Reviews by Mike Russo

(I beta-tested this game).

“Where do you get your ideas?” is surely the most vapid question you can ask a writer, but spare a thought for how much worse it must land when the writer in question is a poet. Poetry isn’t so much a what as a how, “ideas” are at best the jumping-off point that has as much to do with rhythm, an image, a sense of a word’s full freight, as anything else. So spare more than a thought for the protagonist of you are an ancient chinese poet…, child of a disgraced courtier who amuses himself with anonymously-circulated verse but is suddenly summoned to the Emperor’s court to take part in a poetry competition. You have a couple of hours to circulate amongst the great and the good, observing their foibles and possibly being recruited into their intrigues, but you’d better hope you catch a spark somewhere along the way because given the cut-throat nature of court politics, “sorry, I just wasn’t feeling it tonight” probably isn’t going to go over well.

I haven’t exhaustively plumbed the game’s many, many endings, but at least in the ones I’ve tried, the protagonist does manage to rise to the challenge. Admittedly, there’s quite a lot here to stimulate composition: after a prologue that efficiently sets the scene, you’re set loose to wander the garden, where you’ll meet cliques of other poets pursuing their particular passions, and maybe have an opportunity for a tete a tete with the princess and general bent on agendas of their own. They’re a colorful bunch – I was partial to the gang trying to escape the moral burden of choice by embracing extremist fruitarianism, but they’re all in thrall to some decadence or other, even the ones espousing moderation obviously taking things too far. There’s more than a hint of contemporary social comment to all this, which can likewise feel like it tips just over the line of plausibility on occasion, like the voyeurs whose activities are an analog analogue of prurient pursuits that more often play out digitally. But even these moments when the fourth wall strains, the game’s understated prose and its structural imperative to somehow make a poem of all of this helps bring the player along.

There are also a lot of decisions to make, because there isn’t enough time to go everywhere in the pavilion, and each vignette puts you on the spot. The others are keen enough to have noticed that the Emperor’s recruited you as an outside observer, here to render judgment on what you see, so they try to get out ahead of the game by pushing you to preview your reactions, issuing an approval or disapproval of their ideology and behavior. And while it’s not too difficult to map each faction to their real-world inspirations, the game does a good job of complicating the picture so that either response can be justified – the proponent of free speech correctly identifies the need to speak truth outside of systems of constraint, but he’s also a rich kid slumming for clout, and his crew seem more interested in getting sloshed and feeling self-righteous than actually trying to change things. Things get more complicated still when you’re pulled into a conference with one of the Emperor’s would-be successors (you get either the princess or the general, not both); these are not nice people, but they’re powerful ones, and compelling too, so I definitely felt put on the spot.

The prose is restrained throughout, zooming in on tell-tale details that communicate that the Emperor made a good choice when he tapped you as his eyes, and the writing appropriately reaches a climax when it’s time to recite. Your choices in the rest of the game unlock the choices available to you in the final composition – each of the five lines can be cycled through to emphasize a different take on what you’ve experienced in the different vignettes; it’s a happy medium between a pre-baked result and pure Mad Libs, and while it’s possible to make something awkward if you really try, I was impressed at how easy it was to come up with a coherent and compelling poem. Appropriately enough, your words can have significant consequences indeed, or at least, they can for the empire as a whole, because in all the endings I’ve experienced, the protagonist simply returns home to an exile that now might be as much self-imposed as enforced from outside – having seen what it takes to write high-stakes poetry, perhaps you’ve decided from now on to get your ideas closer to home.

(I beta tested this game)

3XXX is not a subtle game. From the moment you enter its hyperrepressed world, where tough-as-nails cops clean up the pieces after infantilized, sex-starved people literally combust when their lust inevitably boils over, it’s clear that the agenda here is to take an axe to the censors and bullies currently trying to enforce heteronormativity and sexual continence at the barrel of a gun. But while it absolutely telegraphs its concerns, it still very much retains the capacity to surprise: I congratulated myself on twigging to where the story was going early on, only to have the rug pulled out from under me when what I’d clocked as the final twist actually happened before the end of Act One. And that same dynamic played out twice more, because while each segment of the game is very clear in its themes and they all mesh together quite neatly, the narrative manages to swerve as much as it escalates, broadening and complicating its dialectics at the same time it keeps its high cards for last.

Indeed, what makes 3XXX more interesting than a latter-day Stiffy Makane game is that it doesn’t simply counterpose fascist repression against libertine indulgence. Sure, the cop protagonist inevitably crosses to the over side of the law, and the community of people trying to imagine a different future understand that a healthier relationship to sex is a key part of the puzzle. But this isn’t a wish-fulfillment fantasy – although they can see the ways the society in which they were brought up has harmed them, the scars linger, and it takes concerted effort to learn to speak without self-censorship, much less act on their desires. For that matter, those desires are by no means identikit; some characters are farther along in one aspect of their liberation than others, and the sensitively-drawn give and take of who’s teaching and who’s learning shifts from scene to scene.

As a game, 3XXX is assured enough to know where it’s headed. There are choices, but they’re mostly there to keep the player engaged and push you to think about what you’re reading instead of mindlessly lawnmowering on – this isn’t a game that needs branching though, no one is thinking “hey, what if I could keep working for the Nazis instead?” And there’s a lot to think about, as this is a provocation that resists supplying easy answers to the dilemmas it creates. This extends to the prose, which is direct enough on a sentence by sentence basis but preserves its ambiguity; there are jokes (funny ones!) but even the winks to the camera can’t always be taken at face value. It all adds up to a compelling experience that’s as personal as it is political, as outrageous as it is empathetic.

I beta-tested this game)

I always question my objectivity when I’ve beta-tested a game – it’s hard to figure out an appropriate critical approach when you’ve spent a bunch of time with a version of the game that’s not the same as the one the mass of players will experience, and on top of that it can be hard to untangle the inevitable feelings of investment that come with helping an author improve their game (at least, I hope that’s what my suggestions are doing!) But even leaving all that aside, there’s no way I wouldn’t be in the tank for a rich, robustly-implemented game that lets you explore the waning days of the Hittite Empire (with footnotes, no less!) and boasts a complex, systems-driven magic system and lets you play as a dog (I like cats just fine, but I’m definitely outside of the IF mainstream in agreeing that canines are man’s best friend).

Starting with the setting, like most I’m by no means super au courant with Bronze Age Anatolia, but it’s a region and era that’s adjacent to a lot of other history that is more accessible: the Homeric epics are notionally happening right next door and Egyptian civilization was reaching one of its period peaks, while there was plenty of confusing back-and-forth warring with the Assyrians and other contemporary powers of Mesopotamia. The Hittites feature in all these stories as antagonists, so it’s fascinating to see something from their perspective; hints of the political situation do leak in from snatches of overheard conversation, and the concomitant footnotes providing needed context, but the dog’s eye view of first an agricultural village, and then a major trading city, do far more to provide a window into this long-lost world. There are relatively crowd-pleasing gags like a tip of the hat to the famously corrupt copper merchant Ea-nāṣir, and what must be an intentional reference to the way a major fire in the Library of Ashurbanipal fired the clay tablets it stored and better preserved them for future archaeological study, but that’s just the surface-level stuff: if you’re a nerd for irrigation practices, religious taboos, and ancient tax policy, Wise-Woman’s Dog is a cornucopia of delights, and if you’re not, man, I’m sorry for you. It’s all delivered with a lightness of touch – at least so long as you don’t binge on the footnotes – with the world-building in service to the puzzles, but I found exploration a joy.

Speaking of those puzzles, they’re another highlight, both complicated and organically embedded into the world. See, you’re not just any dog, but the familiar of a village wise-woman who’s fallen afoul of a rival’s curse. To save her, you need to search out some new, powerful magic, which involves first helping the inhabitants of your city prepare their yearly tax payments, and then, once the raft to the provincial capital departs, gather treasures in the big city in order to amass enough money to purchase what you need. As a dog, your ability to directly intervene in human affairs is modest, but you have a secret weapon up your sleeve: as a “magic sponge”, you can absorb curses and blessings, and move them from one object to another. There are only a modest number of “spells” to find and use, but they’re versatile – one’s related to temperature, another makes things lighter, a third keeps things locked up tight – and it’s very satisfying to figure out how to use them to solve the various challenges thrown in your way.

The system here recalls similar frameworks like Hadean Land’s alchemy or Savoir Faire’s sympathetic magic; they’re satisfying not just because they’re complex, but because their consistent rules enable a player to deduce solutions rather than resorting to trial and error. And without spoiling things too much, things get even more engaging – albeit complicated – once you gain the ability to break some of the rules the first half of the game’s established. The flip side of all of this is that there definitely are some very challenging puzzles, even accounting for the various hints and playing aids, but happily you’re not forced to 100% everything if you don’t want to; in both of the game’s main sections, you can move on once you solve most of the puzzles rather than having to pursue all of them to the bitter end.

Speaking of the hints and playing aids, the game’s implementation also deserves some praise. Beyond taking advantage of Dialog’s ability to seamlessly mesh parser input and hyperlinks, Wise-Woman’s Dog has a built-in map, commands that will nudge you in the right direction by highlighting puzzles you’ve yet to solve, and a variety of shortcut actions that make the business of juggling spells (you can only carry one blessing and item at a time, since of course you’re a dog) and moving from one part of the reasonably-sized play area to another much less painful. This does mean that, combined with the rich location descriptions and active NPCs, there are a few places where the player can get overwhelmed with information, but I found it didn’t take too long to get up to speed, and the upsides of all this support are clear.

Taken together, it’s an impressive package: players who like history, deeply-worked-out magic systems, and deluxe parser-game experiences will all find a lot to enjoy – and if, like me, you check all three boxes and are a dog person to boot? That’s a blessing indeed.

(I beta-tested this game)

As late-period capitalism slouches its way to the trash-heap of history, to be replaced by something that’s almost inevitably going to be worse, the scope for systematic revolt narrows, and the stakes for individual acts of rebellion rise in parallel. The getting-comeuppance-on-a-crappy-boss plot perhaps peaked in the late 90s, with Office Space and the retroactively-incredibly-creepy American Beauty, but there’s something evergreen about an unjustly-terminated employee wreaking their righteous revenge.

Fired offers that fantasy in spades – and actually, you don’t need to do too much of the hard work; you’ve already accumulated hard copies of the evidence that will bring your corrupt old boss down, but now that you’ve been fired and stripped of access to the office where all that stuff has been moved, you need to break in and get it back. In addition to this narrative catharsis, it also offers closure for sinned-against employees by containing a litany of invective, imprecation, and swearing that would make Captain Haddock blush:

"this boogystained breakfast director, this pukebag of a dumbass, this sleepyhead, this freshwater sailor, this pedantic cretin"

This revenge-fantasy is definitely funny, but it’s also nicely designed; there aren’t too many puzzles and too many hoops to jump through as you pursue your vengeance, but they’re cleanly designed so each leads on to the next, and there’s a bit of a sandbox vibe to proceedings: rather than pursue your quest to the bitter end, you can declare partial victory at almost any time, and there are various actions you can take that can wreak extra havoc on the company at risk of having an arrow pointing to you as the culprit. These mostly just reduce to optional, incomplete endings, but they’re logically and entertainingly narrated, and make final victory all the sweeter. There are also a fair number of bonus points available to careful players who go beyond the jokes to examine their surroundings carefully, so while Fired works well as an angrily satirical take on workplace abuse, it’s got more than enough substance to be satisfying to play on its own merits, even if you’ve never personally writhed under the thumb of a supervisor who’s venal, stupid, smelling of bilgewater and pink mold, a scabrous sphincter on the face of the earth…

(I beta tested this game)

The first Galaxy Jones game was a highlight of Spring Thing 2023, a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure that saw you foiling an evil mastermind with adrenaline-fueled displays of derring-do. This sequel in some ways works the same groove – Jones herself is just as appealing a heroine as ever, you’re up against a doomsday plot with high stakes, and making progress gets you the same awesome ASCII banner-drop. But some things are different too, and digging into those changes suggests there might be something beyond simple pulp escapades going on this time out.

These are puzzle games, so perhaps the most notable shift is the nature of the challenges. Progress in the first game often involved working through a series of action-movie set-pieces, the most memorable requiring you to climb up the side of a Martian building. But while in Phobos you’re up against an alien terrorist faction bent on using the eponymous moon to inflict mass casualties on a human colony, at least for the first two thirds of the game, you’re mostly confronted with hacking puzzles rather than zapping guards or otherwise behaving like Die-Hard-era Bruce Willis. Admittedly, you can just use one of your powered-suit’s charges to bust through any lock that’s being overly recalcitrant, but for the most part the action is more cerebral. There’s a pleasing variety to the button-pushing – some of the early challenges are simple bit-flip challenges where pushing button 1 also activates buttons 2 and 4, that sort of thing, but others are more involved – but most of them hinge on decoding the aliens’ language, and especially their numbering system, which is presented via an exotic font substitution (it was sometimes so exotic that it lead to a bunch of squinting, but copy and pasting into a text file helped me parse things).

Early on you find a helmet that provides some translation capacity, and the way you can leverage it to bootstrap an understanding of the digits makes for an elegant on-ramp to the meat of the game. But the language mechanic isn’t restricted to the hacking puzzles, because as you explore the alien base, you’ll come across a bunch of reading material; at first, you can only make out a few words, but increased facility with the language allows you to catch more of the meaning. There are some important clues embedded in these documents, and there’s thematic resonance to the way Jones’ understanding of her foes deepens as she learns more about them – hopefully it’s not spoiling things too much to note that on this adventure, going in guns blazing isn’t always the right answer. Similarly, the full picture of the aliens’ motivations is a bit more complex than the black-and-white conflict of the first game led me to expect. None of this undercuts the essential pleasure of inhabiting Galaxy Jones – that ASCII banner remains as awesome as ever – but sitting here in late 2025, with political violence ratcheting up and accusations of terrorism being thrown at people just trying to keep their communities safe, it’s satisfying to see a hero who scores points for saving lives, not killing bad guys.

The Litchfield Mystery is the latest in the author’s series of whodunnits distinguished by their fidelity to real-world forensics. The first was an engaging but rather dry parser game where various escape-room style puzzles didn’t have much to do with actually solving the mystery, which required consulting some medical reference book in details; the twist was that there wasn’t actually a murder, just an unfortunate drug interaction. The second was an engaging but rather dry choice-based game where solving the mystery involved interviewing suspects, sending evidence in for analysis, and consulting some medical reference books in detail; the twist was that there wasn’t actually a murder, just an unfortunate drug interaction. And here we are, third time out, with some commonalities – the gameplay structure is once again choice-based and the evidence and suspect-interviewing mechanics are unchanged – but some differences too: we’re in the early 20th century, the reference books are decidedly less tome-like, and this time the eponymous lord has shown up with a letter-opener stuck in his back, so the the-murderer-was-nobody twist is off the table. It’s still a bit dry, but Litchfield Mystery has loosened up and thereby manages to be the best installment yet.

The actual setup here is pure English country-house murder: you’ve got the dead paterfamilias, the grieving wife, the shady business partner, the dissolute brother, and household staff occupying various points along the Downton Abbey trustworthy-to-devious continuum of English servants, all gathered in the drawing room for you to interrogate after you’ve done sweeping the study, the bedrooms, and the grounds for clues. It’s all slickly managed through a clean interface that keeps track of your notes and leads in the sidebar, and the mechanics do a good job of creating a structure for your investigation: at first you’ll want to go through each room, looking for fingerprints and hair samples alongside documents and other traditional clues, sending anything more recondite out to the crime lab to take a look at. While they’re running their tests, you can get into the interviews, which consist of a standardized opening statement and then a few pointed questions. At that point, you’ll start getting your evidence reports back, and the interviews will have thrown up new leads, allowing you to circle back around the mansion for a closer inspection or raise new lines of questioning with the suspects. Eventually, the game tells you that you’ve gathered enough evidence, opening up a multiple-choice questionnaire where you select the culprit, their means, motive, and opportunity, and find out whether your theory of the case is correct.

It’s hard to think how this framework could be improved, and it’s filled in with careful attention to detail and a clear affection for the tropes of the genre. There are no smoking-gun clues, but certainly a lot that are suggestive, and the hard work is less in accumulating them than in interpreting them. While the writing does have a few small infelicities like inconsistent tenses, it’s generally good at efficiently conveying information and comfortably inhabits the restrained voice of a veteran British investigator, so much so that the few times the prose takes a bigger swing (“She dabs her eyes with a handkerchief, but all you can see are her nails. Blood red. Like the blood of every victim in your cases, crying out: ‘Justice!’”) the awkwardness feels charming.

Cracking the case has more to do with weighing the evidence than delving into psychology – though a read on the interpersonal dynamics can be helpful – though as mentioned above, the materials you consult here aren’t quite as dense as those in the author’s previous games. The main point of scientific interest is the presence of meat from two different poisonous animals in the mansions fridge; there are a few reference passages to consult and cross-reference to help you assess what role, if any, they might have played in the crime, but it’s a long way from the detailed list of chemicals and drugs in the previous games, but I’ll admit I kinda missed the feeling that I was doing something resembling real forensics. Similarly, it took me a few tries to zero in on the solution to the mystery, because much of the evidence wound up being circumstantial and a key element (Spoiler - click to show)(the governess's affair) could only be guessed at; that’s certainly a valid style of deduction, but it’s distinct from the science-nerd just-the-facts-ma’am approach I’d been expecting.

Still, with my assumptions properly reset, the Litchfield Mystery was a satisfying one to unravel, and demonstrates the author’s success in taking what was originally a heavily pedagogical model and making it much more gameable – if anything, I think there’s room now to take it back a little bit in the other direction.

A story I am astonished to discover I haven’t yet related in an IF review is the time I married my twin sister – she was wearing my mother’s wedding dress, it was a Freudian nightmare. And did I mention I was twelve? Such are the wages of having gone to a small elementary school, where the limited number of students meant that the teachers doing the casting for the eighth-grade production of Fiddler on the Roof wound up making some perverse choices. Despite this slight embarrassment, I really enjoyed the play, and wound up renting the movie version a bunch of times. I was kind of a rigid kid, so beyond the catchy tunes there was something especially appealing about the story of a shtetl milkman who discovers exactly how far he can, and can’t, bend as his daughters begin pairing off. The other thing that made it especially compelling was the ending: unlike the stereotypically happy closings of much musical theater, Fiddler’s last scene has everyone fleeing the village because the Tsar has decided to seize their land and give it to Christians, with a pogrom coming for anyone foolhardy enough to stay.

This is about the moment where Escape the Pale picks up; despite a few in-jokey references, it’s not of course a direct sequel, but the setup has you dusting yourself off after being ejected from your ancestral home, forced to hustle around an economic simulation of Eastern Europe in hopes of accumulating enough money to reach the hopefully-more-than-temporary safety of Istanbul, Austria, or America. That’s a potentially rich premise, but the operative aesthetic here is very stripped-down, from the minimal narrative to the simple gameplay to the bare-bones presentation (we’re talking black-text-on-a-white-background-with-numbered-menus). There are some neatly-designed places where the mechanics create specific story beats in what’s otherwise an open-ended simulation, but despite the impassioned author’s note at the end, I’m not sure there’s enough meat on these bones for the game to make a significant impact on anyone already familiar with the basics of the history.

Let’s start with the economy, since that’s what you spend the great majority of your time in Escape the Pale engaging with. The basic gameplay loop involves arriving at a city, selling any of your wares you might be carrying, deciding whether to buy the single good that city produces (after reviewing a table with the rumored prices of said good in the region’s dozen other cities), and then paying a small amount of money to travel to one of the 2-5 other cities you can reach from where you’re at. Every once in a while a random event will occur – maybe a customs official will ask for a bribe, or your cousin will run afoul of the authorities, they’re never anything positive – and on your first playthrough it’s worth keeping a spreadsheet to track which cities connect to which other ones, and where you can take a train to Vienna or a boat to New York, but the simulation isn’t really robust enough to support anything but the most basic strategy: prices do fluctuate a bit from what the rumors say, but with travel costs imposing friction and no ability to check on the sale price of your goods once you arrive in a new city, the only real strategy appears to be spot-checking whether the good on sale in a city seems to have a good profit margin in any of the places you can reach in one or two hops, then filling your cart with as much as you can afford and hoping you get lucky.

Standing in the way of simple accumulation are a half dozen or so narrative set-pieces, some of which are purely for flavor while others shift the rules of the game. They all play out in only a few bottom-lined sentences, but since they almost all depict the casual inhumanity with which the region’s governments treat Jews, some of them can be chilling if you’ve got the imagination to fill in the gaps. The most impactful is running across some distant family members who beg you to take a young cousin with you when you leave for someplace safer; carrying her around increases your travel costs, and also increases the dangers some of the events pose.

There are other places where the mechanics shape the narrative in a particular way, and again, most of these are unpleasant and unfair. The most galling of these is the way that the price tables always show that the best resale value for any item can always be found in Bucharest. If you do manage to figure out how to travel through the node-web to reach it, though, joke is on you: your papers don’t allow you to enter Romania, so you get an automatic game over (there’s no save function, of course). Similarly, to get to America you need to leave from Vilno, but you can almost never get a good value for your goods there, and if you try to carry in a lot of cash, a corrupt official will invariably steal half of your money, so you’d better make sure you have more than you need for your ticket – although, not too much, because if you ever accumulate an especially significant nest egg the game also arbitrarily imposes a bad end. This obviously helps reinforce the ways that Jews were unjustly victimized, but the blunt approach here risks making it feel like the author, rather than the governments, is the one out to get you.

Ironically then, the part of the game that evoked the greatest feelings in me was the author’s postscript, which has two main themes: first, the way that this game, alone among others, seemed to create controversy among the circle of friends and family to whom the author habitually circulated them, and second, their decision to leave their position at a university and leave the U.S. There’s very little that’s stated directly, but reading between the lines, I’m guessing that the controversy had to do with Israel’s genocide in Gaza – there’s a sentence in one of the endings about how the Jews suffer without a homeland, which is an understandable statement to articulate in 1905 but lands differently in the context of 2025 – and that leaving the country has something to do with Trump’s authoritarianism and targeting of academics (apropos of the author, it’s worth noting that the pseudonym recalls Nabokov’s novel Pnin, about a Russian émigré academic who’s wound up teaching in the US after fleeing the Russian revolution and losing a Jewish lover to the camps).

This is clearly a significant game to the author, but I found this cri de coeur frustratingly vague given how reticent Escape the Pale is to say beyond pointing out the ways the Jews have suffered – fleshing it out to make clear what modern echoes the author would certainly have risked pissing people off, but shorn of the passion animating something like Fiddler, the game doesn’t amount to much more than an arid gesture at some heart-rending history.

I’ve gone to the Star Trek well several times through this year's Comp reviews, so now that we’re nearing the end of the Comp, let’s do so one last time by recalling the objections leveled against Deep Space Nine when it was announced. The fourth series in the franchise (you didn’t forget the animated series, did you?), it departed from tradition not just by failing to be centered on a ship called the Enterprise, but by failing to be centered on a ship at all. I recall all sorts of naysayers arguing that Star Trek was all about discovery, “seeking out new life and new civilizations” (admittedly, the naysayers had some textual support in their favor), so having a show where nobody went anywhere and they just sat around on a space station waiting for the new life to come to them wouldn’t be that interesting. As it turns out, though, they were wrong – after the inevitable season one growing pains that’ve plagued every show in the franchise save the original series, DS9 turned out to be great, by the simple expedient of the writers putting the station in an interesting place that interesting people kept on visiting.

A Rock’s Tale is a fantasy choice-based game rather than a sci-fi television spinoff, but save for that small detail, it’s basically DS9: the game, and succeeds on the same terms. The setup is bizarre but compelling: you’ve been teleported into a new world and transformed into a talking rock, and escaping your predicament will require you to meet, befriend, and problem-solve for a variety of colorful characters who wander across the forest path where you’ve wound up. Given how high the concept is, everybody is remarkably down to earth, and the robust cast is a major highlight of the game: there’s an artistic lumberjack, an anxious florist, a lovelorn cobbler, a fisherman too young to have fully twigged to his family’s poverty, and more. Meeting them is fun in of itself – you can jump-scare most of them, because who expects a rock to talk? – and it’s even more fun to peel back the layers of the game’s onionskin design: befriending them will give you a sense of what they need and what they can do, and allow you to call for them at any time rather than just wait for them to stumble across you at random, which then allows you to start tagging them in to solve problems for each other or otherwise figure out how their lives can be made to intersect.

Gameplay-wise, this is all carried out through a simple set of dialogue menus, but structurally, this is an ending-chase game; there are 20 distinct outcomes, and you’re meant to collect them all in order to unlock a final resolution. But that makes the game seem more intense than it is; you can immediately rewind to the previous decision point upon reaching an ending, so while there are some endings that are mutually exclusive, to see everything you’re looking at probably three of four replays rather than 20. For another, the “true ending” didn’t feel, to me, that much more satisfying than any of the others. I enjoy being a completionist, but I think A Rock’s Tale would work just as well for a player who felt like they’d had enough after seeing ten endings – in fact, possibly more so, as there are a bunch of branches that require you to be motivelessly mean to the characters, which I didn’t really enjoy.

What I did enjoy was the way that each ending wound up in the same place. In some you’re brought home by a cherished friend or are given a new job appropriate to your talents as a rock, while there are a few that seemingly put you in danger of life and er, non-limbs. But in every case, it works out fine after all, and the last line is always “you decide this is not so bad.” Now that’s positive thinking! In fact, the writing throughout is pleasant and grounded, without feeling overly twee. The forest is a generic fantasy forest, but there are still some nice details to savor:

"As you sit alone the sky above you begins to darken. A couple precursory droplets hit your head before thick raindrops descend in droves. You realize that getting stuck in a rainstorm is not so bad for a rock. Through the cacophony you start to discern what sound the rain makes when it collides with certain objects. Before long you have your own personal percussion section, playing to an arbitrary rhythm."

The characters similarly each have their own manner of speaking, and are all sympathetic in their own ways, too – with the possible exception of the overly-mercenary Ringmaster. I admit I did start clicking through their dialogue on repeat play-throughs, but the conversation trees aren’t especially broad, so it didn’t feel especially onerous. Getting the full suite of endings is likewise made easier by two levels of hints for each one, with the first giving some vague direction and the second directly telling you what to do; I did enjoy my time with the game but was getting a bit tired of lawnmowering by the time I got to about ending 14, so I appreciated the touch.

Rocks may be hard and unyielding by way of stereotype, but contrary to all that I found A Rock’s Tale a gentle, upbeat experience. It’s more of a pleasant hangout than a directed experience – to stick with the DS9 comparison, definitely think of the seasons before the Dominion War metaplot kicked in – but stopping to smell the flowers can be lots of fun when they give off such an inviting aroma.

Earlier in one of the reviews in this thread – I confess I don’t remember which one, I’ve written like 75 of them over the last month and a bit – I cited the X-Men as an example of how things like superpowers can be used as a metaphor for race, queerness, or other traits that set a group of people apart from quote-unquote mainstream society. Marvel’s mutants have a long track record of this sort of thing, with plot-lines through the decades echoing segregation, genocide, religious discrimination, and the AIDS epidemic; some more recent stories have leaned hard into socio-political themes by having the X-Men and their allies reject the long-standing idea of integration in regular-human society and set up their own independent nation state – backed by high-level super-powers as a deterrent against aggression – instead. Sure, it’s all people in spandex zapping each other, but there can be big ideas too.

Murderworld, an epic piece of X-Men fan-fiction in parser form, is fine with all that but would rather stick to the spandex and zapping, thanks. There are a few places where the broader social context is touched on – mostly through the backstories of some newly-created students at Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters, who are a bit more diverse and notably queerer than their canonical teachers – but aside from a smattering of non-grawlixed cursing, that’s about the only element that wouldn’t seamlessly fit into a late-80s issue of Uncanny X-Men. Or better yet, a late-80s spin-off video game, since the plot (hitman supervillain Arcade kidnaps the team and subjects them to funhouse-style deathtraps) and lineup (Storm, Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Dazzler, and Wolverine) map pretty directly to those of 1988’s Madness in Murderworld.
Where that was a wonky action-adventure hybrid, though, this Murderworld is a smoothly-implemented romp that just leans into the puzzling. There are three distinct acts on offer across the game’s generous runtime – after a quick introduction to the characters and the setup, you pick your favorite X-Man to guide around the mansion in the aftermath of an attack, repairing the damage and rescuing the aforementioned students from a variety of predicaments, before the Murderworld proper bit kicks in and you control each mutant, round-robin style, as they escape their individual scenarios, with things culminating in a fun endgame that takes a swerve into the unexpected.

Throughout, your mutant powers and super skills are the primary means of getting through challenges: Nightcrawler teleports and swashbuckles, Colossus turns into metal and smashes stuff, Cyclops has his signature optic blasts, Storm can control the weather and fly, Wolvie’s got claws, his healing factor, and preternatural smell (er, he’s got a very powerful nose, I mean), and Dazzler can turn sound into light and is good at roller-skating, look, disco was still a thing when they came up with her. Obviously some of these are more versatile packages than others, but the game comes up with unique challenges for all the characters that require you to get creative with your powers.

Sure, the funhouse nature of Murderworld means that some of the scenarios can get a little contrived, but realism was never the X-Men’s forte. And there’s a pleasing variety on offer – Nightcrawler’s vignette requires careful attention to space and how you can use your teleportation abilities to get around (while featuring a perfectly in-character pirate theme), while Storm’s is a logic puzzle that requires a little bit of lateral thinking, and Dazzler plays against type by doing some math before breaking out the tunes. Colossus’s and Cyclop’s scenarios are a bit more de rigueur, standard-issue deathtraps that just happen to be vulnerable to their particular powers, but it’s only Wolverine’s that feels like a dud. I wound up running around a robot-staffed food court investigating the death of one of their own, which didn’t feel especially in-character and was laborious enough that, unlike in the other vignettes, I kept running afoul of Arcade’s countdown and having to restart. Possibly that was my own fault, though, since checking the walkthrough after I finished revealed that I could have just started slashing everything in sight, an alternate path perhaps more in keeping with that particular hero’s approach.

The mansion segment, meanwhile, is an even tighter bit of design; I played it as Nightcrawler, and found that my teleportation abilities were perfectly suited to getting past barriers or bypassing fallen stairwells. But with only slight tweaks, any other character can go through the scenario and find their powers are the ones that just happen to come in handy to save the kids, which must have been an astonishing amount of work to get right. As for the endgame – I won’t spoil the surprises there, but I’ll just say it’s a wonderful reward for getting through all the torture Arcade subjects you to.

In a game of this length, there are inevitably some puzzles that are a bit weaker than the rest – one puzzle in Colossus’s section seems pretty close to impossible until time starts running down and you’re given a direct hint on how to solve it, and there was a bit where the default font in the Gargoyle interpreter wound up making a clue very misleading (Spoiler - click to show) (the “g” looks like an upside-down 8, not an upside-down 6) – but the average is quite high, with most feeling satisfying and fair to solve.

The writing is similarly good, though not without its wobbles. Most of the character’s voices come through clearly, in a reasonable facsimile of the comics, save for Cyclops – admittedly, he doesn’t have a particular accent or catchphrase to rely on, but sometimes I found his dialogue awkward, like this bit where he reflects on potential uses for the head of a Sentinel robot:

“I wonder if we can turn it into some sort of art piece for the lawn. Though, that would probably create a too-militaristic, ’head-on-a-pike’ kind of aesthetic that I’m not sure a school for children should be dressed in.”

When it comes to the implementation, though, I can’t even muster up minor complaints. Besides the odd extra line-break and a few errant periods, I didn’t run into any bugs, and there are a lot of smart touches, like the way location descriptions automatically shorten after you’ve visited someplace once and the diegetic hints that kick in after you’ve been dawdling for a bit. There’s also a convenient VERBS command that spells out how to use each character’s powers, which was a godsend given how complex some of them could be.

All told Murderworld might not be the most novel of games, and might not have the deepest take on the human condition, but if you’re at all a fan of superheroes in general, and especially if you like the X-Men in specific, playing it is a real treat – games of this scope, depth, and quality don’t come along too often, and are worth savoring when they do.

Mischief at the Masquerade, per the tagline, is a game where music plays an absolutely central role: the crime you’re trying to prevent is going to go down in an opera house, all the suspects and witnesses are musicians or conductors or theater-managers or patrons, and arcane knowledge about obscure musical tunings or the characteristics of obscure instruments can provide surprising insights into the plot. So I appreciate the game’s generosity in letting me play a character who, like me, is absolutely pants at this music wheeze.

See, unlike the other Lamp Post Productions games, this one’s an adventure/RPG hybrid, where you can customize the statistics of the detective protagonist: in addition to prioritizing your mental, physical, or social attributes, you can also decide on theater, society, or music theory as your key skills. Actually, they’re all useful, and the dice-rolling system is generous enough (you roll 1d4 plus your relevant stat against a difficulty that typically ranges from 3-5) that even your secondary priorities will likely succeed more often than not – the game’s interested in letting you inhabit whatever investigative archetype most appeals to you, not punishing you for inferior buildcraft (the fact that the dice rolls appear to be based off a seed, so reloading a saved game to try again always leads to the same result, also counter-intuitively reinforces this low-key vibe: it communicates that you’re expected to fail sometimes, it’s no big deal).

The system isn’t the game’s only nod to RPGs, because the “fantasy” of the title specifically refers to DnD – the setting is a version of Renaissance Venice peopled by half-orcs, gnomes, tieflings… I’ll admit, I found this matter-of-fact juxtaposition sometimes flirted with comedy:

"A bell rings with the opening door, which summons a distinguished-looking dragonborn from a back room. Her mature face is covered with bronze scales. She wears a pair of glasses and an elegant umber gown with satin bodice.

"'Good evening. I’m Chiara Canaletto. May I help you?'"

But Mischief is so earnest that I found myself getting into the swing of things quickly. It helps that the mystery is engagingly designed – the setup is that the city’s premier opera house has gotten wind that criminals might be targeting the opening of their new production, so they’ve hired you to investigate. This mostly involves talking to the cast and crew, snooping around the theater, and following up a few leads in the city; once you’ve got a workable theory of the case, that triggers a more action-oriented endgame. The various people you talk to are appealingly characterized, and beyond the who-what-where-when-how they provide in response to your questions, they also get across one or two personality traits: the vivacious star, the erudite conductor, the frazzled manager, the thoughtful costumer… it all plays out over the course of a day and a half, and there are close to a dozen characters you engage with, so none of them come off as especially deep, but as stereotypes go they’re certainly workable.

Solving the mystery involves creating a “hypothesis” – basically, you’re offered a choice of ten or so options for the suspect, the crime, the means, and the motive, and once you’ve got all those right you can try to stop the bad guys. The clues are parceled out efficiently and fit together in a satisfying way, with your character’s choice of focus areas feeling like an impactful way of determining which bits of info you’re most likely to come across. fI did take a couple of tries to crack the case, because I’d mixed up the primary and secondary motives for the crime, but there are in-game hints to prod you onto the right track with a minimum of fuss. The climax is nicely designed to allow any character to succeed, too – so long as you’ve figured everything out, your success is guaranteed, though more physically adept characters will catch the baddies with less of a commotion, which is a reasonable reward. And the attention to detail throughout is a lot of fun – I especially enjoyed that in the final interrogation scene, the preening mastermind monologues about all their plans, while the savvier minions lawyer up.

