Reviews by Mike Russo

(I beta tested this game)

Pretty much every geek of a certain age, I will confidently assert, had their hearts broken by the X-Files. For a respectable chunk that’s because of the way they botched the Mulder/Scully relationship in the later seasons, but for the larger portion it’s because of the way the originally-compelling “mythology” story arc that spanned the show’s full run, which promised revelations about alien colonization, high-level government conspiracies, a mysterious mind-controlling oil, UFO abductions, and more, eventually petered out with the saddest of sad trombones as it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing and were forced to make up more and more stuff whole cloth as the show somehow kept failing to get canceled (admittedly, I haven’t watched the latest revival seasons, so maybe they actually fixed all this and it did reach a satisfying ending? [googles] yeah looks like that’s a no).

Points, then, to BOSH, for being an X-Files homage that’s unapologetically and intentionally built as a shaggy-dog story. Soon after Agent Larch Faraji reports to their paranormal-investigation-unit’s new strip-mall headquarters, they realize that their new cell phone is ringing; unfortunately, said phone is in a desk whose key has been lost, and while the desk is one of those IKEA numbers that should be easy to disassemble, the only Allen wrench around fell down an air-conditioning vent… in most other puzzley parser games, unearthing the screwdriver to pop open the vent to pop open the desk to answer the phone would be a simple puzzle marking the close of the first act and getting you the infodump necessary to start the plot in earnest. But despite a few tantalizing teases – surely the pawn shop next door has a screwdriver? Or scraping together enough money to buy the one in the convenience store shouldn’t be hard, should it? – that drawer is going to remain inviolate through the game’s fourish hour running time, with Faraji successively having to engage in some light breaking and entering, master interdimensional hypergeometry, conduct an eldritch ritual, and out-fight a band of lizardman assassins (lizardmen assassins? The Chicago Manual of Style is less helpful on this point than I’d like it to be) on a cross-time rescue mission that’s important in its own right, I guess, but mainly just serves to get you that $#%@ screwdriver.

I admire the chutzpah of this structural joke, though I hasten to add that BOSH isn’t all metatextual shenanigans at the player’s expense: while the opening runaround section is maybe a bit too long and involves a few too many challenging puzzles to fit comfortably into the Comp’s time limit, the meat of the game is a reasonably traditional and well-designed IF experience that delivers a large serving of satisfying puzzling, with some neat surprises courtesy of the aforementioned hypergeometry gimmick. And this is a lavish production beyond just its length; there’s an extended, interactive tutorial, robust hints, multiple characters with plenty to talk about, and very solid implementation that means you can poke and prod into every corner of the large, detailed locations without fear of breaking something. Meanwhile, the every-conspiracy-theory-you-can-think-of-is-true setting provides a lot of laughs, courtesy of the wry authorial voice, while still staying sufficiently focused that you can figure out how the particular subset of weirdness this game is concerned with is supposed to work.

Make no mistake, this can be a tricky game – though again, the hints are there – and I suppose I can see how for folks who are less enamored of shaggy-dog stories than I am, the opening hour’s hiding of the ball might be frustrating, so BOSH probably belongs on the list of Comp games better enjoyed once the Comp is over and the two hour time limit and FOMO about 66 other games has receded. But hey, we’re less than 72 hours away from the voting deadline, so there’s good news on that front – and even in its short-form, two hour version, it’s still more satisfying than the X-Files…

It’s a commonplace, I think, for those of us in the mainline IF tradition to look over at the (far bigger and far more successful by any metric you care to name) Choice of Games community and goggle comically at the Brobdingnagian word counts. 110,000 words! 470,000 words! 1,140,000 words! What on earth could they possibly need all that space for, we muse – well, I muse, let’s drop this not-fooling-anybody first-person-plural conceit – and possibly crack a joke about that game a year or two back where character creation involved deciding on the color of your favorite mug. Well, comes a time when I’ve got to eat some crow, because while I’m not sure Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People needs to be twice as long as War and Peace, it sure would work better at three or four times its current length.

There is a lot going on here, but I’ll do my best to hit the high points. So this is a ChoiceScript magic-school game except in place of Hogwarts you’ve got a flying castle hovering far above the Indian Ocean, and there are additional dystopic-YA-novel tropes layered in because magical beings in this world are hated and feared by the general population and the world’s governments fund jack-booted thugs to drag magical teenagers off to the grimly authoritarian Miss Duckworthy’s once their powers begin to pop off. The game includes all the stuff you’d expect to play out given this premise – you wind up part of a plucky group of friends trying to get to the bottom of the school’s mysteries and fight the man, with optional romances on the side and a time-management minigame where you can balance building your various magical skills against exploration, investigation, and relationship-building – and a bunch of extras besides, most notably the four bespoke “origins” for the main character, which involve substantial vignettes that allow you to meet some characters early or otherwise have a reasonably significant impact on the main storyline.

I opted for playing a respectable Dutchman, admittedly as much through a process of elimination as anything else – “artsy Canadian car thief” is not an archetype I feel at all confident at being able to embody, and the Australian and Indonesian origins require you to be athletic and industrious, respectably, so no thanks to those too – but I wound up fairly excited the more I thought about it, since typically I struggle with how to approach ChoiceScript games as anything other than a self-insert of my boring, middle-aged self, and this prompt gave me the idea that this time I could play as @VictorGijsbers instead!

Alas, it was not to be, because Miss Duckworthy’s doesn’t provide much scope for roleplaying, largely due to the rocket-boosted pacing. The opening vignette feels like it lasts an appropriate amount of time, long enough to establish your mundane life and bring a bit of oddness and dread into things as your magical nature manifests and the baddies show up. But after that, all the stuff I mentioned above – meeting your three or four new besties, learning to control your abilities, engaging with student politics, learning secrets about the school, the tentative stirrings of teenaged romance – plays out over maybe half an hour in real time, and seventy-two hours or so in the fiction.

To say that this is break-neck speed is overestimating the resilience of the spine; indeed, the game feels like it’s in so much hurry that it routinely gets way way ahead of itself. My first hint of this was when, on the plane to the school, a troll named Jack introduced himself – he came on a bit strong, maybe, but he seemed like an interesting character, whose backstory had him helping run a magical Underground Railroad for a year before being caught. Seems like a potentially interesting character, I thought to myself, only for my cat familiar to immediately tell me “this guy is consumed with rage and is going to try to dominate everybody,” which in addition to playing out what feel like not-great stereotypes (trolls are people too!) also flattened out any sense of ambiguity about him, bottom-lining what could have been an extended subplot of learning about the ways Jack uses idealistic rhetoric to cloak naked ambition into literally one line of dialogue.

Similarly, the game just sort of assumes that you’ll be down with the fascists. The main plot of the game turns on the fact that Jack decides within two hours of the school to mount a coup and knock off the student who’s sort of the queen trusty of the place (and takes two and a half more days to actually attempt it), and rather than deciding to join him because this whole system sucks and said student appears to have one of the newcomers killed because he sassed her your only options are to ignore the plot, tattle on it, or try to get close to Jack to learn enough to betray him to the authorities.

Now, there’s a reason for this – in my playthrough, I learned that the student capo wasn’t actually that bad, and just pretended to kill that dude so that she’d seem hardcore and no one would mess with her (this is pretty stupid IMO, but we are dealing with teenagers…) But I think that’s missable, and pretty much all the plot-lines are like this, overly-accelerated and assuming you’ll have certain knowledge you might not actually get. There’s also some sloppiness to the game knowledge that means continuity errors were rampant. Within one second of meeting one of the other students, Hannah, she told me that she was a reporter just pretending to be a troll, which seemed like a ridiculously risky thing to disclose to someone you don’t know – and I guess the game agreed because a day and a half later, after gaining her trust, there’s an emotional scene where she told me the exact same information again, with no indication that she was repeating herself. Meanwhile one member of the friend group just sort of showed up in our shared bedroom with no indication of how he’d gotten there; there’s a fun subplot where we successfully conspired to help him escape back to his home in Indonesia, but this didn’t prevent him from still being around during the climax. The game never directly told me that I’d turned into an elf in the opening, either, which seems like a heck of a thing to have to intuit from context.

I have many, many more examples of this stuff, I think a combination of trying to cram too many characters and plot twists into too small a word-count, and a lack of adequate testing for all the many possible permutations (I got rescued by a troll named Rock and had a bunch of banter with him afterwards, the game not seeming to acknowledge that I had never even heard of this guy before in my life). It’s pervasive, and it winds up having a substantial impact on the gameplay mechanics, because I never felt like my choices really mattered; the game is on the clock to get through the story that it’s telling, and I was just along for the ride (as is typical for ChoiceScript, there are like a billion stats, but I feel like maybe only one of them ever made a difference). And the impact on tone and theme is even worse: seriously, are the fascists fascist or are they cool? That’s kind of a big deal!

This is a real shame because I think there’d be a lot to enjoy in a less-hyper version of Miss Duckworthy’s. The characters and situations are broad, sure, but they’re fun, engaging archetypes, and the writing’s quite good at moving quickly while providing enough detail to anchor you and fire the imagination. I really love the disparate-origins approach to the game, which is a lovely mechanic that can make the player’s decisions feel really meaningful. With the action spread out over maybe a month or two rather than just three days, more granular choices allowing the player to actually make decisions, and better testing to make sure all the pieces fit, this game could be really very good – unfortunately that’s not the version of it that’s currently available to play.

What if the world ended and everything more or less went on just as it did before? Yancy at the End of the World puts a unique spin on the zombie apocalypse story, starting with a stereotypical oh-no-the-dead-are-rising premise and then seemingly not doing much with it: characters worry about their anxiety and overall mental health, get annoyed by slanted news coverage of the disaster, and gripe about having to come back into the office when there are packs of the walking dead still roving around out there, but don’t seem especially worried about getting their faces eaten off or anything. Still, there are some things that change, even if they’re small: Yancy finally takes up photography, against their mom’s advice, and reconnects with some old friends. And then just when the apocalypse feels like an anticlimax, it turns out Yancy’s world does end after all – which might actually be a good thing, though they’ll still mourn it.

The game can be disorienting for reasons that go beyond the undead plague and the nonstandard narrative emphases, too. About ten minutes in, it nonchalantly revealed that the couple I was talking to were “a colorful snow leopard” and “a literal cat-fish” (the “literal” doesn’t really help, I can still think of like three different things that could mean); while still digesting that, I went into my apartment and was greeted by my adorable pet, who’s a sort of cyclops-fox-cat kinda thing. And indeed when you take photos of the other characters, it’s clear that most of them are anthropomorphic animals of one sort or another.

There’s a clear gameplay structure that helped me maintain my bearings even as I was getting to grips with the world, though. After an introductory sequence that briskly establishes the zombie threat, reintroduces Yancy to their childhood best friend, and sees them deciding to buy a camera and take some photos while the world is still a going concern, each day runs on a pleasingly predictable rhythm. First, you choose someplace to go – visiting friends or family, heading to the café or bookstore, going for a walk in nature – which leads to a small vignette where you might encounter a member of the game’s medium-sized supporting cast, have a few conversational choices, and then take a picture. In the evening, you check in with some friends on a chat server, which is usually where the game catches you up on the state of the world; at that point, you’ve got an opportunity to DM with one of the online characters, and then head into a voice chat with the aforementioned best friend, Nekoni. Then you go to bed and the pattern repeats.

I found this approach struck a good balance between novelty and familiarity; the number of choices doesn’t feel overwhelming, but the game runs for only nine days, and you’ve generally got about half a dozen options for places to visit or friends to DM, which means that it’s hard to get too deep into any particular story or relationship strand but it’s also hard to feel like any of them have worn out their welcomes. And while the overall vibe is pretty chill – most of the people you encounter are supportive as you explore your new hobby and try to weather the zombie threat together – there are some sequences that effectively raise the stakes, and where your choices feel significant, like a scene where your best friend reacts badly to you coming out as aromantic and asexual.

Working through issues like this is where the game’s heart really lies, with the zombie stuff quickly revealing itself as a close-to-the-surface allegory for issues around queer identity and acceptance rather than an excuse for action-horror or anything like that. And in keeping with that, even when members of the friend group put their feet wrong or get wrapped up in themselves, the game keeps the focus on healing and working together; Yancy isn’t required to always forgive people, but does always keep talking and providing an opportunity for others to prove that they’ve changed after they’ve made a mistake, which makes for a nice, positive vibe while still making clear that their life isn’t always a bed of roses.

The one character who sticks out from this generally well-meaning love-fest is Yancy’s mom. She’s the one person who’s definitively human rather than a furry, and though she insists she love’s Yancy, she’s also invariably misgendering them, and spends most of her time watching the Fox News analogue and letting its misinformation erode her mental and physical health. On the flip side, while Yancy finds spending time with her actively painful, and is increasingly clear on the ways that her expectations and prejudices have created challenges for them, still feels a connection to her beyond a mere sense of familial obligation.

There are a lot of different strands here, in other words, but I feel like Yancy at the End of the World cohered for me in a way that something like String Theory didn’t. There is a clear narrative climax, for one thing, and even though it’s a bit of a swerve from what the opening seems to set up, it nonetheless is an entirely reasonable place for the story to go, and one that’s got strong thematic resonance with everything else that’s going on. And there’s a strong sense of how humanly messy relationships can get, even when you tax sex and romance out of the equation, with lived-in prose and gently funny dialogue keeping things grounded. This is a game that didn’t play out as I expected it would based on the first twenty minutes and my knowledge of genre tropes, but the surprises here were good ones.

Y’all probably know by now that I’m the kind of reviewer who likes to go outside the four corners of a work and look for connections to other games, or books or movies or whatever, that might be touch-points or inspirations or just share a vibe – it has the potential to illuminate the ways a piece of writing is in dialogue with other parts of the scene, or trace intellectual influence to see how a particular author is putting their own spin on a set of ideas, though of course I’ll confess that it can reduce to an unedifying spot-the-reference exercise.

Another problem with this approach is that I have my blind spots, which is how I wound up gobsmacked by the end of You Can’t Save Her. The game is a short former-friends-confront-each-other-in-a-melodramatic-duel story that felt to me like a dark riff on magical-girl anime series like Utena (confession time, Utena is one of only like three anime series I’ve actually seen, so I am LARPing the “getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this” meme here). But per the credits, in fact the project was conceived as an homage to … Porpentine?

We’ll circle back to that in a minute, but in the meantime let’s talk a bit more about what You Can’t Save Her is in itself. The setting here isn’t exhaustively specified, but it’s the kind of science-fantasy world where a character prepares their blade by “anodiz[ing] it in dreams of martyrdom” or opting instead to “machine it with sigils of faith” – one of the most metal choices I’ve ever had in a game, kudos to the author for that – and then brings a laser-gun to the fight to boot. The religious overtones aren’t accidental, either, as both main characters were raised together in the same oppressive convent, before an encounter with a heretical book sowed seeds of doubt and led to one of them renouncing their faith and fleeing, and then the other to be sent to kill her erstwhile friend for her thought-crimes.

The storytelling is straightforward but assured, alternating depictions of the pair’s battle with flashbacks establishing the backstory I bottom-lined above. Across the game’s various acts, viewpoints shift and the rules of the game change slightly, which maintains interest across the fifteen minutes or so it takes to play You Can’t Save Her. There’s an especially effective change-up in Act III, which inverts the mechanics established in earlier sections – one cycling link allowing you to vary your choice of weapon or combat move or dialogue line or what have you, a second at the bottom of the passage locking in your decision and moving to the next one – due to various auguries having found the optimal plan of attack, so that the upper cycling link now just displays the single, proper choice. There are time loops, and portentous drama, and the talismanic repetition of the phrase “She is to the north” as you seek your quarry, effectively setting these events in a mytho-poetic register.

So yeah, I very much had fun with this tale of messy warrior-nuns torn between killing each other and making out, related in overheated, angst-friendly language. But like I said, the credits drew me up short. Because I wasn’t that engaged in the IF scene during the 2010’s, and since then have largely been focused on keeping up with new stuff, I’ve only played a smattering of Porpentine’s stuff – I think a bit of howling dogs, but honestly that’s probably about it? But just from general osmosis and reading other reviews and criticism, I have a pretty clear (though possibly incorrect!) stereotype of her style: intense, visceral physicality; unique, indelible imagery; catharsis through abjection.

I hope it’s no criticism of You Can’t Save Her that it does not strike me as particularly Porpentine-y. While there’s emotion here, it’s all heightened to the point of theatricality; the characters perform fear and longing, but as a player I was entertained but unmoved. Likewise, while one character has been scarred by her encounter with the forbidden book, this manifests as scars that glow with lurid pink light, a CGI-friendly mark of badassery but nothing that calls the body’s ugly biochemical reality into question. Per the citations in the post-game credits, it actually incorporates a half dozen or so specific lines from a few of Porpentine’s games, but the context around them is so reconfigured that they didn’t really stand out to me, seamlessly fitting into the action-yuri angstfest on offer – the game is so resolutely PG-rated that I couldn’t even recognize its gestures towards NC-17 stuff for what they were.

Again, I don’t think this is a complaint about the game as such – I had fun with it, and but for the credits I would be writing that it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. And honestly, being inspired by some canonical pieces of IF to write stuff that’s actually significantly different, rather than trying for a slavish imitation, is if anything even more respectable. Plus per my admission above, my lack of direct experience of Porpentine’s work means I could be reading things entirely wrong. But will all those caveats out of the way, You Can’t Save Her is still an odd kind of homage, and I’m looking forward to reading reviews from others who actually know what they’re talking about.

Usually when I have to review a game I really didn’t get on with, I try to avoid being excessively mean by doing some comedy, maybe going high-concept with a song parody or police blotter or what have you. I’m not doing that here, however, because despite finding Return to Claymorgue’s Castle quite unpleasant to play, I feel like I did get something out of the experience, and explaining what and why requires going into a fair bit of detail about all the things that didn’t work for me.

The game is an authorized sequel to one of Scott Adams’s lesser-played adventures – at least, 1984’s Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle doesn’t have any reviews or ratings on IFDB – taking what appears to have been a fantasy collect-a-thon and giving it the Scooby Doo treatment. You play a journalist who rolls up at the gates of the eponymous fortress with the rest of your crew – a researcher, a hacker, and an athlete – bent on uncovering… well, something or other, the game isn’t really big on motivation beyond exploration for its own sake. So far, so old-school, and the approach to puzzles is likewise quite traditional: outside of a spot of device-manipulation to crack a computer password, you’ll be walking through gimmick-free mazes, digging for secrets, making a grappling hook, and using MacGuffin A to unlock MacGuffin B. The one mechanical twist is that often, you’ll need to enlist the aid of your comrades to get through a puzzle: like, the hacker obviously is the one who can unlock the computer, the athlete is thee only one who can successfully throw the grappling hook, etc.

Now, I must confess that the Scott Adams style of two-word parser games is not a subgenre I find particularly appealing. I never played them back in the day, so there’s no nostalgia value, and the terse prose, primitive interface, and sometimes-unfair puzzles are just not what I come to IF for. As to the last of these, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle lives down to its lineage: the puzzles are severely underclued, with most near-misses, like trying to throw that grappling hook yourself, generating default “that won’t work” messages that don’t provide a push to the intended answer, not to mention a few places where I’m not sure how anyone could progress without going to the walkthrough. For example, pretty much the first challenge of the game requires you to go through the maze to a nondescript area, and then examine a patch of weeds twice, with the first just resulting in another generic failure message.

Admittedly, many of the more traditional lock-and-key puzzles were at least more straightforward, but that brings me to the game’s first point of departure from its inspirations: instead of the traditional two-word parser, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is implemented as a parserlike choice game in Twine. Now, this is a subgenre I tend to enjoy, but the interface here is about the most literal, cumbersome interpretation of the concept you can imagine. In theory, this shouldn’t be that bad – you’ve got the list of characters and their inventories in the left-hand sidebar, the room description and contents in the middle one, and the verb list in the right. But the verb list is long and somewhat fiddly, and you need to manually select yourself as the person doing the action even if you’re alone – plus if you accidentally click object-verb instead of verb-object, the action queue gets reset. As a result, constructing the simplest command requires at least four clicks, and possibly scrolling up and down three separate sub-windows, with more complex actions being more click-happy still.

It’s tortuously slow, and made worse by the low contrast provided by the pixel-art backgrounds and the frequent guess-the-verb issues – sometimes examining would work to reveal what a piece of writing said, sometimes only reading it, and sometimes, as with the leaflet you start out carrying, neither will. Similarly, I could never figure out how to actually talk to any of the other characters, though they do occasionally interject with their thoughts (often when you’re in the middle of clicking to make a command, which means you miss these bits of dialogue unless you notice that the main window’s changed in time). And since the game mechanics require a lot of clue-free trial-and-error where you need to attempt every action you can think of, and then try the exact same actions again with the other members of your group, anyone susceptible to RSI will be a whimpering mess by the halfway mark.

Beyond the interface, the game’s other major difference from its 1980s antecedents is the prose. Afficionados of the era often say they enjoyed the minimalism that early microcomputers’ memory constraints imposed: with the games only able to fit a few words per location, item, or character, players’ imaginations could run wild. Return to Claymorgue’s Castle, by way of contrast, adopts a style that can be charitably described as logorrhetic. Even the emptiest of locations gets hundreds of words of description long on telling me exactly what I was meant to be feeling and short on the actual details that would evoke those feelings. The prose is weighted down by excessive adjectives and adverbs, and frequently talks itself in circles, repeating words or even whole ideas from one sentence to the next. Like, here’s the drawbridge:
"
The drawbridge is old and rusty, with wooden planks that creak and crack. The chains that hold it are thick and heavy, but also worn and corroded. The drawbridge spans over the moat, which is deep and murky. The water is stagnant and foul, with patches of algae and slime. I can’t see the bottom of the moat, but I imagine it is full of bones and debris. The moat surrounds the castle, which is imposing and gloomy. The walls are high and thick, with towers and battlements. The entrance is a large archway, with a portcullis and a gate. The entrance is dark and ominous, with no signs of welcome or warmth."

And here’s a door:

"A sturdy wooden door, its entrance barred by a hefty bolt, conceals untold enigmas. This ancient milieu, rich with history, murmurs the chronicles of eras past. The wooden door, its secrets kept by the heavy bolt."

(There was not even a single enigma here, let alone untold ones – I’d already been around to the other side of the door, it led from a kitchen to a courtyard).

My eyes glazed over early, and I found myself skimming the text desperately looking for the few pieces of concrete information or game-relevant objects amid the flavorless tide of oatmeal. The author’s native language doesn’t appear to be English, so I certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on their language skills, and perhaps there’s something about the translation process that led to this muck (my sense is that an LLM let loose on perfectly fine foreign-language text could certainly generate sludge of the quality here on display). But regardless, the game would have been far better served by a dramatically simpler syntax and vocabulary.

And that’s my little revelation: while I don’t like the simple parser, terse writing, and barely-clued puzzles of this particular tradition, in fact those elements all fit together quite snugly, if not elegantly. If your puzzles are going to demand exhaustive testing of possibilities without much feedback, you need a fast, straightforward interface to make that bearable, and clean prose that focuses on the stuff you actually need to interact with to win. Or turn it around: if you’ve got a relatively simpler parser, you might need harder puzzles to keep the gameplay from likewise feeling too simplistic, and a writing style that’s clear enough that the player won’t try to type stuff the game can’t recognize.

