”I haven’t been alone one minute since it happened—and I want to be. I want to be quite silent and quiet and try to realize it. I know a Matthew who wasn’t dead, and I need to bring that man over the threshold.”

So all told, despite some bumps I think that author-teasing question of “can I?” can be answered with a yes – but for a reader, there’s also the question of “should you?” to be addressed. The point of a mash-up isn’t just to show off virtuosity, after all, but to illuminate something heretofore-unnoticed about the two things being juxtaposed. And here’s where I think Anne of Green Cables begins to struggle. The dour social comment of cyberpunk doesn’t sit all that easily next to a rural Canadian idyll, so what’s the thematic connection the game’s trying to draw?

I think it’s largely meant to be the figure of Anne herself, whose charisma, optimism, and willpower can push through country small-mindedness and megacorp amorality alike. It’s an inspiring idea – especially, let’s acknowledge, in our depressing political circumstances – but it’s one the game hints at rather than fully elucidates. A big issue that blunts the parallel is that most of the plot requires the cyberpunk world to be a reasonably cozy one; while there is one clear bad-guy corp, the other one just seems bumbling, and while the game’s vague about what kind of tech-assisted farming the AvonLea community performs, the environment and people are generally depicted as wholesome. When, at the eleventh hour, a more traditional techbro bad guy sweeps onstage, accompanied by NFT-memes and ChatGPT jokes, the effect is jarring, but worse, the threat he represents also feels like it comes out of nowhere. Anne isn’t showing up how to rebel against a near-overwhelming foe, but simply to dispatch a comic-opera buffoon.

That is, instead of a cyberpunk story featuring Anne Shirley – which I think would be thematically powerful, but much less fun to write and read – what we’ve got here is a romantic bildungsroman with a sci-fi gloss, which is more fun but less coherent. This weighting of the elements extends to the interactive pieces of the game – there are some decision points, but mostly they feel like they don’t lead to much branching and often perceptively offer a choice to either stick to the book-Anne, or do something different, and unsurprisingly book-Anne is more fun. Even combined with an endgame minigame that I still haven’t wrapped my head around, the game-y elements of Anne of Green Cables don’t feel like the major draw.

The major draw, of course, is just Anne herself, and to return to where I started, the success of the game is that she’s as appealing, and inhabiting a world just as inviting, as in the original novel. If the game doesn’t throw a whole new light on an acknowledged classic, that’s entirely forgivable, and if the risk of trying to do so would be weighing Anne down with grimdarkery, a la the Netflix adaptation from a couple year ago that my wife still complains about, it’s even easier to pardon. Having gotten to the end of Anne of Green Cables, I find myself eager to finally read Anne of Green Gables once the Comp ends – and it’s hard to think of a better tribute to the game’s success than that.

The summer of my second year in law school, I got an internship in DC and needed to figure out where to live. My school provided a listing service through which I found someone at a school there who likewise had an out-of-town job for the summer, making her place available to sublet, but the dates didn’t quite match up, forcing me to find someplace to stay for the week between when my internship started and the sublet became available. In those pre-AirBnB days I just checked out Craigslist, and eventually found a room I could rent for a couple of days in a suburb just outside the city proper. I was feeling good about my resourcefulness as I threw my giant duffel over my shoulder and caught a bus from the bus station to my new home for the next week – feelings which curdled as I rang the doorbell to find there was no-one there to answer me, and that turned into a cold weight in my stomach once I realized that when I called the host’s number, nobody was picking up.

Fortunately, it was not a scam after all! The guy had just been out and his phone had died; after fifteen minutes he came over and we sorted it all out (okay, he had double-booked the room so I had to sleep on a futon for the first night, so I guess it was kinda scammy, but he was apologetic and knocked the price down as a result – compared to my fears of being left totally up a creek I wasn’t inclined to complain too much). Still, I remember the way my heart sank as I arrived and realized getting into the place I was supposed to stay that night wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, which means the setup of Rain Check-in immediately had resonance for me. In the game, you’ve arrived at an AirBnB in a rural area, but all the lights are off, your phone is low on charge, and the host’s given you cryptically-translated instructions for finding the key that are only medium helpful. Oh, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way. Good luck!