The last major element of the game worth mentioning is the romance angle. In some ways this doesn’t play out especially differently from how it’s handled in the author’s other games this Comp: you have a choice of six rather than four paramours this time out, but they’re similarly a pleasant, queer-friendly assortment of musicians and other opera hangers-on, with engaging but not too traumatic backstories. Sure, progress with them is gated by dice-rolls, but if you’re being polite and paying a modicum of attention to the kinds of things they like, you get enough bonuses that even bad luck can’t keep you from getting lucky.

I did find the pacing of the relationships pretty odd, though: as mentioned, the investigation plays out relatively quickly, and there are a lot of romanceable NPCs, so by the time you foil the bad guys you might have only had one or two short conversations with any of them, with discussion mostly focused on details of clues, alibis, and so on rather than anything personal. The romance actually kicks off after the detective plot is over; you can decide to dance with an NPC at the post-premiere ball, with successful flirting leading to a longer date in the subsequent scene, at which point the game ends. This makes for an odd structure, I thought, since it feels like the romances are tacked on after the story has pretty much reached its climax; what’s here is well-written and fun, don’t get me wrong, but it does wind up slightly distorting the narrative harmony.

Still, having a pleasant coda after all the banging and crashing is done is an appropriate way to wrap up a story about an opera – or so I assume, see the disclaimer about how little I know about classical music – and besides, I could have just declined to dance with anyone if I’d felt like playing a just-the-facts-m’aam Joe-Friday-alike. The bones here are solid, and Mischief at the Masquerade is a very good time even if you don’t know your andante from your largo.

Last month my wife and I celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary – it’s been an eventful decade, but still, it kinda snuck up on us! And we were together for a few years before we got married, so it’s a bit over thirteen years, all told. Before that, I was in another relationship that lasted for just about ten years, though it definitely had gone one past the point where it was good for either of us, so between that and the fact that that was breakup before my wife and I started seeing each other, I can’t say that I’m especially torn up about the way things ended. So doing the math, to get to the point in my life when breakups were a thing that caused existential-level angst and regret you need to rewind the clock just under a quarter-century – far enough back that I actually have some nostalgia for the crappy Star Wars movies and right-wing president that in retrospect were so much better than the ones we have now.

I’m not, like, incapable of empathy, though, so this quirk of biography doesn’t mean I automatically don’t vibe with stories about relationships ending tragically – far from it! But despite its name the Breakup Game isn’t actually a story like that. It’s not fiction at all, when you get down to it, more of a therapy-adjacent journaling tool that prompts you to reflect on a breakup and learn to feel better about it, with questions inviting you to characterize the other person, the ups and downs of the relationships, how you’re feeling now, and so on, with the game invariably responding with upbeat pep-talks (and even a cavalcade of achievements!) and before coming to close with a series of interactive affirmations.

It feels presumptuous to assess how well this would work for someone who’s in need of some help working through their feelings about the end of a relationship, since I’m so far removed from that situation. Still, I did make a sincere effort to call to mind the details of my most recent breakup and re-inhabit that mental space to the best of my ability as I navigated through the prompts. Personally I can’t say the game felt like it was a useful tool for engaging with my feelings, whether because they were too distant to access with the requisite immediacy or just because we were coming at things from a different angle. See, Breakup Game is written in a very positive way, with almost every sentence working to buck you up and help you move on. It also necessarily reaches for abstractions, because the choices it offers almost inevitably don’t allow a player to communicate much of the specificity of why a relationship was good, and what happened to bring it to an end. An extended excerpt gives a solid flavor of the thing:

"Ah. The void. Some try to ignore it while soldiering onwards. Others try and dull it with any means they find. There are those who try to fill it with other people entirely, only to discover their shape doesn’t quite fit, and that the void slowly leaks in through the gaps.

"Whatever your choices are in the events that follow in your life, know this:
It is you who will outlive the void. Not the other way around. Its size will shrink, its shape will lose its contour, and whether it disappears completely or finds a permanent home in your heart is not the point.

"The point is this: it will lose its relevance."

As slightly-New-Agey lectures about eventually you’ll be able to move on, it’s not bad, but I’m not sure how many people find that kind of approach convincing (it just puts me in mind of that Robyn song where she’s coming up with a vapid way for her new boy-toy to let down his soon-to-be-ex: “the only way your heart will mend/is when you learn to love again”, etc.)

The other place where I felt like the game’s assumptions deviated from my experience is how it treats feelings of regret. See, when I’ve had relationships fail, my negative feelings generally haven’t focused on missing the other person – there’s inevitably some of that, but things falling apart has tended to take most of the bloom off the rose – but rather been ones of guilt, berating myself for being selfish, thoughtless, a bad communicator, etc. Those are unpleasant things to think about, but there’s also a positive aspect to them too, as having made those mistakes and felt bad about them has helped me be at least less-bad with other partners. But the Breakup Game doesn’t have any truck with the idea that you should stew over your mistakes:

"Whether it was your best or your worst is meaningless. The way you tried was the only way you could have. Learn from it, but leave your blame behind you."

Game, I was raised Catholic, that’s just not how we do things.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Breakup Game isn’t for me in the slightest. That’s certainly fine – the nature of the Comp is that games with more idiosyncratic target audiences get played by people they aren’t intended for, and while I think I have fairly ecumenical tastes, those certainly have their limits (see also: all my recent review of anime-ish games). I do think there’s probably a version of this game that could have broader appeal by trying to offer a wider but also more specific range of choices to allow the player to see their circumstances more clearly in the mirror the game offers; making the prose more grounded would probably also help on that front.

But that might not be a tradeoff worth making, as it could risk the game not working as well for the people it does speak to (a cool feature I haven’t mentioned is that after playing, you can submit your own note for future players, and reading the couple that had been posted as of this writing, it’s clear some folks have vibed with the current approach). In other words: it’s not you, it’s me, I think we’ll both be happier if we see other people.

Friends, we are just a week out from the end of the second-biggest Comp in history, and while I’m on pace to complete my reviews just before voting closes (with the main question mark being exactly how much longer than two hours Murderworld winds up being), let me level with you: it’s been a fairly intense experience maintaining an average of just over two reviews every single day. On a physical level I’m getting tired, and mentally, having all those stories – and my critical reaction to those stories – sloshing around in my brain at once for over a month means that I fear I’m not a sharp as I was when September dawned bright and clear. Case in point: when I try to pen a basic summary of Retrograding, just a couple sentences on the plot and themes, I feel myself spiraling into uncertainty. Sure, the game employs a maximalist version of some of the anime-style storytelling tropes that I’ve previously mentioned don’t resonate as well for me, but I can’t help feeling like my internal fuzziness is to blame. So, let’s give it a shot:

Retrograding is a visual novel where you play an interstellar garbagewoman, tasked with traveling to the ruined husks of abandoned colonies in search of refuse you can feed into the incinerator-engines that power your civilization. You get to choose a partner to help you on your latest sortie – I picked Zinnia, a woman who’d previously been a high-up in the corporation we work for but who went rogue before being recaptured and reprogrammed back to loyalty – and then the game settles into a fixed rhythm of alternating scenes where you engage in scavenging, examining various bits of detritus before picking one of three possibilities for disposal, with interludes featuring an intense dialogue with an AI that you’re somehow linked to and which seems to be having delusions of grandeur. And then you and your assistant fall in love, though maybe that’s the AI’s doing and it all feels pretty sinister.

That sounds plausible enough when you write it all out, but I’m pretty sure at least 10% of the above is wrong, and I was still in the dark about much of what I am sure about until pretty late in my playthrough. Like, when I was choosing my partner, I actually thought I was a sort of bounty hunter and I was choosing a target to go after, since the dialogue kept talking about “reclaiming” and the various bad things the potential-partners had done (I think the other option is some kind of terrorist?) I’m also not sure whether “Maria”, the AI, is the same as the helper-robot who assists you in recovering debris or an entirely separate character, and really, her whole deal is extremely [citation needed] to me.

Partially this confusion is an intentional result of the game’s decision to forego conventional exposition, but I do get the sense that I wasn’t meant to be quite as in the dark as I wound up feeling. There’s a database of “records” you unlock as you go, which I presume is intended to provide some of the context the main narrative elides, but instead of clear lore-dumps, you get more of the same elliptical writing and cross-cut dialogue that characterizes the central thread. Always, there are a lot of words to read, but I found them very difficult to parse. Here’s some background on one of the worlds you can explore:

"Prox-3 has been razed down by time and a constant beratement of stars."

And a description of Zinnia:

"She looks to the world bringing life to the phrase ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’ when the only treasure should be the credits left across the table. But she isn’t motivated by silly things like profits."

There’s no copy and paste function that I could find, so this is all transcribed and might have typos that make it less clear than it actually was, I admit, but still, these are opaque statements. I often do enjoy more oblique prose, but in this case the writing didn’t do much for me – I think when this style works for me, it’s because the author’s choosing words that are evocative of specific heightened moods or have particular historical or cultural associations that add enough flavor to infuse the tangled syntax with meaning. But Retrograde just often felt vague to me, and the flavor I picked up on was generally sour: the protagonist isn’t a happy person, the banter with Zinnia at least started off pretty aggressive, and so the vibe was pretty disaffected, and since the game is much more vibe- than plot- or gameplay-driven, it was hard for me to keep myself engaged.

Retrograding’s approach to player agency also undermined my engagement. You do have choices, but the game doesn’t feel very responsive to them – the main thing you have to do is pick what to recycle, but you’re not given much information about the various objects, and your ultimate choice doesn’t seem to have narrative consequences (it does unlock a different “record” entry, but these just depict the protagonist and sidekick talking to each other in their well-established, kinda-snipey communications patterns). The choice of sidekicks does seem to make a big difference to the story, but as I mentioned I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I was making my pick. And the climax pushed me and Zinnia into a doom-inflected romance that felt like it wasn’t especially responsive to anything I’d done to that point. I don’t mind a game that’s light on branching, don’t get me wrong, but since there are choices, I did wish I had more context to make them intentionally, and more clarity and what if anything they meant.

So yeah, my experience of the game was that a lot of stuff was happening but I didn’t really understand or click with most of it; words kept washing over me without finding much purchase, and even when I did start to understand something of what was going on, Retrograding was eager to move on to the next bit of obfuscation. Possibly if you’re more in turn with the storytelling style deployed here, or if you play repeatedly to see all the potential angles of the narrative, it feels more coherent, but unfortunately I was just too frazzled to get much out of the game.

This is maybe just an example of I-wouldn’t-want-to-belong-to-a-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member preciousness, but despite playing a lot of old games, I don’t consider myself a retro-gamer. Like, I will happily play Gold Box RPGs until the cows come home, and not just the later ones when they finally adopted VGA, since 1988’s Pool of Radiance is obviously the best: I sincerely find it more fun than just about any other game released this millennium, and still run through it every couple years. But I don’t think that’s born of nostalgia, since my main memory of playing that game back in the day is that it was too hard for me and I always got frustrated trying to push too far into the slums of New Phlan and then getting slaughtered before I could make my way back to safety to rest. Similarly, I don’t have much attachment to the trappings of old games – I know there are DOSBox settings to get period-authentic audio and apply CRT-aping filters so the pixels don’t look quite so sharp, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in exploring any of them.

I don’t think this reflects any inherent virtue – we’re just talking about the aesthetics of entertainment products, and besides, I definitely do fetishize stuff like old books so who am I to judge? But it does mean that when I come across an artifact like Not So Happy Easter 2025, which despite its up-to-the-minute title is presented as a game file for the ZX Spectrum (a UK microcomputer whose popularity was already on the wane by the time Pool of Radiance came out), it leaves me somewhat nonplussed. I’m certainly capable of firing up an emulator and adapting myself to an old-school design, but the text delay and chunky yellow font, which I’m sure stir the heart-strings of some players who suddenly remember being eight years old again, just make me sigh and wish I could just be playing this thing in a modern interpreter.

Admittedly, there are practical reasons why I had those thoughts. NSHE lacks conveniences like being able to press up to recall the previously-typed command, and instead of L being a shortcut for LOOK, it instead reloads a pre-configured save game, which meant I lost all my progress half a dozen times before I retrained my muscle memory (PSA: you can actually save and load the game with RS and RL, respectively, and if you do that sufficiently often it’s much easier to recover from the occasional mis-typed L). And I found that even with the emulator speed cranked up a bit, typing too fast would lead to some letters getting dropped from my commands, adding an annoying bit of friction to every single interaction in the game. Again, I understand that some people might dig this; friction isn’t always bad! But in this case, I’m not “some people.”

Fortunately the game itself is idiosyncratic enough that the format isn’t the most interesting thing about it. It appears to be set in Czechia, for one thing, but more than that, the setup swerves from slice of life to thriller in a way that more grounded, modern games are typically loath to attempt. See, you start out looking for some kids who got lost doing an Easter egg hunt you designed, before getting a call from a deranged weirdo who tells you he’s kidnapped them and will only release them if you find and hand over several allegedly-magical Easter-themed MacGuffins (the plot has one more twist in store, too). This is overlaid on what are admittedly pretty standard medium-dry goods puzzles, but the novel context does add something to the proceedings, and the game’s gonzo approach did make me grin when a Tesla model called “the Swasticar, [which] goes from 0 to 1939 in three seconds” (you can get it towed, which made the grin bigger).

Unfortunately the puzzle design is as spiky as the interface. There are times when you need to repeat the same action multiple times to progress, with no indication that that would lead to a different result the second time. The stripped-down approach to narration means that some puzzles are harder for the player than they should be, since for example the protagonist would be able to tell that the giant rain-barrel is currently empty just by looking at it (and therefore filling it would help you retrieve what’s inside it). And in an attempt to prevent players from inadvertently solving puzzles before they’re supposed to, some commands only work if you’ve followed a prescribed set of previous steps, which stymied me a couple of times because I’d hit on the correct course of action but the parser was stopping me without any adequate explanation. Oh, and the game uses USE, which as always is a can of worms – I tried to get the Tesla towed by PUTting a ticket on it, which seemed the intuitive approach, and had to run to the walkthrough to realize I’d been thinking too specifically.

That walkthrough does exist, though, which is a nice concession to modern sensibilities, and as a result I was eventually able to get to the surprisingly-happy ending, and I’m satisfied about having done so. Not So Happy Easter 2025 doesn’t exactly make a case for the unvarnished glories of the 80s for those who missed out on them – I still would have had more fun if it was a bog-standard Inform game – but even the thoroughly modern can have some fun here (just remember that walkthrough!)

Exploring a mysterious island from whose bourn no traveler has returned is an appealing trope with deep roots in the pulps and Victorian adventure literature, but the problem is that, unlike the protagonists of these stories, this genre has lots of baggage. One issue is that, obviously, that “no traveler” bit has an implicit “white” in the middle; there are always indigenous folks who’ve been living there and the fact that they’re undiscovered would be news to them. Said indigenous folks are also nearly always portrayed as savages, unsophisticated cannibals ruled by superstition who turn childlike at the doughty hero’s displays of scientific know-how and manly courage. This kind of thing is a turn-off because of the real-world connection between these kinds of stories and the ideologies used to justify colonialism, slavery, and racism, but also because it’s boring – not only is it played out, it also tends to flatten all the characters involved into the world’s stalest archetypes. I’m not saying I write off any game with this premise, to be clear, just that there are some pitfalls here; with sufficient authorial attention to detail and intentionally avoiding slipping into the easiest, default ways of doing things, it’s usually fine!

Er, hang on, I’m getting an update here on the wireless – there’s ultra-generic, low-effort AI cover art? Oh, that doesn’t bode well…

Alas, this is a book one can judge by its cover: Island of Rhynin steers straight into every lazy jungle-island stereotype you can think of, with a story and gameplay that struggle to distinguish themselves from the million other times you’ve seen this sort of thing. There are no details given about why you’re exploring this place or what’s so interesting about it, so the setting never manages to be anything other than a series of cliches: the rickety rope bridge, the altar where heinous sacrifices are made to graven idols, the caverns where the natives lurk in outer darkness that mirrors their spiritual ignorance, ruled by the white man who saved them when they were too dumb to figure out how not to starve. So too do the plot beats fail to cohere into anything unique, with the discovery of secret passages, the revelation of the identity of the natives’ king, and the betrayal of your weaselly (and dark-skinned) sidekick likewise eliciting yawns. The ending is a little surprising, at least, but mostly because it comes out of nowhere – (Spoiler - click to show)there’s nothing about this place that seems appealing, why are we fighting to the death to be the new king?

On the plus side, the writing is pacey and moves through the tropes without getting bogged down, and the gameplay systems seem like they could be engaging: you have a continually-updating series of stats, ranging from raw health to more metaphysical matters like your competence, confidence, and “trust”, which I think has to do with the aforementioned sidekick. As you confront various challenges, these go up and down, but the impact is muted by the fact that the right answer is usually very straightforward to intuit, and there’s no branching – failure just dings some of your stats while success builds them up. It does appear that too-low numbers can lock you out some of the choices available in the endgame, but that sequence isn’t especially reactive anyway, and the perfunctory nature of the epilogues (we’re talking a couple sentences each) means that this can all feel like much ado about nothing. Meanwhile, what feels like a very consequential choice at the beginning of the game – whether you’ll take a spear, pistol, or hatchet with you – was revealed to be less significant than it seems upon replay, as it doesn’t change the choices available to you by nearly as much as you’d think: like, testing the planks in a rope bridge with your spear to make sure you can cross safely makes sense, but apparently shooting them with a gun(!) works just as well.

I don’t want to harp too much on the ways Island of Rhynin fails to make a major impression; it feels like the effort of a neophyte excited by the possibilities of IF, and god knows we were all there once. But thoughtlessly regurgitating a slurry of already-digested tropes doesn’t make for a memorable game, all the more so when a moment of thought would reveal that the tropes aren’t just played-out, they’re harmful – just a bit of mindfulness about this stuff when conceptualizing the game could have made a very big difference indeed.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, they say, before blushing in shame from having wasted their first impression on such a cliché. Dead Sea could stood to listen though, as it had two strikes against it five minutes after I started it up: one, the silly genAI cover art, which just looks insipid upon first glance but seems sillier and sillier the more you try to work out what the waves, clouds, and light are doing, and two, the initial puzzle, which has you make a Fanta for a gravedigger by zapping a sapient monster-orange with a freeze ray and then dismembering it until it fits in a bottle. After those first five minutes, it’s clear that some actual care did go into making the game and it settles down to tell a dark-fantasy story with an occasional hint of whimsy rather than the wearying zaniness that opening challenge seemed to presage – so that’s all good news, but it’s still frustrating to see an author start off in a ditch due to such avoidable missteps.

What we’ve got here is a parser-like choice game that tasks you with uncovering the secrets of the ruler of the island called Necropolis – there’s Bluebeard-y backstory, Moby Dick references, souls being harvested and used to animate golems… The vibes are dour, though the compressed prose style largely gestures at mood rather than wallowing in it, in service of keeping things moving. That isn’t to say there aren’t any good images – I liked the use of color here, for example:

Light struggles through fog, signaling ships home.

No way up found.

An injured White Whale is beached, reddening nearby water.

But as you can see, it’s nothing too fancy, it makes its points and then shuts up. This relative terseness puts the focus on the puzzles, and I’d say they’re serviceable. Most are inventory-based and fairly well signposted, with a few boasting multiple solutions. It’s clear that some of the systems are a bit hacked together – in particular, the inventory system doesn’t allow you to drop things, picking up something new will often just mean replacing what you previously carried, which silently goes back to where you first found it in case you need it again – but this winds up being intuitive enough, and I can’t complain too much since it does reduce the amount of inventory-juggling you might need to engage in. The other mechanic I wasn’t sure how to engage with were the small statues you run into every few minutes – you’re told that praying at one will “reset chapter parameters”, which seemed like it could potentially mean losing progress, so I steered clear. At any rate, what you’re called upon to do is typically straightforward, and you typically just have a small segment of the gameworld unlocked at any point in time, which means I found it hard to get too stuck; again, the pacing is enjoyably quick.

As for the plot, once you uncover enough secrets to understand the main conflict that’s playing out on the island, it’s reasonably engaging; there are a few nicely-observed elements, like how the girl betrothed to the dark, melancholy Duke dreads the arranged marriage but is still looking forward to the wedding. And while it’s clear how this will all be resolved, the option to make suboptimal choices to get premature game-overs makes the player’s input feel more impactful. On the flip side, there’s some bonus content you can access just as you win the game which slathers the functional story with a thick coating of proper-noun fantasy bollocks:

That was before the God fell.

Humans stole fire, dominated the Necropolis, sought to rebuild Eden here.

This caused the Necropolis to expand, spreading Dirt.

Even angels fell because of it.

Humans became the Necropolis’s ‘Stake.’

I suppose that means that Dead Sea’s last impression is just as dodgy as its first, but at least the stuff in the middle goes down easy!

In the very first IF review I wrote after coming back from a 15-year hiatus, I talked about the alienating associations anime tends to have for me – I know, this is a me thing, it’s obviously an incredibly successful medium with aesthetic resonance for untold millions of people! But nonetheless, while I can recognize the reasons why over-busy narratives involving sexy people with nonstandard eye and hair colors and histrionic science-fantasy apocalpyses can be lots of fun, I confess the appeal is somewhat lost on me; less “anime BS (laudatory)” than “anime BS (derogatory)”, to adopt a kids-these-days idiom I do enjoy.

Mooncrash!,if you couldn’t tell from that intro, is very much working in this tradition. In a world due to end any minute, you’re a second-tier hero who gets to team up with the A-listers due to the fact that the world is ending any minute now. The mechanics of this are initially obfuscated, but by exploring the four paths the game offers (each corresponding to one of the four superheroes you can work alongside) it’s clear it involves armies of demons and dragons, and the plans to forestall it involve constructing magitech devices to allow some people to survive the end of the world, stealing a biological WMD from an infernal vault, or possibly just creating a magical simulation into which to escape. And after you run through each of them (there’s a death-and-rebirth thing going on that enables you to toggle between branches, as well as retain your combat skills and achievements across lives) there’s a culminating vignette where you can choose which strategy to save the day you want to throw your weight behind.

It’s a relatively simple setup, but Mooncrash! is maximalist in its storytelling – most actions you take produce long passages of text, dense with proper nouns and action and exposition. When the conflicts it describes are straightforward, this lends a pleasant over-the-topness to proceedings:

"The wind whips around you as you soar through the air, and you grip the red scales of the dragon below you for dear life. Below you, a battle rages on a bridge made of solid hard-light. Your allies, The Dawn Legion of Leont, do battle against the forces of Izalith, The Dread Horde. Twisted forms, demonic and devilish alike, clash against the shining armor of your brethren."

You can practically hear the death metal!

The prose can get bogged down when the action quiets down, though. One of the four branches is an extended conversation with the wizard who’s created the magical simulation I mentioned above – this involves them going into their overcomplicated backstory (they’re a refugee from another reality that collapsed in a crisis similar to the one yours is currently undergoing), their romantic entanglements, the reasons why they created their tower headquarters where and how they did, the nature of the alternate world they’ve built, how it could be used as a cheat code to escape the apocalypse… Again, I can see how those with a taste for this stuff would lap it up, but I found it dragged.

Other sections have more involved gameplay, though. The combat one is straightforward and does require some repetition to grind your skills to the necessary level, but it’s hard to go wrong skewering monsters. There’s a medium-dry-goods one where you solve some very simple object-based puzzles to prepare the ingredients for a sorcerous construction project. And the last involves either a conversation puzzle or a maze, before the endgame puts all the pieces together. They’re mostly pretty basic in terms of challenge, but they all have some time pressure to keep the player on their toes, and can be repeated as many times as needed (plus even failed attempts will typically give you an achievement, which is a motivating touch).

I’m unconvinced that a parser-based interface was the best fit for this game, though. Many sections play out in a primarily or exclusively choice-based mode, with the game prompting you to type CHOOSE (keyword) at some important points; I’d have rather just been able to click on an appropriate link, and a choice-based interface would have made some of the longer chunks of text go down smoother, too. Mooncrash! also doesn’t do much to take advantage of the affordances the parser offers – the object manipulation section spells out exactly what you need to do, for example, and the game is generally underimplemented, leading to unintentional comedy like this:

DANGEROUS PATHOGEN - DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT ALPHA-PLAN AUTHORIZATION

CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE - DO NOT REMOVE FROM CONTAINMENT FIELD BEFORE DEPLOYMENT

REPENT, YE WHO WOULD SEEK THE POWER OF THE BAD BLOOD

Staring at the pitch black vial sends a shiver down your spine. You look away on instinct. You get the sense that a single drop of this vile liquid could kill you instantly. Thankfully, the vial is sealed shut, and not a single smudge of the stuff has reached the outside.

x blood

You see nothing special about Bad Blood.

For all these complaints, though, there are definitely clever touches to Mooncrash! – I particularly liked the way a particular endgame challenge manipulated the choices available to you to mirror a mental assault, and the game is chock full of nonstandard, ambitious elements like this (I haven’t even mentioned the extended personality test that opens the game – it’s kind of pointless since the protagonist is a cipher, and while it shunts you to one of the four branches, you eventually need to play all of them. But I kind of love the ridiculous juxtaposition of a melodramatic Götterdämmerung with an OKCupid quiz, as well as the fact that the answers to “what kind of a person are you?” are basically three flavors of “I’m kind of a jerk” plus “I’m a jerk but I hide it”). Mooncrash! is identifiably a first parser game, with some of the lack of polish that implies, but it’s clearly been well-tested to smooth out bugs, and includes a bunch of customized systems that go way beyond what most rookie authors dare to bite off. And while as I said the specific subgenre it inhabits isn’t one I have much native affinity for, I think its emulation of said subgenre’s aesthetics is spot on, reflecting careful, intentional writing and design. So this is definitely an author to watch; even if Mooncrash! isn’t especially my speed, it’s still an impressive debut.

I’ve been in the tank for the Lady Thalia games pretty much from the minute I first encountered them: I love a heist and a period piece, so add on a flirty enemies-to-lovers dynamic between the lady thief and her policewoman antagonist and I’m more than sold, but the nimble pacing and tightly-designed puzzles take things to the next level. But I’m in an odd situation with this fourth installment: you see, I still haven’t played the third one, since it was released in Spring Thing 2023, and some life events interrupted by reviews of the festival that year. I still want to get back and finish those, and Lady Thalia and the Masterpiece of Moldavia is a reward I’ve set myself for doing so. But that means that I’m coming to this one having missed an episode.

This used to happen all the time, of course – when I went off to high school, I remember being frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep up with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, doubly so because on the odd occasions I could catch an episode suddenly Worf was there – but in this age of on-demand streaming everything, it’s an unfamiliar sensation, and actually not necessarily a bad one? If anything, I’m now even more excited to go back and learn how Thalia and Mel struck a truce that saw the latter leaving the Yard and then the pair going into business together as consulting private detectives. I’m also curious whether Thalia’s heretofore-offscreen husband made his first appearance in that installment, or if the supporting role he places here is his actual introduction (he’s a gay bank robber married to a lesbian cat burglar, you’re each others’ beards, it’s cute). There’s also a distaff Sherlock Holmes analogue who I don’t remember from the first or second game but definitely makes an impression.

But though there’s a lot to catch up on, the game gives you the context you need, and the characters are as always drawn with such bright colors that you feel you know all about them from the moment they come on screen – actually, now that I think about it, Lady Thali4’s handling of Mel on this front is especially deft, since she hasn’t had that much screen time to date, even including her role as deuteragonist in the second game; nonetheless, her dogged approach to investigation and clumsy approach to romance were exactly what I expected based on her prior experiences.

The puzzles are likewise unsurprisingly satisfying. By now the series structure, of alternating case-the-joint sequences where you learn about a target through some light social-engineering mechanics with the actual heists, where you might need to pick some locks, crack a code, or engage in a chase is well established, and even though you’ve gone straight, the rhythm hasn’t changed: it’s just that this time out you’re trying to catch a copycat thief who’s appropriated your name in the act, and investigating their potential targets before they strike. This doppleganger plot is a great way of continuing to play to Thalia’s strengths even as she’s shifted to the side of the angels, and the set-pieces continue to be great fun, with a break-in at the headquarters of an off-brand Golden Dawn a particular highlight. None of the individual challenges are that challenging – you’ll get to the end regardless – but you are graded on the verve and brio you bring to your role, with top marks reserved for those who manage to balance the need to hide your tracks with the urgency of keeping up with your rival. The other fun addition to the series’ systems is interrogation sequences where you play as both Thalia and Mel simultaneously; in the stratified world of Edwardian (I think?) England, what you say might not matter as much as who says it, after all.

“Much as it was, but with some fun new twists” is also my take on the writing. The prose has always been alternately zippy and wry, which kept a smile on my face throughout:

"He chuckles. 'Scandalous of me, I know! To come to an art gallery—making an appointment, no less—with no interest in the current exhibition and no intention of buying anything!'

"You probably do six things more scandalous than that before breakfast each day, but you want to know where he’s going with this, so you laugh along."

I also enjoyed the running joke where Thalia keeps workshopping different nicknames for Mel, which is all the funnier for not drawing undue attention to itself. But the focus on these two characters’ relationship also creates space for things to get more serious at times, including a nicely understated scene where Thalia and her ex talk around their breakup. The central romance is of course the main event, and through the inevitable ups and downs, there’s no getting away from the sweetness of the two falling in love:

"She looks like she hasn’t slept properly in several days, and some of her hair has escaped its bun and is falling in her face, and there’s still a yellowing bruise around her left eye, and of course she’s also currently angry with you. Nevertheless, some part of you is still convinced that she’s the most attractive woman you’ve ever seen, simply because she’s Mel."

I’m not sure whether this fourth installment is my absolute favorite, as there were some minor blemishes to my enjoyment on the mechanical side – I found navigating through the gallery backrooms was a bit more confusing than I wanted it to be (since on my first visit, I had to choose between which door to try, whereas during the subsequent one you need to pick which room to go to), and while an Arts and Crafts exhibit is a cool backdrop, I think the final heist felt like it was over a bit quicker than the prior ones; the titular artifact also feels like it’s underdeveloped. But the story here could well be the best it’s been – all the more reason for me to circle back to the third installment to find out for sure!

Reviewing a chunk of games all at once through the course of the Comp can be a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, there can be synchronicities that help you look at a game through an unexpected angle. On the down side, though, sometimes it’s hard to avoid feeling like past-you is stepping on your toes. Case in point: the best jumping-off point for My creation is Frankenstein, since the game excerpts it at length and is clearly in dialogue with Shelley’s classic. But having already reviewed Frankenfingers, and done a little tap-dance about the not-so-good doctor in my INPUT PROCESS review, it feels awkward to go back for a threepeat.

So let’s go with what’s arguably the second-best jumping-off point: parenthood, specifically those first few days when you’re back from the hospital with your first kid and you are sleep-deprived and your life has changed and you don’t know how anything works. It’s a terrifying, disorienting experience, and so in some respects it’s a perfect fit for a somewhat wonkily-implemented parser game: the sense that moving around is harder than it should be, you’re either seeing double or things that should be there are nowhere to be found…

My creation does communicate the claustrophobic vertigo of those moments quite well via its writing, too. The game starts with your days-old baby screaming and crying while your headache gets worse; you don’t know what to do to quiet the kid down, and as the blurb indicates, you don’t have another parent or any other family member providing any help. Small wonder that even moving from one side of the bed to the other involves “dragg[ing] yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers,” and that there’s a clumsy tactility to your physical interactions with the baby:

The unevenness of the floor and the speed of your movements shake the basket, and the child within it, more than either of you expected. The moan has become a cry. You shift your hand on the floor and grab the baby’s wrapper with the other. In one swift movement, the child is on the bed. With wide, tearful eyes, the child watches you groan and sigh, your face scrunched up in pain.

Thankfully, this isn’t an extended experience – My creation is a short game – but it’s an authentically horrifying experience, knowing you’re responsible for another life but not sure how to do that while also needing to take care of yourself, too. There’s only a single challenge to overcome, but it’s a doozy: get the kid to stop crying, with nary a formula bottle or white-noise machine in sight. As mentioned, the game really could have used more testing, because there are rough patches everywhere: moving from one corner of the bed to another absurdly uses compass directions (and UP and OUT and EXIT won’t let you stand up), you can get told that there’s a basket and a baby where you are but trying to interact with them reveals that they’re actually somewhere else, and Inform’s default responses are jarring when they intrude, both because of their voice – Graham Nelson’s studied disinterest has rarely felt less apposite – and their content, with SLEEP throwing up a totally-not-true “you aren’t feeling especially drowsy” and FEED BABY horrifyingly generating a “(to yourself)” implicit action (thankfully, it fails). The gameplay wouldn’t work in a choice-based interface, since the desperation of typing anything you can think of into the parser, with most of it not working, is 100% the way to marry form and substance when depicting the existential despair at not being able to quiet a crying infant. But the same effect could have been achieved without quite so much clunkiness – heck, the game doesn’t actually end, it just throws a “(the end)” after the wall of text following the correct move.

All right, I think we can circle back to Frankenstein now. The protagonist has a copy of the book right by their bed, and examining it displays an extended passage near the middle of the novel, as the reanimated-and-abandoned monster reflects on his miserable condition by comparing himself, and what he’s been able to intuit about his nature, to the lives lived by a seemingly-happy peasant family. This also prompts him to ponder his origins: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to answer them.”

Dr. Frankenstein is undoubtedly one of the worst parents in all of literature, so it’s understandable that an anxious, frightened father worried about how bad a job they might wind up doing would think of Frankenstein, though there’s a more direct reason why the protagonist would find the monster’s situation resonant too (despite copious clues about where the game is headed with this, it treats this as a reveal, so I’m not going to spoil it). Babies can feel so fragile, and the psychology of child-rearing is presented as requiring such specialized knowledge and attention, is it any wonder that a parent who doesn’t have their whole life already figured out would be terrified that they’ll make a child as broken as they are? Even for those of us who faced parenthood with plenty of supports My creation’s protagonist lacks can find these fears relatable, I think, which is why I appreciate where the game ends: you can stop the kid crying, and hopefully start to get a handle on your anxieties by articulating them, but they don’t go away, and the baby doesn’t stay quiet forever. Taking care of someone else is something you do hour after hour, day after day, never knowing where you’ll both wind up at the end of it – hopefully not locked in an Arctic death-hunt, at least! – but dragging yourself out of bed, searching for creativity even at your wits’ end, nonetheless.

When I’m playing video games as a civilian – i.e., when I’m not blasting through IF so I can meet the review quota before a deadline – I actually tend to prefer games robust systemic elements on top of engaging stories, rather than just pure narrative games. As a result, immersive sims are among my favorite genres, and Prey, a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, is one of the best of recent years, directly bringing in many elements from its inspiration while adding some new ones. And like the best immersive sims, much of the fun is in the way these systems interact in unexpected ways: for example, in both Prey and Shock, the skill points you use to gain character abilities aren’t an abstracted currency, but physical items you acquire in the game world. Something Shock doesn’t have but Prey does is a 3D-printing system that allows you to break down random junk in the world into its constituent parts, and then use the raw materials to build anything you’ve got the specs for. And – you see where this is going, if you hack the right systems or explore in the right areas, you can find a blueprint for the XP items, enabling you to cross the streams of the game’s different sub-economies. It doesn’t quite break the progression wide open, but discovering this obviously-intended exploit made me cackle with glee.

