Reviews by Mike Russo

Usually when I play a piece of IF – or read a book or watch a movie, for that matter – my brain immediately tries to classify it, slotting it into a genre or identifying the key themes or thinking about its antecedents or otherwise fitting it into some broader framework. This is just the way human beings process information, I suppose, and don’t get me wrong, it’s often helpful for understanding the intentions behind a piece and engaging with broader movements and trends. At the same time, it’s rather exhilarating to come across something like A Catalan Summer which had me constantly second-guessing my assumptions of what it was trying to do, not because of self-conscious zaniness or surrealism (those are hoary subgenres all their own) but because its goals, approach, and setting are just so content to do their own thing. The blurb promises “historical gay melodrama,” which is already not an uh especially common IF Comp vibe, but even that fails to truly communicate everything that’s going on here.

I worry that opening paragraph makes it sound like A Catalan Summer is bonkers. It’s not bonkers! It’s actually quite grounded, focusing on an upper-class Catalonian family and their personal and political travails in the aftermath of World War I, with subplots about repressed sexuality, yes, but also labor unrest and separatist politics, as well as lots of very well-described but frankly superfluous detail about the architectural flourishes of the family mansion. True, pretty much everybody (you wind up guiding all four members of the family) can wind up making Telenovela-style decisions – and there’s a (Spoiler - click to show)supernatural element that pretty much comes out of nowhere – but I think the game would still work well if you opted out of all the smoldering-glances stuff, and if anything, I feel like the writing errs too much towards understatement rather than reveling in passion and intensity (this is all quite PG-13 rated). Though then again, there’s also the gay brothel you can visit and where you can choose, for your night’s companion, a panto Viking complete with horned helmet. So maybe it’s a little bonkers.

Gameplay-wise, you navigate through the family house looking for people to talk to, and then make choices. The house is bigger and more open than it needs to be – possibly to create space for the aforementioned architecture-porn, like let me tell you, if you are into festoons this game has you covered – since all you can do is talk to people, and most locations are empty most of the time. But I liked the ability to wander about, including a few extramural excursions that allow for some sightseeing and local color, even if I’m used to this kind of interface be deployed for puzzlefests like A Murder in Fairyland.

The pacing is quite brisk – every ten minutes or so, you’re whisked into the next vignette with a different viewpoint character, and the choices are well-considered, providing enough granularity to give a sense for the voices of each character and allow the player to make significant choices, while not belaboring every bit of dialogue. Sometimes it’s too quick: you can go from flirtation to schtupping to post-coital bliss in one line of dialogue, and I had one sequence where a character survived an assault, went to a hospital, and recovered, all in the space of two short paragraphs. But better too quick than too slow, I think. It also builds to a nice climax, with a final party scene where you can choose which family members to inhabit: you can orchestrate a passionate tryst with one character, then have another stumble upon them in flagrante delicto for maximum shock effect.

I quite enjoyed the characters. Patriarch Josep is the one you spend the most time with, and I think is the best drawn – he’s got rather conservative leanings, but also seems unashamed about his homosexuality. These tensions aren’t played up in the writing – there’s no internal monologue as he wrestles with his understanding of himself – which I think is effective in creating space for players to make a wide variety of choices without feeling like they're being untrue to the character. The others are more one-note, though you can decide whether son Jordi’s habit of slumming it with the hoi polloi reflects sincere belief or is simple dilettantism, and I enjoyed figuring out ways for Josep’s jaded wife, Maria, to amuse herself (spoiler alert: it involved boning the staff). Only Clara, the sheltered daughter, doesn’t find herself with as much to do.

The writing is a significant part of the draw. There are some typos and odd grammar throughout, potentially due to translation? But I liked how it simultaneously created a sort of dreamlike aura while being quite grounded in a sense of history and place, with ever-solid dialogue. Here’s a bit from an early scene, where Josep is giving a tour to the family of a business partner:

“This house, you explain, was an old presbytery built next to this chapel. I had the house renovated while leaving the chapel in its original state. Around the 13th century, the Counts of Barcelona dominated Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and even the south of Italy, which explains the number and beauty of the monuments of that time in the region…”

“A kind of golden age…” Auguste says ironically, “Isn’t it from the memory of this blessed time that the Catalans forged their desire for independence?”

