Reviews by Mike Russo

My son has just turned four, and one of the gifts he got for his birthday was a board game. He hadn’t really played them before, so it was a fun novelty – nothing too complicated, it’s more or less Candyland; you spin the spinner and go ahead whatever number of spaces it says, collecting cards along the way, and whoever’s first to hit the final space with a sufficient number of cards wins. He played it a couple times with my wife – she treated the rules as completely optional, so he won every time. Then I played it with him, and treated the rules as mostly optional – so while we almost tied, it came down to one last spin and I wound up winning.

Four year olds, as it turns out, don’t like losing – actually, it’s pretty well known that games with one winner and several losers aren’t strictly speaking developmentally appropriate in his age bracket, which I feel like the “ages four and up!” on the box failed to communicate. Anyway as I was trying to console him (and wishing I could go back in time to educate my oh-so-naïve past self who just a few minutes ago had been thinking “playing by the rules is important, and losing can teach you a lot!”), I told him “buddy, why do you care about winning? We were having fun playing the game until the very end, and the winner doesn’t get anything. If a 3 or higher had come up on the spinner, you would have won, but you got a 2 so you didn’t – but those are just words, really the only difference between a 2 coming up and a 3 coming up is how you decide to feel about it.”

This didn’t convince him, you’ll be shocked to learn.

Uninteractive Fiction 2 is the sequel to Uninteractive Fiction 1, except instead of it being a one-note gag where you click the play button and it says “you lose” (while playing a sad-trombone musical cue), this time you click the play button and it says “you win” (while playing a happy fanfare musical cue). This simplicity invites us to contemplate what “winning” a piece of IF means – is it just reaching the end of a game’s narrative, or is there something more? Is it a simple binary, or are there degrees? Do we feel different for having been told that we’re a winner, than if we had a nearly identical experience but are told we lost?

But just as I didn’t find UF1 that compelling, so too did UF2 fail to move me. These are somewhat interesting questions, I suppose, but UF2 is so stripped down that it doesn’t provide much of an engaging entry point onto them – there’s more to think about in the example of my son’s board game, to my mind. Meanwhile, the fanfare is objectively much less funny than the sad trombone was. So yeah, after finding the joke in UF1 kinda meh, I’m of the same opinion about the sequel. Maybe the third one will complete the thesis/antithesis/synthesis trifecta and wind up providing new insights into how to reconcile the basic elements that constitute a game with an IF tradition that plays a bit looser with the concept – and while it’s at it, maybe it’ll teach my son that losing is fine. But that’s for next year: for now, if you’ve read a review of UF2 you probably don’t need to also play it.

The fact that you play a severed hand scuttling about scenes that would be right at home in a Hammer horror movie is only the second weirdest thing about Frankenfingers – and let’s be real, it’s a distant second, especially after the two Rosalinda games proved jockeying around dismembered limbs could even be cozy. And you’re the special kind of hand with all five senses, so basically you’re just a standard IF protagonist minus some height, the ability to hold more than one object at a time, and the gift of gab, which are no big deal in the grand scheme of things. No, the weirdest thing is that it’s almost entirely in verse.

There are of course many pieces of IF that are written as poetry, but the list is mostly choice-based games – and while there are other examples in the parser space, like Portrait With Wolf and Nelson’s Shakespeare’s Tempest, they’re generally not structured along conventional medium-dry-goods lines, for the understandable reason that this sort of thing is beyond silly:

You feel a vibration beneath you, a rumble transmits through the floor,
The wall to the north slowly rotates, and now serves as a passable door.

Let me be clear: I enjoy things that are beyond silly. I think the idea here is to lean hard into the cheesy-horror vibe and make it seem like Vincent Price is narrating proceedings, and if that’s the case, the occasional misstep into doggerel just adds to the mood; as long as innocent villagers are being chopped up, I guess the meter can be too:

The damage the innocent suffer, is needed but quite unintentional.
But digging up graves and killing the locals for parts seems a bit unconventional.

There are times when it feels a bit intimidating to have to page through five stanzas of description plus some dialogue to figure out what’s going on in a location, and there are places where the game does resort to unadorned prose (those most of these, like listing moveable objects that have been dropped, are entirely forgivable given the number of variations that would be required). But overall the verse thing works surprisingly well, communicating a sense of place as well as all the quotidian bits of parser functionality like where the exits are, shifting location descriptions when you change state (like noting that a hatch is either opened or closed), and even making some fun shifts into alternate genres of poetry on occasion.

While the verse is the standout feature, Frankenfingers’ design is no slouch either. This is a reasonably big game with a bunch of puzzles, but the clueing is elegantly done; even if I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to accomplish beyond escaping the castle (since that Dr. Frankenstein definitely doesn’t seem nice), there are usually clear sub-objectives to work towards, with new chunks of the map opening up at dramatically appropriate times. The puzzles are very well integrated, with many hinging on your unique abilities and limitations as a hand, and hitting just the right level of complexity and difficulty to feel satisfying to solve without throwing up too high of a hurdle to progress. Getting detected by the good doctor or his servants can lead to a game over, but it’s easy to UNDO, and figuring out how to elude them made me feel very clever. And the horse-riding set-piece makes for a funny enough mental image that it’s easy to overlook that it’s got the one maybe slightly-underclued puzzle of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(in retrospect, feeding her the apple makes sense, but the messages about why she was refusing to move could have been a little clearer about what the issue was, since at first I thought she wanted a blanket to keep the rain off). There’s an effortlessness here that’s very, very hard to achieve in a parser puzzler, again leaving aside the additional difficulty imposed by the use of poetry – it’s impressive stuff.

