Reviews by Mike Russo

I’m not a person who knows anything at all about film, but let’s not let that stop me from advancing a theory: you don’t want to end a movie on a medium shot. A close-up lets you zoom in on a face, an image, and helps the viewer understand the emotional impact of what they’ve just seen. A wide-angle shot dollies out to underscore the sweep of the narrative, creating an epic finish for the story. But a medium shot? It serves well enough to establish a scene and provide spatial context, but as the last thing you see, I think the viewer would wonder: what’s just outside the frame? What details am I not able to make out? What am I missing?

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration at first seems like it’s going to avoid that issue by staying in close-up the whole time. It’s clear from the get-go that the game is going to be all about social comment, as it’s focused on the process of applying for SNAP (colloquially known as food stamps ) benefits, but rather than gritty realism, it opts for fantasy: the protagonist isn’t someone who’s down on their luck, but rather an alien disguised as a human to do research about how earth’s food assistance programs are administered. The setup provides a perfect excuse to linger on the absurd minutiae of the public welfare bureaucracy – the inconsistent paperwork requirements, the perennially-glitchy equipment, the hostile environment. This is all brand new to the alien, and its estranging viewpoint helps a player who isn’t familiar with this stuff revise their assumptions, and question for themselves for why we tolerate this. The prose does a good job of making completely clear what’s going on, while mixing in enough sci-fi comedy to make the critique go down:

"Spoke with a human at the entrance, seems to be some kind of uniformed worker, maybe a firefighter? Note to self: have to brush up on human worker categories.
Firefighter, judging by human social customs, was rude.
Room is brightly lit, gray, tan and white, very bare. My human body has an uncomfortable reaction to it. Curious. Note to self: why would humans create a building they are uncomfortable in? Points to Skrzyyyyt’s theories on human suffering - do they enjoy discomfort?"

Beyond the writing, the design is also engaging; it’s all simple Twine choices, but given the setup you know whatever you try is going to lead to something screwing up, leaving the player trying to figure out how maximize their chances of successfully applying while also looking ahead to guess how it’ll eventually go wrong. The game doesn’t need to get didactic to make its points – presenting a fine-textured look at the lived experience of people who rely on these systems for their survival is advocacy enough.

Unfortunately about ¾ of the way through its short running time, Visit to the HRA does in fact get didactic. The alien has a gadget that lets it freeze time to take notes on its observations, but for some reason one human winds up being immune to the gizmo, and upon learning what the alien’s up to, gets angry and calls it out for studying humans in need as though they were bacteria specimens on a petri dish. Then the game ends and there’s an even more directly condemnatory author’s note (no surprise, they actually are a social worker who’s directly worked with these systems):

"The waste, indifference, and poor quality of service at HRA exemplifies inept bureaucracy and systemic oppression. I’m also disturbed by the desire to study people when we are vulnerable. The inhumane distance created by needing to justify or understand the basic truths that people need food, safety, housing, health, etc. is deeply troubling. As long as politicians demand researched evidence that humans need food, we are fucked."

It’s hard to disagree with any of this, but I found this final chunk of the game much less effective than the rest. Zooming out to the level of argument leaves behind the concrete accumulation of specific SNAFUs, mistakes, and indifference so effectively portrayed in the first part of the game, but it also feels like it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Like, it’s deeply weird to be playing a game about SNAP just two months out from the biggest SNAP cut in American history, with no mention of the fact that the awful picture the game paints will in a couple years’ time be a best-case scenario. The fact that this welfare agency sucks is the result of specific, contested political processes redirecting resources from the poor to the rich, not just bureaucratic inertia, so it feels like a misstep that there’s not really any direct mention of class or politics anywhere here.

As for the research piece, I’m likewise sympathetic to a lot of these critiques: I work for an organization that has a whole bunch of protocols to make sure our research is community-led as well as community-benefitting because we’re aware of how extractive traditional research models can be – and even with that awareness and those systems, we certainly don’t get it right 100% of the time. But it’s also the case research into public welfare systems is extremely important: for example, deep studies of what’s happened when states have adopted “work requirements” for SNAP and Medicaid allow us to know that all this talk of personal responsibility is a smoke-screen, and the primary impact is that eligible people will get thrown off their benefits due to the increased red tape “verifying” that they’re actually looking for work. Again, there are a lot of bad practices to expose and reform here, but without more specific examples of how they play out, or more perspective on the structural factors producing these bad effects, the game’s impact is blunted.

