Reviews by Mike Russo

BYOD ain’t messing around with the “micro” label – I probably spent as much time playing guess-the-acronym as I did actually running through the game – but the five minutes here on offer are a lovely spike of cyberpunk power fantasy that makes me hope there’s a longer piece with similar mechanics somewhere in the future.

So this is a proper hacking game, doing in pure parser form what yer Uplinks and Hacknets have done with hybrid GUI interfaces. After reading the included e-zine feelie – I just noticed feelies have been rather thin on the ground this year, so it was nice to see a well-made one – I was primed for an intense gray-hat type of experience, but actually the plot and set-up are rather low key: you really are just a student starting a do-nothing internship at a tech company. It’s just that you happen to have a smartphone app that gives you all the power of the Internet gods, with the ability to remote-access any computer or device and read, write, or active it with no concern for security protocols.

The hacking is implemented really solidly, using a UNIX-like set of commands, and again contrary to my expectations, rather than the whole thing playing out at a terminal you actually play an embodied character and type commands in typical adventure-game fashion – you just preface your commands with a prefix to direct them to the hacking app. Being able to merge the two levels of play seamlessly is a clever touch that heads off the challenges most hacking games have in depicting anything happening in meatspace.

All this to say that the foundations here are solid and even a bit exciting. The story and puzzle(s) are pretty underdeveloped, though – there’s no real detail about who you are, why you got this internship, or how you managed to wrangle the killer app. Played straight, there’s only one character and one challenge – you meet the secretary at the front desk and print a sign out for her. If you go poking around where you shouldn’t, there’s a little more flavor and a bonus objective (Spoiler - click to show)(the company’s CEO is blackmailing the secretary with nude photos, which you can delete), which feels good to find and accomplish but is also likewise quite slight.

There are alternate endings, the writing is clean and typo-free, and everything works the way it’s supposed to, so it’s all solidly built. But I can’t help feeling like the work it took to build this hacking system was wildly disproportionate to the work it took to build out the scenario. I find it exhausting to play games that are too long for the amount of content they actually have; BYOD has the opposite problem. Always good to leave them wanting more, I suppose, but still: I want more!

Oh, and “Device” and “Drama” are my two best guesses as to the title – the latter because the story isn’t going to find you, you need to manufacture the interesting bit yourself.

Friends, I will level with you: 2020 has been tough for me, and going into this one I wasn’t sure how I felt about another game about murder, especially one that puts the “brutal” right there in the title. Like, I love the Comp for exposing me to things outside my comfort zone and that I never would have found otherwise, but I also come to IF by way of what we used to call adventure games, text or otherwise. Say what you will about Dr. Ego being a bit wonky and not very innovative, but it had me give a banana to a monkey. Now that’s a proper adventure game puzzle: GIVE BANANA TO MONKEY. Not a severed carotid or trace of seminal discharge in sight.

Blessedly, Brutal Murder is – not actually that brutal? Partially this is the tone, which is miles away from the dour proceduralism the title might evoke. If anything it’s a bit chatty, with a narrative voice that directly addresses the player, alternately confessional and urging the player onwards. And while the central crime is like, clearly a murder and is bad, it’s nowhere near as awful, or as awfully described, as what’s on network TV every night (there is one somewhat disturbing plot element that possibly does deserve a content warning, though I’ll spoiler-block it just in case: (Spoiler - click to show)the narrator, an adult tutor who’s in prison for the murder of the eponymous 17-year old, was in a sexual relationship with her that he describes as consensual).

While this came as a relief to me, I do think BMoJL suffers a bit from this tonal unevenness – the subject matter is clearly meant to evoke tragedy, and that mood is stated as text repeatedly, but it’s hard for that sentiment to land given the often-breezy narrative voice, as well as some out-of-context surrealistic flourishes. The game opens with a tutorial sequence, complete with the narrative voice telling you to TAKE KEY and OPEN DOOR, which is completely diegetic and in continuity with the meat of the game. Each chunk of investigation is interspersed with a trip to a black void, and the topography of the map changes in unphysical ways as the story progresses. It’s not too hard to suss out the reason for this, reading between the lines of some of the narrator’s comments (Spoiler - click to show)(the player character appears to be a sort of crime-solving AI trawling through the narrator’s memories) but this doesn’t seem well-integrated with the main thrust of the plot, and felt very underdeveloped.