As for the plot, it’s a silly horror pastiche, but one that doesn’t tip too far into zaniness. Once you accept that you’re a dismembered hand trying to escape Frankenstein’s castle, everything you encounter is entirely logical, and the protagonist has clear, if not poignant, motivations – while it’s hard for a hand to have too much personality, he does have an appealing impulse to help those in need. Actually, one of my few small kicks against the game was that it felt slightly mean to have to keep typing HIT HORSE WITH CROP, except when I slightly mistyped it once the parser error revealed that actually I should have just been TAPping instead, meaning that actually I was the asshole on that score.

When it comes to classic formats like the comedy parser puzzler, often success is more down to execution than novel ideas. Frankenfingers is the rare example of succeeding on both fronts – the alternately super clever/deeply awful verse provides the razzle-dazzle on top of rock-solid implementation and design.

I’m turning 45 in a couple of months, and while I like to think of myself as having maintained an admirable flexibility of mind and try to at least be aware of broader cultural trends even though many of them aren’t especially relevant to me anymore, there are times when I play a game and sure do feel an age gap separating me from the author, and the one I experienced when finishing High on Grief was especially acute: how in the name of all that’s holy does this game, whose inciting incident is the main character’s decision to take drugs laced with their parent’s cremated remains, fail to acknowledge that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards did exactly the same thing? OK sure in his case it was snorting the ashes with some coke rather than baking them into pot brownies, but still – High on Grief’s protagonist, Yancy, makes a point of emphasizing how uniquely bizarre their actions are, when there’s an incredibly famous precedent exactly on point, at least for those of us of a certain age! This would be like having a game where the main character rides naked on a horse to protest taxation and everyone’s like, never heard of that one.

Admittedly, the reason for the omission is likely that High on Grief doesn’t take place in our reality; I think it’s only adverted to in the cover art this time out, but from playing previous games featuring Yancy I’m aware that they live in a world where everyone’s an anthropomorphic animal, and I believe there was a zombie apocalypse not too long ago. Still, there are points in common with the real world – Yancy’s deceased mom, for example, was a Christian, and she used her religion as one element in a relentless campaign of verbal and emotional abuse against her queer and autistic child. The game doesn’t get into much in the way of details here, beyond noting that she continually misgendered Yancy, but I think that’s a reasonable choice, since the focus here isn’t on rehashing specific incidents; instead, it’s about how Yancy comes to grips with their complex feelings about their mom, and her impact on them, now that she’s gone.

The particular way this plays out is, again, via a non-health-code-compliant pot brownie binge; as Yancy starts to get high, questions start bouncing around their brain about why they’re doing this (they’d originally mentioned the idea as a dark joke in high school, but that only takes you so far), what their mom’s death means, and more. Depending on how you answer these questions, you wind up phoning one of ten different friends for support in your dark night of the soul. Or rather, you wind up phoning all of them – after the conversation the game ends, but the blurb and ending text are very clear that you’re intended to play through all the options, and the game crosses out choices you’ve already picked to make sure you call the last friend as you eat the last piece of brownie. Oddly, this is phrased as “rewinding”, despite the fact that Yancy’s table accumulates notes from the previous conversations and previously-eaten pieces of brownie don’t reappear, which is a violation of causality not nearly as jarring as the fact that Yancy knows they’re a character in a piece of IF and occasionally addresses the player, speculating on what the author is up to.

Despite the apparently simple setup, then, there’s a lot going on here, mirroring the roiling stew of emotions Yancy is experiencing. For all that they’re clear that their mom was terrible, and terrible to them, they acknowledge that she could be kind to others and there are a (very) few positive parts of the legacy she’s left them. But their overwhelming feelings are angry ones; there’s very little actual grief here as most would recognize it. The dialogues provide an avenue to unpack all this, since each friend provides a viewpoint on one particular angle: one friend who’s a parent themselves has perspective on the ways parents influence their kids, while an autistic one commiserates by talking about their own struggles with people who are intolerant of the neurodivergent.

These are all written screenplay style, and generally work well; there’s a preponderance of therapy-speak, and again, Yancy often speaks in generalities, but those seem like plausible choices given the scenario. But ten may have been too many – it’s hard to add too much variety to the dialogues since they cover pretty similar ground, with many of them starting with the friend saying some slight variation of “I heard your mom’s funeral just happened, must be rough from what you’ve been saying on the Discord”. It’s also hard to get a sense of such a big supporting cast, especially since the game doesn’t provide any real context for who they are. I dimly remembered a few from earlier games, but for the most part they’re distinguished only by one or two obvious traits, without much room for nuance; again, I think what’s here works fine, but I wonder whether the game might have hit harder with half as many characters, but deeper dialogues that granted them more personality.

