Reviews by Mike Russo

Codex Crusade has the kind of premise where if you explain it to someone else, they’d check the back of your skull to see if you’d suffered a head injury – and I mean that in the best possible way. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you’re a library intern at the University of Turin (Georgia, not Italy), where the geographical confusion adverted to in that parenthetical has led to a collector of arcane lore to leave a treasure trove of books to your otherwise-agronomy-focused archive, which in turn prompts a mysterious woman to charge you with entering the stacks to find a mysterious tome that contains all other books within it, offering you access to all the world’s knowledge if you succeed, delivered in the shape of a cat that answers to “the Akashic record” (you can pet the cat) (okay, having typed all that out, after checking for head trauma they might also just ask if you’d been playing a bunch of Mage: the Ascension).

This off-kilter mix of scholarly references and giddy humor continues once you get through the intro and enter the game proper, which presents you with the first of what will presumably be many challenges in your quest (the game only offers this teaser, but says there’ll be sequels to come). Your task is to navigate through a sort of cross-dimensional cafeteria to reach an elevator to the deeper levels; standing in your way is the elevator security system, which requires a keycard to bypass, and the elevator security guard, who isn’t going to let you by even with said keycard (his first name is Jorge, and I’d eat my hat if his second name isn’t Luis). There isn’t a lot of incidental scenery to take in before puzzle-solving imperatives take over, but what’s there is is fun, like this dialogue from some pretentious scholars:

“Maybe if you read Heidegger, you’d understand why your pedestrian takes on morality aren’t useful!”

“Yikes! Have you considered that if your source is a Nazi, you’re on the wrong team?”

“Well, I think you’ve both missed a big point. Have either of you read House of Leaves…?”

And in trying to wake up a dozing diner, you can shake him and say “hey”, “wake up”, “fire!”, or “hey look there’s Pedro Pascal.” Sure, to a degree these are empty references, but a) they’re funny, and b) given the setting and premise, empty references seem entirely on point. It’s true that I did find the very end of this installment of the game teetered a bit too close to the edge of absurdity, but for the most part Codex Crusade walks a fine line between silliness and profundity.

The puzzles are also engagingly off-beat, though one ill-advised interface decision made the game’s central challenge much more frustrating than I think was intended. You see, through a set of circumstances that don’t fully make sense, you need to follow a half-completed recipe (that you find in the Canterbury Tales!) for posset, a medieval medicinal drink, using only the ingredients you can scrounge up from the criteria. That means raiding the drink area for a choice of two beverages, and the snack bar for a bit of food, which you can then combine as best you see fit. When mixing the beverages, the interface is a conventional choice-based one – you say you want to start preparing the drink, then a pop-up asks you which liquid you want to add first from a multiple-choice list, followed by another prompt that allows you to add a second. But then it prompts to ask you if you want to add a third ingredient, at which point you need to write something into a text bar (and then click the forward link, just hitting enter doesn’t work).

The recipe is especially cryptic, so I ran through a whole bunch of different choices for things I could put in, since the game doesn’t give any indication whether what you type in is being recognized. I tried putting in the seitan-jerky snack I’d picked up just for the heck of it, before shifting to cinnamon, ginger, and lemon, which are the most common additional ingredients in posset from the recipes I found online (there’s also a set of clues you can find by rifling through one of another student’s books, which point in the same direction). Finally after fifteen minutes I checked out the source code to discover what I was missing: turns out you’re just supposed to write in the name of the snack you want to try. I was intensely frustrated by this design choice, since it would have been far simpler and intuitive – not to mention in line with how the beverage-choosing interface works – to just select an inventory item from a list, rather than go with a free-input parser box. The particular solution also doesn’t make much sense on its own terms, either (Spoiler - click to show)(if the key additional ingredient is breadcrumbs, why should you put in oatmeal, rather than wheat-based seitan?)

Brute-forcing my way through this puzzle dimmed my excitement momentarily, and while I’m grousing a bit I’ll say that I thought the two “battles” that wrapped up this section of the story were a bit repetitive. But given the scale of the creativity on offer in Codex Crusade, I’d still gladly sign up to play the next instalment – it tickles a lot of my areas of especial interest, and when it’s on, it’s very on. Just no more parser interfaces where they’re not needed next time, please!

This game (no, I am not retyping the full title out again) is proof that there’s really nothing wrong with the hoariest old storytelling tropes. It trots out one of the oldest premises in parser IF – you wake up alone in a space station, with amnesia – adds the smallest imaginable twist – actually the station is underwater, not outer space – and brings it to life with tense, evocative writing. There are a couple of overly-obscure puzzles that I doubt I would have solved but for David Welbourn’s helpful walkthrough, but this remains a gripping bit of horror-tinged sci-fi.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot; while it hits pretty much all the story beats you’re expecting from the get-go, seeing them play out is a big part of the draw, and the revelations are well spaced out over the course of the game’s hourish running time, creating solid pacing (assuming you can get through the puzzles – we’ll come back to that). But suffice to say that it’s clear from the get-go that there’s something wrong with the facility, and wrong with you, too – for one thing, what’s a small child doing in such an isolated place? The intro does a very good job establishing the stakes and pointing towards where the narrative is headed:

“WE ARE APPROXIMATELY TWO KILOMETERS BELOW THE SURFACE. IF THAT DOOR OPENS—WHICH IS CURRENTLY PREVENTED BY OUR SECURITY FAILSAFES—MILLIONS OF TONS OF SEAWATER WOULD RUSH INTO THE FACILITY AND DESTROY EVERYTHING. YOU YOURSELF WOULD BE CRUSHED BY THE PRESSURE IN MOMENTS.

