Ratings and Reviews by Mike Russo

Even counting games I’ve tested, I’m only about a third of the way into the Comp, so there’s a long way to go – but I will be shocked if, at any point between now and mid-October, any game makes me mutter “what the fuck” under my breath half as many times as The Witch Girls.

This is a compliment! We’re dealing here with a choice-based horror game that uses its supernatural elements to lend a visceral sort of terror to the story of a pair of young Scottish teenage girls grappling with their budding sexuality. A risk of this kind of story is that the magic stuff can be too cleanly allegorical, too direct a stand-in for the real-world analogues, which makes everything feel schematic; another risk is that the supernatural elements get too convoluted and the plot gets too melodramatic, leaving the raw emotion that’s the real engine here behind and replacing it with genial pulp nonsense. Witch Girls neatly swims between this Scylla and Charybdis, with truly horrible horrors whose links to the traumas routinely inflicted on pubescent girls are never at all obfuscated, but which are too uniquely loathsome to be waved away as mere puffs of metaphor. Like, try this on for size:

"As the river rushed by, he shuffled towards you on the sand, then pulled you closer.

"Your first kiss tasted of ash. Of death and decay and nothing. You’d summoned him into this world, yet when your lips met his, you felt nothing for him. He didn’t like you. He didn’t ask you out because he thought you were cool. You’d grown him from rotted lemon juice."

Yes, per the blurb what our witchlings get up to is performing a love spell, but you’re forced to scavenge the ritual’s ingredients from the back of the pantry or the Avon stockpile of a vicious piano teacher; understandably, depending on your choices there’s scope for things to go very wrong.

The weird zombie boyfriend is just medium-wrong, for reference – it gets worse:

"It was grotesque. One milky eye floated in a sea of aspic. The creature had been washed ashore by the low tide, and foam and specs of wet sand clung to its translucent, lumpy body.

"Morag scooped it up. You started—didn’t jellyfish sting? But she cradled it against her green school jumper with no pain.

"She stroked a chewed-down fingernail above the eye, against what might have been its brow.

"‘It’s our,’ she laughed, ‘lover.’"

(I have a lot of text from this game saved into my notes, but I’ll try to keep this review from just turning into a copy-paste of all the bits that made me squirm, since we’ll be here a while).

The prose is perfect even when it’s just describing a beach or a record shop, but it’s at its best when effortlessly braiding together sex and horror: the protagonist is thirteen, equally entranced and repulsed by the prospect of a boyfriend, wanting the social credit and sense of maturity but ignorant and ambivalent at best about what you would do with one – or what one would do with you. The story can go a lot of dark places, with significant branching based on your decisions, but Witch Girls avoids coming off as misery porn because of a crucial choice: the protagonist is always in control. I played through to reach all the endings (in a nice touch, after your first time finishing, you unlock a list of possible resolutions and an interactive flowchart that makes reaching the others simple), and there’s never one where you’re only a victim: you can say no to anything at any time, meaning that there’s a queasy complicity to whatever awful deeds you commit or consent to (or “consent to” – Witch Girls is under no illusions that that’s a simple concept, especially given the social strictures of rural Scotland).

It also helps that all the different ways the story can play out are in dialogue with each other. You can conjure up a perfect homunculus who instantly charms your parents into letting him sleep over every night, or you can get the aforementioned lump up jelly, and you can go along with their respective importunations because you want what they can offer – status at school, proof to yourself that you’re grown-up, even a child – or you can unmake them with oft-terrifying violence. But they all revolve around the dilemma of identifying what you want. It makes for an authentically confused portrait of adolescence, because no one understands you, not your parents, not the various inhumans who are your only potential romantic partners, not the best friend you don’t realize actually seems to be using you, and certainly not yourself. That’s more horrifying than anything in Witch Girls (OK, except maybe for the (Spoiler - click to show)hairy tooth bit).

One of our species’ best qualities is also its worst, which is our ability to get used to just about anything given enough time. It’s responsible for inspiring tales of perseverance in the face of unimaginable privation, as well as mule-like inertia in the face of unjust and intolerable situations. And it’s the reason why, three installments into the Bubble Gumshoe casefiles, I no longer register the premise – of a hard-boiled private detective trying to solve brutal murders, except everyone and everything is made out of candy – as especially comedic. Sure, the rain comes down as syrup, and the cop losing his guts at a gory crime scene is puking up raisins, but save for these superficialities Sugar City could be any other post-industrial hellscape with rising unemployment and sinking life expectancy: the jobs are gone, drugs are flooding the street, even the priests are in bed with the mob, and even when an honest private dick fights like hell to close a case, justice invariably comes too late for the innocent. That’s just how life goes in Shotown.

Beyond familiarity, though, part of the reason I was able to sink so seamlessly back into this world is the immersiveness of the implementation, a clear step up from the prior two installments. Those earlier cases were solid fun, but were smaller affairs that didn’t take full advantage of all Inform’s affordances – JP is a clear step up in ambition. Most obviously, it’s physically larger, inasmuch as its map encompasses locations from both of the prior games plus more beside, with many returning characters as well as a bunch of new ones. There’s more depth too, with a variety of puzzle types, an action set-piece in the middle, and an accusation system that requires you to use evidence to try to establish a suspect’s motive, means, and opportunity. Keyword bolding also highlights key nouns, so the player doesn’t get lost in this larger playground; it makes for a slick package, with the only places I noticed a slight lack of polish being some missing synonyms (CAUSE not counting for CAUSE OF DEATH, or CHIMNEY for CHIMNEYS).

