Reviews by Mike Russo

When I was in law school, one of my favorite classes was a law and philosophy course that went into some of the dominant schools of thought about what law is and how it should be understood: I don’t mean bunkum like “originalism”, but actual philosophies like legal realism (law doesn’t exist as an abstract set of rules but rather is an expression of social interests and public policy) or legal positivism (law doesn’t gain its validity by expressing moral truths, but simply because it has the weight of the sovereign behind it). Our professor, being something of a Marxist, also had us read some Thorstein Veblen. As someone whose undergraduate major was astrophysics and had gotten through a smattering of Sartre and Foucault and not much else, this was fun stuff – but one day, as I was gushing excitedly to one of my fellow students about how much I was getting out of the class, they stifled a yawn: they were a poli-sci/English double major and been doing theory stuff like this since sophomore year, so most of what we were going over was old hat.

This is my attempt to be charitable and acknowledge that no audience is a monolith, players come from a broad variety of experiences and perspectives, and ideas that come off as stale to one person can easily be a breath of fresh air to another. So when I say that it feels like Let Me Play! is aimed at someone who was super impressed by the twist in Bioshock, and then fell into a coma for almost 20 years, I’m aware that’s an unfair judgment: I’m sure there are some players somewhere who’ll find its dramatization of the paradoxes of player agency to have some heft. But even they, I’d wager, would find its glacial pacing intensely frustrating: say what you will about Uninteractive Fiction 2, at least it respects its players’ time.

LMP is presented as a sort of visual novel: there are attractive pixel graphics dramatizing the story, which is draped in theatrical trappings. Act I, Scene I sees a man and a woman collide on their way into an elevator; as it turns out, this isn’t so much a meet-cute as a meet-awkward, as the woman is on her way up to her office to be fired from a job the man is applying for. Inevitably, the elevator breaks, stranding them, allowing them space to express their feelings, reveal some low-key secrets, and bond over their shared desire to escape the corporate grind and be actors.

When laid out in summary form, that sounds like a reasonable enough topic for a game, but sadly, that’s not what Let Me Play! is about. You see, while the scene occasionally stops to present you with a trio of dialogue options for both the man and the woman, your input is never registered – the hand cursor glides between the choices before finally setting on a pre-ordained outcome that allows the scene to continue. Yes, the ability of players to influence the narrative is what LMP is actually concerned with, in a story that gets increasingly heavy-handed as it goes – and gets increasingly snail-like, too. It doesn’t take long before almost every interaction requires a choice, and that whole hand-gliding-around rigmarole takes five or six seconds each time, and the text slowly prints to the screen character by character – but doesn’t pause when it finishes a line, meaning that the poor player is constantly caught on the horns of a dilemma: do you just sit there waiting for the text to update, feeling the minutes of your life slip away like sand through the hourglass, or do you alt-tab away or mess around with your phone and miss what’s actually being said?

This conflict is way more exciting than anything that actually happens in LMP. Every once in a while a special icon pops up, and if you click on that, you can eventually get into some more fourth-wall breaking scenes where the director gets involved in arguing with you about whether this is a play or a game, and every once in a while you’re actually given the opportunity to make some choices. But it’s all pretty bone-dry, going to exactly the places you’d imagine, without any characters or theme or anything specific to establish stakes or a reason to care about these arid pronouncements about what players can, or should, alter in an interactive narrative. It seems aimed at a video-game culture centered on player entitlement, which circa 2012 amid the Mass Effect 3 ending-rewriting controversy and the first stirrings of Gamergate might have felt somewhat on point; entered into an IF contest in 2025, it feels like Rip Van Winkle. And again, the delivery mechanism is more drawn-out than you can imagine – god help me, I went through the game without clicking on the icon to see what happens if you just let things play out, and it’s both uninspiring and excruciating. Of course I’m sure this is part of how the game is dramatizing the unpleasantness of being denied agency, but there are other ways to make withholding more engaging (come back Violent Delight, all is forgiven!) I don’t mind seeing an old argument re-presented, and for a player who hasn’t considered any of these ideas before it could be a gateway into a rich vein of theory and criticism, but I felt like LMP didn’t have much to say to me, and was in no hurry at all to say it.