"You squint to compensate for the darkness and the headache returns. Instinctively, you run a hand over yourself to make sure that no pieces of glass remain on the overalls since the cocoon broke. You are clean."

The prose is a real highlight throughout; it’s typically sharp and declarative, but occasionally reaches for a striking image or presents a more confusing, impressionistic jumble when the protagonist gets knocked off-kilter. And there’s one development in the plot that yes, is telegraphed and a bit cliché, but still landed quite heavily on me (Spoiler - click to show)(the death of Nelly). If you’re looking for a boundary-pushing think-piece, well, that’s not what’s on offer here, but as a piece of genre writing it’s quite successful.

As a work of IF, though… well, this is the kind of piece where being able to wander around at your own pace and soak up the ambiance and environmental storytelling is a natural fit for the plot. And some of the puzzles work well to get you to engage with the setting and gate out the various bits of backstory you can piece together. But too many of them are firmly in read-the-author’s-mind territory. (Spoiler - click to show)I’m not sure how you’re supposed to intuit that the tin you find in the kitchen is poison, for example, much less what cooking cream is and that it’s explosive. And I still can’t at all picture what’s wrong with the dumbwaiter such that setting off an explosion in it sets everything to rights. The magnetic disc, meanwhile, at least feels like something you could solve via trail and error, but similarly feels more like an abstract video-game puzzle than anything organic to the environment. The good news is that most of these rough patches come in the middle of the game; the opening segment and the climax are relatively smooth sailing, so the clueing misfires don’t detract as much as they otherwise would.

All told the positive parts of the game are definitely enough to make this one I’d recommend; there’s something uniquely likeable about a familiar story that’s well-told, especially one that’s spooky and has a good eye for a compelling image. Playing it entirely straight, without hints or a walkthrough, is likely to be an exercise in frustration, though – there are no heroes in this story, so there’s no upside in gritting your teeth and trying to tough it out.

Porn is much like any other fantasy genre in that for it to work, you need to buy into some absurdity in the premise. Sure, in fantasy it’s stuff like trees that can come to life and people who can summon the mightiest powers of the elements exclusively going around in their PJs, while in porn it’s that five minutes of conversation is enough to get perfect strangers to get down to boning – to say nothing of the various physical implausibilities that come into play once said boning commences – but in either case it’s all about the willing suspension of disbelief. Despite making the attempt to engage with it in good faith, however, I have to admit that Hot Office struck me as completely ridiculous even by the fantastical standards of AIF.

Things start off reasonably grounded, I admit: you’re having a chat by text with your coworker Sophie, who’s on her way to the office. It’s all presented clearly enough, with a phone-mimicking interface offering you a choice of two or three terse replies to each message by which she narrates her commute in – it’s like Lifeline with boobs. The basic scenario is also a bit silly – the A/C is off in the building and everyone else is working from home, so with a bit of encouragement from you she wastes little time in stripping down to her underwear, and then beyond – but sticks to the standard tropes of the genre.

But there’s a bunch of stuff that’s decidedly not standard, or just plain odd. For example, each step of the striptease is illustrated with a picture, which is all well and good, except that these appear to have been slapped together in MS Paint – they might have passed for hot and steamy in 1991, but kind of a lot’s happened on this front since then. The conversation with Sophie is also increasingly bizarre the more you pay attention to it: she makes a note of saying that she’s wearing a winter coat as she comes into the office, but if it’s winter why is the office so hot in the absence of A/C? If she’s your coworker, why is she showing you around the place and pointing out the plant in the corner, as if you’ve never been there before? Why are we interrupting the clothes-removing process to snap a photo of Sophia’s office chair, which has a couple of discolored impressions from the weight of her sweaty butt – is that some kind of fetish? Speaking of fetishes, WHY DOESN’T SHE HAVE ANY EYES???

This was all quite confounding. Possibly as a result of being distracted pondering these imponderables, I can’t say I found Hot Office especially hot, but its very idiosyncrasies mean that I eventually began viewing it with some affection. Possibly I only feel this way because it cuts off just as Sophie really gets her kit off – it’s apparently a free excerpt from a longer, paid game, so makes sense to leave the punters wanting more – but there’s something guileless about the very specific sexual scenario being constructed. There’s of course more than a bit of male gaze creepiness in the premise, but even that is blunted by the fact that Sophie is so ridiculously eager to strip for you, to the extent that even if you try to chit-chat about the weather and stick to the most non-committal comments possible, she’ll still aggressively insist on peeling off her shirt and sending you a picture to prove it. My head-canon explains this and all the inconsistencies in what she says about the office by assuming that actually the two of you are a long-partnered-up couple trying some roleplaying to spice up your conjugal life – so go figure that she’s babbling and giddily enthusiastic. Viewed in this light, you might even say there’s something vaguely wholesome about Hot Office.

Of course I’m sure this interpretation is completely untenable if you actually play the full game, and as the encounter gets more explicit things would get unavoidably creepy. But hey, if porn requires buying into a fantasy, I can choose which impossible thing I’d prefer to believe in.

