Reviews by Mike Russo

Everyone knows a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but for all that, there is something in a name – and is there an author’s name more likely to strike terror in a player’s heart than “lazygamedesigner82”? Whether they’re intentionally hearkening back to the text adventures of 1982, or they were just born back then, it’s definitely a warning that the game they’ve produced is going to lack modern conveniences. Similarly, especially for a parser game, a good author has to be the very opposite of lazy, making sure that there’s sufficient depth of implementation, and enough proactive clueing, to make a game anything other than an exercise in frustration. Combined with the fact that Quest for the Serpent’s Eye is a Quest 5 game written as late as 2020, that the blurb winks at all the old-school tropes that to my taste were stale before Infocom shut down, and that the instructions tell you you might need both LOOK IN and LOOK UNDER, I went into this one bracing myself against the pain that was inevitably going to make this experience a torture.

Reader, I was as wrong as I’ve ever been. Low-plot-1980s-throwback-puzzle-fest is by no means my IF subgenre of choice – to put it mildly – so I am as shocked as anyone to relate that I had a really fun time with this.

In one sense, it’s exactly what it looks like. You’re off on a lightly-motivated treasure hunt for the eponymous gem – your old professor went missing trying to find it, so of course you decide to track down both her and it – in a jungle / cave / temple setting that couldn’t be more cliched if it featured in an Indiana Jones movie. The puzzles are a mix of straightforward medium-dry-goods stuff – cutting vines with a machete, that sort of thing – and escape-the-deathtrap gameplay. There’s even a maze. And as advertised, there are monochrome graphics with almost no straight lines, lending everything a wibbly-wobbly vibe.

But contrary to that “lazy” sobriquet, tremendous care has been taken with every aspect of the thing. The puzzles are actually carefully considered, with a relatively small map and relatively small number of objects helping attune the player to the clues that are there to help you progress. Death can come frequently, but it instantly warps you back to where you were so you can try again. The game makes the obvious jokes and references – the shopkeeper is named Stanley – but also goes a step beyond to make the non-obvious ones, too – the ship you arrive on is called the S.S. Fawcett. There’s an infectious enthusiasm to the prose that feels distinctive while staying perfectly in-genre, plus some one-liners that made me laugh out loud (the list of example commands in the HELP text includes “SHOW DRIVERS LICENSE TO HORSE”). The traditional ASK ABOUT conversational system is implemented with an impressive depth of topics. The graphics started to grow on me after a while, and somehow, there’s even a cool twist in the ultra-generic plot that’s well-telegraphed but still took me by surprise.

Quest for the Serpent’s Eye of course isn’t a perfect game – there are a couple of later puzzles that I think are a bit underclued, especially a speak-friend-and-enter riff that feels like it’s taking unfair advantage of a player’s likely assumptions, and it suffers from some of the weaknesses of the Quest 5 platform (notably, you can’t save if you play online, and I wound up losing my progress after alt-tabbing for a bit. Definitely download this one and play it in the interpreter!) But the strong design, robust implementation, assiduous polish, and genial good humor – not to mention the fact that the author puts themself very clearly on the player’s side, rather than an adversarial position – makes this one of the very few games that communicates to a modern player why this style of adventure built a following back in the day, and still has something to offer to a contemporary audience. Typically when I review games in this genre, I wrap up by saying some variation of “if you like this kind of thing, you’ll probably like this.” But for a change I can just say hey, I think you’ll probably like this.

Thread Unlocked is another Neo-Twiny Jam entry like Idle Hands, but instead of using its scant 500 words to communicate an entire, but linear, self-contained experience, it allows the player to construct one of a myriad of one- or two-line forum posts, which gain power from your ability to imagine all that’s come before and all that will come after. The game’s opening wrings as much dread as any horror movie out of just four words: “Thread unlocked. Slowmode off.” We don’t know where we are, or what exactly was being discussed before the modhammer came down (though c’mon, it was probably AI) – all that matters is that we now have a renewed outlet for our feelings, which the mandatory cooling-off period has done nothing to quench.

You build your responses one word at a time, from a choice of two or three, until you’ve picked four, at which point the game extrapolates out a full, short post. This filling out of the prompts provides the game’s energetic kick, because the pieces that are in your control are pretty much just throat-clearing – “well now there’s another,” “you are not being”, “can I just say”. Seeing these banal introductions turned into discourse-interventions that are sure to wind up escalating things is gleefully groan-worthy; after running through the mechanic a couple of times, I started to feel the same exuberant anticipatory outrage I experience when seeing that there’ve been new posts to a contentious thread.

