Reviews by Mike Russo

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I really enjoyed SV Linwood’s entry in last year’s Comp, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, but dinged it for having a generic title and forgettable blurb. Fortunately, there are no worries on that front this year – I already had a smile on my face when I booted this parser game up, looking forward to the promised mad science, demonological deal-making, and (most exciting of all) legal research. And that smile stayed there for the hour and a half it took me to work through all its puzzles – this is a delight, funny and satisfying in the way of the best comedy puzzlefests.

The setup here is a good one – brainy-yet-hubristic mortal treats with the devil for forbidden knowledge, desperately hoping to keep his soul – and could be played straight for a seasonally-appropriate note of gothic horror. That’s not what we’ve got here, though; Dr Ludwig goes for the laugh every time, and every time nails it – like, it took me five minutes to realize that it wasn’t the case that literally every description in the game started with a sentence with an exclamation point, just most of them. It’s the kind of thing that could wear out its welcome, but the game never comes close to that line, deftly slinging joke after joke. Like, here’s what you get when you examine your trusty mad-scientist’s coat:

"My favorite lab coat! After that accident while experimenting with pocket dimensions, I could carry so much stuff in it. And the bloodstains were very fashionable, too!"

(See, I told you about the exclamation points).

Crucially, the humor is almost all character-driven rather than embracing wackiness for its own sake; between Dr Ludwig’s crazed ambitions, the Devil’s sly insinuations, and the leader of the pitchfork-bearing mob’s punctilious adherence to the legal niceties, everyone’s got a slightly different schtick, and an in-world justification for being funny.

And actually, as with A Long Way to the Nearest Star, character interaction is a highlight. Beyond their comedy potential, the whole cast is winning, making you solicitous of their love lives and unfair work conditions even as you’re digging up their ancestors and plotting to violate all God’s laws. And the process of engaging with them is very smooth: Dr Ludwig is an Inform game, but it uses a TADS-style conversation interface where after greeting a character, you can ask them about a constantly-updating list of topics. This hits a nice sweet spot between the freeform ASK/TELL system and more-prescriptive choice-based menus, and you’re able to ask everyone about a wide variety of subjects. The devil is especially impressive; as the game starts, you’ve just summoned and bound him, meaning you can give him commands via the traditional DEVIL, DO ACTION syntax. I confess that I often struggle with these kinds of puzzles, but here the process was well-cued and impressively well implemented: I tried to catch the game out by attempting DEVIL, ABOUT, but was told “As powerful as the Devil is, even he cannot access meta commands” (I was able to get him to take inventory and maybe learned some stuff I shouldn’t have that way, but I can’t help but think the author left that in on purpose).

In fact implementation is a major strength throughout. I did find a single Inform-standard response that had been left in; everything’s rewritten in Dr Ludwig’s bombastic voice. TOUCH attempts fail, for example, because “I am a man of science! I am above such physical labor as touching things without purpose!” (again, see what I mean about the exclamation points?) And you’d better believe that you can LAUGH or CACKLE whenever you want.

The puzzles are similarly of a high standard. They’re mostly traditional object-manipulation challenges, save for the aforementioned get-the-Devil-to-do-your-bidding bits, but they’re well signposted via a dynamic (and funny) to-do list, and they almost all involve engaging with that entertaining supporting cast. Most of the game is fairly open, too, with multiple puzzles available at any one time, so it’s hard to get too stuck. There are two that gave me some trouble, one that could have used better clueing (Spoiler - click to show)(I hadn’t realized that I’d basically solved the shopkeeper’s puzzle by dropping the flyer, because I didn’t understand that the “someone” she was worried would see her reading it was me), and one that was harder than it should have been due to the single bit of awkward implementation I found (Spoiler - click to show)(you need to examine the unsuccessfully-made monster to find your scalpel, but the game refers to it as a “disappointment”, but it doesn’t accept that – or either BODY or MONSTER – to refer to it, requiring you to guess that it’s implemented as EXPERIMENT).

Those are quite minor complaints, though, and just the sort of thing that would be easy to clean up for a post-Comp release. And even in its current form this is an early highlight of the Comp – if you’re adamantly against comedy parser puzzle games, Dr Ludwig won’t change your mind, I suppose, but just about everyone else will have a great time with this one.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

(Spoilers in this one)

What I like most about The Long Kill is its harshness. Oh, as always, I brought it on myself – there’s a trio of difficulty options at the beginning of this nicely-presented Twine game about a British sniper deployed in the Afghan War (the just-concluded one, that is), including story mode and a conventional “pick whatever choice you want” one. But no, I opted for “Sniper Mode”, where you have to do math and dice are rolled behind the scenes, so you can miss your shots even if you do everything right. And it’s not just the violence: the game has flashbacks and flashforwards to civilian life, and I fucked up my one chance to have a girlfriend because after winning her an elephant at a carnival shooting game, I thought she wanted me to show off and go double or nothing, but actually she was cold and wanted me to go home. Some of this may feel unfair, but who says a game about sudden, explosive death coming before you even have a chance to blink should embrace fairness as an ethos?

