Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

The summer of my second year in law school, I got an internship in DC and needed to figure out where to live. My school provided a listing service through which I found someone at a school there who likewise had an out-of-town job for the summer, making her place available to sublet, but the dates didn’t quite match up, forcing me to find someplace to stay for the week between when my internship started and the sublet became available. In those pre-AirBnB days I just checked out Craigslist, and eventually found a room I could rent for a couple of days in a suburb just outside the city proper. I was feeling good about my resourcefulness as I threw my giant duffel over my shoulder and caught a bus from the bus station to my new home for the next week – feelings which curdled as I rang the doorbell to find there was no-one there to answer me, and that turned into a cold weight in my stomach once I realized that when I called the host’s number, nobody was picking up.

Fortunately, it was not a scam after all! The guy had just been out and his phone had died; after fifteen minutes he came over and we sorted it all out (okay, he had double-booked the room so I had to sleep on a futon for the first night, so I guess it was kinda scammy, but he was apologetic and knocked the price down as a result – compared to my fears of being left totally up a creek I wasn’t inclined to complain too much). Still, I remember the way my heart sank as I arrived and realized getting into the place I was supposed to stay that night wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, which means the setup of Rain Check-in immediately had resonance for me. In the game, you’ve arrived at an AirBnB in a rural area, but all the lights are off, your phone is low on charge, and the host’s given you cryptically-translated instructions for finding the key that are only medium helpful. Oh, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way. Good luck!

It’s a fun premise, though in practice what we’ve got here is Standard Parser Scenario #7: “get into a locked house.” There’s a little bit of local color with some patio furniture and a squeaky gate held closed with a rock, but outside of a bonus area I didn’t find on my first playthrough (hint: try exploring around before heading to the house), there aren’t any characters to interact with, or much scenery to ground proceedings in any particular place or time, much less anything resembling environmental storytelling – the closest it gets are a few wry footnotes that do at least add a slight flavor of humor. The few puzzles are likewise ones you’ve seen before – it’s not quite moving the doormat to find the key, and then entering the combination that you find written on a post-it one room over from the safe, but it’s also not miles away from that kind of thing, either.

There are two departures from the generic, one good, one bad. On the plus side, there are more endings than I expected, and some puzzles have alternate solutions. These don’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it was fun to see that you could use brute force to get around some challenges, allowing you to reach a suboptimal ending. The other departure is less enjoyable, sadly: not only does the game have an overall time limit, you also have a light-source with limited charge, and when you run out you die. Mainstream parser-IF design has long since moved away from these kinds of timers, and for good reason – leaving aside questions of verisimilitude and Zarfian cruelty, they tend to disincentivize players from spending excess time exploring and checking out details, which undercuts one of the major strengths of parser IF. There are some ways of taking the sting out of them, but I think it would be hard to find these options on a first play-through, it’s galling to have to treat that initial play-through as initial scouting that must be thrown away to inform a subsequent run, though at least the game is short and simple enough that this only winds up being a minor annoyance.

Implementation-wise, Rain Check-in is more ambitious than other games of its length and simplicity: there are some robust features, like the aforementioned phone and endings. The former has some wobbles – it’s implemented via somewhat-wonky multiple choice menus, and I couldn’t actually get the option to display the phone’s charge in the header to work – but I didn’t find any out and out bugs, beyond a few Inform-standard things like an object whose display name doesn’t match what you need to type to interact with it, and the verb to enter the combination being a bit idiosyncratic. For an author who appears to have only made a few small prior parser games, it’s a pretty good showing.

As for the writing – well, the elephant in the room here is the use of ChatGPT to help generate the game’s prose, which the author discusses in the Comp blurb: as a non-native speaker of English, he used ChatGPT as a translation aid and to refine grammar and phrasing. While I usually find text straight from the LLM intolerable to read, here the writing mostly struck me as unobjectionable, I have to say; while I didn’t note down any especially unique turns of phrase, there weren’t any clunkers, either, and it mostly avoids the annoying tics LLMs tend to get up to when given free rein. I have to believe there are more ethical and sustainable tools for ESL authors to use to sharpen their prose – not least, volunteers from this very forum! – but at least as to the results in this game, it’s not too bad.

And that’s pretty much my judgment on Rain Check-in – it’s not too bad! Again, as a neophyte’s work it’s reasonably well put together, while its most annoying features (those timers!) would hopefully be easy to correct in a follow-up work. As a story, there’s not much there, just a sketch towards an anecdote, but it’s a good-natured enough predicament to be stuck in, and I did enjoy the footnotes. And while “not too bad” isn’t high praise, but sometimes, like when you’re locked out and expecting the worst, “not too bad” can feel like intense relief.

My wife had never been part of an Internet community before last year, when she got into the Bridgerton fandom in a big way: like, she reads the fan-fiction, sure, but also had some of her takes go semi-viral on social media, gotten banned from a subreddit due to inter-board feuding, and even co-hosts a podcast. It’s been an eye-opening experience in a variety of ways – IF drama has nothing on what they get into over there, let me tell you – but has also given me a much finer-grained view of the standard tropes of romance fiction than I had heretofore possessed. Beyond the intrinsic interest, it’s also expanded my critical vocabulary, which was helpful as I turned over my reactions to Pharos Fidelis: it’s a game that I really enjoyed, but whose central relationship I didn’t find as engaging as its other elements. And I now I think I know that that’s mostly just due to a difference of tastes than anything lacking in the game: I’m just more of a Friends to Lovers guy than a Forbidden Love one, and Wound-Tending strikes me as nice but not especially hot. À chacun son goût, no big deal, especially when the game offers so much to dig into (so much, in fact, that I feel greedy for wanting even more in some places).

