Reviews by Mike Russo

Last night my wife and I had one of our all-too-infrequent dates (we’re parents of a toddler, the struggle is real), and I made the questionable decision to use some of that precious time telling her about the drama surrounding NaNoWriMo endorsing LLM tools. She was gobsmacked: the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel, so what possible point could there be to having an “AI” write part of it for you? I didn’t have any great answers; the best I could come up with is that there are people who really want to have written a book, but either can’t or don’t want to do the work to actually write it.

Comes now Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe to assert that yes, there definitely are people like that, and to imagine what they might do if they had to make a deal with an entity darker still than ChatGPT to get their way. Oh, there’s plenty going on in this impressively-put-together TADS game – beyond the main thread involving investigations in an evocatively-presented 19th-Century Baltimore, there’s also a terrorist thriller, and even a brief Renaissance interlude – but the heart of it is a meditation on artistic ambition; trying to uncover exactly what caused Poe’s death provides impetus to the plot, and he enigmatically haunts proceedings as inspiration, cautionary tale, or victim, but the story is ultimately concerned with others who lack his talent and perseverance while feeling no less entitled to success.

Speaking of ambitions, this is a lot for a parser game to bite off, but UCEAP manages it all with aplomb. There’s a modern-day framing story for the main action in Poe’s Baltimore, as well as one or two other nested flashbacks, but everything except the 19th Century stuff is presented in a compact, guided fashion that ensures the player doesn’t flounder even as they’re put in situations without enough context to understand them, or asked to make thematically-charged decisions via a parser interface that doesn’t allow for much nuance. The tools used here include a fair amount of prompting, via a (optional, but enabled by default) system that provides hints about possible conversational topics, or the reduction of complex dilemmas to binary choices represented by physical actions easily fitting the medium-dry-goods paradigm. It’d be churlish to complain about this kind of thing, though, since these sequences are clearly ancillary to the main event, where the player is afforded far more freedom; keeping the necessarily-less-engaging side-stories moving is the right decision.

And oh, what fun there is to be had in Charm City! As an admirer of Poe’s who has heard news of his troubles, you rush to his hospital bed and vow to discover who or what brought him to such dire straits. The whole sequence is rendered in enjoyably melodramatic prose that brings the milieu to life, like this description of the harbor:

"Eagerly I pass through the doors of the ferry building, columned on both sides by the sails and smoke rising from the ferries gliding over the glassy Patapsco River."

Or this later one of a damaged mechanism:

"A great iron pot-bellied engine sits mounted into one wall, with a webwork of contraption and gears sprouting from its head. Blackened metal scraps lie about it like curled patisserie chocolate."

It’s impressively-wrought apery, conjuring ambiance while avoiding mentioning too many nouns that would need to be implemented, and if there are anachronisms or infelicities, I didn’t notice them. A lot of research has clearly gone into this, but the game avoids the pitfall of ploddingly reciting Wikipedia summaries; historical tidbits like how voting frauds were perpetrated or what medical care looked like at the time are given life and made plot-relevant instead.

The puzzles are also woven into the narrative with care and skill. There are barriers to your investigations – you’ll need to retrace his steps before the attack that felled him, wheedle key information out of a wino, er, toper, and even decode some cryptograms that could have come straight out of a Poe story. But they all arise, and are surmounted, in organic fashion; there’s nothing that comes off as a gamey contrivance to pad out the running time, and the puzzles all reward logical thinking and period knowledge (in fact I managed to sequence-break by guessing a cipher keyword well before I was supposed to based on knowing some things about 19th-Century medicine). And even for folks less well-positioned to grapple with its challenges, the game offers hints and a walkthrough.

For all that they’re well done, though, the puzzles aren’t what UCEAP is most interested in. Nor, in the end, is Poe – the game does engage with the historical circumstances of his death with impressive depth and fidelity, and it’s generously larded both with specific references to his work, as well as with tropes that invoke the mysterious, haunted atmosphere of his writings, from uncanny doubles to ominous codes to insoluble murders. But we don’t get much of a sense of his subjectivity: the active characters are people who look up to him, or are jealous of him, or find themselves enmeshed in situations that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his tales. Indeed, there’s even a clever feint that led me to expect that Poe would be revealed as his own worst enemy, only to find that something else entirely was going on.

No, it’s the protagonist and villain, and their echoes in the modern-day story, who are most thematically central to the game. It posits a series of dualities within literary identity: the desire for broad success as well as critical acclaim, for bourgeois respectability as well as demimondaine extravagance, and above all for the trappings of fame without the effort required to master a craft. Much like the puzzles, this theme is well-put together and cleverly integrated into the game as a whole, but here’s my major complaint about UCEAP: I’m not convinced it winds up with as much to say about literary production in general, or Poe in specific, as I’d have hoped.

Most authors, I think, really are trying as hard as they can to produce good work; if they’re taking shortcuts, they’re shortcuts imposed by the exigencies of artistic production under late capitalism rather than moral failings. ChatGPT and its ilk pretend they offer the equivalent of a deal with the devil – have your masterworks handed to you on a platter rather than forging them with the sweat of your brow – but it’s nonetheless clear that this Mephistopheles has not a golden fiddle but an out-of-tune ukulele. And as for Poe, UCEAP convincingly demolishes the character-assassination portrait of him as a depraved alcoholic brought low by his inability to control his vices, but it doesn’t dwell much on the positive vision we should have of him instead. I don’t disagree with anything the game is saying, by any means, but I do wish it had found a way to penetrate a little more deeply, engage more directly with the questions it raises about how we sinful mortals can create undying art.

Let me be clear that I’m just talking about the difference between a great game and an incredible one, though – I found UCEAP a joy to play, with best-of-class prose, design, worldbuilding, and narrative structure (I haven’t gotten a chance to mention how scene transitions are often accomplished via seamless match-cuts, like jumping from a 2024 hospital to an 1849 one). It also boasts the most hilarious way to get out of a bad contract I’ve read in quite some time. And if it doesn’t completely transcend its origins as a sensational tale of depraved and desperate ambition, well, Poe wrote a bunch like that himself and many of them have survived the test of time nonetheless.

Deliquescence is an emotionally charged game presenting one of the most painful experiences possible – being with someone you love in the minutes before they die – so of course instead of engaging with any of that I’m going to start off by talking about the interface.

This is of course a choice-based game, but the presentation of those choices is almost unique in IF – rather than a typical set of inline links or radio buttons, the options available are offered via nested menus. Talk, Touch, and Do are the initial three, each with a little + next to them indicating that they can expand to offer a further set of choices, which of course can expand in turn to offer additional refinements another layer down, ultimately reaching three or four levels deep in some cases; you might select Talk, then About her, then Tell me a story, then finally About your grandmother to trigger a short reminiscence. Even something as comparatively simple as touching her hand is actually Touch, Her, Hand – and the way the nesting works, you don’t know what options are available until you click to fan them out.

I suspect that this choice of interface was partially a practical accommodation to allow for quite a lot of choices – there are something like thirty different courses you can pursue – to be displayed at once, without requiring the player to fumble with the back button or locking in any path-dependence (the game does shunt you into one of several different endings based on what you do, but each interaction works the same way every time). But it’s also a perfect fit for the game’s subject matter: in such a high-stress situation, with seconds ticking down to the inevitable (yes, the game does have a real-time limit hurrying things along if you dither), I think your brain really does work like this: I should say something, what should I say, maybe a question, what was a story she told me, oh the one about her Grandmother. And there’s so much you might want to do, but the likelihood that it will be the right thing is so low given the stakes, that you do find yourself considering action after action, jumping around in the list, all the time knowing you can’t get through even a fraction of what you’d like to do or say before the end, and actually by searching for something perfect you’re frittering away the little time that’s left.

The setup is so neat that the specifics and the writing are almost besides the point; happily, they’re quite good, though I inevitably have a quibble or two. The main one of these is that Deliquescence is not nearly as emotionally devastating as it could be. For one thing, as the title indicates your friend is dying because their body is turning into water; this can be read as a metaphor for all sorts of things, and could be rendered as a terrifying bit of body horror, but in the event the author succeeds in giving the friend’s physical decay an odd, terribly beauty; her death will make you sad, but it’s a wistful kind of sad, and a sadness leavened by the invitation to restart and experience it again. For another, neither the friend nor the protagonist are especially characterized, nor does their relationship have much flavor to it; there are a couple of nice anecdotes, and from the fact that they’re in this situation together the player understands that the ties that bind them together must be tight ones, but I felt an intellectual rather than a visceral understanding.

The endings also pull some punches. There aren’t any good ones where you say exactly the right thing to make you and her feel OK about what’s happening – because of course there aren’t – but nor are there ones where you say the wrong thing, or one or the other of you breaks down irretrievably (er, emotionally, that is). If you futz around with the interface so much that you never actually do anything, she says the important thing was for you just to be there; if ask her to tell you stories, she tells you she was happy with her life. One ending that threatened to become a bummer ended with her saying “My death is not for anyone but me. It’s just another thing that is happening. Don’t make it a burden.” I’m not saying that’s unrealistic – in fact my sister told me something not unlike this a few weeks before she died – but it is a pretty direct instruction to the player not to feel too bad about things.

This all seems to be a matter of choice rather than mistake on the part of the author, though – based on the quality of the writing, I have little doubt they could have gone all-in for melodrama had that been their goal. Instead Deliquescence allows the player to get their toes wet exploring an awful moment, experiencing all the ways it can feel overwhelming and go wrong while still having a safety net that blunts the worst excesses of emotion and reassures them that it’s going to be OK no matter what. That’s an admirable thing to offer, with impressive artistry going into the design, even if the situations it’s emulating are nowhere near as domesticated in practice.

The thing about metaphors is, they can’t be too metaphorical. Similes are anchored by that “like”, they can do anything they want: there’s a Mountain Goats song, International Small Arms Traffic Blues, with the line “my love is like the border between Greece and Albania”, and it completely works, you understand exactly what it means. But metaphors lack any automatic grounding in reality, and so they’re liable to float away if you let them. Case in point: I am pretty sure that when the parents in House of Wolves make the protagonist eat meat for dinner, the game doesn’t (or at doesn’t just) have vegetarianism on its mind, but I couldn’t tell you what it does. Reactionary politics? Sexual orientation or gender identity? Academic success/meritocracy as a cloak for the Hobbesian war of all against all? The fact that this is about “wolves” and “meat” indicates there’s violence at the heart of whatever’s going on, but whatever’s going on is too gestured-at to be visceral.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing powerful in the writing here. Part of the protagonist’s three-part daily ritual is studying (bracketed by ablutions and the aforementioned meal sequences): they appear to be taking a computer-science course under remote-learning conditions, possibly due to COVID, and at one point there’s a description of the technical concepts of encapsulation and abstraction in the context of programming languages, but it’s clear the description could equally apply to avoidance strategies. I also liked that the protagonist’s dream of escape isn’t that their parents will stop trying to make them eat meat, no, it’s that they’ll just enjoy eating it: their imagination doesn’t extend to freedom, just to no longer experiencing the pain of conformity.

But again, we don’t really get a sense of what the protagonist is trying to avoid, or what costs conformity actually would impose. Nor are we given any climax or catharsis. We just get these same concepts repeated in various forms:

"You’ve almost forgotten what it’s like not to have that pressure bearing down on you. Separated from your friends, separated from any form of escape, you’ve buckled under its weight. Let them stamp you down into the cracks till there’s nothing left to break. You pretend it makes it easier. That it makes it hurt any less."

This seems unpleasant, and abstractly, I want things to go better for the protagonist. But I didn’t feel like my choices as a player had anything to do with that – you can acquiesce to eating eat, or be force-fed it, but external and internal end results felt the same – nor was there any poignancy to these scenes, any sense that an actual human being had anything concrete at stake. I’m not saying House of Wolves needed to make its allegories clanglingly explicit; heck, I’m a vegetarian, even if the game is just about eating meat I think that still could work. But right now all there is is the metaphor, and it’s not bloody enough to connect.

Early on in LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST (hereinafter “Sextuple L”, per the subtitle – yes, I know that’s only five, I have some theories but we’ll get to those later), L, the game’s early-20s British transmasc protagonist, watches an ASMR video. It depicts a lemon being poked at in a way that’s meant to evoke a lobotomy – this is one of many sequences in the game that are sufficiently far outside my experience that they seem bizarre but also facially plausible given the way people are on the internet – and at one point, the YouTuber pokes a hypodermic under the fruit’s rind and injects some water to ape anesthetization, except the lemon already being quite full of liquid, the pressure of the plunger just makes the needle shoot back out of the rind. This strikes L as funny, since he did almost the same thing when he practiced on an orange before starting injecting himself with testosterone:

"Who would have thought my [transgender] experiences would connect with this one random guy, who absolutely is cis, even though I have no real way of knowing that, over something so stupid…"

This is a process that absolutely works in reverse: despite this being a game that’s heavily immersed in the subjectivity of L as a trans man, with a supporting cast that’s also entirely trans folks, and almost everybody is a 20-something Brit to boot, I found it incredibly relatable and emotionally engaging despite being a cishet American in my 40s. This isn’t because it’s especially meant for people like me, I don’t think – at least I hope it’s not, God knows there’s more than enough stuff out there catering to my demographic – but precisely because it does such a good job communicating the specificity of what L is seeing, thinking, and feeling. I’m very aware that my own experiences feeling awkward in a nightclub or adrift after graduation, to pluck two examples among many, don’t directly translate to L’s situation – beyond dealing with systemic transphobia and near-crippling confidence issues, he’s also got to grapple with a crush on someone way out of his league, moving back in with parents he’s not yet out to, and how to integrate a powerful rubber fetish into his romantic life, and more besides – but nonetheless I found the game a master-class in empathy: L feels like a flesh and blood person whose happiness I was deeply invested in.

