Reviews by Mike Russo

So I know there’s a plethora of successful Sherlock Holmes games, from Infocom’s run at the great detective to those more recent 3D ones where he goes up against like Lupin or Cthulhu, but I’m not going to let that fact get in the way of my sweeping opinion: there’s no way to make a truly satisfying Holmes game, because you need to either make him too smart or too dumb. That is, either you limit the player’s agency and have him solve the case for you, because of course he’s a genius, or you subject Holmes to every one of the player’s idiotic flailings, making it a wonder he manages to tie his shoes let alone reveal the secret of the speckled band.

The way to dodge this conundrum is to have the protagonist be someone other than Holmes – typically Watson, sometimes, I am informed, a dog – and feed him information, so that once he has the data he needs he can make the great deductive leaps his fictional reputation requires. The Transformations of Dr. Watson takes this approach, putting the player in the shoes of Watson, at least initially, but forgets that this means Holmes doesn’t have to swap his deerstalker for a dunce-cap; sadly, this is the dimmest Sherlock has been since those Robert Downey Jr. movies where he mostly just got in fist-fights.

Making matters worse, the mystery here at issue would barely keep a single Hardy Boy busy for an hour. As the game opens, you as Watson are called to the house of a recently-deceased toff to pronounce him dead, though the game doesn’t exactly play things close to the chest when introducing the setup:

"His nervous smile and damp palm upon shaking hands betrayed his tension. “My father… passed away. Heart, I suppose,” he said hastily.

“'Sir Silas never complained of his heart,' the butler, Cavendish, retorted dryly, casting a quick glance at Alister. My medical intuition screamed an alarm."

The only thing that could make things more suspicious would be – well, Alister’s name oscillating to “Alistair” with no explanation, but I assume that’s just simple typos rather than further evidence of fraud. But the teacup with an oddly-bitter odor right next to the body sure does gild the lily.

In fairness, Watson doesn’t get the odor clue right away; first, his soul needs to transmigrate into the body of a cat so he can take advantage of its enhanced senses. Yes, there’s a gimmick here, and not one that was at all explained in my playthrough: after the treacherous Alister/Alistair bashes his head in with a cane, Watson’s consciousness shifts to inhabit a variety of other creatures, and he uses his newfound lease on life to draw Holmes’ attention to the clues once he arrives to check up on his missing friend.

It’s a bizarre if not unpromising gimmick, but there’s less here than meets the eye. Even once the prologue ends, the game is largely linear, with the few choices almost all having clear right and wrong answers – and again, since the mystery is so obvious, the fact that Holmes needs help at all just makes him look exceptionally slow on the uptake. At least there’s a bit of bathos to be wrung from the way the heir is able to intuit that he’s somehow managed to anger a menagerie that’s now bent on his undoing, leading him to seemingly-unmotivated reprisals that surely only incriminate him further. But unexceptional prose that’s a bit too adjective-happy combined with overly-slick AI art mean that there are few flowers to stop and sniff along the way to Holmes’ preordained triumph. It’s all laid on a bit too thick, we’re denied the conventional pleasures of a Holmes tale, and sadly neither gameplay or presentation are up to much. It’s enough to drive a man to cocaine.

Lately I’ve been getting back into Star Trek. There’s an element of nostalgia to it, certainly, that gets increasingly appealing as my age keeps ticking ever-upwards, and its optimistic vision of humanity makes for a nice change of pace from the evil currently consuming America. But actually the thing that I find most soothing about it is what’s been dubbed the “competence porn” angle: The Next Generation especially is a show where a bunch of high-functioning professionals confront challenging problems, hold meetings to brainstorm ideas and develop a plan of action, then despite whatever twists and turns the galaxy throws at them, save the day in 43, or at worst, 86 minutes (until DS9 came along and ruined things with its three-parters and seasons-long arcs). In this time of chaos, seeing people be good at their jobs is basically my ASMR.

The Tempest of Baraqiel cites golden-age sci-fi as its immediate inspirations, and its setting is far more militarized than the Federation: here, humanity is locked in a losing war against an implacable and cryptic race of crab aliens. But it definitely occupies adjacent territory. As a young exolinguist, you’re assigned to a warship and given a secret mission to decode enough of the aliens’ language to operate one of their weapons. Through a well-paced adventure that’s only a bit longer than a Star Trek episode’s running time, you’ll motivate your team, look for inspiration to get through blocks in your research, and yes, have a bunch of meetings with your superiors (in fairness, you can also get into a fistfight in a knock-off of the Enterprise’s Ten Forward bar, if you want). Kal Shem, the protagonist, is young and has some anxiety to living up to the example of his war-hero mom, but at least as I played him, he’s really good at sweating the details and playing the bureaucratic game – at least until things went off the rails in the endgame.