The game’s setup combines pieces of a bunch of different premises, but manages to feel completely seamless and its own thing: in a world riven by a magical war, a young prodigy named Finnit is studying demon-summoning at a prestigious magical academy; he’s fascinated by these otherworldly entities and their world, but his crappy advisor sees them only as weapons that must be dominated. As part of a final exam slash hazing attempt, the advisor teleports Finnit to the ruins of a remote magical lighthouse, telling him he has only a few weeks to unravel its mysteries and reignite it. Knowing he can’t do this alone, Finnit summons a demon he’d previously seen his advisor abusing; working together, the two learn about each other’s worlds and ways, and discover some shocking secrets about the lighthouse’s history, too.

That relationship is the heart of the game, with revelations about the lighthouse always tied to breakthroughs in the characters’ bond (or vice versa). But Pharos Fidelis is confident enough to delay the two meeting for quite a while, long enough to make sure Finnit and his predicament register, as well as to establish the rules of this world. Demon-summoning is subject to laws, in both senses of the term: some are akin to thermodynamic principles, but others are more like moral injunctions, and the game intersperses its narrative sections with bits of textbooks and other in-world documents fleshing things out. They’re well-written in of themselves, and also feed into the character development – seeing the three iron laws of summoning elucidated by your advisor in stentorian terms, and then having the click-to-proceed link read “ignore his wisdom” helps puncture the pretension and communicate where Finnit is coming from.

The prose is a major highlight throughout, in fact, dense with wordplay and memorable images while still remaining propulsively readable. Here’s a description of the aforementioned advisor:

"Raekard was there, tall and spidery, with the indistinct age of a man whose years had intertwined too closely with the power he commanded."

And a vignette that’s part of Finnit’s tragic backstory:

"Wizened boughs set coral pink leaves adrift. They clung, in soggy piles, to gaps between paving slabs. Young Finnit faced a chore deferred, tender fingers gripping a broom too unwieldy to shoo the litter off the patio at any reliable pace."

There’s alliteration, well-judged details, even small jokes – “wizened” sure seems like a nod to what Finnit’s job winds up being, and there’s a later description of the lighthouse’s focusing-crystal, a survivor of many thunderstorms, which notes “the memories of lightning that had long since bolted.” Come to think of it, “Finnit” is itself a sort of pun, highlighting the bounded, finite nature of his being compared to his immortal lover. There are a few flies in the ointment: the game definitely has fantasy-name disease (I’m awkwardly writing around the demon’s name because I can’t remember it off the top of my head – it definitely starts with a V?), there are places where the dialogue struck me as too informal for the high-fantasy vibe, and it takes some big swings, so of course some of them miss.

But these are tiny niggles; 98% of the time the prose is a delight, which is impressive indeed for a work of this length. In fact, even though it pretty much took me the full Comp-standard two hours to reach an ending, part of me was eager for more – I wouldn’t have minded if the process of understanding and trying to fix the lighthouse had had a couple more scenes to play out in, and there are a few glimpses of hell that likewise could have been expanded. Part of me also wishes the central relationship had been more of a slow-burn, but again, I think that’s just down to preference: in some ways it’s more romantic to have the near-immediate spark of attraction quickly having the two of them thinking sexy thoughts about each other, even if personally I think it would have been fun if they’d started more platonic, until Finnit’s flash of insight in a late-night magical engineering session suddenly made the demon want to jump his bones…

Speaking of the demon, I didn’t find him as cleanly-drawn a character as Finnit, but I think that’s actually a strength of the work. Demons are meant to be more protean and amenable to change, and as he’s recovering from trauma, he could reshape himself in different ways. In fact, cleverly and thematically, while Finnit is the viewpoint character, all the choices are on the demonic side of the ledger. There are only a handful of decision points, a few of which are seemingly low-key, but as far as I was able to experiment, they can have pretty significant impacts on where the plot ultimately goes (the chapter select function also makes it easy to experiment).

To be honest, though, while it’s there and effective, I didn’t need the interactivity, or, as mentioned, to get too hot and bothered by the romance plot, to find Pharos Fidelis engaging – the character work and magical investigation are top-notch, delivered in lovely, luminous prose, with several surprises I didn’t see coming (I haven’t mentioned the way the game plays with the second-personal narrator as it nears its conclusion). A highlight of the Comp for sure, and I’d gladly play any prequels or sequels the author cares to write.

Reader, I’m going to have to say something right now that might be hard for you to hear. Are you ready? Do you want to sit down? Do you have your preferred beverage to hand (but not too close, we wouldn’t want to run the risk of spillage)? Okay.

I have some flaws.