If you were to make a checklist of mistakes first-time parser authors often make, Clickbait would run afoul of a bunch of them. The first puzzle announces its solution in an annoying every-turn rule that spams you with the exact same text every time you do anything, even taking inventory; dialogue uses the ASK X ABOUT Y syntax, with the available topics explicitly listed, but if you mistype or shorten them slightly (e.g. asking about “picture” rather than “his picture”) the command won’t be accepted; there’s a lot of unimplemented scenery, and device-fiddling puzzles made frustrating by the fact that you can’t just type TURN ON BLUE to push the blue button, because you’ll get asked to disambiguate between the button and a blue keycard you’re carrying (plus that won’t work because despite the button’s description noting whether it’s switched on or switched off, TURN ON/OFF actually don’t work and you need to PUSH the button instead); and a couple of puzzles even employ the dreaded USE X ON Y syntax.

But! The good news is that definitionally, an author can only be a first-timer once – and most of these irritants are pretty easy to fix for subsequent games. And the better news about Clickbait, specifically, is that it’s got a lot of high points that make me look forward to playing a second and third and fourth game by the author. The conceit here is fun: an urban-exploration photography contest prompts you to check out a long-sealed-off subway station, and when the door accidentally locks behind you, you need to find your way out while still making time for some winning snaps along the way. Most of what you get up to is relatively standard stuff – again, there are keycards, plus a rope, a lost toy you need to retrieve for a little girl – but the generally modest difficulty and pleasant, pacey writing keeps things zippy. Similarly, the characters are out of central casting but are nonetheless appealing: there’s a cop too lazy to be any help, a seemingly-incoherent derelict who gives you a vital clue, the aforementioned moppet who’s lost her bunny.

Alongside the sometimes-zany puzzles, the station is actually sketched out in a reasonably grounded way, with realistic detritus, graffiti, and other points of interest that make it feel like more than just an artificial funhouse to poke around in. And while the game isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, more than a few moments raised a smile, none more so than the reason the station was abandoned in the first place (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m not talking about the “it was all an experiment thing”, I can take or leave that twist, but the metal-can-of-tuna-in-the-microwave gag alternately makes me giggle and blanch).

Clickbait also gets more ambitious than the typical parser debut by having a robustly-implemented camera. You only have a limited number of shots, and you can photograph just about anything you choose; there are a few places where you’re prompted to take a picture to reveal a clue that for whatever reason isn’t visible to the naked eye, but for the most part, you can let the spirit guide you. I had a taste for portraits and urban-decay pictures of graffiti, but it feels like there’s a reasonable amount of room for player expression (now I’m wondering about doing a series on the color-coded doors). While your choice of candids can’t lead you to fail the game, the ending does evaluate your pics, spitting out a customized blurb for each and scoring you based on how well you realized the contest’s theme. It’s a fun way of giving the player more agency while navigating the often-linear process of solving text adventure puzzles, so I’m all for the experiment.

So given the promise on display, it would be churlish to harp on some of the rough edges in Clickbait’s implementation – I’m attaching my transcript since I do think it’s worth figuring out how to smooth them out for next time, but I very much hope there’ll be a next time.

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. A couple of years ago, I reviewed the author’s debut game, One King to Loot Them All, and at the close of a positive writeup I noted in passing that I prefer prose in the sword-and-sorcery genre to be “a little zestier” than what was on offer. So I can’t help but feel that one bit of Moon Logic – a purposefully-painful game originally destined for the Really Bad IF Jam before it broke scope and containment – is singling out me in particular. You see, this is a Zork pastiche one of whose main features is that alongside the main game window, there’s a frame where two voices on the player’s shoulder (Roger and Wilco, natch) comment on the action, crack dumb jokes, and gurn and grin in the most distracting manner as they refuse. to. shut. up. Come back, One King, all is forgiven!

In fairness, while the commentary is often (intentionally) painful, it’s also incredibly helpful, typically spelling out the next steps you need to take. This is perhaps a bit intrusive, but I found it a godsend given the game’s other gimmick: in a parody of intrusive “AI” assistance functions, this by-the-numbers Zork parody doesn’t use a parser interface, but rather a one-click choice-based one where you select the action, and the game infers the appropriate noun based on that. Of course “appropriate” is a lie, as the rules undergirding all this guarantee that the obviously useful action will only happen at the end (if at all). You can’t easily go a particular direction – opening and closing doors will determine where you wind up when you blindly stab the “go” button. Similarly, if you need to drop an item to progress, it’s going to be the last thing to go after you start pounding “drop” (and then you’ll have to press “take” a bunch of times again to retrieve all your junk). Oh, and you don’t get access to all the actions at once; using a verb will usually remove it from the screen, so you need to add some pointless actions in the middle to get it back.