Detritus is a traditional adventure rather than an immersive sim, but the whole thing is built around a similar recycle/fabricate gameplay loop – and, impressively, it manages to come up with a twist on the system’s capabilities even more impactful than the one in Prey. Admittedly, this isn’t obvious for most of the game’s running time. It starts out as a minor riff on the very traditional spaceship-disaster subgenre of IF: a meteor’s hit your courier ship, causing an explosive decompression and the deaths of everyone on board, but since part of the emergency protocol involves having a backup of one of the crew loaded into the fabricator just in case, you get a second lease on life as a 3D-printed clone with your predecessor’s memories, and a mandate to save the ship. This involves traditional fare like reading datapads to find passwords, fooling biometric locks, and hacking electronic systems via a math-based minigame.

You’ll have done all of this before, and to its credit Detritus doesn’t pretend otherwise; each of these puzzles are implemented smoothly, with a clean choice-based interface and high production values, but they’re not harped on. What is harped on is the fabricator. Almost all of the conventional challenges require some piece of kit that you can manufacture on the spot, or unlock upgrades or raw materials allowing you to make more, different stuff to solve more, different puzzles… It makes for a compelling gameplay loop, as you start out bobbling a few pieces of space-junk back to the fabricator at a time in order to fuel your first, tentative explorations, before increasing upgrades, confidence, and knowledge see you hauling much bigger loads into the recycler and creating ever-more-useful tools. There’s also a gentle survival element to the gameplay – your need for food, water, and oxygen is always ticking up with everything you do, and you have to scavenge, or use your limited stock of fabricator resources, to meet those needs.

This does mean things are a bit more fiddly than in similarly kinds of stories, but again, there’s a robust interface that makes the inventory-juggling quite manageable and at least on the default difficulty, the various timers serve to ground the player in the protagonist’s predicament without ever becoming too much of a nuisance (in a nice touch, if, like me, you neglect to eat or drink while pushing to get to the endgame, Detritus ensures you can get a final meal and gulp of water to allow you to reach the finish line). The logistics-focused gameplay is also often interrupted, sometimes for exposition that fills in the backstory and raises questions about just what you were up to when the accident happened, and action-focused set-pieces like an EVA sequence that sees you explore the breach in the hull. The writing here isn’t flashy, but it sells the space adventure theme with more than adequate panache:

"I look up… through. The distant stars shine with the utter clarity you only get when looking at them directly, and distant nebulae glow with an almost iridescent colour. The hole is large enough for me to fit through. If I were crazy, I’d actually consider it. Am I crazy?"

In true immersive-sim style, there are also lots of flashbacks, unlocked either as your memories come back over time, or when you gain access to various computer logs and terminals. On the plus side, even though the other members of the crew are all dead, they get some solid characterization through these scenes, which makes exploring the ship that became their tomb all the heavier. On the other hand, the backstory you uncover is relatively straightforward, and boasts a reveal that did significant damage to my suspension of disbelief ()

While I’m complaining, I might as well dole out the last of my criticisms now: the twists of Detritus’s plot do somewhat outlast the interest its systems provide. Despite the last couple of upgrades I unlocked in the fabricator seeming useful in theory (one notably expands your inventory limit, another obviates the hunger/thirst timers, and a third allows you to combine a bunch of tools you otherwise need to juggle into a single item), the number of resources they required was sufficiently high that I preferred the annoying grind of forgoing them to the annoying grind of obtaining them. The last major puzzle also feels like it relies on a cartoon logic at odds with the otherwise grounded, often-dark vibe of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I assume it’s just part of the genre rules that we’re ignoring how cost-prohibitive it would be to blast a colony’s trash into space – but even with that hand-wave, what sense could it possibly make to ship it to another planet rather than just dumping it and letting it drift into the star or an asteroid field?).

But I’ll close on a justified positive note, which is to return to that final reveal about the fabricator I mentioned up top. Without spelling it out, I’ll just say that it was the one development in the plot I didn’t see coming from a mile away, while it also made sense of some inconsistencies that I’d written off as just part of the game’s modeling of how immersive sims work. Beyond all this, it takes the creepiness inherent in Star Trek’s transporters and dials it way up, then uses that as the jumping off point for a closing moral dilemma that I legitimately don’t think has an easy answer. It’s a great way to wrap up the game, and some of the questions about consciousness it raises pair nicely, albeit in an understated way, with some of the more standard plot elements having to do with AI possibly replacing ships’ crews. It’s these kinds of juxtapositions that make immersive sims so much fun, so Detritus deserves some kudos for crossing the streams with such gusto.

Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer has comfortably the most bizarre setup of any game I’ve played so far in this year’s Comp – and that includes the explicitly surreal ones like the game where your body occasionally disintegrates into spaghetti. As it says on the tin, it opens with you and your brother raiding a Tokyo office building to perform the eponymous deed, resorting to violence in order to get human-being-who-actually-existed Kenji Eno to surrender his in-development game to your employers. But the gameplay, thankfully, doesn’t involve directly participating in the interrogation: rather, your brother’s browbeating of Eno, which involves running through a potted history of his bad-boy career making PS1- and 2-era survival horror games, is repeatedly interrupted by his (Eno’s) turtle going missing, which triggers him (your brother) to freak out and scream at you to find the animal, so you do that by solving an escalating series of puzzles as he (the turtle) climbs his way into more and more unlikely places.

So yeah, I was pretty lost here, though I was having fun with the anecdotes about the 90s Japanese development scene and the enjoyably over-the-top dialogue – until finally, well after I should have caught on, the game clicked and I realized why every bit of that premise is completely perfect. I won’t spoil what’s going on except to say I laughed quite a lot once I twigged to the twist, and found it added an additional fun layer through which to interpret the main action. But that main action works pretty well on its own, too. The narrative voice is lots of fun, with your brother’s frequent profanity obscured by stars, and entertainingly out-of-context gags. I liked this early bit, right after you restrain Eno:

"Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions."

The game also makes a convincing case for Eno as an under-appreciated (at least in the West) artist. The best story is the one where he outfoxes the console approval process to get an uncensored version of one of his games onto store shelves without anyone the wiser, but even in the quieter bits of the history, as well as his interactions with you and your brother (which per the credits are drawn from actual interviews) he comes across as a thoughtful humanist trying to do something different from the mainstream, not just to shock but because he had something idiosyncratic to communicate – I can easily see how he’s become a cult figure.

As for the puzzles, they’re good examples of how to make such things work in Twine without going whole-hog into designing a parser-like interface. Most of the action plays out in a single combined kitchen/office (though there are occasional forays into other locations once you hit the midgame, including a maze that I think you’re guaranteed to solve just in the nick of time) with a bunch of different interactive features: a fridge, a stove, a cabinet. You can click on each one to interact with it, and for objects you can manipulate, like a stool you can shove around to different locations to help you climb when needed, the appropriate link cycles through to show where you’ve currently pushed it to. There’s perhaps a bit of fiddliness in the way you need to back out of examining stuff to try to climb around (most of the turtle-finding puzzles involve clambering around atop the furniture), and the final challenge maybe involves a slight bit too much busywork, but overall it’s a solid package that kept me engaged while I waited for the next bit of Eno’s career retrospective.

And that’s really where the heart of the game lies, I think. The twist I’m talking around gestures towards some contemporary questions about censorship and what counts as “age-appropriate” material, as does a slightly-didactic epilogue. The points raised are important ones, I think, and the way the game gets at them is unique. And possibly if I were one of the people unable to access a number of the Comp games due to the UK geoblock, that part of the story would be the one that resonated the most strongly. But since I’m American, it feels to me like the reason we don’t get as many video games with the artistry and sensitivity Eno appears to have brought to his stuff isn’t censorship (whether governmental or corporate), but because the mainstream industry has largely decided not to pursue those ends. That being the case, I’m walking away from Kidnapping thinking mostly about the ways he was able to get his games made in the face of a corporate culture no more welcoming to that kind of thing than the one we have now; I’m glad to have learned about his example.

Every once in a while the question of “what is IF?” comes up, and I have a couple of stock answers: one is that “IF” is a community-based discourse rather than a genre, and another is that “IF” is whatever we IF people are playing and talking about (these are equivalent formulations, just with more or less pretension according to taste). The other one I tend to trot out draws more from how academic disciplines are functionally defined, and holds that anything one can usefully analyze via the approaches IF critics have developed counts as IF.

These are broad definitions by intention, but by that last one, it’s very hard to consider that Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter is IF. See, this isn’t a complete game; rather, it’s a prompt you can paste into an LLM in order for it to create a game-like experience for you. As such, it’s pointless to talk about the stuff I usually do when writing a review: there’s no pre-baked prose whose quality I can assess, no ending I can weigh for thematic resonance, no puzzles that might be more or less fair. It’s all just down to whatever the plagiarism-bot feels like spitting up in the moment – so given that, as well as what I think is a well-founded reluctance to use an LLM unnecessarily, I didn’t actually bother to “play” this game.

There are other approaches to game criticism than the ones prevalent in our little community, though, and given the format Penny Nichols uses, I couldn’t help considering how it would look through the lenses tabletop RPG reviewers use when looking at scenarios. Those folks tend to look at questions like “how well are the scenario’s theme and flavor communicated to the GM so they can run it as intended?”, “are there raw materials here to allow the GM to construct a well-paced adventure”, “are the mechanics well thought-out?”, and “how railroaded is this adventure likely to be in practice?” And these are questions one can ask of the Penny Nichols prompt.

Unfortunately I don’t think it comes out very well on any of them. The prompt is quite short and devoid of any consistent vibe; there’s an underbaked science-fantasy theme that provides some proper nouns but no coherent guidance to a human intelligence as to how to play it. Like, here’s what we/the LLM are told of Penny:

The player character is Agent Penny Nichols, an Insurance Investigator from the Solar Insurance Company on Mercury.

Hue 150 (Divination & Illusion specialist).
Prefers indirect investigation, including cover identities.
Member of the Circle Trigonist faction.
Does that “hue” thing indicate Penny can do magic? What’s a “Trigonist”? Is locating an insurance company on a planet that’s consistently so hot it radiates mostly as a black body an indication that there’s some fraud going on, or are people just dumb? Your guess is as good as mine (and much better than ChatGPT’s); this is slightly better than “make up some bullshit,” but not by much.

As for the “plot” of the scenario itself, there’s more concrete reason to think that tabletop RPG design is the best way to think about this since it explicitly says the story should proceed according to the four-act kishokentetsu structure that was all the rage in RPG circles like five years ago. But the implementation of the structure is incredibly sketchy, not even running to 200 words: basically, there’s a space station studying an artifact, but the artifact has vanished, so you’re sent in to investigate. There’s meant to be a mid-story twist where you can find out that the artifact was a hoax by the lead investigator, because he wanted to get more funding; but then the final twist reveals that the artifact (or the station itself, the prompt isn’t clear) is actually a dragon’s hoard (or maybe the dragon itself?) that created the lead investigator as a psychic projection, in order to get the attention on which dragons (and hoards?) subsist. The resolution requires the player to “contain, banish, or escape before [the dragon] consumes more” (there’s no mention anywhere of the dragon having previously consumed anything).

Look, I’ve run a bunch of tabletop RPG adventures, and not to put too fine a point on it, but this one sucks. Hell, the notes I scribble to myself for scenarios I’ve come up with and already live in my brain contain way more detail about the psychology of the characters, how to construct challenges that are engaging to deal with, ideas about how to manage pacing, and particular bits of dialogue or turns of phrase to incorporate in my narration. Speaking as a reasonably experienced GM, I’d find this prompt worse than useless: it doesn’t give me any of the stuff I’d look to a scenario to provide, and in the time it’d take me to read, understand, and attempt to spackle over the holes of this prompt, I could come up with something far better using only my own creativity.

So that’s my assessment of what the author submitted to the Comp as a “game”, but I was morbidly curious about what could be included in the “walkthrough” file, since of course there’s nothing to walk through. Turns out it’s some commands that (might?) work to complete the scenario under Claude.ai, as well as a sample transcript of the author “playing” the game with ChatGPT. And oh lord, as bad a mood as reading the prompt put me in the transcript was worse.

For one thing, ChatGPT seems to insist on presenting everything as bullet-pointed lists of information and options, with embedded emojis, meaning reading it feels like being trapped in an Axios article (What they’re saying: “this is literally hell,” according to Mike Russo), and also makes me wonder how the author reconciled the “you can type anything and the game will understand it!” promise of LLMs with the reality that it was providing an interface indistinguishable from that of an especially low-effort choice-based game. For another, while the blurb promises that Penny Nichols is a “Star-trek style away mission”, ChatGPT sure seemed to think it’s a high fantasy setting where all your actions involve casting magic spells. And actually the prompt in the transcript isn’t the same as the prompt in the Comp submission!

The transcript at least explains the last of these discrepancies; halfway down, the author realizes that things aren’t going well, and asks ChatGPT to change the rules, then regurgitate a new prompt capturing the alterations. It’s of glancing interest that even after the changes, the transcript remains awful: despite being told to stop prompting with an explicit list of options, ChatGPT keeps doing that; the stilted, buzzword-laden prose make it feel like you’re playing DnD with the worst, most corporate manager you’ve ever had; and there’s nothing resembling an actual conflict or revelation, just flaccid set-pieces and irrelevant revelations following each other in succession until the author declares that he’s won. To be fair, I guess I should note that I didn’t notice any glaring inconsistencies or logical contradictions in what the LLM spat out, which either indicates our forthcoming robot overlords are getting better with the hallucination problem or just that the “writing” was so soporific and arbitrary that there was no central narrative for individual developments to contradict.

But like I said, all those criticisms are only of glancing interest. I repeat: this prompt, which was submitted to the Comp as a thing you could use to get an LLM to play a game with you, is itself the product of an LLM – Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter is a coprophagous ouroboros, creating the very slop it feeds on, of no possible use or value to a human being. In that sense I suppose there’s something potentially meta to the prompt’s “final twist”: “Dragons feed on human attention, and this hoard has been feasting.”

They do, and it is.

Are we inclined to do something about that?

This is not IF.

I’ve since moved away, but for a long time I lived just a few minutes away from the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, CA. They’re a series of botanical gardens with various theme – there’s a rose garden, one with native plants, some woodier areas, a Japanese garden – plus a library, art museum, and conservatory, all based on the collection and estate of a railroad magnate who was a great philanthropist (but definitely did some shady stuff to make his money). It’s a lovely peaceful place, and I visited it a whole bunch when I leaved nearby, taking friends or family members when they were in town or just going to hang out on a lazy Sunday, in those pre-kid days when lazy Sundays were a thing.

So when I tell you that The Secrets of Sylvan Gardens is a game about spending a bunch of time at a magic version of the Huntington and solving some riddles and mysteries while building friendships and/or romance with a quartet of appealing characters, let there be no doubt that this is extremely my jam. Like, check this:

"A handful of visitors mill around, chatting and strolling. A half-elven couple and their toddler feed breadcrumbs to a flock of birds. A boy sits on a bench, absorbed in a book. The connected structures of the central villa, the library building to the East, and the glass conservatory to the West bound this area on three sides. An engraved bronze plaque identifies your location as 'NAIADS POOL.'"

There are things to do here: the reason you wind up at the Sylvan Gardens is that you’re afflicted by a strange sleepwalking malady that seems to keep drawing you to its grounds, so you’ve decided to investigate in your waking hours. And after you meet the aforementioned characters, they turn out to have their own problems that relate to your own, and running down these interconnected mysteries involves deciphering mythological references, brewing potions, and solving some similar gentle puzzles. These are all engaging enough, but for me the draw is just that this is a very nice place to spend time. There are follies! Two separate characters want to have tea with you upon first meeting them! There are bucolic graphics and a nice little map! The lady who founded this place was named Ploutossina Pecunia, which is a funny Dickensian name and also proof that this is one of those fantasy worlds that definitely had a Rome!

The characters are very nice too. As with the other game of the author’s that I’ve played in this Comp (Path of Totality), they’re all wholesome and down to earth; some of the early sequences hinge on whether you want to tell them all about your predicament or be more cagey, but they’re all so ingenuous I’d be surprised if many players took the latter route. There’s a child-prodigy librarian, a dedicated botanist, an easygoing gardener, a hermit who knows more than he’s letting on… you can choose to romance one of them, but that doesn’t stand in the way of just strengthening your friendships with the others, which are rewarding in themselves: you can go hiking or stargazing or eat a homecooked meal while getting to know them and helping them with their problems. Those problems aren’t exactly subtle – they’re each suffering from a different malady that mirrors your own, and which have thematic resonance with emotional challenges they’re experiencing as well; these are perhaps a bit on the nose, but allow the gameplay bits where you’re trying to lift the curses mirror the relationship dynamics sketched out via dialogue, which I think is a worthwhile trade.

There’s a lot of game here – I think it took me about three hours to get to the end – and I was engaged the whole time, as the game is paced well to make sure you’re always making progress; once I got through the initial setup I was worried that matters with all four characters would progress at the same rate, but actually you’re able to resolve some of their problems reasonably quickly while others linger into the endgame. And there’s one thread that initially seems to be just a bit of backstory on the same level as many others, but which takes on unexpected weight as you head into the endgame: (Spoiler - click to show)I’m talking, of course, of what to do about the mass killing of the dryads, which isn’t just part of the setup for one of the characters’ arcs, but winds up being the major question posed in the endgame: do you try to reverse the impacts of the genocide if it means potentially destroying this lovely place and the town that depends on it for its prosperity?

This dilemma is more pointed than I was expecting from the otherwise cozy vibe, and the game doesn’t make it too easy on the player (Spoiler - click to show)(taking the morally correct option of maximally repopulating the dryads does lead to some downer consequences as everyone moves away and the town dies). And that’s all to the good: I’ve used “nice” a whole bunch in this review and in my notes, but this element shows Secrets of Sylvan Gardens has more than just pleasant vibes to offer. So it’s maybe apt that the game’s postscript doesn’t list the Huntington as one of its real-world inspirations, but it does mention the Boboli Gardens in Florence, which I’ve also been to. They’re likewise a beautiful, manicured collection of landscapes, with cypress trees and Italianate sculpture and all the rest. But unlike the SoCal facsimile of European elegance, there’s weirder stuff too – my wife and I still talk about the strange grotto we stumbled across there, where after peering through an arch decorated by overgrow, cancerous stucco we glimpsed a bizarre altar resting under sculptures depicting putti, a goat’s head, and a pregnant she-goat with swollen teats. There’s nothing quite so disturbing in the Sylvan Gardens, thankfully, but neither is it an entirely manicured experience.

It’s getting on towards October, so my four-year-old son is enjoy the advent of his favorite holiday. He enjoys everything that makes up the Halloween bundle of spookiness, but some of it is admittedly easier for the toddler brain to assimilate and some is harder. Spiders and skeletons are straightforward enough, and the Count from Sesame Street gives him enough context to understand vampires. But this year he’s been asking a lot of questions about Frankenstein’s monster, which frankly (so to speak) is a bit confusing: I’ve of course been clear that the monster isn’t Frankenstein, but also that Frankenstein is the monster. That is, the point of the story is that the monster is grotesque, but was born innocent, like all children, before turning bad because of how he was treated; the good Doctor, meanwhile, is anything but, and the way he created the monster while rejecting the obligations of parenthood is the motivating crime of the tragedy.

Armed with that understanding, I think he’d be able to make sense of INPUT PROCESS, though I might glide over certain details. Here, you play Frankenstein, and there’s not one but two monsters, both digital creations rather than stitched-together carcasses: the first AI is upbeat and talks like an LLM, while the second is better rounded, and smart enough to ask you some pointed questions about the why (and who) of its creation. This is a game of dialogue, made up nearly entirely of conversations with these two digital avatars, and mostly linear, too, though there are a few choices offered towards the tail end of the game that slot you into one of the several endings. But while the branching may be rather shallow, the presentation takes full advantage of the digital format: the first conversation plays out in a convincing simulation of a terminal (though having a chatbot conversation play out in a DOC prompt, complete with directory path printing out before each bit of user dialogue, is kinda weird), while the second adds graphical elements, notably a yellow eye that’s ready to catch you in an inconsistency.

The first two-thirds of the game play out as a mystery, teasing the question of why the protagonist created the Ais and what secrets she’s keeping from them, but I didn’t find this especially engaging. Beyond the fact that the blurb more or less spills the beans, this is a Frankenstein story, and there’s only one reason a stunted genius tries to create artificial life (well, one and a half if you count hubris). Adding to my impatience for the game to just acknowledge that you’re trying to recreate a lost loved one, duh, is the way it doles out its exposition, which is to say, oh god the timed text. You need to click to get each new paragraph to display, and even once you click the lines fill in letter by letter, making the buildup feel excruciating. I’ll admit that there are a few places where the added drama of delay enhances the narrative, but the omnipresence of this frustrating mechanic is the worst thing about INPUT PROCESS – imagine how much less fun Frankenstein would be if you spent half your time reading it waiting to actually read it!

Fortunately there are some high points too. Beyond the generally lavish production values, the writing is up to the challenge of depicting two different attempts to capture the same character in silicon, with the less-sophisticated iteration sporting noticeable LLM-style tics. The worldbuilding is also nicely shaded in; for plot purposes, all that’s important is that kitbashing AIs is possible but not exactly legal, but there are enough glancing details about the way this cyberpunk-y world works to make it feel lived in. The final segment of the game also is more engaging that what came before – some of this is down to choices finally starting to appear, but it isn’t just a matter of interactivity as such; the last couple of scenes focus more on the emotional dynamics of the situation rather than trying to prolong the aura of mystery, and gain power by that choice. Sure, the protagonist’s psychology here is familiar enough (stop me if you’ve ever read a story about a precocious genius with self-esteem issues who fears getting close to anyone!), but the AI’s reactions are the focus, and lead to an endgame that’s more about feeling out whether a newly-constructed relationship with the protagonist might be plausible or desirable, based on what level of sharing you choose to engage in.

And to the game’s credit, it does allow you to skip to other choice points once you finish the old-fashioned way, which takes much of the sting out of having to face all that timed text a second or, heavens forfend, third time if you want to see how things change in the other endings. All of them are ambiguous to one degree or another since this isn’t a rainbows-and-sunshine kind of game, but they all do open up space for the protagonist and her creations to escape the sort of destructive cycle that consumed Frankenstein and his monster, one way or another, which I suppose can count as hopeful if you catch it in the right kind of light. Of course, in this day and age a story about AI that posits them as specific characters striving to understand humanity, not brainless purveyors of cheerily-delivered slop, feels a bit old fashioned, but as my son’s fascination with Frankenstein indicates, there’s a reason we keep going back to the classics.

The 2023 Comp was notoriously a festival of murder-mysteries and boats, and while we’ve seen our share of the former this year, maritime adventure has been rather thinner on the ground (er). There’s a bit of sea-going amongst the general phantasmagoria of Us Too, and you take ship right at the end of Warrior-Poet, but aside from the inevitable spaceship stuff – which is a different category, to my mind – but that’s pretty much it. So I’m excited that two thirds of the way through the Comp, things are looking up on the boat front! Crescent Sea Story boasts its boatiness in its title, of course, and also offers a lovely watercolor map to trace your progress about its blue-water archipelago.

That’s about the only loveliness to be found, however, since this is a dark story. The protagonist is an amnesiac wizard in a world where people and spirits live in symbiosis – or, as you begin to intuit as you recover your memories, perhaps the relationship is more parasitic than that. As you sail to one island or another, you enter flashbacks that illustrate key moments in your life, jumbled out of order, so beyond the individual challenges in each episode, there’s a metapuzzle of putting them into their proper sequence to suss out who exactly you are, and what you were doing that led you to forget yourself.

This is an engaging structure, and there’s a nice variety to the individual sequences: one starts as a slice of life, with choices primarily keyed to navigating high-school relationship drama, before taking a turn for the macabre, while another sees you performing monotonous task after monotonous task for a sorcerous mentor who seems more focused on getting you to do his chores than teaching you magic. And beyond the shifts in subject matter, the length is also pretty variable, which helps keep things well-paced all the way through to the inevitable climax.
The prose also makes things go down easy. It’s smooth throughout, equally adept at the high-fantasy moments as the quiet, bucolic ones; the style shifts slightly to accommodate these different moods, but not so much as to cause whiplash. I personally like a bit of friction to my writing, especially for fantasy stories, as there are moments when things feel a bit flatter and more contemporary than I’d like – but that’s purely a subjective preference, and the presence of computers and other anachronistic touches indicate that Crescent Sea Stories isn’t actually going for a traditionalist fantasy vibe.

One commonality between the memory-vignettes is that they end with assigning you a character trait, usually based on some climactic choice: the fact that none of these are positive traits (you have your pick of rage, despair, or coldness) is one of many clues that the protagonist’s viewpoint might not be an unbiased one. While your grudge against the gods has its reasons, there are definitely hints that you’ve been shown an incomplete picture – and that regardless of the ends you’ve pursued, the means you’ve employed have put you beyond the moral horizon.

It all makes for a satisfying package, albeit not one without its blemishes. The hardest to ignore of these is the timed text; much of the story requires you to click links to get more text to display, and there’s a noticeable lag before the next paragraphs appear. Meanwhile, choices aren’t offered in list form, but rather via a widget requiring you to click a button to cycle through options, at which point you can click to lock one in. It’s just a little slower and a little fiddlier than you want it to be. Some of the design can exacerbate this sluggishness, especially the training sequence, which has you trudging through a maze and performing repetitive jobs through clicking the same links over and over; it’s thematically appropriate that the protagonist’s impatience would be bubbling over, but I’m not sure the player needed to experience quite so much bleed-through.

These are small quibbles though; Crescent Sea Story is a nicely put-together package, tracking an anti-hero’s journey through engaging reveals and without getting too grimdark. And while the ending shows you triumphant, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re headed for comeuppance in some sequel or spin-off that delves into the folly of your actions – definitely sign me up for that, especially if there are more boats involved.

I think a lot about The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Let me rephrase: relative to most Americans born in 1980, I think a lot about the Sorrows of Young Werther, not so much for the novel’s literary qualities – though it did kick-start the Romantic movement and has some good set-pieces – as for its social impact. The thing about this book is that it was huge, and not in a normal way: “Werther fever” had masses of people over-identifying with the main character, reading the story in paroxysms of emotion, dressing up like him, and even, allegedly, killing themselves to escape their romantic travails, just as he does in the book.

Which is to say that parasocial relationships with literary characters may technically be a modern phenomenon, by virtue of the fact that 1774 is after when many consider the early-modern era to have ended, but they nonetheless have a history that long predates social media (so does cosplay!) And while Werther is obviously a poor choice of role model, I don’t think it’s the case that these kinds of feelings are necessarily bad when kept to a proper proportion: my wife is a big fan of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, and cried happy tears when she read an estate-approved novel that capped off their narratives by marrying them off. When you come to know a character by reading about them, you really do feel for them, and want good things to happen to them, at least once the adventures that provide you with so much excitement are through.

This is exactly what the Little Four is up to. This low-key parser mystery brings Hercule Poirot and his Watsonian sidekick, Captain Hastings – both the protagonist and the putative author – into a domestic menage: after the death of Hastings’ wife, he’s moved his four children into the flat below Poirot’s, while he himself takes the great detective’s guest bedroom (one does not need to look far to find queer subtext). The kids play games, Poirot’s mostly retired and alternates phone consultations with the Yard with cooking meals for the extended family, and Hastings’ greatest obstacle is taking the dog out for a walk on a rainy day.

One of the great powers of parser games is to evoke a place, and the apartments here are nicely drawn and cleanly implemented; they’re substantial without feeling too big, and contain a generous portion of lovingly-described mementos and Christie references without being overstuffed (the robust feelies, which in addition to instructions on commands and a spoiler-y walkthrough also include a map, help make things feel even more manageable). While I’ve not read the original books so can’t directly compare the prose, the writing here is very good, conveying sensory impressions and character details while maintaining a post-Edwardian crispness. Here for example is X SLIPPERS:

"Poirot, in his dandyish and self-admiring manner, loved to have his most luxurious personal items inscribed with his elegant monogram of an intertwined H and P. He sometimes wore these dark velvety slippers around the house after his bath, when the day’s schedule allowed him to keep a casual presentation. I confess that the aches of advancing middle age were making me crave comforts that I had scorned as a younger man, and I was tempted to procure some slippers of my own."

This excerpt is typical in centering on Poirot, who is unsurprisingly the main subject of the game: exploring the apartment gives you a sense of the place but more so provides a portrait of its inhabitant, who comes across as charmingly vain but intensely sentimental, doting on Hastings and the children:

"I have always known Poirot to be a masterful cook; lately, he had been honing his skills with particular zeal by cooking dinner on most nights, and appeared determined to outdo himself at every opportunity. He was on a mission to render even the most dubious of Belgian dishes somehow palatable to young children. He sometimes spoke fondly of his mother as he explained a recipe’s origins, offering us glimpses into a past which he had been reticent about for as long as I have known him."

I can imagine how much enjoyment a Poirot fan would get from this picture, seeing a beloved character happily at rest. And filling out this picture is mostly what there is to do: you’re set a series of simple chores at the beginning of the game that mostly serve as an excuse to wander around the place checking out the scenery and having short conversations with the rest of the supporting cast, while Poirot remains off-screen. There is an added note of excitement as you head into the endgame, but this is exceedingly modest: Poirot sets a simple test of your deductive prowess, which is solved by doing just what you’ve done for the rest of the game, wandering around and looking at things, which is made easier by the convenient way items you haven’t yet sufficiently examined are printed in bold (after you’ve found everything there is to find, cracking the conundrum does require typing in a culprit for the mischief you’ve uncovered, but this too is exceedingly obvious, and anyway there are no consequences for failure). And then the story draws to a close.

It’s a lovely little thing, but I have to confess that – well, I’m not a Poirot fan. I’ve seen an episode or two of the David Suchet series and one of the Branagh movies, but as I said, I’ve never actually read any of the books, and wasn’t aware there was such a character as Captain Hastings until I checked on Wikipedia to see whether he was the game’s creation or original to Christie. So while I can certainly appreciate the happy ending he’s provided here, I still viewed all this coziness with something of the uncomprehending detachment of someone watching a Wertherite sob over a fictional character’s heartbreak – though unlike in that case, part of me was a little disappointed that nobody got killed, since I do love a murder-mystery. But corpses are a dime a dozen in Poirot’s career; evenings where he’s surrounded by affectionate children and shares a nightcap with a friend, I suspect, are rarer, and even our fictional friends deserve a little peace.

It’s a sign that a writer has reached their decadent phase when they turn their critical eye upon themselves and begin to obsess over their process, but I am feeling stymied about how to start my review of A Day in a Hell Corp and the only way I can think of to break through the logjam is to let you behind the curtain a little bit. See, typically my reviewing is two or three days ahead of my playing, which is an important part of how I’m usually able to get through the Comp: between work, taking care of my kid, various chores and errands, and maintaining some minimum of a social life, and cramming 85 games into 45 days, I need to maximize the efficiency of the hour and a half to two hours a night when I can actually sit down and write reviews. And that time lag is a big piece of that, since as I’m doing the laundry or cooking or taking a couple minute break between meetings, my impressions of a game are marinating in the back of my brain, and I can mentally workshop different angles to takes, these to propound, gimmicky intros to use as a way into talking about the game, so by the time I’m in front of the keyboard I can just go without needing too much in the way of anticipatory throat-clearing.

The previous 250ish words, though, are of course anticipatory throat-clearing of the lowest order: pure waffle, the kind of tap-dancing that a sophomore bangs out to bulk out their two-and-a-half-page essay to the requisite three-page mark, valuable only to the extent that they gift an editor a moment of satisfaction as they drag their red pen across in a diagonal slash. And yet, despite my method theoretically safeguarding against such a result, here we are. Why? Well, for one thing, I don’t actually have an editor, but the main reason is that every time I’ve tried to think about A Day in Hell Corp over the last couple of days, I’m overcome by a wave of irritation that renders analysis untenable.

It’s not that its bones are irreducibly awful. What we’ve got here is an old-fashioned Twine game with puzzles, but none of the systems that edge a choice-based game into the “parser-like” category – I suppose there’s a vestigial inventory, but there are only a couple of different items you can pick up, and they automatically enable a choice to use them when appropriate, so that hardly counts. Similarly, there’s a bit of navigation, but the map is simple and there’s not any need to retrace your steps after you’ve cleared each small region. So basically you just wind up going from room to room, clicking through all the links, then circling back once you hit the end to see what’s changed based on your first round of clicking – the puzzles all solve themselves through lawnmowering, so no actual thought is required; it’s not especially satisfying but this can be a brainlessly pleasant structure upon which to hang a story, so like I said, not irreducibly awful.

The same goes for the story, I suppose, though its margin of grace is much narrower. You play a middle-manager demon eager to win a competition whose prize is a celestial vacation, and as a result you have to review the torments of the souls under your care to find ways to dial their suffering up to 11 (a running subplot is the way you screw over, and are screwed over in turn by, your coworkers – it’s an imp eat imp world out there). This is rather broad as workplace satires go, and the gender politics are gross (female demons are either super hot or grotesque, and none of them are smart), but again, a good writer could do something with this setup.

The issue though is that we are not dealing with the work of a good writer, or at least one whose style is to my taste. In fact, I kind of hope that an LLM was used to generate some of this prose (though let me be clear that there’s no disclosure to that effect), because the alternative – that a human being wrote all this – is depressing to contemplate:

"Whoa, in that orc infirmary, those alembics and potions, they’re one crazy, funny mess!

"Alembics: All scattered on the shelves, these alembics got wild shapes, like glass giraffes or hunchback witches. They’re bubbling and gurgling, with colorful smoke and funny sounds, like whistles and burps. Some of the stoppers pop off like champagne, making it even wilder.

"Potions: The potions, in bottles all shapes and sizes, colors like rainbows and glowing. Labels all scribbled and unreadable, like spider tracks, and the effects are crazy, like laughing fits or turning into dancing pumpkins. It’s a real hoot!"

The whole game is like this, every interaction exaggerated into zaniness, visible flop-sweat coming off of the text as it tries to convince you how crazy and over the top the mild humor is:

"The moment you grab that hammer and smack the alarm clock, everything goes kaboom in a total mess. But the alarm clock? It’s still there, perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened. Oh, the irony! And just then, the hellish door opens up, ready to take you to work. Good day, huh? :sweat_smile:"

Or:

"Orc nurses run back and forth, tripping over their own feet, while screaming patients are carried on creaking stretchers. An atmosphere of total disorder, where every step is an adventure into the bizarre."

Or:

"So, our antihero, with a clumsy leap, jumps onto the table. First move? Epic fail, the gum falls and sticks to his tail. Second try? Even worse, he ends up with a foot in a bucket some jerk angel left there, now all rusty—real funny, guys."

It’s exhausting, sucking all the energy out of even the slightly-better gags; I didn’t think you could make whale laxatives enervating, but the game accomplishes it. There’s no sense of pacing, no quieter bits allowing for escalation into comic chaos, just increasingly-incoherent noise wearing down my rational faculties. Heck, there’s one late-game puzzle involving a union rep and some misers that I still don’t fully understand, since the dialogue felt like it was fed into a make-snarkier filter over and over again until the original meaning had long since fled. Perhaps there are people who do find this stuff funny – I’ll confess that maybe I’d have been among them when I was twelve – but these days I find comedy needs some sense of restraint in order to land. Here in IF land, it’s not the mind, but writing, that can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven; that’s certainly the case here.