It’s a fun premise, though in practice what we’ve got here is Standard Parser Scenario #7: “get into a locked house.” There’s a little bit of local color with some patio furniture and a squeaky gate held closed with a rock, but outside of a bonus area I didn’t find on my first playthrough (hint: try exploring around before heading to the house), there aren’t any characters to interact with, or much scenery to ground proceedings in any particular place or time, much less anything resembling environmental storytelling – the closest it gets are a few wry footnotes that do at least add a slight flavor of humor. The few puzzles are likewise ones you’ve seen before – it’s not quite moving the doormat to find the key, and then entering the combination that you find written on a post-it one room over from the safe, but it’s also not miles away from that kind of thing, either.

There are two departures from the generic, one good, one bad. On the plus side, there are more endings than I expected, and some puzzles have alternate solutions. These don’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it was fun to see that you could use brute force to get around some challenges, allowing you to reach a suboptimal ending. The other departure is less enjoyable, sadly: not only does the game have an overall time limit, you also have a light-source with limited charge, and when you run out you die. Mainstream parser-IF design has long since moved away from these kinds of timers, and for good reason – leaving aside questions of verisimilitude and Zarfian cruelty, they tend to disincentivize players from spending excess time exploring and checking out details, which undercuts one of the major strengths of parser IF. There are some ways of taking the sting out of them, but I think it would be hard to find these options on a first play-through, it’s galling to have to treat that initial play-through as initial scouting that must be thrown away to inform a subsequent run, though at least the game is short and simple enough that this only winds up being a minor annoyance.

Implementation-wise, Rain Check-in is more ambitious than other games of its length and simplicity: there are some robust features, like the aforementioned phone and endings. The former has some wobbles – it’s implemented via somewhat-wonky multiple choice menus, and I couldn’t actually get the option to display the phone’s charge in the header to work – but I didn’t find any out and out bugs, beyond a few Inform-standard things like an object whose display name doesn’t match what you need to type to interact with it, and the verb to enter the combination being a bit idiosyncratic. For an author who appears to have only made a few small prior parser games, it’s a pretty good showing.

As for the writing – well, the elephant in the room here is the use of ChatGPT to help generate the game’s prose, which the author discusses in the Comp blurb: as a non-native speaker of English, he used ChatGPT as a translation aid and to refine grammar and phrasing. While I usually find text straight from the LLM intolerable to read, here the writing mostly struck me as unobjectionable, I have to say; while I didn’t note down any especially unique turns of phrase, there weren’t any clunkers, either, and it mostly avoids the annoying tics LLMs tend to get up to when given free rein. I have to believe there are more ethical and sustainable tools for ESL authors to use to sharpen their prose – not least, volunteers from this very forum! – but at least as to the results in this game, it’s not too bad.

And that’s pretty much my judgment on Rain Check-in – it’s not too bad! Again, as a neophyte’s work it’s reasonably well put together, while its most annoying features (those timers!) would hopefully be easy to correct in a follow-up work. As a story, there’s not much there, just a sketch towards an anecdote, but it’s a good-natured enough predicament to be stuck in, and I did enjoy the footnotes. And while “not too bad” isn’t high praise, but sometimes, like when you’re locked out and expecting the worst, “not too bad” can feel like intense relief.

My wife had never been part of an Internet community before last year, when she got into the Bridgerton fandom in a big way: like, she reads the fan-fiction, sure, but also had some of her takes go semi-viral on social media, gotten banned from a subreddit due to inter-board feuding, and even co-hosts a podcast. It’s been an eye-opening experience in a variety of ways – IF drama has nothing on what they get into over there, let me tell you – but has also given me a much finer-grained view of the standard tropes of romance fiction than I had heretofore possessed. Beyond the intrinsic interest, it’s also expanded my critical vocabulary, which was helpful as I turned over my reactions to Pharos Fidelis: it’s a game that I really enjoyed, but whose central relationship I didn’t find as engaging as its other elements. And I now I think I know that that’s mostly just due to a difference of tastes than anything lacking in the game: I’m just more of a Friends to Lovers guy than a Forbidden Love one, and Wound-Tending strikes me as nice but not especially hot. À chacun son goût, no big deal, especially when the game offers so much to dig into (so much, in fact, that I feel greedy for wanting even more in some places).