(OK, there’s an undo button, and I did use it once or twice, but I felt bad about it).

What I like second-best about The Long Kill is its obsessive focus on shooting. Again, this goes beyond the scenes set during the war. The protagonist – he’s given the uninspiring nom de guerre “Mister” – bonds with his father only through shooting targets and rabbits; as mentioned above, he tries to impress his not-girlfriend by shooting; when he interviews for a job, he talks about how shooting gave him great math skills; even when he takes on a home improvement project, the scene ends with him leveling a power saw and pulling the trigger. Mister is very, very good at shooting; it’s not so much that he’s bad at everything else as that there isn’t anything else.

What I like third-best about The Long Kill is the prose. There are some typos, but it manages to be evocative while sticking to a terse, militaristic style. This sentence is about 2/3 of what the game shares about Mister’s relationship with his father, but it communicates just about everything the player needs to know:

"Even without looking though you can picture the little non-smile, that happy frown he does when you do or say something he likes."

What I like least about The Long Kill is its fantasy of victimization. After an opening sequence where you support a house-raid that bags an important Taliban leader, Mister’s convoy gets hit by an IED and he’s captured alongside his unit. They’re subject to torture, and he’s given an ultimatum of teaching the enemy soldiers to be better shots, or his companions will be executed. It’s a queasily compelling sequence, even if it ends rather abruptly, and by making Mister weak and frightened, it finally renders him something close to human. But this was still a bad authorial choice. We know that in the flashforward, Mister has PTSD and a discharge, but there’s no need for a period of abjection to connect the precise, effective wartime operator with the haunted shell of a man; that’s just what war does. More damningly, this sequence creates an underdog narrative that inverts the far more common reality of the war – the number of Western POWs and casualties was miniscule compared to the Afghans captured, maimed, and slain (many, of course, were innocent, and many, of course, were not). To elide this reality, and instead opt for a shell game that seems to swap the positions of the players: that’s kid glove stuff. Not at all harsh.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Oof. Despite being a sucker for libraries, knowledge, and (presumably) libraries of knowledge, I did not get on well with this one. The pitch is compelling: you’ve found a magical shrine that plays host to an all-knowing spirit, a collection of all the world’s wisdom, and a masked library attendant with a secret, and now you can ask to read any book you want. Wow! That is a lovely idea, and if the realities of implementation mean that of course the promise of “any book” can’t come close to being delivered, at least it’s a compelling illusion.

Sadly, after establishing the setup, the game quickly began to lose me. Partially this is because there are only three books on offer – specifically, two short-ish ones that establish the background lore of this fantasy world’s two major nations, delivered in DnD-manual style, and one long one that’s just the story of how your character came to the library, which of course you already would know and wouldn’t bother wasting time on. Partially this is because the prose doesn’t really live up to the fantastical premise:

"Your breath catches sharply in your chest as the last of the incantations die on the biting wind that whips around you. Streams of pale moonlight flicker in past the broken beams overhead, sending a cascade of sprawling patterns through the old, fractured glass. Ancient words scrawled onto a faded scroll bleed off the edges of their crumbling paper, spilling a black mist onto the cold stone floors which slips and slides into the dark corners of this dilapidated temple."

Adjectivitis, unvarying sentence structure, small grammar errors; it’s not awful but it’s not a high point either, and since the game is almost entirely walls of text – there are some engaging choices towards the endgame, but for the most part you’re either picking “turn to next page” or “turn to next section” – I really found myself wishing for better prose.

As for the content, I found the DnD manuals competent but rather uninspired. One nation is fantasy China, with the serial numbers not even filed off – the provinces are literally just real-world Chinese provinces. It’s got a whiff of Orientalism to it (did you know the lands of the East are ruled by “an ancient and magical dynasty”, that the people are “deeply spiritual and honor their ancestors above all else”, that they “practice martial arts as a way of harnessing [chi] energy”, and are ruled from a capital that is “a place of intrigue”?) but I think this is innocent; the country’s multiculturalism and openness to immigration are held up as a strength, and contrasted with the xenophobia of the western nation (which is Europe-flavored but not a direct insert of anyplace in particular; it’s just general fantasy bollocks).

