Reviews by Mike Russo

Let us imagine that puzzley choice games can be separated into two categories – yes, yes, this is an oversimplification even on its own terms, and requires arbitrarily saying that stat-based things like the Choice of Games offerings or Fallen London-style quality-based narratives present “challenges” rather than “puzzles”, but come on, let’s just go with it, two categories: you have your parserlike games that, well, mimic parser games by adopting granular, often compass-based navigation through a modeled world, usually with a persistent inventory and a point-and-click style “choose the verb, then choose the noun” interface; and then you have your escape-room-y games that rely on things like solving codes to reveal combinations that unlock doors or abstract minigames that ape classic puzzles.

There’s a lot that’s well done about the Den, but one of the things that’s most interesting to me is the way it deftly hybridizes these two approaches and winds up with a best-of-both-worlds situation. As you guide a pair of teenagers through their exploration of the high-tech bunker where a mysterious figure is protecting or perhaps imprisoning them, you’ll hoover up every portable item you can find and get very familiar with deactivating fans to enable you to crawl through ventilation ducts, but you’ll also largely do so via a fast travel system putting the whole expansive map at your fingertips, and for every USE X ON Y puzzle, you’ll find yourself doing a round of a streamlined Wordle variant. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything especially innovative, but this cannily designed interface makes what could have felt like a dauntingly large, tricky game a breeze to play.

Not that this is a lighthearted story by any means. The situation both inside and outside the bunker appears to be bad, with a series of earthquakes threatening the Den’s systems while the hints of backstory you come across via computer hacking suggesting that life on the surface isn’t a picnic any longer either. Fortunately, the two leads aren’t the type to sink into a funk; early on, you gain the ability to switch at will between Aiden, a practical whiz who occasionally breaks the rules from being a bit irresponsible, but might not be ready for larger rebellion against the system that’s raised him, and Vee, his driven yet compassionate counterpart. They’re both broadly drawn, but these are YA archetypes for a reason – the functional yet effective writing does a good job of getting across their distinct, appealingly-plucky personalities:

"He eventually smashed into the base of the shaft, leaving a large dent in the metal floor. Incredibly, apart from a few scrapes and bruises, he survived unscathed. He took great gulps of air and tried to calm the rush of adrenaline. He started to giggle, which seemed to him the strangest of reactions. He felt giddy. This was stupid, and terrifying, but hadn’t he wanted an adventure?"

I also enjoyed the way that the story tips its hand, using an early unexpected POV shift to foreshadow that the truth behind the Den is more nuanced than just the standard authoritarian dystopia. The backstory you uncover winds up being surprisingly grounded, and even involves some low-key social comment.

For all that the narrative elements are solid, this is first and foremost a puzzle game, and the set of challenges on offer here are quite good. The aforementioned Wordle riff is just as fun as its inspiration, and right as I was starting to get a little impatient with playing it over and over, the game offered a shortcut enabling me to skip past it when it came up in subsequent challenges. The inventory puzzles are all logical without feeling trivial – the extended set of actions you need to take to recover your lost screwdriver are especially satisfying. The parceling out of gameplay between the two leads is also well paced; you can ping-pong back and forth to run down a particular puzzle chain, or decide instead to bear down with a single character and work through a substantial chunk of progress before having to swap back. And the game escalates its challenges alongside its narrative: the climactic sequence creates a real feeling of mastery, as it prompts you to use what you’ve learned to allow Aiden and Vee to collaborate (albeit in occasionally implausible ways that had me wondering whether they had an ESP connection) and escape the Den at last – or indeed, not, as rather than a linear sequence of puzzles there are actually story-based decisions to make along the way, too.

This commitment to engaging the player and making sure they’re having a good time is all over this thoughtfully-designed game; the only real misstep I can point to is the decision to implement conversations between the two leads as a diegetic hint system, which meant I felt like I had to forego fun character interaction to avoid spoiling the enjoyable puzzles. The Den is scrupulous about making sure most players will find something to like, and smoothing away the edges that might create undue friction – it’s also quite generous, culminating in a wealth of fun post-game extras that put a lovely cap on proceedings. The ending also includes a request not to spoil the plot, which is why I’ve stuck to describing the situation in general terms; suffice to say the story is of a piece with the rest of the Den, executing standard tropes at a very high level while throwing in a few bonus grace notes. This is a real gem, and a game I wouldn’t be surprised to see launch imitations, perhaps eventually even a mini-genre, of its own.

One of the things I love about IF is its plasticity: there are great games in nearly every genre you can think of, from literary character studies to pulp adventure or romantic melodrama. But there are a couple of categories where the IFDB tags are conspicuously bare, and “action” must be chief among them. Partially this is because the things text is good at – detail, interiority, allusion – aren’t especially needed for an action story, while the things text tends to be weaker at – showing exactly how characters are moving through space and time, depicting simultaneous action, communicating urgency – are. Partially I suspect it’s because action-movie buffs are underrepresented amongst the ranks of IF authors (we’re kind of a bunch of nerds). But whatever the reason, divisive experiments like the real-time Border Zone are a case of the exception proving the rule: IF and action just don’t mix well.