I know, you’re going to say, that’s not news, of course you sometimes pad your reviews with hilarious and insightful but maybe only tangentially relevant personal anecdotes, and perhaps sometimes your writing can be too analytically rigorous and insightful. Which, yes, guilty, but actually no, I mean real flaws. I’m terrible at languages, tend to flail when small talk is required, and (worst of all) am too middlebrow to actually enjoy abstract art. I can maunder on about color and composition if I’m trying to impress someone (I’m always trying to impress someone), and there’s definitely some post-Impressionalist transitional stuff, where you can see where the artist jumped off from representation and hangs poised in the air in defiance of gravity, using shapes and textures that aren’t representational but nonetheless have the faintest of tethers to something real, that I find compelling. But beyond that I’m at sea.

All of which is to say that I don’t think I’m the right person to give Eight Last Signs in the Desert its due, even if I weren’t playing it just about a third of the way into this enormous Comp, when my brain is starting to get benumbed at the scale of the task before it and groans in protest at the idea of having to do work. There’s nary a character in sight, much less a motivation easily translatable to Maslow’s hierarchy of need, in this impressively-produced choice-based game: the protagonist addresses a septet of monuments in a sandy wasteland, each of which lets you craft a tone-poem through careful selection of cycling links. There is a progression, as each monument vanishes as you complete it, and for every pair you finish, you get a bonus bit of text that appears customized to the combination of those two. Do that three times, then wrap it up with the final monad and then the surprise eighth monument (no points for guessing what that is), and that’s the game.

It’s a solid enough structure, and the themes at issue – dissolution, the slippery nature of reality, the aridity of the detritus of contemporary civilization – are trenchant enough: what are we living through but the decay of modernism into the abstract? And the prose, er, poetry, is really good, with thought-through meter and memorable images by the score. Heck, speaking of art, the backdrop to all this is lovely, Seurat-style landscapes that provide an unsettling, lyrical home for the seven brooding metaphor-totems.

But good lord is it abstract. Here’s a late-game peregrination:

"You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame."

This is good, but it’s a lot, metaphors tripping over each other in a torrent, and it’s not an exception – this is an extended excerpt of what I landed on for my first monument:

"Enter the palace. Wander its halls until you find the window. Layer its transparencies in a grandiose matrix.

"Seal your choice. Cross it and float outside. Reach for the moon above, but it’s too late in the palace gardens.

"Seal your choice. Sit in it. Dream an uncertain story of the sea."

The lapidary nature of the imagery wound up feeling exhausting to me; until the very end nothing feels like it reaches a climax, each stanza just gives way to the next, sometimes with only the most tangential linkages. Similarly, I experienced the choices as simultaneously polyvalent and weightless in their lack of implication:

"Seal your choice. Rise again and take one step back. Reach for the [discarded/once public/exclusive/devoted] strand and pull."

“Discarded” and “devoted” are wildly disparate concepts, to say nothing of “once public”, so trying to parse out these possibilities imposes a cognitive burden, but then I found it even more challenging to keep those choices in mind once the text moved on, as the subsequent lines might not even mention a strand, much less an excusive one. A more labile brain than mine might have been able to surf the vibes, weaving this riot of language into something that coheres, but I freely admit mine wasn’t up to the challenge: to the extent my quick summary above winds up being accurate, I did end up with a sense of what the game is getting at, and as an aesthetic experience I found a lot to admire in Eight Last Things in the Desert.

But personally in my IF I need a bit more of, well, a personality, and a more disciplined metaphor-palette plus ideally some drama beyond the wearied acceptance of discorporation. So file this one under games I admired more than liked, though I’m pretty sure that to the kind of player who lives for Surrealist art exhibitions and jams to Symbolist poetry will find this among their favorites of the Comp: the fault is not in Eight Last Signs in the Desert, but in myself.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: there’s a Towers of Hanoi puzzle in whoami. It’s only four disks, and seems like it’s at least partially a piss-take – the puzzle is meant to represent the transfer of a full digital encoding of human consciousness that takes literal years to scan in sufficient depth, so seeing this awesome and profound technological feat reduced to a brainteaser that last seemed cool when I was in middle school earned a bark of laughter. But still: it’s 2025, no more, please.

Fortunately, that’s about the only bad thing I have to say about the game! Despite having only used Windows since I graduated from college, I am a sucker for IF that mimics a UNIX shell, and whoami is one of the slickest examples of the subgenre I remember playing. It’s choice-based, so you don’t have to actually type commands, just click on directories and file-names to move around and open stuff, but the presentation is sufficiently authentic to make the player feel like a hacker, even as subtle color-coding helps guide you towards which things you should click. The drive isn’t especially big – I got through the game in maybe fifteen minutes? – and the plot isn’t especially novel, though it mashes up familiar elements into a mélange that I don’t think I’ve specifically seen before. But the “environmental storytelling” of putting together the narrative by reading emails, running a date routine to figure out how time is passing, and checking user logs to piece together what’s happened makes things feel fresh and engaging. Heck, it even hides the save/load functionality behind diegetic dump and reboot functions that you need to hunt around for, which in a longer game would be annoying but since you’ll almost certainly not need them, just registers as another fun bit of business.

whoami also knows the value of changing things up. OK, maybe the Towers of Hanoi were a flop, but otherwise the puzzles are well paced, punctuating progress and giving the player something to do beyond crawling directories. Sometimes this is just a matter of visual presentation, like the web-page mockup whose blaring light-mode makes an unignorable contrast with the black-background filesystem work of the rest of the game. But others are more interactive, including a gag even better than the Towers practical joke (Spoiler - click to show)(the fact that the “primitive” simulation is a seamlessly-implemented-in-Twine Inform game is hilariously meta). There’s also a pretty solid plot twist, and while, again, there’s nothing especially novel here, things move zippily enough that I never felt like the story was getting bogged down, with just enough detail provided to suggest depth without requiring the player to ever get stuck in the weeds, and the game ends just when you want it to. As for the prose, it’s unostentatious but effective, adopting multiple voices as needing and doing a credible impersonation of personal messages or bureaucratese as the situation varies.