The game’s setup combines pieces of a bunch of different premises, but manages to feel completely seamless and its own thing: in a world riven by a magical war, a young prodigy named Finnit is studying demon-summoning at a prestigious magical academy; he’s fascinated by these otherworldly entities and their world, but his crappy advisor sees them only as weapons that must be dominated. As part of a final exam slash hazing attempt, the advisor teleports Finnit to the ruins of a remote magical lighthouse, telling him he has only a few weeks to unravel its mysteries and reignite it. Knowing he can’t do this alone, Finnit summons a demon he’d previously seen his advisor abusing; working together, the two learn about each other’s worlds and ways, and discover some shocking secrets about the lighthouse’s history, too.

That relationship is the heart of the game, with revelations about the lighthouse always tied to breakthroughs in the characters’ bond (or vice versa). But Pharos Fidelis is confident enough to delay the two meeting for quite a while, long enough to make sure Finnit and his predicament register, as well as to establish the rules of this world. Demon-summoning is subject to laws, in both senses of the term: some are akin to thermodynamic principles, but others are more like moral injunctions, and the game intersperses its narrative sections with bits of textbooks and other in-world documents fleshing things out. They’re well-written in of themselves, and also feed into the character development – seeing the three iron laws of summoning elucidated by your advisor in stentorian terms, and then having the click-to-proceed link read “ignore his wisdom” helps puncture the pretension and communicate where Finnit is coming from.

The prose is a major highlight throughout, in fact, dense with wordplay and memorable images while still remaining propulsively readable. Here’s a description of the aforementioned advisor:

"Raekard was there, tall and spidery, with the indistinct age of a man whose years had intertwined too closely with the power he commanded."

And a vignette that’s part of Finnit’s tragic backstory:

"Wizened boughs set coral pink leaves adrift. They clung, in soggy piles, to gaps between paving slabs. Young Finnit faced a chore deferred, tender fingers gripping a broom too unwieldy to shoo the litter off the patio at any reliable pace."

There’s alliteration, well-judged details, even small jokes – “wizened” sure seems like a nod to what Finnit’s job winds up being, and there’s a later description of the lighthouse’s focusing-crystal, a survivor of many thunderstorms, which notes “the memories of lightning that had long since bolted.” Come to think of it, “Finnit” is itself a sort of pun, highlighting the bounded, finite nature of his being compared to his immortal lover. There are a few flies in the ointment: the game definitely has fantasy-name disease (I’m awkwardly writing around the demon’s name because I can’t remember it off the top of my head – it definitely starts with a V?), there are places where the dialogue struck me as too informal for the high-fantasy vibe, and it takes some big swings, so of course some of them miss.

But these are tiny niggles; 98% of the time the prose is a delight, which is impressive indeed for a work of this length. In fact, even though it pretty much took me the full Comp-standard two hours to reach an ending, part of me was eager for more – I wouldn’t have minded if the process of understanding and trying to fix the lighthouse had had a couple more scenes to play out in, and there are a few glimpses of hell that likewise could have been expanded. Part of me also wishes the central relationship had been more of a slow-burn, but again, I think that’s just down to preference: in some ways it’s more romantic to have the near-immediate spark of attraction quickly having the two of them thinking sexy thoughts about each other, even if personally I think it would have been fun if they’d started more platonic, until Finnit’s flash of insight in a late-night magical engineering session suddenly made the demon want to jump his bones…

Speaking of the demon, I didn’t find him as cleanly-drawn a character as Finnit, but I think that’s actually a strength of the work. Demons are meant to be more protean and amenable to change, and as he’s recovering from trauma, he could reshape himself in different ways. In fact, cleverly and thematically, while Finnit is the viewpoint character, all the choices are on the demonic side of the ledger. There are only a handful of decision points, a few of which are seemingly low-key, but as far as I was able to experiment, they can have pretty significant impacts on where the plot ultimately goes (the chapter select function also makes it easy to experiment).