The mystery is also well-put together this time out, with some red herrings and side-plots, but ultimately feeling like it plays fair – I’d guessed the culprit a bit before getting the last set of clues, which was a satisfying way for the pacing to wind up. It also rewards attention to detail: while there’s a critical path with clearly-highlighted clues, examining sub-components of important objects can give you circumstantial evidence that can move your investigation forward too, and logical deduction will take you far.

There are places where the more traditional puzzles could use a bit of smoothing-out, though – there’s one involving a church confessional that I struggled with for a bit despite having basically the right idea, because I was picturing the confessional’s door-handles incorrectly, and it’s good that there’s increasingly-obvious clueing in that action sequence since I wouldn’t have hit on the solution otherwise (though it was grimly badass when I did execute it). There’s also a riddle-type challenge that requires pretty deep out-of-game knowledge, either of baking or a particular TV show, unless you opt to get a hint via reprehensible means.

For each of these wonkier challenges, though, there’s a solid if not inspired one – a multi-step puzzle to get some keys out from behind a window feels intuitive while having you jump through some a Rube Goldberg-esque hoops, and figuring out the adult bookstore password is sublimely dumb. And there’s a big hint file with maps, subtle prods, and complete solutions available if you do get hung up. The one place where I did hit a bit of a wall was the very end, though, due to the lack of much of a denouement – you see, after I accused a suspect and presented the evidence I thought should convict them, I got a message that I’d ended the game with one false accusation. Figuring that I must have gotten things wrong, I started going down my list of suspects and seeing if I could get the crime to stick to anyone else, getting increasingly desperate as my options got more and more marginal. Turns out I’d gotten it right the first time – or technically second, as I’d accused someone else just prior to fingering my prime suspect, just to see how the mechanic worked and try showing some evidence to them (you’re only allowed to SHOW stuff to characters after you levy an accusation). So the false accusation was just referring to that test case, and I’d gotten things right after all – a little bit of a cleaner outro might have helped me be a little less dumb, though in retrospect most of the blame lies with me.

I’ve been treating JP as a serious mystery game, because it very much works on those terms and the core of the story is pretty downbeat. But as I close I should acknowledge that there are still some really good jokes! I liked how Sugar City’s money has portraits of George Noshington, or that its desperate and destitute gather to pray at the Church of the Immaculate Confection. And it’s not all candy puns: if you try to wear a hat when you’ve already got your trusty fedora on, the parser shakes its head at you, as that “would literally be putting a hat on a hat.” So yeah, there are some chuckles here, but they’re the hard, cynical chuckles of a flatfoot who’s seen too much, and knows she can only accomplish so much – it’s all she can do to stay sweet.

Parenthood is a joy, but an adjunct fact about having a toddler is that your memory is completely shot. So I know that a couple of months ago, I was reading about – or maybe having a conversation about? And actually maybe it was like a year and a bit ago? At a museum or aquarium? – anyway I was in some manner engaging with the fact that major elements of the eel reproductive cycle remained mysterious until just a few decades ago, and there are still some holes in our present understanding. But the details, as the preceding sentence perhaps would indicate, remained fuzzy. So I was sincerely delighted to come across Under the Sea Wind, which is a 1980s-set period piece – apparently based on a Rachel Carson short story – about a scientist traveling the world on a quest to unravel the secrets of eel spawning. It’s a debut game that’s gotten a lot less testing than it needed, but the rough patches can’t take away from the obvious enthusiasm it radiates; it refreshed my store of eel facts just when I needed it.

Structurally, the game’s arranged as a series of vignettes as you move from location to location; you start in Scandinavia, investigating one of the world’s oldest eels (150 so years of age!), then go to Bermuda to collect samples at sea and on land. Gameplay changes up a bit between the segments, with your lab notebook providing specific goals an even some helpful syntax for more unique command; the Sweden segment involves some traditional medium dry goods puzzles, while the oceangoing bit involves a bit of map-reading and a navigation puzzle, and the extend finale requires meticulous exploration. None of them are especially involved or novel, but the variety is nice, and I certainly found that having a scientific objective in view helped make the challenges feel more organic and satisfying to solve. There are some funny lines, too – I enjoyed a part where you need to enlist some youthful help, because at a key moment a boy " possesses the necessary verbs to fashion a fishing rod", and you don’t (the cover art, by the author’s 8 year old kid, is also adorable).

With that said, there’s definitely some tricky sailing along the way. Under the Sea Winds is an Adventuron game, and doesn’t do much to mitigate that system’s parser idiosyncrasies – there are few synonyms (I got hung up for a long time because I hadn’t noticed that PUSH BUTTON wasn’t the same as PRESS BUTTON), the game often pretends to understand actions that it’s actually unable to parse, and movable objects sometimes go unmentioned in room descriptions – while adding a few more bugs besides. Notably, I couldn’t get the save function to work, which is an issue since the game does announce that it’s Nasty on the Zarfian scale for one particular sequence, and in once case an incorrect description made me misunderstand a puzzle <spoiler(the well always displays as 2/3 full, so I wasn’t sure why I needed to fill it with additional water)Bespeaking what appears to have been limited testing, there are a reasonable number of typos, and the generally-easy puzzles tend to be either way overclued or way underclued; the notebook spells out much of what you need to do, but I didn’t see any direct indication of where in the ocean I had to go to collect a sample, for example. Meanwhile, many are implemented in a finicky way that seems to assume you’ll solve them in exactly the order the author intends, even when that doesn’t make sense – for example, in an early puzzle the game won’t let you turn on a hose until you’re carrying an item that can contain water, despite the fact that you’d need to drop the container at a neighboring location to actually be useful.

