Reviews by Mike Russo

I count at least two layers of metatextual irony in Nyx’s second sentence:

"Scientists, soldiers, pilots, people of few words — why didn’t we send painters, writers, musicians, why didn’t we send anyone capable of humanity?"

The first layer, of course, is that this is a work of IF, an art form pioneered by programmers, mathematicians, physicists, and many other scientists who proved themselves more than capable of humanity (and, as to at least some of them, less-than-capable at shutting up). The second layer is that this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry, so a person of few words is actually the ideal narrator.

Given the brevity of the format, it makes sense that the game unabashedly tips its hand to what it’s riffing off; the opening is a clear response to the “they should have sent a poet” bit from Contact, and the situation – the narrator is the last one left after a space monster has killed all the other crew on their ship – is structurally the same as Alien, though there are some important differences in the details. It’s a neat juxtaposition, since the former is all about the wonder of exploration while the latter turns space into a site of terror. The prose, as always with this author’s work, edges on the sublime, and is more than capable of holding these opposites simultaneously:

"Why me? Why me, when the only prayer I know is the astronaut’s — dear God, please don’t let me fuck this up — why me when there’s something spiritual about how oxygen reacts upon ignition, stomach lurching backwards, pressed against spine, dreadful exhilaration robbing air from lungs and rattling teeth as higher into the heavens you spiral — why me?"

The story is also well-chosen for the length limit, since relaying how the other crew-members died in a sentence or two apiece is effectively chilling, and conveys all that’s really needed; there are fuzzy indications that the alien does more than just eviscerate people and perhaps exerts some degree of psychic influence, but of course the narrator wouldn’t have a clear sense of how that works, as this is apparently humanity’s first contact with any sort of extraterrestrial life. And this simple setup is more than enough to provide context to the game’s one, climactic choice – whether to send the ship into deep space and hope it stays lost, set coordinates back to earth so that others will encounter the alien, or open the bulkhead door and embrace what’s coming.

Narratively speaking all of these are reasonable endings to the first 2/3 of the game, but my one critique of Nyx is that I didn’t feel like there was as much thematic connection between the opening – which, per the bits I’ve quoted, is heavily devoted to the inadequacies the narrator feels about trying to use words to capture their experiences in space – and two of the endings; each of these individual pieces are quite well written, don’t get me wrong, but for a game this short I wanted the experience to feel tighter. It took until the last ending that I tried to see the build-up actually pay off – which it did, quite well. But as a result I think this is a work of IF that suffers somewhat from its interactivity; I was sufficiently engaged by the presentation, in stark black and reds with clicking required to get the next bit of tense, evocative text, that I didn’t feel like I really needed any narrative agency. And as a work of dynamic fiction that ensured the player sees the parts of the story in the order that would have the most impact, I think Nyx could be even more successful – though I think it certainly works well enough as it is.

Geez, ^ spoiler alert.

We have here the second part in the RGB trilogy – and while it’s recognizably of a piece with He Knows That You Know and Now There’s No Stopping Him, it also throws some curves into the emerging formula. For one thing, the cast list gives us three characters this time: green makes a repeat performance, and we’re introduced to red, “a handsome and charming, if quick-tempered and immature, man” but also purple (purple?), “a kind and gentle, if naive and sheltered, woman.” But rather than a three-way conversation, this green-themed instalment is rather a solitary affair: you play as red, waking up in a dark, solitary room suspended in the air so that… well, see above.

The mechanics of choice are different this time too – you’re given an array of possible actions across the bottom of the screen. Given your predicament there isn’t a lot you’re able to accomplish besides try to look around as best you can, cry out for assistance, or start swinging… eventually you’ll overhear a discussion between the other characters that sheds some light on what’s going on and how you got here, and your attempts to escape bring the short story (this is another Neo Twiny entry, so it’s also 500 words) to another violent close – that’s directly in keeping with part one, at least.

While I found this part a bit slighter than the blue one – as I noted in that review, dialogue lets you do more with less; the need to describe action chews up a chunk of the word count – there’s still plenty of thematic weight to proceedings. Though speaking of spoilers, I should probably spoiler-block the rest…

(Spoiler - click to show)So turns out we, the callow and potentially overbearing husband of the ingenue purple, have been strung up and left to die by green, our mother-in-law. While the milieu has apparently changed somewhat between entries in the series – blue had a historical feel, while the language here is more modern and reference is made to a laptop – the opening page stresses that characters “retain their colors throughout all acts”, and I’m inclined to take it at its word. If this green is the same as the one who killed her husband to escape him, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she’s over-protective of her daughter given her own experience of marriage (though given that said daughter is purple, not teal, we perhaps are being prompted to assume that the family history here isn’t as simple as all that?) and level of comfort with murder. Making the parallels starker yet, as she kills red, green murmurs “she will heal… she always does,” suggesting that much as blue did away with more than half-a-dozen brides, she’s killed several of purple’s grooms by this point.