To be honest, though, while it’s there and effective, I didn’t need the interactivity, or, as mentioned, to get too hot and bothered by the romance plot, to find Pharos Fidelis engaging – the character work and magical investigation are top-notch, delivered in lovely, luminous prose, with several surprises I didn’t see coming (I haven’t mentioned the way the game plays with the second-personal narrator as it nears its conclusion). A highlight of the Comp for sure, and I’d gladly play any prequels or sequels the author cares to write.

Reader, I’m going to have to say something right now that might be hard for you to hear. Are you ready? Do you want to sit down? Do you have your preferred beverage to hand (but not too close, we wouldn’t want to run the risk of spillage)? Okay.

I have some flaws.

I know, you’re going to say, that’s not news, of course you sometimes pad your reviews with hilarious and insightful but maybe only tangentially relevant personal anecdotes, and perhaps sometimes your writing can be too analytically rigorous and insightful. Which, yes, guilty, but actually no, I mean real flaws. I’m terrible at languages, tend to flail when small talk is required, and (worst of all) am too middlebrow to actually enjoy abstract art. I can maunder on about color and composition if I’m trying to impress someone (I’m always trying to impress someone), and there’s definitely some post-Impressionalist transitional stuff, where you can see where the artist jumped off from representation and hangs poised in the air in defiance of gravity, using shapes and textures that aren’t representational but nonetheless have the faintest of tethers to something real, that I find compelling. But beyond that I’m at sea.

All of which is to say that I don’t think I’m the right person to give Eight Last Signs in the Desert its due, even if I weren’t playing it just about a third of the way into this enormous Comp, when my brain is starting to get benumbed at the scale of the task before it and groans in protest at the idea of having to do work. There’s nary a character in sight, much less a motivation easily translatable to Maslow’s hierarchy of need, in this impressively-produced choice-based game: the protagonist addresses a septet of monuments in a sandy wasteland, each of which lets you craft a tone-poem through careful selection of cycling links. There is a progression, as each monument vanishes as you complete it, and for every pair you finish, you get a bonus bit of text that appears customized to the combination of those two. Do that three times, then wrap it up with the final monad and then the surprise eighth monument (no points for guessing what that is), and that’s the game.

It’s a solid enough structure, and the themes at issue – dissolution, the slippery nature of reality, the aridity of the detritus of contemporary civilization – are trenchant enough: what are we living through but the decay of modernism into the abstract? And the prose, er, poetry, is really good, with thought-through meter and memorable images by the score. Heck, speaking of art, the backdrop to all this is lovely, Seurat-style landscapes that provide an unsettling, lyrical home for the seven brooding metaphor-totems.

But good lord is it abstract. Here’s a late-game peregrination:

"You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame."

This is good, but it’s a lot, metaphors tripping over each other in a torrent, and it’s not an exception – this is an extended excerpt of what I landed on for my first monument:

"Enter the palace. Wander its halls until you find the window. Layer its transparencies in a grandiose matrix.

"Seal your choice. Cross it and float outside. Reach for the moon above, but it’s too late in the palace gardens.

"Seal your choice. Sit in it. Dream an uncertain story of the sea."

The lapidary nature of the imagery wound up feeling exhausting to me; until the very end nothing feels like it reaches a climax, each stanza just gives way to the next, sometimes with only the most tangential linkages. Similarly, I experienced the choices as simultaneously polyvalent and weightless in their lack of implication:

"Seal your choice. Rise again and take one step back. Reach for the [discarded/once public/exclusive/devoted] strand and pull."

“Discarded” and “devoted” are wildly disparate concepts, to say nothing of “once public”, so trying to parse out these possibilities imposes a cognitive burden, but then I found it even more challenging to keep those choices in mind once the text moved on, as the subsequent lines might not even mention a strand, much less an excusive one. A more labile brain than mine might have been able to surf the vibes, weaving this riot of language into something that coheres, but I freely admit mine wasn’t up to the challenge: to the extent my quick summary above winds up being accurate, I did end up with a sense of what the game is getting at, and as an aesthetic experience I found a lot to admire in Eight Last Things in the Desert.