It’s all serviceable enough, but unexciting to slog through, all the more so when the author occasionally loses track of the lore (there’s a bad-guy cult alternately called the “Band of the Dark Sun” and “Band of the Black Sun”) or draws too-direct inspiration from pop culture (there were a bunch of killings at a recent marriage, which has become known as the “Crimson Union”). And none of it actually winds up being all that relevant to the main part of the game, which is your character’s autobiography – the setting details are sufficiently straightforward that they could have easily been explained in the course of the story.

This bit does have some zip to it; it’s maybe paced a little slowly, and sometimes drops to bottom-line narration when writing out a scene would have been more effective. It also isn’t self-aware of how funny the premise sounds (you go on a world-shaking quest to find a cure for the ailing goat that’s your last link to your family); it’s offbeat enough to work well, but I think needed more time establishing the stakes and emotional connection between the main character and the goat. But once it gets moving, it executes YA-style fantasy novel tropes solidly enough; this isn’t my genre of choice, but even I got a kick out of the various double-crosses in the pirate section. Then things kicked up again after the story wraps, as the protagonist does face an actually-challenging set of decisions without a clear moral compass to make their choices easy.

As a result, my view of the game improved as it went on, but it’s still hard to recommend this one. The author’s got enthusiasm and some talent, but the game we’ve got feels too much like a first draft – there’s a lot of unnecessary cruft and an awkward frame that doesn’t cleanly mesh with the main substance of the story, along with prose that needs some polishing. Of course, every great game started out as a terrible first draft, so this is no bad thing by itself – but hopefully for their next game, the author will be able to spend more time figuring out what they need to say and what they don’t need to say, and revising their work to foreground the most compelling parts.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

I’ve noted elsewhere that the Manichean parser/choice split has been breaking down in recent years, and Hand Me Down is a leading example of the trend: what we have here is a big old Twine-TADS-Twine sandwich, and despite the slight wonkiness that description might suggest, the narrative handles the transitions with aplomb. In the framing choice-based bits, you play a young woman who’s visiting her ailing father in a hospital oncology ward, while in the middle you play the text adventure he (and your partner) has written up as a gift for you, so the shift in platforms makes diegetic sense.

To its credit, the novelty of the game’s design never felt like a distraction. It helps that the various pieces are playing to their platform’s strengths, and even their stereotypes: the parser game is a lightly comic puzzle-‘em-up in the mansion of a whimsical relation, while the Twine bits deal with emotional family drama. On the technical level, I found the process a tiny bit convoluted, but largely because the author provided a lot of choices about how to play each bit; while I could have simply gone from one bit to the next via the game’s webpage, in my experience TADS games tend to be way better when played via the QTADS interpreter, so I the slight fussiness that came from deciding to download the game file instead is on me. And while there’s no state carried between the different pieces, given the setup, that’s not a feature I missed.

This isn’t exactly a game of halves, though – the two Twine pieces are much shorter than the meaty middle. That’s not to slight them by any means: I thought the opener efficiently sketched out the loves, annoyances, and fears between the various character, while providing scope for a few low-stakes decisions that nonetheless helped characterize the protagonist. And the finale sequence is an impressively open-ended conversation where you can choose to chat about what you liked (or disliked) about the text adventure, press your dad on his health and prognosis, or a combination of the two; while the game cues you towards positivity and escapism, at least it does acknowledge that your dad’s constant wisecracking and avoidance of hard topics is at least a bit problematic, so there’s some tension in how to navigate the discussion. But still, combined these two parts made up perhaps half an hour of my two with the game.

(I also can’t help but note that the Twine sections feature AI-generated character portraits; adding insult to injury, I didn’t think they were very good).

As for the text adventure, it’s an impressively realized artifact that does a great job communicating the fictional details of its construction: it’s a wacky puzzlefest set in the house where your dad grew up (very in line with the first parser game many folks write), and since it was originally intended as a gift for your 16th birthday, the main goal is for you to get an invitation, costume, and shareable gift to bring to your party. So if there are sometimes dumb jokes, overcomplicated puzzles, or implementation niggles, well, those are all to be expected!

Irony can only take you so far, but at least as to the first two potential issues, I think Hand Me Down succeeds. On the writing front, the joke-a-minute style lands more often than not, helped along by appealing, entertaining prose; there’s the inevitable puzzle where you need to search an unpleasant pile of compost, and of course you know there’s something in there, but the game’s going to drag things out:

"The only way to make this dark curiosity go away is meet it at the end. You thought you were used to the smell, a cross between vegetable corpses and bug barf, but nope, urk! there it is again, with a fresh layer of horribleness now that you’re getting closer."