There’s probably more going on here than just “mothers-in-law, amirite?”, though. The other thing of note that green says is “I know your plans for my daughter… I won’t stand for them.” Given the framing of the series so far, the mind naturally goes to sex and/or death, but it’s interesting that in addition to secreting you away, green has also stashed all your possessions in this abattoir: “your books, your gramophone, your laptop – everything’s here.” Knowledge, art, and creativity are also being shut away and taken from purple, which perhaps is part of what keeping her innocent entails – and part of what prevents her from understanding the lies that green spins.

As I said in my review of the first game, though, these are all tentative thoughts; I’d be surprised if the major themes I’ve noticed so far don’t get carried over into the final act, but I also can’t say I have a clear sense of how the series will culminate. But suffice to say that I’m continuing to be intrigued, and am looking forward to seeing how, or whether, everything connects.

After a long stretch of the randomizer doing a shockingly good job of ensuring I play games in the proper order (beyond correctly sequencing the RGB trilogy, I’ve noticed that it also put A1RL0CK before its sequel, and ensured an adequate distance between the two porn games), it’s now thrown a curve-ball by having me play an Inform remake before its Twine original. I’ll be interested to assess comparisons once I hit Cycles in about eight more games, but I can’t imagine I’m missing out by playing How Dare You first, because this is a game that is unashamed about rejecting context, focusing on the dramatic action of a lover desperately trying to avoid a breakup without overly concerning itself with backstory or plot. Sure, you get the bare bones of the setup, but the opening text starts with “we have to talk” and only provides four or five short paragraphs of elaboration before opening up the interactivity.

Such a character-focused premise isn’t the most natural fit for a parser game, but the design cannily takes advantage of what players are likely to do. The scenery is densely-implemented, for example, and the descriptions provide a bit of nuance as to what’s going on. You’re having the breakup fight just outside your partner’s room, and here’s what X HOUSE gets you, for example:

"It’s smaller than the one you share with your parents; only Heron and eir mother live here. She’s out somewhere right now."

(Heron is your soon-to-be ex, and uses ey/em pronouns; I think this line is the clearest suggestion that both of you may be teenagers or young adults).

A lot of your and Heron’s body parts are also implemented, which gives some additional color to the scene and also helps clue potential actions. You see, while the concept might make you think that this is a dialogue-focused game, there are no conversation menus in sight; TALK TO HERON (ask/tell aren’t implemented) just gives you one brief exchange, while subsequent attempts just have you begging “please, Heron…” before drifting into silence. Since you can’t try to convince Heron to change eir mind with words, you’re just left with approaches, which of course is right in the parser wheelhouse. Many of the standard Inform verbs will lead to a customized response (my favorite was sitting on the floor, which sees Heron heave a sigh at your I’m-not-leaving-here-until-you-un-break-up-with-me dramatics), but there are a whole lot of additional possible actions available too, from taking eir hand to weeping. While you’re not limited to just one verb – though there are some that shunt the story to a conclusion – playing How Dare You reminded me a little bit of playing Aisle, since it has a similar dynamic of trying to suss out a large possibility space by testing prompted but not explicitly spelled-out verbs.

So playing this scene while dramatically de-emphasizing the talking is an interesting choice, and I’m curious whether things will be different in the game’s Twine incarnation. I liked the way it lent a heightened, almost theatrical air to proceedings, with one lover searching for the grand gesture that will win back the other. It makes for a novel portrayal of a familiar kind of scene, but at the same time it did mean that I wasn’t especially invested in the outcome since I didn’t get much sense of who either the protagonist or Heron were, or why (or whether) their relationship was worth fighting for. As a result the game didn’t land with much emotional impact for me, though I should add the caveat that beyond attempting one last kiss, I studiously avoided any actions that involved physical violence. I confirmed from reading the spoilery commands list you can read after completing the game that a number of these are implemented, and depending on how those play out I could see them having a significant impact on my sense of what the game is doing. But while domestic violence is an entirely valid thing for a game to take on, it’s not something I feel comfortable opting into if I have any other choice; perhaps that means that my view of How Dare You as an interesting and successful writing exercise is incomplete, but if so I suspect the probably-more-guided experience of playing Cycles may let me in on what I’ve missed.