I worry I just made Sextuple L sound kind of weepy and Very Serious, but it’s nothing of the sort – or, well, it sometimes is, but part of what makes the game so special is the authors’ bravura ability to shift tones and pivot on a dime while carrying you with them. L is an amazing narrator and very funny, incapable of letting a moment to wryly note the absurdity of a situation go by no matter what awful thing might be happening, and he’s sharply observant to boot. Despite the game disabling copy-and-poste (boo) my notes file is littered with lines I loved so much I was willing to type them in manually, like this early reflection L makes on his, er, reflection as he hides in the aforementioned club’s bathroom:

"He doesn’t look like a he. He looks like what a 13 year old girl would draw as her fictional boyfriend before she has an understanding of boys or friends… ugly in a way that he’s not ugly enough. There’s beauty in the beautiful and beauty in the grotesque. He’s neither… not woman enough to be an object; not man enough to be a threat."

The first bit elicits sympathy, the last an “oof” at what a reductive, yet sadly accurate, understanding of gender norms it conveys. And then smash cut from that self-loathing introspection to suddenly “someone with a full gasmask, catsuit sans-arms, and a harness of ropes knotted into a pentagram walks in” (it’s rubber night).

A bit later, when L rabbits out of the club and is waiting at the bus stop, he’s surprised to feel his latex-gloved hands immediately getting cold, due to the way rubber passes on heat – “I need gloves for my gloves”, he laments – and then he meets-cute with another trans guy, Val, who’s also waiting for the bus: “there is a quiet, but unmistakable, squelch of lube sliding under latex as we shake.” And I’ve got a million more examples; the narrative voice is brilliant at bringing out the texture of everything that’s happening and making it come alive, while being very very funny to boot.

…I should get on to actually reviewing the game, rather than just listing off the best bits, but I have to share a couple more. Eventually L hooks up with Val and his friend Artemis, a trans woman (let me just interject here to say that the sex scenes are really well done – there’s always a risk that sex will seem ridiculous when you write about it, and I think that risk is heightened when you’re dealing with fetish material that will be unfamiliar to many readers, but man, these work), and as they’re smoking during the comedown this exchange left me howling:

“Maybe I’ll get into piss,” she narrows her eyes, and taps the end of the cigarette, ash falling to the floor. “I haven’t done anything with piss.”

“Ugh, don’t. Everyone’s getting into piss.”

[banter about not-hot stuff people getting into piss say, culminating with] “Give me swimmer’s ear with your dick!”

Oh god, this is reminding me that just before that, as the sex scene was really getting going, you’re given a choice of having L remain silent or “vocalize”, and choosing that option has him blurt out “I t-think I have covid” – he doesn’t, he’s just overwhelmed and his brain is malfunctioning at the idea of losing his virginity, but good lord that made me laugh.

…I need to stop, but really, last one, here’s a bit where L considers whether to accept his hairdresser’s offer of some product for his hair:

"If I say no I could incur the wrath of someone who in one move could turn me from teenage boy into depressed lesbian."

It is definitely not all fun and games here, though – there are threeish major strands to the plot, and L’s relationship with Val is only one of them. Another has to do with L navigating his still-fairly-recent transition, from dealing with acquaintances who knew him before he was out to enduring the vagaries of interacting with the NHS while trans (it’s not great, though not as bad as you might expect). And then the last has to do with the Internet: like most of us, L is terminally online, and going to uni during COVID has probably exacerbated matters. He’s often checking tumblr or Discord chat while the other events of the game are progressing (these are rendered in Ink with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude), and there are extended sequences as he falls down rabbit-holes, watching interminable arguments about whether only TERFs talk about “bi lesbians” or seeing the control-freak mod of the Discord server, Gerstin, throw their weight around.

I have to admit that I found this last element the least compelling; by its nature, the online stuff largely lacks the grounding in detail that’s so engaging through the rest of the game, and it also goes on fairly long – admittedly, part of the point is that internet stuff in general, and Gerstin in particular, is a whole lot, but that point could have been made in a pacier way, I think. Gerstin’s version of friendship with L also lacks ambiguity; they’re clearly earmarked as toxic from the start, and things only escalate from there (seriously, they wind up endorsing eugenics!), so when you’re finally given the choice to de-friend them it’s cathartic but a very long time coming.

I wasn’t ever frustrated with L for not having kicked them to the kerb long ago, though, because the spine uniting all the disparate elements of this three-or-four-hour game is L’s crisis of confidence. The one bit of mechanics in the game, so far as I can tell, is that your assertiveness is tracked, and eventually slots you into one of two different endings. Early on, L understandably enough is a wallflower’s wallflower, barely able to nod hello or ask people to use his preferred pronouns. But through making real friends, getting laid, and getting a bit of perspective on his life, he (well, you) is given the opportunity to stand up for himself a little more. The choice-density in Sextuple L is fairly low, but almost always when you get one, you’ll see a more-passive and a less-passive option (and just those two). There are times when keeping your head down makes the most sense, but I suspect there’s a reason that the two main branches are labelled in the game files as “conf” and “bad”: almost always, picking the confident approach will make L’s life better, allowing you to cut loose from toxic relationships, assert your right to dignity, and make out with hot people. Perhaps this is a bit of wish-fulfillment – and speaking of, Val, who’s hot and nice and experienced, maybe comes off a bit overly-perfect – but I can’t say this bothered me at all: the way society works, especially for marginalized folks, standing up for yourself usually is going to get better results than just drifting by, and I found the arc of the “confident” ending heartwarming: L undergoes some bad stuff and comes out of it with scars, but also hard-won wisdom and hope. Not every trans story needs to, or should, end like this – but it’s kind of lovely to see one that does.

It’s long past time to bring this in for a landing, and by tradition this is the paragraph where I get to nitpicking. Besides the Discord stuff going on a bit (and Gerstin being the fucking worst), I suppose I have to gripe about the interface, which has you clicking after every couple of paragraphs to get the next bit of text (and if you click too many times, that can trigger a screen-wipe as you transition to the next passage). I loved the prose so much this bothered me much less than it should have, and there are a few places where it helps the punchline of a joke land with that much more force, but really this should probably have been reined in. There’s one sequence – the one that earns the “fatphobia” content warning – that unlike other times where L acts kind of shitty, goes textually unremarked-upon, which doesn’t feel great and could probably be sharpened. Oh, and there’s one typo I found: “right of passage” for “rite of passage”.

Of course, for a game of this length, having only one typo is amazingly clean, and that’s how I feel about Sextuple L’s flaws: sure, they’re there, and I suppose worth pointing out, but they sure didn’t reduce my enjoyment. This is my favorite game of the Comp so far; it’s fleet, human, and funny.

…oh, before I sign off, I said I’d come back to my theory on the sixth L, right? The easy answer is, er, L – as in the protagonist. But I’ve got another idea. Each of the game’s five acts is titled with one of the Ls: the fetish-focused opening is Latex, for example, running through the confrontational scenes in Leather, the consequences of the bloody, ill-advised hookup in Lipstick, engaging with L’s romantic feelings for Val (and the suffocating nature of your relationship with Gerstin) in Love, and in Lust, finally facing the world with open arms. What comes after all that? Life.

As my review of Dream of Silence indicates, I’m maybe not especially good at evaluating fan-fiction riffing on stuff I lack much direct experience with. Unlike with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve at least seen a bit of Dr. Who – I watched the Christopher Eccleston season of the rebooted show, and like three or four stories an ex showed me from the classic show – but it’s still a trivial percentage of a media franchise that’s been around for more than half a century at this point; if I’d seen only one season of Voyager and like three episodes of the original series, I’d feel on uncertain ground assessing how well a fan-game captured the Star Trek experience, and I’m in worse shape here since classic Dr. Who is also a quintessentially British phenomenon.

With that said, Dr. Who and the Dalek Super-Brain certainly seems like an authentic tribute to the show. The Daleks are presented lovingly, for one thing, with attractive 3D models and an endearing combination of ruthlessness and Self-Defeating Evil Overlord behavior. And the scenario, with its series of cliffhanger death-traps and fuzzily-explained time travel techno-babble, seems of a piece with what I know of the old series: after finding your time-ship blown off course, you’re kidnapped by the Daleks and your companion Bex is threatened with extermination if you don’t cough up the secrets of time travel to these tinpot Hitlers, after which you’ve got a chance to turn the tables through judicious application of the sonic screwdriver, logical paradoxes, and jury-rigged explosives.

This is all good clean fun, and if neither the narrative nor the prose ever rise above being workmanlike, well, I’m sure there were lots of weeks when Dr. Who was just phoning it in too. I did like the paradox bit – it’s set up as one of those classic 50s/60s scenarios where the protagonist tries to overload an android’s brain by spouting something nonsensical or self-contradictory, but here, after making the Dalek supercomputer consider one of the many paradoxes of time travel, the result isn’t to make it explode but rather to second-guess whether it truly understands time travel enough to build a working time machine from the info you’ve provided. But other than that, the companion is here to be rescued, the jaded leader of oppressed slaves is here to be inspired, and the Daleks are here to go down like punks – it all plays out exactly as you’d expect, which is the sign of a successful pastiche just as much as of a less-ambitious game.

The interface also contributes to the sense that there’s not much to do here. Things are purely choice-based, but with an opportunity to do a bit of navigation between different locations. While a nice bit of freedom in theory, in practice only one of the three or so rooms available at any given time will have anything you can usefully interact with, which makes the game feel emptier than it would if the choices were more restricted. Meanwhile, the visuals are pleasant but also led to a challenge or two, like the way a passage with various clickable links explaining potential upgrades for my screwdriver kept scrolling up and until I couldn’t actually reach the links anymore (this is the one real puzzle in the game, but fortunately it’s trivially solvable if you read at all carefully).

Speaking of the visuals, we need to address the elephant in the room, or rather the cantaloupes. From my admittedly small sample size, my sense is that Dr. Who is a relatively sexless show. So I experienced a bit of ludonarrative dissonance from the fact that almost the first graphic the game presented to me was a slightly-zoomed in shot of Bex’s chest, with most of her head cropped out of the frame and her zipper pulled down to reveal quite a lot of cleavage. The text itself doesn’t sexualize Bex, beyond the patriarchy-mandated trope of restricting her role to being menaced by aliens and having the plot explained to her, so I don’t think this is an intentional decision to try to make horny Dr. Who. The cleavage could just be because the author was looking for free or low-cost 3D models of sci-fi looking women, and maybe the cast from an off-brand Fallout sex game was all that was on offer; meanwhile, I think the cropping-out of her face was just due to how I had my browser window set up. Still, it made for an off-putting and in-your-face combination; if the first thing a game thrusts at me is boobs, I kinda expect it to be about boobs, and it’s a nice bonus if the person the boobs are attached to has a personality.

There are certain kinds of criticism that, while well-intentioned, nevertheless always bug me, and high on that list is I-wish-this-parser-game-had-been-a-choice-based-one. It can certainly be a legitimate reaction to a game that doesn’t leverage the unique affordances of the text parser, or has a clumsy interface that would be much smoother if the player could just click their way through it, but it sometimes can also just reflect essentialized views of what the two houses of contemporary IF, both alike in dignity, are all about: if a game is about feelings and relationships and people other than straight white men, well, wouldn’t it be more comfortable with the choice-based crowd, not stuck over here with all the medium-dry-goods puzzles? Well, perhaps, but perhaps shifting our expectations of what goes where is worth a bit of discomfort.

With all that as context, it hopefully conveys the power of my reaction to The Garbage of the Future to say that I really wished this choice game had been a parser one.

The minimalist, creepy premise isn’t the issue: the protagonist is a working stiff who’s driven a tanker trunk jammed full of supernaturally potent waste out to the woods to empty the tank where nobody else is around. This is a simple task that’s obviously replete with danger and vague, ominous implications, and the game’s prose does a good job playing up the nerve-wracking details of your errand, from the flickering of your temperamental flashlight to the sound of a threatening figure skittering through the mist. The exact nature of the toxin you’re dumping is never explained, nor are the motivations of whoever’s paying you, but my brain had no trouble filling in the blanks with horrifying possibilities.

No, the trouble is in the implementation. Performing the job requires reading a manual in the darkened truck-cab, picking up and repairing the hose from one compartment and tools from another compartment, as well as exploring your environs for useful equipment and a place to put the waste. The choice-based interface for doing all this is straightforward enough: objects you can interact with are highlighted, and clicking on one of them will usually pop up a sub-menu allowing you to use some standard commands (take, drop, open) or use an inventory item on them or navigate to an exit or some other, bespoke option. But in practice this can be rather overwhelming, like in this early location description (many later ones are even more complex):

Jake opens the glove box. Inside, a faint glow illuminates a flashlight and a manual.

The truck is unnervingly dark.

Bill says, “If you forget what to do, it’s explained in the manual.”

A distant groaning fills the air.

(Exits: Field, Path)

Jake, glove box, flashlight, manual, truck, Bill, field, and path are all highlighted, and in practice I found I was having a hard time keeping up with all my options. Navigation was similarly tricky; not all locations are reachable from all others, and figuring out which areas were connected to which other ones took a long time.

The core puzzle at the center of the game also feels like it leans into the system’s weaknesses. Futzing with the hose feels like it does in a parser game, for example – I definitely got confused trying to remember which end was which – except with more interface friction from all the clicking required, and a half-second screen-refresh delay that began feeling interminable. There’s also a ton of waiting – after I got the tanker draining, I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs while the gauge slowly ticked down, and reaching 0% required five solid minutes of clicking wait, with nothing much of interest happening in the meantime.