The other element that didn’t have as much payoff for me was the meta flourishes. There is a payoff of sorts for them, engaging with what exactly the player is doing when they make choices on Yancy’s behalf and how that relates to the mom’s domineering approach to her relationship with her kid, but this felt more like an intellectual connection than an organic, emotional one. Instead, it’s Yancy’s authentic confusion and defiance that stuck with me; devouring a parent is a highly symbolic act, and not one undertaken lightly, after all. I’m not sure Yancy was entirely justified to do what they did – but then, I don’t think Yancy is sure they were entirely justified, either. Even for those in much less extreme situations, it’s easy to recognize the need to move past your parents and let go of their influence on you, but easy too to feel ambivalence about that.

Except for Keith Richards – to my knowledge he’s never said he felt bad about snorting his dad, he just thought it was awesome.

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous reviews in this thread, I’ve been getting back into Star Trek lately, for reasons that are probably not too hard to guess if you look around (I remember finding the idea that the central event of the mid-21st Century would be “the Eugenics Wars” incredibly funny back in the day). As I’ve been tiptoeing into the last decade’s worth of franchise effluvium, I’ve heard a lot of people recommend Lower Decks, which is an animated comedy that makes fun of the tropes of Star Trek, but folks say also clearly has a lot of affection for them too, and adds solid character work to boot. Sounds great! But I bounced hard off the one episode I watched, because while the substance was indeed as advertised, the style was incredibly off-putting to me – the characters are all yelling at each other all the time, there’s a lot of intentionally-unpleasant visual jokes based on nudity and body fluids, and a strain of stoner-humor runs through the whole thing. I can see how the cocktail could work for some – this is pretty much exactly the aesthetic that made Rick and Morty super successful – it’s just not my bag.

So yeah, Backpackward.

This choice-based game is working in a classic genre (in this case, portal fantasy, where an unwitting protagonist is transported to a fantasy realm), with a solid density of funny jokes (the very first one – your dead-end job of choice is working in a smoothie shop named “Jack of All Fruits” – took me a minute to get, but is legit clever; the fact that they sell a smoothie called the “Mango-Carta Madness” made me disappointed I couldn’t read the full menu board), and a fun mechanic to boot: there are occasional options along the lines you typically see in a choice-based game, most hinging on whether you’ll release your bottomless rage at your marginal existence, or try to keep it bottled up, but they mostly seem to have only cosmetic effect. No, the real interactivity isn’t based on what you do, but what you have. Per the title, at key junctures you’ll have a chance to snatch a potpourri of items and try to cram them into your backpack – stealing a page from action-RPGs like Diablo, this involves playing inventory-Tetris and making hard decisions about what to leave behind, since the available space is strictly limited. And it’s the presence or absence of key items like a light source, a lucky die, or a can of Febreze that impacts how well you navigate the myriad challenges of trying to storm a castle in the fantasy world, and find a place to crash after you piss off all your friends in the real one.

This is all pretty well done – the backpack especially is cool, with lovely graphics making the process of agonizing over what to take feel nice and tactile. But it does all the same stuff I found so grating in Lower Decks: the main character is an aggrieved and aggressive jerk, the game can’t let go of running jokes like how funny it is to step in sheep dung, and yeah, one of the items you can prioritize is a bong. I don’t mean to knock the folks to whom this stuff appeals at all – everyone has their own taste in humor – but I just don’t find it that funny, and in fact running “gags” like the protagonist’s extended flirting with the wife of the one peasant in the fantasy world who’s nice to him feel grating and unpleasant to me.

Often I don’t mind a narrative aesthetic that’s not to my taste as much if the gameplay is grabby, but here Backpackward runs into difficulties because the item-collection mechanic is also pretty random. The game does signpost a few of the items that will be most useful – it’s pretty clear that you’ll want a lighter and some explosives for the endgame, and you’d have to be intentionally sandbagging not to wind up with them – but for the most part, your choices of what to bring are made blind, which makes them feel either inconsequential (I kept a DnD miniature figure through the game because it felt like it had to pay off somewhere, but all it wound up doing was open up a couple opportunities to shove it in people’s faces) or incredibly weighty (by the time I realized that a broken shield would be super helpful to have, I was half the game away from the one moment when I could have grabbed it). Sometimes this can pay off – a half-eaten pack of Cheetos I’d stuffed in the backpack and forgot about wound up being the key item I needed to save my peasant “friend” when we were menaced by attack dogs – but fortuity only takes you so far, especially since there appear to be noticeable negative consequences if you don’t happen to have the right item on you (another issue is that I know this because the ending text I got seemed buggy and didn’t realize I’d used the Cheetos – it told me the peasant had died).

Speaking of the ending, Backpackward isn’t a complete story unto itself, ending on a cliffhanger, and while that can be annoying, in this case it makes me optimistic. See, if there is a sequel, it’s a chance for the characters and world to bed in a bit, develop some nuance now that the basic contours are established. The various setbacks suffered by the main character might also get him to gain a little self-awareness, which would be very welcome. I am planning to take another run at Lower Decks after the Comp, since I hear that it calms own after the first episode – here’s hoping the same is true here!