I can’t decide whether Kiss of Beth works better the first time or on the replay. Oh, even from the get-go of this dialogue-based two-hander, you’ve got more than enough indication that what your interlocutor, Cordero, thinks is happening (nosy roommate grilling the new boyfriend before a date) isn’t what’s actually happening. But you’re not sure exactly what direction the game is going to go, so even as you’re feeling him out by asking leading questions about his family or job, you get the sense that this is building to an important choice, but the stakes for whether to send him on in to see the eponymous Beth after she finishes showering, or fake a family emergency, are deliciously unclear. On a replay, though, despite knowing exactly how the horror is going to play out, I found I was scrutinizing Cordero’s responses to try to get a level of certainty about that final decision that just isn’t possible to achieve – as well as paying even closer attention to what the protagonist’s questions were revealing about them.

The presentation here is effectively off-putting. The text splays over an aubergine background, with a slightly-pixelated photo of Cordero off to the side. Then as you get over the preliminary greetings and the not-so-subtle interrogation begins – you want to make sure you have a clearer sense of who he is before you make a final call – the photo snaps to black and white, before slowly filling in with color as you learn more. The dialogue is well-done too, naturalistically shifting from topic to topic with a sheen of awkwardness that’s entirely fitting for the circumstance. Most of the questions you can ask have at least a hint of passive-aggressiveness about them, but that also makes sense – for reasons that eventually become clear, the main character is looking for reasons to dislike Cordero, which makes for some entertaining friction between the seemingly-cordial dialogue and your inner monologue.

You don’t get a full biographical readout on him through your questioning, of course, but the game does do a good job of sketching out a sense of who he is, both in terms of class, background, and personality, with solid attention to detail (when he mentioned that he wanted to get an MSW, I was able to correctly guess that Columbia was his dream school since I know that they have one of the best social work programs). There are ways to get him open up a little more, or to push him to be more defensive, which makes the conversation still engaging the second time through (again, this is a game you’ll definitely want to replay), but you’ll never be completely satisfied that you’re getting the real Cordero, and not just a scrubbed-up version he’s trotting out to make a good impression.

The eventual reveal isn’t one that’s unguessable by any means, but the details are memorably horrific, and left me feeling queasy regardless of the choices I made – the final screen puckishly tells you “this game has two endings. You got a bad one” in text that doesn’t vary regardless of your decisions. And it effectively throws the spotlight from Cordero back to you; as I mentioned, the second time through the game, I found it interesting to consider whether the questions I was asking, and the asides I was making to myself, meant that I was a better fit for Beth than him.

The randomizer continues tracing its whimsical path through my to-play list, putting the two remaining Kenneth Pedersen games back to back. They make for quite a contrast, though, because while Museum Heist has some things in common with The Way Home – the ADRIFT format, terse but effective prose, bug-free implementation – this is no old-school treasure hunt; while you are an art thief looking to lift as much loot as possible from the eponymous institution, the game operates in the thoroughly modern optimization-game framework. Just as in Ryan Veeder’s Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, which is largely credited with kicking off the sub-genre, you need to search a small map stuffed with riches, solving individual puzzles to obtain each, while using trial-and-error over repeated runs to figure out the metapuzzle of how to get the richest possible haul before time runs out.

The theming is obviously a great fit with the gameplay – the time before the police arrive provides an obvious ticking clock, it makes total sense that a museum would be stuffed with more art and antiquities than one thief could reasonably make off with, and that some would be easy to simply smash and grab while others would be protected with more robust security measures or present logistical challenges to obtain. And while this isn’t the kind of game where you can linger over descriptions, the various galleries and objets d’art are effectively chosen to communicate the idea that you’re grabbing exciting, valuable stuff (look, I’m going to like any game where I get to lift Etruscan artifacts and something made of porphyry).

The game’s relatively compact scope also makes it more approachable than a sprawling example of the subgenre like Sugarlawn. The greater part of the museum is just a three by three grid, and unlike the slowly-flooding ship of CVP, you just have to worry about one timer. You’re also only required to solve maybe two and a half puzzles in order to liberate individual artworks; one of these, which requires some lateral thinking on how to get a massive Rosetta-Stone style inscription, takes some enjoyable outside the box thinking.

