Reviews by Mike Russo

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

Kidney Kwest is an educational game, aimed at helping kids with kidney failure learn more about how to manage their condition (in a heartbreaking detail, the blurb mentions that it’s meant to be played during three-hour dialysis sessions). It’s also unintentionally educational in showing why natural-language parsers aren’t yet dominant in IF.

Taking the first part first: the game gets off to a sweet start, with the player character worried about finding a costume for a school play and unable to find anything until the Kidney Fairy takes a hand. She sweeps you away to the fairy world, where you need to solve some small puzzles to get the pieces of a costume. The educational angle also kicks in once you move to the other world, as a hunger timer starts up, but with a twist – in addition to regularly finding (ideally healthy) food to eat, you need to take your medication (a phosphate binder) before or after each meal. Taking a pill also shifts you into a Fantastic Voyage style minigame, where you roam your body looking for rogue phosphate crystals to hoover up before they accumulate.

This is all charmingly realized – I liked the little drawings that pop up in the sidebar – and the couple of puzzles I solved were reasonably satisfying. I didn’t find the full costume and make it to the end of the game, though, because the hunger timer is tuned really aggressively, and requires a restart once you get too hungry. This makes some sense given that that timer, more so than the costume-gathering puzzle, is the main point of the game, but I still found it frustrating, all the more so because of the second notable thing about the game, which is the custom natural-language parser.

Per the introduction, this is meant to make the game more accessible to younger players who aren’t versed in IF conventions. The details are well above my head, but I read a linked blog post which provides an overview, and the parser does appear to live up to its billing: it understands complete English sentences, including asking questions about the state of the world.

The cost of this success is high, though. First of all, the parser is finicky, requiring you to speak in formal English (you can’t even drop a “the” without making it do extra work) in a way that feels awkward to me as a seasoned player of IF, and I suspect would also not be a good fit for how digital-native young people expect to type things into a computer. Second, some of the standard conveniences of mature IF languages are missing – pronouns aren’t recognized, UNDO does nothing, disambiguation is painful, and there’s no command buffer. And most critically, the engine ran very slowly for me, with each command taking at least a few seconds to process, and some even requiring ten or so to complete. This added so much friction that every interaction became really frustrating – and since running around trying to deal with a hunger timer is already kind of annoying, this makes for a bad combination!

If the natural language engine brought something new to the gameplay, maybe this tradeoff would be worth it. But Kidney Kwest, at least the portions I saw, just requires very simple object-management commands that any traditional IF language could handle quite easily. Sure, there’s added functionality if a player wants to request the detailed description of an object using more convoluted syntax (like “what’s in the safe?”) – but teaching a player how this works seems harder than just teaching them to type X SAFE, and the frustration of waiting so long for a response seems greater than the frustration of struggling with a quickly-responsive parser, at least if a game’s implemented well.

Eventually, these kinds of parsers could replace the ones we’ve got, which are based on decades-old models at this point – but we’re not there yet, and that shift will probably be ushered in by games that make good use of the new affordances provided by natural language, rather than doing the same old stuff in a slower, more convoluted way.

Highlight : I liked the miniaturized segments where you explore your own body – there’s some good detail, and it makes for some novel gameplay.

Lowlight : much of the feedback the game gives feels very close to the world-model, without being translated into more accessible text. For example, “examine myself” gave this response: “you is a person, a physical object, a place, and a thing. It also has a hand, a hand, a body.”

How I failed the author : Henry hadn’t been sleeping super well when I played this one, so I was nodding off while waiting for the game to respond to my commands, which is why I didn’t feel up to a third try.

MUCH LATER UPDATE: I went back for a final replay after the author mentioned that the server’s responsiveness had gotten better. It still wasn’t lightning fast, but was much less frustrating to play nonetheless. I also didn’t worry about eating “bad” food this time out, so the hunger timer was less of an issue, and I was able to get an ending. There’s a neat mechanic where your choice of items to pick up along the way give you a different costume (I got scientist, appropriately enough), and a metal rating depending on your dietary choices (I wound up with bronze, given my damn-the-torpedoes approach to food this time). I can see a couple of places where I could have done things differently, so there’s definitely replayability, and I can see kids swapping stories of how they did. I still think the game’s intended purposes would have been better served by just using one of the existing languages, but now that the optimization is a little better, and I’ve got more familiarity with the parser’s idiosyncracies, it definitely worked a bit better.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

In just about any work of art there’s a gap between ambition and implementation. Occasionally this I because a modest premise is realized with far more care and attention to detail than it need, but more often it’s because an author’s reach exceeds their grasp. There’s certainly nothing wrong with being overambitious and stretching one’s limits, but there’s also little more frustrating than seeing an exciting idea weighed down by failures of execution.