As to the game itself, it’s got a pretty solid implementation. There’s typically a good amount of scenery, some of which isn’t described, but all of the objects one can interact with are broken out on their own line, which is a shorthand that adds some convenience. I was stymied by how to open the storage-room cabinet for a long time, even after I knew the code, since TYPE and TOUCH and OPEN and UNLOCK and all their variants failed, but the HELP text had told me that USE item was an important verb, so it’s on me for overlooking that. I did run into one significant bug: my first trip to limbo never ended, leaving me wandering a black void forever, which prompted a restart (second time after a half-dozen turns of flailing, I was moved on to the next sequence as intended).

The puzzles are relatively straightforward and don’t require off-the-wall thinking, but there’s never a time when you feel like you’re solving a mystery – instead you’re hunting for the one piece of evidence or reading material that will prompt the narrator to understand things a little better and explain his progress to you. There are no suspects to interview, or deductions to piece together, just cabinets to unlock and journals to read. It sometimes feels as though the player’s just fiddling about with some busywork while the game solves itself.

This is a shame, because the core story of the game is I think pretty good, with some solid character dynamics, an interesting twist (albeit one that could have probably used more groundwork-laying), and well-observed details on the experience of being Asian-Canadian in one particular place and one particular time. But these tonal issues, and the feeling of disengagement brought on by the gameplay/story disconnect, meant it didn’t land for me as strongly as I would have liked.

I’ve tried to note in these reviews where I think a post-Comp release or in-Comp update would help improve a game, but usually I do that as a late-in-the-day aside. For Big Trouble in Little Dino Park, let me shout it from the rooftops at the outset: I want to praise your game, but first please fix it! It seems very charming, with a funny premise, good prose, and what appear to be some interesting puzzles. But due to myriad crash and dead-end bugs, no save functionality, and a gauntlet-type structure that kills you a lot, I found it way too frustrating to make progress. Admittedly, I can see from other reviews that some folks have managed to power through, so maybe I’m just at a low ebb after running into similar issues in other Comp games, but still: help me help you.

Starting with the positive, BTLDP is immediately grabby – the summer-intern-at-Jurassic-Park setup lets you immediately know what you’re in for, so even as you’re going about your chores you’re just waiting for all hell to break loose (and despite that, it’s still a funny surprise exactly how it all plays out). The prose has a lot of exclamation points and ensures you’re viewing things with the proper mix of terror and strangely giddy enthusiasm (I mean, dinosaurs are cool, even when they’re chewing your face off). Like, there’s this ejaculation when the beasts free themselves from their cages:

"Chaos ascendant! A return to man’s most primal nature: prey! There is only one possible path to escape!"

How can that not make you grin? It does occasionally try too hard (there’s a Mosasaurs -> Mosas -> Moses -> parting the Red Sea gag that just profoundly doesn’t work), and there are a few comma splices and misspellings – though it’s hard to fault anyone for not being able to quite come to terms with “archaeopteryx”. Still, if anything these flaws in the prose reinforce the general teenager-who’s-getting-carried-away vibe.

After the prologue, the game opens up to offer three different areas to explore in search of a way to escape, and here, unfortunately, my troubles began. It’s completely appropriate that trying to escape a park of rampaging dinosaurs involves dying A LOT, so I can’t knock BTLDP too much for this. Where I can knock it, though, is for confusing design – going to the docks kicks off what the game flags as a sort of Frogger sequence, as you need to hop between various boats to make it to the one that’s pulling away. But many of the descriptions of each potential hopping-place are unclear, much less the spatial relationships between them, and there’s an added note of difficulty because part of the trickiness of the puzzle is that you’re presented with false choices (specifically, the swamped hulks of boats you’ve already hopped on and were subsequently smashed by a dinosaur). And then once you get to the boat, I was even more confused by what happened after an additional choice (Spoiler - click to show)(what to do after one of the crew falls off the escaping boat – I thought I could try to pull him onto the boat with me, but I think what’s actually happening is you’re deciding not to get on the boat and pulling him onto the disintegrating dock?). So this leads to a large amount of trial and error gameplay.

