Reviews by Mike Russo

The “fantasy monster gets a job” genre is a fun one – the first example that comes to mind is Dungeon Detective and its sequel (you’re a gnoll and you fight crime!) but I know there are many others – because there’s a lot of comedy baked into the premise of an otherworldly being, sometimes with magical powers, grinding up against the quotidian reality of working for a paycheck. Dopplejobs very much delivers on this, but also offers a setting with some intriguing mysteries, while striking a nice balance with its choices – there are a lot of them, and they feel (and are) very impactful to the success or failure of your various contracts, but the game isn’t overly punitive so most sets of choices will still get you to a satisfying ending.

Let’s get the downsides out of the way early: there are some typos and the writing is a little bit awkward in places, though it’s not 100% clear to me that these are unintentional – there are many places where articles are dropped, for example, as well as some ungainly use of prepositions and syntax, which could reflect an author whose primary language isn’t English, but could also be an attempt to reflect the overenthusiastic, off-kilter (at least by human standards) character of the eponymous doppelganger. There are also some bugs in the code related to your finances – the framing challenge of the game is earning enough “quartz” to pay back your business’s startup loan, and you get varying amounts of it depending on how well you perform in each of your jobs, as well as having the opportunity to plow some of the proceeds into more advertising, a swankier office, or just going on a spree. However, the math often didn’t add up: I’d have 350 quartz, earn 300 more, and be left with 550, or spend 50 when I have 1050 accumulated, after which I still had 1050.

These niggles don’t undermine the experience all that much, though. As mentioned, the infelicities in the prose ultimately have a kind of addle-pated charm that seems very much in keeping with who the doppelganger is. And despite the loan-centric framing, it didn’t seem like the amount of money you have at the end really has that much impact on where the story ends.

So there’s not much holding back the considerable upsides, which are that this is a fun world to inhabit with lots and lots of reactivity. Each of the jobs you take on – your business is to impersonate humans who want to duck out of some embarrassing or annoying experience you’ll go through in their stead – is quite varied, and offers ample opportunities to stick to the remit, try to cause chaos, or poke into the secrets of the city where you work (this isn’t the real world, and its snake-centric superstitions and bizarre infrastructure make it a pleasure to explore). Your choices not only impact client satisfaction – and therefore how much you get paid – but also help define your character. Since doppelgangers take on some of the traits of those they impersonate, if you behave in an especially curious, or introverted, or patient manner, you’ll inherit some of that in the remaining go-rounds.

The jokes are often quite funny – if you underinvest in advertising, a client might say that the reason they sought you out is that they “appreciated the fact that the slogan was small and the office hard to find. It proves you’re discreet.” Or, when contemplating doing something about that: “when it comes to advertisement, you feel like you are a pretty good singer. You could compose a catchy song advertising your business. Something like: ‘Doppel doppel it’s all proper fa la la la la!’” Again: slightly demented, but very fun.

DJ is well-paced, too – each job has some meat to it, but is fairly zippy, and the post-job opportunity to spend some money offers a nice punctuation of each phase. This, combined with the 20ish minute playtime made me eager to jump back in and replay after I’d finished first time – and sure enough, while you appear to always get the same jobs in the same order, there are a lot of variations possible depending on what you decide to do, and the game is fairly forgiving such that even choices that seem suboptimal don’t take that much of a toll.

This is especially nice because I think on my first play-through, I was overly cautious – I was very fixated in paying back my loan, and the way the job payoffs work you always feel like you’re on the knife-edge to be able to do that by the end. So I passed up a lot of choices that seemed riskier, including opting out of the final bonus job since I was just over the 1000 quartz threshold and didn’t want to mess things up. I had much more fun on subsequent go-throughs, when I didn’t feel so much tension: DJ is at its best when it’s letting you try new things, look under rocks for what might be there, and role-play a well-meaning monster whose instincts for human behavior are not all there.