Still, I managed to muddle through, admittedly sometimes with the help of the walkthrough (which is provided only in video work – why, God, why?). And I’m glad I did, because the game provides an experience like no other; it definitely can get zany, with its Rube-Goldberg puzzle solutions and a magic flying eel haunting your dreams whose origins and agenda go unrevealed, but the steady drip of info on exactly how odd eels are, alongside the novelty of solving puzzles to advance science rather than just amass more inventory objects and treasure, makes me happy to have played Under the Sea Winds, and hopefully armed with more data the next time my son asks me awkward questions about where baby eels come from.

Every once in a while I’ll wander into a conversation about what exactly “literary” fiction is – there are typically scare quotes – and what distinguishes it from genre fiction, and they’re pretty much always frustrating. There are typically aggrieved feelings lurking below the surface for one thing, with proponents of genre fiction feeling like this whole thing is just an arbitrary label cooked up to imply some kinds of books have less value than others, while lit-fic heads find it annoying that their preferred reading material is catching so many strays when for all its relative prestige it’s fairly small and resolutely un-profitable compared to the genre juggernauts. Adding to the feeling that people are mostly talking past each other, “literary” (those aren’t scare quotes this time, I’m just talking about the word) isn’t a very helpful adjective. It’s either too broad – like, anything written down is technically literary – or too narrow – like, it has to be about WASPs cheating on their wives, or maaaaybe people who live in Brooklyn. And attempts to nail it down can wind up being implicitly insulting to other kinds of writing, feeding the already-mentioned bad feelings: literary fiction is fiction where the prose is good, say, or that it’s about important issues and themes. So one of the most interesting things about Grove of Bones, to me, is the way that it takes a premise that could have potentially gone either way, and commits to the genre side of things – it provides a worked example of the difference in a way I found genuinely helpful, and offers a solid adventure story to boot.

That premise is sketched out in the story recited by firelight in the game’s opening sequence. Generations ago, a village was on the brink of starvation when a demonic Johnny-Appleseed figure offered them a terrible bargain: in exchange for a copse of ever-fruiting trees, the villagers would occasionally have to sacrifice one of their own to feed the roots. They’re dragooned into saying yes; over the years they’ve tried different approaches, like ensuring criminals get offered up first, or even trying to avoid paying the price, though in that case the trees take someone at random. The last time that happened, the victim was the protagonist’s spouse – and now, the trees are hungry again, and everyone in the village wants to make sure it’s somebody else’s turn on the chopping block…

There’s a lot you can do with this setup. Focus in on the mob mentality and social dynamics, and you have The Lottery; go abstract, and ensure the victim is an innocent, and you have the political fable of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Or instead of playing with big ideas, you could zoom in: inevitably, the finger points to the protagonist’s child, providing an opportunity to explore the despairing psychology of a widowed parent faced with the final dissolution of their family. But all those would be literary approaches, and Grove of Bones is a piece of genre fiction. So while all these elements are present to a certain degree, they’re not what’s centered: we’re locked to the protagonist’s viewpoint, sure, but the emphasis is on their actions and the next twist of the plot, the next fiendish obstacle they’ll need to struggle to overcome.

That’s totally fine! If the game doesn’t slow down to linger on the political, social, or emotional implications that it raises, that helps it maintain a gripping pace. And despite being written in ChoiceScript, Grove of Bones has low-key character customization (you just pick the gender for the main character and their spouse) and no stats, just a tiny bit of state-tracking, which means it gets to the action quickly and decisions don’t get mediated through min-maxing considerations. Meanwhile, the prose is largely functional and could be cleaner, with a few typos and tense issues, and the occasional piece of awkward phrasing. But one reason literary fiction makes no money is that that level of elegance and polish takes a long time and a lot of rewriting to achieve; meanwhile, Grove of Bones is perfectly capable of throwing out some enjoyably lurid writing despite these niggles:

"Several brawny villagers headed by Larc block any hope of retreat from behind. You’re starting to agree with Morbul, there is something wrong with that man. His face holds the expression of one far too eager to deliver another sacrifice to the grove as he bites into one of the crimson fruits, juice dripping down his chin as his eyes glint with fervour in the firelight."

And for all this focus on action, the climax delivers. You’ve got a manageable but reasonably wide range of potential action available to you as you try to save your kid, and every one of the endings feels like a satisfying resolution to what’s come before. The author’s also kind enough to provide a rewind feature allowing you to try out alternate paths without having to replay the buildup to the confrontation. It makes for an exciting and engaging finale, and the game’s also careful to ensure that you always have some victory to hang onto even in the most bittersweet of the endings (since I’m a parent, I was happy to note there doesn’t appear to be any branch where your child dies). Does this mean Grove of Bones fails to fully explore some of the richer questions it raises in a way that a more literary take on this material would have? Sure, but authorship is about making choices, and the game’s choice of where to focus pays off.

DICK MCBUTTS GETS PUNCHED IN THE NUTS famously is two games in one. As part of author Damon Wakes’s successful plot to win the Golden Banana of Discord, it cunningly rolled an invisible set of dice upon boot-up, and depending on the result slotted the player into either a short, obnoxiously-linear vignette focusing on genital trauma with co-starring roles by Hitler, Darth Vader, and copious vomiting, or a longer, still-obnoxious but not linear scenario featuring better jokes and much less flashing text (I got the first, and hate/loved it). I’m not sure whether the sequel, ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, took the same approach, but this third game goes it one better: I’ve heard people confirm that there’s a similar random sorting of players into either a short, linear version or a longer, more robust one, but even having gotten the latter this time out, I’m confronted with a duality: is this a lackluster DICK MCBUTTS sequel, or an elegant DICK MCBUTTS subversion?