I don’t want to complain too much since this is a well-constructed and well-meaning game that, at least until the end, deftly takes on an often-underappreciated social problem with grace and humor. But I do think it would have worked better if it had stopped right when the time-freeze gizmo did – it would have avoided the lens being awkward middle-distance, the final shots neither sufficiently focused on concrete lives nor on the structural reasons these things are the way they are.

I am nothing of an expert in parser-like choice games and can’t claim any especial insight, but since I have written what I’m pretty sure is the longest article about them, I find my ears perk up when I play one, more alert to questions of craft than I am with any other subgenre of IF. The Promises of Mars offers a good amount to chew on on this front, with some high production values and interface conveniences that often help, but sometimes undermine, player engagement. I can’t help but think, though, that the reason my notes are full of responses to the structure, with comparatively little on the narrative or gameplay, is that the story and puzzles are a bit thinner than the rest of the game deserves.

In the interests of wrapping up with the meatier stuff, we’ll start with that latter chunk. The setup here is able enough, though not novel enough to be too enticing in its own right: the protagonist is a young woman (or older girl, her precise age I don’t think is nailed down) who’s volunteered as a troubleshooter if only to escape the tedium of living in a tunnel-bunker after a climate-collapse apocalypse. Your assignment is to investigate a carbon capture station on the surface that’s gone dark, and your explorations are interspersed with flashbacks to life below the surface, largely revolving around your relationship with your mom.

Despite the relatively standard setup, the sentence-by-sentence writing here is pretty good – I liked this description of what could have just been a throwaway “it’s a desk”, embedding some worldbuilding through a few well-chosen details:

"It’s a sprawling metropolis of scientific paraphernalia: the drum of a helicorder resting next to a thick ream of chart paper; narrow glass tubes filled with multi-coloured liquid; vases of what looks like peat; notepads and biros and strips of litmus paper; canisters of ammonia and dyes."

The plot, though, isn’t much to write home about; inevitably, there’s a bit of a twist, but it’s one you can see coming a mile away, and while the granular details of the station are nicely sketched, other aspects remain rather generic, notably the protagonist’s mother, who never emerges as a character in her own right – if she had, she could have added an extra note of poignancy to the game’s final choice, but as it is the endings likewise felt rather schematic. As for the puzzles, they’re exactly the kinds of things you’d expect from this kind of premise: there are tools to salvage, powered-down elevators to reactivate, keycards and keycodes gating progress, and so on, with none of them posing much of a challenge. This sort of busywork can function well to make the player explore, creating space for environmental storytelling to add texture and resonance to the space and its former inhabitants, but again, the game remains a bit too arid to take advantage of these opportunities.

So much for the content of Promises of Mars, which is usually 95% of what I care about in a game. But the presentation is sufficiently great to be worth highlighting, and in fact so good that I wound up having a lot of fun despite the overall ho-hum-ness of what I was doing. It doesn’t hit on anything other parser-like choice games haven’t tried before, but the way it brings together the interface elements creates visual elegance and a high degree of playability, and really could be a standard-setter for similar games. In addition to generous space for the main text and choices, there’s a big map in one corner and an inventory list in another. The map is purely geometric, but isn’t stuck with the uniform quadrilaterals of most parser game visualizations: streets and corridors are long rectangles, closets tiny squares, and the relationships between each are easy to visualize, which allows for intuitive translation when the text mentions doors to the right and left, say. Meanwhile, having the full map available from the start helps the player gauge their progress through each of the three chapters, and prioritize “clearing” areas before getting too far into unexplored areas; the fact that you can instantly backtrack to a visited location by clicking on its map representation also makes exploration a snap.

The always-available inventory is also nice and convenient, though I think one thoughtful piece of design actually errs too far towards ease of use: items only get highlighted, and therefore clickable, when it’s possible to use them (save for the always-available commlink, which acts as a diegetic hint-line). This takes just about all the guesswork out of the already-simple inventory puzzles, since as soon as you’re confronted with a challenge you’ll see your available options suddenly turn orange. Sure, there are a couple of places where you can make an incorrect choice, but these are either trivial (should you pick a lock with a screwdriver or a paper clip?) or unguessable (there isn’t enough information provided about what size tool you need to use to manipulate some pipes, so you might as well try a wrench as a ballpoint pen), and in either case simple trial and error will see you through in a matter of seconds. In my article’s analysis of parser-like choice systems, I wound up arguing that counterintuitively, you often need to add additional friction to avoid the player simply lawnmowering through all their choices, and this is one place Promises of Mars’ interface puts a foot wrong.