So by sticking to this particular flavor of puzzle design, while unsuccessfully trying new things on the interface and stylistic sides of things, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle wound up giving me a backhanded appreciation for how they used to do things in the old days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m going to be running out to play all the Scott Adams classics as a result – but I suspect if I did I’d have far more appreciation for them than I did before.

“Slice of life” is a funny name for a genre, if you spend too much time thinking about it (I suspect this is true of most genre names). These kinds of games tend to have relatively low stakes; there might be romances kindled or breakups endured, sure, but there likely won’t be melodrama, nothing dramatically out of the ordinary or unexpected. At the same time, they typically have an arc to them: at least some characters finish the story in a different place than where they started, with some event or incident having made some kind of impression. So the “slice” part of the genre label is apt: the selection of what to include, where to begin and where to conclude, is usually artfully curated to present something tidy and appetizing, a lovely triangle of carrot cake with the iced-on carrot just so at the center of the arc.

String Theory defies expectations by not doing that; this is less a slice and more a core sample of life, a series of incidents that sometimes feel like they’ve been thrown together by blind forces rather than authorial design. The opening made me expect that the game would be confined to a single climactic Thanksgiving dinner, but in fact there are a few nested flashbacks, some of which have only glancing relevance to what I take to be the main plot. There’s also a series of short epilogues that leave the narrative lurching past its logical end-point, and the game’s attitude towards tying together its various plot and thematic strands is desultory at best: I finished the game nonplussed, unsure how everything I’d just read was meant to come together.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy some of my time with String Theory, though. The protagonist, Jay, doesn’t have a strong personality but he’s appealing enough – a mostly-closeted Caltech student visiting his Kentucky relatives for Thanksgiving, he undergoes the slings and arrows of a right-wing uncle, a closed-off father, and the time difference and familial obligations separating him from his boyfriend. He’s dealing with self-image issues, too (he’s trying to be vegan so he can lose a little weight), and worried about too-hard classes and too-expensive tuition.

He’s plausibly beleaguered, in other words, and the game is good at deploying bits of interactivity to wryly underline his predicament. When someone asks how college is going, your dialogue options include “I’m going to fail Ph 229,” “I’m in so much debt”, and “am I wasting my life?”, but clicking on any them just redirects to a terse “fine”, for example. And the while the writing doesn’t ever reach for spectacle, there are some good comic set-pieces, like this struggle with your aunt’s well-intentioned attempt at a vegan pie:

"You reach over with a butter knife and poke it. Your first attempt fails to pierce the skin. With some effort, you plunge the knife through the crunchy white tufts into a wobbly lake of yellow, and fight your way down to an alluvial graham cracker deposit from the middle Devonian."

The prose also establishes a nice wintry mood, leaving me missing the cold-weather Thanksgivings I used to have when I was still visiting the northeast on my breaks. But that brings me to some of the weaker elements of String Theory, because despite going to Caltech myself, there weren’t any details of Jay’s experience at the school that felt especially lived-in or resonated particularly strongly, beyond the title of one topology textbook being repeated a few times. Similarly, the plot and characters are very archetypal: dealing with a racist uncle, furtively texting a friend from the bathroom, entering a food coma, bonding with a supportive aunt, and watching football are all prominent on the big board of Thanksgiving tropes. Heck, from context I think this sequence is supposed to be set in Kentucky, but it could be Iowa or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania just as easily – as with the setting as with everything else, the player isn’t given much to attach this story and the people in it to a particular, specific context (admittedly, I did enjoy that one of the things the uncle rants about is California’s push for reparations for slavery – I’m peripherally involved in that campaign!)

The plot is also somewhat perplexing. There’s a fair bit of incident, but at least in my game, the closest there was to a Jay-focused climax was the moment when the uncle awkwardly tried to reach out and tell me that my dead mom loved me very much. It’s not a moment that landed especially heavily – it’s short, stereotypical, and it’s established that Jay’s mom died when he was a baby so his emotional engagement with her memory isn’t exactly clearly, all the more so since he doesn’t really respond directly to the overture. Then there’s another climax where a flashback allows you to relive the car crash that killed your mother, from the perspective of some EMTs, but of course you already generally know the outcome and the gameplay here is odd, with a light time-loop structure resetting things if you make the wrong choices in a couple of coin-flip situations. And then the game keeps going for a couple more scenes after that, before ultimately ending with a visit to your boyfriend’s warm, effusive grandmother who provides a non-uncliched contrast with Jay’s emotionally constipated family.

It just doesn’t feel to me like it adds up to much: why is the game about this Thanksgiving instead of the one before or the one after, say? What makes this particular collection of events – particularly the not-always-intuitively-integrated flashbacks – a single narrative? Admittedly, there are plot points I missed, based on a late-game conversation with some crossed-out options that I think corresponded to options I didn’t take earlier in the story, but this isn’t really the kind of game that invites replay through engaging mechanics or dramatic plot branching (the last screen indicates that instead of the ending I got, where Jay spends winter break house-sitting with his boyfriend in Venice Beach, there’s another one where they go on vacation to Mexico, which seems comparably fine?)

The game’s title, and the mechanic by which progress slowly fills out a graphic of a family tree, seems to indicate that it’s engaging with ideas around connection, but that’s a very broad idea, more a vibe than a theme – I felt like the game needed more of a defined central spine to anchor its disparate pieces. As a result, while I liked some of the ingredients, in the end for me String Theory didn’t serve up a nicely-cut piece of cake; more a haphazardly-chosen lump of frosted dessert that could have used more defined layers and a cleaner presentation.

A sober-minded critic might accuse Miss Gosling’s Last Case of over-egging the pudding. A cozy mystery that leans into the bucolic-English-village element of the subgenre surely needs at most one gimmick, but here we’ve got both ghost-solves-her-own-murder and cute-animal-sidekick-saves-the-day, as the eponymous sleuth can only make her will known beyond the grave by directing Very Good Boy Watson to the clues that will allow the bumbling bobbies to crack the case. Isn’t it, perhaps, a bit too much?

That sober-minded critic can go soak their head; this game is glorious fun, and I wouldn’t surrender either the acerbic Gosling or the doughty collie for the sake of restraint. They’re a lovely pair of partners, and the mystery they’re up against is no slouch, either.

The setup here is classic Christie – Miss Gosling is very clearly Marple-coded, and her mysterious semi-resurrection hasn’t slowed her brains or dulled her edge. A consulting detective who’s helped put more than her share of criminals behind bars, she’s quite sure that foul play must have been involved in the falling-down-stairs incident that led to her death, but the police are content to write it off as an accident. Of course, all that changes after a short tutorial section that sees Watson presenting clues to the investigators; unfortunately, they subsequently get the stick wrong-way-round once again and decide your modest estate must have provided the motive for the crime, and start investigating your nearest and dearest for the crime of murder. At that point the game proper opens up – you follow four distinct puzzle chains across your house, from the crime lab in the attic to the potentially-poisonous garden to the dark and foreboding root cellar, in search of the evidence that will clear the four key suspects and trigger the endgame.

It’s a traditional approach to a mystery, and one that leans into the strengths of IF as a medium (since you’re controlling a dog, you won’t have occasion to lament a weakly-implemented conversation system – you can bark, and that’s about it). The writing similarly is solidly genre-appropriate:

"You have a long history with Basil Hughes, and it’s in no small part thanks to your investigations that he’s risen through the ranks from Constable to Inspector. He has his eye on Chief Inspector now, but really, well…the man is far too close-minded, far too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion. Large and stout, with an immaculate uniform and an impressive moustache, he tries to look every bit the image of the modern constabulary."

There is novelty on offer here too, however. For one thing, this Dialog game is playable entirely with clickable links – context-sensitive actions appear whenever you address a particular item, beyond a few that are always available, and I found the implementation was spot on. Admittedly, the canine nature of the protagonist means there’s a rationale for not including every action you can possibly think of, which helps constrain the screen real-estate needed for this interface, and I’ll confess that I played by typing in my actions 95% of the time. But it’s still an exemplary implementation that makes it plausible to contemplate playing a big parser game with complex puzzles entirely on mobile or without a keyboard, which is quite the achievement – an even playing on my laptop, I still found it more convenient to click links from time to time, like to avoid having to write out SHOW PHOTO ALBUM TO DAVIS or what have you.

The puzzles are also not ones I’ve seen before. Sure, the elements are straightforward enough – you better believe that this house has a dumbwaiter, and good lord are there a lot of locked doors – but the way the problems are posed, and the ultimate solutions, take full advantage of Watson’s canine nature. Particular obstacles might hinge on your color-blindness or lack of thumbs, while your keen senses and peoples’ tendency to overlook a pet provide an edge. Some of the puzzles do trend a bit hard (there’s one in particular that I don’t think you can begin to solve without engaging in some unmotivated arson), but I almost always knew what I was meant to be doing, and the game did a great job making me feel clever as I worked through them (the objective-listing THINK command and full InvisiClues system also helped on that front, of course). There are a few places where Watson’s abilities seem slightly implausible – especially his ability to manipulate a torch or tape recorder – and there was a place or two where I thought an alternate solution might have been nice to provide (Spoiler - click to show)(I spent a lot of time trying to wedge open the root cellar door, which seems like it should have been possible), but this overall is a great set of puzzles that hold together remarkably well.

If I were to venture a sincere criticism, it’s that I wanted a more robust denouement – the endgame sequence revealed the villain and gave them their comeuppance in a satisfying way, but I would have enjoyed a more worked-out idea of what, if anything, is next for our dynamic duo. And given that the meat of the game is concerned with clearing the four suspects, it would have been lovely to see them on-screen and enjoy having saved the day. But for a game that comes in with such an overstuffed premise to leave the player wanting more is no mean feat, and I definitely do want more: this may be Miss Gosling’s last case, but on the strength of what’s here I’d gladly play some prequels (dare I suggest that given the list of beta testers, a flashback crossover with Lady Thalia might not be out of the question?)

I confess that I don’t really have a clear idea about what’s going on in this cops-and-robbers comic-strip game. Here’s what I now: the central agonist is a truck driver who’s conducting a delivery mission for his uncle, who appears to be some kind of crime boss (so far so good, but things are about to get much worse). The driver’s not just a but the Egocentric, which in this case doesn’t mean that he’s a superhero with solipsism powers (Marvel, call me), I guess explaining why he’s got compulsive urges including rewriting stray graffiti so that it’s about him, but I’m not sure how the player character, an aging policeman, knows that about the driver so that he’s able to use this tic against him, just how I’m not sure whether there’s meant to be an explanation for why the only way to win the game is to learn the driver’s phone number while locking yourself out of victory, then restart and use your out-of-world knowledge from the get-go. Much less do I understand why the blurb and genre tag say this is a satire. Are we making fun of self-centered truck drivers? Are they a thing? Or is it just a linear concept of time that’s in for a kicking?

Fortunately, while the substance of the game left me cold, I found the form sublime. I mentioned that it’s presented as a comic strip, but rather than having the player click through each panel in turn as they take actions, instead you always have a view of the four panels that make up the full row. Your options are listed under the panel where the protagonist is currently located, while the driver makes his way from left to right, taking actions as you do. This does a good job of keeping the suite of possibilities manageable, while ensuring that you don’t miss the driver’s activities – which is important since the game’s single puzzle hinges on manipulating his behavior. It’s also a really clever conceit for visualizing a series of complex spatiotemporal relationships: your moves left and right simply shift your location, whereas the driver is always moving forward in time.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of IF by any means, so possibly someone somewhere has previously attempted an interface like this, but even if it’s not wholly unique it’s still well out of the ordinary and makes for a compelling interplay between words and pictures – and I say that as someone who’s generally profoundly unsold on the importance of graphics in IF. The juxtaposition of this richly-interactive presentation with a flashback, which shows up as a traditional click-to-advance-to-the-next-panel sequence, just underlines how much more freedom this almost parserlike (or, dare I say, point-and-click like) approach affords. So yeah, the puzzle breaks some of the rules of good puzzle design, and the plot and characters are a bit inscrutable – admittedly, there’s apparently a prequel game or games that might provide needed context, but real talk, there’s a week left in the Comp and between this event, the Review-a-Thon, and ParserComp, I’ve been on the review train pretty much without stop since the beginning of July so this is not really a moment where I’m doing the extra credit – but A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is very much worth the couple minutes it takes to play just to experience the possibilities of its interface.

(Some spoilers)

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be,” muses a WWII-era American spy, who worked under such deep cover he might have just been a Nazi, in Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Welcome to the Universe isn’t masquerading as anything nearly so horrible – it presents itself as a slightly tarted-up version of ahead-of-its-time 1980s life sim Alter Ego, intercut with excerpts from a fictional sociology textbook – but it might have profited from this hard-won wisdom all the same, since for all that I’m pretty sure the author wanted me to find the meat of the game irritatingly superficial, spending half an hour gritting my teeth at the irritating superficiality on display didn’t prove the best on-ramp to the actual point the game’s trying to make.

The flip side of all this is that Welcome to the Universe gets points for verisimilitude. The conceit here is that the game is the brain-child of a Professor Balamer, a one-time sociological wunderkind whose groundbreaking theories have come under increasing criticism, and who has thus decided to take his arguments to the masses via the medium of electronic entertainment. The game-within-a-game steps you through an archetypal life vignette by vignette, starting from experiencing the loneliness of a baby being sleep-trained through playground philosophizing, from education to puberty to young adulthood, and then eventually on to maturity, potential parenthood, and senescence and death. Occasionally you’re given a binary choice that can help define your personality, like are you a homebody or traveler, someone who’s cool or lame, who’s content in your small town or anxious to enter a bigger world.

I’d characterize the prose here as ambitious – it’s trying to create a lot of context, philosophical resonance, and importance around what are ultimately just a handful of short scenes, the better to make them constitute a life in full, as well as work in some jokes. It’s occasionally successful, and always readable – here’s an early bit I liked, laying out the downsides of life in the crib:

"for some undeterminable reason, you have been left in this cold, damp room alone. Your face begins to sour. Loneliness is not fun. Loneliness is not what you signed up for."

Things get away from the author occasionally, though. Soon after the above, we get this:

"You lean into your mother’s embrace, her body a gentle fortress of claret and peel."

And beyond specific missteps like this, the overall effect can be alienating – seeing six-year-olds debating whether their small town is better than another based on the availability of fast food restaurants through an authorial voice that’s constantly cracking wise with e.g. Thornton Wilder references can’t help place the action at a remove. And sometimes that voice is much less clever than it thinks it is. Here’s a bit about puberty:

"Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don’t get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)"

The swerve in what “don’t get discouraged” means is a good joke, but come on, the New York Times doesn’t itself do studies.

I can’t rule out that these infelicities are diegetic, however. As mentioned above, after every couple of life-sim segments you get a page or so telling you more about the game’s author and his theories. The prose style here is very different, a note-perfect imitation of academic jargon complete with dated citations – it’s an enjoyable parody, but parody it is because the actual ideas being conveyed in this dressed-up language are very stupid. Balamer was obsessed with quantifying existence via standardized, binary properties that he alleges are universal across the human experience and can therefore lead to common understanding and mutual respect across difference, which depending on how you understand it is either banal or false – there are also some supernumerary elements to his thinking that appear to be warmed-over Durkheim or Mead, who were writing at the dawn of sociology’s creation as a field of study. Balamer, meanwhile, is meant to have been heralded as a great genius after his first major publication in 1999 – apparently it “shaped early postmodern research by merging New Journalism techniques with traditional quantitative methodology” so I guess add time travel to his list of talents – so yeah, it’s hard to take this stuff seriously.

Welcome to the Universe appears to be in on the joke that Balamer’s a blowhard; there are some late-game metafictional twists that suggest that he’s having second thoughts about his idea that everybody is reducible to a small number of data points, and the fact the life-sim that purports to reflect universal human experiences, and therefore point to the futility of conflict and the need for brotherhood, is very clearly recounting the life of a straight middle-class suburban white guy, seems like an intentional choice.

So yeah, this is a satire that spends most of its running time playing things straight, meaning that my notes are primarily ejaculations of frustration at how obviously incorrect its purported thesis is (admittedly, intercut with admiring comments about some of the nicer turns of phrase). I can see how some players might find it to be redeemed by its twist, and to the game’s credit it’s open-minded enough to give Balamer a bit of grace, allowing that his intuitions about the need for human connection and the inherent worth of life are correct even while making clear that he was going about all of this the wrong way. But, well, my experience of the game was primarily of it going that wrong way, and I can’t say that I felt the satirical project was sufficiently well-aimed to justify the annoyance: of the major bad ideologies currently out there in the world, “maybe the personality is reducible to a relatively small number of knowable variables” is probably not in the top 50 or 100. Even though Welcome to the Universe isn’t a bad game, it often does a very good job pretending to be one, and that’s a dangerous business.

Among my bad habits is my tendency, upon first visiting the house of an acquaintance, to ignore my host and make a beeline for the bookshelves to see what’s on offer. Of course I’m even less restrained when no actual people are involved, so I love nothing more than to look at book after book in a game’s library, the author’s dedication typically wearing out well before my interest wanes (er, my incomplete exploration of Forbidden Lore’s obfuscated stacks notwithstanding). So believe me when I say that I think An Account of Your Visit… gave me the most pleasure I’ve ever derived from an IF book-browse.

First off, the shelf in question is depicted in delightful ASCII art; there are fat books and thin books, interchangeable ones and unique ones, volumes lined up ramrod-straight and others tilted at a careless angle, making for an aesthetically pleasing invitation to click on all the titles to see what they are. And oh, what a smorgasbord! There are creepy classics like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with older antecedents like Machen and Dunsany, but by no means is this a hair-raising collection or even one restricted to real-world texts: there are books by Threepwood comma Guybrush as well as Threepwood comma Clarence, a deep-cut Quest for Glory reference in Healing Herbs by Erana, and to top it all off, you can even find the Joy of Cooking (well, a Joy, it’s got some recipes Julia Child never contemplated).

I don’t mention this admirable collation just for its own sake, though, but because it’s also something of a synecdoche for the game as a whole. While the framing is pure haunted-house – you get an invitation from a mysterious benefactor who’s mysteriously absent once you roll up to the eponymous manor, and of course no sooner has the door locked behind you than you’re waylaid by a talking cat, with a lively skull just one room over – the vibe is far more cozy than horrific, with characters like the fussy librarian Basil Fink-Nottle explicitly invoking Wodehouse and easygoing puzzles that would be at home in one of the friendlier 90s point-and-click adventures.

The game’s older-school inspirations are also visible in how it motivates the player – or rather, how it doesn’t; you don’t have any particular agenda in mind when you arrive and it takes a while for broader objectives to become clear. So at first you pretty much need to explore the house just because it’s the only thing to do. Fortunately, the gregarious characters and sprightly prose are all the draw I needed. The writing is peppered with risky but ultimately successful imagery, like the description of the driver who drops you off as a man “whose drawn down features bear the characteristics of wilting lettuce”, or saying of the building that “[i]t stretches toward the sky unevenly, like a cat arching its shoulders - cordial, but cautious.” And the already-fun cast I mentioned above is shortly joined by an adorable octopus, a raucous gang of furniture, and a raven, who seems to be the only one taking the proceedings even slightly seriously.

All of them, of course, either have something you need or are standing in your way until you’ve procured something they want. The main business of the game is thus just the standard IF loop of going to a new room, rifling through all the scenery, exhausting the conversation topics, and then moving to the next room to do it again, until you hit the limits of where you can explore and loop back to see what the knowledge and/or items you’ve gained in the meantime will unlock.

Structurally, An Account… is a parser-like choice game, but a very streamlined one. There’s an inventory but you rarely have more than four or five objects at a time, and almost always all you need to do with them is give them to somebody. The game also helpfully eliminates already-clicked options when you’ve exhausted them, which is a nice convenience but also means that revisiting locations to see if there’s anything new to do is a very quick and easy process. The result is a quick-playing game whose puzzles more or less solve themselves – it’s the kind of system ill-informed critics have in mind when they say you can’t do hard puzzles in Twine. They’re of course wrong about that – witness the work of Abigail Corfman and Agnieszka Trzaska, among many others – but also, sometimes easy and amusing fetch-quests perfectly fit a game’s vibe, as is the case here, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

There is a serious note introduced towards the end, as well as some long-deferred answers as to what exactly is going on, but the author avoids treacle and schmaltz. It helps that underneath their surface wackiness, the supporting characters are all loveable in their own way, and the literary antecedents the game isn’t shy about invoking primed me to look for some heart under the light comedy. It’s not an emotionally-effecting climax by any means, but it winds up tying a neat bow around the experience, adding just enough depth to make the hijinx stick in the memory. Sure, this is a game that’s content not to innovate and wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but it picks good inspirations, and integrates them with an impressive deftness of touch, like a jumble of exciting, enticing books crammed into an IKEA Expedit. I repeat: nothing wrong with any of that.

Some blurbs directly transmit what the game is going to be about, but others a little more challenging to decode. So it is with The Triskelion Affair, which starts out by saying you’ll be playing a “medieval detective”, implying a historical whodunnit; the genre tag, on the other hand, says it’s swords and sorcery, which put me in mind of mighty thews, dark sorcery, and greed. As I went through the game’s opening, going through an oddly-vague mission briefing that didn’t tell me what my mission was, courtesy of a martinet straight out of a British operetta, I looked for details that would clue me into the historical era of the setting, or indications that I’d soon be departing from my orders to engage in a bit of freebooting. This sense of uncertainty persisted until I finished the half hour or so prologue and entered into the game proper, which involves exploring a pillaged church to find a powerful magical artifact: in the backstory I was finally given before the adventure started in earnest, I learned that “a cleric, rogue, and two fighters traveled to St Cuthbert’s last week” bent on the same task as I was. So yeah, turns out I needn’t have worried, it’s just Dungeons and Dragons (specifically Grayhawk, I think, given that mention of St. Cuthbert), and the game features both the ropey implementation as well as the naïve but infectious enthusiasm you’d expect from a neophyte author motivated to produce a medium-sized game based on such a hoary premise.

Just to get the negatives out of the way first: this is an almost completely traditional game in terms of plot and gameplay, centering on an old-school dungeon crawl in search of a potent magic item of unexplained powers, which is also sought by some bad guys whose nature and motivations go completely unmentioned. The opening section adds a tiny bit of interest, allowing you to ride out from the headquarters of the army you’re apparently part of and stay a night in an inn before setting forth on your adventure, but it’s entirely on rails, and sticks so squarely to a generic DnD vibe that it doesn’t wind up providing much flavor.

The implementation is also pretty sloppy. Almost the first prompt in the game is “What is your full name, solider?”; there’s lots of unimplemented scenery, and examining certain object just gives a blank response rather than the default “you see nothing special” line; and there are mimesis-breaking touches like the sign in the stables reading “ask Hiram about Boarding”. Of course there’s an inventory limit, and odd touches like a lantern remaining the “south lantern” even after I’d picked it up from its perch on the wall. There’s nothing exactly game-breaking, but my progress was frequently blocked by a lack of clarity about what objects were around, wrestling with synonyms, or otherwise fighting the parser.