Some grounding in what the thing actually is may (but only may) help answer that question. This time out our protagonist is HEN AP PRAT, a Welsh (I think?) trans woman who’s aware of the title of her game and despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of the prediction (since she does not, at least as the game opens, possess the requisite piece of anatomy), locks herself in her apartment and turns to arts cartomantica to fend off her destiny. The game is in DendryNexus rather than Twine, which allows the card-reading conceit to be rendered quite nicely: you deal yourself a hand of three tarot cards, and clicking on one fires you into a zany vignette that typically involves some form of transformation and/or threat to your groin. Some are branching storylets, others are linear, some appear to lead inevitably to a bad end while others are entirely safe, and some get away from the series’ core conceit that getting kicked in the crotch is funny by redefining what being SMACKED IN THE TWAT even means, like maybe it’s just “twat” like the British slang for someone being kinda clueless, you know? (these are the least funny ones). But make no mistake: play for long enough, and one way or another, the title fulfills itself eventually.

There are a number of things one can say about all this. One is that it’s not as funny as its predecessors. Oh, many of the same ingredients are there, like a rotating cast of supporting characters with similarly-constructed names, and wild leaps across genre and plausibility. And there certainly are some jokes that landed for me, like this bit:

"At the reception to the clinic - which is typically small, drab and mean-spirited, the seats composed of the severed left halves of benches collected from a gallery of brutalists’ responses to the prompt “imagine a tramp says out loud ‘at least it can’t get any worse’ and then sees your work” and the walls decorated with posters of that homophobic dog meme saying shit like “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE” and “THIS IS THE PART WHERE HE SMACKS YOU” - Hen gives her name to the receptionist, clarifies that it’s her real name even though the receptionist didn’t think it wasn’t, then decides she’s better off just standing in the corner of the waiting room to wait."

But the humor typically earned a smile rather than the impossible-to-control chortles of the first games. For all the ridiculousness, the effective comic bits tend to be like this one, more observational, which is new ground for the series – when HEN AP PRAT tries to go big, it just feels like a shadow of its predecessors, going over old gags to diminishing returns. The presentation also makes a big difference; I missed the Geocities-aping blinking lights and colored text, whose garishness made a better accompaniment for the DICK MCBUTTS humor than the understated class of DendryNexus’s basic black. Speaking of DendryNexus, the storylet structure means there’s not much of a sense of progression, as you could potentially play any card at any time – a big departure from the delightful escalations that marked prior installments, with near-misses piling up one after another and plot twists turning things this way and that, before the whole Jenga tower collapses; some of the vignettes attempt similar moves here, but they just don’t have the runway they need to be as effective.

The biggest issues, though, are that 1) unlike the feel-good comedy of a dude wincing in pain as someone thwacks him in the junk, a woman being kicked in the genitals is unpleasant to contemplate, given the prevalence of gender-based and sexual violence in the real world; and 2) that gets dialed up to a thousand when the woman is a trans woman, given that they’re targeted for violence at even higher rates, not to mention that there’s an entire right-wing movement that’s attempting to institute global fascism largely on the basis of a fetishistic obsession with trans peoples’ genitals. When we’re told that Hen huddles in her apartment, afraid of other people because of the risk of sexual violence, that isn’t a fun premise for a comedy game, that’s real life.

So yeah, as a DICK MCBUTTS game, HEN is a bummer. But, is that what it is? Beyond the already-mentioned DendryNexus of it all, HEN is also attributed to Larissa Janus, rather than the first two game’s Hugh. There’s a family resemblance, of course (I’m guessing she goes by Lar), but might we entertain the hypothesis that a different author, or at least a different authorial persona, is making a different point, and in fact using some of the underpinnings of the series to raise some pointed questions – like, asking the player to engage with how they feel when the threat of groin-assault is leveled against people of different genders and with different genitals, and maybe take that to other experiences of gender identity. Or just noting how, for Hen, acquiring a vagina is a dreadful thing that carries with it a promise of violence, which can come at any moment, from any direction, in fact is guaranteed to come. On that reading, some of the queasiness I mentioned above is the point.

I don’t mean to say that HEN is overly dour – this is still a game where one flip of a card can turn you into She-Ra, after all. But “it’s less funny” might not be the damning judgment it would be if the game was just trying to be a gag-filled sequel; if HEN is DICK MCBUTTS 3, it’s only so-so, but if it’s NEMESIS MCBUTTA instead, well, that’s something else entirely.

PS: Oh yeah, and that whole ORIGIN OF THE WORLD subtitle is pretty interesting too, huh? No subtitles for the other two DICK MCBUTTS games, much less one that recalls Courbet’s pornographic provocation, a painting that pointedly exchanges the politely-hairless nudes of the artistic establishment with a vagina drawn from, and to, life.

Mashing up J.R.R. Tolkien with Philip K. Dick isn’t an idea that feels obvious, even in retrospect. Sure, they both gained their greatest popularity in the 60s and each had at least one prominent middle initial, other than that? Tolkien’s reputation rests on a few long books, Dick’s on a flurry of short ones; Dick was the bard of a quintessentially American brand of paranoia, Tolkien of a quintessentially English brand of heroism. One searches in vain in Tolkien for Dick’s signature themes of identity, surveillance, and the contingent nature of reality, while Dick deals with Tolkienian motifs like the quest, the redemption of the powerful by the weak, and the tragedy of corruption infrequently and ironically.