(I still don’t have a theory for the no-eyes thing, though. Seriously, is that a thing? Please nobody tell me).

Okay, yes, I’ll confess it, when I read the title I did a double take and my brain couldn’t help making a terrible joke: “you just slice them really thin and layer them, same as the eggplant.” I can’t have been the only one who thought that, right?

I am going to hell.

Despite the evidence of that first paragraph, I actually do like animals quite a lot (including cats!) and so the wholesome comedy on display here quickly put that awkwardness in the past. How to Make Eggplant Lasagna was an entry in the heretofore-unknown-to-me Recipe Jam, games entered into which were supposed to incorporate a complete, cookable recipe (my brain also can’t help wondering whether anyone submitted an entry with a literal recipe for jam: it’d be the Recipe Game Jam jam recipe game). The approach to the theme here is straightforward: you’re trying to cook the eponymous recipe, but you also have two cats who like to involve themselves in the process, and making lasagna is of course relatively time-consuming, with a bunch of different time-dependent steps where a distraction can make things go awry…

I am a sucker for the one-thing-going-wrong-after-another silliness of farce, and cooking provides a perfect framework for escalating accidents, mistakes, and bad judgment calls to threaten to bring everything crashing down into disaster, while having adorable and (mostly) innocent kitties be the vectors of destruction keeps things from getting ill-spirited. And the comedy here is very well done – a solid three quarters of my notes for this game just consist of pasted-in excerpts with me saying “lol” right after them. An example at random:

"Unfortunately it’s Boris. He’s the bigger (and dumber) of your two cats, but despite having the body of a black fuzzy cinder block he also has the soul of a small Victorian orphan."

Another:

"You scoop up Natasha and place her on the ground. She hops right back up on the stove. Having been left with no alternative, you grab your trusty squirt bottle and squirt her right in the face. She blinks at you indignantly and doesn’t move."

Structurally, you face a gauntlet of one dilemma after another: do you try to keep your workspace clear of cats, or leave them be so long as they’re far enough away that you can get your chopping done? When they start to tear things apart in the other room, do you pause your cooking or just let them cause damage until they get bored? There’s rarely a clear right answer, as the best-case scenario typically only allows you to keep chaos at bay for a few more minutes, but at a cost of losing some of the ingredients, or cutting short a key step in the cooking, or just tiring yourself out. I’m not actually sure what’s going on under the hood, here – there aren’t interface elements telling you how much time you have left to cook, or anything else to provide you with an objective view of how you’re doing. And when I replayed, it sometimes felt like slightly different challenges were being thrown at me even when I made similar choices leading up to them. I sometimes felt that there might be a degree of randomness determining which events happened, and sometimes that there were a few key statistics being tracked, but whether it’s one or the other, or both, I think this black-box approach was a good one: nothing kills farce deader than it feeling mechanical, so the obfuscation was worth it in my book (though I did notice one slight inconsistency: in my most successful playthrough, I was told I’d made a lasagna whose “cheese on top is beautifully crispy”, which sounds nice except the last decision I’d made before popping it in the oven was to cut my losses and not chase Natasha around in a futile attempt to get back the cheese package so I could sprinkle the final layer on top).

So yeah, if you like cooking, cats, or shenanigans, I think you’ll have fun with this one – it honestly made me glad I’m usually only cooking with a toddler these days, since at least he mostly understands English and only takes perverse delight in throwing everything everywhere like 15% of the time, meaning he compares favorably to a cat on both of those criteria. It’s funny, the cats are cut; heck, the recipe even sounds good, though I’m not fool enough to try anything this complex until my son’s much older.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the borderline-compulsive way that I can only either review zero or all games in an IF competition to learn that I can get oddly obsessive in how I approach other games too. Take immersive sims: the best ones, like Thief or Dishonored, offer a broad panoply of tools for engaging with multiple deeply-implemented systems, and are at their best when you improvise, roll with the punches, and enjoy the complex way all these interactions lead to emergent gameplay. Me? I prefer to hoard every consumable I come across instead of using a single one, and ignore just about every weapon or supernatural ability in favor of just hitting each baddy in the back of the head with a sock full of quarters. Since of these games aren’t designed assuming that you’re only using 5% of your options, this can often be quite hard, so I often wind up abusing the quickload key, running through particularly tricky setups again and again: maybe if I throw a crate over there to create a distraction, I can nab guard number one when he comes to investigate and create a hole in the patrol pattern to get the others? No, OK, so what about climbing the wall over here and getting the drop on guard number two when he briefly pokes his head into the alley? No, so maybe next time…

Playing Dark Communion is kind of like that – it’s a supercompressed horror scenario that sees you and another girl investigating an abandoned church, at which point things quickly go wrong and you’ve got to face a gauntlet of lightning-fast decision points to try to make it out. It’s clearly designed for multiple replays, inasmuch as it tracks your successes as well as your failures (plus some bonus achievements) so you can see how much of the possibility-space you’ve plumbed, and for me it evoked that same rhythm of repeating a familiar gameplay loop but intentionally introducing small deviations – maybe wait an extra beat before investigating the choir loft this time? – to see if I could get an optimal result.