Faced with this unmistakable historical trend, The Deserter just shrugs and gets on with things. This tale of a mech pilot deciding he’s had enough of being a cog in the war machine doesn’t just lean into action-adventure tropes – it also seems aggressively unconcerned with playing outside that sandbox. For example, while we’re clearly meant to view the army the pilot, Joad, is fleeing as the baddies, the game eschews specificity in favor of the broadest imaginable strokes, as in this bit where an old man explains why he’s in hiding:

“To stay in the city means prison, at best. Our thoughts, beliefs, appearances are a threat to those in power.” He looks at you. “I think you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

I mean I do, but laying it out this way doesn’t make me feel any sort of way about it.

Similarly, while Joad has something he’s running to, not just from, in the shape of a wife and daughter, the game plays its cards here so close to the chest that you’re not given a single flashback or memory to make them anything other than names. Heck, an early sequence even lets you catch sight of their trail without letting on who they are or why you’re following them.

In place of fripperies like characterization and context, The Deserter doubles down on action set pieces. And you know what, it’s not actually bad? The scenarios are relatively standard – scaling high cliffs or crossing raging rivers, exploring a cave, and of course nervy mech-to-mech combat – but they’re quite varied over the game’s twenty minute or so runtime (the two hour play time listed in the blurb maybe applies to exhausting its content through repeated plays, but a single run-through is much shorter, and satisfying enough in its own right). The writing has some technical errors, but manages some effective mood-setting in between the exciting bits:

"You plough along through the desolate canyon, listening to your mechs engine and the booming echo of it’s [sic] heavy steps. The sun occasionally peeks through gaps in the rock and cuts sinister shapes around you."

Gameplay-wise, you’re given just enough choices to feel a sense of urgency and agency, as you’re rarely given enough time or information to calculate the best decision, and the outcomes made me feel like I was skating through by the skin of my teeth. I suspect the author’s got their thumbs on the scales here, since upon replaying I found even making intentionally sub-optimal choices was still enough to get me through to the end, albeit with more stress along the way, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and while certain key events appear to fire no matter what you do, there are still a number of encounters that are missable depending on your actions (making the aforementioned “bad” choices led to an angsty fight against a former comrade lying in wait for you atop a bridge, which was an adrenaline-pumping highlight).

The Deserter’s a narrowly-focused piece, eschewing a lot of what I tend to most enjoy in IF, but I’d rate it successful nonetheless. High-octane set-pieces and war movie cliches might wear out their welcome in a longer game – and there’s definitely room for some polish, between the aforementioned writing issues and a few small technical faults, like the way a late-game passage talked about me piloting my mech immediately after telling me I had to eject after it foundered in a river – but at this scale, and with this focus, it all works.

After raking Breakfast in the Dolomites over the coals for gesturing towards, but not actually providing, a grounded trip into nature, I was surprised to see that the randomizer picked another run at a similar concept for my next game. There are certainly differences – Campfire’s an altogether lonely, more rugged experience – but I’d say it largely delivers on the promise. While it’s been decades since I’ve gone camping, the game’s careful, low-key presentation of the simple joys of roughing it brought back long-buried memories, and made me want to go again. There are bugs and writing errors that mar the process, unfortunately, but the core of the experience still resonates.

There’s also more depth to the game than may at first appear. The opening that depicts you experiencing some minor crises at work as you count down the minutes until you can go on your trip, for example, appears to be randomized, with at least two entirely different sequences playing out if you restart. Similarly, rather than jumping straight to the camping, you first visit some stores to pick up your supplies, which requires carefully counting your money and deciding how to prioritize food vs. gear vs. entertainment (admittedly, I played the protagonist as a self-insert, and since I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t like starting forest fires, I passed up the expensive meats and fireworks, leaving me with plenty of cash left over when I picked up everything else). There’s a packing sequence that’s dull, but serves to build anticipation, and then the trip itself plays out in brief vignettes told in unadorned prose that’s perhaps a bit generic, but boasts a solid, simple cadence:

"The soft grass gives slightly under my feet as I walk the trail. A soft breeze rustles the leaves of the trees that blanket both sides of the trail.

"The fresh autumn air fills my lungs with each breath. Bringing a feeling of peace and relaxation over me.

"After a while of walking the trail starts to become hilly. I walk up a particularly steep hill and have to catch my breath.

"From the top of the hill I spot a small clearing in the distance. Two deer graze on the grass in the clearing."

Nothing that happens is especially revelatory; the game makes clear that you’re a veteran camper who loves the experience and finds a special kind of meaning in the freedom of being on your own in the woods, but this particular trip is just one of many. You can go on pleasant hike, make tasty food, catch a few fish (happily, the game stipulates that you immediately throw them back), and return to your weekday live rejuvenated, but this is a slice of life rather than a drama. That’s a fine idea in the abstract, and in its particulars it makes for an apt fit with the unpretentious gameplay and shortish structure.