The game definitely puts its best foot forward, though. The custom choice-based interface is clunkily sleek in that 80s-sci-fi way, with low-poly 3D renders in the corner illustrating the ship and its locations (admittedly, I mostly stopped noticing it after the first scene – likewise, there’s a custom music system that I can’t offer an opinion on since I didn’t listen to it). There’s a fair bit of world-building to get through, but it’s managed with a deft hand, and if there are few sequences where characters explain things they both already now to each other, that’s part of the charm of old-school sci-fi – mostly the infodumping comes with some character backstory or a reasonable explanation for why someone needs seemingly-basic context. Some of these circumstances can feel a bit contrived, most notably the fact that Shem isn’t a specialist in this particular alien language, so he seems an odd choice for team leader. But his family’s military background means he’s seen as more reliable for an assignment that requires discretion, so I was willing to go with it.

Baraqiel’s approach to interactivity is also nothing fancy, but well done. There’s a high density of choice – there are very few passages where you just click “next”, and there are both a reasonable number of what seem like significant branch points where you can take a different strategy on your research assignment, and more low-key choices that are either cosmetic, or might have a mild impact on your team’s opinion of you. Interestingly, you’re not restricted to making choices for Shem alone; from time to time you can pick actions for another character, sometimes even an antagonistic one. I was typically too gun-shy to lean into creating conflict in these situations – like I said, that’s not what I go to Star Trek for – but it’s a nice option for players more interested in orchestrating an engaging story than getting by with a minimum of fuss.

As for the prose – well, would you be surprised to learn that it’s largely straight-ahead, but well-crafted? The one distinctive note is that many of the characters use Yiddish slang, like dybbuk or macher; I’m not sure whether a passage I missed laid out the in-universe reasons for it, but it’s a touch I enjoyed (I also know enough Hebrew to understand that “Shem” means something like “name”, which is apropos enough for a game centered on linguistics).

There were a few small flies in the ointment as I played – most notably, the save/load system bugged out, recording only the first time I pushed the save button and not any of the others, meaning that when I tried to rewind a late-game choice to explore other options, I got sent nearly back to the beginning. Meanwhile, only one of Shem’s teammates gets much in the way of characterization. Still, I was having quite a good time as I headed into the game’s third act, which serves as the endgame – but unfortunately that’s when things started to fall apart. The methodically-paced research process suddenly leaped ahead with one flash of insight after another, not all of which made much sense, including a final revelation that seemed hard to swallow <spoiler((surely if the alien language was crafted to be comprehensible over the static of interstellar communications, the humans would have already had to understand and craft a similar solution to this problem when they encountered it over their centuries among the stars?))</spoiler). The climax also forces a conflict with one of Shem’s superior officers who I’d managed to cultivate a solid relationship with; I was deeply confused by why Shem suddenly seemed to be edging right up against mutiny for what appeared to be no good reason, regardless of trying to pick the more conciliatory options. And the ending passage I got was exceedingly compressed and anticlimactic – while the game seemed to be building up to a moment when you’d actually communicate with the aliens, or at least operate their weapon, neither of those came to pass, and the scant few paragraphs that tie off the game were also sufficiently ambiguous that I wasn’t sure what was meant to have happened, or why.

My guess is that the author ran out of time as they got to the end of what’s by any measure a big, responsive, and high-production-value game – it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to a first-time Comp entrant, and it certainly won’t be the last. So even if Tempest of Baraqiel’s final act lets it down somewhat, there’s still more than enough competence on display in the majority of its runtime to scratch that meetings-and-science-and-space-adventure itch.

Readers, a confession: I fear I was not a very fun child. Case in point, even when I was little I never much liked cotton candy. Sure, it looks pretty and it’s good enough on first bite. But there’s just so much of it, and every bite is exactly the same – the same unidimensional sweetness, the same airy-yet-claggy texture, with nothing to liven up the monotony of the march to the soggy cardboard at the end.

OVER is much more enjoyable than a stick of cotton candy, so this is an unfair simile with which to open this review. It’s got some characters who eventually grew on me, a nicely-granular look at the enervating logistics of a big family vacation, and entertaining period details. But I also found it way too long for what’s ultimately a simple story whose themes, characterizations, and gameplay don’t have much depth; at half the length, they wouldn’t wear out their welcome, but at over two hours, the candyfloss has time to turn to a gummy paste in the mouth.