Hobbiton Recall’s synthesis of these two authors at first, then, seems to work only at the level of plot – per the blurb, the game runs through the narrative of We Can Remember it for you Wholesale/Total Recall, except with the Martian espionage angle swapped for adventure in Middle-Earth – rather than any substantive connection. But sadly it swiftly becomes clear that it’s working in one tradition common to both of them: being fucking terrible at writing women. Dick’s women are either ball-cutting shrews or naïve sexpots, while Tolkien’s of course are mostly just nonexistent, but Hobbiton Recall opts for its own particular blend of misogyny by having the protagonist constantly condescend to and belittle his wife, when he isn’t behaving like a helpless baby reliant on her for his basic needs. It’s a blatantly obvious element of the game’s writing, and I suppose it’s possible that it’s part of a game-long arc that eventually sees the main character eat some crow. But if so, the game plays it very straight for at least its first hour, meaning that when I hit a progress-breaking bug, I couldn’t be bothered to try to find a workaround.

I suppose I should say that that’s a shame. It is nice to see a GrueScript game in the Comp, and part of me admires the fact that the game appears to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, since in that first hour I solved a bunch of my dumb apartment puzzles to get out of the house, and then wound up stuck in some unrelated busywork having to do with a urine sample, before finally getting a chance to try out the memory-implanting technology – but instead of landing me in Hobbiton, it just sent me to the hospital where I ran into the fatal bug (I believe that bug has been fixed since I wrote this review). Again, I can’t say for sure whether keeping the player so far away from the actual premise of the game for so long is an accidental design weakness or an intentional provocation, but I admit I was a bit disappointed when I checked the source code and saw that there does appear to be a substantial Middle Earth segment eventually. There are one or two funny jokes (when perusing the memory packages, you respond negatively to the option of remembering a life as an assembly-line worker, because you already are one, only for the sales rep to ask “Yes, but have you ever been an assembly line worker in Kettering?”) and one or two reasonably-satisfying puzzles, like the one where you chase away some hooligans with a stick.

But my god, the whole thing is just so sour. Here’s the introduction of the protagonist’s wife:

"Her tongue was hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a warm patch of drool was forming on her chin. Dave smiled; she looked just like she did when they had met in a crowded bar all those years ago."

What the fuck, game. Right after that, you wake her up in the middle of the night – by pinching her nose closed while she’s sleeping! – to send her to the kitchen to get you a warm glass of milk and a cookie, at which point you’re treated to this I-see-your-what-the-fuck-game-and-raise-you-one-more bit of prose:

"Just the one biscuit, mind, too much sugar at this time of night was liable to turn Dave a bit frisky—and she didn’t want that!

"Dave lay back on his pillow, his hands fumbling down the front of his pyjama pants."

Some other bits from the game’s opening section:

"Mavis has been decorating the landing for the last 3 weeks. You should get on at her to speed things up!"

"It’s the first room guests see when they enter the house, so you are very strict with Mavis about always keeping it nicely hoovered."

"'Would you mind not yawning?' you ask politely. 'Not only is it unbecoming of a lady to yawn at the breakfast table, but I also find it extremely sexually unappealing. And what’s more, you’re putting me off my Coco Pops.'"

"This is where Mavis comes to have a little cry when she’s having one of her ‘episodes’."

It’s not just Mavis – there’s a “joke” later where the death of another worker’s wife is played entirely for laughs, and at the factory there’s a woman who’s hunchbacked and deformed and hideous, and the “joke” here is that nobody talks to her. I suppose it’s not just women who have a bad time of it, as the ill-natured puzzles also include things like playing a screeching tune on the bagpipes to wake up a sleeping cat for no earthly reason. But yeah, it’s definitely mostly about women. At least there is one attractive female character – a sexy nurse who’s having an affair with a married doctor (this is where I hit the bug; I was clearly supposed to use my knowledge of the affair to blackmail the doctor into letting me leave the hospital, but the option never appeared).

If I were trying to be balanced, at this point I’d try to scrape together a few more positive points about the game to offset additional critiques I haven’t yet gotten to (there are more bugs, like a teleporting pen and a urine sample whose description doesn’t update even after you accidentally spill it; several puzzles, like replacing the aforementioned urine with pond water, are underclued or nonsensical, and the “walkthrough” that comes with the game just provides hints and stops about a third of the way in; and the genAI pixel art throughout added one more source of omnipresent irritation to the proceedings). But I can’t find it in me to muster up the energy. I’ll say one thing for Hobbiton Recall – at least next time I read some Tolkien or Dick and roll my eyes at their bad treatment of women, I can think to myself “well, could be worse.”

What do vampires have in common with the X-Men? The glib answer is “Vampire: the Masquerade” – yes, we all played it as superheroes with fangs, no, there’s nothing wrong with that – but the one I had in mind is the racism-analogy problem. See, in any genre fiction where you’ve got a distinct and insular minority who are set apart from the ordinary mass of humanity, like because they’re mutants or they drink blood, it’s tempting to lean into the subtext and start telling stories about how the ways they’re set apart resemble real-world discrimination. There can be some rich vines of pathos and thematic weight to mine here, and it can be a solid on-ramp into political awareness (I can’t definitively claim that various 80s comic books where religious reactionaries whip up vicious mobs had no impact on my current views), so I don’t mean to knock the practice by any means. But it runs into difficulties when you try to take the metaphor too literally, because at the end of the day the people who hate and fear vampires or mutants? They, uh, kind of have a point, given the extreme danger they pose to ordinary people, outside the techniques of control we accept as part of a liberal democracy. It’s not crazy to not want to live next door to a bloodthirsty creature of the night or someone who can turn your curtain rod into a deadly weapon, after all, but this gets awkward when curtain-rod guy is a stand-in for Black people or trans folks or what have you.