As a parser game, I think Garbage of the Future could work quite well – default actions and affordances would suffice for most of the machinery-manipulation portions of the puzzle, and moving round the small map would be much easier (it’s also quicker to repeat-slam the Z key and enter than keep clicking in different places on the screen). The fractal nature of attention in the prototypical parser system, where looking at one object may reveal several more to consider, would also help tier out the level of detail provided. As it is, I found my engagement in this creepy vignette was often undercut by interface woes, which is an awful shame given the creativity on offer; exploring the generous spread of achievements tracked by the game, and checking off the variety of different approaches and endings, would have made for a pleasant second hour with the game, but the thought of once again having to juggle a turn timer and click dozens of times to get through sequences I’d already explored was too daunting to surmount.

Fittingly for a game that’s structured as a series of repeating time loops, I am getting déjà vu writing this review, because I’m sadly going to have to start and end with a point I’ve made many many times before: if you are planning on putting a game in the Comp, especially if it’s a parser game, especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game, and especially especially especially if it’s a puzzley parser game relying on a bunch of nonstandard commands and mechanics, you need beta testers to put the thing through its paces. Traffic has some clever ideas and an engaging premise, but as it currently exists I think the only options for experiencing it are “type in the walkthrough” and “tear out a tuft of your own hair every five minutes for two hours, at which point you’ll probably be irrevocably stuck maybe halfway through.” I’d definitely recommend the first experience over the latter – even for those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to be dealing with the incipience of male-pattern baldness – but even better would be playing a hoped-for post-Comp release that improves the clueing and implementation so that its clear potential can be realized.

Part of that potential is the comedy of the setup. Much like Turn Right, this is a game about getting across an intersection; unlike Turn Right, this time you’re a pedestrian (yay), and the risk of being run over is very high (eek – the blurb should probably have a content warning for this), but you’re carrying a weird science gizmo that allows you to rewind the clock and hop into other people’s bodies (er?). With a little experimentation, you learn that by looking at particular people in the short time available to you before you get pasted, you can queue up targets for your Quantum-Leap-y ability, at which point you’ve got a short window to try to change things so as to avoid the accident – prevent the phone-addicted parent from pushing her baby stroller into the road, reset the wonky traffic-light controller system, deescalate a passenger’s mental health crisis that will lead to the bus getting stranded in the middle of the intersection. If you fail, no big deal, you can always try again, albeit at the cost of another bone-crunching death to reset the timeline.

I love this premise; it’s a clever way of making a puzzle of, and lightly skewering, the absurdities of everyday life, while getting around the artificiality of letting the player have infinite time to prevent a traffic accident that clearly has to happen within a few seconds. And making the protagonist be a sad-sack postdoc just adds to the comedy, while the drily understated prose gives the slapstick room to breathe. Unfortunately, to switch transportation metaphors, things quickly go off the rails.

There are two main issues I experienced that undermined the puzzles – and this is an entirely puzzle-focused work. First, you’ve got your implementation challenges. There were many times when I knew what I had to do, but struggled to communicate this knowledge to the parser. Take the bus scenario: to prevent the old lady from melting down, obviously you’d want to let her take your seat rather than being forced to stand. But STAND doesn’t work (someone else takes the seat out from under you), and ASK/TELL WOMAN ABOUT SEAT just gets a generic response indicating the conversational topic isn’t recognized. I had to go to the walkthrough to learn that I had to GIVE SEAT TO WOMAN, which I suppose is idiomatically reasonable but wouldn’t be intuitive to anyone familiar with parser IF conventions; really, if the player types any of these things it’s clear they’ve solved the puzzle and they should be accepted.

Then there are the puzzles that aren’t sufficiently clued. Some of these might just be places where I was being thick: there’s a math puzzle that I feel like might be underdetermined, such that answers other than the one the game is looking for should also be valid, but I admit I could be wrong about that since it’s a long time since I’ve solved this kind of problem. But in the late game, there’s a puzzle that can only be solved by intuiting the presence of an undescribed item (Spoiler - click to show)(the bed, in the sequence with Sarah – adding insult to injury, the stuffed animals, which are mentioned, aren’t implemented), and after you resolve the initial trio of challenges you’re thrown into a second that requires you to maneuver two different cars to block the progress of a police cruiser, which is described so confusingly that even the walkthrough couldn’t get me unstuck, requiring a restart.

And finally there’s the puzzle that gates off the real ending from the premature one, which requires both reading the author’s mind AND wrestling with atypical syntax (Spoiler - click to show)(the game very clearly indicates that looking at people is what triggers the body-hopping, so THINK ABOUT SARAH is completely unmotivated and not a command most parser-players would think to try; and after that we’ve got BREAK PACKAGE rather than OPENing it, which gives a discouraging result, and BARK TWICE being mandatory when BARKing on subsequent turns would be more natural). Admittedly, said “real ending” is still a shaggy dog story, but the game is much more satisfying with it than without it so gating it with the aggressiveness with which you’d conceal an Easter Egg is a bad design choice, to my mind.

But again, I don’t think this was a design choice: like everything else I’ve complained about, I think it’s just a lack of testing – there aren’t any credited that I could see, at least, while the blurb describes these extra-spicy puzzles as “mild”, and many of these issues are ones that I think would be easily corrected if the author had the advantage of seeing how people try to grapple with the game. Again, this is an awful shame because Traffic deserves to be its best self; with its many rough edges thoroughly sanded down, I could easily see myself recommending this game to folks in the mood for a clever yet grounded comedy game, so I very much hope to see a post-Comp release.

I often like IF collaborations quite a lot – Cragne Manor ranks quite high on my all-time favorites list – but they often present a tradeoff: when you’ve got a bunch of authors bringing just their one or two best ideas to the party, the novelty and energy can be infectious, but at the same time, that diversity can fray at the unity of a piece, reducing the impact that any particular element might have on the work as a whole and cramming in too many diverse themes to fully cohere. That’s why reading the blurb for A Death in Hyperspace made me a bit apprehensive: having ten authors work on a game that only lasts about an hour seems like it could be a recipe for chaos. Once I started playing, I was surprised to find that wasn’t at all the case – this tale of a spaceship’s AI investigating the death of its captain maintains a very consistent tone and approach while putting a novel spin on the sci-fi whodunnit genre. If anything, I actually found myself wishing for a bit more of the aforementioned chaos.

After an introduction establishes the murder and lays out the interface, you’re given a roster of about a dozen crew and passengers and access to the various rooms within you where they may be found, and told how investigation proceeds: encountering each character allows to engage in dialogue with them, including asking standardized questions getting to motive, alibi, and anything suspicious they might have seen; the initial conversation also unlocks a piece of evidence that can be found elsewhere on the ship and which, when found, will enable you to further corroborate or undermine the testimony you get in future conversations. Meanwhile, a somewhat-unintuitive “murder board” interface lets you lay out your assessments of how credible each person’s story is, ultimately allowing you to end the game once you’ve made a critical mass of decisions.

It’s easy to see how the structure of the game was created to support collaboration: it appears that the other authors all came up with a character and were responsible for writing the conversations with them, while the organizer or organizers were responsible for the connective tissue. This organizational scheme does allow the various pieces to be stitched together cleanly, but it does mean that there isn’t as much interaction between them as you might expect: often, I’d be having a potentially-incriminating conversation with one suspect while three others were standing right there, with no acknowledgment of the awkward circumstances. It also slowed down an opening that I already found quite slowly-paced: I felt like I had to read the crew roster before jumping into interrogations in order to understand who I was talking to and what they might say about their fellows, but it appears that the roster entries were written to a common format, which made me feel like I was listening to a dozen people tell me about their DnD characters one after another.

Because the thing is, I mostly found the characters dull. They all have one or two interesting sci-fi-y characteristics – there are a couple different kinds of aliens, there’s a cyborg, someone who’s hallucinating while in the throes of hyperspace madness – but given that the only experience of them the game offers is interrogation by a ship’s computer that’s read too many murder-mysteries, there isn’t much room for details of personality to come through in anything but a schematic way. Several of them are also explicitly designated as minimally-interactive red herrings, too, and given that I had a hard time keeping track of a large cast boasting generally-forgettable names (look, I’m not 12 any longer, I’m not going to be able to remember which one is “Until Tomorrow” vs. “Lament Tynes” vs. “Keen Oculus”; at least there are a couple, like “VX2s-K3r BÆSDF”, that are memorably awful) that meant I spent a lot of time clicking on people, finding they didn’t have anything new or interesting to say, and clicking out.

This sense of lassitude is exacerbated by the way the game encourages lawnmowering. You need to loop through every location at least two or three times, since the pieces of “evidence” aren’t findable until you’ve met the appropriate character, at which point you need to loop back for a follow-up conversation, but it’s worse than that because characters can move around. You can track down specific people through the roster feature, but since that means you might miss evidence, it felt like the game was encouraging me to play it by mechanically running through each location and talking to each character over and over until I’d exhausted the content. The conversational structure is also fairly rigid from one character to the next, with few interesting choices to engage the player: many reduce to either behaving normally and asking direct questions, or indulging your murderino streak and wildly leaping to accuse suspects just to see how they’ll react.

Indeed, investigation isn’t that satisfying either; I can’t tell for sure, but I think this is one of those quantum mysteries where every suspect potentially did it or maybe no one did. There are few hard clues to go on (there’s no sign of foul play on the body, and you automatically decline the doctor’s offer to do an autopsy), with your interrogations mostly turning up shifty backstory elements rather than actual evidence; meanwhile, the connection between the “clues” you find and their impacts often felt abstract to me (one of them was a teddy bear that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything?) Beyond that, the game’s promise of 11 different endings makes it seem likely that they’re all like the one I saw, which constructed a plausible-seeming case for why the suspect I picked might have done it – unfortunately, because the game’s save feature isn’t included in the sidebar but rather nested underneath a game menu link that I didn’t think to return to after toggling some initial settings, I didn’t make a save allowing me to test this theory, though regardless it does seem like at least one ending requires you to do a full replay of the game.

For all this griping, there were a few specific elements I definitely thought worked; the one character who had a sense of humor was actually quite funny to me (though I’m not sure it was a great idea to have the single Black person in the cast speak with an accent called out with nonstandard spelling and punctuation). Pearl, the ship’s AI, is also appealingly keen to find the captain’s killer. If the game had provided characters whose voices similarly took up more space, and loosened up its structure to allow for deeper subplots or more involved investigative tracks, it would probably have made A Death in Hyperspace a woolier, more awkward beast – but one that I think I would have liked far more than the overly-sterile version that we got.

Mike, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a very common name in the U.S., so much so that in my elementary school class of 25, I was one of four Mikes – even my sister would call me “Russo.” So I suppose I should have been quicker on the uptake when Final Call, a choice-based escape-room-inspired scenario jumping off from a casino heist gone wrong, seemed to be getting confused about who was saying what to whom. The protagonist – whom I’d naturally enough dubbed Mike since one of the first screens in the game asks you to input your name – is a down-on-his-luck con artist getting ready to scam the penny slots via a smuggled-in magnet; he spends the introduction on the phone, going over the details of the plan with his partner in crime to make sure they’re ready to do what needs to be done. Except sometimes instead of my partner telling me “Mike, you need to do XYZ”, it seemed like my internal monologue was referring to myself in the third person, saying stuff like “Mike said it would be easy.” Shamefully, I was well past the game’s first-act twist, which sees the protagonist kidnapped and abandoned in a creepy lock-and-trap-filled asylum, before I realized oh wait, these aren’t bugs, I just inadvertently Fight Clubbed myself.

Er, spoilers.

Unlike with the Curse, though, where something vaguely similar happened to make my experience idiosyncratic, I think I can reconstruct what a more typical playthrough would look like. Such a player would probably enjoy the clean interface, which adds a helpful sidebar keeping track of the inventory items and clues you’ve found to the typical options-presented-in-blue-text of the main window, as well as nicely-chosen photos with a creepy filter illustrating the abandoned facility you’re trying to escape. They’d probably wince slightly at the prose, which gets the job done but is weighed down by omnipresent typos and odd leaps:

"The door creaks open. It’s just dusty and messy room. Looks like it could have belonged to a pair of twins, or maybe close friends."

They’d likely find the puzzles straightforward – there’s only one or two of them, made relatively simple to solve by the aforementioned helpful interface; even if the steps the protagonist takes occasionally seem unmotivated and hard to predict, well, you’re just clicking through all the options available to you. I suspect they’d be rather conflicted about the copious flashbacks – unlike the thin context escape-room games typically provide, Final Call offers a bunch of scenes fleshing out the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend Roxy as well as with other-Mike, and also digs into the pathologies underlying his failures as a partner to both and the pathologies that drive him. But the consistently lackluster writing, lack of direct connection between this material and the main action, and inexplicable plot twists (seriously, who could have possibly paid other-Mike a boatload of money to set us up?) might make our idealized player think the game would be more focused without all this.

So yeah I noticed all of that stuff, but I was more excited about building out my own version of the story where other-Mike was a facet of the protagonist’s personality, an angel or demon on my shoulder given increased reality by the omnipresent “hangovers” and “headaches” that plague the primary identity. As I got to the end, I figured out how to reconcile the various narrative strands that seemed to pull in different directions: other-Mike, you see, had enough separation to recognize that the compulsive way we keep returning to high-risk, low-reward behavior and chronic substance abuse was pushing Roxy away; to salvage matters, he used our meager savings to hire some people to scare us straight, make us think our criminal ways were going to get us killed, and allow us to escape a reformed man ready to walk the straight and narrow. God bless, other-Mike: you’re the very best part of me.

It’s been well said that America and the U.K. are two countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but interestingly, you could make the same observation about our supposedly-common language. Take, for example, “left turn”, a simple phrase we Yanks commonly use to indicate a sudden, veering shift in the way things are going. It’s one I deploy without thinking, but now I’ve realized that it must make no sense at all to our fancier-accented cousins, for whom the left turn is a trivially-executed move while it’s the right turn that’s the stuff of nightmares.