The responses are all there is to the game, while they vary, it’s not over a wide range. Still, they’re not all just flame-bait. Some are passive-aggressive:

"You are not being very thoughtful with your words. Can you delete what you just said, or I’ll have to flag you."

Some are vain attempts to tamp down the disagreement:

"Well now there’s another thread on sensitive topics. Leave it alone, I tell you."

And there’s at least one that’s actually nice:

"Can I just say that really means a lot to me! Thank you. I can’t express my gratefulness!"

(I stopped after getting this one, figuring I’d quit while I was ahead).

Again, you never see what prompted these posts, or what comes after them, which helps the purity of the gag stand out in sharp relief: it’s notable that there’s no option not to post, you always have to say something and that something will almost always be calculated to keep the bad feelings going until the thread is inevitably re-locked. Part of me wishes that the writing was a bit less generic, that there were more specific jokes or different voices woven into the responses, because I did find that they got a little same-y after a while. But I think that would have wound up undercutting the structuralist point the game is making: Internet arguments are all alike, and however much we might like to think of ourselves as above the fray, even the most anodyne point is likely to feed the flames. The way to win Thread Unlocked is not to play, but where’s the fun in that?

I recently contributed to a game with a dozen or so different authors (Mathbrush’s Untitled Relationship Project 1); the various excerpts are all mixed together without attribution, so part of the fun of playing is trying to figure out who wrote which bits. And while I felt reasonably confident in a number of guesses, the ones I was surest of were those by Sophia de Augustine. While their oeuvre has a bunch of recurring motifs – religious imagery, flawed dads, queer love – even when those elements are dialed down, there’s still something instantly recognizable about their prose, and that something is adjectives. Adjectivitis is a curse, of course – I’ve spent a lot of time groaning at fledgling writers’ attempts to pad their prose by making sure every noun has at least one modifier attacked to it – and often it’s good advice to use them sparingly. Sophia’s writing rejects these counsels of caution, however, and winds up distinctively effective by picking exactly the right words, over and over.

That gift is at the heart of what makes Idle Hands successful. A bit of dynamic fiction entered into last year’s Neo-Twiny Jam – which limited games to 500 words or fewer – it recounts the before, during, and after of a bout of love-making with a demonic partner (the timeline shifts around a bit, and also this is the kind of sex where you have more than one go). The focus is on communicating an overwhelming sensory experience, not plot or narrative; you get a bit of a sense of his personality, but this is an element of flavor rather than anything resembling a character study. As dynamic fiction, there’s also nothing by way of player agency or choice – there are a few highlighted phrases that reveal a bit of additional text when moused-over, which serve to engage the player and provide an opportunity for them to feel complicit in opting into the sex, but otherwise you’re just clicking the forward arrow to reach the next passage.

Given the necessary privity of the piece, these are the right choices – constructing context for what brought these people together and what their coupling means, or allowing for different paths through the text, might seem fine enough goals in isolation, but efforts in those directions would come at the immediate expense of the game’s throbbing, fiery heart. So this is a piece set up to live or die by its prose, and fortunately it delivers, a marvel of evocative economy:

"He is all forked silver-tongue and razor-sharp teeth, biting off the rounded, purring edge to his voice with a cessation droning like fruit-drunk wasps at summerly height."

I could write a couple of paragraphs just on why I like this one sentence so much, but I think the strengths are obvious: its descriptions are playfully haunted by the traditional attributes of the devil, makes sure even seemingly-innocuous details like the timbre of a voice have a seductive tinge, and confines itself to just one idiosyncratic bit of vocabulary to make the reader slow down and feel the emphasis proper to the final simile. It’s a dense style, and in a long game might wind up feeling like too much, but the game also does a good job alternating its purplest transports with sacrilegious gags or winking references to boning; it also doesn’t rely on any one trick for too long, opening with a bunch of alliteration before wisely putting that back in the quiver for the rest of the game.

Admittedly there are a few moments where I felt like the writing was so heavily freighted that it threatened to topple over, but only a few, and it always reined things back in: this is a controlled, writerly piece that creates a singular aesthetic experience through well-chosen words (and also through well-chosen colors and visual theming, though as always I feel less qualified to comment on those elements). I can see how some potential players might find schtupping Satan to be an off-putting premise, but those interested in giving it a try will find lots here to enjoy.