I’ll give credit to You Cannot Speak for an interesting opening – sudden-onset aphasia, intrigue on a Martian colony, and sleep paralysis are an unlikely set of themes to throw into the blender, but you can see how they’d connect up: they all have to do with isolation, alienation, and a lack of agency. The game’s protagonist seems well-fitted to explore this mélange of concepts, too, as she’s fleeing some entanglements on Earth and clearly has cut herself off from her history: upon waking from the aforementioned hag-dream, instead of immediately jumping into your daily routine you can choose to sit for a while and reflect on your past, which involves a premonitory warning that “sometimes it’s better not to ruminate”, and you gate off a detailed description of something that went wrong for you with a simple “you don’t like think about it.”

Unfortunately none of this is paid off in any way: the game as entered into the Comp is a short demo, comprising maybe the first ten minutes of what’s clearly a larger story (part 2 is plugged in the ending). Besides the ominous opening and the vague backstory, you can take a (deeply unpleasant) shower, check out your few belongings, and then get a strange warning from someone lurking outside your quarters. It’s hard not to be a bit frustrated, because this is in no way a complete experience. There have been other part ones entered into this year’s Comp, of course, but Pure and Warrior-Poet are both notably longer and more robust in both gameplay and narrative terms; they reach climaxes at the end, even if there’s clearly more story to go before everything is resolved. You Cannot Speak has none of that, and it doesn’t even elaborate its themes sufficiently to create a hook – sure, there’s the mystery of why the protagonist can’t, well, speak, but this is just an out-of-context mystery, without any potential explanations or avenues of investigation on offer, so it winds up feeling disconnected from the actual gameplay on offer, which again is mostly just twiddling around in a minimally-furnished space cabin.

The prose, meanwhile, is fine (there’s a line about how the TV-picture you’ve got instead of an actual window shows a “canyon [of] breathtaking natural beauty, with all the timeless qualities of a MacOS desktop image”, which I think is good assuming that I’m right that it’s meant satirically) but it’s not especially flashy. So while sure, I’d keep playing based on these first ten minutes, I can’t say that’s because I found a compelling reason to continue as much as that I didn’t find anything sufficiently off-putting to drive me away. And if the plan is to release the second installment in next year’s Comp, I’m pretty sure I’d have to replay this opening in its entirety to remember what happened – to be honest, I’ve already kinda forgotten what the deal is with the protagonist’s sister, and what the guy lurking outside the door said that was creepy – which isn’t a problem I’d have with Pure or Warrior-Poet. Inasmuch as it’s a teaser, You Cannot Speak probably could have stood to be more of a tease.

Probably the most interesting thing about the rise of LLMs (a low bar) is that it’s given us a new AI story. When I was growing up, there were just two: Pinocchio, and 2001. That is, either the story was going to be about whether or not an artificial consciousness could be “real” (so Data from Star Trek, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, Spielberg’s Kubrick’s A.I.), or about whether the robots were going to destroy their creators (Terminator, The Matrix… heck, this trope goes all the way back to R.U.R.) But now there’s a third story, reflecting the anxieties brought on by generative AI: maybe the machines won’t live alongside us, or violently overthrow us, but instead simply supplant us, doing all the work and making all our decisions until we’re superfluous.

One Step Ahead’s implementation isn’t especially impressive – presentation-wise, this is bare-bones Harlowe, and the writing is marred by plenty of typos and infelicities – but when it sticks to telling this new story, it managed to sustain my attention as the protagonist, worn down by the demands of classwork and decision fatigue, slowly cedes more and more of their agency to an LLM. Soon it’s doing their homework, deciding on their meal plans, and shouldering them out of their life. There’s not much characterization or specificity, and the use of interactivity is rather blunt (you can either give into temptation and use the AI – or you can choose not to, which swiftly ends the game without anything by way of denouement), but hey, who doesn’t want to see Faust get his comeuppance?

The trouble is, in the third act of its short runtime, the game swerves back into one of the old narratives, specifically the oh-no-AI-will-kill-us-all one. You have a moment of clarity and try to delete or at least step back from using it, before it’s inevitably reinstalled and punishes you for your disobedience. Narratively, this isn’t especially convincing – the details on how all this is happening are vague, beyond red angry-text being displayed at odd angles. And thematically, it’s a muddle: what’s terrifying about being replaced by an LLM is specifically that it doesn’t have any agency, we’re just making ourselves obsolete through sheer lack of character, or having it imposed on us from above by rapacious bosses. Killer robots reflect a capitalist’s guilty conscience at the oppression of the proletariat, so bringing this note into the mix adds nothing but discordance – it’s a plot twist for the sake of a plot twist, an escalation for the sake of an escalation. And since, unfortunately, there’s not much here beyond the very basic skeleton of a narrative, when that goes off the rails there’s similarly not much left for One Step Ahead to fall back on.

On thing that I never fully appreciated until I started writing some of my own fiction is just how full of holes most narratives are. I don’t mean inconsistencies in the plot or anything like that – just gaps, elisions, places where the story skips through some dull bits. They seem simple enough when you’re reading, but when you’re in the author’s seat, I found it was very easy to get sucked into the momentum of narrating everything that happened to my characters: if I said they went out their front door, well it just stood to reason I’d need to relate what they saw on the other side, then which direction they turned when they finished walking down the driveway, and then whether they had to wait for the stop-light to cross the street… internalizing that you can (and should!) segue into the next place where something interesting happens, trusting that the reader will follow, can be deceptively hard, especially when the next sentence isn’t “when X arrived at school…” but “the next day…” or “by the time Summer Break was over”, much less, as in the case of the fairy tale on which valley of glass riffs, “seven years later…”

The game doesn’t attempt to tell the full story of that fairy tale, or even an incomplete slice of it – instead, it lives entirely in the gap. I had vague memories of the Black Bull of Norroway, which is name-checked in the blurb, but had recourse to Wikipedia to fill in the details, and it sure is a fairy tale: there are three daughters who go off on three separate journeys, a youngest daughter who travels alongside a black bull and is gifted three miraculous fruits, a seemingly-simple instruction that’s accidentally violated to supernaturally-catastrophic effect, and then transformations, setbacks, a trilogy of bribes, and true love winning out in the end. There’s a bit too much business, a bit too little thematic resonance, for Disney to be adapting this anytime soon, but it’s an enjoyable example of the form, and valley of glass zeroes in on one particular lacuna in the narrative: after the youngest daughter inadvertently disobeys the bull which is her polymorphed love, she’s abandoned in the eponymous dale and forced to work for a blacksmith for seven years, at which point he promises to make her iron shoes that will allow her to climb the slippery slopes and make her rendezvous with destiny.

The game doesn’t give you the full context for why you’re here, or where you’re headed after your labors have finished – I’m not sure because the author assumed the audience would know the story (debatable, I think, at least in the US) or if being enigmatic was an intended part of the vibe. I will say I’m glad I looked up the story, since it enabled me to appreciate some details that initially left me nonplussed, like the fact that the aforementioned fruits start out in your inventory. Honestly, even with that background, the game is pretty slight: it just depicts you remembering how you came to the valley and then turning back to the forge to keep up your labors, hoping one day to escape. The writing is evocative, but there isn’t much in the way of interactivity:

"It is early spring in the valley of glass, the first of the seven years you promised to the village blacksmith. Your breath clouds in the crisp morning air as you walk the North Road, your borrowed coat wrapped tight against the chill."

(That last line is unchanged even if you remove the coat).

Pretty much all the player can do is explore off the road, which triggers the aforementioned non-interactive memories. The fantastical nature of the landscape isn’t especially harped on in these sequences, and while I typically like understatement, in a piece this short (it took me less than ten minutes to play through) I think going bigger would have helped it make more of an impression. Similarly, if you’ve read the story, there are some things you can do that would eventually change the outcome (Spoiler - click to show)(breaking open the fruits so the daughter can’t use the gems within as a bribe) but the game can’t really acknowledge that, since its horizon closes well before the next bit of the fair tale’s plot picks up. This makes for a game that’s pleasant enough while it lasts, but almost militantly low-key in its refusal to offer challenges, choices, or consequences, and even the mood it evokes is rather restrained. It’d be churlish to suggest that the fairy tale skips over this bit for a reason, but I did find myself wishing the author had communicated a clearer rationale for why this particular bit of the story was worth spending time on, besides the aforementioned narrative-autopilot I had running as a novice author.

I don’t mean to be controversial here, but I’m going to go ahead and say it: Kafka was a great author. Oh, I know some might disagree – including the man himself, who famously wanted all his writing to be burned after his death – but for all that he’s not great at interiority and he’s better at situations than plot, he sure nailed the 20th century. But beyond his ideas (bureaucracy, alienation, the absurd), he sure could sling a sentence even when working in a more mundane register. Temptation in the Village is an interactive rendering of one of his fragments, and where the game sticks close to his prose, there’s something about it that makes me squirm in my seat with glee:

"One summer, as evening falls, you arrive in a village you’ve never been to before. You’re struck by how broad and open the roads are. Tall, old trees stand in front of the farmhouses. It has been raining recently, the air is fresh, everything delights you. You try to convey this in the way you greet the people standing at the gates; their replies are friendly, though a little reserved."

I can’t easily articulate why this delights me, but it does: the simple words, the emotional immediacy, the accumulation of simple clauses creating a momentum belied by the fact that nothing in particular is happening, the small note of unease at the end… Sure, this borders on the pastoral, but when we get down to the grubby business of human interaction, the distinctively Kafkaesque note begins to emerge. For example, after you decide to take lodgings in the village and bandy some words with a curiously-hostile passerby, a supercilious young man pops atop a wall to tell you you can stay at a farmhouse:

“That’s right,” he replies, with the same arrogance in his reply that there is in all his behavior. He sits above like a master, you stand down below like a petty servant; you have a great desire to stir him up a little by whirling a stone at him.

“Beds for the night are furnished here, not to everyone, but only to those to whom they are offered,” the young man continues.

The near-tautology at the end: lovely.

The gameplay here is pretty minimal – just moving about the map and taking simple actions (talking, sleeping) according to the game’s prompts, which lend a minimal interactivity to the fragment. Sometimes the suggestions can get pretty bald, telling you exactly what the protagonist is feeling and what you should do next, and while these can feel intrusive, I think that’s forgivable due the exigencies of adaptation, especially of a piece so light on plot as this: without clear narrative stakes or character goals to structure things, a heavier authorial hand helps the player avoid flailing.

The trouble is that this is just a fragment, and the author’s given in to the temptation to finish it. It’s hopefully no major critique to note that the writing in this section isn’t as good as Kafka’s, and both the plot and the structure open up a bit: the bit Kafka wrote breaks off after the protagonist experiences an odd incident upon awakening in the farmhouse in the middle of the night, but from there the game’s narrative has you deciding to work as a farmhand for a while, which requires you to perform some chores to prove that you’re up to the task. This involves some satisfying but very typical parser-puzzle business – you need to oil a rusty wheel, things of that nature – and while there’s a consistent undercurrent suggesting that things aren’t right, this comes across more as the locals playing a practical joke on an outsider, which doesn’t contrast well with the more uncanny, slightly-off vibe of the first half. And then the ending strikes the least Kafkaesque note I can imagine:

"But even in this desolate moment, you know that one day you will find a place that truly belongs to you, no matter what it takes - and it will be somewhere entirely different from here."

Still, a too-pat finale can’t negate how engaging I found the first part of the piece; I do wish the author had been more willing to let narrative uncertainty lie and end the game the same place Kafka did, but that’s not because the second half is bad, just comparatively banal. And heck, compared to the various forgettable-at-best attempts at adding closure to incomplete narratives – stabs at solving the Mystery of Edwin Drood or bringing Sanditon in for a landing or the last seasons of Game of Thrones – it could have been a lot worse.

Context, they say, is king, and here is proof number nine hundred: I enjoy testing IF, and will gladly spend hours cataloging typos, brainstorming ways to improve a puzzle’s clueing, messing around with the parser to try to catch the world-model out, and otherwise cheerfully folding, spindling, and mutilating a buggy, incomplete mess of a game. And to be clear I don’t just mean that I like to do it because it’s a useful task for the community, or that I just like to feel helpful – though both of those are true – but that actually, the process itself is fun for me. It’s almost like a meta-puzzle: using your knowledge of writing and coding, how thoroughly can you break and reconstruct a game?

Yet while my playthrough of By All Reasonable Knowledge involved finding a lot of typos, noting inadequate clueing, and manipulating the parser to get around its inability to understand reasonable commands, I was not having fun. Because yeah, when an author has asked you to do that, it feels different from when they force you to do that.

This is all leading up to the reveal that BARK (we’ll circle back to the pun) doesn’t have any testers listed in the credits, and boy does it show. This is a one-room Inform game with a bunch of different bits of furniture, fixtures, and scenery, but LOOK just tells you “You are in a dingy bedroom”, so you constantly need to scroll back to the top of the transcript to review the paragraphs-long description of what’s actually there. There’s a night light you need to grab, but you can’t because despite how the game writes it it’s actually implemented as a nightlight (holding the thing also enables you to unlock a container by trying to open it, with no clue or other indication about this entirely nonstandard interaction so far as I could tell). State-changing actions are inconsistently implemented (there’s a window that kept saying it was closed even after I’d opened it), the grammar for the HELP command is so abstruse I never figured out which prepositions are required (fortunately you can just type HELP and then the name of an object at the disambiguation prompt, which works like half the time), and of course there’s an object where the intuitive command for using it gives a useless, default response, because in that one case you’re supposed to guess that USE is the right command.

Oh yeah, and for a game called BARK, where the blurb tells you the inciting incident is barking dog keeping you awake, and where you can call no less than three hired guns to try to get them to kiss said dog to get it to cease its barking, it sure is surprising that I never heard a single soft arf in my playthrough.

Adding insult to injury, the game seems determined to take its shortcomings out on its players. If you exhaust the hints available for a particular object, you get told “Maybe interactive games are too difficult for you. I’m sure there’s a pinball table in a bar you might be better at,” which I confess made me annoyed – baby, let me assure you, it’s not me, it’s you. That snark is also of a piece with BARK’s edgy, incoherent tone: for all that the setup screams “zany parser game”, you’re treated to a series of flashbacks that attempt to situate things in a social realist mode, creating a bathetic contrast that goes about as well as you’d expect. And although I don’t think you can successfully kill the dog, as the assassination attempts seemed to rebound on me, it’s still a kind of gross thing to push the player to try (I tried to call in a hit just because I dialed a context-free – there’s that word again – number that I was told I’d memorized, with no indication of who was on the other end).

In the game’s defense, there is a FUCK TRUMP Easter egg, and I don’t think the idea of contrasting silly-puzzle solving with downbeat domestic drama is inherently bad, though it’s not well-realized here (and it’s especially not well-served by the “wacky” plastic-looking genAI art of the cover). But playing BARK is still exhausting, far more work than entertainment and with no indication that the author’s going to make updates based on feedback, continuing to slog away at it was hard to justify – so when I got to a point where I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and confirmed my understanding was right via the hint function, but wasn’t able to actually do the thing due to the syntax’s failure to explain itself or accept reasonable alternatives that had worked in other similar situations the game presented ((Spoiler - click to show)I was trying to CLEAN CLOCK WITH SCREWDRIVER), I decided to call that good. I am curious how the various plot threads in BARK might eventually come together, but this one needs a lot more polishing – and testing – before it can fairly ask a player to give it a go.

I’m continually amazed by how Arthur DiBianca is able to write at least one or two highly-polished games a year working in an identifiable niche – limited-parser puzzle games that each boast a distinctive hook – while so rarely feeling like he’s repeating himself. Operative Nine fits comfortably into that tradition, with all the pieces of the classic setup: there’s a light cyber-espionage theme, as this time you’re tasked with breaking into an enemy base to run the table on spy-game shenanigans by swapping dossiers, bugging meeting rooms, putting knockout-gas in the ventilation system, and taking pictures of secret documents with a camera mocked up to look like a pack of cigarettes. But in an extreme approach to the limited-parser aesthetic, pretty much all of that rigmarole takes care of itself if you make it into the appropriate room and examine the relevant bit of scenery: besides compass navigation and good ol’ X [WHATEVER], there’s only one command needed, the almighty LINK, which enables you to deploy your cutting-edge microcomputer to hack into enemy systems.

Now, there’s a long tradition of hacking minigames in video games, so when I finished the intro and started to get to grips with the mission, I couldn’t help speculating about what form these hacking puzzles would take: something verisimilitudinous, like Upling’s command-line interface? A lightly-reskinned version of regular parser gameplay, where locked doors are renamed secure nodes and keys renamed encryption crackers? Number puzzles or letter puzzles? Or maybe something game-ier, like Minesweeper or the Pipe-Mania one they had in Bioshock?

My feelings upon realizing yeah, it’s the last one, and actually, it’s Sokoban, were profoundly mixed. On the one hand, the absurdity of having a po-faced espionage thriller depend on repeated bouts of box-pushing is pretty great, but on the other, Sokoban is one of the classic puzzle frameworks that I personally don’t enjoy. I have a hard time articulating what it is about it that rubs me the wrong way – possibly that it feels very laborious, where you can figure out the answer but still need to spend a long time implementing the solution, with one wrong move requiring a restart? Or maybe it’s just that it always feels stressful to me, since the puzzles require imposing a sense of constraint and hemming in the player with frequent dead ends?

Operative Nine does cater to people with my hesitance about these kinds of puzzles, though, because while I feared I’d wind up having to bang my head against a series of increasingly-fiendish box-mazes, actually the Sokoban structure is used as the jumping-off point for a series of variations and provocations, taking the basic grammar of moving around some at signs to push some hash signs and going all sort of directions with it. Like, there are a couple that just require getting boxes out of the way or pushing them onto pressure plates, but very quickly that becomes the exception: there’s a factory level where you need to move the boxes around by judiciously activating levers that bump them from one conveyer belt to another, and a stealth level that involves hiding from “cameras”. Unsurprisingly, the implementation here is very impressive: there’s a box that’s always displayed on the right half of the screen, and when you activate the LINK command, the puzzle pops up in the box, not interrupting the thread of the story. Arrow keys and WASD move you around, and the controls are quite responsive. There are a couple of wrinkles that make life harder than it could otherwise be – notably, you can’t undo a move, and everything is doubled – like, the player is depicted as “@@” while the boxes are “##”. I assume this is done to make the aspect ratio more readable, but I found this last choice sometimes made it hard to count spaces and keep track of exactly where I was.

And that was a problem because there are some extraordinarily fiddly puzzles here where you do need to count your steps, and feed in an extended series of commands without the slightest mistake. The worst offender here is probably the dark puzzles, where you’re given a view of the level before it’s blocked off, and you need to navigate it blind – I got through the first three of these with only a modicum of difficulty, before giving up on the last one, which required me to squint at a bunch of whitespace to try to estimate whether I needed to go six steps to the right or seven… Enough trial and error would have got me through, but I confess I went to the walkthrough to key in the appropriate sequence – and that was the case for two or three other puzzles as well, where I felt like the effort of getting the solution exactly right was going to be so much busywork once I’d basically figured out what a puzzle was doing.

That’s not a great ratio for a game that just has about a dozen main puzzles, but admittedly, I’m pretty sure a good chunk of my impatience was just my native antsiness at Sokoban rearing its ugly head – for someone who likes this kind of thing, getting a meaty conundrum requiring an extended series of precise movements executed perfectly might be heaven itself (…do surgeons like Sokoban, I wonder) And there really are some lovely highlights that are more exploratory than anything else – I don’t want to spoil the best bits, but I’ll just say there’s an RPG-inspired puzzle that put a smile on my face the whole time.

So mileage can definitely vary, and even for the Sokoban-averse it’s very possible to have a good time here, especially if you’re not averse to using the walkthrough. I do think there are some elements here that make Operative Nine unlikely to rise to the top of the DiBianca pantheon, though: for one thing, the fact that the gameplay is entirely based on the minigames means that the puzzles are almost all self-contained, so it can feel more like an anthology than a single cohesive hole. For another, there’s no postgame or “advanced” puzzles, at least as far as I could see, which often adds an extra element of fun. But even a relatively-straightforward DiBianca game, focusing on a puzzle system I don’t get on with, is hard to have too bad a time with; it showed me some cool stuff, had impeccable implementation, and was zippy enough not to overstay its welcome.

When I was in law school, one of my favorite classes was a law and philosophy course that went into some of the dominant schools of thought about what law is and how it should be understood: I don’t mean bunkum like “originalism”, but actual philosophies like legal realism (law doesn’t exist as an abstract set of rules but rather is an expression of social interests and public policy) or legal positivism (law doesn’t gain its validity by expressing moral truths, but simply because it has the weight of the sovereign behind it). Our professor, being something of a Marxist, also had us read some Thorstein Veblen. As someone whose undergraduate major was astrophysics and had gotten through a smattering of Sartre and Foucault and not much else, this was fun stuff – but one day, as I was gushing excitedly to one of my fellow students about how much I was getting out of the class, they stifled a yawn: they were a poli-sci/English double major and been doing theory stuff like this since sophomore year, so most of what we were going over was old hat.

This is my attempt to be charitable and acknowledge that no audience is a monolith, players come from a broad variety of experiences and perspectives, and ideas that come off as stale to one person can easily be a breath of fresh air to another. So when I say that it feels like Let Me Play! is aimed at someone who was super impressed by the twist in Bioshock, and then fell into a coma for almost 20 years, I’m aware that’s an unfair judgment: I’m sure there are some players somewhere who’ll find its dramatization of the paradoxes of player agency to have some heft. But even they, I’d wager, would find its glacial pacing intensely frustrating: say what you will about Uninteractive Fiction 2, at least it respects its players’ time.

LMP is presented as a sort of visual novel: there are attractive pixel graphics dramatizing the story, which is draped in theatrical trappings. Act I, Scene I sees a man and a woman collide on their way into an elevator; as it turns out, this isn’t so much a meet-cute as a meet-awkward, as the woman is on her way up to her office to be fired from a job the man is applying for. Inevitably, the elevator breaks, stranding them, allowing them space to express their feelings, reveal some low-key secrets, and bond over their shared desire to escape the corporate grind and be actors.

When laid out in summary form, that sounds like a reasonable enough topic for a game, but sadly, that’s not what Let Me Play! is about. You see, while the scene occasionally stops to present you with a trio of dialogue options for both the man and the woman, your input is never registered – the hand cursor glides between the choices before finally setting on a pre-ordained outcome that allows the scene to continue. Yes, the ability of players to influence the narrative is what LMP is actually concerned with, in a story that gets increasingly heavy-handed as it goes – and gets increasingly snail-like, too. It doesn’t take long before almost every interaction requires a choice, and that whole hand-gliding-around rigmarole takes five or six seconds each time, and the text slowly prints to the screen character by character – but doesn’t pause when it finishes a line, meaning that the poor player is constantly caught on the horns of a dilemma: do you just sit there waiting for the text to update, feeling the minutes of your life slip away like sand through the hourglass, or do you alt-tab away or mess around with your phone and miss what’s actually being said?

This conflict is way more exciting than anything that actually happens in LMP. Every once in a while a special icon pops up, and if you click on that, you can eventually get into some more fourth-wall breaking scenes where the director gets involved in arguing with you about whether this is a play or a game, and every once in a while you’re actually given the opportunity to make some choices. But it’s all pretty bone-dry, going to exactly the places you’d imagine, without any characters or theme or anything specific to establish stakes or a reason to care about these arid pronouncements about what players can, or should, alter in an interactive narrative. It seems aimed at a video-game culture centered on player entitlement, which circa 2012 amid the Mass Effect 3 ending-rewriting controversy and the first stirrings of Gamergate might have felt somewhat on point; entered into an IF contest in 2025, it feels like Rip Van Winkle. And again, the delivery mechanism is more drawn-out than you can imagine – god help me, I went through the game without clicking on the icon to see what happens if you just let things play out, and it’s both uninspiring and excruciating. Of course I’m sure this is part of how the game is dramatizing the unpleasantness of being denied agency, but there are other ways to make withholding more engaging (come back Violent Delight, all is forgiven!) I don’t mind seeing an old argument re-presented, and for a player who hasn’t considered any of these ideas before it could be a gateway into a rich vein of theory and criticism, but I felt like LMP didn’t have much to say to me, and was in no hurry at all to say it.

If you were to make a checklist of mistakes first-time parser authors often make, Clickbait would run afoul of a bunch of them. The first puzzle announces its solution in an annoying every-turn rule that spams you with the exact same text every time you do anything, even taking inventory; dialogue uses the ASK X ABOUT Y syntax, with the available topics explicitly listed, but if you mistype or shorten them slightly (e.g. asking about “picture” rather than “his picture”) the command won’t be accepted; there’s a lot of unimplemented scenery, and device-fiddling puzzles made frustrating by the fact that you can’t just type TURN ON BLUE to push the blue button, because you’ll get asked to disambiguate between the button and a blue keycard you’re carrying (plus that won’t work because despite the button’s description noting whether it’s switched on or switched off, TURN ON/OFF actually don’t work and you need to PUSH the button instead); and a couple of puzzles even employ the dreaded USE X ON Y syntax.

But! The good news is that definitionally, an author can only be a first-timer once – and most of these irritants are pretty easy to fix for subsequent games. And the better news about Clickbait, specifically, is that it’s got a lot of high points that make me look forward to playing a second and third and fourth game by the author. The conceit here is fun: an urban-exploration photography contest prompts you to check out a long-sealed-off subway station, and when the door accidentally locks behind you, you need to find your way out while still making time for some winning snaps along the way. Most of what you get up to is relatively standard stuff – again, there are keycards, plus a rope, a lost toy you need to retrieve for a little girl – but the generally modest difficulty and pleasant, pacey writing keeps things zippy. Similarly, the characters are out of central casting but are nonetheless appealing: there’s a cop too lazy to be any help, a seemingly-incoherent derelict who gives you a vital clue, the aforementioned moppet who’s lost her bunny.

Alongside the sometimes-zany puzzles, the station is actually sketched out in a reasonably grounded way, with realistic detritus, graffiti, and other points of interest that make it feel like more than just an artificial funhouse to poke around in. And while the game isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, more than a few moments raised a smile, none more so than the reason the station was abandoned in the first place (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m not talking about the “it was all an experiment thing”, I can take or leave that twist, but the metal-can-of-tuna-in-the-microwave gag alternately makes me giggle and blanch).

Clickbait also gets more ambitious than the typical parser debut by having a robustly-implemented camera. You only have a limited number of shots, and you can photograph just about anything you choose; there are a few places where you’re prompted to take a picture to reveal a clue that for whatever reason isn’t visible to the naked eye, but for the most part, you can let the spirit guide you. I had a taste for portraits and urban-decay pictures of graffiti, but it feels like there’s a reasonable amount of room for player expression (now I’m wondering about doing a series on the color-coded doors). While your choice of candids can’t lead you to fail the game, the ending does evaluate your pics, spitting out a customized blurb for each and scoring you based on how well you realized the contest’s theme. It’s a fun way of giving the player more agency while navigating the often-linear process of solving text adventure puzzles, so I’m all for the experiment.

So given the promise on display, it would be churlish to harp on some of the rough edges in Clickbait’s implementation – I’m attaching my transcript since I do think it’s worth figuring out how to smooth them out for next time, but I very much hope there’ll be a next time.

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. A couple of years ago, I reviewed the author’s debut game, One King to Loot Them All, and at the close of a positive writeup I noted in passing that I prefer prose in the sword-and-sorcery genre to be “a little zestier” than what was on offer. So I can’t help but feel that one bit of Moon Logic – a purposefully-painful game originally destined for the Really Bad IF Jam before it broke scope and containment – is singling out me in particular. You see, this is a Zork pastiche one of whose main features is that alongside the main game window, there’s a frame where two voices on the player’s shoulder (Roger and Wilco, natch) comment on the action, crack dumb jokes, and gurn and grin in the most distracting manner as they refuse. to. shut. up. Come back, One King, all is forgiven!

In fairness, while the commentary is often (intentionally) painful, it’s also incredibly helpful, typically spelling out the next steps you need to take. This is perhaps a bit intrusive, but I found it a godsend given the game’s other gimmick: in a parody of intrusive “AI” assistance functions, this by-the-numbers Zork parody doesn’t use a parser interface, but rather a one-click choice-based one where you select the action, and the game infers the appropriate noun based on that. Of course “appropriate” is a lie, as the rules undergirding all this guarantee that the obviously useful action will only happen at the end (if at all). You can’t easily go a particular direction – opening and closing doors will determine where you wind up when you blindly stab the “go” button. Similarly, if you need to drop an item to progress, it’s going to be the last thing to go after you start pounding “drop” (and then you’ll have to press “take” a bunch of times again to retrieve all your junk). Oh, and you don’t get access to all the actions at once; using a verb will usually remove it from the screen, so you need to add some pointless actions in the middle to get it back.

As a result, knowing what you’re supposed to be doing makes sense – the challenge is actually the how. This does mean that you can largely blow past the moon-logic (drink!) that governs many of the puzzles – it doesn’t really matter why eating guano gives you super strength, you’re just told that it does, so good luck wrestling with the sack to try to get it out of its hiding place. And the game does a good job of mixing things up; just as I was feeling like I’d gotten the hang of the interface, some new annoying challenge would be thrown my way, usually with a clever gag (and groaningly-painful commentary from Roger and Wilco) accompanying it. These are all pretty much drawn from Zork, but with fun twists – I especially enjoyed how the joke around taking the giant pile of leaves, as well as how it’s redeployed given its role in many players’ approach to the maze of twisty little passages, all alike (though of course implementing the solution was laborious in the extreme).

Make no mistake, the humor here is very broad – here’s a representative sample:

[Wilco] Yes! We’ve got ourselves a lunch and a… wait, what happened to the clove of garlic?
[Roger] Maybe the vampire bat overcame its aversion to garlic and ate it?
[Wilco] Leaving a bat dropping in return. You may have a point there.

But it wouldn’t fit the brief of making Bad IF to have actually good jokes (albeit in fairness the giant pile of treasure you loot at the end did legitimately make me giggle a few times). Similarly, complaining that the interface is terrible would miss the point: yeah, it’s frustrating, but working out the rules governing its behavior isn’t too complex, and is reasonably satisfying. I can’t exactly recommend Moon Logic, unless you liked when a big kid would make you play the “stop hitting yourself” game on the playground. But if you’re in the mood for such a thing, you could do a lot worse. Just please, no need for zestiness next time.

I went to Italy for my honeymoon, and when my wife and I were reviewing our photos after the trip, we realized that other than posed pictures where I was smiling into the camera on command, I only ever had two expressions in the candid ones: either I’d be looking down at the guidebook (shoutout to the Blue Guides, whose writeups boast incredibly detailed art-historical analyses, religious and cultural context, and the kind of passive-aggressive condescension that means you understand that if they call something “popular”, it’s meant as a withering insult), or I’d be squinting up at an inscription in Latin and trying to puzzle out its meaning based only on my increasingly-vague memory of two years of middle-school classes in the language and whatever I managed to pick up by osmosis from studying law.

So when I tell you that The Reliquary of Epiphanius is a parser game where you squint at Latin inscriptions and try to puzzle them out, and where you’re also subjected to overly-detailed lectures about which saints and which local patrons are depicted in a series of friezes, what I am saying is that I was in heaven. Oh, there’s other fun stuff about this mystery – most notably, it’s implemented in Vorple and has a really cool map of the Italian village where your dad has gone missing while searching for a lost ecclesiastical treasure. And it’s got a couple of rough spots which meant I had to start over after getting into an unwinnable state right at the end of the game. But the authentic, detail-oriented way the core premise is realized is just so entirely my jam that none of the bells and whistles or occasional implementation stumble really mattered to how much I enjoyed it.

When I say it’s detail-oriented, I don’t meant that it’s plodding; Reliquary is actually pretty zippy, with puzzles that generally aren’t too challenging and not much time spent between important plot points. And it’s not that there’s overdetailed rococo scenery or anything; it’s just that the relatively-standard parser structure is fleshed out with just the right level of research and verisimilitude. This is the kind of game where if you examine the random photos in city hall, you’ll learn about how the local dam was constructed, down to the year when it was completed, and where a big payoff is learning that you might have discovered Italy’s first depiction of Mary’s Assumption. Like, I’m a pretty big nerd about this kind of stuff, but I had no idea that the Saracens launched raids on Italy’s Adriatic coast in the 11th century until I learned about it in the game. And yeah, as you’re exploring the various churches and historical sites that make up the game’s setting, you come across a bunch of Latin, none of which is automatically translated so far as I recall. Obviously in this day and age a quick google is all you need to figure things out (and the game was originally released in Italian, where the assumption that the audience would be able to get the drift without too much trouble is probably on firmer ground) – plus these are usually just adding a bit of context or at most a helpful but superfluous clue – but still, I respect a game that rewards a player who knows stuff or makes an effort to learn, rather than just having the player character do all the work.

Speaking of the fact that this is a game translated into English, I felt like this added a unique quality to the prose, too. As you explore the first few locations in the village, you’re told that the “pellitory of the wall grows spontaneously in the cracks between the stones,” which is a syntax that feels unfamiliar to English, and also matter-of-factly drops the technical name of a weed that would typically just be called a weed. True, there are places where the translation feels overly polished into blandness – we’re told of a barmaid that “her lifeless eyes and weary expression give her an air of boredom and age her beyond her years,” which is prose only an LLM could love – but for the most part the writing is a highlight.

The puzzles are pretty good too – there isn’t anything notably challenging, but they’re satisfying to solve, and reward you for paying attention to all the things you learn. They also feel organic: it’s reasonable to need to get oriented to the landscape before you can start wandering around looking for the ruins of a church, for example. There are one or two that may not hold if up if you think too hard about the plausibility of various millennium-old mechanisms still functioning in contemporary times, but that’s part of the suspension of disbelief the genre requires. As for the various NPCs, they aren’t especially helpful or deeply implemented, but there’s sufficient narrative justification for this so I didn’t mind.

Reliquary does have some old-school elements: most notably, its tracking of time and insistence that one move equals one minute, combined with the battery-powered (though at least rechargeable) flashlight, got me in trouble in my first playthrough, since my light source ran out just as a got to a hidden location that I couldn’t leave until I solved a puzzle that I couldn’t see well enough to even begin to address. But I was having so much fun I didn’t mind retracing my steps. Similarly, I ran into a couple of small syntax issues, one of which sent me to the hints before realizing I had the puzzle solved (in a particular place, UNLOCK DOOR tells you that you can’t see any such thing, which is odd because UNLOCK MARBLE DOOR allows you to proceed).

But as I said above, I can’t bring myself to care about any of that – I can’t think of many other games that satisfy the fantasy of uncovering lost secrets by knowing a lot about religious art and Latin as Reliquary does. The fact that when you reach the ending, it actually has something to say about Italian society’s relationship to its past is just gilding the lily; for a particular kind of traveler, this game is about as good as virtual tourism gets.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Take Achilles, for example: pride of the Achaeans, the premier warrior of a heroic age, one whose divine blood destined him for glory, and a glorious death – and, if you read the Iliad at age 11 with only a weak understanding of the cultural context, a giant douche who gets his best friend killed because he’s sulking about not getting to assault the sex-slave he’s got his eye on.