I’m struggling to think of much else to say, because whoami is a short game that does exactly what it sets out to do, with style and substance to spare. Even those with a terminal aversion to disk-swapping puzzles should just grit their teeth and power through this once.

I’m not a person who knows anything at all about film, but let’s not let that stop me from advancing a theory: you don’t want to end a movie on a medium shot. A close-up lets you zoom in on a face, an image, and helps the viewer understand the emotional impact of what they’ve just seen. A wide-angle shot dollies out to underscore the sweep of the narrative, creating an epic finish for the story. But a medium shot? It serves well enough to establish a scene and provide spatial context, but as the last thing you see, I think the viewer would wonder: what’s just outside the frame? What details am I not able to make out? What am I missing?

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration at first seems like it’s going to avoid that issue by staying in close-up the whole time. It’s clear from the get-go that the game is going to be all about social comment, as it’s focused on the process of applying for SNAP (colloquially known as food stamps ) benefits, but rather than gritty realism, it opts for fantasy: the protagonist isn’t someone who’s down on their luck, but rather an alien disguised as a human to do research about how earth’s food assistance programs are administered. The setup provides a perfect excuse to linger on the absurd minutiae of the public welfare bureaucracy – the inconsistent paperwork requirements, the perennially-glitchy equipment, the hostile environment. This is all brand new to the alien, and its estranging viewpoint helps a player who isn’t familiar with this stuff revise their assumptions, and question for themselves for why we tolerate this. The prose does a good job of making completely clear what’s going on, while mixing in enough sci-fi comedy to make the critique go down:

"Spoke with a human at the entrance, seems to be some kind of uniformed worker, maybe a firefighter? Note to self: have to brush up on human worker categories.
Firefighter, judging by human social customs, was rude.
Room is brightly lit, gray, tan and white, very bare. My human body has an uncomfortable reaction to it. Curious. Note to self: why would humans create a building they are uncomfortable in? Points to Skrzyyyyt’s theories on human suffering - do they enjoy discomfort?"

Beyond the writing, the design is also engaging; it’s all simple Twine choices, but given the setup you know whatever you try is going to lead to something screwing up, leaving the player trying to figure out how maximize their chances of successfully applying while also looking ahead to guess how it’ll eventually go wrong. The game doesn’t need to get didactic to make its points – presenting a fine-textured look at the lived experience of people who rely on these systems for their survival is advocacy enough.

Unfortunately about ¾ of the way through its short running time, Visit to the HRA does in fact get didactic. The alien has a gadget that lets it freeze time to take notes on its observations, but for some reason one human winds up being immune to the gizmo, and upon learning what the alien’s up to, gets angry and calls it out for studying humans in need as though they were bacteria specimens on a petri dish. Then the game ends and there’s an even more directly condemnatory author’s note (no surprise, they actually are a social worker who’s directly worked with these systems):

"The waste, indifference, and poor quality of service at HRA exemplifies inept bureaucracy and systemic oppression. I’m also disturbed by the desire to study people when we are vulnerable. The inhumane distance created by needing to justify or understand the basic truths that people need food, safety, housing, health, etc. is deeply troubling. As long as politicians demand researched evidence that humans need food, we are fucked."

It’s hard to disagree with any of this, but I found this final chunk of the game much less effective than the rest. Zooming out to the level of argument leaves behind the concrete accumulation of specific SNAFUs, mistakes, and indifference so effectively portrayed in the first part of the game, but it also feels like it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Like, it’s deeply weird to be playing a game about SNAP just two months out from the biggest SNAP cut in American history, with no mention of the fact that the awful picture the game paints will in a couple years’ time be a best-case scenario. The fact that this welfare agency sucks is the result of specific, contested political processes redirecting resources from the poor to the rich, not just bureaucratic inertia, so it feels like a misstep that there’s not really any direct mention of class or politics anywhere here.

As for the research piece, I’m likewise sympathetic to a lot of these critiques: I work for an organization that has a whole bunch of protocols to make sure our research is community-led as well as community-benefitting because we’re aware of how extractive traditional research models can be – and even with that awareness and those systems, we certainly don’t get it right 100% of the time. But it’s also the case research into public welfare systems is extremely important: for example, deep studies of what’s happened when states have adopted “work requirements” for SNAP and Medicaid allow us to know that all this talk of personal responsibility is a smoke-screen, and the primary impact is that eligible people will get thrown off their benefits due to the increased red tape “verifying” that they’re actually looking for work. Again, there are a lot of bad practices to expose and reform here, but without more specific examples of how they play out, or more perspective on the structural factors producing these bad effects, the game’s impact is blunted.