BTLDP appears to recognize that this is how most people will experience the story, and positions it as an intended part of the gameplay by listing a death count and a rewind option each time you snuff it.
Except “each time” is overstating it, due to the bugs – I’m not sufficiently familiar with Ink to diagnose exactly what’s going on, but there were a lot of times when I’d click on what looked like a perfectly valid link – even one I’d clicked on just fine in a previous playthrough – only to have the game hang, or print out some text while not offering any further links. There’s no save functionality so far as I could determine, so each time this happened I had to play through the introduction from scratch, which unfortunately loses most of its charm the 12th time through.

I’m holding this space open for hopefully revisiting an updated version of BTLDP, or perhaps coming back to it when I’m more mentally prepared for the whiplash between the whimsical, so-you-died-no-biggie presentation and the Dark-Souls-style grimly repetitive approach currently required, but for now I can’t say I got as much out of, or enjoyed, BTLDP as I’d hoped.

(This review is of the Comp release)

There is nothing creepier than a creepy dream. Conversely, there is often nothing less creepy than that same dream when you’re trying to explain it to others. Plaudits to the author, then, for taking inspiration from one such creepy dream and transforming it into a very unsettling and compelling piece of IF!

The great use of multimedia is part of what makes Babyface so effective. There are judiciously-chosen polaroids, links are highlighted in an ominous red aura, and there’s an amazingly effective jump-scare that’s not at all cheap and that I don’t want to spoil.

But in addition to those (great!) bells and whistles, Babyface has great prose, and – even more importantly for horror – great pacing. The narrative is very canny about revealing some tantalizing hints, and then deferring exploration as the player’s dad calls it a night, or the player wakes up from a dream, or they’re interrupted by a passing police officer. This helps wind up the tension, but also makes the player lean forward in their seat, eager to see what comes next. It’s also set in the here and now, during the COVID pandemic (it’s not stated openly, but it’s possible the main character’s mother has just died of the disease), which as it turns out is a great setting for horror, since it alienates us from the everyday. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of horror fiction set in 2020 in years to come.

There isn’t much interactivity in the sense of meaningful choices or puzzles. I did have fun attempting to translate the mysterious Latin on the photos (fair warning that there’s one bit that isn’t really Latin…) but this is mostly a roller coaster where you’re along for the ride. With that said, there’s definitely some elegance in how links are deployed – there’s one particular sequence where the mechanics of choice effectively communicate a sense of being compelled (Spoiler - click to show)(I mean the bit where the player is entering the house, with “I find myself” the link at the beginning of a sentence that repeatedly changes when you click it. Your cursor isn’t moving, but the character is as the sentence shifts, making it feel like you’re moving forward while remaining inert).

Babyface is definitely worth a play – especially if you give it a spin close to Halloween!

I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.

(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).

This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.

The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.

In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).

All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.

I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.

(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).

This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.

The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.

In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).

All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.

I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.

(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).

This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.

The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.

In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).

All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.

I played this after a Comp entry that leaned almost entirely in the story direction, so it's interesting that At Night takes the opposite tack. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bit of a plot and some internal conflict – the main character is being plagued by nightmares, you see – but what’s distinctive about it is the combat system, which you need to master in order to reach a successful ending (reaching other endings, where you die horrible, is much simpler!)

The initial impression At Night makes is charming – there’s some cute pixel art, and good use of sound with raindrops outside the main character’s window as they play games late into the night. After finally going to sleep, though, they’re hurled (in their dreams?) into a hellish realm and meet a demon who’ll swallow their soul unless they fight for his amusement against a group of his servitors. This section was really frustrating, I found. When you first confront this head demon, you have a number of choices on how to proceed, including attacking flat-out or deciding what to offer him to get him to release you.