The flip side of this, though, is that I quickly found myself grappling with the optimization puzzle rather than trying to figure out its component parts, and the metapuzzle here is largely focused on inventory juggling. If you had infinite carrying capacity, the 40 turns you’re given would provide a comfortable margin for hoovering up everything on offer; the issue is that you can only carry so many items in your hands before you start automatically dropping things. You do have a backpack – and a tube for carrying rolled-up paintings – which makes life easier, but the order things go in matters, with higher-up objects needing to come out to get to the stuff you first stored away, and there are a few puzzles that require swapping things into and out of your carryall.

In the abstract it’s a reasonable enough set of constraints to layer onto the more traditional optimization-game challenges, but I suspect like most people, I don’t really enjoy faffing about with carrying limits, so I found I didn’t have much appetite to really push for the high score, all the more so because I was a bit demoralized when I thought I’d found an optimal solution, only to discover waiting out the time limit rather than manually triggering your escape means you drop everything you’re carrying, so I’d actually need to eke out two more turns somewhere. For all that, Museum Heist is still a solid introduction to this fun, contemporary IF subgenre, providing a manageable sample of why it can be so enjoyable; beyond that, seeing it paired with a more throwback game definitely demonstrates the author’s versatility.

I didn’t find the context for The Way Home quite as dubious as that for Quest for the Serpent’s Eye, but I have to admit I also went into this one with my shoulders preemptively squared up: what we’ve got here is an ADRIFT adapting just the second half of a game the author had previously written for the C64. Perhaps I’m an inveterate stereotyper, but regardless I was expecting unwinnable states, low-context puzzles, minimal implementation, and objects requiring pixel-perfect searching to find.

There’s definitely some of that stuff here. The backstory is conveyed with minimal texture – you’re a Conan-style barbarian who’s just recovered a massive gemstone on behalf of some queen, for some reasons, that aren’t especially fleshed out. Leaving the forest where you found it, and facing the return trek across a trackless desert, you decide to stop off in a glacial valley to up your stocks of water (…can I venture a guess that the author isn’t a geologist?) And the first puzzle very much suffers from some fiddliness of implementation: you get captured by ice trolls in the prologue (I am not at all clear why they left me alive, but one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth I suppose) and need to do the classic cut-the-ropes-with-a-sharp-stone bit, but I found it very hard to tell whether the stone was too far away from me to get, or just hadn’t come up with the right phrasing, and even once I figured out the necessary intermediate step, there were still some misleading responses that delayed the solution yet further (Spoiler - click to show)(in particular, the game strongly prompts you to WEAR BLANKET, but if you try to THROW BLANKET AT STONE while you’re wearing it, you get an unhelpful generic error message, rather than being told that you need to manually remove it from your shoulders first).

Thankfully, things started to look up from there. The map of the valley is small and tersely-described, but it’s got an interesting mix of places to visit, and the subsequent puzzles are generally well-clued and offer some nice shortcuts – there’s one location that holds a bunch of different building materials, and I was a little worried about all the hoops I’d need to jump through to assemble the object I knew I needed, but fortunately MAKE worked a treat. There’s even a cool bit of global interactivity that winds up changing the descriptions and behavior of most of the map, which is implemented way more robustly than it needed to be since it only really impacts one puzzle. There is a slightly-unfair puzzle that forced me to restart – at one point you get an object that unlocks two new areas, and if you go first to the area that’s closest and which you have an in-game reason to be interested in, rather than going to the other side of the map to explore just for the sake of it, you’ll lock yourself into a dead-person-walking scenario – but this isn’t the kind of game where replays take very long once you know what you’re doing, and honestly I was expecting to hit something like that sooner.

And then after solving that area, you’re whisked away to a separate vignette in an entirely new area! This once again suffered from a lack of connective tissue – the problem you need to solve there does directly grow out of what you do in the first part, but it still feels like it comes out of nowhere. But this area has a lot of other characters, who have a reasonably broad set of conversation topics, and the puzzles shift from the predominantly medium-dry-goods affairs of the ice valley to ones having to do with helping, interrogating, investigating, or otherwise interacting with people, which I found more engaging. In fact I’d say I really enjoyed this second half; there’s still not much in the way of scenery or anything to do except solve the next puzzle in the chain, but the difficulty is pitched just right and it’s a perfectly serviceable bit of fantasy adventuring.