You can see there are some punctuation issues and the locution is a bit awkward, but for whatever reason this style really worked for me, and the history nerd in me appreciated all the detail the author offers (I didn’t know Barcelona is named after Hannibal Barca!) Or there’s this, relating an assignation:

“You and Charles are now used to meeting in Barcelona in his apartment, discreetly. As the days go by, both of you feel the initial desire plunging its roots into you, gradually blossoming into a massif with complex interlacing, crazy branches that thicken to become a real and strong feeling that ties you to each other in a knot that will become all the more difficult to slice.”

That second sentence is too long and uses imagery that’s not quite right to my ear, but somehow that makes it even more compelling.

I did run into one technical niggle, which is that at one point Maria showed up somewhere she shouldn’t have (though I couldn’t interact with her), and the admirable openness of the plot made my ending feel a bit ridiculous, as in one paragraph of dialogue, Jordi, clearly full of love for his father, told Josep that he should be unafraid of pursuing happiness with his lover, but then in the next paragraph blew up at him and renounced his inheritance because Josep set an American detective to pursue Jordi’s anarchist friends – melodrama is all well and good, but emotional whiplash is something else altogether.

Still, that couldn’t undercut what was a deeply enjoyable experience. Like, that American detective is actually (Spoiler - click to show)Dashiell Hammett. There’s a (Spoiler - click to show)Marcel Proust cameo too. And I haven’t elaborated on the whole (Spoiler - click to show)ghost thing (my head says, you don’t need this and the author should have dropped it; my heart says, yes, why not this too?) Point being, A Catalan Summer marches to the beat of its own drum, takes direct inspiration from nobody and I’m sure will not be directly inspiring any copycats either, cares not for your petty distinctions of genre, much less the Aristotelian unities, not due to any sophomoric and self-congratulatory iconoclasm but just because it’s content to do its own thing, and it’s all the more worth playing for it.

A puzzle-y fairytale with a twist, Captivity boasts a plucky protagonist, an engaging supporting cast, some pleasant challenges, and solid writing and implementation. It’s perhaps a bit too much on the linear side, and weakens slightly in the home stretch, but all in all it’s a pleasant way to while away an hour or two.

Right, setup: you’re a young lady of the minor nobility (or perhaps haute bourgeoisie) who’s been abducted by an evil Duke. While the Duke’s assorted family members, servants, and minions aren’t particularly fussed at preventing your escape, there’s still an array of locked doors, spike-topped walls, and magic necklaces that will strangle you if you leave the grounds standing in your way. There’s nothing especially novel in the low-key, slightly comedic fantasy setting – though there’s a bit of a PG-13 edge that sometimes works (there’s a god-bothered maid who’s a little more excited by lurid descriptions of the sins of the flesh than on the ways to save oneself from temptation) and sometimes can be a bit off-putting (the intro focuses a bit too much on the protagonist’s impending ravishment, though of course nothing bad actually happens). While this isn’t always to my taste, it’s fine as far as it goes, though there’s one late-game incident that I think is a bit too tonally jarring to be successful (Spoiler - click to show)(when the Duke comes home and catches you mid-escape, you stab him in the face with some scissors, drop a chandelier on him, and leave him “expired in a pool of his own blood”).

The puzzles are nothing too out-there, but are generally logical, well-clued, and satisfying to solve, with almost every one opening up a new area to explore or character to interact with. Captivity also does a good job of detecting if you’re flailing on some puzzles, and will add a gentle hint to get you on the right track if you try the same wrong action too many times, which is quite a nice feature. The puzzle chains are quite linear for the first two thirds or so of the game, with only one barrier at a time to work on surmounting, which helps keep the difficulty low but also can make proceedings sometimes feel a bit dull. The structure opens up once you reach a classic collect-em-all puzzle – you need to find three (Spoiler - click to show)ingredients for a spell – but by that point I’d already found one and a half of them so the increased openness was mostly theoretical in my case.