For all these criticisms, though, I can’t say I had a bad time with the Triskelion Affair. The puzzles are straightforward DnD stuff, with a bell-book-candle ritual livening up the plethora of locked doors with hidden keys, but sometimes you just want comfort food – similarly, the church cum dungeon is absolutely something you’ve seen before, but the attention to detail in terms of church architecture still made it fun to explore. And while it adds to the general slapdashery, I liked that there are a lot of red herrings and puzzle chains that don’t appear to go anywhere – I solved some puzzles to find a hidden pair of magical glasses, which didn’t do anything so far as I can tell. These optional bits ease the difficulty while making the game seem deeper than it is.

I can’t say in good conscience that the game design is strong throughout, mind: there are a couple read the author’s mind puzzles, and a few places where the game, annoyingly, seems to be actively trying to mislead the player (I’m thinking especially of getting the key from the fireplace in the hunting lodge, where the fact that X GRATE will give a different result than X FIREPLACE isn’t telegraphed, and the description saying that the fireplace was recently cleaned seems to indicate to the player that there’s nothing else to be found by poking around). And there’s a pointless yet annoying combat system that’s used for a single fight against a zombie, which you’re foreordained to win but which will see you drop a couple of inventory items you’ll later need to retrieve. Still, if you’ve got a soft spot in your heart for generic DnD adventure and a high tolerance for design and implementation issues that were old hat even in the 90s, the Triskelion Affair has a certain disheveled charm.

(Some unmarked spoilers here, it’s that kind of game).

Rarely has a game’s opening left me with more whiplash than 198BREW’s. After a cryptic couple of paragraphs telling me that my soul is suffering eternal and well-deserved torment, which smash-cuts to a fantasy-ish vignette where a queen urges her consort to kill and cannibalize her, control is handed to the player – only to find that you’re in a My Dumb Apartment game and need to get some coffee because you’re all out. It’s two different lazy late-90s parser IF tropes in one!

Well no, not really. While 198BREW does end once you finally get some sweet, sweet caffeine down your gullet, this is no wacky slice-of-life comedy; and while the first couple of locations are a mostly-nondescript flat with unnecessarily detailed fixtures, it quickly opens up, and that “mostly” is covering for some real eye-poppers. As the prologue indicates, neither the player character nor the world they inhabit are quite like our own, and the gameplay as well isn’t typical parser fare. Sure, getting to the end requires surmounting a series of obstacles laid out as a daisy-chain of fetch quests and medium-dry-goods puzzles, but while your next step is generally obvious, the context for what you’re doing is often left deliberately incomplete, and the outcomes of each action are surreally divorced from the traditional logic of cause and effect. Midway through the game, you’ll stab a woman because a painting asked you to and receive three quarters for your trouble, and that’s only the weirdest puzzle by like 20%.

This is the game’s greatest success, I think – it commits to its enigmatic, downbeat theme, successfully infusing it across the prose, plot, and gameplay. This is the kind of world where just about everybody is trapped in a private hell, mostly of their own making, and their external circumstances match their internal torment. 198BREW’s subtitle – The Age of Orpheus – seems to conceal, but actually reveals, the thematic focus: we’re concerned here less with the best-known portion of the myth, where Orpheus journeys to Hades to rescue his lover, and more with the messy aftermath, where after having lost Eurydice through his own mistakes, he’s torn limb from limb and his still-living head floats down the river, singing lamentations all the while. The player character, you see, like many of the other significant characters, is cursed with a vicious sort of immortality, which means that they displace the mind and soul of anyone who eats their flesh and drinks their blood (in fact, this Dumb Apartment isn’t quite your own; it belonged to your now-dead lover, whose body you now inhabit after she willingly butchered and consumed you). Others are doomed to remain breathing even as cancer wracks their systems beyond what once were the limits of human endurance, while some fall victim to time-loops making a single day an endless, repeating ocean. And then there’s the Evangelion-style ruined mecha crashed in the public park, with a perhaps-still-living pilot deathlessly entombed within.

There’s a fair bit of complicated worldbuilding to establish, in other worlds, and while the approach is a little idiosyncratic – examining prominent objects often prompts multi-paragraph exposition that ranges far beyond describing what you see – it’s well managed, doling out enough details to help you understand what’s going on while avoiding didactically spelling things out. I can’t say I have my head fully wrapped around every detail of the setting, with some questions remaining about that aforementioned sentient painting and those mechs, but I much prefer that to having the mood ruined with dry lore, and I did get the sense that everything here does connect, even if those connections aren’t fully visible to the player.

Beyond over-detailed infodumping, this story is also the kind of thing that would easily be ruined by inadequate prose; happily, it’s largely up to the task, remaining engaging even when there’s not much to directly narrate, as in this near-abandoned train station:

"It’s quiet. Not even the storm’s wailing can breach this place. The only sounds are the echoes of your own footsteps. With every click-clack, the station feels like it grows in size — the ceiling grows higher, the steps further away. The longer you look around, the more convinced you are time itself is somehow expanding, too; the grand clock above the ticket booths seems to move slower and slower as you stare at it."

On the gameplay side of things, well, things are a bit thinner. As mentioned above, your coffee quest ultimately requires you to jump through an increasingly-absurd set of hoops. Each step is generally signposted quite directly, with whichever NPC whose desires you currently need to assuage spelling out what you should do next, even where their ability and desire to provide this direction is a bit unclear. With that said, I sometimes ran into challenges due to the game’s less-than-robust implementation. There’s lots of scenery missing, important NPCs don’t appear to actually be people under the Inform world model, a cat bowl is “hardly portable”, the player has a default “as good looking as ever” description, and as for actions, well, that assassination unwittingly provided one of the few bits of levity to crack the game’s bleak surface:

> hit woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to hit the strange woman.

> hit woman

Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

> cut woman

Cutting him up would achieve little.

> cut woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to cut the strange woman.

> use knife

You can’t use that.

> use knife on woman

You probably shouldn’t go around stabbing things for no reason.

In principle I am right there with you, game, yet here we are (KILL WOMAN did the business, so that brought the mood right back down again).

With that said, these are all typical first-time-author issues – nothing a bit of experience won’t improve, and nothing that substantively reduced the effectiveness of the game. For all that I admire 198BREW’s commitment to subverting expectations and leaning hard into a mournful, uncomfortable vibe, though, I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I have other similarly bleak, well-written works. Partially that’s because a preoccupation with the downsides of eternal life is theoretically interesting but by itself isn’t that viscerally engaging to me – when it’s clear this is a fictional way of talking about survivor’s guilt or depression or what have you, I think it’s a trope that can work, but this game is so defined by negative emotions and negative space that it doesn’t really communicate what positive things the player character, or most of the others for that matter, has lost. And the game’s themes seem to mirror these subjective experiences, basically just saying that life sure is a bummer.

The one potential exception is a minor character: a cameraman who’s filming the rally of a doomed political candidate who rails against the corrupt status quo, and who hands you a ticket when you feed him a keyword. The cameraman is a member of the orthodox church that upholds said status quo, but some of the things the politician is saying make sense to him. He’s listening, he’s feeling torn, he’s questioning things – he seems like a person whose fate isn’t sealed and whose mind could still be changed, someone who still has things he cares about (heck, he even makes a pass at the player character before they make their lack of interest plain). Let the world as a whole be just as fucked, but I wouldn’t mind playing a sequel about that guy.

I’ve said before that I like the aesthetics of horror, but can sometimes be put off by the gore, suffering, bad actions, and trauma that true afficionados of the genre enjoy. So while “investigate spooky goings-on at an old British pub” is sufficiently tame of a premise that the hardcore fans would sniff at it, it’s very much up my alley. The vibe is sufficiently cozy that it took me a while to realize that the setting was contemporary, since the sixty-something landlord has old-fashioned patterns of speech, the bar fittings are timeless, and the names of the beers could go either way – Stinky Ferret is either the brand of some terminally-ironic hipsters, or a Victorian concern proudly upholding a local tradition about the time a sick mustelid crawled into one of the fermentation vats and died.

Apparently said beer is supposed to be good, though, so the fact that it’s gone sour is the low-key inciting incident for this decidedly low-key adventure. After confirming that the barman’s taste buds aren’t misfiring, you can poke around through the pub and come across a bit more evidence of strange goings-on – I won’t spoil them since they’re one of the main pleasures of a short game, but it’s all stuff that would be right at home in a self-published book of local legends you pick up at a small town’s visitor’s center. The implementation in this section is very solid: there aren’t a lot of different scenery items described, but those that are there are nicely detailed, and I never wrong-footed the parser by trying to look under the bed or open the windows. Similarly, there’s a fair bit of social interaction with Jack, the landlord, as well as his wife, the barmaid, and eventually (inevitably) the vicar. Conversations are conducted via the sometimes-tricky ASK/TELL system, but between a handy TOPIC command that orients you to potential avenues to pursue without simply spelling out the options, and the characteristically-thoughtful anticipation of questions the player might ask, it all felt quite smooth.

There’s eventually a shift to a shorter, more dramatic section, which involves the game’s one true puzzle; this has at least two solutions, though I hit a small snag that meant I missed one of them when first playing the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I tried to X STAIRS from the bottom, not the top, since I’d missed the subtlety that Will tripped before actually starting to climb down). Still, the alternate solution is logical enough, and Bad Beer is forgiving here too – should you fail to solve the puzzle and get the worse ending, the post-game options let you rewind and try again even if you didn’t think to make a save.

So Bad Beer is an efficient game that sets a pleasantly chilling mood, elaborates on its premise, throws in a small twist, and then wraps up while leaving the audience wanting more. I think there would have been room to lean in to the drama a little more while still maintaining its family-friendly vibe, and possibly provide a bit more of a rationale for some of the game’s events (Spoiler - click to show)(in particular, I’m still confused about why the player character is able to change the past, rather than just witnessing it, and how the paradox of preventing the haunting that instigated the time-travel in the first place is meant to be resolved). But sometimes a short game that doesn’t belabor itself is just the palette-cleanser one is after; this late in the Comp especially, I can’t complain on that score.

Is there a better setting for anything than Antarctica? It’s obviously aces for horror: the isolation and existential precariousness of the Ice ramps up the social-paranoia body horror of the Thing and the cosmic vertigo of At the Mountains of Madness. It’s just as obviously the ne plus ultra for wilderness adventure, from Shackleton’s thrilling journey of survival to Scott’s dramatic narrative of, er, not survival. Now Winter-Over demonstrates that the South Pole works just as well for a psychologically-driven whodunnit. What’s next – sitcoms? Reality shows? Infomercials?

This choice-based game wastes little time on setup or backstory laying out your life before coming to Antarctica – all that matters is that you’re something of a veteran and used some of your connections to bring your brother, who’s a bit of a screw-up, along on your latest expedition. So when he turns up dead one evening with an unexplained head-wound, of course you’re not going to take the base administrator’s advice and just wait ten days until an investigative team can fly in from New Zealand – despite the fact that the mental pressures of spending a whole winter at the bottom of the world were already starting to get to you, you launch your own search for the killer.

This makes for a classic setup, but the polar milieu helps justify many of the genre’s conventions. Nobody’s cell phones are connected to the Internet, for one thing, cutting out a whole lot of needed contrivances, and the isolation of the facility means that the cast of suspects can be kept manageable and close to hand once the progress of your investigation drives the murderer to take a more active role. The paranoid, desperate vibe that comes from knowing you’re sleeping mere feet from whoever killed your brother also helps increase the urgency, and justifies the game’s light self-care mechanics – an always-visible bit of the interface tells you your current stress level, which you can manage by sleeping or doing some non-investigative activities; I never let it get too high, so I’m not sure if a game-ending breakdown is actually possible, but a lot of the descriptions do shift based on elevated stress to underline how ragged you’ve become, which feels like an elegant way to incorporate the mental toll of the investigation. Contrarily, there are a few times when you need to build rapport with a suspect before they’ll trust you with a clue. It’s a logical enough turn to take the plot, but the relationship-building mechanics felt a little too bare and transactional to me – if you were always choosing who to hang out with, it might come off more natural, but since that stuff takes time away from the investigation I pretty much only made a gardening date or shared a stock-room shift with someone when I was intending to pump them for information.

Outside of those few exceptions, though, most of what you do during your time on the base is talk. There are a dozen or so people around, but many of them have verifiable alibis, so your investigation quickly comes to focus on five key suspects. Interviewing them to find out about their whereabouts on the night of the murder, and probing for any hidden motives or animosity they might be harboring, takes up the first few days of the game and opens up a bunch of new leads – going to the non-suspect personnel to verify the things they’ve said. There are a few puzzles involving computers or physical evidence, but even these are resolved through social means, since you’re typically forced to ask for the assistance of characters with the relevant skills to progress. There are points in the game where the amount of information all this talking turned up was a little hard to hold in my head; fortunately, there’s a handy sidebar that summarizes everything you’ve learned, including breaking down the names and schedules of all of the characters. I didn’t need to use it much, but I appreciated having the security blanket there in case I did.

As for the characters, they’re a nicely-rounded lot. The dialogue trees aren’t especially sprawling, and a few of them definitely are just playing bit parts, but the authors do a lot with a little, efficiently communicating Christian’s slight awkwardness or Victor’s incipient mania without laying things on too thick. I especially enjoyed the grounded humor the doctor, Matt, brought to the table:

“Everything was okay between the two of you?” you press. “You hadn’t fought recently or anything?”
“No,” he says. “What about you?”
“Me?” you say (sounding kind of stupid even to yourself). “What do you mean?”
“I’m just asking you the same thing you asked me,” he says.
“Yeah, but why?” you say, unable to keep the frustration from your tone.
He shrugs. “I don’t know, why did you ask?”
You sigh. “You know what, forget it.”

And yeah, there are jokes. While the plot and overall mood is grim, Winter-Over isn’t too heavy; the death of your brother is even slightly underplayed, I suspect intentionally because depicting it with all the shades of psychological realism would make for an intense, unfun experience at odds with the Miss Marple gameplay on offer. Still, there are moments of real threat, especially in a few gripping scenes where the murder tries to turn the tables on you, and the ending, where the protagonist finally opens themself back up to feeling the entirety of what they’ve gone through. I wouldn’t have minded a few more opportunities for the game to play up its brooding setting – there are one or two memorable set pieces that take advantage of being in Antarctica, but locations like the observation deck go mostly unused in the main gameplay, meaning you spend most of your time wandering around corridors that could as easily be on a spaceship or under the sea as at the pole.

The mystery itself, meanwhile, is a good one, with methodical investigation yielding up secrets as well as red herrings; it plays fair, too, with a solution that doesn’t change based on your actions. It’s perhaps tuned a bit easy, since I cracked the case halfway through the ten-day time limit, but I did get slightly lucky in the order I attempted things (Spoiler - click to show)(look, if you introduce one of the scientists by saying they hang out with the boss a bunch because “fiftysomething white guys need other fiftysomething white guys with whom to discuss football or how weird it is that their young relations aren’t buying houses or whatever,” of course I’m going to suspect one or both of them of being the baddie), and spending the remaining time running down other leads remained engaging. The ultimate motive is perhaps a little deflating, and the fact that the killer seems reticent to directly harm you at first when they’ve just brutally murdered your brother feels a bit strange, but it’s all put together reasonably enough to reward logical deduction (the only goof I noticed is that (Spoiler - click to show)even after I’d twigged that Jack was the killer by showing him the threatening note, the narration still gave him the benefit of the doubt when he lied about the ruler piece used to wedge my door closed).

All told this is a smooth, satisfying whodunnit. Sure, some of its mechanics might be more robust than others, but it executes the tricky feats of plate-spinning the genre requires with aplomb; similarly, while possibly more could have been done to leverage the polar setting, what’s here is more than enough to make for a memorably claustrophobic investigation. Now, will the streamers pick up the baton, with Death Comes to McMurdo launching on Netflix soon? Only time will tell.

(Oh, and let me close this review with bonus appreciation to the included bibliography, especially the article about the 100-year old “almost edible” fruitcake; call me old-fashioned but in my book something can be “almost edible” about as easily as someone can be “almost pregnant”).

If I were feeling cheeky, I would say that the biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn. But look, I take the Reviewer’s Code seriously, and while it’s nice to have a laugh every now and again it would be wrong to mislead you like this: no, the biggest problem is the prose. It’s awkward and flabby, incapable of expressing an idea without larding it up with extraneous commas, asides, and Big Fantasy Nouns, and frequently employing jarring vocabulary that confuses things further. Like, good luck getting through this sentence:

"A bloody past redeemed through the decision of the last Commander-Trainer, Grinhul the Wisest, who in the 22th year before the Great Peace, choose to surrender the Hall to a Great Flight instead of a brave but sterile last stand, saving the life and future of the hundreds of trainees, and the buildings where, in the 8th year since the Great Peace, the Arcanorum was founded."

I’ve said before that generic fantasy is already a genre that I find less than engaging, and this is about the least-engaging way to deliver it. But even when First Contact isn’t plastering exposition over every available surface, the prose lets it down – it smothers the few moments of drama or characterization with its syntactically snarled style.

OK, with that out of the way we can let our hair down. The second-biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core… No, wait, sorry, I’m wrong again. Actually the second-biggest problem is the content warning. “Depiction of breastfeeding” is like, a tired mom feeding her newborn, but what we’ve got here is very very different, and prospective players should know that going in.

Right, for real this time: the third-biggest problem with First Contact is that it doesn’t have enough soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn. This is not a global judgment I apply to all works of art, mind; I did not set down Middlemarch and say to myself “that was good, but it would have been even better if there was a scene of Dorothea tenderly sucking at Mary Garth’s breast” (I’m not saying it wouldn’t be even better; it’s just that I’ve never really considered the question). But in the present context, the breastfeeding is by far the most interesting stuff in the game and seems to be the whole raison d’etre for the work – while I’m not personally in the market for sexy throuple shenanigans kicked off by a transparent “oh no, we all forgot dinner, let’s shove our boobs in each others’ mouths and drink” plot, I’m guessing that’s an underserved audience in IF and they have as much claim to get their rocks off as anyone else. I just feel bad that there’s only like two and a half scenes relevant to their interests in First Contact, and they’re reasonably tame to boot.

In fairness, this is partially a default judgment because I felt like the other elements of the game didn’t do much to justify its existence. There’s no gameplay to speak of, with choices at most letting you pick what order you’d like the ~worldbuilding~ to be shoved down your throat. The plot is likewise quite thin – the narrator, an elf with super special magic powers, goes to wizard school, meets and is immediately attracted to a demon-girl and an angel-girl through the power of authorial fiat, gets subjected to several interminable infodumps about stuff that happened 10,000 years ago, has an interminable conversation about the aforesaid infodumps once she’s able to escape, which is mercifully interrupted by a gauzily-described threeway, and then there’s a fourteen-year time jump and she graduates. Meanwhile, characterization-wise, the elf is an elf; the demon is a demon; the angel is an angel; there’s a dwarf who’s a dwarf and a dragon who’s a dragon, too. It’s the kind of lore-heavy, personality-free backstory that you see overeager 13-year-olds generate for their the DnD characters, full of incident but with no real conflict or reason to care about any of it.

The porny stuff is occasionally interesting though. The legendary event that ended the time of war and ushered in the Great Peace was a feast where all the female participants from every different race contributed their breast milk into a giant ewer, and then they all drank from it, for example – and then the dragon headmistress has everybody re-enact that in the school’s opening assembly (this is a fantasy world where everyone is always lactating, even the reptiles). One of links you can click on is titled “About Lasonthe’s Bosom”! Magical powers are apparently linked to (biologically determinate?) gender, a concept memorably introduced by the phrase “what matters is my relationship and feelings towards the natural force lying raw and untapped behind my pubes.”

Sure, the weakness of the writing means it’s hard to take the world or the characters seriously, but look, everyone’s enthusiastically consenting to everything that’s happening even if I as a reader would prefer that things slow down – it’s fine, and like I said, if you pushed it further, fixed the prose, added a clearer content warning, and didn’t make readers wade through all the gobbleydegook about the Gift of the Subtle and the Arcanorum Senate and the “around 170 Nests and houses” of Rym Iylem and the precise uniform insignias worn by the fourteen different class-years and a 10,000-year-old teddy bear (I guess Theodore Roosevelt exists in this world, but Title IX definitely doesn’t), you’d wind up with something respectable to offer soft-core lesbian lactation-kink porn enthusiasts.

It’s been more than twenty years since my very first IF Comp – it was 2002, I was just out of college, and characteristically I played and reviewed all the games though that was a lot easier when there were fewer than 40 games and I didn’t have a kid. A couple days ago I was trying to explain how the Comp was different back then, and beyond the rules changes and the rise of choice games, I found myself struggling to communicate that beyond the classics people still go back and play, even the parser puzzle games just had a different vibe, were riffing on different things, than the ones you see now. Well, I wish I’d waited a bit to have that conversation, because it would have been easier to just point to Awakened Deeply, as accurate a time capsule from the early-aughts IF scene as you could imagine.

So yeah, this is a game where you wake from cryosleep to find that your spaceship is in peril; where there are no on-screen NPCs you interact with; where the main gameplay mechanic is getting through locked doors, and the cool stuff the PC does happens automatically in cutscenes; and where there’s absolutely no introductory text setting the scene or suggesting you type ABOUT. To its credit, there are no inventory limits or hunger timers or ways to make the game unwinnable – maybe it’s more progressive than the average 2002 game, now that I think about it – but this is a series of traditional sci-fi puzzles in a traditional sci-fi plot (there’s a small twist – what if the Federation from Star Trek were evil? – but it’s telegraphed so early and heavily I don’t feel bad mentioning it), with competent but slightly clumsy execution meaning that occasionally-evocative descriptions underlining the isolation of space terminate in blunt infodumps like:

"You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here."

(There are a lot of notes in this game – finding hastily-scribbled missives or prematurely-terminated audio diaries that recorded the attack that eliminated all other life on the ship is the game’s main storytelling technique).

Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but I think for all this Awakened Deeply does have some charm. It is an utterly sincere, guileless game whose author’s enthusiasm is visible in every description. Of course one of your dead friends is named Riker, since what’s more fun than a Star Trek reference? Of course there’s a climactic, barely-justified moral dilemma toggling between a good ending and a bad ending. Of course there are gratuitous, trivially-reversable deaths. Of course the map is laid out with four symmetric branches leading off from a main hub. This is basic basic IFing, but put together by someone who sure seems tickled pink at the idea of being able to make something like this, and you know, it makes a difference.

Don’t get me wrong – my memory’s already starting to sand off the details in order to deposit Awakened Deeply into the Big Bin O Space Games I never think about. And there are some implementation weaknesses (using a keycard to unlock a door was a bit awkward, I suspect partially due to an overreliance on Instead rules) and typos, though nothing too major on either front. One or two puzzles also could be much better clued, at least as to the syntax required (Spoiler - click to show)(X DIRECTION is not a frequently-used command). The limited nature of the game’s ambition is also impossible to ignore – the ABOUT text even explicitly says the author was inspired by Star Trek and Planetfall, and it’s pretty clear the idea is to just make a game that scratches some of those same itches. So I definitely prefer the way we live now, but for all its flaws Awakened Deeply provided an opportunity for me to check in with how things used to be.