There’s also an extended sequence where you have to follow a snail as he races to show you something that left me giggling.

As for puzzles, thought has clearly gone into how to balance the old-school feel with player accessibility. In particular, while there are five different invitations, costumes, and gifts in the game, you only need to get one of each to get to the ending, which takes a substantial edge off the difficulty. There are definitely some design approaches that are too hardcore for me – if you want to get a full score, this is the kind of game where you’d better LOOK UNDER the kitchen table without any prompting. I also signally failed to figure out how to interact with any of the computers I found, with USE COMPUTER or TURN ON COMPUTER being no help at all; turns out MOVE MOUSE is the way to go, which is a pretty granular requirement for something that shouldn’t be at all hard for the protagonist to accomplish. But since those puzzles were largely optional, I can’t complain too much about a design that allows more hardcore puzzle-solvers than I to have extra fun.

That third category, implementation niggles, did sometimes get more than niggle-y, though. There’s some minor stuff, like unimplemented objects (the narration calls great attention to a clock on a mantelpiece in one room, so I was surprised no such thing actually existed) and a takeable beam of sunlight. But the major issues I ran into were about disambiguation. I had to go to incredible lengths to manage such mundane tasks as unlocking a drawer with the key that clearly unlocked it, or reading the most recent of the dozen notes I’d picked up. Judicious inventory juggling got me through most of these challenges, but there were a few I simply had to write off because I couldn’t figure out how to communicate exactly which object I was referring to. I haven’t experienced anything this rough since playing Cragne Manor – and that had 84 different authors, none of whom coordinated with each other!

Those nearly-interchangeable notes bring me to what I think is Hand Me Down’s other missed opportunity. See, over the course of years, your dad has added what amount to diary entries into the game, musing on his relationship with you, his divorce from your mom, how he felt about his own dad… these are well written, and form the clearest connection point between the text adventure and the frame story, rewarding the diligent player with backstory and deeper emotional engagement to inform the eventual climax. But it’s pretty hard to find them – I only discovered about half – and because they’re embedded in a big, riotous puzzlefest, I found they didn’t have as much heft as they merited, because as soon as I read one it was on to the next complex challenge. I would have enjoyed the game more, I think, if the author had leaned harder into creating resonance between the frame story and the text adventure, so that it felt like progress through the parser game was more directly shedding light on the central character relationships.

That would have been a different game, though; and to be honest I have a hard time believing that the protagonist’s dad would have made a more modern, post-Photopia game instead of going back to the 80s text adventures of his youth. Similarly, if Hand Me Down doesn’t fully integrate and unify its disparate pieces, it’s still quite successful at the ambitious task its set itself. The game has heart, comedy, and clever puzzles out the wazoo; if the pieces don’t fully cohere, at least each of them is enjoyable on its own.

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).

Per a Who song from 50 years ago, no one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, but a cavalcade of anti-hero based movies, TV shows, and podcasts sure are hopeful of filling the gap. Virtue, a UK-set Ink game by a debut author (and/or pseudonym), is the latest to step up to the plate, and it has novelty on its side: here our bad man is a bad woman, and per the blurb, one destined to be a Tory MP. Gloria, our protagonist, is a real piece of work – a status-conscious, property-value obsessed avatar of the bourgeoisie with opinions about Poles, Roma, you name it – and as she confronts, or rather fails to confront, a peeping-Tom incident in the tony neighborhood to which she just moved, her odiousness moves from the personal to the political.

She’s an unpleasant, anxious person, in other words and the game’s great strength is that it keeps just the right distance from her. The player is privy to all Gloria’s fears and hopes (there’s rather a lot more of the former than the latter), which are all sketched with psychological plausibility, but her subjectivity is kept at a remove; the narration weaves in snatches of thoughts and bits of dialogue, but there’s more telling than showing, which might not be the most literary choice but in this case provides the player with some much-needed psychic defenses. Like, here’s a bit where she’s contemplating the horribleness of anything threatening her cozy suburban dream:

"So much seems perfect—the proximity to the kids’ school, the quality of the location, the size of the house, the decoration, the conservatory, the new extension you’re planning, the new carpets, all the many book shelves, the TV that when you stop watching it dims and looks like a painting—the new kitchen fittings, the cooker, the plans to fell the tree in the back garden to give the garden more light—how can you face tainting and undermining any of that?"