Implementation is generally very solid, with most objects and scenery nicely described and few synonym or guess-the-syntax issues. This starts to break down a bit in the last part of the game, though – I had to look up the walkthrough to solve the last major puzzle because I had the right idea but couldn’t figure out how to input the correct commands (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m talking about burning the objects in the brazier – LIGHT BRAZIER doesn’t work, and in fact returns “The brass brazier isn’t something you can light,” with LIGHT BRAZIER WITH MATCH similarly failing. Per the walkthrough, STRIKE MATCH -> PUT MATCH IN BRAZIER is the intended solution, which feels too fiddly to me), and I noticed a few examples of undescribed objects in some of the final few rooms.

It is possible to put the game in an unwinnable state, though it’s kind enough to tell you so and a single UNDO was enough to fix things. I did run into one related issue – when I reached the endgame, I got a message saying I’d missed something at an early stage of the game and now my “maidenly virtue is but a treasured memory”, but the author “in his nearly infinite benevolence” will take pity and fix things. I’m not sure what this was referring to, since I had on hand everything I wound up needing to finish the game, and when I checked the walkthrough I didn’t see that I had missed anything. Regardless, the tone of this message was pretty off-putting and felt unnecessarily adversarial. None of these issues are that major, but I think would be worth cleaning up in a post-Comp release.

Anyway I don’t want to dwell too much on that sour note, because for the most part the writing is lots of fun. The supporting cast were the major standouts – although they’re notionally on the side of the Duke, they mostly view him with eye-rolling tolerance at best, and are quite content to shoot the breeze with you, force you to look at their embroidery collection, or flirt with each other as though you’re not standing there. Even the Duke’s dagger-happy henchman and lecherous wizard servant come off as entertainingly harmless – it’s fun to banter with, and then get one over on, them.

Captivity isn’t trying to do anything revolutionary, but its few missteps aren’t enough to douse the fun of wandering through its castle, outwitting a jerk of a Duke, and engaging in some light sorcery, all related in breezy, clever prose.

Captain Graybeard’s Plunder neatly inverts the adage that history is written by the victors; here, fiction is remixed by the losers. As a pirate captain whose career was ended by complacency (indirectly) and a royal galleon (rather more directly), you take solace in your retirement by dreaming up how things might have gone differently if your ship, crew, and, er, hand-replacing prosthetic had been up to snuff. The gag is that rather than inventing these upgrades whole cloth, instead you turn to your character’s ample library for inspiration, so that, for example, you might imagine a rematch where your crew are veterans straight out of Treasure Island, or where you boast Captain Hook’s eponymous pointy bit atop your stump.

That’s all there is to it, really: this isn’t a puzzle, as any combination of choices appears to lead to a satisfying bout of vengeance, plus there are only three choices for each of the three variables so you’ll run through all of them in only a couple of replats. A grounded character-study or bit of world-building this is not – the captain is your stereotypical pirate save for his love of literature (though pirates do love their arrs, so I suppose it’s not too surprising he got stuck on reading and writing), and the fact that you can plunder from Peter Pan makes the timeline quite suspect!

Fortunately, CGP has charm in spades and that’s what carries it through. The writing ably inhabits the pirate milieu, and effectively conveys both the joys of buccaneering and the transporting power of a good book. The presentation is splendid too, with each of the books you steal from rendered in its own slightly-different cursive font, which carries through into the battle re-creation to make it clear how you’ve stitched everything together. There aren’t major variations depending on your choices, but though they’re small, the responsiveness is nonetheless satisfying, as you get to feel like your choice of Captain Nemo’s sub, for example, was an especially smart one. CGP knows what it’s about, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and made me realize it’s been too long since I’ve reread Moby Dick, which is a lot to accomplish for a ten-minute game!

So this is quite a good game that I really did not enjoy in the slightest. It starts in medias res, but the premise is immediately grabby: your character has been kidnapped by a serial killer with (thankfully) unknown predilections, and must try to manipulate him into creating an opening that would allow her to fight back and escape the murderdungeon. The prose makes this premise no idle backdrop: it’s sweaty, immediate, and immersive, planting you inside the main character’s head in the middle of a deeply, traumatic event – and it doesn’t let up over the course of the days you spend in the basement, until you reach the incredibly violent climax.