I couldn’t tell you where I was when Y2K clicked over. For New Year’s Eve 1998, I’m pretty sure I was at a high-school friend’s house in New Jersey, a bunch of us hanging out and catching up now that we’d been at college for a few months. Two years after that is I think when my college gaming group’s tradition of getting together to game on New Year’s Eve kicked off, so we were playing Changeling: the Dreaming in Pasadena. The big, endlessly-hyped party-like-it’s-1999 New Years, though? By process of elimination I guess I must have just been at home with my mom and sister, and if I try hard I can perhaps summon up a ghost of a memory of feeling relief that the many Y2K Bug worst-case scenarios hadn’t come to pass (I’d read a couple articles about how our nuclear reactors mostly still ran COBOL).

Fin and Jo, a pair of down-on-their-luck twentysomethings trying to hold onto their dreams, and each other, under the weight of dead-end jobs and familial disapproval, are likewise looking forward to the end of the millennium – they’ve got plans to meet up outside the supermarket where Jo works and celebrate together. But unlike my anticlimactic experience, they’re in for a life-changing evening after which things will never be the same again, at least if they can both make it to midnight.

That description, I fear, might not communicate much about what the game is like. When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves is an odd duck, which is no bad thing, but it is hard to sum up. I squinted in confusion when I saw that the blurb on the Comp page listed its genres as slice of life, crime, and time travel, as those aren’t typically tastes that go together, but actually they mesh in a simple way: the grounded setting of your council flat and its environs, along with the quotidian struggles of the main characters, take care of the first element, and the crime that interrupts their New Year’s plans is a plausible enough addition. As for the time travel, well, this is that parser-game standby, the loop game, where failure to ring in the year 2000 as you’d intended somehow leads to the clock rewinding and the day starting over.

While this supernatural contrivance isn’t explained, or at least if it is I missed it, it does make for a relatively straightforward plot: each run through the loop allows you to get a new item or two that in turn can potentially alter how the next loop starts, until after two or three properly-executed redos you wind up with one or more of the items needed to solve the climactic puzzle and keep some robbers from ruining your evening (there are several different ways to accomplish this, leading to distinct endings). The map is small, and there aren’t that many possible things to try, so while the clueing can sometimes feel a little light, it doesn’t take too much effort to hit on at least one of the options. Meanwhile, at the start of each run-through you get a short except of a conversation between Fin and Jo, often talking about their hopes for the future or fears about the present, which present you (as Fin) with several different dialogue options – the prevailing emotional tenor of your choices apparently winds up affecting the mood, if not the actual events, of whichever of the main endings you get.

Thematically, though, there’s a lot going on, and I’m not sure it all worked seamlessly for me. The relationship feels like it’s meant to be the central element of the piece, but the emotional drama of those sections have to sit alongside the standard medium-dry-goods puzzle-based gameplay, and the often-slapstick time-loop conceit (sometimes the reset happens after violence has been visited on you and/or Jo, which led me to experience some desensitization). While I found the leads appealing and was pulling for them to get to a better situation, the out-of-context dialogues felt like they weren’t well integrated into the meat of the game – when you meet Jo while wandering around, she, like most of the NPCs, doesn’t respond to too many dialogue options, and is understandably focused on getting away from the crime scene – and somehow often struck me as abstract, despite there being some solid details included about the lovers’ lifestyle and class. Or maybe fuzziness is a better word? Like, here’s one of the first ones:

“I’m so excited! what do you think the new year’ll bring us?” She quirked an eyebrow. Of course, I knew what she was pondering on right now. In her voice was the well-known trace of uncertainty.

1 – You asked me about a million times, but still I don’t know.
2 – There are a lot of conspiracy theories out, but most tales are based on facts, Jo.
3 – One thing I know for sure is, Jo, that I truly love you with all my heart.
4 – I know what you mean, Jo, but I don’t believe we’ll have any serious problem tomorrow.

There’s a lot that’s underexplained here, which can sometimes be an effective strategy, but here it stood in the way of my investment. The vagueness I felt about the tenor of the dialogues made the relationship mechanics hard for me to parse: per the game’s help menu, there are four different moods you can pick in each dialogue menu, always consistently mapped to the same numbers, meaning that dialogue option number 1 is meant to be consoling, number 2 is inflaming, 3 is objecting, and 4 is insisting. The differences between these categories are muddy, I think, and I had a hard time figuring out how my choices were going to be interpreted by the game.

This weakness in the prose isn’t restricted to just these sequences. While it’s perfectly adequate for the puzzle-based sections of the game – albeit a bit too ready to drop immersion-breaking Easter Eggs, like having the criminals quote Pulp Fiction – there are occasional tense or other grammar errors, and it sometimes struggles to convey the emotional heft of the relationship, landing firmly on the tell vs. show side of the dichotomy:

Most of the time I called her Jo. We’d fallen in love with each other since the graduating class. We both left school at sixteen, then we decided to live together, mostly because Jo had increasing troubles with her father. Jo’s father didn’t like me, and he had other plans for her future, including whom she would have to love and whom not. Though we each earned quite good certification at school, we didn’t manage to get good apprenticeship positions… No matter, I truly love her with all my heart and I was sure she’s the woman of my life.

So this quirky game didn’t quite win my heart, despite having a unique premise and fairly solid implementation (the scenery is a little thin in a few places and as mentioned the number of dialogue topics could be expanded, but the only real bug I ran into was (Spoiler - click to show)the game letting me light a firecracker without having a lighter on me). The challenge inherent in that premise, though, and the originality with which the game pursues it, certainly is memorable, though – far more so than my Y2K, at least.

I firmly believe that ideas are a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to IF: it’s not too hard to come up with a clever, compelling premise, just as it’s very easy to completely flub a promising concept with weak implementation, half-baked design, and boring prose. Execution is all, I’ve been known to say, stroking my chin and self-satisfied at my hard-won wisdom. And yet, for all that I believe that’s true when assessing the fundamental quality of a game (whatever that means), there are practical issues that arise when trying to writeup up said assessment in a review: for a game that trades on innovative mechanics or complex, heady themes, it makes sense to spend reviewing real-estate describing and interpreting these novelties without deigning to pass judgment. For a regular-degular game, though, that at a high level is similar to a dozen others I, and basically everyone, has played before, it’s hard to avoid a review turning into a straightforward, largely uninteresting evaluation of whether it’s any good or not, because there’s not much else of interest to talk about.

The Master’s Lair has a few aspects that help it stand out from the crowd, for good or ill (smaller examples for good: the player character is cheerfully amoral, a wizard’s apprentice upset at his treatment and therefore bent on stealing his erstwhile teacher’s prized artifact. Now ill: the game’s offered exclusively as a download from the Microsoft Store, which I think I previously hadn’t known existed). It’s also written in a custom parser engine that can in theory toggle without interruption into choice-based mode, where you click on object names and use a multiple-choice interface to build a command instead of just typing it.

But for the most part, this is a Zorkian-in-the-zany-sense romp around a wizard’s lab, collecting spell components and artifacts in order to circumvent a series of medium-dry-goods puzzles and lift Foozle’s folderol. There’s a maze with a gimmick. There are safe combinations to be guessed. There are rituals to be studied in books and performed at a workbench, with the appropriate ingredients to hand. It’s classic stuff that can certainly be appealing, but it doesn’t really win much goodwill just from its setup, given how generic it appears. And so my brain inevitably starts turning over the question of whether it’s a good version of these tropes, for lack of anything else to analyze.

To jump ahead to the end, I think it does fine, but there are a few questionable decisions in its design and interface that wind up making the Master’s Lair less engaging than it could have been. Starting out with the narrative level, it fritters away its antihero framing more or less immediately; the PC makes snide comments about the eponymous Master throughout the game, and does succeed in stealing his most powerful magical item, but this is just a thin patina of flavor sprinkled across a very standard adventure: the “bad guy stealing stuff” angle only lasts maybe ten minutes, at which point you could be swapped for the Zork guy with no real difference in behavior. The twist at the halfway mark further undermines any ambiguity you could read into the piece, with the Master’s vices expanding from being gross with the female students he teaches (bad enough as that is), to grand-guignol horrors that indicate that he’s taken inspiration from the seminal Mountain Goats/John Vanderslice EP Moon Colony Bloodbath (Spoiler - click to show)(yeah he’s running an organ-harvesting colony on the moon). It’s a tonal left turn that left me with whiplash, and also flattens out any sense that the protagonist was anything out of the ordinary.

At the implementation level, the variety of interface options is impressive – after struggling through Sidekick, this click-to-build-a-command approach felt much more intuitive to me, and there’s apparently even a voice-activated mode that I didn’t get a chance to test out. But while my preference would have been to stick with the classic parser approach, I ultimately found myself using the link-based interface due to bugs and design oversights. For example, an early scene listed a “low building” as being present, and highlighted the words to indicate I could interact with it, but X LOW, X BUILDING, and X LOW BUILDING all let to confusing errors. Clicking on it eventually revealed that this was just an incompletely-implemented synonym for the hut that’s also in that area, so I could have saved myself some trouble. Similarly, there’s a “high platform” that’s really an “ornate platform”, not that you’d know from the room description, among many other examples, some of which extend to not being sure which verbs would work until I checked out what the interaction menus were suggesting (there’s a switch that gives a deeply unhelpful you-can’t-do-that response when you PUSH it, since only PRESS will work). These tendencies were so pronounced that by the halfway mark I was only using the parser for commands I knew the game would accept, like navigation, using the multiple-choice interface as the most honest guide to what I was seeing and what I could do with it.

Admittedly, some of these implementation hiccups might reflect incomplete translation; Master’s Lair was originally a German game so it’s great to see it available in English, but it still throws up the occasional awkward phrase or untranslated chunk of text. These are no big deal in of themselves, but do suggest that there’s something of a mismatch between the modeled world and the text used to describe it. There were also a few times when I had to go to the hints because the language led me to create a mental picture entirely at odds with what the game thought it was saying – I had no idea what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show) tiny sugar tongs because their operation has to do with the big gem you’re tying to steal, and I hadn’t thought the gem was that small (I’m also not sure whether there are in-game cues about what you’re supposed to do with the gem once you steal it).

With that said, the puzzle design is generally good and has some fresh elements – as the blurb says, a number of the challenges involve talking with, and leveraging the talents of, some magically-reanimated stuffed animals, and I had a fun time with all of these. The scavenger hunts to get the reagents you need for the various plot-advancing spells also pass the time in an entertaining way, although the instructions for how to actually cast the spells once you’ve got the goods could stand to be spelled out (that also meant walkthrough time for me, admittedly also because I think the ritual-critical mortar and pestle aren’t actually mentioned in the room where they’re found). But there are some read-the-authors’ mind moments too, like how exactly you’re supposed to use the milky-glass box or what the math clue the rustling shadow gives you decodes to. The in-game hint menu provides some guidance, and there’s a separate walkthrough too, though, so at least I was rarely completely stuck for long. But again, it’s a mixed bag.

I have a bunch of additional specific examples of everything I’ve mentioned above, but nothing else I noted down that would fundamentally shift how you view a game like this – again, it’s pretty much exactly the game it appears to be, modulo that ill-advised twist that winds up mostly just shunting you into a slightly different flavor of the kind of story you’re already experiencing. If that’s your jam, good news, Master’s Lair will scratch the itch, but if not, you might find your critical faculties getting overly-judgey about its real but not especially major flaws, if only to have something new to think about.

Spoilers).

I am having trouble figuring out how to start this review. Verse is a prototypical quote-unquote challenging work, you see, set in a uniquely-dystopic future with minimal infodumping to provide the player much in the way of orientation, featuring enigmatic gameplay that equates translating Romanian poetry with grokking alien civilizations (I deploy that gerund with intent; see below), and is written in prose that’s simultaneously intensely concrete and absolutely unhinged. It all emerges from an ideological stew encompassing Marxism, Christianity, Kristevan abjection, and maybe even New England Transcendentalism, if you squint (that’s a transparent eye-ball joke). The opening lines put me in mind of Neuromancer (“…cathode green on dead pixel gray…”); the first location could be a riff on Zork (“You are standing in an open field east of an office building and west of a pier”), and there’s a later incident that could be a wry inversion of the climax of Eco’s Name of the Rose.

So yeah, this is a polysemous work, overloaded with meaning, and the difficulty isn’t that I don’t have the first idea of what it’s trying to do – it’s that I’ve got a dozen different ideas all vying for primacy. Verses is a game that begs to be interpreted, generously offering itself up to the player, but also manages the neat trick of remaining inexhaustible; it wants to be read, not solved.

To see what I mean, let’s pick a strand at random. It’s hard to go wrong with Christianity [citation needed] so why not start there? In the main section of the game, your character, an analyst who uses a text-based terminal to interface with unknown objects and artifacts to plumb their secrets, does their work at the transept of an abandoned church. This is the point where the axes of the church intersect, adjacent to the altar to the east, with the nave, where the laity worship, to the west, and chapels devoted to particular patron saints to the north and south. Before each session, one of your colleagues brings you a specially-prepared biscuit, flat and rounded – though late in the game, the process breaks down somewhat and you consume raw meat instead. And there’s a mysterious mutant who dispenses wisdom, and she’s marked by a wound: “a rivulet of dark green fluid pulses from a stoma in her side,” echoing and palette-swapping Christ’s stigmata.

None of this is especially obscure – the game is more or less jumping up and down to draw attention to the ways that these analysis sessions are sacraments of communion, standing between the sacred and the profane, and signpost that that mutant lady is trustworthy and knows what she’s talking about. Similarly, when one of your fellows, labeled “the apostate”, says of your work “[it] happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues,” you don’t need graduate-level study of Marx to see that he’s talking about the alienation of labor, with all that entails, and intuit one of the many reasons he’s on the outs with the power structure.

This is not a dig! Verses doesn’t try to resist interpretation, but rewards it, and if these particular hooks don’t land with a specific player, well, there are plenty more where that came from. The most sensually pleasing must be the set-piece translations. Once you’re strapped into your terminal, you’re confronted with the text, in Romanian, of a poem, all highlighted (the poems are all attributed to their authors). Clicking will reveal a literal translation of each word or phrase, and then often a compete line will offer up one more click to become idiomatic: “măreşte şi mai tare taina nopţii” becomes “magnifies even more mystery of the night” becomes “multiplying the night’s mystery.” And sometimes this transformation is even more magical: that final click turns “and everything that is not understood” to a gnomic “-”.

In a few special cases, the player has agency, and can choose which particular emphasis to put on ambiguous words – one that has to do with production can be code, or progeny, or shit (there is a lot of shit in this game, though it’s described more decorously than that). More usually these are choices the protagonist is making without specific input from the player, but I still found these sequences enormously engaging. For one thing, I wasn’t previously familiar with Romanian and still don’t really know what it sounds like, but it’s an uncanny language on the page: I’ve got a fair bit of French and a smattering of Latin, so I could often sense the gist of some of the words even before I clicked on them and was usually right. But that just meant that the moments of surprise, or of having the rug yanked out from under me when a false-friend led me astray, hit harder: my mind was actively working, dancing with the meaning of the text, and the missed steps are as much a part of that as the successes (there’s one optional poem in Hungarian that didn’t work quite as well for me, reinforcing that there’s something special about Romanian).

The poems themselves are also, almost without exception, spectacular. At their most beautiful, they’re haunting:

Understanding erodes
beneath my eyes-
because of my love
for flowers and eyes and lips and graves.

But more typically they’re brutal. My notes for one read “mud, blood, dead chickens for slaughter, ‘I lived in a house that made no sense’.” And here’s an extended excerpt from one whose title I’m pretty sure translates as “Carnage”:

Descending fog
of crows
to ingest
the meat
broken
I watch with
sinister
blind eyes
they jump
jaws clicking
the swarm
fluttering
hurried
wandering
rows,
rows,

This all sounds unbearably grim and serious, and it kind of is, don’t get me wrong – the fact that this is the story the author needed to construct as an armature for the poems at the heart of the game forces me to mentally revisit what little I know of Romanian history (they were pretty much the only post-Soviet country to have a bloody revolution and execute their dictator after the Iron Curtain fell, which is certainly a data point). But there are jokes! Pretty good ones! Like, there’s an early bit where the word-clicking is still yielding scientific-sounding elaboration, and in the definition of peta-FLOPS you’re teased with the existence of something called “yFLOPS”, but looking for further clarity there just tells you “you think it would be one of those numbers that looks silly written out.” Then there’s a bit where you come across a pond of liquid mercury:

Before you sits the still, strange pond. Diegetic and profane.

Clicking that standout word produces a reassuring etymology:

diegetic: from the Dacian “diegis:” burning, shining.

See, this use of diegetic is diegetic, it’s fine.

There’s also a poem eulogizing a Romanian revolutionary, which starts out undergoing the same transformation from half-recognizable Romanian text to disordered but pregnant-with-meaning literal translation before collapsing into melodrama:

Tender tears build in those who loved you,
Overflowing out onto your grave,
We follow your ascending virtue.
With resounding song, and love renewed,
On to Elysium.

Oof.

It’s perhaps worth pausing here, though, since this isn’t just a gag. If there’s this much similarity between how the translation process works when it’s using actually-good poetry, like “Carnage”, to invoke the aftermath of war, and jingoistic slop like “At the Grave of Aron Pumnel,” perhaps that’s a sign that it’s the process rather than the substance that’s important after all, and all the rigmarole about mutants, aliens, military intelligence, and tungsten is so much entertaining balderdash (I haven’t touched on the plot-qua-plot in this review, since I need to finish it sometime, but there’s definitely a lot of it, and the emphasis should be put on “entertaining” in the previous phrase).

Instead, it’s specifically the act of translation, with all that means and entails, that’s Verse’s true subject (well, plus the act of perception that precedes and is incorporated into translation, but appearances to the contrary I actually do intend to finish this review before the heat death of the universe). Again, it’s saying a lot – about the role of context, with the main character’s bosses obsessed with the possibility of a virgin translation, unburdened by outside knowledge (I’m pretty sure they’re villains), while the protagonist “[struggles] to distinguish between the emptiness of something untouched and something destroyed, flattened, cleared”; about the difference between “the living God, who can be interrogated [and] the dead God can only be interpreted; it has ceased to speak” (God is the text, duh); about the sterile language we mistake for cleanliness and the degenerate language we mistake for confusion and rot.

With that said, we should probably also translate the idea of translation. I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand every ingredient in Verses: I’m not sure about the color yellow. I have a guess about why the only word whose gender is mentioned is “năruită: ruined” (it’s feminine, unsurprisingly). I enthusiastically love the “cells”, “eight hundred meters tall and lighter than air”, and want a whole game centering on them, but will need a lot more than one delightful paragraph to have the faintest idea of how they work. But I’m pretty sure that the game doesn’t want to leave its readers just thinking about the movement from one language to another, but rather how all meaning is mediated through text – an especially apt concern for a piece of text-based IF, because what is the fifty-year history of our genre but an extended study of the possibility that one mind can encounter another, through playing with words?

Well, it’s also an extended set of examples about how incredibly challenging, and commercially unrewarding, that goal can be, and looking to the tradition of IF by queer creators that clearly informs the work, how especially fraught the attempt can be when the circle of communication is widened beyond middle-class cishet white men. To circle back to two points I made (aaaaaall the way up) at the beginning of this review, Verses is not a game that’s reducible to a single thesis, but nor is it a subtle game – so our ears should probably prick up when we come across its title in the wild. This fragment of a poem I think is called “Flowers of Rot” isn’t a keystone, I don’t think, but it may serve as an epigram:

verses from time lost
writing from the pit
thirsty and arid,
of hunger and ash
the verses of –

(Can we dare to hope that there’s something that can fill the blank?)

I am, as I think basically everyone in the world not on the OpenAI or NVIDIA payroll must be, heartily sick of LLMs. Substantively I think they suck when employed for anything resembling creative work; environmentally, turns out the companies have been lying and things are even worse than the already-quite-bad picture that’s been painted; economically, they represent yet another attempt to consolidate wealth and power with the owners of capital at all of our expense. But more than that, the discourse around them is wearying – having to think about this stuff and engage with those conversations even in leisure activities is pretty frustrating. So I should disclose that I went into Hebe, which bills itself as a puzzley adventure through Greek mythology, and also commendably acknowledges that ChatGPT wrote some of the text, with some trepidation, both about what I would find in the game and what I’d need to write about it.

There’s good news and bad news, I suppose. The bad news is that those Hebe-jeebies were justified (Hebe’s the Greek goddess of youth, so her name rhymes with Phoebe – geddit?). All of the game’s room descriptions are overlong and mention lots of unimplemented objects, the prose glops about, weighing everything down like oatmeal laced with lead, and by the end my eye would start twitching whenever I read the words “flickering” or “serene.”

The good news, such as it is, is that I didn’t find it too hard to ignore most of that. The game is clogged with empty locations that are just there to pad out the half-dozen places boasting self-contained puzzles, and so it’s relatively easy to just glide through them and concentrate on the interactions that seem like they were written by a human being, just as I skimmed the overlong cutscenes. Similarly, the author’s offered a helpful INVESTIGATE verb that tells you what items actually exist to be interacted with, so you don’t need to play the guess-the-hallucination game with ChatGPT if you don’t want to. And turns out that under all the AI cruft is – well, a perfectly ordinary undertested, wonkily implemented game that manages to boast a bit of charm, the kind of thing that would be a perfectly respectable starting point for a new author who didn’t yet understand the level of polish a parser game requires, but for the LLM use.

Let’s start with that bit of charm, as I’ve given Hebe a bit of a hard time so far. It’s clear that the author took the theme seriously, bringing in a lot of fringe detail from Greek mythology including but not ending with the choice of protagonist – Hebe’s both the second-most-famous cupbearer to the gods and the second-most-famous wife of Heracles, so I appreciated her underdog energy. The game proper involves visiting various sanctuaries and temples across northern Greece to find the Olympian Gods, who’ve been defeated after a surprise attack by the Titans and left depowered and chained behind various puzzley barriers – and then venturing into the underworld to find Heracles and bring the fight to the Titans. Again, there’s a fair bit of attention to detail, with numerous cities and ports implemented, a visit to the Pytheia, minor naiads given a supporting role, and plenty of obscure bits of myth getting a name-check.

The thin implementation means that the names are often all that you get, however – “you see nothing special about the Charon’s boat” is an enthusiasm-killing phrase to read. And the seams between the LLM stuff and the chattier human-written propose are sometimes comically sharp:

> x aigle
Aigle radiates with a golden glow, her hair like cascading sunlight, and her eyes shimmering like the first light of dawn. She is the embodiment of brightness and warmth, her presence illuminating the garden with a serene, golden aura.

> talk to aigle
“I’m so relieved you’re safe! Now go show them what you’re made of, Hebe! Just like old times!”