Where the metaphor breaks down is that the choices you have aren’t purely about guiding your character through the scenario. In fact the very first one you’re offered asks you define your relationship with Lianna, the other girl: is she your sister, someone you’ve got a crush on, or just some acquaintance you wound up going on an adventure with? At first I was bit nonplussed by this choice, because of course the emotional connection you’ve got with Jane rando will be much weaker than the one you’ve got with a sibling, which feels like it should have a significant impact on the story. And it does! These different choices of relationship significantly alter Lianna’s motivations, and the options available to you at particularly high-stress moments. It’s a neat bit of design because the fundamentals of the narrative remain the same, which maintains the loop-y, accretive nature of the gameplay, but they get remixed and stay fresh by virtue of their new configuration.

As for what those elements are – well, they are fairly generic horror beats, though they’re worked through efficiently and effectively. The church is properly spooky, with the descriptions sprinkling in a light theme of alienation:

"A space that was made to hold throngs of people, voices joined in song, speaking and kneeling in unison, eating ceremonial bread and drinking ceremonial wine. Communion. Now it’s dead and silent, and you, who never even believed in God—you’re the last person who belongs."

The terrible thing, once it gets on-screen, doesn’t get much by way of explanation, which is usually something I dislike in horror – you can definitely take the lore-dumping too far, but one gribbly monster is much the same as another, so give me the tortured backstory and scraps of worldbuilding dripping with implications – but it works fine here since it means the replays aren’t burdened by the need to run around collecting information that the player already knows. The scope of the variation in the potential scenarios means that the thematic connection between the horror and the interpersonal stuff going on with you and Lianna is sometimes tighter and sometimes looser – because of this, I felt like the playthrough where Lianna was a potential romantic partner felt more canonical than the others – but the tropes being invoked are all sturdy ones for the supernatural horror genre, so there’s never too much of a mismatch.

It all adds up to a compelling experience that maybe doesn’t have that much power in any given playthrough, but winds up more than the sum of its parts as you experiment with all the different things you can build with this Girls in Spooky Church Lego set. Even if you’re not moved to exhaust every single possibility – I confess I didn’t get two of the bonus achievements – and the set of tools you’ve got to confront the monster isn’t that broad in any iteration, there’s still more than enough here to make for a satisfying half-hour of playing and replaying. It’s just a shame there are no smoke bombs to collect and never use…

I believe a lot of things that might not have as much hard evidence as some people might prefer. I believe the White Album is the best one the Beatles ever recorded. I believe a good dark beer is far superior to any IPA. I believe it’s worth getting involved in politics. But no matter what receipts you show me, I don’t think I will ever be able to truly believe that Labyrinthine Library of Xleksixnrewix (I will not type that correctly ever again) was written in four hours. I’m by no means accusing the authors of fraud, let me be clear, and I can see that it leverages a bunch of pre-written extensions so I can even see how the trick must have been done. And yet, when I contemplate what’s here – a remappable maze a la the best bit of Enchanter, an intuitive automap, thirty different library sections each with their own in-jokes, and a tightly-designed Dungeon-Keeper style metapuzzle bringing all of these pieces together – I am just in awe that this was entered into an EctoComp’s Petit Mort category (there’s a cool feelie too, though I believe those don’t count against the time limit at least).

The conceit here is that you’re a kobold-librarian midway up the totem-pole at the eponymous archive, which in addition to orderly daytime visits from scholars, is also subject to nightly raids by uncouth adventurers hell-bent on pillaging the place for lost artifacts and recondite secrets. Tonight, it’s your section’s turn in the barrel, so it’s up to you to construct a deathtrap that will rebuff the intruders and leave you well-positioned for advancement to Second Assistant Librarian. The most important thing to say about this premise is that it is delightful beyond all belief; the protagonist’s doughty self-importance, and their fancy little hat, are immediately winning, for one thing. The library is also an amazing character all its own; it’s laid out in a thematic grid, with alphabetically-incrementing nouns running along the east-west axis and a series of adjectives similarly running north-south. That means you start out in archaic languages, while going south sees you visit bio-languages, which in turn is west of bio-music and then bio-numerology. Libraries with unique layouts are among my interests (…why yes, I do love Name of the Rose, thanks for asking), and this is a great one, not least because the gags are good – archaic numerology was my favorite:

"Numerology ranks among the oldest fields of magical science—these tomes date back millennia! They contain more than a dash of unnecessary mysticism, although experiments done centuries later proved that avoiding beans really was necessary for good numerological work."

(I’ll just say it, Pythagoras was wrong, fava beans are delicious. Wait, unless that’s because the souls give them extra tastiness?)

All that is just flavor for the puzzle, of course – you don’t need to read a single book or pay attention to any of the room descriptions to solve the game – but they still make the process anything but dry. That’s helpful because the opening is a little intimidating; the instructions do step you through what you’re meant to be doing, but there are a lot of moving pieces so I was glad to have some solid jokes to enjoy while I was trial-and-erroring my way through the setup. The key mechanic here is that unlike in a tower defense game (or Lock and Key, this game’s clearest antecedent), you can’t set traps before the adventurers arrive: you’ve got a magic gong that opens up the secure chest where they’re kept, but that also is the signal for the baddies to start marching in. Instead, the setup phase is about preparing the layout, since you’ve go the magic ability to open and close passages between the various rooms (though only twenty rooms can be part of the maze at a time, which helps keep things manageable – an especially thoughtful limitation, actually, as I only just now remembered that the map is 3-D, since each section has a possible “above” and “below” location, too!)