Starting out this way obviously focuses on the critique side of things – and from the numerous typos, confusing scene- and character-shifts, frequently-odd worldbuilding, and abrupt ending, there’s definitely lots there – but I don’t want to underemphasize how good the premise is. The structure of a murder-mystery provides a great framework for exploring an alien society, as a variety of suspects can show off the different kinds of people who live in the world, and a detective’s probing questions can elucidate its hidden depths and tradeoffs, so that’s a great starting point. And the particular crime and alien society we’re talking about here – the death of the one young person in a far-future earth whose immortal residents have removed themselves from the cycle of reproduction – seem like they’d be really interesting to dig into.

The game gives occasional hints of paying off this setup, but due to the issues mentioned above, my time with it was really unsatisfying – especially the sudden-ending thing, since the game cut off just as I was starting to get my bearings. I’ve seen other reviewers speculate that some of the wonkiness here might be intentional. The typos and grammar errors could potentially bespeak a Riddley Walker-style attempt to present a far-future evolution of English, for example, and ending the investigation before it gets going could indicate a pomo refusal to endorse detective-fiction tropes.

But if that’s what it’s doing, the game doesn’t even wink at the player to help bring them into the gag, so I’m left just hoping that this is an IntroComp style teaser, and we’ll eventually see a version of The daughter that gets closer, if not all the way, towards its ambitious promise.

Highlight : After finishing the game, I reread the blurb, and some of the info stated there helped me better understand and appreciate what was going on.

Lowlight : Part of the setup is that the post-scarcity residents of the new earth have mostly decided to reshape their bodies so they’re perennially “hot 30 year olds.” Being told about a “middle aged man looking a good 10 years older than anybody else” – i.e. 40, my age – and his unkempt appearance and “short and messy graying hairs” made me feel even older and more decrepit than usual.

How I failed the author : I was playing on my phone and kept getting interrupted, and maybe because my cookie settings were messed up, every time that wound up resetting the game, so I wound up playing the opening like three or four times.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

It’s a rule of thumb that every Comp has at least one oddball entry that strains the bounds of what counts as IF. In the last couple years, Jared Jackson has taken care of this slot, with last year’s deckbuilder and a Zachlike programming puzzle the year before that (I really enjoyed both, for the record). Comes now The Vaults to try its luck: it’s a virtual CCG whose claim to IF-dom appears to rest entirely on the paragraphs of static text that play between bouts of the PvE campaign.

Sadly, I didn’t find much to enjoy here, either as a piece of IF or on its own merits. On the former side, the game’s story appears to be very generic high fantasy, and the paragraphs only stay on screen for a little while, so I missed some of the plot due to alt-tabbing to take notes. Without any choices or interactivity between the battles and the story so far as I could see, there’s not much here for a traditional IF audience to glom onto.

As to the CCG, this isn’t my genre of choice – give me a deckbuilder any day – but even so, I think it’s too slow and confusingly-presented to be much fun. I eventually grokked the gimmick, which is that you have a trio of persistent “keeper” creatures who generate your mana, but only if you don’t use them to attack. That’s a fair enough tradeoff, but it made me feel like I struggled to make progress, as I was either forgoing attacks, nerfing my mana progression, or unsatisfyingly trying to split the difference.

The player’s starting deck is also oddly tuned, with few low-mana creatures, which added to the frustration as I repeatedly drew cool cards I couldn't do anything with. Finally, the visual design is muddy, with card watermarks making text hard to read, and colors rather than icons are used to convey too much information, so I couldn’t always remember what a creature’s purple number was supposed to mean. All told I won one round, lost the second four or five times, then decided The Vaults simply isn’t for me – though I’d be curious what someone better versed in CCGs thinks, and if future developments in the story make the game more satisfying for IF mavens.

Highlight : Your little keepers are kind of adorable, Jawa-like minions.

Lowlight : One tooltip mentioned that you can link any NFTs you own to the game, which is just the worst.

How I failed the author : I played this during a very late-night (or more optimistically, very early-morning) feeding for Henry, and my fuzzy brain was very much not up to retaining the info conveyed by the tutorial. I also played the opening cutscene but didn’t have the audio on, since Henry was drowsing awake, so the plot was pretty much lost on me (there were scrolls and a dude in armor?)

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)

My initial foray playing Cygnet Committee was unsuccessful. A slickly-produced Twine game that from the credits and blurb seems to be mining Metal-Gear-Solid-adjacent territory, albeit with what might be a distinctive cult angle, Cygnet Committee requires sound to play -- and while I’m weirdly resistant to listening to any audio when playing IF in general, at the time of first playing I was in brand-new-parent mode where if I couldn't hear the baby’s breathing for a couple of minutes, I got anxious. I tried to see if I could bluff my way through the game with it muted, but the “sound required” tag does not lie.