As a result, knowing what you’re supposed to be doing makes sense – the challenge is actually the how. This does mean that you can largely blow past the moon-logic (drink!) that governs many of the puzzles – it doesn’t really matter why eating guano gives you super strength, you’re just told that it does, so good luck wrestling with the sack to try to get it out of its hiding place. And the game does a good job of mixing things up; just as I was feeling like I’d gotten the hang of the interface, some new annoying challenge would be thrown my way, usually with a clever gag (and groaningly-painful commentary from Roger and Wilco) accompanying it. These are all pretty much drawn from Zork, but with fun twists – I especially enjoyed how the joke around taking the giant pile of leaves, as well as how it’s redeployed given its role in many players’ approach to the maze of twisty little passages, all alike (though of course implementing the solution was laborious in the extreme).

Make no mistake, the humor here is very broad – here’s a representative sample:

[Wilco] Yes! We’ve got ourselves a lunch and a… wait, what happened to the clove of garlic?
[Roger] Maybe the vampire bat overcame its aversion to garlic and ate it?
[Wilco] Leaving a bat dropping in return. You may have a point there.

But it wouldn’t fit the brief of making Bad IF to have actually good jokes (albeit in fairness the giant pile of treasure you loot at the end did legitimately make me giggle a few times). Similarly, complaining that the interface is terrible would miss the point: yeah, it’s frustrating, but working out the rules governing its behavior isn’t too complex, and is reasonably satisfying. I can’t exactly recommend Moon Logic, unless you liked when a big kid would make you play the “stop hitting yourself” game on the playground. But if you’re in the mood for such a thing, you could do a lot worse. Just please, no need for zestiness next time.

I went to Italy for my honeymoon, and when my wife and I were reviewing our photos after the trip, we realized that other than posed pictures where I was smiling into the camera on command, I only ever had two expressions in the candid ones: either I’d be looking down at the guidebook (shoutout to the Blue Guides, whose writeups boast incredibly detailed art-historical analyses, religious and cultural context, and the kind of passive-aggressive condescension that means you understand that if they call something “popular”, it’s meant as a withering insult), or I’d be squinting up at an inscription in Latin and trying to puzzle out its meaning based only on my increasingly-vague memory of two years of middle-school classes in the language and whatever I managed to pick up by osmosis from studying law.

So when I tell you that The Reliquary of Epiphanius is a parser game where you squint at Latin inscriptions and try to puzzle them out, and where you’re also subjected to overly-detailed lectures about which saints and which local patrons are depicted in a series of friezes, what I am saying is that I was in heaven. Oh, there’s other fun stuff about this mystery – most notably, it’s implemented in Vorple and has a really cool map of the Italian village where your dad has gone missing while searching for a lost ecclesiastical treasure. And it’s got a couple of rough spots which meant I had to start over after getting into an unwinnable state right at the end of the game. But the authentic, detail-oriented way the core premise is realized is just so entirely my jam that none of the bells and whistles or occasional implementation stumble really mattered to how much I enjoyed it.

When I say it’s detail-oriented, I don’t meant that it’s plodding; Reliquary is actually pretty zippy, with puzzles that generally aren’t too challenging and not much time spent between important plot points. And it’s not that there’s overdetailed rococo scenery or anything; it’s just that the relatively-standard parser structure is fleshed out with just the right level of research and verisimilitude. This is the kind of game where if you examine the random photos in city hall, you’ll learn about how the local dam was constructed, down to the year when it was completed, and where a big payoff is learning that you might have discovered Italy’s first depiction of Mary’s Assumption. Like, I’m a pretty big nerd about this kind of stuff, but I had no idea that the Saracens launched raids on Italy’s Adriatic coast in the 11th century until I learned about it in the game. And yeah, as you’re exploring the various churches and historical sites that make up the game’s setting, you come across a bunch of Latin, none of which is automatically translated so far as I recall. Obviously in this day and age a quick google is all you need to figure things out (and the game was originally released in Italian, where the assumption that the audience would be able to get the drift without too much trouble is probably on firmer ground) – plus these are usually just adding a bit of context or at most a helpful but superfluous clue – but still, I respect a game that rewards a player who knows stuff or makes an effort to learn, rather than just having the player character do all the work.

Speaking of the fact that this is a game translated into English, I felt like this added a unique quality to the prose, too. As you explore the first few locations in the village, you’re told that the “pellitory of the wall grows spontaneously in the cracks between the stones,” which is a syntax that feels unfamiliar to English, and also matter-of-factly drops the technical name of a weed that would typically just be called a weed. True, there are places where the translation feels overly polished into blandness – we’re told of a barmaid that “her lifeless eyes and weary expression give her an air of boredom and age her beyond her years,” which is prose only an LLM could love – but for the most part the writing is a highlight.