There’s only one correct answer here – the others get you killed – but I think I exhausted every wrong answer on the way to finding it, both because I wanted to run through the full dialogue tree before moving to the next bit, but also because the main character kept attacking the demon-lord when I was trying to agree to fight his minions. Part of the fault here is that I found some of the dialogue and options unclear: the game appears translated from Spanish (in one maze sequence, I saw the word “izquierda” substitute for “left”) and there are some puzzling phrases and awkward grammar at times (I was told that my “bladder has lost its youth”, and that “it is very good playing [video games] when it is a dog day”). Making things worse, there’s no save option, and there’s lots of timed text, making replays fairly excruciating.

Once I did figure out how to agree to the deal, things got better, thankfully. There’s a clever combat system that relies on using positional audio to track down and beat up the minions (who it turns out are ghosts, not demons). I did die once more because I thought you were supposed to elude the monsters – the main character is completely unarmed – but that just gives them a free hit. The combat minigame works well enough, and even got a laugh out of me because of how the interface is set up: you need to click “left” or “right” depending on where you hear the audio cue, except the screen lists “right” on the left, and “left” on the right, which lent my attempts a slapstick air as I tried to get my stupid, stupid brain to click in the correct place despite this confusing layout. After killing enough demons you win the game and wake up from your nightmare – though there’s the inevitable horror movie sting to suggest you haven’t (this is done in an entertainingly cheesy fashion that also got a laugh out of me).

There’s some clever technical design here, and I really did like the art, so this is a good foundation to build on. In a post-Comp release that tightens up the writing, and irons out some of the more frustrating aspects of the design, this would be a fun distraction, though At Night isn’t quite there yet.

Ascension of Limb applies effective horror theming to what’s mechanically a sort of card game (I think if you squint at it, it might be doing something like Cultist Simulator in parser-IF, though I’m not really sure since I only played Cultist Simulator for like 20 minutes before bouncing off of it, thinking I’d get back to it, and then all the Alexis Kennedy #MeToo stuff came out and, nope). The real fun is in replaying and optimizing, since there are a lot of different outcomes, both positive and negative.

For all that it is a very mechanical game, there is a fair bit of writing, and most of it is quite good. Honestly I’m a bit burned out on straight Lovecraft at this point, but the author really hits the tone, including not just the expected tropes about sinister cults and dark inheritances, but also paying attention to the internal stresses on the player character in a way that doesn’t just hit lazy stereotypes about mental illness. And on subsequent plays, you can enter an “Arcade” mode that skims over some of the more lugubrious bits of writing. There are several characters with whom to interact, though I thought more could have been done to give them a personality – the various customers come and go quickly, and most conversations wind up being alternate ways to engage with the mechanics.

Good news then that the systems are solidly built, and just as importantly, the game is well-paced so that a playthrough doesn’t stretch beyond the amount of content. There are clear early, middle, and late-games, with distinct challenges and risk/reward calculations to play out, and with clear signposting of the different paths to try to follow. Most of what you do is match a limited (but expanding) set of verbs to a limited (but expanding) set of nouns, while running a cursed antique shop.

The basic loop is of finding goods, some mundane but some rather unique and eldritch, in the labyrinthine recesses of the shop, promoting your store to bring in customers and their cash, then using the cash to improve the store and pay upkeep, while dealing with the odd raving loon or incident of vandalism. Going after anything beyond mere material remuneration, like ancient artifacts and forbidden lore, requires juggling additional mechanics including sanity and infamy, and considering making a variety of deals with a variety of devils.

This is a solid structure, and there are a good number of different things to be pursuing, or worry about going wrong, at any moment – beyond the three core victory paths, there are four or five different ways to lose if things start going badly along the different tracks. But the player usually has a good number of options to forestall disaster, plus UNDO is permitted which helps obviate some of the randomness of a few of the events, so it’s usually possible to settle back and play things safe. It’s relatively simple to get into a stable position, and then getting to the more interesting endgames is primarily about when you want to start taking bigger risks for bigger rewards, which seems appropriately in-theme. Towards the latter end of a play-through, interest can start to wane, since there’s only a finite store of characters, unique items, and special events, but I found this was only an issue when I was going for the special mega-ending that combines all three of the primary ones – otherwise it goes down sharp and easy.