Happily, I came back much later and played Cygnet Committee through, with the sound on this time, I can confirm my initial impression that this was going to be a high-production-value game with a lot of work behind it. It’s also got a novel puzzle mechanic that’s played out in a bunch of creative ways, a pomo plot that interrogates the uses and misuses of the historical memory of Joan of Arc, and a sprawling, metroidvania-y map. I’m still not sold on the use of sound in IF – and I wished there was a stronger connection between the puzzles and the plot – but Cygnet Committee is a confident, poised piece of work that makes a strong case for it.

Starting with that puzzle mechanic, it manages to be both brand new, but also really intuitive. As your operative infiltrates an island-based military installation, you’ll come across navigation challenges, patrolling robots, locked keypads, and spying drones. Each presents you with four different audio samples, and you need to pick out the right one to progress. Usually this just means choosing the one that’s different from the other three, though what this means diegetically shifts with context – the lock tumbler that clicks twice, the bit of the minefield that’s not beeping, and so on.

There are a few curve-balls that get thrown in, including some timed sequences, and a few more traditional find-the-keycode puzzles, but most of the hour and a half I took on the game was spent in these sequences, and I found the variation wasn’t enough to keep them from getting a little stale by the end. There’s a lot of going back and forth through the sprawling map – again, it’s got a kind of metroidvania structure, where you’ll get a new keycard or send power to a previously-visited area – and unless you use a slowly-accumulating currency to unlock shortcuts, you generally need to solve the puzzles all over again even when going back over already-trodden ground.

There are also some design choices in the back half of the game that exacerbated the drag, since you’ll repeatedly come across a device – a dam outflow wheel, a first-aid kit – a few locations before you reach the place it impacts, meaning that even though I figured out these puzzles pretty much immediately, there was still five minutes of tedious back-and-forth to implement the solution. This kind of thing is par for course in a metroidvania, of course, but much of this felt more like it was about padding the game length than offering cool new secrets to unlock.

My real hesitance with the puzzles, though, is that the gameplay didn’t feel all that deeply integrated with the interesting plot. There’s a complex backstory, involving the creation and deployment of a military AI based on Joan of Arc that’s gone mad and is now threatening the globe with nuclear war, which is related through stylish cutscenes that juxtapose text read aloud by a French text-to-speech program (like, it speaks the English words as if they were French, which is a neatly alienating effect) with clips from The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent movie beloved by cineastes (I’ve never seen it but can confirm the images are very compelling).

Befitting the Metal Gear Solid inspiration cited in the credits, this narrative has some bonkers ups and downs, involving cyborgs, the intersection of warmongering and commerce, and an extended shaggy dog story about canned beans (there’s a note of humor here, though it’s played bone-dry). Careful attention also suggests that there’s more going on than meets the eye – in particular, the ending I got pretty strongly implied that (Spoiler - click to show)that the nuclear apocalypse threat isn’t real, the protagonist is just an aspect of the AI’s personality, and the game’s action is a pageant of persecution and immolation Joan has constructed for herself to satisfy the imperatives of history.

This is cool stuff, but again, it’s mostly fed to the player in cutscenes. There’s some thematic resonance between the audio-based puzzles and the fact that Joan of Arc was said to hear voices – plus the construction of the AI featured some gross stuff involving auditory nerves – but the separation between the gameplay layer and the narrative one feels pretty wide. With a deserted base and no other characters to speak to, and no clarity on how the various features of the island – there’s a chapel, a forest, a lighthouse – relate to the AI’s plans, I sometimes felt like I was solving abstract puzzles to unlock plot coupons. I did enjoy both sides of the equation, but stronger integration of these pieces would have made the experience more compelling.

Highlight: there are some cool secrets to find along the critical path – I turned up two, and am pretty sure I missed a bunch more – getting these was really rewarding.

Lowlight: winning the game gives you the option of unlocking a new “hard mode”, but to access it you need to have accumulated 500 of the game’s chip currency, and I only had like 100 left over at the end. Better secret-finding would have helped, but I think you’d also need to pass up the various options to spend chips to make navigation easier, so I doubt even the most thorough player would finish with the requisite chips, and requiring two full playthroughs to open up the option to play a third time feels like inaccessible design (though the author clarified there's no additional plot in hard mode).

How I failed the author: as I mentioned in the stub I wrote before I played, my current setup is not conducive to playing games with sound – I was constantly pulling off my headphones to listen for Henry’s noises, or talk to my wife, and these regular interruptions probably undermined my immersion in the game.