It’s one of the few such missteps, and again, combined with the well-written prose I enjoyed my time with the game: for all my critiques, they mostly just boil down to finding the story not especially exciting. But funnily enough, an unexciting story that’s well-told can still be very satisfying, even in as narrative-focused a world as IF.

These days mods are a de rigueur accompaniment to any major game release, but of course this wasn’t always the case. While I remember a few games with limited user-modifiability here and there through the late 80s and early 90s (the one that sticks out the most was Civilization I, which stored a bunch of its text in uncompressed files on the hard drive; it was fun to futz around with unit names, and for some reason I once put a declaration of love for my middle-school crush into the ending scroll, I guess because I thought inviting her over and having her achieve victory in a notably long game was a more plausible course of action than just, like, telling her I liked her) – wow that parenthetical got away from me – despite some limited antecedents, Doom was ground zero. Soon after its release, there were user-created maps by the score, but also more ambitious changes: tweaks to weapons, new enemies or even gameplay features. You – or at least I – couldn’t easily download such things in those days, but you’d usually find a couple dozen of the most popular mod distributed as filler on video game magazine pack-in CDs, alongside demos for the latest games.

Some of the most visually-arresting were so-called total conversions: mods that didn’t just add some new content here or tweak a setting there, but purported to transform the whole game. There was an Alien total conversions, a Batman one, even, bizarrely, a Chex tie-in, and they all looked amazing, with bestiaries and arsenals and level graphics entirely different from what iD had shipped. But when you started playing one, it became clear that sometimes there was much less to these “total conversions” than met the eye. You see, some TCs did get into the guts of the engine to create brand-new gameplay, but a lot of them simply swapped out the graphics. Your eyes could tell you that you were firing a pulse-rifle at an oncoming Xenomorph, but if you’d played a lot of Doom, you could immediately tell that actually you were wielding the chain-gun and shooting at a pinky demon: same firing speed and damage for the gun, same AI and hit-points for the monster. Sometimes there weren’t even new levels – you’d be running through the same old maps with the same old secrets and enemies. I had friends who didn’t mind, because swapping in the aesthetics of Alien for the techno-satanism of Doom was sufficient difference to make things feel fresh and compelling, but for me, the graphics were beside the point: appearances to the contrary, this was still just Doom, and I’d played a lot of Doom (you can see how I wound up a fan of IF).

PURE – yes, this is a review – puts me in mind of those old TCs, because it’s a game whose form and whose structure wildly diverge. The narrative elements lay out a compelling down-spiral of biological and moral horror, little of that is interactive; the gameplay, meanwhile, could have been drawn from an unassuming 80s puzzle-fest, tasking you with running through a linear gauntlet filled with riddles and simple mechanical challenges. There’s a lot to like about the former, and the latter isn’t bad, exactly – though the implementation is often pretty thin – but the mismatch between the two is jarring, like putting a body-horror skin on Nord and Bert.

The best part of the game is the line by line writing. There’s a Dark-Souls-meets-H.R.-Giger kind of vibe to proceedings, with blood and viscera sluicing everywhere across the dungeon complex you’re tasked with exploring; meanwhile, you’re accompanied by a pair of guards who seem offended by your very existence, and an aristocrat who seems to be way too intensely into you (but is probably just using that as a tool of manipulation). There are some typos, including an unfortunate scone/sconce confusion, but those don’t do much to detract from the power of the prose, which emphasizes physical sensations, tiny but exquisite, that escalate as you delve deeper into the earth, the environment becomes more twisted, and the behavior of your companions grows more depraved:

"The carved surface of the door is an undulating expanse of slopes and curves. As you look closer, you realize the shapes are naked bodies, entangled together in a congealing mass of stone flesh. The faces are all turned away, pressed into the crooks of another’s body. Black liquid like that which bled from the shadow’s body trickles out from small cracks between the forms. The Boar follows one of the streams with his gauntlet, settles his thumb into the crevice of a statue’s thigh, and breathes deeply."