I don’t want to complain too much since this is a well-constructed and well-meaning game that, at least until the end, deftly takes on an often-underappreciated social problem with grace and humor. But I do think it would have worked better if it had stopped right when the time-freeze gizmo did – it would have avoided the lens being awkward middle-distance, the final shots neither sufficiently focused on concrete lives nor on the structural reasons these things are the way they are.

I am nothing of an expert in parser-like choice games and can’t claim any especial insight, but since I have written what I’m pretty sure is the longest article about them, I find my ears perk up when I play one, more alert to questions of craft than I am with any other subgenre of IF. The Promises of Mars offers a good amount to chew on on this front, with some high production values and interface conveniences that often help, but sometimes undermine, player engagement. I can’t help but think, though, that the reason my notes are full of responses to the structure, with comparatively little on the narrative or gameplay, is that the story and puzzles are a bit thinner than the rest of the game deserves.

In the interests of wrapping up with the meatier stuff, we’ll start with that latter chunk. The setup here is able enough, though not novel enough to be too enticing in its own right: the protagonist is a young woman (or older girl, her precise age I don’t think is nailed down) who’s volunteered as a troubleshooter if only to escape the tedium of living in a tunnel-bunker after a climate-collapse apocalypse. Your assignment is to investigate a carbon capture station on the surface that’s gone dark, and your explorations are interspersed with flashbacks to life below the surface, largely revolving around your relationship with your mom.

Despite the relatively standard setup, the sentence-by-sentence writing here is pretty good – I liked this description of what could have just been a throwaway “it’s a desk”, embedding some worldbuilding through a few well-chosen details:

"It’s a sprawling metropolis of scientific paraphernalia: the drum of a helicorder resting next to a thick ream of chart paper; narrow glass tubes filled with multi-coloured liquid; vases of what looks like peat; notepads and biros and strips of litmus paper; canisters of ammonia and dyes."

The plot, though, isn’t much to write home about; inevitably, there’s a bit of a twist, but it’s one you can see coming a mile away, and while the granular details of the station are nicely sketched, other aspects remain rather generic, notably the protagonist’s mother, who never emerges as a character in her own right – if she had, she could have added an extra note of poignancy to the game’s final choice, but as it is the endings likewise felt rather schematic. As for the puzzles, they’re exactly the kinds of things you’d expect from this kind of premise: there are tools to salvage, powered-down elevators to reactivate, keycards and keycodes gating progress, and so on, with none of them posing much of a challenge. This sort of busywork can function well to make the player explore, creating space for environmental storytelling to add texture and resonance to the space and its former inhabitants, but again, the game remains a bit too arid to take advantage of these opportunities.

So much for the content of Promises of Mars, which is usually 95% of what I care about in a game. But the presentation is sufficiently great to be worth highlighting, and in fact so good that I wound up having a lot of fun despite the overall ho-hum-ness of what I was doing. It doesn’t hit on anything other parser-like choice games haven’t tried before, but the way it brings together the interface elements creates visual elegance and a high degree of playability, and really could be a standard-setter for similar games. In addition to generous space for the main text and choices, there’s a big map in one corner and an inventory list in another. The map is purely geometric, but isn’t stuck with the uniform quadrilaterals of most parser game visualizations: streets and corridors are long rectangles, closets tiny squares, and the relationships between each are easy to visualize, which allows for intuitive translation when the text mentions doors to the right and left, say. Meanwhile, having the full map available from the start helps the player gauge their progress through each of the three chapters, and prioritize “clearing” areas before getting too far into unexplored areas; the fact that you can instantly backtrack to a visited location by clicking on its map representation also makes exploration a snap.

The always-available inventory is also nice and convenient, though I think one thoughtful piece of design actually errs too far towards ease of use: items only get highlighted, and therefore clickable, when it’s possible to use them (save for the always-available commlink, which acts as a diegetic hint-line). This takes just about all the guesswork out of the already-simple inventory puzzles, since as soon as you’re confronted with a challenge you’ll see your available options suddenly turn orange. Sure, there are a couple of places where you can make an incorrect choice, but these are either trivial (should you pick a lock with a screwdriver or a paper clip?) or unguessable (there isn’t enough information provided about what size tool you need to use to manipulate some pipes, so you might as well try a wrench as a ballpoint pen), and in either case simple trial and error will see you through in a matter of seconds. In my article’s analysis of parser-like choice systems, I wound up arguing that counterintuitively, you often need to add additional friction to avoid the player simply lawnmowering through all their choices, and this is one place Promises of Mars’ interface puts a foot wrong.

It’s one of the few such missteps, and again, combined with the well-written prose I enjoyed my time with the game: for all my critiques, they mostly just boil down to finding the story not especially exciting. But funnily enough, an unexciting story that’s well-told can still be very satisfying, even in as narrative-focused a world as IF.

These days mods are a de rigueur accompaniment to any major game release, but of course this wasn’t always the case. While I remember a few games with limited user-modifiability here and there through the late 80s and early 90s (the one that sticks out the most was Civilization I, which stored a bunch of its text in uncompressed files on the hard drive; it was fun to futz around with unit names, and for some reason I once put a declaration of love for my middle-school crush into the ending scroll, I guess because I thought inviting her over and having her achieve victory in a notably long game was a more plausible course of action than just, like, telling her I liked her) – wow that parenthetical got away from me – despite some limited antecedents, Doom was ground zero. Soon after its release, there were user-created maps by the score, but also more ambitious changes: tweaks to weapons, new enemies or even gameplay features. You – or at least I – couldn’t easily download such things in those days, but you’d usually find a couple dozen of the most popular mod distributed as filler on video game magazine pack-in CDs, alongside demos for the latest games.