This revelation comes courtesy, of course, of Turn Right, an Adventuron game that is to vehicular paralysis as Dubliners is to the emotional and existential varieties. After a long day, you’ve stopped off to pick up some groceries, and just need to pull out of the parking lot for the short drive home. But as the attractively-illustrated overhead map reveals, that means crossing like four different lanes of traffic (there’s something confusing happening with an off-screen roundabout that means you need to get to the farthest lane), and getting a hole in the rush-hour traffic that wide is akin to winning the jackpot on a slot machine.

The gameplay of course isn’t what carries a piece like this – typing TURN RIGHT over and over isn’t intrinsically engaging – but fortunately the author’s got comedy chops to spare. The jokes come in two distinct registers: there’s dry understatement, like the opening screen’s declaration that “this game is about a driving manoeuvre made in the UK,” which left me howling, or the surely-intentional way that the helpful here’s-everything-you-Americans-need-to-know-about-driving-in-Britain glossary casually drops the phrase “multi-carriageway” into the one of the definition as though that’s a meaningful sequence of words. Or, perhaps best of all, take this description of one of the traffic lanes:

The far lane on the opposite side of the road is the one you take if you want to take either the first or second exit from the first roundabout, or the third exit from the first roundabout onto the second roundabout and then the first exit from the second roundabout. The last of these options is your route home, and so you want to turn into that lane.

If your brains aren’t melting out your ears at the end of that, you’re made of sterner stuff than me.

Then there’s the more slapstick flavor of humor, as exasperating event after exasperating event prevent you from getting into gear, achieving “Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake fifteen times” levels of sublimity. I won’t spoil the best gags here, since there are some great ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I particularly liked the sequence with the grocery store manager), but suffice to say they substantially enliven what could have been a dully repetitive scenario.

Also helping relieve potential tedium is the game’s deep implementation; I thought of a bunch of logical and not-so-logical commands, from turning on the radio to waving at oncoming cars, and the game handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. The author even anticipated my attempts to nope right out of Turn Right’s Kobayashi Maru scenario by abandoning my car and walking home, or just stopping off at the neighboring pub for a couple of hours until traffic lightened up. Sure, this isn’t a game that will change your life or make you see things differently than before you played it – unless for some reason you’re unaware that driving is awful – and there are one or two small dud notes (the disappearing clown was a bit too silly for me, especially the second time he showed up) but I am always happy to see a solid gag executed at such an impressive level.

(Speaking of, the joke with which I opened this review was lifted wholesale from Eddie Izzard.)

(Spoilers ahoy; this is one to play blind, I think, and it may be worth trying even if the old-school presentation might initially put you off since the game is shorter, easier, and stranger than you think).

So here’s a Rorschach test for you: get a friend – or actually just an acquaintance is fine – get a TV, get a Battlestar Galactica boxed set, then plop the one down in front of the other while you put on the last and make them watch all the way through the first three seasons (these aren’t your sleek modern 8-episode seasons, mind, we’re talking 50-odd 42 minute episodes so hopefully you’ve built in some bathroom breaks). At the close of the third-season finale, I guarantee that they will turn to you and say “what the hell did I just watch?” – but some of them will say that with incomprehension and disgust, and others with giddy wonder (Spoiler - click to show)(the specific moment I’m thinking of here is of course the part where five characters who obviously can’t be Cylons turn out to be Cylons and start singing All Along the Watchtower, despite none of that making any fucking sense).

I am team giddy wonder so I think I love the Curse, despite being fully aware that this opinion is probably indefensible. The first three quarters of my notes for the game consist of multiple variations of the question “what the hell am I playing here”: this is an 80s-throwback parser game that disorients the player with multiple pop-up windows that are meant to be read in a specific order, a parser that asks a bunch of rhetorical questions except for the ones that aren’t rhetorical, awkwardly timed text, and a backstory that sounds like your stoned friend fell asleep during an Indiana Jones movie, half-awoke during a James Bond marathon, and then attempted to reconstruct the dream they had for you: seriously, you’re a superspy who’s been made redundant by the end of the Cold War, so now you do freelance work and you’ve been called in to rescue a kidnapped woman, who’s been taken to a pyramid by a sorcerer named Shamir, except he died during the abduction attempt, but not before putting a curse on a village, though there’s no village around…

One plane crash later, you’re dumped into a trackless desert and turned loose to explore. This part of the game presents itself as a reasonably straightforward throwback text adventure – there aren’t many objects implemented, nor are there a ton of locations, so moving from place to place trying to few available actions feels natural enough. There are some neat touches, like attractive graphics and Easter Eggs referencing classic rock, and some frustrations, notably a parser that frequently seems to just break. Witness this exchange:

> unlock panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

> open panel

UNLOCK ?. I’m afraid I don’t follow you…

What now Mike?

Oh, and I got a parser error the first time I tried to push the button on the panel, but was able to try to activate it the second time I made the attempt.

Frustration mounted as I realized I couldn’t figure out how to get into the door-free pyramid, or get through a fog-clouded maze section, or what to do at a mysterious altar in the middle of the dunes. Fortunately, there’s a HINT function that prodded me in the right direction: I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)PRAY by the altar, which has a certain sense to it now that I type it out but sure felt like a reach at the time. That led to a new sequence with a couple once-again-buggy objects that I couldn’t quite figure out how to interact with, but as I was flailing around with the parser again I noticed some confounding new text showing up whenever I tried anything:

Will and Pat have never met.

What now Nobody?

Events progress linearly from there, I think regardless of what you do (I certainly didn’t feel like I accomplished much from that point on), and when I realized what was happening my jaw dropped just like it did when I watched that episode of Galactica more years ago than I care to count: (Spoiler - click to show)as best I can tell, the ghost of Shamir escapes you by going back in time and preventing Will Crowther from ever meeting his wife, so that he never spelunks, gets depressed during his divorce, and writes Adventure to try to connect with his kids – meaning that there’s never any such thing as a text adventure, and you, as a text adventure protagonist, go poof.

I’ve been reduced to giving the play by play here because I’m not sure how else to communicate the sheer bonkers-ness of the scenario; there are no shortage of metafictional joke games in IF, of course – heck, I’ve already hit at least one in this year’s Comp – but the ambition of this gag, and the way it’s slow-played by hiding under a reasonable-sized chunk of an authentically kinda-broken custom parser game, really make it stand out as something special. I’m not sure it really stands up to scrutiny; the logic behind the twist is paper-thin and requires some reconstruction even to minimally make sense, and surely the process of getting to the good part could have been made slightly less painful. But look, a thing can be too ridiculous to work and then somehow at least kinda work regardless, and in this case my only possible response is to applaud the audacity (and think about a Galactica rewatch…)

Postscript: when I first posted this review to the IntFic forum, it had a caveat where I said something like “maybe this is just a bad end and I missed the whole game”, but I deleted that before finalizing because how could an author include a twist like this without it being the point of the game? Then I read other reviews, and was delighted to learn that I was wrong and this isn’t actually meant as an Infidel-style deconstruction of IF, but actually is just the retro puzzle adventure it appears to be with a throwaway gag midway through. This makes the whole thing even funnier to me; everyone else is welcome to their flute and their mirror and their Anubis and whatever other stuff they got hung up on; I am content with my memories of the time I retroactively destroyed IF.

(Another review with unmarked spoilers here, due to the brevity of the piece and the centrality of the way the plot develops to assessing the game).

Kubla Khan is a deceptive poem; for one thing, even though I should know better, I always need to catch myself to remember that the title isn’t Xanadu. But more importantly, the mythology Coleridge built up around it – that the idea came to him in a dream, and he had a flash all at once of hundreds of lines that he raced to scrawl down, until that famous person from Porlock knocked on his door, deranging his train of thought and dooming the poem to be a fragment forevermore – is self-evidently bollocks. I don’t have any special insight here, or done any deep examination of Coleridge scholarship, but come on, just read the poem: we get like a dozen lines on Xanadu and Kubla Khan, as advertised, then an overlong digression about a fountain, then a little more about Kubla, before a swerve to first-person section where suddenly we’re talking about an “Abyssinian maid” (Abyssinia being Ethiopia, quite far from China as a polymath like Coleridge would well know), and our narrator starts talking about how if he could conjure up the image of Xanadu in a song, everybody would think he was divinely inspired, if not mad. So yeah: there’s padding, a false swerve, and then a meta turn – this isn’t interrupted genius, it’s a guy desperately trying to spin out those first awesome ten or twelve lines and not quite succeeding.

So it’s appropriate that KING OF XANADU is likewise a deceptive little thing. The title is at least a bit more on point here: you do play the eponymous monarch of the eponymous utopia (though here an empire rather than a city-palace), making judicious choices of how to order your royal gardens, arrange the imperial armies, and perform your religious responsibilities so as to best please your refined sensibilities. The language too is worthy of its inspiration – it’s very easy for attempts at this poetic kind of prose to wind up as claggy high-fantasy treacle, but the writing remains fleet as it picks out one lovely detail after another to highlight:

"The people perform the usual celebrations. Red cloth is hung from balconies. Young children paint bouys the colours of daydreams and set them out to sea. Elders with lit candles parade through the capital, singing the old songs, winding through the streets like ancient snakes. And, lastly, arithmaticians take out tablets and chalk, ready to count and divy the grain of the harvest."

The author’s not afraid to take big swings for pretty much every at-bat – here’s another early bit:

"The fields surge with life. Rivers twirl through the tumbling hills like veins in a grand muscle, unwinding into your harbours, which throng with trading fleets and grow about them the holy lichen of your vast, marble cities."

“Holy lichen” is perhaps a bit too much of a reach for my taste, but the missteps are rare, and better by far to reach for something surprising than let caution keep things boring, in this kind of story.

But this is not a fantastic story about an enlightened, Orientalist despot. No, twist the first is that no matter how you try to play him, my man is an awful ruler, like “80% as bad as Donald Trump” awful. After being presented with a new elm grove for the palace grounds, I ventured the opinion that a water feature might improve things; His Eminence took this to mean the trees should be razed and replaced with an artificially-created salt-water (!) stream. Later on, when confronted with a famine, I attempted to heed the wise counsel of one of our scholars who suggested we “watch closely the simple animals of the world and preserve the ecological balance" before making any rash moves, and of course Kubla Mao issued edicts to kill all the wildlife that might be eating the crops.

Speaking of that famine, another feint is that the game takes as much inspiration from another poem in the Romantic canon, Shelley’s Ozymandias, as it does Kubla Khan. Despite how Xanadu is built up as a perfect, powerful state, it only takes a few years of failing crops – and the king’s increasingly unhinged ukases – to bring it to its knees. The exterior catastrophe mirrors the protagonist’s mental degradation; even as food riots are flaring up outside the palace, you wind up enacting purges, engaging in the kind of mad caprices that enliven the biographies of some of your more outré Roman emperors, and coming up with big ideas that would put the Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to shame (Spoiler - click to show)( “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun” I scrawled down in my notes halfway through, and giggled) – look on my works ye mighty, indeed.

I don’t want to accuse the game of striking false notes, let me be clear – it’s very obvious that these subverted expectations are part of the design, and in fact each of these strands intersect cannily to deliver the desired effect. Having a protagonist who willfully misinterprets the player’s choices can be played for comedy once or twice, but quickly becomes frustrating, for example, but since the game telegraphs that doom is the only possible outcome, it’s possible to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if either the internal spiral of the king’s faculties or the external collapse of the state’s institutions were at all realistic, it’d risk the other half of the game feeling unrealistic; instead, they slide into extreme satire in tandem.

No, for all its deceptiveness, beyond the unfortunate accumulation of typos as the game wears on the only true bit of fakery I picked up on was the ending; after seeing everything come to ruin, you’re given a chance to tack a moral onto the proceedings, choosing to reflect either on the inevitability with which hubris is punished, or the fragility of social cohesion, or the importance of staying true to one’s dreams. But come on: there are no lessons to be learnt here (besides, maybe, “don’t put assholes in charge” – good advice to anyone who can vote in the US this November), and attempts to gesture at one feel unnecessary, like Coleridge grasping for his Abyssinian maid: just stick with Xanadu, no need to go any further.

It feels like every Comp and/or Spring Thing, Andrew Schultz enters a big, robustly-implemented wordplay game bursting with bonus points, tutorial modes, hint mechanics, and support commands that together roll out a red carpet to experience a set of puzzles unlike anything anyone else in IF is putting together – and every Comp and/or Spring Thing, after an hour and a half I feel like my brain is leaking out my ears, that considerate hint mechanic is the only thing keeping me moving, and despite the inviting design I’m just too dumb to fully appreciate what’s being so generously offered. This doesn’t keep me from liking them, by any means; I had a really good time with this year’s Spring Thing entry, Beef, Beans, Grief, Greens, which was a little easier than usual because it’s like the fifth game with its particular wordplay gimmick (guessing double-barreled rhymes, as the title indicates) that I’ve played, and also because there was a strong theme unifying the various challenges. But there’s typically that barrier making me feel like I’m not fully getting the intended experience, since things never get completely intuitive.

Well, callooh callay, at long last I’ve broken the streak – the first puzzle here took me long enough to solve that I thought I was in for my typical experience, but somehow from that point on I was in the zone, almost immediately clicking onto Why Pout?’s wavelength and enjoying the heck out of it. I suspect the main reason is that the central challenge here is pretty much baby mode – instead of complex rhymes or pig Latin, all you need to master is dumb puns. The puzzles all center on being presented with (or, in the harder challenges, noticing in a longer description) a short phrase that can be read as a different phrase if you change the breaks between words – for a (dumb) example (that isn’t in the game since I just made it up), if you see “treat op”, you’d type in TREE TOP. It’s a simple enough concept that I always knew what I was doing, but the implementation manages to avoid being too simple, meaning figuring out the right answer was typically satisfying; I even needed to use the hint button two or three times, which felt about right.