[I should acknowledge that Sophia provided a cool banner for my Review-a-Thon thread on the IntFic forum. But a) I’d played the game and formed my opinion of it before I learned that, and b) I think everyone knows that if you want me to write a positive review of your game, bribery is a far less efficient approach than just slathering crypto-Catholic themes all over it, so Sophia’s bases were covered either way]

Two games after playing an entry planned for 2023’s ShuffleComp revival, the randomizer gave me an entry in 2014’s OG ShuffleComp – I am really enjoying how wide-ranging the thon feels! Once again, this is inspired by a song I’ve never heard before and didn’t get around to listening to, but hey, this isn’t actually a ShuffleComp, so I’m telling myself this is a reasonable approach to reviewing (I’m also telling myself that it’s totally understandable that I spent ten minutes flailing around trying to get the game to work – turns out that the first file listed on the IFDB page is an HTML TADS one that doesn’t work in modern interpreters or web browsers, but fortunately the second one listed plays just fine in QTADS).

There are probably two basic ways to make a game inspired by music. The first, taken by Not Just Once, is to assemble a linear narrative out of the lyrics and bits of plot implied by the songs, filtering a mélange of story-content through the Aristotelian unities. Look Around the Corner takes the more dangerous course, and tries to capture something of the experience of listening to a song while sticking to a largely-traditional IF approach. In particular, it deploys repetition and novelty to mirror the verse-chorus-verse structure familiar from music. This is a time loop game, in each of which the player must perform the same sequence of events: getting up out of bed, leaving their room, catching sight of a ray of light coming around the hallway’s corner, and then experiencing one of five wildly-disparate visions – the only bit of text that changes from iteration to iteration – before the whole thing resets.

The focus is clearly on the set-piece visions, and they range over an intriguingly broad territory, alternately invoking the primum mobile, Sumerian myth, the fractal structures of nature. Here’s that last one:

"The light of the dawn filters through an enormous tree, whose trunk divides into branches, whose branches divide into twigs, whose twigs carry leaves. Each leaf has veins that branch into smaller and smaller veins, bringing water and minerals to every chlorophyllic cell."

The writing is fine enough to communicate the ideas, but I did wish the author had leaned even more into poetry; five different sequences of two sentences isn’t a lot of time to make an impression, and getting a little less linear, a little more allusive, would have made these pieces more memorable and helped the player intuit connections between what felt to me a bit of a random grab-bag of themes. I also found the ending a bit of an anticlimax – there’s a fun little puzzle, clued with increasing obviousness as visions start to repeat, but your reward for untangling it is little more than “and then she woke up.” Again, perhaps listening to the song would mean that all these choices would make sense, as I’d see how the music provides a unifying ground to the whole experience, but I can’t but feel that there was a missed opportunity here to make a song-like game that doesn’t rely on anything else for its impact.

There’s a running joke about the classic sci-fi tabletop RPG Traveller, which is that it’s the only game where you can die before getting out of chargen. It uses a “lifepath” system, you see, where a series of tables let you roll year by year for events in your military career before you decide to muster out, at which point the game proper begins. But buried in those tables are some options that will just kill you, and send you back to the drawing board before your poor character even gets a chance to start a campaign. The other running joke is that chargen is the best part of the game, and A Mouse Speaks With Death shows that actually there might be something to that: it uses a card-based storylet system rather than dice as you recall each of the events of your life, and per the title no matter how well you do there’s no way to get out alive. But just like Traveller, it’s compelling stuff that positively demands you try it at least a couple of times, just to see how differently things can turn out.

The other similarity with Traveller is that the game is based on the author’s own tabletop setting, a Watership-Down-style place where heroic mice scrounge, travel, and protect what’s theirs in the shadow of the overwhelming and arcane world of humankind. I was worried at first that this connection might wind up overburdening the game – there’s a very robust glossary running down in-world terminology, much of which felt unnecessary: did we really need to know that “thief” means someone “who steals from their own nestmates, a term of opprobrium” or that “trouble” is “something dangerous”? I presume that in the RPG some of these terms have mechanics attached to them, but in the context of this game, they’re superfluous.