As mentioned, though, some rough patches made it harder for me to drift away like the game was inviting me to. I know about the alternate beginnings because I had to restart several times: once after I bought everything in the camping store and got to a passage with no further choices, and then again after hitting a similar bug when popping some popcorn – and then a third time when I tried to reload a saved game, which instead brought me to an entirely blank screen. There are also a few times when lines repeat oddly, instances where the game seemed confused about what I’d bought or failed to buy, and a large number of misspellings and typos (some of which I’ve put behind a details tag, below). It’s all forgivable for a first-time author, though, and while each of these issues did momentarily bring me out of the meditative fantasy the game conjured, I was always willing to make my way back there; given my current life circumstances it’ll be a while before I’m able to go camping again, but in the meantime this is the next best thing.

I’ve vacationed in Italy a few times, and when people ask me my favorite part of those trips, it’s usually something about some ancient site or other that comes to mind – often I’ll name my visit to the Castel Sant’Angelo, a set of Renaissance-era papal apartments built atop a medieval fortification built atop the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, or the time I had a beer on a patio overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, or winding my way down St. Patrick’s Well in Orvieto, a shaft dug two hundred feet into a hill-town’s rock to reach the water that would allow the town to outlast a siege. My wife, though, will usually talk about the hotel breakfast buffets: pillowy bread, unlimited Nutella, fresh-squeezed juices, eggs that had been inside a chicken just a day or two previous, and (I am told) high-quality coffee and cured meats worth risking heart disease for.

EDIT: my wife, having read the above paragraph, wishes it to be known that 1) she liked many things about Italy much more than the breakfasts; 2) most days she just had half a croissant since breakfast isn’t her favorite meal anyway; and 3) I am exaggerating for the bit, which, guilty as charged.

The author of Breakfast in the Dolomites thinks my wife has the better of this difference in priorities. While the blurb promises a fizzy romantic comedy on a romantic hiking trip to the mountains (and the AI-created cover art suggests slightly-melted plastic versions of Emma Stone and David Duchovny will be playing the leading roles), the title is actually a more accurate guide: while there’s a bit of prefatory matter and a brief lavatory-based denouement, obtaining and eating breakfast is the main course.

There can be a meditative kind of charm to playing a game whose subject matter is so relentlessly quotidian, but rather than the parser equivalent of those European art films that just follow someone doing their everyday chores in real time, Breakfast in the Dolomites has more in common with slapstick games like Octodad or QWOP where the joke is that a weird bendy alien is trying to act like a regular human and flailing badly. While the game uses your girlfriend, Monica, to prompt you as to the next required course of action, and I didn’t run into any significant bugs despite an impressively deep implementation, my transcript still reads like a comedy of errors. When the desk clerk at the hotel asked for my ID card, for example, I checked my inventory to confirm that I didn’t have my wallet; after Monica prodded me again I thought it might be in my pocket. I was on the right track, but typing X POCKET spat out the kind of response that gives parser-phobes nightmares:

"Which do you mean, the left back pocket, the right back pocket, the left front pocket, the right front pocket, the left leg pocket or the right leg pocket?"

Fortunately I found the wallet on the third try, and thought I had things sorted, except then I ran afoul of the inventory limits that objected to me trying to carry my wallet, ID card, and two keys all at once. This minor inconvenience was as nothing to the hijinks that ensued when I reached the buffet the next morning, though: look, in my IF career I’ve stared down mad scientists thousands of meters deep beneath alien seas, used the last of my strength to perform rituals of banishment abjuring abhorrent gods, and endured painfully-immersive narratives of abuse, but rarely have I felt as stressed as I did juggling a bread plate and a scrambled egg while trying to work a juicer.

> put carrot in container

The juicer bowl is closed.

> open juicer

You open the juicer bowl.

> put carrot in container

“You cannot put a whole carrot in the machine, you have to chop it first.” — Emma suggests you.

> chop carrot

You should specify what you cut it with.

> chop carrot with knife

It is better to lean on a chopping board.

The level of granularity here is frankly incredible; there are easily a dozen different kinds of food, many with different options like choosing lemon for your tea or different kinds of jam for your toast; meanwhile the waiter, waitress, and cook are flitting about, and your girlfriend is making up her own plate. It’s impressive stuff, but I’m at a loss to explain why the author went to this much effort for such a mundane series of set pieces. It’d be one thing if deep conversation or sparkling banter were playing out alongside the banal action, but the hotel staff are blandly efficient, and Monica is too focused on giving you instructions with the patience and level of detail you’d typically associate with a preschool teacher catechizing a bunch of distractible toddlers to have much of a personality. Meanwhile, the charm of what seems like it must be a beautiful setting is smothered under goopy prose that reads like ChatGPT ate a real estate agent:

"This charming little hotel welcomes guests with its cosy reception area: the inviting atmosphere is immediately apparent, with a blend of rustic elegance and modern comfort. The reception of this little hotel in the Dolomites serves as the perfect introduction to the unique blend of comfort and authenticity that awaits guests throughout their stay, promising a memorable and rejuvenating experience in this picturesque mountain retreat."