It’s fun to look at old sci-fi and see which of the things they’ve envisioned have become reality, and which are still the stuff of imagination. Take Star Trek: warp drive remains a physical improbability, matter replicators are sorta getting there with 3D printers, ditto with the holodeck given improvements in VR, and we’ve already got a version of the voice-activated computer that responds to whatever you say though there are uh some unanticipated issues with that. The Universal Translator is looking pretty good, thankfully transporters are still pretty far off, and the Vulcan Mind Meld? I’m ready to declare that one checked off. You see, I’ve been playing Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games for about five years now, and while I remember my brains leaking out of my ears when I realized what the first few were demanding of me, I managed to sail through most of Us Too, firmly vibrating on its wavelength. As far as I can tell, playing his games year after year has expanded my consciousness until I see the world the same way he does, decomposing words into their component phonemes if not effortlessly, then at least with an intuitive appreciation for the logic at work. Just as in the show, it’s a disorienting experience as well as an enlightening one – but it does mean I had a thoroughly good time with Us Too.

For those who haven’t played one of these games, a bit of explanation is in order. Every installment in the series hinges on a particular kind of wordplay that transforms a seemingly-nonsensical word or phrase into another, often-similarly-nonsensical one. While there is an inventory and compass navigation, these vestiges of traditional parser games are just there to support the word puzzles (most items are used and collected automatically – or at least, automatically once you’ve solved the appropriate puzzle). The gameplay loop involves going to a new place, noting that it’s got a weird name and maybe one or two other weird objects, and then typing in what you think those names translate to (note for prospective players: I always forget that you don’t need to type SAY first, just type the solution!) As for the nature of the wordplay, it shifts between games – I think most of the ones I’ve played have involved substituting the initial sounds of an alliterative phrase (like, “Chevy chair “becomes “heavy hair”), though memorably and kinda-painfully, there was even a pig Latin one.

Us Too’s distinctive move is admittedly easier to grasp than these somewhat outre pieces of linguistic dexterity: here, you need to move the space in a two-word phrase to make a different two-word phrase, for example THINK WELL can become THIN QUELL (this is an example from the game, but it’s given to you to toggle a help option rather than being an actual puzzle). It can definitely be tricky – there were some puzzles that I stared at for a long time, babbling demented syllables until they finally cohered by trial and error – but it’s a reasonably bounded problem, and I found I got the knack pretty quickly, which made the pacing satisfying: I tended to make good progress, then run into a couple tricky puzzles that slowed things down, before getting unjammed and zooming ahead again. This is especially the case where I’d figured out the later stages in a puzzle-chain before the first: as mentioned, Us Too isn’t just a series of isolated tongue-twisters, there is an inventory and state tracking, so sometimes you need to have the right item or otherwise satisfied a prerequisite before the puzzle can be solved. Helpfully, though, the game remembers if you’ve stumbled across the right phrase before you’re able to deploy it properly, and it’s very satisfying to solve one puzzle and realize in a flash that it’ll let you work through a half-dozen that had been left tormentingly half-solved across the map.

Much like the other games, Us Too in fact is helpful to a fault. There are tutorial messages, cheat items, and diegetic hints a-plenty. A challenge is that these all use the same linguistic tricks as the rest of the game, so they might be tricky for someone coming to the series fresh to figure out – which is too bad, since of course those are the people for whom they’ll be most important, and they’ll need them most at the very beginning, before the player’s figured out the main trick. And sometimes the game provides so much detail that the forest can get lost for the trees (there’s a hint item that looks like a pair of eyes that has something like three different potential uses, all giving slightly different feedback). But there’s also a full walkthrough that talks all the puzzles through, so really, there’s a lot of support to allow players of all experience levels to have fun here, once they get over that first hurdle.

As for the plot – well, Us Too makes an interesting contrast with Monkeys and Car Keys, which I just reviewed and noted that it doesn’t really bother trying to diegetically justify its puzzles. Despite their bizarre nature, Us Too’s puzzles are all integrated into its narrative, which makes the whole thing quite phantasmagoric: in theory, you’re tasked with exploring a mine to satisfy the conditions of an eccentric great-aunt’s will, but while the mine does have some of the stuff you’d expect, there are also restaurants, oceans with boats and islands, plenty of other people to meet, and odder situations still. Oh, and you’re collecting ingredients for a recipe while you’re down there. I admit that I have a hard time correlating all the different strands of the plot; the opening is pretty coherent, presenting the great-aunt as an appealing presence in the protagonist’s life and featuring a rare sighting of lawyers in IF who aren’t jerks, but after that it gets pretty fractured – I did find it funny, but the various jokes I pasted into my notes don’t really work on their own, you kind of needed to be there.