Sadly, the low-context thing returns in force: once you get to the end of the puzzle chain you’re basically handed an “I win” button to resolve the overall problem (Spoiler - click to show)(in the game’s defense, “here’s an apple, eat it and you’ll automatically beat the dragon” is not a plot twist I’ve seen before), and characteristically the game’s ending text is beyond anticlimactic, consisting of a single sentence saying you brought back the gem and the queen rewarded you. All of which is to say that The Way Home never transcends its origins, but it winds up a reasonably welcoming example of its form just the same.

Friends, I am acutely aware that I just wrote a 900 word review about a 500 word game (He Knows That You Know and Now There's No Stopping Him); with another Neo-Twiny Jam entry up next (and one that actually uses only half of the already-scant budget) I’ve got a chance to do better.

Collision is a practical joke of a game that proceeds largely in deadpan two-word couplets: you get a spray of three or four super-short phrases each “turn” (“stuck neck”, “roaring engine”, “no voice”), and an expanding number of similarly-terse choices to move things ahead (“look around”, “move hands”, “scream”). This hyper-compressed writing style obfuscates the setup slightly, but only slightly – even if you haven’t paid attention to the cover art, an early bit of narration’s declaration that you have “no pants” and “yellow and black dots on arms” mostly gives the game away.

So it’s clear something terrible is going to happen – though your choices allow you to waste time confirming the obvious – and it’s also clear that you’ll ultimately be powerless to avert it. The comedy of the game arises from the absurdity of making the effort nonetheless, and the bathos of panicking at the realization that there are others stuck in the same predicament as you. It’s a solid gag, and the blinking “failure” you see at the end of each run is a canny lure to get you to try again, at which point the futility of your efforts gets even funnier. Collision is nothing but a one-note gag – it won’t make you look at the world differently, or expand your understanding of what IF can accomplish – but it’s a gag that works, and one I haven’t seen before.

(Under 300 words, that’s gotta be a record for me!)

The randomizer must know that I’ve been saying nice things about it, because I just realized that it’s managed another cool trick: it put the three entries in Charm Cochran’s “RGB Trilogy” relatively close together in my to-play list, and in the proper order to boot! I contemplated waiting to review them all at once, since from context, they seem to be designed to be played that way – they were all entered together in the Neo-Twiny Jam (meaning they’re also short, given the 500 word limit for that event), and there are links to the other Acts within each game. But I ultimately decided it might be more interesting to review them piecemeal, to better track how the themes and structure emerge with each installment (so no, this has nothing to do with padding my review count on IFDB and for the sponsorships, perish the thought).

The last review will probably be a bit weightier than the first two, I suspect, since I’ll hold off on digging into what I think the trilogy is doing until I see everything it has to offer, but fortunately, even just in this first Act there’s a fair bit to talk about. From the color-coding of the game’s itch.io page, it’s clear that this is the “blue” entry, with later entries taking the “green” and “red” slots; further reinforcing the color motif, the dramatis personae page that opens the game identifies the two characters not by name, but by description – the game is constructed as a dialogue (which is an efficient way to use the scant words the jam rules allow) between “a rich and imposing, if ugly and impulsive, man” (whose words are all in blue) and “a quick-thinking and witty, if selfish and manipulative, woman” (whose words are all in green). The psychological priming here isn’t especially subtle, and the first line of the game proper – a stage direction noting that the blue man is “brandishing a bloody key” – pretty well confirms what story we’re in: this is Bluebeard, that most Freudian of folktales.

Except, well, that’s not exactly right. The language is off, for one thing: the game is written in a Shakespearean English that feels a bit archaic for a story that was famously collected by Perrault. This is a dangerous choice, since there’s a risk of ending up sounding like a bad 80s RPG, all thee-ing and thou-ing, but I found the style here worked – the grammar and syntax are credibly done, while the vocabulary is kept relatively modern for ease of reading. It winds up giving a hint of old-fashionedness without slowing down the dialogue too much.