I keep wanting the title here to be a pun but can’t figure out how to make “ceviche” fit to “machina”. That feeling of not-quite-rightness is perhaps representative of how I felt about the game. I’m not sure what words to describe the setting – it’s like a Jorodowsky comic book about a sentient virus attacking a capitalistic R’lyeh, maybe? But that doesn't given the full flavor, and I'm unclear on whether I've got the sense of who’s trying to do what to whom (or to what). All this to say the game is enticing and disorienting (in a good way!) off the bat, and the odd interface, atmospheric pixel-art, and punchy text vignettes are grabby and drew me in.

Ultimately, though, that grabbiness wore off for me, I think partially a casualty of the age-old crossword vs. narrative war, and partially because of how the instructions are presented. There’s some in-game help, with a helpful goldfish offering tool-tips when you mouse over bits of the interface. But there’s also a file that comes with the game – the Holy User Manual – that goes into some detail, in out-of-world voice, about the mechanics, goals, and a bit of the strategy of the game. When I played the game, it looked like part of the instructions, and it clearly laid out the mechanics. (Spoiler - click to show)In effect, the game is played in rounds – in each, you’re shuffled a hand of five cards, three of which you must play into three different slots, and then allocate two (differentiated) worker-units to the played cards. Each card gives, or takes, or exchanges resources based on the slot to which it’s played and whether, and which, worker it gets. When you accumulate enough of one of the resource types, you get a special ceremony card – do that three times and you finish the game.

Now, there’s definitely narrative flavor on top of this dry recital – the workers are members of a robotic clergy, each card pops up a unique vignette when it’s played, and the resource names and types paint an interesting picture that fits nicely into this strange, skewed world. But when playing, I found that I mostly focused on the board-game aspect of making the numbers go up, and skimmed the text. Partially this is because the narrative vignettes don’t seem to have much continuity, or impact – they’re really just flavor for the numbers. Partially I think the interface is to blame – you click “submit” on the right side of the screen, then just to the right of that is where the mechanical results are stated, then just to the right of that is the next turn button, so it’s sort of against the flow to move your eyes left to read the text. And partially I think it’s because I had read the instructions so I knew exactly what to do, and was therefore more in goal-seeking than exploration mode.

It does appear that there is some exploration to do – it seems like there may be multiple endings depending on how well you play the board game, and I think there was some interplay of the card and slot mechanics that I didn’t fully suss out. But it’s possible to reach a perfectly satisfying ending without getting into any of that. I wound up wondering whether I might have enjoyed the piece more without that instruction file – which, after subsequent posts from one of the authors, turns out was more of a walkthrough. I probably would have engaged more with DEC and its fiction without having seen the mechanics laid quite so bare – so if you’ve got this one on your list, perhaps try playing it without reading the file first, and see how that works?

Lastly, I can’t leave this one without flagging two great jokes: (Spoiler - click to show)”Davy Jones Industrial Average” and the fact that the last line of the game is “FIN”.

(This is a review of the initial Comp release of the game; I believe mid-Comp updates have addressed some of the bugs mentioned below)

Desolation is a sequel to a game I haven’t played (and side-note, that bothers me way more than it should because I’m the kind of bloody-minded completionist who’ll be recommended a TV show that’s uneven at the beginning but gets really good in season four which is a perfect jumping-on point because they rebooted the premise and shifted the cast, and decide right, season one episode one it is). Interestingly, it appears to be written by a different author (much like Magpie Takes the Train, it occurs to me), so I’m a bit curious about the backstory.

Anyway, the lack of familiarity with the prequel isn’t too much handicap, as the opening immediately establishes 1) you’re fleeing into a desert with little but your wits, and 2) you’re being pursued by a sort of demonic Pippi Longstockings. I kid, but the horror bits here are probably the most effective part of the game — whenever the two braids girl shows up or is mentioned, the writing conveys how reality constricts around the player character, and their desperation to get somewhere, anywhere else. There’s not much specificity about who she is or what she wants, but for a plot as elemental as this, I don’t think that’s really a drawback (play the prequel if you want the lore, nerd! Or so I assume the rejoinder goes).