There are various strategies for dealing with this, of course, from steering into the skid (I haven’t read it, but I understand there’s a recent X-Men run where mutants basically set up their own nation-state, with an implicit threat of global annihilation keeping the jealous superpowers at bay) to the one Conversation in a Dark Room employs, which is to neuter the threat. Again, I understand the impulse, since the vampires in this game are clearly meant to evoke real-world marginalized groups (the bit of dialogue saying “[y]ou may even have vampire coworkers, you know. It’s not as easy as you think to spot us these days” is a bit on the nose, as is the bit about how the label “vampire” is applied as a blanket term despite the fact that most of them are “mixed”, with varying degrees of human-ness), and part of the point of the game appears to be to put the protagonist’s unexamined group-hatred of vampires under the microscope, so this wouldn’t work the same way if vampires were draining people dry willy-nilly. But there’s part of me that rebels at seeing horror’s ur-predators defanged as comprehensively as they are here: we’re told that rather than drinking human blood, they’ve created a network of humane farms that sustainably harvest non-life-threatening amounts of animal blood, as well as invented synthetic blood alternatives; oh, and they mostly don’t even reproduce, having decided that subjecting other people to their immortal curse would be mean. And as far as we’re told, vampires are a monolithic block who agree with these Jain-style precepts – given that they also don’t burst into flames in the sunlight, they come off as especially long-lived, super nice goths.

This is a shame, because with real menace on the table, Conversation in a Dark Room could be have been a nail-biter. A two-hander where a vampire and the human he’s hired to kill him chit-chat before getting down to the deed is a great premise, and there’s some queasily compelling writing in the dialogue, especially the bits that make it look like what’s happening here is a seduction:

He asks you, “Have you ever done something like this before?”

“No…No, I haven’t. Not like this. But…”

It’s also played for comedic effect – like, this is a very different kind of date:

So what do you do, anyway?" His voice broke your trance.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What do you do? You know, for work?”

And while the vampire’s motives for choosing annihilation aren’t spelled out, and don’t seem to go too far beyond the traditional tropes of the modern vampire mythos, the author knows how to play the hits:

"He sighs. 'When you live a long time, you…experience a great array of things. You’d think the world would be full of endless opportunities and feelings and experiences, but the truth is, much of it is the same. And at the same time, some of it is impossible to replicate, and you’ll spend your whole life chasing it.'"

So the ingredients are here for a tense yet melancholy battle of wits, but some of the narrative and design choices sap the setup of its power. Again, the major issue is that the vampire just doesn’t seem scary; it’s certainly possible that he’s just gaslighting the protagonist about how woke the modern vamp is, but there’s no indication that’s the case, which makes it feel like the protagonist’s vendetta against the undead is just a thoughtless prejudice rather than anything to take seriously (at least in the two run-throughs I played, these feelings don’t stem from a specific grievance or incident that would make them feel more reasonable or psychologically grounded). Further undercutting my identification with the protagonist, they appear to be the worst journalist ever: despite their job being all about asking questions, and an apparently longstanding distaste for vampires, they seem to have never pondered, much less done research to resolve, various important matters about how vampires live and feed. For a blank-slate whose ignorance is meant to provide an excuse for world-building exposition, this would be easier to overlook, but instead, as mentioned their animus towards vampires is positioned as a major reason why they’ve taken on this assignment in the first place.

Below the narrative layer, the mechanics also make proceedings more ho-hum than they could have been. There are multiple different endings you can achieve, with your path through the story largely determined by your scores along three axes: wallow in your aggression, and you can get Hatred points, while asking lots of questions gains Intrigue and commiserating with the vampire earns Empathy. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gain these points, meaning I found it hard to proactively think about trying to shape the character along different extremes; instead I clicked around and hoped for the best, which led to a balanced score along the three gauges, but also an ending that paid off the setup without adding much in the way of surprises – it’s possible to overstate the value of novelty, of course, but again, this game feels to me like it wants to be structured as a thriller, which requires at least one good twist or gear-shift.

Still, all this puts Conversation in a Dark Room at “well-written vampire game with solid politics and themes,” which isn’t a bad place to be, and I haven’t even mentioned the neat visual presentation and interface bells and whistles, like a customized note-taking tool. It’s a testament to its promise that I can’t help but imagine a game that leans into, rather than away from, its darker moments, and mines richer emotions than just world-weary pathos from a premise that, again, seems very well-chosen – and it’s not like I think anyone’s actually ever solved the racism-analogy problem, it’s just that it can be more fun to read the more spectacular failures. Conversation in a Dark Room isn’t a failure by any means, but it could have stood to take a few more risks.

Despite its short play-time, Errand Run engages with a number of different themes, but there’s one I keep coming back to, possibly because it’s increasingly salient of late: how do you tolerate the intolerable? It’s no spoiler, I think, to reveal that what initially appears to be a simple trip to the grocery store with twenty bucks in your pocket is concealing something darker than just dealing with the impacts of inflation; the first passage glancingly averts to wrongness by mentioning in passing that all the shopping baskets are scattered around upside-down, but the second passage leaves subtlety behind:

"THEYRE JUST ONIONS FOR GODSSAKE but your mind is a bullet a knife slicing splitting s u n d e r i n g each precious layer ghostprickleof tears in your eyes"

(The last four words are blurred).