This means that dealing with the adventurers isn’t just a waiting game, where you stab the Z key over and over and wait five minutes to find out whether you’ve already won – once they’re in the maze, you need to run to the area where the traps are kept, and then scramble deploy them even as those vicious miscreants are marauding through the passageways, ready to shoot you down if they catch the merest sight of you. This lends a pleasant dynamism to proceedings; even though the puzzle is pretty simple once you understand all the rules for how the traps work, and how the adventurers behave, implementing the solution still requires active thought to come up with and carry out your plan without getting skewered, and the details will vary based on how exactly you’ve constructed your maze. I wouldn’t say this gives the game replay value, exactly – there are only three traps at your disposal, and I’m pretty sure they need to be deployed in a specific way and in a specific order to attain victory – but it does mean that my playthrough felt like it was uniquely mine; I brought the adventuring party down in demonic oikology (which is to say, the interior decoration that most appeals to the mephitic taste), which seemed the appropriate place to do it.

All told, this is a heck of a clever game, marrying a lovely theme with engaging writing and a puzzle that made me feel smart. Most authors could spend 40 hours and still barely succeed at one of these pillars; to accomplish all in a tenth of that time is something miraculous – just as miraculous as me being able to spell the game’s name from memory: folks, believe me when I say you should drop everything and go play Labyrinthine Library of Xacklexendrewxixix!

Okay, I was close. Kinda.

The Faust legend is an old one – Marlowe’s take goes back to the early 17th Century, and of course there are many medieval and classical antecedents similarly featuring deals with the devil. But it’s one that’s got many modern incarnations, too: Thomas Mann reworked the story to juxtapose Mephistopheles with the Nazi regime, The Master and Margarita does the same with the Soviets, but there are lots of other more or less elastic adaptations. The mere fact of reinterpretation perhaps doesn’t mean that much in our current reboot-heavy culture, but Dr. Faust has a couple hundred years even on Spider Man, so it’s worth considering what’s responsible for the myth’s longevity. Beyond the obvious vicarious pleasure of seeing all the joys that a life of sin can offer (portrayed inside of a moralizing frame offering plausible deniability, of course), the fun of a capering, too-clever-by-half devil, and the compelling image of a scholar who’ll stop at nothing for knowledge – surely there are more than a few literary critics who flatter their egos by seeing something of Faust in themselves – it also satisfies a primitive desire for punishment: Faust makes a rash deal, promises something he shouldn’t, and has to face the consequences. Even if he is sometimes saved in the end, he earns his redemption, and the story as a whole reifies the idea that a moral order exists, which is comforting even if the details of said order may or may not be defensible.

The protagonist of The Revenant’s Lament, John Cassidy King (who winds up going by a variety of names and pronouns over the course of the game, so I’m going to stick with King and they/them pronouns for ease of discussion) certainly seems to believe in the reality of punishment, and even crave it to a certain extent. This is an EctoComp entry so tortured protagonists are de rigueur, but the details here are compellingly specific: King is an Old West cowboy, born as a girl but living now as a man, who escaped a domineering, vicious father though not without committing some crimes in return. They ride their father’s stolen horse but expect it to turn on them at any moment, and it’s not surprising that that guilty conscience seems to hover over the conversation they have when a white-clad stranger shows up at their campfire, offering any wish King pleases just for a song and the warmth of the flames – the narration is close-third on King throughout, but it still judgmentally notes that King is being selfish when asking what the visitor can offer as a gift. And when it appears that the stranger can make good on his extravagant promise, what does King wish for but to live forever, to forestall the day of reckoning as long as they can. And when that decision has consequences – because of course it does – King fights mightily against their fate, but still seems half to believe they deserve what’s coming to them.

Tragedies can’t hold the player in suspense as to their outcomes, so they need a solid dose of pathos to really deliver, and this Revenant’s Lament has in spades. The prose here is very good, propulsive and showing equal facility with drawing characters and displaying well-turned images. Here’s an early bit of scene-setting:

"The trading post is just across the street from the post office, the hitches outside occupied by tall, painted horses who graze on sparse grass, shuffle and snort and wait for their riders to return. The type of creature to make John nervous, beasts so assured of their own existence that fear becomes an afterthought."

And here’s the devil himself:

"The lonesome stranger doesn’t look old. For the briefest of seconds, he looks like John’s father, smiles in the same crooked way, his thin lips curling back into a snarl or sneer, nothing real in the expression. A coyote grin; knowing something John doesn’t. And then he’s a stranger again, one with short, slicked back salt and pepper hair and the shadow of a beard across his jaw, one with eyes black as a clouded night, empty, dull, filled with flame."

Every once in a while it does tack on one clause too many after a comma, or get a small detail wrong (the dead man’s hand was a pair of aces and a pair of eights, not a full house), but that’s only the kind of thing that you’d notice if you were taking notes for a review (er.). The themes here are relatively straightforward ones – identity, sin, all that stuff – but they’re played with a lovely richness of tone, elevating what could have been merely pulp material in lesser hands.