I also wanted to call out that the included walkthrough is quite good, and makes for interesting reading as basically a set of design notes. I had to consult it to get the even more special bonus ending (Spoiler - click to show)(I could not figure out how to avoid being on good terms with the seer, since even trying to kill her wasn’t doing the trick! I don’t think I would have hit on either of the options for doing so on my own) but would definitely recommend doing so, though only after you’ve decided you’re finished playing because it lays everything quite bare.

Oh, and I can’t help sharing the way I customized the super secret ending:

(Spoiler - click to show)Let us begin a new spiritual task that will allow us to keep growing going forward. Let us ensure that even when our work is done, our work will continue. Let us show our initiative and make κλάδος proud. Let us believe in Puppies from now on. Let us cultivate puppies. Let us trust in puppies! After consulting the treatises of ανάβαση, I believe the best way to do this is by tail-wagging.

There are two kinds of fantasy RPGs: the bad ones, where the wizard is named something dumb like Firganzallum or Thoranor or what have you, and the good ones, where the wizard is named Wizard. Ipso facto, this is one of the good ones.

All right, I’m being (slightly) tongue in cheek, but The Arkhill Darkness is not faffing about. You’re a fledgling adventurer who needs to free a town from an unearthly curse of darkness, so you hit the tavern to get quests from your mentor and chat with half a dozen people who have job titles where their names should be. There’s a faint tongue-in-cheekness about this, though proceedings mostly proceed in a po-faced way with a slight flavor of horror, and the writing sports some typos and comma errors, so altogether TAD conveys a distinctive (and to me at least, oddly appealing) author’s-first-game jankiness.

Gameplay-wise, this is a pretty clean adventure/RPG hybrid, with a clearly-delimited area to go to grind encounters for cash and ingredients, but most exploration plays out in a choice-based fashion with the occasional puzzle and less interspersal of combat than I expected ((Spoiler - click to show)maybe it’s just the choices I made, but there were only three set-piece encounters involving combat: the werewolf, where fighting is a losing game regardless of one’s stats, the landwurm, which is much more about minigame mechanics as far as I could tell, and then the dragon fight at the end).

The grinding didn’t seem to have much impact – I seemed to do as much damage, and if anything hit more frequently, when kicking as when using a weapon, and Wizard never followed through on his promise to brew me a potion with which to poison my axe – so the adventure side of things I think predominates over the RPG elements. The exploration sequences are fleet enough so as not to wear out their welcome, and use a variety of different approaches: there’s a traditional password-puzzle, a choose-the-right-option action sequence, and a climactic battle that involves some timing-based minigames (these were a fun idea, but very hard on my trackpad, for what it’s worth).

Throughout, the prose is functional, though typically a bit wordy and in need of an editing pass. There are some moments when things tip over into being more evocative, usually when the game is leaning into its horror vibe, as here when the player is battling a sort of monstrous congeries of five or six different sorcery-warped horses:

"As the horsething continues to advance upon you, you dart towards the underbelly of the horsething. As you do, you have an idea. You pull out your Axe and begin to hack its legs as you run. It is clear the horsething was not expecting this move. It stumbles as you cut off a couple of its legs. You dive forward, as the beast falls to its underbelly. You turn and start chopping of its heads, one by one. The horsething screams as its head come off. Even with the last head dismembered, its necks flail around. At last the flailing stops, as it’s last scream turns into the a weak wheeze."

Grammar issues and typos aside, this is pretty metal.

TAD’s not exactly a diamond in the rough – I don’t think it’s sufficiently ambitious, and its highs are really just about evoking warm feelings of familiarity – but I had a fun old time with it: perhaps the quintessential “if you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this thing” game.

(Oh, and a quick warning: despite there being a Save Game option, I could never get it to work. Fortunately there’s back/forward functionality throughout the story, so it’s not a major concern).