But personally in my IF I need a bit more of, well, a personality, and a more disciplined metaphor-palette plus ideally some drama beyond the wearied acceptance of discorporation. So file this one under games I admired more than liked, though I’m pretty sure that to the kind of player who lives for Surrealist art exhibitions and jams to Symbolist poetry will find this among their favorites of the Comp: the fault is not in Eight Last Signs in the Desert, but in myself.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: there’s a Towers of Hanoi puzzle in whoami. It’s only four disks, and seems like it’s at least partially a piss-take – the puzzle is meant to represent the transfer of a full digital encoding of human consciousness that takes literal years to scan in sufficient depth, so seeing this awesome and profound technological feat reduced to a brainteaser that last seemed cool when I was in middle school earned a bark of laughter. But still: it’s 2025, no more, please.

Fortunately, that’s about the only bad thing I have to say about the game! Despite having only used Windows since I graduated from college, I am a sucker for IF that mimics a UNIX shell, and whoami is one of the slickest examples of the subgenre I remember playing. It’s choice-based, so you don’t have to actually type commands, just click on directories and file-names to move around and open stuff, but the presentation is sufficiently authentic to make the player feel like a hacker, even as subtle color-coding helps guide you towards which things you should click. The drive isn’t especially big – I got through the game in maybe fifteen minutes? – and the plot isn’t especially novel, though it mashes up familiar elements into a mélange that I don’t think I’ve specifically seen before. But the “environmental storytelling” of putting together the narrative by reading emails, running a date routine to figure out how time is passing, and checking user logs to piece together what’s happened makes things feel fresh and engaging. Heck, it even hides the save/load functionality behind diegetic dump and reboot functions that you need to hunt around for, which in a longer game would be annoying but since you’ll almost certainly not need them, just registers as another fun bit of business.

whoami also knows the value of changing things up. OK, maybe the Towers of Hanoi were a flop, but otherwise the puzzles are well paced, punctuating progress and giving the player something to do beyond crawling directories. Sometimes this is just a matter of visual presentation, like the web-page mockup whose blaring light-mode makes an unignorable contrast with the black-background filesystem work of the rest of the game. But others are more interactive, including a gag even better than the Towers practical joke (Spoiler - click to show)(the fact that the “primitive” simulation is a seamlessly-implemented-in-Twine Inform game is hilariously meta). There’s also a pretty solid plot twist, and while, again, there’s nothing especially novel here, things move zippily enough that I never felt like the story was getting bogged down, with just enough detail provided to suggest depth without requiring the player to ever get stuck in the weeds, and the game ends just when you want it to. As for the prose, it’s unostentatious but effective, adopting multiple voices as needing and doing a credible impersonation of personal messages or bureaucratese as the situation varies.

I’m struggling to think of much else to say, because whoami is a short game that does exactly what it sets out to do, with style and substance to spare. Even those with a terminal aversion to disk-swapping puzzles should just grit their teeth and power through this once.

I’m not a person who knows anything at all about film, but let’s not let that stop me from advancing a theory: you don’t want to end a movie on a medium shot. A close-up lets you zoom in on a face, an image, and helps the viewer understand the emotional impact of what they’ve just seen. A wide-angle shot dollies out to underscore the sweep of the narrative, creating an epic finish for the story. But a medium shot? It serves well enough to establish a scene and provide spatial context, but as the last thing you see, I think the viewer would wonder: what’s just outside the frame? What details am I not able to make out? What am I missing?