Structurally, Desolation is well set up into a series of self-contained puzzle areas, which generally keeps things zippy, and the puzzles themselves are fairly well clued. However, there’s no walkthrough or hints on offer, and there’s some unfortunate wonkiness in the implementation. In general, there’s not much scenery that’s implemented (including some that seems like it would be needed/helpful, like (Spoiler - click to show)the “softball-sized” rocks that one might try to throw at the dog), there’s wonkiness about trying to go directions that don’t lead anywhere (which the player is likely to do, since exits are sometimes described in a confusing fashion), and there are a fair number of bugs, including lots of scenery not being flagged as such (in the (Spoiler - click to show)apartment sequence, I was able to pick up pretty much all the (Spoiler - click to show)furniture, and start cramming the bathroom sink into the peanut jar). It’s possible to do some things before they should be allowed, and I ran into a guess-the-verb issue that stymied me for quite a while (Spoiler - click to show)(to hit the dog with the pick axe, HIT DOG WITH PICK AXE doesn’t work but ATTACK DOG does – but the dog is very clearly scary, I don’t want to fight it without a weapon!).

One last thing that’s neither here nor there in terms of evaluation, but which was certainly interesting (very light spoilers for an early part of Desolation, then slightly deeper spoilers for a different, 20-year-old game): (Spoiler - click to show)the first main sequence involves the player character hallucinating that they’re back in their apartment, going through a pre-trip checklist. But any time they open the fridge or turn on the taps, sand starts coming out, until everything starts dissolving into dunes. This is Shade! But it isn’t presented in an in-jokey way that makes it seem like an obvious tip of the hat, nor is it exactly the same because the player clearly knows what’s up (the choice of soundtrack creates some really funny moments here). I’m not sure if this is an homage played exactly straight, or what would be even more interesting, independent invention of the idea. If so, well done for having a brain that can simulate Andrew Plotkin!

Hopefully the author can make a quick update to squash some of these bugs (and add a walkthrough file too!) because if you stick to the critical path and don’t poke around too much, this checks a lot of boxes for a short, scary, puzzley vignette.

Deelzebub is a lightly-puzzly comedy game that nails the comedy and got my first out-loud laughs of the Comp.

The scenario – the player character is part of a cult that may be harboring a dark secret – is immediately familiar, but the tone of the presentation quickly subverts expectations, as the player character is presented as earnest, friendly, and a little bit suspicious of many different things and people, but willing to go along to get along. This easygoing vibe fits well with a rather ridiculous but appealing supporting cast, and some engagingly silly situations.

I don’t want to get too much into detail on the comedy, both not to ruin it and because what worked for me might not work for you. But I think it’s really, really well done. The best gags, I thought, have to do with the main character trying to bluff his way through a demon summoning, and this bit alone is worth the price of admission. I can’t help spoiler-blocking my favorite single joke:

(Spoiler - click to show)Dave [the aforementioned demon] looks around the chamber. “So this is the human world, huh? It’s a lot smaller than I imagined.”

“This isn’t all of it. We’re in a basement.”

Deelzebub stacks up well pacing-wise, too. The player character is given a series of tasks, which are generally pretty clear in pointing you in the right direction and none of which overstay their welcome. The structure then opens up during the endgame, with four different endings to pursue (I found two).

The puzzles generally have good clueing, though some niggles in implementation and a little bit of guess-the-noun/verb-ing occasionally undercut the momentum. I also was a little disappointed that Dave, the demon you summon early on, can sort of drop out of the story midway through, since he was the clearest throughline for the first half of the game.

There’s a good amount of scenery implemented, though occasionally objects that seem to be mentioned aren’t actually there (there’s reference to a pamphlet that explains the group’s beliefs in the opening scene, but I couldn’t find or read it), or objects that are important but aren’t mentioned despite being present (Chris was listed as being in the crop field area, but not Ruth, even though you can, and should, interact with her! And I had the same issue with the (Spoiler - click to show)ear in the worm bin). The map felt a bit too big, but maybe that’s just because I had a hard time holding it in my brain due to there being some non-cardinal directions thrown in to confuse things.