Some of the most visually-arresting were so-called total conversions: mods that didn’t just add some new content here or tweak a setting there, but purported to transform the whole game. There was an Alien total conversions, a Batman one, even, bizarrely, a Chex tie-in, and they all looked amazing, with bestiaries and arsenals and level graphics entirely different from what iD had shipped. But when you started playing one, it became clear that sometimes there was much less to these “total conversions” than met the eye. You see, some TCs did get into the guts of the engine to create brand-new gameplay, but a lot of them simply swapped out the graphics. Your eyes could tell you that you were firing a pulse-rifle at an oncoming Xenomorph, but if you’d played a lot of Doom, you could immediately tell that actually you were wielding the chain-gun and shooting at a pinky demon: same firing speed and damage for the gun, same AI and hit-points for the monster. Sometimes there weren’t even new levels – you’d be running through the same old maps with the same old secrets and enemies. I had friends who didn’t mind, because swapping in the aesthetics of Alien for the techno-satanism of Doom was sufficient difference to make things feel fresh and compelling, but for me, the graphics were beside the point: appearances to the contrary, this was still just Doom, and I’d played a lot of Doom (you can see how I wound up a fan of IF).

PURE – yes, this is a review – puts me in mind of those old TCs, because it’s a game whose form and whose structure wildly diverge. The narrative elements lay out a compelling down-spiral of biological and moral horror, little of that is interactive; the gameplay, meanwhile, could have been drawn from an unassuming 80s puzzle-fest, tasking you with running through a linear gauntlet filled with riddles and simple mechanical challenges. There’s a lot to like about the former, and the latter isn’t bad, exactly – though the implementation is often pretty thin – but the mismatch between the two is jarring, like putting a body-horror skin on Nord and Bert.

The best part of the game is the line by line writing. There’s a Dark-Souls-meets-H.R.-Giger kind of vibe to proceedings, with blood and viscera sluicing everywhere across the dungeon complex you’re tasked with exploring; meanwhile, you’re accompanied by a pair of guards who seem offended by your very existence, and an aristocrat who seems to be way too intensely into you (but is probably just using that as a tool of manipulation). There are some typos, including an unfortunate scone/sconce confusion, but those don’t do much to detract from the power of the prose, which emphasizes physical sensations, tiny but exquisite, that escalate as you delve deeper into the earth, the environment becomes more twisted, and the behavior of your companions grows more depraved:

"The carved surface of the door is an undulating expanse of slopes and curves. As you look closer, you realize the shapes are naked bodies, entangled together in a congealing mass of stone flesh. The faces are all turned away, pressed into the crooks of another’s body. Black liquid like that which bled from the shadow’s body trickles out from small cracks between the forms. The Boar follows one of the streams with his gauntlet, settles his thumb into the crevice of a statue’s thigh, and breathes deeply."

This is all vibes, though – there isn’t much in the way of context or explanation offered for anything here, beyond a helpful authorial note highlighting trans themes in the uncomfortable transformations visited upon the protagonist, and this is another Part I, ending just as the journey through the subterranean complex reaches its end. So without much traditional plot to speak of, the story of Pure can feel mostly determined by what you do, and what you do is, well, traditional: there’s a match-the-numbers puzzle, a series of riddles you answer by putting one of a series of objects into the appropriate chest, a keypad lock you defeat with powers of observation…none of them are especially challenging, and while there are a couple late-game obstacles that require some grand guignol actions to bypass, it’s hard to ignore the fact that mechanically speaking all you’re doing is putting a key in a lock.

Part of what makes the disparate halves of the game feel so distinct is that most of the stuff playing out in the narrative layer isn’t easy to engage with. While the other characters will occasionally fiddle about in the background, and take active roles in the short cut-scenes that play in between bouts of puzzle-solving, there’s not much you can do with them while you’re in control; there’s no conversation system that I could find, for example, and they’ll just hang around forever waiting for you to solve the puzzles (I did check the walkthrough after finishing the game, and it turns out you can try to kiss all the NPCs, which would be interesting but to be honest neither they nor the protagonist felt like they’d be into that kind of thing under the circumstances). There’s also not much in the way of scenery, and a lack of quality-of-life polish (I spent like eight turns trying to figure out how I was supposed to refer to some “shadowy dog-like things”) wound up disincentivizing me from poking at the world in favor of just getting on with the logic puzzles.

To be fair, there are some nice bits of craft in the game – PURE makes heavy use of color-coding to denote interactive objects, for example, which is explained in a simple and clear tutorial. And I did always enjoy unlocking the next bit of interaction between the characters, and seeing the next degradation of the protagonist, each time I solved a puzzle. But where the best pieces of IF ensure all the elements of their writing and design echo and reinforce each other, PURE struggles to find consistency; I can’t help but wonder what a choice-based version of the game that cuts out the busywork and builds its gameplay around actually talking to the NPCs, and making decisions about how much corruption to accept, would feel like to play. The good news is that, as mentioned, this is only a prologue, so there’s time to think about a different approach for Part II, or at least a refinement of the current structure: either way, my interest is definitely piqued.