ACoD doesn’t wallow in awfulness, let me be clear: there are ways of doing this setup that would objectify the main character’s suffering, or that would linger on the awful things the killer has and will do to her, and the game steers clear of them. And I got to a “happy” ending that was quite grisly, per the prominent content warnings, but did allow the protagonist to get out. I wouldn’t say it’s a tasteful take on the in-the-den-of-a-killer genre, because what would that even mean, but it’s not out to purposefully alienate the player or push any buttons just for the sake of getting a response. In fact, in my playthrough at least, the killer, while clearly plotting something awful, never made any overt moves towards violence, and stayed relatively polite throughout. The violence came from the protagonist, who in addition to envisioning the awful fate awaiting her, also vividly fantasizes about wreaking bloody revenge against her captor (and then, of course, actually does so). This is an interesting reversal because it puts the violence more under the control of the player, or at least the player character. It also highlights that while the killer presents a bit of a social puzzle to solve, as you try to figure out how to build his empathy and lull him into letting his guard down, so too is the protagonist something of a conundrum.

She’s by no means a blank slate, and there are hints of backstory sprinkled through the game. They’re appropriately vague and allusive – she’s hardly going to be putting her memoirs in mental order under the circumstances – but I found them the most intriguing bit of the game. There’s one that I think provides the title for the game, where she reflects on the way attractive women get cat-called, while unattractive ones (like her, the implication goes) are called dogs, which triggers her towards anger. She also seems very comfortable self-consciously playing a role and suppressing her actual feelings so that others will see her differently, so much so that for the first few minutes of the game I half-thought that this might be a really, really intense S&M roleplay session. And while being fixated on violent escape makes sense in the circumstances, my impression at least was that she was far more likely to dwell on inflicting (deserved!) harm on the killer than on the possibility of being able to get away and live. These hints weren’t paid off in the ending that I got, unfortunately, because while I obviously was invested in trying to help her escape, I was more interested in figuring out what was going on with the protagonist.

Implementation-wise, there are a few stray typos and possibly-intentional comma splices. I did find a few places where the choices went wonky or there appeared to be continuity errors (the options for what to eat for lunch sometimes repeated oddly, and in the first sequence, the main character starts referring to a cookie that I don’t think had been previously mentioned). But on the whole things were solid, and the choices really feel like they have weight, forcing you to sweat as you realize that one wrong move could have catastrophic consequences. So all told this is a well-put-together entry in the Comp, with more going on than it needed to have and strong writing that really puts you in the situation. As I mentioned in my opening, I very much did not enjoy it because this is not my preferred genre or style in the slightest, but that’s on me – and of the number of games in the Comp with somewhat adjacent themes, ACoD seems to me to be the strongest so far.

When I was on an airplane many years ago, I had the idea of writing a Lovecraft pastiche in a noir voice suddenly pop into my head. After I landed and got home, I fired up my computer and had enormous fun writing a page and a half of my hard-boiled private dick sharing how he usually deals with ghoul infestations and musing that if you’ve seen one Hound of Tindalos, you haven’t seen a Hound of Tindalos – but then the juice suddenly ran out because I couldn’t figure out where the story would go. If I kept up the world-weary noir thing throughout, the Cthulhu elements wouldn’t land because the cosmic horror doesn’t find a purchase in the protagonist's psyche. And if you lean into the Cthulhu bits and have even the noir hero shaken by the burden of things man was not meant to know, well, you’ve just written a Lovecraft pastiche with some weird similes, clipped phrasing, and hopefully less racism. It’s a mashup that ultimately needs to collapse into just being one thing or the other, and therefore can’t be fully satisfying (this is also why every attempt I’ve seen to do a pomo detective story doesn’t work – yes, I’m calling you out, Paul Auster) (and before I wrap up this ridiculously self-indulgent introduction, let me shout out the one completely effective Lovecraft genre remix, which is the Cthulhu-meets-Wodehouse of A Scream For Jeeves).