Solving the puzzles is also fun because there are some legit great gags here; I ooohed with delight when I realized what I could do with “no notion”. There’s also a mechanic unlocking new capabilities when recruiting new companions, and it made me laugh to get a (Spoiler - click to show)mensch elf as a follower. Why Pout? also has figured out how to make hay out of a sometimes-awkward element in previous games, which is what to do about dirty words; the nature of wordplay games means that sometimes you stumble on one, and feel like you either have to or want to try it, even though that’s at odds with the sweetly innocent vibe the games generally transmit. But here all that stuff is segmented away into a separate bonus area, where you’re straight-up told to start swearing if you want or just leave, with no negative consequences, if you don’t; it’s an elegant way to deal with the issue, and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that I solved just about all these puzzles immediately.

There are some places where the game isn’t fully polished – in particular, I found a couple of places where variant spellings weren’t accepted, making me think I was on the wrong track when I’d actually found the solution (Spoiler - click to show)(MANA for MANNA, MEETING for MEETIN’, WIPEOUT for WIPE OUT). But it’s hard to feel too aggrieved about that given the complexity of implementing this kind of game, to say nothing of the author’s impressive track record of doing mid-Comp and post-Comp updates to fix bugs and add further polish. Similarly, the narrative is entertaining enough, with some solid set-pieces (I liked visiting different islands with a squid, and supporting an alcoholic troll through recovery) and a positive message about self-esteem, but it lacks the unifying through-line boasted by some stronger games in Schultz’s oeuvre, and has a climax that feels like it’s over a bit soon – again, though, the fact that a long game focused so narrowly on one specific kind of wordplay is about to cohere at all is quite the achievement. And I’m not just grading on a curve; I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole time I was playing Why Pout?, and I’m having to exercise quite a lot of willpower to avoid spoiling too many of the jokes that got a laugh. This might be a beginner-level game compared to some of its peers, but it works equally well as a gateway into that larger catalog or as just a delightful stand-alone. The only down-side is that it’s got me directing even more awful puns at my wife than usual…

As a straight white dude, for good or ill I very rarely find myself second-guessing my opinions too intensively. I mean, I like to think that I’m pretty ecumenical in my viewpoints, and when it comes to reviewing it’s frequently the case that I’ll like something but understand why other folks might not, or find something doesn’t have much personal appeal while getting the reasons why it might be generally popular. But every once in a while I hit a game like A Dream of Silence. I really like everything else by Abigail Corfman I’ve ever played; D&D adventures are one of my guilty pleasures; heck, while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 the earlier games in the series are among my all-time favorites. So when I bounced off the first part of this game (which was entered in this year’s Spring Thing) so hard my ears are still ringing, I couldn’t help feeling like there was something off in my judgment – maybe the first third is just slow and I’ll like the other parts better? Maybe if I was more familiar with BG3 in general, or Astarion, the elven vampire who’s the primary character here, in specific, the emotional beats would resonate more? Maybe if I had more experience with and native affinity for fanfiction I’d better vibe with an unabashed fan-game? Maybe I’m just working out sublimated resentment towards the DnD branding people for slapping “Baldur’s Gate 3” on a game whose connections to the first two seem superficial at best?

So I was looking forward to trying to play this culminating part of the game as an opportunity to start with a blank slate, reset my expectations, and try and find the positive elements in the scenario that other reviewers could detect in the first part. But while I definitely enjoyed my time with part three far more than I did with the prologue, my overall take stands: neither the narrative and mechanical elements of Dream of Silence really work for me, and I remain bummed out about that fact.

The setup for the series is that a random encounter with a nightmare-inducing beastie that feeds on fear has thrown Astarion into a catatonic state where he psychically relives his time in thrall to his vampiric sire; you’re able to exploit a telepathic connection to try to help him escape by joining him in the dream, albeit only showing up as a spirit whose ability to sense, much less impact, the environment is profoundly limited. Act 1 turned on understanding your predicaments and balancing your exploration of the cell where Astarion was trapped with building your nascent Sight, Speech, and Touch skills and maintaining his physical and mental well-being. As Act 3 begins, Astarion has finally managed to get out of the cell after what he’s experienced as several months of solitary confinement, and it’s up to you to help guide him past his vampire siblings in search of a way out.

I’ll come back to the narrative side of things in a bit, but first I need to go into more detail on how the gameplay works. This is an RPG-inflected game, and you need to prioritize the three aforementioned skills – you’ll be pretty good at one, middling at a second, and miserable at a third. As a spirit, your actions are also constrained by a ten-point energy gauge; anything you do of any significance will eat up at least one chunk of energy, and even on the easy “Explorer” difficulty setting, you get pretty much just one recharge per encounter with the quartet of characters who stand between Astarion and freedom. Each scene progresses with dialogue, and potential physical conflict, between your companion and his brothers and sisters; meanwhile, you’re also given the opportunity to explore the environment, rifle through the furniture, check out the paintings, etc. Depending on your decisions, various gauges will fill: Astarion’s trust in you has been a key stat since Act 1, while getting clues and moving past obstacles will increase your progress towards escape, and taking too much time or drawing attention ticks up a gauge tracking his sire’s focus on him.

Spelled out like that, it’s a reasonable set of systems, but in practice I found them pretty enervating. You don’t have nearly enough energy to take even a quarter of the potential actions offered in each scene, so the opportunity cost of deciding to do anything is quite high. What’s worse, this is not a game that embraces a fail-forward ethos; you definitely can waste energy trying stuff that’s completely pointless and uninteresting, and while Explorer difficulty is tuned easy enough that that won’t prevent you from getting to the ending, it’s still pretty dispiriting and wound up discouraging experimentation. It’s also the case that there are significant elements of the game that are walled off from certain characters: I prioritized touch last, which felt like a reasonable choice (given that this is a game about interacting with Astarion, knowing what’s going on and being able to talk to him felt more important), but that meant that I was basically unable to participate in what appears to be a reasonably robust combat system. That’d be all well and good, except a large portion of the exploration rewards are focused on said system; I was especially annoyed when, prior to the final confrontation, I treaded almost all my energy to explore what was clearly flagged as a high-risk, high-reward situation, only to find a weapon that neither I nor Astarion could do anything with.

The other way I found the mechanics undermined the experience is that your explorations are bifurcated from the interactions Astarion is having with the other vampires; their charged pas-de-deux play out in a “watch” tab, while you mess about with the scenery in the “explore” tab. Time generally only passes in the former, thankfully, but at the same time the act of swapping back and forth makes the conversations, and in fact the broader plot, feel disjointed; the fact that I was continually thinking to myself “is this an important enough moment to try to use some of my precious energy?” made this intrusion of the mechanics into the narrative all the more awkward. And the story isn’t sufficiently compelling to power past these points of friction: Astarion clearly has history with the other characters, who’ve all taken different tacks for coping with a sire who’s clearly signposted as an abuser, but in their limited screen-time the best-drawn only manage to inhabit a stereotype, while the others are just forgettable.

Meanwhile, because you and Astarion are so focused on escape, the trust mechanic – and the relationship that it’s meant to model – feels besides the point; the only time I noticed it was when I was told his trust in me wasn’t quite high enough to trigger a bit of bonus dialogue when we were almost free, which hardly felt like an impactful toggle. Sure, you wouldn’t usually expect deep relationship-building in the middle of a long action scene. But remember, this is basically a dream sequence, with all the challenges that entails: none of the dangers, or other characters, really matter at all, it’s only the relationship between the protagonist and Astarion that has any lasting significance, so relegating it to second fiddle is a substantial miss.

The one big grain of salt in all of this is that I did skip past Act 2 – when starting this third piece, you’re given the choice either to replay the series from the beginning, or play a condensed version of the first two parts. I opted for the latter, since as mentioned I wanted a clear break from my earlier impressions and replaying a first act that I’d already found quite slowly-paced seemed like a bad way of accomplishing that. It’s quite possible that in the grand tradition of fantasy trilogies, the middle section is the best part – and I’m not just saying that, I can easily see that the segment of the story before the action has kicked off, but after the setup has been introduced, could be the place where deep character work is happening. But it was Act 3 that was entered into the Comp for evaluation, not 2 and 3 together, and at this point I feel like I’d be doing everyone, myself included, a favor by not playing it and letting myself imagine that that’s where all the great stuff I typically associate with the author’s games resides – it’s either that keep fretting that I’ve somehow completely missed the point again.

The parodic sendup of CRPG tropes is such a hoary old subgenre that I think I’ve already written two or three different intros discussing the microgenre in previous reviews just over the last couple years. Rather than attempting to rehash them – or, heavens forfend, actually tracking them down, reading what I’d previously written, and trying to synthesize them or even speak a new word – let’s just take as read that I find CRPGs lots of fun but yes, of course, they’re sufficiently ridiculous that without more satire can feel just like shooting fish in a barrel. Merely pointing out that RPG protagonists will go off to challenge immortal evil wizard-kings with only the flimsiest of provocations might provoke faint amusement, but not anything more than that sitting here 50 years on from the creation of DnD.

QftToMSV is certainly the kind of game that you think of when you think of this kind of game – the jumping off point is that you, the proprietor of a tea room, seem to have misplaced a teacup you had before you started your business and therefore feel a slight bit of attachment to, and as a result you’re willing to ransack your neighbors’ houses, stare down an incarnation of supernatural evil, and scale a mysterious, forbidding tower as you try to reclaim it – but happily the level of execution is high. For one thing, it’s quite streamlined so that you don’t need to put in a lot of busywork to get to the next joke; it’s implemented in RPG Maker, but navigation is taken care of for you, and combat is generally a quickly-finished indication that something’s gone wrong, so it winds up running almost as quick as a pure choice-based game. It also doesn’t play coy about how to reach the “best” ending; at almost every decision node, you’re offered a choice of doing things the easy, common-sense way, or escalating them absurdly, and off course taking the off-ramps leads to a “bad end” while steering into the skid keeps the shaggy dog story going (the author also helpfully autosaves the game quite frequently, so there’s little risk to exploring losing paths).

But this sort of thing lives or dies by the quality of its gags, and happily they’re quite good. “Ha ha, look a the CRPG protagonist rummaging around their neighbors’ possessions” is a dull commonplace, but following it up by having the rummagee respond to your assertion that it’s totally OK to steal everything that isn’t nailed down with "I was a juror in a court case a few years back, and that was very much not the view the judge took” was unexpected enough to provoke a laugh. Similarly, “the evil overlord calls you mean for assuming he’s bad just because he looks and acts just like an evil overlord” is a one-note joke, but the game hits it hard and repeatedly, so it reaches Sideshow-Bob-stepping-on-a-rake-fifteen-times levels of funniness. And the sly use of endings encourages messing around; the first BAD END is self-evidently a totally fine outcome, and what’s even funnier, (Spoiler - click to show) I’m pretty sure it’s only like 5% different from the hard-won GOOD END.

Is all this enough to make QftToMSV anything other than an ephemeral amusement? I don’t think so; it’s a well-executed example of its genre, but it never manages to transcend said genre’s limitations (not that I get the sense it was trying to). It’s worth a play to enjoy the well-paced jokes, but I guarantee you absolutely will look at CRPG sidequests in exactly the same way ever again.

There are few design challenges more vexing than the hacking minigame. They’re a nearly unavoidable necessity in anything cyberpunk: sure, you can let the player succeed with just a simple HACK COMPUTER, but that makes a skill that should be exciting and narratively significant just a big “I win” button, or you can go the other direction and implement a full emulation of running cracking programs and installing rootkits and what-not, but that’s incredibly high-overhead and likely to limit your audience. So the minigame is the least-worst option, as proved by such notable triumphs of game design as the PipeMania clone in Bioshock, the node-capturing abstraction of Deus Ex, and the flying-around-shooting-giant-shapes of System Shock.

So it’s to be expected that Focal Shift, a cyberpunk heist unembarrassed to be playing the genre’s hits (you’re a freelancer working for a shady client, with a job to raid a corporate databank and an experimental implant giving you an edge…) has not one but two hacking minigames; what’s more, pretty much all the puzzles bar one or two run through these systems, blurring the line between “minigame” and “actually just the game.”

It’s a bold move, but to its credit the game has the chops to back it up. It’s based on the GameFic engine, which I recently encountered in this year’s ParserComp entry Project Postmortem; I found it a solid platform for that demo-length game, and it confirms that impression in this full-sized experience. It does just about everything you want a modern parser system to do, down to seamless choice-based gameplay integration for dialogue, with no bugs that I ran across. As for the design of the minigames, the first is a Wordle-alike with a twist, and the second is a wandering-around-cyberspace-messing-with-a-keycode riff that escalates nicely; they also interact interestingly with the real-world layer, most notably with the option to solve a small puzzle in meatspace to upgrade your abilities in the first of the games.

The way the minigames communicate their rules to the player is inconsistent, however – because in neither case are you given the rules of the road. The second one seems linked to your new implant, and only comes into play towards the end of the game; I’ll keep the details vague since it is pretty clearly set up as a twist, but for all that I found it pretty easy to suss out via trial and error, and since the first time you experience it time pressure is light, there’s no penalty to replaying things, and the interface helps cue you towards what a correct solution will look like. The first minigame is a different kettle of fish, however. It’s recognizable a Wordle/Mastermind game – you type in guesses for six-letter passwords, and you get feedback based on how close you were to the right answer – but while I figured out that if the response shows you a letter in one of the blank spaces, that means you got it right, I was completely flummoxed about what the +s and -s that otherwise would appear, since they didn’t correspond to the “letter not present in solution” and “letter is in the solution but now in the right place” options that I was expecting. After finishing the game I checked the walkthrough, so now I understand that it’s doing something distinct, but at the time I worried I had just run into some bugs, so I wound up brute-forcing all of these puzzles. It was less than fun, and worse, it felt needlessly obfuscated because unlike the second minigame, which seemed like a surprise to the protagonist, there’s no indication that this first one is anything other than routine; surely there should be a manual, or quick flashback, explaining how the rules work, since there’s no diegetic reason for the main character to be flailing.