The details are all well-observed, but the language is vapid enough to let the player off the hook (similarly, the author’s careful not to have anyone say anything too awful about the various minorities being demonized, though of course they’re thinking it). This isn’t due to a lack of writerly skill, I don’t think, but reflects a deliberate choice, because when the stakes are lower, the prose is more engaging. Here’s a bit of landscape description that I liked:

"Beyond two multi-million pound houses—and beyond the strip of garden belonging to the first house, which was lined prettily with pink bougainvilleas—the estuary turns and opens up in one large, swerving gleam."

At any rate, intentional or not I was glad of the distance because Gloria is a truly odious creature. After learning that a mysterious person has been lurking in the hedgerows and abusing himself while peeping on local women (which fact she discovers through an incredibly awkward conversation with her Polish neighbor), she launches a crusade to push the filth to finger a perpetrator, ideally by trawling the local Roma caravan for some suspects to fit up for the crime.

When that doesn’t work, she forms a busybody committee and catches the attention of the local MP. Her interactions with her family form a counterpoint to this more political strand of the plot, and these are likewise quite dour: she fights with her henpecked husband, infantilizes her much more self-aware daughter, and ignores her furtively absent son. This stuff by no means engenders sympathy, but does provide some context for the aggression she displaces onto those she finds insufficiently British (there’s an intimation that she was a victim of clergy sexual abuse while younger, which serves a similar purpose by giving her what seems to be an anxiety disorder and a persistent fear of impurity and inadequacy).

It’s an unpleasant but neatly-told story with its politics in the right place, I think. It doesn’t lean especially hard into interactivity; most passages end with a single choice leading to the next bit of plot, and those choices that do exist largely seem illusory. But the format does help establish the modicum of complicity that’s needed for the piece to work, so I think it justifies the author’s decision to write IF. I’d rate Virtue a well-done game that’s worth playing – but as always, I do have two caveats.

The first is that the game seemed to end quite abruptly, perhaps due to a bug? I reached the final section of the game, which is the meeting with the local MP, but after greeting him in the pub and deciding to have some white wine, the game simply stopped before getting to the substance of the meeting. This might have been a consequence for some poor decision-making, since the game seemed to be implying that I was insufficiently sloshed (I mean fair, I’d have to be three sheets to the wind to survive a conversation with a Tory backbencher) – there’d been an earlier option to have either a cuppa or some wine before heading out to the meeting, and I’d opted for the tea, and the horrible Tory was having a G+T because of course he was and I could have joined him in that rather than sticking to wine. But since the rest of the game’s choices felt fairly low-stakes, and the ending didn’t indicate he sent me packing for being too much of a lightweight or anything, it felt less like an anticlimax and more like a technical issue. Still, by that point it was clear where the story was headed so I don’t think this negatively impacted my enjoyment too much.

As for the other issue, it’s a broader one but also more nebulous, and it involves a spoiler – though one that the game’s own blurb comes pretty close to revealing, so I’ll omit the blurry-text this time. Turns out in addition to Gloria’s crusade being motivated by her self-esteem issues and general xenophobia, the game is pretty clear that the roving Onanist who’s kicked this whole thing off is her son Andrew, which a part of Gloria recognizes but refuses to confront, leading to her sublimating her denial into political action. I suppose it’s reasonable to consider that many reactionaries are the way they are because of deep-seated insecurities and a guilty conscience – and in some ways it’s even attractive to think that they’re just broken people dealing with trauma in deeply antisocial ways. So it’s all plausible enough.

But I can’t help but wonder whether this is a bit too pat. The blurb also says that this is an “origin story of a shameful MP” – it’s unsurprising that the complete ending appears to involve Gloria running for office as a knock-off Liz Truss – but really, do these kinds of people typically have origin stories? I think they don’t, or if they do, they’re less psychological and more tawdry: people born with unjust privilege realize they can maintain it by scapegoating others; people born without it realize they can curry favor by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. We’re primarily dealing with material conditions, in other words, and in the post-Trump, post-Boris Johnson age, the idea that the enemies of democracy could work through their issues if they just got some therapy feels, I have to say, a bit naïve. And here, Virtue’s otherwise-praiseworthy decision to hold Gloria at a remove winds up being a negative, because a more literary take going deep into her subjectivity perhaps could have avoided this objection; since the didactic writing style invites us to view the game not as a character study, but as an object lesson, though, I think it’s harder to argue that Gloria isn’t meant as a type.

Let me emphasize once again this is a pretty rarefied complaint: “Virtue is insufficiently Marxist” isn’t a criticism that should prevent one from playing a smart, well-implemented game that made me think. Recommended!