Anyway, given this tediously-explained context, I was interested to see how Call of Innsmouth followed through on its blurb, which seemed to presage going hard on the noir tropes, and avoided this dilemma. The answer is that mostly it sidesteps the tension by presenting a completely straight-ahead take, with prose that doesn’t commit hard either way – the smoky, jazzy tones of noir and the adjective-mad enthusiasm of Lovecraft get a few hat-tips, but the style is overall quite normcore. The same is true for the plot, which mirrors the plot of the mid-aughts Call of Cthulhu video game remarkably closely – and even if you, like the author, haven’t played it, proceedings will still feel pretty familiar so long as you've read the Shadow Over Innsmouth. I think the biggest story-related surprise I experienced was that at one point, after I made a bad decision, I was expecting to get eaten by Dagon, but instead I got eaten by a shoggoth.

None of this is necessarily bad – if you are in the mood for a Lovecraft game, Call of Innsmouth has you covered in spades! It’s big, with lots to do that gives you that old Cthulhu charge – you prep for the investigation by visiting an Arkham boarding house and consulting Miskatonic’s Professor Armitage, and you get to raid Devil’s Reef and meet Zadok Allen (though oddly, his name is misspelled and he’s given a weird dialect different from what he’s got in the book, maybe coding him as Native American? Zadok is a biblical name so I always assumed he’s a Quaker or something like that). There are a number of action sequences, and while it’s (appropriately) easy to die, the correct choices aren’t too obfuscated, and unlimited rewinds are offered if your guts do wind up decorating a Deep One’s claws.

Writing-wise, as mentioned the style is pretty straightforward and there are some typos, but also a few nice bits of characterization – when the player character’s client breaks down in worry over her missing son, he just shifts uncomfortably rather than comforting her, for example. And while you appropriately freak out at some of the revelations, and start out a bit skeptical about this whole dark-god-and-fish-men business, it isn’t overly belabored so there’s no tedious tension between the genre-savvy player and the notionally new-to-all-this player character. Call of Innsmouth delivers what it sets out to, and if it’s not the most novel take on these tropes, and the prose plays it down the middle, you still get a meaty adventure to satisfy any Mythos cravings (like for a game I mean, not forbidden knowledge or human flesh or anything gross like that).

BYOD ain’t messing around with the “micro” label – I probably spent as much time playing guess-the-acronym as I did actually running through the game – but the five minutes here on offer are a lovely spike of cyberpunk power fantasy that makes me hope there’s a longer piece with similar mechanics somewhere in the future.

So this is a proper hacking game, doing in pure parser form what yer Uplinks and Hacknets have done with hybrid GUI interfaces. After reading the included e-zine feelie – I just noticed feelies have been rather thin on the ground this year, so it was nice to see a well-made one – I was primed for an intense gray-hat type of experience, but actually the plot and set-up are rather low key: you really are just a student starting a do-nothing internship at a tech company. It’s just that you happen to have a smartphone app that gives you all the power of the Internet gods, with the ability to remote-access any computer or device and read, write, or active it with no concern for security protocols.

The hacking is implemented really solidly, using a UNIX-like set of commands, and again contrary to my expectations, rather than the whole thing playing out at a terminal you actually play an embodied character and type commands in typical adventure-game fashion – you just preface your commands with a prefix to direct them to the hacking app. Being able to merge the two levels of play seamlessly is a clever touch that heads off the challenges most hacking games have in depicting anything happening in meatspace.

All this to say that the foundations here are solid and even a bit exciting. The story and puzzle(s) are pretty underdeveloped, though – there’s no real detail about who you are, why you got this internship, or how you managed to wrangle the killer app. Played straight, there’s only one character and one challenge – you meet the secretary at the front desk and print a sign out for her. If you go poking around where you shouldn’t, there’s a little more flavor and a bonus objective (Spoiler - click to show)(the company’s CEO is blackmailing the secretary with nude photos, which you can delete), which feels good to find and accomplish but is also likewise quite slight.

There are alternate endings, the writing is clean and typo-free, and everything works the way it’s supposed to, so it’s all solidly built. But I can’t help feeling like the work it took to build this hacking system was wildly disproportionate to the work it took to build out the scenario. I find it exhausting to play games that are too long for the amount of content they actually have; BYOD has the opposite problem. Always good to leave them wanting more, I suppose, but still: I want more!

Oh, and “Device” and “Drama” are my two best guesses as to the title – the latter because the story isn’t going to find you, you need to manufacture the interesting bit yourself.