Fortunately the game quickly proved that it’s a fleeter thing than that first impression might have suggested. Part of that is the lovely art: you’re greeted with a well-realized mouse skeleton wearing a robe and perched on a spool of thread, a near-perfect blend of dread and cute (this is the eponymous Death, to whom you’re reciting your memories before he moves you on to your final destination). Part of it is the no-nonsense interface: at each life-stage, you’re given a hand of three cards and can pick one to play, at which point you’re whisked into a storylet that offers more traditional choice-based gameplay (past the first choice, you can also use one of a limited stock of redraws to swap out your options). But mostly it’s just down to the writing, which efficiently delivers all the pleasures of this genre: the mice are doughty and resourceful, the mysterious human artifacts they encounter induce awe as well as a thrill of recognition, and there’s a lovely concreteness to it all. Here’s a bit from one of the opening vignettes:

"Our nest was tissue paper chewed into strips. When I first opened my eyes, the world was white and red in the gloom, the colour of the paper. We — me and my brothers and sisters — were all heaped up together. Those were wonderful days. We had full bellies; each other."

While you’re to a certain degree at the mercy of the cards, and no matter how well you play you can only make it through at most eight rounds, the game still feels generous and provides plenty of player agency. It helps that the framing lets you know that you’re going to die no matter what so you might as well enjoy yourself, but the storylets are also designed to let you coauthor many of the outcomes; if you feel like inflicting setbacks on your mouse, you’re free to, but for the most part you can also just decide to live a relatively charmed life before the inevitable happens.

While there isn’t any visible stat tracking or explicit connections between the cards, it’s clear that some storylets unlock others, like the way I saw cards enabling me to start a family after playing one that introduced me to my partner (I was a little disappointed, though, that the Red Beast storylet, which saw me boldly stride out to defend the nest, didn’t acknowledge that a previously one had seen me named the nest’s official Champion – this was actually just my job). The end of the game also shows you a little animated word-cloud based on how you played your mouse and what you accomplished; in my most eventful playthrough, I wound up with something like 17 tags, which maybe made the animation drag, but it makes for a nice incentive to try again and explore the possibility-space. The space around Death also fills up with cute bits of art representing possessions you accumulate or key events in your life, which similarly winds up rewarding experimentation.

Also contributing to A Mouse Speaks to Deaths’ grabbiness is the suggestion of a metaplot. Certain cards are marked with a special triangle symbol, and by playing as many of those as you can, you can learn scraps of lore about a fabled city whose inhabitants managed to obtain immortality. I’m not sure if the likelihood of getting these triangle cards increases in subsequent playthroughs, but in my fourth go-round I was able to find out the truth of these legends after some nerve-wracking derring-do; it’s maybe less climactic than I was expecting, and I still had three rounds left so this heroic mouse still wound up going out on a relatively simple note, but that fits the game’s unpretentious, wistful vibe better than allowing an epic fantasy theme to suddenly dominate.

I should mention some elements that are flaws, not just design choices: I noticed a few bugs in the Wind storylet, where several passages threw up angry red “bad conditional expression” errors, and the chronology of the different storylets sometimes got muddled (a few seem to take multiple years, whereas others are clearly over in a matter of hours or days and seem like they should certainly overlap with a few of the longer-term ones). One time I also died at my fourth or fifth card play without being sure what exactly had happened – I suppose that’s delivering the classic Traveller experience, but I definitely wanted a bit more closure. And I’m not sure the pool of different events is broad enough to keep each playthrough fresh after the third of fourth. Still, that’s more than enough to make for a meaty, satisfying experience; the well-judged game design structure and winsome prose were enough to induce me to see 23 of the 46 available stories, over the course of an hour or so, and I enjoyed every single one at least a little. The one downside is that I’m left with no desire at all to check out the tie-in RPG: I’m satisfied just rolling up and killing characters, thanks.

Continuing the review-a-thon run through the highlights of other events, we come to Not Just Once, which was intended as an entry in last year’s ShuffleComp revival, but missed the deadline. The conceit of ShuffleComp is that participants submit a couple of songs, the organizers shuffle them around, and then they hand a new selection back to the authors, who make a game based on some or all of the songs on their customized mini-mix-tape. Sadly for my ability to evaluate Not Just Once according to the rules of the Comp, I didn’t listen to the playlist listed by the author, which contained three songs from bands I’d never heard of, a Radiohead track that’s unfamiliar to me, and a Genesis song whose title meant nothing to me at the time though now that I go back and look at it again, I realize was on the adult contemporary station all the time when I was a kid.