This is all vibes, though – there isn’t much in the way of context or explanation offered for anything here, beyond a helpful authorial note highlighting trans themes in the uncomfortable transformations visited upon the protagonist, and this is another Part I, ending just as the journey through the subterranean complex reaches its end. So without much traditional plot to speak of, the story of Pure can feel mostly determined by what you do, and what you do is, well, traditional: there’s a match-the-numbers puzzle, a series of riddles you answer by putting one of a series of objects into the appropriate chest, a keypad lock you defeat with powers of observation…none of them are especially challenging, and while there are a couple late-game obstacles that require some grand guignol actions to bypass, it’s hard to ignore the fact that mechanically speaking all you’re doing is putting a key in a lock.

Part of what makes the disparate halves of the game feel so distinct is that most of the stuff playing out in the narrative layer isn’t easy to engage with. While the other characters will occasionally fiddle about in the background, and take active roles in the short cut-scenes that play in between bouts of puzzle-solving, there’s not much you can do with them while you’re in control; there’s no conversation system that I could find, for example, and they’ll just hang around forever waiting for you to solve the puzzles (I did check the walkthrough after finishing the game, and it turns out you can try to kiss all the NPCs, which would be interesting but to be honest neither they nor the protagonist felt like they’d be into that kind of thing under the circumstances). There’s also not much in the way of scenery, and a lack of quality-of-life polish (I spent like eight turns trying to figure out how I was supposed to refer to some “shadowy dog-like things”) wound up disincentivizing me from poking at the world in favor of just getting on with the logic puzzles.

To be fair, there are some nice bits of craft in the game – PURE makes heavy use of color-coding to denote interactive objects, for example, which is explained in a simple and clear tutorial. And I did always enjoy unlocking the next bit of interaction between the characters, and seeing the next degradation of the protagonist, each time I solved a puzzle. But where the best pieces of IF ensure all the elements of their writing and design echo and reinforce each other, PURE struggles to find consistency; I can’t help but wonder what a choice-based version of the game that cuts out the busywork and builds its gameplay around actually talking to the NPCs, and making decisions about how much corruption to accept, would feel like to play. The good news is that, as mentioned, this is only a prologue, so there’s time to think about a different approach for Part II, or at least a refinement of the current structure: either way, my interest is definitely piqued.

[When this review was originally posted on the IntFic forum, it used the LLM-generated cover-art as a jumping-off point to poke fun at the warrior-poet concept -- " someone who’s really good at fighting, but is also like super soulful, like he’s like a poet, man." Fortunately, the cover was later changed!]

The funny thing is, unlike the protagonist the game actually seems to be in on the joke. It plays things almost entirely straight, happy to rattle off wordy boilerplate about how the journey to cross the Infinite Sands seemed to take forever (you don’t say!), has the main character try to make a deal with a camel-seller by saying stuff like “what say you, merchant!”, and features a po-faced RPG system that has you weighing +1 to your armor against a bonus to your weapon damage. But as soon as you enter combat and try out your magical poetry attacks, you – or at least I – will have your jaw drop, because you’re not declaiming epic quatrains in a Quenya knock-off or whatever else you might be imagining: instead your dude, he of the artfully-cultivated stubble and multiple belts strapped every which way, busts out with Little Jack Horner or Pease Porridge Hot (inflicting 1d4 + 2 damage to the enemy and 3d6 SAN loss to the player). The intro also makes clear that warrior poets are something of a joke even in-setting: you’ve gone to a famous university to study their arts, but the department’s been bleeding enrollment to Business Administration, the deans have been making budget cuts, and when one of your instructors steals a magical MacGuffin, presumably because their adjunct’s salary just isn’t cutting it, the administrators dispatch the ten-person class’s star pupil (that’s you) to recover it, apparently because they don’t want to shell out for a real adventurer.

This setup made me laugh, and combined with the adventure-RPG hybrid gameplay and some well-chosen details like a focus on the different kinds of exotic food you can eat, I was reminded of the Quest for Glory graphic adventures, for which I have enormous fondness. Sure, the prose style is turgid enough that it mostly steps on the jokes, but there’s still an overall good-natured vibe to the setting that’s also QFGish, and the business of exploring a new city while making sure you have an inn to stay at, carefully counting your gold, getting incremental upgrades to your skills and equipment, and making progress by alternately solving puzzles and winning fights, makes for an engaging gameplay loop.