Friends, I will level with you: 2020 has been tough for me, and going into this one I wasn’t sure how I felt about another game about murder, especially one that puts the “brutal” right there in the title. Like, I love the Comp for exposing me to things outside my comfort zone and that I never would have found otherwise, but I also come to IF by way of what we used to call adventure games, text or otherwise. Say what you will about Dr. Ego being a bit wonky and not very innovative, but it had me give a banana to a monkey. Now that’s a proper adventure game puzzle: GIVE BANANA TO MONKEY. Not a severed carotid or trace of seminal discharge in sight.

Blessedly, Brutal Murder is – not actually that brutal? Partially this is the tone, which is miles away from the dour proceduralism the title might evoke. If anything it’s a bit chatty, with a narrative voice that directly addresses the player, alternately confessional and urging the player onwards. And while the central crime is like, clearly a murder and is bad, it’s nowhere near as awful, or as awfully described, as what’s on network TV every night (there is one somewhat disturbing plot element that possibly does deserve a content warning, though I’ll spoiler-block it just in case: (Spoiler - click to show)the narrator, an adult tutor who’s in prison for the murder of the eponymous 17-year old, was in a sexual relationship with her that he describes as consensual).

While this came as a relief to me, I do think BMoJL suffers a bit from this tonal unevenness – the subject matter is clearly meant to evoke tragedy, and that mood is stated as text repeatedly, but it’s hard for that sentiment to land given the often-breezy narrative voice, as well as some out-of-context surrealistic flourishes. The game opens with a tutorial sequence, complete with the narrative voice telling you to TAKE KEY and OPEN DOOR, which is completely diegetic and in continuity with the meat of the game. Each chunk of investigation is interspersed with a trip to a black void, and the topography of the map changes in unphysical ways as the story progresses. It’s not too hard to suss out the reason for this, reading between the lines of some of the narrator’s comments (Spoiler - click to show)(the player character appears to be a sort of crime-solving AI trawling through the narrator’s memories) but this doesn’t seem well-integrated with the main thrust of the plot, and felt very underdeveloped.

As to the game itself, it’s got a pretty solid implementation. There’s typically a good amount of scenery, some of which isn’t described, but all of the objects one can interact with are broken out on their own line, which is a shorthand that adds some convenience. I was stymied by how to open the storage-room cabinet for a long time, even after I knew the code, since TYPE and TOUCH and OPEN and UNLOCK and all their variants failed, but the HELP text had told me that USE item was an important verb, so it’s on me for overlooking that. I did run into one significant bug: my first trip to limbo never ended, leaving me wandering a black void forever, which prompted a restart (second time after a half-dozen turns of flailing, I was moved on to the next sequence as intended).

The puzzles are relatively straightforward and don’t require off-the-wall thinking, but there’s never a time when you feel like you’re solving a mystery – instead you’re hunting for the one piece of evidence or reading material that will prompt the narrator to understand things a little better and explain his progress to you. There are no suspects to interview, or deductions to piece together, just cabinets to unlock and journals to read. It sometimes feels as though the player’s just fiddling about with some busywork while the game solves itself.

This is a shame, because the core story of the game is I think pretty good, with some solid character dynamics, an interesting twist (albeit one that could have probably used more groundwork-laying), and well-observed details on the experience of being Asian-Canadian in one particular place and one particular time. But these tonal issues, and the feeling of disengagement brought on by the gameplay/story disconnect, meant it didn’t land for me as strongly as I would have liked.

I’ve tried to note in these reviews where I think a post-Comp release or in-Comp update would help improve a game, but usually I do that as a late-in-the-day aside. For Big Trouble in Little Dino Park, let me shout it from the rooftops at the outset: I want to praise your game, but first please fix it! It seems very charming, with a funny premise, good prose, and what appear to be some interesting puzzles. But due to myriad crash and dead-end bugs, no save functionality, and a gauntlet-type structure that kills you a lot, I found it way too frustrating to make progress. Admittedly, I can see from other reviews that some folks have managed to power through, so maybe I’m just at a low ebb after running into similar issues in other Comp games, but still: help me help you.