It’s this Achilles about which the plot of Penthesileia revolves: although the setting is a modern neo-fascist state reminiscent of the Handmaid’s Tale, he remains much the same, an egotistical tyrant anxious of his status and with a taste for nonconsensually dominating his paramours. That paramour, however, is not the Iliad’s Briseis, but instead the eponymous Amazon, who comes from a now-lost sequel to the canonical epic (it’s not just the MCU that doesn’t know how to let a good ending alone), where she’s slain by Achilles as the interminable siege of Troy wears on. Unlike her mythological counterpart, though, the game’s Penthesilieia – the viewpoint character – is brought back to life after being killed in a raid on the resistance, resurrected to perform a robotic mimicry of wifehood. Some of the most effective parts of the game allow you to either accede to, or resist, the pageant of matrimony Achilles has constructed: you’re meant to start each day by waking him and asking “has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?”, then busy yourself in pointless housework – you rearrange the furniture twice in one day – before greeting him again and performing gratitude as he brings you a gift as he returns from his important work serving the Prefect (the gifts are all, of course, slinky dresses). The prose is simple and concrete and fillets Achilles’ pretensions without pity, appropriate for a story centering on the brutalism of tyranny:

"Achilles fills the twenty-minute car ride with the sound of his own voice. Electronic billboards flash past. They leave stars in your eyes, the vague impression of children laughing and women dancing."

Penny (as he calls you) is an appealing figure, but she’s a bit of a cipher, suffering from the double-whammy of being an IF protagonist whose actions are dictated by the player, and an amnesiac who only slowly understands the nature of her existence. The choices are engaging, but your resistance is guaranteed: what’s up to you is the extent to which you play along publicly while pursuing your own agenda sub rosa, versus making your dawning revolutionary consciousness visible to Achilles (I mostly kept quiet: this is praxis). While the general shape of what’s happened is clear from the get-go, the game hits its thriller beats effectively, marrying Bluebeard-style domestic horror to righteous fight-the-dystopia sci-fi. And Achilles is a compelling figure throughout, dangerous but also petty and pathetic in his obsession with small slights, the way he takes his anxieties out on you because he thinks you can’t fight back – given the times we’re living in, I especially appreciated this portrayal of a fascist whose position certainly allows them to inflict harm, but who is obviously a craven and contemptible piece of shit.

That modern resonance, though, is what makes the ending I got unsatisfying: (Spoiler - click to show)After walking a high-tension tightrope, I was able to uncover some of Achilles’ secrets and broadcast them to the nation, triggering the downfall of the regime. But these secrets were just the quotidian brutality in which authoritarian regimes marinate their subjects – the fact that the tyrant’s flunkies gun down innocents in their efforts to suppress dissidents surely isn’t any sort of surprise to people. True, sometimes one incident among many others can be the trigger for mass uprising when the conditions are right (witness George Floyd or the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran), but the way that Penny’s single act of rebellion catalyzes such large scale consequences smacks of wish fulfillment. Would that it weren’t so, but sitting here eight months into the Trump presidency, I don’t buy that the reason we have fascism is that people just don’t know what’s being done in their name.

With all that said, it’s hard to complain too much about a game with such an effectively withering portrayal of the sad, flaccid excuse for masculinity that powers the backlash against equity. If the ending feels too pat right now, God willing in a few years we’ll be able to look back on it and say yes, that’s exactly how it was, that’s all it took to overthrow these people who pretended they were invincible warriors, whose heels were the biggest targets you could hope for.

One likes to think of oneself as an independent thinker whose opinions are all entirely rational and timeless, standing athwart the tides of history unmoved by their eddies and undertows. But alas, even (especially?) those who proclaim that their views are unbiased and objective are downstream of crass, material considerations like marketing. Thus, as someone who was born in 1980 and experienced a certain series of promotional pushes during my formative years, I can tell you that to me if adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones. The fantasy of delving into lost tombs, solving puzzles steeped in archaeology and mythology, and punching-out Nazis is fantastically compelling to me. The one fly in the ointment, of course, is that one line, three movies deep, about how all these artifacts belong in a (Western) museum doesn’t do much to lampshade the awkward tradition of colonialism and antiquities-looting into which said fantasy fits.

Pharaoh’s Heir manages to neatly avoid the trap, however. This short choice-based romp has you solving a bunch of Egypt-themed puzzles and raiding secret chambers, but you’re not actually marauding through Giza with capacious pockets and a dodgy export license: instead, you’re uncovering the secrets of Louis XIV and plundering your way through Versailles, on the theory that he was somehow involved with a legacy of Pharaonic mysticism. This is historically risible, missing the actual French Egyptological craze by a century or so, but it sure does defang the plundering-the-East issue, since you wind up raiding the tomb of someone who raided the tombs of the actual Egyptians.

The fact that you’re playing the female “sidekick” also helps avoid the problematic patriarchal politics of the genre (let’s not dwell on how old Marian was meant to be when Indy had his first fling with her) – you play as Layla, assistant to so-called “intrepid archaeologist” Herbert Tapioca, but his brains are of a piece with his surname. Oh, he’s pleasant enough, and can even be helpful in his bumbling way, but you’re the one actually responsible for unveiling the various secrets on offer.

The other novel element of Pharaoh’s Heir is its nonlinear nature. The story is told in flashback, as a police official questions you about your role in destroying some national treasure or other; in your replies to him, you can jump back to a morning consultation with Herbert, a later visit to Versailles, or the climactic moment when you breach the hidden sanctum, and recount your explorations to your interrogator. These start out fairly straightforwardly, with only a couple of choices each, but they intersect in a nonlinear fashion: there are clues in Versailles that help you make sense of what to try in the morning, for example. None of the puzzles are that complex – there’s a lot of pointing mirrors and putting things in holes in the right order – but the fact that you’re unbound by chronology helps lend an extra air of intrigue to proceedings.

As for those puzzles, they’re fun enough to solve, though I admit that I still don’t really understand how the last one is meant to work, despite having found all the clues and looked at the walkthrough that lays out the answer; you need to correlate two separate lists of objects, but I can’t quite figure out the logic for the order in which you’re meant to do so. That final puzzle is also sufficiently involved that trying to solve it in a choice-based interface, where it takes a dozen or so clicks each time you want to make an attempt, wound up a bit frustrating (thus the recourse to the walkthrough). But up until that point I was having a grand time; again, this sort of thing is my jam, and the writing is zippy enough to keep things moving, with the police inspector livening up proceedings with the occasional arch comment as well as oblique hints as to which time period to which you might want to focus your attention. That time-hopping is eventually explained with a minimum degree of diegetic plausibility, which helps prevent proceedings from feeling too gamey as well as pointing toward potential sequels – if there are more Layla Roccentiny games to come, sign me up, albeit given precedent I might get a bit worried come installments four and five.

My son has just turned four, and one of the gifts he got for his birthday was a board game. He hadn’t really played them before, so it was a fun novelty – nothing too complicated, it’s more or less Candyland; you spin the spinner and go ahead whatever number of spaces it says, collecting cards along the way, and whoever’s first to hit the final space with a sufficient number of cards wins. He played it a couple times with my wife – she treated the rules as completely optional, so he won every time. Then I played it with him, and treated the rules as mostly optional – so while we almost tied, it came down to one last spin and I wound up winning.

Four year olds, as it turns out, don’t like losing – actually, it’s pretty well known that games with one winner and several losers aren’t strictly speaking developmentally appropriate in his age bracket, which I feel like the “ages four and up!” on the box failed to communicate. Anyway as I was trying to console him (and wishing I could go back in time to educate my oh-so-naïve past self who just a few minutes ago had been thinking “playing by the rules is important, and losing can teach you a lot!”), I told him “buddy, why do you care about winning? We were having fun playing the game until the very end, and the winner doesn’t get anything. If a 3 or higher had come up on the spinner, you would have won, but you got a 2 so you didn’t – but those are just words, really the only difference between a 2 coming up and a 3 coming up is how you decide to feel about it.”

This didn’t convince him, you’ll be shocked to learn.

Uninteractive Fiction 2 is the sequel to Uninteractive Fiction 1, except instead of it being a one-note gag where you click the play button and it says “you lose” (while playing a sad-trombone musical cue), this time you click the play button and it says “you win” (while playing a happy fanfare musical cue). This simplicity invites us to contemplate what “winning” a piece of IF means – is it just reaching the end of a game’s narrative, or is there something more? Is it a simple binary, or are there degrees? Do we feel different for having been told that we’re a winner, than if we had a nearly identical experience but are told we lost?

But just as I didn’t find UF1 that compelling, so too did UF2 fail to move me. These are somewhat interesting questions, I suppose, but UF2 is so stripped down that it doesn’t provide much of an engaging entry point onto them – there’s more to think about in the example of my son’s board game, to my mind. Meanwhile, the fanfare is objectively much less funny than the sad trombone was. So yeah, after finding the joke in UF1 kinda meh, I’m of the same opinion about the sequel. Maybe the third one will complete the thesis/antithesis/synthesis trifecta and wind up providing new insights into how to reconcile the basic elements that constitute a game with an IF tradition that plays a bit looser with the concept – and while it’s at it, maybe it’ll teach my son that losing is fine. But that’s for next year: for now, if you’ve read a review of UF2 you probably don’t need to also play it.

The fact that you play a severed hand scuttling about scenes that would be right at home in a Hammer horror movie is only the second weirdest thing about Frankenfingers – and let’s be real, it’s a distant second, especially after the two Rosalinda games proved jockeying around dismembered limbs could even be cozy. And you’re the special kind of hand with all five senses, so basically you’re just a standard IF protagonist minus some height, the ability to hold more than one object at a time, and the gift of gab, which are no big deal in the grand scheme of things. No, the weirdest thing is that it’s almost entirely in verse.

There are of course many pieces of IF that are written as poetry, but the list is mostly choice-based games – and while there are other examples in the parser space, like Portrait With Wolf and Nelson’s Shakespeare’s Tempest, they’re generally not structured along conventional medium-dry-goods lines, for the understandable reason that this sort of thing is beyond silly:

You feel a vibration beneath you, a rumble transmits through the floor,
The wall to the north slowly rotates, and now serves as a passable door.

Let me be clear: I enjoy things that are beyond silly. I think the idea here is to lean hard into the cheesy-horror vibe and make it seem like Vincent Price is narrating proceedings, and if that’s the case, the occasional misstep into doggerel just adds to the mood; as long as innocent villagers are being chopped up, I guess the meter can be too:

The damage the innocent suffer, is needed but quite unintentional.
But digging up graves and killing the locals for parts seems a bit unconventional.

There are times when it feels a bit intimidating to have to page through five stanzas of description plus some dialogue to figure out what’s going on in a location, and there are places where the game does resort to unadorned prose (those most of these, like listing moveable objects that have been dropped, are entirely forgivable given the number of variations that would be required). But overall the verse thing works surprisingly well, communicating a sense of place as well as all the quotidian bits of parser functionality like where the exits are, shifting location descriptions when you change state (like noting that a hatch is either opened or closed), and even making some fun shifts into alternate genres of poetry on occasion.

While the verse is the standout feature, Frankenfingers’ design is no slouch either. This is a reasonably big game with a bunch of puzzles, but the clueing is elegantly done; even if I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to accomplish beyond escaping the castle (since that Dr. Frankenstein definitely doesn’t seem nice), there are usually clear sub-objectives to work towards, with new chunks of the map opening up at dramatically appropriate times. The puzzles are very well integrated, with many hinging on your unique abilities and limitations as a hand, and hitting just the right level of complexity and difficulty to feel satisfying to solve without throwing up too high of a hurdle to progress. Getting detected by the good doctor or his servants can lead to a game over, but it’s easy to UNDO, and figuring out how to elude them made me feel very clever. And the horse-riding set-piece makes for a funny enough mental image that it’s easy to overlook that it’s got the one maybe slightly-underclued puzzle of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(in retrospect, feeding her the apple makes sense, but the messages about why she was refusing to move could have been a little clearer about what the issue was, since at first I thought she wanted a blanket to keep the rain off). There’s an effortlessness here that’s very, very hard to achieve in a parser puzzler, again leaving aside the additional difficulty imposed by the use of poetry – it’s impressive stuff.

As for the plot, it’s a silly horror pastiche, but one that doesn’t tip too far into zaniness. Once you accept that you’re a dismembered hand trying to escape Frankenstein’s castle, everything you encounter is entirely logical, and the protagonist has clear, if not poignant, motivations – while it’s hard for a hand to have too much personality, he does have an appealing impulse to help those in need. Actually, one of my few small kicks against the game was that it felt slightly mean to have to keep typing HIT HORSE WITH CROP, except when I slightly mistyped it once the parser error revealed that actually I should have just been TAPping instead, meaning that actually I was the asshole on that score.

When it comes to classic formats like the comedy parser puzzler, often success is more down to execution than novel ideas. Frankenfingers is the rare example of succeeding on both fronts – the alternately super clever/deeply awful verse provides the razzle-dazzle on top of rock-solid implementation and design.

I’m turning 45 in a couple of months, and while I like to think of myself as having maintained an admirable flexibility of mind and try to at least be aware of broader cultural trends even though many of them aren’t especially relevant to me anymore, there are times when I play a game and sure do feel an age gap separating me from the author, and the one I experienced when finishing High on Grief was especially acute: how in the name of all that’s holy does this game, whose inciting incident is the main character’s decision to take drugs laced with their parent’s cremated remains, fail to acknowledge that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards did exactly the same thing? OK sure in his case it was snorting the ashes with some coke rather than baking them into pot brownies, but still – High on Grief’s protagonist, Yancy, makes a point of emphasizing how uniquely bizarre their actions are, when there’s an incredibly famous precedent exactly on point, at least for those of us of a certain age! This would be like having a game where the main character rides naked on a horse to protest taxation and everyone’s like, never heard of that one.

Admittedly, the reason for the omission is likely that High on Grief doesn’t take place in our reality; I think it’s only adverted to in the cover art this time out, but from playing previous games featuring Yancy I’m aware that they live in a world where everyone’s an anthropomorphic animal, and I believe there was a zombie apocalypse not too long ago. Still, there are points in common with the real world – Yancy’s deceased mom, for example, was a Christian, and she used her religion as one element in a relentless campaign of verbal and emotional abuse against her queer and autistic child. The game doesn’t get into much in the way of details here, beyond noting that she continually misgendered Yancy, but I think that’s a reasonable choice, since the focus here isn’t on rehashing specific incidents; instead, it’s about how Yancy comes to grips with their complex feelings about their mom, and her impact on them, now that she’s gone.

The particular way this plays out is, again, via a non-health-code-compliant pot brownie binge; as Yancy starts to get high, questions start bouncing around their brain about why they’re doing this (they’d originally mentioned the idea as a dark joke in high school, but that only takes you so far), what their mom’s death means, and more. Depending on how you answer these questions, you wind up phoning one of ten different friends for support in your dark night of the soul. Or rather, you wind up phoning all of them – after the conversation the game ends, but the blurb and ending text are very clear that you’re intended to play through all the options, and the game crosses out choices you’ve already picked to make sure you call the last friend as you eat the last piece of brownie. Oddly, this is phrased as “rewinding”, despite the fact that Yancy’s table accumulates notes from the previous conversations and previously-eaten pieces of brownie don’t reappear, which is a violation of causality not nearly as jarring as the fact that Yancy knows they’re a character in a piece of IF and occasionally addresses the player, speculating on what the author is up to.

Despite the apparently simple setup, then, there’s a lot going on here, mirroring the roiling stew of emotions Yancy is experiencing. For all that they’re clear that their mom was terrible, and terrible to them, they acknowledge that she could be kind to others and there are a (very) few positive parts of the legacy she’s left them. But their overwhelming feelings are angry ones; there’s very little actual grief here as most would recognize it. The dialogues provide an avenue to unpack all this, since each friend provides a viewpoint on one particular angle: one friend who’s a parent themselves has perspective on the ways parents influence their kids, while an autistic one commiserates by talking about their own struggles with people who are intolerant of the neurodivergent.

These are all written screenplay style, and generally work well; there’s a preponderance of therapy-speak, and again, Yancy often speaks in generalities, but those seem like plausible choices given the scenario. But ten may have been too many – it’s hard to add too much variety to the dialogues since they cover pretty similar ground, with many of them starting with the friend saying some slight variation of “I heard your mom’s funeral just happened, must be rough from what you’ve been saying on the Discord”. It’s also hard to get a sense of such a big supporting cast, especially since the game doesn’t provide any real context for who they are. I dimly remembered a few from earlier games, but for the most part they’re distinguished only by one or two obvious traits, without much room for nuance; again, I think what’s here works fine, but I wonder whether the game might have hit harder with half as many characters, but deeper dialogues that granted them more personality.

The other element that didn’t have as much payoff for me was the meta flourishes. There is a payoff of sorts for them, engaging with what exactly the player is doing when they make choices on Yancy’s behalf and how that relates to the mom’s domineering approach to her relationship with her kid, but this felt more like an intellectual connection than an organic, emotional one. Instead, it’s Yancy’s authentic confusion and defiance that stuck with me; devouring a parent is a highly symbolic act, and not one undertaken lightly, after all. I’m not sure Yancy was entirely justified to do what they did – but then, I don’t think Yancy is sure they were entirely justified, either. Even for those in much less extreme situations, it’s easy to recognize the need to move past your parents and let go of their influence on you, but easy too to feel ambivalence about that.

Except for Keith Richards – to my knowledge he’s never said he felt bad about snorting his dad, he just thought it was awesome.

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous reviews in this thread, I’ve been getting back into Star Trek lately, for reasons that are probably not too hard to guess if you look around (I remember finding the idea that the central event of the mid-21st Century would be “the Eugenics Wars” incredibly funny back in the day). As I’ve been tiptoeing into the last decade’s worth of franchise effluvium, I’ve heard a lot of people recommend Lower Decks, which is an animated comedy that makes fun of the tropes of Star Trek, but folks say also clearly has a lot of affection for them too, and adds solid character work to boot. Sounds great! But I bounced hard off the one episode I watched, because while the substance was indeed as advertised, the style was incredibly off-putting to me – the characters are all yelling at each other all the time, there’s a lot of intentionally-unpleasant visual jokes based on nudity and body fluids, and a strain of stoner-humor runs through the whole thing. I can see how the cocktail could work for some – this is pretty much exactly the aesthetic that made Rick and Morty super successful – it’s just not my bag.

So yeah, Backpackward.

This choice-based game is working in a classic genre (in this case, portal fantasy, where an unwitting protagonist is transported to a fantasy realm), with a solid density of funny jokes (the very first one – your dead-end job of choice is working in a smoothie shop named “Jack of All Fruits” – took me a minute to get, but is legit clever; the fact that they sell a smoothie called the “Mango-Carta Madness” made me disappointed I couldn’t read the full menu board), and a fun mechanic to boot: there are occasional options along the lines you typically see in a choice-based game, most hinging on whether you’ll release your bottomless rage at your marginal existence, or try to keep it bottled up, but they mostly seem to have only cosmetic effect. No, the real interactivity isn’t based on what you do, but what you have. Per the title, at key junctures you’ll have a chance to snatch a potpourri of items and try to cram them into your backpack – stealing a page from action-RPGs like Diablo, this involves playing inventory-Tetris and making hard decisions about what to leave behind, since the available space is strictly limited. And it’s the presence or absence of key items like a light source, a lucky die, or a can of Febreze that impacts how well you navigate the myriad challenges of trying to storm a castle in the fantasy world, and find a place to crash after you piss off all your friends in the real one.

This is all pretty well done – the backpack especially is cool, with lovely graphics making the process of agonizing over what to take feel nice and tactile. But it does all the same stuff I found so grating in Lower Decks: the main character is an aggrieved and aggressive jerk, the game can’t let go of running jokes like how funny it is to step in sheep dung, and yeah, one of the items you can prioritize is a bong. I don’t mean to knock the folks to whom this stuff appeals at all – everyone has their own taste in humor – but I just don’t find it that funny, and in fact running “gags” like the protagonist’s extended flirting with the wife of the one peasant in the fantasy world who’s nice to him feel grating and unpleasant to me.

Often I don’t mind a narrative aesthetic that’s not to my taste as much if the gameplay is grabby, but here Backpackward runs into difficulties because the item-collection mechanic is also pretty random. The game does signpost a few of the items that will be most useful – it’s pretty clear that you’ll want a lighter and some explosives for the endgame, and you’d have to be intentionally sandbagging not to wind up with them – but for the most part, your choices of what to bring are made blind, which makes them feel either inconsequential (I kept a DnD miniature figure through the game because it felt like it had to pay off somewhere, but all it wound up doing was open up a couple opportunities to shove it in people’s faces) or incredibly weighty (by the time I realized that a broken shield would be super helpful to have, I was half the game away from the one moment when I could have grabbed it). Sometimes this can pay off – a half-eaten pack of Cheetos I’d stuffed in the backpack and forgot about wound up being the key item I needed to save my peasant “friend” when we were menaced by attack dogs – but fortuity only takes you so far, especially since there appear to be noticeable negative consequences if you don’t happen to have the right item on you (another issue is that I know this because the ending text I got seemed buggy and didn’t realize I’d used the Cheetos – it told me the peasant had died).

Speaking of the ending, Backpackward isn’t a complete story unto itself, ending on a cliffhanger, and while that can be annoying, in this case it makes me optimistic. See, if there is a sequel, it’s a chance for the characters and world to bed in a bit, develop some nuance now that the basic contours are established. The various setbacks suffered by the main character might also get him to gain a little self-awareness, which would be very welcome. I am planning to take another run at Lower Decks after the Comp, since I hear that it calms own after the first episode – here’s hoping the same is true here!

It’s fun to look at old sci-fi and see which of the things they’ve envisioned have become reality, and which are still the stuff of imagination. Take Star Trek: warp drive remains a physical improbability, matter replicators are sorta getting there with 3D printers, ditto with the holodeck given improvements in VR, and we’ve already got a version of the voice-activated computer that responds to whatever you say though there are uh some unanticipated issues with that. The Universal Translator is looking pretty good, thankfully transporters are still pretty far off, and the Vulcan Mind Meld? I’m ready to declare that one checked off. You see, I’ve been playing Andrew Schultz’s wordplay games for about five years now, and while I remember my brains leaking out of my ears when I realized what the first few were demanding of me, I managed to sail through most of Us Too, firmly vibrating on its wavelength. As far as I can tell, playing his games year after year has expanded my consciousness until I see the world the same way he does, decomposing words into their component phonemes if not effortlessly, then at least with an intuitive appreciation for the logic at work. Just as in the show, it’s a disorienting experience as well as an enlightening one – but it does mean I had a thoroughly good time with Us Too.

For those who haven’t played one of these games, a bit of explanation is in order. Every installment in the series hinges on a particular kind of wordplay that transforms a seemingly-nonsensical word or phrase into another, often-similarly-nonsensical one. While there is an inventory and compass navigation, these vestiges of traditional parser games are just there to support the word puzzles (most items are used and collected automatically – or at least, automatically once you’ve solved the appropriate puzzle). The gameplay loop involves going to a new place, noting that it’s got a weird name and maybe one or two other weird objects, and then typing in what you think those names translate to (note for prospective players: I always forget that you don’t need to type SAY first, just type the solution!) As for the nature of the wordplay, it shifts between games – I think most of the ones I’ve played have involved substituting the initial sounds of an alliterative phrase (like, “Chevy chair “becomes “heavy hair”), though memorably and kinda-painfully, there was even a pig Latin one.

Us Too’s distinctive move is admittedly easier to grasp than these somewhat outre pieces of linguistic dexterity: here, you need to move the space in a two-word phrase to make a different two-word phrase, for example THINK WELL can become THIN QUELL (this is an example from the game, but it’s given to you to toggle a help option rather than being an actual puzzle). It can definitely be tricky – there were some puzzles that I stared at for a long time, babbling demented syllables until they finally cohered by trial and error – but it’s a reasonably bounded problem, and I found I got the knack pretty quickly, which made the pacing satisfying: I tended to make good progress, then run into a couple tricky puzzles that slowed things down, before getting unjammed and zooming ahead again. This is especially the case where I’d figured out the later stages in a puzzle-chain before the first: as mentioned, Us Too isn’t just a series of isolated tongue-twisters, there is an inventory and state tracking, so sometimes you need to have the right item or otherwise satisfied a prerequisite before the puzzle can be solved. Helpfully, though, the game remembers if you’ve stumbled across the right phrase before you’re able to deploy it properly, and it’s very satisfying to solve one puzzle and realize in a flash that it’ll let you work through a half-dozen that had been left tormentingly half-solved across the map.

Much like the other games, Us Too in fact is helpful to a fault. There are tutorial messages, cheat items, and diegetic hints a-plenty. A challenge is that these all use the same linguistic tricks as the rest of the game, so they might be tricky for someone coming to the series fresh to figure out – which is too bad, since of course those are the people for whom they’ll be most important, and they’ll need them most at the very beginning, before the player’s figured out the main trick. And sometimes the game provides so much detail that the forest can get lost for the trees (there’s a hint item that looks like a pair of eyes that has something like three different potential uses, all giving slightly different feedback). But there’s also a full walkthrough that talks all the puzzles through, so really, there’s a lot of support to allow players of all experience levels to have fun here, once they get over that first hurdle.

As for the plot – well, Us Too makes an interesting contrast with Monkeys and Car Keys, which I just reviewed and noted that it doesn’t really bother trying to diegetically justify its puzzles. Despite their bizarre nature, Us Too’s puzzles are all integrated into its narrative, which makes the whole thing quite phantasmagoric: in theory, you’re tasked with exploring a mine to satisfy the conditions of an eccentric great-aunt’s will, but while the mine does have some of the stuff you’d expect, there are also restaurants, oceans with boats and islands, plenty of other people to meet, and odder situations still. Oh, and you’re collecting ingredients for a recipe while you’re down there. I admit that I have a hard time correlating all the different strands of the plot; the opening is pretty coherent, presenting the great-aunt as an appealing presence in the protagonist’s life and featuring a rare sighting of lawyers in IF who aren’t jerks, but after that it gets pretty fractured – I did find it funny, but the various jokes I pasted into my notes don’t really work on their own, you kind of needed to be there.

Outside of the narrative, the gameplay also departs from its key mechanic a few times, and while they can provide a welcome change of pace, I did get stuck on one of these because I was expecting to solve everything with wordplay, rather than messing around with items (Spoiler - click to show) (I’m talking about the bit where you can boost your speed by examining a particular item, and depending on how much gas you’ve got left in the tank, going south at a specific intersection will take you to one of three different destinations). Admittedly, there is a lot of signposting that something weird is happening here, but the challenge just felt very out of context with what the rest of the game had been training me to do. I guess that just means there’s a bit more work required on the mind meld – once Andrew wraps that up, maybe he can start in on the space communism bit of Star Trek next?

I have a four-year-old son who is very sweet. Recently he’s been sick, so he’s been extra cuddly, and when his fever got bad for a bit, he wanted me to sit right next to him and tell him facts about the planets and galaxies to distract him from how crummy he was feeling. But then – thankfully – he started to feel better, and when I asked him if he wanted me to read him one of the science books we’d gotten out of the library, he yelled “poop!” and demanded I flip him upside down.

Which is to say, even the sweetest of us hit a point where they have had too much coziness – this is more or less the major theme of Dosteovsky’s Notes from Underground – and I must confess that Path of Totality had me contemplating just where mine is located. Not that this is a flaw in the game, or that I think I actually wound up tripping over the line! It never pretends to be something it’s not, and it carries off its brief with craft and care. As someone on their way to witness a sacred eclipse in a DnD-but-sanded-down fantasy world, your journey requires you to overcome the kind of obstacles that would get you a PG rating for “mild peril”, but more importantly, to bond with an appealingly-drawn quartet of fellow travelers, each with their own wholesome aspirations and hobbies.

Deepening your relationships with them is really the meat of the game; for the first half, each day on the trail sees you manage a few low-key decisions about how best to proceed along your path to the best spot to view the eclipse, then at night you have a chance for a conversation with one of your companions. After that series of one-on-ones, you have a chance to establish a chaste romance, and as the challenges in your way ramp up slightly, so too do you learn more about some of the (largely low-key) issues bedeviling them, before you reach a happy ending. It’s a simple structure, but it works, largely because the character work is solid. They’re largely fantasy stereotypes, but played just slightly against type: the halfling who loves nature as well as writing stories, the orc twins who work together building furniture, the trans shapeshifting elf princess. I can’t say I was ever deeply surprised by any of the backstory revelations that unpeel as the game progresses, but that’s partially because they feel like coherent people from the moment you meet them. Similarly, none of them are harboring intense conflicts or uncontrollable passions, but as a middle-aged person myself, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a game take an interest in people who are subject to the occasional bit of anxiety but are generally secure in their lives, goals, and work.

The trip itself very much is an excuse to allow you to spend time with your companions, though there are things to do. Beyond the quotidian incidents on the path, like bumping into other travelers to compare notes, or weathering an unexpected rainstorm, there are three more involved set-piece challenges, each of which involve dealing with mischievous fae. While they’re notionally different, in practice I found each was an exercise in trial and error, requiring a lot of clicking but without much in the way of real danger. I don’t want to spoil the latter ones, but the first is a sort of riddle contest that I found easiest to win by simply repeating myself until the fae got bored; the other two were physical traversal challenges, one of which was made trivial by my choice of background (at the beginning of the game, you decide why you want to see the eclipse: are you an adventurer hoping it will help solve a quest, a pilgrim looking for a blessing, or an astronomer seeking scientific knowledge?) They’re fine, but there’s a lot of clicking without much deep thinking required; they pace out the journey, but again, the real focus of the game is chatting with the characters.

So yeah, this is good, and I enjoyed it – but there were times when the coziness threatened to tip over into feeling cloying. Notably, while the romances are generally sweet, they’re aggressively chaste; I wound up getting close to the shapeshifter, whose powers require her to be naked to change her form, but despite this happening a couple of times, the description just matter-of-factly notes her doffing or shrugging on her clothes with no acknowledgment of sexuality whatsoever. I also felt like a late-game sequence where the companions meet a married couple who shelter them right before they reach the eclipse dragged and went back over previously-covered ground: there’s a truth-or-dare-without-dares dice game that gets played out in highly granular detail, but nothing much new comes out of any of the conversations, and everyone’s uniformly supportive of everyone else, so much so that I also wanted to tip the table over and scream “poop!” just for a change of pace.

Except, I had the option to, but I didn’t. For all that what I’ve described above is I think pretty clearly the intended experience of Path of Totality, you can opt out of just about all of it: alongside the positive, encouraging dialogue option, there’s almost always a second saying you’re not interested in hearing any more about woodworking, and what would a halfling know about birds of prey, and you can even make a transphobic comment to the elf lady. Heck, as far as I can tell the companions are optional, and you can decide to make the pilgrimage all by yourself!

I have a hard time understanding the kind of player who, after the game introduces itself via an extended conversation with a relatable, helpful pair of characters who ask to join you, decides to turn them down, mind – and I likewise don’t think many people will take the latter option in the frequent be cool/be an asshole choices. But it’s meaningful that they’re there, because even if I did sometimes chafe at how upbeat and cheerful everything was, if I’d really wanted to I could have peed in the cheerios at any time. By revealed preferences, then, I got exactly the experience I wanted, and it was a good one. I am glad, though, that I’ve got a good number of games before the next Lamp Post Productions game comes up in my queue, since I don’t want to overdose on the positive vibes (though if that’s a danger, I could take my son’s advice and flip myself upside down, I suppose).

One of the trickiest bits of designing a parser puzzle game is fitting the crossword into the narrative. Sometimes everything hums along in perfect harmony, and challenges naturally thrown up by the story have obvious mechanical implementations that are well-suited to the medium-dry-goods model – or, conversely, a great idea for a puzzle turns out to be easy to slot into the plot with minimal complications. But often, the gears grind rather than turn smoothly; you can wind up with long stretches of narrative with no ideas for how to break them up (maybe throw in the Towers of Hanoi?), or more often, a fiendishly clever puzzle idea that one despairs of justifying diegetically. On the horns of this dilemma, many an author has bent over backwards to try to come up with some minimally-plausible justification (if I had a nickel for every time aliens or a wizard ran a test to find out if I was worthy…) Monkeys and Car Keys, though, opts for the bolder path: since trying to reverse-engineer an explanation for these puzzles would itself be disruptive to any sense of narrative coherence, why not steer into the skid and just go with it?

Which is to say, when I pictured the kinds of stuff I’d need to do to retrieve my eponymous car keys when the eponymous monkeys snatched them mid-jungle-safari, I was on target with exactly one of them (though really, I get no points for guessing that at some point I’d need to bribe a monkey with a banana, and now that I think of it even that isn’t played entirely straight).

The range of challenges put before you include a translation puzzle, an action-mirroring one, and a fair bit of hidden-object spotting – none of it exactly explodes the conventional paradigm, but they’re all clever and provide a spark of novelty. And none of them make a lick of sense in any universe resembling our own. I won’t spoil the later places it goes, but the first set of puzzles revolve around figuring out how a trio of magic statues work. It’s satisfying when the pieces click into place, and I found there were just enough clues to move me along to the next step (albeit sometimes these were of the “you’ve been flailing around for an extended number of turns, so here are some increasingly-direct prompts to get you back on track” variety). But logical deduction isn’t enough to solve these puzzles: instead, you need to check your assumptions and the door and experiment.

For all that this represents a total capitulation of narrative in the face of the crossword, this is something parser games are quite good at – and let’s be honest, letting the puzzles dominate a “some monkeys stole my keys, those silly-billies” premise probably doesn’t mean we missed out on War and Peace. There are some places where I found my tired brain wasn’t up to the task – the second major set-piece involves a bunch of different bits of scenery and characters, and I found my mental picture wasn’t quite accurate enough for me to have a handle on what was going on – but Monkeys and Car Keys largely plays fair. It’s also smoothly implemented, with only one or two small exceptions (I had to consult the hints at one point since I’d forgotten that MONKEY wasn’t an acceptable synonym for the STATUE of a monkey). And honestly, given that the last story beat made me kind of feel like a bad person (Spoiler - click to show) (OK that one monkey was being a jerk, but did he really deserve to get beat down with a tire iron?) there’s something to be said for refusing to allow the player to take matters seriously – and while the game knows its puzzles are the main draw, there are some engaging bits of simian mischief, and a cute sidekick, to lighten proceedings. There’s also an incredibly long setup for a bit of physical comedy illustrating that nothing’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Tricky puzzles and silly jokes is an enduring recipe for success in parser IF; if it lacks a certain balance of form and checks its literary pretensions at the door, well, what else would you expect of monkey business?

Spoiler alert for this review: there’s an admittedly-telegraphed plot development about midway through Fable’s relatively short run time that I have to address to properly discuss it, and turning the review into a Swiss-cheese of blurry text didn’t seem like a good idea.