Outside of the narrative, the gameplay also departs from its key mechanic a few times, and while they can provide a welcome change of pace, I did get stuck on one of these because I was expecting to solve everything with wordplay, rather than messing around with items (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m talking about the bit where you can boost your speed by examining a particular item, and depending on how much gas you’ve got left in the tank, going south at a specific intersection will take you to one of three different destinations). Admittedly, there is a lot of signposting that something weird is happening here, but the challenge just felt very out of context with what the rest of the game had been training me to do. I guess that just means there’s a bit more work required on the mind meld – once Andrew wraps that up, maybe he can start in on the space communism bit of Star Trek next?

I have a four-year-old son who is very sweet. Recently he’s been sick, so he’s been extra cuddly, and when his fever got bad for a bit, he wanted me to sit right next to him and tell him facts about the planets and galaxies to distract him from how crummy he was feeling. But then – thankfully – he started to feel better, and when I asked him if he wanted me to read him one of the science books we’d gotten out of the library, he yelled “poop!” and demanded I flip him upside down.

Which is to say, even the sweetest of us hit a point where they have had too much coziness – this is more or less the major theme of Dosteovsky’s Notes from Underground – and I must confess that Path of Totality had me contemplating just where mine is located. Not that this is a flaw in the game, or that I think I actually wound up tripping over the line! It never pretends to be something it’s not, and it carries off its brief with craft and care. As someone on their way to witness a sacred eclipse in a DnD-but-sanded-down fantasy world, your journey requires you to overcome the kind of obstacles that would get you a PG rating for “mild peril”, but more importantly, to bond with an appealingly-drawn quartet of fellow travelers, each with their own wholesome aspirations and hobbies.

Deepening your relationships with them is really the meat of the game; for the first half, each day on the trail sees you manage a few low-key decisions about how best to proceed along your path to the best spot to view the eclipse, then at night you have a chance for a conversation with one of your companions. After that series of one-on-ones, you have a chance to establish a chaste romance, and as the challenges in your way ramp up slightly, so too do you learn more about some of the (largely low-key) issues bedeviling them, before you reach a happy ending. It’s a simple structure, but it works, largely because the character work is solid. They’re largely fantasy stereotypes, but played just slightly against type: the halfling who loves nature as well as writing stories, the orc twins who work together building furniture, the trans shapeshifting elf princess. I can’t say I was ever deeply surprised by any of the backstory revelations that unpeel as the game progresses, but that’s partially because they feel like coherent people from the moment you meet them. Similarly, none of them are harboring intense conflicts or uncontrollable passions, but as a middle-aged person myself, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a game take an interest in people who are subject to the occasional bit of anxiety but are generally secure in their lives, goals, and work.

The trip itself very much is an excuse to allow you to spend time with your companions, though there are things to do. Beyond the quotidian incidents on the path, like bumping into other travelers to compare notes, or weathering an unexpected rainstorm, there are three more involved set-piece challenges, each of which involve dealing with mischievous fae. While they’re notionally different, in practice I found each was an exercise in trial and error, requiring a lot of clicking but without much in the way of real danger. I don’t want to spoil the latter ones, but the first is a sort of riddle contest that I found easiest to win by simply repeating myself until the fae got bored; the other two were physical traversal challenges, one of which was made trivial by my choice of background (at the beginning of the game, you decide why you want to see the eclipse: are you an adventurer hoping it will help solve a quest, a pilgrim looking for a blessing, or an astronomer seeking scientific knowledge?) They’re fine, but there’s a lot of clicking without much deep thinking required; they pace out the journey, but again, the real focus of the game is chatting with the characters.

So yeah, this is good, and I enjoyed it – but there were times when the coziness threatened to tip over into feeling cloying. Notably, while the romances are generally sweet, they’re aggressively chaste; I wound up getting close to the shapeshifter, whose powers require her to be naked to change her form, but despite this happening a couple of times, the description just matter-of-factly notes her doffing or shrugging on her clothes with no acknowledgment of sexuality whatsoever. I also felt like a late-game sequence where the companions meet a married couple who shelter them right before they reach the eclipse dragged and went back over previously-covered ground: there’s a truth-or-dare-without-dares dice game that gets played out in highly granular detail, but nothing much new comes out of any of the conversations, and everyone’s uniformly supportive of everyone else, so much so that I also wanted to tip the table over and scream “poop!” just for a change of pace.

Except, I had the option to, but I didn’t. For all that what I’ve described above is I think pretty clearly the intended experience of Path of Totality, you can opt out of just about all of it: alongside the positive, encouraging dialogue option, there’s almost always a second saying you’re not interested in hearing any more about woodworking, and what would a halfling know about birds of prey, and you can even make a transphobic comment to the elf lady. Heck, as far as I can tell the companions are optional, and you can decide to make the pilgrimage all by yourself!

I have a hard time understanding the kind of player who, after the game introduces itself via an extended conversation with a relatable, helpful pair of characters who ask to join you, decides to turn them down, mind – and I likewise don’t think many people will take the latter option in the frequent be cool/be an asshole choices. But it’s meaningful that they’re there, because even if I did sometimes chafe at how upbeat and cheerful everything was, if I’d really wanted to I could have peed in the cheerios at any time. By revealed preferences, then, I got exactly the experience I wanted, and it was a good one. I am glad, though, that I’ve got a good number of games before the next Lamp Post Productions game comes up in my queue, since I don’t want to overdose on the positive vibes (though if that’s a danger, I could take my son’s advice and flip myself upside down, I suppose).