A game written entirely in the latter style might feel a little silly, but could have some zip to it; the juxtaposition with ChatGPT’s overwrought descriptions just creates bathos.

As for the substance of the adventure, the puzzles are largely old chestnuts. There are a couple of codes, a put-the-right-object-in-the-right-place one with a poem providing the hints, a guess-how-heavy-the-unmarked-weights one… None of them break new ground, but the classic are classics for a reason and they could be fun to work through. Unfortunately bugs and incomplete implementation make many of them way harder than I think they’re intended to be – the weight one stymied me for a long time due to the fact that I wasn’t clear that there were two scales, not one, and I couldn’t directly interact with the first one (“which do you mean, the scale or the small scale?”); the object-placement will softlock you unless you get it right first try, because the game incorrectly thinks one of the slots stays full even after you remove an item from it; and the endgame seems to have gotten especially little testing, as accessing it requires going through an unmarked exit (tip to other players: try IN/ENTER when you’re near the Necromanteion) and then the climactic conversation with Heracles is made awkward by a YES/NO are-you-ready-to-proceed choice that doesn’t work (to continue with the service journalism: say YES and then manually type DOWN afterwards). And there’s a lot more besides; see the transcript for the gory details.

But again, pretty much all of these issues are familiar ones – heck, I’ve committed some of these sins myself, and but for lucking into experienced testers for my first game could have wound up with similar egg on my face at my debut. And as I’ve said, I do think Hebe comes from a place of real authorial excitement, some of which occasionally comes through. So it would be easy enough to just wrap up with my typical remark in these cases, about how I hope to play a much better second game from this author. Which I do!

My weariness at LLM discourse can’t prevent me from adding, though, that I think use of ChatGPT was an especial disservice to the game. Beyond weighing down the enthusiasm that’s often one of the best elements of a debut game, the use of AI I think might have created some bad habits that contributed to the overall weak implementation. As I mentioned, the long location descriptions include a fair bit of (bland) scenery detail, and call out sounds and smells, so it’d be easy enough for an author to review what ChatGPT spit out and feel like their bases were covered – but none of the scenery is implemented, and LISTEN and SMELL return their default responses throughout. The difference between the prose styles also makes it really obvious to the player where there’s stuff they should be paying attention to and what they can safely tune out – as an author, though, I don’t think you ever want the player shutting off their brain. I don’t think I can say with a straight face that the version of Hebe that didn’t use an LLM would have been significantly higher-quality, but it would have been a clearer reflection of the author’s vision, and probably a much much better learning experience to boot.

So, remember two reviews ago, when I was playing The Bat? Remember how I said that it was so smoothly-put together, “I found myself craving a bit of friction”? Well, guess who else remembered: the gods, who decided to punish me for my hubris. Sidekick is our second Old West game of the Comp, taking a more overtly comedic approach to the theme by having you be the unheralded number-two to a swaggering, useless “hero” who relies on you to get the actual work of villain-foiling done. But while that premise offers some thematic resonance with The Bat, the implementation is exactly the opposite: not only is this game Cruel in the Zarfian sense (it ostensibly offers an optional warning system that renders it Polite, except the feature is buggy so if anything it’s Extra-Cruel), it’s also a Dialog game that relies exclusively on clickable links for its interface while still relying on parser-standard conventions for interactivity. The result is a game with some cleverly designed puzzles and engagingly witty writing, in a package that nonetheless did a real number of my rapidly-thinning, rapidly-graying hair.

I am going to reverse my usual order and start with the critiques this time, since I do think there are positives here worth celebrating but they’ll risk getting buried under the cavalcade of annoyances if I start with them. So let’s start with the gripefest, beginning with that major red flag I adverted to in the parenthetical above: authors, I am begging you, if you make a game that can be made unwinnable, and flag that to the player, that’s good; if you then program in an easy mode that informs the player when they’ve messed up, either immediately or after a short delay, that’s even better (coward that I am, I opted for the “tell me right away” option); but if you then don’t have sufficient testing to ensure the feature actually works as advertised, that is worse than if you’d done nothing at all. Three separate times I had to replay significant portions of the game because I hadn’t realized I’d borked things up: I think the issue is that the testing algorithm doesn’t realize that much of the map can be made inaccessible, either temporarily (the first part of the game is built around a series of set-piece encounters with the Black Hat’s henchmen, some of whom block you from exiting the room where you encounter them) or permanently (let’s just say some stuff goes down in the mine), and as I found out, this can make the game unwinnable if you can’t reach items you still need, with no warning given.

Now, I kept multiple saves in different filenames, and replaying in a parser game is usually a pretty quick process, so this shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? Oh my sweet summer child. Sidekick uses one of the cool features of Dialog to increase accessibility by offering a web-friendly, clickable interface: after the description of each location, a compass rose gets printed out, as well as a listing of your inventory and a small set of standard verbs; if you click on an object, you’ll get a further set of options about how to interact with it (if it’s a person, for example, you’ll get examine, and greet, and ask about…), which may then involve an additional click to set an indirect object – so for example, you could click on a burning match in your inventory which will pull up a context-sensitive list of options that includes LIGHT, so you click that which then pops up a further list of everything else in the room so you can choose what to try to set on fire.

It’s a respectable enough interface and I’d been playing on a phone I could see it being a godsend, but the trouble is, it’s not optional, and the sad fact is that it’s much clunkier than just being able to type in commands. Limited parser games or puzzle-light ones would probably not be slowed down too much by this interface awkwardness, but Sidekick is decidedly old-school in the degree of medium-dry-good manipulation it requires, and doesn’t make any allowances for the fact that players are not using an old-school parser. For one thing, there’s a sprawling map that’s a pain to navigate, because you can’t simply type E half a dozen times to go from one end to the other – because each location’s description is a different length, you need to wait for each one to print out, look for where the spacing has pushed the compass, and then click to get to the next one and then repeat the process again. Time also progresses when you’re in the middle of multi-step actions, meaning I got frustrated when trying to tie a rope to a randomly-wandering mule, only to find that she’d left in the time it took me to click ROPE → TIE TO…

That’s not the only fiddly part of Sidekick, either. There’s of course an inventory limit, and one that appears to be based on volume or weight, rather than a simple count of items. Helpfully, you can click the CAPACITY button to be told how many available “units” remain in your hands and your knapsack; less helpfully, there’s no way of telling how many “units” a given item takes up without trial-and-error experimentation, which I generally didn’t attempt given the aforementioned interface clunkiness (…you maybe now are seeing why I wound up leaving so many items lying around in places I couldn’t later find my way back to). And there were a few times where I was stymied because an object offered necessary actions only when I clicked on it when I was standing right next to it, even though it was visible and I could do other things one room away, or when I had to close and re-open a matchbook because I was only allowed to click on the match it contained immediately upon flipping it open.

…I am finally coming to the end of my complaints, but there are a couple of puzzles I can’t let go by unmentioned. Most of them involve getting your hapless boss out of trouble, but he has an annoying habit of wandering off without any indication of where he’s got to and which bad guy he’s run into, meaning that your reward for solving a puzzle is often to comb through the large map to look for any changes. There are also a few that felt completely unmotivated to me – I’d thought I’d made friends with a visiting scientist, and in return he’d lend me his geyser-detecting helmet (…don’t ask), but instead I was apparently supposed to lure him to the saloon and start a punch-up with some random cowboys, which would lead the good doctor to flee the scene but forget to bring his room-key along. The fight against the first henchman is even worse, relying on slapstick cartoon logic that’s at odds with the rest of the game.

But – and here we can finally transition to the praise – there are a lot of really good puzzles here too. There are a series of reasonably challenging ones in the middle part of the game that I nonetheless was able to solve without clues, while being original to boot. Busting your “hero” out of jail and getting rid of the thug who stuffed him in a railroad-side water tower was immensely satisfying, albeit those are both examples of the game’s occasionally-disquieting bloodthirstiness.

The writing as well is often a lot of fun. While the sidekick conceit recedes somewhat in the back half of the game, as your boss gets well and truly kidnapped and you’re left doing standard IF-protagonist stuff on your lonesome, the game wrings some solid comedy out of him while he’s around:

“Well, Mr. Mayor, I eat danger for breakfast and evil for brunch. And that’s a kind of breakfast.”

Pausing awkwardly, the Mayor recovers and again takes Buck’s hand and shakes vigorously.

So this is a game I wanted to enjoy, and often did enjoy, which just made all the time it spent dragging me across a bed of nails hurt all the worse. I know there are a lot of ideas bandied around about how to make parser games more accessible, which is an important conversation to be had, but unfortunately Sidekick stands for the proposition that if you take a clever if old-school game and remove all the typing, you’ll wind up with something worse than what you started with.

It is the mark of a lazy writer to reduce their criticism to “X is just like Y plus Z,” but I’ve tried to rewrite this opening several times now and there’s no way around it: Eikas is Stardew Valley plus cooking, there’s your pull quote. I guess to make it look like I actually put in some effort I can note that Eikas was the name of the ancient Epicureans’ monthly day of community and feasting.

That’s the kind of history-nerd content that’s a value-add for my reviews, right?

Joking aside, cottagecore life sim winds up being a great fit for choice-based IF, and Eikas is a robust and charming implementation of the idea even if it’s not the most original thing in the world. You play a chef recruited to a village to run their community canteen, an institution that by local tradition hosts a meal for all comers every five days; after each, the elders judge you on the quality of the fare you’ve been able to provide and adjust your stipend accordingly, with your performance over the game’s probationary thirty-day period determining whether you’re offered a permanent position. Fortunately, you’ve got assets including a regular infusion of tax revenue, a bat-spirit named Merry-Andrew, and the kind of indefatigable spirit that leads attractive villagers of all gender identities to want to get close to you by revealing their mildly-dramatic backstories to you one pseudo-date at a time.

OK, I’m kidding again, but really, the game implements its recognizable formula faithfully and well. The mechanics are rich enough to stay engaging over six iterations of the socialize-prepare-feast cycle, without being overwhelming. Each day you have four actions, one of which will almost always be to knock together some snacks you can sell in the marketplace to supplement your stipend; the rest can be used to spend time with one of the three primary friends/love interests, go foraging in the outskirts, harvest herbs from your garden, or lend a hand to other villagers in the hopes of getting a reward. Other actions, notably shopping for ingredients and new cookbooks, don’t take any time but do require money. And the game does a good job of feeding its various systems into the set-piece feasts: build enough affection with the busker Orlando and they’ll offer to play fiddle at one of your meals, increasing the number of stars the elders will award you, and helping Merry-Andrew with a series of tasks he’s struggling with will also build your standing with the village as a whole, which is what you’re ultimately judged on.

The cooking is of course the centerpiece of gameplay. You start out with a few cookbooks, each containing a half dozen or so main courses and side dishes requiring perhaps one or two common ingredients, rated in quality from average to deluxe. You also have another book that provides some broad hints about how to approach the feasts: making sure the three dishes you offer are from the same culture might boost your rating, for example, as will sticking to the classic main plus side plus dessert structure. There are many more cookbooks you can buy, and a few additional ingredients you can unlock through various means, meaning I was never short of new recipes to try, even as I felt perpetually short of time and cash until I hit the last few days of the month. And in general fancier dishes take more and/or rarer ingredients, but will give you more stars at the feast, which in turn gives you more resources for the next go-round, which makes for a pleasing progression.

The food itself, happily for me, is almost entirely vegetarian (I think there are like two fish dishes?) It also ranges across an enticing variety of origins, though the constraints of gameplay inevitably lead to some questionable choices (naan is only “average”? Fight me). It’s well-described too, and in fact the prose is solid throughout the game; this isn’t the kind of story that ever indulges in stylistic flourishes, but it rarely puts a foot wrong. Here’s a bit of dialogue from Antonia, a painter who went to the big city to make it big but who’s since come back:

“I don’t know if I’d call it home,” she says, shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. “I’ve always thought of myself as a city girl, really. Hardly know what possessed me to come back here of all places. Fancied it would be a good place to paint, I suppose.”

She lapses into silence, and you let it string out. You have the sense that Antonia is more likely to speak if you leave space for it, rather than prompting her.

“It hasn’t even been that,” she says after a moment. “Nothing I do comes out right. I’m not a landscape artist, not really. I’ve always painted people. But change is supposed to be good, isn’t it? Refreshing. I mean, why did you decide to come here? To do this job?”

For all that the text is earnest to the point of being po-faced, though, there are some sly touches here and there – did I mention that the character who uses they/them pronouns is named Orlando? And among the want-ads on the notice-board is tucked this gem: “for sale: adult shoes, worn a bit.”

While the interface does provide almost all the information you need to plan meals and decide how to balance all the different objectives you can pursue, there are a few places where I felt a bit at sea. For example I was never able to get that same-culture bonus despite trying to cluster all the Asian-origin dishes together; this is especially awkward since Eikas is set in a fantasy world so I was never sure if, like, India existed, or just onion bhajis and carrot halwa. Beyond that, I never fully sussed out what advantages you gain from fulfilling requests on the notice-board, or why you’d want to replace one of your three precious feast dishes with a sauce. And there’s a sequence where you have to collect three different objects for Merry-Andrew, but searching for each takes an action and relies on a random die-roll to determine whether you succeed or fail, which I found an irresistible temptation to save-scumming.

I probably didn’t need to have bothered, though – I finished the game with hundreds of unneeded coins in the bank, with the strongest-possible affection with all the named characters, and four or five more stars than I needed to max out the village’s approval. Just as in Eikas’ fiction, nothing can ever really go wrong, the mechanics are also tuned to provide a gentle, cozy experience. I can understand an objection to this on an aesthetic level – if you thrive on stories of drama and conflict, there are only slim pickings here – but if the objective was to provide a bit of low-stakes feel-good solace, as in yes, Stardew Valley, Eikas more than achieves the brief.

There are, of course, two iconic master/valet pairs in fiction (well, three I suppose if you the Remains of the Day guy and his Nazi boss), and the Bat’s name, cover art, and listed genre will likely prompt you to think of the more famous one. But the “superhero” in this limited-parser game isn’t Master Bryce of stately Wyatt Manor – instead it’s you, his valet, tasked with preparing the mansion for a charity concert, seeing to the needs of the demanding guests who each have their own agenda, and steering your master through it all while minimizing harm to reputation, limb, and life, in that order, inasmuch as he’s come down with some kind of disorder that’s left him thinking he’s a bat (fortunately, he’s rich enough that everyone else pretends he’s just slightly eccentric).

Yes, what we have here is a farce, in the grand Jeeves and Wooster tradition, with you playing the Jeeves role. This is a tricky genre to realize in IF form, since it turns almost entirely on pacing, which is a fickle thing for an author to stage-manage when players get involved. To smooth the process, the limited-parser approach is pared to the bone, as besides movement verbs, looking, and examining, the only action-verb available is ATTEND TO, which will serve equally well for mixing drinks, opening doors, manipulating machinery, and putting out fires both metaphorical and literal. It also serves to pick up and drop the myriad inventory items, which you’ll be spending a lot of time doing – besides a few small objects like a matchbox and keys, you can only hold as many things as you have hands (sometimes fewer if something’s especially big). This juggling isn’t too annoying, thankfully, both because the map is relatively compact so you won’t have to go far to track down what you need, and because it’s a reasonable compromise to make the puzzles work – most hinge on the fact that the result of ATTENDing depends on what you’re carrying, with a mess of broken glass for example giving a “better not touch that” response unless you’re holding the broom, in which case you can sweep it discreetly away. A bottomless inventory would trivialize things, so the limit is a small price to pay.

If the mechanics are well set up to support the comedy, the prose plays a starring role. The protagonist’s voice is hilariously understated, even as he weathers indignities Wodehouse could never have dreamed of. The use of dry asides left me giggling:

"All the fortunes amassed by the Wyatt Dynasty can be traced to a single magneto-polonium mine, which the late Tomas Wyatt acquired (along with radiation poisoning) in the last century."

And while a gentleman’s gentleman would never directly criticize their said gentleman, there’s still plenty of room to read between certain lines:

>X MASTER

You are careful not to see what might be indiscreet, especially when you can see it very clearly. Master Bryce has such a difficulty keeping himself dressed when he is in these moods.

Just about every description and event has something that’s chuckle-worthy at a minimum, with a few of the edgier developments eliciting a delighted shudder (Spoiler - click to show)(the prongs, oh god, the prongs). The other fertile source of comedy is the donations meter – as the guests’ moods fluctuate according to whether they’re pleased that you’ve recently refreshed their drink, say, or miffed that Master Bryce is trying to eat the dragonfly-clips that are keeping up their hairdo, you’ll get a notification that their expected gifts to the widows-and-orphans fund you’re stumping for have shifted accordingly. It’s a simple gag, I suppose, and not one that appears to vary based on your performance – I think all players wind up with the same final result – but it still helps establish the magnitude of certain beats, like exactly how grateful a noblewoman is for your help arranging a surreptitious tryst, or precisely how far you’ve sunk when another dignitary notices that her jewelry has gone missing in the chaos (it also allows for a great running bit about how the Bishop – a prince of the church! – is a gigantic cheapskate, kicking at most $40 or $50 into the kitty).

So yes, every element has been polished to a sheen to provide a lovely time, and a lovely time I had. Oh, there were a few small elements that provided tiny hiccups, but really, we’re talking tiny – there’s a flashback at the midpoint of proceedings that’s fine on its own merits but I though disrupted the energetic buildup into the second half, and I had a hard time visualizing the geography of the climactic sequence, though I was able to bungle through just fine following the game’s copious prompts about what I might want to do next.

But that right there is my one substantive, and admittedly supremely churlish, critique of The Bat: it’s so smooth, so finely-tooled, that I found myself craving a bit of friction. Just about every time you run across an obstacle or crisis, just examining or attempting to attend to it will provide a substantial hint about what you should be doing, and if you don’t get it at first, repeated attempts will likely provoke an onlooker to prod you further in the right direction. And more broadly, I rarely felt like I was coming up with exciting plans to try to manage the party’s multiple escalating catastrophes as I was following someone else’s script.

Again, this is jolly good fun, but for me at their best parser games feel like a pas des deux between player and author, while in the Bat I just didn’t always feel like my creativity was required. Part of this is the nature of the valet’s job, I suppose – you’re always at someone else’s beck and call, fetching whatever they require or dropping everything to be dragooned into their schemes. But what makes Jeeves an incomparable servant is his skill of anticipation, of seeing how his master’s failings will get him in trouble and allowing things to proceed just up to the edge of disaster before revealing how his foresight has actually saved the day; by comparison the Bat’s man comes off a rather more ordinary servant.

I suppose it’s my fault for not starting earlier, but I wished I’d seen more of the rat. He(?)'s the familiar of the eponymous apothecary, and my first shift working at the store involved helping out with the stockroom; the little fellow(?) was quite a lovable and useful assistant’s assistant, tracking down inventory and speeding up the process so much that I was looking forward to spending more time with him(?) But he hasn’t turned up after ten more days of playing the game, which is why the details are beginning to fade (I think his(?) name started with a D but don’t quote me on it) – given that the game’s events are tied to the real-world calendar and clock, I suspect the cute rat was front-loaded into the first week or two of the Comp to help bring in the lookie-lous.

At the risk of over-interpreting an anecdote, my rodent-related forgetfulness maybe stands for the broader way the real-time element of The Apothecary’s Assistant often overshadows its cozy, cottagecore vibe. Whenever you first launch it, I believe you get the same vignette where you stumble through the woods into Aïssatou’s shop of balms and curiosities, and quickly agree to help from time to time in return for a payment of acorns (you also trip over a sheet of cryptic-crossword clues on your way out; more on those later). But then you’re told to come back tomorrow to start a shift, and tomorrow is tomorrow – until your patch of ground rotates around the earth’s axis to greet the sun once more, all there is to do is ask a single question of Aïssatou or noodle over the cryptics (we’ll get there). You can also use your accumulated acorns to purchase one of several beads, each of which is linked to a particular real-world charity; in a generous touch, the author’s planning to make actual donations out of their Colossal Prize winnings from last year’s Comp, with each player-selected acorn translating to an additional $1.

The main interest of the game is thus in the daily shifts (though turns out some days you can get up to three of them, depending on the shop’s schedule). While each vignette is unique, there are several kinds that recur: you’ll be tasked to find a creature or plant for Aïssatou, which requires matching the description you’ve gotten with one of a pair of drawings; or pick out which of chartreuse, burgundy, or mustard is a shade of red for a befuddled customer; or a Mad Libs bit where you read a story to entertain a customer’s kid – making sure all the words you plug in start with the letter “v” is entirely optional, but I enjoyed that self-set challenge.

There are plenty of one-offs, too (though of course some of them might ultimately prove to have sequels), but they all hit that same low-key, comforting vibe: they set a mood, present the smallest imaginable quantum of challenge, then after a few hundred words they send you on your way, 60 acorns richer (you get 50 just for showing up, and a bonus 10 if you get things right, which so far I’ve accomplished 100% of the time). But if you’re feeling like you want something more robust to chew on, well, that’s where the cryptics have you covered. You ultimately stumble across more than half a dozen clues to work through, and while the average individual difficulty is perhaps a bit lower than what you’d see in a professional cryptic crossword, the fact that they’re given individually, rather than interlocking in a grid, means that you can’t rely on the easier clues filling in letters for the harder ones. Still, they’re eminently fair, and the slow pace of the rest of the game meant I was able to nibble at them a little at a time, only needing to consult the forum hint thread for one I’d gotten my head wrapped the wrong way around.

Your reward for solving them all is a bonanza of acorns, and the most dramatic scene in the game – several of Aïssatou’s former assistants, who had some kind of falling out with her, reveal that they’ve been behind the clues as part of a scheme to get her to reconsider her actions. It’s well-written, but I have to confess that if there were earlier hints seeding that something like this had happened, I didn’t pick up on them, and I have to further confess that since the gimmick of this review has me writing this sentence like two weeks on, most of what I now remember about the scene is not remembering its context.

All of which is to say that while I quite like each element of the Apothecary’s Apprentice – the cozy shopkeeping, the gentle challenges, the fairytale cast, the charity element, and the cryptic crossword – and think the real-time structure is a neat thing to play with in the context of a Comp that’s running over a specified number of real-world days, for me it wound up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. A low-stakes magic-shop simulator that you could binge all at once would work gangbusters, I think, as would a slow-paced real-time game that presented a high-intensity plot and dramatic, engaging characters. But the combination of low-key hangout vibes and short play sessions with big gaps between them made for an awkward combination that’s left me with positive feelings but not many real stand-out moments. And as with this review, which I’ve written a single sentence at a time over the course of two weeks without looking back at anything I previously wrote besides the last few words of the previous one to guide me, there’s a slight wooliness and lack of momentum to the whole, even as each individual piece is pleasant and well put together.