I try not to pay too much attention to what a game is called: for me at least, coming up with a name is usually a slow, agonizing process that ends when I can’t stand to think about it anymore, so I try to do unto others as I would have done unto me and glide right past them. That was simple enough for me to do when starting Fable: is there a more generic title imaginable for a fantasy game? But after I finished, I wound up going back to it and worrying at it like a sore tooth: a fable is a simple story leaning heavily on allegory with an instructive moral at the end, perhaps with some anthropomorphized animals along the way, but what we’ve got here is a somewhat-convoluted teen melodrama whose central dilemma appears monstrous if you apply a lens of morality rather than romance to it. Don’t get me wrong, as melodrama it’s effective, albeit breathlessly paced, but I’m not sure that the questions the title invites are to its benefit.

The game introduces a lot of characters, situations, and prophecies in its first few passages, but it quickly becomes clear that much of it is secondary to the romantic obsession of Kel, the primary character: he’s long been in love with his best friend, Ronan, who himself is in love with Kel’s twin sister (I’ll admit that being myself a twin, I found the awkwardness of this setup excruciating, but it’s all fair enough by genre standards, I suppose – there’s nothing here more twisted than what’s in Star Wars). Then Ronan suddenly gets chosen to go on a quest – this is that prophecy, it’s pretty hand-wavey – and when he returns a year later, he’s changed, most notably by seeming to reciprocate Kel’s interest this time, though of course there’s plausible deniability. There are choices through this section, mostly coming down to leaning into the flirtation or playing hard to get, which is an engaging way of playing a romance, but it does suffer somewhat by the dial being immediately jammed to 11 and staying there. Nearly every passage ends in grasping towards big emotions, and yeah, I remember being a teenager, this is pretty much how it was, but the dialogue does sometimes buckle under the load:

“Do you know what it’s like to love you?”

At once, Ronan falls still.

“It’s finally understanding that this is what the bards sing about.” You squeeze your eyes shut. “So this is how I bleed.”

In the silence that follows, you blink back open your eyes, only to find a peculiar expression spasming across Ronan’s face.

(The emotion, thankfully, is not extreme mortification).

Throughout, though, there are intimations that there’s something off with Ronan, and the first half culminates in the revelation that he’s not really Ronan – which triggers a short flashback to the (much more sedately and evocatively written, I found) quest, where a psychic parasite named Jamie brain-jacked Ronan; it’s Jamie who’s returned and is into you. Barely has he been established as a mind-possessing fiend than he turns to lovestruck idiot, though, because as soon as Kel tumbles to what’s going on, he offers to release his hold (it was unclear to me whether this guaranteed his permanent discorporation) and allow Ronan to take his body back, free and clear. The climax, then, comes down to the choices you have Kel make to navigate this situation – as far as I could see, there’s no direct “keep Ronan’s consciousness shoved down an oubliette forever” path, but you can drag out the process for a while.

Again, as melodrama, this is a solid series of twists, though I think the pacing is a bit too breakneck for each to have as great an impact as it could. The bigger issue goes back to the title: if you don’t think about it too hard, a lovelorn seventeen-year-old torn between doing what he knows is right and finally having someone who desires him is dramatic enough. But if you splash some cold water on yourself first, holy crap: this dude has just about killed your best friend, who you’ve been in love with for years, but because he seems like he’ll put out and he’s wearing your crush like a skin-suit, you’re vacillating about what to do? Unless the moral here is meant to be that the terminally horny are too depraved to think straight, it’s hard to walk away from this feeling especially sympathetic to Kel’s angst. There’s a version of the game that leans into that discomfort – it’d certainly be risky to acknowledge the terrible things he’s contemplating and explore some of the darker aspects of desire. By calling itself a fable, Fable opens the door to that reading, which meant that I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that instead the game glides over these implications. In the final sequence, Ronan and his sister just pat Kel on his back and sympathize with his pain after it’s all over – I’m not sure that he’s learned anything.

A nice thing about having been around IF-world for some time now, and making an effort to work through all the games in a couple of the major events, is that there are games that wind up sticking in my head as a sort of alternate canon – games that pushed boundaries or nailed a theme or were just really good, but for whatever reason haven’t stuck in the popular consciousness the way other, equally-worthy ones have. I’m not saying this to be more-hipster-than-thou; usually there are understandable reasons for the lower profile, like Fairies of Haelstowne, which was entered into ParserComp, or Constraints, which had a good showing in a twenty-years-gone Comp, or Accelerate, which was overshadowed by its prequel, Spy Intrigue, which I happen not to have played. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, communities glom on to some things and not others, memories are sparked or fade, new games cycle in to replace old ones… But going back to Accelerate, one of its fellow entries in the 2020 Comp is also on my idiosyncratic forgotten-classic list: Electric word, “life”. It’s a Twine 1999-set period piece about Halloween, and life, and death, but not in the way you’d imagine from hearing those themes laid out like that, and I adored it; even though I don’t think I’ve heard it mentioned in the last half-decade, I still think about it sometimes.

So I was excited to see that game’s author had written something new! While they still haven’t figured out how to come up with an easy-to-say title, the games couldn’t be more different: this time out we’ve got a wordplay-based parser comedy, and it’s a bit smaller in scope (though that could largely just be down to the difference between how scale works in choice-based and parser game). But it’s once again got great writing and satisfying mechanics; I can’t guarantee the Semtanta… the Semantamagia… the Assistant will wind up grabbing me the same way its predecessor did in years to come, but it’s certainly got a fighting chance of doing so.

Anyone writing a parser game where you solve puzzles by using gadgets to transform words must surely be intimidated by the legacy of Counterfeit Monkey, and to the game’s immense credit, it’s got the chutzpah to pay homage in one early in-joke and get on with things. The premise also helps cut to the chase: you play an underemployed striver looking for a job that’ll let you escape the grind, which has led to you answering a bizarre help-wanted ad and getting sucked into an interactive interview process. To prove you’ve got what it takes to be the magician’s understudy, you’ve got to figure out how to escape the room he’s trapped you in (there are no bones of previous applicants lying around, which is somewhat reassuring, at least?)

Where the plot is admittedly a bit thinner than in other, similar games – as is the number of puzzles, as there are really only three major word transformations in the critical-path chain – the range of tools is broader. There are half a dozen magical tools at your disposal, each performing a different bit of linguistic legerdemain: diegetically they may look typical stage-magician tat like a table where you saw people in half or a wheel with animals drawn on it or whatever, the effects include breaking apart or joining words, duplicating or removing instances of a particular vowel, slapping on a prefix, and so on. The operation of some of them is immediately clear, while the purpose of others is obfuscated, leading to a series of great aha moments when I worked out what they did and why that was useful.

Figuring out the syntax required to employ them can be just as challenging as solving the puzzles themselves, though – there’s a USE [DEVICE] command that’s mentioned in the About text as a way of providing a hint, but for some of them I think it’s more of a required tutorial; regardless, the game does eventually give you a hand. While I’m picking nits, there are a few other places bespeaking a slight lack of polish, like unimplemented scenery items and a super long location description that reprints every time you look. And I had to consult the actual hints after finishing the first major puzzle, since solving it doesn’t give direct feedback that something I’d tried earlier, only to see it end in failure, would now suddenly work.

Beyond those niggles, though, the implementation and design are both very very solid. Puzzle-wise, since this isn’t nearly as big a game as something like Counterfeit Monkey, there’s not that same scope for experimentation and solving puzzles through different solutions – there’s usually only one way to make progress at any time, and that very lack of extraneous options can wind up functioning as a sort of hint system unto itself, as a couple of times I went through some word transformations because I saw that I could perform them, rather than because I saw why I should perform them. But usually the logic clicked before I’d gotten too far down that path, leading to some of those “aha” moments mentioned above (I really enjoyed figuring out what the wheel was for). The downside is that I didn’t engage with the diegetic hint mechanics, which involve chatting with an adorable bunny, as much as might have been fun.

I was sad to miss out on any jokes that might have been lurking there, because the ones in the rest of the game are fun. The game steers clear of the flop-sweat-y patter of comedy games desperate to show you how zany they are, just weaving its gags into the inherent absurdity of the situation, alongside a calculated few flashbacks that quickly characterize your prospective boss:

“Magicians manipulate objects. I manipulate the names of objects. I can turn a cub into a cube; I can turn a tub into a tube—”

This time desperation took a back seat. “Hold on,” you interrupted. “Doesn’t that make you, like, an Orthographician? Spellingagician? Spellspeller…”

It all adds up to a delightful package, and in five years’ time I’d very much look forward to seeing an expanded sequel – or something just as different from this game as it is from Electric word, “life”.

There’s a proud IF tradition of trolling game and subversive ones that cheekily undermine their ostensible premises (let’s pick, oh, 9:05 and Nemesis Macana as respective exemplars), and Space Mission: 2045 is a fitting inheritor to that legacy. There’s perhaps no topic in contemporary IF as contentious as the use of LLMs, so what could be riper for satire? Space Mission: 2045 lures the player in with an earnest-seeming 2,500 word monograph about the weaknesses of previous attempts to use generative AI to write IF, which segues into a manifesto for the virtues of the author’s approach, followed by an extended manual for the RPG-lite system the game uses (a particularly fun gag is that in a game about traveling through space to colonize Mars, “Animal Kinship” is one of the ten skills you can pick), and wrapping up with more details on how you can interact with the AI-driven parser – again, there’s a good piss-take here where the readme implies that the response to EXAMINE [OBJECT] will always be LLM-generated rather than written by a human, but that “doesn’t necessarily mean that the details are useless.” (emphasis added).

It’s all very gung-ho, but when you launch the game, there’s a one-two sucker punch. The first is that this cutting-edge game looks extraordinarily primitive, displaying without paragraph breaks or any left-margin whatsoever – all this makes the prospect of reading reams of LLM-generated text even more terrifying. The first and a half – OK, I should go back and edit the first sentence of this paragraph now that I’ve thought of one more, but it’s late so we’re just going with it – is that we’re going on this Mars mission on behalf of thinly-veiled caricatures of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, which I really hope is meant to be a setup for jokes.

The second is that, of course, after you get done with the over-complex chargen section, nothing works. All the sophisticated features promised by the readme, like natural-language dialogue with NPCs who could adjudge whether you’d been sufficiently persuasive to convince them, or the smart parser which matches whatever convoluted sentence you care to write to the more limited list of actions that are actually possible In a particular sequence? Yeah, they sound great, and in fairness this is a game that allows you type whatever you want – it’s just that you’ll always get a response telling you there’s something wrong with the API key the game uses to interface with the LLM. It’s not particularly sophisticated, I suppose, but this is an elegant way of puncturing the pretensions of AI evangelists, demonstrating that even leaving aside the substance of what they claim, you can’t trust a chatbot game to even last all the way through a Comp before tech-company shenanigans knock it offline (meanwhile, interpreters mean we can still play forty-five year old classics with a click). It also opens up space for improvisational comedy like this:

What do you want to do? write a witty deconstruction of the folly of overreliance on generative ai
Error during AI interpretation: 401 Client Error: Unauthorized for url: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions

The only thing that could make the satire better is if it were actually intentional – since I glanced at some other reviews, and turns out there once was a playable game here? Sadly, Space Mission: 2045 might be more of a monument to hubris than deconstruction of same; if it ever starts working again, I’ll try to revisit it and update this review accordingly, but in the meantime, it’s one of the most effective bits of inadvertent self-mockery since the literary career of Norman Mailer.

[I believe that after the Comp closed, the game started working again; I haven't gone back to play it but I'm omitting my rating from the average]

When I was little, I thought that the most important reason why it might be kinda fun to be rich is that you could hire somebody to be on call so that anytime you had a question about why the world was a certain way, they could run off to the library and do a bunch of research and come back and tell you the answer. The internet sorta scratches that itch, and in that respect I was right, it was awesome, but as far as I can tell from intermittent half-hearted Googles every couple of years over the decade or so I’ve pondered this mystery, no one has posed a robust answer to this question: given that basically every American in their late thirties to mid forties played the Oregon Trail to death in their elementary school computer labs, why are there so few clones, knock-offs, and spiritual sequels? Sure, there were some actual sequels, I’m aware of a series of Android-only fantasy RPGs that take a similar approach, and then more recently some satirical riffs like The Organ Trail have popped up in indie spaces – plus it’s certainly the case that some of the aspects of the game’s design have shown up in the DNA of roguelites like FTL. But given the ubiquity of the original, I’ve always been surprised that it’s inspired so few direct followers, and if I could fund whatever nerdy research projects I wanted, getting to the bottom of this conundrum would be high on the list.

Saltwrack is evidence in favor of my “there’s less Oregon Trail than you’d think” thesis, though that’s one of the less interesting things about it. This medium-length Twine game is working in an identifiable sci-fi tradition, exploring the aftermath of the uncanny ecological transformations wrought by an otherworldly incursion. But where Stalker situates the event in the steppes and Annihilation in the swamps, Saltwrack opts for the more-exotic-still polar salt flats. There’s a straightforward quest narrative, and characters with their own perspectives and backstories – you’ve decided you’re going to venture north until you can find the origin point for the eponymous Saltwrack, traveling in a sort of walking tank with a crusty guide and a psychic navigator – but the environment is the true star here. The post-collapse civilization gets a fair bit of world-building and is interesting enough, but pales in comparison to the restrained, evocative, and ominous descriptions of the changed landscape. Even before the metamorphoses are given free rein, these are a highlight:

"You pass through a landscape of short, gritty cliffs. Rectangular segments of rock lie littered in the snow beneath them. Lichens splotch the stone in unexpected colors: brilliant orange, soft green, scabby red."

Things escalate, of course, but the prose retains a slight detachment, a slight flattening, that I found made the weirdness feel more immediate and concrete: not bent on evoking any particular reaction in either the protagonist or the player, content simply to exist, independent of humanity:

"In the ice itself you find other wonders. Silicaceous networks and lattices, tubes, vase- and flower-shapes; you wonder if these are some relative of sea sponges or corals, and if so, how they could have made their way onto this land. Cnidarian clumps of tendrils, too, that hang from boulders or slabs of ice. Soft-bodied crawlers cling to these glacial reefs."

The gameplay around all this is structured as a there-and-back-again trek: throughout, a header tracks the time you’ve spent traveling, the number of miles you’ve accumulated, and a qualitative assessment of your supply level. You make some initial decisions about who to bring (you’ve a choice of two guides, and a choice of two “oracles”) and whether to overburden yourself to increase your stock of supplies, and from there you march through the journey day by day, typically facing a binary choice or two around the evening. Some of these are purely narrative – choosing which of your companions to chit-chat with while making camp, say – and others are fairly clearly testing how much the player is interested in dawdling to investigate interesting phenomena at the expense of quick progress to the goal. A few are higher-stakes, like planning how to cross a mountain range in the way of your route, or, once you get close to your destination, how much danger to life and mind to risk in pursuit of knowledge. They’re all reasonably engaging, but like the rest of the game, they tend to be dry and rather diffuse: again, you typically only have two choices (seeing the guide smoking a cigarette, you can only ask to try some or scold them), and the variety of different kinds of scenarios, and the relative scarcity of decisions, meant that it was over a week before I felt like I had even the slightest sense of who the companion characters were.

Contributing to the vague dissociative vibe the game projects is its refusal to go full Oregon Trail. Supplies are kept abstract, and the outcomes of your decisions are stated in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. A few times I pushed on to travel past dusk to avoid a danger, or overruled a companion’s suggestion, or saw some of my food spoiled by environmental contamination, but those displays at the top didn’t budge, and save for the climax, few if any of my decisions felt like they had any consequences past the scene in which I made them. And several elements of the game’s progression feel more tied to narrative considerations than systemic ones – I was told that packing supplies for 40 days should be adequate for a journey of several hundred miles, but it wasn’t until day 24, after going around a thousand miles, that my supplies finally ticked down from “plentiful” to “sufficient” (they finally gave out at a suitably climactic moment that also makes me suspicious of hand-waving in the background). This sense that my decisions weren’t having that much impact was exacerbated by some small bugs I found near the end, where one of my companies appeared to disappear without any direction mention that that’d happened; conversely, back at the beginning of the game the first choice you make is what title you’d like others to refer to you by, with clear social implications stated for the different options, but I only remembered it coming up once or twice, and seeming entirely cosmetic when it did.

I’m not too hung up on how gamey or “interactive” a particular game is, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a weakness that Saltwrack doesn’t track exactly how much food you have down to the pound, or pop up a numerical morale score for the companions that fluctuates according to your choices. But it did feel like a lot of the game was built around the expectation that these things would matter – that header, those go-slow-vs-go-fast dilemmas – so once I started feeling that a lot of it was for show, I got less enthusiastic about going through the motions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since as mentioned just focusing on Saltwrack’s scenery is a compelling experience by itself. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the version of the game that didn’t even feint in this direction, perhaps by communicating to the player that they wouldn’t need to worry about getting to the end, and thereby creating space for decisions about how they explore the world, rather than whether they explore it or simply beaver away at the trek (creating more opportunities to delve into the world’s mystery might also help make the slightly-underwhelming final revelations land with more force). Don’t get me wrong, Saltwrack is a worthwhile experience even in its current form – but it’s certainly consistent with the observation that even when developers lift the wagon train from of Oregon, they frequently leave the mechanics behind.

Violent Delight, by Coral Nulla

This is a game that’s impossible to discuss without going into a fair bit of detail on how the mechanics work – and where the surprise of figuring those details out is a big part of the experience – so as a result, if you’re spoiler-averse, this might be a review to come back to once you’ve given it a go yourself.

Though to be brutally honest, this is a review that you might want to skip even if you have played Violent Delight, because while I always strive to come up with some insights or analysis or at least jokes that make reading my takes worthwhile, in this case I’m unconvinced that I have much of interest to say. Not to get all Marxist, but that’s because the material conditions under which I experienced the game were completely mismatched with the mode of production by which it generated that experience. Let me explain!

So this is a game with a series of interlocking gimmicks, and they all revolve around a temporal see-saw: either you’re waiting, desperate to kill time, or you’re desperately clicking around and speed-reading as the clock ticks down. There’s a robust narrative framework around this that we’ll get into in a sec, but in many ways that’s downstream of the experience of being crushed by this chronological trapjaw. Even under best-case circumstances, playing Violent Delight would be stressful, and you’d be inclined to miss stuff.

But I did not manage to achieve those best-case circumstances. See, I’d been spoiled on the first section of the game, which involves bidding on a video-nasty style video game on an eBay-alike and then waiting for an hour of real time for it to ship to you. And since I need to manage my game-playing time pretty aggressively to get through the full Comp, I figured I’d start things up and get the timer running in the background while I finished up my work day, so I could play it in earnest once I was done. Except just as I was about to put in my bid, my boss texted me about something, and while I was writing him back, the auction expired and someone else bought the cartridge, ending the game with nothing having happened (when I told this to the author, I found out this is considered the “good ending”).

Undeterred, I tried again, and managed to get into the meat of Violent Delight – once the cartridge arrives, there’s a gameplay loop of playing the thing – this involves clicking around low-res graphical mazes as occasional people or signs spout some text when you interact with them (it’s implemented in Decker) – before a timer runs down, your console overheats, and you need to wait for another timer to count down allowing you to play again. During these two-minute interregnums you can mess with the age-limiting chip you discover on the cartridge, which initially makes the game seem quite anodyne; as you dial it up, things get unsurprisingly sinister, and the increased intensity makes the console overheat even more rapidly once you get back into the cartridge.

Again, this is all in real time, and even after my work was done, it was very hard for me to play with the extended focus the game requires: my son’s been home sick and was bouncing off the walls, so I was popping up to do Legos with him or otherwise distract him, I had a couple late work emails come in I had to respond to, my wife came into the room and it would have been churlish to completely ignore her… this is kind of how my life goes these days, which is one reason why I play a lot of IF and turn-based games, and basically nothing real-time, since my son was born. As a result, the frantic sections of gameplay got even more frantic, my ability to connect the fractured elements of the intentionally-obscure plot was more or less shot by the constant interruptions, and I completely failed to take adequate notes, much less capture the game’s actual prose to ponder later (there’s a printer function that lets you dump text sections from the cartridge, but it strips them of context and the interface for retrieving them later is unintuitive, so that wound up just confusing matters further). Like, here is the stuff I have at my fingertips as I’m trying to construct a review:

electric volleyball, people not wanting to see attractive people

Ramping up snowstorms, hell to psychological testing vs. dreams of testing while dying (?) to hospital administration. Layers but also age

21 now! Time in each layer decreasing. Age rating?

Code?

Down, base, fall out? All you can say is I’m sorry. Breaks at 31?

This is very disappointing to me, since I think there’s some interesting stuff going on in Violent Delight beyond the mechanics – each time you tweak the age-rating, you unlock another level of the game, which seems to advance things temporally (the earliest stages have characters playing with toys in a park or taking tests in a school, later ones are set in offices or hospitals) as well as dialing up the horrific elements (there’s a hell-layer, terrible experiments are happening in another; people who find highly-abstract pixelated gore upsetting may want to steer clear) and playing with the structure. It’s elusive and downbeat, but there are good jokes too, especially in the time-wasting initial hour, which features some dead-on parodies of the Comp (though you can’t play any of them due to UK geoblocking).

If I can’t trace out all the nuances, though, I can maybe close with one big-picture thought, riffing on Violent Delight’s claim that it is “an experiment in withholding.” See, I think regardless of the semantic content of the game, it may be the alternation of bored waiting with desperate zooming around, with each cycle promising to get you closer to the truth concealed at the heart of all things, that’s the core theme of the game. This dynamic has all sorts of resonances – given the retro nature of the cartridge, it put me in mind of swapping urban legends about video game secrets on the elementary school playground, counting down the hours until I could go home and see what I could discover in the short window my parents let me mess around on the NES between homework and dinner. But you could equally draw similarities with social media, politics, consumerism and capitalism writ large, undergoing medical treatment… and the game touches on some of those themes, too. There’s definitely an element of trolling to the way Violent Delight deploys its interlocking timers, to cruel effect, but I don’t think that’s all it’s doing: I think it’s also lampooning the way we fritter away our lives, convinced that there’s some final point where all the busywork stops, our disparate experiences cohere, and it all makes sense.

Or it could be that’s just a delusive interpretation I dreamed up to try to wrestle my scattered understanding of the game, deformed by the stop-start nature of my distracted attempts to play it, into a plausible shape that retroactively gives meaning to the time I spent with it. If that’s the case, I guess this review is part of the joke too.

The comedy parser puzzler is a nigh-infinitely-extensible format, capable of incorporating the wildest of premises and set-pieces with nary a crack in the suspension of disbelief: we’ve been conditioned over the decades to accept puzzles based on logical absurdities and high-concept setups that wouldn’t pass muster as two-minute improv sketches, and in return, players are promised gags with a reasonable hit-to-miss ratio and the opportunity to participate in a farce. Polymorphed pigs, idiot knights, gentleman thieves, harried chefs – any protagonist you can think of can confront any mad-libs combination of wacky aliens, bumbling cultists, blithering aristocrats, or misunderstood monsters imaginable, and the critical inventory item could equally well be a piece of chewing gum, a leaky jar of battery acid, a toy sheriff’s badge, or an authentic death ray. For the most part Mr. Beaver fits seamlessly into this tradition – here, it’s a diligent mailman rescuing a shrunken shopkeeper using a patched-together diving suit – but by making the protagonist’s degree of desperation a critical game mechanic, it also tries something I don’t recall seeing before. In some ways it’s a not a perfect fit for this extremely-plastic genre, but it does add a critical touch of novelty.

Without that element, the game would still work perfectly well, I think. We’re recognizably in the rescue-the-zany-uncle-from-his-kooky-mansion subgenre, which is a classic for a reason, and Mr. Beaver is a well-realized example of the form; the geography isn’t too expansive, and the locations are fairly dense, making the overstuffed antique shop something more than a bare setting for puzzles, with plenty of opportunity for character-ful details and tiny jokes. The inevitable sci-fi touches are also kept focused and while there are some out-of-left-field elements, like an incongruous coffin, they’re explained by Mr. Beaver’s eclectic taste, so the worst excesses of kitchen-sink aesthetics are avoided. I did find the very ending fluffed the balance slightly and drifted into more slapstick wackiness than I prefer, but save for those last couple paragraphs I enjoyed the vibe; the humor’s more likely to raise a gentle smile than a sudden guffaw, but there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

As for the puzzles, they’re cleanly in the medium-dry-goods tradition, though similarly a bit more grounded than is typical for the genre: there are secret passages and some devices to fiddle with, but with reasonable diegetic explanations and, usually, enough clueing to help the player understand what they should be trying to do and why. A few of the more esoteric puzzles did require highly-specific phrasing to get the parser to understand what I meant – there were a couple of these, but I’m thinking especially of a puzzle where you have to manhandle a reasonably-large object but PUSHing and MOVing and LIFTing didn’t register, with only TIPing did the business. My frustration was increased by the fact that every time I made an attempt, I had to struggle with a disambiguation prompt because typing the name of the object wound up getting it confused with the similarly-named table it was resting on top of. This is a custom parser system, and while it’s generally solid, this and a few other issues (notably, default responses printing out right after, and contradicting, the results of successful actions) make it a little less smooth sailing than the major platforms.

On these fronts Mr. Beaver is perhaps unexceptional though certainly unexceptionable. But it does have its one unique twist, the desperation-meter. Throughout the game, there are a series of actions that the average comedy-parser protagonist would perform without thinking twice – things like knocking over a shelf to get at a blocked passage, or opening up a sealed sarcophagus – but which here fail, with a pointed note that you’d only resort to such measures it were clear that the situation were especially dire. And as you conduct your investigations, you’re occasionally informed that your worries are increasing, allowing you to go back and try some of those formerly-blocked actions and succeed this time.

Functionally, of course this is just another way of constructing a puzzle dependency chain – you must solve X puzzle before solving Y. But building things this way helps take some of the arbitrariness out of the parser puzzler. I’m sure we can all think of examples where solving a puzzle makes a heretofore-hidden object incongruously reveal itself, or advance time in such a way that a previously-inaccessible area opens up. These contrivances are part of the genre, but too many of them can cause the player to roll their eyes, and also make it harder to make a plan, since you never know what might happen next. So there’s a benefit to having much of the gating depend on the protagonist’s mental state rather than seemingly-random circumstances. Similarly, this also helps mitigate the adventure-game-PC problem of the character who’s meant to be heroic, but nonetheless steals everything that’s not nailed down or engages in motiveless mayhem.

So in concept I’m a fan, but I think the implementation here could be smoother. For one thing, the choice of what actions are verboten can sometimes feel arbitrary – breaking open a coffin requires less disquiet than looking under a doily, for example, and no matter how worried you are that Mr. Beaver’s time is running out, nothing will persuade you to risk disassembling a Jenga tower. For another, there are I think five levels of escalation, which is probably too many to be qualitatively distinguished – it felt like a few times, I ran across information that felt mostly redundant with what I already knew, but was told that his had ratcheted up my desperation another quantum; combined with the previous issue, this wound up requiring a bit too much tedious lawnmowering of previously-forbidden actions to see what had opened up this time. And there are some places where the mismatch between player-knowledge and what the protagonist is willing to do gets sufficiently wide as to cause frustration: any player who glances at the cover art for half a second will realize that the aquarium – and by extension the diving suit and related paraphernalia you find about the shop – will be important to the endgame, which is quicky confirmed by messing about with it, but you’re prevented from doing much to start in on that puzzle chain until very late in the game (since the cover art is AI generated, if you glance at it for more than half a second will note that the crab has seven legs, no claws, and no mouth; for all that the text portrays Crusty as a charismatic little arthropod, as a result I shuddered any time I had to interact with him).

I’m sharing these quibbles less because I think they’re significant flaws, though, than because I did find this novel gameplay system an interesting, worthwhile one, and as with any system in its infancy it’s worth giving detailed feedback to help figure out best practices. It’s not the only reason to play Mr. Beaver – as I’ve said, if this is a kind of IF you like, there’s much to enjoy here – but it did give me something more substantive to chew on after the farce was done.

One of the weirder experiences of my reading life was a couple years ago, when I wound up spending most of the night at the ER with my wife – she wound up being fine, but it was stressful and there was a lot of that hurry-up-and-wait that always happens in hospitals, so I wound up reading all the way through the short book I’d thrown into the go-bag since it was next on my to-read pile: The Pilgrim’s Progress. Now, this is already a bit of an odd duck of a book; it’s an allegory from the late 17th century depicting a soul’s progress towards salvation, taking much of its surface incident from the stuff of chivalric romance but its structure, and deeper meaning, from the radical strains of Protestant theology that briefly flourished during the chaos of the English Civil War before being inevitably quashed as order was restored. I’m reasonably well versed in the milieu for a layperson, but it definitely still feels like an alien text to me – and that’s before accounting for the fact that I read it in one sitting, in the middle of the night, trying to distract myself from anxiety.

It’s not just a critique and not just a compliment that playing WATT reminded me of that experience: just as the eponymous Pilgrim is called to abandon his family to seek salvation, the eponymous WATT hears a voice ordering him to leave his home in order to save it; just as Pilgrim undergoes allegorical trials as he struggles with despair, fear, and other sins, WATT visits seven houses that each host a challenge focusing on aging, anxiety, or the difficulty of making a human connection; just as the locations in the Progress have excessively-literal names, like the Valley of the Shadow of Death or Doubting Castle, WATT’s journey sets from a town that’s just “Penance” spelled backwards; just as I sometimes found the early-modern text alternately uncommonly lyrical rough going, some of the prose in WATT is really good and some verges on doggerel; and just as I felt flipping to the end of the book in the ER, I finished WATT rather unmoored and unsure of what had just went down.

There are two ways you can assess an allegorical journey like this, I think – the first is how well the overall arc functions, and the second is weighing up the individual steps in the path. The former is where WATT is unfortunately least successful. Not to extend the Pilgrim’s Progress comparisons past the point of reason, but while the opening there is similarly abrupt and disorienting, it’s drawing on centuries of Christian teaching; we know what salvation is, we know roughly what is needed to attain it, and we know that, at least within that worldview, it’s the most important thing there is. The Pilgrim, who’s actually called Christian, is an intentional everyman figure, from his generic name to his lack of backstory beyond a consciousness of sin. In WATT, we’re not given much to understand who this voice is or how credible it is, and what if any metaphysical significance the task it gives to the protagonist – finding seven keys to unlock and activate a lighthouse – is meant to have, which makes the game’s feints towards religious issues unsatisfying: there’s just not much substance here to engage with. And while WATT initially seems to be a blank slate, down to an opening “character creation” section that aborts, telling you that you don’t have the power to make such choices, he eventually develops a very specific history that might have impacted how I understood the first half of the game. And the ending exacerbates this lack of coherence, both by introducing an unnecessary twist that further undermined my investment in the overall arc, and concluding the story in a way that I didn’t think tied off the various threads of the plot.

The other side of that criticism, though, is that there were threads of that plot that I was invested in, because some of those individual steps are quite good. Oh, there are some clunkers, especially in the first half – there’s a contextless school quiz, a dialogue with a naïve woman that moves too quickly to establish a forced emotional connection, a workplace simulator that doesn’t have much to say about capitalism – but they’re all over relatively quickly and, except for that second one, work fine for what they are. But the latter set of vignettes boast less standard setups: there’s more about WATT’s regret at having never met his mother, a miserabilist flash-forward to a failing marriage, and a long slog of a climb that uses timed text to defensible purposes. But the real standout is a section where you’re playing the role of the emperor in a classical Chinese opera, choosing how to govern your nation and your household but always aware of the audience’s expectations, and the way they push you into playing a specific role that holds emotions in reserve and never commits to anything (that the audience might only exist in your head is a nice grace-note). The writing here also gets more lyrical:

"She enters the front yard of your chambers, perfumed in jasmine and rogue. Her silk trails behind her like a serpent, the colour of dusk after rain – deep, warm and aching."

The momentum the game builds through the back half of its journey was strong enough that even the disappointing ending I mentioned above wasn’t enough to blunt my enjoyment – and after all, Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t memorable for where it ends up (one vision of heaven is much like another, and Christian’s redemption is pretty much guaranteed from the get-go) but for the vividness of the obstacles in the path, and how they relate to moments of moral struggle we’ve all experienced. So on that front, WATT is in good company.

I don’t think I’m especially atypical in finding that it’s increasingly hard to steer clear of revenge fantasies. The rise of authoritarian regimes in what are notionally democracies means that every day, we’re confronted with the latest antics of amoral grifters, who put on a paper-thin veil of piety while committing crime after crime to line their pockets and save their skins. How can you not occasionally give in to the temptation to imagine that some form of divine justice could be realized in this world, not the next one, and redeem our debased reality? And of course I’m talking here of Trump and his cronies, but also of the Netanyahu regime, which even as I’m writing this is launching another ground offensive in Gaza, targeting already-starving civilians because two years of genocide apparently isn’t enough to satiate their bloodlust.

Just Two Wishes is a revenge fantasy, though to its credit it’s a lot less vicious than mine tend to be. It doesn’t reveal this at first, because it’s told backwards: there aren’t really any puzzles in this parser game except for piecing together the meaning. As a result, I can’t really talk about it without getting into that meaning, so fair warning: if you haven’t played it yet and don’t want the experience spoiled any more than I already have, it’s time to bounce.

OK, now it’s just us chickens. So yeah, this is the game that depicts the aftermath of a Palestinian child’s birthday wishes: that Bibi and Trump turn into the frayed teddy-bear she’s playing with, and that a giant black bowl like the one she’s got clapped over a bunch of beetles seal off Israel from the outside world. Because it is played backwards, the Tel Aviv segment feels like a disquieting mystery, with the disappearance of the sun and sky a horrifying bit of magical realism – admittedly, on my first go I missed seeing the Netanyahu speech, which would have broken up the somber mood, but that did mean that the jump to Mar-a-Lago was even more ridiculous, as the smash-cut to Trump in bed with a Hitler Youth and suddenly sprouting fur left me enjoyably discombobulated. I sometimes like not knowing what the heck I’m playing!

As a parser-game experience, it works well enough – design-wise, it’s all about moving through space until you get to the climactic cut-scenes that trigger the next sequence. With that said, the implementation is pretty thin; the menu-based conversation is slickly done, but you only ever have one or two choices, and the characters don’t have any depth, largely two-dimensional villains, heroic victims, or background players there to help the machinery of plot move along (though Zulaija has an understandable, and appealing, nasty streak). Meanwhile, the use of PunyInform means that there’s a bit more fussing about with doors than fits the game’s story, and the persistence of default Inform responses makes for some inadvertent comedy, especially in the Trump section (being told that, after JD Vance informs you that he’s taking over the presidency, “you politely end the conversation” beggars belief, as does the “violence isn’t the answer to this one” when you subsequently try to tear him limb from limb). But this isn’t exactly a game that lives and dies by its simulation – a parser presentation is a good fit for a story where you’re wandering around confused.

As politics, well, it’s not exactly trenchant. The caricatures of the bad guys are just that, and the fantasy being played out is satisfying but woefully incomplete (in particular, while I’m definitely a voting-for-the-Democrat-is-necessary-but-not-sufficient liberal, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the genocide started in the Biden administration – it’s obviously gotten worse since Trump took over, of course!) On the flip side, some of the characterization of ordinary Israelis made me uncomfortable: while I can’t fully disagree with the statement that “what Israel’s voters want is the eradication of Palestine, genocide pure and simple”, at least in terms of revealed preferences, it’s worth noting that there’s a large contingent of Israelis deeply unhappy with Netanyahu. Along similar lines, there’s a magazine described as featuring “Zionist beauties” Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman; I don’t follow the political views of celebrities all that closely, but while Gadot was famously in the IDF and has repeatedly stuck her foot in her mouth criticizing people who support Palestinians, I wasn’t aware of Portman doing anything in particular that would open her up to an implication of complicity with war crimes — and a quick Google left me no better informed since it turned up reasonably high-profile opposition to Netanyahu and some support for Gazans. And the reference to the elevator in the Tel Aviv apartment building being a “Schindler” feels like an awkward Holocaust reference, though per the author's later comments this is just a meaningless coincidence. There's nothing out of bounds here by any means, I don't think, but since collective punishment is so central to what's happening to Gaza, a work engaging with it necessarily is going to invite heightened scrutiny about its portrayals of collective guilt.