Fortunately, Not Just Once stands on its own well enough. A Twine game gussied up with a stylish blue header and footer, it also boasts a customized interface where selecting a choice reveals a few new paragraphs and then scrolls down to the next set of options, making it play something like an Ink game with a better color palette. It also impresses with how quickly it establishes its downmarket UK setting:

"This is your local high street, although it barely deserves the title. Fully half the shop fronts are boarded up or to let. There’s a corner shop with overpriced groceries - that you’ve just come out of - an off-license, a phone repair kiosk, and a couple of charity shops (they closed mid-afternoon, though).

"Overhead, Christmas lighting flashes desultorily - alternating stylised LED gifts and trees, strung across the street. The local council’s festive offering, still in place."

There are a few small infelicities here (the “that you’ve just come out of” interjection is a little clumsy, and “desultorily” is always a mistake) but they’re drowned out by the evocatively sardonic turns of phrase and nicely-chosen details. The prose remains strong as the plot kicks in: a pay phone is ringing in its booth as you walk by, and after you feel drawn to pick it up, you unexpectedly find yourself thrust into a disorienting and intense conversation with a women who’s alluring as she is threatening, and who says she knows you though you’d swear you’ve never met her before in your life.

While the direction the story goes isn’t too hard to guess, the writing is effective at communicating your warring curiosity and wariness, and early choices that seemed merely incidental see call-backs that make the game feel responsive. Despite drawing on five different songs, it struck me as fairly one-note – modulo a bit of a twist in the ending and those couple minutes of setup before it shows its hand, Not Just Once is content to stick with a slow ratcheting up of its I-want-to-make-out-with-you-but-also-you-might-kill-me tension. But hey, that’s a fun note, and it’s well played here.

There are a few missed opportunities: many of the choices do feel like they reduce to “do you want the plot to keep happening Y/N”, which isn’t very interesting, and I was surprised the ending didn’t twist in the way I was expecting (Spoiler - click to show)(wouldn’t it have been more fun, and neater, if it had been the girl who answered the phone call at the end, except this time she’s the one with no memory of you?). And I think the pacing is perhaps five to ten percent slower than would be ideal; this is still a nervy little thriller, don’t get me wrong, but a little bit of tightening would pay significant dividends. But that’s often the way with mix-tapes: they can be a bit shaggy, but an enthusiastic mix of disparate elements will take you far.

We’ve now reached the first of a couple Goncharov games in the thon. I’m dimly aware of the provenance here; there was a social-media meme a couple years ago where folks conjured up the existence of a “lost” Scorsese film focusing on the namesake Russian gangster, and then a game jam dedicated to games fleshing out the mythos. I’m not sure how much of the core concepts were set by the organizers, or the meme – I’m assuming at least some of the details of setting and a few of the characters – but suspect that the jam will take the “interpretation of the Odyssey by someone who’s never read the Odyssey” thing I mentioned a couple reviews up to heretofore-unplumbed, kaleidoscopic extremes.

Someone Else’s Story is a short Twine game, and zooms in on one moment that surely must come early in the film: you play Sofia, a woman with some connection to the Italian mob who’s given the task of weaseling into the good graces of Goncharov’s wife Katya at a cocktail party to see what she knows about what the Russians are up to. I found the backstory here somewhat confusing – there are a lot of different characters name-checked, and the details of who you are and what kind of move is being made are left vague – but this isn’t a mystery or thriller where you need to carefully sift through information and make high-stakes deductions. No, all of that setup is basically just there to create background vibes for a flirtation-with-intent pas des deux with Goncharova.

Sexually-charged conversations with an undercurrent of danger are a staple of mob movies, of course, even if the details here would strain credulity if one took the meme seriously (forget the lesbian subtext, has Scorsese ever shot a scene that’s just two women talking?) The game does a good job of playing this trope; the descriptions convey Katya’s sexiness, and the player’s given a couple of satisfying opportunities to take a risk and make their interest known. Meanwhile, while the men’s criminal business is never openly spelled out, the writing conveys the possibility of violence and its potential to swallow you up, too, if you’re not careful:

"'Most people don’t want to get on the wrong side of my husband,' she says. 'But you—you don’t care. I like that.'

"You wonder if perhaps it would have been wise to care."

While there are clearly mechanics that track how much you’re leaning into seduction vs. fishing for information vs. playing it safe and building a rapport to exploit later on, the choices never feel mechanical; the fiction effectively pushes you to try to balance your disparate goals, and it makes sense that there’s rarely a conversational gambit without tradeoffs or opportunity costs. My one complaint about the implementation of the battle of wits is that on my first go-round, it was over surprisingly quickly – the main conversation is just a sequence of four or five choices, so while I thought I was starting out with a cautiously considered opening to feel Katya out, in fact I was just frittering away my scarce opportunities to push forward. But on the flip side, the game’s brevity means it was easy to replay, armed with the knowledge of the ticking clock, and even that ambivalent, premature ending works well on its own terms.