There’s not much to Focal Shift outside of these minigames beyond cyberpunk tropes, as I mentioned before, but I still found its specific take enjoyable. There’s a jaded-but-still-idealistic street doc, a double-cross, all the stuff that you want to see. Making the target of the job a financial tech company focused on the blockchain is also a decision that feels novel but completely natural for this kind of story. And there’s a sly humor to some of the writing; I especially enjoyed this dig from the client (who’s monitoring everything through the implant) when I stopped to watch TV so I could check out the worldbuilding being done by the news chyrons:

“You get your fill of world events, Brokaw? Chop chop. Let’s get this over with.”

Focal Shift isn’t a game that will stick with you long after finishing it, admittedly – it’s telling a story you’ve heard before, with a mechanical approach that’s its own but recognizably of a piece with a million other implementations of these ideas. But the level of execution is nonetheless high, modulo the decision not to tutorialize the main hacking minigame in order to non-diegetically increase the difficulty.

(Spoilers in this one; a lot of what I have to say about this game has to do with the ending. It’s relatively short and well worth playing, so definitely do that before reading this review if you’re at all interested).

I like going to art museums, but even more than that I really like reading about art. Yes, yes, I know the old saw about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and presumably that can be extended to painting, but at the same time, I find my appreciation of art is often much deepened when I come to it after seeing what a perceptive critic has to say about a particular work (I love reading A.S. Byatt for this kind of thing, for example); they can share historical context, sure, but also just an analysis of how it functions, what choices the artist made, how it does (or at least is intended to) impact the viewer. Some of this is surely an artifact of not being an artist myself – I often need things explained to me slowly – but I think there also can be something magical about the way prose can complement a picture, teasing out the purpose behind fine details, zooming out to engage with the emotions, and reversing the alchemy by which an artist incarnates the spiritual into the concrete.

So I am entirely on board with Imprimatura’s project, as I understand it. This Twine game is built around two twinned tracks: in the first, you visit the studio of a deceased relative (you can define the exact relation) to pick out the seven paintings that’ve been left to you in your will, while in the second you recall memories of your relationship with them. The first track wholly depends on short prose descriptions of the pieces being able to sell the talent, and psychological considerations, your relative brought to their art, and I found it entirely successful, so much so that my first time through the game I chose to keep the first septet of paintings I encountered since they all seemed so engaging. Here’s one that could stand for many others:

"The painting you choose is called ‘Photosynthesis.’ A massive tropical plant is rendered in green blocks, styled in a geometric pattern like a stained glass window. At the top is a teal bloom just beginning to open. Looking at the painting makes you feel optimistic, like a door has just opened inside you."

Admittedly, I don’t always love it when authors tell the player how they feel (the protagonist is lightly characterized, so they don’t serve as much of a filter), but it seems appropriate here because it helps efficiently communicate the emotional valence of each piece without larding up the more descriptive bits with heavy-handed adjectives, and it also helps make the game’s mechanics more legible. This isn’t just an open-ended exercise; the paintings you pick influence the ending, with the artistic movements, color palettes, and general vibe of your chose collection being carefully tracked.

The second half of the game, the memories, are less mechanically engaging – there are no choices to be made or narrative implications so far as I could tell – but still work well enough on their own terms. There’s a large variety of them (at least I didn’t see any repeats after two full playthroughs) and different players will walk away with a different sense of the relative, and their relationship to the protagonist, depending on which they see and in which order they’re presented. Each vignette is quite condensed, requiring you to fill in some blanks to piece together a full view of things, but regardless the picture is credibly complex; your relative was a very successful artist who had warm feelings for you, but struggled in many areas, clearly dealing with undigested trauma, envy, and isolation. As a result, your painting choices feel something like going through a Rorschach test, deciding which of these mutable colors should predominate.

I didn’t find that the culminating moment of the game was as effective as what led up to it, though differently so in each of my playthroughs. The last sequence involves finding the outline of a last painting, which you finish yourself; unlike the rest of the game, this sequence is presented via graphics. You decide you want to adopt elements of your relative’s style in completing their work, which is where the consequences of your choices come in – or at least where they can come in. My first time through, since I was accepting paintings more or less at random, the game seemed to struggle to assess what style most resonated with me, which led it to pepper me with questions about how I wanted to approach the painting. It’s a reasonable design solution, but it made me feel like the finale was disconnected from what had come before, since I was just making all the important decisions at the end. My second time through, by contrast, I took a more aesthetically coherent approach to my choices, which led to a host of automatic decisions being made in the endgame; the price of this aesthetic consistency, though, is that I felt like I didn’t have much to do.

Beyond these mechanical issues, the finale also felt like it departed from what had been effective in the earlier part of the game. I liked the prose describing the works of art, and while the game continues to narrate what you’re trying to do as you finish the last painting, I found the writing was less rather than more impactful when paired with graphics that were inevitably different from, and flatter than, what I was imagining based on the words. The ending’s catharsis also feels like it relies on a key element of the backstory that’s revealed through memories – namely, that the protagonist was once the relative’s protégé, but decided to quit painting to get an office job. Returning to the art that united you with your mentor should be a poignant moment, but I found that the decision to make the protagonist weakly characterized dramatically undercut its effectiveness: in neither playthrough did I feel like I had a handle on why the protagonist made that decision in the first place, so revisiting and possibly reversing it didn’t fully land.

When Imprimatura sticks to its knitting, though – words over visuals, the relative as the central character rather than the notional protagonist – I found it effective indeed, and a relatively weaker ending can’t undermine that too badly. After all, nobody expects an artist’s retrospective to come to a narratively satisfying climax; it’s all about walking through, tarrying with a particular piece that strikes your fancy, trying to make sense of a particular motif or color scheme that seems to haunt several of the works, psychoanalyzing the artist based on what you think you see, or yes, if you’re me, maybe trying to crib an explanation from the writing on the placards or an exhibit catalog you pick up at the end. And on those criteria, Imprimatura delivers.

Sometimes a game’s title tells you exactly what you’re going to get. And so it is in this choice-based nature simulator, as you take a gentle stroll through nature to look for noteworthy avians while your tongue gently caresses Leo the Great.

If I wasn’t out of the Church before, that gag would earn an excommunication – sorry not sorry, as the kids say. No, as best I can tell from a bit of wiki-diving, the place got its name because some guy in Louisville named Pope had some salt licks on his riverside property. What the park loses in nominative exoticism it gains in natural beauty, at least according to the copious pictures (the author’s own) illustrating the game. It’s nothing fancy – there’s a bridge, some water, soccer fields, paths, grass, and trees – but I found it a pleasant place to make a virtual visit, especially since I’ve been living under a 105-degree heat dome for the past week. Oh, and there are birds, which are the whole point of the exercise!

The protagonist isn’t characterized by anything other than their love of birdwatching, which means the game presupposes that when you wander the park, you won’t want to spend time striking up conversations or kicking a ball around or getting exercise, and instead will have eyes and ears alert for feathered friends. I confess that this isn’t a hobby that’s ever appealed to me, but the author does a good job articulating why one might enjoy it. In each location you visit, you’ll get a sprinkling of flavor text setting the scene, an attractive photo (with thoughtfully-provided alt text), and a prompt to look closer and possibly spot a new bird. If you do, you’re rewarded with another nice pic of the avian in question, and a compact description of what’s uniquely interesting about this one in particular. Here’s one I liked:

"Looking through your binoculars, maybe 50 feet away you spot a bird walking head-first down a tree trunk…. A White-breasted Nuthatch. You love these goofy birds. You listen closely and hear the quiet “ha ha” sound it makes as it searches for bugs living in the bark. It flies from tree to tree, sometimes going up, sometimes upside down on the bottom of a horizontal branch."

And that’s it, that’s the game. You’re using a birding app – the game provides an external link to it if you’d like to download it yourself – which allows you to track what you’ve seen, and the game provides a quick summary once you decide you’ve had enough and leave the park, but there’s no checklist, no goals beyond the intrinsic ones of enjoying a walk and looking at as many different birds as you can find. There are a whole lot of them, from swallows to hawks to cardinals to vultures, and even as a layman I was impressed by the variety. The game’s also designed to be non-deterministic; sometimes you’ll revisit an area you’d been to previously and see that some new birds have taken up residence, which makes things feel less like an exercise in lawn-mowering. The often-confusing layout of the park also reduces any perceived gaminess – I found it hard to keep track of where I’d already been, and how different paths connected, which was frustrating at first but eventually I unclenched my jaw and just went with the flow.

So yeah, there’s nothing here that isn’t said on the tin. And unfortunately this isn’t a game that plays nicely on mobile – the bird pictures displayed for me at a super high resolution that drastically reduced the zoom and somehow blanked out most of the links. But if you’re at all interested in what birders see in their objects of obsession, you could do a lot worse than spending a few minutes with this grounded, low-key experience.

I was all set to rate this troll game a 1. Look, the question of what does and doesn’t count as interactive fiction is almost as old as I am at this point (that is to say, it’s old), and I at least find it singularly uninteresting; likewise, the questions of “what if the player’s desire to see all the game’s content is at odds with the diegetic incentives of the characters” and “does choice-based IF actually need choices” are pretty hoary. There’s room to say something interesting about them, I’m sure, but at this stage in the development of the medium, that takes some actual engagement and analysis of how these issues come up and play out, and how different kinds of players may experience them; lazily gesturing in their direction and calling it a day, which is the limit of UF’s ambitions, doesn’t cut it. Even “Leah Thargic” is low energy as transparent pseudonyms go (“Anna Apathy” was right there).

But then I saw from some forum discussion that there’s an aural component to the game, and went back and replayed with the sound on. I’m not one to be overly swayed by multimedia, but I gotta admit, the bathos the sound effects add to the narrative is enough to indicate at least some care went into this thing: take your 2 out of 10 and get out of here.

It’s no secret that I’m very interested by the ways limited parser games share design DNA with certain kinds of puzzley choice-based games as well as hearken back to the golden age of point-and-click graphic adventures – here’s the long version of the argument, if you’re interested – so it’s likewise unsurprising that I’m very interested in the games of Arthur DiBianca, who much be one of the acknowledged masters of the subgenre whether you’re judging on quality or quantity. While an analysis of his full oeuvre is well beyond the scope of a single review, I’d argue there’s a divide between his cornucopia games, which are overstuffed with unlockable gameplay options and often bring in ideas from other kinds of games – I’m thinking of Skies Above and its myriad clicker-inspired minigames, or Sage Sanctum Scramble and its potpourri of word puzzles, or the complex, roguelike systems of Black Knife Dungeon – and his cooler, minimalist games, which succeed by stripping the player’s tools way down and wringing every single puzzle idea out of this restricted palette – Inside the Facility’s mapquesting, or Temple of Shorgil’s statue-swapping.

A Very Strong Gland is of this latter school. You’re nobody special this time out – just a schlub abducted by a trio of aliens so they can run tests on you to assess your intelligence – and since their translation software only works one way, you can’t even talk back: all you’re able to do is walk around, look at stuff, and poke stuff (oh, and wait – there are lots of timing puzzles). Fortunately for the aliens, you’re a resourceful sort and that limited action set is more than enough to save the day once things go wrong with their little experiments. Their spaceship is small but dense, with a host of locked doors, helpful robots, capability-enhancing auras, and even more mysterious devices to master as you fix its broken systems. Even this description undersells how streamlined the game is, because its interface employs the single-keypress approach previously used in Vambrace of Destiny. There’s no need to press enter or type the full name of objects; the game automatically translates X T into EXAMINE TULIP or T O to TOUCH OUTLINE.

There’s nothing much in the way of incidental scenery here, and everything you find in the ship is mostly incomprehensible and abstract; most of the puzzles involve figuring out controls that are described as a thimble or a funnel or a scallop, but whose function is entirely divorced from those forms. And while the aliens can speak to you and occasionally give helpful hints about what to do next, their advice also requires quite a lot of interpretation. They’re charming little weirdos – I picture them talking like Andy Kaufman’s character in Taxi – but rather than provide much in the way of context or character engagement, they mostly just blurble on about their oblu or complaining that the shouter is broken.

I’ll confess that this combination of parsimonious mechanics and abstract theme made my playthrough of A Very Strong Gland an arid affair. The setting feels like an artificial test-bed for intellectual challenges, because diegetically that’s what it’s supposed to be, but this means I didn’t experience exploration as intrinsically rewarding separate from solving the puzzles. Those puzzles, meanwhile, often rely on trial-and-error experimentation with devices whose functions are intentionally obfuscated, which likewise felt less than engaging. This describes most puzzle-based games, I suppose, and I enjoy many of them, but I especially like it when solving a challenge gets me a new bit of story or character development, or when I’m able to quickly get through an obstacle because I’ve intuited a logical solution; here, both of those payoffs are mostly off the table.

I get that with such a restricted action set, you need to design puzzles not to be susceptible to trial-and-error, and I admit that the solutions on display here are clever ones – but I unfortunately found them dry and occasionally annoying, requiring great leaps in logic that often rely on paying attention to tiny, unexciting details, as well as being fiddly to implement (again, there a lot of timing puzzles, and the single-keystroke thing plus the lack of undo meant I made a bunch of mistakes shifting my aura and had to restart the relevant sequences). There are some puzzles here I did enjoy – helping one of the aliens conduct an EVA repair job built on stuff I’d previously learned in a reasonably intuitive way, for example – but I confess that I got through a bunch of them just looking at another player’s transcript for hints since the experimentation required to make progress sometimes felt exhausting.