There were also a few niggles that might have just been part of the way TADS works, but which stood out as strange to me since it’s been a while since I’ve played a game written in it – in particular, there are a fair number of multi-passage scenes (including the opening) where you need to hit enter to continue, but without specific prompting and with the ability to write text before one hits enter, I wound up being a bit confused because I thought I was playing the game and just getting unhelpful/strange responses before twigging to what was going on.

All of which to say there are a few small rough patches that can hopefully be smoothed over for a post-comp release, because what’s here is really solid and really funny, just tremendously appealing.

Finally, someone dares to tell the truth about pickles - we need to get this game into the hands of Congress because it's time for action!

This one’s pretty hard to discuss without blowing a lot of what makes it so charming - Cursèd Pickle is a candy box of surprises, both narrative and mechanical, and I’m wary of stomping all over said charm by discussing anything other than the graphics on the loading screen (it’s a lovely picture, reminded me of Loom!) And I can’t just put the whole thing in spoiler-text, because there are like double-secret spoilers that I want to conceal even if you have dipped in for a bit but haven’t plumbed all the depths. So do yourself a favor and make sure you’ve played the game at least until you understand the title before you read the rest of this.

It occurs to me that you – my beloved (I mean belovèd) as-yet-unspoiled reader – might need some buffer text after the above admonition so you don’t accidentally seccade your eyes over something unsuited for their gaze. Let’s see, I can point out that there’s a location that features a peristyle, which is a sort of obscure column-filled courtyard that I also worked into my game, and showed up in Vain Empires as well. That’s just the sort of vaguely interesting coincidence one likes to bring up when one’s marking time.

All right, so here we are. Cursèd Pickle continues the MMORPG parody of the author’s earlier game, the Baker of Shireton, except this time you start out as a player character. The "game" is undergoing a big version upgrade, and the resultant crash bugs and corrupted data eventually shift you into reinhabiting the said Baker, except this time in a much more manageable choice-based interface as opposed to the parser chaos that overtook me, at least, when I tried to play its prequel.

Cursèd Pickle commits to its conceit, down to the IRQ port options when attempting to configure your nonexistent 3D hardware (before dumping you into the fall-back text mode). And it commits hard: even before you get to the baking bit, there are a good number of fetch quests, dozens of hair and beard options, a raid dungeon and mansion-looting mini-module, four different classes each with their own combat minigame… there’s even a “legacy” server that presents an interactive vignette from the main game in Inform 7 form! (Spoiler - click to show)(I couldn’t win this one, as I couldn’t figure out how to get ahead of the server wipe – if anyone’s found a secret here, please drop a line!).

I think like 90% of this is technically optional, but it’s all crafted with incredible care, with tiny jokes and novel features everywhere you look. I’m listing a couple of my favorites here, but they’re pretty major spoilers, so proceed with caution: (Spoiler - click to show)you can ask the pickle about its plans for world domination, which spits out a list of the fifty-odd zones it’s going to conquer, with four or five laugh-out-loud gags buried among them; and you can turn into a freakish man-bee hybrid by accepting the Hive Queen’s offer at the end of the dungeon, which lets you grow wings and skip what I think is an arduous desert trek that makes up the final section of the game. Though this makes your henchman flip out and book it for home, understandably.. And all these systems aren’t there just as a joke-delivery mechanism: the core RPG loop is well fleshed-out, and compelling enough that I spent an hour and a half just doing side-quests and grinding up my character’s stats instead of engaging with the main quest.

Speaking of the jokes, the writing is dead on throughout, sending up MMORPG global chat, fetch-quest tropes, and marketing patter with equal aplomb (OK, I do have one note: some of the pickle jokes over-rely on “briny,” and subbing in “vinegary” in two or three places might be worth considering. This is my only critique of the prose, and it is more than counterbalanced by the use of the accent in “Cursèd”). I heartily approved of the disgusting descriptions of how the filthy townspeople gave vent to their pickle addictions, and approved even more heartily of the harbourmaster’s disapproving opinion of same. And the best joke in the entire game is the song my bard sang at the end – it’s a nice, confident trick to save your strongest material for the very end!