For all that, I was disappointed when the game ended so prematurely – the technical chops and attention to detail on display made me feel like the author could have implemented a very special nature hike, or a nicely open-ended conversation with Monica that would get me invested in their relationship. I’m not sure if this small slice of narrative was always the plan, or if the effort of coding up these early sequences with such fidelity wound up eating all the development time allotted for what would have been a larger story. Either way Breakfast in the Dolomites doesn’t quite live up to its billing, whether you’re in the mood for seeing the sights or just a rich meal – but here’s hoping the author takes that impressive ambition and level of effort and turns them to different ends next time.

Unreal People is a vexing game that isn’t easy to come to grips with; it’s also set in “early mediaeval India”, so with Hindu deities in mind, let’s grant ourselves more than the standard duo of hands to work with.

So on the first hand, the game is a slightly-janky shaggy dog story. You play a spirit, a deva, who’s bound to serve a charlatan of a fortune-teller; you’re tasked with uncovering the secrets of both the humble and the exalted in a small kingdom, using your gifts to possess objects, animals, and eventually people in your quest for gossip. You’ve only got limited opportunities to jump from one vessel to the next, so most of your choices come down to when to stay and when to go (and if you go, who’s going to be the target of your next leap). The effect is of riding a rushing river, becoming privy to snatches of low-context conversation, brief excerpts of domestic drama, and unconnected vignettes that seem like they’re adding up to a bigger picture before the game suddenly ends because you chose the wrong branch and it instakilled you – fortunately, there’s an undo available to let you make forward progress again, but unfortunately, even if you evade all these hazards the game ultimately peters out without bringing any of its myriad plot threads into coherence or showing you the payoff for your secret-gathering.

As for the jank, there are a lot of typos – much like signage at a small business, apostrophes often appear just to mark that a word ends in an S – and the occasional sign of incomplete development, like the way that I learned that my increasing powers now allowed me to make conversational decisions on behalf of my hosts from the all-caps exhortation to “!!EXPLAIN U CAN MAKE DIALOGUE CHOICES!!” Beyond these technical faults, the story’s structure is also decidedly odd; after half an hour or so of flitting around a dozen or so characters on the night of a feast, the game suddenly had me decide to contact the fortune-teller and call it a night, which started a new sequence sometime in the future with a smaller cast of partially-overlapping characters, which terminated in the above-mentioned anticlimax after about a further fifteen minutes. And but for the blurb and some of the names, I’d have had a hard time telling you where or when the game is meant to be set – admittedly, this isn’t one of my stronger areas, but things like the presence of light bulbs, and the drunkard princess’s habit of handing out high fives to passersby, undercut the verisimilitude of the milieu. And ugh, there’s AI cover-art (it’s not immediately bad, but just look at the reflections in the water and try to make sense of them).

On the second hand, I’m noticing some interesting resonances here. While I’m pretty weak on the history of the pre-Mughal subcontinent, I’ve got at least a little grounding in the contemporary religion and philosophy, so I definitely raised my eyebrows at details like the way that the spirit’s ability to possess starts with the lower orders of matter, like rocks, plants, and birds, before progressing to a cow, then to human beings in the throes of emotion or unreason, and then to calmer, more controlled people: squint and this isn’t far afield from some Hindu conceptions of how a virtuous soul can advance up the chain of being through reincarnation. Or consider that we’re not in any historical polity, but the kingdom of Chaitanya, Sanskrit for “consciousness”. More fundamentally, the way that you’re able to inhabit all the living beings (and some of the scenery) in the kingdom nods towards the Brahman-Atman belief that individual souls nondualistically partake together in the ultimate, unified reality of existence. And then the ending – well, spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)in the final sequence, you somehow possess everyone and everything at once, leading to a Mad Libs segment where you can type in dialogue for each of two characters, with the narrative voice needling you by saying this is super unsatisfying, huh? Which puts me in mind of lila, the idea that the divine unity created the world’s multifarious forms, and divided consciousness, in order to experience and enjoy itself: “god’s play”.

Well, so what? Does all this talk of unity and differentiation add up to anything? My judgment here is a qualified ……maaaaaybe. On the third hand, I’m personally fond of shaggy dog stories myself, and swerving from a tawdry story about a grasping gossip-monger to contemplation of divine mysteries is just the kind of bold move I admire. And even if the social reality of Chaitanya leaves something to be desired, there are individual memorable characters – like princess Gauri, unable to express her crush on the knight Mazboot (who, awkwardly, might be her half-brother, except by berating him, or the peasants squabbling over a stolen chicken – who together present a kaleidoscopic view of the human pageant, and allowing each of them a voice and a viewpoint is appealingly democratic.