One of the trickiest bits of designing a parser puzzle game is fitting the crossword into the narrative. Sometimes everything hums along in perfect harmony, and challenges naturally thrown up by the story have obvious mechanical implementations that are well-suited to the medium-dry-goods model – or, conversely, a great idea for a puzzle turns out to be easy to slot into the plot with minimal complications. But often, the gears grind rather than turn smoothly; you can wind up with long stretches of narrative with no ideas for how to break them up (maybe throw in the Towers of Hanoi?), or more often, a fiendishly clever puzzle idea that one despairs of justifying diegetically. On the horns of this dilemma, many an author has bent over backwards to try to come up with some minimally-plausible justification (if I had a nickel for every time aliens or a wizard ran a test to find out if I was worthy…) Monkeys and Car Keys, though, opts for the bolder path: since trying to reverse-engineer an explanation for these puzzles would itself be disruptive to any sense of narrative coherence, why not steer into the skid and just go with it?

Which is to say, when I pictured the kinds of stuff I’d need to do to retrieve my eponymous car keys when the eponymous monkeys snatched them mid-jungle-safari, I was on target with exactly one of them (though really, I get no points for guessing that at some point I’d need to bribe a monkey with a banana, and now that I think of it even that isn’t played entirely straight).

The range of challenges put before you include a translation puzzle, an action-mirroring one, and a fair bit of hidden-object spotting – none of it exactly explodes the conventional paradigm, but they’re all clever and provide a spark of novelty. And none of them make a lick of sense in any universe resembling our own. I won’t spoil the later places it goes, but the first set of puzzles revolve around figuring out how a trio of magic statues work. It’s satisfying when the pieces click into place, and I found there were just enough clues to move me along to the next step (albeit sometimes these were of the “you’ve been flailing around for an extended number of turns, so here are some increasingly-direct prompts to get you back on track” variety). But logical deduction isn’t enough to solve these puzzles: instead, you need to check your assumptions and the door and experiment.

For all that this represents a total capitulation of narrative in the face of the crossword, this is something parser games are quite good at – and let’s be honest, letting the puzzles dominate a “some monkeys stole my keys, those silly-billies” premise probably doesn’t mean we missed out on War and Peace. There are some places where I found my tired brain wasn’t up to the task – the second major set-piece involves a bunch of different bits of scenery and characters, and I found my mental picture wasn’t quite accurate enough for me to have a handle on what was going on – but Monkeys and Car Keys largely plays fair. It’s also smoothly implemented, with only one or two small exceptions (I had to consult the hints at one point since I’d forgotten that MONKEY wasn’t an acceptable synonym for the STATUE of a monkey). And honestly, given that the last story beat made me kind of feel like a bad person (Spoiler - click to show) (OK that one monkey was being a jerk, but did he really deserve to get beat down with a tire iron?) there’s something to be said for refusing to allow the player to take matters seriously – and while the game knows its puzzles are the main draw, there are some engaging bits of simian mischief, and a cute sidekick, to lighten proceedings. There’s also an incredibly long setup for a bit of physical comedy illustrating that nothing’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Tricky puzzles and silly jokes is an enduring recipe for success in parser IF; if it lacks a certain balance of form and checks its literary pretensions at the door, well, what else would you expect of monkey business?

Spoiler alert for this review: there’s an admittedly-telegraphed plot development about midway through Fable’s relatively short run time that I have to address to properly discuss it, and turning the review into a Swiss-cheese of blurry text didn’t seem like a good idea.

I try not to pay too much attention to what a game is called: for me at least, coming up with a name is usually a slow, agonizing process that ends when I can’t stand to think about it anymore, so I try to do unto others as I would have done unto me and glide right past them. That was simple enough for me to do when starting Fable: is there a more generic title imaginable for a fantasy game? But after I finished, I wound up going back to it and worrying at it like a sore tooth: a fable is a simple story leaning heavily on allegory with an instructive moral at the end, perhaps with some anthropomorphized animals along the way, but what we’ve got here is a somewhat-convoluted teen melodrama whose central dilemma appears monstrous if you apply a lens of morality rather than romance to it. Don’t get me wrong, as melodrama it’s effective, albeit breathlessly paced, but I’m not sure that the questions the title invites are to its benefit.

The game introduces a lot of characters, situations, and prophecies in its first few passages, but it quickly becomes clear that much of it is secondary to the romantic obsession of Kel, the primary character: he’s long been in love with his best friend, Ronan, who himself is in love with Kel’s twin sister (I’ll admit that being myself a twin, I found the awkwardness of this setup excruciating, but it’s all fair enough by genre standards, I suppose – there’s nothing here more twisted than what’s in Star Wars). Then Ronan suddenly gets chosen to go on a quest – this is that prophecy, it’s pretty hand-wavey – and when he returns a year later, he’s changed, most notably by seeming to reciprocate Kel’s interest this time, though of course there’s plausible deniability. There are choices through this section, mostly coming down to leaning into the flirtation or playing hard to get, which is an engaging way of playing a romance, but it does suffer somewhat by the dial being immediately jammed to 11 and staying there. Nearly every passage ends in grasping towards big emotions, and yeah, I remember being a teenager, this is pretty much how it was, but the dialogue does sometimes buckle under the load:

“Do you know what it’s like to love you?”