Implementation-wise the player is in very good hands here too. The timing aspects of the combat mechanics were sometimes a little stressful for me to keep up with on a trackpad, but not so much so that I felt the need to use the optional slow-down plugin (if you’re in the market for such a thing, you can find it in the message board linked off the stats page). I noticed a couple of very small implementation issues – amazingly few, considering the “more is more” approach to different subsystems and interfaces: as the baker, at one point I had -1 customers queueing for bread, and dough left in the oven when quitting for the day would still be in the oven, yet unburnt, in the morning, just the same as I’d left it ten hours before.

There are few games as positively crammed full of delight as Cursèd Pickle. An ill-wisher could cavil at the premise, arguing that for such a Brobdingnagian game, it’s ultimately rather slight in thematic terms – at this late date, does the world really need another MMORPG satire? But after giving it a play, they’d change their tune right quick.

(The tune is the Melody of Malcontent, and while they’re singing it you’ve been sliced to ribbons. Ow!)

(Also I wasn’t joking in my opener, pickles are gross)

The second RPG/IF hybrid I’ve hit in this year’s Comp, Creatures nails the dark, dour, and dank atmosphere of a grim-and-gritty dungeon crawl, but bugs and custom-engine wonkiness mean I didn’t appreciate the game as much as it perhaps deserves (though the second release addressed at least some of the bugs; see the addendum at the bottom of this review).

Let’s see, why don’t we go last part first. Creatures runs as a Windows executable with a fairly long startup time, and looks like it’s trying to shoot the moon in a beauty contest – I found the white text on black background too high-contrast to be pleasant, the engine allows words to be broken up between two lines with nary a dash in sight, and there are a fair number of typos (including the first sentence of the walkthrough).

More damning than these superficial considerations, at least to me, the interface is very fiddly. It’s choice-based, though you type a number or letter to enter each command, which in theory should be fine. But the implementation is often aggravating: because the screen updates slowly, and if you mis-type an option you’re taken to a separate screen noting you didn’t select a valid choice and which in turn requires an additional keypress to exit, it’s easy to start typing a sequence of commands that starts throwing off a series of errors. Options are also often nestled several layers deep – each room is divided into four quadrants, for example – so doing anything feels like it takes at least twice as many keypresses as it ought to. Oh, and there’s an encumbrance system that I’d say is an especially irritating example of the type, except every encumbrance system is an especially irritating example of the type.

The bugs run the gamut from small bits of oddness (I was able to heal myself above my theoretical maximum hit points) to hard crashes (trying to equip leg armor when I was already wearing something in that slot reliably broke the game) to a progress-ender involving a lever puzzle in the initial release (later fixed).

In my first go-through I only got about halfway through, which was a shame because I was enjoying Creatures enough to want to see the rest, and thought the prose was actually not bad. It only comes in fits and starts, as you get a couple of paragraphs in between moving to a new room, while taking actions, fighting, or fiddling with puzzles usually doesn’t generate much in the way of description. And the premise – you’re in a dungeon, have amnesia, and probably there’s a baddie somewhere towards the end you need to stab – is barely even there. But these intermittent paragraphs did a reasonable job of creating an atmosphere of decay, age, and unpleasantness which felt like a good tone for a work like this. The puzzles are again nothing to write home about – they’re under-clued and, at least as far as I got, exclusively about opening different locked doors with various kinds of combinations – but fine enough to break up the combat, and it’s always fun to level up and get new gear.

From skimming the walkthrough, it looks like the remainder of the game involves more number puzzles, more combat – and possibly some (Spoiler - click to show)light cannibalism? – again, nothing ground-breaking, but solid meat-and-potatoes stuff (Spoiler - click to show)(so to speak). So I’m hoping there’s an update, either mid-Comp or post-Comp, that would let me check it out (like, because of the number puzzles and combat I mean, not the (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism).