The text effects calm down after that, save for an ominous red-shift as you near the ending, but the intimations of exactly how much has gone wrong keep escalating; often you’ll see a potentially disturbing phrase that, when clicked, turns anodyne: “the fly died” becomes “the fly flew all the way back to home to make little fly babies,” for example (though depending on how you feel about flies, it occurs to me, maybe the latter is worse than the former). The gameplay loop remains consistent throughout, with each new aisle peeling back a layer of the protagonist’s denial, and providing more clues about the enormity of what’s happened – there aren’t any real choices to make, but fortunately, at ten minutes, this simple structure doesn’t wear out its welcome, and when the last band-aid is ripped off, what we’re presented with is memorable in its details, and appropriately grand guignol, even if it’s not especially novel (I seem to recall a Comp game from four or five years ago with a largely similar take on (Spoiler - click to show)the Rapture).

So Errand Run is an effective little horror story, sounding in delusion and religious mania and post-apocalyptic nihilism, but as I said up top, the reading I’m finding most resonant right now focuses on the protagonist’s actions as a form of coping. While there’s an implication that their perceptions may sometimes be confused by trauma, I think it’s more frequently the case that they’re trying to recontextualize and ignore the evidence of their senses, rather than suffering full-bore hallucination. That is, the protagonist knows that things have gone to hell, but just continues to engage in quotidian rituals like grocery-shopping to propitiate the devils of despair. At a time when the aspirations that gave our lives meaning seem increasingly questionable, and our own devils of despair seem not just real, but in charge of major government agencies (this store’s take on food safety has nothing on RFK Jr’s), Errand Run feels as much of a political story as a supernatural one. Just going through the motions can keep the hounds at bay, but for how long? We’re down to a rotting back of onions and two packs of cinnamon gum; eventually something will have to give.

Is there anything more talismanic than last words? There are fictional characters – and real people too! – defined completely by the all-time great way they went out: who knows anything about Nathan Hale, or that guy from Tale of Two Cities, other than their eminently quotable exits? And “badass” is only one viable strategy, like, imagine how much time humanity has collectively spent trying to figure out what the heck Socrates meant about that chicken. In fact you can get a lot of mileage out of enigma – “Rosebud” is the engine that powers Citizen Kane, after all. They even have a special power in the law: dying declarations are exempted from the rules against hearsay evidence because of their gravitas. So kudos to Your Very Last Words for zeroing in on a perfect scenario for interactive fiction; we’re all head-over-heels for words already, so how can we resist the chance to author a sentence written in lightning whose thunder will reverberate down the ages?

Of course, in reality last words usually don’t live up to their billing. People who are close to death are often confused by pain and medication, and there can sometimes be disagreement about what a person’s last words actually were. Plus, most of us aren’t Socrates, or being written by Charles Dickens – for all that it can be morbidly fun to fantasize about the words of wisdom we’ll bequeath to our loved ones as we leave them for the last time, don’t we also nurse a secret fear that they’ll lean forward, pens at the ready to note down our valedictory phrase, only to shoot each other guilty looks once we’ve departed, disappointed at how banal our dying thoughts proved to be? And if that’s the case, kudos I suppose too to Your Very Last Words for being a bit muddled in its implementation and less than piercing in its prose.

Judged just on its mechanics, this is a very odd duck, and an underexplained one, if a duck can be underexplained. The way it works is that you’re facing a firing squad, and the sergeant derisively gives you a few minutes to think of something to say before he orders the bullets to fly. Your character says a sentence or two, reminiscing about the revolution that brought them to this awful end, their grieving family, or the fate of their country, and then the player gets to choose one of three phrases with which to complete the thought – though you’re given the unexplained option to choose and remember, or choose without remembering, for whichever one you pick. It turns out that phrases you remember are recorded in a running list tucked under a dialogue bubble in the upper left corner, but these aren’t your actual last words – instead, at the moment before you’re killed, you can choose three of the phrases in your list and slot them together, Mad Libs style, to complete your self-written epitaph. Oh, and at any time you can press E to open your eyes, at which point the game’s black backdrop irises out to reveal a black-and-white 3D rendering of the firing squad and the fellow prisoners being executed alongside you, which you can explore via mouselook.

It’s confusing and awkward, all the more so because some controls are mapped to the keyboard (opening the eyes, advancing to the next bit of dialogue) and some to the mouse (looking around, picking a dialogue option, opening up the list of phrases you’ve recorded). Beyond the interface, I also found the particulars of the protagonist’s predicament hard to come to grips with. This isn’t an abstracted, Platonic ideal of an execution – instead you’ve been caught up in the violence of Mexico’s Ten Tragic Days, when rival generals who’d launched a coup against the incumbent president unleashed terror against supporters of the regime. This is a historical period that I must admit I know vanishingly little about, and while the game provides some proper nouns, it doesn’t give much more so unless you’ve got a solid grounding in Mexican history you’d better hit Wikipedia if you want some context. And this isn’t just a matter of idle curiosity – it was hard for me to have a handle on which dialogue options I wanted to pick when the protagonist was lamenting the loss of freedom and the fate of his country, without knowing whether he was likely a right-wing or left-wing paramilitary! Meanwhile, the personal side of the monologue often felt melodramatic, which I suppose is as much due to the structure as anything else – when the screen only displays a dozen words at a time, the main way to make brevity have an impact is to get histrionic. And likewise, there’s not really enough detail for a personality to emerge; in a longer work, there could be poignancy in the way the protagonist mourns for the loss of his lover and unborn child, only to reflect on the many, many other lovers and many, many other illegitimate children he’s sired, but as it is I found it injected a presumably-unwanted comic note.

The nail in the coffin is that I found it really hard to string my list of isolated phrases together into a coherent, much less powerful, set of last words. Because they’re not drawn from consecutive sentences, it was challenging to create syntactical connections between the three phrases, much less substantive or thematic ones. Plus, trying to bridge the personal and the political felt too challenging since there’s so little real estate to work with – but choosing one over the other felt like giving short shrift to the game’s full set of themes.