Here’s the short version: a 19-person family goes on vacation to an unnamed theme park that is 100% Disneyworld, and over the course of five days, the two main characters – both queer women, one a 20-year old whose name the player supplies, the other a maybe-late-thirties aunt named Lou – come to grips with the ways they’ve allowed the demands of their big, homophobic family to push aside their need for autonomy and love, against a backdrop of low-key child-mediated mayhem and ubiquitous walkie-talkie use serving as a metaphor for garbled communication and the possibility of surprising connections. Everybody gets on each others’ nerves, everyone’s trying to convince themselves they’re having fun when there’s little authentic pleasure on offer, and just as Disneyland is a pleasant but generic façade over a grim capitalist reality, so too do the rituals of a loving family cloak disapproval, sharp elbows, and bigotry. Fortunately, both the 20-year-old and Lou happen across idealized love interests who offer an escape (though you can’t see how both of their stories resolve, since you have to choose just one to follow into the climactic sequence, which retroactively renders much of the slow buildup of the path not taken superfluous).

That’s not a bad story, but it’s not an especially complex or novel one to support a game that ran me well over two hours to get through. Characters are almost all slotted into a one-dimensional good vs. bad continuum, except for the children who are such non-entities they’re not even allowed names (this is a game with a lot to say about parenting and nothing to say about parenthood). There are a few small choices the player can make to affect the story, but they come infrequently and late – I mostly just remember them being of the form KISS LOVE INTEREST/DON’T KISS LOVE INTEREST. Instead, most of the gameplay consists of deciding which of the characters to follow for the next piece of narration, which always left me feeling like I was missing out on the full story (a feeling exacerbated by the game occasionally calling back to events that I hadn’t seen happen, or even been mentioned). And as for the plot, there’s not much that happens for the first three or so days of the five-day running time, besides the slow establishment of the character dynamics, low-key introductions to the love interests, and (in fairness) a kid puking on the awful grandma’s shoes – and things only pick up slightly in days four and five.

All that means that playing OVER can feel enervating, something the prose definitely contributes to – it’s wordy, and intentionally evades detail:

"The lines were long and dark, most line games were rendered inoperable, and tiredness made them all skirt around conversation. The kids talked about their plans for the coming days, which rides were high priority repeaters and which they barely felt the need to do once. The mom’s, Marian, and Lou talked about the weather, how poorly they had all packed, how nice it was to get away from home for a little while. Charlotte asked her mom about work, and they discussed some previously relayed story’s newest developments. Lou hadn’t heard that story, and didn’t feel like listening to a saga start to finish at the moment, so she asked Margot if she’d read any good books lately. It was a thing they had bonded over in the past, though their tastes weren’t similar, by any means, they both appreciated texts that were unusual, that you wouldn’t necessarily find on any of Oprah’s lists."

There’s a reason the author adopted this style, I suspect – with its busy-ness, its focus on logistics, and its monomaniacal fixation on form and allergy to substance, it clearly has some resonance with the Disneyworld experience it depicts. That same logic applies to OVER’s length, too – the brutality of long exposure to this place, and this family, is precisely what’s ground down Lou, and what the 20-year-old eventually comes to see as an existential threat. So subjecting the player to this very much furthers the work’s artistic aims. And it’s clear the author is writing from experience, and can include some wry or winsome detail when desired:

"A dramatic sobriety falls over her, so dramatic that it almost feels like she’s actually drunk, and she clenches her fists together tight enough to make crescent-moons in her palms with her fingernails, matching the sliver of moon in the sky."

It’s also the case that quantity can have a quality all its own, and by the end I did have some fondness for the sympathetic members of the cast. While Lou is a straightforward character not drawn with as much specificity as I’d have liked (I don’t need a ton of backstory, but there are a couple sentences towards the end that imply that she’s never actually been in a relationship, and if that’s true that should probably have been mentioned earlier), I still wish I’d been able to see how her story turned out, since after long exposure to her travails I couldn’t help but root for her. A fling with a hot, understanding bartender, which seemed to be where she was heading, won’t cure all ills but it certainly wouldn’t hurt, and it would have been a fun note to end on.

So there’s definitely enjoyment to be had in OVER, but it can’t overcome the fundamental mismatch of scope and richness: as the game itself argues, a week is way too long to spend in someplace as simple and cloying as Disneyworld, so better to make it a day trip or go to Rome instead.