That’s important because – understandably given the space constraints – the game is concerned just with the climax of the tale: blue has caught green (his wife) in the act of defying him, and bad news, the player is responsible for what green says as she attempts to escape punishment. The back and forth her is really punchy; each line of dialogue is fairly short, and the back-and-forth volley between the partners in this two-hander feels rapid, and intense, as a result. Your possible responses tend to include calling blue out for his crimes, pleading for forgiveness, and playing for time, but not in a mechanical way – sometimes you only have two options, and the confrontation does escalate fluidly, so I think it would be hard to stick to just one approach without intentionally disengaging from the story; I did find my approach varied satisfyingly in replays, but the game did a good job of shaping an arc from my choices regardless of what I did, sometimes starting out defiant and then growing chastened, other times desperate for mercy and then trying just to delay the inevitable once it became clear that wasn’t working.

There’s one other interesting aspect of the game’s storytelling that’s worth discussing under spoiler tags: (Spoiler - click to show)the main way the game departs from the story it’s riffing on is the ending – because blue does not kill green the way he’s killed all his previous wives, instead she ganks him with the dagger she’s had concealed behind her back this whole time. For all that the presence of the weapon is flagged from the very beginning, it’s still an effective twist, not least because the player’s given no direct hint that all of green’s conversational gambits are just setup for a stabbing. Indeed, one of the options you’re given late in the game is simply to “acquiesce” to your own imminent murder, but even that is a feint and leads to blue’s bloody end just the same. I really enjoyed this move; it’s an effective way of demonstrating exactly how manipulative green can be, and exploits the tensions within IF’s triangle of identities (player, narrator, protagonist) to good ends.

There’s more to say about the game, or at least more to speculate on – I’m curious what direction the Hamlet quote that closes things off is meant to be pointing to, and when we’ll be introduced to the “red” character who must surely come onstage at some point to complete the design. But I’ll hold all that in reserve until I get further into the trilogy; for now, I’ll just note that I’m wrapping up Act One very interested in seeing more.

The randomizer always enjoys its little jokes, its latest being to sequence a somber choice-based retelling of a Greek myth right after a parser romp riffing on one. For all that the games are quite different, the particular stories at issue aren’t too dissimilar: while Lysidice and the Minotaur centered on a young woman dedicated as a sacrifice to a monster, only to be rescued by a demigod, Andromeda Chained centers on the eponymous princess who’s dedicated as a sacrifice to a monster, only to be rescued by a demigod. Both even subvert the stories in analogous ways, with the former swapping the roles of monster and rescuer, whereas the latter makes the rescuer a dunderheaded representative of the patriarchy. They have their differences, though – Lysidice is a romp that ends on an optimistic note, whereas Andromeda Chained is a somber reflection on fate that may end differently in multiple replays, but never ends happily.

It’s also a focused game: it starts on the rocks by the sea where your father is about to chain you – for those unfamiliar with the backstory, your mother boasted of your beauty in a way that offended Poseidon, so he sent a sea monster to ravage your home and the Oracle has said that it’ll only go away if you’re offered up as a snack – and proceeds through a few beats of isolation and fear before Perseus shows up to destroy the serpent, and off-handedly mention that he’s decided to marry you once he completes the rescue. This is still plenty of time to engage with the situation, though, and the available choices do a good job of articulating various stances towards what’s happening without changing the fundamental direction of the myth, which would undermine the theme of inevitability that permeates the work. Here are the options you’re given after you’ve been chained, but before you have any hope of rescue:

"-Look for a means of escape.
-Await your fate.
-Wonder why you have to be naked.
-Think about how glad you are to be helping your kingdom.
-Think about your father."

This division – some options indicating resistance, others indicating acquiescence, and one emphasizing the more ridiculous or credulity-straining aspects of the myth – runs through most of the game’s choice points, and helps unify the emphasis on fate with the emphasis on patriarchy: after all, it’s a god whose curse has doomed you, your father who personally chains you up, and Perseus who decides that he can do whatever he wants with you since you would have died without him. As a result, your attitude towards inevitability maps to your attitude towards these domineering men.

The language throughout is effective; there’s a note of archness or wryness running through even the non-snarky options, and it’s couched in archaic-sounding syntax that doesn’t draw attention to itself. It doesn’t strike me as a distinctively Ancient Greek voice, but it’s solid enough for what it needs to do, and most of the key moments land, like this reflection on how blameworthy you find your father:

"Is your father a good king? Does he truly love you, to do something like this? These questions glide in and out of your mind like gulls on the water, but you’re not sure their answers are relevant. You decide that at the very least he is competent. After all, a single life for the safety of his entire kingdom? It makes a certain kind of sense, and you’re sure he did a lot of beard-stroking to figure that out himself. Yes, it’s your life, and no, you don’t particularly want to die. Still, it’s only a single life."