The puzzles are pretty good too – there isn’t anything notably challenging, but they’re satisfying to solve, and reward you for paying attention to all the things you learn. They also feel organic: it’s reasonable to need to get oriented to the landscape before you can start wandering around looking for the ruins of a church, for example. There are one or two that may not hold if up if you think too hard about the plausibility of various millennium-old mechanisms still functioning in contemporary times, but that’s part of the suspension of disbelief the genre requires. As for the various NPCs, they aren’t especially helpful or deeply implemented, but there’s sufficient narrative justification for this so I didn’t mind.

Reliquary does have some old-school elements: most notably, its tracking of time and insistence that one move equals one minute, combined with the battery-powered (though at least rechargeable) flashlight, got me in trouble in my first playthrough, since my light source ran out just as a got to a hidden location that I couldn’t leave until I solved a puzzle that I couldn’t see well enough to even begin to address. But I was having so much fun I didn’t mind retracing my steps. Similarly, I ran into a couple of small syntax issues, one of which sent me to the hints before realizing I had the puzzle solved (in a particular place, UNLOCK DOOR tells you that you can’t see any such thing, which is odd because UNLOCK MARBLE DOOR allows you to proceed).

But as I said above, I can’t bring myself to care about any of that – I can’t think of many other games that satisfy the fantasy of uncovering lost secrets by knowing a lot about religious art and Latin as Reliquary does. The fact that when you reach the ending, it actually has something to say about Italian society’s relationship to its past is just gilding the lily; for a particular kind of traveler, this game is about as good as virtual tourism gets.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Take Achilles, for example: pride of the Achaeans, the premier warrior of a heroic age, one whose divine blood destined him for glory, and a glorious death – and, if you read the Iliad at age 11 with only a weak understanding of the cultural context, a giant douche who gets his best friend killed because he’s sulking about not getting to assault the sex-slave he’s got his eye on.

It’s this Achilles about which the plot of Penthesileia revolves: although the setting is a modern neo-fascist state reminiscent of the Handmaid’s Tale, he remains much the same, an egotistical tyrant anxious of his status and with a taste for nonconsensually dominating his paramours. That paramour, however, is not the Iliad’s Briseis, but instead the eponymous Amazon, who comes from a now-lost sequel to the canonical epic (it’s not just the MCU that doesn’t know how to let a good ending alone), where she’s slain by Achilles as the interminable siege of Troy wears on. Unlike her mythological counterpart, though, the game’s Penthesilieia – the viewpoint character – is brought back to life after being killed in a raid on the resistance, resurrected to perform a robotic mimicry of wifehood. Some of the most effective parts of the game allow you to either accede to, or resist, the pageant of matrimony Achilles has constructed: you’re meant to start each day by waking him and asking “has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?”, then busy yourself in pointless housework – you rearrange the furniture twice in one day – before greeting him again and performing gratitude as he brings you a gift as he returns from his important work serving the Prefect (the gifts are all, of course, slinky dresses). The prose is simple and concrete and fillets Achilles’ pretensions without pity, appropriate for a story centering on the brutalism of tyranny:

"Achilles fills the twenty-minute car ride with the sound of his own voice. Electronic billboards flash past. They leave stars in your eyes, the vague impression of children laughing and women dancing."

Penny (as he calls you) is an appealing figure, but she’s a bit of a cipher, suffering from the double-whammy of being an IF protagonist whose actions are dictated by the player, and an amnesiac who only slowly understands the nature of her existence. The choices are engaging, but your resistance is guaranteed: what’s up to you is the extent to which you play along publicly while pursuing your own agenda sub rosa, versus making your dawning revolutionary consciousness visible to Achilles (I mostly kept quiet: this is praxis). While the general shape of what’s happened is clear from the get-go, the game hits its thriller beats effectively, marrying Bluebeard-style domestic horror to righteous fight-the-dystopia sci-fi. And Achilles is a compelling figure throughout, dangerous but also petty and pathetic in his obsession with small slights, the way he takes his anxieties out on you because he thinks you can’t fight back – given the times we’re living in, I especially appreciated this portrayal of a fascist whose position certainly allows them to inflict harm, but who is obviously a craven and contemptible piece of shit.