[When this review was originally posted on the IntFic forum, it used the LLM-generated cover-art as a jumping-off point to poke fun at the warrior-poet concept -- " someone who’s really good at fighting, but is also like super soulful, like he’s like a poet, man." Fortunately, the cover was later changed!]

The funny thing is, unlike the protagonist the game actually seems to be in on the joke. It plays things almost entirely straight, happy to rattle off wordy boilerplate about how the journey to cross the Infinite Sands seemed to take forever (you don’t say!), has the main character try to make a deal with a camel-seller by saying stuff like “what say you, merchant!”, and features a po-faced RPG system that has you weighing +1 to your armor against a bonus to your weapon damage. But as soon as you enter combat and try out your magical poetry attacks, you – or at least I – will have your jaw drop, because you’re not declaiming epic quatrains in a Quenya knock-off or whatever else you might be imagining: instead your dude, he of the artfully-cultivated stubble and multiple belts strapped every which way, busts out with Little Jack Horner or Pease Porridge Hot (inflicting 1d4 + 2 damage to the enemy and 3d6 SAN loss to the player). The intro also makes clear that warrior poets are something of a joke even in-setting: you’ve gone to a famous university to study their arts, but the department’s been bleeding enrollment to Business Administration, the deans have been making budget cuts, and when one of your instructors steals a magical MacGuffin, presumably because their adjunct’s salary just isn’t cutting it, the administrators dispatch the ten-person class’s star pupil (that’s you) to recover it, apparently because they don’t want to shell out for a real adventurer.

This setup made me laugh, and combined with the adventure-RPG hybrid gameplay and some well-chosen details like a focus on the different kinds of exotic food you can eat, I was reminded of the Quest for Glory graphic adventures, for which I have enormous fondness. Sure, the prose style is turgid enough that it mostly steps on the jokes, but there’s still an overall good-natured vibe to the setting that’s also QFGish, and the business of exploring a new city while making sure you have an inn to stay at, carefully counting your gold, getting incremental upgrades to your skills and equipment, and making progress by alternately solving puzzles and winning fights, makes for an engaging gameplay loop.

Unfortunately, Warrior Poet also sometimes shares the old Sierra philosophy on puzzle intuitiveness. Most of them are so signposted they practically solve themselves, with heavy hinting prompting you about exactly where you should go and what you should do next, but there are a few that feel quite unfair, especially the one that first puts you on the trail of your quarry. While I’d imagined that I’d need to start asking around, maybe interviewing the fellow countryman I came across at the docks about whether they’d seen anyone suspicious taking ship to another port, or checking with the magical antiquities dealer about whether anyone had tried to fence the MacGuffin, instead progress requires examining an unimportant-seeming bit of scenery four times, since the changing description will eventually throw up the critical clue. There’s a walkthrough provided at least, but this is still a pretty unfriendly welcome to Dol Bannath.

The RPG side of the equation is easier, at least. There are three different fights in the game, but none of them are tuned to be particularly difficult; despite being wishy-washy on my build rather than specializing, the baddies all fell without inflicting too much damage, and while I might have benefited from some lucky dice-rolls, even if fortune hadn’t favored me UNDO-scumming would have helped save my bacon. Hybrids like this usually benefit from leaning harder on one of their genre inspirations rather than trying in vain to serve them both equally, I think, so making the combat a pleasant distraction rather than anything more taxing is a good decision.

A less-good decision is that the game really lives up to its “Part I” subtitle, ending before anything much of interest has happened in the main plot, but despite my critiques I did find myself disappointed there wasn’t more to Warrior Poet, if only because I was desperate to see if anyone else was going to point out how absurd my “poetry” was. So sign me up for Part II, I guess – ditch the AI, streamline the writing, and workshop some of the rougher puzzles, while keeping the focus on fantasy-tourism and watching numbers go up, and I promise to dial down the ribbing next time.

• Time for an anecdote even I couldn’t crowbar into the intro in good conscience: so many years ago I was in a Mage: the Ascension game that was also set in a magical college, where the PCs where the newest group of late-teen wizards on the block. As is typically the case in RPGs, we’d all chosen to play misfits of one variety or another – we had an antisocial goth, a smart-aleck overachiever, a girl who grew up in a Narnia knockoff, That One Libertarian Who Won’t Just Shut Up – so combined with our youth, we were obviously the lamest crew around. Except then we went to a big schoolwide convocation and discovered that there was a cabal called the Warrior Poets: according to the GM they were really cool and everyone liked them, but as nerds ourselves, we knew what we were looking at, and proceeded to make brutal fun of them behind their backs and to their faces the whole time. It was glorious, with the one fly in the ointment being the fact that seeing the damage a bad cabal-name could do, we dithered on coming up with one for our own group for something like three real-world years.

A murder of Crows has one of the most descriptive titles in the Comp – this minimally-styled Twine game indeed has you following along with a group of birds as they go about their daily business, mostly trying to avoid danger and look after each other. It’s an appealing setup, since beyond the inherent fun of inhabiting an animal protagonist, crows boast surprising smarts, tool use, and a sociable nature. But as corvids go, this game is more magpie than crow – the former famously being known primarily for getting distracted by whatever shiny objects they see.