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration at first seems like it’s going to avoid that issue by staying in close-up the whole time. It’s clear from the get-go that the game is going to be all about social comment, as it’s focused on the process of applying for SNAP (colloquially known as food stamps ) benefits, but rather than gritty realism, it opts for fantasy: the protagonist isn’t someone who’s down on their luck, but rather an alien disguised as a human to do research about how earth’s food assistance programs are administered. The setup provides a perfect excuse to linger on the absurd minutiae of the public welfare bureaucracy – the inconsistent paperwork requirements, the perennially-glitchy equipment, the hostile environment. This is all brand new to the alien, and its estranging viewpoint helps a player who isn’t familiar with this stuff revise their assumptions, and question for themselves for why we tolerate this. The prose does a good job of making completely clear what’s going on, while mixing in enough sci-fi comedy to make the critique go down:

"Spoke with a human at the entrance, seems to be some kind of uniformed worker, maybe a firefighter? Note to self: have to brush up on human worker categories.
Firefighter, judging by human social customs, was rude.
Room is brightly lit, gray, tan and white, very bare. My human body has an uncomfortable reaction to it. Curious. Note to self: why would humans create a building they are uncomfortable in? Points to Skrzyyyyt’s theories on human suffering - do they enjoy discomfort?"

Beyond the writing, the design is also engaging; it’s all simple Twine choices, but given the setup you know whatever you try is going to lead to something screwing up, leaving the player trying to figure out how maximize their chances of successfully applying while also looking ahead to guess how it’ll eventually go wrong. The game doesn’t need to get didactic to make its points – presenting a fine-textured look at the lived experience of people who rely on these systems for their survival is advocacy enough.

Unfortunately about ¾ of the way through its short running time, Visit to the HRA does in fact get didactic. The alien has a gadget that lets it freeze time to take notes on its observations, but for some reason one human winds up being immune to the gizmo, and upon learning what the alien’s up to, gets angry and calls it out for studying humans in need as though they were bacteria specimens on a petri dish. Then the game ends and there’s an even more directly condemnatory author’s note (no surprise, they actually are a social worker who’s directly worked with these systems):

"The waste, indifference, and poor quality of service at HRA exemplifies inept bureaucracy and systemic oppression. I’m also disturbed by the desire to study people when we are vulnerable. The inhumane distance created by needing to justify or understand the basic truths that people need food, safety, housing, health, etc. is deeply troubling. As long as politicians demand researched evidence that humans need food, we are fucked."

It’s hard to disagree with any of this, but I found this final chunk of the game much less effective than the rest. Zooming out to the level of argument leaves behind the concrete accumulation of specific SNAFUs, mistakes, and indifference so effectively portrayed in the first part of the game, but it also feels like it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Like, it’s deeply weird to be playing a game about SNAP just two months out from the biggest SNAP cut in American history, with no mention of the fact that the awful picture the game paints will in a couple years’ time be a best-case scenario. The fact that this welfare agency sucks is the result of specific, contested political processes redirecting resources from the poor to the rich, not just bureaucratic inertia, so it feels like a misstep that there’s not really any direct mention of class or politics anywhere here.

As for the research piece, I’m likewise sympathetic to a lot of these critiques: I work for an organization that has a whole bunch of protocols to make sure our research is community-led as well as community-benefitting because we’re aware of how extractive traditional research models can be – and even with that awareness and those systems, we certainly don’t get it right 100% of the time. But it’s also the case research into public welfare systems is extremely important: for example, deep studies of what’s happened when states have adopted “work requirements” for SNAP and Medicaid allow us to know that all this talk of personal responsibility is a smoke-screen, and the primary impact is that eligible people will get thrown off their benefits due to the increased red tape “verifying” that they’re actually looking for work. Again, there are a lot of bad practices to expose and reform here, but without more specific examples of how they play out, or more perspective on the structural factors producing these bad effects, the game’s impact is blunted.

I don’t want to complain too much since this is a well-constructed and well-meaning game that, at least until the end, deftly takes on an often-underappreciated social problem with grace and humor. But I do think it would have worked better if it had stopped right when the time-freeze gizmo did – it would have avoided the lens being awkward middle-distance, the final shots neither sufficiently focused on concrete lives nor on the structural reasons these things are the way they are.

I am nothing of an expert in parser-like choice games and can’t claim any especial insight, but since I have written what I’m pretty sure is the longest article about them, I find my ears perk up when I play one, more alert to questions of craft than I am with any other subgenre of IF. The Promises of Mars offers a good amount to chew on on this front, with some high production values and interface conveniences that often help, but sometimes undermine, player engagement. I can’t help but think, though, that the reason my notes are full of responses to the structure, with comparatively little on the narrative or gameplay, is that the story and puzzles are a bit thinner than the rest of the game deserves.