Of course, partially that’s because this is, as mentioned, an early establishing scene: it sets up the relationship between two characters and clarifies the stakes for when they next come together. Whether Katya will be eager to pursue an assignation with an enticing stranger, or will find herself trying to shield a nosy interloper from the consequences of her own curiosity, the consequences will all play out off-screen. So too are we not privy to how Sofia will navigate the conference with the boss who assigned her her task, though notably in none of the game’s endings does she get any definitive information from Katya. This range of potential outcomes combined with the lack of narrative resolution mean that the game is essentially ambiguous – but that’s not a flaw so much as further confirmation that, as Katya says, this is fundamentally someone else’s story: Scorsese’s camera will lock onto the husbands and capos, while the struggles, loves, and hazards of the women are confined to the margin.

While at 43 I often find myself feeling like a bit of a graybeard, my contemporary experience with vintage-era IF is actually fairly limited – I played a few Infocom games that I was a bit too young for, and outside of a few low-rent BASIC adventures that was pretty much it until Photopia got me into the amateur scene. I’ve managed to go back and patch up several of my biggest lacunae, but I’ve never felt especially tempted to check out the Scott Adams two-word parser games; I understand their historical relevance in cramming an adventure game experience onto the earliest microcomputers, but by reputation and upon first inspection they seem to have bare prose, a primitive parser, and obtuse puzzles, which aren’t exactly a cocktail that gets me excited.

Thus, I groaned when I saw that Sunburst Contamination was a Scott Adams homage from 1988, then given an update into Inform in 2007. And indeed at first blush it mostly lived down to my preconceptions: there’s the simple moon-logic plot overcomplicated with dream logic, for one thing, in which you’ve taken your employer’s spaceship on an unauthorized joyride to visit your girlfriend and now need to get back to base, except there are hungry toads who’ve gotten loose, and you need to run around the ship finding inexplicably-hidden ration packets to prevent the toads from eating them while in transit. There are the frequent typos, the unimplemented scenery (one of the first locations is named “Fountain,” with a description that spotlights the eponymous water feature – guess what response X FOUNTAIN gives?), the inevitable inventory limit, a nonsensical title, and then there’s the stuff that’s really baroquely terrible, like the “insignificant button” that can only be interacted with by calling it INSIGNIFICANT, rather than BUTTON, or the switched-off flashlight I spent a solid ten minutes guess-the-verb-ing in an ultimately futile attempt to activate.

I managed to struggle through the first half hour or so, by sheer force of will solving the initial couple of puzzles that gated access to the ship and collecting one or two of the seven ration packs, but pretty quickly hit a wall. There’s no included walkthrough, so I scoured the IFDB page and saw that the BASIC source code was available. I was bent on finishing the game – let it never be said that you don’t get value for money in a Mike Russo review-a-thon – but I figured I’d glance at the other reviews while I girded my loins to start back-tracing GOTO statements to discover what I was missing. And lo and behold, what did I see but a SPAG review from 2008 crowing about what a funny parody of Scott Adams style games the authors had pulled off.

Reader, the light dawned, and my good mood was further strengthened by the realization that CASA had a full walkthrough available and I didn’t need to go source diving after all.

Having played the game to completion, I can say I now kinda get the joke and see how it could be enjoyable? The flashlight bit is legit pretty funny, I have to say, and it is notable that the game is mostly merciful (I hit an issue where fumbling around with the cargo-crane controls got me in an unwinnable position, but I think that was due to a bug rather than intentional design); likewise careful trial and error, paying close attention to the verbs the ABOUT text tells you are implemented, will get you through most of the puzzles, even though the game’s humor extends to messing with the verb list. I think this is an attempt to make a game that sends up the extreme difficulty of those Scott Adams games, while still providing enough modern conveniences to be player-friendly.

Except, well, this is a game from 1988, so player-friendly by those standards still winds up feeling pretty forbidding today; meanwhile, the tropes being parodied have sufficiently receded that I suspect it’d be hard for most modern players to tell the difference between a sincere and a satirical implementation. The overall effect is like one of those jokes in Chaucer you need the footnotes to understand; now that I get what Sunburst Contamination is up to I appreciate what it’s doing, but I’m too far away from the target audience for the gag to truly land.