Unfortunately, Warrior Poet also sometimes shares the old Sierra philosophy on puzzle intuitiveness. Most of them are so signposted they practically solve themselves, with heavy hinting prompting you about exactly where you should go and what you should do next, but there are a few that feel quite unfair, especially the one that first puts you on the trail of your quarry. While I’d imagined that I’d need to start asking around, maybe interviewing the fellow countryman I came across at the docks about whether they’d seen anyone suspicious taking ship to another port, or checking with the magical antiquities dealer about whether anyone had tried to fence the MacGuffin, instead progress requires examining an unimportant-seeming bit of scenery four times, since the changing description will eventually throw up the critical clue. There’s a walkthrough provided at least, but this is still a pretty unfriendly welcome to Dol Bannath.

The RPG side of the equation is easier, at least. There are three different fights in the game, but none of them are tuned to be particularly difficult; despite being wishy-washy on my build rather than specializing, the baddies all fell without inflicting too much damage, and while I might have benefited from some lucky dice-rolls, even if fortune hadn’t favored me UNDO-scumming would have helped save my bacon. Hybrids like this usually benefit from leaning harder on one of their genre inspirations rather than trying in vain to serve them both equally, I think, so making the combat a pleasant distraction rather than anything more taxing is a good decision.

A less-good decision is that the game really lives up to its “Part I” subtitle, ending before anything much of interest has happened in the main plot, but despite my critiques I did find myself disappointed there wasn’t more to Warrior Poet, if only because I was desperate to see if anyone else was going to point out how absurd my “poetry” was. So sign me up for Part II, I guess – ditch the AI, streamline the writing, and workshop some of the rougher puzzles, while keeping the focus on fantasy-tourism and watching numbers go up, and I promise to dial down the ribbing next time.

• Time for an anecdote even I couldn’t crowbar into the intro in good conscience: so many years ago I was in a Mage: the Ascension game that was also set in a magical college, where the PCs where the newest group of late-teen wizards on the block. As is typically the case in RPGs, we’d all chosen to play misfits of one variety or another – we had an antisocial goth, a smart-aleck overachiever, a girl who grew up in a Narnia knockoff, That One Libertarian Who Won’t Just Shut Up – so combined with our youth, we were obviously the lamest crew around. Except then we went to a big schoolwide convocation and discovered that there was a cabal called the Warrior Poets: according to the GM they were really cool and everyone liked them, but as nerds ourselves, we knew what we were looking at, and proceeded to make brutal fun of them behind their backs and to their faces the whole time. It was glorious, with the one fly in the ointment being the fact that seeing the damage a bad cabal-name could do, we dithered on coming up with one for our own group for something like three real-world years.

A murder of Crows has one of the most descriptive titles in the Comp – this minimally-styled Twine game indeed has you following along with a group of birds as they go about their daily business, mostly trying to avoid danger and look after each other. It’s an appealing setup, since beyond the inherent fun of inhabiting an animal protagonist, crows boast surprising smarts, tool use, and a sociable nature. But as corvids go, this game is more magpie than crow – the former famously being known primarily for getting distracted by whatever shiny objects they see.

I genuinely have a hard time recapping what happens in the course of this ten-minute game, because something about the way the prose tries to communicate the nonhuman experience of crow-ness never clicked in my brain. There’s a combination of short, disconnected sentences that don’t always spell out what they’re trying to say, and an avoidance of any words that might seem too human-centric or sophisticated for a bird, which makes it hard to parse what’s happening:

"We got into less trouble thanks to Crowley, only teaming up when Crowley was angry, to show the meanies who they’re messing with!"

"Noodle needs scary place and Penny at sad place."

"Penny basked in the sun happily."

"As we waited an observed Penny, the green unfeathered returned and starting moving Penny elsewhere."

(As that last one indicates, there are some typos too).