At once, Ronan falls still.

“It’s finally understanding that this is what the bards sing about.” You squeeze your eyes shut. “So this is how I bleed.”

In the silence that follows, you blink back open your eyes, only to find a peculiar expression spasming across Ronan’s face.

(The emotion, thankfully, is not extreme mortification).

Throughout, though, there are intimations that there’s something off with Ronan, and the first half culminates in the revelation that he’s not really Ronan – which triggers a short flashback to the (much more sedately and evocatively written, I found) quest, where a psychic parasite named Jamie brain-jacked Ronan; it’s Jamie who’s returned and is into you. Barely has he been established as a mind-possessing fiend than he turns to lovestruck idiot, though, because as soon as Kel tumbles to what’s going on, he offers to release his hold (it was unclear to me whether this guaranteed his permanent discorporation) and allow Ronan to take his body back, free and clear. The climax, then, comes down to the choices you have Kel make to navigate this situation – as far as I could see, there’s no direct “keep Ronan’s consciousness shoved down an oubliette forever” path, but you can drag out the process for a while.

Again, as melodrama, this is a solid series of twists, though I think the pacing is a bit too breakneck for each to have as great an impact as it could. The bigger issue goes back to the title: if you don’t think about it too hard, a lovelorn seventeen-year-old torn between doing what he knows is right and finally having someone who desires him is dramatic enough. But if you splash some cold water on yourself first, holy crap: this dude has just about killed your best friend, who you’ve been in love with for years, but because he seems like he’ll put out and he’s wearing your crush like a skin-suit, you’re vacillating about what to do? Unless the moral here is meant to be that the terminally horny are too depraved to think straight, it’s hard to walk away from this feeling especially sympathetic to Kel’s angst. There’s a version of the game that leans into that discomfort – it’d certainly be risky to acknowledge the terrible things he’s contemplating and explore some of the darker aspects of desire. By calling itself a fable, Fable opens the door to that reading, which meant that I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that instead the game glides over these implications. In the final sequence, Ronan and his sister just pat Kel on his back and sympathize with his pain after it’s all over – I’m not sure that he’s learned anything.

A nice thing about having been around IF-world for some time now, and making an effort to work through all the games in a couple of the major events, is that there are games that wind up sticking in my head as a sort of alternate canon – games that pushed boundaries or nailed a theme or were just really good, but for whatever reason haven’t stuck in the popular consciousness the way other, equally-worthy ones have. I’m not saying this to be more-hipster-than-thou; usually there are understandable reasons for the lower profile, like Fairies of Haelstowne, which was entered into ParserComp, or Constraints, which had a good showing in a twenty-years-gone Comp, or Accelerate, which was overshadowed by its prequel, Spy Intrigue, which I happen not to have played. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, communities glom on to some things and not others, memories are sparked or fade, new games cycle in to replace old ones… But going back to Accelerate, one of its fellow entries in the 2020 Comp is also on my idiosyncratic forgotten-classic list: Electric word, “life”. It’s a Twine 1999-set period piece about Halloween, and life, and death, but not in the way you’d imagine from hearing those themes laid out like that, and I adored it; even though I don’t think I’ve heard it mentioned in the last half-decade, I still think about it sometimes.

So I was excited to see that game’s author had written something new! While they still haven’t figured out how to come up with an easy-to-say title, the games couldn’t be more different: this time out we’ve got a wordplay-based parser comedy, and it’s a bit smaller in scope (though that could largely just be down to the difference between how scale works in choice-based and parser game). But it’s once again got great writing and satisfying mechanics; I can’t guarantee the Semtanta… the Semantamagia… the Assistant will wind up grabbing me the same way its predecessor did in years to come, but it’s certainly got a fighting chance of doing so.

Anyone writing a parser game where you solve puzzles by using gadgets to transform words must surely be intimidated by the legacy of Counterfeit Monkey, and to the game’s immense credit, it’s got the chutzpah to pay homage in one early in-joke and get on with things. The premise also helps cut to the chase: you play an underemployed striver looking for a job that’ll let you escape the grind, which has led to you answering a bizarre help-wanted ad and getting sucked into an interactive interview process. To prove you’ve got what it takes to be the magician’s understudy, you’ve got to figure out how to escape the room he’s trapped you in (there are no bones of previous applicants lying around, which is somewhat reassuring, at least?)

Where the plot is admittedly a bit thinner than in other, similar games – as is the number of puzzles, as there are really only three major word transformations in the critical-path chain – the range of tools is broader. There are half a dozen magical tools at your disposal, each performing a different bit of linguistic legerdemain: diegetically they may look typical stage-magician tat like a table where you saw people in half or a wheel with animals drawn on it or whatever, the effects include breaking apart or joining words, duplicating or removing instances of a particular vowel, slapping on a prefix, and so on. The operation of some of them is immediately clear, while the purpose of others is obfuscated, leading to a series of great aha moments when I worked out what they did and why that was useful.