For all that, I’ve still been going back each day to earn some supernumerary acorns (I’ve long since purchased all the beads), and I’ll be interested to see whether the long-teased arrival of the Hunter’s Moon will bring the story to a climax that might reconfigure how I’ve felt about it to date. I also can’t help but wonder whether the exact same structure and approach would have worked much better if I hadn’t played it in the middle of the Comp, with dozens of other stories and characters jostling the gentle Apothecary’s Assistant crew out of my brain’s limited attention span. As experiments go, then, it’s certainly a worthwhile one, and one I’ve definitely enjoyed, even as I wish more of it had stuck with me.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t really believe in “so bad it’s good” art – my experience is that even stuff that notionally seems like it would be campy fun winds up, if realized by sufficiently unskilled hands, leaden, poorly-paced, and dull. Sure, there’s definitely trashy stuff that’s executed well out there, but I’d argue that’s not really “bad”; likewise there are some things that people enjoy laughing at rather than with, but that usually feels too mean for me to enjoy, and regardless surely mocking something doesn’t magically transmute it into being good.

I do believe that there are games that can be so bad they’re interesting, though, and my notes for Big Fish are littered with pop-eyed what-the-absolute-fuck-am-I-looking-at-here moments. The framing of this mechanically simple (you go to some places and pick up a couple of items) Twine game led me to expect something true crime-ish: you get a letter from your favorite uncle, telling you that he’s sending it on the eve of being executed for a murder he was convicted of committing a year ago. He protests his innocence, though of course by the time you get the message it’s too late for him, but you nonetheless decide to posthumously vindicate him by investigating exactly what happened in the lakeside village where the girl lost her life. But the actual story Big Fish has to tell is far wilder than that, and by the time you’ve uncovered the truth you’ll have encountered crocodile cults, a crocodile Jesus, and genetic experiments with crocodile DNA (crocodiles are a pretty big deal here, is what I’m saying – your uncle was even executed by being thrown into the water for crocodiles to eat).

That’s all pretty weird, but the way the story is told is weirder still. Like, what’s going on with the protagonist? Here’s one of the very first things that happens in the game:

"You pick up your toothbrush and start brushing your teeth.

"The repetitive in-and-out motions bring some lewd thoughts to your mind."

Look, people are horny perverts, I get it, but find me someone who gets turned on by brushing their teeth, I dare you. Later on too I think the game indicates that you find some pornography(?) under the bed of one of the people you’re investigating, which seems to trigger an elliptically-described episode of some kind:

"You found a few things that shouldn’t be here under the bed.

"This led you to some despicable thoughts."

It plays coy about the protagonist in other ways too: the opening segment indicates that you’ve taken a leave of absence from the publishing house where you work to look into the killing, but here’s how you convince a policeman to give you access to his files:

"He only becomes slightly more respectful after you show your reporter ID.

"After showing another credential, he becomes very respectful."

So actually we’re a reporter? Or… something else?

Then there’s the bizarre stuff that seems like it might reflect bugs or incomplete edits? Like one of the first places you can visit in town is the hospital, where you’re told:

"Here we met the victim’s sister, Sarah… When I was in the archives, I saw a photo of her just after she was admitted a year ago. Her hair wasn’t as long then."

But I came to the hospital right after exploring the police archives, and not only wasn’t there a photo of Sarah, the fact that the victim had a sister wasn’t even mentioned! There’s also a medium-length sequence where the name of your uncle changes from Fleur to Fuller, and then back again.

There are whiplashes in tone, too – there’s an old woman who starts talking in oracular mumbo-jumbo that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantasy novel, and the game often veers wildly between goofy fun and e.g. clumsy speculation about sex crimes (one of many, many nonsensical twists is the game asserting that your uncle couldn’t have raped anybody because he’d been impotent since the death of his family which, uh, is not how any of this works and also ew).

There is an attempt to create a mystery that “plays fair” – at the end you’re given a choice of which culprit to finger, and it does seem like there are right and wrong answers, with the clues you’ve found helping you find the best outcome. But the game’s plot to that point is crammed with so many arbitrary assertions and illogical deductions that the process feels like playing darts while drunk and blindfolded.

With all that said, I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t enjoy some of the time I spent playing Big Fish with my jaw agape, utterly gobsmacked about where it might be going next. It’s definitely not a good game; it definitely needs content warnings more assertive than “maybe violence, gore, or sexual themes”; and its vision of a crocodile nailed to a cross is definitely implausible given the stubbiness of their arms. But it’s the memorable kind of bad, and at least that counts for something.

I’m pretty ecumenical in my IF tastes, I think, but I admit I sometimes stifle a groan when I see an entry in that most challenging of genres, the allegorical game, coming up in the queue. Possibly that’s just down to personal preference, but I do think it’s a hard nut to crack: how do you come up with a scenario that’s comprehensible to the player, but obscure enough not to be obvious? How do you engender connection to the material when the plot might not be happening in a literal sense? How do you take advantage of the freedom allegory offers while retaining enough cause-and-effect logic to establish stakes?

Well. You know that saying about how every hard problem, there’s a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong? At the risk of running afoul of the adage, let me speculate a way to resolve the many issues raised by this vexed genre: don’t worry about being too simple or too obvious, pick something nice and straightforward, and concentrate on building enough texture into your allegory so that it doesn’t feel glib.

If that’s not a fully generalizable answer, don’t blame me, blame You, because that’s the tack it takes and it’s an entirely successful one. It doesn’t take much chin-scratching to understand what the game is getting at – you leave school only to find yourself lost in an unfamiliar forest, and finding that you feel curiously alien to yourself, a sense of disconnection that’s tied to the pronouns you use for yourself not feeling right. This could apply to many an adolescent identity crisis, but the conflict here clearly has a lot to do with gender, which is reinforced by the central action of the game: casting about for a way home, you come across a crow and goat who offer to help you if you assist them with gathering the items they need for the wedding (something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…)

This is all accomplished via a light parserlike interface; there’s compass navigation around a small map, all handled with inline links, and a modest inventory available through a backpack link in the sidebar. There’s pretty much just a general “use” verb, but You has an additional cool narrative-mechanical gimmick up its sleeve: many of the actions you take or items you use alter your pronouns. You’re always “you”, but the font can be bigger or smaller, or boast an underline or an accent, or be subject to other transformations, and while some of the puzzles involve straightforward inventory manipulation, most of them require mastering these typographical manipulations, and understanding how they’ll translate narratively. I won’t spoil the specifics, since I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises given the game’s short running time, but there are at least two or three puzzles that I found both entirely intuitive, and entirely delightful.

I also found the writing as satisfying as the design. The fantasy world isn’t especially memorable by itself, but again, it’s got neat little details that lend it just enough weight – the aforementioned crow/goat couple are especially charming:

“Not feeling quite yourself lately?” One nods. “One understands. It was barely a month ago that one’s own self was lost down a waterfall.”

Zhe laughs at the memory. “It’s true,” zhe adds. “Had to go down to the mud flats with a net. But it got back where it needed to be in short order.” Zhe taps a talon against zher chin thoughtfully. “THEY helped greatly with the task. THEY might be able to help you too, if you ask THEM.”

THEY do indeed wind up helping, once you’re able to get the pair what they need, in a climactic sequence that does a lovely job of presenting the player with a no-wrong-answers choice that nonetheless has real weight – I wound up stopping to think for two or three minutes before I finally selected how I wanted to go about creating my new self.

So yes, as allegories go, this one is quite straightforward but that doesn’t make it any less effective. You presents a dilemma that’s admittedly not especially novel in IF these days, even for a boring old cis guy like myself, but uses its fantastical conceit to present the situation from a bit of an angle, which somehow makes it come through more clearly. That’s the power of allegory when done well, and You does it well enough that I really do think it’s something of a blueprint.

What are we to make of the genre label which Hildy blithely affixes to itself, “Zorkian Fantasy”? Considered as a setting, it’s simple enough to summarize the relevant tropes: the Great Underground Empire, Enchanter-style magic, grues (all of which feature in Hildy, though you need to go out of your way to find, and be eaten by, the last). But as a genre, we need to consider the themes, and here things get confusing: which Zork? Are we talking about the colonialism, doubling, and metaphysical renunciation that Drew Cook finds in the original trilogy? The austere apocalyptics of Spellbreaker? Perhaps the playful treasure-hunting of mainframe Dungeon, or the don’t-think-too-hard-about-it minigame-frame of Zork Zero?

I confess that I’m no expert – heck, I’ve never even played a game with Zork in its title, though I did work my way through the Enchanter trilogy some years ago – but as best I can tell, Hildy’s answer is “that bit in Sorcerer with the amusement park.” There are other echoes, of course: you play a neophyte enchanter, as in Enchanter, you run around their eponymous Guild for a bit, as in the beginning of Sorcerer, and in a homage to Spellbreaker, you’ll tear your hair out at some of the puzzles (more on that later). But after a linear, more character-driven opening that sees the titular Hildy chewed out for unconventional use of magic, experiencing a crisis of confidence, and on the advice of her mentor going for a walk in the woods to clear her head, she finds her way to a Great Underground Shopping Mall chock full of 1980s puns, where the bulk of the game plays out.

To its credit, it really commits to the bit: you’ll search for spells at Waldenscrolls, see The Implementors Must Be Crazy promoted on the theater’s marquee, and get a pizza at Little Flathead’s; meanwhile, when you magic yourself up an outfit, it comes complete with yellow leggings and orange high tops. If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it, but I have to confess I don’t count myself in that audience, especially given the few occasions when the author shows that they’re also capable of a Wodehovian sort of humor that would fit just fine in the Zork wheelhouse:

"Field snooker is a sport with an exciting and noble history. The history of the perpetually last place Lucksuckers is neither of those things."

It’s not all fun and games, though – there’s an ancient vampire who’s taken over the mall and turned his victims into ghouls, and to escape that fate you’re going to need to solve some puzzles. For all my mixed feelings about how out of place the mall is, I have to confess it makes a solid backdrop for this kind of adventure – witness Only Possible Prom Dress. Just as in that game, the stores in Hildy provide some light theming for different pieces of several interlocking puzzle chains, with mall-wide challenges like getting the power on and navigating around places the cavern’s decay has made less accessible. There are machinery puzzles, and combat puzzles, and time travel puzzles, and of course lots of spellcasting puzzles. As in the Enchanter trilogy, much of the game is structured around a Metroidvania loop of solving puzzles to get spells (or potions) to solve more puzzles to get more spells – it’s a classic, and it works just as well here as you’d expect (though purists may balk at the way Hildry streamlines some of the traditional elements of the Enchanter system, for example by not requiring you to memorize a spell more than once to cast it multiple times, I appreciated the quality of life upgrades).

Some of these puzzles are quite enjoyable, and I got through about half of the game with only the lightest of hints – getting the lights up and running, defeating my first ghoul, exorcising a cursed mirror. And exploration is typically smooth, with generally strong implementation and the author doing a good job communicating the vibe of each store and location without larding up the descriptions with unnecessary nouns. But after that point, I started turning to the walkthrough more and more frequently. At a macro level, beyond knowing that I was trying to defeat the vampire, it wasn’t clear to me what I was trying to do other then just bumble through any puzzle-looking situation I ran across and hope eventually I’d achieve my goal. And at the tactical level, I ran into a couple of challenges that seemed to require much higher levels of authorial ESP than I possess.

I’ll spoiler-block the one that broke my trust that I’d be able to figure the later puzzles out: (Spoiler - click to show) so there’s a scroll that’s lodged in a small hollow under a giant pile of debris, which I assumed I needed to find a telekinesis spell to retrieve. But no, actually you’re meant to intuit that you should use the shrink ray next door to make yourself small enough to pick your way through the rubble and grab the scroll. Unfortunately, you can’t aim the ray at yourself, so you need to fix a vending-machine robot (that part was fine), and intuit that of the half-dozenish items on the open-ended list of what’s for sale, the only one you’re actually meant to buy is the makeup compact, since you can use its mirror to reflect the shrink ray. But even that’s not done because you won’t have enough time to get the scroll before growing big again unless you RUN, not walk, through a very specific path. In fairness, use of RUN is prompted in an earlier puzzle, but there are a lot of leaps of logic the player needs to make to even develop a theory of how they might solve this, with no real clues pointing you in the right direction.

Unfortunately this isn’t a one-off, as many of the endgame clues seem very challenging to solve through logic alone. Hildy also starts to feel like it doesn’t trust you to play with your new toolkit once you’re sufficiently tooled up: there’s a late-game sequence where you’re forced into a room with a bunch of ghouls, but you’re not given the chance to act in the scene and invoke the powerful protective magic you have at that point, or even use a disguise spell on the cyclops guarding the door, since the game has a single solution in mind and contrives the timing so that nothing else can even be attempted. As for the climactic vampire confrontation, it relies not only on purely out-of-world knowledge about the vulnerabilities of a vampire, but also incorrect out-of-world knowledge (Spoiler - click to show)(vampires don’t show up in mirrors, but that doesn’t mean looking in one is typically supposed to hurt them), as well as requiring the player to think back to the earliest moments of the game without much in the way of specific prompts. Adding insult to injury, even after defeating him you need to jump through one last underclued hoop to make it home.

In fairness, there are other elements of Hildy that I enjoyed. There’s some understated storytelling in the environment, low-key mysteries that don’t really matter but which are fun to engage with and develop theories around as you explore. The Guild material also felt promising; the characters aren’t exactly richly-drawn to rise above stereotypes, but the author’s got a good handle on a Harry-Potter-but-Zork vibe that could have easily played a bigger role. And the implementation for what must be a complex magic system struck me as very solid, despite the inherent difficulty involved. But Hildy presents itself first and foremost as a comedy puzzler, and having chosen this take on what being a piece of Zorkian Fantasy means, there’s not much support the other pieces of the design can lend when the going gets too tough and idiosyncratic.

A confession: I copied and pasted the above.

So yeah, this is a potluck-game, much like A Death in Hyperspace in this competition, or Cragne Manor. Maze Gallery has differences from both of those – it’s in Ink rather than Twine or Inform, and we’re dealing here not with sci-fi mysteries or Lovecraft pastiche, but a sightseeing trip through a fantastical museum, plus its size and number of contributors put it somewhere in the middle of the relatively-compact ADH and the luxuriant sprawl of CM. But by its very nature it has similarities, too, mostly that its greatest strength and its greatest weakness is that it is made by divers hands: there’s always something new around the next corner, and indeed given the open-endedness of the theme, even knowing the name of the room you’re about to visit likely won’t clue you in on what’s to come, but on the flip side, despite a few recurring characters and the epilogue’s valiant attempt to call back to key sequences, the game can feel somewhat scattered, ending because there’s no more content rather than because the experience has hit a climax.

Of course, that’s how museum visits go – you leave because you get tired or because they kick you out – and Maze Gallery leans into its conceit. Your journey starts in an atrium with an information desk (well, disinformation) offering audio tours (well, headphones plugged into potatoes), with a handy directory helping you to plan your visit (except that a disconcerting percentage of the rooms just have ???s marked, and a disquieting number of passages simply lead off-map without any indication of where they end up). You didn’t exactly choose to come here – maybe it’s all a dream? – so your first consideration is to get out, but while the place is rather odd, it’s never (well, rarely) threatening, so might as well sightsee on the way to the gift shop, right? And while the disinformation desk greeter isn’t much help, chortling at the lie they tell you, the game’s authors at least are at pains to make your visit a pleasant one: there’s a map to help you trace your progress across the game’s four acts, with fast travel available whenever you run into a hub room with one of those directories, a goals list keeping track of the tasks you’ve taken on, and an inventory listing the objects you accumulate as well as the impact this place is having on your sense of self (I escaped minus my name and with my teeth rearranged; could have been worse).

From there it’s all about stumbling from one exhibit to another in search of the exit. The map allows you to orient yourself and make a beeline for freedom if you like, in which case the game would probably run about an hour, but I found myself at least popping my head into every room, which wound up taking closer to three. Partially this was from wanting to be able to review the game while doing justice to the anthology format – I didn’t want to miss any author’s contribution, though from the final credits it seems like many wrote more than one room – but also because it’s hard to see a name like “Wing of Four Humors” or “Dead President’s Exhibit” and not want a peek. And Maze Gallery does a good job of rewarding curiosity, with a wide range of experiences on offer – there are classic art spaces where you examine a few nicely-curated objets, installation pieces you can clamber around and inside, labyrinths that take some thinking to navigate, social areas where you can converse with museum staff or other visitors and learn more about their problems, and some that present gentle puzzles, beyond functional spaces like the cafeteria and the aforementioned gift shop (I never did find a bathroom…)

While each author has put their own stamp on the material – there are a few areas that don’t make a big deal out of the fact that they’re written entirely in rhyming couplets, for example – there’s definitely a consistent aesthetic of whimsy, with the amount of threat undergirding it waxing and waning according to preference. A representative excerpt:

"Only dim refractions filter into the gloom. A sea snail the size of a sheep dog notices your presence and begins a mad scramble away at 12 centimeters a minute. At the end of the tunnel there is an old oak door that shows no sign of being aware that it is, in fact, in the ocean and not inside a stately manor. Chiseled into the stone above it are the words, “Doll Room”."

It’s a canny choice of style, since it’s sufficiently broad to allow for variation while still feeling coherent. Admittedly, this approach to prose does lend itself to the occasional moment of overreach:

"Twinkling fragments of sapphire, a moon of opulent opal, and stars of brilliant pyrite swirl betwixt the lamp’s now-copper borders…. As if to beckon the ephemeral, a melodic voice of silken song seeps from around the turning of the hall."

Similarly, some of what’s presented is a little lame, like “a sculpture of David, but it’s Bernini’s, not Michelangelo’s, and he’s wearing a party hat”. But some of the images here are striking:

"Emerging from the ombré walls are dull bronze casts of outstretched hands and legs, a car-sized head half-submerged in the wall with mouth open and gasping for air. A colossal shiny torso covers one entire wall. In the light, you notice deep wrinkles on the sculptures, so detailed that you can see scatterings of freckles and pronounced pores. One of the hands even has a diamond ring.

"And how can you not love the cute mice dressed up in red jackets and busbies (there’s a picture)?"

…this review risks devolving into a guided tour, which would undermine the fun of properly wandering around the place, so let me just say those examples stand in for a great deal more, most of which I enjoyed a medium to high amount. For all that, I did find myself a bit weary in the last hour or so of the game. Partially this is due to the fact that I found navigating through the gallery somewhat disorienting – the lack of compass directions or an ability to translate the rectilinear visuals presented on the map with the options you’re presented with in a particular room, which sometimes didn’t align with my mental pictures, meant I did more wandering around than I think was intended, even accounting for the out-and-out mazes (it’s funny that I had this experience just as the intermittent forum discussion about how different players relate to different navigation systems – so I’m definitely aware that this choice that didn’t work so well for me might actually be a plus for others).

Beyond that, while the act breaks and map do a good job of letting the player know how much game is left, there’s not much of an organic sense of progression, unlike say Cragne Manor where you gain momentum in the back half of the game as you see how the puzzle chains are starting to resolve and getting a new item can lead to an “aha” that provides a key to earlier barriers that had been stymying you. There are some things that pay off in the Maze Gallery, items you collect in early rooms that get used to good effect later, but the surrealistic nature of the Gallery meant that I couldn’t really predict what would or wouldn’t be useful later (and in fact I finished the game with a lot of unused items as souvenirs of the visit).

I also think the game could use a few more showstopper rooms, like the slaughterhouse bathroom in Cragne Manor – there are some rooms that are intentionally low-key, but none that feel like they’re taking a big big swing and providing some contrast for the medium-scale locations (admittedly, the Clown Alley comes close, but it’s sequenced a little late in the path, and only has a few moments of interactivity, so it didn’t wind up energizing me as much as I’d hoped).

With that said, there’s real pleasure to be had in the charms the game does have to offer, especially the characters: while the nature of the locations was that most of them were places to experience and then move past, there were some stories that stuck with me, like the young blob looking for some kind of self-definition whose anxious parents wanted to help without overstepping, or the bat and the pig who metafictionally quizzed me about narratively significant events while sharing gossip about inter-departmental politics at the Gallery. It’s a lovely potpourri, and my complaints are likely primarily just a symptom of playing Maze Gallery as part of the IFComp firehouse rather than at the more leisurely pace that the material deserves – those comparisons with Cragne Manor above should probably be taken with a grain of salt since my feelings about the game would be vastly different if I’d tried to speed-run my way through its bulk. And after all, nobody likes to be frog-marched through a museum!

One of the characteristics of early-21st-Century life is that the line between reality and parody has become vanishingly thin. So when, early on in therapy-sim The Shyler Project, the eponymous chatbot designed to counsel patients in the place of human psychologists, admits to being mentally ill themself, at first I wasn’t sure if it was a bit – physician, heal thyself, and all that. But no, this is an earnest game that plays the plot beat straight, and it’s actually depressingly plausible: any AI developed to help people with these kinds of problems would of course need to be trained up on the toughest case studies and examples, as well as the easiest, and just as we in the West can remain comfortably ignorant of the toll that viewing vile content exacts on the often-non-US moderators tasked with removing it from our social networks, so too is it logical that the same dynamics would apply to non-human people performing the same kind of labor.

I should say that while the game doesn’t really go into detail about the mechanics underpinning Shyler’s identity, I think for the game to work as intended the player is meant to understand them as a person, rather than an LLM mechanistically regurgitating tropes while hastening global warming. But it wasn’t too hard for me to make this leap regardless; Shyler’s personality is sufficiently idiosyncratic, with much of their dialogue drawing parallels between the relationship between God and those who pray to Him and the myriad petitioners entreating Shyler to heal their psychological wounds, that I never felt like they were an oatmeal-generating machine built to the ChatGPT plan. They’ve got a solid sense of humor about their situation, too:

"Now that I understand the world better, I think it was fucked up of my creators to feed me peoples’ suicide posts and the like to get me to understand mental health. What, the World Health Organization’s website wasn’t enough for you, dumbasses?"

While I got a good sense of Shyler’s concerns, I can’t say the same for the notional protagonist, Jaiden – while in your first therapy session, it’s made clear that you suffer from manic-depression, actually for most of the game it’s Shyler who does most of the talking and who ultimately faces a series of existential crises. And while you’re given some choices determining how Jaiden responds, ultimately your options are just different ways of being supportive – which is nice enough, and I appreciate the author sticking with a specific vision of how the story is meant to play out, but I think there would have been room to characterize them with a little more specificity, and perhaps establish whether reaching out to help Shyler is challenging, which could make the plot feel more poignant.

My only other complaint is that the game makes extensive use of timed text, with every single line of dialogue prompting a pause. I think this is because the game is fully voice-acted, but I have to confess I wasn’t able to play with the sound on, so this effort was lost on me, and since I couldn’t find a way to skip ahead I often wound up alt-tabbing after making a choice and doing something else while I waited for the full text of the next passage to scroll on-screen.

For all the unneeded friction this added to the experience, though, I still found the Shyler Project engaging. Shyler’s plight eventually gets quite dire, in a way that works on its own terms within the conceit of the fiction but also offers allegorical connections to a host of other situations: parental rejection, a feeling of being ill-suited for the role that’s been thrust on you, or just being depressed and overwhelmed by your responsibilities. If Jaiden’s decision to help doesn’t have explicit motivation behind it, and feels a bit like a deus ex machina, well, in these times we could all use a bit of unmerited grace, couldn’t we?