This obfuscation is especially confusing when it comes to the player’s options; I often wasn’t sure what a particular link was trying to communicate, and making matters worse, sometimes options seemed to circle back on themselves, re-initiating chains of events that should have already concluded. There also do seem to be challenges resembling puzzles, though the above factors meant I didn’t feel very good at them; I was never able to figure out why a nice-seeming dog had been surprisingly aggressive with one of the murder’s members, or be sure that I’d ensconced an injured crow sufficiently out of harm’s way. And they move quickly from one vignette to another; often I’d feel like I’d only started to get to handle on a particular incident or problem before it was on to the next one.

Of course, these are nonhuman intelligences, so perhaps it’s apt for the thought process of the crows to be hard to follow. But I can’t help but think that if it’s intentional, this approach would have worked better with more of a vibes-based take on a crow’s daily life rather than presenting the player with puzzles that demand to be resolved and creating frustration at your inability to direct the crows accordingly. Or, alternately, the current structure married to a clearer prose style might have worked better too. As it is, A murder of Crows has a nice premise but in practice is less pleasant than its subjects deserve.

It’s by far one of the least-destructive elements of the patriarchy, but ever since I became a dad (four years ago yesterday!) I’ve been irritated by the absurdly low bar society sets for fatherhood. Like, in some sense I suppose it’s nice that when I’m at the park with my son and people see that it’s just the two of us and I’m playing with him, not just staring at my phone, passersby are visibly surprised, or when I’m chatting with one of the teachers at his day care and it comes out that it’s almost always me who makes his lunches and snacks, I get an “oh, that’s so nice.” It’s meant well, I’m sure, but it can feel almost insultingly condescending – these are bare minimum parental tasks, but because I’m a dad, not a mom, I get graded on a curve that would shame the Matterhorn.

But as annoying as that can be, A winter morning on the beach goes one step farther in the low-expectations sweepstakes. Initially, it doesn’t seem like it has much to do with parenthood, presenting itself as a meditative little parser game where you walk on a beach for a while (the protagonist is getting older and is trying to get more exercise on their doctor’s advice). I’ve played a reasonable number of these sorts of games, and found that I kept getting wrong-footed, feeling like it was sometimes undercutting itself: there’s not much scenery beyond the sea and sand, for one thing, and while the implementation of what’s there is fairly deep and engaging all the senses, the descriptions are relatively flat in a way that doesn’t provide much in the way of reward for trying to enjoy the environment:

">smell water

"It smells like nothing: water is notoriously odourless."

My experience is that beaches have a lot of smells, with the water in particular having a salty tang and sometimes the odor of seaweed, fresh or rotting – but even if that were a realistic response, it’s not a very interesting one. A sharper challenge to slowly taking in the sights as you stroll down the beach is the world’s most poop-happy seagull; if you spend more than a couple turns in any location, one shows up to ruin your jacket and end your playthrough, which is the grossest ticking clock imaginable. The aesthetics are also not conducive to a lazy stroll; the game’s played in Vorple, and displays in a retro font and color scheme that I found a bit jarring (in fairness, the Vorple integration does enable a convenient hyperlink-based interface, though I mostly played by typing rather than clicking).

The impetus to hurry, the lack of sightseeing, and maybe even the eyestrain-inducing interface are intentional, though, since as it turns out the game wants you to get to the story rather than linger and smell the roses. After a lot of walking through near-identical locations, you finally reach the end of the beach, and here’s where the plot kicks in, though it’s rather slight: you find a toy car, then one location over find the kid to whom the car belongs, bawling his eyes out over losing it. If you do the obvious thing, you muse to yourself that you’ve just proven that you have what it takes to be a wonderful grandfather, at which point you receive a phone call from your kid with news you’ll never be able to guess.

In some ways this makes for a nice ending; the protagonist seems legitimately happy to be a new grandfather. But at the same time, going back to what I said earlier it makes me shake my head that he appears to think this scenario constituted any kind of crucible: if as a grown-up you steal a toy from a child for no reason, the issue isn’t that you might not get a World’s Best Grandpa mug, the issue is that you’re a motivelessly-evil Iago figure. If the lost-car vignette had been one of several low-key encounters on a more crowded beach, I think the revelation at the end could have been more effective, recontextualizing what had come before in a way that had some genuine surprise. But since the environment and exploration elements are so thin, everything hangs on this one small moment, and just isn’t a big enough deal to bear even this relatively light weight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"‘It’s our,’ she laughed, ‘lover.’"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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