In the interests of wrapping up with the meatier stuff, we’ll start with that latter chunk. The setup here is able enough, though not novel enough to be too enticing in its own right: the protagonist is a young woman (or older girl, her precise age I don’t think is nailed down) who’s volunteered as a troubleshooter if only to escape the tedium of living in a tunnel-bunker after a climate-collapse apocalypse. Your assignment is to investigate a carbon capture station on the surface that’s gone dark, and your explorations are interspersed with flashbacks to life below the surface, largely revolving around your relationship with your mom.

Despite the relatively standard setup, the sentence-by-sentence writing here is pretty good – I liked this description of what could have just been a throwaway “it’s a desk”, embedding some worldbuilding through a few well-chosen details:

"It’s a sprawling metropolis of scientific paraphernalia: the drum of a helicorder resting next to a thick ream of chart paper; narrow glass tubes filled with multi-coloured liquid; vases of what looks like peat; notepads and biros and strips of litmus paper; canisters of ammonia and dyes."

The plot, though, isn’t much to write home about; inevitably, there’s a bit of a twist, but it’s one you can see coming a mile away, and while the granular details of the station are nicely sketched, other aspects remain rather generic, notably the protagonist’s mother, who never emerges as a character in her own right – if she had, she could have added an extra note of poignancy to the game’s final choice, but as it is the endings likewise felt rather schematic. As for the puzzles, they’re exactly the kinds of things you’d expect from this kind of premise: there are tools to salvage, powered-down elevators to reactivate, keycards and keycodes gating progress, and so on, with none of them posing much of a challenge. This sort of busywork can function well to make the player explore, creating space for environmental storytelling to add texture and resonance to the space and its former inhabitants, but again, the game remains a bit too arid to take advantage of these opportunities.

So much for the content of Promises of Mars, which is usually 95% of what I care about in a game. But the presentation is sufficiently great to be worth highlighting, and in fact so good that I wound up having a lot of fun despite the overall ho-hum-ness of what I was doing. It doesn’t hit on anything other parser-like choice games haven’t tried before, but the way it brings together the interface elements creates visual elegance and a high degree of playability, and really could be a standard-setter for similar games. In addition to generous space for the main text and choices, there’s a big map in one corner and an inventory list in another. The map is purely geometric, but isn’t stuck with the uniform quadrilaterals of most parser game visualizations: streets and corridors are long rectangles, closets tiny squares, and the relationships between each are easy to visualize, which allows for intuitive translation when the text mentions doors to the right and left, say. Meanwhile, having the full map available from the start helps the player gauge their progress through each of the three chapters, and prioritize “clearing” areas before getting too far into unexplored areas; the fact that you can instantly backtrack to a visited location by clicking on its map representation also makes exploration a snap.

The always-available inventory is also nice and convenient, though I think one thoughtful piece of design actually errs too far towards ease of use: items only get highlighted, and therefore clickable, when it’s possible to use them (save for the always-available commlink, which acts as a diegetic hint-line). This takes just about all the guesswork out of the already-simple inventory puzzles, since as soon as you’re confronted with a challenge you’ll see your available options suddenly turn orange. Sure, there are a couple of places where you can make an incorrect choice, but these are either trivial (should you pick a lock with a screwdriver or a paper clip?) or unguessable (there isn’t enough information provided about what size tool you need to use to manipulate some pipes, so you might as well try a wrench as a ballpoint pen), and in either case simple trial and error will see you through in a matter of seconds. In my article’s analysis of parser-like choice systems, I wound up arguing that counterintuitively, you often need to add additional friction to avoid the player simply lawnmowering through all their choices, and this is one place Promises of Mars’ interface puts a foot wrong.

It’s one of the few such missteps, and again, combined with the well-written prose I enjoyed my time with the game: for all my critiques, they mostly just boil down to finding the story not especially exciting. But funnily enough, an unexciting story that’s well-told can still be very satisfying, even in as narrative-focused a world as IF.