This is a negative-sounding review of a game that’s solidly designed and implemented, and will I’m sure spark joy in a certain kind of player. But to me it’s primarily interesting as a case study in how far you can push the limited-parser approach before I lose interest: I’ve realized I much prefer those games of abundance, where simplifying the interface allows for new ideas and new kinds of gameplay to be put into effect, so that the restrictions feel additive rather than just jettisoning standard parser-game affordances without replacing them with something else.

Let us imagine that puzzley choice games can be separated into two categories – yes, yes, this is an oversimplification even on its own terms, and requires arbitrarily saying that stat-based things like the Choice of Games offerings or Fallen London-style quality-based narratives present “challenges” rather than “puzzles”, but come on, let’s just go with it, two categories: you have your parserlike games that, well, mimic parser games by adopting granular, often compass-based navigation through a modeled world, usually with a persistent inventory and a point-and-click style “choose the verb, then choose the noun” interface; and then you have your escape-room-y games that rely on things like solving codes to reveal combinations that unlock doors or abstract minigames that ape classic puzzles.

There’s a lot that’s well done about the Den, but one of the things that’s most interesting to me is the way it deftly hybridizes these two approaches and winds up with a best-of-both-worlds situation. As you guide a pair of teenagers through their exploration of the high-tech bunker where a mysterious figure is protecting or perhaps imprisoning them, you’ll hoover up every portable item you can find and get very familiar with deactivating fans to enable you to crawl through ventilation ducts, but you’ll also largely do so via a fast travel system putting the whole expansive map at your fingertips, and for every USE X ON Y puzzle, you’ll find yourself doing a round of a streamlined Wordle variant. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything especially innovative, but this cannily designed interface makes what could have felt like a dauntingly large, tricky game a breeze to play.

Not that this is a lighthearted story by any means. The situation both inside and outside the bunker appears to be bad, with a series of earthquakes threatening the Den’s systems while the hints of backstory you come across via computer hacking suggesting that life on the surface isn’t a picnic any longer either. Fortunately, the two leads aren’t the type to sink into a funk; early on, you gain the ability to switch at will between Aiden, a practical whiz who occasionally breaks the rules from being a bit irresponsible, but might not be ready for larger rebellion against the system that’s raised him, and Vee, his driven yet compassionate counterpart. They’re both broadly drawn, but these are YA archetypes for a reason – the functional yet effective writing does a good job of getting across their distinct, appealingly-plucky personalities:

"He eventually smashed into the base of the shaft, leaving a large dent in the metal floor. Incredibly, apart from a few scrapes and bruises, he survived unscathed. He took great gulps of air and tried to calm the rush of adrenaline. He started to giggle, which seemed to him the strangest of reactions. He felt giddy. This was stupid, and terrifying, but hadn’t he wanted an adventure?"

I also enjoyed the way that the story tips its hand, using an early unexpected POV shift to foreshadow that the truth behind the Den is more nuanced than just the standard authoritarian dystopia. The backstory you uncover winds up being surprisingly grounded, and even involves some low-key social comment.

For all that the narrative elements are solid, this is first and foremost a puzzle game, and the set of challenges on offer here are quite good. The aforementioned Wordle riff is just as fun as its inspiration, and right as I was starting to get a little impatient with playing it over and over, the game offered a shortcut enabling me to skip past it when it came up in subsequent challenges. The inventory puzzles are all logical without feeling trivial – the extended set of actions you need to take to recover your lost screwdriver are especially satisfying. The parceling out of gameplay between the two leads is also well paced; you can ping-pong back and forth to run down a particular puzzle chain, or decide instead to bear down with a single character and work through a substantial chunk of progress before having to swap back. And the game escalates its challenges alongside its narrative: the climactic sequence creates a real feeling of mastery, as it prompts you to use what you’ve learned to allow Aiden and Vee to collaborate (albeit in occasionally implausible ways that had me wondering whether they had an ESP connection) and escape the Den at last – or indeed, not, as rather than a linear sequence of puzzles there are actually story-based decisions to make along the way, too.

This commitment to engaging the player and making sure they’re having a good time is all over this thoughtfully-designed game; the only real misstep I can point to is the decision to implement conversations between the two leads as a diegetic hint system, which meant I felt like I had to forego fun character interaction to avoid spoiling the enjoyable puzzles. The Den is scrupulous about making sure most players will find something to like, and smoothing away the edges that might create undue friction – it’s also quite generous, culminating in a wealth of fun post-game extras that put a lovely cap on proceedings. The ending also includes a request not to spoil the plot, which is why I’ve stuck to describing the situation in general terms; suffice to say the story is of a piece with the rest of the Den, executing standard tropes at a very high level while throwing in a few bonus grace notes. This is a real gem, and a game I wouldn’t be surprised to see launch imitations, perhaps eventually even a mini-genre, of its own.

One of the things I love about IF is its plasticity: there are great games in nearly every genre you can think of, from literary character studies to pulp adventure or romantic melodrama. But there are a couple of categories where the IFDB tags are conspicuously bare, and “action” must be chief among them. Partially this is because the things text is good at – detail, interiority, allusion – aren’t especially needed for an action story, while the things text tends to be weaker at – showing exactly how characters are moving through space and time, depicting simultaneous action, communicating urgency – are. Partially I suspect it’s because action-movie buffs are underrepresented amongst the ranks of IF authors (we’re kind of a bunch of nerds). But whatever the reason, divisive experiments like the real-time Border Zone are a case of the exception proving the rule: IF and action just don’t mix well.

Faced with this unmistakable historical trend, The Deserter just shrugs and gets on with things. This tale of a mech pilot deciding he’s had enough of being a cog in the war machine doesn’t just lean into action-adventure tropes – it also seems aggressively unconcerned with playing outside that sandbox. For example, while we’re clearly meant to view the army the pilot, Joad, is fleeing as the baddies, the game eschews specificity in favor of the broadest imaginable strokes, as in this bit where an old man explains why he’s in hiding:

“To stay in the city means prison, at best. Our thoughts, beliefs, appearances are a threat to those in power.” He looks at you. “I think you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

I mean I do, but laying it out this way doesn’t make me feel any sort of way about it.

Similarly, while Joad has something he’s running to, not just from, in the shape of a wife and daughter, the game plays its cards here so close to the chest that you’re not given a single flashback or memory to make them anything other than names. Heck, an early sequence even lets you catch sight of their trail without letting on who they are or why you’re following them.

In place of fripperies like characterization and context, The Deserter doubles down on action set pieces. And you know what, it’s not actually bad? The scenarios are relatively standard – scaling high cliffs or crossing raging rivers, exploring a cave, and of course nervy mech-to-mech combat – but they’re quite varied over the game’s twenty minute or so runtime (the two hour play time listed in the blurb maybe applies to exhausting its content through repeated plays, but a single run-through is much shorter, and satisfying enough in its own right). The writing has some technical errors, but manages some effective mood-setting in between the exciting bits:

"You plough along through the desolate canyon, listening to your mechs engine and the booming echo of it’s [sic] heavy steps. The sun occasionally peeks through gaps in the rock and cuts sinister shapes around you."

Gameplay-wise, you’re given just enough choices to feel a sense of urgency and agency, as you’re rarely given enough time or information to calculate the best decision, and the outcomes made me feel like I was skating through by the skin of my teeth. I suspect the author’s got their thumbs on the scales here, since upon replaying I found even making intentionally sub-optimal choices was still enough to get me through to the end, albeit with more stress along the way, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and while certain key events appear to fire no matter what you do, there are still a number of encounters that are missable depending on your actions (making the aforementioned “bad” choices led to an angsty fight against a former comrade lying in wait for you atop a bridge, which was an adrenaline-pumping highlight).

The Deserter’s a narrowly-focused piece, eschewing a lot of what I tend to most enjoy in IF, but I’d rate it successful nonetheless. High-octane set-pieces and war movie cliches might wear out their welcome in a longer game – and there’s definitely room for some polish, between the aforementioned writing issues and a few small technical faults, like the way a late-game passage talked about me piloting my mech immediately after telling me I had to eject after it foundered in a river – but at this scale, and with this focus, it all works.

After raking Breakfast in the Dolomites over the coals for gesturing towards, but not actually providing, a grounded trip into nature, I was surprised to see that the randomizer picked another run at a similar concept for my next game. There are certainly differences – Campfire’s an altogether lonely, more rugged experience – but I’d say it largely delivers on the promise. While it’s been decades since I’ve gone camping, the game’s careful, low-key presentation of the simple joys of roughing it brought back long-buried memories, and made me want to go again. There are bugs and writing errors that mar the process, unfortunately, but the core of the experience still resonates.

There’s also more depth to the game than may at first appear. The opening that depicts you experiencing some minor crises at work as you count down the minutes until you can go on your trip, for example, appears to be randomized, with at least two entirely different sequences playing out if you restart. Similarly, rather than jumping straight to the camping, you first visit some stores to pick up your supplies, which requires carefully counting your money and deciding how to prioritize food vs. gear vs. entertainment (admittedly, I played the protagonist as a self-insert, and since I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t like starting forest fires, I passed up the expensive meats and fireworks, leaving me with plenty of cash left over when I picked up everything else). There’s a packing sequence that’s dull, but serves to build anticipation, and then the trip itself plays out in brief vignettes told in unadorned prose that’s perhaps a bit generic, but boasts a solid, simple cadence:

"The soft grass gives slightly under my feet as I walk the trail. A soft breeze rustles the leaves of the trees that blanket both sides of the trail.

"The fresh autumn air fills my lungs with each breath. Bringing a feeling of peace and relaxation over me.

"After a while of walking the trail starts to become hilly. I walk up a particularly steep hill and have to catch my breath.

"From the top of the hill I spot a small clearing in the distance. Two deer graze on the grass in the clearing."

Nothing that happens is especially revelatory; the game makes clear that you’re a veteran camper who loves the experience and finds a special kind of meaning in the freedom of being on your own in the woods, but this particular trip is just one of many. You can go on pleasant hike, make tasty food, catch a few fish (happily, the game stipulates that you immediately throw them back), and return to your weekday live rejuvenated, but this is a slice of life rather than a drama. That’s a fine idea in the abstract, and in its particulars it makes for an apt fit with the unpretentious gameplay and shortish structure.

As mentioned, though, some rough patches made it harder for me to drift away like the game was inviting me to. I know about the alternate beginnings because I had to restart several times: once after I bought everything in the camping store and got to a passage with no further choices, and then again after hitting a similar bug when popping some popcorn – and then a third time when I tried to reload a saved game, which instead brought me to an entirely blank screen. There are also a few times when lines repeat oddly, instances where the game seemed confused about what I’d bought or failed to buy, and a large number of misspellings and typos (some of which I’ve put behind a details tag, below). It’s all forgivable for a first-time author, though, and while each of these issues did momentarily bring me out of the meditative fantasy the game conjured, I was always willing to make my way back there; given my current life circumstances it’ll be a while before I’m able to go camping again, but in the meantime this is the next best thing.

I’ve vacationed in Italy a few times, and when people ask me my favorite part of those trips, it’s usually something about some ancient site or other that comes to mind – often I’ll name my visit to the Castel Sant’Angelo, a set of Renaissance-era papal apartments built atop a medieval fortification built atop the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, or the time I had a beer on a patio overlooking the Mausoleum of Augustus, or winding my way down St. Patrick’s Well in Orvieto, a shaft dug two hundred feet into a hill-town’s rock to reach the water that would allow the town to outlast a siege. My wife, though, will usually talk about the hotel breakfast buffets: pillowy bread, unlimited Nutella, fresh-squeezed juices, eggs that had been inside a chicken just a day or two previous, and (I am told) high-quality coffee and cured meats worth risking heart disease for.

EDIT: my wife, having read the above paragraph, wishes it to be known that 1) she liked many things about Italy much more than the breakfasts; 2) most days she just had half a croissant since breakfast isn’t her favorite meal anyway; and 3) I am exaggerating for the bit, which, guilty as charged.

The author of Breakfast in the Dolomites thinks my wife has the better of this difference in priorities. While the blurb promises a fizzy romantic comedy on a romantic hiking trip to the mountains (and the AI-created cover art suggests slightly-melted plastic versions of Emma Stone and David Duchovny will be playing the leading roles), the title is actually a more accurate guide: while there’s a bit of prefatory matter and a brief lavatory-based denouement, obtaining and eating breakfast is the main course.

There can be a meditative kind of charm to playing a game whose subject matter is so relentlessly quotidian, but rather than the parser equivalent of those European art films that just follow someone doing their everyday chores in real time, Breakfast in the Dolomites has more in common with slapstick games like Octodad or QWOP where the joke is that a weird bendy alien is trying to act like a regular human and flailing badly. While the game uses your girlfriend, Monica, to prompt you as to the next required course of action, and I didn’t run into any significant bugs despite an impressively deep implementation, my transcript still reads like a comedy of errors. When the desk clerk at the hotel asked for my ID card, for example, I checked my inventory to confirm that I didn’t have my wallet; after Monica prodded me again I thought it might be in my pocket. I was on the right track, but typing X POCKET spat out the kind of response that gives parser-phobes nightmares:

"Which do you mean, the left back pocket, the right back pocket, the left front pocket, the right front pocket, the left leg pocket or the right leg pocket?"

Fortunately I found the wallet on the third try, and thought I had things sorted, except then I ran afoul of the inventory limits that objected to me trying to carry my wallet, ID card, and two keys all at once. This minor inconvenience was as nothing to the hijinks that ensued when I reached the buffet the next morning, though: look, in my IF career I’ve stared down mad scientists thousands of meters deep beneath alien seas, used the last of my strength to perform rituals of banishment abjuring abhorrent gods, and endured painfully-immersive narratives of abuse, but rarely have I felt as stressed as I did juggling a bread plate and a scrambled egg while trying to work a juicer.

> put carrot in container

The juicer bowl is closed.