On the fourth hand, though, it’s still the case that it sure feels like the author eventually just got bored with the story and decided to stop it, and for every entertaining bit of anachronism, there’s a clanger like Gauri saying superficial things about feudalism and post-barter economies. The quick shifts from one character to the next also meant that there were certain conflicts and storylines that I didn’t really have time or space to care about before I was on to the next one.

On the fifth hand – well, the number four is a big one in Hinduism (four primary social classes, four stages of life, four types of yoga), so let’s leave things here. Suffice to say Unreal People didn’t make me feel very much, so if that was its goal I can’t count it as very successful – but it did make me think.

An annoying thing that I can’t stop my brain from doing when I’m reading escapist, pulp stuff is think about money. Take this game’s eponymous organization of vampire hunters, an elite crew with offices and safehouses across the globe, dozens if not hundreds of skilled humans as well as the higher-minded sort of undead on staff, killer custom-tailored leather uniforms, a web of high-powered informants and contacts, and an idealistic mission of promoting peace among the vampiric underworld by resolving conflicts via mediation and negotiated truces before escalating things to assassination. It’s a cool secret-society fantasy, but seriously: are we meant to believe that there are enough super-rich elders of the night who want their rivals offed, but only after a rigorous restorative-justice process, to pay for all of these wonderful toys?

It’s unfair to hold Redjackets to such rigorous worldbuilding standards, I admit. This is clearly character-first urban fantasy, with the always-visible character portraits and romance subplots to prove it, and the author’s effort has clearly been focused on things like offering a choice of three different protagonists and fleshing out their angsty backstories rather than diving deep into the setting. And it’s an appealing, diverse crew: you’ve got Fiia, a fledgling vampire on the run from her crime-boss sire, and then the pair of Redjacket agents she turns to for help, vampiric detective Lynette and her human partner, a professor of folklore named Declan. The assassination plot they’re forced into enacting gives them all an opportunity to settle old scores and come to terms with their natures, while giving the author an opportunity to purple up some prose:

"He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. “I’ve seen people die - I’ve seen-” you start, fumbling over your own tongue limp with panic, with flashing memories of sunset-red tissue, cavernous wounds, and joints bent at wrong angles."

What it doesn’t provide is an opportunity for much in the way of meaningful choices. While picking which of the trio to make the viewpoint character unsurprisingly has a significant impact on the story, there are comparatively few once the game actually starts up, to the extent that I was often surprised to find myself confronted with one after ten or fifteen minutes of just clicking to the advance from one passage to the next – and often these are low-key ones, like picking what order to ask a set of dialogue options that I’d have to exhaust before moving on. I’ve got nothing against dynamic fiction, but I did occasionally feel like the game wound up undercutting itself, for example by offering Fiia a choice of whether to enthusiastically join the Redjackets or recoil in fear of the consequences should her sire find out, but then railroading her into being a happy recruit regardless of the option selected.

Beyond the gameplay mechanics, I often found myself feeling like the author was more focused on telling their story than they were on the audience reading it. The “handbook” feely provided with the game goes into a lot of detail on the Redjacket organization, but it – and many of the quotidian sequences peppered through the narrative – sometimes felt like they presupposed an unearned level of interest in the nuts and bolts of their operations. What’s worse, there are quite a few pieces of the story that are asserted rather than demonstrated, reducing their effectiveness: we’re told that the Redjackets are hypercompetent investigators, for example, but they fail to distinguish paint from blood, find it annoying that an underground arms dealer only takes cash, and land on a plan to kill the baddie not too much more sophisticated than “run up to him at a crowded party and shoot him.” What’s worse, the bad guy’s evil is very much in tell-not-show territory; everyone talks about him like he’s a creep, and admittedly he does overreact to the failure of one of his minions, but what we see of his behavior just involves restoring paintings to sell them for a lot of money, doting on his lover and being dismayed when he’s injured, and being instinctually protective of Fiia even after he knows she’s betrayed him.

There are also some technical issues here that make it hard to enjoy Redjackets as much as I wanted to. Beyond a few typos, I experienced some issues with how the three branches of the story were integrated, with pronouns shifting in some sequences as the game seemed to get confused about who I’d picked to be “you.” Further, while the game indicates that if you replay it, choices you made as another character will be remembered and happen in the same way, I found that this wasn’t the case. And worst of all, after making it through Fiia’s and Lynette’s paths, I wound up hitting a dead end shortly after starting Declan’s, with all the choices available to me leading to a blank passage (the game has a single save slot and no undo, so I couldn’t recover from this bug without restarting).

There’s definitely promise here; this is an ambitious game that often delivers on its character-first goals. But unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to an even slightly skeptical player who wants to know why the bad guy is the bad guy, what choices they’re actually allowed to make, why these cool folks are the heroes, and yes, how they’re getting paid for this hit. Compared to the amount of work the author’s already put in, it wouldn’t take too much more to address these kinds of questions (or, hopefully, fix the bug borking Declan’s part of the story), which would make Redjackets the enjoyable kind of pulp adventure where I could turn my brain off.