The surrealist IF game about trauma is a sufficiently well-represented subgenre that by this point I have a standard bit of patter I trot out for my reviews: these pieces often have spikily compelling writing and can be engaging on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but they also run the risk of being too idiosyncratic to resonate with the audience, as it’s very easy for an author to present snatches of imagery, language, and events that are incredibly personally meaningful, but which lack enough context to ground them in lived experience. No matter how great your prose or vivid your imagination, if the player can’t connect to what they’re reading, there’s a limit to how much impact your game can have.

Slated for Demolition is a very good Twine game in this vein, and as if to prove how little I know, one of the two things holding it back from being really great is that at a climactic moment, it reaches for universality rather than staying rooted in the subjective. At least the other thing is the more conventional challenge of underexplaining a key metaphor.

Before circling back to those issues, though, it’s worth dwelling on the ways that Slated for Demolition really works. While the subject-matter here is pretty familiar – early-20s anomie interrupted by sexual assault – the authorial voice is immediately confident, equally at ease describing the bleakness of a late-night suburb, the degrading consequences of alcohol dependence, and magical-realist irruptions of beauty and terror. The sentences have rhythm, the anecdotes have enlivening details, and the tone never stays stuck too long in one place, preventing the player from being desensitized through repetition. An example, more or less at random:

"Once when you were 18, you went to a party and drank your entire personality away all night long. You managed a few passed-out hours of sleep, and then you had to wake up and go to work for the early shift.

"It was your turn to stock the freezers. You knelt on the hard concrete floor, gingerly placing TGI Fridays-brand meals and trying your hardest not to vomit absolutely everywhere."

The gameplay also knows how to change things up. The overall structure is that of a quest, or a shaggy dog story – you leave your house in search of a Slurpee, but compulsions keep dragging you into more errands, and memory drags you back into reveries, leading to distinct set-pieces as you pass a long dark night of the soul. Some of these involve straightforward choice-based branching, but others require the player to move through or explore a persistent space; a stand-out vignette is more or less an extended puzzle, as you try to figure out which apartment an acquaintance lives in when all you know is the building’s address.

This kind of variety could risk undermining the game’s sense of progression, but one of its conceits is that in each scene, you’re collecting items to satisfy an obscure shopping list you find in your pocket. While the significance of each is typically unclear, wanting to complete the collection kept me engaged in the details of what was happening even in the strangest of the sequences, and provided a sense of pacing across the game’s almost-two-hour running time (the list is also rather forgiving – even if you miss something, just before the endgame you’re given a chance to zoom back to pick up the items you lost).

That endgame is where Slated for Demolition attempts something surprising and audacious, which I can’t help admire even though it didn’t quite work for me (I admire it enough to spoiler-block it, in fact, but the short version is that it makes a move for the universal rather than the particular, when the particular had previously served it very well indeed). (Spoiler - click to show)After doing a lot of work to situate the player in the protagonist’s subjectivity and revealing the details of the traumatic event exerting its gravitational pull throughout the rest of the game, the protagonist begins a ritual to attain closure – except before performing it, the player is invited to think about some pain they’ve experienced and use the ritual structure to fill in details for their own exorcism. It’s a lovely idea for bridging the gap between author and player, and I made a good-faith effort to engage with it, but I found the exercise deeply uncomfortable, because it felt like I was overwriting the protagonist’s, and perhaps the author’s, experiences with my own. Trauma is trauma, to a certain degree, but as the rest of the game demonstrates, the specific details of what was done by whom, to whom, and how, make an enormous difference – and that’s especially the case when dealing with sexual assault, given the role gender and power dynamics play. For some players, I’m sure, the details of the ritual would resonate deeply and the memories it evokes would be congruent with the game’s themes. But for me, even making the attempt felt like overstepping.

My other complaint is that the strongest image in the game didn’t cohere in a satisfying way. I also don’t want to spoil this too much, but the blurb and cover art give away that every once in a while, the protagonist feels like she’s dissolving into pasta and red sauce, and while that sounds silly, in fact it’s written to be the most upsetting piece of body horror I’ve come across in years. I was delighted by how much these sequences made me squirm, but while there are a few hints for how they connect to the game’s broader concerns, the hints are rather thin and ultimately the metaphor doesn’t connect very neatly with the title and framing idea about a house fated for destruction. It’s a textbook example of surrealism that needs a bit more connective tissue, so while Slated for Demolition definitely challenges my theory for what makes these kinds of games succeed, at least I don’t need to throw it out entirely.