Calling a revenge fantasy occasionally tasteless isn’t exactly a criticism, though – that’s kind of the point. Nuance isn’t the order of the day, emotional catharsis to help manage the day to day stress of living in an unjust world is. By that standard Just Two Wishes does what it’s supposed to, I have to admit – I’m just not sure whether that daydream is completely healthy, or one that’s appropriate for me as an American to indulge in. And in fairness, the game seems to share that ambivalence to at least a certain degree – its subtitle is “a triptych on anger”, which at least implicitly passes judgment on little Zulaija’s dreams of vengeance. Some degree of retribution will be needed if we’re ever to live in decent societies again, but finding the right degree without going too far will take more than an idle daydream.

The mash-up is a big part of contemporary culture, from X-meets-Y high-concept movies to pop music, where samples and guest verses rule the charts, but it’s notable that, save for the burst of popularity enjoyed by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies some 15 years ago, the literary mash-up doesn’t tend to be especially commercially successful – and yet, it still gets written, Jeeves meets Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes meets the Great War, Star Wars meets Shakespeare, and so on. My suspicion is that part of the explanation is that for an author in a gamesome mood, it’s an exciting challenge to just answer the basic question “can this be made to work?” Getting into the guts of genre and prose style and suturing together two disparate approaches so that the seams don’t show appeals to the Dr. Frankensteinian hubris that lurks within most writers.

On this score, I think Anne of Green Cables can be adjudged a success – with the notable caveat that I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables all the way through. Still, I’m familiar with the basics of the plot and writing style – my wife is a major fan of the books, so I’ve absorbed a lot second-hand – and I skimmed the original as I was playing the game, so I think I’m not totally speaking without foundation when I say that its ventriloquism of L.M. Montgomery in a cyberpunk range comes off.

In the early going, this is because it mostly sticks to a line-by-line retelling of the original, just with the odd bit of sci-fi jargon thrown in: an “intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade ” becomes and “intricate, forgotten bulk of undersea cables in its earlier course, sporadically garlanded with dark fiber splitters and routers,” for example. Sure, the latter excerpt misses some of what’s great in the former – “dark secrets of pool and cascade” is a banger – but the rhythm and sense mostly come through. As the game progresses, though, it gains confidence, and risks more departures from the text. Rather than a simple orphan, in this telling Anne is the ward of a megacorp swallowed up by a hostile acquisition; she’s hired out on a gig contract to the Cuthbert siblings, and while the anachronistic sexism of the original is maintained – they’re disappointed she’s not a boy – she’s got a knack for hacking that lets her work wonders with their glitchy farm equipment.

Notably, while pretty much every incident save the climax is drawn from the book, the amount of recontextualizing varies: some see a near-complete translation of genre tropes, like when a younger sibling laid down by croup is instead rendered insensate by a computer virus. But the infamous raspberry-cordial episode, where Anne accidentally gets a friend drunk, comes through almost entirely intact. This is a good choice because it means that the game isn’t forced to strain for cyberpunk analogues for every little thing, and that the original’s pastoral vibe isn’t totally swallowed up. And the places where the two work in concert are really fun, like the nosy gossip-hound of a neighbor who’s now a vlogger and influencer:

"If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a J-Pop idoru bot Mrs Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually piping /dev/null for a solid five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but as her Bayesian agents suggested, Mrs Rachel was almost forced to suppose it."

Again, it’s clear the best lines are Montgomery’s – this bit, where Anne relates how she and her friends have been writing melodramatic VR-stories, earned me a guffaw (the punch-line is verbatim from Green Gables):

"We made vids of the best ones and sent them to Diana’s aunt Josephine. She messaged back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died."

But some of the prose that’s wholly new to the game, as far as I can tell, is very very good as well, with Anne’s monologue upon the death of her almost-stepfather particularly affecting:

”I haven’t been alone one minute since it happened—and I want to be. I want to be quite silent and quiet and try to realize it. I know a Matthew who wasn’t dead, and I need to bring that man over the threshold.”

So all told, despite some bumps I think that author-teasing question of “can I?” can be answered with a yes – but for a reader, there’s also the question of “should you?” to be addressed. The point of a mash-up isn’t just to show off virtuosity, after all, but to illuminate something heretofore-unnoticed about the two things being juxtaposed. And here’s where I think Anne of Green Cables begins to struggle. The dour social comment of cyberpunk doesn’t sit all that easily next to a rural Canadian idyll, so what’s the thematic connection the game’s trying to draw?

I think it’s largely meant to be the figure of Anne herself, whose charisma, optimism, and willpower can push through country small-mindedness and megacorp amorality alike. It’s an inspiring idea – especially, let’s acknowledge, in our depressing political circumstances – but it’s one the game hints at rather than fully elucidates. A big issue that blunts the parallel is that most of the plot requires the cyberpunk world to be a reasonably cozy one; while there is one clear bad-guy corp, the other one just seems bumbling, and while the game’s vague about what kind of tech-assisted farming the AvonLea community performs, the environment and people are generally depicted as wholesome. When, at the eleventh hour, a more traditional techbro bad guy sweeps onstage, accompanied by NFT-memes and ChatGPT jokes, the effect is jarring, but worse, the threat he represents also feels like it comes out of nowhere. Anne isn’t showing up how to rebel against a near-overwhelming foe, but simply to dispatch a comic-opera buffoon.

That is, instead of a cyberpunk story featuring Anne Shirley – which I think would be thematically powerful, but much less fun to write and read – what we’ve got here is a romantic bildungsroman with a sci-fi gloss, which is more fun but less coherent. This weighting of the elements extends to the interactive pieces of the game – there are some decision points, but mostly they feel like they don’t lead to much branching and often perceptively offer a choice to either stick to the book-Anne, or do something different, and unsurprisingly book-Anne is more fun. Even combined with an endgame minigame that I still haven’t wrapped my head around, the game-y elements of Anne of Green Cables don’t feel like the major draw.

The major draw, of course, is just Anne herself, and to return to where I started, the success of the game is that she’s as appealing, and inhabiting a world just as inviting, as in the original novel. If the game doesn’t throw a whole new light on an acknowledged classic, that’s entirely forgivable, and if the risk of trying to do so would be weighing Anne down with grimdarkery, a la the Netflix adaptation from a couple year ago that my wife still complains about, it’s even easier to pardon. Having gotten to the end of Anne of Green Cables, I find myself eager to finally read Anne of Green Gables once the Comp ends – and it’s hard to think of a better tribute to the game’s success than that.

The summer of my second year in law school, I got an internship in DC and needed to figure out where to live. My school provided a listing service through which I found someone at a school there who likewise had an out-of-town job for the summer, making her place available to sublet, but the dates didn’t quite match up, forcing me to find someplace to stay for the week between when my internship started and the sublet became available. In those pre-AirBnB days I just checked out Craigslist, and eventually found a room I could rent for a couple of days in a suburb just outside the city proper. I was feeling good about my resourcefulness as I threw my giant duffel over my shoulder and caught a bus from the bus station to my new home for the next week – feelings which curdled as I rang the doorbell to find there was no-one there to answer me, and that turned into a cold weight in my stomach once I realized that when I called the host’s number, nobody was picking up.

Fortunately, it was not a scam after all! The guy had just been out and his phone had died; after fifteen minutes he came over and we sorted it all out (okay, he had double-booked the room so I had to sleep on a futon for the first night, so I guess it was kinda scammy, but he was apologetic and knocked the price down as a result – compared to my fears of being left totally up a creek I wasn’t inclined to complain too much). Still, I remember the way my heart sank as I arrived and realized getting into the place I was supposed to stay that night wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought, which means the setup of Rain Check-in immediately had resonance for me. In the game, you’ve arrived at an AirBnB in a rural area, but all the lights are off, your phone is low on charge, and the host’s given you cryptically-translated instructions for finding the key that are only medium helpful. Oh, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way. Good luck!

It’s a fun premise, though in practice what we’ve got here is Standard Parser Scenario #7: “get into a locked house.” There’s a little bit of local color with some patio furniture and a squeaky gate held closed with a rock, but outside of a bonus area I didn’t find on my first playthrough (hint: try exploring around before heading to the house), there aren’t any characters to interact with, or much scenery to ground proceedings in any particular place or time, much less anything resembling environmental storytelling – the closest it gets are a few wry footnotes that do at least add a slight flavor of humor. The few puzzles are likewise ones you’ve seen before – it’s not quite moving the doormat to find the key, and then entering the combination that you find written on a post-it one room over from the safe, but it’s also not miles away from that kind of thing, either.

There are two departures from the generic, one good, one bad. On the plus side, there are more endings than I expected, and some puzzles have alternate solutions. These don’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it was fun to see that you could use brute force to get around some challenges, allowing you to reach a suboptimal ending. The other departure is less enjoyable, sadly: not only does the game have an overall time limit, you also have a light-source with limited charge, and when you run out you die. Mainstream parser-IF design has long since moved away from these kinds of timers, and for good reason – leaving aside questions of verisimilitude and Zarfian cruelty, they tend to disincentivize players from spending excess time exploring and checking out details, which undercuts one of the major strengths of parser IF. There are some ways of taking the sting out of them, but I think it would be hard to find these options on a first play-through, it’s galling to have to treat that initial play-through as initial scouting that must be thrown away to inform a subsequent run, though at least the game is short and simple enough that this only winds up being a minor annoyance.

Implementation-wise, Rain Check-in is more ambitious than other games of its length and simplicity: there are some robust features, like the aforementioned phone and endings. The former has some wobbles – it’s implemented via somewhat-wonky multiple choice menus, and I couldn’t actually get the option to display the phone’s charge in the header to work – but I didn’t find any out and out bugs, beyond a few Inform-standard things like an object whose display name doesn’t match what you need to type to interact with it, and the verb to enter the combination being a bit idiosyncratic. For an author who appears to have only made a few small prior parser games, it’s a pretty good showing.

As for the writing – well, the elephant in the room here is the use of ChatGPT to help generate the game’s prose, which the author discusses in the Comp blurb: as a non-native speaker of English, he used ChatGPT as a translation aid and to refine grammar and phrasing. While I usually find text straight from the LLM intolerable to read, here the writing mostly struck me as unobjectionable, I have to say; while I didn’t note down any especially unique turns of phrase, there weren’t any clunkers, either, and it mostly avoids the annoying tics LLMs tend to get up to when given free rein. I have to believe there are more ethical and sustainable tools for ESL authors to use to sharpen their prose – not least, volunteers from this very forum! – but at least as to the results in this game, it’s not too bad.

And that’s pretty much my judgment on Rain Check-in – it’s not too bad! Again, as a neophyte’s work it’s reasonably well put together, while its most annoying features (those timers!) would hopefully be easy to correct in a follow-up work. As a story, there’s not much there, just a sketch towards an anecdote, but it’s a good-natured enough predicament to be stuck in, and I did enjoy the footnotes. And while “not too bad” isn’t high praise, but sometimes, like when you’re locked out and expecting the worst, “not too bad” can feel like intense relief.

My wife had never been part of an Internet community before last year, when she got into the Bridgerton fandom in a big way: like, she reads the fan-fiction, sure, but also had some of her takes go semi-viral on social media, gotten banned from a subreddit due to inter-board feuding, and even co-hosts a podcast. It’s been an eye-opening experience in a variety of ways – IF drama has nothing on what they get into over there, let me tell you – but has also given me a much finer-grained view of the standard tropes of romance fiction than I had heretofore possessed. Beyond the intrinsic interest, it’s also expanded my critical vocabulary, which was helpful as I turned over my reactions to Pharos Fidelis: it’s a game that I really enjoyed, but whose central relationship I didn’t find as engaging as its other elements. And I now I think I know that that’s mostly just due to a difference of tastes than anything lacking in the game: I’m just more of a Friends to Lovers guy than a Forbidden Love one, and Wound-Tending strikes me as nice but not especially hot. À chacun son goût, no big deal, especially when the game offers so much to dig into (so much, in fact, that I feel greedy for wanting even more in some places).

The game’s setup combines pieces of a bunch of different premises, but manages to feel completely seamless and its own thing: in a world riven by a magical war, a young prodigy named Finnit is studying demon-summoning at a prestigious magical academy; he’s fascinated by these otherworldly entities and their world, but his crappy advisor sees them only as weapons that must be dominated. As part of a final exam slash hazing attempt, the advisor teleports Finnit to the ruins of a remote magical lighthouse, telling him he has only a few weeks to unravel its mysteries and reignite it. Knowing he can’t do this alone, Finnit summons a demon he’d previously seen his advisor abusing; working together, the two learn about each other’s worlds and ways, and discover some shocking secrets about the lighthouse’s history, too.

That relationship is the heart of the game, with revelations about the lighthouse always tied to breakthroughs in the characters’ bond (or vice versa). But Pharos Fidelis is confident enough to delay the two meeting for quite a while, long enough to make sure Finnit and his predicament register, as well as to establish the rules of this world. Demon-summoning is subject to laws, in both senses of the term: some are akin to thermodynamic principles, but others are more like moral injunctions, and the game intersperses its narrative sections with bits of textbooks and other in-world documents fleshing things out. They’re well-written in of themselves, and also feed into the character development – seeing the three iron laws of summoning elucidated by your advisor in stentorian terms, and then having the click-to-proceed link read “ignore his wisdom” helps puncture the pretension and communicate where Finnit is coming from.

The prose is a major highlight throughout, in fact, dense with wordplay and memorable images while still remaining propulsively readable. Here’s a description of the aforementioned advisor:

"Raekard was there, tall and spidery, with the indistinct age of a man whose years had intertwined too closely with the power he commanded."

And a vignette that’s part of Finnit’s tragic backstory:

"Wizened boughs set coral pink leaves adrift. They clung, in soggy piles, to gaps between paving slabs. Young Finnit faced a chore deferred, tender fingers gripping a broom too unwieldy to shoo the litter off the patio at any reliable pace."

There’s alliteration, well-judged details, even small jokes – “wizened” sure seems like a nod to what Finnit’s job winds up being, and there’s a later description of the lighthouse’s focusing-crystal, a survivor of many thunderstorms, which notes “the memories of lightning that had long since bolted.” Come to think of it, “Finnit” is itself a sort of pun, highlighting the bounded, finite nature of his being compared to his immortal lover. There are a few flies in the ointment: the game definitely has fantasy-name disease (I’m awkwardly writing around the demon’s name because I can’t remember it off the top of my head – it definitely starts with a V?), there are places where the dialogue struck me as too informal for the high-fantasy vibe, and it takes some big swings, so of course some of them miss.

But these are tiny niggles; 98% of the time the prose is a delight, which is impressive indeed for a work of this length. In fact, even though it pretty much took me the full Comp-standard two hours to reach an ending, part of me was eager for more – I wouldn’t have minded if the process of understanding and trying to fix the lighthouse had had a couple more scenes to play out in, and there are a few glimpses of hell that likewise could have been expanded. Part of me also wishes the central relationship had been more of a slow-burn, but again, I think that’s just down to preference: in some ways it’s more romantic to have the near-immediate spark of attraction quickly having the two of them thinking sexy thoughts about each other, even if personally I think it would have been fun if they’d started more platonic, until Finnit’s flash of insight in a late-night magical engineering session suddenly made the demon want to jump his bones…

Speaking of the demon, I didn’t find him as cleanly-drawn a character as Finnit, but I think that’s actually a strength of the work. Demons are meant to be more protean and amenable to change, and as he’s recovering from trauma, he could reshape himself in different ways. In fact, cleverly and thematically, while Finnit is the viewpoint character, all the choices are on the demonic side of the ledger. There are only a handful of decision points, a few of which are seemingly low-key, but as far as I was able to experiment, they can have pretty significant impacts on where the plot ultimately goes (the chapter select function also makes it easy to experiment).

To be honest, though, while it’s there and effective, I didn’t need the interactivity, or, as mentioned, to get too hot and bothered by the romance plot, to find Pharos Fidelis engaging – the character work and magical investigation are top-notch, delivered in lovely, luminous prose, with several surprises I didn’t see coming (I haven’t mentioned the way the game plays with the second-personal narrator as it nears its conclusion). A highlight of the Comp for sure, and I’d gladly play any prequels or sequels the author cares to write.

Reader, I’m going to have to say something right now that might be hard for you to hear. Are you ready? Do you want to sit down? Do you have your preferred beverage to hand (but not too close, we wouldn’t want to run the risk of spillage)? Okay.

I have some flaws.

I know, you’re going to say, that’s not news, of course you sometimes pad your reviews with hilarious and insightful but maybe only tangentially relevant personal anecdotes, and perhaps sometimes your writing can be too analytically rigorous and insightful. Which, yes, guilty, but actually no, I mean real flaws. I’m terrible at languages, tend to flail when small talk is required, and (worst of all) am too middlebrow to actually enjoy abstract art. I can maunder on about color and composition if I’m trying to impress someone (I’m always trying to impress someone), and there’s definitely some post-Impressionalist transitional stuff, where you can see where the artist jumped off from representation and hangs poised in the air in defiance of gravity, using shapes and textures that aren’t representational but nonetheless have the faintest of tethers to something real, that I find compelling. But beyond that I’m at sea.

All of which is to say that I don’t think I’m the right person to give Eight Last Signs in the Desert its due, even if I weren’t playing it just about a third of the way into this enormous Comp, when my brain is starting to get benumbed at the scale of the task before it and groans in protest at the idea of having to do work. There’s nary a character in sight, much less a motivation easily translatable to Maslow’s hierarchy of need, in this impressively-produced choice-based game: the protagonist addresses a septet of monuments in a sandy wasteland, each of which lets you craft a tone-poem through careful selection of cycling links. There is a progression, as each monument vanishes as you complete it, and for every pair you finish, you get a bonus bit of text that appears customized to the combination of those two. Do that three times, then wrap it up with the final monad and then the surprise eighth monument (no points for guessing what that is), and that’s the game.

It’s a solid enough structure, and the themes at issue – dissolution, the slippery nature of reality, the aridity of the detritus of contemporary civilization – are trenchant enough: what are we living through but the decay of modernism into the abstract? And the prose, er, poetry, is really good, with thought-through meter and memorable images by the score. Heck, speaking of art, the backdrop to all this is lovely, Seurat-style landscapes that provide an unsettling, lyrical home for the seven brooding metaphor-totems.

But good lord is it abstract. Here’s a late-game peregrination:

"You stand in the desert like a monument to yourself, a tension, a spark, a ribbon on fire or perchance a rubber band, promises fulfilled?, indistinct realities, a desert (recursively), the language of objects, curtains, the object of language, the sputtering of a flame."

This is good, but it’s a lot, metaphors tripping over each other in a torrent, and it’s not an exception – this is an extended excerpt of what I landed on for my first monument:

"Enter the palace. Wander its halls until you find the window. Layer its transparencies in a grandiose matrix.

"Seal your choice. Cross it and float outside. Reach for the moon above, but it’s too late in the palace gardens.

"Seal your choice. Sit in it. Dream an uncertain story of the sea."

The lapidary nature of the imagery wound up feeling exhausting to me; until the very end nothing feels like it reaches a climax, each stanza just gives way to the next, sometimes with only the most tangential linkages. Similarly, I experienced the choices as simultaneously polyvalent and weightless in their lack of implication:

"Seal your choice. Rise again and take one step back. Reach for the [discarded/once public/exclusive/devoted] strand and pull."

“Discarded” and “devoted” are wildly disparate concepts, to say nothing of “once public”, so trying to parse out these possibilities imposes a cognitive burden, but then I found it even more challenging to keep those choices in mind once the text moved on, as the subsequent lines might not even mention a strand, much less an excusive one. A more labile brain than mine might have been able to surf the vibes, weaving this riot of language into something that coheres, but I freely admit mine wasn’t up to the challenge: to the extent my quick summary above winds up being accurate, I did end up with a sense of what the game is getting at, and as an aesthetic experience I found a lot to admire in Eight Last Things in the Desert.

But personally in my IF I need a bit more of, well, a personality, and a more disciplined metaphor-palette plus ideally some drama beyond the wearied acceptance of discorporation. So file this one under games I admired more than liked, though I’m pretty sure that to the kind of player who lives for Surrealist art exhibitions and jams to Symbolist poetry will find this among their favorites of the Comp: the fault is not in Eight Last Signs in the Desert, but in myself.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: there’s a Towers of Hanoi puzzle in whoami. It’s only four disks, and seems like it’s at least partially a piss-take – the puzzle is meant to represent the transfer of a full digital encoding of human consciousness that takes literal years to scan in sufficient depth, so seeing this awesome and profound technological feat reduced to a brainteaser that last seemed cool when I was in middle school earned a bark of laughter. But still: it’s 2025, no more, please.

Fortunately, that’s about the only bad thing I have to say about the game! Despite having only used Windows since I graduated from college, I am a sucker for IF that mimics a UNIX shell, and whoami is one of the slickest examples of the subgenre I remember playing. It’s choice-based, so you don’t have to actually type commands, just click on directories and file-names to move around and open stuff, but the presentation is sufficiently authentic to make the player feel like a hacker, even as subtle color-coding helps guide you towards which things you should click. The drive isn’t especially big – I got through the game in maybe fifteen minutes? – and the plot isn’t especially novel, though it mashes up familiar elements into a mélange that I don’t think I’ve specifically seen before. But the “environmental storytelling” of putting together the narrative by reading emails, running a date routine to figure out how time is passing, and checking user logs to piece together what’s happened makes things feel fresh and engaging. Heck, it even hides the save/load functionality behind diegetic dump and reboot functions that you need to hunt around for, which in a longer game would be annoying but since you’ll almost certainly not need them, just registers as another fun bit of business.

whoami also knows the value of changing things up. OK, maybe the Towers of Hanoi were a flop, but otherwise the puzzles are well paced, punctuating progress and giving the player something to do beyond crawling directories. Sometimes this is just a matter of visual presentation, like the web-page mockup whose blaring light-mode makes an unignorable contrast with the black-background filesystem work of the rest of the game. But others are more interactive, including a gag even better than the Towers practical joke (Spoiler - click to show)(the fact that the “primitive” simulation is a seamlessly-implemented-in-Twine Inform game is hilariously meta). There’s also a pretty solid plot twist, and while, again, there’s nothing especially novel here, things move zippily enough that I never felt like the story was getting bogged down, with just enough detail provided to suggest depth without requiring the player to ever get stuck in the weeds, and the game ends just when you want it to. As for the prose, it’s unostentatious but effective, adopting multiple voices as needing and doing a credible impersonation of personal messages or bureaucratese as the situation varies.

I’m struggling to think of much else to say, because whoami is a short game that does exactly what it sets out to do, with style and substance to spare. Even those with a terminal aversion to disk-swapping puzzles should just grit their teeth and power through this once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Penny basked in the sun happily."

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

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

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

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

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

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

">smell water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"‘It’s our,’ she laughed, ‘lover.’"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DICK MCBUTTS GETS PUNCHED IN THE NUTS famously is two games in one. As part of author Damon Wakes’s successful plot to win the Golden Banana of Discord, it cunningly rolled an invisible set of dice upon boot-up, and depending on the result slotted the player into either a short, obnoxiously-linear vignette focusing on genital trauma with co-starring roles by Hitler, Darth Vader, and copious vomiting, or a longer, still-obnoxious but not linear scenario featuring better jokes and much less flashing text (I got the first, and hate/loved it). I’m not sure whether the sequel, ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, took the same approach, but this third game goes it one better: I’ve heard people confirm that there’s a similar random sorting of players into either a short, linear version or a longer, more robust one, but even having gotten the latter this time out, I’m confronted with a duality: is this a lackluster DICK MCBUTTS sequel, or an elegant DICK MCBUTTS subversion?

Some grounding in what the thing actually is may (but only may) help answer that question. This time out our protagonist is HEN AP PRAT, a Welsh (I think?) trans woman who’s aware of the title of her game and despite acknowledging the ridiculousness of the prediction (since she does not, at least as the game opens, possess the requisite piece of anatomy), locks herself in her apartment and turns to arts cartomantica to fend off her destiny. The game is in DendryNexus rather than Twine, which allows the card-reading conceit to be rendered quite nicely: you deal yourself a hand of three tarot cards, and clicking on one fires you into a zany vignette that typically involves some form of transformation and/or threat to your groin. Some are branching storylets, others are linear, some appear to lead inevitably to a bad end while others are entirely safe, and some get away from the series’ core conceit that getting kicked in the crotch is funny by redefining what being SMACKED IN THE TWAT even means, like maybe it’s just “twat” like the British slang for someone being kinda clueless, you know? (these are the least funny ones). But make no mistake: play for long enough, and one way or another, the title fulfills itself eventually.

There are a number of things one can say about all this. One is that it’s not as funny as its predecessors. Oh, many of the same ingredients are there, like a rotating cast of supporting characters with similarly-constructed names, and wild leaps across genre and plausibility. And there certainly are some jokes that landed for me, like this bit:

"At the reception to the clinic - which is typically small, drab and mean-spirited, the seats composed of the severed left halves of benches collected from a gallery of brutalists’ responses to the prompt “imagine a tramp says out loud ‘at least it can’t get any worse’ and then sees your work” and the walls decorated with posters of that homophobic dog meme saying shit like “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE” and “THIS IS THE PART WHERE HE SMACKS YOU” - Hen gives her name to the receptionist, clarifies that it’s her real name even though the receptionist didn’t think it wasn’t, then decides she’s better off just standing in the corner of the waiting room to wait."

But the humor typically earned a smile rather than the impossible-to-control chortles of the first games. For all the ridiculousness, the effective comic bits tend to be like this one, more observational, which is new ground for the series – when HEN AP PRAT tries to go big, it just feels like a shadow of its predecessors, going over old gags to diminishing returns. The presentation also makes a big difference; I missed the Geocities-aping blinking lights and colored text, whose garishness made a better accompaniment for the DICK MCBUTTS humor than the understated class of DendryNexus’s basic black. Speaking of DendryNexus, the storylet structure means there’s not much of a sense of progression, as you could potentially play any card at any time – a big departure from the delightful escalations that marked prior installments, with near-misses piling up one after another and plot twists turning things this way and that, before the whole Jenga tower collapses; some of the vignettes attempt similar moves here, but they just don’t have the runway they need to be as effective.

The biggest issues, though, are that 1) unlike the feel-good comedy of a dude wincing in pain as someone thwacks him in the junk, a woman being kicked in the genitals is unpleasant to contemplate, given the prevalence of gender-based and sexual violence in the real world; and 2) that gets dialed up to a thousand when the woman is a trans woman, given that they’re targeted for violence at even higher rates, not to mention that there’s an entire right-wing movement that’s attempting to institute global fascism largely on the basis of a fetishistic obsession with trans peoples’ genitals. When we’re told that Hen huddles in her apartment, afraid of other people because of the risk of sexual violence, that isn’t a fun premise for a comedy game, that’s real life.

So yeah, as a DICK MCBUTTS game, HEN is a bummer. But, is that what it is? Beyond the already-mentioned DendryNexus of it all, HEN is also attributed to Larissa Janus, rather than the first two game’s Hugh. There’s a family resemblance, of course (I’m guessing she goes by Lar), but might we entertain the hypothesis that a different author, or at least a different authorial persona, is making a different point, and in fact using some of the underpinnings of the series to raise some pointed questions – like, asking the player to engage with how they feel when the threat of groin-assault is leveled against people of different genders and with different genitals, and maybe take that to other experiences of gender identity. Or just noting how, for Hen, acquiring a vagina is a dreadful thing that carries with it a promise of violence, which can come at any moment, from any direction, in fact is guaranteed to come. On that reading, some of the queasiness I mentioned above is the point.

I don’t mean to say that HEN is overly dour – this is still a game where one flip of a card can turn you into She-Ra, after all. But “it’s less funny” might not be the damning judgment it would be if the game was just trying to be a gag-filled sequel; if HEN is DICK MCBUTTS 3, it’s only so-so, but if it’s NEMESIS MCBUTTA instead, well, that’s something else entirely.

PS: Oh yeah, and that whole ORIGIN OF THE WORLD subtitle is pretty interesting too, huh? No subtitles for the other two DICK MCBUTTS games, much less one that recalls Courbet’s pornographic provocation, a painting that pointedly exchanges the politely-hairless nudes of the artistic establishment with a vagina drawn from, and to, life.

Mashing up J.R.R. Tolkien with Philip K. Dick isn’t an idea that feels obvious, even in retrospect. Sure, they both gained their greatest popularity in the 60s and each had at least one prominent middle initial, other than that? Tolkien’s reputation rests on a few long books, Dick’s on a flurry of short ones; Dick was the bard of a quintessentially American brand of paranoia, Tolkien of a quintessentially English brand of heroism. One searches in vain in Tolkien for Dick’s signature themes of identity, surveillance, and the contingent nature of reality, while Dick deals with Tolkienian motifs like the quest, the redemption of the powerful by the weak, and the tragedy of corruption infrequently and ironically.

Hobbiton Recall’s synthesis of these two authors at first, then, seems to work only at the level of plot – per the blurb, the game runs through the narrative of We Can Remember it for you Wholesale/Total Recall, except with the Martian espionage angle swapped for adventure in Middle-Earth – rather than any substantive connection. But sadly it swiftly becomes clear that it’s working in one tradition common to both of them: being fucking terrible at writing women. Dick’s women are either ball-cutting shrews or naïve sexpots, while Tolkien’s of course are mostly just nonexistent, but Hobbiton Recall opts for its own particular blend of misogyny by having the protagonist constantly condescend to and belittle his wife, when he isn’t behaving like a helpless baby reliant on her for his basic needs. It’s a blatantly obvious element of the game’s writing, and I suppose it’s possible that it’s part of a game-long arc that eventually sees the main character eat some crow. But if so, the game plays it very straight for at least its first hour, meaning that when I hit a progress-breaking bug, I couldn’t be bothered to try to find a workaround.

I suppose I should say that that’s a shame. It is nice to see a GrueScript game in the Comp, and part of me admires the fact that the game appears to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, since in that first hour I solved a bunch of my dumb apartment puzzles to get out of the house, and then wound up stuck in some unrelated busywork having to do with a urine sample, before finally getting a chance to try out the memory-implanting technology – but instead of landing me in Hobbiton, it just sent me to the hospital where I ran into the fatal bug (I believe that bug has been fixed since I wrote this review). Again, I can’t say for sure whether keeping the player so far away from the actual premise of the game for so long is an accidental design weakness or an intentional provocation, but I admit I was a bit disappointed when I checked the source code and saw that there does appear to be a substantial Middle Earth segment eventually. There are one or two funny jokes (when perusing the memory packages, you respond negatively to the option of remembering a life as an assembly-line worker, because you already are one, only for the sales rep to ask “Yes, but have you ever been an assembly line worker in Kettering?”) and one or two reasonably-satisfying puzzles, like the one where you chase away some hooligans with a stick.

But my god, the whole thing is just so sour. Here’s the introduction of the protagonist’s wife:

"Her tongue was hanging out of the corner of her mouth, and a warm patch of drool was forming on her chin. Dave smiled; she looked just like she did when they had met in a crowded bar all those years ago."

What the fuck, game. Right after that, you wake her up in the middle of the night – by pinching her nose closed while she’s sleeping! – to send her to the kitchen to get you a warm glass of milk and a cookie, at which point you’re treated to this I-see-your-what-the-fuck-game-and-raise-you-one-more bit of prose:

"Just the one biscuit, mind, too much sugar at this time of night was liable to turn Dave a bit frisky—and she didn’t want that!

"Dave lay back on his pillow, his hands fumbling down the front of his pyjama pants."

Some other bits from the game’s opening section:

"Mavis has been decorating the landing for the last 3 weeks. You should get on at her to speed things up!"

"It’s the first room guests see when they enter the house, so you are very strict with Mavis about always keeping it nicely hoovered."

"'Would you mind not yawning?' you ask politely. 'Not only is it unbecoming of a lady to yawn at the breakfast table, but I also find it extremely sexually unappealing. And what’s more, you’re putting me off my Coco Pops.'"

"This is where Mavis comes to have a little cry when she’s having one of her ‘episodes’."

It’s not just Mavis – there’s a “joke” later where the death of another worker’s wife is played entirely for laughs, and at the factory there’s a woman who’s hunchbacked and deformed and hideous, and the “joke” here is that nobody talks to her. I suppose it’s not just women who have a bad time of it, as the ill-natured puzzles also include things like playing a screeching tune on the bagpipes to wake up a sleeping cat for no earthly reason. But yeah, it’s definitely mostly about women. At least there is one attractive female character – a sexy nurse who’s having an affair with a married doctor (this is where I hit the bug; I was clearly supposed to use my knowledge of the affair to blackmail the doctor into letting me leave the hospital, but the option never appeared).

If I were trying to be balanced, at this point I’d try to scrape together a few more positive points about the game to offset additional critiques I haven’t yet gotten to (there are more bugs, like a teleporting pen and a urine sample whose description doesn’t update even after you accidentally spill it; several puzzles, like replacing the aforementioned urine with pond water, are underclued or nonsensical, and the “walkthrough” that comes with the game just provides hints and stops about a third of the way in; and the genAI pixel art throughout added one more source of omnipresent irritation to the proceedings). But I can’t find it in me to muster up the energy. I’ll say one thing for Hobbiton Recall – at least next time I read some Tolkien or Dick and roll my eyes at their bad treatment of women, I can think to myself “well, could be worse.”

What do vampires have in common with the X-Men? The glib answer is “Vampire: the Masquerade” – yes, we all played it as superheroes with fangs, no, there’s nothing wrong with that – but the one I had in mind is the racism-analogy problem. See, in any genre fiction where you’ve got a distinct and insular minority who are set apart from the ordinary mass of humanity, like because they’re mutants or they drink blood, it’s tempting to lean into the subtext and start telling stories about how the ways they’re set apart resemble real-world discrimination. There can be some rich vines of pathos and thematic weight to mine here, and it can be a solid on-ramp into political awareness (I can’t definitively claim that various 80s comic books where religious reactionaries whip up vicious mobs had no impact on my current views), so I don’t mean to knock the practice by any means. But it runs into difficulties when you try to take the metaphor too literally, because at the end of the day the people who hate and fear vampires or mutants? They, uh, kind of have a point, given the extreme danger they pose to ordinary people, outside the techniques of control we accept as part of a liberal democracy. It’s not crazy to not want to live next door to a bloodthirsty creature of the night or someone who can turn your curtain rod into a deadly weapon, after all, but this gets awkward when curtain-rod guy is a stand-in for Black people or trans folks or what have you.