I genuinely have a hard time recapping what happens in the course of this ten-minute game, because something about the way the prose tries to communicate the nonhuman experience of crow-ness never clicked in my brain. There’s a combination of short, disconnected sentences that don’t always spell out what they’re trying to say, and an avoidance of any words that might seem too human-centric or sophisticated for a bird, which makes it hard to parse what’s happening:

"We got into less trouble thanks to Crowley, only teaming up when Crowley was angry, to show the meanies who they’re messing with!"

"Noodle needs scary place and Penny at sad place."

"Penny basked in the sun happily."

"As we waited an observed Penny, the green unfeathered returned and starting moving Penny elsewhere."

(As that last one indicates, there are some typos too).

This obfuscation is especially confusing when it comes to the player’s options; I often wasn’t sure what a particular link was trying to communicate, and making matters worse, sometimes options seemed to circle back on themselves, re-initiating chains of events that should have already concluded. There also do seem to be challenges resembling puzzles, though the above factors meant I didn’t feel very good at them; I was never able to figure out why a nice-seeming dog had been surprisingly aggressive with one of the murder’s members, or be sure that I’d ensconced an injured crow sufficiently out of harm’s way. And they move quickly from one vignette to another; often I’d feel like I’d only started to get to handle on a particular incident or problem before it was on to the next one.

Of course, these are nonhuman intelligences, so perhaps it’s apt for the thought process of the crows to be hard to follow. But I can’t help but think that if it’s intentional, this approach would have worked better with more of a vibes-based take on a crow’s daily life rather than presenting the player with puzzles that demand to be resolved and creating frustration at your inability to direct the crows accordingly. Or, alternately, the current structure married to a clearer prose style might have worked better too. As it is, A murder of Crows has a nice premise but in practice is less pleasant than its subjects deserve.

It’s by far one of the least-destructive elements of the patriarchy, but ever since I became a dad (four years ago yesterday!) I’ve been irritated by the absurdly low bar society sets for fatherhood. Like, in some sense I suppose it’s nice that when I’m at the park with my son and people see that it’s just the two of us and I’m playing with him, not just staring at my phone, passersby are visibly surprised, or when I’m chatting with one of the teachers at his day care and it comes out that it’s almost always me who makes his lunches and snacks, I get an “oh, that’s so nice.” It’s meant well, I’m sure, but it can feel almost insultingly condescending – these are bare minimum parental tasks, but because I’m a dad, not a mom, I get graded on a curve that would shame the Matterhorn.

But as annoying as that can be, A winter morning on the beach goes one step farther in the low-expectations sweepstakes. Initially, it doesn’t seem like it has much to do with parenthood, presenting itself as a meditative little parser game where you walk on a beach for a while (the protagonist is getting older and is trying to get more exercise on their doctor’s advice). I’ve played a reasonable number of these sorts of games, and found that I kept getting wrong-footed, feeling like it was sometimes undercutting itself: there’s not much scenery beyond the sea and sand, for one thing, and while the implementation of what’s there is fairly deep and engaging all the senses, the descriptions are relatively flat in a way that doesn’t provide much in the way of reward for trying to enjoy the environment:

">smell water

"It smells like nothing: water is notoriously odourless."

My experience is that beaches have a lot of smells, with the water in particular having a salty tang and sometimes the odor of seaweed, fresh or rotting – but even if that were a realistic response, it’s not a very interesting one. A sharper challenge to slowly taking in the sights as you stroll down the beach is the world’s most poop-happy seagull; if you spend more than a couple turns in any location, one shows up to ruin your jacket and end your playthrough, which is the grossest ticking clock imaginable. The aesthetics are also not conducive to a lazy stroll; the game’s played in Vorple, and displays in a retro font and color scheme that I found a bit jarring (in fairness, the Vorple integration does enable a convenient hyperlink-based interface, though I mostly played by typing rather than clicking).

The impetus to hurry, the lack of sightseeing, and maybe even the eyestrain-inducing interface are intentional, though, since as it turns out the game wants you to get to the story rather than linger and smell the roses. After a lot of walking through near-identical locations, you finally reach the end of the beach, and here’s where the plot kicks in, though it’s rather slight: you find a toy car, then one location over find the kid to whom the car belongs, bawling his eyes out over losing it. If you do the obvious thing, you muse to yourself that you’ve just proven that you have what it takes to be a wonderful grandfather, at which point you receive a phone call from your kid with news you’ll never be able to guess.

In some ways this makes for a nice ending; the protagonist seems legitimately happy to be a new grandfather. But at the same time, going back to what I said earlier it makes me shake my head that he appears to think this scenario constituted any kind of crucible: if as a grown-up you steal a toy from a child for no reason, the issue isn’t that you might not get a World’s Best Grandpa mug, the issue is that you’re a motivelessly-evil Iago figure. If the lost-car vignette had been one of several low-key encounters on a more crowded beach, I think the revelation at the end could have been more effective, recontextualizing what had come before in a way that had some genuine surprise. But since the environment and exploration elements are so thin, everything hangs on this one small moment, and just isn’t a big enough deal to bear even this relatively light weight.