Starting with the positive, BTLDP is immediately grabby – the summer-intern-at-Jurassic-Park setup lets you immediately know what you’re in for, so even as you’re going about your chores you’re just waiting for all hell to break loose (and despite that, it’s still a funny surprise exactly how it all plays out). The prose has a lot of exclamation points and ensures you’re viewing things with the proper mix of terror and strangely giddy enthusiasm (I mean, dinosaurs are cool, even when they’re chewing your face off). Like, there’s this ejaculation when the beasts free themselves from their cages:

"Chaos ascendant! A return to man’s most primal nature: prey! There is only one possible path to escape!"

How can that not make you grin? It does occasionally try too hard (there’s a Mosasaurs -> Mosas -> Moses -> parting the Red Sea gag that just profoundly doesn’t work), and there are a few comma splices and misspellings – though it’s hard to fault anyone for not being able to quite come to terms with “archaeopteryx”. Still, if anything these flaws in the prose reinforce the general teenager-who’s-getting-carried-away vibe.

After the prologue, the game opens up to offer three different areas to explore in search of a way to escape, and here, unfortunately, my troubles began. It’s completely appropriate that trying to escape a park of rampaging dinosaurs involves dying A LOT, so I can’t knock BTLDP too much for this. Where I can knock it, though, is for confusing design – going to the docks kicks off what the game flags as a sort of Frogger sequence, as you need to hop between various boats to make it to the one that’s pulling away. But many of the descriptions of each potential hopping-place are unclear, much less the spatial relationships between them, and there’s an added note of difficulty because part of the trickiness of the puzzle is that you’re presented with false choices (specifically, the swamped hulks of boats you’ve already hopped on and were subsequently smashed by a dinosaur). And then once you get to the boat, I was even more confused by what happened after an additional choice (Spoiler - click to show)(what to do after one of the crew falls off the escaping boat – I thought I could try to pull him onto the boat with me, but I think what’s actually happening is you’re deciding not to get on the boat and pulling him onto the disintegrating dock?). So this leads to a large amount of trial and error gameplay.

BTLDP appears to recognize that this is how most people will experience the story, and positions it as an intended part of the gameplay by listing a death count and a rewind option each time you snuff it.
Except “each time” is overstating it, due to the bugs – I’m not sufficiently familiar with Ink to diagnose exactly what’s going on, but there were a lot of times when I’d click on what looked like a perfectly valid link – even one I’d clicked on just fine in a previous playthrough – only to have the game hang, or print out some text while not offering any further links. There’s no save functionality so far as I could determine, so each time this happened I had to play through the introduction from scratch, which unfortunately loses most of its charm the 12th time through.

I’m holding this space open for hopefully revisiting an updated version of BTLDP, or perhaps coming back to it when I’m more mentally prepared for the whiplash between the whimsical, so-you-died-no-biggie presentation and the Dark-Souls-style grimly repetitive approach currently required, but for now I can’t say I got as much out of, or enjoyed, BTLDP as I’d hoped.

(This review is of the Comp release)

There is nothing creepier than a creepy dream. Conversely, there is often nothing less creepy than that same dream when you’re trying to explain it to others. Plaudits to the author, then, for taking inspiration from one such creepy dream and transforming it into a very unsettling and compelling piece of IF!

The great use of multimedia is part of what makes Babyface so effective. There are judiciously-chosen polaroids, links are highlighted in an ominous red aura, and there’s an amazingly effective jump-scare that’s not at all cheap and that I don’t want to spoil.

But in addition to those (great!) bells and whistles, Babyface has great prose, and – even more importantly for horror – great pacing. The narrative is very canny about revealing some tantalizing hints, and then deferring exploration as the player’s dad calls it a night, or the player wakes up from a dream, or they’re interrupted by a passing police officer. This helps wind up the tension, but also makes the player lean forward in their seat, eager to see what comes next. It’s also set in the here and now, during the COVID pandemic (it’s not stated openly, but it’s possible the main character’s mother has just died of the disease), which as it turns out is a great setting for horror, since it alienates us from the everyday. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of horror fiction set in 2020 in years to come.