That modern resonance, though, is what makes the ending I got unsatisfying: (Spoiler - click to show)After walking a high-tension tightrope, I was able to uncover some of Achilles’ secrets and broadcast them to the nation, triggering the downfall of the regime. But these secrets were just the quotidian brutality in which authoritarian regimes marinate their subjects – the fact that the tyrant’s flunkies gun down innocents in their efforts to suppress dissidents surely isn’t any sort of surprise to people. True, sometimes one incident among many others can be the trigger for mass uprising when the conditions are right (witness George Floyd or the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran), but the way that Penny’s single act of rebellion catalyzes such large scale consequences smacks of wish fulfillment. Would that it weren’t so, but sitting here eight months into the Trump presidency, I don’t buy that the reason we have fascism is that people just don’t know what’s being done in their name.

With all that said, it’s hard to complain too much about a game with such an effectively withering portrayal of the sad, flaccid excuse for masculinity that powers the backlash against equity. If the ending feels too pat right now, God willing in a few years we’ll be able to look back on it and say yes, that’s exactly how it was, that’s all it took to overthrow these people who pretended they were invincible warriors, whose heels were the biggest targets you could hope for.

One likes to think of oneself as an independent thinker whose opinions are all entirely rational and timeless, standing athwart the tides of history unmoved by their eddies and undertows. But alas, even (especially?) those who proclaim that their views are unbiased and objective are downstream of crass, material considerations like marketing. Thus, as someone who was born in 1980 and experienced a certain series of promotional pushes during my formative years, I can tell you that to me if adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones. The fantasy of delving into lost tombs, solving puzzles steeped in archaeology and mythology, and punching-out Nazis is fantastically compelling to me. The one fly in the ointment, of course, is that one line, three movies deep, about how all these artifacts belong in a (Western) museum doesn’t do much to lampshade the awkward tradition of colonialism and antiquities-looting into which said fantasy fits.

Pharaoh’s Heir manages to neatly avoid the trap, however. This short choice-based romp has you solving a bunch of Egypt-themed puzzles and raiding secret chambers, but you’re not actually marauding through Giza with capacious pockets and a dodgy export license: instead, you’re uncovering the secrets of Louis XIV and plundering your way through Versailles, on the theory that he was somehow involved with a legacy of Pharaonic mysticism. This is historically risible, missing the actual French Egyptological craze by a century or so, but it sure does defang the plundering-the-East issue, since you wind up raiding the tomb of someone who raided the tombs of the actual Egyptians.

The fact that you’re playing the female “sidekick” also helps avoid the problematic patriarchal politics of the genre (let’s not dwell on how old Marian was meant to be when Indy had his first fling with her) – you play as Layla, assistant to so-called “intrepid archaeologist” Herbert Tapioca, but his brains are of a piece with his surname. Oh, he’s pleasant enough, and can even be helpful in his bumbling way, but you’re the one actually responsible for unveiling the various secrets on offer.

The other novel element of Pharaoh’s Heir is its nonlinear nature. The story is told in flashback, as a police official questions you about your role in destroying some national treasure or other; in your replies to him, you can jump back to a morning consultation with Herbert, a later visit to Versailles, or the climactic moment when you breach the hidden sanctum, and recount your explorations to your interrogator. These start out fairly straightforwardly, with only a couple of choices each, but they intersect in a nonlinear fashion: there are clues in Versailles that help you make sense of what to try in the morning, for example. None of the puzzles are that complex – there’s a lot of pointing mirrors and putting things in holes in the right order – but the fact that you’re unbound by chronology helps lend an extra air of intrigue to proceedings.

As for those puzzles, they’re fun enough to solve, though I admit that I still don’t really understand how the last one is meant to work, despite having found all the clues and looked at the walkthrough that lays out the answer; you need to correlate two separate lists of objects, but I can’t quite figure out the logic for the order in which you’re meant to do so. That final puzzle is also sufficiently involved that trying to solve it in a choice-based interface, where it takes a dozen or so clicks each time you want to make an attempt, wound up a bit frustrating (thus the recourse to the walkthrough). But up until that point I was having a grand time; again, this sort of thing is my jam, and the writing is zippy enough to keep things moving, with the police inspector livening up proceedings with the occasional arch comment as well as oblique hints as to which time period to which you might want to focus your attention. That time-hopping is eventually explained with a minimum degree of diegetic plausibility, which helps prevent proceedings from feeling too gamey as well as pointing toward potential sequels – if there are more Layla Roccentiny games to come, sign me up, albeit given precedent I might get a bit worried come installments four and five.

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!