The interactivity is also nicely handled. King is something of a passive character, often deferring their choices to what others wish, and this is nicely mirrored in choices that wind up channeled into a single outcome (either through narrating abortive attempts that turn out futile, or graying out seemingly-valid options to make clear that there’s only one path forward). There is one significant moment of choice at the end, leading to substantially different denouements; by that point events have progressed so far that the outcome is always tragic, but it is an engaging moment of agency by way of contrast with the rest of the game. And this approach does mean that the moments when King does take the reins and articulate what they want for themselves stand out, and land with some force.

The one thing holding the Revenant’s Lament back is its pacing. The plot here is compelling, with a lot of incident – I was very invested in following King’s story to its end – and the characters and prose also help sustain interest. But nonetheless there are a few sequences that felt quite slow to me, notably an extended series of vignettes towards the middle of the story that went on a bit too long, and ill-judged timed text at both the opening and closing of the game which undercut the moments that should have been the most powerful – I know the intention was to slow down and emphasize the significance of what’s happening, but the reality is that I alt-tabbed to check my email until I could actually read the story again.

If I wound up spending a bit longer with King as a result, though, that’s hardly something to lament. The game offers a compelling character study, with a meditation on guilt and violence that’s entirely in line with what the Western genre does best while interjecting unique themes and story beats I’d never exactly seen before – it’s a worthy addition to the deal-with-the-devil canon, even if the reader does wish King had been able to be better at forgiving themself.

I mentioned in my review of Remembrance that a straightforward structure for Single Choice Jam games is to reserve the choice for the final bit of the game, using the opening and middle to establish stakes and build up to the drama of the one place where there’s player agency, and then ramify the endings according to the path the player opts to take. There’s nothing wrong with that approach at all, but it’s also interesting to see another entry in the jam subvert that structure and call into question whatever this “agency” thing it is we think we’re talking about. Chinese Family Dinner Moment also stands out from its peers in the jam by being a parser game; the very concept of “choices” fits awkwardly into the standard parser game format, inasmuch as typically they offer quite a large range of potential inputs (you can type anything you want, and might get a customized response) but also often constrain the player to a stultifyingly-linear plot. So what, exactly, counts as a choice and what doesn’t?

Let’s put in a pin in that; don’t worry, we’ll be circling back soon enough.

Shifting from structure to themes, CFDM makes no bones about the fact that it’s about alienation. The protagonist is a young Chinese person who’s recently come back from studying abroad in the U.S., which their parents have used as an occasion to throw a bigger Lunar New Year party than usual. And on every level they feel disconnected: from the casually racist attitudes of their family and family friends, from their narrowly-materialist view of what matters, from their choice of food to serve (they’ve gone vegan), even from the plausibly-deniable sexual assault they endure and from their own physical reality:

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"You don’t like your body."

Make no mistake, this is a downbeat game; there’s some humor, but it’s almost all dark and derives from how unselfconsciously awful the other characters are. Here’s some dating advice from an aunt:

“You better not get a white woman since white women can’t cook. And you definitely don’t want to get a black woman because they’re criminals … or an Indian because their cooking smells.

“Between you and me,” she continues, whispering in your ear, “Chinese women are a bit better, but have you read the news? That lady tricked her husband into giving up his cash. That’s why you shouldn’t trust us devious Chinese women. Get a Japanese woman. They are polite and deferential to their husbands — unlike me!”

The picture being painted here is very specific to a particular socioeconomic cultural stratum, of course, but I have a friend who was subject to almost this same tirade, word for word, except he got it from a Persian woman warning him off of other Iranian-Americans. So while the details are all well-chosen to root the game in its milieu, I think it also succeeds in creating resonance with anyone who’s ever chafed at the chauvinistic, greedy, blinkered principles of friends and family after starting to be exposed to a broader understanding of the world, and questioning what received wisdom tells them is their place in it (Chinese people, of course, don’t have a monopoly on either side of this equation).

I use “picture” advisedly here, since the player’s role in CFDM is largely a passive one, but one that requires the player’s active complicity. There are conversations that play out, uncomfortable situations that occur, and an unsuccessful attempt to take refuge by retreating to social media (if you thought your relatives were shallow and transactional…), but while you might expect these to be implemented as events that occur according to a timer system that ticks onward regardless of what you do, in fact by default scenes are mostly static. Instead, time generally advances only when you type LISTEN; this is a canny design decision, because of course your silence means that your interlocutors feel free to fill the air with their discriminatory nonsense or otherwise play out their anti-human pathologies. But since you’re allowing them, if not inviting them, to do so, can you say that you’re so much better? There’s even a late-game sequence that makes this explicit, as LISTEN leads to you actually speaking up, though not for yourself, as it leads you to repeat your relatives’ prejudices about poor people and black folks and trans people right back to them, validating and reifying their biases.

This is of course deeply unpleasant, but as I said above, I played through the game expecting that it was building to a point where I’d finally have a choice to rebel. As it came close to the end, I thought I’d spotted the moment: there’s a family picture to wrap up the evening, and as everyone prompted me to say cheese, I saw the opportunity for a gesture of quiet dissent, at least FROWNing to create some visible distance. But no, I was surprised to see, that wasn’t an option: again, all there was to do was LISTEN, and go along with the crowd.

Is CFDM a zero-choice game instead of a single-choice one, then? Well, no; after finishing I checked out the source code and saw that there’s one other option that’s always available: the out-of-world command QUIT is altered to have diegetic effect here, and you can invoke it at any time. It doesn’t exactly let you achieve catharsis, though – instead of a self-righteous denunciation of your family’s reactionary values that validates your identity and maybe starts to change their minds, you get a response indicating that running out of the restaurant caused a small scandal that impacts both you and the rest of your family. No matter what, you’re in this together.