I admire what Your Very Last Words is trying to do – I like idiosyncratic games, personal games, and historical games very much, and it certainly checks all three boxes. But as with the fetishization of last words, it tries to pack too much into too few phrases, and as a result it buckles under its own weight. After all, last words carry the most weight when we can see how they’re a capstone for a full life: without that broader background, they might as well be written in water.

There have been a lot of lessons to be drawn from the explosive growth of superhero movies over the last decade and a half, one of the more positive of which is the way they can escalate. You introduce a hero, maybe a half-sketched-in sidekick, they mostly fight mooks before the last set-piece kicks things up a notch – nothing wrong with that! But then soon enough you’ve got a team of dozens, with factions, betrayals, time travel, multiverses, romances, deaths, MacGuffins upon MacGuffins…

A Smörgåsbord of Pain is a sequel to 2022’s A Matter of Heist Urgency, and if it doesn’t quite speedrun the entire Iron-Man-to-Endgame progression, it’s dramatically more ambitious. The first game was largely an exercise in trying out some ideas for designing fight scene in a parser game, with a memorably off-kilter premise (anthropomorphic super-hero pony fights pirate llamas) and a final scene where you could leaven the simple punching and kicking with some environmental swashbuckling. But Anastasia the Power Pony’s second adventure is no mere proof-of-concept – we get to see her in her secret identity, there’s a chase, a much more assured combat sequence, some investigation and infiltration, revelations, and a gonzo climax featuring half a dozen combatants, an optional sidekick, and more buffet-based mayhem than you can shake a hoof at. I haven’t gotten to Murderworld yet, so I suppose it’s got competition in the best-superhero-adventure category, but it’s definitely an impressive showing.

The humor is a big part of what makes the game so enjoyable. Smörgåsbord makes the genius choice to play its bonkers setup completely straight, never acknowledging that there’s anything inherently funny about a pony with an office job and super-strength. Instead, jokes are made at the expense of overly-pretentious martial arts (“Many martial arts emphasize ‘philosophy,’ ‘understanding,’ or even ‘learning how to fight so one does not have to fight.’ Such ideas betray a true lack of enlightenment and deserve no attention…. Remember, we are here to learn how to beat people up.”), default Inform responses (“When you conclude that violence is the answer, simply >ATTACK, >PUNCH, >KICK, >WHAP, or even >CLONK the source of your problems”), Scandinavian cuisine (there is a lot of lutefisk at the titular buffet), and banal chit-chat with coworkers you despise (the opening dialogue about whether there are usually waiters and menus at buffets could work as a scene from The Office). I laughed very hard when Anastasia’s sensei noted that “wordplay is almost 89% of swordplay” (yes, there’s a pun-based fighting style), and harder at the dialogue options when I stormed into the eponymous restaurant bent on justice:

“D-Do you have reservations?” [the host] inquires, trying to maintain his composure.

1. “Not about using violence.”

The production values are also absurdly high. There are great feelies, two maps and a martial-arts how-to that contains some of the best jokes in the game. The implementation also feels deluxe, with social interaction feeling especially rich – there’s a menu-based conversation system, but you can also interrupt that to ASK/TELL about an impressive array of topics; I don’t recall getting a single generic response, though admittedly this is more a game about action than talking. And there’s a newscast sequence midway through that’s one of the most impressive visuals I’ve ever seen in an Inform game; I think I can kind of guess at how it’s put together, but I can only applaud the audacity to even attempt such a thing, much less the chops to pull it off so well.

It’s not entirely rainbows and unicorns, though. Another lesson of superhero cinema – and one it shares with buffets – is that that’s possible to have too much of a good thing. While I was initially delighted at the prospect of a throwdown in the restaurant, since I was looking forward to a food fight from the first scene where the location appeared, in practice I found this sequence way too involved and fiddly to be as fun as I wanted it to be. It’s set in a big, 5x5 region, with half a dozen enemies across multiple waves of reinforcements moving around to pursue you, so I found it very difficult to keep track of where everyone was, even when referencing the included map. There’s also a high degree of randomness that governs when your attacks, and those of your enemies, land, which meant that some of my attempts petered out much quicker than others. Meanwhile, success largely depends on coming up with pun-based uses for the buffet’s food, which is a great idea, but in practice slowed things down as I tried to come up with the appropriate joke, which was often frustrating: it’s great fun to WAYLAY an enemy WITH HAY, but I couldn’t TICKLE with PICKLES, or ROUT with SPROUTS, HARRASS with GLASS, or NAIL WITH SNAILS… given the significant number of food items in the buffet, and the large number of dumb jokes you can make with the English language, it’d be unreasonable to ask that all of this stuff work, I suppose, but the difficulty of this sequence is tuned hard enough that I felt like I’d have needed to figure out a lot of the trickier puns, not just the obvious ones, in order to win, not to mention getting lucky with the RNG.

Fortunately, the game lets you proceed even if a sequence proves too hard, and the actual final bit is much more forgiving, and wound up playing to my strengths (let me just say that as the parent to a science-oriented almost-four-year-old, my practice making baking-soda volcanos stood me in good stead). And everything up too that point had a well-judged curve of escalation, especially the stealthy bit at the end of act 2, which has some really good puzzles. If Smörgåsbord gets a little top-heavy towards the end, well, at least it’s never anywhere near as ponderous as the MCU’s worst excesses. For all that I’m definitely suffering from superhero fatigue at the movie theater, I’m definitely down for more Anastasia – maybe just don’t demand such rigor from a silly food fight next time?