One cool thing about the review-a-thon is that it seems like a lot of the games were entries in jams or events that passed me by, so it functions as an anthology of sorts, providing a little taste of a wide range of flavors. Your World is from 2023’s Bare Bones Jam, whose operating constraint was that entries had to stick to their system of choice’s default visual styling. This is obviously far more interesting for choice games than parser ones, so fortunately that’s what we’ve got here, a Twine game in that glorious black-background-white-text-blue-links palette we all know and love.

I’m not sure whether many other entries in the jam justified their minimalist presentation diegetically, but Your World does, and with a doozy of a concept: the game presents itself as written by a sentient word, who swapped places with the author for a month, in order to communicate its experiences and reflections after leaving its text-based world for our own. With the clock ticking on its sojourn, and after an abortive attempt to learn Inform, it makes sense that the word wouldn’t be wasting time with fripperies.

There’s a certain irony to that choice, however. You see, one of the central things the word wants to share is exactly how much better rich sensory experiences are than mere text. The early section of the game, where the word explores the author’s apartment, is dominated by an overwhelming intensity of sensation:

"The noise from the AC was blaring, the brown light coming from the bulbs in the room hurt me, and the smell of the carpet – god, it must smell normal to you, but I could smell the mustiness. I tried to breathe for the first time and the dust in the air choked me."

The word is eager for all of this: there’s an entertaining bit where it opens the author’s dresser and lists each and every garment there, focusing on the color and texture of every one (there’s also a fun running joke where it keeps expecting green things to smell like grass – capped off by a heck of a punchline when the word eventually does make it outside). But despite the clear pleasure it takes in all this, the word is no mere sybarite; no, it has philosophical and ideological reasons for rejecting its textual origins, riffing on Wittgenstein to critique the naïve idea that words have distinct meanings, and continually arguing that mere text is too imprecise and too abstract to full communicate the quiddity of experience. Images, especially moving images and moving images with sound, are the word’s beau ideal:

"I want to be free from words. I want to be the gestalt that captures all the sights and sounds of everything around me. I want to live up to my ideals, not just be a word association game."

I mentioned that the choice to present this ode to splendor in the ugliest imaginable format is an ironic choice, but to an extent the whole game undercuts itself. Look at its structure: it opens with an incredibly zoomed-in look at a single room, with hyper-realized, fractal detail, then skips over a whole romantic relationship in only a few sentences. And almost every single sequence features description that foregrounds smell, taste, and a subjectivity around color and sound that would be near-impossible to communicate in film, at least without near-constant, plodding narration. The bit where the word stumbles across the IF Top Fifty and is horrified is just the cherry on top – what better way to prompt an IF audience to view the word as an unreliable narrator?

It’d be easy to dismiss Your World as a self-satisfied joke about the superiority of text-only IF, in other words – all the more so because there really are some great bits here that only work in text, like the word feeling “like serifs [are] coming out of me” when it starts sweating from a fever, or accuses the color gray of being “like a half-assed word… something like ‘implicative’.” The final reveal of what the word actually is also earned a guffaw. But I think there’s more going on here. For one thing, the word is self-aware enough to anticipate the most obvious objections to its position:

"I know what you’re thinking: I’m just some word that’s in love with anything that isn’t text; anything that is reminds me of my own weaknesses."

And is capable of acknowledging the ways that words alone can be effective:

"I think there’s something to be gained by trying to communicate – even within this broken and flawed system.

"At the very least, it’s easy to write something in text."

This combination of sincerity and irony is very contemporary, of course, but I think it’s also apposite to what the game seems to me to be getting at: all the different media at our fingertips have their limitations and their glories, and though the specifics of our experience may make one more appealing than another – indeed, just as the word rejects the markers of the textstream where it came from, by negative inference perhaps many of us are so drawn to text precisely because we live in a culture so saturated with audiovisual noise! – the possibility of connection, however achieved, is the important thing. And a rejection of artifice can ultimately wind up being just as artificial as what it purports to oppose, if it departs from that goal.

There’s a story I remember hearing about O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ The-Odyssey-by-way-of-Appalachia musical, which is that as they translated each of the famous elements from the source material into the 1930s context – the cyclops, the suitors, some dude named Menelaus – they intentionally did not refer back to Homer or reread the poem, the better to lock in on the pieces of the story that are archetypal and have fully entered the cultural zeitgeist.