What are we to make of the moral universe thus established? Per the implementation of LISTEN, allowing yourself to be a victim makes you culpable in the small-minded bigotries of your family; per the implementation of QUIT, refusing to be culpable makes you a victim and tars your family with guilt by association. Some might say this is no choice at all, since both ends are so bad, but are choices just about outcomes? And does the possibility of even an unguessable choice that doesn’t wind up changing anything somehow still bestow freedom? For all that Chinese Family Dinner Moment is studiously anchored to its context, it’s nonetheless one of the most Existentialist pieces of IF I’ve encountered – we can hope that material circumstances will change and liberate the protagonist from their subaltern status, but even that won’t blunt the horns of the dilemma that’s depicted here.

One of the things I like best about IF is its austerity. Mainstream video games have had decades to develop the sensory delights they offer, from photorealistic graphics to pleasingly responsive interfaces to viscerally satisfying sound affects, but I often find the humblest piece of interactive fiction more impressive because it’s living and dying just by its text. Sure, there can be various bells and whistles on both the parser and choice-based side of things – integrated music, some attractive pixel art, that sort of thing – but to be honest I find that stuff rarely makes much difference to me when I’m reflecting on my response to a game: it’s all about the words, and how they’re used. So it’s hopefully a marker of DOL-OS’s aesthetic achievement that the main thing I keep coming back to is how pretty it is.

The game presents itself as a sort of found-object piece: the conceit is that it’s far in the future and you discover an old but still functional computer, so you decide to undertake some digital archaeology. It seems as though it dates from some time at least a few years on from our present, so strictly speaking it doesn’t make sense that the presentation relies on 80s-era markers – a yellow-green palette, graphics broken up by scan lines, chunky, pixelated icons – but this is what my brain, at least, thinks a computing artifact should look like, so I think it’s an inspired choice. And it commits hard to the conceit; every font, image, and glitched-out display is note-perfect. Similarly, I don’t know what kind of work was needed to torture Twine to create an interface that functions exactly like I remember the old Apple II ones working, but it’s similarly an impressive achievement – navigating the file system is immediately intuitive, and there are myriad extras all the way up to interactive implementations of hangman and sudoku. Truly, it’s a triumph – if, instead of a self-contained piece of IF, it was embedded in a AAA game like one of the later Fallouts, it would inspire excited PC Gamer blog pieces about this awesome Easter Egg everyone should check out.

(Now that I’ve typed that out, both in presentation and plot I realize that DOL-OS would perfectly fit as one of those terminals you occasionally run across in Fallout – I’m curious if there was any direct inspiration there?)

As for that plot, there’s a fair bit of it. DOL-OS proceeds in three distinct layers, with the game’s two puzzles gating progression between each act. The first act is a collage, with a variety of different documents painting a picture of a repressive, authoritarian society. The files on offer include news stories about public executions, official histories, annotated literary texts, official documents… it’s a real mélange, and while there are a few connections between the various small stories on offer, those function more as bonus insights; the point is just to experience the many different ways a society like this commits violence against its citizens. The writing here is often stilted, reflecting the way that fascist states manage to use language bluntly while still avoiding saying what they mean:

"We encourage still that anyone having had contact with The Gendarme to deliver to the nearest police station any information that might to help recover these documents or in relation to the young woman and her connections."

(I should note that the game was translated from French – it won last year’s French Comp – so some of these stylistic tics might be a result of that process. It still works well, though).

There’s room for a bit of humor, though – the story implied in the terse notation that one criminal was punished for “[stealing] a goose thrice (same goose)” is marvelous.

The second section is more focused; now the documents are following a young researcher who’s been brought on board a mysterious project, that involves both digitizing historical documents and developing an AI. This part of the game proceeds fairly linearly, as you read his diary and his involvement in the project gets deeper and deeper. The final section sees you engage with the research project directly and shifts from the document-review gameplay of the first two-thirds of the game to a more traditional choice-based interface, which effectively raises the stakes and indicates that the focus has moved from understanding what’s on this old computer to deciding what to do with it.

It’s a nicely-paced progression, and as a result I’ll reserve in-depth discussion of where the game winds up going for a spoiler section; suffice to say that that I think the plot works well, though perhaps takes a slightly more tropey and bloodless approach to an issue that could have been rendered with a bit more social realism. And while I’m being slightly critical, I’ll also say that the puzzles are rather desultory; there’s a guess-the-password bit that’s got some very blunt clueing, and a jigsaw-puzzle captcha where the main challenge was avoiding getting a headache from squinting at a bunch of yellowish smudges. They’re by no means bad, but at the same time I can’t help but think I’d have enjoyed the game more if they’d either been made more demanding, or dropped entirely so that progress just depended on reaching certain milestones in the document-review process. These are especially niggly niggles even by my standards, though – DOL-OS stands as a really impressive game that deservedly won the laurel in its Francophone version, and us English speakers are lucky to get another bite at the apple.