MUCH LATER UPDATE: So I went back to this after the author posted a revised version that fixed the bug that had stopped my progress, and was able to win. It definitely goes on as it began, with the pattern of obscure number puzzles alternated with narrowly-tuned combat continued. The puzzles also continued to be very challenging, though from looking at the walkthrough it looks like one of them didn’t fire in my playthrough (Spoiler - click to show)(the text indicated that I was locked into Wilfred’s quarters, but I was able to walk right out without inputting anything). And while I was able to get a few critical hits towards the end, which opened up a bit more wiggle room in the combat, in still feels like you need to tackle the enemies in a very specific order to get the right armor, weapons, and healing items you need to win (like, the (Spoiler - click to show)cannibalism does in fact seem mandatory). The writing is still pretty fun, albeit quite bleak, and I found the ending a bit of an anticlimax. I did start to get more used to the interface, though this might be Stockholm Syndrome talking. The author’s got talent but a little more attention to making the game more player-friendly, both in interface and puzzle terms, would go a long way in whatever they do next!

The Copyright of Silence has what’s probably the most genius premise of all 103 games in the Comp. It’s an optimization puzzle where you need to manage pet allergies, kitchen mishaps, and social dynamics in order to maximize the amount of time you can stay quiet while sitting opposite mid-20th-century avant-garde composer John Cage. This works as an amazingly silly joke about Cage’s most famous piece, 4’33”, which is popularly though inaccurately summarized as “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence”, but it also helps prove one of the deeper themes of the piece: turns out there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of silence!

The presentation is top-notch, with one niggle: the game is presented as a view of Cage’s four-room apartment, with always-on text blurbs listing which characters are in each room, and then longer text with dialogue, actions, and options in the location where your character is. The floor-plan art is clean and fits the mid-century aesthetic, and it’s helpful to always be able to monitor what’s happening everywhere in the apartment at a glance. The fly in the ointment is that to fit the whole apartment on one screen, each room’s sub-window is fairly small, meaning I had to do a little more squinting than I liked.

Gameplay-wise, TCoS appears to all be one big, heavily timing-based puzzle hinging on managing your conversation with Cage – there are various intervening events that might interrupt your silence, and being quiet too long in the wrong circumstances will anger him and dock your score. There are several more discrete puzzles to solve, like what to do about an irritating dog-and-parrot pair (shades of Jay Schilling’s Edge of Chaos!), and tasks to accomplish, but they all require specific steps to be taken at specific times, so they’re incorporated into the overall structure. And here’s where the game started to break down for me, as the steps required to make progress can feel pretty tedious.

Quick autobiographical side-note that will come back to TCoS, I promise: when I was doing math and physics problem sets in my college days, there was a particular point in many problems where you’d have figured out the overall approach to take, sussed out how to set up the relevant equations, determined the angle of attack by identifying any needed substitutions or assumptions, and now just needed to spend half an hour wrestling some god-awful, notebook-wide integral or 7 by 7 matrix multiplication into submission through theoretically simple, but fiddly and irritating, application of basic math. We called this “grunge”, and unfortunately once I got over the initial hump of figuring out the basics, I found TCoS pretty grungy.

This takes several forms. First off, a major gameplay element is a piano which somehow conceals helpful objects on particular notes, but you have to select the right octave and note to get what you’re looking for, rather than being able to see everything at once. In each playthrough, a postcard arrives during a brief window that might point you towards one of the useful notes to search, but it would require a lot of repetition to find them all, and I think intercepting the mail is fatal to your progress – or I suppose you could just try looking at each piano-note one by one, but either way you’re in for a lot of grunge.

Second, the conversation with Cage proceeds in a very scripted fashion, with some critical dialogue options available only at certain blink-and-you-missed-it opportunities. The conversation pauses when you’re not in the same room, but the game has a hard deadline at 7 pm, meaning that any fiddling around you do reduces your ability to experiment with the later stages of the conversation.

Exacerbating the previous two problems, there’s no quick way to reset or restart the loop that I could find, and since each playthrough steps through 7 minutes in 7 second intervals, that’s a lot of clicking to have to go through once you realize you’ve fluffed something up, or have an idea you want to try. As a result, while I was able to solve several of the puzzles and get a bit over halfway to the goal, after about 45 minutes of play my enthusiasm wore out. With that said, I’ll probably try to pick this one up again when there’s less time pressure, since there are fun hints of hidden bonus puzzles and alternate endings, and I do really love the setup – and I suppose it’s in keeping with the theme that TCoS isn’t over-concerned with player friendliness.