Figuring out the syntax required to employ them can be just as challenging as solving the puzzles themselves, though – there’s a USE [DEVICE] command that’s mentioned in the About text as a way of providing a hint, but for some of them I think it’s more of a required tutorial; regardless, the game does eventually give you a hand. While I’m picking nits, there are a few other places bespeaking a slight lack of polish, like unimplemented scenery items and a super long location description that reprints every time you look. And I had to consult the actual hints after finishing the first major puzzle, since solving it doesn’t give direct feedback that something I’d tried earlier, only to see it end in failure, would now suddenly work.

Beyond those niggles, though, the implementation and design are both very very solid. Puzzle-wise, since this isn’t nearly as big a game as something like Counterfeit Monkey, there’s not that same scope for experimentation and solving puzzles through different solutions – there’s usually only one way to make progress at any time, and that very lack of extraneous options can wind up functioning as a sort of hint system unto itself, as a couple of times I went through some word transformations because I saw that I could perform them, rather than because I saw why I should perform them. But usually the logic clicked before I’d gotten too far down that path, leading to some of those “aha” moments mentioned above (I really enjoyed figuring out what the wheel was for). The downside is that I didn’t engage with the diegetic hint mechanics, which involve chatting with an adorable bunny, as much as might have been fun.

I was sad to miss out on any jokes that might have been lurking there, because the ones in the rest of the game are fun. The game steers clear of the flop-sweat-y patter of comedy games desperate to show you how zany they are, just weaving its gags into the inherent absurdity of the situation, alongside a calculated few flashbacks that quickly characterize your prospective boss:

“Magicians manipulate objects. I manipulate the names of objects. I can turn a cub into a cube; I can turn a tub into a tube—”

This time desperation took a back seat. “Hold on,” you interrupted. “Doesn’t that make you, like, an Orthographician? Spellingagician? Spellspeller…”

It all adds up to a delightful package, and in five years’ time I’d very much look forward to seeing an expanded sequel – or something just as different from this game as it is from Electric word, “life”.

There’s a proud IF tradition of trolling game and subversive ones that cheekily undermine their ostensible premises (let’s pick, oh, 9:05 and Nemesis Macana as respective exemplars), and Space Mission: 2045 is a fitting inheritor to that legacy. There’s perhaps no topic in contemporary IF as contentious as the use of LLMs, so what could be riper for satire? Space Mission: 2045 lures the player in with an earnest-seeming 2,500 word monograph about the weaknesses of previous attempts to use generative AI to write IF, which segues into a manifesto for the virtues of the author’s approach, followed by an extended manual for the RPG-lite system the game uses (a particularly fun gag is that in a game about traveling through space to colonize Mars, “Animal Kinship” is one of the ten skills you can pick), and wrapping up with more details on how you can interact with the AI-driven parser – again, there’s a good piss-take here where the readme implies that the response to EXAMINE [OBJECT] will always be LLM-generated rather than written by a human, but that “doesn’t necessarily mean that the details are useless.” (emphasis added).

It’s all very gung-ho, but when you launch the game, there’s a one-two sucker punch. The first is that this cutting-edge game looks extraordinarily primitive, displaying without paragraph breaks or any left-margin whatsoever – all this makes the prospect of reading reams of LLM-generated text even more terrifying. The first and a half – OK, I should go back and edit the first sentence of this paragraph now that I’ve thought of one more, but it’s late so we’re just going with it – is that we’re going on this Mars mission on behalf of thinly-veiled caricatures of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, which I really hope is meant to be a setup for jokes.

The second is that, of course, after you get done with the over-complex chargen section, nothing works. All the sophisticated features promised by the readme, like natural-language dialogue with NPCs who could adjudge whether you’d been sufficiently persuasive to convince them, or the smart parser which matches whatever convoluted sentence you care to write to the more limited list of actions that are actually possible In a particular sequence? Yeah, they sound great, and in fairness this is a game that allows you type whatever you want – it’s just that you’ll always get a response telling you there’s something wrong with the API key the game uses to interface with the LLM. It’s not particularly sophisticated, I suppose, but this is an elegant way of puncturing the pretensions of AI evangelists, demonstrating that even leaving aside the substance of what they claim, you can’t trust a chatbot game to even last all the way through a Comp before tech-company shenanigans knock it offline (meanwhile, interpreters mean we can still play forty-five year old classics with a click). It also opens up space for improvisational comedy like this:

What do you want to do? write a witty deconstruction of the folly of overreliance on generative ai
Error during AI interpretation: 401 Client Error: Unauthorized for url: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions

The only thing that could make the satire better is if it were actually intentional – since I glanced at some other reviews, and turns out there once was a playable game here? Sadly, Space Mission: 2045 might be more of a monument to hubris than deconstruction of same; if it ever starts working again, I’ll try to revisit it and update this review accordingly, but in the meantime, it’s one of the most effective bits of inadvertent self-mockery since the literary career of Norman Mailer.

[I believe that after the Comp closed, the game started working again; I haven't gone back to play it but I'm omitting my rating from the average]