(Spoiler - click to show)Right, so the revelations: it turns out that the authoritarian era is well in the past by the time the researcher starts up his work, and in fact at first his job is just to digitize the records you find in the first chunk so they can be used as AI training data. The judicial system is overburdened in his time, you see, so the project is all about creating to a tool to speed up the slow business of deciding guilt and punishment; the previous project lead gets chewed up by the stress and ethical compromises, so the researcher gets thrust into the limelight, at which point it becomes clear that the bosses don’t care that the AI is bloodthirsty in the extreme. The story breaks off somewhat at this point, but when the third act kicks off and you’re able to engage the AI in direct conversation, it becomes clear that it was in fact deployed and wound up passing judgment on a whole lot of folks. This final tete a tete makes clear a lot of the stuff that’s established by implication in the first two sequences before building to a climactic choice of either consigning the AI to its doom on the failing terminal hardware, or copying it over in a fresh install.

This all works well enough, and I have to give the game kudos for creating a “save the AI y/n” moral dilemma where I was all in on letting the thing die, but I did feel like it could have played things with a bit more nuance. These kind of systems are being implemented in real life – most notably, a lot of jurisdictions have experimented with algorithms to make recommendations for who should be offered bail after being charged with crimes. You can see how this might be a good idea in theory, but in practice mostly they just wind up laundering racist decision-making via a Big Data disguise; there are well-known cases where first-time Black offenders aren’t recommended bail, while white career criminals get every benefit of the doubt, because that’s what the algorithms learned to do from the training data. Beyond these instances of straight bias, there’s also a ideological element of horror here; in the Anglo-American criminal system, at least, decisions of guilt are consigned to a jury of ordinary people, and taking a social judgment and turning it into a data-driven one is a radical shift, and I wish more hay was made of it. But DOL-OS mostly refrains from plumbing direct real-life analogues or self-consciously putting big ideas into play; the second section sticks to the well-worn Frankenstein-y scientists-create-monster-that-escapes-their-control plot beats, and the third section doesn’t create much nuance or ambiguity. All told that means I found DOL-OS an effective bit of sci-fi horror – and again, a gorgeous example of the form – but I was disappointed it didn’t try to do a bit more in the way of social comment.

Here’s our next entry in the review-a-thon as a jam of jams: Remembrance was originally entered in the Single Choice Jam, which, as it says on the tin, required authors to construct games with only one moment where the player has multiple options. There are several potential structures that satisfy this constraint, and Remembrance opts for what’s probably the most straightforward: the game consists of an initial linear section that previews and builds up the significance of the choice, then shunts the player into one of four short, somewhat-different endings based on what they pick.

The flesh that goes on those bones is anything but straightforward, though. The protagonist is a young woman – maybe in your early twenties – who lives on the world’s first asteroid-mining station, and whose mother has recently died; you’re going back to Earth to inter her ashes, and have to decide which of a quartet of objects to bring along to leave by her urn as a memorial. As the game tells the story of your relationship with her through each of the potential offerings, you get a sense of the challenges you both faced relating to each other: the gifts that pushed you to be someone you’re not, the art pieces that she didn’t know what to make of. It’s narrated in a compellingly wry voice that lets the grief show by its absence, and which combines worldbuilding and character work with impressive economy:

"It’s been about a year since she died; the trip can only be made within a narrow window every 370 days or so, and your mother’s heart attack happened right after the last shuttle left. Punctuality was never her strong suit."

The game also succeeds at making its situations relatable by leaning into specificity: I’m not a tomboy who isn’t into jewelry, but I’ve definitely had interests that diverged from my parents’ expectations; I’m not a Jew who can’t cook the family recipes because there’s no honey on the space station, but there are certainly a lot of traditions my family hasn’t been able to keep up due to time and distance. And there was one moment where the specificity was, in fact, my specificity: the worn wooden box the mother stored her recipe cards in seems on its face identical to the wooden box my mom stores her recipe cards in.

The endings are finely-tooled as well. The temptation with this structure would be to have the choice be a Bioware-style BIG CHOICE, with each of the objects directly corresponding to some specific aspect of your relationship with your mom that would then take primacy in the final sequence – leaning into rebellion, or acceptance, or spirituality, or what-not. Remembrance resists this temptation, to its credit; there’s clearly a particular cluster of associations and emotions bound up in each object, but they’re not simple to unpack, and while the ending text does change in ways that feel satisfyingly responsive to the choice you make, there’s no radical branching or splintering of outcomes. Everything goes just as you expect it to, it’s just that the details are different.

With that said, I do think I would have liked the game better if there was a broader set of objects to choose from – I don’t mean that four is necessarily too few, but it was notable to me that all of the objects are ones that are as much, if not more, about you as they are about your mother. Two of them are gifts she gave you, one is something you made, and the last is something of hers that it seems like she wanted you to have after she died. As a result, no matter what choice you make, the remembrance-offering winds up presenting your mother through the memory-prism of her daughter; for many parents, that might well be what they’d want, but I think it would have been interesting to have at least one choice that was more clearly focused on how she understood herself, and how she’d want posterity to remember her. I can see the argument that that might have weakened the game’s focus on the mother/daughter relationship, but who we are when we’re alone determines who we are when we’re with someone else, after all. Perhaps the stronger reason against such an option is that Remembrance doesn’t really strike me as being about mourning as such; the stories it tells are more about how we understand ourselves in the light of the people who helped us become who we are, intentionally or not. And yes, that understanding is a choice, but it’s not a clean one.