The brain is a pattern-making machine, and so while it’s of course ridiculous to assign any particular weight to the first game that the randomizer coughs up in any year’s Comp, I can’t help but feel that it’s appropriate Where Nothing is Ever Named led off my 2024 lineup – because what better way to inaugurate the thirtieth year of an event dedicated to games that were considered obsolete even when the contest first began, than with a piece that absolutely, positively, could only work in a text-only format?

The game both does and doesn’t provide much in the way of context: upon launching the story file, you’re simply told that you’re in the eponymous place where etc. and then that “you can see something and the other thing here”, before being turned loose to use your parser skills to suss out what’s going on and what you’re meant to be doing. The blurb, more merciful, does inform the player that the third chapter of Through the Looking Glass is the major inspiration, which I went back and reread; it’s not a section that I remember well, mostly having to do with a strange train whence Alice is ejected for lack of a ticket, and a large gnat who’s reticent (with good reason) to start a career in comedy. But there is a short episode towards the end where Alice is lost in a wood where everything loses track of what it’s called and what to call anything else – and there’s none of your “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet” nonsense here, as in a Hermetic turn ignorance of names means ignorance of substance, as Alice doesn’t know what anything is when she sees it.

So what we’ve got here is a language puzzle, not miles distant from the Gostak or Suveh Nux; if you figure out what the “other thing” is and what to do with it, you’ll win the game, and if you also figure out what the “something” is you’ll get a happier ending. It’s a lovely setup for a text game, since visuals would of course kill the thing (as would audio, actually); all the Ubisoft studios in the world would struggle in vain to render this ten-minute metaphysical riff. And it’s quite satisfying to trial-and-error your way through two paired games of twenty questions, matching the default parser actions to the responses you elicit from the things in order to narrow down their identities.

In practice the metapuzzle is a little too simple to make this philosophically-charged premise really sing, however, and some implementation quirks add some unneeded frustration. I suspect most players will uncover the identity of one of the things in a half-dozen moves at most, and the other one possibly even quick, though in my case it took me longer because I was referring to the two objects as THING and OTHER THING; turns out this was just two different synonyms for the other thing, and I had to type SOMETHING to interact with the first. Similarly, I would have finished Where Nothing is Ever Named a few minutes earlier but for a reasonably-game-winning action generating a facially-bizarre and unhelpful response (Spoiler - click to show) (in retrospect I can reconstruct why “you can’t ride unmounted” is a plausible response to RIDE THING, since it’s indicating you’re supposed to MOUNT or CLIMB ON the thing first, but this is slicing the salami awfully thin).

These implementation niggles are quite small-scale, though, worth mentioning only because the game is so compact and they interact confusingly with the guess-who gameplay – really, my main critique is just that I wanted a more robust incarnation of this concept, one that really teased my brain and addressed the existential question of what’s in a name head on. That’s not Where Nothing is Ever Named, but that’s not its fault; on its own merits it’s a winsome little piece, and a worthy justification for the existence of text-only games at the opening of the Comp.

Now that the post-Twine revolution is well and truly settled, it feels natural to survey the different choice-based subgenres – branching CYOA-style narratives, RPG-lite quality-based narratives, puzzle-y parserlike hybrids – and think yes, of course this is how it had to be. But if you went back to 2000 to tell a reasonably-cosmopolitan member of the parser-focused amateur IF community that in 25 years choice-based games would be a big part of the scene, I’d bet that they’d think you primarily meant hypertext fiction. While many folks back then thought CYOA and gamebook approaches were overly simplistic, literary hypertext had serious ambitions and academic cred that matched the arty aspirations of the IF scene, so it might not have seemed like that big a gap to bridge. Of course that’s not the path events wound up taking, and I’m not sure of any contemporary authors mainline-IF working in that tradition other than Kaemi Velatet. But I still sometimes wonder what our Comps and Festivals would look like if the hypertext model was a major influence on our games: we might see narrative choices decentered in favor of allusive linkages, characters deemphasized in favor of linguistic play, and thematic coherence seen as a greater virtue than a satisfying plot. We might have better tools, in short, to create, present, and engage with games like SALTWATER.

Recapping the premise and the way it’s elaborated here might start to get at what I mean. The game plays out over three acts that are more like cycles, with each one moving an ensemble of half a dozen or so main characters (and maybe a dozen more supporting ones) through a sequence of set-pieces and flashbacks that see as much variation and elaboration as straight repetition, before ending in a climactic scene that brings everyone together in a collapsing church just as the world might be ending. The emotions are pitched fever-high, and the roles each character plays progresses over time: there are always people being lost, and people looking for them, but the identity of who plays any particular role is always in flux. There are different subgenres at work, largely divvied up between the different viewpoints the game provides: one character is drawn back to a past they’d tried to flee by the death of their parents, and is haunted by one of the people they left behind; another is running a sort of Lord of the Flies apocalypse-cult, squatting in the ruins of an old slaughterhouse to listen to the prophetic whispers of long-dead pigs. Much of this is compelling, but none of it is especially naturalistic, and besides a shared juxtaposition of externally-mediated catastrophe against salvation through connection, the strands aren’t woven together especially tightly.