The Comp randomizer handed me Congee and Mother Tongue close together, which is an interesting coincidence since they’re both short choice-based games dealing with immigration, alienation, and assimilation. Where Mother Tongue focuses more on the relationships between different generations and touches on some big issues, Congee is really about friends supporting each other, and the comforts of home.

The story here is very slight – the blurb says it all – so it’s really about the small details in how the thing is put together. Congee’s greatest strengths are the way it cleanly sets up the personalities and relationship between the main character and her friend, and the canny use of just a few simple visuals to set the mood on a cold, rainy British evening.

There’s good use of humor here – the protagonist bewailing her fever by noting that “the body is but a weak vessel” is a funny bit of self-pity, and the gag following her decision on what to name the regular get-togethers with her friend to eat congee also made me laugh. The writing in the exchanges between her and her best friend Allison is filled with nicely-judged details, in-jokes, and clever turns of phrase. Making the text messages look like text messages, and imposing delays that are long enough to make one believe in the conceit, but short enough that it doesn’t feel frustrating is a really nice touch too (and I hate it 99% of the time when games force you to wait for text to display).

Where I think the game falls down a tiny bit, and where I can’t help make a comparison to Mother Tongue, is in the short exchange between the protagonist and her mom. In fairness this isn’t the central relationship of the game – that’s clearly the one between the main character and her bestie – but the dialogue here felt a bit generic and vague, in a way that the conversation with Allison never did.

Again, though, that doesn’t do much to mar the appeal of this sweet story of how friends can make wherever you are feel a bit more like home.

I’m usually a story/writing-first, systems-later sort of player, but Chorus’s big puzzle grabbed me hard, and I spent more time replaying and fiddling with it than any other game in the Comp so far. On the down side, this is because I found the prose at times a bit flat, and certainly often overwhelming; on the positive side, it’s because the meta-puzzle provides lots of rewarding reveals and surprise interactions as the player pokes and prods at it.

Right, backing up: in Chorus, you’re tasked with helping what’s basically a community-based organization of (mostly mythical Greek and/or Lovecraftian) monsters do some public service: hunting down raw materials, sorting out paperwork in the library, that sort of thing. You don’t play a specific character, but get to eavesdrop on the thoughts and decisions of nine central characters in turn, deciding how to allocate them between the three main tasks and then doing an additional task-prioritization within each of the main projects. If you’ve matched the right character to the right task and sub-task, the job gets done; if not, not. Along the way, there are a fair number of potential character beats, both positive and negative, depending on which people you’ve grouped together.

The premise is a fun, unique one, though I’m not sure the writing fully does it service. The monsters, as mentioned, are a sort of twee Lovecraft (there’s a slime-girl named Tekeli, e.g., plus Camilla who might be from the King in Yellow?), but the prose is actually fairly grounded. I suppose you could say this fits the entertainingly bureaucratic and grounded premise, but perhaps leaves some fun on the table (I believe the game may have been translated, given that French comes first in the FR-EN toggle, and I think there were some cases where the prose was adopting French sentence structure in a way that felt awkward, which also maybe sapped some of the fun from the writing).

Chorus also wears its worldbuilding rather heavily – the initial sequence feels very overwhelming, as it jumps in in medias res and then runs through the nine different characters without giving much chance to catch one’s breath or refer back to what and who came before (the fact that all the characters are female, and many have names starting with C or K, makes keeping track of things even more difficult). Despite all this exposition, there were parts of the setting I didn’t fully understand – there’s some broader organization or powers-that-be who the community folks seem to resent but nonetheless have to work for. This never fully clicked for me, even though interactions with these powers seemed to be ultimately what's most important in the game's narrative, given how the different endings play out.