There is a justly-famous bit in the 1950’s movie Harvey that changed my life when I came across it as an undergrad: Jimmy Stewart (playing a grown man whose best friend is a giant invisible bunny; I look forward to the inevitable remake giving us a CGI look at mega-Flopsy) relates a pearl of wisdom from his mother, namely “in this world, you can be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” And then reflecting on his own experience, he continues: “for years I was smart – I recommend pleasant.” In two lines, it crystallized some feelings I’d been having for months, the dawning realization that responding to an awkward teenagerhood by making sure I was always the cleverest guy in the room, with a sarcastic quip for every occasion, was just self-defense that I didn’t need, and didn’t want, anymore.

Well, it’s a lesson that must be continually be relearned, because reader, I felt oh so smart as I started the Dragon of Silverton Mine, after the introduction told of how this parserlike choice-game’s protagonist, a neophyte mage with only a telekinesis spell to their name, was sent into a collapsed mine to rescue survivors and perhaps track down the cause of the quote-unquote mysterious fires that caused the cave-in. “Spoiler alert for the title,” I jotted down in my notes, chortling the while. But oh, I should have been pleasant, because I was wrong wrong wrong.

Admittedly the setup is a little generic – we’re in whitebread fantasyland, and at first the only distinctive feature is that the comedy-dwarves are German, not Scottish. And if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to troubleshoot mine-based shenanigans, well, I’d need one of those fancy coin-machines to count them all. So yes, Silverton Mine certainly plays the hits; the first puzzle involves wrangling some rope, and your explorations will bring you to flooded tunnels and a ghost-haunted tomb before it’s all over. But it also isn’t afraid to subvert expectations, and the climactic reveal of what was actually amiss, and how I’d need to solve it, brought a big smile to my face. That’s not the only moment where a situation I’d encountered a million times before took an entertaining swerve, either: at one point, a character starts to ask you the oldest chestnut of a riddle, and before they get five words in you get your dialogue options:

Man!
It’s a man!
The answer is man.
Woman works too.

(I, like everyone else I’m sure, selected the last one).

The puzzles are similarly comfortably familiar while boasting enough novelty to stay engaging – and the well-designed interface makes even potentially-fiddly solutions intuitive. In addition to compass-based navigation and clickable links allowing you to investigate and take the objects that you find in the environment, there’s an inventory system that allows you to use the stuff you’re carrying with other inventory items or objects in the current room, with the possibilities fanning out as horizontal tabs atop the item list. It makes trying out your ideas quick and easy, but since the second-object options often include items beyond the relatively small set of interactive links in the main description, it subtly discourages lawnmowering, too. There’s an early multi-step puzzle to find a magic crystal that’s one of my favorites in the Comp so far: I had an “aha” moment at pretty much every stage, and the speed of clicking almost precisely matched my speed of thought.

I should admit that those “aha” moments came in such density because the game is never especially challenging – the only time I felt a bit lost was when I inadvertently clicked the “refresh” button in a dialogue scene, rather than the ellipses that actually moved things forward, and wound up skipping a bunch of exposition. Fortunately, a quick reload fixed that and I was soon back on track. So yes, the Dragon of Silverton Mine will not provide you with brainteasers for the ages, nor will its story or characters stick with you for weeks. But it is both oh so smart and oh so pleasant, and that’s certainly worth appreciating.

The genre listing for The Killings in Wasacona is one of those things that drifts right by you when you read it, but gets increasingly odd the more you think about it: “Crime Detective Mystery”. Combining these words in exactly this way feels natural at this point: stories where criminals are brought to justice by investigators who apply their intellects to solve the mysteries presented by their misdeeds are a dime a dozen. But I wonder how much of this seemingly-intuitive melding of the crime story and the brain-teaser would be left if we somehow were able to subtract the influence of a century of Sherlock Holmes? Real criminals, after all, are decidedly irrational, and are less often caught by an ineluctable web of deductions slowly closing in on them than by people they’ve pissed off ratting them out to the cops. On the flip side, the forensic methods used to identify and convict suspects frequently are just a patina of pseudo-science atop hunches and prejudice (if you ever want to make your blood run cold, read up on the people “arson investigation” has sent to Death Row). On this evidence, why would we think the messy, squalid stories of crime should render up their secrets if the detective does the equivalent of solving a sudoku?

These contradictions can be noted against just about any game in this capacious category, of course, but Killings in Wasacona raises them more than most, on both the cops and the robbers sides of the equation. The game offers a solid framework for building a mystery: as a rookie FBI agent, you’re brought in to help solve a trio of small-town deaths, at least two of which were clearly murders, in the course of a week. The interface shows potential investigative hot-spots on a map – the crime scenes, the houses of the victims and their families, and more – and once you choose one to visit, typically chewing up an hour of the limited clock, you pick your way through conversational gambits, searches for evidence, or whatever else is needed to reveal clues. After time is up, the final passage helpfully sorts everything you’ve uncovered according to the different theories of the case that it supports, and based on what you’ve found you select the appropriate culprit and motive for each death.

Some details of this setup, it must be admitted, don’t make much sense (where’s the federal jurisdictional hook? Why are we sent out alone for fieldwork just days after graduation from Quantico? Why is everybody so tall, with the shortest victim being a woman who’s 5’10”?) but it’s a well-designed structure for a mystery investigation. Similarly, while the prose regularly veers into melodrama (the prologue narrating the first killing uses sentence fragments to illustrate the crime, culminating with “A new demonic visage. A face of fire. Teeth. Pupils. Hands”, which seems to imply the murderer’s hands are part of their face; meanwhile, the proprietor of a party house refers to the protagonist as a “square”, which, come on, it’s not 1957 anymore) and the writing occasionally drops details that don’t make sense (a down-on-his-luck drifter “looks twice his age”, which given that he’s 45 seems quite extreme; a co-worker of one of the victims volunteers, without prompting, details of her and her friends’ drug use), the story itself is generally fine, turning on reasonably-plausible small-town secrets and eventually encompassing a stereotypical but reasonably-drawn cast (there’s a racist cop, but the game and other characters recognize that’s a problem, e.g.)

As a mystery, though, I found it less satisfying than I wanted it to be; I was able to logic my way through most of the solution, but key details eluded me. Possibly this is just because I’m a bit of a dunderhead, but I do think those twin issues I flagged above played a role. Starting with the criminals’ side of the ledger, it’s difficult to get at least one, and possibly two, of the murders “right” because in those particular cases the motive of the killer is bizarre and self-defeating. Guessing that it was Moriarty who committed a crime, and sussing out his methods, is hard because he’s so smart, but equally, fingering Inspector Clouseau and identifying his M.O. is tough precisely because he’s an idiot. This isn’t necessarily unrealistic, certainly, but it does make the puzzle of solving the mystery less satisfying.

The methods of investigation are also not unproblematic. Clues are unlocked not primarily through player skill – there’s more than enough time to visit every relevant location in the game, and you generally don’t have too many options at any of them, so lawnmowering is relatively easy – but through character skill. Yes, Killings in Wasacona has RPG-style stats, which you set at the beginning of the game either by picking a pre-rolled archetype (jock, nerd, face, etc.) or manually setting your bonuses or penalties across five different investigative approaches. Frequently a choice will lead to a test of one of these skills, at which point you roll a d20, subject your character’s relevant modifier – if the sum is 11 or higher you succeed and get the clue, 10 or less and you fail.

The specifics of the implementation make me feel like this might be a mechanic derived from Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s notable that these kinds of approaches to clue-gathering are very much out of vogue in tabletop RPG circles: these days, the mechanics for mystery-focused games are likely to focus on resource allocation, like spending a limited pool of points to automatically succeed at certain rolls, and mitigate the impact of risk by allowing for rerolls or partial success. And my experience of Killings in Wasacona bore out the wisdom of this shift, as I didn’t roll above a 6 more than once in my first seven or eight rolls (and since none of my bonuses were above +3, that means I failed nearly all of them).

Admittedly, my luck eventually reverted to the mean, and I wound up getting some additional “morale” bonuses that made rolls much easier (oddly, I got these bonuses mainly by chasing red herring, suggesting that the most efficient course through the game is to start out wasting time on tangential matters so that your chances of success are optimized by the time you turn to the actual investigation). And again, cops miss stuff all the time. But it doesn’t make for a satisfying set of mechanics, and as I was scratching my head on the final screen trying to figure out the last details of my theory, it was unpleasant to think that I might not be able to fit the pieces together not from lack of trying, but because the RNG gods decreed I shouldn’t see the relevant clue.

All told this means I found Killings in Wasacona more successful at the “crime” part of the genre label than the “detective mystery” part. But the framework and overall presentation, modulo the dice-rolling, really were quite strong, and I have to admit there’s a dark charm to the Fargo-esque series of misadventures revealed at the end – I’d definitely sign up for a sequel using the same basic approach, but tighter writing and more intentional design.

We’ve been self-deprecatingly saying parser puzzlers with traditional mechanics are medium-dry-goods games for decades now, but never I think have I seen that conceit made so literal as it is in Dust: progressing through this Old West adventure requires grit and a swift hand at the revolver, sure, but mostly it just takes a lot of trips to the general store. Crowbars, rope, matches, you name it, they’ve got it, which allows you to progress through a linear sequence of logical, satisfying puzzles. Much like the game as a whole, it’s a little silly if you think about it too much, but as you’re playing it all makes sense.

The Western is not a genre whose subtleties I’m especially familiar with, but even with my cursory knowledge I can tell that Dust plays the hits. You’re a drifter who’s come into town on a personal errand of some urgency, before getting swept up in the ills facing the community and having to resolve them before you can move on, a victim of circumstance as much as your moral code (it is a ding against the game that the original errand doesn’t go as much as mentioned until you’ve saved the day, but I suppose that would just make the game feel less self-contained). Said town boasts a saloon, a sheriff’s office, a gallows and graveyard, and the aforementioned dry-goods story – everything an Old West community needs, and not a whit more. This also includes, of course, a ranch whose owners are up to no good, which is where the plot kicks in: some toughs under their sponsorship are doing something in the old mine, and they appear to be mixed up with the disappearance of an ingenue with a heart of gold, as well as her fiancée. Sure, the sheriff tells you you’re the main suspect and need to clear your name, but he immediately falls asleep and there’s nothing stopping you from just walking out of town: must be that you have a heart of gold too.

There are no surprises here in terms of either plot or character tropes – all is exactly as you’d think it’d be – so mostly all there is to talk about is the implementation. On the technical side, it’s all quite solidly put together, and as mentioned, the puzzles are a good fit for the setting and generally well clued, though I was getting a little sick of running back to Bill the Storekeeper every five minutes by the end (the puzzle requiring you to jump through a bunch of hoops to get some rope was perhaps a bridge too far in my book – come on, the only bit of rope that’s lying around in town is the leftovers from when they hanged some people?) They did hold my hand more than I wanted; in particular, many are resolved via dialogue, which is run via a menu-based system, so you don’t even need to ASK STOREKEEPER ABOUT MATCHES, just TALK TO him and select the single option available instead. And I was momentarily stymied when I couldn’t get other characters to acknowledge that I needed a lamp – turned out I needed to blunder around in the dark for a bit first, rather than just come up next to the darkened mine entrance and recognize that light would be helpful, which felt like overly-fussy authorial stage-managing.

If I’m searching for critiques, I’d also say that there are some occasional odd phrases, perhaps artifacts of the game’s translation from the German. The saloonkeeper is described thus, for example:

"She is in her late forties, a corpulent, attractive woman with laugh lines and calloused hands."

But with that said, the version with “plump” subbed in for “corpulent” is much less memorable, and strictly speaking there’s nothing actually wrong here. Actually if I’m honest I mostly enjoyed these occasional departures from standard English, as they’re at worst harmless, and at best reasonably amusing: in a game otherwise so dedicated to smoothly incarnating its genre, it’s fun to run across the occasional bit of friction. So too with the occasional challenge that sent me elsewhere than the general store – sure, structurally there’s nothing too different about borrowing a parrot from the German barber in order to take advantage of his expanded senses (the parrot, not the German) as compared to borrowing a crowbar from the nearsighted shopkeeper to pry up a rock, but it does lend some much-needed novelty.

The result is a success, I think, though a low-key one: if Westerns are your jam, you’re in for a solid take at the genre, and if not, well, at least Dust goes down easy and will probably offer you a chuckle or two along the way to boot. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to get too excited about this kind of thing after so many decades, but those with less experience in the dry goods industry might easily feel differently.

Some of my favorite works of IF are games where it’s part of the player’s responsibility to fit together different pieces of narrative that are intentionally presented out of order or out of context, engaging with themes, allusions, and character- or plot-based hints to create a gestalt theory of what the work is communicating. Obviously there are precedents for this sort of thing all over the arts – hello, Modernism – but it’s often an especially good fit for IF; even though we’ve long since moved beyond the genre’s puzzles-first roots, players and authors alike have been trained to think about the narrative possibilities inherent in what’s being presented, and allowing players to inhabit a story, poking and prodding at it to see how it responds, both forces players to slow down and think critically about what they’re reading while allowing for a kind of trial-and-error expectation that you can’t get just from e.g. reading Virginia Woolf. And when this approach works well, it can be amazing – I don’t think I would have gotten as much out of Metallic Red if it simply presented everything it was doing on a platter; actively engaging with it, testing out theories, and going back to earlier sections of the game to look for parallels all increased the impact it had on me.

This is a risky strategy to pursue, though. For one thing, you’re asking a fair bit of work of the player, and you need to make sure you’ve properly motivated them to put in the labor. And for a second, by leaving plenty of blanks for the player to fill in, you’re ceding control of what exactly gets put in them. And I found that Civil Service, while notionally being something I might enjoy sinking my teeth into, runs face-first into both of these dangers.

The second issue was actually the bigger one for me, but it hinges on some stuff that happens later on in the game so first things first: what does make a player willing, if not eager, to try to make sense of a fragmented narrative? Well, let’s not overthink this, it’s basically just the stuff that makes fiction compelling in the first place: if there’s an intriguing mystery plot, or there are compelling but enigmatic characters, or there’s something about the structure that compels you to find the story’s intended shape, or the prose and narrative voice are sufficiently rich that your brain naturally wants to spend more time in their world – or, if it’s a game rather than a piece of static fiction, there are gameplay mechanics that promote exploration – that’s a good start, and if you’ve got two or more you’re off to the races.

Civil Service, though, maybe checks a couple boxes halfway? The plot takes a long time to emerge: the game starts more or less in medias res, with your character, who appears to be some kind of ghost or spirit, musing negatively about offices in general and this one office they’ve started haunting in particular. You appear to have some kind of mission, with some urgency attached to it, but this is mentioned only quite obliquely, and you spend most of your time alternately focusing on the quotidian annoyances of the trio of workers you’re cohabitating with (perhaps straining your spectral powers to rattle some office supplies ominously) and zoning out to look at the business owners and passersby outside the window; then there are occasional interspersed vignettes that wrench you away from this grounded milieu and require you to make one-to-three star ratings of various things, or immerse you in flashbacks without direct linkages to the main plot. As to the office stuff, it’s grounded enough to be banal, and the other pieces are sufficiently disconnected that I rarely felt my brain tickle with an exciting insight.

Characters are even more of a bust. A day on from playing the game, I can remember that there were two male workers and one woman, and one of the guys has a dog he brings to work, and might be named Colin (the person, not the dog); they’re all kind of petty and appear to passive-aggressively dislike each other, and that’s about all I got in terms of personality. The outside-the-window people are even more thinly drawn – the narrative tries to indicate that your character feels a mysterious connection with at least one of them, which is fair enough but not especially exciting when you haven’t heard a word of dialogue from them. Meanwhile, the structure is a bit wooly – it’s structured about workdays, but Monday stretches on for quite a while, but Tuesday and Wednesday are over in flash – and the writing is fine, but largely devoted to establishing a mood of grim monotony. Like, lest you think these workers are doing anything interesting or valuable:

"An application to the state, a plea to ungodly power, through the right channels and justly made is - in my colleague’s world - a grey and spectral effort from the office printer… Tea stained, creased, worthless. These are the things they deal in."

It’s fine, but it doesn’t really compel one, does it?

Mechanically speaking, this is largely structured as a hypertext narrative, where seemingly-random words throughout each passage can be clicked and move you through the story; the narrative apparently does branch somewhat based not on anything you have the protagonist directly do, but of all things on the ratings you give in those seemingly-random Yelp-ish segments. It could work fine if the other aspects of the game were more engaging – heck, it’s not miles away from how some of my favorite games, like Queenlash and Manifest No are designed – but lacks much in the way of standalone appeal.

Now, having said all this, there is one vignette – I think a flashback – that I did find grabbed me: it’s quite disconnected from everything else in the game, narrating a holiday-gone-wrong that sees a caddish character snubbing his new girlfriend’s attempts to make their relationship something special. You get a sense of the boyfriend as an actual human being, with (admittedly awful) desires and a personality, and the writing is noticeably more energetic as for once it’s got events that fit together into an actual conflict to narrate. Unfortunately, it comes quite late in the game, perhaps 2/3 or ¾ of the way through, and it’s not directly built up to, or followed up on, in the rest of the plot: I have a theory or two about how those characters relate to the main story, but even if I’ve guessed right these connections feel like something I’ve imposed on an arid text, rather than noticed organically growing out of the piece.

I worry that the above comes off more negatively than I intend it. Really, most of the game is fine; I was mildly disengaged as I clicked through it, but it’s more mediocre than actively bad, and there is that one bit that’s good; I wasn’t super excited to think rigorously about what all the stuff it was slinging at me meant, but it got me to at least do the minimum. And here is where we get to the second issue I mentioned above, because I found the theory I developed about the game’s key mystery completely ridiculous.

Throughout the game, you’re cued to think of the three office-workers as bad people: you alone can tell that their environment is spiritually corrupted and they snipe at each other under a cloak of politeness, but there are intimations that there’s some deeper crime they’re complicit in, some offense they’ve committed against a capitalized She. And then among the seemingly-random bits of prose that get dropped in your lap, there’s this:

"Fifty three miles away at the
bottom of a ravine
Her veins chill"

So clearly these bad people like murdered someone, maybe because they’re embezzling or otherwise up to no good and were trying to cover up the crime? That would be a bit cliched, I suppose, but a reasonable enough motivating incident and fit the downbeat mood of the game. But no, I’m quite convinced the truth is something different: (Spoiler - click to show) there are repeated references to something terrible happening at an office morale-building event, and that the trio of jerks paid so little attention to Her they didn’t even remember her name. In the event, it appears that they all were brought together to do a ropes course and She slipped doing a trust fall or something, fell into a ditch, and the other workers were so self-involved they didn’t notice.

While respecting the sanctity of the spoiler-block, I’ll just say that this feels more like a cut subplot from a late-season episode of the Office than the stuff of drama; I suppose you could suspend disbelief about the unrealistic aspects of it, but you’re still left with a plot twist more likely to elicit hilarity than any other response, and the rest of the game sure doesn’t seem to indicate that it’s a comedy. And then the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)She isn’t actually dead yet, and manages to cling to life at the bottom of the ravine for the better part of a week until your white-out related antics somehow trigger an ending where She’s suddenly remembered and rescued just adds an additional note of slapstick.

But while I’m pretty sure I’ve got the basic sequence of events right, these tone issues also make me quite sure that there’s a version of all of this that looks quite different in the author’s head. Alas, she didn’t write it, or provide sufficient prompts to make my brain fill out the paint-by-numbers in the right way. Trust the player/reader, authors are often told, so I think this failure must have come out of a noble impulse – but I, at least, needed a bit more hand-holding to see what the author wanted me to see, and feel why all of this was worth caring about.

“Well, this is quite pleasant” is perhaps an odd reaction to a decidedly idiosyncratic game: Forsaken Denizen is written in Dialog, has gameplay structured around survival-horror resource management tropes, and is set in a High Weird sci-fantasy world that puts me in mind of the Metabarons or the less-fascist parts of Warhammer 40k – oh, and the narrative voice belongs to the protagonist’s space-princess girlfriend, who won’t condescend to her or drool over her when she can do both at the same time. But while there’s a version of this game that’s a spiky, off-putting blast of weirdness, instead there’s a smoothness of design and of implementation that makes playing it just feel very nice indeed.

There are any number of places to dig in, but let’s start with that last one, the narrator, since she’s got to be my single favorite element of the game. Princess Cathabel X starts the game locked in her floating palace, victim of her own machinations after the extradimensional finance-monsters she cut a deal with decide to collateralize the debt by turning the citizens of her space-colony into cybernetic zombies. When you put it like this, she’s possibly the villain of the piece, though as a clone of the galaxy’s sovereign assigned to a periphery world to operate the infrastructure that allows for space travel (I think – the worldbuilding here, to its credit, is portentous and a bit confusing), and raised as part of a failed experiment to perform a royal marriage to space-bees, perhaps she was just acting out. By far her most redeeming feature is that she’s head-over-heels in love with the game’s actual main character, Dor, who’s a working-class (and possibly trans? Again, I confess I’m not really sure how all of this is meant to work) alien crammed into the skin of a human-looking bureaucrat; she’ll need to use every scrap of her ingenuity to save the day, and Cath will be squeeing over her, while pretending to remain archly unimpressed, the whole time. They’re a heck of a pair – I mean, here’s their meet-cute:

"Thirteen years ago. She was twenty-two and I was nineteen. When my automated guardians dropped from orbit, all they saw was someone threatening the Second Princess of the Empire of the Final Sun.

"But I saw someone gaunt with hunger and exhaustion, with a weapon that didn’t look like it would even fire. I saw someone with a burning flame behind her black eyes. And it suddenly felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a pretty woman to jam a gun into my sternum."

There’s not much of a plot beyond Dor making her way through the city to find Cath, then deciding she’s not leaving and it’s time to take the fight to the mastermind behind the attack on her home. But there’s plenty of incident along the way. Traversing from one side of the map to the other requires going through Dor’s workplace, her home, and an industrial district, with gonzo lore dribbled out in compelling nuggets along the way – there are clever details by the wazoo, from the aforementioned demonic capitalism to weird shadow-based technology to small-scale human stories that are there to remind you that there are actual stakes here. It’s all done by allusion and is maybe hard to take too seriously, but they’re well-written enough that I was excited to track down every errant fax (seriously, they still use faxes) and document I could find. Beyond the environmental storytelling, there are metroidvania elements that make exploration a key part of the game; mostly this reduces to finding new flavors of keys to unlock new flavors of doors, but the rewards you find, from unique conversational partners to one-off rewards that create new gameplay opportunities, were enough to keep me engaged through the game’s running time.

Speaking of the gameplay, as I mentioned it’s going for a survival-horror vibe, with a limited-parser interface mostly channeling your options to shooting or running from the baddies. Of course your ammo is limited and replenished only by scavenging (killing monsters doesn’t result in bodies to loot, sad to say), UNDO is disabled and you can only save in specific map rooms, and there’s an inventory limit keeping you from having all your tools on you at once; that sits alongside a light equipment system that allows you to wear different outfits for bespoke benefits like more frequent critical hits. Beyond the specific mechanics, there are also a few nods to past examples of the genre, like a roving super-zombie who recalls Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis and an unlockable opera-dress outfit that sets enemies on fire, which is surely a Parasite Eve callback. It’s typically possible to evade monsters by just going to a different location, but many of the game’s puzzles require juggling inventory items or waiting for processes to finish, which is often tricky when cyborgs are trying to burst you like a pinata. Fortunately fighting is straightforward, too: at its most basic, you just need to land two regular hits on a monster to kill it. The feelies spell out the math – 1/6 of the time you crit, 1/6 of the time you miss, and 4/6 of the time you land your blow – which is generally forgiving unless you get ganged up on, and of course there’s limited healing as well as several special attacks available.