Indeed, I have to confess that it took me a while to get into SALTWATER. The entire first act – an hour or so of playtime – consists of jumping from one perspective to the next, running through five or six entirely different sets of characters and situations with little time for the often-disorienting plot elements to breathe, much less engender investment in the characters or their world. And the relatively traditionalist choice-based approach to interactivity highlighted my lack of understanding and investment. There are quite a lot of novels I’ve loved while still experiencing pervasive moment-to-moment confusion about what exactly is happening or which character is talking (Ulysses is the obvious touchstone here, so let’s give the shout-out to Gaddis’s The Recognitions just for variety’s sake) – but that confusion lands different when you’re expected to put yourself in someone (whose?) shoes and make choices for them. There’s an early sequence, for example, where I had to decide whether a bartender (who I knew basically nothing about) was going to lie to Molly, a customer he’d just met (who both I and he knew nothing about), about an old woman who’d just collapsed upon entering the bar (who both he and she knew nothing about, though I at least had a small inkling about her deal since she’d featured in one of the earlier vignettes) – trying to figure out what the bartender might do, and why, and why I’d be expected to have any clue about any of that, took me right out of the game.

SALTWATER is also sometimes a bit slapdash about its worldbuilding and characterization. Rye, the aforementioned prodigal child, is introduced receiving a phone call from their sister, who asks them to come to their parents’ funeral to help support her. But then the next time we see them, the funeral’s over, and the last we hear of the sister is when an old friend asks Rye how she’s holding up, and Rye waves the question away with a dismissive “she’ll be fine.” Meanwhile, the societal decay implied by a bunch of children taking up long-term residence in the meatpacking plant is nowhere on display in the other sequences, and I got hung up on the revelation that the aforementioned bar is miles and miles from where people live (it sure doesn’t seem like it’s in a business district either, so who decided to set it up there?) And there’s an overreliance on talismanic images and activities – many of these are individually powerful, but between rising floodwaters, a collapsing church, a flickering lighter, bodies being put into and dug up from graves, people being lost in the snow and warmed back to the land of the living, plus the oracular pigs and maybe-ghost, there’s too much being crammed into the frame to fully cohere.

Yet I did find that I enjoyed the game substantially more when I got to the second act, and SALTWATER shifted from introducing a disorienting panoply of people to fleshing out their motivations, personalities, and the context for their decisions. And on a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is often quite evocative and engaging (the way Ink is customized here meant that copy and paste wasn’t working for me, so you’ll have to trust me on this). By the time the third act came around and it became clear that events were moving into their final configurations, I found myself moved by the plights of some of the characters, hoping for them to find some peace.

All of which is to say there’s a better version of SALTWATER that ruthlessly simplifies it, cutting unneeded viewpoint characters (the bartender and Molly wound up being completely irrelevant so far as I could tell), building more extensive linkages between those that remain, and rigorously providing context so that the player feels empowered to make choices on their behalf. But I think I’d like that less than the other better version of SALTWATER that leans into its messiness, doesn’t impose expectations of agency on the player, jumbles up the characters without worrying so much about where one ends and another starts, shifts the prose to be even more poetic, and presents its various narrative strands not as rigorously-alternating plaits in a braid but as nodes in an ever-expanding, densely-interconnected web: a beautiful sally in a hypertext revolution that never was.

What makes a Verdeterre-like a Verdeterre-like? A design-focused analysis of the subgenre would zero in on key elements of Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure, the game that launched the mini-trend: high-score-chasing gameplay, a time limit, a complex optimization metapuzzle providing a framework around the individual challenges, and an expectation of multiple replays to come to terms with all of the above. Captain Piedaterre’s Blunders, however, has a much simpler answer: just put Captain Verdeterre, the world’s snarkiest rat pirate, in the game.

Mr. Green-dirt only has a glorified cameo at the end, however – instead looting duties fall this time to his cousin, the eponymous Captain Piedaterre. That punny name is one of the one and a half very solid jokes in this short choice-based take on the formula. The half is the Piedaterre takes the adage that one person rat’s trash is another’s treasure a bit too literally; as you run around a treasure-laden pirate ship (not your own), you reject the shiny stuff in favor of everyday dross. There’s a bit of backstory here that explains the source of this curious approach to valuation, and provides a sample of the game’s breezy prose:

"This splintered chair leg lights the corners of my mind. It reminds me of the day when, as a wee rat, I fell off a broken chair and landed on my head. Coincidentally, that was the day I discovered I had exceptional taste in all aesthetic matters."