> open juicer

You open the juicer bowl.

> put carrot in container

“You cannot put a whole carrot in the machine, you have to chop it first.” — Emma suggests you.

> chop carrot

You should specify what you cut it with.

> chop carrot with knife

It is better to lean on a chopping board.

The level of granularity here is frankly incredible; there are easily a dozen different kinds of food, many with different options like choosing lemon for your tea or different kinds of jam for your toast; meanwhile the waiter, waitress, and cook are flitting about, and your girlfriend is making up her own plate. It’s impressive stuff, but I’m at a loss to explain why the author went to this much effort for such a mundane series of set pieces. It’d be one thing if deep conversation or sparkling banter were playing out alongside the banal action, but the hotel staff are blandly efficient, and Monica is too focused on giving you instructions with the patience and level of detail you’d typically associate with a preschool teacher catechizing a bunch of distractible toddlers to have much of a personality. Meanwhile, the charm of what seems like it must be a beautiful setting is smothered under goopy prose that reads like ChatGPT ate a real estate agent:

"This charming little hotel welcomes guests with its cosy reception area: the inviting atmosphere is immediately apparent, with a blend of rustic elegance and modern comfort. The reception of this little hotel in the Dolomites serves as the perfect introduction to the unique blend of comfort and authenticity that awaits guests throughout their stay, promising a memorable and rejuvenating experience in this picturesque mountain retreat."

For all that, I was disappointed when the game ended so prematurely – the technical chops and attention to detail on display made me feel like the author could have implemented a very special nature hike, or a nicely open-ended conversation with Monica that would get me invested in their relationship. I’m not sure if this small slice of narrative was always the plan, or if the effort of coding up these early sequences with such fidelity wound up eating all the development time allotted for what would have been a larger story. Either way Breakfast in the Dolomites doesn’t quite live up to its billing, whether you’re in the mood for seeing the sights or just a rich meal – but here’s hoping the author takes that impressive ambition and level of effort and turns them to different ends next time.

Unreal People is a vexing game that isn’t easy to come to grips with; it’s also set in “early mediaeval India”, so with Hindu deities in mind, let’s grant ourselves more than the standard duo of hands to work with.

So on the first hand, the game is a slightly-janky shaggy dog story. You play a spirit, a deva, who’s bound to serve a charlatan of a fortune-teller; you’re tasked with uncovering the secrets of both the humble and the exalted in a small kingdom, using your gifts to possess objects, animals, and eventually people in your quest for gossip. You’ve only got limited opportunities to jump from one vessel to the next, so most of your choices come down to when to stay and when to go (and if you go, who’s going to be the target of your next leap). The effect is of riding a rushing river, becoming privy to snatches of low-context conversation, brief excerpts of domestic drama, and unconnected vignettes that seem like they’re adding up to a bigger picture before the game suddenly ends because you chose the wrong branch and it instakilled you – fortunately, there’s an undo available to let you make forward progress again, but unfortunately, even if you evade all these hazards the game ultimately peters out without bringing any of its myriad plot threads into coherence or showing you the payoff for your secret-gathering.

As for the jank, there are a lot of typos – much like signage at a small business, apostrophes often appear just to mark that a word ends in an S – and the occasional sign of incomplete development, like the way that I learned that my increasing powers now allowed me to make conversational decisions on behalf of my hosts from the all-caps exhortation to “!!EXPLAIN U CAN MAKE DIALOGUE CHOICES!!” Beyond these technical faults, the story’s structure is also decidedly odd; after half an hour or so of flitting around a dozen or so characters on the night of a feast, the game suddenly had me decide to contact the fortune-teller and call it a night, which started a new sequence sometime in the future with a smaller cast of partially-overlapping characters, which terminated in the above-mentioned anticlimax after about a further fifteen minutes. And but for the blurb and some of the names, I’d have had a hard time telling you where or when the game is meant to be set – admittedly, this isn’t one of my stronger areas, but things like the presence of light bulbs, and the drunkard princess’s habit of handing out high fives to passersby, undercut the verisimilitude of the milieu. And ugh, there’s AI cover-art (it’s not immediately bad, but just look at the reflections in the water and try to make sense of them).

On the second hand, I’m noticing some interesting resonances here. While I’m pretty weak on the history of the pre-Mughal subcontinent, I’ve got at least a little grounding in the contemporary religion and philosophy, so I definitely raised my eyebrows at details like the way that the spirit’s ability to possess starts with the lower orders of matter, like rocks, plants, and birds, before progressing to a cow, then to human beings in the throes of emotion or unreason, and then to calmer, more controlled people: squint and this isn’t far afield from some Hindu conceptions of how a virtuous soul can advance up the chain of being through reincarnation. Or consider that we’re not in any historical polity, but the kingdom of Chaitanya, Sanskrit for “consciousness”. More fundamentally, the way that you’re able to inhabit all the living beings (and some of the scenery) in the kingdom nods towards the Brahman-Atman belief that individual souls nondualistically partake together in the ultimate, unified reality of existence. And then the ending – well, spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)in the final sequence, you somehow possess everyone and everything at once, leading to a Mad Libs segment where you can type in dialogue for each of two characters, with the narrative voice needling you by saying this is super unsatisfying, huh? Which puts me in mind of lila, the idea that the divine unity created the world’s multifarious forms, and divided consciousness, in order to experience and enjoy itself: “god’s play”.

Well, so what? Does all this talk of unity and differentiation add up to anything? My judgment here is a qualified ……maaaaaybe. On the third hand, I’m personally fond of shaggy dog stories myself, and swerving from a tawdry story about a grasping gossip-monger to contemplation of divine mysteries is just the kind of bold move I admire. And even if the social reality of Chaitanya leaves something to be desired, there are individual memorable characters – like princess Gauri, unable to express her crush on the knight Mazboot (who, awkwardly, might be her half-brother, except by berating him, or the peasants squabbling over a stolen chicken – who together present a kaleidoscopic view of the human pageant, and allowing each of them a voice and a viewpoint is appealingly democratic.

On the fourth hand, though, it’s still the case that it sure feels like the author eventually just got bored with the story and decided to stop it, and for every entertaining bit of anachronism, there’s a clanger like Gauri saying superficial things about feudalism and post-barter economies. The quick shifts from one character to the next also meant that there were certain conflicts and storylines that I didn’t really have time or space to care about before I was on to the next one.

On the fifth hand – well, the number four is a big one in Hinduism (four primary social classes, four stages of life, four types of yoga), so let’s leave things here. Suffice to say Unreal People didn’t make me feel very much, so if that was its goal I can’t count it as very successful – but it did make me think.

An annoying thing that I can’t stop my brain from doing when I’m reading escapist, pulp stuff is think about money. Take this game’s eponymous organization of vampire hunters, an elite crew with offices and safehouses across the globe, dozens if not hundreds of skilled humans as well as the higher-minded sort of undead on staff, killer custom-tailored leather uniforms, a web of high-powered informants and contacts, and an idealistic mission of promoting peace among the vampiric underworld by resolving conflicts via mediation and negotiated truces before escalating things to assassination. It’s a cool secret-society fantasy, but seriously: are we meant to believe that there are enough super-rich elders of the night who want their rivals offed, but only after a rigorous restorative-justice process, to pay for all of these wonderful toys?

It’s unfair to hold Redjackets to such rigorous worldbuilding standards, I admit. This is clearly character-first urban fantasy, with the always-visible character portraits and romance subplots to prove it, and the author’s effort has clearly been focused on things like offering a choice of three different protagonists and fleshing out their angsty backstories rather than diving deep into the setting. And it’s an appealing, diverse crew: you’ve got Fiia, a fledgling vampire on the run from her crime-boss sire, and then the pair of Redjacket agents she turns to for help, vampiric detective Lynette and her human partner, a professor of folklore named Declan. The assassination plot they’re forced into enacting gives them all an opportunity to settle old scores and come to terms with their natures, while giving the author an opportunity to purple up some prose:

"He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. “I’ve seen people die - I’ve seen-” you start, fumbling over your own tongue limp with panic, with flashing memories of sunset-red tissue, cavernous wounds, and joints bent at wrong angles."

What it doesn’t provide is an opportunity for much in the way of meaningful choices. While picking which of the trio to make the viewpoint character unsurprisingly has a significant impact on the story, there are comparatively few once the game actually starts up, to the extent that I was often surprised to find myself confronted with one after ten or fifteen minutes of just clicking to the advance from one passage to the next – and often these are low-key ones, like picking what order to ask a set of dialogue options that I’d have to exhaust before moving on. I’ve got nothing against dynamic fiction, but I did occasionally feel like the game wound up undercutting itself, for example by offering Fiia a choice of whether to enthusiastically join the Redjackets or recoil in fear of the consequences should her sire find out, but then railroading her into being a happy recruit regardless of the option selected.

Beyond the gameplay mechanics, I often found myself feeling like the author was more focused on telling their story than they were on the audience reading it. The “handbook” feely provided with the game goes into a lot of detail on the Redjacket organization, but it – and many of the quotidian sequences peppered through the narrative – sometimes felt like they presupposed an unearned level of interest in the nuts and bolts of their operations. What’s worse, there are quite a few pieces of the story that are asserted rather than demonstrated, reducing their effectiveness: we’re told that the Redjackets are hypercompetent investigators, for example, but they fail to distinguish paint from blood, find it annoying that an underground arms dealer only takes cash, and land on a plan to kill the baddie not too much more sophisticated than “run up to him at a crowded party and shoot him.” What’s worse, the bad guy’s evil is very much in tell-not-show territory; everyone talks about him like he’s a creep, and admittedly he does overreact to the failure of one of his minions, but what we see of his behavior just involves restoring paintings to sell them for a lot of money, doting on his lover and being dismayed when he’s injured, and being instinctually protective of Fiia even after he knows she’s betrayed him.

There are also some technical issues here that make it hard to enjoy Redjackets as much as I wanted to. Beyond a few typos, I experienced some issues with how the three branches of the story were integrated, with pronouns shifting in some sequences as the game seemed to get confused about who I’d picked to be “you.” Further, while the game indicates that if you replay it, choices you made as another character will be remembered and happen in the same way, I found that this wasn’t the case. And worst of all, after making it through Fiia’s and Lynette’s paths, I wound up hitting a dead end shortly after starting Declan’s, with all the choices available to me leading to a blank passage (the game has a single save slot and no undo, so I couldn’t recover from this bug without restarting).

There’s definitely promise here; this is an ambitious game that often delivers on its character-first goals. But unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to an even slightly skeptical player who wants to know why the bad guy is the bad guy, what choices they’re actually allowed to make, why these cool folks are the heroes, and yes, how they’re getting paid for this hit. Compared to the amount of work the author’s already put in, it wouldn’t take too much more to address these kinds of questions (or, hopefully, fix the bug borking Declan’s part of the story), which would make Redjackets the enjoyable kind of pulp adventure where I could turn my brain off.

The brain is a pattern-making machine, and so while it’s of course ridiculous to assign any particular weight to the first game that the randomizer coughs up in any year’s Comp, I can’t help but feel that it’s appropriate Where Nothing is Ever Named led off my 2024 lineup – because what better way to inaugurate the thirtieth year of an event dedicated to games that were considered obsolete even when the contest first began, than with a piece that absolutely, positively, could only work in a text-only format?

The game both does and doesn’t provide much in the way of context: upon launching the story file, you’re simply told that you’re in the eponymous place where etc. and then that “you can see something and the other thing here”, before being turned loose to use your parser skills to suss out what’s going on and what you’re meant to be doing. The blurb, more merciful, does inform the player that the third chapter of Through the Looking Glass is the major inspiration, which I went back and reread; it’s not a section that I remember well, mostly having to do with a strange train whence Alice is ejected for lack of a ticket, and a large gnat who’s reticent (with good reason) to start a career in comedy. But there is a short episode towards the end where Alice is lost in a wood where everything loses track of what it’s called and what to call anything else – and there’s none of your “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet” nonsense here, as in a Hermetic turn ignorance of names means ignorance of substance, as Alice doesn’t know what anything is when she sees it.

So what we’ve got here is a language puzzle, not miles distant from the Gostak or Suveh Nux; if you figure out what the “other thing” is and what to do with it, you’ll win the game, and if you also figure out what the “something” is you’ll get a happier ending. It’s a lovely setup for a text game, since visuals would of course kill the thing (as would audio, actually); all the Ubisoft studios in the world would struggle in vain to render this ten-minute metaphysical riff. And it’s quite satisfying to trial-and-error your way through two paired games of twenty questions, matching the default parser actions to the responses you elicit from the things in order to narrow down their identities.

In practice the metapuzzle is a little too simple to make this philosophically-charged premise really sing, however, and some implementation quirks add some unneeded frustration. I suspect most players will uncover the identity of one of the things in a half-dozen moves at most, and the other one possibly even quick, though in my case it took me longer because I was referring to the two objects as THING and OTHER THING; turns out this was just two different synonyms for the other thing, and I had to type SOMETHING to interact with the first. Similarly, I would have finished Where Nothing is Ever Named a few minutes earlier but for a reasonably-game-winning action generating a facially-bizarre and unhelpful response (Spoiler - click to show) (in retrospect I can reconstruct why “you can’t ride unmounted” is a plausible response to RIDE THING, since it’s indicating you’re supposed to MOUNT or CLIMB ON the thing first, but this is slicing the salami awfully thin).

These implementation niggles are quite small-scale, though, worth mentioning only because the game is so compact and they interact confusingly with the guess-who gameplay – really, my main critique is just that I wanted a more robust incarnation of this concept, one that really teased my brain and addressed the existential question of what’s in a name head on. That’s not Where Nothing is Ever Named, but that’s not its fault; on its own merits it’s a winsome little piece, and a worthy justification for the existence of text-only games at the opening of the Comp.