The only real criticism I’d levy at Andromeda Chained is that it never surprised me: from its framing, it looks like a feminist take on the Andromeda myth, and if you’re familiar with the rudiments of feminist deconstruction and the major beats of the legend, there’s a lot that you’ll see coming. Part of me wishes the game had leaned harder into idiosyncrasy in some way – by making the characters more naturalistic and less archetypal, say, or risking a stranger prose style, or confusing the themes a little so they feel less stark. But that’s just a judgment based on aesthetic preferences; making any of those changes would shift the flavor of the game without impacting its already-high quality, and there’s certainly always room for more engaging, clear-eyed pieces like this.

There are, I am sure, many IF reviewers who can cooly and dispassionately evaluate the merits of lighthearted parser romps set in Ancient Greece – but I, sadly, am not one of them. Lysidice and the Minotaur has a lot of points of difference from my first game (it’s riffing on the mythological rather than historical eras, for one thing, and it’s not written in a trying-too-hard Wodehouse-aping style), but still, this kind of thing is very much my jam – and actually, now that I think about it, my objectivity could probably be called into question for another reason, which is that I actually helped a tiny bit with this game because when a couple months ago Manon mentioned wanting to know what kinds of foods they ate in Ancient Greece, I passed along the food-y (and pottery-y – there are a lot of funny-sounding jugs) bits I’d written up as potential inspiration. All of which is to say that this is the kind of thing that I like, so it’s maybe not much surprise that I like it.

Still, I think there are defensible reasons for that! This Adventuron entry into the most recent Text Adventure Literacy Jam does a nice job running players through the basics of parser gameplay. There’s a maze (duh), albeit a rather simple one, but also a lot of object manipulation puzzles, a couple fetch-quests running between different characters, a riddle… The solid gameplay is paired with nice quality-of-life features, too; beyond the de rigueur tutorial, exits and usable objects are highlighted in each room’s header, and while the critical path to finish the game is easy enough to figure out, there are a number of satisfying optional puzzles that make the ending more satisfying and give more experienced players something to do.

The plot is similarly solid. You play as the eponymous maiden, who was brought to the Labyrinth as one of the Athenian sacrifices paid as tribute to Minos, but who’s befriended the minotaur who now serves as your protector. After the latest would-be hero grievously wounds your bovine pal, you decide it’s time for the two of you to bust out and make your own way in the world. It’s an appealing premise, and the puzzles do a good job of involving the minotaur so that it feels like he’s pulling his own weight, and the two of you are working together (you providing more of the brains, he more of the brawn, of course), which strengthens the central relationship of the game. I also enjoyed how deeply the game engaged with the myths; this is still a game aiming more for fun than verisimilitude, but it does draw in some more esoteric bits of the stories, and puts its own spin on traditional elements like the Daedalus/Icarus relationship. It’s well done, and I think would appeal even to players without a predisposition to this particular body of legends.

So the bones here are good ones, but unfortunately the flesh is not without its blemishes. The game doesn’t have quite as much polish as I generally like to see, and I think the standard for a game intended for IF newbies is generally set higher than that. While I didn’t run into any game-breaking bugs, there were definitely some instances of confusing behavior, like GIVE WAX TO MINOTAUR leading to me giving wax to Daedalus, and this disorienting output when I tried to TAKE SACK

"I don’t need to carry that old thing around.

"You can’t take it.

"You pick up the a sack of grains."

(I didn’t actually pick up the sack, at the end of all that).

The prose is also a little rough in patches, especially around more idiomatic English. Here’s a bit on your history with the minotaur, which includes a few of the relatively-common infelicities I noticed:

"The Minotaur would often come back from his strolls in the treacherous maze with drinks and food, usually in too large quantity. You never missed for a thing."

It’s nothing that sinks the game – actually the writing is breezy and engaging, for the most part – but again, for a game that’s intended to provide an on-ramp to people unfamiliar with IF, it’d be nice if things were a bit smoother.

As always, though, these are cavils. Lysidice and the Minotaur is a straightforward but effective introduction to traditional parser IF, with an appealing cast and good pacing (I haven’t mentioned that different sections of the maze are unlocked successively as you solve puzzles – it’s a good mechanic to keep the possibilities manageable, and ensure exploration is never overwhelming). It could use a little more time in the oven, but even in its current state, and even for experienced players or those who don’t find its premise immediately entertaining, it’s very much worth a play.