(No, I haven’t gone back to verify whether or not this is true; that would go against the point of the anecdote, wouldn’t it?)

Anyway, if the Coen Brothers can make a movie about the Odyssey without reading the Odyssey, hopefully I can get away with reviewing a game about City of Secrets without playing City of Secrets. Tribute, you see, was an entry in 2020’s Emily Short Anniversary Contest (said anniversary being Galatea hitting the 20 year mark), and it directly riffs on CoS by borrowing its map and many of its scenery descriptions and then plopping a scavenger hunt on top of the geography. My dim sense of the original game is that it’s got a lot of conversation with a bunch of different characters, with an espionage kind of vibe, but little of that carries over into Tribute: there’s one character who contacts you via a telepathy-enabling pendant to say deeply un-Shortian things like “we really need your help. Evil is once again threatening our city. This time the enemy is in the form of dark magic.” I also suspect that the gameplay for CoS is more involved than just finding ten haphazardly-hidden gems in a nearly-empty map.

So yeah, playing Tribute doesn’t seem like it much resembles playing CoS, despite the fact that it seems like a large majority of the words here come from the original game. But writing prose as good as Emily Short’s is a high bar, to say nothing of designing challenges as tightly as she does, so I think there’s limited value in comparing the games directly. Really what the author is doing here is akin to doodling on a bunch of Caravaggios to create a hidden object game; the cartoons aren’t going to display quite the same mastery of chiaroscuro, but hey, you get to enjoy some great art while playing find-the-widget, what’s not to like?

Viewed in those terms, Tribute is… okay. I like Short’s descriptions as much as the next IF veteran, and there are some solid ones here that do entice me to play the full game so I can see what they look like in their intended context:

"The bottom of the hill, outside the train station, with its trolley tracks and the dulled statue of an ancient queen, hemmed on the east by the hotel and on the west by the health office."

But I couldn’t help notice that the map, denuded of characters and stripped of plot-relevant objects, is a bit sparse. Short often does the thing where you carefully mention as few nouns as possible in your area descriptions in order to convey the idea of a place without having to spend days implementing scenery; it’s is a canny technique to effectively create a backdrop, but it works less well when you take away the foreground. It also seems like the author hasn’t translated over everything that was in the original game, since I ran into far more unimplemented objects than I’d expect to see in a game from the same person who wrote Metamorphoses.

This art-appreciation side of Tribute is also undercut by the Where’s-Waldo side’s choice not to engage much with the original setting. In a map of 30ish locations, only ten feature a hidden gem, and only a handful more are involved with any of the puzzles. The pendant the player character starts with gives a warning when you’re in one of the rooms with a gem, as well as when you’ve found one of the plot-critical objects. This does avoid the tedium of aimlessly fiddling about with every unpromising bit of impedimenta, but unavoidably does make it easy to play on autopilot when you don’t get a bolded alert telling you to pay attention. It also means that I was stymied for a while when I hit the one or two puzzles that didn’t announce themselves (these largely had to do with unlocking exits that are mentioned in the text but don’t show up on the convenient automap – it makes sense that only currently-valid connections are shown, but I didn’t realize that was the rule so once again a helpful feature wound up being an obstacle).

The puzzles themselves are generally fine; they’re nothing to write home about, but I found it pleasing to poke and prod around until I found each gem. Many of them do involve that very Shortesque dynamic of fractally unveiling more and more details of an object by looking at successive pieces in turn, and a bit of messing around with the standard verb set is enough to solve nearly all (though I thought (Spoiler - click to show)SHAKE TREE was a bit underclued). Unfortunately I did run into a couple of bugs that rendered the game harder than it should be: there’s one object that should reveal a gem once you take it, but I was able to tote it around and pick it up and down a couple of times before the appropriate trigger fired, and I had to replay because the game didn’t register the first gem I found (they’re supposed to vanish once you touch them, but this one stuck around in my inventory after I grabbed it).

This is a lot of caviling, though, since I think Tribute did succeed in its most important goal: it made me want to play City of Secrets. Viewed through this imperfect reflection, CoS seems elusive yet enticing, filled with sweetshop robots, a surprisingly-large academic district, and a nightclub where I’m sure there’s at least one or two people I’d enjoy chatting up. If Tribute doesn’t stand on its own two feet as well as something like O Brother Where Art Thou, perhaps that’s partially because it doesn’t do enough to carve out its own identity – but then, this is a tribute, not a reinterpretation.