All right, so that’s the grousing out of the way. On the flip side, the tasks themselves are enormous fun, both because they’re very clever examples of what a monster-y community service organization would do, and because the sub-tasks are really engaging to dig into. The library bit, for example, has you sorting through half a dozen books looking for supernatural secrets, and the different powers of the various characters can turn up very different results! Careful attention to the character dossiers, prompts in the text, and lateral thinking all pay dividends, and it’s very compelling to tweak your solution to try to optimize it. And as mentioned, there are some unexpected and fun interactions that can happen when you pair up the right set of characters, which are fun in of themselves and make it feel like you’re making progress even when you still have a ways to go. I just wish there were a way to speed up replays – primarily by making it easier to skip through the exposition, since I think Chorus really shines on repeat play and has big just-one-more-go energy.

I very much hope there’s a post-comp release, or even a sequel/expansion, both to continue a story which clearly has more room to grow, but also to clean up these few niggles – with writing that’s a bit sharper and more careful pacing-out of the worldbuilding, this could be a real classic.

This was the second game I played in the Comp that put me in mind of a "lifepath" character creation system (quick recap: the old tabletop RPG Traveler has a enjoyable character creation system where you make various decisions on careers and such and have little bottom-lined adventures which shape your states before spitting out a ready-to-play character. The other game -- Minor Arcana -- reminded me of that because it had a lot of fun, flavorful choices that seemed to shape the protagonist in the early going, but which didn’t fully pay off in the game proper). I had the same response to The Cave – defining my character through choices is fun, wish there was more to do with it. Things clicked when I finished a playthrough and saw a set of Dungeons and Dragons stats spit out, and read the included help file after wrapping up my playthrough: The Cave is self-consciously a character-generation aid for tabletop roleplaying. It’s not, perhaps, all that it is, but knowing that up front I think helps set good expectations, which is why I’m not obscuring it behind spoiler text.

So if that’s the function of the piece, what’s the form? It’s a well-implemented choice-based dungeon-crawler, with an appropriately tabula rasa protagonist. You run through a series of chambers, each usually containing something interesting to poke at and a choice of egress. Everything you do seems like a challenge – you might choose to fight a tiger, or shimmy your way through a narrow crevice, or decide whether to swap one of your books to an old woman who might be a hag – but there’s no way to die or even temporarily fail, as far as I could tell. Instead your choice of how to resolve the challenge impacts your blank-slate hero’s stats. Talking to the various characters you find makes you charismatic; praying over the corpse of a dead enemy makes you wise; reading books makes you smart (and in the game!) This isn’t fully transparent as you go, but you do get a callout of your top one or two stats as they increase (past a certain point, you’ll get a message telling you that you’re especially agile, for example).

Spelled out mechanically like this, there’s not much here, but the little vignettes are fun to engage with. The writing is quite evocative, and the implied setting adheres to a lot of classic dungeon-y tropes – yer bottomless shafts, yer golden treasure, yer mystical crones – but there are some fun twists, like a much higher prevalence of romance novels than in bog-standard Dungeons and Dragons, and some surprising interactions possible with a few of the dungeon features that I definitely don’t want to spoil (one involves a chest, is all I’ll say). And while in retrospect the association of choices to stats is clear, it’s not too thuddingly obvious as you play, and rarely seems crowbarred in. The downside to that, though, is that some of the stats that aren’t used as actively – I’m thinking mostly here of constitution – don’t come up as frequently.

Still, while I think it does what it’s trying to do, I wish there were maybe like 10-15% more here. I mean that both in terms of the content, since in each of two full playthroughs I saw rooms and challenges repeated (I don’t think I was backtracking), and also in incentivizing exploration. There’s a bit of inventory-tracking as you play through the game – I found a remarkably handy stick in my first go-round – including treasure you can carry out, and certain actions taken in-dungeon lead to the ending text calling out specific achievements as well as your base stats. With a persistent tracking system encouraging you to find the unexpected interactions, or some elements in the ending beyond the base stats that add consequences to the decisions, I think I’d have been more excited to re-engage with the game. This could be an idiosyncratic response – I’m a weirdo who will happily sink a hundred hours into an Assassins Creed game or roguelike but completely lose interest once I’m out of specified quests or goals even though I really like the systems! But especially in a Comp with so many other games on offer, a bit more of a prod to go back for more would have been welcome.