Despite its choice-based interface, the game is unexpectedly written in Inform, with a convenient set of options enabling you to make choices by clicking hyperlinks a la Twine, typing a number, or both. The system itself works well, but I ran into some broader UI issues when playing via the browser, as “More” prompts kept popping up and requiring me to scroll down to the bottom of the window in order for new keypresses to register; sometimes a simple space bar or page-down would do the trick, but other times I was reduced to using the mouse to manually drag down the scroll bar, which was finicky process – fortunately the clickable links helped avoid this issue when it got too annoying.

For all that there was clearly a lot of time spent on the interface, I did find the substance of the game rather bare. It doesn’t wear out its welcome, to its credit, but as mentioned, it forgoes the dynamism and optimization of the core Verdeterre-like gameplay loop in favor of presenting a static environment with few puzzles; you mostly just walk through the small map grabbing whatever bits of dross you see (and if you don’t see any upon entering a room, you just poke and prod at the scenery until you find it). For a short comedy game, it’s fine, but since it so clearly invokes the original, it can’t help but suffer from the comparison – really, that title is a magnificent gag that deserves at least a little follow-up (I would love to see how Captain Piedaterre’s city apartment is decorated).

I was mystified by the first ending I reached in Larvae: for one thing, there’s no clear indication that you’ve reached the final passage, which left me half-expecting that there was timed text still to come or I’d run into a bug. For another, it felt like some horror elements teased in the opening sections (and the genre tag on IFDB) had receded without fanfare, with the story seemingly content to pivot exclusively to low-key teenage melodrama. Wondering if I’d missed something, I backed up and started making different choices – where before I’d picked options having the protagonist I’d chosen, Isla, express contentment with her boyfriend Cam as they spent a month together at an academic summer camp focusing on biology research, I tried to pull back and see if this would provoke a blow-up. But no, this just made the conclusion an understated break-up scene, rather than an I’ll-visit-you-during-all-the-vacations lovefest.

Then I went back to the very first choice I’d made after deciding which of the pair to play as, which bizarrely had me as Isla deciding whether Cam wanted a drink from my water bottle, and this time opted for him to say he’ d already had his own water. This seemingly-innocuous choice was the last one I made, as it put me on an underexplained railroad track to an entirely different kind of ending.

While this kind of non-telegraphed swerve between genres can work – heck, Hanna, We’re Going to School does something not entirely dissimilar – it’s a tricky thing to manage in practice. Ideally, each branch of the story would make sense of what comes before and act as a satisfying resolution of at least the major themes the beginning has put into play. Or if there are less-canonical options that provide a quick off-ramp from the story, that can work if the author signposts where the story is supposed to go, so the player gets a thrill out of bucking their fate for a minute before getting back on the ride. But here, it really does seem like there’s meant to be a “right” option – the horror one – which is less worked-out than the longer set of branches that don’t pay off a key element of the setup, and the contrast between the trivial decision and its fatal consequences lends the game an unintended note of bathos.

True, if you play as Cam you get a bit more perspective on why that choice of potables matters, but why would you? As mentioned, the setup here is that he and Isla are a couple of high school seniors who get an opportunity to attend a prestigious research program bringing together talented students with biologists doing cutting-edge work in a variety of fields. Except it’s Isla who’s the talented student – Cam just gets to come along as her plus one so they can spend some time together before university, and maybe so he can do some livestreaming of anything interesting they see – and if there are any players of IF who are going to pick the bro-y YouTuber over the studious, responsible one, I’ve yet to meet them.

Larvae’s multigenre ambitions are also let down by some weak writing. Neither of the main characters enjoys much in the way of characterization, and the worldbuilding is thin (it’s notionally set in the 2050s, but the world pretty much works the way it does now, except that the only cultural touchstone people tend to reference is 1979’s Alien). The rules of narrative economy are flagrantly violated – there are two different scientific legends who are introduced as potential mentor figures, but who both immediately disappear after the passages when they’re first mentioned. And the prose has the feel of something translated from another language, which sometimes can work to add an unexpected note to a game’s writing, but here is just awkward:

“Come on, you have enjoyed the activities we’ve been doing these weeks, right?” I observe a strawberry, and toss it away as it’s rotten.

“Yeah, yeah I know,” he says, taking my hand as he rises.

“Besides, it does you some good to be away from your truelove the blue-light devices.” I say, taking a look at the beautiful lavender sky. Stars are already sparkling it.

He smiles. “You’re literally my next-door neighbor girl.”

Admittedly, some of the creepier horror elements are effective, especially a viscerally upsetting bit of gore in the worst endings. And even sadder is that I think there’s the germ of an idea here that could have worked really well: when you’re experiencing the last few weeks with your girlfriend before she goes away to school and might forget you forever, it does kinda feel like there’s a monster growing in your guts could explode your heart any minute. But making that work would have required ensuring that all the pieces of the premise come into play in most paths, and sharpening the writing so that we really feel the emotional bond between the core pair, and understand them as distinct, engaging people. Unfortunately in its current version, Larvae is only able to gesture towards the stronger game it could have been.