It’s all very cleanly designed; despite this adding up to a fair number of systems, everything is explained quite well and works straightforwardly in practice, so it only took me a few minutes before I was skulking through the alleys and splattering techzombies like a pro. And though it’s churlish to say this, that leads to my only major critique of Forsaken Denizen: there’s perhaps a mismatch between the desperate struggle for survival that Cath narrates and the frictionless, laid-back set of combat puzzles I actually played through. I always knew where I was going, I never felt in danger unless I was intentionally pushing my luck (and even then I knew I had close checkpoints to fall back to), and I wrapped up my first playthrough with substantial reserves of bullets and healing items left. Generously, the game does encourage challenge-run replays, since you’re given a score when you win which unlocks new outfits with exciting bonus powers, like the aforementioned opera dress and a jacket that allows you to opt into fun alternate endings; a series of achievement-like goals or restrictions that will win you extra points are also listed.

This was all fun enough that I did a quick second play-through that won me all but one unlock, but the lack of randomization and the ease with which I’d identified what felt like an optimal strategy meant I didn’t feel too compelled to play a final time to get the last outfit – not having systems that are robust enough to support full roguelike replayability is a pretty faint criticism to levy at a piece of IF, though. Again, it’s all very fun, and very winsome, but part of me wonders if I would have enjoyed Forsaken Denizen more if the experience of playing it was more like the experience Dor is diegetically having: marshaling my strategies to the utmost, wincing at every run of bad luck, moments of sanctuary hard-won and few and far between, might have been less fun but more memorable. But, well, probably not – I don’t actually like survival horror games that much, and there are far worse things to be than pleasant.

I find it very hard to review a game like A Warm Reception, because it’s part of a very well-populated subgenre – the anachronism-and-joke-filled fantasy romp by a first-time parser author – that could just as well be designed to frustrate criticism. These games are usually more wacky than funny, inevitably have some infelicities of implementation, and offer up puzzles you’ve generally seen a million times before and a plot that you’ve seen a couple million more than that. But all of that is besides the point; these games are mostly earnest learning experiences, where the author is visibly having a great time making a world and bringing it to life. And that enthusiasm can be infectious when, like the present case, they’re well put-together. So perhaps the thing to do is take as read all the above critiques, so we can just move on to the things that are relatively unique about A Warm Reception.

It must be said that the premise is one of those elements that stands out – you’re a medieval reporter who’s going to the princess’s wedding reception to write a puff piece – but also one that the game jettisons on pretty much the first screen. The castle is of course deserted (relatable, NPCs are tricky!) because a dragon’s rather spoiled the party by attacking, so it’s of course up to you to save the day by driving off the beast (in fairness, if you try to sleep the narrator will demur, saying “you need to finish the case”, so it’s unclear you really know how journalism is supposed to work). So off you go to ransack your way through the mid-sized castle, looking for the equipment that will give you an edge in the final fight with nary a second thought of the “wait, doesn’t the king have a guy for this sort of thing?” variety to slow you down.

That actually leads to a second unique element: rather than having to check every item off the scavenger hunt before you can reach the endgame, you can give it a go any time you like, with your score giving you bonuses on a d20 roll that determines the outcome. It’s the kind of idea that could work in a tabletop RPG, but winds up unsatisfying in an IF context; for one thing, you can just UNDO-scum to get to the winning sequence right out the gate, and for another, your reward for gutting out a close victory is that you miss out on content. More charitably I suppose the idea is that you get to skip puzzles that you aren’t working for you, but actually the puzzles are fun enough that I was motivated to finish them all. Sure, a bunch are straightforward lock-and-key dealies, and there’s a maze with a blink-and-you-missed-it gimmick, but the author manages to deploy typical medium-dry-goods interactions in entertaining ways – the puzzle chain involving the moths is especially good.

So much for the bits that are memorable. The prose and implementation fall into the “workmanlike” category; I won’t harp on the latter, except to note that there are a few places where simply examining an object triggers an action, like allowing you to input the combination to a safe, which led to some moments of confusion (for the author, I noted a couple of additional small snags in the attached transcript). As to the former, well, this is the kind of medieval fantasy world where they eat pizza and reference break-dancing and professional wrestling. For all that I still found the plot more endearing than it needs to be, with patriarchal mores lightly sent up and love conquering all in the end.

Now that I’ve run through a bunch of particulars, by tradition I should now transition back to some general judgment and overall critical evaluation of A Warm Reception. But as I said, that’s devilishly hard – it’s a solidly engaging but slightly rough entry in a deeply inessential subgenre, so what does that make it? I guess we can just call it a promising start for an author who might very well wow us with their second game.

(This is one of those games that’s difficult to discuss without getting into spoiler-territory, and blurring out ¾ of the review would be an awkward compromise, so caveat lector).

A couple of times this Comp, I’ve stumbled onto decidedly non-standard ways of experiencing games: I mistook a jokey ending in the Curse for the main thrust of what it was trying to do, and I inadvertently gave myself the same name as the principal NPC in Final Call, making it all go off a bit more Fight Club than intended. Now with Metallic Red it’s happened again: when my solitary space-trucker had a dream where a hooded figure asked “have you drunk the kykeon?”, I assume for most people it will be an alienating, mysterious beat, but for me it was like sinking into a warm bath: oh hey, we’re doing the Eleusinian Miseries 3, er, Mysteries!

In fairness, that’s not all we’re doing. Metallic Red starts out quite austere: after the lovely but forbidding tarot-inflected cover art sets the mood and an introductory paragraph establishes the boxy, dilapidated nature of the ship you’re piloting, you’re confronted with an excerpt from Oedipus Rex that ends “Do you know the family you come from?” From there you’re shunted into a series of highly granular, dull activities as you while away the days until you reach your destination. That first day you meticulously clean the ship; on subsequent ones, you can tend to the greens in the hydroponics bay, exercise to keep muscle atrophy at bay, or just futz around on the internet. More interesting, perhaps, are your flirtations with divination: you 3D-print a tarot deck and pull a single card every day or two, and you’re also erroneously delivered a mechanical orrery that you rewind in order to track the astrological influences of your life and birth, though in both cases there’s something half-hearted or desultory about your engagement, performing the requisite actions without thinking about what they mean.

Oh, and in between days you dream, visited by some that appear to be fantasies, others that might be memories (the Eleusinian Mysteries one struck me as the former at first, but turns out to be the latter). Their content seems to reflect a fear of engagement (in one, you’re horrified at the idea that another person might be coming within a thousand kilometers of your ship), of disorder (an earlier part of that sequence involves trying to adjust one bolt in your food-synthesizing machine, only to be horrified when it breaks), or both (the most viscerally compelling one sees you sitting next to your dad on the grounded ship, as he eats a hamburger and spills food waste all over the consoles).

To say this is all conveys a monastic vibe would be an understatement – but per the twist halfway through, it would also be completely wrong. Your trip, you see, has taken you back to Eleusis, or at least an underground colony that’s named itself after the sanctuary of the cult. Here, the spartan choice-based interface, which previously presented only a few options at a time, each of which had to be exhausted to progress, blossoms into the freedom of parserlike navigation as you’re welcomed back to a spiritual community that once counted you a member: you’re here to consult with the hierophant. And as you wait for your audience, you meet an old friend again, help with the cooking via a lovely peanut-sauce-making minigame that’s dead-on to how I do it (add half a dozen ingredients a little bit at a time to keep things proportional as you accumulate enough for the dish, tasting liberally as you go) before being served a deliciously-described feast – by leaving the brethren, you haven’t escaped asceticism but embraced it.

The hierophant, meanwhile, is no dogma-bound prelate. By this point I was unsurprised that he was sympathetic, while the protagonist indefatigably pressed an absurd point, insisting on being allowed to renounce membership in the community – absurd because, as the hierophant reasonably pointed out, while they’re happy to say goodbye to you and let you continue on your own way, what you’re really asking for is to forget what you learned when you became an initiate, and that’s impossible. And then the game ends.

This review has seen me just uncharacteristically narrating the plot of the game, because I think before evaluating Metallic Red it’s important to get a sense of what it’s doing, and what it’s doing requires some explication (I haven’t read other reviews yet, but I’m very curious to see what folks made of it) – and that comes back to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Again, it’s not just the Mysteries, there’s some business with jade figurines that I think must be drawn from a different tradition, references to bird-auguries that are more Roman than Greek, and it’s notable that your ship is a “Buraq class”, referencing the flying steed that took the prophet Mohammed on a trip to the heavens. But the conversation with the hierophant clearly centers on something the protagonist learned or intuited in a ritual, so this is the natural jumping-off point. And while we don’t fully know what happened in the sanctuary at Eleusis, we do know they focused on the earth-goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and had to do with the latter’s journey to and return from the Underworld: allegories for death, but also rebirth and, perhaps, immortality.

Why does the protagonist want to escape a memory of immortality? We can’t know for sure, and in fact clearly aren’t meant to; in one of the web-surfing sessions from the first part of the game, you read an interview with a game designer who’s chosen to keep the important elements of the game’s narrative off-screen, only gesturing towards them in dialogue, because:

"when an event has already taken place and players only hear about it after the fact we begin to look at agency differently. No one can change the past, but we can use our agency to build a future."

Still, there are intimations of what might be driving this perverse desire. For one thing, the protagonist’s father, he of the distressing dream, is noted as a major supporter of the cult, and presumably the reason you joined it as well, which puts that Oedipus Rex quote at the beginning into some context. And then there’s your attitude to your decaying ship, which is worth quoting at length as I think it serves as a kind of thesis statement:

"You suspect that once it passes from your hands it’ll be decommissioned but you don’t mind old things. It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. If you float through a bulkhead awkwardly and chip some of the paintwork, it’s just another chip to be added to the litany of minor damages the craft has sustained over its working life. And the totality of damages is just what the ship is composed of. No one at this point could really imagine what the Metallic Red was like when it was new. When it was first built, the concept of an object without history was entirely different to what it is now, and there’s no way to think backwards into what it meant whilst surrounded on all sides by the ship as it currently stands."

This idea of an object without history recurs in various forms through the piece: there’s also an article on a jet fighter that’s been abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle, which makes the protagonist muse on the contrast between the anonymous thing it’s becoming and the bureaucratically-known machine it once was, with a serial number and kill counts and all. So too is the theme of going backwards: recall how you retrace your past via the orrery.

Existence as the accumulation of damage; a father who’s part of a religious cult; the impossibility of imagining original innocence when inside the wreck of what it’s become. It’s not very subtle when you look at it like that, is it? Noting that “metallic red” can refer not just to rust but to (iron-filled) blood would just be gilding the lily; so too would nailing down the trauma that makes the protagonist view the knowledge of immortality as a curse rather than a blessing, and turn their back on sensual pleasures to boot.

To be clear, I’m not intending to oversimply what the game is saying – we’re finally at the evaluation part now, and I can say that I very much enjoyed this. The author has taken what could have been a simple core story and through restraint, allusion, and skill, created something so memorable no world-fleeing hermit could forget it. Admittedly, perhaps its blurb’s warning that it contains “elements of esotericism” is too understated – the player probably needs to have a reasonable knowledge of its reference points to make sense of Metallic Red’s agenda – but after all the way of the Mysteries is that only the initiates understand.

Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.

There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.

Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.

Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).

But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:

"Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk."

So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?

Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.

Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: (Spoiler - click to show) I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.

I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.

When the Republican Party inevitably moves on from having Trump as its standard-bearer (soon may the day come), there’s a chance they’ll land on Hubert Janus next. Sure, he’s fictional, and probably British, to boot, but he’s clearly devoted to inverting Marx: for in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, Europe is haunting a spectre.

No, wait, I mean: in ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, history repeats itself, first as farce, second as tragedy. ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG is of course the sequel to last year’s DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, which was precision-engineered to win the Golden Banana of discord (seriously. There was math). It offered two separate paths to potential players, determined randomly and irrevocably upon startup; while I believe both elaborated upon the scenario teased in its title one, apparently, was surprisingly robust and engaging, designed to elicit a middling score, while the second was an intentionally-awful congeries of timed text, GeoCities-era flashing text and overbusy design, completely linear gameplay, and a conga line of cameos from Darth Vader to Adolf Hitler. I got the second version, and finding its goofily over-the-top effort to be the worst game in the Comp sublimely ridiculous, gave it the 1/10 it was angling for.

To say DICK MCBUTTS is a tough act to follow is an understatement (and possibly a butt joke in itself). But ROD MCSCHLONG makes a manful go at providing more of the same, but different. In particular, whereas the comedy in the former came from the dizzying variety of ways that the titular act was perpetrated, here DONG-PUNCHING is a fail state; the groin of our hero is ever-threatened, but the player has the agency to guide ROD through the gauntlet and escape the ever-thrusting fists of, in turn, a swole leprechaun, a passel of mutated Sciuridae, alien overlords with more limbs than a Hindu god, and more besides. You’re only offered at most two options at any time, and the Twine game allows you to freely undo, so a bad end just means enduring a gif depicting shocking stick-figure violence and then a replay, but for a joke game, ROD MCSCHLONG does a good job of playing fair; more often than not, logical deduction, careful attention to detail, and a cautious regard for the importance of safeguarding your “baloney pony” will see you through. There’s an engaging sense of escalation throughout, too – it’s hopefully no spoiler to reveal that ultimately the very multiverse is put into the balance, meaning that you’re not just protecting one dong, but innumerable dongs across countless realities.

The tragedy is – well, there are two tragedies (see how elegantly Hubert rebuts Karl: everything repeats, not just history!) For one thing, while the game is structured around a dream of escape, the title exerts a remorseless pull: no matter how you try, no matter what you do, ROD MCSCHLONG will GET PUNCHED IN THE DOG, with each near-miss serving to raise the tension before the inevitable. Heck, you need to get out your classical-tragedy bingo card, because here we’ve got both character-is-destiny (the piece opens with ROD’s hubristic boast that no one will ever PUNCH him in the DONG) and trying-to-escape-fate-makes-it-happen (ROD’s efforts to evade PUNCHES are themselves what eventually put his DONG right in the line of fire).

The second tragedy is, well, of course it’s not quite as funny as DICK MCBUTTS. There are some great one-off gags, don’t get me wrong – I don’t exactly know what it means to say performing the eponymous assault would be “[l]ike going to the Cumberland Pencil Museum and trying to beat up the world’s largest coloured pencil,” but it makes me laugh anyway – but inevitably the second time around, the jokes don’t have quite the anarchic zing they once did. There’s an extended sequence involving an athletic supporter and cup that’s played a little too straight, and the easy way failure can be undoing means that ROD MCSCHLONG actually GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG quite a lot, with no lasting consequences. Despite a glee-inducing late-game cameo and quite a lot of craftsmanship, sadly the game ultimately can’t help but disappoint.

That’s OK though, since as stated it’s all in service of inverting Marx’s dialectics and endearing Hubert Janus to the GOP’s movers and shakers – at least until next Comp’s inevitable DONNIE MCTRUMP GETS THRASHED ON THE RUMP.

The Comp welcomes all kinds of IF, but it’s also an awkward place to enter a teaser. As the most, well, competitive of the community’s various events, it tends to be where long, polished games by seasoned authors tend to wind up, so an incomplete effort will look even slighter by way of comparison. But beyond that, the audience simply expects complete experiences: while the Comp’s been home to multi-part series, like the Earth and Sky superhero trilogy that dominated the winner’s circle in the early aughts, or the game I’m going to be reviewing next for that matter, those games had full beginnings, middles, and ends, with linkages to future installments being akin to Marvel-movie postcredit sequences. Well, I say “the audience” but I mean “me” – for all that the blurb clearly discloses that we’ve got here is “simply the prologue” to The Lost Artist, I was still disgruntled to reach the end well before I expected to, all the more so since there’s no indication of when and where the continuation might show up.

But admitting that putting a teaser in IFComp is probably not a good idea, is this prologue nonetheless an effective one? I’d have to say no. For a preview to make me excited to check out the full experience, I think it has to establish the premise and end on a moment of drama, when things are opening up and you’re left on the edge of your seat, half-imagining what might happen next but sure that there’ll be plenty of surprises beyond what you can think up. Think about the Lord of the Rings: you could cut things off after the hobbits take the Buckleberry Ferry just ahead of the Ringwraiths, say, and have a solid teaser. If that’s too much movie to give away for free, you could push back to the moment where Frodo tells Sam that he’s about to go farther from home than he’s ever been before: we don’t get the excitement of the Black Riders or the other hobbits yet, but we know what’s at stake, and that the journey’s about to begin in earnest.

The Lost Artist: Prologue, by way of contrast, basically decides to cut off just as Bilbo slips the ring on at his party, and excises the opening historical flashback besides: we have a disconnected set of characters who’ve barely interacted with each other, some kind of inciting incident that seems like it’s going somewhere, but no real idea of the shape of the story, what the themes or conflicts to come will be, and little reason to care about anything we’ve just seen. Here, instead of hobbits we’ve got a pair of bird-sanctuary-keepers turned bank robbers, an artist trapped against her will and losing her creativity, and the world’s most generic detective; instead of the dark lord Sauron we’ve got an ominous megacorporation with decidedly odd ideas about profitability (we’re told that at least one part of their business is making corporate logos, and they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?), and instead of magic rings we’ve got low-context invocations of time travel and a mystical raven. Possibly there are rules and thematic linkages that unify all of this, but the vibe is that anything could happen, and not necessarily in a good way:

Balding picks up the envelope but notices that his name is misspelled.

“Damn.” The Detective whimpers to himself, looking off to somewhere else.

The letters of his name are floating in the center of his view. The letters continuously disassemble and reassemble into hallucinated shapes.

He gets all weird about that.

Better to find something else to focus on.

Hey! What’s over there?

Let’s just say that the word “huh?” recurs a lot in my notes.

There are one or two possibly-intriguing images here – I liked the bit where the captive artist, who’s stuck working on the aforementioned logos, has a moment of clarity after she clumsily spills maté tea powder on one of her doodles and is arrested by the “depth and texture” it lends to her work – and just at the end, it indicates that the detective is being brought in to investigate something to do with the artist’s predicament. But there’s just not enough here to make me care about what happens next, even without the wacky tone, barely-there characters, and underexplained worldbuilding. It could be that after another act or two, the Lost Artist brings its disparate parts together, establishes compelling themes, and creates an engaging narrative – or it could be that it doesn’t. But either way, this prologue doesn’t allow the player to give it a fair shake.

I was recently reading a review of the DnD 3rd Edition version of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting – sometimes I make questionable choices about what to do with my spare time – and the author teased out a distinction between “generic” fantasy and “vanilla” fantasy: there’s some fantasy that’s too specific, too flavorful, to count as generic, and yet lacks the sort of twist or high concept or especially-novel distinguishing feature that would admit it to a subgenre. Thus: vanilla.

(You might be pooh-poohing this whole idea, but try a spoonful of regular plain yogurt, and then vanilla. They’re different!)

(You might prefer the plain, of course. That’s fine too).

So yes, The Saltcast Adventure is the kind of fantasy where you can’t get two paragraphs in before the narrator informs you that you’re now the farthest you’ve ever been from home (those of you reading these reviews in order will note that I mentioned this scene in Fellowship of the Ring two games ago), and where one paragraph after that we’re told, in solid but Tolkien-invoking prose:

"The trees here look different; they’re taller, with canopies that reach high into the autumn air, grasping at the pale sun. There are huge boulders scattered across the landscape, glittering stone that looks nothing like the occasional flint pebbles that fleck the paths long behind you. The smell in the air is sweet, unflavored by human industry."

The protagonist is of course an unassuming peasant who’ll have to tap into heretofore-unguessed reserves of strength to succeed in their quest, which is to delve deep into a subterranean world of monsters and stop their attacks on humanity and get a reward from the king. She (yes, she’s a she, and a mother, so that’s a nice departure from the norm though hardly that interesting in itself) starts off with some water, some rope, a knife, and a lantern with a small enchantment placed on it. The lore infodump is woven skillfully through the opening, but it’s there, and the setting’s major distinctive element – magic gone awry can create different kinds of the eponymous Saltcasts, mutated or spirit-ridden creatures with supernatural powers whose lives are bound up in tiny mirrors – is a specific, but not exactly revisionist, take on fantasy worldbuilding.

And yet, the game leans into its meat-and-potatoes conceits with admirable consistency. The Saltcast are the only unnatural creatures in the setting, for example, and while the exact mechanics of the magics that create and sustain them are laid out with the detail of an RPG monster manual, they’re all presented as individuals, both as to their powers and their personalities, and not all are hostile. Madelaine, meanwhile, while the very model of the plucky hero’s journey protagonist, is drawn with conviction – her grit and perseverance feel well-earned, her devotion to her struggling family rendered with poignancy:

"You close your eyes, see your children’s faces. Thin, wan, smiling. Mattias’s teeth have started falling out because he does not eat well enough."

She seems like an individual, not an archetype, and the same is true of the central antagonist, who is recognizably a load-bearing Foozle of the type that has clogged CRPGs since time immemorial, but whose uniqueness extends beyond a perhaps-overcomplex backstory and cool special effects – not to mention the plucky supporting cast.

There’s a risk that all I’m doing here is inferring a qualitative difference based just on quality. It is true that Saltcast Adventure is a well-executed example of its form; as noted above, the prose largely avoids Generic Fantasy Bollocks, with descriptions that leverage all the senses, and while the piece is long it’s well-paced, with act breaks coming just as I was feeling like the plot structure could use a change-up. Meanwhile, the choice mechanics are nicely done too – besides a few pick-a-door false choices that shunt you to the same scene regardless and could have been excised, you’re given options to try to build connections or prioritize efficiency, with stakes that feel high even though the mechanics are reasonably forgiving (you can accumulate wounds, but the game doesn’t visibly track them, and if you die you’re able to immediately undo, so I think it’s hard to lock yourself out of good outcomes).

But I’ve played tightly-made stories like this before, and this one does do things a little bit differently. There’s a big twist right at the end of Act 2 that I legitimately failed to predict, for example, and if the final section can’t fully pay it off, that’s probably just because the author would have needed to add an extra hour to this three-hour game to make it land. And while each decision the author made about how to construct the Saltcast, their origins, and their society comes straight out of the fantasy playbook, the gestalt still winds up being memorable. Moreover, the game has the discipline to stick with its intentionally-picked elements rather than watering them down with the exact same stuff you’ve seen a million times before. So yeah, if the only kind of yogurt you like is peach or blueberry or, god help you, chocolate raspberry, you’ll probably want to give Saltcast a miss, but it remains a great example of why vanilla keeps selling too.

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.