There isn’t much interactivity in the sense of meaningful choices or puzzles. I did have fun attempting to translate the mysterious Latin on the photos (fair warning that there’s one bit that isn’t really Latin…) but this is mostly a roller coaster where you’re along for the ride. With that said, there’s definitely some elegance in how links are deployed – there’s one particular sequence where the mechanics of choice effectively communicate a sense of being compelled (Spoiler - click to show)(I mean the bit where the player is entering the house, with “I find myself” the link at the beginning of a sentence that repeatedly changes when you click it. Your cursor isn’t moving, but the character is as the sentence shifts, making it feel like you’re moving forward while remaining inert).

Babyface is definitely worth a play – especially if you give it a spin close to Halloween!

I'm putting the full review here under a spoiler block, but let me just flag two things: 1) this game is fun, and 2) if you're finding it tough going, you might better understand it if you check it out in context on the original IF Comp entries page.

(Spoiler - click to show)So yeah, the three games with similar titles and cover art, and obviously pseudonymous authors, are in fact all the same game. I don’t think the author is trying very hard to hide this, and honestly given how big the field is this year, that’s probably a good decision – lots of people are just going to play the first five or ten games the randomizer hands them, so making these similarities clear, including a note in the blurb that “you may need to seek aid from an unusual place”, and requiring cross-referencing multiple games to solve every puzzle so that it’s impossible to spend more than five or ten minutes on any game before you figure out the trick are all helpful concessions that hopefully mean more people will be able to play this Voltronish game (the ending screen calls it The Knot, so that’s how I’m going to refer to it, rather than trying to juggle the three more unwieldy titles).

This trend of erring on the side of simplicity continues into the puzzles themselves. Once you’ve figured out the trick, they’re extraordinarily straightforward. The first one involves finding the right order to insert colored orbs into a mural depicting a solar system – and there’s a reference item in one of the other games that runs through five planets in order, with relevant colors marked out in highlighted text, and at the end there’s a page headlined “TO SUM UP THIS IMPORTANT CLUE” that spells out the order again and tells you to keep it handy. Most of the puzzles are like this, with clear signposting of the steps needed to solve each of them. This makes juggling the three games a breeze, and it’s fun to jump between browser tabs decoding hieroglyphs and inserting combinations, but since there are only two puzzles per games, it makes the game-y part of the Knot feel rather slight.

The depth really comes in in the writing and story. Each of the three installments operates in a different genre – over-the-top action archeology, over-the-top pulp sci-fi, and over-the-top swords and sorcery. The same set of exotic words and names are used in each (look at the title for a sampling), but remixed and reconfigured – sometimes Chirlu is the name of the rival archaeologist working for the Nazis, sometimes he’s a sympathetic alien doing research on the extradimensional Knot that wends through all three titles. In each, the baddies are always described as fascist, but sometimes that’s the corrupt horde known as the Illfane, and sometimes it’s the monsters attacking the people whose protector is the priestly leader called the Illfane.

In fact, the Knot is surprisingly political – at one point, a set of baddies are said to be trying to “make the galaxy great again”, though in another, a set of characters rebelling against unjust oppression are called “deplorables” – to editorialize for a moment, it’s a sad statement on current events that a game worrying about authoritarianism and fascism scans as topical (as you reach the ending, you encounter a character who’s unlocked the potential within the Knot and lists off the reality-bending now within their power, but who notes “but I can’t do anything about the Nazis”). Beyond these signifiers, the ending also seems to point to a vision of a sort of socialist utopia, as instead of exploiting the Knot as a mystical power source to be hoarded by those wishing power to defeat their enemies, it rather becomes distributed to all, granting a tiny bit of magic and hope to everyone. The Nazis are said not to understand what’s going on as the climax nears, and the ancient tomb they’re pursuing turns out to be made of papier-mâché. This doesn’t come off as leaden political allegory, though – the writing is fleet, and there’s lots of incidental text that’s very fun and funny (my favorite was the series of fairy tales that were all bent in a dystopic-capitalist direction).

All this makes the Knot a fun distraction with a clever gimmick and enough hints of depth to enliven its relatively straightforward puzzles. I was left wanting a little more, though – and actually, wonder whether in fact there are secrets beyond those needed to get to the ending (the introduction to the fairy tales protests perhaps a bit overmuch that they’re not related to the puzzles, and there are intimations that sussing out the identity of the player character in the sci-fi section might be important). Even if this is all that’s on offer, though, it’s still worth a play.