There are various strategies for dealing with this, of course, from steering into the skid (I haven’t read it, but I understand there’s a recent X-Men run where mutants basically set up their own nation-state, with an implicit threat of global annihilation keeping the jealous superpowers at bay) to the one Conversation in a Dark Room employs, which is to neuter the threat. Again, I understand the impulse, since the vampires in this game are clearly meant to evoke real-world marginalized groups (the bit of dialogue saying “[y]ou may even have vampire coworkers, you know. It’s not as easy as you think to spot us these days” is a bit on the nose, as is the bit about how the label “vampire” is applied as a blanket term despite the fact that most of them are “mixed”, with varying degrees of human-ness), and part of the point of the game appears to be to put the protagonist’s unexamined group-hatred of vampires under the microscope, so this wouldn’t work the same way if vampires were draining people dry willy-nilly. But there’s part of me that rebels at seeing horror’s ur-predators defanged as comprehensively as they are here: we’re told that rather than drinking human blood, they’ve created a network of humane farms that sustainably harvest non-life-threatening amounts of animal blood, as well as invented synthetic blood alternatives; oh, and they mostly don’t even reproduce, having decided that subjecting other people to their immortal curse would be mean. And as far as we’re told, vampires are a monolithic block who agree with these Jain-style precepts – given that they also don’t burst into flames in the sunlight, they come off as especially long-lived, super nice goths.

This is a shame, because with real menace on the table, Conversation in a Dark Room could be have been a nail-biter. A two-hander where a vampire and the human he’s hired to kill him chit-chat before getting down to the deed is a great premise, and there’s some queasily compelling writing in the dialogue, especially the bits that make it look like what’s happening here is a seduction:

He asks you, “Have you ever done something like this before?”

“No…No, I haven’t. Not like this. But…”

It’s also played for comedic effect – like, this is a very different kind of date:

So what do you do, anyway?" His voice broke your trance.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What do you do? You know, for work?”

And while the vampire’s motives for choosing annihilation aren’t spelled out, and don’t seem to go too far beyond the traditional tropes of the modern vampire mythos, the author knows how to play the hits:

"He sighs. 'When you live a long time, you…experience a great array of things. You’d think the world would be full of endless opportunities and feelings and experiences, but the truth is, much of it is the same. And at the same time, some of it is impossible to replicate, and you’ll spend your whole life chasing it.'"

So the ingredients are here for a tense yet melancholy battle of wits, but some of the narrative and design choices sap the setup of its power. Again, the major issue is that the vampire just doesn’t seem scary; it’s certainly possible that he’s just gaslighting the protagonist about how woke the modern vamp is, but there’s no indication that’s the case, which makes it feel like the protagonist’s vendetta against the undead is just a thoughtless prejudice rather than anything to take seriously (at least in the two run-throughs I played, these feelings don’t stem from a specific grievance or incident that would make them feel more reasonable or psychologically grounded). Further undercutting my identification with the protagonist, they appear to be the worst journalist ever: despite their job being all about asking questions, and an apparently longstanding distaste for vampires, they seem to have never pondered, much less done research to resolve, various important matters about how vampires live and feed. For a blank-slate whose ignorance is meant to provide an excuse for world-building exposition, this would be easier to overlook, but instead, as mentioned their animus towards vampires is positioned as a major reason why they’ve taken on this assignment in the first place.

Below the narrative layer, the mechanics also make proceedings more ho-hum than they could have been. There are multiple different endings you can achieve, with your path through the story largely determined by your scores along three axes: wallow in your aggression, and you can get Hatred points, while asking lots of questions gains Intrigue and commiserating with the vampire earns Empathy. But there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gain these points, meaning I found it hard to proactively think about trying to shape the character along different extremes; instead I clicked around and hoped for the best, which led to a balanced score along the three gauges, but also an ending that paid off the setup without adding much in the way of surprises – it’s possible to overstate the value of novelty, of course, but again, this game feels to me like it wants to be structured as a thriller, which requires at least one good twist or gear-shift.

Still, all this puts Conversation in a Dark Room at “well-written vampire game with solid politics and themes,” which isn’t a bad place to be, and I haven’t even mentioned the neat visual presentation and interface bells and whistles, like a customized note-taking tool. It’s a testament to its promise that I can’t help but imagine a game that leans into, rather than away from, its darker moments, and mines richer emotions than just world-weary pathos from a premise that, again, seems very well-chosen – and it’s not like I think anyone’s actually ever solved the racism-analogy problem, it’s just that it can be more fun to read the more spectacular failures. Conversation in a Dark Room isn’t a failure by any means, but it could have stood to take a few more risks.

Despite its short play-time, Errand Run engages with a number of different themes, but there’s one I keep coming back to, possibly because it’s increasingly salient of late: how do you tolerate the intolerable? It’s no spoiler, I think, to reveal that what initially appears to be a simple trip to the grocery store with twenty bucks in your pocket is concealing something darker than just dealing with the impacts of inflation; the first passage glancingly averts to wrongness by mentioning in passing that all the shopping baskets are scattered around upside-down, but the second passage leaves subtlety behind:

"THEYRE JUST ONIONS FOR GODSSAKE but your mind is a bullet a knife slicing splitting s u n d e r i n g each precious layer ghostprickleof tears in your eyes"

(The last four words are blurred).

The text effects calm down after that, save for an ominous red-shift as you near the ending, but the intimations of exactly how much has gone wrong keep escalating; often you’ll see a potentially disturbing phrase that, when clicked, turns anodyne: “the fly died” becomes “the fly flew all the way back to home to make little fly babies,” for example (though depending on how you feel about flies, it occurs to me, maybe the latter is worse than the former). The gameplay loop remains consistent throughout, with each new aisle peeling back a layer of the protagonist’s denial, and providing more clues about the enormity of what’s happened – there aren’t any real choices to make, but fortunately, at ten minutes, this simple structure doesn’t wear out its welcome, and when the last band-aid is ripped off, what we’re presented with is memorable in its details, and appropriately grand guignol, even if it’s not especially novel (I seem to recall a Comp game from four or five years ago with a largely similar take on (Spoiler - click to show)the Rapture).

So Errand Run is an effective little horror story, sounding in delusion and religious mania and post-apocalyptic nihilism, but as I said up top, the reading I’m finding most resonant right now focuses on the protagonist’s actions as a form of coping. While there’s an implication that their perceptions may sometimes be confused by trauma, I think it’s more frequently the case that they’re trying to recontextualize and ignore the evidence of their senses, rather than suffering full-bore hallucination. That is, the protagonist knows that things have gone to hell, but just continues to engage in quotidian rituals like grocery-shopping to propitiate the devils of despair. At a time when the aspirations that gave our lives meaning seem increasingly questionable, and our own devils of despair seem not just real, but in charge of major government agencies (this store’s take on food safety has nothing on RFK Jr’s), Errand Run feels as much of a political story as a supernatural one. Just going through the motions can keep the hounds at bay, but for how long? We’re down to a rotting back of onions and two packs of cinnamon gum; eventually something will have to give.

Is there anything more talismanic than last words? There are fictional characters – and real people too! – defined completely by the all-time great way they went out: who knows anything about Nathan Hale, or that guy from Tale of Two Cities, other than their eminently quotable exits? And “badass” is only one viable strategy, like, imagine how much time humanity has collectively spent trying to figure out what the heck Socrates meant about that chicken. In fact you can get a lot of mileage out of enigma – “Rosebud” is the engine that powers Citizen Kane, after all. They even have a special power in the law: dying declarations are exempted from the rules against hearsay evidence because of their gravitas. So kudos to Your Very Last Words for zeroing in on a perfect scenario for interactive fiction; we’re all head-over-heels for words already, so how can we resist the chance to author a sentence written in lightning whose thunder will reverberate down the ages?

Of course, in reality last words usually don’t live up to their billing. People who are close to death are often confused by pain and medication, and there can sometimes be disagreement about what a person’s last words actually were. Plus, most of us aren’t Socrates, or being written by Charles Dickens – for all that it can be morbidly fun to fantasize about the words of wisdom we’ll bequeath to our loved ones as we leave them for the last time, don’t we also nurse a secret fear that they’ll lean forward, pens at the ready to note down our valedictory phrase, only to shoot each other guilty looks once we’ve departed, disappointed at how banal our dying thoughts proved to be? And if that’s the case, kudos I suppose too to Your Very Last Words for being a bit muddled in its implementation and less than piercing in its prose.

Judged just on its mechanics, this is a very odd duck, and an underexplained one, if a duck can be underexplained. The way it works is that you’re facing a firing squad, and the sergeant derisively gives you a few minutes to think of something to say before he orders the bullets to fly. Your character says a sentence or two, reminiscing about the revolution that brought them to this awful end, their grieving family, or the fate of their country, and then the player gets to choose one of three phrases with which to complete the thought – though you’re given the unexplained option to choose and remember, or choose without remembering, for whichever one you pick. It turns out that phrases you remember are recorded in a running list tucked under a dialogue bubble in the upper left corner, but these aren’t your actual last words – instead, at the moment before you’re killed, you can choose three of the phrases in your list and slot them together, Mad Libs style, to complete your self-written epitaph. Oh, and at any time you can press E to open your eyes, at which point the game’s black backdrop irises out to reveal a black-and-white 3D rendering of the firing squad and the fellow prisoners being executed alongside you, which you can explore via mouselook.

It’s confusing and awkward, all the more so because some controls are mapped to the keyboard (opening the eyes, advancing to the next bit of dialogue) and some to the mouse (looking around, picking a dialogue option, opening up the list of phrases you’ve recorded). Beyond the interface, I also found the particulars of the protagonist’s predicament hard to come to grips with. This isn’t an abstracted, Platonic ideal of an execution – instead you’ve been caught up in the violence of Mexico’s Ten Tragic Days, when rival generals who’d launched a coup against the incumbent president unleashed terror against supporters of the regime. This is a historical period that I must admit I know vanishingly little about, and while the game provides some proper nouns, it doesn’t give much more so unless you’ve got a solid grounding in Mexican history you’d better hit Wikipedia if you want some context. And this isn’t just a matter of idle curiosity – it was hard for me to have a handle on which dialogue options I wanted to pick when the protagonist was lamenting the loss of freedom and the fate of his country, without knowing whether he was likely a right-wing or left-wing paramilitary! Meanwhile, the personal side of the monologue often felt melodramatic, which I suppose is as much due to the structure as anything else – when the screen only displays a dozen words at a time, the main way to make brevity have an impact is to get histrionic. And likewise, there’s not really enough detail for a personality to emerge; in a longer work, there could be poignancy in the way the protagonist mourns for the loss of his lover and unborn child, only to reflect on the many, many other lovers and many, many other illegitimate children he’s sired, but as it is I found it injected a presumably-unwanted comic note.

The nail in the coffin is that I found it really hard to string my list of isolated phrases together into a coherent, much less powerful, set of last words. Because they’re not drawn from consecutive sentences, it was challenging to create syntactical connections between the three phrases, much less substantive or thematic ones. Plus, trying to bridge the personal and the political felt too challenging since there’s so little real estate to work with – but choosing one over the other felt like giving short shrift to the game’s full set of themes.

I admire what Your Very Last Words is trying to do – I like idiosyncratic games, personal games, and historical games very much, and it certainly checks all three boxes. But as with the fetishization of last words, it tries to pack too much into too few phrases, and as a result it buckles under its own weight. After all, last words carry the most weight when we can see how they’re a capstone for a full life: without that broader background, they might as well be written in water.

There have been a lot of lessons to be drawn from the explosive growth of superhero movies over the last decade and a half, one of the more positive of which is the way they can escalate. You introduce a hero, maybe a half-sketched-in sidekick, they mostly fight mooks before the last set-piece kicks things up a notch – nothing wrong with that! But then soon enough you’ve got a team of dozens, with factions, betrayals, time travel, multiverses, romances, deaths, MacGuffins upon MacGuffins…

A Smörgåsbord of Pain is a sequel to 2022’s A Matter of Heist Urgency, and if it doesn’t quite speedrun the entire Iron-Man-to-Endgame progression, it’s dramatically more ambitious. The first game was largely an exercise in trying out some ideas for designing fight scene in a parser game, with a memorably off-kilter premise (anthropomorphic super-hero pony fights pirate llamas) and a final scene where you could leaven the simple punching and kicking with some environmental swashbuckling. But Anastasia the Power Pony’s second adventure is no mere proof-of-concept – we get to see her in her secret identity, there’s a chase, a much more assured combat sequence, some investigation and infiltration, revelations, and a gonzo climax featuring half a dozen combatants, an optional sidekick, and more buffet-based mayhem than you can shake a hoof at. I haven’t gotten to Murderworld yet, so I suppose it’s got competition in the best-superhero-adventure category, but it’s definitely an impressive showing.

The humor is a big part of what makes the game so enjoyable. Smörgåsbord makes the genius choice to play its bonkers setup completely straight, never acknowledging that there’s anything inherently funny about a pony with an office job and super-strength. Instead, jokes are made at the expense of overly-pretentious martial arts (“Many martial arts emphasize ‘philosophy,’ ‘understanding,’ or even ‘learning how to fight so one does not have to fight.’ Such ideas betray a true lack of enlightenment and deserve no attention…. Remember, we are here to learn how to beat people up.”), default Inform responses (“When you conclude that violence is the answer, simply >ATTACK, >PUNCH, >KICK, >WHAP, or even >CLONK the source of your problems”), Scandinavian cuisine (there is a lot of lutefisk at the titular buffet), and banal chit-chat with coworkers you despise (the opening dialogue about whether there are usually waiters and menus at buffets could work as a scene from The Office). I laughed very hard when Anastasia’s sensei noted that “wordplay is almost 89% of swordplay” (yes, there’s a pun-based fighting style), and harder at the dialogue options when I stormed into the eponymous restaurant bent on justice:

“D-Do you have reservations?” [the host] inquires, trying to maintain his composure.

1. “Not about using violence.”

The production values are also absurdly high. There are great feelies, two maps and a martial-arts how-to that contains some of the best jokes in the game. The implementation also feels deluxe, with social interaction feeling especially rich – there’s a menu-based conversation system, but you can also interrupt that to ASK/TELL about an impressive array of topics; I don’t recall getting a single generic response, though admittedly this is more a game about action than talking. And there’s a newscast sequence midway through that’s one of the most impressive visuals I’ve ever seen in an Inform game; I think I can kind of guess at how it’s put together, but I can only applaud the audacity to even attempt such a thing, much less the chops to pull it off so well.

It’s not entirely rainbows and unicorns, though. Another lesson of superhero cinema – and one it shares with buffets – is that that’s possible to have too much of a good thing. While I was initially delighted at the prospect of a throwdown in the restaurant, since I was looking forward to a food fight from the first scene where the location appeared, in practice I found this sequence way too involved and fiddly to be as fun as I wanted it to be. It’s set in a big, 5x5 region, with half a dozen enemies across multiple waves of reinforcements moving around to pursue you, so I found it very difficult to keep track of where everyone was, even when referencing the included map. There’s also a high degree of randomness that governs when your attacks, and those of your enemies, land, which meant that some of my attempts petered out much quicker than others. Meanwhile, success largely depends on coming up with pun-based uses for the buffet’s food, which is a great idea, but in practice slowed things down as I tried to come up with the appropriate joke, which was often frustrating: it’s great fun to WAYLAY an enemy WITH HAY, but I couldn’t TICKLE with PICKLES, or ROUT with SPROUTS, HARRASS with GLASS, or NAIL WITH SNAILS… given the significant number of food items in the buffet, and the large number of dumb jokes you can make with the English language, it’d be unreasonable to ask that all of this stuff work, I suppose, but the difficulty of this sequence is tuned hard enough that I felt like I’d have needed to figure out a lot of the trickier puns, not just the obvious ones, in order to win, not to mention getting lucky with the RNG.

Fortunately, the game lets you proceed even if a sequence proves too hard, and the actual final bit is much more forgiving, and wound up playing to my strengths (let me just say that as the parent to a science-oriented almost-four-year-old, my practice making baking-soda volcanos stood me in good stead). And everything up too that point had a well-judged curve of escalation, especially the stealthy bit at the end of act 2, which has some really good puzzles. If Smörgåsbord gets a little top-heavy towards the end, well, at least it’s never anywhere near as ponderous as the MCU’s worst excesses. For all that I’m definitely suffering from superhero fatigue at the movie theater, I’m definitely down for more Anastasia – maybe just don’t demand such rigor from a silly food fight next time?

One of the vanishingly few advantages of the current political environment in the US is that it’s largely put to bed the tedious “is MAGA really fascism, or just sparkling authoritarianism?” debates. Scan the headlines – or hell, go outside, I live in LA and used to live in DC – and it’s clear that fascism is the air that we breathe, the water in which we swim. It’s everywhere around us, it’s totalizing in its ambition to reduce all of society to the coddled in-group, licensed to glut on violence and graft to try in vain to satisfy their sociopathy and daddy issues, and the abject out-group, stripped of rights and property and dignity. Fascism, sad to say, is pretty much always on-topic these days.

Except, famously, for that recent forum topic spun off a thread on the itch.io de-indexing of NSFW content, after some sea-lioning led to one more of those “but are they really fascists?” conversations I thought we were well quit of. Yes, pity the poor player coming to this one fresh, Fascism – Off-Topic is a forum in-joke come to life. But come back! It’s actually pretty fun!

Well, fun is maybe not le mot juste for a game that sticks you in a moving subway car opposite a couple having a yeah-they’re-definitely-breaking-up-after-this argument. Around this central conflict is arranged a well-realized suite of furniture, both plastic and human – there are some tourists, a guy playing chess on his phone, a lady listening to loud music on her headphones, but they’re all minding their own business, or at least pretending to do so while eavesdropping on the fight, just like you are. This is a parser game, so you’re free to check out the surroundings as things between the couple escalate, but since you’re in a subway car there’s no place you can go, and nothing you can do.

Well, actually, there’s one thing you can do. You see, you’ve just read an article about fascism (note the singular there), and you’re raring to share your opinions about it (well, again, it’s more like an opinion). As a result, my heart sank when I saw the response to X ME: “Normal, unlike the clowns still left in this car. You know what I mean: white, male, patriotic.” In fairness, I also more or less meet that description, and the protagonist’s thoughts about fascism are a bit in the weeds but not that bad, thankfully, but waiting to see what he’ll say adds an additional layer of anticipatory squirming as you watch the blowout escalate.

Once you intuit the command to talk about fascism, you can do so at any time – but the game’s central, nay only, mechanic is that most of the time, this comes off as a non-sequitur. So your challenge, if you are a bad enough dude to accept it, is to pick your moment so that you can make fascism on-topic. It’s a cleverer conceit than an in-joke game needs, as it forces the player to think about the ways that this couple are berating each other might mirror the larger patterns of abuse fascists inflict on subject populations. That’s of course a big, depressing topic, and this is a small, mostly-funny game, so I wouldn’t say the insight is life-changingly trenchant or anything. But it does get at some intersections of politics, gender, and control that are worth slowing down and examining.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Fascism – Off Topic is super serious, though. While the argument is downer, the rest of the cast are engaging in funny little bits of ambient business to lighten the mood, none more so than the unobtrusive old guy who (Spoiler - click to show)surreptitiously eats a raw onion – I completely lost it when, upon finishing, he pulled out a second . And it’s not just this patter that indicates a solid level of polish; the implementation is generally quite strong, with thoughtful synonyms helping avoid the multiple men and women in the car sending the player to disambiguation hell, and good cueing helping signal the verb you’ll use to trigger your fascistic monologue.

There are a few places where things are a bit rough – it might have been nice to have some alternatives to that custom verb for folks more familiar with Inform’s traditional ASK/TELL conversation system, and I think the timing on the ending banners is off by one, since I saw the “winning” version fire the turn before the one where the fascism-talk provokes a response from the couple. But these are minor niggles, and this isn’t exactly the kind of game where a months-long beta testing process is a reasonable expectation. And at the end of the day, I don’t think we actually need to worry about players who come to the game knowing nothing about forum spats and thread splits: Fascism – Off Topic stands well enough on its own, pushing us to consider the ways totalitarianism has its roots in everyday interpersonal relationships, and also to consider knowing more than one thing about it because again, fascism is unfortunately kind of a big deal right now.

• I should probably disclose that I believe a joke I made when discussing the forum contretemps is incorporated into the game. But as I barely remember the joke, and anyway ideas matter far less than implementation, I think I can rate and review in good faith

Have you ever taken a personality test for work?

A: No.

B: Yes, once.

C: Yes, more than once.

D: My work is administering personality tests.

If B or C, did the exercise seem worthwhile?

A: No, because it didn’t tell me or my managers anything we didn’t already know.

B: No, because I lied on all the answers.

C: Yes, because the insights I gleaned helped me increase my performance and

D: Yes, because if I hadn’t taken it they would have fired me.

Are work-administered personality tests a good topic for comedy?

A: …I admit it’s not one I would have ever thought of on my own.

B: I suppose it’s an experience that a reasonable number of folks have shared?

C: This game is funny, so I guess my answer has to be yes.

D: All of the above.

What about a multiple-choice test, is that a good format for comedy?

A: No.

B: No.

C: Yes?

D: Well, I’m writing this review, what do you think.

What line in the game made you laugh the hardest?

A: “Ready to learn a little more about yourself and not hold Burger Meme™ responsible for any trauma this required voluntary test may cause?”

B: “Social Skills: BRACE FOR IMPACT, HR.”

C: “Liberal Arts majors don’t historically become productive members of the Burger Meme™ family. They become ‘whistleblowers’ who ‘believe in the dignity of workers’ and ‘try to start unions’ so that employees can ‘take profits from parasitic shareholders and redistribute them to employees.’”

D: “It would be like trying to work at Disney and being afraid of lawsuits.”

From that answer, I’m wondering whether this comedy game is actually more of a satire of bad corporate behavior?

A: Yes, though Burger Meme is so cartoonishly evil and short-sighted that the critique doesn’t seem like it could possibly apply to any actual corporation.

B: Yes, and now that I think about it, it’s almost certainly the case that corporations really are using AI chatbots to interrogate prospective hires and using the results to make decisions, and good lord that’s bleak.

C: No, because the test gets so zany, so quickly, that the occasional bits of trenchant social commentary don’t have time to breathe.

D: No, of course not (please don’t fire me).

Why do you think the Burger Meme test-administrator-bot tracks answers that it doesn’t like as “Sins”?

A: It’s a statement about the ways that corporations try to moralize simple questions of efficiency, in to exploit human beings’ natural pro-social instincts.

B: It’s a mechanic that unlocks a unique ending if you finish the game with exactly seven sins.

C: It’s an acronym for “Situationally INapposite Solution.”

D: None of the above.

What was the first ending you got, and why was it a failure?

A: I got too belligerent with the AI.

B: I got too friendly with the AI.

C: I admitted I was also an AI.

D: I admitted I was a vegetarian.

Final assessment:

Analytic acumen: 63%

Comedic chops: 24%

Overall employability: 17%

Potential role in the Burger Meme™ family:

A: High-concept corporate-retreat designer.

B: Customer experience technician.

C: Ingredients.

After more than 30 years, the Comp has accumulated a body of folk wisdom, tips and tricks, and helpful pointers about how authors can best position their work for a successful reception. Sadly, this store of knowledge is built atop the broken debris of promising games that demonstrated what not to do, and sadder still, Horse Whisperer, which boasts an engagingly oddball premise (you’re a horse psychologist trying to fix a race for the mob) and more than its share of solid gags, must join this host of fallen exemplars, offering an illustration of the lesson that if the phrase “untested alpha build” appears anywhere in your game or blurb in a non-diegetic context, you should withdraw and resubmit next year (or to Spring Thing! There’s always Spring Thing!)

It would feel mean to catalogue all the errors I ran into trying to play Horse Whisperer, but there are a lot and they’re obvious – none more so than the dialogue options currently marked with asterisks, which when you click them take you to a “sorry, coming soon” passage. The logic linking the results of your actions to an ending appears either broken or absent, since the outcome of the race ignored that I’d psyched up one horse, demoralized another, and disqualified a third (the disqualified horse came in second place). Oh, and the race happened a day after it was supposed to.

Again, this is a shame, since this dark, absurdist take on Mr. Ed has some comedic potential that’s occasionally well-realized, and the author clearly has a lot of fun ideas for how to elaborate on the premise. But it’s not spitting-distance to done, even for a horse. Hopefully in addition to being a warning sign to others on the dangers of submitting an incomplete game to the Comp, Horse Whisperer will also be fodder for the author to come back next year (or again, this coming spring!) with something that lives up to the promise that’s on display here. Until then, the game isn’t stable enough to… be able to make much hay? These horse puns are harder than they look!

Cart is a choice-based game where you play a night-soil man (baldly: someone who collects human excreta and sells it for fertilizer) trying to eke out an existence at the margins of a brutal society rife with classism, racism, and brutality. The most impactful choices hinge on how far you’re willing to stick your neck out for a Roma boy who, at least in my playthrough never exchanged a single word with me. And it’s all rendered in ornate prose that takes a bunch of big swings that hit much more often than they miss. Yes, everything about Cart appeals to me, except for one tiny word in the blurb: the genre is listed as “allegory.”

It’s not that I’m completely allergic to them. Sure, when done lazily they can be witless exercises in matching a thin fictionalization to its real-world counterpart, with nothing to offer but a mildly-enjoyable recognition. But there are plenty of richer examples, too, where translating an aspect of everyday experience, heightening and recontextualizing it, helps us see more clearly: think of Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, or the cannibalistic Stalinism of Animal Farm. No, the trouble is that right now, allegory feels besides the point, since whatever you can say about the current omnicrises roiling the globe – of governance, of the environment, of simple human decency – lack of clarity isn’t a complaint you can levy; we all know exactly what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what horrifying consequences it will have, it’s all spelled out for us every day in pellucid detail. What could allegory possibly add to this picture?

Fortunately, while per the above summary Cart clearly has plenty of present-day resonance, there’s more to it than simple this-for-that transposition of current events. First off, there’s something appealingly mythical about the protagonist. A victim of circumstance, he actually takes on the night-soil man’s trappings and identity when his predecessor is killed by a crackdown on some “undesirables”; that this degraded job is his by choice underscores his previous desperation, and takes him more to the realm of folklore than allegory. Then there’s the prose, which is written in a complex, convoluted style that serves to conceal what it’s doing until just before the whip cracks:

"They cannot in their own conscience pay you enough to forget that you aren’t servicing the arse end of society. Perhaps this is why your predecessor was a gambler rather than a drunk —- this amount of coin can merely buy hope, not ignorance."

Or:

"Around the corner you hear the confederated slap of guard boots against the road. Probably two guards, judging from the banter. You do not open your eyes. You do not move. While you lack many things, chief among them is the need to invite attention."

It’s not all aphorism, though – the dialogue of your chief tormentor’s henchmen is positive Deadwood-y (says the guy who’s never seen Deadwood, but I know it by reputation). Here’s one reminiscing about a particularly enthusiastic session of keeping the hoi polloi in their place:

"It was a bountiful feast for a hungry truncheon!"

Inevitably, there are some stumbles – at one point, the game informed me that “a dark rumination descends upon you” – but they’re easy to overlook when the average is as good as it is.

The game doesn’t immerse you too much in the abject routine of your profession – though the occasional reference to “the warm, variegated latrine slurry” is enough to evoke a shudder – which is perhaps part of the allegory we’re warned about; it’s enough to establish that the protagonist is a pariah, but that’s not what Cart is about. The set pieces where you must navigate a series of choices are where its interest truly lies, and these are presented as moral dilemmas without pat answers: do you defile the dead to help the living, how far will you go to deflect attention from that Romany boy without drawing too much to yourself? It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the very first choice is about whether to eat an apple…

Cart is at its rawest in the climax. Partially that’s because the pacing feels a bit abrupt; I was settling into the game’s rhythms and enjoying seeing its world slowly expand, so while I understood this story would have a violent end, I didn’t want or expect it to come so soon. Partially that’s because when the antagonist is a nativist orator ranting about racialized others eating pets, we’re straying into the ponderous sort of allegory. But the ending sticks the landing: you’re confronted with another tense choice with unclear but high stakes and then get crushed down by despair, before the epilogue offers a tiny sliver of light by presenting a flat-eyed view of what the end of fascism actually usually looks like.

This, I think, is where the allegory is successful: it’s not about showing us anything new or unique about the villains, because we know all about them already and they’re banal, empty figures. Instead, Cart explores the way that our actions in a time of oppression at the same time matter very little, but also matter enormously; the dream of escaping degradation and overturning an unjust order with the power of words or the revelation of elite corruption in a single redemptive moment is just a dream, after all, and it’s important to recognize that, just as it’s important to know that not everyone will survive persecution. But it’s just as important to know that evil does come to an end, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad, and the decisions we make can determine who’s there to greet that new day, and what they’re carrying forward to meet it – and that’s an allegory that helps us look beyond to the horrors of the news cycle to bigger, true things.

Everyone knows that the worst part of parser-based IF is guess-the-verb puzzles. What Imperial Throne presupposes is – maybe it’s the best?

Admittedly, the setup here is fairly unique, and far afield from wrestling with medium dry-goods in an eccentric relative’s mansion. The game plops you down on the eponymous seat, placing you in command of a fantasy empire boasting rich provinces, inconsistently-competent generals, restive peasants, impious priests, and more rival powers than you can shake a stick at. From your exalted perch, you can examine all of the above and more, and ask your advisor to provide a bit of color commentary on them, but that’s about it in terms of traditional IF commands; trying to move about or take stuff just tells you that these things are unbecoming to and unnecessary for an emperor. There’s no ABOUT text to provide any direction, so what can you do? Just type stuff in and see if it’ll work.

And, thrillingly, there’s a lot of stuff that works. I cooed with happiness half a dozen times at seeing my ideas for governance accepted by the parser – I’m having to restrain myself from listing off half a dozen examples, but since this is a case where spoilers really do undercut the enjoyment the game offers, I’ll just note that one of my early priorities was establishing sumptuary taxes to support a shipbuilding program that I think made my foreign trade more lucrative. Yes, you can just type TAX SILK, and Imperial Throne will make that happen. At its best, the game manages to recapture the I-can-do-anything feeling experienced by the earliest players of parser games – I’m too young to have experienced that first-hand, but now I have a far greater appreciation for how impactful that must have been. Like, you can intervene in the capital’s culture, respond to crimes with punishments lenient and severe, balance class interests, and of course shuffle around troops to engage in great-power adventurism! And OK, I can’t help adding one more, though I’ll spoiler-block it: (Spoiler - click to show)BUILD BRIDGE ON LOCANUS will give a military advantage to your soldiers when they need to cross that river to retaliate against a neighboring kingdom’s raids!

The impact of all these decisions isn’t always clear – you’ll note that I only had a guess about what all those ships were accomplishing for me. While your emperor-o-vision lets you see the troops, leaders, and resources at your command, it provides only vague information about foreign policy or domestic unrest. Where a Civilization or Paradox strategy game would give you dials, charts, and numbers galore, Imperial Throne just gives you a sentence or two. This feels restrictive, but in a way that more authentically captures the experience of pre-modern rulership: this is a fantasy kingdom, but one without magic or other shortcuts that would allow a state to see or know things that historically required a significant bureaucracy and educational infrastructure. You get told that opening up the granaries to starving peasants softened a famine’s impacts and reduced unrest, but not that you lost 3 farmer populations and unrest notched own by 2, which helps keep the game’s mechanical underpinnings from showing through too baldly.

There are some rough edges and limitations, of course. The game’s opacity is a critical part of what makes it work, but it did lead to frustration when I couldn’t figure out the syntax to incorporate potatoes into my subsistence agriculture, and I was surprised that I couldn’t imprison a particular troublemaker, only execute him (all the more so when I saw that the walkthrough seemed to think that should have been possible, too). Keeping track of all the different made-up names of people, provinces, and kingdoms, is really difficult, since they’re all so much fantasy gobbledygook, and there are no built-in help features tracking this stuff, so you’d better have been taking good notes if you want to move a specific general to a specific place. And there are some minor bugs and a lack of polish; besides the aforementioned issues with imprisonment, X LABORERS got me a “runtime error: invalid comparison”, and a fair number of things just give the default “you see nothing unusual about them” response (even the potatoes, which had been brought back by an explorer returning from a far-off land!)

The biggest issue, though, is just that once the thrill of discovery wears off, there’s not much to keep the player engaged. After about 150 turns, I’d pretty much figured out what I could do, and while different events kept happening, they were mostly variations on what had come before, and the thing is playing a simple strategy game with a parser interface isn’t that intrinsically enjoyable. So when an ally I’d carefully cultivated suddenly turned on me after some domestic upheaval, I checked the walkthrough, saw that I’d uncovered like 90% of the possibility space, and decided I couldn’t be bothered laboriously shuffling troops around to fight off the invasion; I just hammered Z until the end game (joke’s on the betrayers, though, actually one of my generals took advantage of the chaos to get declared Emperor and toppled me after a brief civil war). But there’s no way to avoid that kind of come-down in a game built around experimentation – inevitably, you eventually run out of new stuff. But until that point arrives, Imperial Throne is a lovely little toy to mess around with, and I’m looking forward to reading other reviews to see what I might have missed.

Last year, I was disappointed when the premise of this author’s previous game, Warm Reception, didn’t turn out to much survive the prologue: the idea of a medieval gossip columnist covering a royal wedding is all sorts of fun, so I couldn’t help pine for what might have been when the game quickly revealed itself as a puzzlefest where you romped across a wacky, uninhabited castle. But that means this year I was happy to see that the protagonist’s notional job as a reality-TV producer fell just as quickly by the wayside, as Willy’s Manor is similarly a puzzlefest where you romp across a wacky, uninhabited mansion.

Warm Reception wasn’t especially sophisticated but it had enthusiasm and charm, and that’s another thing it has in common with Willy’s Manor. Structurally, you need to solve a series of clues (notionally, this is a test a novelty-company magnate has set for you before he’ll agree to being featured on your show, which is at least a new one) by depositing the answer to a riddle into a box in order to get the next clue, and occasionally a key opening up a new area of the house. Most of the riddles are pretty straightforward, both because the game isn’t especially large, and because they tend to the hoary – the old “what do the poor have but the rich lack” one gets trotted out. And that final coat of polish is conspicuously absent: beyond a fair number of typos, items are sometimes still mentioned in descriptions after you take them, there are a lot of default responses that don’t fit the tone of the game, and some obvious synonyms remain unimplemented.

Still, I didn’t come across any flat-out bugs, and there is that charm I mentioned. The eponymous Willy is a devotee of slapstick and awful puns, and while none of them are laugh-out-loud funny, the corniness of the “full moon” you see above a skylight is easy to enjoy. It also turns out that there is an actual connection between the answers to all the riddles, one that’s surprisingly sweet – though of course that sweetness has only a few moments to linger before hitting a final silly joke. The game also gets a little less simple towards the end; the last major location you unlock has a reasonably sophisticated gimmick to it, and plays host to some more satisfying puzzles that take a little bit of thinking to solve (though admittedly one of these, involving (Spoiler - click to show)entering a pond with no indication that that’s possible or desirable, is under-clued). And the late-game “liebrary” is legitimately clever without being overly complicated.

Am I over-estimating the game’s virtues out of relief that I didn’t actually have to think about reality TV during its running time? Possibly, but while Willy’s Manor is doing things a million small comedy-parser games have done before, it does them with a sincere smile, and that’s worth something – and so too is the fact that it’s a clear improvement over its predecessor. Let’s see, maybe next time out the protagonist can be an investment banker, and we might be entering modern-classic territory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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